AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Over to his right, behind the burned-out carcass of one of those Lees, a mortar team started lobbing bombs at the Lizard lines a few hundred yards south of the farmhouse.Whump! Whwnp! Whwnp! Those little finned shells didn’t have much in the way of range, but they could throw a lot of explosive and steel fragments in a hurry.
The Lizards wasted no time replying. Mutt hunkered down and dug himself into the ground with his entrenching tool. Those weren’t only mortar bombs whistling in; the Lizards were shooting real cannon, too, and probably from a range at which American guns couldn’t reply.
Under cover of that bombardment, Lizard infantry skittered forward. When Mutt heard the platoon BAR start chattering, he stuck his head up and blazed away with his tommy gun. He didn’t know whether any of the Lizards got hit or not. The BAR might well nail ’em at those ranges, but he’d just be lucky if he wounded one of the aliens. Still, they dove for cover and stopped advancing, which was the point of shooting early and often.
“Haven’t seem ’em try to move up on us in a while,” Muldoon yelled through the din.
“Me neither,” Daniels said. “They been happy enough on the defensive for a while. An’ you know somethin’ else? I was pretty much happy to have ’em that way my own self.”
“Yeah,” Muldoon said. A big shell landed close by a couple of seconds later, showering both men with dirt and leaving them stunned and half deafened.
Mutt glanced back into a foxhole about twenty yards away to make sure his radioman was still in one piece. The kid was still moving and wasn’t screaming, so Daniels figured nothing irreparable had happened to him. He wondered if he was going to have to call for mustard-gas shells to hold the Lizards back.
He was about to yell to the radioman when the Lizards’ barrage let up. He peered suspiciously over the bricks. What sort of trick were they trying to play? Did they think they could catch the Americans all so deep in their holes that they wouldn’t notice attackers till those attackers were in among them? If they didn’t know better than that after more than two years of hard fighting, they damned well should have.
But the Lizards, having tried one advance, weren’t pushing forward again. Small-arms fire from their side of the line had died away, too. “Made their point, I guess,” Mutt said under his breath.
“Hey, Lieutenant, take a gander at that!” Herman Muldoon pointed out toward the Lizards’ lines. Something white was waving on the end of a long stick. “They want a parley or somethin’.”
“Pick up their wounded, mebbe,” Daniels said. “I dickered that kind o’ deal with ’em once or twice. Wouldn’t mind doin’ it again: they make a truce, they keep it for as long as they say they’re gonna.” He raised his voice: “Hold fire, boys! I’m gonna go out there an’ parley with them scaly sons of bitches.” He turned to Muldoon as the Americans’ guns fell silent. “You got anything white, Herman?”
“Still got a snotrag, believe it or not.” Muldoon pulled the handkerchief out of his pocket with no small pride; not many dogfaces could match it these days. It wasn’t very white, but Mutt supposed it would do. He looked around for something to fix it to. When he didn’t find anything, he cussed for a couple of seconds and then stood up, waving the hanky over his head. The Lizards didn’t shoot at him. He walked out into the debatable ground between the two forces. A Lizard holding his own flag of truce came toward him.
He hadn’t gone very far before the radioman hollered, “Lieutenant! Lieutenant Daniels, sir!”
“Whatever it is, Logan, it’s gonna have to wait,” Mutt called back over his shoulder. “I got business here.”
“But, sir-”
Mutt ignored the call and kept walking. If he turned around and went back now, the Lizards were liable to figure he’d changed his mind about the cease-fire and start shooting at him. The alien with the white flag approached to within maybe ten feet of him, then stopped. So did Mutt. He nodded politely; as a soldier, he had nothing but respect for the Lizards. “Second Lieutenant Daniels, U.S. Army,” he said. “You speak English?”
“Yessss.” The Lizard drew the word out into a long hiss, but Mutt had no trouble understanding him.Good thing, too, he thought: he didn’t know word one of Lizard talk. The alien went on, “I am Chook, small-unit group leader, conquest fleet of the Race.”
“Pleased to meet you, Chook. Our ranks match, pretty much.”
“Yess, I think so also,” the Lizard said. “I come to tell you, there is cease-fire between conquest fleet of the Race and your U.S. Army.”
