In the Balance (15 page)

I am flying toward my death
. George Bagnall had had that thought every time the Lancaster made its ungainly leap off the tarmac for a run into Germany. Now, flying against the Lizards, it was much more tightly focused. Death lurked in the air over Germany, yes, but random death: a
flak shell that happened to burst just where you were, or a night fighter coming close enough to spot your exhaust.

Going against the Lizards, death was not random. This was Bagnall’s third sortie into France, and he had seen that for himself. If the Lizards chose your plane, you
would
go down. Their rockets came after you as if they knew your home address. You couldn’t run; shooting at the missiles did no good to speak of; Bagnall wanted to hide.

He glanced over at Ken Embry. The pilot’s face was set, the skin stretched tight across his cheekbones, his mouth nothing but a bloodless slash. They were coming in low tonight, too low to bother with oxygen, so Embry’s whole face was visible. Going in high just made them better targets. The RAP had learned that lesson the hard way.

Bagnall sighed. “Pity we couldn’t have come down with a case of magneto drop or some such, eh?”

“You’re the engineer, Mr. Bagnall,” Embry said. “Arranging a convenient mechanical failure should be your speciality.”

“Pity I didn’t think of it as we were running through the checklists,” Bagnall murmured. Embry’s answering grin stretched his mouth wider, but did nothing to banish the look of haunted determination from his features. Like Bagnall, he knew what the odds were. They’d been lucky twice—three times, if you counted the wild melee in the air over Cologne on what everyone was starting to call The Night the Martians Landed. But how long could luck hold?”

Embry said, “Feels odd, flying out of formation.”

“It did seem rather like lining up all the ducks to be knocked over one by one,” Bagnall said. The first attack on the Lizards—in which, fortunately, his Lanc had not been involved—had been a failure horrific enough to make Bomber Command change tactics in a hurry, something the flight engineer hadn’t previously imagined possible.

And attacking low and dispersed did work better than pouring in high and in formation, as if the Lizards were nothing but Germans to be overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Bagnall’s bomber had made it back to England twice.

“Five miles to commencement of target area,” the navigator announced over the intercom.

“Thank you, Alf,” Ken Embry said. Ahead of them, streaks of fire began leaping up from the ground.
Fully laden bombers
exploded in midair, one after another, blazing through the night like great orange chrysanthemums of flame. They would have been even more beautiful had each one not meant the deaths of so many men.

Bagnall waited for one of those fiery streaks to burn straight for his Lanc. It hadn’t happened yet, but—

Embry whooped, pounded his thigh with a fist. “Did you see that? Did you bloody
see
that? One of them missed. Somebody dodged it.” Sure enough, one of the rockets kept flying up and up, then went off in a blast not much more impressive than a Guy Fawkes Day firework. Embry quickly sobered. “But there’s so many that don’t miss.”

From his glassed-in window in the bottom front of the Lanc’s nose, Douglas Bell said, “Coming up on something that looks like it belongs to the Lizards.”

That was good enough for Embry. “Commencing bombing run under your direction, Bomb-Aimer.”

“Very good,” Bell said. “Steer slightly west, toward that—bloody hell, I don’t know what it is, but it never came from Earth.”

“Slightly west; straightening my course on the object ahead,” the pilot acknowledged.

Peering ahead through the Perspex, Bagnall too saw against the horizon the great tower ahead. It looked more like a pregnant skyscraper than anything else he could think of, though even the Yankees’ famous Empire State Building might have shrunk by comparison, for the tower was still miles ahead. It assuredly did not belong in the French countryside, a good long way south and east of Paris.

It was not the only tower—
spaceship
, Bagnall supposed the proper word was—in the neighborhood, either. The Lizards kept setting down more and more of them. And to attack the spaceships themselves was certain death. Nobody had succeeded in knocking one out; nobody had come back from trying, either.

The bomb-aimer, while as brave a man as could be hoped for—he was up here, after all, wasn’t be?—was not actively trying to kill himself. He said, “Slightly more to the west, if you please, sir—three degrees or so. I think that’s the tank park we were told of in the briefing, don’t you?”

Embry and Bagnall both leaned forward to look now. Something big and orderly was going on down on the ground, that was certain. If it wasn’t German, it had to belong to the Lizards. And if it was German, Bagnall thought, well, too bad for Jerry. His eyes flicked over to Embry’s. The pilot nodded, said, “I think you’re right, Bomb-Aimer. Carry on.”

“Very good,” Bell repeated. “Steady course, steady …” His voice rose to a shout. “Commence bombing!” The fuselage rattled and groaned as bombs rained down on the target. Bagnall took a moment to pity the poor French peasants below. They were, after all, his allies, now suffering under the double yoke of the Nazis and the Lizards, and some of them were only too likely to die in the bombardment that was at the moment the only hope of getting them free.

The Lanc staggered in the air. For a dreadful instant, Bagnall thought it
was hit. But it was only plowing through the turbulence kicked up by exploding bombs—the plane was usually two or three miles higher above them when they went off.

“Let’s get out of here.” Embry heeled the bomber over and swung its nose toward England. “Give us a course for home, Mr. Whyte.”

“Due north will do for now; I’ll fine it up momentarily,” the navigator said.

“Due north it is. I wonder how many will land with us,” Embry said.

I wonder if
we’ll
be lucky enough to land
, Bagnall thought. He would not give the evil omen strength by speaking it aloud. Green-yellow tracers zipped past the windscreen, too close for comfort. Along with their rockets, the Lizards boasted formidable light flak. Embry threw the Lancaster into a series of evasive jinks and jerks that rattled everyone’s teeth.

