In the Balance (26 page)

“It’s not the Deutsche themselves calling for our assistance, surely?”

“By the Emperor, no, Exalted Fleetlord,” the intelligence officer said. “It’s the others, the ones fighting against them. Our estimates are that the empire of Deutschland as it now stands is a jerry-built structure, most of its territory having been added in the course of the inter-Tosevite war in progress when our fleet arrived. Some of the inhabitants of that empire remain restive under Deutsch control.”

“I see,” Atvar said, though he didn’t, not altogether. Product of an empire—of
the
Empire—which had been itself for tens of millennia, he felt himself failing to grasp what it was like to try to build one in a couple of years (without even the symbol of an emperor to bind it together, in most cases), or, for that matter, to pass suddenly out of the control of one empire and into that of another.

The intelligence officer said, “The groups involved in the fighting against the Deutsche appear to be prominently represented in the camp our forces overran east of the town now involved in strife.”

“Which camp do you mean?” Atvar asked; a fleetlord’s life is full of minutiae. Then he let out a hiss. “Yes, I remember.
That
camp. What was its name?”

The intelligence officer had to check the computer before he answered. “It is called Treblinka, Exalted Fleetlord.” Even spoken by a male of the Race, the Tosevite word sounded harsh and ugly. “Do you wish me to call up the images our combat teams recorded when they captured the place?”

“By the Emperor, no,” Atvar said quickly. “Once was sufficient.”

Once, as a matter of fact, had been excessive. Atvar thought he’d hardened himself to the horrors of war. Even such hardening as he’d gained had not come easy; his own forces were taking far more casualties than the grimmest estimates had predicted before the fleet left Home. But then, no one had expected the Tosevites to be able to fight an industrialized war.

What the Race’s advancing armor discovered at Treblinka wasn’t industrialized war, though. It wasn’t even industrialized exploitation of criminals
and captives. The Race had camps of that sort on all its planets, and had overrun more on Tosev 3; the SSSR, especially, seemed full of them, all far more brutal than anything the Emperor, in his mercy, would have permitted.

But Treblinka … the fleetlord did not need the computer screen to replay images of Treblinka. Once reminded of the place, his mind called up the pictures, and he could not turn his eyes away from what his mind saw. Treblinka wasn’t industrialized war or industrialized exploitation. Treblinka was industrialized murder—mass graves full of Tosevites shot in the head, trucks designed so the waste products of their inefficient, dirty engines were vented into a sealed compartment to kill those inside, and, just installed before the Race seized Treblinka, chambers to slaughter large numbers of Big Uglies at once with poisonous gas. It was as if the Deutsche had kept working to find the most effective way to get rid of as many other Big Uglies at a batch as they could.

Even if Treblinka represented no more than one set of barbarians tormenting another, it was plenty to sicken Atvar. It also set him thinking. “You say the groups now opposing the Deutsche in this town are the same ones the Deutsche have been massacring?”

“Linguistic evidence and preliminary interrogations suggest this is so, yes, Exalted Fleetlord,” the intelligence officer answered.

“We shall promise, them help, then, and deliver it,” Atvar said.

“As the exalted fleetlord wishes.” The intelligence officer deserved higher rank, Atvar thought. He kept any trace of what he thought about the fleetlord’s order from his voice. Whether he agreed with it or thought it demented, he would obey it, as males of the Race were trained to obey from their hatchling days.

Atvar said, “We have here at last an opportunity to use some Big Uglies as gloves, with our hands inside. Despite their losses, the leading empires refuse to yield to us. Italia is wavering, but—”

“But Italia has too many Deutsch soldiers in it to be fully a free agent. Yes,” the male said.

He was not only submissive but keen, Atvar thought happily, forgiving him the interruption because he had been right. “Exactly so. Perhaps we shall presently help them as we shall go to the aid of the, the—”

“The Polska and the Yehudim,” the male supplied.

“Thank you, those are the kinds of Big Uglies I had in mind, yes,” Atvar said. “And our assistance to them should not be grudging, either. If they give us a secure zone from which we may with impunity assail both Deutschland and the SSSR, we shall derive great benefits therefrom. We can promise them whatever they want. Once Tosev 3 is fully under our control … well, it’s not as if they belong to the Race.”

“Or even the Rabotevs or Hallessi,” the intelligence officer said.

