Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

Dimly-ever more dimly-he watched Drefsab take the head off the plump Buddha that sat on a low lacquer table. The stinking little devil knew just where he stowed his ginger. Drefsab took a taste, hissed in delight, and poured the rest of the powder into a clear bag he’d also brought along inside his coat. Then he opened the door and left.

The courtesan kept screaming. Yi Min wanted to tell her to shut up and close the door; it was getting cold. The words would not come. He tried to crawl toward the door himself. The cold reached his heart. The scarlet flames faded, leaving only black.

Harbin was falling. Any day now, the Race would be in the city. It would be an important victory; Harbin anchored the Nipponese line. Teerts would have been gladder of it had the town not been falling around his head.

That was literally true. During the most recent raid on Harbin, bombs hit so close to his prison that chunks of plaster rained down from the ceiling and just missed knocking out what few brains he had left after so long in Tosevite captivity.

Outside, an antiaircraft gun began to hammer. Teerts didn’t hear any planes; maybe the Big Ugly was just nervous. Go ahead, waste ammunition, Teerts thought. Then you’ll have less to fire off when my friends break in here, and then, dead Emperors willing, they won’t have to suffer what I’ve gone through.

He heard a commotion up the hall, orders barked in loud Nipponese too fast for him to follow. One of the guards came up to his cell. Teerts bowed; with this kind of Big Ugly, you couldn’t go far wrong if you bowed and you could go disastrously wrong if you didn’t. Better to bow, then.

The guard didn’t bow back; Teerts was a prisoner, and so deserving only of contempt. Behind the armed man came Major Okamoto. Teerts bowed more deeply to his interrogator and interpreter. Okamoto didn’t acknowledge him, either, not with a bow. He spoke in Teerts’ language as he unlocked the cell door: “You will come with me. We leave this city now.”

Teerts bowed again. “It shall be done, superior sir.” He had no idea how it would be done, or if it could be done, but wondering about such things was not his responsibility. As a prisoner, as had been true in the days before he was captured, his duty was but to obey. Unlike his superiors of the Race, though, the Nipponese owed him no loyalty in return.

Major Okamoto threw at him a pair of black trousers and a baggy blue coat that could have held two males his size. Then Okamoto put a conical straw hat on his head and tied it under his jaws with a scratchy piece of cord. “Good,” the Nipponese said in satisfaction. “Now if your people see you from the sky, they think you just another Tosevite.”

They would, too, Teerts realized dismally. A gun camera, maybe even a satellite photo, might have picked him out from among the swarming masses of Big Uglies around him. Bundled up like this, though, he would be just one more grain of rice (a food he had come to loathe) among a million.

He thought about throwing off the clothes if one of the Race’s aircraft came overhead. Reluctantly, he decided he’d better not. Major Okamoto would make his life not worth living if he tried it, and the Nipponese could spirit him away before his own folk, who were none too hasty, arranged a rescue effort.

Besides, Harbin was cold. The hat helped keep his head warm, and if he threw aside the coat, he was liable to turn into a lump of ice before either the Nipponese or the Race could do anything about it. Okamoto’s hat and coat were made from the fur of Tosevite creatures. He understood why the beasts needed insulation from their truly beastly climate, and wondered why the Big Uglies themselves had so little hair that they needed to steal it from animals.

Outside the building in which Teerts had been confined, he saw more rubble than he ever had before. Some of the craters looked like meteor strikes on an airless moon. Teerts didn’t get much of a chance to examine them; Major Okarnoto hustled him onto a two-wheeled conveyance with a Big Ugly between the shafts instead of a beast of burden. Okamoto spoke to the puller in a language that wasn’t Nipponese. The fellow seized the shafts, grunted, and started forward. The guard strode stolidly along beside the conveyance.

Tosevites streamed out of Harbin toward the east, fleeing the expected fall of the city. Disciplined columns of Nipponese soldiers contrasted with the squealing, squalling civilians all around them. Some of those, females hardly larger than Teerts, bore on their backs bundles of belongings almost as big as they were. Others carried burdens hung from poles balanced on one shoulder. It struck Teerts as a scene from out of the Race’s prehistoric past, vanished a thousand centuries.

Before long, the guard got in front of the manhandled conveyance and started shouting to clear a path for it. When that failed, he laid about him with the butt end of his rifle. Squeals and squalls turned to screams. Teerts couldn’t see that the brutality made much difference in how fast they went.

Eventually they reached the train station, which was noisier but less chaotic than the surrounding city. The Race had repeatedly bombed the station. It was more debris than building, but somehow still functioned. Machine-gun nests and tangles of wire with teeth kept everyone but soldiers away from the trains.

When a sentry challenged him, Major Okamoto flipped up Teerts’ hat and said something in Nipponese. The sentry bowed low, answered apologetically. Okamoto turned to Teerts. “From here on, we walk. No one but Nipponese-and you-permitted in the station.”

Teerts walked, Okamoto on one side of him and the guard on the other. For a little while, a surviving stretch of roof and wall protected them from the biting wind. Then they were picking their way through stone and bricks again, with snow sliding down from a gray, dreary sky.

Out past the station in the railroad yard, troops were filing onto a train. Again a sentry challenged Okamoto on his approach, again he used Teerts as his talisman to pass. He secured half a car for himself, the guard, and his prisoner. “You are more important than soldiers,” he smugly told Teerts.

With a long, mournful blast from its whistle, the train jerked into motion. Teerts had shot up Tosevite trains when he was still free. The long plumes of black smoke they spat made them easy to pick out, and they could not flee, save on the rails they used for travel. They’d been easy, enjoyable targets. He hoped none of his fellow males would think the one he was riding a tempting target.

Major Okamoto said, “The farther from Harbin we go, the more likely we are to be safe. I do not mind losing my life for the emperor, but I am ordered to see that you safely reach the Home Islands.”

Teerts was willing to lay down his life for his Emperor, the Emperor, but not for the parvenu Big Ugly who claimed the same title. Given a choice, he would have preferred not to lay down his life for anyone. He’d been given few choices lately.

The train rattled eastward. The ride was tooth-jarringly rough; the Race hit the rails themselves as well as the trains that rolled on them. But the Big Uglies, as they’d proved all over the planet, were resourceful beings. In spite of the bombs, the railroad kept working.

Or so Teerts thought until, some considerable time after the train had pulled out of Harbin, it shuddered to a stop. He hissed in dismay. He knew from experience what a lovely, tasty target a stopped train was. “What’s wrong?” he asked Major Okamoto.

“Probably you males of the Race have broken the track again.” Okamoto sounded more resigned than angry; that was part of war. “You are sitting by the window-tell me what you see.”