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She wanted to kick him right where it would do the most good. “By which you mean I don’t care to be your whore,” she snarled. Before she said something worse to him, something irremediable, she turned to Boris Lidov. “Comrade Colonel, how are we to get to Pskov?”
“I could have you sent by train,” Lidov answered. “North of Moscow, rail service works fairly well. But instead, I have a U-2 waiting at a field not far from here. The aircraft itself will prove useful in defending Pskov, as will the addition of a pilot and a skilled mechanic who can also serve a gun. Now go-you spent too much time getting here, but I was unwilling to detach a plane from frontline service.”
Ludmila was unsurprised to find the driver waiting for them when they left Colonel Lidov’s office. The driver said, “I will take you to the airport now.”
Georg Schultz scrambled up into thepanjewagon. He reached out a hand to help Ludmila join him and laughed when she ignored it, as if she’d done something funny. Once more she felt like kicking him. Being sent to Pskov was one thing. Being sent there in the company of this smirking, lecherous lout was something else again.
She brightened for a moment: at least she would be escaping Nikifor Sholudenko. And-exquisite irony! — maybe his reports on her had helped make that possible. But her glee quickly faded. For every Sholudenko she escaped, she was only too likely to find another one. His kind was a hardy breed-like any other cockroaches,she thought.
Atvar nervously pondered the map that showed the progress of the Race’s invasion of Britain. In one respect, all was well: the British could not stop the thrusts of his armored columns. In another respect, though, the picture was not as bright: the Race’s armor controlled only the ground on which it sat at the moment. Territory where it had been but was no longer seethed with rebellion the moment the landcruisers were out of sight.
“The trouble with this cursed island,” he said, jabbing a fingerclaw at the computer display as if it were actually the territory in question, “is that it’s too small and too tightly packed with Tosevites. Fighting there is like trying to hold a longball game in an airlock.”
“Well put, Exalted Fleetlord.” Kirel let his mouth fall open in an appreciative chuckle. Atvar studied the map with one eye and the shiplord with the other. He still mistrusted Kirel. A properly loyal subordinate would have played no role in the effort to oust him. Yes, next to Straha, Kirel was a paragon of virtue, but that was not saying enough to leave the fleetlord comfortable.
Atvar said, “The cost in equipment and males for territory gained is running far higher than the computer projections. We’ve lost several heavy transports, and we cannot afford that at all. Without the transport fleet, we’ll have to use starships to move landcruisers about-and that would leave them vulnerable to the maniacal Tosevites.”
“Truth, Exalted Fleetlord.” Kirel hesitated, then went on, “At best, computer projections gave us less than a fifty percent chance of succeeding in the conquest of Britain if the campaign in the SSSR was not satisfactorily concluded first.”
Kirel remained unfailingly polite, but Atvar was not in the mood for criticism. “The computer’s reasoning was based on our ability to shift resources from the SSSR after we conquered it,” he snapped. “True, we did not conquer it, but we have shifted resources-after the Soviets exploded that atomic bomb, we’ve scaled back operations in their territory. This produces something of the effect the computer envisioned, even if by a different route.”
“Yes, Exalted Fleetlord.” If Kirel was convinced, he did a good job of hiding it. He changed the subject, but not to one more reassuring: “We are down to our last hundred antimissiles, Exalted Fleetlord.”
“That is not good,” Atvar said, an understatement that would do until a bigger one came along, which wouldn’t be any time soon. As was his way, he did his best to look on the bright side of things: “At least we can concentrate those missiles against Deutschland, the only Tosevite empire exploring that technology at the moment.”
“You are of course correct,” Kirel said. Then he and the fleetlord stopped and looked at each other in mutual consternation-and understanding. With the Race, saying something was not happening at the moment meant it would not happen, certainly not in a future near enough to require worry. With the Big Uglies, it meant what it said and nothing more: it was no guarantee that the Americans or the Russkis or the Nipponese or even the British wouldn’t start lobbing guided missiles at the Race tomorrow or the day after. Even more unnerving, both males had come to take that possibility for granted. With the Tosevites, you couldn’t tell.
