Striking the Balance (32 page)

“This here’s the end of the wash,” Andy Osborne announced in a tone like doom.

Now Auerbach wished he’d laid Penny Summers when he had the chance. All his scruples had done was to give him fewer happy memories to hold fear at bay. He didn’t even know what had happened to Penny. She’d been helping the wounded last he’d seen her, a day or so before a Lizard armored column smashed Lamar to bits. They’d evacuated the injured as best they could with horse-drawn ambulances—his States War ancestors would have sympathized with that ordeal. Penny was supposed to have gone out with them. He hoped she had, but he didn’t know for sure.

“Okay, boys,” he said out loud. “Mortar crew went off to the left. Machine gun to the right and forward. Bazookas straight ahead. Good luck to everybody.”

He went forward with the two bazooka crews. They’d need all the fire support they could get, and the M-l on his back had more range than a tommy gun.

The Lizard pickets behind them started firing. Troopers who’d stayed back with the mortar crew engaged the Lizards. Then another Lizard machine gun chattered, this one almost in Auerbach’s face. He hadn’t noticed the armored personnel carrier till it was nearly on top of him; Lizard engines were a lot quieter than the ones people built. He stretched himself flat in the dirt as bullets spattered dust and pebbles all around.

But that machine gun gave away the position of the vehicle on which it was mounted. One of the bazooka crew let fly at it. The rocket left the launcher with a roar like a lion. It trailed yellow fire as it shot toward the personnel carrier.

“Get the hell out of there!” Auerbach yelled at the two-man crew. If they missed, the enemy would just have to trace the bazooka’s line of flight to know where they were.

They didn’t miss. A Lizard tank’s frontal armor laughed at the shaped-charge head of a bazooka round, but not an armored personnel carrier. Flame spurted from the stricken vehicle, lighting it up. Troopers with small arms opened up on it, potting the Lizard crew as they popped out of the escape hatches. A moment later, the deep stutter of the
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50 caliber machine gun added itself to the nighttime cacophony.

“Keep moving! Come on, forward!” Auerbach screamed. “We gotta hit ’em inside Karval!” Behind him, his mortar crew started lobbing bombs at the hamlet. He was rooting for one of them to start a fire to illuminate the area. Lots of the Lizards were shooting back now, and they had a much better idea where his men were than the other way around. A nice cheery blaze would help level the playing field.

As if it were Christmas, he got his wish. A clapboard false front in Karval went up in yellow flames. By the way it burned, it had been standing and curing for a long time. Flames leaped to other false fronts along what had probably been the pint-sized main drag. Their lurid, buttery light revealed skittering Lizards like demons in hell.

From more than a mile outside of town, the heavy machine gun started blazing away at the targets the light showed. You couldn’t count on any one bullet hitting any one target at a range like that, but when you threw a lot of bullets at a lot of targets, you had to score some hits. And, when a
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50 caliber armor-piercing bullet hit a target of mere flesh and blood, that target (a nice bloodless word for a creature that thought and hurt like you) went down and stayed down.

Auerbach whooped like a red Indian when another Lizard armored personnel carrier brewed up. Then both bazooka crews started firing rockets almost at random into Karval. More fires sprouted. “Mission accomplished!” he shouted, though nobody could hear him, not even himself. The Lizards had to figure they were getting hit by something like an armored brigade, not a raggedy cavalry company.

The hammering of the guns hid the noise of the approaching helicopters till it was too late. The first warning of them Auerbach had was when they salvoed rockets at the bazooka crews. It seemed the Fourth of July all over again, but this time the fireworks were going the wrong way—from air to ground. That tortured ground seemed to erupt in miniature volcanoes.

Blast grabbed Auerbach, picked him up, and slammed him down again. Something wet ran into his mouth—blood from his nose, he discovered from the taste of iron and salt. He wondered if his ears were bleeding, too. If he’d been a little closer to one of those rockets—or maybe if he’d been inhaling instead of exhaling—he might have had his lungs torn to bits inside him.

He staggered to his feet and shook his head like a stunned prizefighter, trying to make his wits work. The bazookas weren’t in operation any more. The
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50 caliber machine gun turned its attention to the helicopters; its like flew in Army Air Force planes. He’d heard of machine guns bagging helicopters. But the helicopters could shoot back, too. He watched their tracers walk forward and over the machine-gun position. It fell silent.

