Ttomalss almost collided with Tessrek, another researcher into the habits and thought patterns of the Big Uglies. In his arms, none too gently, Tessrek carried the wayward Tosevite hatchling. He thrust it at Ttomalss. “Here. This is yours. Kindly keep better track of it in future. It came wandering into my laboratory chamber, and, I assure you, it is not welcome there.”
As soon as Ttomalss took hold of it, the hatchling stopped wailing. It knew him, and knew he cared for it. He might as well have been its mother, a Tosevite term with implications far more powerful than its equivalent in the language of the Race.
Tessrek went on, “The sooner you give that thing back to the Big Uglies, the happier everyone else along this corridor will be. No more hideous noises, no more dreadful stenches-a return to peace and quiet and order.”
“The hatchling’s ultimate disposition has not yet been determined,” Ttomalss said. Tessrek had always wanted the little Tosevite gone. Its jaunt today would only give him fresh ammunition.
“Getting rid of it will improve my disposition,” he said, and let his mouth fall open in appreciation of his own joke. Then he grew serious once more: “If you must have it, keep it in your own area. I cannot answer for its safety if it invades my laboratory once more.”
“Like any hatchling, it is as yet ignorant of proper behavior,” Ttomalss said coldly. “If you ignore that obvious fact and deliberately mistreat it, I cannot answer foryour safety.” To make sure he’d made his point, he turned and carried the hatchling back into his own chamber. With one eye turret, he watched Tessrek staring after him.
IV
An ugly little tracked ammunition carrier cameput-putting up to the Panthers halted in the forest north of Lodz. The front hatch of the French-built machine-booty from the triumphant campaign of 1940-opened and a couple of men scrambled out, calling, “Here, lads! We’ve got presents for you.”
“About time,” Heinrich Jager said. “We were down to our last few rounds for each panzer.”
“That’s not where you want to be against the Lizards, either,” Gunther Grillparzer added. The gunner went on, “Their armor is so good, you can waste a lot of hits before you get one penetration.”
The ammunition haulers grinned. They wore one-piece coveralls like the panzer crewmen, but in the field-gray of self-propelled gun units rather than panzer black. One of them said, “New toys for you here-a notion we borrowed from the Lizards and put into production for ourselves.”
That was plenty to get the panzer men crowding around them. Jager took shameless advantage of his rank to push his way to the front. “What do you have?” he demanded.
“We’ll show you, sir,” the fellow who’d spoken before answered. He turned to his companion. “Show them, Fritz.”
Fritz went around to the back of the Lorraine hauler, undid the whitewashed canvas tilt on top of the storage bin at the rear of the machine. He reached in and, grunting a little at the weight, drew out the oddest-looking shell Jager had ever seen. “What the devil is it?” half a dozen men asked at once.
“You tell ’em, Joachim,” Fritz said. “I never can say it right”
“Armor-piercing discarding sabot,” Joachim said importantly. “See, the aluminum sabot fits your gun barrel, but as soon as it gets out, it falls off, and the round proper goes out with a lot more muzzle velocity than you can get any other way. It’s capped with wolfram, too, for extra penetration.”
“Is that so?” Jager pricked up his ears. “My brother is a panzer engineer, and he says wolfram is in short supply even for machine tools. Now they’re releasing it for antipanzer rounds?”
“I don’t know anything about machine tools,Herr Oberst,” Joachim said, and Fritz’s head solemnly bobbed up and down to signify he didn’t know anything, either. “But I do know these shells are supposed to give you half again as much penetration as you get with regular capped armor-piercing ammunition.”
“Are supposed to give you.” That was Karl Mehler, Jager’s loader. Loaders had an inherently pessimistic view of the world. When panzers were moving, they didn’t see much of it. They stayed down in the bottom of the turret, doing what the gunner and the commander ordered. If you were a loader, you never had a clue before a shell slammed into your machine. One second, you’d be fine; the next, butchered and burnt. Mehler went on, “How good are they really?”
Fritz and Joachim looked at each other. Fritz said, “They wouldn’t issue them to front-line units if they didn’t think they’d perform as advertised, would they?”
