Upsetting the Balance w-3

by Harry Turtledove

  16

  Inside the landcruiser, which was inside the heavy transporter, Ussmak was thoroughly shielded from the outside world. What he was not shielded from was fear. After all he and his crewmales had endured in Britain, he knew he would never again be shielded from fear.

  He spoke into the intercom microphone: “How does your wound feel today, superior sir?”

  “Getting better all the time,” Nejas answered. “High time I was back on duty.” He hesitated, perhaps making sure the crew of the transporter could not hear the next thing he had to say. Once he was sure they were out of the circuit, he went on, his words all at once quick and breathy: “Do you by any chance happen to have another-taste of ginger, landcruiser driver?”

  “I’m sorry, superior sir, but I don’t have any even for myself,” Ussmak answered. He wished he hadn’t had to start his commander tasting. If he hadn’t, though, he and Skoob would have had to leave Nejas behind. The landcruiser commander would never have made it to Tangmere and evacuation. Maybe none of them would have made it out of Britain alive.

  “Too bad,” Nejas said. “Oh, too bad. How I crave the herb!”

  “As well you can’t get it, then, superior sir,” Skoob told him. The gunner and commander had been crewmales since long before Ussmak joined them; Skoob had earned the right to speak bluntly to his chief. “That filthy stuff’s no good for any male, believe you me it’s not.”

  He’d said as much back in Britain, but he hadn’t turned Ussmak in to the disciplinarians once they’d escaped the chaos of evacuation and reached the relative safety of southern France-relative safety, because even there the Big Uglies proved themselves able to lob poison gas at males and females of their own kind who labored on behalf of the Race. And Skoob had turned both eye turrets away from Nejas when his commander kept tasting while recovering. Skoob disapproved, but was too loyal to do anything about it.

  Shame licked at Ussmak like the flames from a burning landcruiser. Hidden away in the driver’s compartment, he had several-maybe more than several-tastes of ginger. He told himself he’d lied to Nejas because he didn’t want to see the landcruiser commander plunge into degradation as he had done. It was even true-to a degree. But the main reason he’d said he had no more ginger was simple and selfish in the extreme-he didn’t want to share it.

  “Attention, landcruiser crews.” The voice of the transporter pilot filled the audio button taped to Ussmak’s hearing diaphragm. “Attention, landcruiser crews. We are beginning our descent to the landing. Please be alert for possible abrupt motions of the aircraft. Thank you.”

  “Thankyou — very much,” Ussmak muttered, having first made sure he was not transmitting even to his crewmales.Please be alert for possible abrupt motions of the aircraft, indeed! He’d flown into Britain in a landcruiser aboard a heavy transporter. He knew too well what that innocent-sounding euphemism meant. Had the pilot wanted to be honest, he would have said something like,We may have to dodge like maniacs because the stinking Big Uglies are doing everything they can to shoot us down.

  What Ussmak didn’t know was how much the local Big Ugliescould do to shoot him down. Britain had been a dreadful place to fly into or out of. Not only was it a cramped little island, but the locals had a great many killercraft, some of them jet-powered, and radar to help guide those killercraft to their targets. No wonder, then, the transporters had taken such a beating over British skies.

  Here in the eastern portion of the SSSR, that part of the mission was supposed to be easier, although Ussmak had grown heartily tired of experts telling him things about the Tosevites that soon turned out not to be so. But he’d fought in the SSSR before, if farther west, and knew that the Soviets, while they made good landcruisers by Big Ugly standards, lagged behind in other areas of the military art and lacked the doctrine to get the best results from the equipment they did have.

  Or rather, he knew the Sovietshad lagged behind in other areas of the military art andhad lacked proper doctrine. He hadn’t fought them in two of his years, one of Tosev 3’s. Against his own people, or the Rabotevs, or the Hallessi, that wouldn’t have mattered. For the mutable Big Uglies, it was as good as an age. Fearfully, he wondered what new destructive skills the Soviets had learned while he was busy elsewhere on this planet. Suddenly he shuddered. They were the ones who had used atomic weapons.

  Nejas said, “Pilot, how bad is the weather in the area to which we’re flying?”

