Being taken to the shuttlecraft fascinated the hatchling. Several times on the journey, it saw something new and said, “This?”-sometimes with the interrogative cough, sometimes without.
“It speaks!” Heddosh said in surprise.
“Yes, it does,” Ttomalss answered coldly. “It would learn to speak more if I were allowed to continue my experiment, too.” Now the hatchling would have to acquire the horrible sounds of Chinese rather than the Race’s elegant, precise, and (to Ttomalss) beautiful language.
The clanging noises the shuttlecraft airlock doors made frightened the hatchling, which clung tightly to Ttomalss. He soothed it as best he could, all the while trying to look on the bright side of things. The only bright side he found was that, until he could obtain another newly emerged Big Ugly hatchling, he would get enough sleep for a while.
More clangings signaled the shuttlecraft’s freeing itself from the starship to which it had been attached. With centrifugal force no longer giving a simulacrum of gravity, the shuttlecraft went into free fall. To Ttomalss’ relief, the hatchling showed no perceptible distress. It seemed to find the sensation interesting, perhaps even pleasant. Data showed that the female Liu Han had had the same reaction. Ttomalss wondered if it was hereditary.
There was a long-term research project, he thought. Maybe someone could start it after the conquest was safe and secure. He wondered if the day would ever come when the conquest was safe and secure. He’d never imagined the Race making concessions to the Tosevites in negotiations, as Ppevel was in yielding the hatchling to them. Once you started making concessions, where would you stop? That was a chilling thought, when you got down to it.
The shuttlecraft’s rocket engine began to roar. Acceleration shoved Ttomalss back into his couch, and the hatchling against him. It squalled in fright. He comforted it again, even though its weight pressing on him made him far from comfortable. The hatchling had calmed before acceleration ended, and squealed with delight when free fall returned.
Ttomalss wondered if the Big Ugly female Liu Han could have done as well with the hatchling, even if she’d kept it since it emerged from her body. He had his doubts.
When Otto Skorzeny came back to the panzer encampment, he was grinning from ear to ear. “Brush the canary feathers off your chin,” Heinrich Jager told him.
The SS man actually did make brushing motions at his face. In spite of everything, Jager laughed. Whatever else you could say about him, Skorzeny had style. The trouble was, there was so much else to say. “Off it went,” Skorzeny boomed. “The Jews ate the story up like gumdrops, poor damned fools. They brought up their own wagon to carry the present, and they promised they’d sneak it past the Lizards. I figure they can do that, probably better than I could. And once they do-”
Jager tipped back his head and slid his index finger across his throat. Chuckling, Skorzeny nodded. “When is the timer set for?” Jager asked.
“Day after tomorrow,” Skorzeny answered. “That’ll give ’em plenty of time to get the bomb back to Lodz. Poor stupid bastards.” He shook his head, perhaps even in genuine sympathy. “I wonder if anybody’s ever done such a good job of committing suicide before.”
“Masada,” Jager said, dredging the name up from the long-vanished days before the First World War, when he’d wanted to be a Biblical archaeologist. He saw it meant nothing to Skorzeny, and explained: “The whole garrison killed one another off instead of surrendering to the Romans.”
“There’ll be more of ’em done in now,” the SS man said. “A lot more.”
“Ja,”Jager answered absently. He still couldn’t tell whether Skorzeny hated Jews on his own hook or because he’d got orders to hate them. In the end, what did it matter? He’d go after them with the same genial ferocity either way.
Had the message got through to Anielewicz? Jager had been wondering about that ever since the meeting he, Skorzeny, and the Jewish fighting leader had had in the forest. Anielewicz hadn’t tipped his hand then. Had he got the message and then not believed it? Had he got it, believed it, and then been unable to convince his fellow Jews it was true?
No way to be sure, not from here. Jager shook his head. He’d have a way to tell, soon enough. If the Jews in Lodz were snuffed out like so many candles day after tomorrow, he could figure somebody down there had decided he was lying.
Skorzeny had an animal alertness to him. “What’s up?” he asked, seeing Jager’s head go back and forth.
“Nothing, really.” The panzer colonel hoped his voice sounded casual. “Thinking about the surprise they’ll have in Lodz-for a little while, anyhow.”