“We can do that,” Mutt agreed. “How long do you want the truce to last? Till nightfall, say? That’ll give both sides plenty of time to bring in whoever’s hurt and let us have a bit of a blow-a little rest,” he added, thinking the Lizard was liable not to know slang-“afterwards, too.”
“You not understand, Second Lieutenant Daniels,” Chook said. “Is cease-fire between conquest fleet of the Race and your U.S. Army. Whole U.S. Army, whole part of conquest fleet here. Declared by Atvar, fleetlord of conquest fleet. Agree by not-emperor of your U.S. Army, whatever him name be. Cease-fire in place for now: not move forward, not move back. No set time to ending of cease-fire. You hear, Second Lieutenant Daniels? You understand?”
“Yeah,” Mutt answered absently. “Jesus.” He didn’t know the last time he’d felt like this. November 1918, maybe, but he’d been expecting that cease-fire. This was a bolt from the blue. He turned and hollered, loud as he could: “Logan!”
“Sir?” The radioman’s voice came back thin and tiny over a hundred fifty yards of ground.
“We got a cease-lire with these Lizards?”
“Yes, sir. I was trying to tell you, sir, I just got the word when-”
Mutt turned back to Chook. The Lizard had already given him the word. He spoke formally to Chook, to make sure the alien knew he had it straight: “I hear you, Small-Unit Group Leader Chook. I understand you, too. We got us a cease-fire in place here, just like all over the U.S. of A, no time limit.”
“Truth,” Chook said. “This what we have. This cease-fire not only for you. Is also for SSSR”-Mutt needed a second to figure out he meant Russia-“and for Deutschland.” After going Over There, Daniels got that one fast.
“Lordy,” Mutt said in an awed voice. “You pile that all together, it’s half the world, pretty much.” He noticed something else, too. “You made truces with the countries that bombed you back when you bombed ’em.”
“Truth,” Chook said again. “Are we fools, to waste cease-fire on empires we have beaten?”
“Look at things from your end o’ the stick and I guess maybe you got a point,” Mutt admitted. He wondered what was going to happen to England. Chook hadn’t said a thing about the limeys, and Mutt had admired them ever since he’d seen them in action in France in the war that was supposed to end war. Well, the Lizards had tried invading them once, and got a clout in the snout for their trouble. Maybe they’d learned a lesson.
Chook said, “You are good fighters, you Big Uglies. I tell you that much. It is truth. We come to Tosev 3-this planet, this world-we think we will win and win fast. We not win fast. You fight good.”
“You’re no slouches your own selves.” Mutt half turned. “One of your boys, he shot me right there.” He indicated his left nether cheek.
“I am lucky. I am not shot. Many males who are my friends, they are shot,” Chook said. Mutt nodded. He knew about that. Every front-line soldier knew about that. Chook said, “We are fighters, you and I.” Mutt nodded again. Chook let loose with a hissing sigh, then went on, “I think now one time, now another time, fighters of Race, fighters at the tips of the tongue of the fight, these males more like Big Uglies at tips of tongue of fight than like other males far away. You hear, Second Lieutenant Daniels? You understand?” He made a funny coughing noise after each question.
“Small-Unit Group Leader Chook, I hear you real good,” Mutt said. “I understand you real good, too. What do you say when something is just right? You say ‘trut
h,’ don’t you? That there’s truth, Chook.”
“Truth,” Chook agreed. He spoke into something not much bigger than a paperback book. Back at his line, Lizards started standing up and poking their noses out of cover.He’s got a radio right there with him, Mutt realized,and so do all his troops. Ain’t that a hell of a thing? Wish we could do the like.
He turned around and waved to his own men. One by one, they stood up, too. Of them all, Herman Muldoon was the last fellow to show himself. Mutt didn’t blame him a bit. He’d been shot at so many times by now, he probably had trouble believing this wasn’t some sort of trick Mutt would have, too, if he hadn’t already been standing out here all vulnerable in case the Lizards did aim to pull off something sneaky.
Warily, still holding weapons, humans and Lizards approached each other. Some of them tried to talk back and forth, though Chook’s males knew a lot less English than he did, and few Americans had much in the way of Lizard lingo. That was okay. You didn’t need a whole lot of talking to get across the idea that you weren’t trying to kill anybody right now, even if you had been a few minutes before. Mutt had seen that on truces in no-man’s-land in France in 1918. Only a few of his buddies had been able to talk with theBoches, but they’d got on well enough.
