Harry Turtledove - Upsetting the Balance

Now he surveyed Moishe with a sympathetic eye. “Bad for you last night? You look done in.”

“I am done in,” Russie said. “I hope the tea in there has a jolt to it this morning. If it doesn’t, I’m apt to fall asleep in front of the microphone.”

“It’ll be hot, anyhow,” Jacobi said, which was true. “As for the jolt, you never can tell from day to day, not with these messes of leaves and roots and rose hips we get instead of the proper stuff.” He sighed. “What I wouldn’t give for a cup of vintage Darjeeling-Bloody war.”

The last two words were in English. Moishe knew what they meant, but took the adjective literally. “Bloody war is right. And the worst of it is, we can’t make the Lizards out to be as black as we would otherwise, because they haven’t done much worse to us than we were already doing to ourselves.”

“You would know best about that. Anyone who was in Poland-” Jacobi shook his head. “But still, if we hadn’t been geared up to a fever pitch to fight each other, could we have put up such a battle against the Lizards?”

“I suppose not, but it’s no credit to us that we were,” Russie answered. “It’s not as if we knew they were coming. We’d have gone right on slaughtering ourselves if they hadn’t come, too. Still, I admit that’s neither here nor there at the moment. They are here, and we have to make life miserable for them.” He waved the pages of his script, then fished out his pass and showed it to the guard at the door. The guard nodded. Russie and Jacobi went in to get ready to broadcast.

“Forgive me, Exalted Fleetlord, but I have an emergency call for you from the 206th Emperor Yower ,” Atvar’s adjutant said. In the vision screen, the younger male looked as worried as he sounded.

“Very well, Pshing, patch it through,” Atvar said, setting aside for a moment the war against the Big Uglies for his private conflict with the shiplord Straha. After Straha failed to topple him from command of the conquest fleet, the shiplord should have known revenge was on its way. Atvar wondered what sort of lying nonsense Straha would come up with to justify himself.

Pshing’s face disappeared from the vision screen. It was not, however, replaced by that of Straha. Instead, Atvar’s chief security officer, a male named Diffal, turned his eye turrets toward the fleetlord. Diffal was earnest and capable. All the same, Atvar yearned for the cunning deviousness Drefsab had brought to the job. Even as a ginger taster, he’d been the best in the fleet. But now he was dead, and Atvar had to make do. “Do you have the shiplord Straha in your custody?” he demanded.

“Exalted Fleetlord, I do not.” Diffal also sounded worried. “I am informed that, shortly before the arrival of my team aboard the 206th Emperor Yower, the shiplord Straha left this vessel and traveled down from orbit to confer with Horrep, shiplord of the 29th Emperor Jevon, whose ship has landed in the central region of the northern portion of the lesser continental mass, near the city called St. Louis.”

Atvar hissed. Horrep was a member of Straha’s faction. Pshing, who must have been monitoring the conversation from his outer office, came onto the screen for a moment. “Exalted Fleetlord, the 206th Emperor Yower did not report this departure to us.”

Diffal said, “I have been in communication with the 29th Emperor Jevon. Straha is not aboard that ship, nor has his shuttlecraft landed nearby. I examined the radar records of the trajectory of the shuttlecraft. Computer analysis of the course they indicate gives a landing point relatively close to the 29th Emperor Jevon, but not so close as would be expected if Straha truly intended to confer with Horrep. The shiplord Horrep, I should inform you, vehemently denies that Straha sent messages announcing a visit, as custom and courtesy would have required.”

“Ever since we came to Tosev 3, custom and courtesy have been corroding,” Atvar said. Diffal stared back at him, not replying. One couldn’t expect a male in security to be concerned with philosophy as well. Atvar dragged himself back to the matter at hand: “Well, where is the shiplord Straha, then?”

“Exalted Fleetlord,” Diffal said, “I don’t know.”

Jens Larssen was sick and tired of bicycles. He was sick and tired of pedaling all over creation on missions he shouldn’t have had to take on and knew he wouldn’t get thanked for, and, of all the things he never would have expected before he set out from Denver, he was sick to death of pine trees.

“First the Arapaho goddamn National Forest, now the Payette goddamn National Forest-or is it the Nez Perce goddamn National Forest yet?” he asked as he worked his way up US 95 toward Lewiston, Idaho. He was used to talking to himself on the road; days often went by when he didn’t talk to anybody else. The longer he spent on his bike, the better he liked being alone.

He wiped sweat off his forehead with a sleeve. The day was hot, but he wore long sleeves and a long-brimmed cap anyway-he was so fair that he worried more about burning in the sun than baking in his clothes. His ears, which the cap didn’t protect, were a permanently raw red peeling mess.

“Not that anybody gives a damn what I look like these days,” he said. Self-pity notwithstanding, he wasn’t a bad-looking fellow: a skinny blond Viking, just past thirty, with bright blue eyes. A sour twist to his mouth marred his features, but since he couldn’t see it, he didn’t know it was there.

A Lizard jet screamed by, high overhead, flying west. The Lizards held the Snake River valley from Idaho Falls to Twin Falls, and used it as an air base against the Pacific Northwest. Outside of their airfields, though, they didn’t seem to give a damn about the area-a sentiment with which Jens heartily concurred. He’d gone through several towns-even what passed for cities hereabouts-without seeing a one of the little scaly bastards.

“Maybe I should have stopped and gone looking for them,” he said to the trees. He knew enough to make the Lizards have kittens. What better way to pay back Barbara for dumping him, to pay back Colonel Hexham for helping him lose his wife, to pay back Oscar the guard for slugging him when he grabbed her to try to get her back, to pay back the Metallurgical Laboratory and the whole stinking human race on general principles? Denver might not earn an atomic bomb all on its own, but it would sure as hell get leveled.

A mountain stream chuckled by, close to the road. Jens ran his sleeve over his forehead again, then decided he’d earned a break. He pulled the bike over to the shoulder, let down the kickstand, and climbed off. He pulled a tin cup out of the pack tied behind the bike saddle and headed for the stream. He had to think about walking the first few steps; his legs kept wanting to go round and round.

The water, undoubtedly snowmelt, was very sweet, but so cold it gave him a savage headache for a few seconds after his first long swig. He swore as he waited for the pain to subside. A gray and blue jay scolded him from the branches of one of those pines.

“Oh, shut up,” he told it. “You’d say the same thing if it happened to you.”

He unslung the Springfield he carried on his back and looked around. He wasn’t much of a hunter, but if a deer came down for a drink, he wouldn’t say no to trying for some venison. The jay screeched again. He swung the rifle its way, then laughed at himself. He’d probably miss, and even if he didn’t, nailing a jay with a.30-caliber slug was about like smashing a roach by dropping an anvil on it. You might have a few feathers left, floating on the breeze, but that was it.

Since he was sitting by the stream, he drank another cup of water. If Bambi didn’t show up, he’d be gnawing on beef jerky for lunch. He’d traded a few rounds of rifle ammo for it just outside of a tiny town incongruously called Cambridge; the more he thought about the deal he’d made, the more he figured he’d been snookered.