Tilting The Balance (57 page)

The Chinese officer shrugged, which infuriated Fiore.

“Run,” he answered placidly. “If we cannot run, we fight. If we must, we die. We hope to hurt the enemy as they kill us.”

“Thanks a hell of a lot,” Fiore muttered in English. He had no doubt Nieh Ho-T’ing meant just what he said, too. He had had that do-or-die look Fiore had sometimes seen in the eyes of starting pitchers before a big game. It hadn’t always meant victory, but it generally did mean a hell of an effort.

The Japs had that look, too. In his dreadful Chinese, Fukuoka told stories about pilots who’d flown their bombers right at landed Lizard spaceships, accepting the loss of their own lives as long as they could hurt the foe, too. Fiore shivered. Martyrs were all very well in church, but disconcerting when encountered in real life. He couldn’t decide whether they were insanely brave not just plain insane.

They came to a road sign that said
SHANGHAI
50 KM along with its incomprehensible Chinese chicken scratches. At last the band split into little groups of men to make their advance less obvious.

Bobby Fiore didn’t know much about Shanghai, or care. He felt like a man who’d just got out of jail. In essence, he was a man who’d just got out of jail. After a year or so trapped first in Cairo, Illinois, then on the Lizard spaceship, and then in the Chinese prison camp, just being on his own and moving from place to place again felt wonderful.

He’d been a nomad for fifteen years, riding trains and buses across the United States from one rickety minor-league park, one middle-sized town, to the next, every April to September. He’d done his share of winter barnstorming, too. He wasn’t used to being cooped up in one place for weeks and months at a time.

He wondered how Liu Han was doing, and hoped the Lizards weren’t giving her too hard a time because he’d gone grenade-chucking with Lo the Red. He shook his head. She was a sweet gal, no doubt about that – and he wondered what a kid who was half dago, half chink would look like. He rubbed his nose, laughing a little. He would have bet money the schnoz got passed on.

But no going back, not unless he wanted to stick his head in the noose. He wasn’t a man to go back, anyhow. He looked ahead, toward whatever came next: the next series, the next train ride, the next broad. Liu Han had been fun – she’d been more than fun; that much he admitted to himself-

but she was history. And history, somebody said, was bunk.

Peasants in their garden plots and rice paddies looked up when the armed band passed, then went back to work. They’d seen armed bands before: Chinese, Japanese, Lizards. As long as nobody shot at them, they worked. In the end, the armed bands couldn’t do without them, not unless the people – and Lizards – wanted to quit eating.

Up ahead on the road, something stirred. Its approach was rapid, purposeful, mechanical – which meant it belonged to the Lizards. Bobby Fiore gulped. Seeing Lizards coming reminded him he wasn’t marching along from place to place here. He’d signed up to fight, and the bill was about to come due.

The Japs ahead started jumping off the road, looking for cover. That suddenly struck Bobby as a real good idea. He remembered the little streambed that had cut across the field outside the prison camp. Better an idea should strike him than whatever the Lizards fired his way. He got behind a big bush by the side of the road. A moment later he wished he’d gone into a ditch instead, but by then it was too late to move.

He willed a thought at the Japs: don’t start shooting. Attack right now would be suicidal – rifles against armor just didn’t work. Through the thick, leafy branches of the bush, he couldn’t see just what kind of.armor it was, but the little band of fighters didn’t have the tools to take on any kind.

Closer and closer the Lizard vehicles came, moving with the near silence that characterized the breed. Bobby pulled out his pistol, which all at once seemed a miserable little weapon indeed. Instead of squeezing the trigger, he squeezed off a couple of Hail Marys.

Somebody fired. “Oh, shit,” Bobby said, in the same reverent tone he’d used a moment before to address the Mother of God. Now he could tell what the fighters were up against not tanks, but what he thought the U.S Army called halftracks – soldier-haulers with machine guns of their own. Maybe a Lizard had been dumb enough to ride with his head sticking out so a Jap could try to blow it off.

Fiore didn’t think that showed the kind of brains which would have taken the Jap very far on “The $64,000 Question.” Take a potshot at armor and the armor would chew you up – which it proceeded to do. The halftracks stopped and began hosing down the area with their automatic weapons. The bush behind which Bobby was hiding suffered herbicide as bullets amputated the top two-thirds. Flat on his belly behind it, Fiore didn’t get hit.

