Upsetting the Balance (50 page)

“Tell me something I didn’t know,” Ussmak answered. “Where’s the commander?”

Just then, Nejas jumped down on both of them. Blood dripped from a surprisingly neat hole in his left forearm. “They hit me when I started to climb out,” he said, barely opening his mouth so as to show as little pain as he could. Skoob reached for a bandage, but Nejas waved him off. “We have to get clear first.”

The commander scurried away from the hull of the stricken landcruiser, keeping it between himself and the Tosevites. Ussmak and Skoob followed. Ussmak wanted to spray bullets back at the Big Uglies, but that would have reminded them he was there. He would sooner have had them forget all about him.

Clang-pow!
The sound was quite different from outside the landcruiser, but unmistakable all the same. Another of those spring-launched bombs—Ussmak and his crewmates had got away just in time. Turning one eye backwards, he saw flame race over the whole vehicle. Then ammunition started cooking off inside. A perfect black smoke ring shot out through the opening atop the cupola.

The pyrotechnics finally alerted the crews of the other two landcruisers that something had gone wrong behind them. They both broke off shelling the advancing British Big Uglies and lashed the ruins of Farnham with fire, trying to rout out the fighting males already sneaking through those ruins.

Ussmak doubted they would succeed in exterminating the Tosevites. He was past the point of caring. As long as they made the Big Uglies lie low long enough to let him find shelter, that would do. He’d given up hoping for anything better than temporary respite.

Nejas dove behind a couple of gray stone blocks that had been blasted off the wall of Farnham’s castle. Ussmak and Skoob followed him to earth as if they were hunted beasts.
We might as well be hunted beasts,
Ussmak thought. In combat and out of his landcruiser, he felt naked and soft and hideously vulnerable, like some crawler cruelly torn from its shell.

“Let’s see that now, superior sir,” Skoob said, pointing to Nejas’ wound.

Nejas held out the arm. His eyes wandered vaguely. When he opened his mouth to speak, only a wordless hiss came out. The interior of his mouthparts was a pale, pale pink. He hadn’t lost that much blood, but he did not look good. “Shock,” Ussmak said, his voice worried.

“Truth,” Skoob said. He wrapped a wound bandage around the landcruiser commander’s arm. “I hope one of those other crews will radio for an evacuation helicopter; our own set just went up in flames.” He turned both eyes toward Nejas. “If we have to walk out—and I’m afraid we will—he’ll be a burden unless he comes out of it.”

No rescue helicopter appeared. Nejas sank further into sludgy semiconsciousness. Ussmak grew more and more sure they would have to retreat on foot. If they were going to do that, they needed Nejas on his legs and moving. Trying to carry him, they’d be separately slowed, and easy meat for any armed Big Uglies whose path they chanced to cross. Abandoning the landcruiser commander never crossed Ussmak’s mind; for all he’d been through, he was still in some ways a well-drilled male of the Race.

But how to get Nejas up on his legs? Skoob was looking around helplessly, perhaps for some males to lend them a hand. Ussmak did not think anyone would magically materialize, not unless another landcruiser got killed, in which case the crewmales would likely have wounded of their own.

He got an idea of a different sort. He reached into the pouch in which he’d stored his ginger, took out a vial, and poured some of the powdered herb into the palm of his hand. Skoob stared at him in astonishment. He ignored the gunner. Holding his hand just in front of the tip of Nejas’ muzzle, he said, “Superior sir? Taste this.”

His greatest fear was that Nejas was too far gone to hear him, or to respond if he did. But the commander’s bifurcated tongue flicked out, almost of itself, and brought into his mouth a fair-sized taste of ginger. Ussmak waited tensely to see if it would do any good.

The membranes that had fallen halfway across Nejas’ pupils suddenly peeled back, leaving the landcruiser commander’s eyes bright and alert. His tongue shot forth again, and cleared the last of the ginger from Ussmak’s palm. “By the Emperor, what is that stuff?” he demanded. “Whatever it is, it’s marvelous.”

Skoob spoke before Ussmak could: “That’s the Tosevite herb, isn’t it? The one we’ve had so much trouble with, I mean.” He turned one eye from Nejas toward Ussmak. “What are you doing with it? Possession of ginger is against regulations and subject to punishment.”

