In the Balance (91 page)

Jens was the second of those
yous
. He opened his mouth to protest: he was supposed to be a valuable physicist, not a dog-face. But he didn’t have the nerve to finish squawking, not when the rest of the party was heading out, not when everybody was looking at them—and at him. Legs numb with fear, he lurched after the others.

The tank seemed almost naked out there. If it had any infantry support, the Lizards on the ground were holding their fire. Larssen watched the distant turret. It got less distant all the time, which meant it got more and more able to kill him.
If it swings this way, I know I’m going to run
, he thought. But he kept trotting forward.

One of the soldiers lay flat on the ground, opened up with a Browning automatic rifle. He had about as much chance of hurting the tank with it as a mosquito did blowing holes in an elephant. “Come on, keep moving!” the kid who was a major bawled. Jens kept moving. The farther he got from the brave maniac with the BAR, the better he liked it.

A couple of hundred yards farther on, another fellow, also armed with a BAR, took cover in some bushes that wouldn’t have been there if the field had been tended since last summer. He too started firing short bursts at the Lizard tank. Now Larssen was close enough to see a couple of sparks as bullets spanged off its turret. Again, he couldn’t see that they did any good.

“The rest of you, spread out, find what cover you can, and start shooting,” the major said. “We are a diversion. We have to make that gunner pay attention to us.”

Diversion indeed
, Jens thought. The Lizard gunner ought to have extraordinarily good sport chewing up humans who couldn’t do him any damage in return.

But there was another tall patch of snow-covered dead weeds just ahead. He dropped down behind them. Even through several layers of clothes, the snow chilled his belly. He drew a bead on the tank, squeezed the Springfield’s trigger.

Nothing happened. Scowling, he checked the rifle. He’d left the safety
on. “You idiot!” he snarled to himself as he clicked it off. He aimed again, fired. The kick hammered his shoulder, a lot harder than he remembered from when he’d fooled around with a .22.

The physicist part of him took over:
You’re sending a heavier slug out at a higher velocity—of course it’ll kick harder. Newton’s Second Law, remember—good old
F = ma? He adjusted the sight for long range; his first shot, with it set for four hundred yards, couldn’t have come close. He pulled the trigger again. This time he was better braced against the recoil. He still couldn’t tell whether he hit it or not.

As he’d been ordered, he banged away. The rest of the detachment was making a lot of noise, too. If somebody got real lucky with a round, he might mess up a sight or a periscope. Past that, the major’s diversion wasn’t doing anything more than standing out in the open with a
SHOOT ME
sign would have accomplished.

After a while, though, the Lizard commanding the tank must have got tired of just sitting there in a target suit. The turret skewed toward one of the BAR men. Having seen American tank turrets in action, Larssen was appalled at how fast this one traversed.

Fire spurted from the turret, not the main armament—why swat flies with a sledgehammer?—but the coaxial machine gun by it. Snow and dirt spurted up all around the soldier with the automatic rifle. It wasn’t a long burst—the gunner was flung for effect. After a few seconds’ silence, the BAR man shifted his weapon on its bipod, sent back a few defiant rounds.
Here I am!
he seemed to be saying.
Nyaah, nyaah!

The tank gunner squeezed off an answering burst, longer this time. Another silence fell after he stopped. The fellow with the Browning automatic rifle did not reply now.
Wounded or dead
, Larssen thought grimly, The tank turret turned on to the other BAR man.

He had a better spot from which to shoot back, and lasted quite a bit longer than the first gunner had. The firefight between him and the tank gunner went on through several exchanges. But the fellow, with the BAR was under orders to keep the tank busy, and brave enough to carry out those orders with exactitude. That meant he had to keep exposing himself to fire and in any case, the dirt and bushes behind which he lay were no match for the inches of armor that sheltered the Lizard in the tank turret.

When the second BAR fell silent, the tank turret traversed through another few degrees. Larssen watched it with fearful fascination—for now it bore on him. He was lying in what had been a plowed furrow. When the machine gun began to chatter again, he flattened himself out like a snake, hoping—praying—the hard earth would offer some protection. The second BAR man had lived a little while, after all.

