Upsetting the Balance (77 page)

They would have visited the same fire on the Race, had they possessed it Teerts knew that full well. It salved his conscience, but not enough.

He thought about tasting ginger, but decided to wait until his body’s need could no longer be denied. “I think faster with ginger,” he said, first making sure his radio was off. “I don’t think better. Or I think I don’t think better, anyhow.” He puzzled through that, finally deciding it was what he meant.

He dove down beneath the clouds. This would be the third ship he’d attacked on his flight to the lesser continental mass. They seemed almost as thick as parasites on the water. The males with the fancy body paint were right to start paying more attention to them, as far as he was concerned. The Race had automatically discounted water and travel on it.

“Trust the Big Uglies to do things we’d never think of,” he muttered. You could use up a lot of aircraft and a lot of munitions trying to suppress the Tosevites’ nautical commerce. If you tried shutting down all of it, would you have any aircraft left to commit to other tasks?

That wasn’t his judgment to make. But attacking ships wasn’t like blowing cities off the face of Tosev 3. It was a real part of war, easily comprehensible to any male at all. For once, Elifrim had assigned him something he didn’t loathe.

There! Sheet metal and wood, crude and homely, slow and wallowing, belching a trail of smoke into the cloudy sky. You didn’t need missiles for this. He’d used up his laser-guided bombs on the two previous targets, but he still had cannon and plain bombs taken from a Tosevite arsenal. They would do the job.

The ship swelled monstrously fast. His killercraft screamed toward it in a shallow dive. The targeting computer told him to release the bombs. The aircraft’s nose tried to come up as they dropped away. He and the autopilot kept it on its proper course.

He spotted Tosevites scrambling about on the deck of the ship. The killercraft bucked in the air as he thumbed the firing button of the cannon. He poured shells into the ship before the blasts from the bombs, and the water they kicked up, obscured it from sight “Goodbye, Big Uglies,” he said, pulling out of the dive, so he could make another pass and inspect the damage.

He hadn’t sunk this one. Radar told him as much, before he got a good look at it. But smoke spurted from places it hadn’t before. Some of the Big Uglies were down and motionless now, others struggling to repair the damage he’d done.

And others—Fire spurted from the front end of the ship, again and again and again. They had an antiaircraft gun aboard, and were using it with great vim even if the shells they threw up weren’t coming very close to him.

“Praise the Emperor’s name for that,” he said. If he was unlucky enough to get shot down twice, he wouldn’t be taken prisoner, not here. He’d go into the water and see whether he froze before he drowned or vice versa.

This time, he fired a long burst at the Tosevite’s popgun. He knew he’d damaged their vessel some more, and had no intention of coming round again to find out how much. That antiaircraft cannon might not have been wrecked.

Up above the clouds once more, to broaden the radar’s range. He looked forward to landing in what the locals called Florida. The air-base in southern France from which he’d been flying had turned unpleasantly cold, by his standards if not by those of Tosev 3. But Florida stayed close to temperate throughout its winter season, even if the air was moist enough to make him inspect his scales for mold whenever he got up in the morning.

He checked his fuel supply. The attack runs he’d made had left him rather low on hydrogen to make it all the way across this ridiculously wide stretch of water. The Race kept a couple of refueling aircraft flying above the ocean for such contingencies. Satellite relay quickly put him in touch with one of them. He swung north for a rendezvous.

Guiding the prong from the refueling aircraft into his own took delicacy and concentration. He was glad he hadn’t tasted beforehand; he knew how jumpy and impatient he got with ginger in him. Unfortunately, he also knew how sad and morose he got with no ginger in him.

He attacked one more ship on his way to Florida. The fog was so thick over the water that he carried out the run almost entirely by radar. He saw the wallowing Tosevite craft only at the last instant, just in time to add a few rounds from his cannon to the bombs he’d dropped.

Before long, he left behind the clouds and fog. The sky above him was a deep blue, the water below an even deeper shade of the same color. For once, Tosev 3 seemed almost beautiful—if you liked blue. It was a color far less common on Home than here. A proper world, to his way of thinking, was supposed to have an abundance of yellows and reds and oranges. Blue should have been an appetizer, not a main course.