“What do you think I’m doing with it?” Ussmak snapped, irritated by the manifest stupidity of the question. “I’m a ginger taster, that’s what. And it was the only thing I could think of to get the commander moving again.” He shifted his eyes to Nejas. “I’m sorry, superior sir. This way, we can sort things out later. If I hadn’t given it to you, I didn’t think there’d be a later.”

“You were right,” Nejas declared, which silenced Skoob. The landcruiser commander’s voice was vibrant, full of life. Moments before, his wound had left him all but unconscious. Now he seemed to have forgotten he’d been hurt. “Where’s my personal weapon?” he asked, looking around for it. “If I can get my hands on it, the three of us should be plenty to drive all the Big Ugly fighting males out of this damp, grimy little town.”

Now Skoob stared at him, as if certain the ginger had robbed him of his wits. And so, in a way, it had. Ussmak recognized the symptoms from his own first tastes of ginger: the certainty that you could do anything, regardless of the odds. He still felt that when he tasted, but now he knew it was the herb’s illusion. Nejas didn’t have the experience to recognize it for what it was.

Gently, Ussmak said, “Superior sir, you remain yourself, nothing more, however powerful the herb may make you feel. Use logic, if you can: if we could not drive the Big Uglies from Farnham from inside our landcruiser, we won’t do it now that the machine is wrecked. We need to get out of here and get you and your wounded arm seen to.”

Ginger made you think faster than you did without it. It also made you think you were thinking better than you did without it, though that wasn’t always so. After only the briefest pause, Nejas said, “Truth. We must leave. Logic.” Ussmak wasn’t sure how clear his commander’s wits really were, but he wanted to get Nejas moving and get all three of them out of Farnham before the ginger’s exhilaration wore off and the first dreadful depression crashed down to take its place.

Without warning, Nejas broke cover, skittering southward toward another pile of rubble. A bullet kicked up earth between his feet; another struck sparks from the stonework behind him. With a headlong leap, he reached the new shelter. “Come on!” he called to his crewmales. “Nothing to it!”

Ussmak wished he’d also tasted; it would have helped nerve him for the dash across open, empty space. “Go on,” Skoob said. “I’ll cover you.” He fired a few shots as Ussmak poised, sprinted, dove. Ussmak returned the favor when Skoob made the dangerous crossing.

From rubble to wreckage, from wreckage to house, they made their way south out of Farnham. The houses, those few of them that hadn’t been ruined in the fighting, looked tidy and comfortable, at least by Tosevite standards. As he scurried from one of them to the next, always wondering when a bullet he never heard would hit him, Ussmak began to see how a Big Ugly who was faced with the loss of such comfort might fight hard to keep it.

Houses thinned out and gave way to open country. That worried Ussmak. It gave him and his crewmales fewer hiding places than they’d had in town. And untold enemies could lurk behind the hedgerows that separated one miniature field from the next. Ussmak eyed those hedgerows with mingled fear and respect. Some of them had been growing for the Emperor only knew how long; even a land-cruiser had trouble crashing through them.

Hedgerows, however, were not his only concern. As he’d known it would, Nejas’ ginger charge wore off, leaving the landcruiser commander very much a drained battery. Nejas slumped bonelessly to the rough asphalt of the road. “I can’t go on,” he moaned, after-tasting depression holding him in its teeth. “And even if I could, what good would it do?”

“Here, superior sir, taste this.” Ussmak got out more ginger. He didn’t know if a brand-new user could stand having so much course through him, but he did know the alternative was abandoning Nejas. He’d had commanders he would have happily abandoned, but Nejas wasn’t one of them.

“I don’t want it,” Nejas said; now he knew what Ussmak was giving him. But Ussmak had never heard a more obvious lie. Nejas’ eyes never moved from the palm that held the ginger. When Ussmak brought his hand close to the other male’s muzzle, Nejas’ tongue flicked out and licked it clean.

Quietly, Skoob said to Ussmak, “We ought to report you for punishment when we get to an area where such things are possible.”

“Do whatever you’re going to do,” Ussmak answered, as weary as he ever remembered being. “The point is that we get to one of those places, not what we do afterwards.”