Bullets lashed the ground all around him. Freezing dirt spattered onto
his coat and the back of his neck. He could not force himself to get up and shoot back; not in the face of a machine gun behind armor. Did that make him a coward? He didn’t know or care.

The burst from the tank broke off. He lifted his head out of the dirt. If by some miracle the turret had moved on to take up the hunt for someone else, he thought, he might start firing again, and then scoot for new cover. But no. The cannon—and, therefore, the machine gun, too—still bore on him.

He saw motion on the far side of the Lizard tank: more human soldiers, men who’d snuck close to the monster while he and his comrades occupied its attention. He wondered if they’d leap aboard and throw explosives into the turret through the cupola. Lizard tanks had died that way, but an awful lot more soldiers had died trying to kill them.

One of the Americans raised something to his shoulder. It wasn’t a gun: it was longer and thicker. Flame spurted from its rear end. Trailing fire all the way, some kind of rocket round shot across the couple of hundred yards that separated the soldiers from the Lizard tank. It slammed into the engine compartment at the rear, right where the armor was thinnest.

More fire, some blue, some orange, spurted from the stricken vehicle. Hatches popped open in the turret; three Lizards bailed out. Now, yelling like a savage, Jens fired with ferocious glee. Suddenly the tables were turned, the tormentors all but helpless against those they had bedeviled. One Lizard fell, then another.

Then the tank brewed up as the fire reached the main fuel storage. Flame washed over the whole chassis; a smoke ring spurted up from the turret. Pops and booms marked ammunition starting to cook off. The last Lizard who’d made it out of the hatch went down under a fusillade of bullets.

The kid major was up on his feet, waving like a madman. Off to the east, the distant roar of engines marked new motion from the tanks and self-propelled guns the Lizard tank had stalled. Then the major ran back to see how the two BAR men were. Jens ran with him.

One of them was gruesomely dead, the top of his skull clipped off by a Lizard round and gray-red brains splashed in the snow. The other had a belly wound. He was unconscious but breathing. The major pulled aside clothes, dusted the bleeding wound with sulfa powder, slapped on a field dressing, and waved for a medic.

He turned to Larssen: “You know what? I think we’re really gonna do this!”

“Maybe.” Jens knew his voice wasn’t everything it should be; he hadn’t hardened himself against human beings looking like selections from the butcher’s. Trying not to think of that, he asked, “What did they use to take out the tank?” As if to punctuate his words, more rounds went up inside the
blazing hulk.

“The rocket? Wasn’t that great?” When the major grinned, he didn’t look a day over seventeen. “The fancy name is 2.36-inch Rocket Launcher, but all the teams I know are calling it after that crazy instrument Bob Burns plays on the radio.”

“A bazooka?” Larssen grinned, too. “I like that.”

“So do I.” The major’s grin slipped a little. “I just wish we had a hell of a lot more of ’em. They were brand new last year, and of course we’ve had the devil’s own time building ’em since the damned Lizards came. But what we’ve got, we’re using.” All at once, he went from informant back to officer. “Now we’ve got to get moving. Bust your hump, there!”

“Shouldn’t they go ahead, sir?” Jens pointed to the Lees and Shermans just now rattling past the carcass of the Lizard tank.

“They need us, too,” the major answered. “They make the hole, we go through it and we-support them. If the Lizards had had some infantry on the ground to support that vehicle, we couldn’t have stalked it the way we did. Their machines are marvelous and you can’t say they’re not brave, but their tactical doctrine stinks.”

Colonel Groves, Larssen remembered, had said the same thing. At the time, it hadn’t seemed to matter; the aliens’ machines were carrying everything before them. But it seemed they might be fought successfully after all.

The major was already moving west again. Jens trotted heavily after him, giving the pyre of the Lizard tank a wide berth.

Assault Force Commander Rethost said, “No, I can’t send you more landcruisers up there in your sector.”

On the radio, the voice of Zingiber, the Northern Flank Commander, was anguished. “But I need them! The Big Uglies have so much of their garbage coming at me that they’re pushing me back. And it’s not all garbage any more, either: I lost three landcruisers today to those stinking rockets they’ve started using. Our crews aren’t trained to regard infantry as a tactical threat, and we can’t pull them out for training sessions now.”

