Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

“Well?” Yevgenia said when she did not comment.

“You were right, Yevgenia Gavrilovna-it is from a secret admirer.”

The other pilot made a rude noise. “The Devil’s nephew, no doubt.”

“How did you guess?”

A shell screamed down and landed in the middle of the grove of larches south of Shabbona, Illinois. Mutt Daniels threw himself flat. Splinters of wood and more deadly splinters of metal whined past overhead. “I am getting too old for this shit,” Daniels muttered to no one in particular.

A flock of black-crowned night herons-“quawks,” the locals called them, after the noise they made-leapt into the air in panic. They were handsome birds, two feet tall or more, with long yellow legs, black or sometimes dark green heads and backs, and pearl-gray wings. Quawking for all they were worth, they flew south as fast as they could go.

Mutt listened to their receding cries, but hardly looked up to watch them go. He was too busy deepening the foxhole he’d already started in the muddy ground under the larches. In the generation that had passed since he’d got back from France, he’d forgotten how fast you could dig while you were lying on your belly.

Another shell burst, this one just east of the grove. The few quawks that hadn’t taken flight at the first explosion did at this one. From a hole a few feet away from Daniels’, Sergeant Schneider said, “They likely won’t be back this year.”

“Huh?”

“The herons,” Schneider explained. “They usually head south for the winter earlier in the year than this, anyhow. They come in in April and fly out when fall starts.”

“Just like ballplayers,” Daniels said. He flipped up more dirt with his entrenching tool. “I got a bad feeling this grove ain’t gonna be the same when they come north after spring training next year. Us and the Lizards, we’re kind of rearranging the landscape, you might say.”

He didn’t find out whether Sergeant Schneider would say that or not. A whole salvo of shells crashed down around them. Both men huddled in their holes, heads down so they tasted mud. Then, from east of the larches, American artillery opened up, pounding back at the Lizard positions along the line of Highway 51. As he had in France, Mutt wished the big guns on both sides would shoot at one another and leave the poor damned infantry alone.

Tanks, rumbled past the grove under cover of the American barrage, trying to push back the Lizard vanguard still moving on Chicago. Daniels raised his head for a moment. Some of the tanks were Lees, with a small turret and a heavy gun mounted in a sponson on the front corner of the hull. More, though, were the new Shermans; with their big main armament up in the turret, they looked like the Lizard tanks from which Daniels had been retreating since the Lizards came down from beyond the sky.

“The closer they get to Chicago, the more stuff we’re throwin’ at ’em,” he called to Schneider.

“Yeah, and a fat lot of good it’s doing us, too,” the other veteran answered. “If they weren’t spread thin trying to conquer the whole world at once, we’d be dead meat by now. Or maybe they don’t really care whether they get into Chicago or not, and that’s why they’ve moved slower than they might have.”

“What do you mean, maybe they don’t care? Why wouldn’t they?” Mutt asked. When he thought about strategy, he thought about the hit-and-run play, when to bunt, and the right time for a pitchout. Since he got home after the Armistice, he’d done his best to forget the military meaning of the word.

Schneider, though, was a career soldier. Though only a noncom, he had a feel for the way annies functioned. He said, “What good is Chicago to us? It’s a transportation hub, right, the place where all the roads and all the railroads and all the lake and river traffic come together. Just by being this close, and by their air power, the Lizards have smashed that network to smithereens.”

Daniels pointed to the advancing American tanks. “Where’d those come from, then? They must’ve got into Chicago some kind of way, or they wouldn’t be here.”

“Probably by ship,” Sergeant Schneider said. “Things I’ve heard, they don’t quite understand what ships are all about and how much you can carry on one. That probably says something about wherever they come from, wouldn’t you think?”

“Damned if I know.” Mutt looked at Sergeant Schneider with some surprise. He might have expected that remark from Sam Yeager, who’d enjoyed reading about bug-eyed monsters before people knew there were any such things. The sergeant, though, seemed to have a one-track military-mind. What was he doing wondering about other planets or whatever you called them?

As if to answer the question Mutt hadn’t asked, Schneider said, “The more we know about the Lizards, the better we can fight back, right?”

“I guess so,” said Daniels, who hadn’t thought of it in quite those terms.

“And speaking of fighting back, we ought to be moving up to give those tanks some support.” Schneider scrambled out of his foxhole, shouted and waved one arm so the rest of the troops in the grove would know what he meant, and dashed out into the open.

Along with the others, Daniels followed the sergeant. He felt naked and vulnerable away from his hastily dug shelter. He’d seen more than enough shelling, both in 1918 and during the past weeks, to know a foxhole often gave only the illusion of safety, but illusions have their place, too. Without them, most likely, men would never go to war at all.

Westbound American shells tore through the air. Their note grew fainter and deeper as they flew away from Mutt. When he heard a rising scream, he threw himself into a ditch several seconds before he consciously reasoned that it had to spring from an incoming Lizard round. His body was smarter than his head. He’d seen that in baseball often enough-when you had to stop and think about what you were doing, you got yourself in trouble.

The shell burst a few hundred yards ahead of him, among the advancing Lees and Shermans. It had an odd sound. Again, Daniels didn’t stop to think, for more rounds followed the first. Cursing himself and Schneider both for breaking cover, he tried once more to dig in while flat on his belly. The barrage walked toward him. He wished he were a mole or a gopher-any sort of creature that could burrow far underground and never have to worry about coming up for air.

His breath sobbed in his ears. His heart thudded inside his chest, so hard he wondered if it would burst. “I am too old for this shit,” he wheezed. The Lizard barrage ignored him. He remembered that the Boche artillery hadn’t paid any attention when he cursed it, either.

The shells rained down for a while, then stopped. The one blessing about going through Lizard barrages was that they didn’t last for days on end, the way German pounding sometimes had in 1918. Maybe the invaders didn’t have the tubes or the ammunition dumps to raise that kind of hell.

Or maybe they just didn’t need to do it. Their fire was more accurate and deadly than the Boches had ever dreamed of being. When Daniels ever so cautiously raised his head, he saw that the field he’d been crossing was churned into a nearly lunar landscape. Up ahead, two or three tanks were burning, As he watched, smoke and flame burst from under another one. A tread thrown, it ground itself into the mud.

“How’d they do that?” Mutt asked the air. No new shell had struck the Lee; he was sure of that. It was almost as if the Lizards had a way to pack antitank mines inside their artillery rounds. Before the invaders came down from Mars or wherever, he would have laughed at the idea He wasn’t laughing now; the Lizards were nothing to laugh about.