Harry Turtledove - Upsetting the Balance

“Yes, that does make sense.” Atvar sighed again. “No help for it. Some junior males will get new marks and colors for their body paint. Some of them won’t have the experience or the sense to do their jobs as well as they should. As they show that, we’ll cull them and put others in their place. We shall rule China. We shall rule Tosev 3.” And I shall drink enough hudipar-berry brandy to forget I’m orbiting above this miserable, hateful world.

Despite that gloomy thought, his outward demeanor inspired Rokois, who exclaimed, “It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord!”

“Yes, spirits of past Emperors aiding us, it shall.” Now Atvar paused before resuming, “When you came in here, I feared you were bringing me word the Big Uglies had touched off another nuclear device. The Emperor be praised, I was wrong.” Instead of lowering his eye turrets, he turned them toward the hologram of his ruler.

“May it not come to pass,” Rokois burst out, also gathering strength from the image of the Emperor.

“Indeed. May it not” The fleetlord squirted a long pull of brandy down his throat.

Teerts’ radar gave him a new target. He didn’t have it visually, not yet. All he saw through his windscreen were clouds and, through occasional rents in them, the wave-chopped surface of the ocean that stretched between the main and lesser continental masses.

He was just as glad not to be flying over Deutschland any more. Maybe Munchen had deserved what the Race gave it; he was no targeting specialist or shiplord, to be able to judge such things from full knowledge. Flying over the glassy ruins of what had been a large city, though, left him glum. The sight made him think of Tokyo, which, but for him, might still be standing. To hate the Nipponese was one thing, to visit on them nuclear fire quite another.

They would have visited the same fire on the Race, had they possessed it Teerts knew that full well. It salved his conscience, but not enough.

He thought about tasting ginger, but decided to wait until his body’s need could no longer be denied. “I think faster with ginger,” he said, first making sure his radio was off. “I don’t think better. Or I think I don’t think better, anyhow.” He puzzled through that, finally deciding it was what he meant.

He dove down beneath the clouds. This would be the third ship he’d attacked on his flight to the lesser continental mass. They seemed almost as thick as parasites on the water. The males with the fancy body paint were right to start paying more attention to them, as far as he was concerned. The Race had automatically discounted water and travel on it.

“Trust the Big Uglies to do things we’d never think of,” he muttered. You could use up a lot of aircraft and a lot of munitions trying to suppress the Tosevites’ nautical commerce. If you tried shutting down all of it, would you have any aircraft left to commit to other tasks?

That wasn’t his judgment to make. But attacking ships wasn’t like blowing cities off the face of Tosev 3. It was a real part of war, easily comprehensible to any male at all. For once, Elifrim had assigned him something he didn’t loathe.

There! Sheet metal and wood, crude and homely, slow and wallowing, belching a trail of smoke into the cloudy sky. You didn’t need missiles for this. He’d used up his laser-guided bombs on the two previous targets, but he still had cannon and plain bombs taken from a Tosevite arsenal. They would do the job.

The ship swelled monstrously fast. His killercraft screamed toward it in a shallow dive. The targeting computer told him to release the bombs. The aircraft’s nose tried to come up as they dropped away. He and the autopilot kept it on its proper course.

He spotted Tosevites scrambling about on the deck of the ship. The killercraft bucked in the air as he thumbed the firing button of the cannon. He poured shells into the ship before the blasts from the bombs, and the water they kicked up, obscured it from sight “Goodbye, Big Uglies,” he said, pulling out of the dive, so he could make another pass and inspect the damage.

He hadn’t sunk this one. Radar told him as much, before he got a good look at it. But smoke spurted from places it hadn’t before. Some of the Big Uglies were down and motionless now, others struggling to repair the damage he’d done.

And others-Fire spurted from the front end of the ship, again and again and again. They had an antiaircraft gun aboard, and were using it with great vim even if the shells they threw up weren’t coming very close to him.

“Praise the Emperor’s name for that,” he said. If he was unlucky enough to get shot down twice, he wouldn’t be taken prisoner, not here. He’d go into the water and see whether he froze before he drowned or vice versa.

This time, he fired a long burst at the Tosevite’s popgun. He knew he’d damaged their vessel some more, and had no intention of coming round again to find out how much. That antiaircraft cannon might not have been wrecked.

Up above the clouds once more, to broaden the radar’s range. He looked forward to landing in what the locals called Florida. The air-base in southern France from which he’d been flying had turned unpleasantly cold, by his standards if not by those of Tosev 3. But Florida stayed close to temperate throughout its winter season, even if the air was moist enough to make him inspect his scales for mold whenever he got up in the morning.

He checked his fuel supply. The attack runs he’d made had left him rather low on hydrogen to make it all the way across this ridiculously wide stretch of water. The Race kept a couple of refueling aircraft flying above the ocean for such contingencies. Satellite relay quickly put him in touch with one of them. He swung north for a rendezvous.

Guiding the prong from the refueling aircraft into his own took delicacy and concentration. He was glad he hadn’t tasted beforehand; he knew how jumpy and impatient he got with ginger in him. Unfortunately, he also knew how sad and morose he got with no ginger in him.

He attacked one more ship on his way to Florida. The fog was so thick over the water that he carried out the run almost entirely by radar. He saw the wallowing Tosevite craft only at the last instant, just in time to add a few rounds from his cannon to the bombs he’d dropped.

Before long, he left behind the clouds and fog. The sky above him was a deep blue, the water below an even deeper shade of the same color. For once, Tosev 3 seemed almost beautiful-if you liked blue. It was a color far less common on Home than here. A proper world, to his way of thinking, was supposed to have an abundance of yellows and reds and oranges. Blue should have been an appetizer, not a main course.

Radar spotted the land ahead before he did-but radar was not concerned with aesthetics. Teerts didn’t think much of the low, damp terrain toward which he was flying. Its hideous humidity meant that everything not recently cleared was covered by a rank, noxious coat of vegetation. He wasn’t any too fond of green, either, though he did prefer it to blue.

Only the sandy beaches reminded him of Home, and they should have been broad expanses, not narrow strips hemmed in by more of Tosev 3’s omnipresent water. He sighed. He wasn’t going to have to do anything complicated from here on out, so he let himself have some ginger.

“I might as well be happy when I land,” he told the cockpit canopy as he followed the seacoast south toward his destination. Every so often, he’d fly over a little Tosevite town. Some of them had ships in their harbors. The aggressiveness the herb put in him made him want to blast those ships, as he had the ones out on the ocean. But the Race had held this territory for a long time, and any traffic was likely to be in authorized goods.