Upsetting the Balance w-3 Read online

  He looked around as the plane streaked off after other targets. One of his troopers was down, dead. So was Wendell Summers. It looked as if one shell had got him and another his horse. Auerbach gulped. Even for war, it was ugly.

  Penny Summers had reined in, staring in numb astonishment at the red smears and badly butchered meat that had been her father. “Get moving!” Auerbach shouted at her. “You want to end up just like him? We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “But-he’s dead,” she said disbelievingly, as if such things couldn’t happen, as if this were peaceful 1938 rather than 1943.

  “It’s a chance you take, shooting back at the Lizards,” Auerbach answered. He wanted to be gentle, but he didn’t have time. “Look, miss, we can’t hang around. That plane may be back for another pass, you know.”

  Her eyes were green, but white showed all around their irises. She was, he guessed, somewhere in her middle twenties, but shock left her face so blank, she looked years younger. But if she didn’t pull herself together at least well enough to ride that horse in the next ten seconds, he was damn well going to leave her here.

  She did. She was still stunned, but she booted the horse in the ribs and got rolling. Auerbach rode alongside her. When he had the time, he’d grieve for his lost men, too. Not now. Now getting away was all that mattered. If that stinking jet hadn’t chewed up the rest of the company too badly, he might even have won himself a minor victory.

  Ussmak said, “If they keep pulling us out of the line, how do they expect us to maintain the advance against the Deutsche?”

  Nejas let out a hissing sigh. “I am but a landcruiser commander, Ussmak, just as you are but a driver and Skoob here but a gunner. I do not make these decisions, but I am a male of the Race. I obey.”

  “Yes, superior sir.” Ussmak sighed, too, but quietly. High-ranking males made decisions, lower-ranking ones obeyed them… and paid the price. Two landcruiser commanders and one gunner with whom he’d fought were dead now, and another commander and gunner arrested for being ginger addicts-all that in what everyone had assumed would be a walkover campaign, back when males went into the cold-sleep tanks while the conquest fleet still orbited Home.

  Nejas and Skoob were good crewmales, the best he’d had since his first commander and gunner. They didn’t know he had his own little stash of ginger stowed away under one of the flameproof mats in the driver’s compartment of the landcruiser. He wished he’d never got the habit, but when good males died around you, when half your orders made no sense, when you were hurt and bored and didn’t look forward to more combat but knew you had no choice, what were you going to do?

  He was no fleetlord or shiplord or grand strategist of any sort, but pulling the landcruisers back from the thrust they’d made struck him as stupid. They’d reached an important river (the locals called it the Rhine) and were poised to strike deep into Deutschland if they could force a crossing-and now this.

  “You have to give the Deutsche credit,” he said reluctantly. “No matter how hard we hit them, they hit back. And the Swiss-is that what the other tribe’s name is? — are like that, too. They don’t have weapons as good as the Deutsche, but-”

  “I know what I want to give the Deutsche,” Skoob the gunner said. He pointed to the main armament of the landcruiser, a thin black line against the dark blue of the night sky. “Better that than credit, if you ask me.”

  Ussmak didn’t argue. The landcruiser was pulled off the road north of Mulhouse (and hadn’t going back through the wrecked Tosevite town been a delight?), parked in a meadow. Tosev 3’s big moon spilled pale light on the mountains to the west, but only made the closer woods seem blacker and more forbidding.

  Even by day, Tosev 3 was an alien world to Ussmak. It was too cold to suit him, while the light from the star Tosev paradoxically seemed whiter and brighter than he was used to. At night, though, the planet turned into the sort of haunted place a female might have used to frighten hatchlings.

  Everything felt unfamiliar. The odors the chilly breeze brought to the scent receptors on Ussmak’s tongue, some spicy, some bland, others redolent of decay, were all strange to him. The air itself felt heavy and wet to breathe. And the sounds-the chirps and tweets and occasional snarls-were none of them like those night creatures made back on Home. That was one reason Ussmak found them frightening. Another was that he could never be certain which of those night noises came from a Big Ugly sneaking up with the intent of doing him permanent bodily harm.

