Upsetting the Balance (29 page)

The guilt never lasted long, though. For one thing, the Big Uglies would have blown up a similar number of males of the Race without a qualm. For another, the way the Nipponese had treated him deserved revenge.

He wasn’t flying in the eastern region of the main continental mass any more. His commanders realized his life would end quickly—or perhaps slowly—if the Nipponese captured him again. Now he undertook missions for the Race from an airfield almost halfway round Tosev 3 from Nippon. France, the local Big Uglies called the place.

“These are the toughest Big Uglies you’ll face in the air,” Elifrim, the base commander, told him. “Our friends across the ocean who fight the Americans might argue, but take no notice of them. The Deutsche fly jets more dangerous than any others the Tosevites use, and the British had airborne radar before we invaded their island.”

“I don’t mind facing them in the air, superior sir,” Teerts answered. “I can shoot back at them now.” He remembered too well lying in Tosevite hands, unable to strike his Nipponese captors. He’d never known or imagined such loneliness, such helplessness.

“Shoot first,” Elifrim urged. “That’s what I mean: you could take your time with the Big Uglies before, but not so much now. The other thing is, you’ll want to use your cannon more and your missiles less.”

“Why, superior sir?” Teerts asked. “I can kill with my missiles from much greater range. If the Big Uglies’ weapons systems are better than they were before the Nipponese captured me, I ought to be more cautious about closing with them, not more eager to do it.”

“Under normal circumstances, you would be right,” the base commander answered. “When it comes to Tosev 3, though, precious little is normal, as you’ll have discovered for yourself. The problem, Flight Leader, is that stocks of air-to-air missiles are dwindling planetwide, and we haven’t found a way to manufacture more. We have plenty of shells for the cannons, though, from our own factory ships and from Tosevite plants here in France and in Italia and the U.S.A. That’s why we prefer you to use the guns.”

“I—see,” Teerts said slowly. “How good is this Tosevite ammunition we’re using? I hate trusting my life to something the Big Uglies turn out.”

“We had some quality control problems at first,” Elifrim said; Teerts wondered how many males had ended up dead as a result of such an innocuous-sounding thing. The commandant went on, “Those are for the most part corrected now. Several Tosevite aircraft have been brought down using shells of Tosevite manufacture.”

“That’s something, anyhow,” Teerts said, somewhat reassured.

Elifrim reached into a desk drawer and drew out two shell casings. Teerts had no trouble figuring out which chunk of machined brass had traveled from Home and which was made locally: one was gleaming, mirror-finished, while the other had a matte coating, with several scratches marring its metal.

“It looks primitive, but it works,” Elifrim said, pointing to the duller casing. “Dimensionally, it matches ours, and that’s what really counts.”

“As you say, superior sir.” Teerts was less than enthusiastic about using those shell casings in his killercraft, but if the Race had plenty of them and a dwindling supply of both proper shells and missiles, he didn’t see that he had much choice. “Are the armorers satisfied with them?” Armorers were even fussier about guns than pilots.

“On the whole, yes,” Elifrim answered, though for a moment his eyes looked to the side walls of the office, a sign he wasn’t telling everything he knew. When he spoke again, he attempted briskness: “Any further questions, Flight Leader? No? Very well, dismissed.”

Teerts was glad to leave the office, lit only by a weak electric bulb left over from the days when the Tosevites had controlled the air base, and to go out into the sunlight that bathed the place. He found the weather a trifle cool, but pleasant enough. He walked over to his killercraft to see how the technicians were coming along in readying it for the next mission.

He found a senior armorer loading shells into the aircraft’s magazine. “Good day, Flight Leader,” the male said respectfully—Teerts outranked him. But he was an important male, too, and everything in his demeanor said he knew it.

“Good day, Innoss,” Teerts answered. He saw that some of the shells the armorer was using were shiny ones of the Race’s manufacture, others with the duller finish that marked Big Ugly products. “What do you think of the munitions the Tosevites are making for us?”

“Since you ask, superior sir, the answer is ‘not much,’ ” Innoss said. He lifted a Tosevite shell out of the crate in which it had come. “All the specifications are the same as they are for our own ammunition, but some of these don’t feel quite right.” He hefted the shell. “The weight is fine, but the balance is off somehow.”

