“Let me at it,” Skoob said. “We were on duty down south of here, somewhere in the landmass unit the Tosevites call Africa. It was warm enough there, but the water was in the streams or falling from the sky in sheets; the local Big Uglies didn’t know anything about putting it in pipes.”
Nejas also made enthusiastic noises. Ussmak said, “Here, throw your gear on these beds”—they had been Hessef’s and Tvenkel’s—“and I’ll show you what we have.”
All three males were luxuriating in the showers when the unit commander, a male named Kassnass, stuck his head into the chamber and said, “All out. We have an operations meeting coming up.”
Feeling unjustly deprived, to say nothing of damp, Ussmak and his crewmales listened to Kassnass set forth the newest plan for a push toward Belfort. To the driver, it seemed more of the same. Nejas and Skoob, however, listened as if entranced. From what Ussmak had heard, they wouldn’t have faced serious opposition in this Africa place, which was almost as backward technologically as the Race had thought all of Tosev 3 to be. Things were different here.
The unit commander turned one eye turret from the holograms on which the positions of the Deutsche and the Race were marked to the males assembled before him. “A lot of you are new here,” he said. “We’ve had troubles with this garrison, but, by the Emperor”—he and the landcruiser crews cast down their eye turrets—“we’ve cleaned up most of that now. Our veterans know how devious the Deutsche can be. You newcomers, follow where they lead and stay cautious. If something looks too good to be true, it probably is.”
“That’s so,” Ussmak whispered to Nejas and Skoob. Neither of them responded; he hoped they’d pay more attention to Kassnass than they did to him.
Kassnass went on, “Don’t let them lure you into rugged country or the woods; you’re vulnerable if you get separated from the other landcruisers in the unit, because then the Big Uglies will concentrate fire on you from several directions at once. Remember, they can afford to lose five or six or ten landcruisers for every one of ours they take out, and they know it, too. We have speed and firepower and armor on our side; they have numbers, trickery, and fanatical courage. We have to use our advantages and minimize theirs.”
They’re the enemy and they’re only Big Uglies, so of course we call their courage fanatical, Ussmak thought. Saying they’re just doing their best to stay alive like anybody else would give them too much credit for sense.
The males trooped out to the revetments that protected the landcruisers, Ussmak guiding his new commander and gunner. The earth was scored with hits from Tosevite mortars; bomb fragment scars pocked the sides of buildings. Nejas and Skoob rapidly swiveled their eye turrets. Ussmak guessed they hadn’t seen resistance like this from the Big Uglies.
Once in place in the driver’s position, he stopped worrying about what they’d seen and what they hadn’t. He had a vial of ginger stashed in the landcruiser’s fuse box, but he didn’t open it up and taste, not now. He wanted to be clear and rational, not berserk, if he saw action unexpectedly soon.
Helicopter gunships took off with whickering roars audible even through the landcruiser’s thick armor. They’d reach the target area well before the ground vehicles did. With luck, they’d soften up the Deutsche and not take too much damage themselves. Ussmak knew somebody reckoned the mission important; as he’d told his crewmales, helicopters had grown too scarce and precious to hazard lightly.
Through the streets of Besançon, past the busy-looking buildings with their filigrees of iron railings and balconies. Engineers preceded the landcruisers, to make sure no more explosive surprises awaited. All the same, Ussmak drove buttoned up and regarded every Big Ugly he saw through his vision slits as a potential—no, even a likely—spy. The Deutsche would know they were coming even before the helicopters arrived.
Ussmak breathed easier when his landcruiser rumbled over the bridge across the Doubs and headed for open country. He was also taking the measure of Nejas as a landcruiser commander. The new male might not have seen much action, but he seemed crisp and decisive. Ussmak approved. He hadn’t felt part of a proper landcruiser crew since a sniper killed Votal, his first commander. He hadn’t realized how much he missed the feeling till he saw some chance of getting it back.
Somewhere off in the trees, a machine gun opened up with harassing fire. A couple of bullets pinged off the landcruiser. Nejas said, “Take no notice of him. He can’t hurt us, anyway.” Ussmak hissed in delight. He’d seen males with heads abuzz with ginger badly delay a mission by trying to hunt out Tosevite nuisances.
