Tilting the Balance

Peasants in their garden plots and rice paddies looked up when the armed band passed, then went back to work. They’d seen armed bands before: Chinese, Japanese, Lizards. As long as nobody shot at them, they worked. In the end, the armed bands couldn’t do without them, not unless the people-and Lizards-wanted to quit eating.

Up ahead on the road, something stirred. Its approach was rapid, purposeful, mechanical-which meant it belonged to the Lizards. Bobby Fiore gulped. Seeing Lizards coming reminded him he wasn’t marching along from place to place here. He’d signed up to fight, and the bill was about to come due.

The Japs ahead started jumping off the road, looking for cover. That suddenly struck Bobby as a real good idea. He remembered the little streambed that had cut across the field outside the prison camp. Better an idea should strike him than whatever the Lizards fired his way. He got behind a big bush by the side of the road. A moment later he wished he’d gone into a ditch instead, but by then it was too late to move.

He willed a thought at the Japs: don’t start shooting. Attack right now would be suicidal-rifles against armor just didn’t work. Through the thick, leafy branches of the bush, he couldn’t see just what kind of.armor it was, but the little band of fighters didn’t have the tools to take on any kind.

Closer and closer the Lizard vehicles came, moving with the near silence that characterized the breed. Bobby pulled out his pistol, which all at once seemed a miserable little weapon indeed. Instead of squeezing the trigger, he squeezed off a couple of Hail Marys.

Somebody fired. “Oh, shit,” Bobby said, in the same reverent tone he’d used a moment before to address the Mother of God. Now he could tell what the fighters were up against not tanks, but what he thought the U.S Army called half-tracks-soldier-haulers with machine guns of their own. Maybe a Lizard had been dumb enough to ride with his head sticking out so a Jap could try to blow it off.

Fiore didn’t think that showed the kind of brains which would have taken the Jap very far on “The $64,000 Question.” Take a potshot at armor and the armor would chew you up-which it proceeded to do. The half-tracks stopped and began hosing down the area with their automatic weapons. The bush behind which Bobby was hiding suffered herbicide as bullets amputated the top two-thirds. Flat on his belly behind it, Fiore didn’t get hit.

He had his pistol out and his surviving grenade alongside him, but he couldn’t make himself use the weapons. That would only have brought more fire down on him-and he wanted to live. He had trouble understanding how anybody in combat ever fired at anybody else. You could get killed like that.

The Japanese soldiers didn’t seem to worry about it. They kept on blazing away at the Lizards’ vehicles-those of them who hadn’t got killed in the curtain of lead the half-tracks laid down, anyway. Bobby had no idea how much damage the Japs were doing, but he was pretty damn sure it wouldn’t be enough.

It wasn’t. Along with keeping up the machine-gun fire, the half-tracks lowered their rear doors. A couple of squads of Lizards skittered out, their personal automatic weapons blazing. They weren’t just going to hurt the people who’d shot at them, they were going to wipe ’em off the face of the earth.

“Oh, shit,” Fiore, said again, even more sincerely than he had before. If the Lizards caught him here with a pistol and a grenade, he was dead, no two ways about it. He didn’t want to be dead, not even a little bit. He shoved the evidence under the chopped-off part of the bush and rolled backwards till he fell with a splash into a rice paddy.

He crouched down there as low as he could, huddling in the mud and doing his best to make like a farmer. Some of the real farmers were still in the knee-deep water. One or two weren’t going to get out again; red stains spread around their bodies. Others, sensible chaps, ran for their lives.

The Japs didn’t run, or Fiore didn’t see any who did. They held their ground and fought till they were all dead. The Lizards’ superior firepower smashed them like a shoe coming down on a cockroach.

Then the shooting tapered off. Fiore fervently hoped that meant the Lizards would get back into their half-tracks and go away. Instead, some of them came prowling his way, making sure they hadn’t missed anybody.

One of them pointed his rifle right at Bobby Fiore. “Who you?” he demanded in lousy Chinese. He was standing no more than a foot and a half from the weapons Bobby had stashed. Bobby was dreadfully aware he hadn’t stashed them all that well, either. The Lizard repeated. “Who you?”

“Name is, uh, Nieh Ho-T’ing,” Fiore said, stealing a handle from the Red officer. “Just farmer. Like rice?” He pointed to the plants peeping out of the water all around him, hoping the Lizard wouldn’t notice how bad his own Chinese was.