Striking the Balance

Between bites, the German said, “I’ll pass on what you’ve told me. I don’t promise anything will come of it, but I’ll do my best. I tell you this, Mordechai: if we do skirt Lodz, you’d better come through on your promise. Show that dealing with you people has a good side to it, show that you deliver, and the people above me are more likely to want to try to do it again.”

“I understand that,” Anielewicz answered. “The same goes back at you, I might add: if you break faith with us after a deal, you won’t like the partisans who show up in your backyard.”

“And I understand that,” Jager said. “Whether my superiors will-” He shrugged. “I told you, I’ll do what I can. My word, at least, is good.” He eyed Anielewicz, as if daring him to deny it. Anielewicz couldn’t, so he nodded. The German let out a long, heavy sigh, then went on, “In the end, whether we go into Lodz or around it won’t matter, anyhow. If we conquer the territory around the city, it will fall to us, too, sooner or later. What happens then?”

He wasn’t wrong. That made it worse, not better. Anielewicz gave him credit: he sounded genuinely worried. Gunther Grillparzer, on the other hand, looked to be just this side of laughing out loud. Let a bunch of Nazi soldiers like him loose in Lodz and the results wouldn’t be pretty.

“What happens then?” Mordechai sighed, too. “I just don’t know.”

Ussmak sat in the base commandant’s office-hisoffice now, even if he still wore the body paint of a landcruiser driver. He’d killed Hisslef, who had led the Race’s garrison at this base in the region of the SSSR known as Siberia. Ussmak wondered ifSiberia was the Russki word fordeep freeze. He couldn’t tell much difference between the one and the other.

Along with Hisslef, a lot of his chief subordinates were dead, too, hunted down in the frenzy that had gripped the rest of the males after Ussmak fired the first shot. Ginger had had a lot to do with both the shooting and the frenzy that followed it. If Hisslef had just had the sense to let the males gathered in the communal chamber yell themselves out complaining about the war, about Tosev 3, and about this miserable base in particular, he probably still would have been alive. But no, he’d come storming in, intent on stamping this out no matter what… and now his corpse lay stiff and cold-in Siberian winter, very stiff and very cold-outside the barracks, waiting for the weather to warm up enough for a cremation.

“And Hisslef was legitimate commandant, and see what happened to him,” Ussmak muttered. “What will end up happening tome?” He had no millennia of authority to make his orders obeyed almost as if by reflex. Either he had to be obviously right, or else he had to make the males in the base obey him out of fear of what would happen if they didn’t.

His mouth fell open in a bitter laugh. “I might as well be a Big Ugly ruling a not-empire,” he said to the walls. They had to rule by fear; they had no tradition to give them legitimate authority. Now he sympathized with them. He understood in his gut how hard that was.

He opened a drawer in what had been Hisslef’s desk, pulled out a vial of powdered ginger. That washis, by the Emperor (the Emperor against whose officers he’d mutinied, though he tried not to think about that). He yanked off the plastic stopper, poured some of the powder into the palm of his hand, and flicked out his long forked tongue again and again, till the herb was gone.

Exhilaration came quickly, as it always did. In moments after tasting the ginger, Ussmak felt strong, fast, clever, invincible. In the top part of his mind, he knew those feelings, save perhaps for heightened reflexes, were an illusion. When he’d driven the land-cruiser into combat, he’d held off on tasting till he got out again: if you felt invincible when you really weren’t, you’d take chances that were liable to get you killed. He’d seen that happen to other males more times than he cared to recall.

Now, though-“Now I taste all I can, because I don’t want to think about what’s going to happen next,” he said. If the fleetlord wanted to blast this base from the air, Ussmak and his fellow mutineers had no antiaircraft missiles to stop them. He couldn’t surrender to the authorities; he’d put himself beyond the pale when he shot Hisslef, as his followers had with the killings that followed.

He couldn’t hold out indefinitely here, either. The base would run short of both food and hydrogen for fuel-and for heat! — before long. No supplies were coming in. He hadn’t worried about such things when he raised his personal weapon against Hisslef. He’d just worried about making Hisslef shut up.

“That’s the ginger’s fault,” he said querulously-even if his brain was buzzing with it while he complained. “It makes me as shortsighted as a Big Ugly.”