Striking the Balance Read online

  “Get the hell out of there!” Auerbach yelled at the two-man crew. If they missed, the enemy would just have to trace the bazooka’s line of flight to know where they were.

  They didn’t miss. A Lizard tank’s frontal armor laughed at the shaped-charge head of a bazooka round, but not an armored personnel carrier. Flame spurted from the stricken vehicle, lighting it up. Troopers with small arms opened up on it, potting the Lizard crew as they popped out of the escape hatches. A moment later, the deep stutter of the .50 caliber machine gun added itself to the nighttime cacophony.

  “Keep moving! Come on, forward!” Auerbach screamed. “We gotta hit ’em inside Karval!” Behind him, his mortar crew started lobbing bombs at the hamlet. He was rooting for one of them to start a fire to illuminate the area. Lots of the Lizards were shooting back now, and they had a much better idea where his men were than the other way around. A nice cheery blaze would help level the playing field.

  As if it were Christmas, he got his wish. A clapboard false front in Karval went up in yellow flames. By the way it burned, it had been standing and curing for a long time. Flames leaped to other false fronts along what had probably been the pint-sized main drag. Their lurid, buttery light revealed skittering Lizards like demons in hell.

  From more than a mile outside of town, the heavy machine gun started blazing away at the targets the light showed. You couldn’t count on any one bullet hitting any one target at a range like that, but when you threw a lot of bullets at a lot of targets, you had to score some hits. And, when a .50 caliber armor-piercing bullet hit a target of mere flesh and blood, that target (a nice bloodless word for a creature that thought and hurt like you) went down and stayed down.

  Auerbach whooped like a red Indian when another Lizard armored personnel carrier brewed up. Then both bazooka crews started firing rockets almost at random into Karval. More fires sprouted. “Mission accomplished!” he shouted, though nobody could hear him, not even himself. The Lizards had to figure they were getting hit by something like an armored brigade, not a raggedy cavalry company.

  The hammering of the guns hid the noise of the approaching helicopters till it was too late. The first warning of them Auerbach had was when they salvoed rockets at the bazooka crews. It seemed the Fourth of July all over again, but this time the fireworks were going the wrong way—from air to ground. That tortured ground seemed to erupt in miniature volcanoes.

  Blast grabbed Auerbach, picked him up, and slammed him down again. Something wet ran into his mouth—blood from his nose, he discovered from the taste of iron and salt. He wondered if his ears were bleeding, too. If he’d been a little closer to one of those rockets—or maybe if he’d been inhaling instead of exhaling—he might have had his lungs torn to bits inside him.

  He staggered to his feet and shook his head like a stunned prizefighter, trying to make his wits work. The bazookas weren’t in operation any more. The .50 caliber machine gun turned its attention to the helicopters; its like flew in Army Air Force planes. He’d heard of machine guns bagging helicopters. But the helicopters could shoot back, too. He watched their tracers walk forward and over the machine-gun position. It fell silent.

  “Retreat!” Auerbach yelled, for anyone who could hear. He looked around for his radioman. There was the fellow, not far away—dead, with the radio on his back blown to smithereens. Well, anybody who didn’t have the sense to retreat when he was getting hit and couldn’t hit back probably didn’t deserve to live, anyhow.

  He wondered where Andy Osborne was. The local could probably guide him back to the ravine—although. If helicopters started hitting you from above while you were in there, it would be a death trap, not a road to safety. A couple of the Lizard outposts were still firing, too. There weren’t any roads to safety, not any more.

  A shape in the night—He swung his Garand toward it before he realized it was a human being. He waved toward the northwest, showing it was time to head for home. The trooper nodded and said, “Yes, sir—we’ve got to get out of here.” As if from a great distance, he heard Rachel Hines’ voice.

  Steering by the stars, they trotted in the right direction, more or less, though he wondered how they were going to find the horses some of the troopers were holding. Then he wondered if it would matter: those helicopters would chew the animals to dog food if they got there first.

  They were heading that way, too, when the heavy machine gun started up behind them. With the crew surely dead, a couple of other men must have found it and started serving it. They had to have scored some hits on the helicopters, too, for the Lizard machines abandoned their course and swung back toward the .50 caliber gun.

