Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

It wasn’t always a good chance. Her air regiment was chewed to bits. She knew of only three or four other pilots from it still flying. The regiment was long since broken up, of course-large concentrations of aircraft on the ground drew the Lizards’ wrath like nothing else. These days, the Kukuruzniks flew by ones and twos, not in formation.

The lighted area swelled ahead of her. Her finger went to the firing button for the machine guns. She spied what looked at first like bumpy ground but proved as she drew nearer to be some sort of vehicles under camouflage netting. Trucks, she thought-Lizard tanks, being almost impervious to human weapons, were seldom concealed so carefully.

She started her firing run. The machine guns hammered under her wings. The little U-2 shook like a leaf in an autumn wind. The flying sparks of tracer bullets helped guide her aim.

Almost in the same instant, the Lizards began shooting back. They owned more firepower than the Germans had been able to bring to bear; by the muzzle flashes on the ground, Ludmila thought ten thousand automatic weapons had opened up on her all at once. The fabric skin of the Kukuruznik’s wings made cheerful popping noises as bullets pierced it.

Then one of the trucks blew up in a blue-white ball of hydrogen fire, so different from the orange flames of blazing petrol. The blast of heat seared Ludmila’s cheeks as she flew past; it tried to fling her aircraft tumbling out of control. She wrestled with stick and pedals, held it steady in the air.

Touched off by the first, more trucks exploded behind her. She gave the U-2 all the meager power it had, banked away toward the friendly darkness. A few Lizards kept shooting at her, but only a few; more ran to fight the fires she’d touched off. As night drew its cloak around her, she took one hand off the stick for a moment, pounded fist against thigh. she’d hurt them this time.

Now to find her way home. Even without flying a combat mission, navigating at night was anything but easy. She straightened onto compass course 047. That would bring her somewhere close to the airstrip from which she’d been operating. She checked her watch and her airspeed indicator, the other vital tools of night flying. After about-hmm-fifty minutes, she’d begin to circle and look for landing lights.

Just surviving a mission was enough to make her proud-and to make her remember all her friends who would never fly again. That thought quickly leached joy from her, leaving behind only weariness and the jittery residue of terror.

Either she was a better navigator than she’d thought or much luckier than usual, for she spotted the dim banding lanterns after only a couple of circles. They were hooded so as not to be visible from high overhead. The Red Air Force had learned the dangers of that from the Luftwaffe; the lesson was all the more vital against the Lizards.

Her approach in the dark was tentative, the makeshift airstrip anything but smooth. The landing she made would have earned only scorn from her Osoaviakhim instructor (she wondered if the man was still alive). she didn’t care. She was down and among her own people and safe-until her next mission. she didn’t even have to think about that, not yet.

As soon as she got out of the U-2, groundcrew started dragging it to cover. A woman mechanic pointed to the bullet holes. Ludmila shrugged. “Patch them as you get the chance, comrade. I’m all right and so is the aircraft.”

“Good,” the mechanic said. “Oh-you have a letter down in the bunker.”

“A letter?” The Soviet post, erratic since the start of the war, had grown frankly chaotic once the Lizards added their ravages to those of the Nazis. Eagerly, Ludmila asked, “From whom?”

“I don’t know. It’s in an envelope, and it doesn’t say on the outside,” the mechanic answered.

“An envelope? Really?” The very occasional letters Ludmila had had from her brothers and her father and mother were all written on folded single sheets of paper, with her name and unit scrawled on the reverse. she’d had only one note since the Lizards came, three hasty lines, from her younger brother Igor, letting her know he was alive. She trotted for the shelter bunker, saying, “I’ll have to see who’s gotten rich.”

Curtains and doglegs in the entry passage kept candlelight from leaking out. Yevdokia Kasherina looked up from the tunic she was darning. “How did it go?” she asked with a fellow pilot’s concern. It was a long way from the formal debriefings of earlier missions, but the Soviet Air Force was too dispersed and battered to have much room for formalities these days.

“Well enough,” Ludmila said. “I shot up some trucks that weren’t hidden well enough, and I got back here alive. Now what’s this I hear about a letter?”

“It’s over there on your blankets,” Yevdokia said, pointing. “You don’t think anyone would dare do anything with it, do you?”

“Better not,” Ludmila said fiercely. Both women laughed. Ludmila hurried over to where she slept. The clean, white envelope gleamed against the dark blue wool of the blankets. She snatched it up, carried it over to a candle.

she’d expected to recognize the script on the envelope at a glance, and thus know who had written to her before she started the letter itself. Hearing from any of her family would be so good… But, to her surprise and disappointment, the handwriting was unfamiliar to her. Indeed, handwriting was too good a word for it; her name and unit were printed in large copybook letters of the sort a bright eight-year-old might make.

“Who’s it from?” Yevdokia asked.

“I don’t know yet,” Ludmila said.

The other pilot laughed. “A secret admirer, Ludmila Gorbunova?”

“Hush.” Ludmila tore open the envelope, pulled out the piece of paper inside. The words on that were also printed rather than written. For a moment, they seemed utterly meaningless to her. Then she realized she had to switch languages and even alphabets: the letter was in German.

Her first reaction was fright. Before the Lizards came, a letter in German would have been delivered by a harsh-faced NKVD man certain she was guilty of treason. But censors must have seen this note and decided to let it go through. Reading it probably would not endanger her.

To the brave flier who plucked me from the kolkhoz, it began. Flier had a feminine ending tacked on, and kolkhoz was spelled out in those copybook Cyrillic letters. I hope you are well and safe and hitting back against the Lizards. I write this as simply as I can, as I know your German is slow, though much better than my Russian. I am now in Moscow, where I work with your government to hurt the Lizards in new ways. These will-

A few words were neatly clipped out of the letter. A censor had been at it, then. Some of Ludmila’s fear returned: somewhere in Moscow, her name appeared in a dossier for getting mail from a German. As long as Germany and the Soviet Union kept on working together against the Lizards, that dossier would not matter. If they had a falling out…

Ludmila read on: I hope one day we may see each other again. This may be so, because- The censor had excised another section. The letter finished, Your country and mine have been enemies, allies, enemies, and now allies again. Life is strange, not so? I hope we shall not be enemies ourselves, you and I. The signature was a scrawl that looked to her eyes nothing like Heinrich Jager, but that was surely what it said. Underneath, in the clear printing that marked the rest of the note, he had appended Major, 16th Panzer, as if she were unlikely to remember him without being reminded.

She stared at the piece of paper for a long time, trying to sort out her own feelings. He was polite, he was well-spoken, he was not the ugliest man she had ever seen… he was a Nazi. If she answered his letter, another note would go down in the dossier. She was as certain of that as of tomorrow’s sunrise.