  “It’s cold, landcruiser commander,” the pilot answered. “There’s frozen water on the ground already, for instance.”

  “That seems to happen a great deal on this planet,” Nejas said, his tone halfway between weary resignation and making the best of things. “I don’t suppose this Siberia place can be too much worse than the rest.”

  “Last Tosevite winter, we were on duty in the southwestern part of the great land mass, what the Big Uglies call Africa,” Skoob said. “That would have been downright pleasant if it hadn’t been so damp. It was warm enough, anyhow, which is more than you can say for a lot of Tosev 3.”

  Ussmak had spent most of the previous winter in a hospital ship, recovering from radiation poisoning after he’d had to bail out of his landcruiser into plutonium-contaminated muck when the Big Uglies raided the area for metal for their nuclear devices. The climate inside the ship had been salubrious enough. Getting there by way of radioactive mud was not a route he recommended, though.

  Even through the steel and ceramic armor of the landcruiser in which he rode now, Ussmak could hear the roaring whine of the transporter’s turbofans. He listened closely for any abrupt change in their tone, and braced himself in his seat. Especially on its landing descent, the huge, clumsy aircraft wasn’t much faster than a Tosevite killercraft. Instead of feeling safe within the twin eggshells of transporter and landcruiser, he felt doubly trapped.

  A swing to the side set his heart pounding. A moment later, the pilot came on to say, “We are experiencing some violent crosswinds, you males in there who can’t see out. Nothing to worry about; radar reports no Tosevite killercraft airborne in our vicinity. We’ll be on the ground shortly.”

  “What do you know?” Skoob said. “Good news for a change.”

  “The Emperor knows we could use some, after the fiasco in Britain,” Nejas said. He sounded like a male who needed a taste of ginger. When you hadn’t had any for a while, the world seemed a grim place indeed. Ussmak had slowly learned that it was the herb-or rather, the lack of it-talking, not the world itself. Some tasters took a long time to figure that out. Some never did.

  The transporter jet jerked in the air. Ussmak jerked in his seat. You didn’t want to try to sit bolt upright; you’d smash your head against the roof of the driver’s compartment. He remembered just in time. The pilot said, “Flaps are down. We’ll be landing momentarily. Landcruiser crews prepare to roll out the cargo bay.”

  Another jolt announced the landing gear coming down. Then the transporter hit the runway. Despite its bulk, it bounced back into the air for an instant, then rolled to a stop. The turbofans screamed as they reversed thrust to help slow the enormous aircraft.

  Ussmak was eager to escape from the transporter. Tosev 3 had too much water and not enough land, but they’d just flown one of the longest all-overland routes possible on the planet. He wanted to get out, look around at his new duty area (or as much of it as he could see through the vision slits of a landcruiser), and, more important still, meet some of the males here and find out where he could get some more ginger after his present supply ran out.

  The nose of the transporter swung up, filling the cargo bay with light other than that of its own fluorescents. The light was white and very cold. “Driver, start your engine,” Nejas said.

  “It shall be done, superior sir,” Ussmak said, and obeyed.

  No sooner had he obeyed than Nejas slammed the lid of the cupola down with a clang. “It’s a freezer out there,” he exclaimed. “Worse than a freezer! You’d go into a freezer to warm up.” A
s if to support him, the landcruiser’s heating elements came on, hissing gently as they blew warm air through the interior of the machine.

  When Ussmak saw the male with a light wand who came up to direct the landcruiser out of the aircraft, he believed every word Nejas had said. The poor guide had an electrically heated suit of the sorts pilots used in the chilly air of high altitudes, and over it a hooded coat and boots made from the furry hides of Tosevite animals. In spite of all that, he looked desperately cold as he waved the landcruiser ahead.

  Ussmak put the machine in gear and rumbled down the ramp. Snow blowing almost horizontally greeted him. The landcruiser’s heater hummed as it worked harder. He hoped it was made to withstand a challenge like this. Snow also started clogging his vision slits. He flicked the button that sent a stream of cleaning liquid onto them. It got rid of the snow, but froze in place, so it was as if he were trying to see out through a pane of ice.

