Turtledove: World War

by In the Balance

  Hessef and Tvenkel had only two concerns: to keep the investigators from learning they had a ginger habit, and to do as much tasting as they could. Those concerns were in Ussmak’s mind, too, but not, as intensely; he’d done a better job of coming to terms with ginger than his commander or gunner.

  But if the investigating officers didn’t figure out ginger had played a big part in the landcruisers’ lackluster performance, what was their report good for? Wastepaper, Ussmak thought.

  A new male with a sack full of gear came into the barracks. His toeclaws clicked on the hard tile floor. Ussmak idly turned one eye turret toward the fellow, but gave him both eyes when he’d read his body paint. “By the Emperor, you’re a driver, too.”

  The newcomer cast down his eyes. So did Ussmak. The new male said, “Good to see someone who shares my specialization.” He tossed his stuff onto a vacant cot. “What are you called, friend?”

  “Ussmak. And you?”

  “Drefsab.” The new driver swiveled both eye turrets. “What a dismal, ugly hole this is.”

  “Too right,” Ussmak said. “Even for the Big Uglies who used to live here, it was nothing to boast about. For properly civilized males—” He let that hang. “Where did they transfer you from?”

  “I’ve been serving in the far east of this continent, against the Chinese and Nipponese,” Drefsab answered.

  “You must have come out of your eggshell lucky,” Ussmak said enviously. “That’s easy duty, from all I’ve heard.”

  “The Chinese don’t have much in the way of landcruisers at all,” Drefsab agreed. “The Nipponese have some, but they aren’t very tough. Hit them and they’re guaranteed to brew up—one-shot firestarters, we call them.” The new male let his mouth fall open at the joke.

  Ussmak laughed, too, but said, “Don’t get overconfident here or you’ll pay for it. I was in the SSSR just after the invasion, and the Soviets, while their landcruisers weren’t too bad, didn’t have the faintest idea how to use them. Then I got hurt, and then I came here. I didn’t believe what the males told me about the Deutsche, but I’ve been in action against them now, and it’s true.”

  “I listen,” Drefsab said. “Tell me more.”

  “Their new landcruisers have guns heavy enough to hurt us with a side or rear deck shot, and front armor thick enough to turn a glancing shot from one of our guns. You can forget about the one-shot firestarter business here. And they use their machines well: reverse slopes, ambushes, any trick you can think of and too many you’ve never imagined in your worst nightmares.”

  Drefsab looked thoughtful. “As bad as that? I’ve heard of some of the things you’re talking about, but I figured half of that, maybe more, was males shooting off steam to haze the new fellow.”

  “Listen, my friend, we were rolling north from here not long ago when we got our eye turrets handed to us.” Ussmak told Drefsab about the push that had started for Belfort and ended up back here at the Besançon barracks.

  “We were held—by Big Uglies?” The new driver sounded as If he couldn’t believe it Ussmak didn’t blame him. When the Race tried to go somewhere on Tosev 3, it generally got there. In lower tones, Drefsab went on, “What happened? Were all the landcruisers tongue-deep in the ginger jar?”

  Although Drefsab had spoken quietly, Ussmak scanned the barracks before he answered. No one was paying any particular attention. Good. Almost whispering, Ussmak said, “As a matter of fact, that might have had something to do with it. Have you been assigned to a landcruiser crew yet?”

  “No,” Drefsab said.

  “I’ll give you a few names to try to stay away from, then.”

  “Thank you, superior sir.” By their paint, Drefsab and Ussmak were of virtually identical rank, but Drefsab honored him not only for the favor but also because of his longer service at this post. Now the new male glanced around the barracks. He too whispered: “Not that I have anything against a taste now and again, you understand—but not in combat, by the Emperor.”

  After he’d raised his eyes from the ritual gesture of respect for the sovereign, Ussmak said cautiously, “No, that’s not so bad.” It was what he tried to do himself. But If Drefsab had asked him for a taste, he would have denied keeping any ginger. He had no reason to trust the other male.

  Instead, though, Drefsab produced a tiny glass vial from one of the pockets of his equipment bag. “Want some of the herb?” he murmured. “We’re not in combat now.”