“Hardly.” Rethost didn’t want to know whether Zingiber was serious or not. He might have been; some males still hadn’t adjusted to the pace war required on Tosev 3. Rethost went on, “I say again, I have no more landcruisers to send. We’ve lost seven on the southern flank as well, and the rocket threat is making us deploy them more cautiously there, too.”

“But I need them,” Zingiber repeated, as if his need would conjure landcruisers out of thin air.
“I
say again, superior sir, that as things stand we are losing ground. The two Big Ugly attacks may even succeed in joining.”

“Yes, I know. I am also looking at a map screen.” Rethost didn’t like
what he saw there, either if the Big Uglies did manage to link their thrusts, they’d cut support for his principal assault force, which was finally pounding into the suburbs of Chicago. That was expensive, too; in the rubble of their towns, the Tosevites fought like
ssvapi
on Rabotev 2 protecting their burrows.

Zingiber said, “If you can’t send landcruisers, send helicopters to help me take out some more of the Tosevites’ armor.”

Rethost made up his mind that if Zingiber made one more such idiotic request, he’d relieve him. He hissed angrily before he pressed the
TRANSMIT
button. “We have fewer helicopters than landcruisers to spare. The miserable Tosevites have learned something new.”
They’re faster at that than we are
. The thought worried him. He made himself continue: “They’ve brought their antiaircraft artillery as far forward as they can, towing it with light armor or sometimes even with soft-skinned vehicles. The helicopters are armored against rifle-caliber bullets. To armor them against these shells would make them too heavy to fly.”

“Let them ship us landcruisers from elsewhere on this stinking planet, then,” Zingiber said.

“The logistics!” Rethost cringed. “Landcruisers are so big and heavy only two will fit onto even our biggest hauler aircraft. And we brought few of those aircraft to Tosev 3, not anticipating so large a need. Besides, the haulers are unarmed and vulnerable to the upsurge in Tosevite air activity lately. It takes only one of those nasty little machines slipping through a killercraft screen to bring down the hauler and the landcruiser both.”

“But if we don’t get reinforcements from somewhere, we’ll lose this battle,” Zingiber said. “Let them put the landcruisers on a starship if they must, so long as we get them.”

“Land a starship in the middle of a combat zone, vulnerable to artillery and the Emperor only knows what ingenious sabotage the Big Uglies can devise? You must be joking.” Rethost made a bitter decision. “I’ll pull a few landcruisers back from the principal assault force … maybe more than a few. They can return once they rectify the situation.”

I hope
, he thought. The landcruisers didn’t run without fuel, and the Tosevites were doing everything they could to interfere with supply lines. No one loved logistics, but armies that ignored logistics died.

Of course, the Tosevites had fuel problems of their own. They’d stockpiled the noxious stuff their machines burned for this campaign, but the facilities that produced it were vulnerable to assault. Rethost looked at the map again. He hoped the Race would assault them soon.

A couple of Big Uglies in long black coats and wide-brimmed black hats pushed an ordinance cart toward the flight of killercraft. Gefron took
no notice of them; Tosevites were doing a lot of menial work these days, to let males of the Race get on with the business of conquering Tosev 3.

Gefron gave Rolvar and Xarol, his fellow pilots in the flight, their last few instructions: “Remember, this one is important. We really have to plaster that Ploesti place; the Big Uglies of Deutschland draw much of their fuel from it.”

“It shall be done,” the other two males chorused together.

Gefron went on, “So much I have been ordered to tell you. But for myself, I would like to dedicate this mission to the spirit of my predecessor as head of this unit, Flight Leader Teerts. We shall aid in making it impossible for the Big Uglies to kill or capture—we still do not know his exact fate—any more brave males like Teerts. Thanks to us, the conquest of Tosev 3 shall grow nearer its completion.”

“It shall be done,” the pilots chorused again.

Mordechai Anielewicz walked along Nowolipie Street between closed armaments plants, listening to Nathan Brodsky. The Jewish fighting leader had long since grown used to taking promenades through Warsaw to listen to things he didn’t want to take the chance of having the Lizards overhear. This was one of those things: Brodsky, who worked as a laborer at the airport, had picked up a lot of the Lizards’ language.