Tilting the Balance w-2

by Harry Turtledove

  Shrapnel pattered down like hail. “We better not stand here watching like a couple of dummies,” Sam said. “That stuff’s no good when it lands on your head.” Holding Barbara’s hand, led her across the street and into the apartment building. He felt safer with a tile roof over him and solid brick walls all around.

  The antiaircraft guns kept hammering for fifteen or twenty minutes, which had to be long after the Lizards’ planes were gone. Behind blackout curtains, Sam and Barbara got ready for bed. When she turned out the light, the bedroom was dark as the legendary coal cellar at midnight.

  Sam slid toward her under the cover. Even through his pajamas and the cotton nightgown she wore, the feel of her in his arms was worth all the gold in Fort Knox, and another five bucks besides. “Yeah, happy.”

  “So am I.” Barbara giggled. “By the way he’s poking me there, you’re not just happy.”

  She wasn’t shy about it, or upset, either. That was the good half of her having been married before: she was used to the way men worked. But Yeager shook his head. “Nah he’s horny, but I’m not really,” he answered. “I’d sooner just hold you for a while and then go, to sleep.”

  She squeezed him tight enough to bring the air out in a surprised oof. “That’s a very sweet thing to say.”

  “It’s a very tired thing to say,” he answered, which made her poke him in the ribs. “If I were ten years younger-ah, phooey, if I were ten years younger, you wouldn’t want anything to do with me.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “But I like you fine the way you are. you’really have learned an amazing amount about the Lizards in a very short time.” As if to prove her own point, she added an emphatic cough.

  “Mm, I suppose so,” he said. “Not as much as I want to, though, not just for the sake of the war but because I’m curious, too. And there’s one thing I don’t begin to have a clue about.”

  “What’s that?”

  “How to get rid of them,” Yeager said. Barbara nodded against his chest. He fell asleep with her still in his arms.

  Ussmak gunned the landcruiser toward the next Tosevite town ahead: Mulhouse, its name was. After so long going up and down the road between Besancon and Belfort, pushing past Belfort made him feel he was exploring new territory. He spoke that conceit aloud: “We might as well be part of the band of Sherran-you know, the first male to march all the way around Home.”

  “We studied Sherran just out of hatchlinghood, driver,” Nejas said. “How long ago did he live? A hundred fifty thousand years, something like that-long before the Emperors unified Home under their benevolent rule.”

  Ussmak cast down his eye turrets, but only for a perfunctory instant. No matter how important formalities were to the life of the Race, not getting killed counted for even more. And the more built-up the area got, the more danger the landcruiser faced and the smaller the chance he had to react to it.

  A cloth whipped in the breeze above a half-burnt building: not the red, white, and blue stripes of France, but a white circle on a red background, with a twisty black symbol on the white. The Big Uglies used such flapping rags to tell one of their tiny empires from the next. Ussmak felt a certain amount of pride that the forces of the Race had at last penetrated into Deutschland.

  Bullets rattled off the landcruiser’s flank and turret. The cupola up top closed with a clang. Ussmak hissed in relief: for the first time in a long while, he had himself a landcruiser commander whom he would have minded seeing dead.

  “Driver halt,” Nejas ordered, and Ussmak obediently pressed on the brake pedal. “Gunner, turret bearing 030. That building with the banner above it, two rounds high explosive. The machine gun is in there somewhere.”

  “Two rounds high explosive,” Skoob echoed. “It shall be done, superior sir.”

  The landcruiser’s main armament spoke once, twice. Inside the hull, shielded by steel and ceramic, the reports were not especially loud, but the heavy armored fighting vehicle rocked back on its tracks after each one. Through his vision slits, Ussmak watched the building, already in ruins, fly to pieces; the flag on the makeshift staff was wiped away as if it had never existed.

  “Forward, driver,” Nejas said in tones of satisfaction.

  “Forward, superior sir,” Ussmak acknowledged, and stepped on the accelerator. No sooner had the landcruiser begun to roll, though, than more bullets pattered off its side and rear deck.

  “Shall I give them another couple of rounds, superior sir?”

  Skoob asked.