  The makeshift crew played it smart: as soon as the helicopters got close, they stopped firing at them. No sense running up a SHOOT ME RIGHT HERE sign, Auerbach thought as he stumbled on through the darkness. The Lizard helicopters raked the area where the machine gun hid, then started to leave. As soon as they did, the troopers opened up on them again.

  They returned for another pass. Again, when they paused, the gunners on the ground showed they weren’t done yet. One of the helicopters sounded ragged. He dared hope the armor-piercing ammunition had done it some harm. But it stayed in the air. When the helicopters finished chewing up the landscape this time, the machine gun didn’t start up.

  “Son of a bitch!” Rachel Hines said disgustedly. She swore like a trooper; half the time, she didn’t notice she was doing it. Then she said, “Son of a bitch,” in an altogether different tone of voice. The two hunting helicopters were swinging toward her and Auerbach.

  He wanted to hide, but where could you hide from flying death that saw in the night? Nowhere, he thought, and threw his M-1 to his shoulder. He didn’t have much chance of damaging the machines, but what he could do, he would. If you’re going to go down, go down swinging.

  The machine guns in the noses of both helicopters opened up. For a second or so, he thought they were beautiful. Then something hit him a sledgehammer blow. All at once, his legs didn’t want to hold him up. He started to crumple, but he didn’t know whether he hit the ground or not.

  A guard threw open the door to Ussmak’s tiny cell. “You—out,” he said in the Russki language, which Ussmak was perforce learning.

  “It shall be done,” Ussmak said, and came out. He was always glad to get out of the cell, which struck him as poorly designed: had he been a Tosevite, he didn’t think he would have been able to stand up or lie down at full length in it. And, for that matter, since Tosevites produced liquid as well as solid waste, the straw in the cell would soon have become a stinking, sodden mess for a Big Ugly. Ussmak did all his business over in one corner, and wasn’t too badly inconvenienced by the lack of plumbing fixtures.

  The guard carried a submachine gun in one hand and a lantern in the other. The lantern gave little light and smelled bad. Its odor reminded Ussmak of cooking; he wondered if it used some animal or plant product for fuel rather than the petroleum on which the Tosevites ran their landcruisers and aircraft.

  He’d learned better than to ask such questions. It just got him into deeper trouble, and he was in quite enough already. As the guard led him toward the interrogation chamber, he called down mental curses on Straha’s empty head. May his spirit live an Emperorless afterlife, Ussmak thought. On the radio, he’d sounded so sure the Big Uglies showed civilized behavior toward males they captured. Well, the mighty onetime shiplord Straha didn’t know everything there was to know. That much Ussmak had found out, to his sorrow.

  Waiting in the interrogation chamber, as usual, were Colonel Lidov and Gazzim. Ussmak sent the paintless interpreter a stare full of mixed sympathy and loathing. If it hadn’t been for Gazzim, the Big Uglies wouldn’t have got so much from him so fast He’d yielded the base in Siberia intending to tell the males of the SSSR everything he could to help them: having committed treason, he was going to wallow in it.

  But Lidov and the other males of the NKVD had assumed from the outset that he was an enemy ben
t on hiding things rather than an ally eager to reveal them. The more they’d treated him that way, the more they’d done to turn their mistake into truth.

  Maybe Lidov was beginning to realize the error in his technique. Speaking without the translation of Gazzim (something he seldom did), he said, “I greet you, Ussmak. Here on the table is something that may perhaps make your day pass more pleasantly.” He gestured toward the bowl full of brownish powder.

  “Is that ginger, superior sir?” Ussmak asked. He knew what it was; his chemoreceptors could smell it across the room. The Russkis hadn’t let him taste in—he didn’t know how long. It seemed like forever. What he meant, of course, was, May I have some? The more he associated with the males of the NKVD, the less saying what he meant seemed like a good idea.

  But Lidov was in an expansive mood today. “Yes, of course it is ginger,” he answered. “Taste all you like.”