Kirel tried again: “We continue to expend the antimissile missiles at a rate of several per day. We also seek to destroy the launchers from which the Deutsch missiles come, but we have had only limited success there, as they are both mobile and easy to conceal.”
“Any success on Tosev 3 seems limited,” Atvar said with a sigh. “We might do better to blast the factories in which the missiles are manufactured. If the Deutsche cannot produce them, they cannot fire them. And missiles require great precision; if we destroy the tools needed to make them, the Big Uglies will be a long while coming up with more.” He realized he was once more reduced to buying time against the Tosevites, but that was better than losing to them.
“This course is also being attempted,” Kirel said, “but, while it pains me to contradict the exalted fleetlord, the Tosevite missiles are astonishingly crude. Their guidance is so bad as to make them no more than area weapons, extremely long-range artillery, but the prospect of large weights of high explosive landing behind our lines remains unpleasant; some have evaded our countermeasures and done considerable damage, and that situation will grow far worse as we run out of countermissiles. The corresponding point is that they are far easier to build than the missiles that shoot them down. We attack factories we’ve identified as producing missile components, but the Deutsche continue to produce and launch the pestilential things.”
Atvar sighed again. There in an eggshell was the story of the war against the Big Uglies. The Race took all the proper steps to contain them-and got hurt anyhow.
A screen on his desk lit up, showing the features of his adjutant, Pshing. Atvar immediately started to worry. Pshing wouldn’t interrupt his conference with Kirel for anything that wasn’t important, which meant, in practice, for anything that hadn’t gone wrong. “What is it?” Atvar demanded, putting a fierce snarl into the interrogative cough.
“Forgive me for troubling you, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing said nervously, “but Fzzek, commander of invasion forces in Britain, has received under sign of truce a disturbing message from Churchill, the chief minister to the petty emperor of Britain. He requests your orders on how to proceed.”
“Give me the message,” Atvar said.
“It shall be done.” Pshing swung an eye turret to one side, evidently reading the words from another screen. “This Churchill demands that we begin evacuating our forces from Britain in no more than two days or face an unspecified type of warfare the Tosevites have not yet employed against us, but one which is asserted to be highly e
ffective and dangerous.”
“If this Churchill uses nuclear arms against us, we shall not spare his capital,” Atvar said. “The island of Britain is so small, a few nuclear weapons would utterly ruin it.”
“Exalted Fleetlord, Churchill specifically denies the weapons he describes are nuclear in nature,” Pshing replied. “They are new, they are deadly. Past that, the British spokesmale declined detailed comment.”
“Having begun the conquest of Britain, we are not going to abandon it on the say-so of a Tosevite,” Atvar said. “You may tell Fzzek to relay that to Churchill. For all we know, the Big Ugly is but running an enormous bluff. We shall not allow ourselves to be deceived. Relay that to Fzzek as well.”
“It shall be done,” Pshing said. The screen holding his image went blank.
Atvar turned back to Kirel. “Sometimes the presumption Tosevites show astonishes me. They treat us as if we were fools. If they have a new weapon, which I doubt, advertising it will produce nothing from us, especially since we’ve seen for ourselves what liars they are.”
“Exactly so, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said.
Mutt Daniels crouched in ruins, hoping the Lizard bombardment would end soon. “If it don’t end soon, there ain’t gonna be nothin’ left of Chicago,” he muttered under his breath.
“What’s that, Lieutenant?” Dracula Szabo asked from the shelter of a shell hole not far away.
Before Mutt could answer, several Lizard shells came in, close enough to slam him down as if he’d been blocking the plate when a runner bowled him over trying to score. He thanked his lucky stars he’d been breathing out rather than in; a blast could rip your lungs to bits and kill you without leaving a mark on your body.
“Come on,” he said, and charged west across the ruined lawn of Poro College toward the rubble that had been shops and apartments on the other side of South Park Way. Szabo followed at his heels.
Somewhere close by, a Lizard opened up with an automatic rifle. Daniels didn’t know whether the bullets were intended for him, and didn’t wait to find out. He threw himself flat, ignoring the bricks and stones on which he landed. Bricks and stones could hurt his bones, but bullets… he shuddered, not caring for the parody on the old rhyme.
