Last Orders: The War That Came Early by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page B

whimper. God would hear anyway. Or, by all the signs she’d been able to glean, more likely He wouldn’t.
    Boom! Boom! Boomety-boom!
The ground shook. The windows rattled. But the house didn’t fall down on top of them. The windows didn’t blow in and slash them. Their neighborhood had missed the worst of it again.
    After twenty minutes or half an hour (or a year or two, depending on how you looked at things), the droning faded off into the west. The flak guns kept banging away, probably at nothing. Every so often, a falling fragment from their shells would smash a roof and start a fire or land on some luckless man’s head. A couple of guns went on even after the warbling all-clear sounded.
    By then, Sarah was already back in bed. So were her folks. As soonas they decided nothing was coming down on their heads, they slowly and carefully climbed the stairs again. If you were tired enough, you could sleep after almost anything. They were. They could. They did.
    Next morning, Father rolled a cigarette of tobacco scavenged from other people’s discarded dog-ends. A certain predatory gleam lit his eyes as he walked out the front door. “I wonder what we’ll be cleaning up today,” he said.
    In smashed houses, the laborers stole whatever they could: real cigarettes, food, clothes. Once,
Herr Doktor Professor
Samuel Goldman would have been ashamed to do such a thing. Not Samuel Goldman the work-gang man. Sarah understood the change only too well. What Jew in Nazi Germany had any room left for shame?
    Anastas Mouradian went through the preflight checklist in the cockpit of his Pe-2 with meticulous care. His copilot and bomb-aimer, Isa Mogamedov, sat in the other chair there. He helped Mouradian run down the list.
    They spoke to each other in Russian, the only language they had in common. Each flavored it with a different accent. Their home towns lay only a hundred kilometers or so apart, but neither knew or wanted to know a word of the other’s native tongue. Mouradian was an Armenian, Mogamedov an Azeri. Their peoples had been rivals and enemies for a thousand years, ever since the Turkic Azeris invaded the Caucasus. Mouradian had been born a Christian, Mogamedov a Muslim. Now they both had to do their best to be New Soviet Men.
    “Comrade Pilot, everything seems normal,” Mogamedov said formally when they got to the end of the checklist.
    “Thank you, Comrade Copilot. I agree,” Mouradian replied with equal formality. New Soviet Men had no business quarreling with one another, especially when the Fascist enemy remained on Soviet soil.
    Part of Stas Mouradian wanted to believe all the Soviet propaganda that had bombarded him since he was very small. Part of him simply thought some personnel officer had played a practical joke on him by sticking an Azeri in his cockpit. But Mogamedov was plenty capable. With that being true, Mouradian could ignore the rest.
    He could, and he had to. Russians didn’t officially dominate the Soviet Union the way they had in the Tsar’s empire. The leader of the USSR, after all, came out of the Caucasus himself—Stalin was a Georgian. But, even though he spoke the country’s chief language with an accent thick enough to slice, Stalin often acted more Russian than the Tsars. Any of the blackasses—Russian slang for the mostly swarthy folk of the southern mountains—who wanted to get ahead needed to do the same.
    Mouradian not only wanted to get ahead, he wanted to get airborne. He shouted into the speaking tube that led back to the bomb bay: “Everything good for you, Fetya?”
    “Everything’s fucking wonderful, Comrade Pilot,” Sergeant Fyodor Mechnikov replied. The bombardier was a Russian, all right: a foulmouthed thug dragged off a collective farm and into the Red Air Force. He was as strong as an ox—another reason his station was back there with the heavy packages of explosives—and not a great deal brighter.
    But if everything looked good to him, too … Stas waved