Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

The two pieces of the bottom half of the gun carriage went onto the two central tracks and were aligned with each other. They rested on twenty rail trucks, again to distribute Dora’s mass as widely as possible. Becker was part of the crew that hydraulically leveled the lower mount.

The diesel cranes lifted crossbeams onto the lower mount, then placed the two-piece upper mount where it belonged. The top of the carriage held Dora’s loading assembly and the trunnion supports. It was joined to the lower mount by dozens of heavy bolts. Becker went down one side of the carriage and Arenswald down the other, checking that every one was in place.

They met at the rear, grinned, exchanged drawings, then went up the carriage to check each other’s sides. Everything had to work once the shooting started; things would go wrong soon enough after that.

Assembly went faster once the carriage was together. The trunnions, the gun cradle, the breech, and the barrel sections all were raised to their proper positions. When Dora was at last complete, Becker admired the monster gun through blowing smoke. Carnage and all, the 80-centimeter cannon was fifty meters long and eleven meters tall; its barrel alone was thirty meters long. Somewhere far above the smoke, Becker heard a Lizard plane whine past. His shoulders slumped; his hands made futile fists. “No, God,” he said, almost as a threat, “not now, not when we were so close.”

Michael Arenswald clapped him on the shoulder. “They’ve flown over us before, Karl. It will be all right; you’ll see.”

No bombs fell on them; no guided rockets exploded by the gun carriage. A crane lifted from a freight car a seven-tonne shell, slowly swung the great projectile, more than five meters long and almost a meter thick, onto the loading assembly. It didn’t look like an artillery shell, not to Becker. It looked like something more primeval, as if Tyrannosaurus rex had been reincarnated as artillery.

The breech received the shell, was closed with a clang that sounded like a factory noise. The whole battalion cheered as the gun barrel slowly rose, its tip no doubt projecting out of the smoke screen now. Laughing, Arenswald said, “It reminds me of the world’s biggest prick getting hard.”

“That’s one hell of a hard-on, all right,” Becker said.

The barrel reached an angle of almost forty-five degrees, stopped. Along with everyone else around, Becker turned away: from it, covered his ears, opened his mouth.

The blast was like nothing he’d ever imagined. It sucked all the air out of his lungs, shook him like a terrier shaking a rat. Stunned, he staggered, stumbled, sat down hard on the ground. His head roared. He wondered if he would ever hear anything through that oceanic clamor again. But he could still see. Sprawled in the dirt beside him, Michael Arenswald gave a big thumbs-up.

A radar technician on the grounded transport ship 67th Emperor Sohrheb stared at the screen in front of him, hissed in dismay. Automatic alarms began to yammer even before Breltan shrieked, “Missile incoming!” A warning had come down that the Big Uglies were playing with missiles, but he’d never expected to encounter one of their toys so soon. He raised both eye turrets to the ceiling in bemusement. The Big Uglies just weren’t like the Race. They were always in a hurry.

Their missile was in a hurry, too, chewing away the distance to the grounded ships. Breltan’s jaws opened again, this time in amusement. So the Tosevites had discovered missiles, had they? Well and good, but they hadn’t yet discovered that missiles too could be killed.

No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than the radars showed missiles leaping up to smash the intruder. Breltan laughed again, said, “You’ll have to do better than that, Big Uglies.”

A missile, as a rule, is a flimsy thing, no stronger than it has to be-any excess weight degrades performance. If another missile-or even a fragment hurled from an exploding warhead-hits it, odds are it will be wrecked.

The shell from Dora, however, had to be armored to withstand the monstrous force that had sent it on its way. A missile exploded a couple of meters from it. The fragments bounced off its brass sides. Another missile struck it a glancing blow before exploding and spun away, ruined.

The shell, undisturbed, flew on.

Breltan watched the radar screen in disbelief mixed with equal measures of horror and fascination. “It can’t do that,” he said. But it could-the Tosevite missile shrugged off everything the Race threw at it and kept coming. Coming right at Breltan.

“Emperor save me,” he whimpered, and dove under his seat in the approved position for protection against attack from the air.

The shell landed about ten meters in front of the 67th Emperor Sohrheb. Just under a tonne of its mass was high explosives. The rest, in a time measured in microseconds, turned to knife-edged, red-hot fragments of every shape and size.

Like all starships of the invasion fleet, the 67th Emperor Sohrheb drew its primary power from an atomic pile. But, like most of the ships that landed on Tosev 3, it used a fair part of the energy from that pile to electrolyze water into oxygen and the hydrogen that fueled the Race’s air and ground vehicles.

When it blew, it blew sky-high. No one ever found a trace of Breltan-or his seat.

The fireball was big enough to be visible across sixty kilometers. When it lit up the northern horizon, the men of Heavy Artillery Battalion Dora screamed with: delight, loud enough for Karl Becker to hear them even with his abused ears. “Hit! Hit! Hit!” he shouted, and danced in a clumsy circle with Michael Arenswald.

“Now that’s what I call an orgasm,” Arenswald yelled.

The brigadier commanding the heavy artillery battalion climbed up onto the immense gun carriage, megaphone in hand. “Back to it!” he bawled to his capering crew. “We want to hit them again before they hit us.”

Nothing could have been better calculated to send the battalion back to work at full speed. Unlike a tank gun, Dora could not traverse. A locomotive attached to the front end of the carriage moved forward a few meters, pulling nearly 1,500 tonnes of cannon and mounting along the curved track into its preplanned next firing position.

Even as the flagman brought the engine to a halt right at the mark painted on the track, Becker was dashing forward to make sure the gun carnage had remained level after the stress of the round and the move. The bubbles in the spirit levels at all four corners of the carriage hadn’t stirred a millimeter. He waved up to the reloading gang. “All good here!”

The long barrel lifted a degree or two. A crane was already lifting the expended shell casing out Of the breech. “Clear be-low!” the crane operator shouted. Men scattered. The casing thudded to the ground beside the gun carriage. That wasn’t the way the manuals said to get rid of such casings, but it was the fastest way. The crane swung to pick up a new shell.

Karl Becker kept an eye on his watch. Twenty-nine minutes after Dora spoke for the first time, the great gun spoke again.

Krefak felt the heat from the burning 67th Emperor Sohrheb, though his missile battery was posted a good ways away from the luckless starship. He was heartily glad of that; the blast when the ship went up had taken out several units closer to it.

Krefak also felt the heat from his own commander, who’d waxed eloquent over his failure to shoot down, the Big Uglies’ missile. He’d done everything right; he knew he had. The battery had intercepted the Tosevite projectile at least twice. Tapes from the radars proved it. But how was he supposed to say so, with only smoking rubble left where a proud starship had stood mere heartbeats before?