Harry Turtledove - Second Contact

“It will do, for now.” Liu Han leaned forward. “Let’s talk.”

Theirs was not the only talk that went into the plan, of course. They met with leading officials from the Party and the People’s Liberation Army, hammering out what they wanted to do and also how to keep both the little scaly devils and the Kuomintang from getting wind of it before the attacks went on. Liu Han helped organize a disinformation campaign: not one that claimed there would be no attack, but one that said it was aimed at a different part of Peking a week later than the real assault would be launched.

Nieh Ho-T’ing went several times to the Muslim quarter in the southwestern part of the Chinese city of Peking. He came back from one trip laughing. “I met with a mutton merchant,” he told Liu Han. “Across the street, an ordinary Chinese has set up as a pig butcher. The fellow painted a tiger in the front window of his shop, to frighten the Muslim’s sheep. The Muslim put a mirror in front of his own place, to make the tiger turn on the pigs, which the Muslim cannot eat himself. I thought it was a good joke.”

“It is a good joke,” Liu Han agreed. “Now, will the Muslims make their diversion?”

“I think they will,” Nieh answered. “The scaly devils oppress them because Muslims cause so much trouble in the west-you had a good notion there. That pig butcher is an example of this oppression: pigs offend Muslims, but the little devils let him open his shop in that district even so.”

“If they are fools, they will pay for being fools,” Liu Han said. “A pity we have to give the Muslims weapons to help them rise up. The ones who live may end up turning some of those weapons against us.”

“It can’t be helped,” Nieh said.

“I suppose not,” Liu Han admitted. “I wish it could. But the Muslims are less dangerous to us than the Kuomintang, much less than the little scaly devils.”

The chosen day dawned clear and cold, with a strong wind blowing out of the west. The wind brought with it yellow dust from the Mongolian desert; a thin coating of dust got everywhere, including between Liu Han’s teeth. That gritty feeling in the mouth and in the eyes was part of living in Peking. Liu Han quickly got used to it again, though she hadn’t missed it when she and Liu Mei went to America.

She stayed in her roominghouse with her daughter, waiting for things to happen. In a way, she wished she were carrying an American tommy gun or a Russian PPSh submachine gun, but she wasn’t an ordinary soldier any more. She was of more use to the cause of popular revolution setting others in motion than moving herself.

Right at the appointed hour, gunfire broke out south of the roominghouse. “It begins,” Liu Mei said.

“Not yet, not for us,” Liu Han replied. “If the Muslims do not draw enough scaly devils away from the Forbidden City, our fighters will sit on their hands and let the little devils crush this uprising. That will be hard on the Muslims, but it will save our men for another time when we can get better use from them.”

“We will give the Muslims to the Kuomintang if that happens,” Liu Mei said.

“Truth,” Liu Han answered in the scaly devils’ language. Returning to Chinese, she went on, “It cannot be helped, though. If we waste the substance of the People’s Liberation Army, we have nothing left.”

Before long, her practiced ear caught the rattle of the little scaly devils’ automatic weapons, a sound different from the one the Muslims’ rifles and submachine guns made. When she caught the rumble of tanks rolling through the narrow streets of Peking, she grinned at her daughter. Things were unfolding just as Nieh Ho-T’ing had planned them. Liu Mei didn’t grin back; that was not her way. But her eyes sparkled in an otherwise expressionless face, and Liu Han knew she was pleased.

Had the People’s Liberation Army been fighting the Kuomintang, the attack on the Forbidden City would have come after sunset. But the Chinese Communists had learned to their sorrow that the scaly devils had devices allowing them to see in the dark like owls. And so the assault on the moated walls surrounding the rectangle of the Forbidden City began in the early afternoon. American submachine guns smuggled one by one into the surrounding Imperial City opened up on the walls. So did heavy Russian mortars. The gates into the Forbidden City-especially the Wu Men , the Meridian Gate, at the south-would already be open, to let the soldiers of the little scaly devils and their fighting vehicles go forth to put down the Muslims. Teams of picked Chinese fighters were to rush in through them, to make sure they stayed open so more human beings could follow.

“If we take the Forbidden City, can we keep it?” Liu Mei asked.

“I don’t know,” Liu Han answered. “We can do a lot of damage. We can kill a lot of their officials and a lot of running dogs. And we can embarrass them, make them look like fools all over the world. It’s worth the price we’ll pay.”

“They do fight hard,” her daughter remarked. “They will slay more of ours than we slay of theirs.”

“I know that.” Liu Han’s shrug was not so much callous as calculating. “Mao is right when he says they can slay hundreds of millions of Chinese and still leave us with hundreds of millions to resist them. They cannot afford losses that match ours. They cannot afford losses that are the tenth part of ours. That is what this attack is supposed to tell them.”

Someone pounded on her door. She opened it. A runner, a man she recognized as one of Nieh Ho-T’ing’s junior officers, stood panting in the hallway. Half his left ear had been shot away; blood dripped down onto his tunic. He didn’t seem to notice. “Comrade-Comrades”-he corrected himself, catching sight of Liu Mei behind Liu Han-“I am to tell you that the Tai Ho Tien , the Hall of Supreme Harmony, at the heart of the Forbidden City is in the hands of the People’s Liberation Army.”

“So soon?” Liu Han exclaimed. The runner nodded. She shook her head in slow wonder. “I think we will conquer-I think we have conquered-after all.”

Except on the days when he felt worse, Mordechai Anielewicz bicycled through the streets of Lodz. It was defiance as much as anything else, a refusal to let the nerve gas he’d breathed twenty years before do anything more to his life than he could help.

When he saw Ludmila Jager hobbling along on a stick, he pulled to a stop beside her. Her broad Russian face bore a look of intense concentration; she was fighting pain as best she could, too. “How is it today?” Mordechai called to her.

She shrugged. “Today, not so good,” she answered. “When the weather is cold and wet, it hurts more,” she went on in her Russian-accented Polish. Then she eyed him. “But you know this for yourself.”

“I suppose so,” he answered, again feeling oddly guilty that the gas had done worse to her than it had to him.

She snapped her fingers. “Something I meant to tell you. Someone asked me yesterday where you live.”

“ Nu? Did you tell him?” Mordechai asked.

Ludmila frowned. “I did, and now I wonder if I should have. That’s why I wanted to let you know: in case I was stupid.”

Anielewicz grew alert. “Why? Do you think he was a Polish nationalist? Or did he like a Nazi talk?” He smiled as he put on the German accent, but the expression didn’t reach his eyes. He’d done the Greater German Reich a few favors during the fighting, but he’d done the Nazis any number of unfavors during it and since, not least refusing to let himself and Lodz go up in fire when the SS smuggled what was now the Jews’ explosive-metal bomb into the city.

“No.” Ludmila shook her head. “And no again. As a matter of fact, he spoke Polish the same way I do. Not as well, I don’t think.”