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The ground to either side of the paved road was soft and soggy: not surprising, Ussmak supposed, since the highway ran parallel to the river that flowed through, Besancon. He didn’t think anything of it until a landcruiser, and then another one, bogged down in the muck.
From the woods to the north of the road came another sound with which Ussmak had become intimately familiar in the SSSR: a sharp, fast, harsh tac-tac-tac. He slammed the hatch with a clang. “They’re shooting at us!” he screamed. “That’s an egg-addled machine gun, that’s what that is!” Bullets ricocheting from the landcruiser’s composite armor underscored his words.
In the turret, Hessef shouted in high excitement. “I see muzzle flashes, by the Emperor! There he is, Tvenkel, right over there! Bring the turret around-that’s the way. Give him some with the machine gun, and then a round of high explosive. We’ll teach the Big Uglies to fool with us!”
Ussmak let out a slow hiss of wonder. Hessef’s sloppy commands weren’t anything like the ones that had been drilled into the landcruiser crews in endless days of simulator training and exercises back on Home. Ussmak realized he was listening to the ginger talking again. An adjutant monitoring Hessef would have swelled up as if he had the gray staggers.
However unorthodox the orders, though, they accomplished their purpose. Hydraulics whirred as the turret smoothly traversed. The coaxial machine gun opened up. Heard from inside the landcruiser, it wasn’t loud at all. “Fool with us, will they?” Tvenkel yelled. “I’ll teach them this world belongs to the Race!” He fired a long, long burst. Not being turned toward the Big Uglies with the machine gun, Ussmak at first had trouble judging how effective Tvenkel’s shooting was. But then more bullets pattered off the landcruisers like pebbles thrown at a metal roof. They did no more damage than pebbles would have, but showed the Tosevite gunners were still in business.
“Give ’em the real thing,” Hessef said. Again, thick armor muffled the cannon’s roar, though the landcruiser rocked slightly on its treads as it took up the recoil.
“There, that’s done it,” Tvenkel said with satisfaction. “We put enough rounds on that machine gun so the Big Uglies running it won’t bother their betters again.” As if to underscore his words, bullets stopped hitting the landcruiser.
Ussmak peered through his forward vision slits. Some of the other vehicles in the column were already moving ahead. A moment later, Hessef said, “Forward.”
“It shall be done, superior sir.” Ussmak released the brake, put the landcruiser into low gear. It rumbled forward. He steered very close to the machine that had thrown a track, keeping one of his own on the paved road to make sure he didn’t bog down. As soon as he was past the crippled landcruiser, he sped up to try to recapture some of the time everyone had lost shooting at the Big Uglies and their machine gun.
Hessef said, “Not bad at all. The column commander reports only two wounds, neither serious. And we obliterated those Tosevites.”
The ginger was still talking through him, Ussmak thought. Landcruiser crews shouldn’t have taken any casualties from a nuisance machine gun. Besides which, Hessef was ignoring the disabled fighting vehicle and the delay that sprang from the little firefight. If you’d tasted ginger a while before, such setbacks were too small to be worth noticing. Had Ussmak tasted along with the rest of the crew, he wouldn’t have noticed them, either. Without a particle of the herb in him, though, they bulked large. He wondered just how clever he really was after a good taste.
From behind and to the left, bullets clattered off the landcruiser’s rear deck and the back of the turret. The Big Uglies at their machine gun had lived through the firestorm around them after all.
“Halt!” Hessef screeched. Ussmak obediently hit the brake. “Five rounds high explosive this time,” the commander ordered. “Do you hear me, Tvenkel? I want those maniacal males blown to bloody bits.”
“So do I,” the gunner said. He and his commander agreed perfectly, just as training said members of a landcruiser crew should. The only trouble was that the tactic on which they agreed struck Ussmak as insane.
The landcruiser’s main armament boomed, again and again. And Hessef’s was not the only crew that had halted. Through his vision slits, Ussmak watched several other landcruisers stop so they could pour fire down on the Tosevites who had had the temerity to annoy them. The driver wondered if their commanders were tasting, too.