  Ussmak wondered if the Big Ugly was trying to drug him with something other than the powdered herb. He decided Lidov couldn’t be. If Lidov wanted to give him another drug, he would go ahead and do it, and that would be that. Ussmak went over to the table, poured some ginger into the palm of his hand, raised the hand to his mouth, and tasted.

  Not only was it ginger, it was lime cured, the way the Race liked it best. Ussmak’s tongue flicked out again and again, till every speck of the precious powder on his hands was gone. The spicy taste filled not just his mouth, but his brain. After so long without, the herb hit him hard. His heart pounded; his breath gusted in and out of his lung. He felt bright and alert and strong and triumphant, worth a thousand of the likes of Boris Lidov.

  Part of his mind warned him that feeling was a fraud, an illusion. He’d watched males who couldn’t remember that die, confident their landcruisers could do anything and their Big Ugly opponents would not be able to hinder them in the slightest. If you didn’t kill yourself through such stupidity, you learned to enjoy ginger without letting it enslave you.

  But remembering that came hard, hard, in the middle of the exhilaration the drug brought. Boris Lidov’s little mouth widened into the gesture the Tosevites used to show amiability. “Go ahead,” he said. “Taste more.”

  Ussmak did not have to be invited twice. The worst thing about ginger was the black slough of despond into which you fell when a taste wore off. The first thing you wanted then was another taste. Usually, you didn’t have one. But that bowl held enough ginger to keep a male happy for—a long time. Ussmak cheerfully indulged again.

  Gazzim had one eye turret fixed on the bowl of powdered ginger, the other on Boris Lidov. Every line of his scrawny body showed Ussmak his terrible longing for the herb, but he did not make the slightest move toward it. Ussmak knew the depths of a male’s craving. Gazzim had plainly sunk to those depths. That he was too afraid to try to take a taste said frightening things about what the Soviets had done to him.

  Ussmak was used to suppressing the effects ginger had on him. But he hadn’t tasted for a long time, and he’d just ingested a double dose of potent stuff. The drug was stronger than his inhibitions. “No, let us now give this poor addled male something to make him happy for a change,” he said, and held the bowl of ginger right under Gazzim’s snout.

  “Nyet!” Boris Lidov shouted angrily.

  “I dare not,” Gazzim whispered, but his tongue was more powerful than he was. It leaped into the bowl, again and again and again, as if trying to make up for lost time by cramming a dozen tastes into one.

  “No, I tell you,” Lidov said again, this time in the language of the Race. He added an emphatic cough for good measure. When neither Ussmak nor Gazzim took the slightest notice of him, he strode forward and knocked the bowl out of Ussmak’s hands. It shattered on the floor; a brownish cloud of ginger fogged the air.

  Gazzim hurled himself at the male from the NKVD, rending him with teeth and claws. Lidov let out a bubbling shriek and reeled away, blood spurting from several wounds. He threw up one arm to protect his face. With the other hand, he grabbed for the pistol he wore on his belt.

  Ussmak leaped at him, grabbing his right arm with both hands. The Big Ugly was hideously strong, but his soft, scaleless skin left him vulnerable; Ussmak felt his claws sink deep into Tosevite flesh. Gazzim might have been a wild thing. His jaws had a grip on Lidov’s throat, as if he was going to feed on the male from the NKVD. Along with the smell of the spilled ginger, Ussmak’s chemoreceptors filled with the acrid tang of Tosevite blood. The combination brought him close to beasthood, too.

  Lidov’s shrieks grew fainter; his hand relaxed on the grip of the pistol. Ussmak was the one who drew it out of its holster. It felt heavy and awkward in his grip.

  The door to the interrogation chamber opened. He’d expected that for some time, but the Big Uglies were too primitive to have television cameras monitoring such places. Gazzim screamed and charged at the guard who stood in the doorway. Blood dripped from his claws and his snout. Even armed, Ussmak would not have wanted to stand against him, not drug-crazed and insane as he was at that moment.

  “Bozhemoi!” the Tosevite shouted. But he had extraordinary presence of mind. He brought up his submachine gun and fired a quick burst just before Gazzim got to him. The male of the Race crashed to the ground, twitching. He was surely dead, but his body hadn’t quite realized it yet.

