Striking the Balance (44 page)

She closed her hand around his shaft, down below her busy mouth, and squeezed him, hard. Not more than two heartbeats later, he shuddered and exploded. For a moment, purple spots swam before his eyes. Then the inside of the tent filled with light, so clear and brilliant it seemed to be—

The Lizard fighter-bomber broke off its attack run and began to gain altitude. Omar Bradley scratched at the little bandage on his nose; he’d had a boil there lanced a couple of days before. “I’m glad we’re doing this with a radio signal to back up the wire,” he said. “Lay you seven to two the bombs and rockets broke the link.”

“My old man always told me never bet when I was liable to lose,” Leslie Groves answered. “No flies on him.”

“Not a one,” Bradley agreed. “You’ve got the buttons right there, General. One of them had better work. You want to do the honors and push them?”

“You bet I do,” Groves said. “I’ve been building these damn things for a hell of a long time now. About time I get to find out what they’re like when they go off.”

One of the ignition devices had an insulated wire coming out of it. The other one didn’t. Groves’ broad right thumb came down on one red button, his left on the other.

“Take that, you scaleless, egg-addled, stiff-jointed things!” Teerts cried as his rockets turned a stretch of Tosevite defenses into an oven where the meat would be diced and ground as it was roasted

The Race’s landcruisers were snouting forward even as he bombarded the Big Uglies. The Tosevites had made a mistake this time—they’d made their attack with inadequate resources, and not shifted over to the defensive fast enough when they ran out of steam. The Race’s commanders, who’d learned alertness since coming to Tosev 3, were making them pay for it.

There wasn’t even much in the way of antiaircraft fire in this sector. The Big Uglies had probably had a lot of guns overrun when the Race’s counterattack went in. As Teerts began to climb back into the sky so he could return to the Kansas air base and rearm his killercraft, he decided he hadn’t had such an easy mission since the early days of the conquest, well before the Nipponese captured him.

Sudden impossible swelling glare made the nictitating membranes slide over his eyes in a futile effort to protect them. The killercraft spun and flipped and twisted in the air, violently unstable in all three axes. The controls would not answer, no matter what Teerts did.

“No!” he shouted. “Not
twice!”
He stabbed a thumb toward the ejector button. The killercraft smashed into a hillside just before he reached it.

—real.

Penny Summers pulled back from him, gulping and choking a little, too. She took a long, deep breath, then said, “What the dickens do you suppose that is?”

“You mean you see it, too?” Auerbach said in his ruined voice. His heart was racing like a thoroughbred on Kentucky Derby day.

“Sure do.” Penny flipped the blanket up over him again. “Like somebody fired up a new sun right outside the tent.” She looked around. “Fading now, though.”

“Yeah.” The preternatural glow had lasted only a few seconds. When Auerbach first saw it, he’d wondered if it was a sign he was going to cash in his chips right then and there. It would have been a hell of a way to go, but he was glad he was still around. “What do you suppose it was?”

Before she answered, Penny scrubbed at her chin with a corner of the blanket. Then she said, “Couldn’t begin to guess. Probably some damn Lizard thing, though.”

“Yeah,” Auerbach said again. He cocked his head to one side. There was some sort of commotion out in the streets of the growing tent city of wounded. He heard Lizards calling and shouting to one another, sounding like nothing so much as boilers with bad seams. “Whatever it was, they’re sure excited about it.”

“Will you look at that?” Leslie Groves said softly, craning his neck back to look up and up and up at the cloud whose top, now spreading out like the canopy of an umbrella, towered far higher into the sky than any of the Rockies. He shook his head in awe and wonder. The Lizard fighter plane burning not far away, normally cause for a celebration, now wasn’t worth noticing. “Will you just
look
at that?”

“I’d heard what they were like,” General Bradley answered. “I’ve been through the ruins of Washington, so I know what they can do. But I never imagined the blast itself. Until you’ve seen it—” He didn’t go on. He didn’t need to go on.

“—and heard it,” Groves added. They were some miles back toward Denver: the one thing you didn’t want to be was too close to an atomic bomb when it went off. Even so, the roar of the blast had sounded like the end of the world, and the earth had jumped beneath Groves’ feet. Wind tore past, then quickly stilled.

“I hope we pulled all our men back far enough so the blast didn’t harm them,” Bradley said. “Hard to gauge that, when we don’t have enough experience with these weapons.”

