Upsetting the Balance (37 page)

He scrambled out through the cupola. Skoob opened his escape hatch and joined him. Ussmak waited till they both jumped down from the landcruiser. Then he reached under the mat below the control pedals and pulled out his little jar of ginger. He’d been twitchy with need for it all through the fighting, but made himself refrain. Males who went snarling into combat with a head full of the herb were braver than they would have been otherwise—and also stupider. It was a bad combination.

Now, though—He pulled off the stopper to the vial and hissed in dismay. The little bit of brownish powder that poured into the palm of his hand was all he had left. His forked tongue flicked out and lapped it up.

“Ah!” he said. Well-being flowed through him. Fear, loneliness, even cold fell away. He felt proud to be a male of the Race, bringing the benighted Tosevites into the domain of civilization. He thought he could singlehandedly force a crossing of the Thames ahead and effect a junction with the rest of the Race’s males north of London.

With a distinct effort of will, he made himself keep his hands away from the wheel and his foot away from the accelerator. He’d been using ginger a long time now, and knew he wasn’t as omnipotent as he thought he was.

He hadn’t been all that smart before he tasted, though. Had he remembered how low on the herb he was, he could have got out of the landcruiser and found an infantrymale who had more than he could taste at the moment. Now, though, he’d look foolish if he emerged. Worse, he’d look suspicious. Nejas and Skoob both had untainted tongues. They thought he did, too. If they ever found out otherwise, he’d be sent off for punishment, with green stripes painted on his arms.

But if he didn’t find some ginger somewhere, before long his condition would be apparent to them anyhow. He’d be a red-nostriled nervous wreck. Once you started tasting ginger, it got its claw in you and you had to keep doing it.

The exaltation from the herb faded. He sank as low as he had been high. Now the only thing he wanted to do was sit quietly and pretend the world outside the landcruiser didn’t exist. Nejas had had the right of it: he was using the vehicle as an eggshell to separate himself from everything around him. The world couldn’t come in here.

But it did, in the persons of Nejas and Skoob. The landcruiser commander said, “You were wiser than we, driver. Nothing here worth seeing, nothing worth taking. Better we should have stayed inside.”

“We’ll sleep in here, no matter how cramped it is,” Skoob added. “I don’t want to be out in the open if the British start throwing gas at us.”

“No arguments there,” Nejas said, whereupon they did start arguing about who would try to sleep in the turret and who would have the dubious privilege of stretching halfway out next to Ussmak’s reclining driver’s seat. Being the landcruiser commander, Nejas won the argument. The victory proved of dubious value because, among other things, he tried lying down on the spent machine-gun cartridges that littered the floor.

He sat up suddenly, cracking his head on the low ceiling of the driver’s compartment, and hissed in pain. “Help me clean up these miserable things,” he snapped. “You think my hide’s armored in steel and ceramic?” There wasn’t room for anyone to give him a lot of help, but Ussmak opened the hatch above his head. He and Nejas threw the spent cartridges out of the landcruiser. They jingled on the flagstones outside. As soon as most of them were gone, Ussmak dogged the hatch again. As his commander had said, poison gas made sleeping in the open even less attractive than it had been before.

Even for Ussmak, who had the best resting place in the landcruiser, sleeping in it was no bargain, either. He twisted and turned and once almost fell off his seat onto Nejas. Except for feeling elderly, he was glad to see light build up when he peered through his vision slit. Day came early at these latitudes.

Nejas started to sit up again, but thought better of it just in time. He called back to the turret: “Are you awake, Skoob?”

“Superior sir, the question is, ‘Skoob, have you been asleep?’ ” the gunner replied in aggrieved tones. “And the answer is, ‘Yes, but not nearly enough.’ ”

“That holds for all of us,” Nejas said. “Toss down a couple of ration bars, would you?”

“It shall be done.”

The ration bars almost landed on Nejas’ toes. He twisted around so he could pick them up, then handed one to Ussmak. When they were done eating, the commander scrambled back up into the cupola with Skoob and said, “Driver, advance us to the point where we have a good view of the river and that town by it . . . Henley-on-Thames.” After a moment, he added, “ ‘On’ must mean something like ‘alongside of’ in the local Big Uglies’ language.”

