Striking the Balance

“It shall be done,” Teerts said, wondering what sort of brainaddled fit had befallen his superiors now. There was a job right in front of his snout that badly needed doing, so why were they wasting their time and his trying to come up with something exotic?

Since he evidently wasn’t going straight back into action, he dug out his vial of ginger from the space between the padding and the cockpit wall and had a good taste. With the herb coursing through him, he was ready to go out and slaughter Big Uglies even without his aircraft.

“Flight Leader Teerts!” The traffic control male’s voice boomed in the audio button taped to Teerts’ hearing diaphragm. “You are hereby detached from duty at this Florida air base and ordered to report to our forward base in the region known to the local Tosevites as Kansas, there to assist the Race in its attack on the center bearing the local name Denver. Flight instructions are being downloaded to your piloting computer as we speak. You will also require a drop tank of hydrogen. This will be provided to you.”

Sure enough, a new truck came rolling up to Teerts’ killercraft. A couple of males got out, lowered the droplet-shaped tank onto a wheeled cart with a winch, and hooked it up under the belly of the killercraft. As he listened to their clattering, he was heartily glad the Race didn’t entrust that job to Big Ugly hirelings. The potential for disaster was much too high.

He let out a puzzled hiss. The Tosevites had scored a breakthrough on this front; he knew perfectly well that his bombardment hadn’t halted them single-handedly. Yet the base commander was sending him away to serve on another front. Did that mean the Race was overwhelmingly confident of stopping the Big Uglies here, or that the attack on-what was the name of the place? — Denver, the traffic-control male had called it, stood in desperate need of help? He couldn’t very well ask, but he’d find out.

He checked the computer. Sure enough, it had the course information for the flight to Kansas. A good thing, too, because he didn’t know where on this land mass the region was. The technicians finished installing the drop tank. They got back into their truck. It sped away.

“Flight Leader Teerts, you are cleared for takeoff,” the traffic control male said. “Report to the Kansas forward base.”

“It shall be done.” Teerts gave the engine power and taxied down the runway toward the end.

Whenever George Bagnall went into the gloom of theKrom at Pskov these days, he felt his own spirits sinking into darkness, too. He wished Aleksandr German had never mentioned the possibility of sending him, Ken Embry, and Jerome Jones back to England. Before, he’d resigned himself to going on here in this godforsaken corner of the Soviet Union. But with even the slightest chance of getting home again, he found both the place and the work he did here ever more unbearable.

Inside theKrom,

German sentries came to attention stiff as rigor mortis. Their Russian opposite numbers, most of them in baggy civilian clothes rather than uniforms that had been laundered too many times, didn’t look as smart, but the submachine guns they carried would chew a man to pieces in short order.

Bagnall went up the stairs to Lieutenant General Kurt Chill’s headquarters. The stairwell was almost black; neither occasional slit windows nor tallow lamps right out of the fourteenth century did much to show him where to put his feet. Every time he got up to the first floor, he thanked his lucky stars he hadn’t broken his neck.

He found Embry up there ahead of him, shooting the breeze with Captain Hans Dolger, Chill’s adjutant As far as Bagnall could tell, Dolger didn’t much fancy Englishmen, but he made a point of being correct and polite. As arguments in Pskov had a way of being settled with bullets as often as with words, politeness was a rarity worth noting.

Dolger looked up when Bagnall came in.“Guten Tag,” he said. “For a moment, I thought you might be one of the partisan brigadiers, but I know that was foolish of me. As well expect the sun to set in the east as a Russian to show up when he is scheduled.”

“I think being late-or at least not worrying about being on time-is built into the Russian language,” Bagnall answered in German. He’d done German in school, but had learned what Russian he had since coming to Pskov. He found it fascinating and frustrating in almost equal measure. “It has a verb form for doing something continuously and a verb form for doing something once, but pinning down the momentright now is anything but easy.”