Harry Turtledove - Striking the Balance

His mouth fell open in amusement. As far as he was concerned, a Big Ugly was a Big Ugly, and no more needed to be said. The Tosevites themselves, though, evidently saw things differently.

These Tosevites had stripped off the tunics that covered the upper parts of their bodies. The metabolic water they used for bodily cooling glistened on their hides. As far as they were concerned, it was hot.

To Teerts, the temperature was comfortable, though he found the air far too moist to suit him. Still, the humidity in this Florida place was the only thing about its weather he didn’t care for. He’d spent winters in Manchuria and Nippon. Next to them, Florida seemed wonderful.

A couple of armorers began loading the munitions onto Teerts’ klllercraft. He looked at the load. “Only two air-to-air missiles?” he said unhappily.

The senior armorer said, “Be thankful you’ve got two, superior sir.” He was a solid fellow named Ummfac. Though he was nominally subordinate to the killercraft pilots, wise ones treated him and his ilk as equals-and often got better loads because of it. Now he went on, “Pretty soon it’ll be nothing but cannon fire, we and the Big Uglies hammering away at each other from short range.”

“There’s a nasty thought,” Teerts said. He sighed. “You’re probably right, though. That’s the way the war seems to be going these days.” He patted the skin of the killercraft’s fuselage. “The Emperor be praised that we still fly superior aircraft.”

“Truth,” Ummfac said. “There’s the question of spares even with them… “

Teerts climbed up into the cockpit and snuggled down in the armored, padded seat as if he were a hatchling curling up inside the eggshell from which he’d just emerged. He didn’t want to think about problems with spares. Already, the Big Uglies were flying aircraft far more dangerous to his machine than they had been when the Race first came to Tosev 3.

He laughed again, bitterly. The Big Uglies weren’t supposed to have been flying any aircraft. They were supposed to have been pretechnological barbarians. As far as he was concerned, barbarians they were: no one who’d ever been in Nipponese captivity could possibly argue with that. Pretechnological, however, had turned out to be another matter.

He went through his preflight checklist. Everything was as it should have been. He stuck a finger into the space between a loose piece of padding and the inner wall of the cockpit. No one had found his vial of ginger. That was good. The Nipponese had addicted him to the herb while he lay in their hands. After he’d escaped from captivity, he’d discovered how many of his fellow males tasted it of their own accord.

He called the local flight controller, got permission to take off. The twin turbofans in the killercraft roared to life. The vibration and noise went all through him, a good and familiar feeling.

He taxied down the runway, then climbed steeply, acceleration shoving him back hard into his seat. His horizon expanded marvelously, as it did whenever he went airborne. He enjoyed that expansion less than he had from other bases, though, for it soon brought into view the ruins of Miami.

Teerts had been flying down to Florida when that area went up in an appalling cloud. Had he been a little ahead of himself, the fireball might have caught him, or the blast might have wrecked his killercraft or flipped it into a spin from which it never would have recovered.

Even thinking about that squeezed an alarmed hiss from him. Of itself, his hand started to reach for the little plastic vial of powdered ginger. When he was reassigned to the lesser continental mass, he’d wondered if he would still be able to get the powdered herb he craved. But a good many males on the Florida base used it, and the dark-skinned Big Uglies who labored for the Race seemed to have an unending supply. They hadn’t yet asked him for anything more than trinkets, little electronic gadgets he could easily afford to give up in exchange for the delights ginger brought him.

But-“I will not taste now,” he said, and made his hand retreat. However good ginger made him feel, he knew it clouded his judgment. Engaging the Big Uglies wasn’t so easy or so safe as it had once been. If you went at them confident you’d have things all your own way no matter what, you were liable to end up with your name on the memorial tablet that celebrated the males who had perished to bring Tosev 3 into the Empire.

Rabotev 3 and Halless 1 had such tablets at their capitals; he’d seen holograms of them before setting out from Home. The one on Halless 1 had only a few names, the one on Rabotev 2 only a few hundred. Teerts was sure the Race would set up memorial tablets for Tosev 3; if they’d done it on the other worlds they’d conquered, they’d do it here. If you didn’t maintain your traditions, what point to having a civilization?

But the memorial tablets here would be different from those of the other two habitable worlds the Race had conquered. “We can set up the tablets, then build the capital inside them,” Teerts said. In spite of himself, his mouth fell open. The image was macabre, but it was also funny. The memorial tablets to commemorate the heroes who fell in the conquest of Tosev 3 would have a lot of names on them.

Teerts flew his prescribed sweep, north and west over the lesser continental mass. A lot of the territory over which he passed was still in the hands of the local Big Uglies. Every so often, antiaircraft fire would splotch the air below and behind him with black puffs of smoke. He didn’t worry about that; he was flying too high for the Tosevites’ cannon to reach him.

He did keep a wary eye turret turned toward the radar presentation in his head-up display. Intelligence said the Americans lagged behind the British and the Deutsche when it came to jet aircraft, and they mostly used their piston-and-airfoil machines for ground attack and harassment duties, but you never could tell… and Intelligence wasn’t always as omniscient as its practitioners thought. That was another painful lesson the Race had learned on Tosev 3.

Here and there, snow dappled the higher ground. As far as Teerts was concerned, that was as good a reason as any to let the Big Uglies keep this part of their world. But if you let them keep all the parts where snow fell, you’d end up with a depressingly small part of the world to call your own.

He drew nearer the large river that ran from north to south through the heart of the northern half of the lesser continental mass. The Race controlled most of the territory along the river. If his aircraft got into trouble, he had places where he could take refuge.

The large river marked the westernmost limit of his planned patrol. He was about to swing back toward Florida, which, no matter how humid it was, did at least enjoy a temperate climate, when his forward-looking radar picked up something new and hideous.

Whatever it was, it took off from the ground and rapidly developed more velocity than his killercraft had. For a moment, he wondered if something inside his radar had gone wrong. If it had, would the base have the components it needed to fix the problem?

Then his paradigm shifted. That wasn’t an aircraft, like the rocket-powered killercraft the Deutsche had started using. It was an out-and-out rocket, a missile. The Deutsche had those, too, but he hadn’t known the Americans did. From his briefings, he didn’t think Intelligence knew it, either.

He flicked on his radio transmitter. “Flight Leader Teerts calling Florida base Intelligence,” he said.

Satellite relay connected him almost as quickly as if he’d been in the next room. “Intelligence, Florida base, Aaatos speaking. Your report, Flight Leader Teerts?”

Teerts gave the particulars of what his radar had picked up, then said, “If you like, I have fuel enough to reach the launch site, attack any launcher or Tosevite installation visible, and still return to base.”