Tilting The Balance (69 page)

“Enough, you two,” Ludmila said. She’d been saying that ever since the German and the security man met. She’d kept them from trying to kill each other on the tramp back to the village where they’d shot it out with the anti-Tolokonnikovites (she still didn’t know who Tolokonnikov’s was or what sort of faction he led), and sometimes kept them from sniping at each other with words for as long as half an hour.

“You be careful up there,” Schultz told her, in the not-to-be-denied tones of a field marshal giving orders – or a man who wanted to go to bed with her. She knew which only too well. Wanting to go to bed with her was the only thing on which he and Sholudenko agreed. The air base had needed a political officer when Sholudenko got there, but that wasn’t the only reason Sholudenko had arranged to stay on here, even if it was the official one.

In a way, climbing into the cockpit of her new U-2 was a relief. She didn’t have to argue with the Lizards or cajole them along; all they wanted to do was kill her. Avoiding that was a lot simpler than the passes from Schultz and Sholudenko she kept ducking.

Schultz spun the prop. He’d been right about one thing – Colonel Karpov had been so glad to have his mechanical talents back that he’d overlooked the little matter of going off without bothering to get permission first. That Schultz had actually returned with Ludmila hadn’t hurt there, either.

The Kukuruznik’s little five-cylinder radial buzzed into life. It had a note slightly different from the one she’d grown used to, but Schultz insisted that was nothing to worry about. On engines, if not many other places, Ludmila trusted his word.

She released the brake, gave the biplane full throttle, and bounced across the still-muddy steppe till she was airborne. She stayed at treetop height as she flew south and west toward the front. One rule the Red Air Force had learned: the higher you flew against the Lizards, the less likely you were to come back.

The front south of Sukhinichi was not far away, and got closer all the time whether she was in the air or not. With the coming of good weather, the Lizards were on the move again, pushing through German remnants and Soviet troops alike as they advanced on Moscow. By crackling shortwave Stalin had ordered, “Ni shagu nazadl – Not one step back!” Giving the order and being strong enough to make sure it was obeyed were not the same thing, worse luck.

The Red Army had brought up all the artillery it could to try to stem the Lizard tide. Ludmila flew past bare-chested young men in khaki trousers serving their guns for all they were worth. When a cannon, or sometimes a whole battery, discharged close by, the blast made the U-2 tremble in the air like a falling leaf caught by a gust of wind. The gun crews waved at her plane, not because they knew she was a woman, but for joy at seeing anything human-built in the air.

Tanks rumbled along the dirt roads. Some of them spewed smoke to help mask their positions. Ludmila hoped that would do some good; going up against Lizard armor was worse than facing the Germans. The Nazis had had better tactics but worse tanks. The Lizards’ tanks were better than the T-34s and KV-1s that were the pride of Soviet armored forces, and their tactics weren’t bad, either.

A curtain of dust thrown up from shell hits marked the front. Ludmila took a deep breath as she drew near; every second she spent in and around that curtain or on the other side was a second in which she was hideously more likely to die than at any other time. Her bowels clenched and loosened, her bladder felt very full though it wasn’t. She noticed none of that, not consciously.

What she did notice was the Soviet line beginning to go to pieces. Along with the dust, smoke from burning tanks filled the air and made her cough and choke when she flew through plumes of it. She didn’t see many tanks right at the front to try to halt the Lizards’ advance. Most either hunkered down where they were or pulled back toward Sukhinichi.

Ludmila shook her head. That wasn’t going to hold things together; it would probably end up costing the vital railway center, too. The Germans had had surprisingly few tanks, but they’d massed them and used them aggressively against Soviet troops. She’d thought the Red Army had grasped the principle. It didn’t seem that way, not from what she was seeing here.

Without armor to support them, the Russian infantrymen who huddled in their trenches had to take whatever the Lizards dished out without much hope of hitting back. She wondered how long they would stay and fight, even with
NKVD
men with submachine guns back of the line to discourage them from doing anything else.

As the soldiers at the guns had, some of the infantry waved as she flew over them. She wondered if the young peasants and workers down below appreciated the irony of her sallying forth against the Lizards in an aircraft that had seemed obsolete even against the Nazis. She doubted it. All they saw was a plane with red stars on the fuselage and wings. That was enough to give them hope.

