In the Balance (17 page)

“As you say, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel answered. He did not say—presumably because he knew Atvar knew it as well as himself—that the factories, even at top output, could not produce in a day more than a small part of the supplies the Race’s armed forces used during that day. Back on Home, no one had reckoned that the armada would use as much as it had.

As if to turn away from that unpleasant reflection, Atvar said, “For all the bluster the Big Ugly envoys show, they may yet prove tractable. The male from the empire called Deutschland, despite his sickness, showed some comprehension of our might.” All at once, he remembered that Molotov had said Deutschland was a not-empire. He wondered queasily if its emperor had been murdered, too.

Shiplord Kirel said, “Deutschland? Interesting. May I use your screen to show you an image a reconnaissance satellite caught for us yesterday?” Atvar opened, his hands wide to show assent. Kirel punched commands in the
127th Emperor Hetto’s
data storage system.

The screen lit to show green land and grayish sea. A spot of fire appeared in one corner of the land, not far from a clump of big wood buildings. The fire suddenly spread and got brighter, then went out more slowly. “One of our bombing runs?” Atvar asked.

“No. Let me show it to you again, this time in slow motion with maximum magnification and image processing.”

The amplified image came up on the screen. Atvar stared at it, then at Kirel. “That is a missile,” he said accusingly as if it were the shiplord’s fault. He did not want to believe what he had just seen.

But Kirel said, “Yes, Exalted Fleetlord, this is a missile, or at least was intended to be one. Since it exploded on its launching pad, we are unable to gain estimates of its range or guidance system, if any, but to judge from its size, it appears more likely to be strategic than tactical.”

“I presume we have eradicated this site,” Atvar said.

“It was done, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel agreed.

The shiplord’s doleful voice told Atvar what he already knew: even though this site was gone, the Race had no sure way of telling how many others the Deutsche possessed—until a missile roared toward them. And swatting missiles out of, the sky was an order of magnitude harder than dealing with these slow, clumsy Tosevite airplanes. Even the airplanes were hurting his forces now and again, because the Big Uglies kept sending them out no matter how many got knocked down. As Kirel had said, their courage and skill went some of the way toward making up for their poor technology.

“We have to destroy the factories in which these weapons are produced,” Atvar said.

“Yes Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel answered.

Not
, Atvar noted,
“It shall be done.”
From the air, one factory looked like another. Destroying
all
the factories in Deutschland was a tall order. Compared to the size of the planet, Deutschland was a small empire, but even small empires, Atvar was learning, covered a lot of ground. The other Tosevite empires had factories, too. How close were they to making missiles?

The fleetlord did his best to look on the bright side. “Their failure gives us the warning we need. We shall not be taken unawares even if they succeed in launching missiles at us.”
We had better not be
, his tone said.

“Our preparations are adequate,” Kirel said. He did his best to keep on sounding businesslike and military, but his voice had an edge to it that Atvar understood perfectly well: if that was the bright side, it was hardly worth looking for.

The train chuffed to a halt somewhere on the south Russian steppe; men in field gray sprang down and went efficiently to work. They would have been more efficient still, Karl Becker thought, if they’d been allowed to proceed in their usual methodical fashion rather than at a dead run. But an order from the
Führer
was an order from the
Führer
. At the dead run they went.

“The ground will not be adequately prepared, Karl,” Michael Arenswald said sadly. Both men were part of the engineering detachment of Heavy Artillery Battalion Dora.

“This is true, of course,” Becker said with a fatalistic nod, “but how many shots are we likely to be able to fire before the Lizards descend on us?” They were sixty kilometers from the Lizard base. With aircraft, though, especially the ones the Lizards flew, sixty kilometers passed in the blink of an eye. Karl Becker was a long way from stupid; he recognized a suicide mission when he heard one.

If Arenswald did, too, he kept it to himself. “We might even get off half a dozen before they figure out what’s happening to them.”

“Oh,
quatsch!”
said Becker, a Berliner. He jabbed an index finger out at his friend. “You are a dead man, I am a dead man, we are all dead men, the whole battalion of us. The only question left unanswered is whether we can take enough Lizards with us to make our deaths worth something.”

