Striking the Balance

When Atvar didn’t say anything more, Kirel tried to prod him: “Exalted Fleetlord, you can’t be contemplating genuine negotiations with these rebellious-and revolting-males? Their demands are impossible: not just amnesty and transfer to a warmer climate-those would be bad enough by themselves-but also ending the struggle against the Tosevites so no more males die ‘uselessly,’ to use their word.”

“No, we ca

One possible answer was,a new fleetlord. The assembled shiplords of the conquest fleet had tried to remove Atvar once, after the SSSR detonated the first Tosevite fission bomb, and had narrowly failed. If they tried again, Kirel was the logical male to succeed Atvar. The fleetlord waited for his subordinate’s reply, not so much for what he said as for how he said it.

Slowly, Kirel answered, “Were the Tosevites factions of the Race opposed to the general will-not that the Race would generate such vicious factions, of course, but speaking for the sake of the hypothesis-their strength, unlike that of the mutineers, might come close to making negotiations with them mandatory.”

Atvar contemplated that. Kirel was, generally speaking, a conservative male, and had couched his suggestion conservatively by equating the Big Uglies with analogous groupings within the Race, an equation that in itself made Atvar’s scales itch. But the suggestion, however couched, was more radical than any Straha, the shiplord who’d led the effort to oust Atvar, had ever put forward before deserting and fleeing to the Big Uglies.

“Shiplord,” Atvar demanded sharply, “are you making the same proposal as the mutineers: that we discuss with the Tosevites ways of ending our campaign short of complete conquest?”

“Exalted Fleetlord, did you yourself not say our males seem incapable of effecting a complete conquest of Tosev 3?” Kirel answered, still with perfect subordination but not abandoning his own ideas, either. “If that be so, should we not either destroy the planet to make sure the Tosevites can never threaten us, or else-” He stopped; unlike Straha, he had a sense of when he was going too far for Atvar to tolerate.

“No,” the fleetlord said, “I refuse to concede that the commands of the Emperor ca

Kirel crouched into the Race’s pose of obedience. “It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord.”

Again, the response was perfectly subordinate. Kirel did not askhow it should be done. The Race had brought only so much materiel from Home. It was of far higher quality than anything the Tosevites used, but there was only a limited quantity of it. Try as they would, the Race’s pilots and missile batteries and artillery had not managed to knock out the Big Uglies’ manufacturing capacity. The armaments they produced, though better than those they’d had when the Race first landed on Tosev 3, remained inferior… but they kept on making them.

Some munitions could be produced in factories captured from the Tosevites, and the Race’s starships had their own manufacturing capacity that would have been signflicant… in a smaller war. When added to what the logistics vessels had brought from Home, that still left the hope of adequacy for the coming campaign… and the Big Uglies were also in distress, no doubt about that. Victory might yet come.

Or, of course… but Atvar did not care to think about that.

Even under a flag of truce, Mordechai Anielewicz felt nervous about approaching the German encampment. After starving in the Warsaw ghetto, after leading the Jewish fighters of Warsaw who’d risen against the Nazis and helped the Lizards drive them out of the city, he was under no illusions about what Hitler’s forces wanted for his people: they wanted them to vanish from the face of the earth.

But the Lizards wanted to enslave everybody, Jews andgoyim alike. The Jews hadn’t fully realized that when they rose against the Nazis. Had they, it wouldn’t have mattered much. Measured against extermination, enslavement looked good.

The Germans were still fighting the Lizards, and fighting hard. No one denied their military prowess, or their technical skill. From afar, Anielewicz had seen the nuclear bomb they’d touched off east of Breslau. Had he seen it close up, he wouldn’t be coming here to dicker with the Nazis.

“Halt!” The voice might have come out of thin air. Mordechai halted. After a moment, a German wearing a white camouflage smock and a whitewashed helmet appeared as if by magic from behind a tree. Just looking at him made Anielewicz, who had Red Armyvalenki on his feet and was dressed in Polish Army trousers, aWehrmacht tunic, a Red Army fur hat, and a sheepskin jacket of civilian origin, feel like a refugee from a rummage sale. He needed a shave, too, which added to his air of seediness. The German’s lip curled. “You are the Jew we were told to expect?”

“No, I’m St. Nicholas, here late for Christmas.” Anielewicz, who had been an engineering student before the war, had learned fluent standard German. He spoke Yiddish now, to a

The fellow just grunted. Maybe he didn’t think the joke was fu

That was what Anielewicz was there for, but he didn’t like the way the sentry said it even so. The German spoke as if the universe permitted no other possible outcome. Maybe it didn’t. Mordechai followed him through the cold and silent woods.

“Your colonel must be a good officer,” he said-softly, because the brooding presence of the woods weighed on him. “This regiment has come a long way east since the bomb went off near Breslau.” That was part of the reason he needed to talk with the local commandant, though he wasn’t going to explain his reasons to a private who probably thought he was nothing but a damn kike anyway.

Stolid as an old cow, the sentry answered,“Ja,” and then shut up again. They walked past a whitewashed Panther tank in a clearing. A couple of crewmen were guddling about in the Panther’s engine compartment. Looking at them, hearing one grumble when the exposed skin between glove and sleeve stuck to cold metal, you might have thought war no different from any other mechanical trade. Of course, the Germans had industrialized murder, too.

They walked by more tanks, most of them also being worked on. These were bigger, tougher machines than the ones the Nazis had used to conquer Poland four and a half years before. The Nazis had learned a lot since then. Their panzers still didn’t come close to being an even match for the ones the Lizards used, though.

A couple of men were cooking a little pot of stew over an aluminum field stove set on a couple of rocks. The stew had some kind of meat in it-rabbit, maybe, or squirrel, or even dog. Whatever it was, it smelled delicious.

“Sir, the Jewish partisan is here,” the sentry said, absolutely nothing in his voice. That was better than the scorn that might have been there, but not much.

Both men squatting by the field stove looked up. The older one got to his feet. He was obviously the colonel, though he wore a plain service cap and an enlisted man’s uniform. He was in his forties, pinch-faced and clever-looking despite skin weathered from a lifetime spent in the sun and the rain and, as now, the snow.