Harry Turtledove - Tilting the Balance

Ussmak crawled back through the fighting compartment, then, and stuck his head up through the opening in the bottom of the turret. “Here you are, just another shell to be expended,” Tvenkel exclaimed. “Well, as long as you are here, you might as well have a taste.”

Before Ussmak could say no as he’d intended, his tongue shot out and licked the little mound of ginger from the palm of the gunner’s hand. He opened and closed his jaws several times, gulped the powder down his throat.

“That’s good ,” he exclaimed. With the herb buzzing through him, he felt like a brand-new male. All his worries, all his fears, ebbed away. “I wish we had the Big Uglies in our sights again.” Part of him knew that was just the ginger talking, but none of him cared.

“So do I,” Tvenkel said fiercely. “If they think I’d miss ’em again at that range, I tell you they’re wrong.”

So Tvenkel had missed when he should have hit, had he? Under the influence of the ginger, Ussmak felt almost as much contempt for him as he did for the Big Uglies. The bungling incompetent couldn’t hit a city if he was in the middle of it, he thought.

Hessef said, “We didn’t do as well as we should have.” His voice held melancholy uncertainty; the drug was wearing off, leaving crushing sadness and emptiness behind. He also sounded more thoughtful than usual as he continued, “Maybe Ussmak is right: maybe we should go into combat without tasting first.”

“I think that would be a good idea, superior sir,” Ussmak said. At the moment, he would have thought any ideas good that agreed with his own. He went on, “We may think we do well when we taste the herb, but in fact we don’t.” The contrast between belief and reality hit him with stunning force, almost as if his own words came not from his mouth but from one of the great departed Emperors of the past.

“It may be so,” Hessef agreed mournfully. He was sliding down from his peak of omnipotent euphoria, sure enough.

“Nonsense, superior sir.” Tvenkel must have had another taste just before he gave one to Ussmak, for he still sounded ginger-certain about things. “Just bad luck, that’s all. Can’t hit everything all the time-and these Big Uglies had the advantage of position on us.”

“Yes, and how did they get it?” Ussmak answered his own question: “They got it because we rushed ahead without taking proper notice of our surroundings and we did that because too many of us were tasting.” His mouth fell open. Here he was complaining about tasting while he had a head full of ginger. The irony struck him as deliciously funny.

“We should smash them anyhow,” Tvenkel declared.

“When we first landed, we would have, I think,” Hessef said. “Now we face tougher landcruisers… and ours remain the same.”

“Still better by far than anything the Big Uglies have,” Tvenkel said with an angry hiss; the herb was making him confident to the point of being combative. “Even these new machines are slow and weak next to ours.”

“That’s so,” Hessef said, “but they’re not as slow or as weak as the ones we met before. And who can say what the Tosevites will build next?” He shivered a little. Just as Tvenkel was arrogant under the influence of ginger and ignored real problems, Hessef saw those problems magnified in the depression that came when the drug wore off.

“If we conquer them, they won’t build anything next,” Tvenkel said.

Ussmak liked that idea. Since he was riding his taste of ginger up to the heights, he felt as Tvenkel did: that the Race could accomplish whatever it desired, and that nothing would be allowed to stand in its way. But he had learned that what he felt when he tasted was not to be relied upon, which was something few other ginger tasters seemed to have realized. He tried to stand outside himself, to look at what the ginger did to him as if it were happening to someone else.

He said, “We had better conquer them soon, or they will build their new machines. And every one they do build makes them that much harder to overcome.”

“Retreating from their landcruisers isn’t going to make conquering them any easier,” Hessef said, almost moaning. “But losing five machines in battle against them doesn’t get the job done, either. The Emperor only knows what they’re saying about that back in Besancon.” He cast down his eyes at the mention of the Race’s sovereign, and didn’t raise them again right away. Sure enough, after-ginger depression held him in its claws.

“Superior sir, what you need is another taste,” Tvenkel said. He took out a vial of ginger, poured some into his hand, offered it to Hessef. The landcruiser commander’s tongue flicked out. The powdered drug disappeared.

“Ah, that’s better,” Hessef said as the ginger began to take hold of him once more.

“Why is it better?” Ussmak wondered aloud. “The world is still the same as it was before you tasted, so how have things really changed?”

“They’ve changed because now I have this lovely powder inside of me. No matter how ugly the Big Uglies outside the landcruiser are, I don’t have to worry about it. All I have to do is sit here in my seat and not think about a thing.”

And if some Tosevite chooses this moment to sneak up on us with a satchel charge, we’re all liable to die because you’re not thinking. Ussmak held that to himself. Despite all he’d been through, despite the herb coursing through him, the subordination drilled into him since his hatchling days remained strong.

In any case, he didn’t think the Big Uglies had pursued the Race’s retreating landcruisers. Why should they have? They’d kept the Race from pushing north, which was what they’d had in mind. They didn’t have to conquer, they just had to resist. For how long? Ussmak wondered. The answer slammed into him like a cannon shell: till we have no equipment left.

Five landcruisers gone today in this engagement alone. Hessef was right: they would be gnashing their teeth in Besancon over that news. Ussmak wondered how many landcruisers the Race had left, all over Tosev 3. In the first heady days of the invasion, it hadn’t seemed to matter. They advanced as they would, and swept all before them. They didn’t sweep any more; they had to fight. And when they fought, they got hurt.

Oh, so did the Tosevites. Though his ginger euphoria was starting to ebb, Ussmak still acknowledged that. Even in the botched engagement from which the Race’s landcruisers had just retreated, they’d killed many more enemy vehicles than they’d lost themselves. When transcribing his after-action report onto disk, the unit commander would probably be able to present the engagement as a victory.

But it wasn’t a victory. The clarity of thought the drug brought to Ussmak let him see that only too well. The Big Uglies were losing landcruisers at a prodigal rate, yes, but they were still making them, too, and making them better than they had before. Ussmak wondered how many landcruisers remained aboard the freighters that had fetched them from Home. Even more than that, he wondered what the Race would do when no more landcruisers were left on those freighters.

When he said that aloud, Hessef answered, “That’s why we’d better conquer quickly: if we don’t, we’ll have nothing left to do the job with.” Even the landcruiser commander’s new taste of ginger didn’t keep him from seeing as much for himself.

“We’ll beat them. It’s our destiny-we are the Race,” Tvenkel said. The herb left him confident still. He gave his gun’s autoloader an affectionate slap.

Thus reminded of the device, Hessef said, “We ought to perform maintenance on that gadget. We expended a lot of rounds today. It goes out of adjustment easily, and then we’re left with main armament that won’t shoot.”