“Let’s go.” Nejas surged to his feet again. His eyes had a hectic glow to them, as if fires burned uncontrolled in his brain. Ussmak knew about those fires, and the herbal wind that fanned them. He hoped he hadn’t given the commander too much ginger. Voice crackling with unassailable certainty, Nejas pointed south. “That way. Before long we shall surely encounter one of our bases intended to hold down this land.”

Unless we encounter Big Ugly infiltrators first,
Ussmak thought.
If they were in Farnham, no reason they can’t have slipped south of it. They’re good at such things. After all, this is their planet.
Over the days since the Race came to Tosev 3, he’d got a thorough education as to what that meant.

Something moved at the bottom of a hedgerow. He didn’t pause to wonder about what it might be; males who hesitated once seldom got the chance to hesitate twice. He fired a short burst, his first bullet an instant ahead of Skoob’s.

Only after his finger came off the trigger did he see what he and the landcruiser gunner had been shooting at: a round little spiny animal with a pointed snout. It was dead now, dead and torn and bleeding, its tiny black eyes staring up in blind reproach. For the first time since he woke up from cold sleep on Tosev 3, Ussmak felt guilty about killing something.

13

Mutt Daniels crouched in a broken house, peering out through the glassless window and down the wreckage-filled street. The Lizards were still moving forward; between their onslaughts and the stubborn American defense, Chicago was being ground to meal, and fine meal at that.

The wind that whistled through the window and through the gaping holes in the roof had a chilly edge to it. The sun was going down early these days, too, when you could see it through the clouds, both natural and of smoke.

“Never thought I’d be one rootin’ for an early winter an’ snow on the ground, but I sure as hell am,” Mutt muttered to himself. The winter before, the Americans had kicked the stuffing out of the Lizards, who didn’t seem to have a clue about fighting in the cold. In the summertime, though—Mutt marveled that he was still alive.

A noise from behind him made him whirl around. His first sergeant, a burly Irishman named Herman Muldoon, nodded to him and said, “We got some new fish comin’ in out of the north, Lieutenant; replacements, by Jesus! They’re all going to be green as paint, poor lads.”

“Yeah, well, that’s one thing ain’t nobody can say about the likes of us,” Mutt answered. Muldoon’s answering chuckle showed crooked teeth, a couple of them broken. He was a few years younger than Daniels; like Mutt, he’d been Over There in what had been optimistically called the War to End War. As best they could figure it, they’d been only a few miles apart in the Argonne, though they hadn’t met.

Muldoon took off his old British-style tin hat and ran a hand through matted hair that had been red but now was going gray. He said, “I seen a few of ’em when they was back a ways. Christ on His cross, they’ve got guns, they’ve got helmets, some of ’em even got uniforms. They look like soldiers on the outside, but inside a couple weeks—hell, maybe, inside a couple days—half of ’em’s gonna end up dead.”

“I know,” Mutt answered gloomily. “That’s the way it works. The ones who live, we’ll make soldiers out of some of ’em.”

“ ‘S true,” Muldoon said. “ ‘S a fuckin’ waste, but it’s true. The real bitch of it is, some o’ the ones who stop a bullet early would make pretty decent men if they had any luck. Just how you roll the dice.”

“Yeah,” Mutt said again. He fell silent. He didn’t like thinking about that, though he’d seen it in France and here in Illinois. If chance ruled, if skill played no part on the battlefield, you could die any old time, no matter how good a soldier you’d got to be. Of course you could. He knew that. Knowing it and contemplating it were two different things, though.

A couple of hundred yards off to the left, back toward Lake Michigan, shooting started up. It was just a spattering of rounds, but Daniels hunkered down without conscious thought. Muldoon said, “Probably some of the rookies coming into the line. They get up here, they think they gotta start shootin’.”

Mutt nodded. It had been like that in France. His granddad—hell, both his granddads—had said it was like that in the States War. It had probably been like that since the day Alley Oop, Jr., joined up with his dad and chucked a rock at the first dinosaur he saw.