  “Careful!” Nejas shouted. “You almost ran down the guide.”

  “Sorry, superior sir,” Ussmak answered. “If you have vision out your cupola, command me.” He explained what had gone wrong with his own optics.

  Between them, the male with the light wand and Nejas directed Ussmak to a point in front of a building he saw only as a large, solid lump of snow in the midst of all the swirling stuff. A door opened in the side of the solid lump. The guide gestured. “We’re supposed to bail out and go in there, I think,” Nejas said. “I just hope we don’t freeze to death before we make it”

  With a single convulsive motion, Ussmak threw open the hatch above his head and scrambled out. The cold was stunning. His nictitating membranes drew over the surface of his eyes to protect them from the icy blast of the wind, but he had to blink hard to make them return to where they belonged; they had started to freeze in place. His lungs felt as if he were breathing fire. His skin burned for a moment, too, but then went cold and numb.

  “This way! This way!” the guide shouted. Stumbling, Ussmak and his crewmales threw themselves at the entrance to the building. It was only a couple of his own bodylengths away, but he wondered if he would freeze into a solid block of ice before he got to it.

  As soon as the landcruiser crew was inside, the male who had guided them off the transporter slammed the door and dogged it shut. Then he opened the inner door to the chamber. Delicious warmth flowed out. The chamber between the blizzard outside and the oasis of comfort within might almost have been a spaceship airlock. As far as Ussmak was concerned, the environment from which he’d just escaped was far more hostile than the unchanging vacuum of space.

  “New hatchlings!” the guide called as he went into the barracks room that seemed a tiny piece of Home magically transported to Tosev 3. “I’ve got some new hatchlings here-poor fools don’t know they’ve just been stuck up the cloaca of this miserable world.”

  Males in the body paint of landcruiser and fighting vehicle crews crowded round Ussmak and his companions. “Welcome to Siberia,” one of them called. “This place is so bad, they say even Big Uglies got exiled here.”

  “The ground is frozen half the year,” another male added.

  “The atmosphere doesn’t freeze-it just seems that way,” said a third.

  Ussmak had never run into such a cynical band of males. They had to be ginger tasters, he decided, and felt better for a moment.

  Nejas waved his hands, trying to get a word in edgewise. “Where is this railroad we’re supposed to be interdicting? How can we even move about in this hideous weather, let alone fight?”

  “The railroad’s south of here, but not far enough to do us any good,” their guide answered. “We’ve broken it; the trick is to keep the Russkis from hauling anything across the break and shipping it one way or the other. They have all sorts of animals, and sometimes they even use motor transport. When we come on one of their convoys, it’s usually a massacre.”

  “Coming on them is the problem, though,” another male said. “Even radar has trouble seeing through these storms-when it’s not frozen up, that is.”

  Yet another male said, “And we don’t even have it too bad-when we’re out there, we’re in our vehicles. It’s the poor infantrymales I really pity. They have to head out without a nice, warm eggshell around them.”

  “Infantrymales!” Skoob exclaimed. “How could you possibly go out there and fight on foot in-that? And even if you could, why would you?”

  “Because the Russkis can,” said the male who’d guided them. “If we didn’t have infantry patrols out there, the cursed Big Uglies would sneak within mortar range and start dropping their stinking bombs right down on top of our heads. Either that or they’d get into our vehicle parks and work the Emperor knows how much havoc there. They’ve done both, and they probably will again.”

  Ginger or no ginger, Ussmak wanted to hide. “I thought nothing could be worse than Britain and all that poison gas. Maybe I was wrong.”

  In a ragged chorus, the guide and the other males in the barracks sang out: “Welcome to Siberia!”

  Rance Auerbach looked to the cloudy skies, hoping for snow. Thus far, his prayers had gone unanswered. Low, dirty-gray clouds hung over the prairie of eastern Colorado, but whatever snow or even rain-he would gladly have taken rain-they held refused to fall.

