Upsetting the Balance (36 page)

“Damfino,” Mutt answered. “But you’re right, sir, that’s what it is, all right. Seems to me somebody ought to know about this.” He reached under his helmet to scratch above one ear. “Reckon those bomb disposal people’ll be able to say more about it than we can—if they make it here alive, that is.”

They did. There were four of them, all quiet and unhurried men who didn’t look as if anything got on their nerves, If you were nervous when you started out disposing of bombs, odds were you wouldn’t last long enough to get good at it.

Their leader, a first lieutenant in his middle thirties, nodded when he saw the bomb. “Yeah, we’ve run into a fair number of these,” he said. He’d stuck a toothpick in one corner of his mouth, maybe in lieu of a cigarette. “It’s one of ours, but the fixtures there make it nastier than it used to be.” He pointed to the Lizards’ additions at the nose and tail of the bomb. “Some way or other—don’t quite know how—they can guide these things right into a target. You fellas are lucky to be here.”

“We figured that out, thanks,” Szymanski said dryly. “Can you pull its teeth for us?”

The toothpick waggled. “Sir, if we can’t, you won’t be around to complain about it.” The first lieutenant turned around and studied the bomb. With his back to Mutt and Szymanski, he said, “Now that I think about it, we’ve run into too damn many of these. I used to think the Lizards had raided an arsenal or something, but now my guess is that they’re making bombs for themselves—or having us make ’em for them, I mean.”

“I don’t even like to think about it,” Mutt said. “How can you go to a weapons plant, work all day, know the Lizards are going to use whatever you make to blow up other Americans, and then go home at night and look at yourself in the mirror?”

“Beats me,” the bomb disposal man said. He and his companions stooped beside the bomb and got to work. Their talk reminded Mutt of what you heard in movie operating rooms, except they asked one another for wrenches and pliers and screwdrivers instead of scalpels and forceps and sutures. The real doctors and medics in the aid station he’d just escaped had been a gamier crew; they’d sounded more like ballplayers than anybody’s conventional notion of medical men. On the other hand, if they made a mistake on one of their patients, they wouldn’t blow themselves sky high. That might have a way of concentrating the mind on the job at hand.

One of the men grunted soffly. “Here we go, sir,” he said to the first lieutenant. “The fuse assembly in the nose is fouled up eight ways till Sunday. We could use this one for a football and it still wouldn’t go off.”

The first lieutenant’s sigh was long and heartfelt. “Okay, Donnelly. We’ve seen a fair number of those, too.” He turned back to Mutt and Szymanski. Sweat was pouring down his face. He didn’t seem to notice. “I think maybe the guys who work the bomb factory do a little bit of sabotage when they can get away with it. When the Lizards were using all their own ordnance, they hardly ever had duds.”

“So are they all out of theirs?” Mutt asked.

“Don’t know,” the bomb disposal man answered, with a shrug to dramatize it “If it blows up, who can say who made it?”

“Plenty of them blew up outside.” Captain Szymanski’s voice was harsh. “This probably wouldn’t have been the only Made in the U.S.A. bomb in whatever load that airplane carried. They may be sabotaging some, but they sure as hell aren’t sabotaging all of ’em.”

“Sir, that’s the God’s truth,” the first lieutenant said. He and his men set up what looked like a heavy-duty stretcher next to the bomb. With much careful shifting, they loaded it onto the stretcher and carried it away. Their chief said, “Thanks for calling us on this one, sir. Every time we get one of these guiding mechanisms in one piece, it bumps up the odds we’ll figure out how they do what they do, sooner or later.”

Staggering under the weight of weapon and stretcher, the bomb disposal crew hauled their burden out of the Chicago Coliseum. Mutt watched anxiously till they were gone. Yeah, Donnelly had said the bomb was harmless, but high explosive was touchy stuff. If one of them fell and the bomb went thud on the ground, the bad guys might still win.

Szymanski said, “Sabotage one in ten, say, and you hurt the enemy with that one, yeah, but the other nine are still gonna hurt your friends.”

“Yes, sir,” Mutt agreed, “but even if you’re just sabotaging one in a hundred, you’re making it so you can live with yourself afterwards. That counts, too.”

“I suppose so,” Szymanski said unwillingly.

Mutt didn’t blame him for sounding dubious. Being able to live with yourself counted, sure. But giving the Lizards a good swift kick in the balls counted for more in his book. Having them bomb American positions with American bombs . . . it stuck in his craw.