  Ussmak tried to shoot at the guard. Though his chance of escape from this prison was essentially nil, he was a soldier with a weapon in his hand. The only problem was, he couldn’t make the weapon fire. It had some kind of safety, and he couldn’t figure out what it was.

  As he fumbled, the muzzle of the Big Ugly’s submachine gun swung to cover him. The pistol didn’t even bear on the guard. In disgust, Ussmak threw down the Tosevite weapon, which clattered on the floor. He wondered dully if the guard would kill him out of hand.

  Rather to his surprise, the fellow didn’t. The sound of gunfire in the prison had drawn other guards on the run. One of them spoke a little of the language of the Race. “Hands high!” he yelled. Ussmak obeyed. “Move back!” the Tosevite said. Obediently, Ussmak stepped away from Boris Lidov, who lay in a pool of his own blood. It looks the same as poor Gazzim’s, Ussmak thought.

  A couple of guards hurried over to the fallen Soviet male. They spoke back and forth in their own guttural tongue. One of them looked toward Ussmak. Like any Big Ugly, he had to turn his whole flat face toward him. “Dead,” he said in the language of the Race.

  “What good would saying I’m sorry do, especially when I’m not?” Ussmak answered. None of the guards seemed to understand that, which was probably just as well. They talked some more among themselves. Ussmak waited for one of them to raise his firearm and start shooting.

  That didn’t happen. He remembered what Intelligence had said of the males of the SSSR: that they stuck to their orders almost as carefully as did the Race. From what he’d seen, that seemed accurate. Without orders, no one here was willing to take the responsibility for eliminating him.

  Finally, the male who had led him to the interrogation chamber gestured with the muzzle of his weapon. Ussmak understood that gesture; it meant come along. He came. The guard led him back to his cell, as if after a normal interrogation. The door slammed behind him. The lock clicked.

  His mouth fell open in amusement. If I’d known that was all that would happen if I killed Lidov, I’d have done it a long time ago. But he didn’t think it was going to be all . . . oh, no. And, as the ginger euphoria leaked out of him and after-tasting depression set in, he wondered what the Russkis would do with him—to him—now. He could think of all sorts of unpleasant possibilities, and he was unpleasantly certain they could come up with even more.

  Liu Han walked past the Fa Hua Ssu, the Temple of Buddha’s Glory, and, just west of it, the wreckage of the Peking tramway station. She sighed, wishing the tramway station were not in ruins. Peking sprawled over a large area; the temple and the station were in the eastern part of the city, a good many li from her roominghous
e.

  Not far from the station was Porcelain Mouth Street, Tz’u Ch’i K’ou, whose clay was famous. She walked north up the street, then turned off onto one of the hutungs, Peking’s innumerable lanes and alleys that branched from it. She was learning her way through the maze; she had to double back and retrace her steps only once before she found the Hsiao Shih, the Small Market.

  Another name for that market, less often heard but always in the back of everyone’s mind, was the Thieves’ Market. From what Liu Han had been told, not everything in the market was stolen goods; some of the trash so loudly hawked had been legally acquired but was being sold here to create the illusion that the customer was getting a bargain.

  “Brass plates!” “Cabbage!” “Chopsticks!” “Mah-jongg tiles!” “Noodles!” “Medicine to cure you of the clap!” “Piglets and fresh pork!” “Peas and bean sprouts!” The noise was deafening. Only by Peking standards could this be reckoned a small market. In most cities, it would have been the central emporium; all by itself, it seemed to Liu Han as big as the camp in which the little scaly devils had placed her after bringing her down from the airplane that never landed.

  In the surging crowds, she was just one among many. Anonymity suited her. The kind of attention she got these days was not what she wanted.

  A man selling fine porcelain cups that certainly looked as if they might have been stolen saw her, pointed, and rocked his hips back and forth. She walked over to him with a large smile on her face. He looked half eager, half apprehensive.

  She made her voice high and sweet, like a singsong girl’s. Still smiling, she said, “I hope it rots off. I hope it shrinks back into your body so you can’t find it even if you’ve tied a string around its tiny little end. If you do find it, I hope you never, ever get it up.”