“I shall have to examine the overall strategic situation,” was what Chill did say. “Standing on the defensive until spring may prove a wiser, more economical choice.”
Vasiliev and Aleksandr German both shouted at him.Coward was one of the kinder words they used. Bagnall found himself speechless. Up till now, Chill had always been an aggressive commander, willing, even eager, to spend lives to gain territory. Of course, a lot of the lives he’d spent around Pskov were Russian…
Not only were a lot of the lives Chill had spent Russian, so was a lot of the materiel. The German garrison at Pskov had done plenty of hard fighting, and the Lizards in Poland cut them off from theVaterland (one of these days, he’d have to think about what the differences betweenrodina andVaterland implied, but not now, not now).
As innocently as he could, Bagnall asked, “How is your supply situation, General Chill?”
“Given all we have done, it is not bad,” Chill answered. Bagnall had heard a great many more responsive replies. The German officer’s face said more; it reminded Bagnall of the look a poker player wore when he’d got himself into a big hand and had to own up to holding nothing more ferocious than a pair of nines.
From strident, Aleksandr German’s voice went soft, persuasive: “Generalleutnant,supplies from the Soviet Union would probably be available. The routes and the amounts are not always what they might be, but they do exist. Surely your well-trained men would not have much trouble getting used to Soviet weapons.”
“Hardly-we captured enough of them on the way here,” Chill said with as much aplomb as he could muster: more than Bagnall had guessed he had in him. He was indeed a formidable man. When he continued, he cut straight to the heart of the problem: “If I take Soviet supplies and grow to depend on them to keep my force in being, then before long I have to take Soviet orders, too.”
“If you don’t, then before long you have no supplies and it no longer matters whose orders you take, because you won’t be able to carry them out in any case,” Aleksandr German said.
Nikolai Vasiliev’s eyes lit up with a fierce light. “And when you have no supplies left, no point to our truce any more, either. We will restore Pskov to therodina then, and we will remember what you have done here.”
“You’re welcome to try, at any time you choose,” Chill answered calmly. “This I tell you, I do not lie: we have plenty to knock any number of partisans back into the woods, or into graves in them. By all means feel free to test what I say.” The German soldier glared fiercely back at Vasiliev. By the look inhis eye, he would sooner have killed Russians than Lizards any day of the week.
“Enough, both of you!” Bagnall exclaimed. “The only ones who gain when we bicker are the Lizards. We would do well to remember that. We can hate one another later, after the main war is won.”
Kurt Chill and Aleksandr German both stared at him as if he’d suddenly started spouting Swahili. After Aleksandr German translated, Nikolai Vasiliev gave Bagnall that same dubious look. But slowly, one by one, the three leaders nodded. “This is truth,” Chill said. “Wewould do well to remember it.”
“Da,”Aleksandr German said. But he could not resist twisting the knife: “Also truth,Herr Generalleutnant, is that sooner or later, hoard them or use them, your German munitions will be exhausted. Then you will use those of the Soviet Union or you will cease being soldiers.”
Lieutenant General Chill looked as if he’d found a worm-worse, found half a worm-in his apple. The prospect of becoming not just allies but dependents on the Soviet Union, after being first overlords and then at least superior partners because of superior firepower, had to be anything but appetizing for him.
“It can work,” Bagnall insisted, not just to theWehrmacht officer but also to the partisan brigadiers. And yet it wasn’t their shaky truce that made him speak with such conviction; it was the passionate affair that German mechanic who’d come into Pskov with Ludmila Gorbunova was having with the fair Tatiana (much to Bagnall’s relief, and even more to Jerome Jones’). The pair still didn’t like each other much, but that didn’t stop them from coming together every chance they got.They should be a lesson for all of us, Bagnall thought.
“This should be a lesson for all of us,” Atvar said, looking with one eye at the video of the damage to the gas-mask factory in Albi and with the other at Kirel. “Whatever we thought of our security procedures, they have been starkly revealed as inadequate.”
“Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “And yet, the destruction was not so bad as it would have been had these mortar rounds contained explosives rather than poison gas. Now that the plant has been decontaminated, it is ready to resume full operation.”
“Ready physically, yes.” Atvar felt ready himself, ready to bite something. In lieu of an actual enemy, poor Kirel would have to do. “Of course, the decontamination cost us four irreplaceable males of the Race. Of course, the gas attack itself killed most of one entire shift of highly trained Big Uglies. Of course, the Big Uglies who work the other two shifts are afraid to go back into the plant even if it is decontaminated, for one thing because they don’t believe it truly is and for another because they fear the Deutsche will attack once more-and how can we blame them for that when we fear it ourselves? Other than these minor details, the plant is, as you said, ready to start up again.”
Kirel crouched down, as if he expected to be bitten. “Exalted Fleetlord, it is merely a matter of bringing in other Tosevites who have this skilclass="underline" either that or making it plain to the locals that if they do not do this work, they will not eat.”
“Bringing Tosevites into one area from another is far more difficult than it would be on a properly civilized world,” Atvar said, “for they are not simply Tosevites, essentially the same regardless of from which part of the planet they spring. Some are Francais Tosevites, some are English Tosevites, some are Italiano Tosevites, some are Mexicano Tosevites, and so on. They all have their own foods, they all have their own languages, they all have their own customs, and they all think their ways are superior to everyone else’s, which touches off fights whenever groups from two regions come together. We’ve tried; the Emperor knows we’ve tried it.” He cast down his eyes not so much in reverence as in worn resignation. “It does not work.”
“The other approach will, then,” Kirel said. “No matter what foods they eat, all the Big Uglies must eat some foods. If they fail to produce what we require of them, they will also fail to be fed.”
“This has some merit, but, again, not so much as I would wish,” Atvar said. “The sabotage level in Tosevite factories producing goods for us is already unacceptably high. Wherever we try to coerce the workers to produce more or produce under harsher conditions, it goes higher. This is intolerable when the product under discussion is as important as a gas mask.”
“Truth,” Kirel said again, this time wearily. “The Big Uglies’ poison gas has already lowered the morale of fighting males to the point where they have shown reluctance to go into combat in areas bordering the Deutsche. And now the Americans are also beginning to deploy it in large quantities. If males cannot have confidence in their protection, their fighting spirit will plummet further, with unfortunate consequences for our efforts here.”
“Unfortunate consequences indeed,” Atvar said. What if his males simply upped and quit fighting? He’d never imagined such a thing. No commander in the history of the Race (and perhaps not in its prehistory, either) had ever had to imagine such a thing. The Race’s discipline had always proved reliable-but nothing had ever tested it as it was being tested now.