Radar spotted the land ahead before he did—but radar was not concerned with aesthetics. Teerts didn’t think much of the low, damp terrain toward which he was flying. Its hideous humidity meant that everything not recently cleared was covered by a rank, noxious coat of vegetation. He wasn’t any too fond of green, either, though he did prefer it to blue.

Only the sandy beaches reminded him of Home, and they should have been broad expanses, not narrow strips hemmed in by more of Tosev 3’s omnipresent water. He sighed. He wasn’t going to have to do anything complicated from here on out, so he let himself have some ginger.

“I might as well be happy when I land,” he told the cockpit canopy as he followed the seacoast south toward his destination. Every so often, he’d fly over a little Tosevite town. Some of them had ships in their harbors. The aggressiveness the herb put in him made him want to blast those ships, as he had the ones out on the ocean. But the Race had held this territory for a long time, and any traffic was likely to be in authorized goods.

Staying rational through that first jolt of pleasure and excitement was never easy—the ships were just sitting there, as if begging to be destroyed. But Teerts knew how to separate the urgings of the ginger from those he would have had without it. He didn’t let the herb make him as stupid as he once had.

The radar was linked to a map that listed the names of the cities over which he flew. Coming up was Miami, and past that the landing strip the Race had taken for its own. Miami was easy to recognize, being much the largest center the Big Uglies had built hereabouts. He could see it coming up in the distance. It had a large harbor, with tens upon tens of ships. Teerts’ mouth fell open in ginger-induced amusement as he imagined the havoc he could wreak upon them with a good strafing run. It was almost—but not quite—worth braving the wrath of his superiors once he’d landed.

Then, right before his eyes, the whole harbor—for all he could tell, the whole city—went up in a fireball.

Ginger made you think faster. That much he knew. He swung the killercraft away from that fireball in as tight a turn as it would take. He knew what the fireball was. He’d seen one of the same sort over the Deutsch city Jisrin had incinerated. This one, in fact, wasn’t quite so large as the other, and looked to be a ground burst rather than one in the air. But nothing could be mistaken for the explosion of a nuclear bomb.

The blast slapped the killercraft like a blow across the muzzle. For a dreadful moment, he thought he had no control. The ocean here was supposed to be warmer than it was farther east and north, but that didn’t mean he wanted to go into it. And if Miami had just exploded in radioactive fire, who would rescue him, anyhow?

He was starting to review ejection procedures in his mind when the aircraft decided to answer the controls. He wondered how much radiation he’d picked up from being all too close to two nuclear blasts in a matter of days. Nothing he could do about that, not now.

His next query was much more urgently relevant: was his landing site still on the map? He got on the radio: “Flight Leader Teerts to south Florida airbase. Are you there?” He’d never before meant that question literally.

To his relief, the answer came back in moments, though it was hashed with static. “Reading you clearly, Flight Leader Teerts. Were you damaged in the explosion? Was that . . .? Could that have been . . . ?”

Teerts didn’t blame the male for not wanting to say it out loud. But the ginger in him made him impatient with subterfuge and euphemism. “That was a nuclear bomb in Miami, air base. Whatever we had in the city, it’s gone now.”

“How could they have done that?” The male on the other end of the radio connection sounded stunned, disbelieving. “Our radar spotted no aircraft to deliver the weapon, nor missiles, either. And we’ve chased the Big Uglies out of this peninsula. They couldn’t have smuggled the weapon in by land. What does that leave?”

Maybe ginger really did make Teerts think better, not just faster. Or maybe his mission had freed his mind from the Race’s usual patterns of thought. Without a moment’s hesitation, he replied, “Maybe they brought it in by water.”

“By water?” The fillip the male added to his interrogative cough made him sound incredulous, not just curious. “How could they do that?”

“I don’t know exactly how.” Teerts’ right eye turret swung back toward the capped cloud still rising above Miami. “But I’d say they seem to have managed.”

Atvar was growing to hate the reports he got from the targeting specialists, and to hate the sessions he spent with Kirel translating the recommendations from those reports into an order that would throw another city into the fire. Kirel called up a map of the United States.