But if they were running out of their own, maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.

Crash!
The shell smote Ussmak’s landcruiser in the glacis plate. The driver’s teeth clicked together. The shell did not penetrate. The landcruiser kept rolling forward, toward the village that topped the wooded hill.
Crash!
Another shell struck, with the same result, or rather lack of result.

“Front!” Nejas said, back in the turret.

“Identified,” Skoob answered. The turret hummed as it traversed, bringing the landcruiser’s main armament to bear on the little gun that was hammering away at them. Through his vision slits, Ussmak saw Tosevites dash about in the deepening twilight as they served the gun. The landcruiser cannon spoke; the heavy machine rocked back on its tracks for an instant from the recoil. At the same time, Skoob called, “On the way!”

He hadn’t finished the sentence when the high-explosive round burst alongside the Tosevite gun. The cannon overturned; the Big Uglies of its crew were flung aside like crumpled papers. “Hit!” Ussmak shouted. “Well placed, Skoob!” Even now, he could still sometimes recapture the feeling of easy, inevitable triumph he’d known when the war on Tosev 3 was newly hatched. Most of the time, he needed ginger to do it, but not always.

Skoob said, “The British here, they don’t have such good antilandcruiser guns. When we were down there fighting the Deutsche, now, and they hit you, you knew you’d been hit.”

“Truth,” Ussmak said. Deutsch antilandcruiser guns could wreck you if they caught you from the side or rear. The British didn’t seem to have anything to match them. Even the British hand-launched antilandcruiser weapons weren’t a match for the rockets the Deutsch infantry used. Unfortunately, that didn’t make the campaign on this Emperor-forsaken island any easier. Ussmak shivered, though the inside of the landcruiser was heated to a temperature he found comfortable. “The British may not have good antilandcruiser guns, but they have other things.”

“Truth,” Nejas and Skoob said in identical unhappy tones. Nejas went on, “That accursed gas—”

He didn’t say any more, or need to. The landcruiser crew was relatively lucky. Their machine shielded them from the risk of actually being splashed with the stuff, which, if it didn’t kill you, would make you wish it had. They’d stuck makeshift filters over all the land-cruiser’s air inlets, too, to minimize the danger of getting it into their lungs. But the landcruiser wasn’t sealed, and minimizing the danger didn’t make it go away.

In a pensive voice, Skoob said, “You couldn’t pay me enough to make me want to be an infantrymale in Britain.”

Now Ussmak and Nejas chorused, “Truth.” Gas casualties among the infantry had been appalling. They moved from place to place in their combat vehicles—a couple of those were advancing up the hill toward the village with Ussmak’s landcruiser—but when they got to where they were going, they had to get out and fight. Getting out was dangerous at any time. Getting out with the gas in the air and clinging to the ground was worse than dangerous.

Machine-gun fire pattered off the landcruiser. At Nejas’ orders, Skoob pumped high-explosive shells into the buildings that sheltered the gunners. The buildings, made largely of timber, began to burn.

“We’ll seize that village,” Nejas declared. “The native name is”—he paused to check his map—“Wargrave, or something like that. The height will give us a position from which we can look down on and shell the river beyond. Tomorrow we advance on the . . . the”—he checked again—“the Thames.”

“Superior sir, should we consider a night advance?” Skoob asked. “Our vision equipment gives us a great advantage in night fighting.”

“Orders are to stop at Wargrave,” Nejas answered. “Too many casualties have been suffered and machines lost charging through territory still heavily infested with Big Uglies. The gas only makes that worse.”

The shelling had not taken out all the British gunners. Skoob poured more rounds into Wargrave. The mechanized combat vehicles also opened up on the village with their smaller guns. Smoke rose high into the evening sky. Down on the ground, though, muzzle flashes said the British were still resisting. Ussmak sighed. “Looks as if we’ll have to do it the hard way,” he said, wishing for a taste of ginger. The resigned comment might have applied to the Race’s whole campaign on Tosev 3.

“Landcruiser halt,” Nejas said.

“Halting, superior sir.” Ussmak stamped down on the brake pedal. Nejas, he thought approvingly, knew what he was doing. He’d stopped the landcruiser outside the built-up area of Wargrave, but close enough so it could still effectively use not only its cannon but also its machine gun. Firepower counted. Being literally in the middle of action didn’t.

