Harry Turtledove - Down to Earth

“It should not be too hard,” she said.

He laughed. “Not for you-you have lived here all your life. For me, everything is strange. You have no idea how strange everything here is.”

That was likely to be true. Kassquit said, “I only hope we can go on living here.”

As if to underscore her words, the floor shuddered a little beneath her feet. “What was that?” Jonathan Yeager asked.

“I do not know, not for certain,” she answered. “But I think it may have been missiles firing at a target.”

“Oh,” the wild Tosevite said, and then, “I hope they hit it.”

“So do I,” Kassquit answered. “If they do not hit it, it will hit us.”

“I know that.” Jonathan Yeager put his arm around her. No male or female of the Race would have made such a gesture. Physical contact mattered more among Big Uglies than it did to the Race. Having grown up among the Race, Kassquit had not thought it would matter to her. She was surprised to discover herself mistaken. Genetic programming mattered. The touch of another of her kind-and one with whom she’d known other physical intimacies-brought a certain reassurance.

Not that that will do us any good whatever if a missile does strike this starship, she thought, and then wished she hadn’t.

For Mordechai Anielewicz, a quarter of a century might have fallen away in the course of bare days. Here again were the Nazis swarming over Poland’s western border, panzer engines rumbling, attack aircraft diving on the forces defending the land where he’d lived all his life.

Coming out of Lodz, he was a lot closer to the border than he had been in 1939, when he’d lived in Warsaw. The Germans didn’t have so far to come to get him this time. On the other hand, Poland was better able to fight back than she had been then.

A Lizard fired a missile at an oncoming German panzer. The panzer stopped coming on; it burst into flames. A hatch opened. German soldiers started bailing out.

Anielewicz squeezed the trigger on his automatic rifle. One of the Germans threw out his arms, spun, and fell facedown. A lot of bullets were flying; Mordechai didn’t know whether he’d been the one who killed the Nazi. He hoped so, though.

The Lizards didn’t have a lot of troops on the ground-most of their males were in landcruisers. By themselves, they’d had trouble with the Wehrmacht when the conquest fleet first landed. The Nazis were a lot better armed now than they had been in 1942. That was why Jewish fighters and Poles served as a lot of the infantry in the fight against the German invaders.

“Gas!” The cry rang out in Yiddish, in Polish, and in the language of the Race at almost the same instant. Mordechai Anielewicz yanked out his mask and put it on with almost desperate haste. It wasn’t complete protection against nerve gas; he knew that all too well. And he’d already had one dose of what the Germans had used during the last round of fighting against the Race. He didn’t know how much he could take now without quietly falling over dead.

Maybe you’ll get to find out, he thought, breathing in air that tasted of rubber through an activated-charcoal canister that gave him a pig-snouted look. If he’d been a proper kind of fighting leader, he wouldn’t have been at the front at all. He would have been back in a headquarters somewhere tens of kilometers to the rear, with aides to peel him grapes and with dancing girls to pinch whenever he felt he needed a break from commanding.

But headquarters weren’t necessarily safe these days, either. He couldn’t think of any place in Poland that was necessarily safe. As soon as talks between the Race and the Germans broke down, he’d got his wife and children (and Heinrich’s beffel) out of Lodz and into a hamlet called Widawa, southwest of the city. Widawa wasn’t safe, either, and the knowledge that it wasn’t ate at him. It was closer to the German border than Lodz was. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if the Nazis overran the little town.

Trouble was, he also didn’t want to think about what would happen if the Nazis hit Lodz with an explosive-metal missile. If they did, the city would go-and, probably, the fallout from the blast would blow east. Looked at that way, Widawa made more sense than a lot of other refuges.

Machine-gun bullets stitched the ground in front of Anielewicz, kicking up dirt that bounced off the lenses of his gas mask. He blinked as if the dirt had gone in his eye. If he did get an eyelash in his eye or something like that, he would have to live with it. If he took off the mask to get it out, he would die on account of it.

Another German panzer started burning. They didn’t go up like bombs the way they had before, though. Back in the last round of fighting, they’d used gasoline-fueled engines. Now they ran on diesel fuel, as Russian tanks had even then, or on hydrogen, as Lizard landcruisers did.

But the Germans had a lot of panzers. The flame that burst from a machine near the one that had taken a hit was muzzle flash, not damage. And a Lizard landcruiser off to Anielewicz’s right caught fire itself. Males of the Race bailed out, as German soldiers had a moment before. Mordechai grunted, though he could hardly hear himself inside the mask. In the last round of fighting, the Germans had counted on losing five or six of their best panzers for every Lizard landcruiser they knocked out. The ratio would have been higher than that, but the Nazis were tactically better than the Race, as they had been tactically better than the Red Army.

And now they had panzers that could stand against the land-cruisers the Lizards had brought from Home. That wasn’t a pretty thought.

But before Mordechai could do more than form it, it vanished from his mind. The day was typical of Polish springtime, with clouds covering the sun more often than not. All of a sudden, though, a sharp, black shadow stretched out ahead of Anielewicz, toward the west.

He whirled. There, right about where Lodz was-would have been-had been-a great apricot-and-salmon-colored cloud, utterly unlike the gray ones spawned by nature, climbed into the sky. Crying inside the gas mask, Mordechai rapidly discovered, was almost as bad as getting something in his eye in there. He blinked and blinked, trying to clear his vision.

“Yisgadal v’yiskadash shmay rabo-” he began: the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. Looking around, he saw Polish fighting men making the sign of the cross. The expression was different, but the sentiment was the same.

The repulsively beautiful cloud rose and rose. Mordechai wondered how many other explosive-metal bombs were going off in Poland. Then he wondered how many would go off above the Greater German Reich. And then, with horror that truly chilled him, he wondered how many people would survive between the Pyrenees and the Russian border.

He wondered if he would be one of them, too. But that thought came only later.

“We’ve got to fall back,” somebody near him bawled. “The Germans are cutting us off!”

How many times had that frightened cry rung out on battlefields throughout Europe during the last round of fighting? This was how the Wehrmacht worked its brutal magic: pierce the enemy line with armor, then either surround his soldiers or make him retreat. It had worked in Poland, in France, in Russia. Why wouldn’t it work again?

Anielewicz couldn’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work again, not if the Nazis had broken through-and they had. “Form a rear guard!” he shouted. “We have to slow them down.”

He fired at a German infantryman, who dove for cover. But more Germans kept coming, infantrymen following the panzers into the hole the armored machines had broken in the defenders’ line. The Nazis had been doing that since 1939; they’d had more practice than any other human army in the world.