Upsetting the Balance

New models.The thought ran through his head as he slid down into the landcruiser through the driver’s hatch. The weapons with which the Race fought on Tosev 3 were not much different from the ones they’d used to conquer the Rabotevs and Hallessi, thousands of years before. They’d been on Tosev 3 a bit more than two years (only a little more than one of this planet’s slow turns around its sun), and already the landcruisers and aircraft with which the Big Uglies fought them were vastly more dangerous than those they’d first met.

That was frightening in and of itself. Worse than frightening was the atomic bomb the Russkis had used. If the Big Uglies got nuclear weapons, the Race was liable to lose the war. Ussmak hadn’t imagined that, not when he rampaged across the plains of the SSSR just after the Race landed.

He closed the hatch after him, dogged it tight. Nejas and Skoob would sleep by the landcruiser, they didn’t have enough room for comfort in the turret. But his seat reclined to make a fair bed. He lay there for a while, but sleep eluded him.

Ever so cautiously, he reached under the mat and took out a little plastic vial. It was full of brownish powder. He pulled off the top, poured a small mound of powder into the palm of his hand, and brought the hand up to his mouth. His scent receptors caught the ginger’s spicy tang even before his tongue flicked out to lap up the powder.

As it made its way to his brain, well-being flowed through him: he felt wise and quick and powerful all at the same time, as if he were the fleetlord and part of the fleetlord’s computer scrambled together. But he also feltgood, almost as good as he would during mating season. With no females within light-years, mating hardly ever crossed his mind; to the Race, the habits of the Big Uglies seemed a planetwide dirty joke.

When ginger coursed through him, the Big Uglies were laughable, contemptible. Better yet, in his mind they weresmall. With ginger, the war looked not only winnable but easy, the way everyone had thought it would be before the conquest fleet left Home.

But Ussmak had learned better than to taste just before he went into combat. Ginger made you think you were smart and strong, but it didn’t really make you smart and strong. If you roared into action convinced the Tosevites couldn’t possibly hurt you, you were all too likely to end up dead before you realized you’d made a mistake.

Tasting ginger had two other problems attached to it. One was that the first thing a taste made you want was another taste. Ussmak knew he was an addict; he fought against it as best he could, but an addict he remained.

The other problem was what happened when you didn’t take that second taste. Ginger didn’t just lift you. When it was through with you, it dropped you-hard. And the drop seemed all the worse because of how high you’d been before.

Ussmak made himself not reach for the vial again when exhilaration faded. “I’ve done this a lot of times by now,” he said aloud, willing himself to stillness. Depression and fear crashed down on him just the same. He knew they weren’t real, but they felt as real as the pleasure that had gone before them.

Infantrymales screened the landcruisers. In Ussmak’s worried imagination, they fell asleep at their posts or simply failed to spy Deutsch males creeping through what were to the Race alien woods. The first the crewmales would know of their blunders was satchel charges chucked at their landcruisers. Ussmak dozed off shivering in terror.

He woke with a fresh spasm of alarm when the turret hatches clanged shut, but it was only Nejas and Skoob getting into the landcruiser. “I thought you were a couple of Tosevites,” he said resentfully.

“If we were, you’d be dead meat,” Skoob retorted. A short pause showed he was letting his mouth fall open in laughter.

“Let’s get moving,” Nejas said. “Driver, start the engine.”

“It shall be done, superior sir.” The return to routine heartened Ussmak; however battered by fate he’d been, he was still a male of the Race. The hydrogen-burning turbine caught on the first try. He would have been astonished at anything else. The Race’s engineering was solid.

“We’ll clean up the Deutsche here and then resume our advance,” Nejas said as the landcruiser began to move. “A little delay won’t matter.” Ussmak wondered if he’d had his tongue in the ginger jar, too. But no. Nejas and Skoob had never developed the habit. They were everything a male of the Race should be, and so unselfconscious about it that he couldn’t even resent them.

Landcruisers and troop carriers rumbled up the road together. The farmland to either side had probably been fertile once, but armies going back and forth across it hadn’t done much to help that. Ruins, craters, and the tumbled corpses of Tosevite animals were appalling. Ussmak didn’t see any Big Uglies. They weren’t too stupid to get out of the way of the war.