Page 46 of Tilting the Balance (Worldwar 2)

“Forward the Panthers,” he ordered. “Tigers and IVs lay back to support.”

“How many Panthers are still running?” Klaus Meinecke asked. Jager blinked; the gunner’s question hadn’t occurred to him, but it was a damn good one. It would be a hell of a thing to go swarming over the ridge to confront the Lizards… alone. But no. At least two other machines rumbled past the flaming hulks of friends and foes to renew the fight against the Lizards on the Belfort road.

The smartest thing the Lizards could have done was to keep right on moving toward Belfort, make the Germans react to them. With their rotten fuel pumps, the Panthers would surely have broken down if pushed hard. And the Lizard panzers were faster than the ones Jager commanded, anyhow. Guderian and Manstein had invented the drill: first force your opening, then worry about what happens next.

But the Lizards in this column didn’t have a Guderian leading them. Jager stuck his head and torso out of the cupola to see what they were about. They still waited on the road, face-on toward the ridge line. “Halt hull down,” he called to his comrades. He also ordered his own panzer to halt; no sense in exposing more of it to enemy fire than he had to.

For the moment, standoff. Jager saw no point in firing from his present position. He’d just waste ammunition and announce to the Lizards where he was. About the only way he could hurt them from here would be to put one right down a cannon barrel. He laughed at that and muttered, “If I want a miracle, I’ll ask for it in church.”

The Lizards weren’t eager to swarm up the ridge any more, though, not when the two that had tried it didn’t come back. They weren’t used to armor fights where their foes had a decent chance of doing them in. Jager didn’t think they were afraid; he’d stopped underestimating enemies after his first couple of weeks in Russia. He did think he’d made the Lizards thoughtful.

He was about to order his reserves to try a flanking maneuver using the ridge for cover when a shell slammed into the side of the northernmost Lizard panzer. Another followed a few seconds later and set the armored vehicle ablaze. Jager was still trying to figure out who was doing the shooting when the Lizard crew bailed out of their panzer and ran for the brush. Machine-gun fire cut them down.

Jager whooped. “It’s that Panzer IV!” he yelled. “They should have chased it down and killed it, but they got busy with us and forgot all about it.” He’d forgotten all about it, too, but he didn’t have to admit that, even to himself.

The Lizards certainly had left it out of their plans. Its unexpected return to action did the same thing to them that the unexpected in combat often did to the Russians: it panicked them and sent them into a retreat they didn’t have to make. Jager fired a couple of rounds at them from the ridge line, just to remind them he was there, but didn’t pursue-coming out into the open against them was asking to get shot up.

Klaus Meinecke looked up from his gunsight, a grin stretched wide across his face. “By God, Colonel, they’re as sensitive about their flanks as any virgin I ever tried to lay,” he exclaimed.

“So they are.” Jager laughed, too, but under the coarse joke lay a grain of truth. He had seen the same thing fighting the Red Army. Come straight at them and they’d die in place by thousands sooner than yielding a meter of ground. Flank them out-or even threaten to flank them out-and they were liable to run like rabbits. Half to himself, he said, “They aren’t quick to adapt, not even a little.”

“No, sir,” the gunner agreed. “And they’ve paid for being slow, that they have.”

“You’re right.” Jager sounded wondering, even to himself. His men had killed at least five Lizard panzers-to say nothing of a helicopter-in this fight. They’d lost more than that-Tigers, Panthers, Panzer IVs-but they’d done the enemy some real damage. He wondered how long it had taken the Wehrmacht’s armor to kill five Lizard panzers last year. Weeks probably, maybe months. Panzer IIs, Panzer IIIs, Czech machines impressed into action, Panzer IVs with the stubby 75mm guns for infantry support-they were all toys, set against the Lizards’ tanks.

He must have said that aloud, for Meinecke answered, “That was last year. This is now. And who knows what they’ll come up with next? Maybe a Tiger with sloped armor and a really long-barreled 88. That’d make the Lizards sit up and think.”

It made Jager sit up and think, too. He liked the idea. Then he looked around again. Now he didn’t see smoke and flame and shattered flesh and metal. He saw that his comrades were still here and the Lizards had fled. “We held the position,” he exclaimed.

“We did, by God!” The gunner sounded as surprised-almost dazed-as Jager felt. “I’m not used to that.”

