Harry Turtledove - A World of Difference

“I’m done, I think,” Louise answered. Like her colleagues- like the chamber-she was spattered and dripping with gore. She wiped the back of a hand across her face, which only made matters worse. With an engineer’s caution, she went on, “Check me, will you?”

Irv looked at one of the vessels she had repaired, Pat at the other. Irv gave a thumbsup a moment later; the clamp was on perhaps more securely than either of the ones he had done.

“This one’s fine, Louise,” Pat said. “Well done. I’m officially impressed.”

“You told me what to do, and I did it.” Louise seemed surprised anyone would make much of simple competence. “Shall we get the bandage packs on now?”

“Yeah, we’d better.” Irv started to walk over to pick up bandages and tape, but almost tripped on one of the newIy hatched budlings. All six of them were scrambling around like so many little wild animals-which, Irv supposed, in essence they were. Their squawks were calliope whistle shrill. “When we’re done, we’ll have to catch these critters,” he said.

He was taping the first gauze-soaked sweat sock into place when he suddenly realized Lamra had neither said anything nor moved in some time. He could not afford to think about that, not until the other bandage was on. Then, with the emergency work done as well as could be, he took a step back-a careful step, so as not to step on a budling-to see how the mate was doing.

“Lamra?” he asked. She did not answer. All the eyes Irv could see were closed, and her eyestalks hung down against her body. So did her arms. They were not as limp, he thought, as those of the eloc mates he had failed to save. But the toy runnerpest had fallen in the blood between her feet.

“Lamra?” he asked again. Still no reply.

“Now what.’?” Louise asked.

Irv shook his head, baffled, fearful, but still hopeful. “Now we wait…”

“Progress at last!” Fralk shouted. At the eastern end of the fight, the Skarmer warriors had finally forced Reatur’s males back from the barrier. But the Omalo, curse their stubborn ways, would not flee. They fought on, holding a line against Fralk’s warriors. Progress it was, but not enough.

And from where he was, Fralk could not help make it more. His males stood between him and the enemy. He could not use the rifle, not without doing the Skarmer more harm than the Omalo.

“We shall advance,” he declared. “From a position nearer the barricade, I will be able to pour a flood of bullets into the foe. They will surely break then, and our gallant males will be able to surround them.”

“We advance!” the males with him shouted. They shook their spears and axes. Most of them, Fralk guessed, had resented being kept out of the fighting. “The pistol-“ Oleg said.

“Shut up, coward! Come on,” his keeper growled, understanding the word the human had used before. He tugged on the rope. Oleg stumbled forward.

“Do not worry about the pistol, Oleg Borisovich,” Fralk said in the human speech. “It has not boomed for a long time now. Surely the human who has it is out of bullets.” He waited for Oleg’s reply. Oleg only made the gesture humans used for a shrug. Fralk shrugged, too. “Toward the fighting!” he cried grandly, playing to the pride of the warriors with him.

“Toward the fighting!” they yelled back, and toward the fighting they went.

“He’s in among that little bunch near the center… There!

He just fired a burst. See the muzzle flashes?”

“I see them, Emmett.” Sarah wondered how Emmett’s voice could come so calmly through the radio. The battlefield ahead looked like 200proof chaos, nothing else but. Down there, she knew she would have been scared shitless-she was scared plenty up here. But Emmett seemed in his element.

He had read the Minervans well, too. So far none of the Skarmer had spotted her, though she was less than half a mile behind their army, flying straight down its line of march. A minute to target, maybe a minute and a half. Time to get ready.

Her left thumb clicked the POWER switch to ON. She would need all the help she could get from the batteries, because her pedaling was going to have to suffer now.

She reached down, peeled up a square of mylar that was only taped in place. Cold wind blew into her face. She pulled a butane lighter from the waistband of her shorts and flicked the little metal lever till it caught. She lowered the flame toward the wick on the gallon bottle that hung just behind her front wheel. The wind blew it out.

She swore, flicked the lever again, and then glanced up to see if the Minervans had spotted her yet. Damn, they had! She would never get to make another pass. The lighter lit. Thanking God for the fire retardant chemicals that were stinking up the cabin, she made the flame Bunsen burner big.

The wick was not soaked with fire retardants-very much the opposite. This time, it caught.

“Move, curse you, you worthless traitor,” snarled the Minervan who had hold of Oleg Lopatin’s leash. Lopatin had no choice but to move. He glared at the warrior. If only I had you back in Lefortovo Prison, he thought longingly, you would learn just what an amateur at torment you are. The KGB man knew how futile such dreams of revenge were. But they helped keep him going, anyhow.

Fralk fired again. His band was less than a hundred meters from the Omalo barricade. Any second now, Lopatin expected the American back of the barrier to prove Fralk wrong and with a little luck fill him full of holes. Lopatin would have saved a few rounds for another good chance at taking out the Kalashnikov, and he was sure anyone smart enough to make it onto Athena’s crew would also be smart enough to do the same.

Maybe, he thought with a sudden savage grin, the American would fill his kennelmaster full of holes. There was a revenge that might be no dream.

One of the other high-ranking Minervans in Fralk’s group let out a startled squeal-he sounded amazingly like a housewife spotting a rat. “A monster in the sky!” he shrieked. “Look! Three arms away from the battlemit’s coming straight at us!”

Eyestalks writhed. Lopatin’s head whipped around. He had never seen Damselfly before, but he knew what it was. The Skarmer did not. That first scream was quickly echoed by many more.

Lopatin’s keeper had two eyes on the human, two on the battle, and two on the new flying horror. That left none to pay attention to the small green-brown bush by his feet. One of those feet brushed it. The keeper jerked, went limp. The rope slipped from his fingerclaws.

“A pestilence!” one of the other males shouted. “Nogdar just stepped on a stunbush! Grab that rope, somebody!”

Too late. Lopatin was free.

A spear, wildly flung, whizzed past Damselfly. Sarah did her best to ignore it; she couldn’t do anything about it, anyway. Fortunately, most of the Minervans seemed too scared of the ultra-ultralight to think of trying to bring it down.

There was her target, dead ahead. She leaned down again, this time with a Swiss army knife in her hand.

Seeing the monster fly hissing toward him, Fralk wanted to void where he stood. He needed an instant to remember he was still holding the rifle. A rifle had chewed the krong to bloodyrags. Anything that could kill a krong ought to be able to take out a skymonster, he thought.

The cursed rifle was on the wrong side of his body to shoot at the thing! Fast as he could, he passed it from arm to arm.

Oleg Lopatin looked at Damselfly, looked at Fralk, and discovered, as so many had before him, one of the great flaws of international socialism: when faced with a choice between their own kind and an ideology, most people chose their own kind.

Lopatin did not pause to reason that out. He just yelled and jumped on Fralk.