“Sooner or later, we are all dead men.” Arenswald laughed. “We’ll give them a surprise before we go, at any rate.”

“With luck, we may manage that,” Becker admitted. “We—” He broke off and started coughing. The battalion had a chemical unit attached to it, to send up, smoke and hide, it from view from the air while it was setting up for action. Some of the smoke came from nothing more sophisticated
than flaming buckets of motor oil. Breathing it was probably doing Becker’s lungs no good, but odds were it wouldn’t kill him before he died of other causes. He coughed again, then ignored it.

Men swarmed over the tram like ants. Special tracks had been laid for the heavy artillery battalion, four gently curved arcs, each always a constant distance from its neighbors. The inner two sets of rails were exactly twenty feet apart. Crews began moving specially built diesel construction cranes to the outer pair of tracks for aid in the upcoming assembly process.

Looking at all the purposeful activity, Arenswald laughed again. “Not bad, considering how under strength we are.” The smoke was already turning his face sooty.

“A lot of people we don’t need, considering we won’t be here long.” When Heavy Artillery Battalion Dora came into Russia, it was accompanied by a security unit that included three hundred infantry and secret police with dogs, and by a four-hundred-man reinforced flak battalion. Neither the one nor the other mattered now. If the Lizards chose to come this way, German infantry could not hold them off, and the flak battalion could not keep their planes away. Dora’s only hope of accomplishing anything was going into action before the enemy noticed it was there. And considering what Dora was …

Becker laughed, too. Arenswald gave him a curious look. He explained: “Keeping Dora a secret is like taking an elephant out of its enclosure at the Berlin
Tiergarten
and walking it out of the-zoo without the keepers’ paying you any mind.”

“Something to that.” Arenswald waved at the ever-denser smoke all around. “But you see, Karl, we have a very large pocket here.”

“We have a very large elephant, too.” Becker hopped down from the train and walked between the two center tracks, the ones that would have to bear Dora’s weight. The tracks were laid with closely spaced cross ties to help strengthen the roadbed, but the ground was not nearly so stony as it should have been. That would matter a great deal if Dora stayed here a long while. For the few shots it was likely to get off, the ground was less important.

The next few days passed in a berserk blaze of work, with sleep, snatched in odd moments, often under the train to give some protection in case Lizard aircraft did come by. The manuals said assembling Dora needed a week. Driven by the lash of fear for the fatherland, the heavy artillery battalion did it in four and a half days.

The two pieces of the bottom half of the gun carriage went onto the two central tracks and were aligned with each other. They rested on twenty rail trucks, again to distribute Dora’s mass as widely as possible. Becker was part of the crew that hydraulically leveled the lower mount.

The diesel cranes lifted crossbeams onto the lower mount, then placed the two-piece upper mount where it belonged. The top of the carriage held Dora’s loading assembly and the trunnion supports. It was joined to the lower mount by dozens of heavy bolts. Becker went down one side of the carriage and Arenswald down the other, checking that every one was in place.

They met at the rear, grinned, exchanged drawings, then went
up
the carriage to check each other’s sides. Everything had to work once the shooting started; things would go wrong soon enough after that.

Assembly went faster once the carriage was together. The trunnions, the gun cradle, the breech, and the barrel sections all were raised to their proper positions. When Dora was at last complete, Becker admired the monster gun through blowing smoke. Carnage and all, the 80-centimeter cannon was fifty meters long and eleven meters tall; its barrel alone was thirty meters long. Somewhere far above the smoke, Becker heard a Lizard plane whine past. His shoulders slumped; his hands made futile fists. “No, God,” he said, almost as a threat, “not now, not when we were so close.”

Michael Arenswald clapped him on the shoulder. “They’ve flown over us before, Karl. It will be all right; you’ll see.”

No bombs fell on them; no guided rockets exploded by the gun carriage. A crane lifted from a freight car a seven-tonne shell, slowly swung the great projectile, more than five meters long and almost a meter thick, onto the loading assembly. It didn’t look like an artillery shell, not to Becker. It looked like something more primeval, as if
Tyrannosaurus rex
had been reincarnated as artillery.