“Retreat!” Auerbach yelled, for anyone who could hear. He looked around for his radioman. There was the fellow, not far away—dead, with the radio on his back blown to smithereens. Well, anybody who didn’t have the sense to retreat when he was getting hit and couldn’t hit back probably didn’t deserve to live, anyhow.

He wondered where Andy Osborne was. The local could probably guide him back to the ravine—although. If helicopters started hitting you from above while you were in there, it would be a death trap, not a road to safety. A couple of the Lizard outposts were still firing, too. There weren’t any roads to safety, not any more.

A shape in the night—He swung his Garand toward it before he realized it was a human being. He waved toward the northwest, showing it was time to head for home. The trooper nodded and said, “Yes, sir—we’ve got to get out of here.” As if from a great distance, he heard Rachel Hines’ voice.

Steering by the stars, they trotted in the right direction, more or less, though he wondered how they were going to find the horses some of the troopers were holding. Then he wondered if it would matter: those helicopters would chew the animals to dog food if they got there first.

They were heading that way, too, when the heavy machine gun started up behind them. With the crew surely dead, a couple of other men must have found it and started serving it. They had to have scored some hits on the helicopters, too, for the Lizard machines abandoned their course and swung back toward the
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50 caliber gun.

The makeshift crew played it smart: as soon as the helicopters got close, they stopped firing at them.
No sense running up a SHOOT ME RIGHT HERE sign,
Auerbach thought as he stumbled on through the darkness. The Lizard helicopters raked the area where the machine gun hid, then started to leave. As soon as they did, the troopers opened up on them again.

They returned for another pass. Again, when they paused, the gunners on the ground showed they weren’t done yet. One of the helicopters sounded ragged. He dared hope the armor-piercing ammunition had done it some harm. But it stayed in the air. When the helicopters finished chewing up the landscape this time, the machine gun didn’t start up.

“Son of a bitch!” Rachel Hines said disgustedly. She swore like a trooper; half the time, she didn’t notice she was doing it. Then she said, “Son of a bitch,” in an altogether different tone of voice. The two hunting helicopters were swinging toward her and Auerbach.

He wanted to hide, but where could you hide from flying death that saw in the night?
Nowhere,
he thought, and threw his M-1 to his shoulder. He didn’t have much chance of damaging the machines, but what he could do, he would.
If you’re going to go down, go down swinging.

The machine guns in the noses of both helicopters opened up. For a second or so, he thought they were beautiful. Then something hit him a sledgehammer blow. All at once, his legs didn’t want to hold him up. He started to crumple, but he didn’t know whether he hit the ground or not.

A guard threw open the door to Ussmak’s tiny cell. “You—out,” he said in the Russki language, which Ussmak was perforce learning.

“It shall be done,” Ussmak said, and came out. He was always glad to get out of the cell, which struck him as poorly designed: had he been a Tosevite, he didn’t think he would have been able to stand up or lie down at full length in it. And, for that matter, since Tosevites produced liquid as well as solid waste, the straw in the cell would soon have become a stinking, sodden mess for a Big Ugly. Ussmak did all his business over in one corner, and wasn’t too badly inconvenienced by the lack of plumbing fixtures.

The guard carried a submachine gun in one hand and a lantern in the other. The lantern gave little light and smelled bad. Its odor reminded Ussmak of cooking; he wondered if it used some animal or plant product for fuel rather than the petroleum on which the Tosevites ran their landcruisers and aircraft.

He’d learned better than to ask such questions. It just got him into deeper trouble, and he was in quite enough already. As the guard led him toward the interrogation chamber, he called down mental curses on Straha’s empty head.
May his spirit live an Emperorless afterlife,
Ussmak thought. On the radio, he’d sounded so sure the Big Uglies showed civilized behavior toward males they captured. Well, the mighty onetime shiplord Straha didn’t know everything there was to know. That much Ussmak had found out, to his sorrow.

Waiting in the interrogation chamber, as usual, were Colonel Lidov and Gazzim. Ussmak sent the paintless interpreter a stare full of mixed sympathy and loathing. If it hadn’t been for Gazzim, the Big Uglies wouldn’t have got so much from him so fast He’d yielded the base in Siberia intending to tell the males of the SSSR everything he could to help them: having committed treason, he was going to wallow in it.

