Striking the Balance

“So it does,” Atvar said. “I have visited there before. Itis pleasant; parts of it could almost be Home. Very well, Shiplord, make the requisite preparations. We shall temporarily shift headquarters to this region, the better to supervise the conduct of the conquest at close range.”

“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said.

Ludmila Gorbunova wanted to kickGeneralleutnant Graf Walter von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt right where it would do the most good. Since the damned Nazi general was in Riga and she was stuck outside Hrubieszow, that wasn’t practical. In lieu of fulfilling her desire, she kicked at the mud instead. It clung to her boots, which did nothing to improve her mood.

She hadn’t thought of Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt as a damned Nazi when she was in Riga herself. Then he’d seemed a charming,kulturny

general, nothing like the boorish Soviets and cold-blooded Germans it had mostly been her lot to deal with.

“Fly me one little mission, Senior Lieutenant Gorbunova,” she muttered under her breath. “Take a couple of antipanzer mines to Hrubieszow, then come on back here and we’ll send you on to Pskov with a pat on the fanny for your trouble.”

That wasn’t exactly what thekulturny general had said, of course, and he hadn’t tried to pat her on the fanny, which was one of the things that made himkulturny. But if he hadn’t sent her to Hrubieszow, herKukuruznik

wouldn’t have tried to taxi through a tree, which would have meant she’d still be able to fly it.

“Which would have meant I wouldn’t be stuck here outside of Hrubieszow,” she snarled, and kicked at the mud again. Some of it splashed up and hit her in the cheek. She snarled and spat.

She’d always thought of U-2s as nearly indestructible, not least because they were too simple to be easy to break. Down in the Ukraine, she’d buried one nose-first in the mud, but that could have been fixed without much trouble if she hadn’t had to get away from the little biplane as fast as she could. Wrapping aKukuruznik around a tree, though-that was truly championship-quality ineptitude.

“And why did the devil’s sister leave a tree in the middle of the landing strip?” she asked the God in whom she did not believe. But it hadn’t been the devil’s sister. It had been these miserable partisans. It wastheir fault.

Of course she’d been flying at night. Of course she’d had one eye on the compass, one eye on her wristwatch, one eye on the ground and sky, one eye on the fuel gauge-she’d almost wished she was a Lizard, so she could look every which way at once. Just finding the partisans’ poorly lit landing strip had been-not a miracle, for she didn’t believe in miracles-a major achievement, that’s what it had been.

She’d circled once. She’d brought the Wheatcutter down. She’d taxied smoothly. She’d never seen the pine sapling-no, it was more than a sapling, worse luck-till she ran into it.

“Broken wing spars,” she said, ticking off the damage on her fingers. “Broken propeller.” Both of those were wood, and reparable. “Broken crankshaft.” That was of metal, and she had no idea what she was going to do about it-what shecould do about it.

Behind her, someone coughed. She whirled around like a startled cat. Her hand flew to the grip of her Tokarev automatic. The partisan standing there jerked back in alarm. He was a weedy, bearded, nervous little Jew who went by the name Sholom. She could follow pieces of his Polish and pieces of his Yiddish, and he knew a little Russian, so they managed to make themselves understood to each other.

“You come,” he said now. “We bring blacksmith out from Hrubieszow. He look at your machine.”

“All right, I’ll come,” she answered dully. Yes, a U-2 was easy to work on, but she didn’t think a blacksmith could repair a machined part well enough to make the aircraft fly again.

He was one of the largest men she’d ever seen, almost two meters tall and seemingly that wide through the shoulders, too. By the look of him, he could have bent the crankshaft back into its proper shape with his bare hands if it had been in one piece. But it wasn’t just bent; it was broken in half, too.

The smith spoke in Polish, too fast for Ludmila to follow. Sholom turned his words into something she could understand: “Witold, he say if it made of metal, he fix it. He fix lots of wagons, he say.”

“Has he ever fixed a motorcar?” Ludmila asked. If the answer there was yes, maybe she did have some hope of getting off the ground again after all.

When he heard her voice, Witold blinked in surprise. Then he struck a manly pose. His already huge chest inflated like a balloon. Muscles bulged in his upper arms. Again, he spoke rapidly. Again, Sholom made what he said intelligible: “He say, of course he do. He say, for you he fix anything.”