Upsetting the Balance полностью

Ludmila had heard stories of Red Air Force pilots who’d flown below treetop height right down paths like that, shooting up everything in their sights. People who did things like that got the Hero of the Soviet Union award pinned on their tunics, sometimes by the Great Stalin himself. It was tempting, but…

“I’d only get myself killed,” Ludmila said, as if someone were in theKukuruznik arguing with her. It wasn’t that she was afraid the Lizards would shoot her down; she’d signed up with the risk of getting shot down when she joined the Red Air Force. But she didn’t think the lane was wide enough to let her get the U-2 down it. Tearing the wings off your aircraft by running into a tree was not what they taught you in flight school.

That left her with one choice. She spun the little-but not little enough-biplane through a tight turn and headed back toward Pskov. The Germans had artillery that could pound this position and the area north of it. It wouldn’t be a guaranteed kill, not by any means, but it would make the Lizards unhappy.

Again she wished she could wring a better turn of speed from the Wheatcutter. The sooner she got back to Pskov, the shorter the distance the supply convoy would have traveled and the better the chance for a hit.

The tall stone pile of theKrom and the onion domes of the churches marked the town. The old citadel wasn’t badly damaged, but some of the domes had bites taken out of them and others leaned drunkenly away from the perpendicular. Some churches, along with a great many secular buildings, were in ruins.

Ludmila was a loyal child of the October Revolution, and had no great use for churches. Had the Soviet government knocked them down, she wouldn’t have missed them a bit. But to have them destroyed by invading aliens was something else again. Even the Nazis, albeit for reasons of their own, had usually refrained from wrecking churches.

Instead of using the airstrip to the east of Pskov, as she usually did, Ludmila brought theKukuruznik down in the park in the middle of town, the way she had when she first came to the city. Again, she managed to keep from running over people or livestock. Men came running to get the U-2 under the shelter of friendly trees.

She scrambled out of the aircraft and hurried toward theKrom, whereGeneralleutnant Kurt Chill had his headquarters. Having a Nazi in overall command of the defenses of a Soviet city galled her, but she couldn’t do anything about it, not now. And if Chill didn’t fight hard against the Lizards, it was assuredly his backside, too.

People shouted to her, asking what she’d seen that made her want to land in the middle of Pskov. “I can’t tell you that,” she answered. Some of the Pskovites seemed never to have heard of security. Well, if they hadn’t, she certainly had.

She hurried over to theKrom. No sentries, Soviet or German, stood outside. Nobody wanted to give the Lizards a clue that anything important went on in there. Inside the entrance, a couple of tall Nazi soldiers leered at her. The Germans often found the idea of women in the fighting forces funny.“Was willst du, Liebchen?” one of them asked. His companion, a very rough-looking customer indeed, broke out in giggles.

“Ich will Generalleutnant Chill sofort zu sehen,”Ludmila answered in the iciest German she could muster: “I want to see Lieutenant General Chill immediately.”

“Give me a kiss first,” the guard said, which made his comrade all but wet himself with mirth.

Ludmila drew her Tokarev automatic, pointing it not at the fellow’s head or chest but at his crotch. “Stop wasting my time,dummkopf,” she said sweetly. “If the Lizards get away on account of you, it won’t be my neck that goes into the noose.”

“Bitch,” muttered one of the Germans. “Dyke,” the other said under his breath. But both of them moved aside. Ludmila didn’t put the pistol back in its holster till she got round the corner.

Another German, a captain, sat at a desk in the antechamber outside Lieutenant General Chill’s office. He treated Ludmila like a soldier, but was no more helpful on account of that. “I am sorry, Senior Lieutenant, but he is away at the front,” the German said. “I do not expect him back for several days.”

“I need to have an artillery barrage laid on,” Ludmila said, and explained what she’d seen moving up the forest track from the south. The German captain frowned. “I have no authority to commit artillery to action except in immediate defense of the front,” he said doubtfully. “Using it is dangerous, because Lizard counterbattery fire so often costs us guns and men, neither of which we can afford to lose.”

“I risked my life to get this information and bring it back here,” Ludmila said. “Are you going to sit there and ignore it?” The captain looked too clean and much too well-fed to have seen the front lines lately, no matter where Lieutenant General Chill was.