Upsetting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than something exploded against the side armor of one of the landcruisers farther down the hill. One of the revolting things about the British spring-launched antilandcruiser bombs was that they gave no clue about their launch site, as, say, a missile did.

  This bomb, by good fortune, did not penetrate the landcruiser’s armor, perhaps because it hadn’t landed squarely. After the initial blast, no smoke mounted skyward. No escape hatches popped open. No males bailed out of the landcruiser. Instead the turret slewed rapidly through a quarter of a circle. The machine gun coaxial with the main armament chattered angrily. But if anything in the ruins of Farnham stirred, Ussmak didn’t see it.

  “The Big Uglies’ weapons get better all the time,” he said. “We have the same ones we started out with, and we don’t have as many of them. The Tosevite substitutes we’re getting are shoddy, and we don’t have enough of those, either. Why can’t we be the ones who invent something new for a change?”

  Neither Nejas nor Skoob answered him. They did not need to answer him; he had already answered himself. The Race looked warily on invention. When it did happen, the results were fed into the culture of the Empire a tiny bit at a time, so as not to create instability. Steadiness counted for more than quickness. The past hundred thousand years, that had worked well. It did not work well on Tosev 3.

  His crewmales also had another, less abstract reason for not answering him: they were trying to spot the Big Ugly who’d launched the bomb at the nearby landcruiser. Ussmak peered through his own vision slits, but his field of view was too narrow to offer him much hope of getting a glimpse of the dangerous Tosevite.

  He heard a metallic rasp from the turret: Nejas was sticking his head out for a direct look around. That was what a good landcruiser commander was supposed to do. Looking out at the world through the periscopes that ringed the cupola didn’t let you see enough to be sure you were safe.

  But if you did stand up in the cupola, by definition you were no longer safe. The moment Nejas emerged, British males started shooting at him. Two bullets ricocheted off the turret and another cracked past before he ducked back down and slammed the cupola lid with a clang.

  “I didn’t see any Big Uglies,” he said, the words punctuated by swift, harsh breathing. “That doesn’t mean they didn’t see me. By the Emperor, I hope that other landcruiser took out the male with the bomb launcher. If he didn’t—”

  “If he didn’t, we’ll find out quite soon,” Skoob said. The silence that followed probably meant his mouth had fallen open in a laugh. He went on, “I haven’t come close to spotting him. He’s good at what he does. By now, on this planet, the males who aren’t good warriors are mostly dead, on their side and ours both.”

  Ussmak was still alive, so he supposed he was good at what he did, by Skoob’s standard, at any rate. He wished he could taste some ginger. Then he’d feel alive, too. He hissed bemusedly. Even when he tasted, he imagined himself triumphantly wielding weapons, never inventing them. Somehow fantasy and hard work in a laboratory failed to come together.

  Was that movement in the rubble, right at the edge of his field of vision? He moved his head to one side, trying to look farther in that direction. If it had been movement, it was stopped now.

  He opened his mouth to speak up about it anyhow. Better safe was a motto drilled into the Race from hatchlinghood. Back on Home, it usually meant avoiding annoyance or discomfort. Here, it had more to do with preventing agony and gruesome death.

  Before he could say anything, Skoob’s machine gun started rattling away. Hot brass cartridge cases clattered down onto the floor. “Got him!” Skoob shouted, almost as excitedly as if he’d tasted ginger himself. “Tosevite male with a rifle—probably one of the ones who was shooting at you, superior sir.”

  “Good riddance to him,” Nejas said.

  The turret of the landcruiser that had taken the bomb hit swung back toward the north. The landcruiser started shelling the advancing British males once more. The flames that spurted from the muzzle, the smoke and dirt that flew with each shellburst, impressed Ussmak less than they had before. Armed Tosevites were already inside Farnham, sneaking toward the landcruisers like biters looking to slide needle-nosed mouths between a male’s scales. Swat as you would, you never could quite get rid of all of them. For that, you needed a spray—but here on Tosev 3, the biters were the ones with the poisonous gas.