When the barrage was done, Hessef said, “Forward,” in tones of self-satisfaction. Ussmak obeyed again. Not much later, the landcruiser column came to an enormous hole blown in the highway. “The Big Uglies can’t stop us with nonsense like that,” Hessef declared. And sure enough, the armored fighting vehicles’ swung off the road one by one.
The machine just in front of Ussmak’s rolled over a mine and lost a track. As soon as it slewed to a stop, a concealed Tosevite machine gun opened up. The landcruisers again returned fire with cannon and machine guns.
The column was very late reaching its assigned destination.
Heinrich Jager paced through the cobblestoned streets of Hechingen. Up on a spur of the Schwabische Alb stood Burg Hohenzollern. Its turrets, seen mistily through fog, made Jager think of medieval epic, of maidens with long golden tresses and of the dragons that coveted them for their own dragonish reasons.
The trouble these days, however, was Lizards, not dragons. Jager wished he were back at the front so he could do something useful about them. Instead, he was stuck here with the best scientific minds of the Reich.
He had nothing against them: on the contrary. They were far more likely to save Germany-to save mankind-than he was. But they thought they needed him to help them do it, and in that, as far as he could see, they were badly mistaken.
He’d watched soldiers make the same kind of mistake. If a detachment from the quartermaster’s office brought a new model field telephone to the frontline soldiers, they were automatically seen as experts on the gadget, even if the only thing they knew about it was how to get it out of its crate.
So with him now. He’d helped steal the explosive metal from the Lizards, he’d hauled it across the Ukraine and Poland. Therefore, the presumption ran, he had to know all about it. Like a lot of presumptions, that one presumed too much.
Coming up the street toward him, munching on a chunk of black bread, was Werner Heisenberg. In spite of the bread, Heisenberg looked very much the academic: he was tall and serious-looking, with bushy hair combed straight back, fluffy eyebrows, and an expression mostly, as now, abstracted.
“Herr Doktor Professor,” Jager said, touching the brim of his service cap. No matter how bored he was, he remained polite.
“Ah; Colonel Jager, good day. I did not see you.” Heisenberg chuckled uneasily. Being taken for the traditional absentminded professor had to embarrass him, not least because he really wasn’t that way. Up till now, he’d always seemed plenty sharp-and not just brilliant, which went without saying-to Jager. He went on, “I am glad to find you, though I must thank you again for the material you have given us to work with.”
“To serve the Reich is my pleasure and my duty,” Jager answered, politely still. If Heisenberg had ever seen combat, he didn’t show it. He could thank Jager for bringing the explosive metal, but he didn’t really know what that meant, or how much blood had been spilled to get him his experimental material.
He proceeded to prove that, saying, “A pity you could not have fetched us a bit more. Theoretical calculations indicate the amount we have is marginal for the production of a uranium explosive. Another three or four kilos would have been most beneficial.”
That did it. Jager’s boredom boiled away in fury. “Dr. Diebner had the courtesy to be grateful for what was provided rather than to complain about it. He also had the sense, sir”-Jager loaded the title with scorn-“to remember how, many lives were lost obtaining it.”
He’d hoped to make Heisenberg ashamed. Instead, he flicked him on his vanity. “Diebner? Ha! He has not even his Habilitation. He is
, if you ask me, more tinkerer than physicist.”
“He knows what war entails, which is more than you seem to. And, by all accounts, he and his group are further along than yours in setting up the apparatus to produce more of this explosive metal for ourselves after we expend what we procured from the Lizards.”
“By no means is his work theoretically sound,” Heisenberg said, as if he were accusing the other physicist of embezzlement.
“I don’t care about theory. I care about results.” Jager automatically reacted like a soldier. “Without results, theory is irrelevant.”
“Without theory, results are impossible,” Heisenberg retorted. The two men glared at each other. Jager wished he hadn’t bothered to greet the physicist. By the expression on his face, Heisenberg wished the same thing.
Jager shouted, “The metal is more real to you than the men who fell getting it.” He wanted to clout Heisenberg down from his cloud, make him glimpse, however distantly, the world beyond equations. He also wanted to kick him in the teeth.