Then she was on the other side of the line, the side the Lizards controlled. The ground below her resembled nothing so much as the craters of the moon she’d once examined in a science text: the aliens were advancing through territory that had already been fought over. If that bothered them, they didn’t show it.

Pop. pop! A couple of bullets tore through the doped fabric hat covered the U-2’s wings. Ludmila grunted in dismay. The only thing that would protect her was the aircraft’s speed, and the Kukuruznik wasn’t very fast…

Off to one side a couple of kilometers, she glimpsed the fierce tadpole shape of a Lizard helicopter gunship. She heeled he U-2 away from it and dove even closer to the deck. The gunship could fly rings around her and blow her out of the sky, and painful experience had taught that the machine guns she carried wouldn’t do anything more than scratch its paint.

Luck stayed with her: the helicopter continued on up toward he front without spying her. And her turn brought her straight toward a convoy of lorries – some Lizard-made, others captured from the Red Army or the Nazis – also moving up with troops and supplies. She never would have spotted them if she hadn’t had to evade the gunship.

With a joyful whoop, she thumbed the firing button. The Kukuruznik jerked a little as its twin machine guns began to hammer away. Orange lines of tracers showed she was scoring hits. A German-made lorry suddenly became a ball of flame.

Ludmila whooped louder.

Lizards bailed out of vehicles and started shooting at her. She got out of there as fast as she could.

After a good strafing run like that, she could have flown back to her base and truthfully reported success. But, like most good combat pilots, she lusted for more. She buzzed on, deeper into Lizardheld territory.

Back of the line, fire came her way less often. The Lizards seemed less alert, or maybe just hadn’t counted on many human planes getting through. She wished she were flying a Pe-2 bomber with a couple of thousand kilos of high explosive rather than a wheezing trainer that had had a brace of machine guns strapped onto it. But then, the Lizards shot down Pe-2s with effortless ease.

She spied more lorries – human-made ones, stopped to fuel up. She raked them with machinegun fire, and felt a mix of terror and crazy exhilaration when flames shot so high that she had to pull up sharply, to keep from flying straight through them.

The machine guns had performed without a jam. They usually did, so she didn’t know how much Georg Schultz’s relentless perfectionism had to do with that, but it couldn’t have hurt. She swung the U-2 back toward the north; she was low on fuel and she’d used a lot of ammunition. She was willing to bet Schultz had spent the time she was flying methodically filling belts with bullets.

Coming back, she was fired on not only by the Lizards but also by jittery Soviet troops convinced anything in the air, especially if it flew over them from the other side of the line, had to be dangerous. But the Kukuruznik, not least because it was so simple, was a rugged machine: unless you hit the engine or the pilot or were lucky enough to snap a control wire with a bullet, you wouldn’t hurt it much.

Ludmila flew over advancing Lizard tanks. They were across a small river whose line the Soviets had been holding when she’d gone out on her attack run an hour or so before. She bit her lip. It was as she’d feared: in spite of everything the Red Army could do, in spite of her own pinprick successes inside Lizardheld territory, the local position was deteriorating. Sukhinichi would fall, and after that only Kaluga stood between the Lizards and Moscow.

The U-2 bounced to a stop. A couple of groundcrew men lugged jerricans of petrol toward the airplane, squelching through mud that was still pretty thick. Behind them came Georg Schultz, ammunition belts draped across his chest so that he resembled nothing so much as a Cossack bandit. He took a chunk of black bread from a pocket of the German infantry blouse he still wore, held it out to Ludmila. “Khleb,”he said, one Russian word he’d mastered.

“Spasebo,”she answered, and took a bite. Right in back of Schultz slogged Nikifor Sholudenko. Maybe he didn’t want the German spending even a moment alone with her because they were rivals, or maybe just because he was
NKVD
. Either way, Ludmila was glad to see him: he was someone to whom she could report, which meant she wouldn’t have to hunt up Colonel Karpov.

Or could she? The air base looked like an anthill somebody had kicked, with people running every which way to no apparent purpose. Before she could ask any questions, Schultz spread his arms wide and exclaimed, “Bolshoye drap – big skedaddle.” That was, ironically, the same term the Russians had used to describe the flight of bureaucrats from Moscow when it looked as if the Germans would capture the capital in October 1941. Ludmila wondered if Schultz was using it with malice aforethought.