More noises from the rear. The firing wasn’t spreading, not yet. Daniels risked a peek back over his shoulder. Crawling through the wreckage of what had been a quiet North Side residential neighborhood came six or eight—they weren’t dogfaces, not yet. Puppyfaces, maybe.

Those faces were all dirty, but only a couple of the rookies had struck up any serious acquaintance with a razor. To Mutt’s jaundiced eye, they all looked too pale and too skinny. Down in Mississippi, his first guess would have been hookworm. Here, he knew better. He thumped his belly, what was left of it. Nobody’d been eating good, not this whole past year—one more reason to hate the Lizards’ scaly hides.

Muldoon slid back and took charge of the kids, moving them into the houses to either side of the one Mutt was in. Daniels had the heady feeling of actually being part of a real fighting line again, not just a picket of a band of skirmishers. That quickly went away. The new fish not only wouldn’t know when to shoot and when not to, they wouldn’t shoot worth a damn when they did open up.

Sure as hell, one of them let loose with a long burst from a tommy gun. Through the racket—and after it abruptly fell silent—Daniels listened to Muldoon raking the kid over the coals: “You go blowin’ it off like that again, you worthless no-brain turd, and the lieutenant’ll chew on your ass, not just me. You don’t ever want that to happen, buddy, believe me you don’t.”

Mutt snorted rueful laughter as Muldoon came back to him by way of a battered trench (in France in 1918 it hardly would have deserved the name; they’d known how to build trenches then) that ran across what had been a neat urban lawn. When Daniels had been a noncom, he, too, had warned privates about the fearsome wrath of their officers. Now he was one of those officers, awesome and distant as some minor-league god. He hadn’t changed, but when he’d got his gold bar, the way people looked at him had, sure as the dickens.

The Lizards, worse luck, weren’t asleep at the switch. When somebody shot at them, they shot back. Mutt didn’t know if they really had all the ammo in the world, but they sure as hell acted that way. He threw himself flat; he’d return fire after the storm calmed down. A thump told him Muldoon had gone down on his belly, too. Muldoon knew how things worked.

A couple of houses away, somebody started screaming for his mother in a high, broken voice. Mutt bit his lip. One of the rookies had just found misfortune, or rather, it had found him. He hoped the kid wasn’t wounded too badly. Any kind of gunshot wound hurt enough and was bloody enough to scare the piss out of you, even if it didn’t set you pushing up daisies.

He looked out through a hole in the wall and saw a couple of Lizards skittering forward under cover of all the lead they were laying down. He fired in their direction. They dove for cover. He nodded to himself. Some ways, he had more in common with the Lizards these days than he did with raw recruits on his own side.

A buzzing in the air made him scoot back from that hole. Anything in the air nowadays most likely belonged to the Lizards. When machine guns began to yammer, he congratulated himself on his own good sense and hoped none of the new fish would get killed.

But the machine-gun bullets, by the sound of them, were slamming into the Lizard position, not his own. He grinned wickedly—the scaly bastards didn’t often screw up like that. The aircraft, whatever it was, passed right overhead. A bomb landed on the Lizards, close enough to batter his ears and make the ground shake under him.

Even the most cautious man will take a chance every once in a while. Daniels wriggled forward, ever so warily peeked out through the hole in the wall. He burst out laughing, a loud, raucous noise altogether at variance with the racket of combat.

“What the hell?” Muldoon grunted.

“You know what just strafed the Lizards, Muldoon?” Daniels held up a solemn hand to show he was telling the truth: “A so-help-me-God Piper Cub with a couple machine guns, one slung under each wing. Got away, too. Flew in maybe ten feet off the rooftops here, or what’s left of ’em, shot up the Lizards, dropped that light bomb, and got the hell out of there.”

“A Piper Cub, Lieutenant?” Muldoon didn’t sound as if he believed his ears. “Jesus God, we really must be scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

“I dunno about that,” Mutt answered. “I heard somewheres the Russians been giving the Lizards fits with these little no-account biplanes, fly so low and slow they’re damn near impossible to stop until they’re right on top of you—they can do stuff a regular fighter plane can’t.”