  “No, the infantry will dig them out soon enough,” the landcruiser commander said. “Small-arms ammunition is still in good supply, but we’re low on shells, and we’ll need high-explosive as well as armor-piercing if we have to fight inside Mulhouse.” He didn’t sound happy at the prospect. Ussmak didn’t blame him: landcruisers were made for quick, slashing attacks to cut off and trap large bodies of the enemy, not to get bogged down battling for a city one street at a time. But taking cities with infantry alone used up males at an alarming rate, even with air strikes. Armor had to help.

  A cloud of dust rose not far in front of the landcruiser, dirt and asphalt rose in a graceful fountain, then pattered down again, some of it onto Ussmak’s vision slits. He hit the cleaner button to clear them. Inside the landcruiser, he needed to worry about only a lucky hit from artillery-and if a round did pierce the vehicle, he’d probably be dead before he knew it.

  Night was falling when they approached the built-up area Ussmak had seen ahead. Nejas said, “We have orders to halt outside of town. This shall be done, of course.” Again the commander sounded less than pleased. As if trying to convince himself, he went on, “However good our night-vision equipment may be, our commanders do not care to go in amongst the Big Uglies’ buildings in darkness. This is no doubt a wise precaution.”

  Ussmak wondered. If you lost momentum, sometimes you had trouble getting it back again. He said, “Superior sir, just this once I wish our commanders would stick their tongues in the ginger jar.” Maybe he’d have a taste himself after everything was secured for the night. Nejas had searched the landcruiser for his little vial, but he’d never found it.

  The commander said, “Just this once, maybe they should. I never thought I would hear myself say that, driver, but you may well be right.”

  Several landcruisers bivouacked together, under the cover of some broad, leafy trees. Not for the first time, Ussmak marveled at the spectacular profusion of plants on Tosev 3-far more varieties than Home enjoyed, or Rabotev 2, or Halless 1. He wondered if all the water on this world had something to do with that it was the most obvious difference between the planets of the Empire and the Big Uglies’ homeworld.

  Even with infantry sentries all around Nejas ordered his crewmales to stay in the landcruiser till they’d finished eating. Then he and Skoob took their blankets and went under the big armored hull to sleep, which gave them almost as much protection from the alert Deutsch snipers as staying inside the turret would have. Ussmak’s seat flattened out enough to let him stay inside the forward hull section through the night.

  That night should have passed peacefully, but it didn’t. He jerked awake in alarm when the turret hatches clanged open. Fearing Big Ugly raiders, he grabbed for his personal weapon and crawled back through the hull to poke his head up through the bottom of the turret ring.

  The silhouette above him unmistakably belonged to a male of the Race. “What’s going on?” Ussmak said indignantly. “I could have shot you as easy as not.”

  “Don’t speak to me of shooting.” Nejas sounded furious. “For a tenth of a day’s pay, I’d turn the main armament of this landcruiser on what are lyingly called our supply services.”

  “Give the order, superior sir,” Skoob said. The gunner had to be even more irate than his commander. “You wouldn’t need to pay me to make me obey. I’d do it for free, and gladly. No supply service would be better than the mishatched one we have in place-or no worse, anyhow, for as best I can tell, we have no suppl
y service in place.”

  “We expended a couple of rounds of high explosive against that machine-gun nest yesterday, if you’ll recall?” Nejas said. “And we used the usual amount of armor-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot rounds, too-you may have noticed we’ve been fighting lately.” He sounded as sardonic as Drefsab, the most cynical male Ussmak had ever met.

  The driver caught the drift of the way things were going.” We didn’t get resupplied?” he asked.

  “We got resupplied,” Skoob said. Again echoing his commander, he went on sarcastically, “In their infinite wisdom and generosity, the fleetlords of the supply service have deigned to dole out to us five magnificent new rounds, one of which is actually high explosive.”

  “Aii.” Ussmak let out a hiss of pain. “They’ve shorted us before, but never anywhere near so badly. If they do that for another two or three days, we won’t have any ammunition left.”

  “It’s all right,” Skoob said. “Before long, they’ll stop issuing hydrogen, too, so we won’t be going anywhere anyhow.”

