Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

“As you say, Commander,” Ussmak answered. “It shall be done.” How he was supposed to be especially alert for bandits when he could see only straight ahead with the landcruiser buttoned was beyond him. Maybe Krentel ought to open up the cupola and look around after all.

He thought about saying as much to the landcruiser commander, but decided not to bother. The Race did not encourage lower ranks to reprove their superiors; that way lay anarchy. In any case, Ussmak doubted that Krentel would have listened; he seemed to think the Emperor had personally granted him all the answers. And finally, Ussmak’s own sense of isolation from everything going on around him had only grown worse since his two original landcruiser crewmales died. A good replacement for Votal would have taken pains to reforge the team. Krentel just treated him like a piece of machinery. Machines don’t care.

Machinelike, Ussmak kept the landcruiser out of as much trouble as he could. He’d found some better ground, where the grass, now yellow and dying rather than green and shiny with life, was still thick enough under his tracks to keep the landcruiser from sinking as fast as it had on barer terrain.

Ahead lay a stand of low, scrubby trees. Their bare branches groped for the sky like thin, beseeching arms. They’d dropped their leaves when the rains started. Ussmak wondered why; it seemed wasteful to him. Certainly none of the trees back on Home behaved in such profligate fashion.

He missed Home. Although the idea of turning Tosev 3 into another version of his own world had seemed good and noble when he got into the cold-sleep capsule, everything he’d seen since he came out of it screamed that it wasn’t going to be as easy as everybody had thought. Given the Big Uglies’ intractability, he wondered how the Race had succeeded so well on Rabotev 2 and Halless 1.

He also wondered why no one else seemed to have any doubts about what the Race was doing here. The males had just formed their own rather compressed version of society back Home and gone on about their business, changing original plans only because the Tosevites had more technology than anyone expected. No one worried about the rightness of what they were doing.

Even Ussmak had no real idea of what the Race’s forces ought to be doing now that they’d come to Tosev 3. He supposed the doubts he did have sprang from his own feeling of apartness from everyone around him, from having been wrenched out of his comfortable niche in the original landcruiser crew and thrust into the unwanted company not merely of strangers, but of pompous, inept strangers.

Behind him, the turret traversed with a whir of smooth machinery. The coaxial machine gun began to chatter. “We shall rout out any Big Uglies lurking among the trees,” Krentel declared with his usual grandiloquence.

For once, though, the commander’s tone failed to grate on Ussmak. Krentel was actually doing something sensible. Ussmak cherished that when it happened. Had it happened more often, he might have been content even on this miserable, cold, wet ball of mud.

Machine-gun bullets whined less than a meter above Heinrich Jager’s head. Had any leaves remained on the birch trees, the bullets would have shaken the last of them dow. As it was, he used the fallen leaves to help conceal himself from the Lizard-panzer firing from the open country ahead.

The wet ground and wet leaves soaked Jager’s shabby clothes. Rain beat on his back and trickled down his neck. He suppressed a sneeze by main force. A round ricocheting from a tree trunk kicked mud up into his face.

Beside him, Georg Schultz let out a ghostly chuckle. “Well, Major, aren’t you glad we never had to mess with this infantry shit before?”

“Now that you mention it, yes.” It wasn’t just the manifold discomforts of crawling around bare to the elements, either. Jager felt naked and vulnerable without armor plate all around him. In his Panzer III, machine-gun bullets had been something to laugh at. Now they could pierce his precious, tender flesh as easily as anything else they happened to strike.

He raised his head a couple of centimeters, just enough to let him peer out at the Lizard panzer. It seemed sublimely indifferent to anything a mere foot soldier could hope to do to it. All at once, Jager understood the despair his own tank must have induced in French and Russian infantry who’d tried and failed to stop it. The shoe was on the other foot now, sure enough.

One of the partisans who huddled with Jager might have been reading his mind. The fellow said, “Well, there it is, Comrade Major. What the fuck do we do about it?”

“For the time being, we wait,” Jager answered. “Unless you’re really keen on dying right now, that is.”

“After what I’ve been through the last year and a half from your fucking Nazi bastards, dying is the least of my worries,” the partisan answered.

Jager twisted his head to glare at the ally who would have been anything but a few months before. The partisan, a skinny man with a gray-streaked beard and a big nose, glared back. Jager said, “I find this as ironic as you do, believe me.”

“Ironic?” The partisan raised bushy eyebrows. Jager had trouble understanding him. He wasn’t really speaking German at all, but Yiddish, and about every fourth word made the major stop and think. The Jew went on, “Fuck ironic. I asked God how things could be worse than they were with you Germans around, and He had to go and show me. Let it be a lesson to you, Comrade Nazi Major: never pray for something you don’t really want, because you may get it anyhow.”

“Right, Max,” Jager said, smiling a little in spite of himself. He hadn’t fought side by side with any Jews since the First World War; he had no great use for them. But the Russian partisan band sprawled in the dripping woods with him was more than half Jewish. He wondered whether the Ivans back in Moscow had set it up that way on purpose, to make sure the partisans didn’t think about betraying Stalin. That made a certain amount of sense, but it was also likely to make a fighting unit less efficient than it would have been without mutual suspicion and, on the Jews’ side, outright hatred.

The Lizard panzer’s machine gun stopped spitting flame. It swung away from the woods; Jager envied the turret’s quick power traverse. If he’d had himself a machine like that, now, he could have accomplished something worthwhile. It was wasted on the Lizards, who, had hardly a clue about how to exploit it.

The tank wallowed forward through the mud. Jager had made the acquaintance of Russian mud the previous fall and spring. It had done its best to glue his Panzer III in one place for good; he was not altogether disappointed to watch it give the Lizards trouble, too.

His attention shifted from the tank to the trucks and soldiers it was guarding. The trucks, like any wheeled vehicles, were having a lot of trouble in the mud. The NKVD man back in Moscow had been right; they were unusually heavy. Every so often a Lizard soldier, looking even more alien than usual in a shiny gray suit that covered him from toe claws to crown, would go over and put something-at this distance, Jager couldn’t tell what-into the back of a truck.

I hope we don’t have to hijack a vehicle, he thought. Given the state of what the Russians, for lack of a suitably malodorous word, called roads, he wasn’t sure the band could hijack a Lizard truck.

From a position carefully camouflaged by tall dead grass, a German machine gun began to bark. A couple of Lizards fell. Others started to run, while still others, wiser or more experienced, flattened out on the ground as human soldiers would have done. The glass blew out of a truck’s windshield when a round or two struck home; Jager couldn’t see what happened to the driver.