Tilting The Balance (31 page)

The Lizards weren’t eager to swarm up the ridge any more, though, not when the two that had tried it didn’t come back. They weren’t used to armor fights where their foes had a decent chance of doing them in. Jager didn’t think they were afraid; he’d stopped underestimating enemies after his first couple of weeks in Russia. He did think he’d made the Lizards thoughtful.

He was about to order his reserves to try a flanking maneuver using the ridge for cover when a shell slammed into the side of the northernmost Lizard panzer. Another followed a few seconds later and set the armored vehicle ablaze. Jager was still trying to figure out who was doing the shooting when the Lizard crew bailed out of their panzer and ran for the brush. Machinegun fire cut them down.

Jager whooped. “It’s that Panzer IV!” he yelled. “They should have chased it down and killed it, but they got busy with us and forgot all about it.” He’d forgotten all about it, too, but he didn’t have to admit that, even to himself.

The Lizards certainly had left it out of their plans. Its unexpected return to action did the same thing to them that the unexpected in combat often did to the Russians: it panicked them and sent them into a retreat they didn’t have to make. Jager fired a couple of rounds at them from the ridge line, just to remind them he was there, but didn’t pursue – coming out into the open against them was asking to get shot up.

Klaus Meinecke looked up from his gunsight, a grin stretched wide across his face. “By God, Colonel, they’re as sensitive about their flanks as any virgin I ever tried to lay,” he exclaimed.

“So they are.” Jager laughed, too, but under the coarse joke lay a grain of truth. He had seen the same thing fighting the Red Army. Come straight at them and they’d die in place by thousands sooner than yielding a meter of ground. Flank them out – or even threaten to flank them out – and they were liable to run like rabbits. Half to himself, he said, “They aren’t quick to adapt, not even a little.”

“No, sir,” the gunner agreed. “And they’ve paid for being slow, that they have.”

“You’re right.” Jager sounded wondering, even to himself. His men had killed at least five Lizard panzers – to say nothing of a helicopter – in this fight. They’d lost more than that – Tigers, Panthers, Panzer IVs – but they’d done the enemy some real damage. He wondered how long it had taken the Wehrmacht’s armor to kill five Lizard panzers last year. Weeks probably, maybe months. Panzer Us, Panzer Ills, Czech machines impressed into action, Panzer IVs with the stubby 75mm guns for infantry support – they were all toys, set against the Lizards’ tanks.

He must have said that aloud, for Meinecke answered, “That was last year. This is now. And who knows what they’ll come up with next? Maybe a Tiger with sloped armor and a really long-barreled 88. That’d make the Lizards sit up and think.”

It made Jager sit up and think, too. He liked the idea. Then he looked around again. Now he didn’t see smoke and flame and shattered flesh and metal. He saw that his comrades were still here and the Lizards had fled. “We held the position,” he exclaimed.

“We did, by God!” The gunner sounded as surprised – almost dazed – as Jager felt. “I’m not used to that.”

“Nor I,” Jager said. “I’ve been part of a partisan raid that stung them, but every time I went up against them in regular combat, I always ended up retreating… till now.” He started thinking about what needed to happen next. “Now we can bring some infantry forward, send ‘em down the road to screen for us.”

“Infantry!” Meinecke spoke the word with a tanker’s ingrained scorn. “What’s infantry going to do against panzers?”

“Give us warning when they’re on the move, if nothing else,” Jager answered. “Snipers may pick off a commander or two; the Lizards come out of their cupolas when they think it’s safe, same as we do. Maybe even an unbuttoned driver. And I hear they’re going to get some sort of antipanzer rocket the Americans have passed on to us.”

“That’d be something, if it works,” the gunner said. “The Lizards have hurt us plenty with rockets.”

“I know. They’ve hurt us with their panzers, too, a lot worse than they did today.” Jager scratched his head. His hair was matted with greasy sweat. “I haven’t seen them foolish that way before – those couple that charged straight at us. They should have known better. I wonder why they didn’t.”

“don’tknow that, sir,” Meinecke said, “but I m not going to complain about it. You?”

No,” Jager said.