“Yes, sir,” Groves said, and then, “Well, we’re learning more all the time, and I expect we’ll know quite a lot before this war is through.”

“I’m very much afraid you’re right, General,” Bradley said, scowling. “Now we have to see where and how the Lizards will reply. The price we’ve paid to stop this drive is a city given over to the fire. I pray it will prove a good bargain in the end.”

“So do I, sir,” Groves replied. “But if we don’t hold Denver, we can’t hang on to the rest of the U.S.A.”

“So I tell myself,” Bradley said. “It lets me fall asleep at night.” He paused. His features grew so grim and taut, Groves was easily able to imagine what he’d look like if he lived to eighty. “It lets me fall asleep,” he repeated, “but it doesn’t let me stay that way.”

Atvar had been used to getting bad news up in his chamber aboard the
127th Emperor Hetto
or in the bannership’s command center. Receiving it in this Tosevite room more or less adapted for the comfort of the Race was somehow harder. The furnishings and electronics were familiar. The design of the windows, the Tosevite cityscape he saw through them, the very size of the chamber—reminding him why the Race called Tosevites
Big
Uglies—all shouted at him that this was not his world, that he did not belong here.

“Outside Denver, is it?” he said dully, and stared at the damage estimates coming up on the computer screen. The numbers were still preliminary, but they didn’t look good. The Americans, fighting ferociously from prepared positions, had already taken a heavy toll on his males. And now, just when he thought his forces had achieved a breakthrough—“Exalted Fleetlord, they tricked us,” Kirel said. “They conducted an attack in that sector, but so clumsily that they used themselves up in the process, leaving inadequate force to hold the line there. When the local commander sought to exploit what he perceived as a blunder—”

“It was a blunder. Indeed it was,” Atvar said. “It was a blunder on our part. They are subtle, the Big Uglies, full of guile and deceit. They did not simply pull back and invite us forward, as they have with past nuclear weapons. We have warned our males against that. But no. They executed what seemed a legitimate if foolish tactical maneuver—and deceived us again.”

“Truth,” Kirel said, his voice as worn and filled with pain as that of the fleetlord. “How shall we avenge ourselves now? Destroying their cities does not seem to deter the Big Uglies from employing the nuclear weapons they build.”

“Do you suggest a change in policy, Shiplord?” Atvar asked. That could have been a very dangerous question, one all but ordering Kirel to deny he’d suggested any such thing. It wasn’t, not the way the fleetlord phrased it. He meant it seriously.

Even so, Kirel’s voice was cautious as he answered, “Exalted Fleetlord, perhaps we might be wiser to respond in kind and destroy Tosevite military formations in the field against us. This may have more effect than our present policy of devastating civilian centers, and could hardly have less.”

“That does appear to be truth.” Atvar called up a situation map of the fighting in the United States. That let him banish the damage reports from the computer screen. If not from his mind. He pointed to the narrow peninsula stabbing out into the water in the southeastern region of the not-empire. “Here! This Florida place is made for such exploitation. Not only is the fighting on a confined front where nuclear weapons can be particularly effective, striking the Big Uglies in this area will also let us avenge ourselves on the dark-skinned Tosevites who treacherously feigned allegiance to us.”

“May I, Exalted Fleetlord?” Kirel asked, approaching the computer. At Atvar’s gesture of permission, he shifted the image to a more detailed map of the fighting front in Florida. He pointed. “Here, between this town called Orlando and the smaller one named . . . can it really be Apopka?”

His mouth fell open in surprised amusement. So did Atvar’s. In the language of the Race,
apopka
meant “to create a bad smell.” The fleetlord leaned forward to examine the map. “That does seem to be what the characters say, doesn’t it? And yes, that is a likely spot for retaliation.”

“Truth.” Kirel pointed to the dispositions on the map. “The Americans have concentrated a good deal of armor hereabouts. Let the bomb fall where you indicated—after our males withdraw just a bit too obviously. Perhaps we can lure the Tosevites with one of their own tricks.”

“Exalted Fleetlord, it shall be done,” Kirel said.

Nieh Ho-T’ing was glad the little scaly devils had finally stopped showing their pornographic films of Liu Han. They hadn’t succeeded in destroying her usefulness to the cause of the People’s Liberation Army, and, after they’d returned her daughter to her, there wasn’t much point in continuing to portray her as a slut.