The breech received the shell, was closed with a clang that sounded like a factory noise. The whole battalion cheered as the gun barrel slowly rose, its tip no doubt projecting out of the smoke screen now. Laughing, Arenswald said, “It reminds me of the world’s biggest prick getting hard.”

“That’s one hell of a hard-on, all right,” Becker said.

The barrel reached an angle of almost forty-five degrees, stopped. Along with everyone else around, Becker turned away: from it, covered his ears, opened his mouth.

The blast was like nothing he’d ever imagined. It sucked all the air out of his lungs, shook him like a terrier shaking a rat. Stunned, he staggered, stumbled, sat down hard on the ground. His head roared. He wondered if he would ever hear anything through that oceanic clamor again. But he could still see. Sprawled in the dirt beside him, Michael Arenswald gave a big thumbs-up.

A radar technician on the grounded transport ship
67th Emperor Sohrheb
stared at the screen in front of him, hissed in dismay. Automatic
alarms began to yammer even before Breltan shrieked, “Missile incoming!” A warning had come down that the Big Uglies were playing with missiles, but he’d never expected to encounter one of their toys so soon. He raised both eye turrets to the ceiling in bemusement. The Big Uglies just weren’t
like
the Race. They were always in a hurry.

Their missile was in a hurry, too, chewing away the distance to the grounded ships. Breltan’s jaws opened again, this time in amusement. So the Tosevites had discovered missiles, had they? Well and good, but they hadn’t yet discovered that missiles too could be killed.

No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than the radars showed missiles leaping up to smash the intruder. Breltan laughed again, said, “You’ll have to do better than that, Big Uglies.”

A missile, as a rule, is a flimsy thing, no stronger than it has to be—any excess weight degrades performance. If another missile—or even a fragment hurled from an exploding warhead—hits it, odds are it will be wrecked.

The shell from Dora, however, had to be armored to withstand the monstrous force that had sent it on its way. A missile exploded a couple of meters from it. The fragments bounced off its brass sides. Another missile struck it a glancing blow before exploding and spun away, ruined.

The shell, undisturbed, flew on.

Breltan watched the radar screen in disbelief mixed with equal measures of horror and fascination. “It can’t do that,” he said. But it could—the Tosevite missile shrugged off everything the Race threw at it and kept coming. Coming right at Breltan.

“Emperor save me,” he whimpered, and dove under his seat in the approved position for protection against attack from the air.

The shell landed about ten meters in front of the
67th Emperor Sohrheb
. Just under a tonne of its mass was high explosives. The rest, in a time measured in microseconds, turned to knife-edged, red-hot fragments of every shape and size.

Like all starships of the invasion fleet, the
67th Emperor Sohrheb
drew its primary power from an atomic pile. But, like most of the ships that landed on Tosev 3, it used a fair part of the energy from that pile to electrolyze water into oxygen and the hydrogen that fueled the Race’s air and ground vehicles.

When it blew, it blew sky-high. No one ever found a trace of Breltan—or his seat.

The fireball was big enough to be visible across sixty kilometers. When
it lit up the northern horizon, the men of Heavy Artillery Battalion Dora screamed with: delight, loud enough for Karl Becker to hear them even with his abused ears. “Hit! Hit! Hit!” he shouted, and danced in a clumsy circle with Michael Arenswald.

“Now
that’s
what I call an orgasm,” Arenswald yelled.

The brigadier commanding the heavy artillery battalion climbed up onto the immense gun carriage, megaphone in hand. “Back to it!” he bawled to his capering crew. “We want to hit them again before they hit us.”

Nothing could have been better calculated to send the battalion back to work at full speed. Unlike a tank gun, Dora could not traverse. A locomotive attached to the front end of the carriage moved forward a few meters, pulling nearly
1,500
tonnes of cannon and mounting along the curved track into its preplanned next firing position.

Even as the flagman brought the engine to a halt right at the mark painted on the track, Becker was dashing forward to make sure the gun carnage had remained level after the stress of the round and the move. The bubbles in the spirit levels at all four corners of the carriage hadn’t stirred a millimeter. He waved up to the reloading gang. “All good here!”