Harry Turtledove - Upsetting the Balance

“We have to maintain the landcruiser, no matter how hard it is,” Nejas answered. The landcruiser commander was bundled up as thoroughly as Ussmak. “It has to be perfect in every way-no speck of dirt, no slightest roughness in the engine. If the least little thing goes wrong, the Big Uglies will swoop down and kill us before we even know they’re around.” He paused, then added, “I want a taste of ginger.”

“So do I, superior sir,” Ussmak said. He knew he’d probably saved Nejas’ life by giving him ginger when he was wounded in the invasion of Britain. But ginger fit Nejas’ personality only too well. He’d been a perfectionist before; now the least little flaw sent him into a rage. The herb also exaggerated his tendency to worry about everything and anything, especially after he’d been without it for a while.

A lot of males in this Emperor-forsaken frozen Soviet wasteland were like that. But for going on patrol and servicing their land-cruisers, they had nothing to do but sit around in the barracks and watch video reports on how the conquest of Tosev 3 was going. Even when couched in broadcasters’ cheerily optimistic phrases, those reports were plenty of incitement for any male in his right mind to worry about anything and everything.

“Superior sir, will this planet be worth having, once the war of conquest is over?” Ussmak asked. “The way things are going now, there won’t be much left to conquer.”

“Ours is not to question those who set strategy. Ours is to obey and carry out the strategy they set,” Nejas answered; like any proper male of the Race, he was as good a subordinate as a commander.

Maybe it was all the ginger Ussmak had tasted, maybe all the crewmales he’d seen killed, maybe just his sense that the Race’s broadcasters hadn’t the slightest clue about what the war they were describing was really like. Whatever it was, he didn’t feel like a proper male any more. He said, “Meaning no disrespect to the fleetlord and those who advise him, superior sir, but too much of what they’ve tried just hasn’t worked. Look what happened to us in Britain. Look at the poisonous gas and the atomic bombs the Big Uglies are using against us.”

Skoob was also climbing into the gear a male needed to survive in Siberia, the gear that turned quick death into prolonged discomfort. The gunner spoke in reproving tones: “The leaders know better than we what needs doing to finish the conquest of Tosev 3. Isn’t that right, superior sir?” He turned confidently to Nejas.

Skoob had come through the British campaign unwounded; he’d also managed to keep from sticking his tongue in the powdered ginger, though he turned his eye turrets the other way when his crewmales tasted. But for that toleration, though, he still seemed as innocent of the wiles of the Tosevites as all the males of the Race had been when the ships of the conquest fleet first came to Tosev 3. In a way, Ussmak envied him that. He himself had changed, and change for the Race was always unsettling, disorienting.

Nejas had changed, too-not as much as Ussmak, but he’d changed. With a hissing sigh, he said, “Gunner, sometimes I wonder what is in the fleetlord’s mind. I obey-but I wonder.”

Skoob looked at him as if he’d betrayed their base to the Russkis. He sought solace in work: “Well, superior sir, let’s make sure the landcruiser is in proper running order. If it lets us down, we won’t be able to obey our superiors ever again.”

“Truth,” Nejas said. “I don’t want to quarrel with you or upset you, Skoob, but I don’t want to lie to you, either. You’d think I was talking out of a video screen if I tried it.” He didn’t think much of the relentless good news that kept coming from the fighting fronts either, then.

Trying to keep the landcruiser operational was a never-ending nightmare. It would have been a nightmare even had Ussmak himself been warm. Frozen water in all varieties got in between road wheels and tracks and chassis and cemented them to one another. The intense cold made some metals brittle. It also made lubricants less than enthusiastic about doing their proper job. Engine wear had been heavy since the landcruiser was airlifted here, and spare parts were in constantly short supply.

As he thawed out the cupola lid so it would open and close, Ussmak said, “Good thing we have those captured machine tools to make some of our own spares. If it weren’t for that and for cannibalizing our wrecks, we’d never keep enough machines in action.”

“Truth,” Skoob said from back at the engine compartment So Ussmak thought, at any rate. The howling wind blew the gunner’s words away.

Ussmak took tiny, cautious sips of air. Even breathed through several thicknesses of cloth, it still burned his lungs. Little crystals of ice formed on the mask. His eyes, almost the only exposed part of him, kept trying to freeze open. He blinked and blinked and blinked, fighting to keep them working.

“Good enough,” Nejas said some endless time later. “What we really need is a flamethrower under the chassis of the landcruiser. Then we could melt the ice that freezes us to the ground in a hurry.”

The crew started back toward the barracks. Ussmak said, “I’ve been talking with some of the males who’ve been here a long time. They say this is bad, but local spring is a hundred times worse. All the frozen water melts-by the way they make that sound, it happens in the course of a day or two, but I don’t think that can be right-and whatever was on top of the ground sinks down into the mud. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can get it out again.”

“You served in the SSSR before, didn’t you?” Nejas said. “Did you see any of that for yourself?”

“I saw the mud in local fall, before I was hurt,” Ussmak answered. “That was bad. It just comes from rain falling on the ground, though. From all I’ve heard, the mud that comes in spring, when a winter’s worth of frozen water melts, is a lot worse.”

He looked around at the white expanse through which they slogged. A lot of the drifts were higher than a male was tall. Winter had a long way to go, too; all of Tosev 3’s seasons were twice as long as those of Home in any case, and here in Siberia winter seemed to rule most of the local year.

His sigh turned the air around him smoky. Softly, he said, “I hope we last long enough to see how bad the local mud is.”

Rance Auerbach stared out across the snowy east-Colorado prairie. He didn’t see anything much, which suited him fine. He wanted to be off fighting the Lizards, not making like an MP. What he wanted and the orders he got weren’t the same beast.

He wasn’t the only one on whom those orders grated, either. Lieutenant Magruder rode up to him and asked, “Who is this guy we’re supposed to be looking for again? Waste of time, if you ask me-not that anybody did.”

“Fellow’s name is Larssen, says Colonel Nordenskold.” Auerbach laughed. “One squarehead telling us to go find another one. The colonel got word from General Groves that this Larssen plugged two guys and then headed east. They don’t want him to make it into Lizard country.”

“Why do they give a damn? That’s what I want to know, and nobody’s told me yet,” Magruder said. “If he’s a bastard and he’s heading toward the Lizards, why shouldn’t we let him be their headache?”

“Colonel Nordenskold told you just as much as he told me,” Auerbach answered, “so I don’t know, either.” He could make some guesses, though. He’d led the cavalry detachment that had escorted Groves-who’d been a colonel then-all the way from the East Coast to Denver. He didn’t know for certain what Groves had carried in that heavy, heavy pack of his, but he suspected. The explosions in Chicago and Miami hadn’t done anything to make him think he was wrong, either.