  Clang-pow! For a moment, Ussmak thought the main armament had fired. But this jolt slewed the landcruiser sideways. Warning lights blazed all over the instrument panel. A klaxon started to hoot, loud enough to make his hearing diaphragms feel like vibrating drumheads. That meant fire loose in the engine compartment in spite of everything the extinguishers could do, which in turn meant the landcruiser could brew up at any moment. Hydrogen wasn’t so enthusiastically explosive as the hydrocarbon fuels the Big Uglies used, but it burned. Oh, it burned . . .

  All of that went through Ussmak’s mind far faster than conscious thought. Even before Nejas screamed “Bail out!” Ussmak had the hatch over his head open. He paused only to grab his little jars of ginger, stuff them into a belt pouch, and, almost as an afterthought, pick up his personal weapon. Then he was scrambling up and out, fast as legs and arms would propel him.

  A rifle bullet whined past his head, close enough for him to feel, or imagine he felt, the wind of its passage. He skittered across the smooth, sloping surface of the glacis plate, jumped down, and landed heavily on torn-up asphalt, the bulk of the landcruiser between him and the Tosevite guns.

  Skoob already sprawled there. “We can’t stay here,” he said, his eyes swiveling wildly as he looked for danger every which way at once. “This thing is liable to go up whenever the fire gets to the ammunition, or to the fuel, or if that cursed Big Ugly sends another bomb into the fighting compartment.”

  “Tell me something I didn’t know,” Ussmak answered. “Where’s the commander?”

  Just then, Nejas jumped down on both of them. Blood dripped from a surprisingly neat hole in his left forearm. “They hit me when I started to climb out,” he said, barely opening his mouth so as to show as little pain as he could. Skoob reached for a bandage, but Nejas waved him off. “We have to get clear first.”

  The commander scurried away from the hull of the stricken landcruiser, keeping it between himself and the Tosevites. Ussmak and Skoob followed. Ussmak wanted to spray bullets back at the Big Uglies, but that would have reminded them he was there. He would sooner have had them forget all about him.

  Clang-pow! The sound was quite different from outside the landcruiser, but unmistakable all the same. Another of those spring-launched bombs—Ussmak and his crewmates had got away just in time. Turning one eye backwards, he saw flame race over the whole vehicle. Then ammunition started cooking off inside. A perfect black smoke ring shot out through the opening atop the cupola.

  The pyrotechnics finally alerted the crews of the other two landcruisers that something had gone wrong behind them. They both broke off shelling the advancing British Big Uglies and lashed the ruins of Farnham with fire, trying to rout out the fighting males already sneaking through those ruins.

  Ussmak doubted they would succeed in exterminating the Tosevites. He was past the point of caring. As long as they made the Big Uglies lie low long enough to let him find shelter, that would do. He’d given up hoping for anything better than temporary respite.

  Nejas dove behind a couple of gray stone blocks that had been blasted off the wall of Farnham’s castle. Ussmak and Skoob followed him to earth as if they were hunted beasts. We might as well be hunted beasts, Ussmak thought. In combat and out of his landcruiser, he felt naked and soft and hideously vulnerable, like some crawler cruelly torn from its shell.

  “Let’s see that now, superior sir,” Skoob said, pointing to Nejas’ wound.

  Nejas held out the arm. His eyes wandered vaguely. When he opened his mouth to speak, only a wordless hiss came out. The interior of h
is mouthparts was a pale, pale pink. He hadn’t lost that much blood, but he did not look good. “Shock,” Ussmak said, his voice worried.

  “Truth,” Skoob said. He wrapped a wound bandage around the landcruiser commander’s arm. “I hope one of those other crews will radio for an evacuation helicopter; our own set just went up in flames.” He turned both eyes toward Nejas. “If we have to walk out—and I’m afraid we will—he’ll be a burden unless he comes out of it.”

  No rescue helicopter appeared. Nejas sank further into sludgy semiconsciousness. Ussmak grew more and more sure they would have to retreat on foot. If they were going to do that, they needed Nejas on his legs and moving. Trying to carry him, they’d be separately slowed, and easy meat for any armed Big Uglies whose path they chanced to cross. Abandoning the landcruiser commander never crossed Ussmak’s mind; for all he’d been through, he was still in some ways a well-drilled male of the Race.