“Quite so. They remain wild, and thus we have no obligations toward them save those which we choose to assume.” Atvar studied the male. “You are perceptive. Remind me of your name, that I may record your diligence.”

“I am Drefsab, Exalted Fleetlord,” the officer said. “Drefsab. I shall not forget.”

Georg Schultz raised up on his elbows to peer at the ripening fields of wheat and oats and barley, made a sour face. “The crop at this
kolkhoz
is going to be shitty this year,” he said with the certainty of a man who had grown up on a farm.

“That, at the moment, is the least of our worries,” Heinrich Jager answered. He hefted the Schmeisser that had belonged to Dieter Schmidt. Schmidt himself had lain under the black soil of the Ukraine for the past two days. Jäger hoped he and Schultz had heaped on enough to keep the wild dogs from tearing up the body, but he wasn’t sure. He and his gunner had been in a hurry.

Schultz’s chuckle had a bitter edge to it.
“Ja
, we’re a pair out of a jumble sale, aren’t we?”

“You can say that again,” Jäger answered. Both men wore scavenged infantry helmets and infantry tunics of field gray rather than tanker’s black; Schultz, carried an infantry rifle as well. Jager’s new, bristly beard itched all the time. Schultz complained about his, too. It was coming in carroty red, though his hair was light brown. Any inspector who saw them would have locked them in the guardhouse and thrown away the key.

Tankmen are usually neat to the point of fussiness. A tank without things stowed just so, and with working parts dirty and poorly maintained, is a tank waiting for breakdown or blowup. But Jager had jettisoned spit and polish when he bailed out of his killed Panzer III. His Schmeisser was clean. So was his pistol. Past that, he’d stopped worrying. He was alive, and for a German on the south Russian steppe, that remained no small achievement.

As if to remind him he was still alive, his stomach growled. The last time he’d been full was the night he got a bellyful of kasha, the night before the Lizards came. He knew what he had in the way of rations: nothing. He knew what Schultz had: the same.

“We have to get something from that collective farm,” he said. “Take it by force, sneak, up in the night, or go up and beg—I don’t much care which any more. But we have to eat.”

“I’m damned if I want to be a chicken thief,” Schultz said. Then, more pragmatically, he added, “Shouldn’t be too hard, just going on in. Most of the men, they’ll be off at the front.”

“That’s true,” Jäger said; almost all the figures he saw working in the field wore babushkas. “But this is Russia, remember. Even the women carry rifles. I’d sooner get something peaceably than by robbery. With the Lizards all around, we may need help from the Ivans.”

“You’re the officer,” Schultz said, shrugging.

Jäger knew what he meant:
you’re the one who gets paid to think
. Trouble was, he didn’t know what to think. The Lizards were at war with Russia no less than with the Reich, which meant he and these
kolkhozniks
shared a common foe. On the other hand, he hadn’t heard anything to let him know Germany and the Soviet Union weren’t still fighting each other (for that matter, he hadn’t heard anything at all since his panzer died).

He got to his feet. The south Russian steppe had seemed overpoweringly vast when he traversed it in a tank. Now that he was on foot, he felt he could tramp the gently rolling country forever without coming to its end.

Georg Schultz stood up beside him, though the gunner muttered, “Might as well be a bug walking across a plate.” That was the other side of Russia’s immensity: if one could see a long way, one could be seen just as far.

The peasants spotted the two Germans almost instantly; Jager saw their movements turn jerky even before they swung his way. He kept his submachine gun lowered as he strode toward the cluster of thatch-roofed wooden buildings that formed the heart of the
kolkhoz
. “Let’s keep this peaceful, if we can.”

“Yes, sir,” Schultz said. “If we can’t, no matter what we take from the Ivans now, they’re liable to stalk us through the grass and kill us.”

“Just what I’m thinking,” Jager agreed.

The workers in the fields converged on the Germans. None of them put down their hoes and spades and other tools. Several, young women and old men, carried firearms—pistols stuck in belts, a couple of rifles slung over shoulders. Some of the men would have seen action in the previous war. Jager thought he and Schultz could have taken the lot of them even so, but he didn’t want to find out the hard way.

He turned to the gunner. “Do you speak any Russian?”

“Ruki verkh!
—hands up! That’s about it. How about you, sir?”