Ussmak had had a couple of commanders who would have charged right into the middle of Wargrave, guns blazing. One of them had got his bravado from a vial of ginger; the other was just an idiot. Both males would have wondered where the satchel charge or bottle full of blazing hydrocarbons or spring-fired hollow-charge bomb had come from . . . for as long as it left them alive to wonder. Nejas hung back and didn’t have the worry.

The mechanized combat vehicles, unfortunately, did not enjoy such luxury. If they disembarked their infantrymales too far from the fighting, they might as well have stayed back at the base—enemy fire would chew those poor males to pieces. They pulled up right at the edge of the village. The infantrymales skittered out, automatic rifles at the ready. Ussmak wouldn’t have wanted their job for all the ginger on Tosev 3.

One of those males went down. He wasn’t dead; he kept firing. But he didn’t advance with his fellows any more. Then a British male in the wreckage of Wargrave launched one of their antilandcruiser bombs at a combat vehicle. The thing was all but ludicrous against the landcruisers. It couldn’t defeat their frontal armor, and usually wouldn’t penetrate from side or rear, either.

But a mechanized combat vehicle was not a landcruiser, nor was it armored like one. Flames and smoke shot from the turret, and from the door by which the infantrymales had exited. Escape hatches popped open. The three-male crew bailed out. One of them managed to reach the second combat vehicle. The Big Uglies shot the other two on the ground. A moment later, the stricken combat vehicle brewed up.

“Advance, driver,” Nejas said. “We’re going to have to mix it up with them whether we want to or not, I fear. Move forward to the outermost buildings. As we clear the village of enemies, we may be able to go farther.”

“It shall be done.” The landcruiser rumbled forward. Shell casings clattered down from the machine gun to the floor of the fighting compartment.

“What’s that?” Nejas said in alarm. With his limited vision, Ussmak had no idea what it was. Of itself, one eye turret swung up to the hatch above his head. If whatever it was hit the landcruiser, he hoped he could dive out in time. Then Nejas said, “Rest easy, males. It’s only a couple of combat vehicles bringing up fresh troops. These egg-impacted British are too stubborn to know they’re beaten.”

Skoob said, “If we have to send in more males here than we’d planned, so be it. We have to get across the river and link up with our males in the northern pocket.”

And why did they have to do that? Ussmak wondered. The short answer was, because the males in the northern pocket not only weren’t beating the British, they were having a dreadful time staying alive. Neither Nejas nor Skoob seemed to notice the contradictions in what the two of them had just said. They were both solid males, gifted militarily, but they didn’t examine ideas outside their specialties as closely as they did those within them.

Ussmak’s lower jaw fell slightly open in an ironic laugh. Since when had he become a philosopher fit to judge such things? Only alienation from the rest of the Race had let part of his mind drift far enough from his duties to notice such discrepancies. Those who still reckoned themselves altogether part of the great and elaborate social and hierarchical web were undoubtedly better off than he was.

Night had fallen by the time the males either killed or drove out the last British defenders of Wargrave. Even then, small-arms fire kept rattling from the woods below the crest of the hill atop which the village sat.

An aggressive officer would have sent males into those woods to clear out the nuisance. The local commander did nothing of the sort. Ussmak didn’t blame him. Even with infrared gear, Tosevite forests were frightening places at night for males of the Race. The Big Uglies belonged in amongst those trees and bushes, and could move quietly through them. The Race didn’t and couldn’t. A lot of males had ended up dead trying.

“Shall we get out and stretch our legs and wiggle our tailstumps?” Nejas asked. “The Emperor only knows when we’ll see another chance.”

As he’d been trained, Ussmak cast down his eyes at the mention of his sovereign. Skoob said, “It’ll be cold out there, but I’ll come. Even a Big Ugly town is better than looking at my gunsight and autoloader all day.”

“What about you, driver?” Nejas asked.

“No thank you, superior sir,” Ussmak said. “With your permission, I’ll sit tight. I’ve already seen more Big Ugly towns than I ever wanted.”

“You don’t want to hatch out of your nice steel eggshell,” Nejas said, but jokingly, not in a way that would cause offense. “As you will, of course. I can’t say I disagree with you for not caring about Tosevite towns. They’re generally ugly before we smash them up, and uglier afterwards.”