Upsetting the Balance by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page A

air toward a Panzer IV in one of the lead companies. New Panzer IVs had long-barreled 75mm guns almost as good as the ones Panthers carried, but their armor, though thicker than in the earlier models, wasn’t excellent protection even against terrestrial foes. Against a Lizard anti-panzer rocket, the armor might as well not have been there at all. The Panzer IV brewed up, orange flame billowing and a column of thick black smoke mounting swiftly into the air.
    Confused, angry shouts filled the radio. Jäger grabbed the headset, shoved the earphones into place, and shouted orders into the microphone. The nearest surviving panzer poured machine-gun fire into the thick clump of bushes from which the anti-panzer rocket had come, hoping to flush out or knock down the Lizards who had fired it.
    Nothing without armor could have survived that hail of bullets. From more than four hundred meters farther to the rear, Jäger watched the bushes writhe under it, as if under torture. But a moment later, another rocket incinerated a German panzer.
    “They’ve got one of their troop carriers in there!” Jäger shouted into the microphone. “Give ’em your main armament.” Unlike German half-tracks, the Lizards’ armored troop carriers bore light cannon that could chew up anything this side of a panzer, and carried those rockets on turret rails to either side of the cannon. With them, the troop carriers became deadly dangerous panzer killers.
    But, while they were formidably armed, they were only lightly armored. They could withstand small-arms fire, but when a panzer shell came knocking, they opened up. The German panzer hit the brakes to fire into that stand of bushes. Moments later, the bushes went up in flames as part of the troop carrier’s funeral pyre.
    Jäger whooped like a Red Indian. He remembered all too well the bad days of the summer before, when killing any Lizard armored vehicle seemed to require divine intervention. He’d done it himself once, with the 50mm cannon of a Panzer III, but he didn’t pretend he’d been anything but lucky.
    Yet another rocket streaked out from cover and smote a Panzer IV. The rocket exploded in a ball of flame, but the panzer did not brew up. Jäger whooped again. “The
Schürzen
work!” he shouted to the world at large. The hollow-charge warheads of the Lizards’ anti-panzer rockets sent a jet of white-hot flame through armor and into a panzer. Some bright engineer had figured out that 5mm plates—“skirts,” he called them—welded onto a panzer’s turret and sides would make the rocket warhead go off prematurely and dissipate that jet. Now Jäger saw that the bright idea actually worked in combat.
    The advancing German panzers kept on spraying the Lizard infantry positions with machine-gun bullets. Covered by that, German infantrymen ran forward, too. The only opposing fire came from small arms. Jäger’s hopes rose, if the Lizards didn’t have any panzers in this sector, the
Wehrmacht
really could make some gains. He hadn’t taken the brass seriously when they talked about getting Mulhouse back and cutting the Lizards off from the Rhine, but he was starting to think that just might happen.
    Then three Lizard helicopters popped up from behind cover, two from out of clearings in the woods and the third from behind a barn. Jäger’s mouth went dry; helicopters were deadlier foes than panzers. They launched two rockets each. One blew a hole in the ground. The other five hit German panzers. Two of the machines survived, but the other three went up in flames. A couple of crewmen managed to bail out of escape hatches; most perished.
    Then 20mm rapid-fire antiaircraft guns started hammering at the helicopters. On the raid that captured the plutonium from the Lizards, the Germans who’d joined with the Russian partisans had carried a mountain version of one of those guns, which broke down into man-portable loads. Now the
Wehrmacht
made a habit of posting the light guns as far forward