  That alarmed Ussmak all over again. Nejas said, “It’s not quite so bad. To make hydrogen, all they need is water and energy. If Tosev 3 has too much of anything, it’s water, and energy is cheap. But ammunition needs precision manufacture, too, and the Big Uglies who can do precision manufacture, or most of them, anyhow, aren’t on our side. So we’re short on landcruiser shells. They made it sound very logical when they explained it.”

  “Superior sir, I don’t care about logic like that,” the gunner retorted. “I have a logic of my own: if I don’t get rounds for my gun, and if the Race doesn’t take over some of the places here that can turn out our rounds, we’ll lose-but how can we take them if we don’t have the ammunition to do it?”

  “Believe me, I wasn’t supporting what the supply service males said, just setting it forth,” Nejas said. “As far as I’m concerned, they all come out of addled eggs. If we don’t have the ammunition to do the job now, it’s just going to be tougher later.”

  The gunner grunted. “Right you are, superior sir. Let’s get what they gave us stowed-the Emperor knows we’ll need it tomorrow, even if the supply service hasn’t a clue.” One after another, the five new rounds clunked into place in the racks. “Go back to sleep, driver,” Nejas said when the job was done. “That’s what we’re going to do, anyhow.”

  Ussmak did his best to go back to sleep, but found himself worrying instead. Skoob’s circular logic set his own head spinning. If the Race didn’t have the munitions to overcome the Big Uglies, how were they supposed to conquer Tosev 3? For that matter, how were they supposed to conquer Mulhouse? They could fight their way into the town, but what were they supposed to do when they had no more shells and supply services had none to bring forward?

  Get killed, that’s what, Ussmak thought. He’d come too close to getting killed already, he’d seen too many males die around him, to contemplate that with equanimity. He wiggled and twisted on the lowered seat, trying to find a position where he wouldn’t have to think. The manufacturers of the seat seemed to have overlooked that important design feature.

  When sleep would not come no matter bow he tried to lure it, he sat up and ever so cautiously took his vial of ginger from its hiding place. Even though he was alone in the landcruiser, he let his eye turrets swivel in all directions to make sure no one was watching him. Only then did his tongue flick out to taste the precious powder.

  Instantly, his worries about how the advance into Deutschland would continue fell away. Of course the Race would do whatever was required. Ussmak could see, could all but reach out and touch, the best and easiest way to smash the Big Uglies once and for all. He wished Nejas and Skoob were in here with him. His wisdom would amaze them.

  But somehow, try as he would, he couldn’t make the image glittering in his ginger-filled mind turn from mere image into concrete words and plans. That was the herb’s frustration: what it showed you seemed real until you tried to make it so. Then it proved as evanescent as the steam of his breath on a chilly Tosevite morning.

  “Maybe if I have another taste, everything will come clear,” Ussmak said. He reached for the vial again. Even before his hand closed on it, his tongue flicked out in anticipation.

  Liu Han hated the little scaly devils’ photographs, whether they moved or stood still. Oh, they were marvelous in their way, full of lifelike color and able to be viewed from more than one perspective, almost as if they were life itself magically captured.

  But they had seldom shown her anything she wanted to see. When the little devils held her prisoner on the airplane that never came down, they’d made moving pictures of the congress they’d forced her to have with men she hadn’t wanted. Then, after Bobby Fiore put a child in her, they’d terrified her with images of a black woman dying in childbirth. And now…

  She stared down at the still photograph the scaly devil named Ttomalss had just handed her. A man lay on his back on the paved sidewalk of some city. His face looked peaceful, but he rested in a great glistening pool of blood and a submachine gun lay beside him.

  “This is the Big Ugly male named Bobby Fiore?” Ttomalss asked in fair Chinese.

  “Yes, superior sir,” Liu Han said in a small voice. “Where is this picture from? May I ask?”

  “From the city called Shanghai. You know this city?”

  “Yes, I know this city-I know of it, I should say, because I have never been there. I have never been close to it.” Liu Han wanted to make that as plain as she could. If Bobby Fiore had been killed fighting against the scaly devils, as certainly looked likely, she didn’t want Ttomalss to suspect she was involved. Of that she was innocent.

