Upsetting the Balance (7 page)

After about fifteen rounds, the mortar stopped shooting. That was painfully developed doctrine. If you kept banging away from the same place too long, the Lizards would get you. Besides, they were going to be calling in air support any minute now. You didn’t want to lose artillery, even a little old mortar. If they couldn’t find you, they couldn’t shoot you.

One of the high school buildings had caught fire. Lizards skittered out of it. Auerbach drew a bead on one, fired. The Lizard sprawled on the ragged grass and lay there kicking. Auerbach shot at another one, to no visible effect. He swore.

Some of his men had got into Lakin itself, so fire came at the consolidated high school from three sides of a ring. Auerbach pricked up his ears—some of the weapons firing from, that direction weren’t regulation Army issue. That meant the locals had joined in the fight. Auerbach wanted to pound his head against the dirt of the shallow foxhole he’d scraped out for himself. The cavalry was going to have to get the hell out in a couple of minutes. Did the Lakinites or whatever they called themselves think the Lizards would give them a big kiss on the cheek for trying to make like soldiers?

He turned to the radioman. “Call our boys in town and tell ’em to get out. Tell ’em to bring out as many of the townies with guns as they can.” He laughed. “Those folks don’t know it yet, but they just joined the Army.” Several of his troopers had joined in the same highly informal way. If you were willing to put your neck on the line to fight the Lizards, Uncle Sam was more than willing to give you a chance to do it by the numbers.

When firing in Lakin began to die down, Auerbach also ordered his troops on the left to pull back. Now he used his machine guns to cover the retreat and keep the Lizards from getting too enthusiastic about pursuit. The troopers had made a lot of raids on Lizard-held small towns. They knew the drill. You wanted to get back to your horses and scatter before the Lizards brought in their planes and helicopters and splattered you all over the landscape.

You could tell at a glance the new fish the troopers were bringing out of Lakin, and uniforms or their absence had next to nothing to do with it. The civilians who’d taken up arms against the Lizards didn’t know how to take cover, they didn’t know how to move, they hesitated before doing what somebody told them. About what you’d expect from three or four farmers in bib overalls and . . . two girls?

Auerbach did a double take. Sure as hell, a couple of young women toting .22s were trotting back with his soldiers. One of them wore overalls, too; the other was in a dress. He played back in his head the orders he’d given the radioman. He’d said
townies;
he hadn’t said
men,
if the troopers claimed they were just following orders, they’d have a point.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” he muttered. That sort of thing had happened before, but, like anybody, he hadn’t expected it to happen to him. He hoped the girls could ride. He’d have horses for them; he’d seen a couple of his men go down. Companions were helping others along.

There were the horses, in a little hollow that shielded them from being spotted from the high school. The mortar was already broken down and packed away. Here came the machine gun crews. The 1919A2 had been developed especially for cavalry; with the weapons came light metal fittings that attached to the standard pack saddle and carried gun, tripod, a spare parts chest, a spare barrel, and three small ammunition chests. Getting everything ready for travel took bare moments.

Auerbach turned to the civilians who’d taken up arms against the Lizards. “Can you ride, people?” Even in farm country like this, it wasn’t a given, the way it would have been a generation before.

But nobody said no, for which he was duly grateful. The newcomers gave their names as they mounted—or, in a couple of cases, clambered onto—the horses of cavalrymen who wouldn’t need them any more. What anybody called Lorenzo Farquhar was doing in Lakin, Kansas, was beyond Auerbach, but it wasn’t his business, either.

The woman in overalls was named Penny Summers; her father Wendell was there, too. The other one was Rachel Hines. She said, “I’ve wanted to shoot those things ever since they came here. Thanks for giving me the chance.” Though she showed a lot of leg mounting, she swung into the saddle as smoothly as any of the men.

When everyone was horsed, Auerbach said, “Now we scatter. You new people, pick a trooper and stick close to him. Rendezvous point is Lamar, Colorado. See you there in a couple of days. Let’s ride.”

Scattering was the best way to make sure attack from the air didn’t wipe out your whole command. Some of the troops galloped off to the north, some to the south toward the Arkansas, some straight off to the west. Auerbach headed northwest himself, to be in the middle of things when the air attacks came. Not that he could do anything about them, but his job was to try . . .