The column rolled north and east. Reports came back that the helicopters had struck hard at the Tosevite landcruisers. Ussmak hoped the reports were right. Knowing the Big Uglies could hurt him put combat in a new light.
A flash, a streak of fire barely seen, a crash that made the landcruiser ring like a bell. “Turret rotate from zero to twenty-five,” Nejas called—urgently, but without the panic or rage or excessive excitement a ginger taster would have used. “Machine-gun fire into those bushes.”
“It shall be done, superior sir,” Skoob replied. The turret swung through a quarter of a circle, from northeast to northwest. The machine gun yammered. “No way to tell whether I got him, superior sir, but he won’t shoot another rocket at one of our landcruisers for a while, I hope.”
“Let us hope not,” Nejas said. “We’re lucky that one hit us on the turret and not in the side of the hull, where the armor is thinner. Briefings say the results can be most unpleasant.”
“Briefings don’t know the half of it, superior sir,” Ussmak said. Vivid inside his head were flames and explosions and unremitting fear, fear that had come flooding back at that impact against the turret and now receded only slowly.
The landcruiser column rolled on. Every now and again, bullets from the bushes struck sparks off armor plate, but the column did not slow. Ussmak kept driving buttoned up. He felt half blind, but didn’t care to have one of those rounds clip off the top of his head.
“Why don’t they keep those pests from harassing us?” Nejas asked after yet another band of Tosevites sprayed the column with gunfire. “This is our territory; if we can’t keep raiders from slipping in, we might as well not have conquered it.”
“Superior sir, the trouble is that almost all the Tosevites hereabouts favor the raiders and shelter them, and we have an impossible time trying to figure out who really lives in the farms and villages and who doesn’t. Identity cards help, but they aren’t enough. This is their planet, after all; they know it better than we can hope to.”
“It was simpler down in Africa,” the landcruiser commander said mournfully. “The Big Uglies there had no weapons that could hurt a landcruiser, and did what they were told once we made a few examples of those who disobeyed.”
“We tried that here, too, I’ve heard,” Ussmak said. “This was before I arrived. The trouble was, the Big Uglies had been making examples of one another yet fighting just the same. They ignored the examples we made, the same way they’d ignored their own.”
“Mad,” Skoob said. Ussmak didn’t contradict him.
The landcruisers began passing old battlefields, some still showing the scars of fires set by shot-up landcruisers. The hulks of destroyed Deutsch armored fighting vehicles still sprawled in death. Some of them were the angular little machines Ussmak had encountered on the plains of the SSSR, but others were the big new ones that could endanger a landcruiser of the Race if well-handled—and the Deutsche handled them well.
Nejas said, “Those are impressive-looking hulks, aren’t they? Even holograms don’t do them justice. When I first saw one, I wondered why our males hadn’t salvaged it; I needed a moment to realize the Big Uglies had made it. I apologize for wondering about some of the things you said, Ussmak. Now I believe you.”
Ussmak didn’t answer, but felt a burst of pleasure more subtle than the jolt he got from ginger, and perhaps more satisfying as well. It had been too long since a superior ackno
wledged that the Race’s obligations ran down as well as up. His last pair of landcruiser commanders had taken him for granted, as if he were just a component of the machine he drove. Not even being a ginger buddy with Hessef had changed that. No wonder he’d felt isolated, alone, hardly part of the Race at all. Now … it was almost as if he’d come out of the eggshell anew.
Smoke rose from the woods up ahead. An artillery shell burst off to one side of the road: the helicopters hadn’t routed the Deutsche, then. Ussmak had hoped he’d be going in to mop up. He hadn’t really believed it, but he’d hoped.
A cannon belched fire and smoke from behind some bushes. Wham! Ussmak felt as if he’d been kicked in the muzzle. But the landcruiser’s heavy glacis plate kept the Tosevite shell from penetrating. Without being ordered, Ussmak swung the vehicle in the direction from which the round had come. “I almost fouled my seat,” he said. “If the Big Uglies had waited till we passed and shot at the side of our hull—”
Nejas took the time to give him one word: “Yes.” Then the landcruiser commander snapped an order to Skoob: “Gunner!” A moment later another single-word command followed: “Sabot!”
