Upsetting the Balance (49 page)

“So it might, but then they would not have had the strength to back up their deviousness,” Atvar said. “Now they do. And sooner or later, the Soviets will manage to build another nuclear weapon, or the Deutsche, or the Americans—and then more difficult choices will present themselves to us.”

“Difficult, yes,” Kirel said. “We suspect the Americans and the Deutsche and the British as well of having nuclear programs, as the Soviets surely do. But what if we cannot find the source of their production, as we were lucky enough to manage with the Nipponese? Shall we destroy one of their cities instead, taking vengeance for their nuclear attacks in that way?”

“It is to be considered,” Atvar answered. “Many things are to be considered which we had not contemplated before we came here.” That made him nervous in and of itself. Maneuvering through uncharted territory was not what the Race did best. It was seldom something the Race had to do at all, for those who led knew their kind’s weaknesses full well. But on Tosev 3, Atvar found himself with only the choice of too many choices.

The ruined gray stone castle before which Ussmak had halted his landcruiser seemed to him immeasurably old. Intellectually, he knew the frowning pile of stone could hardly have stood there for more than a couple of thousand years (half that, if you counted by Tosev 3’s slow revolutions around its primary)—hardly a flick of the nictitating membrane in the history of the Race.

But his own people had not built such structures since days now more nearly legendary than historical. None survived; a hundred thousand years and more of earthquakes, erosion, and constant construction had seen to that. Chugging up the hill to the castle at Farnham, Ussmak had felt transported in time back to primitive days.

Unfortunately, the British were not so primitive now as they had been when they ran up the castle, either. Otherwise, Ussmak’s landcruiser would not have had to retreat from its attempted river crossing to aid the males in the northern pocket. The northern pocket had no males left in it now. Some had been evacuated. More were dead or captured.

Back in the turret, Nejas called out, “Front!”

Ussmak peered through his own vision slits, trying to find the target the landcruiser commander had spotted. He waited for Skoob to answer, “Identified!” Instead, the gunner said doubtfully, “What have you found, superior sir?”

“That group of Tosevite males advancing along the highway, bearing as near zero as makes no difference,” Nejas answered. “Give them a round of high explosive. It will teach them not to show themselves so openly.”

“It shall be done, superior sir,” Skoob said. The autoloader clanged as it slammed a shell into the branch of the landcruiser’s main armament. “On the way,” Skoob said, an instant before the big gun roared and the landcruiser rocked back on its tracks, absorbing the recoil.

The Big Uglies knew enough to move forward in open order, which left them less vulnerable to artillery fire. Even so, several males went down when the shell burst among them. Those who had not been hit quickly joined their comrades on the ground. “Well aimed, Skoob!” Ussmak exclaimed. “One round and you stopped the advance cold.”

“Thank you, driver,” Skoob answered. “I’m not used to retreating. Of course I obey for the good of the Race, but I don’t much fancy it.”

“Nor I,” Ussmak said. Every time he sneaked a taste of ginger, he was filled with the urge to charge forward into the ranks of the Big Uglies, smashing them with the landcruiser’s tracks while the gunner and commander used the weapons in the turret to work a great slaughter. He knew that was the herb doing his thinking for him, but knowing it made the urge no less urgent.

“No one fancies retreating,” Nejas said. “Landcruiser males are trained to be first into battle, to tear holes in the enemy’s force through which others may pass. Now our task is to keep the British from tearing holes in our force and to be the last ones out of battle. Difficult, I grant you, but less far removed from our basic role than you might think.”

“Truth,” Ussmak said, “but not satisfying truth. Forgive me for speaking so boldly, superior sir.”

“I do forgive you, driver, but I also remind you of our task here,” Nejas said. “The Race has but one airstrip on this island out of range of British artillery: that at the place called Tangmere south of here, not far from the sea. As long as we can hold the British away from it, we can freely bring in supplies and evacuate wounded males as well as those being withdrawn.”

“Truth,” Ussmak repeated. He followed the strategy, but giving up ground to the Tosevites still seemed strange to him. The Deutsche were probably better warriors in a technical sense than the British, but here every Tosevite, whether formally a warrior or not, was an enemy. He hadn’t felt that in the SSSR or France; some there had seemed willing to serve the Race on its terms. Not in Britain. Here they fought with everything they had.