“For a little while is right,” Skorzeny said. “Stupid sheep. You’d think they’d know better than to trust a German, but no, they walked right into it.” He bleated sardonically. “And the lambs’ blood will go up on the doorposts of all the houses.” Jager stared; he hadn’t imagined Skorzeny as a man who knew his Scripture. The SSStandartenfuhrer chuckled again. “TheFuhrer will have his revenge on the Jews, and who knows? We may even kill a few Lizards, too.”
“We’d better,” Jager answered. “You go and rip the heart out of the human sector of Lodz and there’s nothing to keep the scaly sons of bitches from staging out of it any more. They could hit the bases of our penetrations north and south of the city and cut us right off. That’s too steep a price for theFuhrer’s revenge, you ask me.”
“Nobody asked you, and theFuhrer doesn’t think so,” Skorzeny said. “He told me as much himself-he wants those Jews dead.”
“How am I supposed to argue with that?” Jager said. The answer was simple: he couldn’t. So he’d set himself up to circumvent a personal order from theFuhrer, had he? Well. If anyone ever found out what he’d done, he was a dead man anyhow. They couldn’t kill him any deader.No, but they can take longer getting you dead, he thought uneasily.
He threw himself flat on the ground almost before he consciously heard the shells whistling in from out of the east. Skorzeny sprawled there beside him, hands up to cover the back of his neck. Somewhere not far away, a wounded man was screaming. The bombardment went on for about fifteen minutes, then let up.
Jager scrambled to his feet “We’ve got to move camp now,” he shouted. “They know where we are. We were lucky that time-far as I could tell, that was all ordinary ammunition coming, none of their special delights that spit mines all over the place so people and panzers don’t dare go anywhere. They’re short of those little beauties, by all the signs, but they will use ’em if they think they can make a profit. We won’t let ’em.”
He’d hardly finished speaking before the first panzer engines rumbled into life. He was proud of his men. Most of them were veterans who’d been through everything the Russians and the British and the Lizards could throw at them. They understood what needed doing and took care of it with a minimum of fuss and bother. Skorzeny was a genius raider, but he couldn’t run a regiment like this. Jager had his own talents, and they were not to be sneezed at.
While the regiment was shifting its base, he didn’t have to think about the horror waiting to happen in Lodz, growing closer with every tick of a timer. Skorzeny was right: the Jews were fools to trust any German. Now the question was, which German had they been fools enough to trust?
The next day, he was too busy to worry about it. A Lizard counterattack drove the German forces west six or eight kilometers. Panzers in the regiment went from machinery to burnt and twisted scrap metal, a couple from the fire of Lizard panzer cannon, the rest because of the antipanzer rockets the Lizard infantry carried. The only Lizard panzer killed was taken out by aWehrmacht private in a tree who dropped a Molotov cocktail down into the turret through the open cupola when the panzer clattered by below him. That happened toward sunset, and seemed to halt the Lizards’ push all by itself. They didn’t like losing panzers these days.
“We have to do better,” he told his men as they ate black bread and sausage that night. “We got flank targets, but we weren’t hitting them. Ca
n’t make many mistakes like that, not unless we want to get buried here.”
“But,Herr Oberst,” somebody said, “when they move, they can move so damned fast, they’re by us before we have a chance to react.”
“Good thing we had defense in depth, or they would have cracked us wide open,” somebody else said. Jager nodded, pleased at the way the troops were hashing things out for themselves. That was how German soldiers were supposed to operate. They weren’t just ignorant peasants who followed orders without thinking about them, as Red Army men did. They had brains and imaginations, and used them.
He was about to curl up in his bedroll under his Panther when Skorzeny showed up in camp. The SS man was toting a jug of vodka he’d found God only knew where, and passed it around so everybody got a nip. It wasn’t good vodka-the taste put Jager in mind of stale kerosene-but it was better than no vodka.
“Think they’re going to hit us again in the morning?” Skorzeny asked.
“Won’t know for certain till then,” Jager answered, “but if I had to guess, I’d say no. They’d have kept pressing harder after it got dark if that was what they had in mind. These days, they push when they think they’ve found a weakness, but they ease up when we show strength.”