“Nor I,” Jager said. “I’ve been part of a partisan raid that stung them, but every time I went up against them in regular combat, I always ended up retreating… till now.” He started thinking about what needed to happen next. “Now we can bring some infantry forward, send ’em down the road to screen for us.”

“Infantry!” Meinecke spoke the word with a tanker’s ingrained scorn. “What’s infantry going to do against panzers?”

“Give us warning when they’re on the move, if nothing else,” Jager answered. “Snipers may pick off a commander or two; the Lizards come out of their cupolas when they think it’s safe, same as we do. Maybe even an unbuttoned driver. And I hear they’re going to get some sort of antipanzer rocket the Americans have passed on to us.”

“That’d be something, if it works,” the gunner said. “The Lizards have hurt us plenty with rockets.”

“I know. They’ve hurt us with their panzers, too, a lot worse than they did today.” Jager scratched his head. His hair was matted with greasy sweat. “I haven’t seen them foolish that way before-those couple that charged straight at us. They should have known better. I wonder why they didn’t.”

“don’tknow that, sir,” Meinecke said, “but I m not going to complain about it. You?”

“No,” Jager said.

Ussmak desperately wanted a taste of ginger. He needed to feel strong and bright and in control of things, even if he knew he wasn’t. Back in the turret of the landcruiser, Hessef and Tvenkel were undoubtedly dipping their tongues into the supply of the drug they’d brought along. Undoubtedly, too, it made them see the fight from which they’d just retreated as a small thing, hardly more than some cracked pavement on the path to the Race’s inevitable victory.

Ussmak wished he could feel the same way. But no matter how much he craved ginger, he didn’t trust it any more. Ginger could make you do stupid things, things stupid enough to get you killed. Two landcruisers had swarmed over that rise after the Deutsche. Neither one had come back.

Everything had seemed so easy when he started out on the plains of the SSSR: easier even than the training simulators, for those had assumed an opposition of a quality to match his own, and the Soviets’ machines didn’t come close, while their tactics weren’t anything special, either.

When he’d got into Besancon, the males had warned him the Deutsche were better at armored warfare. Now he knew what they’d meant. Nobody’d paid any attention to that rise until the Deutsche started shooting from it. They’d lured the Race’s landcruisers right into an ambush, he realized. They were just Big Uglies-they shouldn’t have been able to trick males of the Race like that.

And their landcruisers weren’t just inflammable targets any more. These were a lot bigger and heavier than the Soviet tanks he’d faced in the SSSR, let alone the little Deutsch models. Their guns could hurt, too.

Hessef’s voice came over the audio button taped to Ussmak’s hearing diaphragm: “Come on back here. We’ve got enough herb to share with you, even if you didn’t bring any of your own.”

“I’ll be there soon, superior sir,” Ussmak answered. Just blind luck, he thought, that Hessef hadn’t gone charging after the Big Uglies himself and gotten his landcruiser-and Ussmak with it-blown to bits.

He wanted to pop the hatch above his reclining seat and get a little fresh if chilly air, but he kn

ew that wasn’t a good idea. The side of the road closer to the river offered no cover for Big Uglies with guns, but any number of Tosevite raiders might be lurking in the woods that led up onto the mountain slopes to the west, just waiting for a male to show himself, even for a moment.

As with landcruisers, the Big Uglies’ personal weapons were less effective than those of the Race: most of their individual firearms could shoot only one bullet at a time, while their machine guns were too heavy and clumsy to be easily portable. As with the landcruisers again, though, you didn’t want to make a mistake or you’d find that one of those inferior weapons was plenty good enough to kill you.

Ussmak crawled back through the fighting compartment, then, and stuck his head up through the opening in the bottom of the turret. “Here you are, just another shell to be expended,” Tvenkel exclaimed. “Well, as long as you are here, you might as well have a taste.”

Before Ussmak could say no as he’d intended, his tongue shot out and licked the little mound of ginger from the palm of the gunner’s hand. He opened and closed his jaws several times, gulped the powder down his throat.

“That’s good,” he exclaimed. With the herb buzzing through him, he felt like a brand-new male. All his worries, all his fears, ebbed away. “I wish we had the Big Uglies in our sights again.” Part of him knew that was just the ginger talking, but none of him cared.

“So do I,” Tvenkel said fiercely. “If they think I’d miss ’em again at that range, I tell you they’re wrong.”

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