  But how to get Nejas up on his legs? Skoob was looking around helplessly, perhaps for some males to lend them a hand. Ussmak did not think anyone would magically materialize, not unless another landcruiser got killed, in which case the crewmales would likely have wounded of their own.

  He got an idea of a different sort. He reached into the pouch in which he’d stored his ginger, took out a vial, and poured some of the powdered herb into the palm of his hand. Skoob stared at him in astonishment. He ignored the gunner. Holding his hand just in front of the tip of Nejas’ muzzle, he said, “Superior sir? Taste this.”

  His greatest fear was that Nejas was too far gone to hear him, or to respond if he did. But the commander’s bifurcated tongue flicked out, almost of itself, and brought into his mouth a fair-sized taste of ginger. Ussmak waited tensely to see if it would do any good.

  The membranes that had fallen halfway across Nejas’ pupils suddenly peeled back, leaving the landcruiser commander’s eyes bright and alert. His tongue shot forth again, and cleared the last of the ginger from Ussmak’s palm. “By the Emperor, what is that stuff?” he demanded. “Whatever it is, it’s marvelous.”

  Skoob spoke before Ussmak could: “That’s the Tosevite herb, isn’t it? The one we’ve had so much trouble with, I mean.” He turned one eye from Nejas toward Ussmak. “What are you doing with it? Possession of ginger is against regulations and subject to punishment.”

  “What do you think I’m doing with it?” Ussmak snapped, irritated by the manifest stupidity of the question. “I’m a ginger taster, that’s what. And it was the only thing I could think of to get the commander moving again.” He shifted his eyes to Nejas. “I’m sorry, superior sir. This way, we can sort things out later. If I hadn’t given it to you, I didn’t think there’d be a later.”

  “You were right,” Nejas declared, which silenced Skoob. The landcruiser commander’s voice was vibrant, full of life. Moments before, his wound had left him all but unconscious. Now he seemed to have forgotten he’d been hurt. “Where’s my personal weapon?” he asked, looking around for it. “If I can get my hands on it, the three of us should be plenty to drive all the Big Ugly fighting males out of this damp, grimy little town.”

  Now Skoob stared at him, as if certain the ginger had robbed him of his wits. And so, in a way, it had. Ussmak recognized the symptoms from his own first tastes of ginger: the certainty that you could do anything, regardless of the odds. He still felt that when he tasted, but now he knew it was the herb’s illusion. Nejas didn’t have the experience to recognize it for what it was.

  Gently, Ussmak said, “Superior sir, you remain yourself, nothing more, however powerful the herb may make you feel. Use logic, if you can: if we could not drive the Big Uglies from Farnham from inside our landcruiser, we won’t do it now that the machine is wrecked. We need to get out of here and get you and your wounded arm seen to.”

  Ginger made you think faster than you did without it. It also made you think you were thinking better than you did without it, though that wasn’t always so. After only the briefest pause, Nejas said, “Truth. We must leave. Logic.” Ussmak wasn’t sure how clear his commander’s wits really were, but he wanted to get Nejas moving and get all three of them out of Farnham before the ginger’s exhilaration wore off and the first dreadful depression crashed down to take its place.

  Without warning, Nejas broke cover, skittering southward toward another pile of rubble. A bullet kicked up earth between his feet; another struck sparks from the stonework behind him. With a headlong leap, he reached the new shelter. “Come on!” he called to his crewmales. “Nothing to it!”

  Ussmak wished he’d also tasted; it would have helped nerve him for the dash across open, empty space. “Go on,” Skoob said. “I’ll cover you.” He fired a few shots as Ussmak poised, sprinted, dove. Ussmak returned the favor when Skoob made the dangerous crossing.

  From rubble to wreckage, from wreckage to house, they made their way south out of Farnham. The houses, those few of them that hadn’t been ruined in the fighting, looked tidy and comfortable, at least by Tosevite standards. As he scurried from one of them to the next, always wondering when a bullet he never heard would hit him, Ussmak began to see how a Big Ugly who was faced with the loss of such comfort might fight hard to keep it.

