Aftershocks (18 page)

“I have no idea, superior sir,” Yarssev answered. “It has been a long time since they tried to make me learn history, and I have long since forgotten most of what they taught me.”

“So have I,” Gorppet said. “But this I will tell you: we did not go from rocket to spaceport in a fraction of an individual’s lifetime.”

“Well, of course not, superior sir,” Yarssev said. “If you ask me, there is something unnatural about the way the Big Uglies change so fast.”

“I would have a hard time arguing with you there, because I think that is also a truth,” Gorppet said. “And I will tell you something else: I think there is something unnatural about the way the Deutsche are surrendering their armaments.”

“Do you?” Yarssev gestured. The broad, low, damp plain was full of the implements of war: landcruisers, mechanized fighting vehicles, artillery pieces, rocket launchers, machine guns, stacked infantrymales’ weapons.

But Gorppet made the negative gesture. “Not enough. Remember what these Big Uglies threw at us in Poland? They had more than this—and better than this, too. They do not love us. They have no reason to love us. I think they are trying to hold out, to conceal, as much as they can.”

“What will you do, superior sir?” Yarssev asked.

And Gorppet had to hiss in dismay. That was an unfortunate question. He wished with every lobe of his liver that the trooper had not asked it. He answered, “There is not much I
can
do, you know. I am only a small-unit group leader. I have no tremendous authority, certainly not enough to compel the Deutsche to do anything. All I have is a lot of combat experience, and it tells me something is wrong here.”

Yarssev found another unfortunate question: “Have you given your views to the company commander?”

Gorppet let out another dismayed hiss. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I have. His opinion of the situation differs from mine.”

That was all he would say to Yarssev. The company commander was smugly convinced the Deutsche were obeying all treaty requirements. Gorppet hissed once more. Back in the days when he was an ordinary trooper, he’d seen that officers all too often didn’t want to listen to him. It wasn’t so much that they were smarter or more experienced than he was. But they had rank, and so they didn’t have to listen. He’d been sure things were different among officers, that they paid attention to their fellows if not to their inferiors. To his company commander, though, he remained an inferior.

Deutsch males moved among the weaponry they were turning over to the Race. Deutsch civilians were properly submissive to the Race. They knew their not-empire had taken a beating. These were not civilians. They wore the gray wrappings and steel helmets of soldiers. They also wore an almost palpable air of resentment and regret that the fighting had ended.

“Look at them.” Gorppet pointed with his tongue. “Do they have the look of males who will contentedly return to civilian life?”

“Does it matter if they are contented or not?” Yarssev asked in return. “So long as they are demobilized and have no weapons with which they can wage war against us, why should we care if they hate us?”

“Because, if they hate us, they will seek to hide and to regain weapons,” Gorppet answered patiently. “At the moment, they are merely submitting because they have no choice. I would sooner see them truly conquered.”

Yarssev didn’t argue with him any more.
Of course not,
Gorppet thought.
I am an officer. He sees no point to arguing with officers, because he will not convince them even if he is right.

Gorppet laughed. When he’d been a trooper himself, most officers had looked like addled eggs to him, too. Now, though, he was sure he was right and Yarssev wrong. Perspective counted for a great deal.

Perspective . . . Gorppet made the affirmative hand gesture, although no one had asked him anything. Even if his company commander wasn’t interested in what he had to say, he could think of some males who might be. He found his top-ranking underofficer and told him not to let the Deutsche steal any troopers while he was gone, then went over to the tents marking brigade headquarters not far away. The brigade commander’s tent, of course, was bigger and more impressive than any of the others. Gorppet ignored it. The tent he had in mind was the least obtrusive one in the whole compound.

When he walked in, a male of a rank not much higher than his turned one eye turret away from a computer terminal and toward him. “Yes? What do you want?” the fellow asked, his tone implying that it had better be something interesting and important.

“Superior sir, does brigade Intelligence believe the Deutsche are in fact turning over all weapons required under the terms of their surrender?” Gorppet asked.