“Maybe,” Muldoon said dubiously. “I tell you one thing, though, sir: you wouldn’t get me up on one of those little crates, not for all the tea in China. Hell, the Lizards can pick out which eye they’re gonna shoot you through. No, thanks. Not for me, no way, nohow.”

“Not for me, either,” Daniels admitted. “I ain’t never been on an airplane, an’ it’s too late for me to start now. But this here ain’t exactly a safe line o’ work we done picked ourselves, neither.”

“Boy, don’t I wish you was wrong.” Muldoon slithered up beside Mutt. “But them Lizards, half the time they ain’t aiming at me in particular. They’re just throwin’ bullets around, and if I happen to stop one, I do. But if you’re up there in an airplane and they’re shooting at you, that’s
personal,
you know what I mean?”

“I guess maybe I do,” Mutt said, “but a dogface who stops one of those bullets with his head, he’s just as dead as the Red Baron who got shot down all personal-like.”

Muldoon didn’t answer. He was looking out through the hole in the wall. Mutt got up on one knee and peered through the window. The strafing run from the Piper Cub had taken the wind right out of the sails of the Lizards’ pounding of his position. That made him think he could maybe do a little pounding of his own.

“Stay here and give us some coverin’ fire,” he told Muldoon. “I’m gonna see if we can head south for a change, ‘stead o’ north.”

At Muldoon’s acknowledging nod, Daniels crawled through the trench to the ruins of the house next door. The men who had dug it had broken both gas and water mains, but, since neither had worked for months, that didn’t matter. A soldier he didn’t recognize gave him a hand up out of the trench.

He pointed southward. “They’re hurting there. Let’s go take us back some houses before they remember which end is up.”

The young soldiers cheered with an intensity that made him proud and frightened at the same time. They’d do whatever they thought it took, the same way a young outfielder would chase a fly ball right into a fence. Sometimes the fence would be wood, and give a little. Sometimes it would be concrete. Then they’d cart the kid off on a stretcher.

They’d cart a lot of these kids off on stretchers before the fight was through. Mutt tried not to think about that. They’d carted him off on a stretcher once already. Now he was back. He hoped he’d stay in there this time.

“Come on, we can’t waste time here,” he said. He told some men to move forward with him, others to stay back and give covering fire. The ones he told to stay back squawked and pouted like spoiled children deprived of a lollipop. He held up a hand: “Don’t get in a swivet, boys. This here’ll be fire and move. Soon as we find cover up ahead, we’ll hunker down and start shootin’ so you-all can move on up ahead of us. You’ll get your share, I promise.”
Your share of shattered skulls and splintered bones and belly wounds.
Exploiting such eagerness filled Mutt with guilt. He’d never again feel it himself.

Yelling like fiends, his men moved forward, some shooting from the hip to add to the Americans’ firepower and make the Lizards keep their heads down. Mutt dove behind the burnt-out hulk of somebody’s old Packard. Sheet metal wouldn’t keep bullets from biting him, not the way a good pile of concrete or dirt would. But if the Lizards couldn’t see him, they wouldn’t send as many bullets toward him.

A couple of men were down, one twisting, one ominously limp and still. The Lizards weren’t sending out the wall of lead they had before, though. Daniels waved for the troops who had been covering to move forward past and through the detachment that had accompanied him. Those men, in turn, laid down covering fire for their buddies. They did a better job than Mutt had thought they had in them. Maybe he would be able to push the Lizards out of their forward positions.

One Lizard had other ideas. He’d pop up in a window like a jack-in-the-box, squeeze off a few rounds, and duck back down before anybody could nail him. He was a good shot, too. Somebody brave and stubborn and lucky like that, whether human or twisty-eyed alien critter, could derail an advance.

Mutt gauged the distance from himself to the house in which the Lizard sheltered: maybe forty yards. The window the Lizard was using wasn’t a very big one, which wasn’t surprising—being a twisty-eyed alien critter didn’t make you stupid. The Lizard let loose with another burst. Off to Mutt’s right, a human voice started screaming.

He grimaced, shook his head, and took a grenade from his belt. His arm had got him to the majors, even if that was a long time ago—and even if his lousy bat hadn’t let him stay there. Almost without conscious thought, he went into a catcher’s crouch in back of, not the plate, but the trunk of the Packard.