  Houses thinned out and gave way to open country. That worried Ussmak. It gave him and his crewmales fewer hiding places than they’d had in town. And untold enemies could lurk behind the hedgerows that separated one miniature field from the next. Ussmak eyed those hedgerows with mingled fear and respect. Some of them had been growing for the Emperor only knew how long; even a land-cruiser had trouble crashing through them.

  Hedgerows, however, were not his only concern. As he’d known it would, Nejas’ ginger charge wore off, leaving the landcruiser commander very much a drained battery. Nejas slumped bonelessly to the rough asphalt of the road. “I can’t go on,” he moaned, after-tasting depression holding him in its teeth. “And even if I could, what good would it do?”

  “Here, superior sir, taste this.” Ussmak got out more ginger. He didn’t know if a brand-new user could stand having so much course through him, but he did know the alternative was abandoning Nejas. He’d had commanders he would have happily abandoned, but Nejas wasn’t one of them.

  “I don’t want it,” Nejas said; now he knew what Ussmak was giving him. But Ussmak had never heard a more obvious lie. Nejas’ eyes never moved from the palm that held the ginger. When Ussmak brought his hand close to the other male’s muzzle, Nejas’ tongue flicked out and licked it clean.

  Quietly, Skoob said to Ussmak, “We ought to report you for punishment when we get to an area where such things are possible.”

  “Do whatever you’re going to do,” Ussmak answered, as weary as he ever remembered being. “The point is that we get to one of those places, not what we do afterwards.”

  “Let’s go.” Nejas surged to his feet again. His eyes had a hectic glow to them, as if fires burned uncontrolled in his brain. Ussmak knew about those fires, and the herbal wind that fanned them. He hoped he hadn’t given the commander too much ginger. Voice crackling with unassailable certainty, Nejas pointed south. “That way. Before long we shall surely encounter one of our bases intended to hold down this land.”

  Unless we encounter Big Ugly infiltrators first, Ussmak thought. If they were in Farnham, no reason they can’t have slipped south of it. They’re good at such things. After all, this is their planet. Over the days since the Race came to Tosev 3, he’d got a thorough education as to what that meant.

  Something moved at the bottom of a hedgerow. He didn’t pause to wonder about what it might be; males who hesitated once seldom got the chance to hesitate twice. He fired a short burst, his first bullet an instant ahead of Skoob’s.

  Only after his finger came off the trigger did he see what he and the landcruiser gunner had been shooting at: a round little spiny animal with a pointed snout. It was dead now, dead and torn and bleeding, its tiny black eyes staring up in blind reproach. For the first time since he woke u
p from cold sleep on Tosev 3, Ussmak felt guilty about killing something.

  13

  Mutt Daniels crouched in a broken house, peering out through the glassless window and down the wreckage-filled street. The Lizards were still moving forward; between their onslaughts and the stubborn American defense, Chicago was being ground to meal, and fine meal at that.

  The wind that whistled through the window and through the gaping holes in the roof had a chilly edge to it. The sun was going down early these days, too, when you could see it through the clouds, both natural and of smoke.

  “Never thought I’d be one rootin’ for an early winter an’ snow on the ground, but I sure as hell am,” Mutt muttered to himself. The winter before, the Americans had kicked the stuffing out of the Lizards, who didn’t seem to have a clue about fighting in the cold. In the summertime, though—Mutt marveled that he was still alive.

  A noise from behind him made him whirl around. His first sergeant, a burly Irishman named Herman Muldoon, nodded to him and said, “We got some new fish comin’ in out of the north, Lieutenant; replacements, by Jesus! They’re all going to be green as paint, poor lads.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s one thing ain’t nobody can say about the likes of us,” Mutt answered. Muldoon’s answering chuckle showed crooked teeth, a couple of them broken. He was a few years younger than Daniels; like Mutt, he’d been Over There in what had been optimistically called the War to End War. As best they could figure it, they’d been only a few miles apart in the Argonne, though they hadn’t met.

  Muldoon took off his old British-style tin hat and ran a hand through matted hair that had been red but now was going gray. He said, “I seen a few of ’em when they was back a ways. Christ on His cross, they’ve got guns, they’ve got helmets, some of ’em even got uniforms. They look like soldiers on the outside, but inside a couple weeks—hell, maybe, inside a couple days—half of ’em’s gonna end up dead.”