Harry Turtledove - Down to Earth

However much practice they had at it, though, not everything went their way. The Poles hated them as much as ever, and didn’t like retreating. And the Jewish fighters whom Anielewicz led hated retreating and wouldn’t be captured. They knew-those of his generation from the bitterest personal experience-the fate of Jews who fell into German hands.

German jets raced low over the battlefield, spraying it with rockets and rapid-firing cannon shells. They didn’t have it all their own way, either; the Lizards’ killercraft replied in kind, and were better in quality. But the Germans had been building like men obsessed-were men obsessed-and had more airplanes, as they had more panzers. Step by step, the defenders of Poland were forced back.

“What are we going to do?” one of Anielewicz’s fighters asked him. Seen through the lenses of his gas mask, the man’s eyes were wide with horror.

“Keep fighting,” Mordechai answered. “I don’t know what else we can do.”

“What if the Poles give way?” the Jew demanded.

“They won’t,” Anielewicz said. “They’ve fought well. They’d better be fighting well. We have to have ’em-there are a lot more of them than there are of us.” All the same, he worried, not so much that the Poles would throw in the towel as at the command structure, or lack of same, of the defenders. He commanded his Jews, the Poles led their own, and the Lizards, while theoretically in charge of everybody, were a lot more diffident than they might have been.

Whatever command problems the Germans might have had, diffidence wasn’t one of them.

Battered by superior force, the defenders fell back toward Lodz-or rather, toward what had been Lodz. Before long, they began running into refugees streaming out from the city. Some of those plainly wouldn’t last long: they were vomiting blood, and their hair fell out in clumps. They’d been far too close to the bomb; its radiation was killing them. Anielewicz had never seen burns like those in all his life. It was as if some of their faces had been melted to slag.

Some people were blind in one eye, some in both. That was a matter of luck, depending on the direction in which they’d happened to face when the bomb went off. Some were burned on one side but not the other, the shadow of their own bodies having protected them from the hideous flash of light.

And, bad off as they were, they told stories of worse horrors closer to the explosion. “Everything’s melted down flat,” an elderly Polish man said. “Just flat, with only little bits of things sticking out from what looks like glass. It’s not glass, I don’t guess. What it is is, it’s what everything got melted down into, you know what I mean?”

A woman, a badly burned woman who probably wouldn’t live, had her own tale: “I came out of what was left of my house, and there was my neighbor’s wall next door. All the paint got burned off it-except where she’d been standing. I don’t know what happened to her. I never saw her again. I think she burned up instead of that stretch of the wall, and all that was left of her was her silhouette.”

“Here-drink,” Mordechai said, and gave her water from his canteen. He thanked God his own family was in Widawa. Maybe they would live. If they’d stayed in Lodz, they would surely be dead.

Because the refugees filled the roads, they made fighting and moving harder. But then, to Anielewicz’s delighted surprise, the German onslaught slowed. He and his comrades and the Lizards contained them well short of Lodz. Before long, he ran into someone with a radio who’d been listening to reports of how the wider war was going.

“Breslau,” the fellow said. The Germans had set off an explosive-metal bomb east of it in the last round of fighting. It wasn’t the Germans this time: it was the Race’s turn. “Peenemunde. Leignitz. Frankfurt on the Oder.” He tolled the roll of devastation. “Olmutz. Kreuzberg. Neustettin.”

A light went on in Anielewicz’s head. “No wonder the Germans have stalled. The Race is bombing all their cities near the border. They must be having the devil’s time getting supplies through.”

“That’s not all the Race is bombing,” the man with the radio answered. “The Lizards aren’t playing the game halfway this time.”

“Will there be anything left of the world when they’re through?” Mordechai asked.

“I don’t know about the world,” the man answered. “But I’ll tell you this: there won’t be much left of the goddamn Greater German Reich .”

Mordechai Anielewicz said, “Good.”

So far, the Deutsche had aimed four missiles at Cairo. The Race had knocked down two. One warhead had failed to detonate. And even the explosive-metal bomb that had gone off exploded a good distance east of the city. All things considered, it could have been much worse, and Atvar knew it.

He swung an eye turret toward Kirel. “They thought we would be meek and mild and forbearing,” he said. “Not this time. They miscalculated. In spite of all our warnings, they miscalculated. And now they are going to pay for it.”

“Indeed, Exalted Fleetlord.” Kirel pointed toward the map on the monitor in front of Atvar. “They have paid for it already.”

“Not yet,” Atvar said. “Not enough. This time, we are going to make a proper example of them.”

“By the time we are through with the Reich, nothing will be left of it,” Kirel said.

“Good,” Atvar said coldly. “The Deutsche have troubled us altogether too much in the past. We-I-have been far too patient. The time for patience is past. In the future, the Deutsche shall not trouble us again.”

Kirel ordered a different map up on the monitor. “They have also done us considerable damage in the present conflict.”

Atvar sighed. “That, unfortunately, was to be expected. With their orbiting weapons and with those fired from their submersible boats, the time between launch and detonation is very short. Our colonies on the island continent and on the central peninsula of the main continental mass have suffered, as have those west of here.”

“And our orbiting starships,” Kirel said.

“And our orbiting starships,” Atvar agreed. “And also Poland, very heavily, which is unfortunate.”

“We might have done better not to settle so many colonists in Poland,” Atvar admitted. “The only reason we ended up administering the subregion was that none of the Tosevite factions involved in the area would admit that any of the others had the right to control it. To reduce the chances of an outbreak, we kept it-and see what our reward was for that.”

“ ‘Reward’ is hardly the term I would use, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said.

Pshing came into Atvar’s office, which had become the command post for the Race’s war against the Reich. “Exalted Fleetlord, our monitors have just picked up a new broadcast from the not-emperor of the Deutsche.”

“Oh, a pestilence!” Atvar burst out. “We have expended several warheads on Nuremberg. I had hoped their command and control would be utterly disrupted by now. We shall just have to keep trying, that is all. Well, Pshing? What does the Big Ugly say?”

“His tone remains defiant, Exalted Fleetlord,” his adjutant replied. “Translation indicates he still predicts ultimate victory for his side.”

“He is as addled as an egg twenty days past hatching in the hot sun,” Atvar said.

“Unfortunately, Exalted Fleetlord, he is not so addled as to have failed to take shelter against our attacks, at least not yet,” Kirel said. “We kept getting reports that the Deutsche were constructing elaborate subterranean shelters. Those reports, if anything, appear to have been understatements.”

“So they do,” Atvar said. “And the Deutsche appear to have continued all the ruthlessness they displayed in the earlier fighting. You will recall that we hoped some of their subject allies would desert them?”