Penny Summers and her dad rode with him. They weren’t horse-folk like his troopers, but they kept up—and everyone was going flat out, too. Hearing a swelling roar in the air behind him, he roweled his gelding with his spurs, wringing out of it every ounce of speed it had. A hammering noise rang through the roar, as if God’s jalopy had developed a knock.

The damage was done in the few seconds before the fighter plane screamed overhead, close enough for Auerbach to see the seams and rivets on the underside of its fuselage. Cannon shells chewed up the ground around the fleeing cavalrymen. A fragment tore his trouser leg and drew a bleeding line on the side of his calf.

He looked around as the plane streaked off after other targets. One of his troopers was down, dead. So was Wendell Summers. It looked as if one shell had got him and another his horse. Auerbach gulped. Even for war, it was ugly.

Penny Summers had reined in, staring in numb astonishment at the red smears and badly butchered meat that had been her father. “Get moving!” Auerbach shouted at her. “You want to end up just like him? We’ve got to get out of here.”

“But—he’s dead,” she said disbelievingly, as if such things couldn’t happen, as if this were peaceful 1938 rather than 1943.

“It’s a chance you take, shooting back at the Lizards,” Auerbach answered. He wanted to be gentle, but he didn’t have time. “Look, miss, we can’t hang around. That plane may be back for another pass, you know.”

Her eyes were green, but white showed all around their irises. She was, he guessed, somewhere in her middle twenties, but shock left her face so blank, she looked years younger. But if she didn’t pull herself together at least well enough to ride that horse in the next ten seconds, he was damn well going to leave her here.

She did. She was still stunned, but she booted the horse in the ribs and got rolling. Auerbach rode alongside her. When he had the time, he’d grieve for his lost men, too. Not now. Now getting away was all that mattered. If that stinking jet hadn’t chewed up the rest of the company too badly, he might even have won himself a minor victory.

Ussmak said, “If they keep pulling us out of the line, how do they expect us to maintain the advance against the Deutsche?”

Nejas let out a hissing sigh. “I am but a landcruiser commander, Ussmak, just as you are but a driver and Skoob here but a gunner. I do not make these decisions, but I am a male of the Race. I obey.”

“Yes, superior sir.” Ussmak sighed, too, but quietly. High-ranking males made decisions, lower-ranking ones obeyed them . . . and paid the price. Two landcruiser commanders and one gunner with whom he’d fought were dead now, and another commander and gunner arrested for being ginger addicts—all that in what everyone had assumed would be a walkover campaign, back when males went into the cold-sleep tanks while the conquest fleet still orbited Home.

Nejas and Skoob were good crewmales, the best he’d had since his first commander and gunner. They didn’t know he had his own little stash of ginger stowed away under one of the flameproof mats in the driver’s compartment of the landcruiser. He wished he’d never got the habit, but when good males died around you, when half your orders made no sense, when you were hurt and bored and didn’t look forward to more combat but knew you had no choice, what were you going to do?

He was no fleetlord or shiplord or grand strategist of any sort, but pulling the landcruisers back from the thrust they’d made struck him as stupid. They’d reached an important river (the locals called it the Rhine) and were poised to strike deep into Deutschland if they could force a crossing—and now this.

“You have to give the Deutsche credit,” he said reluctantly. “No matter how hard we hit them, they hit back. And the Swiss—is that what the other tribe’s name is?—are like that, too. They don’t have weapons as good as the Deutsche, but—”

“I know what I want to give the Deutsche,” Skoob the gunner said. He pointed to the main armament of the landcruiser, a thin black line against the dark blue of the night sky. “Better that than credit, if you ask me.”

Ussmak didn’t argue. The landcruiser was pulled off the road north of Mulhouse (and hadn’t going back through the wrecked Tosevite town been a delight?), parked in a meadow. Tosev 3’s big moon spilled pale light on the mountains to the west, but only made the closer woods seem blacker and more forbidding.