  He said, “I’m going to get my rest while I can. We’ll probably be fighting tomorrow.” Somewhere altogether too close for comfort, the Deutsche were camped with their landcruisers, too, waiting for Tosev to rise. The landcruisers themselves weren’t much, though the new models could sting. But by the way the Deutsche handled them, they could have served as instructors at any training center in the Empire.

  New models.The thought ran through his head as he slid down into the landcruiser through the driver’s hatch. The weapons with which the Race fought on Tosev 3 were not much different from the ones they’d used to conquer the Rabotevs and Hallessi, thousands of years before. They’d been on Tosev 3 a bit more than two years (only a little more than one of this planet’s slow turns around its sun), and already the landcruisers and aircraft with which the Big Uglies fought them were vastly more dangerous than those they’d first met.

  That was frightening in and of itself. Worse than frightening was the atomic bomb the Russkis had used. If the Big Uglies got nuclear weapons, the Race was liable to lose the war. Ussmak hadn’t imagined that, not when he rampaged across the plains of the SSSR just after the Race landed.

  He closed the hatch after him, dogged it tight. Nejas and Skoob would sleep by the landcruiser, they didn’t have enough room for comfort in the turret. But his seat reclined to make a fair bed. He lay there for a while, but sleep eluded him.

  Ever so cautiously, he reached under the mat and took out a little plastic vial. It was full of brownish powder. He pulled off the top, poured a small mound of powder into the palm of his hand, and brought the hand up to his mouth. His scent receptors caught the ginger’s spicy tang even before his tongue flicked out to lap up the powder.

  As it made its way to his brain, well-being flowed through him: he felt wise and quick and powerful all at the same time, as if he were the fleetlord and part of the fleetlord’s computer scrambled together. But he also feltgood, almost as good as he would during mating season. With no females within light-years, mating hardly ever crossed his mind; to the Race, the habits of the Big Uglies seemed a planetwide dirty joke.

  When ginger coursed through him, the Big Uglies were laughable, contemptible. Better yet, in his mind they weresmall. With ginger, the war looked not only winnable but easy, the way everyone had thought it would be before the conquest fleet left Home.

  But Ussmak had learned better than to taste just before he went into combat. Ginger made you think you were smart and strong, but it didn’t really make you smart and strong. If you roared into action convinced the Tosevites couldn’t possibly hurt you, you were all too likely to end up dead before you realized you’d made a mistake.

  Tasting ginger had two other problems attached to it. One was that the first thing a taste made you want was another taste. Ussmak knew he was an addict; he fought against it as best he could, but an addict he remained.

  The other problem was what happened when you didn’t take that second taste. Ginger didn’t just lift you. When it was through with you, it dropped you-hard. And the drop seemed all the worse because of how high you’d been before.

  Ussmak made himself not reach for the vial again when exhilaration faded. “I’ve done this a lot of times by now,” he said aloud, willing himself to stillness. Depression and fear crashed down on him just the same. He knew they weren’t real, but they felt as real as the pleasure that had gone before them.

  Infantrymales screened the landcruisers. In Ussmak’s worried imagination, they fell asleep at their posts or
simply failed to spy Deutsch males creeping through what were to the Race alien woods. The first the crewmales would know of their blunders was satchel charges chucked at their landcruisers. Ussmak dozed off shivering in terror.

  He woke with a fresh spasm of alarm when the turret hatches clanged shut, but it was only Nejas and Skoob getting into the landcruiser. “I thought you were a couple of Tosevites,” he said resentfully.

  “If we were, you’d be dead meat,” Skoob retorted. A short pause showed he was letting his mouth fall open in laughter.

  “Let’s get moving,” Nejas said. “Driver, start the engine.”

  “It shall be done, superior sir.” The return to routine heartened Ussmak; however battered by fate he’d been, he was still a male of the Race. The hydrogen-burning turbine caught on the first try. He would have been astonished at anything else. The Race’s engineering was solid.