As if thinking along with him, Nejas said, “We can’t let them get within artillery range of Tangmere. If they do, they’ll plaster the airstrip with the hideous poison gas of theirs.” He paused for a moment, then went on, “And from what I’ve heard, we have it lucky. The Deutsche are using a gas that makes this one seem tame: one good whiff and you fall over dead.”

Ussmak said, “Superior sir, if what we have here is good luck, I don’t ever want to see the bad.”

“Nor I,” Skoob agreed. To Nejas, he added, “I see more Big Uglies in the fields and along the road to the north. Shall I give them another couple of rounds of high explosive?”

“Pick your own targets, Skoob,” the landcruiser commander answered. “Remember what ammunition resupply has been like lately, though. We have to hold this position and keep on holding it till we’re ordered to fall back again. That probably won’t be until our time for evacuation comes up: they’re using armor for a shell, and pulling back all the soft meat behind it.”

“Back when we first started the campaign on Tosev 3,” Ussmak said, his words punctuated by the deep rumble of the landcruiser’s main armament, “one of our landcruisers could sit out in the middle of open country and dominate as far as its cannon could reach.” He let out a long, hissing sigh. “It’s not like that any more.”

“Not here, that’s certain,” Nejas said. “Britain hardly has open spaces worthy of the name. There are always trees or hedgerows or stone fences or buildings to give cover to the Big Uglies. When we first landed, too, they didn’t have any antilandcruiser weapons worthy of the name: nothing this side of big guns, anyway, and big guns are easy to spot and neutralize. But now any sneaking infantrymale can carry a rocket or one of those spring-launched egg-addlers the British use. They still can’t hurt us from the front, but from the sides or rear . . . we’ve lost too many landcruisers that way.”

Skoob traversed the turret a couple of hundredths and fired again. Two other landcruisers held positions slightly lower on the hill that led up to Farnham Castle. They also sent high-explosive rounds into the loose ranks of the oncoming British males. Again and again, the British went to ground. Again and again, the survivors got up and kept moving forward.

“I wish we had more infantrymales in the ruins of the town down there,” Ussmak said. “Some of those Big Uglies will get in among them—as you said, superior sir—and work their way toward us.”

Neither of his crewmales argued with him. He wondered if this was what the Tosevites had felt at the outset of the campaign, when for a while the Race swept all before it: the numbing sense that, try as you would to stop it, something would go wrong and you’d end up dead or maimed on account of it

A flight of killercraft roared low overhead from out of the south, dropping bombs on the Big Uglies and strafing them with their cannon. A series of runs like that, by multiple flights, would have ruined the British, but the Race had neither the aircraft nor the munitions to expend in such lavish quantities.

That meant the British would not be ruined. It also probably meant the Race’s forces in Britain would. Ussmak desperately wanted a taste of ginger. Without the herb, the world was a depressing, gloomy, cold place—not that he’d ever found Tosev 3 anything but cold, even with a taste or two inside him. But the cloud that settled over his spirit when he’d gone too long without ginger made the world feel even worse than it was and defeat seem a certainty.

No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than something exploded against the side armor of one of the landcruisers farther down the hill. One of the revolting things about the British spring-launched antilandcruiser bombs was that they gave no clue about their launch site, as, say, a missile did.

This bomb, by good fortune, did not penetrate the landcruiser’s armor, perhaps because it hadn’t landed squarely. After the initial blast, no smoke mounted skyward. No escape hatches popped open. No males bailed out of the landcruiser. Instead the turret slewed rapidly through a quarter of a circle. The machine gun coaxial with the main armament chattered angrily. But if anything in the ruins of Farnham stirred, Ussmak didn’t see it.

“The Big Uglies’ weapons get better all the time,” he said. “We have the same ones we started out with, and we don’t have as many of them. The Tosevite substitutes we’re getting are shoddy, and we don’t have enough of those, either. Why can’t we be the ones who invent something new for a change?”

Neither Nejas nor Skoob answered him. They did not need to answer him; he had already answered himself. The Race looked warily on invention. When it did happen, the results were fed into the culture of the Empire a tiny bit at a time, so as not to create instability. Steadiness counted for more than quickness. The past hundred thousand years, that had worked well. It did not work well on Tosev 3.