“Are all the ones the Tosevites produce like that?” Teerts asked.

“No,” the armorer answered. “Only a few. With their primitive manufacturing techniques, I suppose I should not be surprised. The miracle is that we get any usable shells at all.”

Suspicion flared in Teerts. “If it is not a universal trait, these shells with the odd balance will be somehow flawed,” he predicted. “Believe me when I say this, Innoss. I know the Big Uglies and their tricks better than I ever dreamt I would. Sure as I had an eggtooth to help me break out of my shell, some ingenious Tosevite has found a way to diddle us.”

“I don’t see how,” Innoss said doubtfully. “The weight is proper, after all. More likely some flaw in the process. I have seen video of what they call factories.” Derision filled his hiss.

“Their weapons may be outdated next to ours, but they are well made of their kind,” Teerts said. “I’ll bet you a day’s pay, Innoss, that close enough examination of that misbalanced shell will turn up something wrong with it.”

The armorer sent him a thoughtful look. “Very well, Flight Leader, I accept that wager. Let us see what this shell has to say to us.” He carried it away toward his own shack by the ammunition storage area.

Teerts thought about how he would spend his winnings. Reaching a conclusion didn’t take long:
I’ll buy more ginger.
Amazing how easy the stuff was to get. Every other Big Ugly who swept up or brought food onto the air base seemed to have his own supply. Every so often, Elifrim caught a user and made an example of him, but he missed tens for every one he found.

Teerts was still busy inspecting his aircraft when Innoss returned. The armorer drew himself up in stiff formality. “Superior sir, I owe you a day’s pay,” he said. “I have already requested a file transfer between our accounts.” He spoke more respectfully than he ever had before; till now, Teerts had been just another officer as far as he was concerned.

“What did the Big Uglies do?” Teerts asked, doing his best not to show the relief he felt. He’d gained prestige by being right; only now did he think about how much he’d have lost had he been wrong.

“I X-rayed three shells: one of ours, one of theirs with proper balance, and one of theirs with improper balance,” Innoss said. “The first two were virtually identical; as you said, superior sir, they can do good enough work when they care to. But the third—” He paused, as if still not believing it.

“What did the Big Uglies do?” Teerts repeated. By Innoss’ tone, he guessed it was something perfidious even for them.

“They left out the bursting charge that goes behind the penetrating head,” the armorer answered indignantly. “If they’d just done that, the shells would have been light, and quality control would have found them easily. But to make up for the empty space within the shells, they thickened the metal of the head just enough to match the missing weight of powder. I wonder how many shells have done far less damage to the enemy than they should because of that.”

“Have you any way to trace down which Tosevite plant turned out the sabotaged shells?” Teerts asked.

“Oh, yes.” Innoss opened his mouth not in a laugh but to show off all his teeth in a threat display that made it clear the distant ancestors of the Race had been fierce carnivores. “Vengeance shall fall on them.”

“Good,” Teerts said. This wasn’t like vengeance on the Nipponese, where thousands who had done nothing to him had died simply because they lived near where the Big Uglies had chosen to undertake nuclear research. The Tosevites who suffered now would have earned what they got, each and every one of them.

“The Race is in your debt,” Innoss said. “I telephoned the base commandant and told him what you had led me to discover. You shall be recognized as you deserve; your body paint will get fancier.”

“That was generous of you,” Teerts said. A promotion, or even a commendation, would mean more pay, which would mean more ginger. After so many horrors, life was good.

Like Shanghai, Peking had seen better days. The former capital’s fall to the Japanese had been relatively gentle—
Chiang’s corrupt clique simply cut and ran,
Nieh Ho-T’ing thought disparagingly. But the Japanese had fought like madmen before the little scaly devils drove them out of Peking. Whole districts lay in ruins, and many of the palaces formerly enjoyed by the emperors of China and their consorts and courtiers were only rubble through which scavengers picked for bits of wood.

“So what?” Hsia Shou-Tao growled when Nieh spoke of that aloud. “They were nothing but symbols of oppression of the masses. The city—the world—is better off without them.”

