Tilting the Balance

“It’s a very tired thing to say,” he answered, which made her poke him in the ribs. “If I were ten years younger-ah, phooey, if I were ten years younger, you wouldn’t want anything to do with me.”

“You’re right,” she said. “But I like you fine the way you are. you’really have learned an amazing amount about the Lizards in a very short time.” As if to prove her own point, she added an emphatic cough.

“Mm, I suppose so,” he said. “Not as much as I want to, though, not just for the sake of the war but because I’m curious, too. And there’s one thing I don’t begin to have a clue about.”

“What’s that?”

“How to get rid of them,” Yeager said. Barbara nodded against his chest. He fell asleep with her still in his arms.

Ussmak gunned the landcruiser toward the next Tosevite town ahead: Mulhouse, its name was. After so long going up and down the road between Besancon and Belfort, pushing past Belfort made him feel he was exploring new territory. He spoke that conceit aloud: “We might as well be part of the band of Sherran-you know, the first male to march all the way around Home.”

“We studied Sherran just out of hatchlinghood, driver,” Nejas said. “How long ago did he live? A hundred fifty thousand years, something like that-long before the Emperors unified Home under their benevolent rule.”

Ussmak cast down his eye turrets, but only for a perfunctory instant. No matter how important formalities were to the life of the Race, not getting killed counted for even more. And the more built-up the area got, the more danger the landcruiser faced and the smaller the chance he had to react to it.

A cloth whipped in the breeze above a half-burnt building: not the red, white, and blue stripes of France, but a white circle on a red background, with a twisty black symbol on the white. The Big Uglies used such flapping rags to tell one of their tiny empires from the next. Ussmak felt a certain amount of pride that the forces of the Race had at last penetrated into Deutschland.

Bullets rattled off the landcruiser’s flank and turret. The cupola up top closed with a clang. Ussmak hissed in relief: for the first time in a long while, he had himself a landcruiser commander whom he would have minded seeing dead.

“Driver halt,” Nejas ordered, and Ussmak obediently pressed on the brake pedal. “Gunner, turret bearing 030. That building with the banner above it, two rounds high explosive. The machine gun is in there somewhere.”

“Two rounds high explosive,” Skoob echoed. “It shall be done, superior sir.”

The landcruiser’s main armament spoke once, twice. Inside the hull, shielded by steel and ceramic, the reports were not especially loud, but the heavy armored fighting vehicle rocked back on its tracks after each one. Through his vision slits, Ussmak watched the building, already in ruins, fly to pieces; the flag on the makeshift staff was wiped away as if it had never existed.

“Forward, driver,” Nejas said in tones of satisfaction.

“Forward, superior sir,” Ussmak acknowledged, and stepped on the accelerator. No sooner had the landcruiser begun to roll, though, than more bullets pattered off its side and rear deck.

“Shall I give them another couple of rounds, superior sir?”

Skoob asked.

“No, the infantry will dig them out soon enough,” the landcruiser commander said. “Small-arms ammunition is still in good supply, but we’re low on shells, and we’ll need high-explosive as well as armor-piercing if we have to fight inside Mulhouse.” He didn’t sound happy at the prospect. Ussmak didn’t blame him: landcruisers were made for quick, slashing attacks to cut off and trap large bodies of the enemy, not to get bogged down battling for a city one street at a time. But taking cities with infantry alone used up males at an alarming rate, even with air strikes. Armor had to help.

A cloud of dust rose not far in front of the landcruiser, dirt and asphalt rose in a graceful fountain, then pattered down again, some of it onto Ussmak’s vision slits. He hit the cleaner button to clear them. Inside the landcruiser, he needed to worry about only a lucky hit from artillery-and if a round did pierce the vehicle, he’d probably be dead before he knew it.

Night was falling when they approached the built-up area Ussmak had seen ahead. Nejas said, “We have orders to halt outside of town. This shall be done, of course.” Again the commander sounded less than pleased. As if trying to convince himself, he went on, “However good our night-vision equipment may be, our commanders do not care to go in amongst the Big Uglies’ buildings in darkness. This is no doubt a wise precaution.”

Ussmak wondered. If you lost momentum, sometimes you had trouble getting it back again. He said, “Superior sir, just this once I wish our commanders would stick their tongues in the ginger jar.” Maybe he’d have a taste himself after everything was secured for the night. Nejas had searched the landcruiser for his little vial, but he’d never found it.