Tilting the Balance

Artillery boomed and flashed, off toward the east. The Lizards’ guns outranged those of the Red Army, too; from north of Kaluga, they could all but reach Moscow. Ludmila flew toward the guns. If she could shoot up the crews, that would be a good part of a day’s work.

Though retreating, the Red Army hadn’t given up the fight. She heard screams in the air; a ragged pattern of explosions tore up a square kilometer of ground not far ahead of the Kukuruznik “Katyushas!” she cried in high glee. The rockets were some of the best weapons the Soviets had. Unlike more conventional artillery, they were easily portable, and a flight of them not only did a lot of damage but also spread terror.

Some Lizards were just emerging from their hidey-holes after the Katyusha salvo when Ludmila flew by. She opened up with her machine gun. The Lizards dove back into cover. She hoped some of them weren’t fast enough to reach it, but was gone before she could be sure.

As she approached the Lizards’ artillery position, she got down below treetop height. Some of those gun stations had tank chassis with antiaircraft ca

Jinking, weaving, Ludmila came up on the Lizard guns. She didn’t see any of the antiaircraft tanks, so she bored in. “Za rodina! — For the motherland!” she shouted as her thumb came down on the firing button.

Lizard gu

Ludmila glanced at her fuel gauge. She had a bit more than half a tank left. Time to head for home, she thought regretfully; she hadn’t had such a good day shooting up the Lizards in a long time. But she also knew about stretching her luck. If she tried to go on until she found one more perfect target, she was only too likely to make one instead.

“There will be more tomorrow,” she said, and then laughed at herself. She wouldn’t wait for tomorrow to go out again: as soon as she had more fuel, more bullets, more bombs, she’d be in the air again. They kept using you until they used you up. Then they found somebody else-if they could.

What happens when they run out of everybody? she wondered. The answer came back stark: then we lose. It hadn’t happened yet, no matter how black things sometimes looked. But when the Germans drove on Moscow in 1941, they’d faced Russian winter and fresh troops from Siberia. Now it was the begi

“Which means the veterans like me will just have to carry the load a while longer,” she said, adding after a moment, “if any veterans like me are left alive.” There was Georg Schultz, but he didn’t really count; he’d started the war on the wrong side. Colonel Karpov had been through the whole thing, but he was more a military administrator than a fighting soldier. Ludmila had nothing against that; Karpov ran his air base as well as a man could in the chaos of a losing war. But it removed him from her list, or what would have been her list had she had anyone to put on it.

She wondered how Heinrich Jager was doing these days. He’d been in it from the start, even if he came from the wrong side, too. The memory of their brief time together in Germany the winter before seemed faded, unreal. What would she do if she ever saw him again? She shook her head. For one thing, it wasn’t likely. For another, how could she know till it happened?

Down on the ground, a man in a khaki Red Army uniform waved his cap as she flew by. She was back over Soviet-held territory now, well away from the bulge northeast of Kaluga where the Lizards were forcing their way toward Moscow. They were concentrating their effort on that push, and had loaded the bulge with troops and weapons. Ludmila dared hope the air base would still be operating when she got back to it.

The U-2 bucked in the air, as if it had taken a hit from an antiaircraft gun. Then the aircraft steadied. Ludmila swore; were Red Army gu

She accepted that for a moment. Then she remembered she was flying into the sun.

Even as she wheeled the Kukuruznik through a tight turn, that impossible shadow began to fade. She looked back to see what could have made it; her first guess was a Lizard bomb. The shock wave from a bomb might have made her think she was hit.

But while the flash from a bomb might have given her a momentary shadow, it could hardly have lasted long enough for her to notice it. She figured that out while her head turned ahead of the plane’s motion to see what had happened.

Because she checked the near distance first, she didn’t spot anything right away. Then she raised her eyes a little higher, and felt like the prize fool of all time. The fireball that had printed her shadow on the instrument panel was already dissipating, but not the enormous cloud of dust and wreckage it had raised.

“Bozhemoi-My God,” she whispered. That growing cloud had to be at least twenty-five kilometers off to the east, maybe more. It towered thousands of meters into the air, glowing yellow and pink and salmon and colors for which she had no name. Its shape took her back to fall days before the war, when she and her family would hunt mushrooms in the woods outside Kiev.

“Bozhemoi,” she said again, when what it had to be hit her like a kick in the stomach: one of the Lizards’ explosive-metal bombs, the kind that had flattened Berlin and Washington, D.C. She moaned, back deep in her throat-were the Lizards sealing the rodina’s doom by raining such destruction on it?

The cloud climbed and climbed. Five thousand meters? Six? Eight? She couldn’t begin to guess. She simply watched, stu

Had the Lizards dropped it in the wrong place? She hadn’t thought they made mistakes like that. Or, somehow, had the scientists of the Soviet Union devised an explosive-metal bomb of their own?

“Please, God, let it be so,” she said, and didn’t feel the least bit guilty about praying.

Reports flooded onto Atvar’s desk: video of the nuclear explosion from a spy satellite, confirmation (as if he needed any) from those ground commanders lucky enough not to have been incinerated in the blast, sketchy preliminary lists of units that hadn’t been so lucky.

Kirel came in. Atvar grudged him a brief glance from one eye turret, then went back to plowing through the reports. “Forgive me, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said, “but I have a formal written communication from Straha, shiplord of the 206th Emperor Yower.”

“Give it to me,” Atvar said. Males used formal written communication only when they wanted to get something down on the record.

The communication was to the point: it read, EXALTED FLEETLORD, NOW WHAT?

“You’ve looked at it?” Atvar asked Kirel.