  He waved to the troopers of his company, urging them to spread out farther. If a Lizard helicopter spotted them, they were on the way to becoming raw meat. The winter before, from all he’d heard, the Lizards hadn’t got so frisky so late in the year. This time, they’d sent a force west by helicopter to occupy Cheyenne Wells, and were pushing infantry west along US 40 to try to consolidate their position. If they did, that would put Lamar, due south of Cheyenne Wells down US 385, in a hell of a bind.

  Worse still, the next town west of Cheyenne Wells on US 40 was called First View: it was the place where the Rockies first poked up over the horizon of the Great Plains. In the Rockies lay Denver. Because he’d traveled with Leslie Groves, Auerbach got the idea something important was going on in Denver, even if he didn’t know-and had no business knowing-what. Lizard thrusts that headed toward Denver needed stopping, no matter what.

  The prairie seemed utterly empty but for his men and their horses. Turn those into buffalo and you’d have things back the way they were before the white man came-before the red man, too, come to that.

  He turned in his saddle and called to Bill Magruder. “Now I know what the Indians must have felt like, going up against the U.S. Cavalry back in my grandpa’s day.”

  His second-in-command nodded. “Sitting Bull licked General Custer, but look at all the good it did him in the end. We can’t just win fights now and again. We have to win the whole shootin’ match.”

  Auerbach nodded. He’d been trained to think in terms of campaigns, which Sitting Bull certainly hadn’t. He wondered what sort of global strategy the Lizards were trying to maintain. They’d plainly had one at the start of their invasion, but it seemed to have broken down in the face of unexpected human resistance.

  As soon as his company passed Sheridan Lake, Auerbach waved them off US 385. No tracked vehicle could match a horse for cross-country performance. So he told himself, anyhow, although the rule applied more in mountains and marshes than on the rolling plains near the Kansas border. But his troopers and their mounts would be harder to spot in the mix of stubble and unharvested crops than on the asphalt of the highway.

  “Sir, will you want to strike US 40 east or west of Arapahoe?” Magruder asked.

  Auerbach’s orders gave him discretion. Arapahoe lay about ten miles east of Cheyenne Wells, close to the Kansas line. If he came to the highway west of the little town, he risked drawing notice from the Lizards who’d been helicoptered into Cheyenne Wells. If he reached the highway on the Kansas side of Arapahoe, though, he was closer to what had been the Lizards’ main forward bases.

  “We’ll go in to the east of Arapahoe,” he decided after a few seconds’ thought. “The farther east we can damage them,
the more we draw their attention away from moving west, which is what we want to try to do.” That operating as far east as possible made it easier for the Lizards to damage him was something he tried not to think about.

  He and his men camped for the night on an abandoned farm not far south of US 40. When they set out the next morning, they left their horses behind, toting on their backs the supplies they needed, as if they were infantrymen.

  Auerbach had scouts out. He and most of his men sprawled in tall, yellow grass while the scouts advanced to make sure no Lizard patrols were on the highway. He watched through field glasses as the scouts crept forward, their khaki uniforms almost invisible against the brown earth and dying plants.

  Only when they waved did he go forward with the demolition team. Two men laid charges on the surface of the road, connecting each one with the electrical detonator. They ran wire back to a little gully a couple of hundred feet away and then, crouching in it, blew the charges.

  The earth shook under Auerbach. Chunks of asphalt rained down on the improvised trench. Somebody swore: “Goddamn thing hit me right in the ass, Howard. Whose side you on, anyway?”

  Howard was the trooper who’d pushed down the detonator plunger. He said, “I’m on the good guys’ side. Reckon that leaves you out, Maxwell.”

  “Let’s see what we’ve done.” Auerbach got up and trotted over to US 40. He nodded in solemn approval. Through swirling dust, he saw they’d blown a crater across both lanes of blacktop. Anybody who sent a tracked vehicle down into it would get his teeth rattled. Nobody would try to send a wheeled vehicle into it-you’d have to go around.

  The demolition team finished their job in the area, then became ordinary cavalrymen-turned-foot soldiers like the rest of the company. Auerbach positioned his men on the north side of US 40, although that put the highway between them and their horses. The ground rose toward the low ridge of the Smoky Hills there, and offered better firing positions.