Upsetting the Balance

Radar spotted the land ahead before he did-but radar was not concerned with aesthetics. Teerts didn’t think much of the low, damp terrain toward which he was flying. Its hideous humidity meant that everything not recently cleared was covered by a rank, noxious coat of vegetation. He wasn’t any too fond of green, either, though he did prefer it to blue.

Only the sandy beaches reminded him of Home, and they should have been broad expanses, not narrow strips hemmed in by more of Tosev 3’s omnipresent water. He sighed. He wasn’t going to have to do anything complicated from here on out, so he let himself have some ginger.

“I might as well be happy when I land,” he told the cockpit canopy as he followed the seacoast south toward his destination. Every so often, he’d fly over a little Tosevite town. Some of them had ships in their harbors. The aggressiveness the herb put in him made him want to blast those ships, as he had the ones out on the ocean. But the Race had held this territory for a long time, and any traffic was likely to be in authorized goods.

Staying rational through that first jolt of pleasure and excitement was never easy-the ships were just sitting there, as if begging to be destroyed. But Teerts knew how to separate the urgings of the ginger from those he would have had without it. He didn’t let the herb make him as stupid as he once had.

The radar was linked to a map that listed the names of the cities over which he flew. Coming up was Miami, and past that the landing strip the Race had taken for its own. Miami was easy to recognize, being much the largest center the Big Uglies had built hereabouts. He could see it coming up in the distance. It had a large harbor, with tens upon tens of ships. Teerts’ mouth fell open in ginger-induced amusement as he imagined the havoc he could wreak upon them with a good strafing run. It was almost-but not quite-worth braving the wrath of his superiors once he’d landed.

Then, right before his eyes, the whole harbor-for all he could tell, the whole city-went up in a fireball.

Ginger made you think faster. That much he knew. He swung the killercraft away from that fireball in as tight a turn as it would take. He knew what the fireball was. He’d seen one of the same sort over the Deutsch city Jisrin had incinerated. This one, in fact, wasn’t quite so large as the other, and looked to be a ground burst rather than one in the air. But nothing could be mistaken for the explosion of a nuclear bomb.

The blast slapped the killercraft like a blow across the muzzle. For a dreadful moment, he thought he had no control. The ocean here was supposed to be warmer than it was farther east and north, but that didn’t mean he wanted to go into it. And if Miami had just exploded in radioactive fire, who would rescue him, anyhow?

He was starting to review ejection procedures in his mind when the aircraft decided to answer the controls. He wondered how much radiation he’d picked up from being all too close to two nuclear blasts in a matter of days. Nothing he could do about that, not now.

His next query was much more urgently relevant: was his landing site still on the map? He got on the radio: “Flight Leader Teerts to south Florida airbase. Are you there?” He’d never before meant that question literally.

To his relief, the answer came back in moments, though it was hashed with static. “Reading you clearly, Flight Leader Teerts. Were you damaged in the explosion? Was that…? Could that have been…?”

Teerts didn’t blame the male for not wanting to say it out loud. But the ginger in him made him impatient with subterfuge and euphemism. “That was a nuclear bomb in Miami, air base. Whatever we had in the city, it’s gone now.”

“How could they have done that?” The male on the other end of the radio connection sounded stunned, disbelieving. “Our radar spotted no aircraft to deliver the weapon, nor missiles, either. And we’ve chased the Big Uglies out of this peninsula. They couldn’t have smuggled the weapon in by land. What does that leave?”

Maybe ginger really did make Teerts think better, not just faster. Or maybe his mission had freed his mind from the Race’s usual patterns of thought. Without a moment’s hesitation, he replied, “Maybe they brought it in by water.”

“By water?” The fillip the male added to his interrogative cough made him sound incredulous, not just curious. “How could they do that?”

“I don’t know exactly how.” Teerts’ right eye turret swung back toward the capped cloud still rising above Miami. “But I’d say they seem to have managed.”

Atvar was growing to hate the reports he got from the targeting specialists, and to hate the sessions he spent with Kirel translating the recommendations from those reports into an order that would throw another city into the fire. Kirel called up a map of the United States.

“Once again, Exalted Fleetlord, Denver is a recommended target, along with this other, more peripheral one.”