“Once again, Exalted Fleetlord, Denver is a recommended target, along with this other, more peripheral one.”

“There is enough radiation loose on this continental mass, thanks to the Big Uglies,” Atvar answered. Somehow, catastrophe endlessly repeated didn’t seem so catastrophic as it had the first time. One Tosevite atomic bomb had had the shiplords hissing for his skin. Now that the Big Uglies had touched off a whole string of them, the males stopped worrying about Atvar. They had a new kind of war on their hands.

Kirel said, “The Emperor be praised we didn’t delay another generation in attacking this planet, as some of the budget-cutters proposed. Even if we’d kept our nuclear armory intact, we’d have faced more nuclear weapons than we brought along. We might not even have effected a planetfall, let alone conquest.”

“Truth,” Atvar said. “This device, you will note from the analysis, was prepared entirely from the Big Uglies’ own plutonium. They would have had nuclear arms all too soon in any case, even if we had not come to this miserable world. Of course, if we had come a generation later, they might also have succeeded in fighting their own full-scale atomic war, which would have solved most of our problems for us.”

“Ours, yes, but not those of the colonization fleet,” Kirel said.

“If the Big Uglies slagged Tosev 3 themselves, the colonization fleet could stop here just long enough to pick up reaction mass for the motors, and then honorably return Home,” Atvar answered. “But since the Big Uglies have not quite wrecked the planet, we cannot do so, either. We know limits; they seem unaware of the concept.”

“We have spoken before of how the restraint we feel compelled to observe has been the Tosevites’ biggest single safety factor,” Kirel agreed. He illuminated the other possible bomb site the targeting specialists had chosen. “I don’t know why they reckon this place a candidate for annihilation, Exalted Fleetlord. By planetary standards, it’s far away from everything.”

“Only if you look at matters from the perspective of a male of the Race,” Atvar said. “To the Tosevites, in its own way it is as important a nexus as Chicago.”
Which they went and destroyed themselves,
he added mentally.

“You are going to choose the out-of-the-way site, then,” Kirel said, not quite in resignation, but with the clear intention of conveying that, had he been fleetlord, he would have come to a different conclusion.

Well, he wasn’t fleetlord, and Atvar now had reason to hope he never would be. A small or medium-sized crisis agitated males; in a large one, they got behind the leaders they had. The fleetlord said, “That is my choice, yes.”

“Very well,” Kirel said. “Per your orders, it shall be done. We shall bomb this Pearl Harbor place.”

Ttomalss did not read Chinese well. He was one of the few males of the Race who read Chinese at all. Learning a separate character for each word struck him as far more trouble than it was worth, and he had a computer to help him recognize the angular squiggles and remind him of what they meant. How a Big Ugly ever learned to cope with this cumbersome system was beyond him.

He did not need to know a great many characters to decipher those on the strips of paper that had been brought up to him from cities throughout the eastern stretch of China the Race occupied. Those strips had been found pasted up around sites the Chinese Tosevites had bombed; some of them had been captured in the cases of beast-show males before the bombs in those cases exploded.

The Tosevite female called Liu Han not only wanted her hatchling back, she was in a position with the Chinese who still resisted the Race’s rule to make her demands widely known and to exert force to persuade the Race to yield to them.

Ttomalss turned an eye turret toward the hatchling in question. That was partly in reaction to the demands for its return and partly a simple caution to make sure it wasn’t getting into anything it shouldn’t. It could move around on all fours now, and could reach for things with at least some chance of having a hand actually land on them. And, as always, whatever it touched went straight into its mouth.

None of the beast-show males who hadn’t blown themselves to small, gory fragments admitted to having heard of Liu Han. Ttomalss wished he’d never heard of her, either. Given the amount of trouble her hatchling had caused him, he might well have been delighted to give it back to her, would that not have disrupted his research program. As things were, though, he hated to abandon the experiment just when its results were beginning to seem interesting.

“What have you to say for yourself?” he asked the hatchling, and tacked on the usual interrogative cough at the end.