In the Balance

Krefak felt the heat from the burning 67th Emperor Sohrheb, though his missile battery was posted a good ways away from the luckless starship. He was heartily glad of that; the blast when the ship went up had taken out several units closer to it.

Krefak also felt the heat from his own commander, who’d waxed eloquent over his failure to shoot down, the Big Uglies’ missile. He’d done everything right; he knew he had. The battery had intercepted the Tosevite projectile at least twice. Tapes from the radars proved it. But how was he supposed to say so, with only smoking rubble left where a proud starship had stood mere heartbeats before?

One of the males at a radar screen let out a frightened hiss. “The eggless creatures launched another one!” he exclaimed.

Krefak gaped in shocked surprise. Once was catastrophe enough, but twice-He couldn’t imagine twice. He didn’t want to imagine twice. His voice rose to a most-unofficerlike screech:

“Shoot it down!”

Roars from the launchers showed him that the computers hadn’t waited for his orders. He ran, to the screen, watched the missiles fly. As they had before, they went straight to the mark, exploded… and were gone. So far as the Tosevite missile was concerned, they might as well never have been fired. It proceeded inexorably on its ordained course.

Below the radar screen that marked its track through the air was another that evaluated the ground target at which it was aimed. “No,” he said softly. “By the Emperors, launch more missiles!”

“The battery has expended all the ones we had on launchers, superior sir,” the male answered helplessly. “More are coming.” Then he too took a look at where the Tosevite missile was heading. “Not the 56th Emperor Jossano.” His eye turrets quivered with fright as he stared at Krefak.

“Yes, with most of our nuclear weapons on board. To treachery with colonizing this stinking planet; we should have sterilized it to be rid of the Tosevites once and for all. We-” His voice was lost in the roar of the exploding missile, and in the much, much bigger roar that subsumed it.

The 56th Emperor Jossano went up in the same sort of blast as had taken the 67th Emperor Sohrheb. The fission and fusion weapons were stored in the very heart of the ship, in a strongly armored chamber. It did not save them. As the 56th Emperor Jossano blew to pieces and burned, the explosives that triggered the rapid joining of precisely machined chunks of plutonium began going off, as if they were rounds of ammunition in a flaming tank.

The bombs themselves did not go off; the triggering charges did not ignite in the precise order or at the precise rate that required. But the casings were wrecked, the chunks of plutonium warped out of shape and broken and, indeed, scattered over a goodly part of the Tosevite landscape as explosion after explosion wracked the 56th Emperor Jossano.

They were very likely the most valuable pieces of metal on the face of the Earth, or would have been had any human being known they were there or what to do with them. No human being did, not then.

More screams of glee rose from Dora’s firing crew. They did not waste motion dancing at the sight of this new flame on the distant horizon, but immediately set to work reloading the 80-centimeter cannon.

Michael Arenswald bellowed in Becker’s ear. “Six! Didn’t I tell you we’d get off six?”

“We’ve been lucky twice,” Becker said. “That’s more than I expected right there. Maybe we’ll go again-third time’s the charm, they say.”

For an instant too long, he thought the scream in the sky was part of the way his head rang after the second detonation of the monster gun. The locomotive had just finished hauling Dora to its next marked firing position. Becker started over to the gun carriage to see if it had stayed level yet again.

The first bomb blast, a few meters behind him, hurled him facefirst into that great mountain of metal. He felt things break-his nose, a cheekbone, several ribs, a hip. He opened his mouth to scream. Another bomb went off, this one even closer.

Jens Larssen’s apartment lay a few blocks west of the Union Stockyards. The neighborhood wasn’t much, but he’d still been surprised at how cheap he got the place. The incessant Chicago wind came from the west that day. A couple of days later, it started blowing off Lake Michigan, and he understood. But it was too late by then-he’d already signed the lease.

The wind blew off the lake the day his wife, Barbara, got into town, too. He still remembered the way her eyes got wide. She put the smell into one raised eyebrow and four words: “Essence of terrified cow.”