If anything, she’d gained prestige from their attacks on her. That had partly been Nieh’s doing, through his showing how the films exposed not Liu Han’s character but the little scaly devils’ vicious exploitation of her when they had her in a situation where her only choice was to submit.

That proposition had proved persuasive to the people of Peking. The central committee, however, had been less impressed. Oh, they’d gone along with Nieh’s arguments, because it redounded to their advantage to do so—and, indeed, Liu Han had gained prestige there, too. But they couldn’t forget that she had been photographed in positions far beyond merely compromising. Since they couldn’t blame her for that, they looked askance at Nieh for taking up with a woman who had done such things.

“Not fair,” Nieh muttered under his breath. The complaints went unnoticed in the
hutung
down which he made his way. What with gossiping women, squealing children, yapping dogs, vendors crying. The virtues of their nostrums and fried vegetables, and musicians hoping for coins, anything less than machine-gun fire would have drawn scant attention. And even machine-gun fire, provided it wasn’t too close, went unremarked in Peking these days.

Nieh came out onto the
Liu Li Ch’ang,
the Street of the Glazed Tile Factory. It would have been a pleasant place to pass time had he had more leisure, for it was full of shops selling old books and other curios. Though he’d been born in the dying days of the Chinese Empire, and though he’d been thoroughly indoctrinated in Marxist-Leninist thought, he still maintained more respect for antiquarian scholarship than he sometimes realized.

Now, though, instead of going into one of those booksellers’ establishments, he paused at the little devils’ outdoor cinema device in front of it. Instead of leering at Liu Han as she let some man’s potent pestle penetrate her, the crowd gaped at what looked like the mother of all explosions.

The smooth Chinese narrator for the newsreel—the same running dog who had so lovingly described Liu Han’s degradation—said, “Thus does the Race destroy those who oppose it. This blast took place in the American province called Florida, after the foolish foreign devils provoked the merciful servants of the Empire beyond measure. Let it serve as a warning to all those who dare to offend our masters here in China.”

From the fiery cloud of the bomb blast itself, the scene shifted to the devastation it wrought. A tank’s cannon sagged down as if it were a candle that had drooped from being too close to the fire. Some of the ground looked as if the heat of the bomb had baked it into glass. Charred corpses lay everywhere. Some of the charred chunks of meat were not yet corpses, for they wriggled and moaned and cried out in their unintelligible language.

“I wouldn’t want that happening to me,” exclaimed an old man with a few long white whiskers sprouting from his chin.

“It happened to the little scaly devils, too,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said. “The Americans used a bomb just like this one against them. This is the scaly devils’ retaliation, but people can make these bombs, too.” He was glad of that, even if the Americans were capitalists.

“Foreign devils can make these bombs, maybe. If what you say is true,” the old man answered. “But can we Chinese do this?” He paused a moment to let the obvious answer sink in, then went on, “Since we can’t we had better do what the little devils say here, eh?”

Several people nodded. Nieh glared at them and at the old man. “The little devils have never used that kind of bomb here, or even threatened to,” he said. “And if we don’t resist them, they’ll rule us the same way the Japanese did—with fear and savagery. Is that what we want?”

“The little scaly devils, they’ll leave you alone if you leave them alone,” the old man said. Nieh resolved to find out who he was and arrange for his elimination; he was obviously a collaborator and a troublemaker.

A couple of people nodded again. But a woman spoke up: “What about that poor girl, the one they made do all those horrible things in front of their cameras? What had she done to them beforehand?”

The old man stared at her. He opened his mouth like a little devil laughing, but had far fewer teeth than the imperialist aggressors from the stars. While the fellow was still groping for a reply, Nieh Ho-T’ing headed back toward the roominghouse where he lived.

When he got there, he found Hsia Shou-Tao sitting in the downstairs dining room, drinking tea with a pretty singsong girl whose green silk dress was slit to show an expanse of golden thigh. Hsia looked up and nodded to him, without the least trace of embarrassment. His self-criticism had not included any vows of celibacy, only a pledge to keep from bothering women who showed they were not interested in him. For the singsong girl, the transaction would be purely commercial. Nieh frowned anyhow. His aide had a way of letting pledges slip a finger’s breadth at a time.