Harry Turtledove - Down to Earth

Drucker stared at the radio receiver. His boss at Peenemunde was running whatever was left of the Reich? How had that happened? When had it happened? Why hadn’t Dornberger started broadcasting sooner?

And, even more to the point, if Dornberger was running the Reich, why in hell wasn’t he surrendering just as fast as he could? He’d thought the idea of war against the Race utter madness, as Drucker had. It had proved to be utter madness, too. Why wasn’t he giving up, then?

Did he think he could win? Had the Race refused to accept his surrender? Was he trying to prove he could still hurt the Lizards after they’d done their worst to Western and Central Europe?

Did any of that matter? Reluctantly, Drucker decided it didn’t. An order that included all German spacecraft certainly included him. And, he had to admit, Dornberger was a Fuhrer he could respect. If he was going to go out, he would go out in a blaze of glory.

For the first time in quite a while, he looked out through the canopy with a view to sizing up targets. The points of light that moved against the stars were in Earth orbit, as he was. Some of them, the bright ones, shone more brilliant than Venus. Those would be the starships of the conquest and colonization fleets, the ships the Lizards couldn’t afford to lose.

He chose one by eye. They’d always orbited higher than upper stages usually did, and had moved higher still after the war with the Reich broke out. He could have fired up his radar to see exactly how far they’d moved, but he would have been shouting Here I am! if he did. Instead, he eyeballed a starship out ahead of him. If he could get close before turning on the radar and launching his missiles…

His calculations were automatic, instinctive, like a fighter pilot’s. If it was at that altitude, it was moving about so fast, which meant he’d need a burn of about so long to take himself out of his present orbit and put him into firing position. If the Lizards were alert and blasted him into wreckage before he could launch, they’d win. If they weren’t… He sighed. If they weren’t, they’d blow him into wreckage after he launched.

Soldiers, unfortunately, found themselves in such positions now and again. His finger poked the button that started his engine. The acceleration wasn’t enormous, but he hadn’t felt any acceleration at all for most of a month. Any at all made him seem to weigh five hundred kilos.

He used his fuel lavishly. It wasn’t as if he’d be coming back. The starship he’d chosen as a target grew brighter and brighter, then started showing a visible disk. Drucker knew he’d be visible, too, on every Lizard radar screen in the neighborhood. That starship couldn’t run away, not as massive as it was. They would need to interpose, or to come at him from some other direction, before he got close enough to do what he’d set out to do.

Now he did light up his radar. It showed the starship dead ahead, with just about the range and velocity he’d guessed. “I have good eyeballs,” he said with a chuckle. If he was going to go out, he’d go out laughing-and as a colonel, no less.

And he thought he would take the starship with him. The Lizards never had been good at reacting to the unexpected. None of their missiles headed his way. None of their spacecraft designed to fight in orbit-nastier creatures than Hans-Ulrich Bus — showed up on his screen. Somewhere on their starships, they were probably yelling back and forth at one another, trying to figure out what the devil to do. He didn’t need to figure. He was already doing.

No, here came one of their spacecraft, under what looked like pretty good acceleration. But it was late, late. He used the attitude jets to align the nose of Hans-Ulrich Bus on the starship. And then his thumb and forefinger found the red switch he’d never thought he would use. He pulled it out and activated it, then flipped it first to the left, then to the right.

His upper stage shuddered as the missiles left their tubes with puffs of compressed gas. When they were far enough from Hans-Ulrich Bus , their motors came on. The radars they carried guided them straight toward the Lizards’ starship, less than fifty kilometers away.

Drucker cursed horribly a moment later, for the Lizards aboard the starship weren’t asleep after all. Countermissiles leaped away no more than a heartbeat after he launched his. One of his blew up almost at once. The other, though-the other bored in on its target. “Come on,” Drucker whispered. “Come on!” The missiles, had proximity fuses set to detonate them a hundred meters from a ship’s skin. Would that one get through? All the countermissiles had missed it. If the Lizards didn’t do something nasty…

They did. Something sparkled along the starship’s centerline: a close-in weapon system, nothing more dramatic than a computerized heavy machine-gun battery-and the missile exploded in a fireball made up not of bursting atoms but of bursting fuel tanks. Over. It was all over. Drucker swung Hans-Ulrich’s Bus by the attitude jets so he could face the oncoming Lizard spacecraft. Without hope and without fear, he readied himself for his last fight.

“Deutsch upper stage!” That was a Lizard, speaking the language of the Race. “Surrender, Deutsch upper stage. You have no more missiles. You can do no more significant harm. Your not-empire is in ruins. What can you gain by further senseless sacrifice?”

That was a good question. The longer Drucker thought about it, the better it looked. He swung his thumb from the machine-gun trigger to the radio switch. “Male of the Race, I have no good answer for you,” he said wearily. “You have me. I do not know what you will do with me. At the moment, I do not much care what you will do with me. Whatever it is, you have me. I surrender.”

“What can I do for you today, Shiplord?” Straha’s driver asked.

“I cannot think of anything,” Straha answered. “If I need anything, you may be certain that I shall not be shy in letting you know.”

His driver bent into the posture of respect. It was half true subordination, half mockery. The Tosevite had at least as much power in their relationship as did Straha himself. “I have no doubt that you will. In the meantime, if it suits you, I will do some work on your motorcar.”

“Go ahead,” Straha told him. “You could just as easily take it to someone specializing in repairs, you know. Funds would appear to be adequate for any necessary expenditures.” Considering that the government of the not-empire of the United States paid for everything connected with Straha’s upkeep, funds were bound to be adequate.

But the driver said, “I enjoy working on machinery. I would rather do it myself. That way, I am sure it is done right.”

“Whatever pleases you,” Straha replied. Now that he thought about it, he shouldn’t even have tried to discourage the Big Ugly. With him out on the street tinkering with balky Tosevite machinery, Straha could come closer to living a normal, or at least an unspied-upon, life.

When Straha looked out the kitchen window a little later, he saw his driver bent over the engine compartment of the motorcar, happily repairing something or other. The ex-shiplord shrugged. He’d also known males and females of the Race who enjoyed messing about with machines. He had never understood the excitement himself-but then, most Big Uglies saw his gardening as a waste of time.

Straha hurried to his study and turned on the computer that connected him to the Race’s computer network. Since his connection was highly unofficial-even more so than Sam Yeager’s-he didn’t get very many electronic messages, but a synthesized voice announced that he had one today. It was, he noted without surprise, from Yeager, under his pseudonym of Maargyees.