Free In the Balance by Harry Turtledove Page A

hit the all-hands frequency. “All halt!” he bawled. “We’re hitting mines.” He shouted the order forward to Dieter Schmidt, then stood up in the cupola to make sure it was being obeyed.
    The ten surviving tanks of the company did stop. The rest of the commanders bounced up just like Jäger, each of them trying to see what was going on. But for two blazing hulks, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Jäger was about to call divisional headquarters to ask for a sapper detachment when a lance of fire tore across the sky and blew the turret clean off one of the stopped panzers. The oily chassis promptly began to burn.
    Cursing his own mistake, Jäger let himself fall back into the turret. He grabbed the radio, screamed, “Get moving! They’re rockets from the air, not mines! The Ivans must have found some way to mount
Kasyushas
on their ground-attack planes. If we stay where we are, we’re sitting ducks.” He didn’t need to relay the order to Schmidt this time; his Panzer III was already lurching ahead, the engine roaring flat out.
    Only as the captain went up into the cupola again did he consciously realize the trail of fire in the sky had come from the west, from behind him. “Turn the turret around!” he yelled, and cursed the hydraulics as the heavy dome of metal ever so slowly began to traverse. A couple of the other commanders had been more alert. Their tanks’ turrets were already slewing to the rear.
    Jäger turned that way himself. As he did so, a fourth panzer was hit in the engine compartment. Flames began to spurt. Turret doors flew open; men started bailing out. One, two, three … commander, gunner, loader. Fire washed over the whole tank. The driver and hull gunner never had a chance.
    The company commander frantically scanned the sky. Where was the Stormovik, the armored Russian attack plane that was likeliest to be carrying
Katyusha
rockets? His heart leapt when he spotted a flying shape. The coaxial 7.92mm machine guns of the company’s faster-reacting panzers spat flame at it. They weren’t likely to hurt it, but might keep the pilot from making a low firing run.
    They didn’t. Here he came. Jäger got ready to throw himself behind the turret’s armor the instant the Stormovik’s guns started shooting back. Then, as the plane drew swiftly nearer, he noticed it wasn’t a Stormovik. And when it fired, its whole blunt nose went yellow-white with the muzzleblast. Dust fountained around two more panzers. Both of them stopped dead. Smoke poured from them. Along with the reek of flaming gas and oil and cordite, Jäger’s nose caught the roast-pork stink of burning human flesh.
    The airplane passed overhead, almost close enough to touch. In spite of everything, Jäger stared at it in disbelief. It was almost the size of a medium bomber, and had no propeller he could see. It bore neither the German cross and swastika nor the Soviet star; in fact, it bore no device at all on its camouflaged wings and body. And it did not roar like every other airplane he had ever known—it shrieked, as if its motive power came from damned souls.
    Then it was gone, vanishing into the east more swiftly than any fighter Jäger knew. He gaped after it, mouth fallen open in most unofficerlike fashion. One pass, and half his company was flaming wreckage.
    Like his own, Ernst Riecke’s panzer had survived the onslaught. It came rattling over. Riecke was standing up in his cupola. The captain’s face bore the same expression of stunned disbelief Jäger knew his own did. “What—” Riecke had to try twice before he could get the words out. “What the devil was that?”
    “I don’t know.” Jäger found an even worse question: “What if it comes back?”
    The Japanese were looting the village. They’d already shot a couple of people for protesting when their possessions were hauled away. The bodies lay as mute warnings in the square beside the ruined wall of the yamen. As if they did not suffice, the invading