Ussmak cared for the local Big Uglies’ language about as much as he’d cared for his egg tooth after it fell off his snout in earliest hatchlinghood. He started the landcruiser engine. “Superior sir, we’re a little low on hydrogen,” he said as he studied the gauges. “We can operate today, I think, but a supply tanker should have come up last night.”

“I’ll radio Logistics,” Nejas answered. “Maybe they did try to send one, and Tosevite bandits ambushed it behind the line. The Big Uglies are pestilentially good at that kind of thing.”

The landcruiser rumbled forward. Ussmak listened with a certain malicious satisfaction to paving stones breaking under the pressure of the tracks. When Nejas ordered him to halt, he hit the brake.

He leaned forward and peered through the vision slit. It didn’t give him anywhere near the view Nejas had from the turret, but what he saw, he didn’t like. The Big Uglies had spent the night—and who could say how much time before that?—fortifying the slope that led down to the river. Belts of the spiky stuff they used in place of razor wire were everywhere. So were trenches, brown scars on green, plant-covered earth. Ussmak was willing to bet that greenery also concealed cleverly hidden mines.

“We shall begin shelling Henley-on-Thames,” Nejas said.

“Gunner, high explosive.”

“It shall be done,” Skoob said, “but we are also low on high-explosive shells. We used a good many yesterday, and, as with the hydrogen, we got no resupply afterwards.”

Before Skoob began firing, the English down below opened up with their own artillery. Whitish puffs, different from the usual clouds of smoke and dust, rose from the Tosevite shells as they burst. Nejas slammed the lid of the cupola down with a clang. “That’s gas!” he exclaimed, with less than the equanimity a landcruiser commander should have displayed.

Nor was Ussmak delighted at having to drive the landcruiser through a thickening curtain of the horrid stuff. The filters that shielded the landcruiser’s air intakes were makeshifts, and he distrusted them for no other reason than that. The Race did not think well of makeshifts. They went wrong too easily. Properly engineered solutions worked right every time. Trusting your life to anything less seemed a dreadful risk to take.

But at least Ussmak and his crewmales enjoyed, if that was the word, some protection against the poison the British spread with such enthusiasm. The poor males in the infantry had next to none. Some males wore masks, patterned either after those the Race used to fight radiation or based on Big Ugly models. But there weren’t nearly enough masks to go around, and the gas also left hideous burns and blisters on bare skin. Ussmak wondered if that was one of the reasons the Tosevites wrapped themselves in cloth.

The landcruiser’s main armament started hammering away, searching for the British guns. Not all the flying rubble came from that cannon’s shells. Radar-guided counterbattery fire also rained down on the sites from which the gas shells had been launched. Low-flying killercraft poured rockets and their own cannon shells into Henley-on-Thames.

“Forward!” Nejas ordered, and Ussmak took his foot off the brake. A moment later, to his surprise, the commander said, “Landcruiser halt.” Halt Ussmak did, as Nejas went on, “We can’t move forward, not against positions like those, without infantry support to keep the Tosevites from wrecking us as we slow down for their egg-addled obstacles.”

“Where are the infantrymales, superior sir?” Ussmak couldn’t see them, but that didn’t prove anything, not with the narrow field of view his vision slits gave. He wasn’t about to unbutton and look around, either, not with gas shells still coming in. “Have they got back into their mechanized combat vehicles?”

“Some of them have,” Nejas said. “They don’t do us much good in there, though, or themselves, either; the combat vehicles will have to slow down for the wire and trenches. But some of the males”—his voice sputtered in indignation—“are running away.”

Ussmak heard that without fully taking it in at first. A few times, especially during the hideous northern-hemisphere winter, Tosevite assaults had forced the Race to fall back. But he slowly realized this was different. These infantrymales weren’t falling back. They were refusing to go forward. He wondered if the like had ever happened in the history of the Race.

Skoob said, “Shall I turn the machine gun on them, superior sir, to remind them of their duty?” His voice showed the same disbelief Ussmak felt.

Nejas hesitated before he answered. That in itself alarmed Ussmak; a commander was supposed to know what to do in any given situation. At last he said, “No, hold fire. The disciplinarians will deal with them. This is their proper function. Hold in place and await orders.”

