In the Balance полностью

Either she was a better navigator than she’d thought or much luckier than usual, for she spotted the dim banding lanterns after only a couple of circles. They were hooded so as not to be visible from high overhead. The Red Air Force had learned the dangers of that from the Luftwaffe; the lesson was all the more vital against the Lizards.

Her approach in the dark was tentative, the makeshift airstrip anything but smooth. The landing she made would have earned only scorn from her Osoaviakhim instructor (she wondered if the man was still alive). she didn’t care. She was down and among her own people and safe-until her next mission. she didn’t even have to think about that, not yet.

As soon as she got out of the U-2, groundcrew started dragging it to cover. A woman mechanic pointed to the bullet holes. Ludmila shrugged. “Patch them as you get the chance, comrade. I’m all right and so is the aircraft.”

“Good,” the mechanic said. “Oh-you have a letter down in the bunker.”

“A letter?” The Soviet post, erratic since the start of the war, had grown frankly chaotic once the Lizards added their ravages to those of the Nazis. Eagerly, Ludmila asked, “From whom?”

“I don’t know. It’s in an envelope, and it doesn’t say on the outside,” the mechanic answered.

“An envelope? Really?” The very occasional letters Ludmila had had from her brothers and her father and mother were all written on folded single sheets of paper, with her name and unit scrawled on the reverse. she’d had only one note since the Lizards came, three hasty lines, from her younger brother Igor, letting her know he was alive. She trotted for the shelter bunker, saying, “I’ll have to see who’s gotten rich.”

Curtains and doglegs in the entry passage kept candlelight from leaking out. Yevdokia Kasherina looked up from the tunic she was darning. “How did it go?” she asked with a fellow pilot’s concern. It was a long way from the formal debriefings of earlier missions, but the Soviet Air Force was too dispersed and battered to have much room for formalities these days.

“Well enough,” Ludmila said. “I shot up some trucks that weren’t hidden well enough, and I got back here alive. Now what’s this I hear about a letter?”

“It’s over there on your blankets,” Yevdokia said, pointing. “You don’t think anyone would dare do anything with it, do you?”

“Better not,” Ludmila said fiercely. Both women laughed. Ludmila hurried over to where she slept. The clean, white envelope gleamed against the dark blue wool of the blankets. She snatched it up, carried it over to a candle.

she’d expected to recognize the script on the envelope at a glance, and thus know who had written to her before she started the letter itself. Hearing from any of her family would be so good… But, to her surprise and disappointment, the handwriting was unfamiliar to her. Indeed, handwriting was too good a word for it; her name and unit were printed in large copybook letters of the sort a bright eight-year-old might make.

“Who’s it from?” Yevdokia asked.

“I don’t know yet,” Ludmila said.

The other pilot laughed. “A secret admirer, Ludmila Gorbunova?”

“Hush.” Ludmila tore open the envelope, pulled out the piece of paper inside. The words on that were also printed rather than written. For a moment, they seemed utterly meaningless to her. Then she realized she had to switch languages and even alphabets: the letter was in German.

Her first reaction was fright. Before the Lizards came, a letter in German would have been delivered by a harsh-faced NKVD man certain she was guilty of treason. But censors must have seen this note and decided to let it go through. Reading it probably would not endanger her.

To the brave flier who plucked me from the kolkhoz, it began. Flier had a feminine ending tacked on, and kolkhoz was spelled out in those copybook Cyrillic letters. I hope you are well and safe and hitting back against the Lizards. I write this as simply as I can, as I know your German is slow, though much better than my Russian. I am now in Moscow, where I work with your government to hurt the Lizards in new ways. These will-

A few words were neatly clipped out of the letter. A censor had been at it, then. Some of Ludmila’s fear returned: somewhere in Moscow, her name appeared in a dossier for getting mail from a German. As long as Germany and the Soviet Union kept on working together against the Lizards, that dossier would not matter. If they had a falling out…