  Ussmak’s suspicions flickered and blew out. When Drefsab poured a little ginger into his hand, Ussmak bent his head down and flicked it off the scales with his tongue. The new driver tasted, too. They sat companionably together, enjoying the surge of pleasure the powdered herb gave them.

  “Very fine,” Ussmak said. “It makes me want to go out and kill all the Deutsche I can find—or maybe Hessef instead.” He had to explain that: “Hessef is my landcruiser commander. If ginger truly made you as smart as it makes you think you are, Hessef would be the greatest genius the Race ever produced. Barracks, battle, it’s all the same to him: a good enough time for a taste. And Tvenkel the gunner tastes enough to make him shoot before he takes proper aim. I’ve seen him do it.”

  “That doesn’t strike me as smart, not if the Deutsche are as good as you make them out to be,” Drefsab said.

  “They are,” Ussmak answered. “When we got to this miserable iceball of a planet, we had equipment and training simulations. The Deutsche had experience in real combat, and their equipment keeps getting better, while ours doesn’t. Let them choose the terms of the fight and they can be a handful.”

  Drefsab made the vial disappear. “You don’t taste before you’re going into action?”

  “I try not to.” Ussmak moved his eye turrets in a way that said he was ashamed of his own weakness. “When the hunger for ginger comes on a male—but you know about that.”

  “Yes, I know about that,” Drefsab agreed soberly. “The way I look on it is this: a male can yield himself up to the herb and let it be all he lives for, or he can taste the herb as it suits him and go on with the rest of his life as best he can. That’s the road I try to follow, and if it has some bumps and rocky places in it—well, what road on Tosev 3 doesn’t?”

  Ussmak stared at him in admiration. Here was a philosophy for a ginger taster—no, after hearing such words, he needed to be honest with himself: a ginger addict—who nonetheless tried to remember he was a male of the Race, obedient to orders, attentive to duty. He said to Drefsab, “Superior sir, I envy you your wisdom.”

  Drefsab made a gesture of dismissal. “Wisdom? For all I know, I may well be fooling myself, and now you. Whatever it is, the price I paid to win it is much too high. Better by far the herb had never set its claws in me.”

  “I don’t know,” Ussmak said. “After I’ve tasted, I feel as if ginger were the only worthwhile thing this miserable world produces.”

  “After I’ve tasted, so do I,” Drefsab said. “But before, or when I need a taste badly and there’s none to be had . . . times like those, Ussmak, I’m certain ginger is worst for the Race, not best.”

  Times like those, Ussmak had the same feeling. He’d heard stories that some males, if they got desperate enough for ginger, traded pieces of the Race’s military hardware for the herb. He’d never done anything like that himself, but he understood the temptation.

  Before he found a safe way to tell that to Drefsab (some things you didn’t say directly even to a male who’d given you a taste of ginger, not until you were positive you could trust him with your life as well as with the herb), he heard a brief, shrill whistle in the air, followed by a loud crummp! The glass from a couple of windows in the barracks blew inward in a shower of tinkling shards.

  Ussmak sprang to his feet. As he did so, a loudspeaker blared, “Mortars incoming from forest patch grid 27-Red. Pursuit in force—”

  Ussmak didn’t wait to hear any more, not with a good taste of ginger running through him. “Come on,” he shouted to Drefsab.
“Out to the landcruiser park.” Another mortar bomb hit in the yard in front of the barracks. His words punctuated by the blast, Drefsab said, “But I’ve been assigned to no crew.”

  “So what? Some commander and gunner won’t want to wait for their own driver.” Ussmak was as sure of that as of his own name. Ginger ran rampant through the base at Besançon; some commander or other would be feeling more intrepid than patient.

  The two males ran side by side down the stairs to the yard. Ussmak almost stumbled; the risers were built for Big Uglies, not the smaller Race. Then he almost stumbled again, this time because a blast from a mortar bomb nearly hurled him off his feet. Fragments whistled by; he knew only luck kept them from carving him into jagged, bloody bits.

  Off to one side of the barracks, guns opened up, flinging blast and sharp-edged bits of hot brass back at the Tosevites who were hurling them at the Race’s bastion in Besançon. With luck, artillery would take care of the raiders before landcruisers had to go in after them.