Ussmak desperately wanted a taste of ginger. He needed to feel strong and bright and in control of things, even if he knew he wasn’t. Back in the turret of the landcruiser, Hessef and Tvenkel were undoubtedly dipping their tongues into the supply of the drug they’d brought along. Undoubtedly, too, it made them see the fight from which they’d just retreated as a small thing, hardly more than some cracked pavement on the path to the Race’s inevitable victory.

Ussmak wished he could feel the same way. But no matter how much he craved ginger, he didn’t trust it any more. Ginger could make you do stupid things, things stupid enough to get you killed. Two landcruisers had swarmed over that rise after the Deutsche. Neither one had come back.

Everything had seemed so easy when he started out on the plains of the SSSR: easier even than the training simulators, for those had assumed an opposition of a quality to match his own, and the Soviets’ machines didn’t come close, while their tactics weren’t anything special, either.

When he’d got into Besangon, the males had warned him the Deutsche were better at armored warfare. Now he knew what they’d meant. Nobody’d paid any attention to that rise until the Deutsche started shooting from it. They’d lured the Race’s landcruisers right into an ambush, he realized. They were just Big Uglies – they shouldn’t have been able to trick males of the Race like that.

And their landcruisers weren’t just inflammable targets any more. These were a lot bigger and heavier than the Soviet tanks he’d faced in the
SSSR
, let alone the little Deutsch models. Their guns could hurt, too.

Hessef s voice came over the audio button taped to Ussmak’s hearing diaphragm: “Come on back here. We’ve got enough herb to share with you, even if you didn’t bring any of your own.”

“I’ll be there soon, superior sir,” Ussmak answered. Just blind luck, he thought, that Hessef hadn’t gone charging after the Big Uglies himself and gotten his landcruiser – and Ussmak with it – blown to bits.

He wanted to pop the hatch above his reclining seat and get a little fresh if chilly air, but he knew that wasn’t a good idea. The side of the road closer to the river offered no cover for Big Uglies with guns, but any number of Tosevite raiders might be lurking in the woods that led up onto the mountain slopes to the west, just waiting for a male to show himself, even for a moment.

As with landcruisers, the Big Uglies’ personal weapons were less effective than those of the Race: most of their individual firearms could shoot only one bullet at a time, while their machine guns were too heavy and clumsy to be easily portable. As with the landcruisers again, though, you didn’t want to make a mistake or you’d find that one of those inferior weapons was plenty good enough to kill you.

Ussmak crawled back through the fighting compartment, then, and stuck his head up through the opening in the bottom of the turret. “Here you are, just another shell to be expended,” Tvenkel exclaimed. “Well, as long as you are here, you might as well have a taste.”

Before Ussmak could say no as he’d intended, his tongue shot out and licked the little mound of ginger from the palm of the gunner’s hand. He opened and closed his jaws several times, gulped the powder down his throat.

“That’s good” he exclaimed. With the herb buzzing through him, he felt like a brand-new male. All his worries, all his fears, ebbed away. “I wish we had the Big Uglies in our sights again.” Part of him knew that was just the ginger talking, but none of him cared.

“So do I,” Tvenkel said fiercely. “If they think I’d miss ‘em again at that range, I tell you they’re wrong.”

So Tvenkel had missed when he should have hit, had he? Under the influence of the ginger, Ussmak felt almost as much contempt for him as he did for the Big Uglies. The bungling incompetent couldn’t hit a city if he was in the middle of it he thought.

Hessef said, “We didn’t do as well as we should have.” His voice held melancholy uncertainty; the drug was wearing off, leaving crushing sadness and emptiness behind. He also sounded more thoughtful than usual as he continued, “Maybe Ussmak is right: maybe we should go into combat without tasting first.”

“I think that would be a good idea, superior sir,” Ussmak said. At the moment, he would have thought any ideas good that agreed with his own. He went on, “We may think we do well when we taste the herb, but in fact we don’t.” The contrast between belief and reality hit him with stunning force, almost as if his own words came not from his mouth but from one of the great departed Emperors of the past.

“It may be so,” Hessef agreed mournfully. He was sliding down from his peak of omnipotent euphoria, sure enough.

“Nonsense, superior sir.” Tvenkel must have had another taste just before he gave one to Ussmak, for he still sounded ginger-certain about things. “Just bad luck, that’s all. Can’t hit everything all the time – and these Big Uglies had the advantage of position on us.”

