Tilting the Balance

He might not have fooled another human being, with his accent, his nose, his eyes, and the stubble on his cheeks, but the Lizard wasn’t trained to pick up the differences between one flavor of Big Uglies and the next. He just hissed something in his own language, then switched back to Chinese: “You know these bad shooters?”

“No,” Fiore said, half bowed so he looked down into the murky water and didn’t show much of his face. “They eastern devils, I think. Me good Chinese man.”

The Lizard hissed again, then went off to ask questions of somebody else. Bobby Fiore didn’t move until all the males got back into the half-tracks and rolled away.

“Jesus,” he said when they were gone. “I lived through it.” He scrambled up out of the rice paddy and reclaimed the weapons he’d stashed. He’d started to feel naked without a pistol, even if it wasn’t any good against armor-and having a grenade around made you warm and comfortable, too.

He wasn’t the only one scuttling for guns, either. The Japs were all communing with their ancestors, but most of the Chinese Reds had played possum the same way he had. Now they came splashing from the paddies and grabbed their rifles and pistols and submachine guns.

They searched the corpses of the Japanese, too, but added little to what they already had. Nieh Ho-T’ing made a sour face as he walked over to Fiore. “Scaly devils are good soldiers,” he said disappointedly. “They don’t leave guns around for just anybody to pick up. Too bad.”

“Yeah, too bad,” Fiore echoed. Water dripped from his pants and formed little puddles and streams by his feet. Whenever he moved, the wet cotton made shlup-shlup noises right out of an animated cartoon.

Nieh nodded to him. “You did well. Unlike these imperialists”-he pointed to a couple of dead Japs not far away-“you understand that in guerrilla war the fighter is but one fish in a vast school of peasants. When danger too great to oppose confronts him, he disappears into the school. He does not call attention to himself.”

Fiore didn’t understand all of that, but he got the gist. “Look like farmer, they not shoot me,” he said.

“That’s what I was talking about,” Nieh answered impatiently. Bobby Fiore gave an absentminded emphatic cough to show he understood. Nieh had started to go off; his soaked pants went shlup-shlup, too. He spun back around, spraying small drops of water as he did so. “You speak the language of the little scaly devils?” he demanded.

“A bit.” Bobby held his hand close together to show how small a bit it was. “Speak more Chinese.” And if that wouldn’t make my mama fall over in a faint, what would? he thought, and then, She’s gonna have a half-Chinese grandkid eveniIf she doesn’t know it. That oughta do the job.

Nieh Ho-T’ing didn’t care about grandkids. “You speak some, though?” he persisted. “And you understand more than you speak?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Fiore said in English. Feeling himself flush, he did his best to turn it into Chinese.

Nieh nodded-he got the idea. He patted Bobby on the back. “Oh, yes, we will gladly take you to Shanghai. You will be very useful there. We do not have many who can follow what the little devils say.”

“Good,” Bobby answered, smiling to show how happy he was. And he was happy, too-the Reds could just as easily have shot him and left him here by the side of the road to make sure he didn’t make a nuisance of himself later on. But since he made a good tool, they’d keep him around and use him. Just like Lo, Nieh Ho-T’ing hadn’t asked how he felt about any of that. He had the feeling the Reds weren’t good at asking-they just took.

He started to laugh. Nieh gave him a curious look. He waved the Red away: it wasn’t a joke he knew how to translate into Chinese. But of all the things he’d never expected, getting shanghaied to Shanghai was right up at the top of the list.

“Exalted Fleetlord, here is a report that will please you,” the shiplord Kirel said as he summoned a new document onto the screen.

Atvar read intently for a little while, then stopped and stared at Kirel. “Major release of radioactivity in Deutschland” he said. “This is supposed to please me? It means the Big Uglies there are a short step away from a nuclear bomb.”

“But they do not know how to take that next step,” Kirel replied. “If you please, Exalted Fleetlord, examine the analysis.”

Atvar did as his subordinate asked. As he read, his mouth fell open in a great chortle of glee. “Idiots, fools, maniacs! They achieved a self sustaining pile without proper damping?”

“From the radiation that has been-is being-released, they seem to have done just that,” Kirel answered, also gleefully. “And it’s melted down on them, and contaminated the whole area, and, with any luck at all, killed off a whole great slew of their best scientists.”