Now both the male’s eye turrets swung his way. “What makes you think they are not, Small-Unit Group Leader?” he asked sharply.

“What I see delivered here, superior sir,” Gorppet answered. “It does not seem to be matériel of the quality my unit faced when we fought the Deutsche in Poland. If it is not, where has that matériel gone?”

“Where has it gone?” the officer from Intelligence repeated. “The Deutsche say the Race destroyed most of it in combat. There is, without a doubt, some truth to that: would you not agree?”

“Certainly, superior sir,” Gorppet said. Then, brash as if he’d just had a big taste of ginger—which he hadn’t—he went on, “But would you not agree that it also gives the Deutsche a very handy excuse for hiding whatever they think they can get away with?”

“Give me your name.” The male from Intelligence rapped out the order. Liver in turmoil, Gorppet obeyed. How much trouble had he found for himself? The other male spoke into the computer, then to Gorppet again: “And your pay number?” Gorppet gave him that, too. He wondered if anything would be left of him by the time this male was through. But then, after a hiss of surprise, the fellow asked, “You are the male who captured the agitator Khomeini?”

“Yes, superior sir,” Gorppet admitted with what he hoped was becoming modesty.

“Have you spoken of this matter to your company commander?” the male from Intelligence asked.

“I have. He is of the opinion that the Deutsche are honoring their obligations,” Gorppet said.

“I am of the opinion that he is a fool,” the male from Intelligence said. “He could not see a sunrise if he were out in space.” He paused. “What made you come here, Small-Unit Group Leader, if your superior officer told you this matter that concerned you was unimportant?”

“What made me come here?” Gorppet echoed. “Superior sir, I did not like fighting the Deutsche once. You may believe me when I say I never want to have to fight them again.” He added an emphatic cough.

“No one wants to fight the Deutsche again—no one with sense,” the male said. “No one wants to fight any of the independent Tosevite not-empires again. The
Reich
caused us altogether too much damage. Another war would only be worse.”

“Truth!” Gorppet said with another emphatic cough.

“And you do not know everything the Deutsche are doing,” the other male said, “or rather, everything they are not doing. Their delivery of missile components and their surrender of poison gas have been well behind schedule. Their excuses, I might add, challenge credulity.”

“More blame on battle damage?” Gorppet asked.

“Why, yes, as a matter of fact. You have encountered similar claims?” the other male returned. Gorppet made the affirmative gesture. The other male eyed him appraisingly, then said, “Small-Unit Group Leader Gorppet, you show wit and initiative. Have you ever wondered if you were wasted as an infantrymale?”

“What do you mean, superior sir?” Gorppet asked.

“My name is Hozzanet,” the male from Intelligence said—a sign he was interested in Gorppet, sure enough. And he went on, “It might be possible to arrange a transfer to my service, if you are interested. Then you would be able to devote your full energies to tracking down Tosevite deceit.”

“That
is
tempting,” Gorppet admitted. “But I am not sure I would want to pursue it.” He did not think males from Intelligence would be encouraged to taste ginger. The reverse: he was sure they would be more closely monitored than ordinary infantrymales. And if they ever connected him with the ginger deal in South Africa that had involved males of the Race shooting at one another . . .

But if they ever connected him with that deal, he was in endless trouble no matter which service he belonged to. Still . . .

Hozzanet said, “Speaking off the record and hypothetically—I ask no questions, note—sticking your tongue in the ginger vial every once in a while would not disqualify you. If you are in the habit of doing things like feeding females ginger to get them to mate with you, you would be well advised not to consider such a position.”

“I . . . see,” Gorppet said slowly. “No, I am not in the habit of doing any such thing with females. I have mated with females who have tasted ginger, but such tasting has always been at their initiative.”

“I understand,” Hozzanet said. “Many males have done that here on Tosev 3, I among them. Whether we like it or not, the herb is changing our sexual patterns here, and will continue to do so. But that, at the moment, is a patch of scales shed from one’s back. I ask again: are you interested in serving in Intelligence?”

