“Exalted Fleetlord, I believe this to be the proper course, painful though it is,” Kirel said. “If we cannot conquer the entire surface of Tosev 3 without damaging great parts of it and having the Big Uglies damage still more, best we hold some areas and await the arrival of the colonization fleet. We gain the chance to reestablish ourselves securely and to prepare for the safe arrival of the colonists and the resources they bring.”
“So I tell myself, over and over,” Atvar said. “I still have trouble being convinced. Seeing how the Tosevites have improved their own technology in the short time since we arrived here, I wonder how advanced they will be when the colonization Fleet finally reaches this world.”
“Computer projections indicate we will retain a substantial lead,” Kirel said soothingly. “And the only other path open to us, it would appear, is the one Straha the traitor advocated: using our nuclear weapons in prodigal fashion to smash the Big Uglies into submission-which also, unfortunately, involves smashing the planetary surface.”
“I no longer trust the computer projections,” Atvar said. “They have proved wrong too often; we do not know the Big Uglies well enough to model and extrapolate their behavior with any great hope of accuracy. The rest, however, is as you say, with the ironic proviso that the Tosevites care much less about the destruction of major portions of their world than we do. That has let them wage unlimited warfare against us, while we of necessity held back.”
“ ‘Has let them’?” Kirel said. “ ‘Held back’? Am I to infer, Exalted Fleetlord, you purpose a change in policy?”
“Not an active one, only reactive,” Atvar answered. “If the Deutsche, for example, carry out the threats their Leader has made through this von Ribbentrop creature and resume nuclear warfare against us, I shall do as I warned and thoroughly devastate Deutsch-held territory. That will teach whatever may be left of the Deutsche that we are not to be trifled with, and should have a salutary effect on the behavior of other Tosevite not-empires.”
“So it should, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel agreed. He was too tactful to remark on how closely the plan resembled the one Straha had advocated, for which the fleetlord silently thanked him. Instead, he continued, “I cannot imagine the Deutsch Tosevites taking such a risk in the face of our clear and unmistakable warnings, however.”
“As a matter of fact, neither can I,” Atvar said. “But, with the Big Uglies, the only certain thing is uncertainty.”
Heinrich Jager looked around with something approaching wonder. He could not see all the panzers and other armored lighting vehicles in his regiment, of course; they were concealed along the front on which they were to attack. But he’d never expected to come so close to establishment strength, never expected to be so fully loaded with both petrol and ammunition.
He leaned out of the cupola of his Panther and nodded to Otto Skorzeny. “I wish we weren’t doing this, but if we do it, we’ll do it well.”
“Spoken like a soldier,” said an SS man standing near Skorzeny. The boys in the black shirts had drifted back up to the front line over the past few days. If Lizard Intelligence was up to keeping track of their movements, Jager would be feeding his regiment into a sausage machine. He didn’t think the Lizards were that smart, and hoped he was right. The SS man went on, “It is every officer’s duty, just as it is that of every soldier, to obey the commands of his superiors and of theFuhrer without question, regardless of his personal feelings.”
Jager stared down at the jackbooted ignoramus in silent scorn. Take his words to the logical extreme and you’d turn theWehrmacht into a bunch of automata as inflexible as the Russians or the Lizards. If you got orders that made no sense, you questioned them. If they still didn’t make sense, or if they led you into an obvious catastrophe, you ignored them.
You needed guts to do it. You put your career on the line when you disobeyed orders. But if you could convince your superiors you’d been right, or that the orders you’d got showed no real understanding of the situation in front of you, you’d survive. You might even get promoted.
Jager, now, hadn’t just disobeyed orders. If you wanted to look at things in a particular light, he’d given aid and comfort to the enemy. Any SS man who found out about what he’d done would look at it in that particular light.
For his part, he studied the weedy little fellow standing there beside Skorzeny. Had he dropped his pants and enjoyed himself with Karol’s wife, or maybe with his young daughter, while a couple of others held her down? Was he the one who’d carved SS runes into the Polish farmer’s belly? And what, in his agony, had Karol said? Was this smiling chap just waiting for the bomb to go off before he arrested Jager and started carving runes into him?
Skorzeny glanced down at his wristwatch. “Soon now,” he said. “When it goes up, we move, and the signal goes out to our armies on the other fronts, too. The Lizards will be sorry they didn’t give in to our demands.”
“Yes, and what happens afterwards?” Jager asked as he had before, still hoping he could talk Skorzeny out of pushing the fateful button. “We can be sure the Lizards will destroy at least one city of the GermanReich. They’ve done that every time anyone used an explosive-metal bomb against them in war. But this isn’t just war-it’s breaking a cease-fire. Aren’t they liable to do something worse?”
“I don’t know,” Skorzeny said cheerfully. “And you know what else? I don’t give a fuck, either. We’ve been over this ground already. The job theFuhrer’s given me is kicking the Lizards and the Jews in the balls, just as hard as I can. That’s what I’m going to do, too. Whatever happens afterwards, it damn well happens, that’s all, and I’ll worry about it then.”
“That is the National Socialist way of thought,” the other SS man declared, beaming at Skorzeny.
Skorzeny wasn’t looking back on him. TheStandartenfuhrer’s eyes were on Jager instead, up there in the cupola (the engineers and mechanics had been right-it was a vastly improved cupola) of the Panther. Without giving his black-shirted colleague a hint of what he was thinking, he made his opinion plain to the panzer colonel. If it wasn’t,What a load of pious crap, Jager would have eaten his service cap.
And yet, even if Skorzeny didn’t give a damn about the slogans under which he fought, they remained valid for him. Hitler flew him like a falcon at chosen foes. And, like a falcon, he didn’t worry about where he was flying or for what reasons, only about how to strike the hardest blow when he got there.
That wasn’t enough.
Jager had fought the same way himself, till he’d had his eyes forcibly opened to what Germany had done to the Jews in the lands it had overrun, and to what it would have done had the arrival of the Lizards not interrupted things. Once your eyes were opened, shutting them again wasn’t easy. Jager had tried, and failed.
He’d also-cautiously-tried to open the eyes of some other officers, Skorzeny among them. Without exception, everybody else had stayed willfully blind, not wanting to see, not wanting to discuss. He understood that. He even sympathized with itif you refused to notice the flaws of your superiors and your country, you could go on about your daily routine a lot more easily.
As long as he was fighting just the Lizards, Jager had no trouble suppressing his own doubts, his own worries. Nobody could doubt for even a moment that the Lizards were deadly foes not only to Germany but to all mankind. You did what you had to do to stop them. But the explosive-metal bomb in Lodz didn’t have only the Lizards in mind. It didn’t even have the Lizards primarily in mind. Skorzeny knew as much. He’d set it there after the nerve-gas bomb he’d intended for the Jews of Lodz failed. It was his-and Germany’s-revenge on the Jews for thwarting him once.