Skoob put the automatic loader through its paces. A round of armor-piercing discarding sabot ammunition clattered into the breech of the gun, which closed with a solid thunk. “Up!” the gunner reported.
“Landcruiser, front!” Nejas said, noting the target for Skoob.
“Identified,” Skoob answered: he had it in his thermal sight.
“Fire!”
“On the way,” Skoob said. The report of the landcruiser cannon was less than thunderous inside the hull, but the massive vehicle rocked back from the recoil and a sheet of flame billowed across Ussmak’s vision slits. Again the driver knew pleasure almost as intense as ginger gave: this was how a crew was supposed to work together. He hadn’t known anything like it since Votal got killed. He’d forgotten how satisfying it could be.
And, just as ginger brought a burst of ecstasy as it shot from the tongue to the brain, so teamwork also had its reward: fire and black smoke boiled up behind the bushes as the Deutsch landcruiser that had tried to impede the progress of the Race paid the price for its temerity. The turret machine gun chattered, mowing down the Big Uglies who’d bailed out of their wrecked vehicle.
“Ahead, driver,” Nejas said.
“It shall be done, superior sir,” Ussmak said. Along with part of the column of landcruisers, he pushed the machine forward down the road past the ambush the Big Uglies had hoped to set. The rest of the Race’s armor went after the Deutsche who’d tried to waylay them. The fight was savage, but didn’t last long. When they weren’t caught by surprise in disadvantageous positions, the Race’s landcruisers remained far superior to those of the foe. They methodically pounded the Deutsche till no more Deutsche were left to pound, then rejoined the rear of the advancing column.
“These Big Uglies are better than any Tosevites I’ve seen before,” Nejas said, “but they don’t seem to be anything we can’t handle.”
Ussmak wondered about that. Had his previous crew, their wits cooked on ginger and their tactics and even their commands full of drug-induced sloppiness, really been so inept? He had trouble believing it, but here was an ambush that would have thrown them into fits, brushed away like any minor annoyance.
On the highway, black smoke rose from burning trucks that formed a barricade across the paved surface. The landcruisers in front of Ussmak’s peeled off to the grassy verge to the left to bypass the obstacle. Ussmak was about to swing his handle-bar controller to follow them when dirt fountained up under one and it slewed sideways to a stop.
He hit the brakes, hard. “Mines!” he shouted.
Concealed Deutsch landcruisers and guns opened up on the crippled vehicle. No armor could take that pounding for long. Blue flames spurted from the engine compartment as a hydrogen line began to burn. Then the landcruiser went up in a ball of fire.
Big Ugly males with satchel charges burst from cover to attack the vehicles that had stopped. Machine guns cut down most of them, but a couple managed to fling the explosives either under the rear of a turret or through an open cupola hatch. The roars from those explosions shook Ussmak even inside his armored eggshell.
“Driver, I apologize,” Nejas said. But then, a moment later, he was all business again: “Gunner … Sabot!” The cannon spoke, and killed a Big Ugly landcruiser. Nejas gave his attention back to Ussmak. “Driver, there’s a narrow space of ground on the right between the road and the trees. Take it—if we can get by, we’ll put ourselves in the Tosevites’ rear.”
“Superior sir, that space is probably mined, too,” Ussmak said.
“I know,” Nejas answered calmly. “The gain we win by passing is worth the risk. Steer as close to the burning vehicles as you can without making our own paint catch fire.”
“It shall be done.” Ussmak tramped down hard on the accelerator. The sooner the passage was over, the sooner his scales would stop itching with anticipation of the blast that would put his landcruiser out of commission. With a hiss of relief loud as an air brake, he was through and back on the road again. Big Uglies turned a machine gun on his landcruiser. He let his mouth fall open in scornful laughter: that wouldn’t do them any good. Nor did it; from the turret, the coaxial machine gun scythed down the Tosevites.
“Keep advancing,” Nejas said urgently. “We have more landcruisers behind us, and mechanized infantry combat vehicles as well. If we can deploy in the Big Uglies’ rear, we ruin their whole position.”