  The little devil turned one eye turret toward the photograph, the other toward her. She always found that disconcerting. He said, “This male of yours met these evil males who fight us while he was in this camp. He met with them here, in this house. We have proof of this, and you do not ever say it is a lie. If he is with the Big Ugly bandits, maybe you are with these bandits, too?” In spite of the interrogative cough, his words sounded much more like a threat.

  “No, superior sir.” Liu Han used the other cough, the emphatic one. She would have been more emphatic still had she not been feeding the Communists information for weeks. Fear clogged her throat. To the little scaly devils, she was hardly more than an animal. Moreover, she was a woman, and women always ended up with the raw end of any deal.

  “I think you are telling me lies.” Ttomalss used the emphatic cough, too.

  Liu Han burst into tears, Part of that was strategy as calculating as any general’s. Tears bothered the little scaly devils even more than they bothered men: the little devils never cried. Seeing water from a person’s eyes affected them much as seeing smoke coming out of someone’s ears would have affected her. It distracted them and kept them from pushing as hard as they would have otherwise.

  But if she forced the timing of the tears, at bottom they were real enough. Without the scaly devils, she never would have had anything to do with Bobby Fiore; he’d been just another of the men with whom they’d paired her. But he’d been as good to her as circumstances allowed-and he was the father of the child that kicked in her belly even now. Seeing him dead in a great puddle of his own blood was like a blow to the face.

  And she wept for herself. Just before the little scaly devils came down from the sky, the Japanese had bombed her village and killed her husband and son. Now Bobby Fiore was gone, too. Everyone she cared about seemed to die.

  She hugged herself; her forearms went around the swell of her abdomen. The baby kicked again. What would the little devils do with it once it came out into the world? Fear filled, her again.

  Ttomalss said, “Stop this disgusting dripping and answer what I say. I think you are lying, I tell you. I think you know much more of these bandits than you admit… Is that the right word, admit? Good. I think you hide this from us. We do not put up with these lies forever, I promise. Maybe not for long at
all.”

  “Do you know what I think?” Liu Han said. “I think you have night soil where your wits should be. How am I supposed to be a bandit? I am in this camp. You put me here. You put all the people in here. If there are bandits among them, whose fault is that? Not mine, I tell you.”

  She managed to startle Ttomalss enough to make him turn both eye turrets toward her. “There are bandits in this camp; I admit that. When we set it up, we did not know how many foolish and dangerous factions you Big Uglies had, so we did not weed you carefully before we planted you here. But just because the bandits are here does not mean a properly obedient person will have anything to do with them.”

  The phrase he used had the literal meaning of properly respectful to one’s elders. Hearing a little devil speak of filial piety was almost enough to send Liu Han from tears to hysterical laughter. But she sensed she’d made him retreat; he spoke to her now more as equal to equal, not in the badgering way he’d used before.

  She pressed her tiny advantage: “Besides, how could I have anything to do with bandits? You watch me all the time. The only place I ever go is to the market. What can I do there?”

  “The bandits came here,” Ttomalss said. “This male”-he held up the photo of Bobby Fiore’s corpse-“went with them. You knew it, and you said nothing to us. You are not to be trusted.”

  “I did not know where Bobby Fiore went, or why,” she returned. “I never saw him again after that-till now.” She started to cry again.

  “I told you not to do that,” the little devil said peevishly.

  “I can’t-help it,” Liu Han said. “You show me a horrible picture that says my man is dead, you say I did all sorts of dreadful things”- mostof which I did-“and now you want me not to cry? Too much!”

  Ttomalss threw his hands in the air, much as Liu Han’s husband had when he’d given up arguing with her. She hardly mourned him and her boy any more; her life had taken too many other hammer blows since they died. The scaly devil said, “Enough! Maybe you are telling the truth. Our drug to learn this works imperfectly, and I noted that we do not want to give it to you for fear of harming the hatchling growing inside you. You Big Uglies are revolting in so many different ways, and we have to learn about all of them if we are to rule you properly.”