“Yes, and how did they get it?” Ussmak answered his own question: “They got it because we rushed ahead without taking proper notice of our surroundings and we did that because too many of us were tasting.” His mouth fell open. Here he was complaining about tasting while he had a head full of ginger. The irony struck him as deliciously funny.

“We should smash them anyhow,” Tvenkel declared.

“When we first landed, we would have, I think,” Hessef said. “Now we face tougher landcruisers… and ours remain the same.”

“Still better by far than anything the Big Uglies have,” Tvenkel said with an angry hiss; the herb was making him confident to the point of being combative. “Even these new machines are slow and weak next to ours.”

“That’s so,” Hessef said, “but they’re not as slow or as weak as the ones we met before. And who can say what the Tosevites will build next?” He shivered a little. Just as Tvenkel was arrogant under the influence of ginger and ignored real problems, Hessef saw those problems magnified in the depression that came when the drug wore off.

“If we conquer them, they won’t build anything next,” Tvenkel said.

Ussmak liked that idea. Since he was riding his taste of ginger up to the heights, he felt as Tvenkel did: that the Race could accomplish whatever it desired, and that nothing would be allowed to stand in its way. But he had learned that what he felt when he tasted was not to be relied upon, which was something few other ginger tasters seemed to have realized. He tried to stand outside himself, to look at what the ginger did to him as if it were happening to someone else.

He said, “We had better conquer them soon, or they will build their new machines. And every one they do build makes them that much harder to overcome.”

“Retreating from their landcruisers isn’t going to make conquering them any easier,” Hessef said, almost moaning. “But losing five machines in battle against them doesn’t get the job done, either. The Emperor only knows what they’re saying about that back in Besangon.” He cast down his eyes at the mention of the Race’s sovereign, and didn’t raise them again right away. Sure enough, after-ginger depression held him in its claws.

“Superior sir, what you need is another taste,” Tvenkel said. He took out a vial of ginger, poured some into his hand, offered it to Hessef. The landcruiser commander’s tongue flicked out. The powdered drug disappeared.

“Ah, that’s better,” Hessef said as the ginger began to take hold of him once more.

“Why is it better?” Ussmak wondered aloud. “The world is still the same as it was before you tasted, so how have things really changed?”

“They’ve changed because now I have this lovely powder inside of me. No matter how ugly the Big Uglies outside the landcruiser are, I don’t have to worry about it. All I have to do is sit here in my seat and not think about a thing.”

And if some Tosevite chooses this moment to sneak up on us with a satchel charge, we’re all liable to die because you’re not thinking. Ussmak held that to himself. Despite all he’d been through, despite the herb coursing through him, the subordination drilled into him since his hatchling days remained strong.

In any case, he didn’t think the Big Uglies had pursued the Race’s retreating landcruisers. Why should they have? They’d kept the Race from pushing north, which was what they’d had in mind.

They didn’t have to conquer, they just had to resist. For how long? Ussmak wondered. The answer slammed into him like a cannon shell: till we have no equipment left.

Five landcruisers gone today in this engagement alone. Hessef was right: they would be gnashing their teeth in Besangon over that news. Ussmak wondered how many landcruisers the Race had left, all over Tosev 3. In the first heady days of the invasion, it hadn’t seemed to matter. They advanced as they would, and swept all before them. They didn’t sweep any more; they had to fight. And when they fought, they got hurt.

Oh, so did the Tosevites. Though his ginger euphoria was starting to ebb, Ussmak still acknowledged that. Even in the botched engagement from which the Race’s landcruisers had just retreated, they’d killed many more enemy vehicles than they’d lost themselves. When transcribing his after-action report onto disk, the unit commander would probably be able to present the engagement as a victory.

But it wasn’t a victory. The clarity of thought the drug brought to Ussmak let him see that only too well. The Big Uglies were losing landcruisers at a prodigal rate, yes, but they were still making them, too, and making them better than they had before. Ussmak wondered how many landcruisers remained aboard the freighters that had fetched them from Home. Even more than that, he wondered what the Race would do when no more landcruisers were left on those freighters.

When he said that aloud, Hessef answered, “That’s why we’d better conquer quickly: if we don’t, we’ll have nothing left to do the job with.” Even the landcruiser commander’s new taste of ginger didn’t keep him from seeing as much for himself.