“It shall be done.” Skoob still sounded doubtful. Again, Ussmak was taken aback. Nejas and Skoob were a long-established unit; for the gunner to doubt the commander was a bad sign.

Orders were a long time coming. When they came, they were to hold in place until the field guns in Henley-on-Thames and the bigger British cannon farther north could be silenced. Aircraft and artillery rained destruction on the town. Ussmak watched that with great satisfaction. All the same, gas shells and conventional artillery kept falling on Wargrave.

Fresh hydrogen eventually reached the landcruiser, but the ammunition resupply vehicle never came. The males of the Race did not move forward, save for a probe by the infantry that the entrenched Big Uglies easily repulsed.

Ussmak wasn’t very happy about where he was. He would have been even less happy, though, he decided, had he been in the northern pocket. That one wasn’t just stalled. It was shrinking.

Atvar paced back and forth. That helped him to think, to some degree. It didn’t mean he wasn’t always staring at the situation map of Britain; one eye always swiveled toward it, no matter how his body was aligned. That kept the pain constant, as if it were festering in several tooth sockets at once.

He hissed in rage and frustration. “Perhaps you were right, Shiplord,” he said to Kirel. “Perhaps even Straha was right, though his egg should have addled before it hatched. We might have done better to deal with the British by means of a nuclear weapon.”

“Exalted Fleetlord, if that be your pleasure, we can still accomplish it,” Kirel said.

“Using nuclear weapons is never my pieasure,” Atvar answered. “And what point to it?”

“Securing the conquest of Britain?” Kirel said.

“The accursed island is so small, it’s scarcely worth having after a couple of these devices detonate on it,” Atvar answered gloomily. “Besides, our losses there have been so dreadful that I fear even keeping pacification forces on it will be more expensive than it’s worth. And besides—” He stopped, unwilling to go on.

Kirel, a reliable subordinate, did it for him: “And besides, now that the British have introduced the use of these vile poisonous gases, every Tosevite empire still in the field against us has begun employing them in large quantities.”

“Yes.” Atvar made the word a hiss of hate. “They were not using them against one another when we came to this miserable iceball of a world. Our analysis leaves no possible doubt as to that point. And yet all their leading empires and not-empires had enormous quantities of these munitions stored and ready for deployment. Now they know we are vulnerable to them, and so bring them out. It seems most unjust.”

“Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel agreed. “Our historical analysis unit has perhaps uncovered the reason for the anomaly.”

“Seeking rational reasons for anything the Big Uglies do strikes me as an exercise in futility,” Atvar said. “What did the analysis unit deduce?”

“The Big Uglies recently fought another major war, in which poisonous gases played an important part. Apparently, they were so appalled at what the gases did that, when this new war broke out among them, no empire dared to use them first, for fear of retaliation from its foes.”

“One of the few signs of rationality yet detected among the Tosevites,” Atvar said with heavy sarcasm. “I gather this unwillingness to use the poisonous gases did not keep them from producing such gases in limitless quantities.”

“Indeed not,” Kirel said. “No empire trusted its neighbors not to do so, and no empire cared to be without means of retaliation should its neighbors turn the gases against it. And so production and research continued.”

“Research.” Atvar made that into a curse. “The blistering agent the British threw at us is quite bad enough, but this stuff the Deutsche use—Have you seen those reports?”

“I have, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. His tailstump curled downward in gloom. “First a male finds the day going dim around him, then he has difficulty breathing, and then he quietly dies. I am given to understand, though, that there is an injectable antidote to that gas.”

“Yes, and if you inject it thinking you have breathed the gas but are mistaken, it makes you nearly as ill as the gas would without treatment.” Atvar hissed mournfully. “A perfect metaphor for Tosev 3, would you not agree? When we do nothing, the Big Uglies wreck us, and when we take steps against them, that presents problems just as difficult in a different way.”

“Truth,” Kirel said. He pointed to the map. “In aid of which, what are we to do about the northern pocket in Britain? We have not been able to suppress British artillery, and it can reach every spot within the pocket. The closer our males get to London, the more built-up areas they have to traverse, and fighting in built-up areas means heavy losses in males and materiel both.”