  When no more mortar bombs fell for a little while, Ussmak hoped that had happened. But then the bombs started coming in again. The Big Uglies didn’t have antiartillery radar, but they’d learned they had to shift their guns to keep the Race from pounding them to bits. That was the trouble with the Big Uglies: they learned too fast.

  Hessef and Tvenkel came dashing up from wherever the investigation team had been questioning them. “Come on!” they shouted together. Ussmak scrambled into his landcruiser the instant he got to it; unless a mortar bomb landed on top of the turret or in the engine compartment, it was the safest place he could be.

  The familiar vibration of the big hydrogen-burning engine starting up made him feel this was the purpose for which he’d been hatched. He noted with sober pride that his was the third landcruiser to move out of its revetment. Sometimes the energetic aggression ginger brought wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

  With the intercom button taped to one hearing diaphragm, he listened to Hessef telling Tvenkel, “Quick, another taste. I want to be all razor wire when we go after those Deutsche or Français or whoever’s trifling with us.”

  “Here you go, superior sir,” the gunner answered. “And wouldn’t the egg-addled snoops who were just grilling us pitch a fit if they knew what we were doing now?”

  “Who cares about them?” Hessef said. “They’re probably hiding under their desks or else wishing they were back in those addled eggs.” Silence followed—likely the silence of the two males laughing together.

  Ussmak laughed, too, a little. What the other crewmales said was true, but that didn’t mean he was happy about their going into action with heads full of ginger, even If he was doing the same thing himself, it’s not my fault, he thought virtuously. I didn’t know the Big Uglies would sneak a mortar into range.

  Square 27-Red was northeast of the fortress, and east of the river that wound through Besançon. Following the two landcruiser crews that had managed to get moving ahead of him, Ussmak roared down the hill on which the fortress sat and toward the nearest bridge. Big Uglies stared at the landcruisers as they went by. Ussmak was sure they wished one of those mortar bombs had blown him to bits.

  Sometimes when he rumbled through town, he drove unbuttoned and noticed the fancy wrought-iron grillwork that decorated so many of the local buildings. Not today; today, action was liable to be immediate, so he had only his vision slits and periscopes to peer through. The streets, even the big ones, were none too wide for landcruisers. He had to drive carefully to keep from mashing a pedestrian or two and making the Français love the Race even less than they did already.

  He felt the explosion ahead as much as he heard it; for a moment, he thought it was an earthquake. Then gouts of flame shot from the lead landcruiser, which lay on its side. He slammed on the brakes as hard as he could. The murdered landcruiser’s ammunition load began cooking off, adding fireworks to the funeral pyre. Ussmak shivered in horror. If I’d been just a clawtip faster out of the revetment, I’d have driven over that bomb in the street, he thought. The Big Uglies must have figured out just how the Race would respond to a mortar attack and set their ambush accordingly.

  “Reverse!” Hessef yelled into Ussmak s hearing diaphragm. “Get out of here!” The order was sensible, and Ussmak obeyed it. But the commander of the landcruiser behind him didn’t have reflexes as fast as Hessef’s (maybe they weren’t ginger-enhanced). With a loud crunch, the rear of Ussmak’s machine slammed into the front of that one. A moment later, the landcruiser in front of Ussmak backed into him.

  Had the terrorists who planted the explosive under the road stayed around, they might have had a field day attacking stuck landcruisers with firebombs. Perhaps they hadn’t realized how well their plan would work: the multiple accident of which Ussmak found himself a part was far from the only one in the line of landcruisers. The machines, fortunately, were tough, and suffered little damage.

  The same could not be said about the Big Uglies who’d been standing anywhere near where the bomb went off. Ussmak watched other Tosevites carry away broken, bleeding bodies. They were only aliens, and aliens who hated him at that, but Ussmak wanted to turn his eye turrets away from them anyhow. They reminded him how easily he could have been broken and bleeding and dead.

  With patience, which the Race did have in full measure, the snarls unkinked and the landcruisers chose the next best route out of Besançon. This time a special antiexplosives unit preceded the lead machine. Near the bridge over the River Doubs, everybody halted: the unit found another bomb buried under a new patch of pavement.

