Free We Install by Harry Turtledove

stood there. To eke them out and give the Forty-First Panzergrenadiers a fraction of the mobility they’d once enjoyed, a motley assortment of captured Red equipment and impressed civilian cars and trucks sprawled across the asphalt. Maintenance personnel were still slapping hasty tape crosses onto their doors and sides to identify them as German.
    â€œLook at all this soft-skinned junk,” Sack blurted. “The Reds won’t need missiles to take it out. They won’t even need machine guns. An officer’s pistol ought to do the job nicely.”
    â€œThey’ll get some of us there, wherever ‘there’ is,” Zimmer said, shrugging. “Once that happens, we’re on our own, but that’s the way it always works.”
    To Sack’s relief, a lieutenant waved him into a mechanized infantry combat vehicle. He peered out through the Marder ’s firing ports as it began to roll. At least he had a modicum of armor between himself and the unfriendly intentions of people in the wrong uniforms.
    Somebody inside the Marder came up with a name for where it was heading: Perayaslav, about eighty kilometers south and east along the Dnieper. An hour’s drive on the Autobahn , Sack thought. It took the rest of the day and all night. Not only did the alleged highway stop being paved not far out of Kiev—which slowed the impressed vehicles to a crawl—the enemy had it under heavy bombardment from artillery and rockets both.
    An antitank missile fired at extreme range from across the Dnieper took out the lead panzer and forced everyone else to detour around its blazing hulk. That made delays even worse. Jets blazoned with red stars arrogantly screamed past overhead. They raked the column with cannon fire and more missiles. The Luftwaffe was nowhere to be found. The Germans expended their whole stock of surface-to-air missiles before they got halfway to Perayaslav. As far as Sack could tell, they hit nothing.
    He must have dozed in spite of the racket and the rough ride, for he woke with a jerk when the Marder stopped. He had to piss so bad, it was a miracle he hadn’t wet himself while he slept. Artillery boomed ahead. He licked his lips. The firing sounded heavy. It was almost all incoming.
    Somebody banged on the combat vehicle’s entry doors with a rifle butt. Lothar Zimmer was sitting closest to them. When he opened the metal clamshell, whoever was outside handed him a bucket full of stew. He took it with a word of thanks and set it down between the two facing rows of seats. Everyone dug in with his own spoon. It was vile stuff, mostly potatoes and grease by the taste, but it filled the belly.
    Sack took advantage of the lull to leap out and empty his bladder. Another Marder had stopped in the mud a few meters away. One of its crewmen—likely the driver, judging by his fancy helmet packed full of electronics—stood by his machine doing exactly the same thing as Sack. The little the lance-corporal could see of his face looked gloomy. “We’re for it now,” the fellow said.
    â€œWhat do you know?” Sack asked eagerly. Nobody bothered telling infantrymen anything, but a driver couldn’t help but get the word over the radio net.
    The man answered, “The Reds are pushing hard. You can hear the guns, can’t you?” He didn’t give Sack a chance to answer. “Their field engineers have done something sneaky, too. They’ve built their pontoon bridges half a meter under the surface of the fucking Dnieper. Makes ’em harder to spot, a lot harder to knock out, but men and panzers just keep on coming across.”
    â€œBad,” Sack said. The driver grudged him a nod, then climbed back into his fighting vehicle through the front hatch. He slammed the hatch down after him. The Marder ’s diesel roared. Its tracks spat mud as it headed toward the fighting.
    When Sack returned to his own Marder , he passed on the news the