He had his pistol out and his surviving grenade alongside him, but he couldn’t make himself use the weapons. That would only have brought more fire down on him – and he wanted to live. He had trouble understanding how anybody in combat ever fired at anybody else. You could get killed like that.

The Japanese soldiers didn’t seem to worry about it. They kept on blazing away at the Lizards’ vehicles-those of them who hadn’t got killed in the curtain of lead the halftracks laid down, anyway. Bobby had no idea how much damage the Japs were doing, but he was pretty damn sure it wouldn’t be enough.

It wasn’t. Along with keeping up the machinegun fire, the halftracks lowered their rear doors. A couple of squads of Lizards skittered out, their personal automatic weapons blazing. They weren’t just going to hurt the people who’d shot at them, they were going to wipe ‘em off the face of the earth.

“Oh, shit,” Fiore, said again, even more sincerely than he had before. If the Lizards caught him here with a pistol and a grenade, he was dead, no two ways about it. He didn’t want to be dead, not even a little bit. He shoved the evidence under the chopped-off part of the bush and rolled backwards till he fell with a splash into a rice paddy.

He crouched down there as low as he could, huddling in the mud and doing his best to make like a farmer. Some of the real farmers were still in the knee-deep water. One or two weren’t going to get out again; red stains spread around their bodies. Others, sensible chaps, ran for their lives.

The Japs didn’t run, or Fiore didn’t see any who did. They held their ground and fought till they were all dead. The Lizards’ superior firepower smashed them like a shoe coming down on a cockroach.

Then the shooting tapered off. Fiore fervently hoped that meant the Lizards would get back into their halftracks and go away. Instead, some of them came prowling his way, making sure they hadn’t missed anybody.

One of them pointed his rifle right at Bobby Fiore. “Who you?” he demanded in lousy Chinese. He was standing no more than a foot and a half from the weapons Bobby had stashed. Bobby was dreadfully aware he hadn’t stashed them all that well, either. The Lizard repeated. “Who you?”

“Name is, uh, Nieh Ho-Ting,” Fiore said, stealing a handle from the Red officer. “Just farmer. Like rice?” He pointed to the plants peeping out of the water all around him, hoping the Lizard wouldn’t notice how bad his own Chinese was.

He might not have fooled another human being, with his accent, his nose, his eyes, and the stubble on his cheeks, but the Lizard wasn’t trained to pick up the differences between one flavor of Big Uglies and the next. He just hissed something in his own language, then switched back to Chinese: “You know these bad shooters?”

“No,” Fiore said, half bowed so he looked down into the murky water and didn’t show much of his face. “They eastern devils, I think. Me good Chinese man.”

The Lizard hissed again, then went off to ask questions of somebody else. Bobby Fiore didn’t move until all the males got back into the halftracks and rolled away.

“Jesus,” he said when they were gone. “I lived through it.” He scrambled up out of the rice paddy and reclaimed the weapons he’d stashed. He’d started to feel naked without a pistol, even if it wasn’t any good against armor – and having a grenade around made you warm and comfortable, too.

He wasn’t the only one scuttling for guns, either. The Japs were all communing with their ancestors, but most of the Chinese Reds had played possum the same way he had. Now they came splashing from the paddies and grabbed their rifles and pistols and submachine guns.

They searched the corpses of the Japanese, too, but added little to what they already had. Nieh Ho-T’ing made a sour face as he walked over to Fiore. “Scaly devils are good soldiers,” he said disappointedly. “They don’t leave guns around for just anybody to pick up. Too bad.”

“Yeah, too bad,” Fiore echoed. Water dripped from his pants and formed little puddles and streams by his feet. Whenever he moved, the wet cotton made shlup-shlup noises right out of an animated cartoon.

Nieh nodded to him. “You did well. Unlike these imperialists” – he pointed to a couple of dead Japs not far away-”you understand that in guerrilla war the fighter is but one fish in a vast school of peasants. When danger too great to oppose confronts him, he disappears into the school. He does not call attention to himself.”

Fiore didn’t understand all of that, but he got the gist. “Look like farmer, they not shoot me,” he said.

