Tilting the Balance

“I understand this, ” Atvar said. “What galls me still more is that, despite our air of superiority, we have not been able to shut down the Big Uglies’ industrial capacity. Their weapons are primitive, but continue lawstore.ru to be produced. ”

He had once more the uneasy vision of a new Tosevite landcruiser rumbling around a pile of ruins just after the Race’s last one had been lost in battle. Or maybe it would be a new missile flying off its launcher with a trail of fire, and no hope of knocking it down before it hit.

Kirel said, “Our strategy of targeting the Tosevites’ petroleum facilities has not yet yielded the full range of desired results. ”

“I am painfully aware of this, ” Atvar replied. “The Big Uglies are better at effecting makeshift repairs than any rational being could have imagined. And while their vehicles and aircraft are petroleum-fueled, the same is not true of a large proportion of their heavy manufacturing capacity. This also makes matters more difficult. ”

“We are beginning to get significant amounts of small-arms ammunition from Tosevite factories in the areas under our control, ” Kirel said, resolutely looking at the bright side of things. “The level of sabotage in production is acceptably low. ”

“That’s something, anyhow. Up till now, these Tosevite facilities have produced nothing but frustration for us, ” Atvar said. “The munitions they turn out are good enough to damage us, but not of sufficient quality or precision to be useful to us in and of themselves. We cannot merely match them bullet for bullet or shell for shell, as they have more of each. Ours, then, must have the greater effect. ”

“Indeed so, Exalted Fleetlord, ” Kirel said. “To that end, we have recently converted a munitions factory we captured from the Francais to producing artillery ammunition in our calibers. The Tosevites manufacture the casings and the explosive charges; our only contribution to the process is the electronics for terminal guidance. ”

Something Atvar said again. “But when our supply of seeker heads runs out-” In his mind that ugly smoke-belching landcruiser came out from behind the pile of ruins again.

“Such stocks are still fairly large, ” Kirel said. “Again, we now have factories in Italia, France, and captured areas of the U S A and the SSSR beginning to turn out brakes and other mechanical parts for our vehicles. ”

“This is progress, ” Atvar admitted. “Whether it proves sufficient progress remains to be seen. The Big Uglies, unfortunately, also progress. Worse still, they progress qualitatively, where we are lucky to be able to hold our ground. I still worry about what the colonization fleet will find here when it arrives. ”

“Surely the conquest will be complete by then, ” Kirel exclaimed.

“Will it? ” The more Atvar looked ahead, the less he liked what he saw. “Try as we will, Shiplord, I fear we shall not be able to prevent the Big Uglies from acquiring nuclear weapons. And if they do, I fear for Tosev 3. ”

Vyacheslav Molotov detested flying. That gave him a personal reason for hating the Lizards to go along with reasons of patriotism and ideology. Ideology came first, of course. He hated the Lizards for their imperialism, for the efforts to cast all of mankind-and the Soviet Union in particular-back into the ancient economic system, with the aliens taking the role of masters and reducing mankind to slaves.

But beneath the imperatives of the Marxist-Leninist dialectic, Molotov also despised the Lizards for making him fly here to London. This trip wasn’t as ghastly as his last one, when he had flown in the open cockpit of a biplane from just outside Moscow to Berchtesgaden to beard Hitler in his den. He’d been in a closed cabin all the way-but he’d been no less nervous.

True, the Pe-2 fighter-bomber that had brought him across the North Sea was more comfortable than the little U-2 he’d used before. But it was also more vulnerable. The U-2 seemed too small for the Lizards to notice. Not so the machine he’d flown in yesterday. If he’d gone down into the cold, choppy gray water below, he knew he wouldn’t have lasted long.

But here he was, at the heart of the British Empire. For the five major powers still resisting the Lizards-the five major powers which, before the Lizards came, had been at war with one another-London remained the most accessible common ground. Large parts of the Soviet Union, the United States, and Germany and its European conquests lay under the aliens’ thumb, while Japan, though like England free of invaders, was next to impossible for British, German, and Soviet representatives to reach.

Winston Churchill strode into the Foreign Office conference room. He nodded first to Cordell Hull, the American Secretary of State, then to Molotov, and then to Joachim von Ribbentrop and Shigenori Togo. As former enemies, they stood lower on his scale of approval than did the nations that had banded together against fascism.

But Churchill’s greeting included all impartially: “I welcome you, gentlemen, in the cause of freedom and in the name of His Majesty the King. ”

Molotov’s interpreter murmured the Russian translation for him. Big Five conferences got along on three languages: America and Britain shared English, while Ribbentrop, a former German ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, was also fluent in that tongue. That left Molotov and Togo linguistically isolated, but Molotov, at least, was used to isolation-serving as foreign commissar for the only Marxist-Leninist state in a capitalist world was good pariah training.

The envoys delivered their replies. When Molotov’s turn came, he said, “The peasants and workers of the Soviet Union express through me their solidarity with the peasants and workers of worldwide humanity against our common foe. ”

Ribbentrop gave him a dirty look. Getting the Nazi’s goat, though, was no great accomplishment; Molotov thought of him as nothing more than a champagne salesman jumped up beyond his position and his abilities. Churchill’s round pink face, on the contrary, remained utterly imperturbable. For the British Prime Minister, Molotov had a grudging respect. No doubt he was a class enemy, but he was an able and resolute man. Without him, England might have yielded to the Nazis in 1940, and he had unhesitatingly gone to the support of the Soviet Union when the Germans invaded a year later. Had he thrown his weight behind Hitler then in the crusade against Bolshevism he’d once preached, the USSR might have fallen.

Cordell Hull said, “It’s a good idea that we get together when we can so we can plan together the best way of ridding ourselves of the damned Lizards. ” As he had been at previous meetings, Molotov’s interpreter was a little slower in translating for Hull than he had been for Churchill: the American’s dialect differed from the British English he’d learned.

“Ridding ourselves of the Lizards now is not our only concern, ” Shigenori Togo said.