  “We’ll clean up the Deutsche here and then resume our advance,” Nejas said as the landcruiser began to move. “A little delay won’t matter.” Ussmak wondered if he’d had his tongue in the ginger jar, too. But no. Nejas and Skoob had never developed the habit. They were everything a male of the Race should be, and so unselfconscious about it that he couldn’t even resent them.

  Landcruisers and troop carriers rumbled up the road together. The farmland to either side had probably been fertile once, but armies going back and forth across it hadn’t done much to help that. Ruins, craters, and the tumbled corpses of Tosevite animals were appalling. Ussmak didn’t see any Big Uglies. They weren’t too stupid to get out of the way of the war.

  Not far ahead, a male in the gray sacks the Deutsche wore to protect themselves from their world’s beastly climate popped up out of a concealed hole in the ground and pointed something at a troop carrier. Flame shot from the rear of the device; a projectile rocketed toward the carrier. Without looking to see whether he’d scored a hit, the Big Ugly ducked back into his hole.

  Troop carriers were armored against small-arms fire but, unlike landcruisers, not against heavy weapons. The projectile struck just below the turret. The carrier burst into flames at once. Escape hatches popped open as its crew and the fighting males it bore tried to escape. Some did; fire from Deutsch gunners cut down others.

  “Smash that Tosevite!” Nejas screamed from the intercom speaker taped to Ussmak’s hearing diaphragm. Normally a calm, collected commander, he sounded as furiously excitable as any ginger-licker after three tastes.

  By contrast, Ussmak was coldly furious. “It shall be done, superior sir,” he said grimly, and steered straight for the foxhole from which the Big Ugly had emerged. He made sure he put a tread right on it, then locked that tread and turned the landcruiser in its own length, crushing the Deutsch male as if he were grinding an insect underfoot. Then he drove on.

  “It’s not revenge enough,” Skoob complained.

  “It certainly isn’t, by the Emperor,” Nejas agreed. “The Deutsche came out ahead in that exchange.”

  As he’d been trained since hatchlinghood to do, Ussmak cast down his eyes at the mention of his sovereign. Before he could raise them-WHAM! The impact against the front of the landcruiser was like a kick in the muzzle. He’d been in a landcruiser that had taken shell hits back in the SSSR, but never one like this. But the armor held-if it hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been sitting there thinking about how hard he’d just been hit.

  Commander and gunner normally went through a series of orders identifying a target and designating it for destruction. This time, Skoob just said, “With your permission, superior sir,” and fired after a tiny pause. That hesitation was enough to let the Deutsche fire again, too. WHAM! Again an impact that jolted Ussmak, again the shell failed to penetrate.

  The landcruiser rocked with the round Skoob fired. “Hit!” Ussmak shouted as flame and smoke spurted from behind bushes. Not even the best Big Ugly landcruiser gun could pierce the frontal armor of one of the Race’s landcruisers, but the reverse did not hold true.

  “Forward,” Nejas ordered. Ussmak gave the engine more throttle. The landcruiser leaped ahead.

  More Deutsche, Ussmak discovered, were armed with those alarming rocket projectors. They killed two troop carriers that he saw, and managed to set one landcruiser afire. Few of the males who used the projectors escaped. The blast from the launchers showed just where they were, and gunners sent heavy fire their way-nor was Ussmak the only male to take more direct measures of extermination.

  He’d almost reached a town marked on the map as Rouffach when Nejas ordered, “Driver halt.”

  “Halting, superior sir,” Ussmak said obediently, though the command puzzled him: despite the antivehicle rockets, they’d been driving the Big Uglies before them.

  “Orders from the unit commander,” Nejas said. “We’re to pull back from this position and resume our previous offensive.”

  “It shall be done,” Ussmak said, as he had to say. Then, not only because he’d been through a lot of combat with a lot of crews but also because the deaths of his previous crewmales made him much more an outsider than males of the Race usually became, he went on, “That doesn’t make a lot of sense, superior sir. Even if we were beating them, we haven’t smashed the Big Uglies here, and by going off we’ve just given the Deutsche by the big river a couple of days’ rest to strengthen their defenses. They were tough enough before, and they’d stay that way, even if we had forced our way through some of them.”