“It could be so,” Nieh said. “Were it up to me, though, they would have been preserved as symbols of that oppression.” He laughed. “Here we are, arguing over what should be done with them when, first, they are already destroyed and, second, we have not yet the power to say what any building’s fate will be.”

“A journey of a thousand
li
begins with but a single step,” Hsia answered. The proverb made him grimace. “More than a thousand
li
from Shanghai to here, and my poor feet feel every stinking step I took.”

“Ah, but here we are in the hibiscus-flower garden,” Nieh Ho T’ing said with an expansive wave. “Surely you can take your ease.”

“Hibiscus-flower night soil,” Hsia said coarsely; he reveled in a peasant’s crudity. “It’s just another dive.”

The Jung Yüan (which meant hibiscus-flower garden) had been a fine restaurant once. It looked to have been looted a couple of times; soot running up one wall said someone had tried to torch the place. Those efforts were all too likely to succeed; Nieh wondered why this one had failed.

He sipped tea from a severely plain earthenware cup. “The food is still good,” he said.

Hsia grunted, unwilling to admit anything. But, like Nieh, he’d demolished the
lu-wei-p’in-p’an
—ham, minced pork, pigs’ tripes and tongue, and bamboo shoots—all in a thick gravy—that was one of Jung Yüan’s specialties. Pork and poultry were the only meat you saw these days; pigs and chickens ate anything, and so were eaten themselves.

A serving girl came up and asked, “More rice?” When Nieh nodded, she hurried away and returned with a large bowlful. Hsia used the lacquerware spoon to fill his own eating bowl, then held it up to his mouth and shoveled in rice with his chopsticks. He slurped from a bowl of
kao liang,
a potent wine brewed from millet, and belched enormously to show his approval.

“You are a true proletarian,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said, not at all ironically. Hsia Shou-Tao beamed at the compliment.

A couple of tables over, a group of men in Western-style suits was having a dinner party, complete with singsong girls and a raucous orchestra. Despite all Peking had been through, the men looked plump and prosperous. Some had their arms around singsong girls, while others were trying to slide their hands up the slits in the girls’ silk dresses. A couple of the girls pulled away; not all entertainers were courtesans. Most, though, accepted the attentions either as their due or with mercenary calculation in their eyes.

“Collaborators,” Nieh said in a voice that would have meant the firing squad in territory controlled by the People’s Liberation Army. “They could not be so rich without working hand in glove with the little scaly devils.”

“You’re right,” Hsia grunted. He filled his bowl of rice again. With his mouth full, he added, “That one there, in the dark shiny green, she’s a lot of woman.”

“And her beauty is exploited,” Nieh answered. Like a lot of Communist officials, he had a wide puritanical streak in him. Sex for sport, sex for anything but procreation, made him uneasy. His stay in a Shanghai brothel had reinforced that opinion rather than changed it.

“So it is,” Hsia said; Nieh’s doctrine was true. But the other man did not sound happy to concur.

“You are not an animal. You are a man of the revolution,” Nieh Ho-T’ing reminded him. “If joy girls are what you wanted in life, you should have joined the Kuomintang instead.”

“I am a man of the revolution,” Hsia repeated dutifully. “Coveting women who are forced to show their bodies”—a Chinese euphemism for prostitution—“to get money to live proves I have not yet removed all the old corrupt ways from my heart. Humbly, I shall try to do better.”

Had he made the self-criticism at a meeting of Party members, he would have stood with head bowed in contrition. Here, that would have given him away for what he was—and the scaly devils and their running dogs were as eager as either Chiang’s clique or the Japanese had been to be rid of Communists. Hsia stayed in his seat and slurped millet wine . . . and, in spite of self-criticism, his eyes kept sliding toward the singsong girl in the green silk dress.

Nieh Ho-T’ing tried to bring his attention back to the matter at hand. Keeping his voice low, he said, “We have to put fear into these collaborators. If a few of them die, the rest will serve the little devils with less attention to their duties, for they will always be looking over their shoulder to see if they will be next to pay for their treacheries. Some may even decide to cooperate with us in the struggle against imperialist aggression.”

Hsia Shou-Tao made a face. “Yes, and then they’d sell us back to the scaly devils, along with their own mothers. That kind of friend does our cause no good; we need people truly committed to revolution and justice.”