His crewmales also had another, less abstract reason for not answering him: they were trying to spot the Big Ugly who’d launched the bomb at the nearby landcruiser. Ussmak peered through his own vision slits, but his field of view was too narrow to offer him much hope of getting a glimpse of the dangerous Tosevite.

He heard a metallic rasp from the turret: Nejas was sticking his head out for a direct look around. That was what a good landcruiser commander was supposed to do. Looking out at the world through the periscopes that ringed the cupola didn’t let you see enough to be sure you were safe.

But if you did stand up in the cupola, by definition you were no longer safe. The moment Nejas emerged, British males started shooting at him. Two bullets ricocheted off the turret and another cracked past before he ducked back down and slammed the cupola lid with a clang.

“I didn’t see any Big Uglies,” he said, the words punctuated by swift, harsh breathing. “That doesn’t mean they didn’t see me. By the Emperor, I hope that other landcruiser took out the male with the bomb launcher. If he didn’t—”

“If he didn’t, we’ll find out quite soon,” Skoob said. The silence that followed probably meant his mouth had fallen open in a laugh. He went on, “I haven’t come close to spotting him. He’s good at what he does. By now, on this planet, the males who aren’t good warriors are mostly dead, on their side and ours both.”

Ussmak was still alive, so he supposed he was good at what he did, by Skoob’s standard, at any rate. He wished he could taste some ginger. Then he’d feel alive, too. He hissed bemusedly. Even when he tasted, he imagined himself triumphantly wielding weapons, never inventing them. Somehow fantasy and hard work in a laboratory failed to come together.

Was that movement in the rubble, right at the edge of his field of vision? He moved his head to one side, trying to look farther in that direction. If it had been movement, it was stopped now.

He opened his mouth to speak up about it anyhow.
Better safe
was a motto drilled into the Race from hatchlinghood. Back on Home, it usually meant avoiding annoyance or discomfort. Here, it had more to do with preventing agony and gruesome death.

Before he could say anything, Skoob’s machine gun started rattling away. Hot brass cartridge cases clattered down onto the floor. “
Got
him!” Skoob shouted, almost as excitedly as if he’d tasted ginger himself. “Tosevite male with a rifle—probably one of the ones who was shooting at you, superior sir.”

“Good riddance to him,” Nejas said.

The turret of the landcruiser that had taken the bomb hit swung back toward the north. The landcruiser started shelling the advancing British males once more. The flames that spurted from the muzzle, the smoke and dirt that flew with each shellburst, impressed Ussmak less than they had before. Armed Tosevites were already inside Farnham, sneaking toward the landcruisers like biters looking to slide needle-nosed mouths between a male’s scales. Swat as you would, you never could quite get rid of all of them. For that, you needed a spray—but here on Tosev 3, the biters were the ones with the poisonous gas.

Clang-pow!
For a moment, Ussmak thought the main armament had fired. But this jolt slewed the landcruiser sideways. Warning lights blazed all over the instrument panel. A klaxon started to hoot, loud enough to make his hearing diaphragms feel like vibrating drumheads. That meant fire loose in the engine compartment in spite of everything the extinguishers could do, which in turn meant the landcruiser could brew up at any moment. Hydrogen wasn’t so enthusiastically explosive as the hydrocarbon fuels the Big Uglies used, but it burned. Oh, it burned . . .

All of that went through Ussmak’s mind far faster than conscious thought. Even before Nejas screamed “Bail out!” Ussmak had the hatch over his head open. He paused only to grab his little jars of ginger, stuff them into a belt pouch, and, almost as an afterthought, pick up his personal weapon. Then he was scrambling up and out, fast as legs and arms would propel him.

A rifle bullet whined past his head, close enough for him to feel, or imagine he felt, the wind of its passage. He skittered across the smooth, sloping surface of the glacis plate, jumped down, and landed heavily on torn-up asphalt, the bulk of the landcruiser between him and the Tosevite guns.

Skoob already sprawled there. “We can’t stay here,” he said, his eyes swiveling wildly as he looked for danger every which way at once. “This thing is liable to go up whenever the fire gets to the ammunition, or to the fuel, or if that cursed Big Ugly sends another bomb into the fighting compartment.”