  Even though air conditioning kept the interior of the landcruiser’s fighting compartment comfortably warm, Ussmak shivered. The Big Uglies had known what the males of the Race would do, and done their best to hurt them not just once but twice—and their best had been pretty good.

  Eventually, the landcruisers did reach square 27-Red. By then, of course, the raiders and their mortar were long gone.

  Back at the barracks that evening, Ussmak said to Drefsab, “They made Idiots of us today.”

  “Not altogether,” Drefsab said. Ussmak waggled one eye turret slightly in a gesture of curiosity. The other male amplified: “We did a good job of making idiots of ourselves.” With that Ussmak could not disagree. It was, however, an opinion to be shared only among those of inconsequential rank—or so he thought.

  But he was wrong. Three days later, inspectors of a sort altogether different from the first lot descended on Besançon. Most of the males whom Ussmak knew to be ginger tasters (and especially ginger tasters who’d let their habits get the better of them) disappeared from the base: Hessef and Tvenkel among them.

  Drefsab wasn’t seen at Besançon any more after that, either. Ussmak wondered at the connection; before long, wonder hardened into near certainty. He knew more than a little relief that the inspectors hadn’t swept him up along with his crewmales.

  If I ever see Drefsab again, I’ll have to thank him, he thought.

  “Jesus Christ, Jäger, you’re still alive?” The big, deep voice boomed through the German encampment.

  Heinrich Jäger looked up from the pot of extremely ersatz coffee he was brewing over a tiny cookfire. He jumped to his feet. “Skorzeny!” He shook his head in bemusement. “And you wonder that I’m alive, after the madcap stunts you’ve pulled off?” He hurried over to shake the SS man’s hand.

  Otto Skorzeny said, “Pooh. Yes, my stunts, if that’s what you want to call them, are maybe more dangerous than what you do for a living, but I spend weeks between them planning. You’re in action all the time, and going up against Lizard panzers isn’t a child’s game, either.” He glanced at Jäger’s collar tabs. “And a colonel, too. You’ve stayed up with me.” His rank badges these days also had three pips.

  Jäger said, “That’s your fault. That madman raid on the Lizards in the Ukraine—” He shuddered. He hadn’t had a tank wrapped around him like an armored skin then.

  “Ah, but you brought home the b
acon, or half the rashers, anyhow,” Skorzeny said. “For that, you deserve everything you got.”

  “Then you should be a colonel-general by now,” Jäger retorted. Skorzeny grinned; the jagged scar that ran from the corner of his mouth toward his left ear pulled up with the motion of his cheek. Jäger went on, “Here, do you have a cup? Drink some coffee with me. It’s vile, but it’s hot.”

  Skorzeny pulled the tin cup from his mess kit. As he held it out, tie clicked his heels with mocking formality. “Danke sehr, Herr Oberst!”

  “Thank me after you ye tasted it,” Jäger said. The advice proved good; Skorzeny’s scar made the face he pulled seem only more hideous. Jäger chuckled under his breath—wherever he’d seen Skorzeny, in Moscow, in the Ukraine, and now here, the man hadn’t cared a fig for military discipline. And now here—Jäger’s gaze sharpened. “What does bring you here, Standartenführer Skorzeny?” He used the formal SS title with less irony than he would have aimed at any other soldier of Hitler’s elite.

  “I am going to get into Besançon,” Skorzeny announced, as if entering the Lizard-held city were as easy as a stroll around the block.

  “Are you?” Jäger said noncommittally. Then he brightened. “Did you have anything to do with that bomb last week? I hear it took out one of their panzers, maybe two.”

  “Petty sabotage has its place, but I do not engage in it.” Skorzeny grinned again, this time like a predator. “My sabotage is on the grand scale. I aim to buy something of value which one of our little scaly friends is interested in selling. I have the payment here.” He reached over his shoulder, patted his knapsack.

  Jäger jabbed: “They trust you to carry gold without disappearing?”

  “O ye of little faith.” Skorzeny sipped the not-quite-coffee again. “That is without a doubt the worst muck I have ever drunk in my life. No, the Lizards care nothing for gold. I have a kilo and a half of ginger in there, Jäger.”

  “Ginger?” Jäger scratched his head. “I don’t understand?”