Striking the Balance

“Yeah, but Captain Auerbach, thereain’t nothin’ but us between them and Punkin Center,” Rachel Hines said. She looked around in the darkness at the shapes of their companions. “There ain’t that much left of us, neither.”

“You know that, and I know that,” Auerbach said. “As long as the Lizards don’t know it, everything’s swell.”

His company-or the survivors thereof, plus the ragtag and bobtail of other broken units who’d hooked up with them-laughed some more. So did he, to keep up morale. It wasn’t really funny. When the Lizards wanted to put on a blitzkrieg, they put one on that made the Nazis look like pikers. Since they started by pasting Lamar from the air, they’d ripped damn near halfway across Colorado, knocking out of their path everything that might have given them trouble. Auerbach was damned if he knew how anything could stop them before they hit the works outside of Denver. He’d got orders to try, though, and so he would.

Very likely, he’d die trying. Well, that was part of the job.

Lieutenant Bill Magruder said, “Remember, boys and girls, the Lizards have gadgets that let ’em see in the dark like cats wish they could. You want to keep under cover, use the fire from one group so they’ll reveal their position and another group can attack ’em from a different direction. They don’t play fair. They don’t come close to playing fair. If we’re going to beat ’em, we have to play dirty, too.”

The cavalry wasn’t going to beat ’em any which way. Auerbach knew that. Any of his troopers who didn’t know it were fools. As hit-and-run raiders, though, they still might accomplish something useful.

“Let’s mount up,” he said, and headed for his own horse.

The rest of the company was dim shadows, jangling harness, the occasional cough from a man or snort from an animal. He didn’t know this territory well, and worried about blundering into the Lizard pickets before he knew they were there. If that happened, he was liable to get his whole command chewed up without doing the cause a lick of good or the Lizards any harm.

But a couple of the men who rode along were farmers from these parts. They weren’t in uniform. Had they been going up against a human foe, that could have got them shot if they were captured. The Lizards didn’t draw those distinctions, though. And the farmers, in bib overalls, knew the country as intimately as they knew their wives’ bodies.

One of them, a fellow named Andy Osborne, said, “We split here.” Auerbach took it on faith that he knew wherehere was. Some of the company rode off under Magruder’s command. Auerbach-and Osborne-took the rest closer to Karval. After a while, Osborne said, “If we don’t dismount now, they’re liable to spot us.”

“Horseholders,” Auerbach said. He chose them by lot before every raid. Nobody admitted to wanting the job, which held you out of the fighting while your comrades were mixing it up with Lizards. But it kept you safe, too-well, safer, anyhow-so you might crave it without having the nerve to say so out loud. Picking holders at random seemed the only fair way.

“We got a couple o’ little ravines here,” Osborne said, “and if we’re lucky, we can sneak right on past the Lizards without them ever knowin’ we’re around till we open up. We manage that, we can hit Karval pretty damn hard.”

“Yeah,” somebody said, an eager whisper in the night. They had a mortar, a. 50 caliber machine gun, and a couple of bazooka launchers with plenty of the little rockets they shot. Trying to kill Lizard tanks in the darkness was a bad-odds game, but one of the things they’d found out was that bazookas did a hell of a job of smashing up buildings, which weren’t armored and didn’t travel over the landscape on their own. Get close enough to a Lizard bivouac and who could say what you might do?

The mortar crew slipped off on their own, a couple of troopers with tommy guns along to give them fire support. They didn’t have to get as close to Karval as the machine gunners and the bazooka boys did.

Auerbach slapped Osborne on the shoulder to signal him to guide them down the ravine that came closest to the little town. Along with the crews who served their fancy weapons, he and the rest of the men crouched low as they hustled along.

Off to the north somewhere, small-arms fire wentpop-pop-pop. It sounded like firecrackers on the Fourth of July, and the flares that lit up the night sky could have been fireworks, too. But fireworks commonly brought cheers, not the muffled curses that came from the troopers. “Spotted ’em too soon,” somebody said.

“And they’ll be lookin’ extra hard for us, too,” Rachel Hines added with gloomy certainty.

As if to underscore her words, a flare mounted skyward from the low hilltop where the Lizard pickets were posted. “That’s a good sign, not a bad one,” Auerbach said. “They can’t spy us with their funny gadgets, so they’re trying out the old Mark One eyeball.” He hoped he was right.