“A little more. Not much.”

A short, swag-bellied fellow marched importantly up to Jager. It really was a march, with head thrown back, arms pumping, legs snapping forward one after the other. The kolkhoz chairman, Jager realized. He rattled off a couple of sentences that might have been in Tibetan for all the good they did the major.

Jäger did know one word that might come in handy here. He used it:
“Khleb
—bread.” He rubbed his belly with the hand that, wasn’t holding the Schmeisser.

All the
kolkhozniks
started talking at once. The word “Fritz” came up in the gabble, again and again; it was almost the only word Jäger understood. It made him smile—the exact Russian equivalent of the German slang “Ivan.”

“Khleb, da,”
the chairman said, a broad grin of relief on his wide, sweaty face. He spoke another word of Russian, one Jager didn’t know. The German shrugged, kept his features blank. The chairman tried again, this time in halting German: “Milk?”

“Spasebo,”
Jäger said. “Thank you.
Da.”

“Milk?” Schultz made a face. “Me, I’d rather drink vodka—there, that’s another Russian word I know.”

“Vodka?” The
kolkhoz
chief grinned and pointed back toward one of the buildings behind him. He said something too rapid and complicated for Jäger to follow, but his gestures left no doubt that if the Germans wanted vodka, the collective farm could supply it.

Jäger shook his head.
“Nyet, nyet,”
he said. “Milk.” To his gunner, he added, “I don’t want us getting drunk here, not even a little bit. They’re liable to wait until we go to sleep and then cut our throats.”

“Likely you’re right, sir,” Schultz said. “But still—milk? I’ll feel like I’m six years old again.”

“Stick to water, then. We’ve been drinking it for a while now, and we haven’t come down with a flux yet.” Jäger was thankful for that. He’d been cut off from the medical service ever since the battle—skirmish, he supposed, was really a better word for it—that cost his company its last panzers. If he and Schultz hadn’t stayed healthy, their only chance was to lie down and hope they got better.

Another old woman—a
babushka
in the grandmotherly sense of the word—hobbled toward the Germans. In her apron she carried several rings of dark, chewy-looking bread. Jäger’s stomach growled the second he saw it.

He took two rings. Schultz took three. It was food fit for peasants, he knew; back in Münster, before the war, he would have turned up his nose at black bread. But compared to some of the things he’d eaten in Russia—and especially compared to nothing at all, of which he’d had far too much lately—it was manna from heaven.

Georg Schultz somehow managed to cram a whole ring of bread into his mouth at once. His cheeks bulged until he looked like a snake trying to swallow a fat toad. The
kolkhozniks
giggled and nudged one another. The gunner, his face beatific, ignored them. His jaws worked and worked. Every so often, he swallowed. His enormous cud of bread began to shrink.

“That’s not the best way to do it, Sergeant,” Jäger said. “See, I’ve almost managed to finish both of mine while you were eating that one.”

“I was too hungry to wait,” Schultz answered blurrily—his mouth was still pretty full.

The
babushka
went away, came back with a couple of carved wooden mugs of milk. It was so fresh, it warmed Jäger’s cup. Its creamy richness went well with the earthy, mouth-fifing taste of the bread. Peasants’ food, yes, but a peasant who ate it every day was likely to be a contented man.

For politeness’ sake, Jäger declined more, though he could have eaten another two dozen rings—or so he thought—without filling himself up. He drained the mug of milk, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, asked the
kolkhoz
chief the most important question he could think of:
“Eidechsen?”
He necessarily used the German word for Lizards; he did not know how to say it in Russian. He waved his hand along the horizon to show he wanted to find out where the aliens were.

The
kolkhozniks
didn’t get it. Jäger pantomimed short creatures, imitated the unmistakable screech of their airplanes as best he could. The
kolkhoz
chief’s eyes lit up.
“Ah—yasheritsi,”
he said. The peasants clustered round him exclaimed. Jäger memorized the word; he had the feeling he would need it again.

The chief pointed south. Jäger knew there were Lizards in that direction; that was the way he’d come. Then the chief pointed east, but made pushing motions with his hands, as if to say the Lizards over there weren’t close. Jäger nodded to show he understood. And then the
kolkhoz
chief pointed west. He didn’t do any dumb show to indicate the Lizards thereabouts were far away, either.