Upsetting the Balance

The Big Uglies, meanwhile, had gone from riding animals and swinging swords to riding jet aircraft, launching short-range missiles, using radio… and now to atomic weapons. The Race’s savants would be millennia investigating and explaining how a species could move forward so fast. Neither the Race itself nor its subjects, the Hallessi and the Rabotevs, had ever shown such a pattern. To them, change came in slow, tiny, meticulously considered steps.

Atvar, unfortunately, did not have millennia to investigate the way the Big Uglies worked. Circumstances forced him to act on their time scale, and with too large a measure of their do-it-now, worry-later philosophy. He said, “In this entire sorry episode, I take comfort in but one thing.”

“Permission to speak, Exalted Fleetlord?” a male called from near the front of the hall: Straha, shiplord of the206th Emperor Yower, next senior in the fleet after Kirel-and no ally of Atvar’s. To Atvar’s way of thinking, he was so rash and impetuous, he might as well have been a Big Ugly himself.

But at a meeting of this sort, all views needed hearing. “Speak,” Atvar said resignedly.

“Exalted Fleetlord-” Straha used the proper deferential title, but sounded anything but properly deferential. “Exalted Fleetlord, how can any part of this fiasco cause you comfort?”

Some of the shiplords muttered in alarm at the harsh language Straha used; males of the Race, even those of highest rank, were expected to show-and to feel-respect for their superiors at all times. But a disquieting number of officers-and not just those of his faction-seemed to agree with Straha.

Atvar said, “Here is the comfort, Shiplord.” He used Straha’s title, high but not supreme in the conquest fleet, to remind him of his place, then went on, “Analysis shows the plutonium the SSSR used in its weapon to have come from stocks stolen from us in a raid during Tosev 3’s past autumn. The Big Uglies may be able to make a bomb if they get nuclear material, but we have no evidence they can manufacture it on their own.”

“Cold comfort to the thousands of males dead because you didn’t think the Tosevites could do even so much,” Straha jeered.

“Shiplord, you forget yourself,” Kirel said from beside Atvar; sometimes a near-equal could call attention to a breach of decorum a superior might feel he had to ignore.

“By the Emperor, Shiplord, I do not,” Straha shouted back. At the mention of his sovereign, he cast down both eye turrets so he looked at the floor for a moment. So did every other male in the chamber, Atvar included. The murmurs among the shiplords grew; as Kirel had said, Straha’s conduct was most out of place in a staid officers’ meeting.

But Straha himself was anything but staid. “Who, Exalted Fleetlord, led the raid in which we lost this nuclear material?” he demanded.

Atvar’s gut knotted. Now he knew the direction from which Straha would attack, but knowing brought no comfort. He tried to head off the shiplord: “That is not relevant to the matter before us now.”

Many males, probably even most, would have yielded to his authority. Straha, though, refused to be headed off. “It most certainlyis relevant, Exalted Fleetlord,” he howled. “Wasn’t the chief Big Ugly male the one named Skorzeny?”

With its hisses, the name might almost have belonged to a male of the Race. That, however, was not why it drew a sharp reaction from the assembled shiplords. The male called Skorzeny had given the Race grief ever since the conquest fleet landed on Tosev 3. And-

Straha continued as Atvar had known he would: “Exalted Fleetlord, along with promising us the capture of Moskva at our previous meeting, did you not also promise us the imminent destruction of Skorzeny? Have we achieved either of these goals?”

His sarcasm made the murmurs in the great hall rise to a din. Males shouted angrily at one another. Through the uproar, Atvar answered steadily, “Shiplord, you know we have not. I assure you, I find that at least as unfortunate as you do.”

The sardonic reply did nothing to calm the shiplords. It certainly did not calm Straha, who said, “Instead of Moskva captured, we have a major force ruined. Instead of Skorzeny dead, we have the city of Split lost, Croatia more firmly in the Deutsch camp than ever, and Skorzeny boasting of what he did over every frequency on which the Deutsche broadcast. Assembled shiplords, I submit to you that these plans were not adequately developed.”

He couldn’t have been much more provocative if he’d suggested that Atvar was in the Big Uglies’ pay. Accusing a male of the Race of bad planning was as harsh a condemnation as you could make. Atvar had trouble replying, too, for the plan on which he’d relied in Split had come from the mind of an operative named Drefsab, who, despite being perhaps the best intelligence officer the Race possessed, was-or rather, had been-addicted to the Tosevite herb ginger, which could easily have clouded his judgment.