Upsetting the Balance

“Because the Russkis can,” said the male who’d guided them. “If we didn’t have infantry patrols out there, the cursed Big Uglies would sneak within mortar range and start dropping their stinking bombs right down on top of our heads. Either that or they’d get into our vehicle parks and work the Emperor knows how much havoc there. They’ve done both, and they probably will again.”

Ginger or no ginger, Ussmak wanted to hide. “I thought nothing could be worse than Britain and all that poison gas. Maybe I was wrong.”

In a ragged chorus, the guide and the other males in the barracks sang out: “Welcome to Siberia!”

Rance Auerbach looked to the cloudy skies, hoping for snow. Thus far, his prayers had gone unanswered. Low, dirty-gray clouds hung over the prairie of eastern Colorado, but whatever snow or even rain-he would gladly have taken rain-they held refused to fall.

He waved to the troopers of his company, urging them to spread out farther. If a Lizard helicopter spotted them, they were on the way to becoming raw meat. The winter before, from all he’d heard, the Lizards hadn’t got so frisky so late in the year. This time, they’d sent a force west by helicopter to occupy Cheye

Worse still, the next town west of Cheye

The prairie seemed utterly empty but for his men and their horses. Turn those into buffalo and you’d have things back the way they were before the white man came-before the red man, too, come to that.

He turned in his saddle and called to Bill Magruder. “Now I know what the Indians must have felt like, going up against the U.S. Cavalry back in my grandpa’s day.”

His second-in-command nodded. “Sitting Bull licked General Custer, but look at all the good it did him in the end. We can’t just win fights now and again. We have to win the whole shootin’ match.”

Auerbach nodded. He’d been trained to think in terms of campaigns, which Sitting Bull certainly hadn’t. He wondered what sort of global strategy the Lizards were trying to maintain. They’d plainly had one at the start of their invasion, but it seemed to have broken down in the face of unexpected human resistance.

As soon as his company passed Sheridan Lake, Auerbach waved them off US 385. No tracked vehicle could match a horse for cross-country performance. So he told himself, anyhow, although the rule applied more in mountains and marshes than on the rolling plains near the Kansas border. But his troopers and their mounts would be harder to spot in the mix of stubble and unharvested crops than on the asphalt of the highway.

“Sir, will you want to strike US 40 east or west of Arapahoe?” Magruder asked.

Auerbach’s orders gave him discretion. Arapahoe lay about ten miles east of Cheye

“We’ll go in to the east of Arapahoe,” he decided after a few seconds’ thought. “The farther east we can damage them, the more we draw their attention away from moving west, which is what we want to try to do.” That operating as far east as possible made it easier for the Lizards to damage him was something he tried not to think about.

He and his men camped for the night on an abandoned farm not far south of US 40. When they set out the next morning, they left their horses behind, toting on their backs the supplies they needed, as if they were infantrymen.

Auerbach had scouts out. He and most of his men sprawled in tall, yellow grass while the scouts advanced to make sure no Lizard patrols were on the highway. He watched through field glasses as the scouts crept forward, their khaki uniforms almost invisible against the brown earth and dying plants.

Only when they waved did he go forward with the demolition team. Two men laid charges on the surface of the road, co

The earth shook under Auerbach. Chunks of asphalt rained down on the improvised trench. Somebody swore: “Goddamn thing hit me right in the ass, Howard. Whose side you on, anyway?”

Howard was the trooper who’d pushed down the detonator plunger. He said, “I’m on the good guys’ side. Reckon that leaves you out, Maxwell.”

“Let’s see what we’ve done.” Auerbach got up and trotted over to US 40. He nodded in solemn approval. Through swirling dust, he saw they’d blown a crater across both lanes of blacktop. Anybody who sent a tracked vehicle down into it would get his teeth rattled. Nobody would try to send a wheeled vehicle into it-you’d have to go around.

The demolition team finished their job in the area, then became ordinary cavalrymen-turned-foot soldiers like the rest of the company. Auerbach positioned his men on the north side of US 40, although that put the highway between them and their horses. The ground rose toward the low ridge of the Smoky Hills there, and offered better firing positions.

Once the men had dug in, there was nothing to do but wait. He gnawed jerked beef and fidgeted. He hadn’t wanted to blow the road too close to Cheye

Bill Magruder let out a hiss, then said, “Sir, something coming down the road from the east.”

Auerbach peered in that direction. “Something” was a motor vehicle-no, a couple of motor vehicles. That meant they were Lizards, all right. He raised the field glasses to his eyes. The vehicles leaped closer: a couple of armored perso

The carriers-he would have thought of them as half-tracks, but the Lizards fully tracked their machines-slowed when they saw the crater ahead. Auerbach kept a wary eye on their turrets. They mounted light ca

A Lizard crawled out of a hatch and went up to the edge of the broken asphalt. No one fired at him. He got back into the machine. Auerbach waited to see what would happen next. If the Lizards decided to wait and send for a road repair crew, a mighty good plan would have gone up in smoke.

After a moment, several Lizards emerged from the lead armored perso

The Lizards got back into the carrier. It rolled off onto the soft shoulder of the road. The dozer blade dug in to pick up dirt to fill in the hole in the road. The engine’s note, though quiet to anyone used to American armor, got louder.

Hunkered down behind a tumbleweed, Auerbach bit his lip and waited, fingers crossed. When the explosion came, it wasn’t as loud as the one that had blasted the crater in US 40, but far more satisfying. Antitank mines carried a charge big enough to wreck a Sherman. That didn’t always suffice to take out the tougher Lizard tanks, but it was plenty to ruin an armored perso