Even by day, Tosev 3 was an alien world to Ussmak. It was too cold to suit him, while the light from the star Tosev paradoxically seemed whiter and brighter than he was used to. At night, though, the planet turned into the sort of haunted place a female might have used to frighten hatchlings.

Everything felt unfamiliar. The odors the chilly breeze brought to the scent receptors on Ussmak’s tongue, some spicy, some bland, others redolent of decay, were all strange to him. The air itself felt heavy and wet to breathe. And the sounds—the chirps and tweets and occasional snarls—were none of them like those night creatures made back on Home. That was one reason Ussmak found them frightening. Another was that he could never be certain which of those night noises came from a Big Ugly sneaking up with the intent of doing him permanent bodily harm.

He said, “I’m going to get my rest while I can. We’ll probably be fighting tomorrow.” Somewhere altogether too close for comfort, the Deutsche were camped with their landcruisers, too, waiting for Tosev to rise. The landcruisers themselves weren’t much, though the new models could sting. But by the way the Deutsche handled them, they could have served as instructors at any training center in the Empire.

New models.
The thought ran through his head as he slid down into the landcruiser through the driver’s hatch. The weapons with which the Race fought on Tosev 3 were not much different from the ones they’d used to conquer the Rabotevs and Hallessi, thousands of years before. They’d been on Tosev 3 a bit more than two years (only a little more than one of this planet’s slow turns around its sun), and already the landcruisers and aircraft with which the Big Uglies fought them were vastly more dangerous than those they’d first met.

That was frightening in and of itself. Worse than frightening was the atomic bomb the Russkis had used. If the Big Uglies got nuclear weapons, the Race was liable to lose the war. Ussmak hadn’t imagined that, not when he rampaged across the plains of the SSSR just after the Race landed.

He closed the hatch after him, dogged it tight. Nejas and Skoob would sleep by the landcruiser, they didn’t have enough room for comfort in the turret. But his seat reclined to make a fair bed. He lay there for a while, but sleep eluded him.

Ever so cautiously, he reached under the mat and took out a little plastic vial. It was full of brownish powder. He pulled off the top, poured a small mound of powder into the palm of his hand, and brought the hand up to his mouth. His scent receptors caught the ginger’s spicy tang even before his tongue flicked out to lap up the powder.

As it made its way to his brain, well-being flowed through him: he felt wise and quick and powerful all at the same time, as if he were the fleetlord and part of the fleetlord’s computer scrambled together. But he also felt
good,
almost as good as he would during mating season. With no females within light-years, mating hardly ever crossed his mind; to the Race, the habits of the Big Uglies seemed a planetwide dirty joke.

When ginger coursed through him, the Big Uglies were laughable, contemptible. Better yet, in his mind they were
small.
With ginger, the war looked not only winnable but easy, the way everyone had thought it would be before the conquest fleet left Home.

But Ussmak had learned better than to taste just before he went into combat. Ginger made you think you were smart and strong, but it didn’t really make you smart and strong. If you roared into action convinced the Tosevites couldn’t possibly hurt you, you were all too likely to end up dead before you realized you’d made a mistake.

Tasting ginger had two other problems attached to it. One was that the first thing a taste made you want was another taste. Ussmak knew he was an addict; he fought against it as best he could, but an addict he remained.

The other problem was what happened when you didn’t take that second taste. Ginger didn’t just lift you. When it was through with you, it dropped you—hard. And the drop seemed all the worse because of how high you’d been before.

Ussmak made himself not reach for the vial again when exhilaration faded. “I’ve done this a lot of times by now,” he said aloud, willing himself to stillness. Depression and fear crashed down on him just the same. He knew they weren’t real, but they felt as real as the pleasure that had gone before them.

Infantrymales screened the landcruisers. In Ussmak’s worried imagination, they fell asleep at their posts or simply failed to spy Deutsch males creeping through what were to the Race alien woods. The first the crewmales would know of their blunders was satchel charges chucked at their landcruisers. Ussmak dozed off shivering in terror.

He woke with a fresh spasm of alarm when the turret hatches clanged shut, but it was only Nejas and Skoob getting into the landcruiser. “I thought you were a couple of Tosevites,” he said resentfully.