“You never can tell,” Mehler said darkly. “Some poor slobs have to be the guinea pigs, I suppose. We must have drawn the short straw this time.”
“That’s enough, Karl,” Jager said. The rebuke was mild, but plenty to make the loader shut up. Jager turned to the men with the munitions conveyor. “Do you have any of our conventional armor-piercing rounds to use in case these things aren’t as perfect as the people away from the firing line seem to think?”
“Uh, no, sir,” Joachim answered. “This is what came off the train, so this is what we have.”
The mutters that rose from the panzer crewmen weren’t quite rumbles of mutiny, but they weren’t rapturous sighs, either. Jager sighed, also not rapturously. “Well, we all still have a few rounds of the old issue, anyhow. We know what that will do-and what it won’t. Tell me one thing right now, you two: is this new round supposed to be able to pierce the frontal armor of a Lizard panzer?”
Regretfully, the ammunition resupply men shook their heads.“Herr Oberst, the next round that can do that will be the first,” Joachim said.
“I was afraid you were going to say as much,” Jager answered. “The way things are now, it costs us anywhere between six and ten panzers, on average, for every Lizard machine we manage to kill-that’s just panzer against panzer, mind you. It would be even worse if we didn’t have better crews than they do-but we’ve lost so many veterans that our edge there is going. The thing that would help us most is a gun that would let us meet them face-to-face.”
“The thing that would help us most is another one of those bombs that they set off outside of Breslau and Rome,” Gunther Grillparzer put in. “And I know just where to set it, too.”
“Where’s that?” Jager asked, curious to see what his gunner used for a sense of strategy.
“Lodz,” Grillparzer answered promptly. “Right in the middle of town. Blast all the Lizards and all the kikes there to kingdom come, just like that.” He was wearing gloves, so instead of snapping his fingers he spat in the snow.
“Wouldn’t mind getting rid of the Lizards,” Jager agreed. “The Jews-” He shrugged. “Anielewicz said he’d keep the Lizards from mounting a counterattack out of the city, and he’s done it. He deserves the credit for it, too. If you ask me.”
“Yes, sir.” The gunner’s round, fleshy face went sullen, not that Grillparzer didn’t look a little sullen most of the time. He knew better than to argue with his regimental commander, but he wasn’t about to think warm, kind thoughts about any Jews, either.
Jager glanced around the rest of the panzer crewmen. Nobody disagreed with him, not out loud, but nobody sprang up to say anything nice about the Jews in the Lodz ghetto. That worried Jager. He wasn’t massively enamored of Jews himself, but he’d been horrflied when he learned what German forces had done to them in the areas theReich had conquered. He hadn’t wanted to learn about such things, but he’d had his nose rubbed in them, and he was not the sort of man who could pretend he was blind when be wasn’t. A lot of German officers, he’d found to his dismay, had no trouble at all managing that.
Right this second, though, he didn’t have to think about it “Let’s share out what they’ve brought us,” he told his men. “If all you’ve got is a dead pig, you eat pork chops.”
“This stuff is liable to turn us all into dead pigs,” Karl Mehler muttered under his breath, but that didn’t keep him from taking his fair share of the newfangled rounds. He stowed them in the Panther’s ammun
ition bins. “It doesn’t look right,” he grumbled when he scrambled back out of the panzer. “It looks funny. We’ve never had anything like it before.”
“Intelligence says one of the reasons we drive the Lizards crazy is that we keep coming up with new things,” Jager said. “They don’t change, or don’t change much. Do you want to be like them?”
“Well, no, sir, but I don’t want to change for the worse, either, and not for the hell of it,” Mehler said. “These things look like a sausage sticking out of a bun, like some engineer is having a joke with us.”
“They don’t pay off on looks,” Jager answered. “If these new shells don’t work the way they’re supposed to, then somebody’s head rolls. First, though, we have to find out.”
“If these new shells don’t work the way they’re supposed to, our heads roll,” Karl Mehler said. “Maybe somebody else’s head rolls afterwards, but we won’t get to watch that.”