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rolling.
    “Maybe we can push them out of Mulhouse again,” he said hopefully.
    “That’s what they said we’d do back in Colmar, anyhow,” Meinecke answered. He was a veteran, all right; he understood that what they said and what actually happened could be two very different animals. He pursed his lips, then added quietly, as if afraid of being overheard by malignant fate, “Engine’s been behaving pretty well, knock wood.” He made a fist and tapped it against the side of his own head.
    “Let’s hope it keeps up,” Jäger agreed. Rushed into production, the Panther could be balky; among other things, fuel pump problems plagued it. But it was a great step forward from earlier German panzers, boasting a high-velocity 75mm gun and thick, well-sloped armor borrowed in concept from that of the Soviet T-34.
    All of which meant you only had to be foolhardy to go up against the Lizards in a Panther, as opposed to clinically insane, which was about what opposing them in a Panzer III had required.
    “Wish we had one of those bombs the Russians used to blow the Lizards to hell and gone,” Meinecke said. “When do you suppose we’ll get one of our own?”
    “Damned if I know,” Jäger said. “I wish to God I did.”
    “If you don’t, who does?” the gunner asked.
    Now Jäger just grunted by way of reply. He wasn’t supposed to say anything about that to anybody. He’d been part of the band of raiders that had stolen explosive metal from the Lizards in Russia—
like Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods,
said the part of him that, back before World War I, had planned on becoming a classical archaeologist. He’d taken Germany’s share of the material across Poland on horseback, only to have half of it hijacked by Jewish fighters there.
    Only luck they didn’t kill me and take it all,
he thought. In Russia and then in Poland, he’d learned what the
Reich
had done to the Jews who’d fallen into their hands; it made him sick, so he understood why the Polish Jews had risen in favor of the Lizards and against their German overlords.
    He’d also been involved in the German physicists’ efforts to build an atomic pile at Hechingen, although, again luckily, he’d been in combat in eastern France when the pile went out of control somehow and killed off a good many physicists, including Werner Heisenberg. How long the program would take to recover was anyone’s guess.
    Meanwhile, the unglamorous infantry and panzer troops would have to keep the Lizards from overrunning the
Vaterland.
If they didn’t, the high foreheads would never get the chance to finish their research and make something that would go
boom!
In Hechingen, Jäger had felt useless; he’d been too ignorant to contribute properly. Now he was back to doing what he did best.
    Off to one side of the road, an artillery piece barked, then another and another. “Eighty-eights,” Jäger said, identifying them by the report. “That’s good.”
    Meinecke understood him without any more discussion than that: “So they can fire their salvo and then get the hell out of there, you mean?”
    “Right the first time, Sergeant. They’re easy to shift to a new firing position—a lot easier than the bigger guns.” Jäger paused meditatively. “And Lizard counterbattery fire is better than anything we ever dreamt of.”
    “Isn’t that the sad and sorry truth, sir?” Meinecke agreed with a mournful sigh. “They can drive nails into your coffin from halfway round the world, seems like sometimes. If there were more of them, and if they had the doctrine to go with all their fancy equipment—”
    “—The likes of us would have been dead for quite a while now,” Jäger finished for him. Meinecke laughed, though again the colonel had spoken nothing but the truth. Down lower in the turret, Wolfgang Eschenbach, the loader, laughed, too. He was a big blond farm boy; getting more than half a dozen words out of him in the course of a day was just this side of