The rear gunner called, “We’ve a fighter to starboard, looking us over.”

Whatever spit was left in Bagnall’s mouth dried up as his eyes swung rightward. But the plane there, a deeper blackness against black night, was not a Lizard jet, only—only!—a Focke-Wulf 190. It waggled its wings at the Lanc and darted away at a speed the British bomber could not hope to match.

When he breathed again Bagnall discovered he’d forgotten to for some time. Then another Lizard flak battery started up below. With a sound like a giant poking his fist through a tin roof shells slammed into, the Lancaster’s left wing. Flames spurted from both engines there. To his subsequent amazement, the flight engineer performed exactly as he’d been trained. A glance at the gauges told him those Merlins would never fly again. He shut them down, shut down the fuel feed to them, feathered the props.

Embry flicked a toggle, made a face. “Flaps aren’t responding on that side.”

“No hydraulic pressure,” Bagnall said after another check of his instruments. He watched the pilot fight the controls; already the Lanc was trying to swing in an anticlockwise circle. “Appears we have a bit of a problem.”

“A bit, yes,” Embry said, nodding. “Look for a field or a road. I’m going to try to set her down.” Still sounding calm, he went on, “Sooner pick my time for it than have the aircraft choose for me, eh?”

“As you say,” Bagnall agreed. The pilot’s couple of sentences told the same story as his own bank of instruments: the aircraft would not make it back to England. He pointed. “There’s as likely a stretch of highway as we’re apt to find. One thing for the war—we’re not likely to run over Uncle Pierre’s Citroën.”

“Right.” Embry raised his voice. “Crew prepare for crash landing. Mr. Bagnall, lower the landing gear, if you please.”

The right wheel descended smoothly; without hydraulics, the left refused to budge. Bagnall worked the hand crank. From the belly turret, a gunner said, “It’s down. I can see it.”

“One thing fewer to worry about,” Embry remarked, with what seemed to Bagnall to be quite excessive good cheer. Then the pilot added, “That leaves only two or three hundred thousand, unless I miss my count.”

“We could be trying this up in Normandy, where the hedge-rows grow right alongside the roadbed,” Bagnall said helpfully.

Embry corrected himself: “Two things fewer. You do so relieve my mind, George.”

“Happy to be of service,” Bagnall answered. Joking about what was going to happen was easier than just sitting back and watching it. A forced landing in a damaged aircraft on a French road in the middle of the night without lights was not easy to contemplate in cold blood.

As if to underscore that, Embry said, “Aircrew may bail out if they find that preferable to attempting a landing. I shall endeavor to remain airborne an extra minute or two to allow them to avail themselves of the opportunity. Had we suffered this misfortune a month ago, I would bail out myself and permit the aircraft to crash, thus denying it to the Germans. As you have seen this evening, however, that situation has for the moment changed. If you do intend to, parachute, please so inform me at this time.”

The intercom stayed silent until someone in the back of the plane said, “You’ll get us down all right, sir.”

“Let us hope such touching confidence is not misplaced,” Embry said. “Thank you, gentlemen, one and all, and good luck to you.” He brought the stick forward, reduced power to the two surviving Merlins.

“To us,” Bagnall amended. The road, a dark gray line arrowing through black fields, was almost close enough to reach out and touch. Embry brought the Lanc’s nose up a little, cut power still more. The bomber met the road with a bump, but Bagnall had been through worse landings at Swinderby. Cheers erupted in the intercom.

Then, just as the Lancaster slowed toward a stop, its right wing clipped a telegraph pole. It spun clockwise. The left landing gear went off the asphalt and into soft dirt. It buckled. The wing snapped off where the shells had chewed it. The stump dug into the ground. The aircraft’s spars groaned like a man on the rack. Bagnall wondered if it would flip over. It didn’t. Even as it was spinning, Embry had shut off the engines altogether.

Into sudden silence, a second round of cheers rang out. “Thank you, friends,” Embry said. Now at last, when it no longer mattered, he let himself sound wrung out. He turned to Bagnall with a tired grin.
“Est-ce que vous parlez francais, monsieur?”

“Hell, no,” Bagnall answered. They both laughed like schoolboys.

4

A metallic rumble echoed through
127th Emperor Hetto
as the transfer craft’s airlock engaged with one of the bannership’s docking collars. A speaker chimed softly in Fleetlord Atvar’s office. “The Tosevite is here, Exalted Fleetlord,” a junior officer announced.

“Fetch him hither,” Atvar said.

“It shall be done.”

Atvar hung in midair as he awaited the arrival of the Tosevite official He’d ordered the spin taken off the bannership when he began receiving natives. He was used to free-fall; while he did not particularly enjoy it, he endured it without trouble, as did his crew. The Tosevites, however, were without space travel. Finding themselves weightless might fluster them and put them at a disadvantage. Atvar hoped so, at any rate.

He let his jaws fall open in amusement as he remembered the unfortunate native from the empire called Deutschland who had lost all his stomach contents, luckily while still in the transfer craft. That poor befuddled Ribbensomething had been in no state even to try to negotiate his empire’s submission to
the
Empire.

The door to the office opened. An officer charged with learning the appropriate Tosevite dialect floated outside along with the native for whom he would interpret. The officer said, “Exalted Fleetlord, I present to you the emissary of the empire called the
Soyuz Sovietskikh Sotzialesticheskikh Respublik—
SSSR for short. His name is Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov.”