  For a considerable time, Nejas did not answer him. At last, the landcruiser commander said, “Driver, I fear you demonstrate imperfect subordination.” Ussmak knew he was imperfect in any number of ways. That was a long way from saying he was wrong.

  “Take off your clothes,” Ttomalss said. The little scaly devil’s Chinese held a thick, hissing accent, but Liu Han was used to it and followed it without trouble.

  She used the little devil’s speech in return: “It shall be done, superior sir.” She wondered if Ttomalss could detect the weary resignation in her voice. She didn’t think so. The little scaly devils were interested in learning everything they could about people, but only as people might be interested in learning everything they could about some new kind of pig. That people might have feelings didn’t seem to have occurred to them.

  Sighing, Liu Han pulled off her black cotton tunic, let her baggy trousers and linen drawers fall to the dirt floor of the hut in the refugee camp west of Shanghai. Outside, people chattered and argued and scolded children and chased chickens and ducks. The marketplace lay not far away; the racket that came from there was never-ending, like the plashing of a stream. She had to make a deliberate effort to hear it.

  Ttomalss’ weird eyes swiveled independently as they examined her. She stood still and let him look all he cared to; one thing more than a year’s association with the little scaly devils had taught her was that they had no prurient interest in mankind… not that she would have aroused prurient interest in many men, not with a belly that looked as if she’d swallowed a great melon whole. Her best guess was that the baby would come in less than a month.

  Ttomalss walked up to her and set the palm of his hand on her belly. His skin was dry and scaly, like a snake’s, but warm, almost feverish, against hers. The little devils were hotter than people. The few Christians in the camp said that proved they came from the Christian hell. Wherever they came from, Liu Han wished they’d go back there and leave her-leave everyone-alone.

  The baby kicked inside her. Ttomalss jerked his hand away, skittering back a couple of paces with a startled hiss. “That is disgusting,” he exclaimed in Chinese, and added the emphatic cough.

  Liu Han bowed her head. “Yes, superior sir,” she said. What point to arguing with the scaly devil? His kind came from eggs, like poultry or songbirds.

  Cautiously, Ttomalss returned He reached out again and touched her in a very private place. “We have seen, in your kind, that the hatchlings come forth from this small opening. We must examine and study the process most carefully wh
en the event occurs. It seems all but impossible.”

  “It is true, superior sir.” Liu Han still stood quiet, enduring his hand, hating him. Hate filled her, but she had no way to let it out. After the Japanese overran her village and killed her husband and little son, the little scaly devils had overrun the Japanese-and kidnapped her.

  The little devils had mating seasons like farm animals. Finding out that people didn’t had repelled and fascinated them at the same time. She was one of the unlucky people they’d picked to learn more about such-again, as people might explore the mating habits of pigs. In essence, though they didn’t seem to think of it in those terms, they’d turned her into a whore.

  In a way, she’d been lucky. One of the men they’d forced on her, an American named Bobby Fiore, had been decent enough, and she’d partnered with him and not had to endure any more strangers. The baby kicked again. He’d put it in her belly.

  But Bobby Fiore was dead now, too. He’d escaped from the camp with Chinese Communist guerrillas. Somehow, he’d got to Shanghai. The scaly devils had killed him there-and brought back color photos of his corpse for her to identify.

  Ttomalss opened a folder and took out one of the astonishing photographs the little scaly devils made. Liu Han had seen photographs in magazines before the little devils came from wherever they came from. She’d seen moving pictures at the cinema a few times. But never had she seen photographs with such perfect colors, and never had she seen photographs that showed depth.

  This one was in color, too, but not in colors that seemed connected to anything in the world Liu Han knew: bright blues, reds, and yellows were splashed, seemingly at random, over an image of a curled-up infant. “This is a picture developed by the machine-that-thinks from scans of the hatchling growing inside you,” Ttomalss said.