“That’s what I was talking about,” Nieh answered impatiently. Bobby Fiore gave an absentminded emphatic cough to show he understood. Nieh had started to go off; his soaked pants went shlup-shlup, too. He spun back around, spraying small drops of water as he did so. “You speak the language of the little scaly devils?” he demanded.

“A bit.” Bobby held his hand close together to show how small a bit it was. “Speak more Chinese.” And if that wouldn’t make my mama fall over in a faint what would? he thought, and then, She’s gonna have a half-Chinese grandkid evenilfshe doesn’t know it. That oughta do the job.

Nieh Ho-T’ing didn’t care about grandkids. “You speak some, though?” he persisted. “And you understand more than you speak?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Fiore said in English. Feeling himself flush, he did his best to turn it into Chinese.

Nieh nodded – he got the idea. He patted Bobby on the back. “Oh, yes, we will gladly take you to Shanghai. You will be very useful there. We do not have many who can follow what the little devils say.”

“Good,” Bobby answered, smiling to show how happy he was. And he was happy, too – the Reds could just as easily have shot him and left him here by the side of the road to make sure he didn’t make a nuisance of himself later on. But since he made a good tool, they’d keep him around and use him. Just like Lo, Nieh Ho-T’ing hadn’t asked how he felt about any of that. He had the feeling the Reds weren’t good at asking – they just took.

He started to laugh. Nieh gave him a curious look. He waved the Red away: it wasn’t a joke he knew how to translate into Chinese. But of all the things he’d never expected, getting shanghaied to Shanghai was right up at the top of the list.

“Exalted Fleetlord, here is a report that will please you,” the shiplord Kirel said as he summoned a new document onto the screen.

Atvar read intently for a little while, then stopped and stared at Kirel. “Major release of radioactivity in Deutschland” he said. “This is supposed to please me? It means the Big Uglies there are a short step away from a nuclear bomb.”

“But they do not know how to take that next step,” Kirel replied. “If you please, Exalted Fleetlord, examine the analysis.”

Atvar did as his subordinate asked. As he read, his mouth fell open in a great chortle of glee. “Idiots, fools, maniacs! They achieved a self sustaining pile without proper damping?”

“From the radiation that has been – is being – released, they seem to have done just that,” Kirel answered, also gleefully. “And it’s melted down on them, and contaminated the whole area, and, with any luck at all, killed off a whole great slew of their best scientists.”

“If these are their best-” Atvar’s hiss was full of amazement. “They’ve done almost as much damage to themselves as we did to them when we dropped the nuclear bomb on Berlin.”

“No doubt you are right, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “One of the main characteristics of the Tosevites is their tendency to leap headlong into any new technology which comes within their capabilities. Where we would study consequences first, they simply charge ahead. Because of that, no doubt, they went in the flick of an eye turret from spear-flinging savages to-”

“Industrialized savages,” Atvar put in.

“Exactly so,” Kirel agreed. “This time, though, in leaping they fell and smashed their snouts. Not all ventures into new technology come without risks.”

“Something went right,” Atvar said happily. “Ever since we came to Tosev 3, we’ve been nibbled to pieces here: two killercraft lost in one place, five landcruisers in another, deceitful diplomacy from the Big Uglies, the allies we’ve made among them who betrayed us-”

“That male in Poland who embarrassed us by recanting his friendship is back in our claws,” Kirel said.

“So he is. I’d forgotten that,” Atvar said. “We’ll have to determine the most expedient means of punishing him, too: find some way to remind the Tosevites who have joined us that they would do well to remember who gives them their meat. No hurry there. He is not going anyplace save by our leave.”

“No indeed, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “We also need to consider the effect of stepping up our pressure on Deutschland in light of their failure with the atomic pile. We may find them discouraged and demoralized. Computer models suggest as much, at any rate.”

“Let me see.” Atvar punched up detail maps of the northwestern section of Tosev 3’s main continental mass. He hissed as he checked them. “The guerrillas in Italia give us as much trouble as armies elsewhere… and though the local king and his males loudly swear they are loyal to us, they do cooperate with the rebels. Our drives in eastern France have bogged down again – not surprising, when half the local landcruiser crews cared more about tasting ginger than fighting. We’re still reorganizing there. But from the east – something might be done.”