Ussmak stepped on it again. The landcruiser bounded ahead. Speed, sometimes, was as important a weapon as a cannon. He spied a Deutsch landcruiser barreling through the undergrowth, trying to find a place from which to block the onslaught of the Race’s armor.
“Gunner! … Sabot!” Nejas shouted—he’d seen it, too. But before Skoob could acknowledge the order and crank the round into the cannon, a streak of fire off to one side took the Big Ugly vehicle in the engine compartment. Red and yellow flames shot up from it, setting the bushes afire.
“Superior, sir, I think the infantry’s dismounted from their carriers,” Ussmak said. “That was an antilandcruiser rocket.”
“You’re right,” Nejas said, and then, “Steer right, away from the road.” Ussmak obeyed, and caught sight of another Tosevite landcruiser. Nejas gave orders to Skoob, the cannon barked, the landcruiser jerked with the recoil … and the Deutsch machine brewed up.
Before long, Ussmak saw something he hadn’t seen much of since the early days on the endless plains of the SSSR: Big Uglies coming out of their overrun hiding places with arms raised in token of surrender. He hissed in wonder. Just for a moment, the sense of inevitable triumph he’d felt then—before the Race really understood how the Big Uglies could fight—came flooding back. He doubted anything was inevitable any more, but the way to Belfort and, with luck, beyond lay open.
When the landcruiser finally stopped for the evening, he thought, he’d have a taste of ginger to celebrate. Just a small one, of course.
Mutt Daniels tasted the rich black earth just outside Danforth, Illinois. He knew soil; he’d grown up as a dirt farmer, after all. If he hadn’t had a talent for baseball, he’d have spent his life eastbound behind the west end of a mule. This was soil as good as he’d ever come across; no wonder the corn grew here in great green waves.
All the same, he wished he weren’t making its acquaintance under these circumstances. He tasted it because he lay flat on his belly between the rows, his face jammed into the dirt so he wouldn’t get a shell splinter in the eye. With the coming of spring, the Lizards were driving hard. He didn’t know how the Army would hold them out of Chicago this time. “Gotta try, though,” he muttered, and tasted dirt again.
More shells came in. They lifted Mutt up, slammed him back to the ground like a wrestler putting on a show in a tank town. Unlike a wrestler, they didn’t pull any punches—he’d be black and blue all over.
“Medic
!” somebody shouted, not far away. The tone wasn’t anguish; surprise was more like it. That meant one of two things: either the wound wasn’t bad or the fellow who’d got it didn’t realize how bad it was. Mutt had seen that before, men perfectly calm and rational with their guts hanging out and blood soaking into the dark dirt and making it blacker than it already was.
“Medic!” The cry came again, rawer this time. Mutt crawled toward it, tommy gun at the ready; no telling what the tall corn might hide.
But only Lucille Potter crouched by Freddie Laplace when Daniels reached him. She was gently getting him to take his bloodstained hands off his calf. “Oh … goodness, Freddie,” Mutt said, inhibited in his choice of language by Lucille’s presence. He hurt not only for Laplace but for the squad; the little guy was—had been—far and away their best point man.
“Give me a hand, Mutt, if you please,” Lucille Potter said. The place where the shell fragment had gone in was a small, neat hole. The exit wound—Mutt gulped. He’d seen worse, but this one wasn’t pretty. It looked as if somebody had dug into the back of Laplace’s leg with a sharp-edged serving spoon and taken out enough meat to feed a man a pretty good dinner. Lucille was already cutting away the trouser leg so she could work on the wound.
“Careful with that scissors,” Laplace said. “You don’t want to slice me any worse than I am already.” Mutt nodded to himself; if that was what Freddie was worrying about, he didn’t know how bad he’d been hit.
“I’ll be careful,” Lucille answered gently. “We’re going to have to get you back to an aid station after Mutt and I bandage you up.”
“Sorry, Sarge,” Laplace said, still eerily composed. “I don’t think I can walk that far.”
“Don’t worry about it, kid.” Mutt was wondering whether Laplace would keep that leg, not about his walking on it. “We’ll get you there. You just want to hold still now while Miss Lucille patches you up.”
In the Balance & Tilting the Balance Page 123