That, however, mattered relatively little. “Skedaddle?” Ludmila said in dismay. “We’re puffing out of here?”

“We are indeed,” Nikifor Sholudenko said. “Orders are to shorten, consolidate, and strengthen the defensive front.” He didn’t bother to add that that was a euphemism for retreat, just as severe fighting meant a battle we’re losing. Ludmila knew that as well as he did. So, very likely, did Georg Schultz.

Ludmila said, “May I fly another mission before we pull back? I stung them the last time; they hardly had any air defenses set up.”

“Who can defend against one of these things?” Schultz said in German, setting an affectionate hand on the U-2’s cloth-covered fuselage. “They peep in through the keyhole when you’re taking a leak.”

Sholudenko snorted at that, but to Ludmila he shook his head. “Colonel Karpov’s orders are that we leave now. They came in just after you took off; if you hadn’t been airborne, we probably would have already cleared out.”

“Where are we going?” Ludmila asked.

The
NKVD
man pulled out a scrap of paper, glanced down at it. “They’re setting up a new base at Collective Farm 139, bearing 43, distance fifty-two kilometers.”

Ludmila translated distance and bearing into a dot on the map. “That’s right outside Kaluga,” she said unhappily.

“Just west of it, as a matter of fact,” Sholudenko agreed. “We’re going to fight the Lizards house by house and street by street in Sukhinichi to delay them while we prepare new positions between Sukhinichi and Kaluga. Then, at need, we will fight house by house in Kaluga. I hope the need does not arise.”

He stopped there; not even an
NKVD
man, answerable to no one at the air base but himself and perhaps, for something particularly heinous, Colonel Karpov, wanted to say too much. But Ludmila had no trouble reading between the lines. He didn’t expect whatever makeshift line the Red Army would set up north of Sukhinichi to hold the Lizards. He didn’t expect to hold them at Kaluga, either, not by the sound of what he said. And between Kaluga and Moscow lay only plains and forest – no more cities in-which to slow down and maul the invaders.

“We’re in trouble,” Georg Schultz said in German. Ludmila wondered at his naTvete in speaking so freely: the Nazis might not have the
NKVD
, but they certainly did have the Gestapo. Didn’t Schultz know you weren’t supposed to open your mouth where people you couldn’t trust were listening?

Sholudenko gave him an odd look. “The Soviet Union is in trouble,” he conceded. “No more so than Germany, however, and no more so than any of the rest of the world.”

Before Schultz could answer, Colonel Karpov came running up the airstrip, shouting, “Get out!

Get out! Lizard armor has broken through west of Sukhinichi, and they’re heading this way. We have maybe an hour to get clear – maybe not, too. Get out!”

Wearily, Ludmila climbed back into the little Kukuruznik Groundcrew men turned the plane into the wind; Georg Schultz spun the two-bladed wooden prop. The engine, reliable even if puny, caught at once. The biplane rattled down the runway and hopped into the air. Ludmila swung it northeast, toward Collective Farm 139.

Schultz, Sholudenko, and Karpov stood on the ground waving to her. She waved back, wondering if she would ever see them again. Suddenly, instead of being, the one who flew dangerous combat missions, she was the one who could escape the oncoming Lizards: If they were only an hour away, they had a good chance of overrunning the humans trying to escape from the air base.

She checked her airspeed indicator and her watch At the U-2’s piddling turn of speed, Collective Farm 139 was about half an hour away. She hoped she’d be able to spot the new base, and then hoped she wouldn’t: if the maskirovka was bad, the Lizards would notice it.

Of course, if the maskirovka was good, she’d fly around and around and probably have to set down in the wrong place because she was running out of fuel. Airspeed indicator, watch, and compass were not the most sophisticated navigational instruments around, but they were what she had.

A Lizard warplane shot by, far overhead. The howl of its jet engines put her in mind of wolves deep in the forest baying at the moon. She patted the fabric sides of her U-2. It was also an effective combat aircraft, no matter how puny and absurd alongside the jet. It had seemed puny and absurd alongside an Me-I09, too.