Free In the Balance by Harry Turtledove Page B

soldiers swaggered around with fixed bayonets, ready to spit anyone who gave them so much as a hard look.
    Liu Han had done her best to make herself invisible to the Japanese. She knew how they recruited their pleasure battalions. Ashes grayed her hair, charcoal added not just filth but also lines to her face, giving her the look of a much older woman. Grief made it easy for her to assume the stooped posture of the elderly. She wandered aimlessly around the edges of the village, in part to keep away from the soldiers, in part because, with home and family gone, she had nothing better to do.
    Because she kept away from the noisy chaos that engulfed invaders and townsfolk alike, she might have been the first to hear the thuttering in the air. Her head came up in fright—more bombers on the way? But surely not, not when the village already lay under the Japanese boot.
    Or could they be Chinese planes? If the Kuomintang government wanted to hold Hankow, it would need to fight back with everything it had. And the noise was growing from the south! Fear and excitement warred within Liu Han. She wanted the Japanese dead, but did she wish to die with them?
    In spite of her anguish, she decided she wanted to live. Stoop forgotten, she ran for the woods—the farther from the village when bombs began to fall, the better. The drone of approaching aircraft swelled in her ears.
    She threw herself down in a tangle of bushes and ferns. By then the planes were almost overhead. She, stared up at them through tree branches. Despite anguish and terror, her eyes went wide. The planes she was used to had graceful, birdlike bodies. These flying—things—looked more like dragonflies. They were angular, awkward-seeming, with landing gear projecting from their bodies like insect legs. And they had no wings! If anything save magic kept them in the air, it was the whirling disk above each of them.
    They hovered in midair like dragonflies, too. Liu Han had never heard of an airplane that could do such a thing, but then, all she knew of airplanes was the death and devastation they brought.
    There these dragonfly planes proved no exception. As they hung in the sky, they fired machine guns and rockets into Liu Han’s poor bleeding village. Screams pierced the rattle of gun-fire and the crash of explosions. So did the deep, harsh cries of the Japanese soldiers. Liu shuddered to hear them; they reminded her of the baying of wolves. Seeing the invaders lashed with such pitiless fire almost made her forget the ruination, of her village.
    Then a machine gun began to chatter inside the ruins of the yamen. The Japanese were doing their best to fight back. Tracer bullets drew fiery lines up toward the dragonfly planes. Two rockets snarled groundward. A roar, a flash of light, and the machine gun fell silent. Forgetting she was supposed to be in hiding, Liu Han let out a delighted screech. With chaos all around who was likely to hear one more screech?
    A couple of dragonfly planes settled toward the ground, floating through the air as light as windborne snow. Doors opened in their sides as they touched down. Liu Han saw motion inside them. Holding her breath, she waited for soldiers to leap out and finish slaughtering the Japanese.
    Could they really be men of the Kuomintang? Liu Han hadn’t imagined that her country boasted such marvelous airplanes. Maybe they came from America! The Americans were supposed to be the most clever of all the foreign devils when it came to machines—and they were fighting the Japanese, too. Liu Han had seen an American once, a big, fat Christian missionary who spoke bad Chinese. He’d sounded very fierce, she remembered. She imagined big, fierce American soldiers springing out of the, dragonfly planes, each with a sparkling bayonet half as long as he was tall. She hugged herself with glee at the delicious thought.
    Helmeted soldiers began springing out of the dragonfly plane. They were not big, fierce Americans. They were not