But Lidov and the other males of the NKVD had assumed from the outset that he was an enemy bent on hiding things rather than an ally eager to reveal them. The more they’d treated him that way, the more they’d done to turn their mistake into truth.

Maybe Lidov was beginning to realize the error in his technique. Speaking without the translation of Gazzim (something he seldom did), he said, “I greet you, Ussmak. Here on the table is something that may perhaps make your day pass more pleasantly.” He gestured toward the bowl full of brownish powder.

“Is that ginger, superior sir?” Ussmak asked. He knew what it was; his chemoreceptors could smell it across the room. The Russkis hadn’t let him taste in—he didn’t know how long. It seemed like forever. What he meant, of course, was,
May I have some?
The more he associated with the males of the NKVD, the less saying what he meant seemed like a good idea.

But Lidov was in an expansive mood today. “Yes, of course it is ginger,” he answered. “Taste all you like.”

Ussmak wondered if the Big Ugly was trying to drug him with something other than the powdered herb. He decided Lidov couldn’t be. If Lidov wanted to give him another drug, he would go ahead and do it, and that would be that. Ussmak went over to the table, poured some ginger into the palm of his hand, raised the hand to his mouth, and tasted.

Not only was it ginger, it was lime cured, the way the Race liked it best. Ussmak’s tongue flicked out again and again, till every speck of the precious powder on his hands was gone. The spicy taste filled not just his mouth, but his brain. After so long without, the herb hit him hard. His heart pounded; his breath gusted in and out of his lung. He felt bright and alert and strong and triumphant, worth a thousand of the likes of Boris Lidov.

Part of his mind warned him that feeling was a fraud, an illusion. He’d watched males who couldn’t remember that die, confident their landcruisers could do anything and their Big Ugly opponents would not be able to hinder them in the slightest. If you didn’t kill yourself through such stupidity, you learned to enjoy ginger without letting it enslave you.

But remembering that came hard, hard, in the middle of the exhilaration the drug brought. Boris Lidov’s little mouth widened into the gesture the Tosevites used to show amiability. “Go ahead,” he said. “Taste more.”

Ussmak did not have to be invited twice. The worst thing about ginger was the black slough of despond into which you fell when a taste wore off. The first thing you wanted then was another taste. Usually, you didn’t have one. But that bowl held enough ginger to keep a male happy for—a long time. Ussmak cheerfully indulged again.

Gazzim had one eye turret fixed on the bowl of powdered ginger, the other on Boris Lidov. Every line of his scrawny body showed Ussmak his terrible longing for the herb, but he did not make the slightest move toward it. Ussmak knew the depths of a male’s craving. Gazzim had plainly sunk to those depths. That he was too afraid to try to take a taste said frightening things about what the Soviets had done to him.

Ussmak was used to suppressing the effects ginger had on him. But he hadn’t tasted for a long time, and he’d just ingested a double dose of potent stuff. The drug was stronger than his inhibitions. “No, let us now give this poor addled male something to make him happy for a change,” he said, and held the bowl of ginger right under Gazzim’s snout.

“Nyet!”
Boris Lidov shouted angrily.

“I dare not,” Gazzim whispered, but his tongue was more powerful than he was. It leaped into the bowl, again and again and again, as if trying to make up for lost time by cramming a dozen tastes into one.

“No, I tell you,” Lidov said again, this time in the language of the Race. He added an emphatic cough for good measure. When neither Ussmak nor Gazzim took the slightest notice of him, he strode forward and knocked the bowl out of Ussmak’s hands. It shattered on the floor; a brownish cloud of ginger fogged the air.

Gazzim hurled himself at the male from the NKVD, rending him with teeth and claws. Lidov let out a bubbling shriek and reeled away, blood spurting from several wounds. He threw up one arm to protect his face. With the other hand, he grabbed for the pistol he wore on his belt.

Ussmak leaped at him, grabbing his right arm with both hands. The Big Ugly was hideously strong, but his soft, scaleless skin left him vulnerable; Ussmak felt his claws sink deep into Tosevite flesh. Gazzim might have been a wild thing. His jaws had a grip on Lidov’s throat, as if he was going to feed on the male from the NKVD. Along with the smell of the spilled ginger, Ussmak’s chemoreceptors filled with the acrid tang of Tosevite blood. The combination brought him close to beasthood, too.