“I . . . may be, superior sir,” Gorppet said. “May I have a day to think on it?” Hozzanet made the affirmative gesture. Gorppet assumed the posture of respect and left the tent. He didn’t know what he’d expected on visiting brigade Intelligence, but he was sure he hadn’t expected an invitation to join it.

He was on his way back to his small group when a beffel trotted across the path in front of him. It turned one eye turret his way, gave him a friendly beep, and went on about its business.

“And hello to you, too, little fellow,” Gorppet said: a beffel was a welcome reminder of Home. He’d walked on for several paces before he paused to wonder what in the Emperor’s name a beffel was doing in the midst of the wreckage of the Greater German
Reich.

DOWN BUT NOT OUT
. Monique Dutourd had seen those signs so many times in Marseille, she was sick of them. She was, by late summer, sick of everything that had anything to do with her home town. She was sick of wreckage. She was sick of high prices everywhere she looked. She was especially sick of the tent city in which she had to live, and of being crammed into a tent with her brother and his lover.

French officials had promised things would be back to normal by now. She hadn’t believed the promises, and her skepticism was proving justified. The French hadn’t done anything but what the Germans told them to do for a solid generation. Now the Germans were gone. The French bureaucrats were on their own. With no one to tell them what to do, they didn’t do much of anything.

Monique picked her way through one of the market squares. Everybody who had peaches and apricots wanted an arm and a leg for them. She scowled. Shipping hadn’t come back the way the bureaucrats promised it would, either.

She almost ran into a Lizard.
“Pardonnez-moi, monsieur,”
the creature said in hissing French. Monique wanted to laugh in its pointed, scaly face, but she didn’t. In a way, dealing with someone who couldn’t tell whether she was male or female was refreshing. She wished a good many of her crude countrymen had the same problem. She wished even more that Dieter Kuhn had had it.

For once, thinking of the SS
Sturmbannführer
made her smile. Odds were, he’d died when the Lizards detonated their explosive-metal bomb on Marseille. If he hadn’t, he’d gone back to the
Reich
once France regained her freedom. Any which way, he was out of her life for good.

Thinking of his being out of her life for good made her a lot more cheerful than she would have been otherwise. That, in turn, made her more inclined to spend her money—well, actually, her brother’s money—on the fruit she wanted than she would have been otherwise.

Stringbag full of apricots in a wire basket behind her, she rode a battered bicycle back to the tent city. She’d had a far better machine before the bomb fell. Now she was glad to have any bicycle at all. The chain she’d used to secure it while she shopped weighed more than it did.

Commotion rocked the tent city when she reached it. A squad of hard-faced men in uniform were trundling a man and woman into a waiting motorcar. A crowd followed, yelling and cursing and throwing things. Monique couldn’t tell if they were pelting and reviling the captives or their captors.

“What’s going on?” she asked a man who was just standing there watching. With luck, that made him something close to neutral.

“Purification squad,” he answered, and jerked a thumb toward the captives. “They say those two were in bed with the
Boches.”

“Oh, are they finally down here?” Monique said, and the man nodded. Now that France was free again, everyone who’d collaborated with the Nazis in any way was all at once fair game. Since the country had been under German rule for a quarter of a century, the new government could make an example of almost anyone it chose. No one said a word in protest, though. To complain was to appear unpatriotic, un-French, and probably pro-German: and therefore a fitting target for the purification squads.

They’d been in the news for weeks, fanning out through northern France to get rid of people described as “traitors to the Republic.” But everything reached Marseille more slowly than almost anywhere else. Till now, traitors here had been allowed to go on about their business like anybody else.

One of the men from the purification squad drew his pistol and fired it into the air. That gave the angry crowd pause. It let the men get the couple they’d captured into the automobile. Some of them got into it, too. Others piled into another motorcar behind it. Both cars drove away in a hurry.

“Are they really collaborators?” Monique asked.

“Ferdinand and Marie? Not that I ever heard of, and I’ve known them for years.” With a shrug, the man went on, “It could be that I did not know everything there is to know about what they did. But it could also be that someone who does not care for them for whatever reason—or for no reason at all—wrote out a denunciation.”