Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

That sent a nasty chill through Larssen. He hadn’t imagined Lizards marching up Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House. But if they could move on Chicago, they could surely move on Washington. He wondered if the invaders from another world had figured out it was the capital of the United States.

Looking at Szilard’s smug expression, he realized the Hungarian had gotten exactly what he wanted. For all his devotion to democracy, Szilard had maneuvered the meeting like a Chicago wardheeler. Larssen chuckled. Well, if that wasn’t democracy, what was it? A question better left unanswered in Chicago, perhaps.

The chuckle turned into a guffaw that Larssen fortunately managed to strangle before it got loose. If you played with the letters in Dr. Szilard’s name just a little… Larssen wondered if Szilard himself had noticed, and how one said lizard in Magyar.

I can report one riddle solved, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said.

“That will be a pleasant novelty;” Atvar snapped; the longer he wrestled with Tosev 3; the testier he became. But he could not afford to irk Kirel excessively. All bowed to the Emperor, yes, but those below him competed. Even officers’ cabals were not unknown. And so Atvar softened his tone: “What new things have you learned of the Big Uglies, then?”

“Our technicians have discovered why the high-burst nuclear weapons of our initial bombardment failed to completely disrupt their radio communications.”

Kirel beckoned to, one of those technicians, who floated up with a captured Tosevite radio set. Atvar opened his jaws in mocking laughter. “Big and ugly and clumsy, just like the Tosevites themselves,” he said.

“You speak truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” the technician said. “Also clumsy and primitive. The electronics are not even solid-state, as ours have been through almost all our recorded history. The Tosevites use as clumsy makeshifts these large vacuum-filled tubes here.” He pulled off the back plate of the set to point to the parts he meant. “They are bulky, as you see, Exalted Fleetlord, and the amount of waste heat they produce is appalling-they are most inefficient. But exactly because they are so large and so-so gross, if I may use an imprecise word, they are much less susceptible to electromagnetic pulse than unshielded integrated circuits would be.”

“Thank you, Technician-Second,” Atvar said, reading the male’s body paint for his rank. “Your data are valuable. Service to the Emperor.” Hearing himself dismissed, the technician cast down his eyes in salute to the sovereign, then took back the radio set and pushed himself away from the fleetlord’s presence.

“You see, Exalted Fleetlord, the Tosevites’ communications system retained its utility only because it is so primitive,” Kirel said.

“Their radios are primitive, and that ends up being useful to them. They don’t yet know how to make decent missiles, so they fling outsized artillery shells instead, and that ends up being useful. Now they are trying to build missiles. Where will it end, Shiplord?”

“In our victory,” Kirel said stoutly.

Atvar gave him a grateful look. Maybe the only reason Kirel was acting so loyally was that he did not want command of what looked like an effort that promised more in the way of trouble than glory. At the moment, Atvar didn’t care. Just having someone to whom he could complain worked wonders.

And complain he did: “When the Tosevites aren’t primitive, they hurt us, too. By the memories of all the ancient Emperors, who would have been mad enough to imagine making boats big enough to put airplanes on them? Who but the Big Uglies, I mean?”

Home, Rabotev 2, and Halless 1 all had free water, yes, but in the form of rivers and ponds and lakes (Rabotev 2 even had a couple of smallish seas). None of them was troubled by the vast, world-bestriding oceans of Tosev 3, and neither the Race, the Rabotevs, nor the Hallessi used their waters to anything like the extent the Big Uglies did. Having planes appear out of nowhere, as when they raided the base on the Chinese Coast, was a rude surprise. So were the ships with big guns that pounded bases anywhere near water.

Kirel waggled his fingers in a shrug. “Now that we know they fight from the sea, we can sink their big boats, and faster than they can hope to build them. The boats aren’t exactly inconspicuous, either. That problem will go away, and soon.”

“May it, be so.” But once Atvar got to worrying out loud, he wasn’t about to let himself be mollified so easily, “These missiles they’re trying to build-how are we supposed to shoot them all down? We came here intending, to fight savages whose only missiles came from bows. And do you know what the latest is?”

“Tell me, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said, in the tones of a male who understands he’d better listen sympathetically if he knows what’s good for him.

“In the past few days, for the first time, jet planes rose against our aircraft from both Deutschland and Britain, They’re still badly inferior to ours-especially the Britainish ones-but not nearly so much so as the primitive crates with revolving airfoils we’ve been facing.”

“I-hadn’t heard that, Exalted Fleetlord.” Now Atvar really had Kirel’s attention again. After that moment of surprise, the shiplord continued, “Wait a bit. Deutschland and Britain were enemies to each other before we landed, am I right?”

“Yes, yes. Britain and the U.S.A. and the SSSR and China against Deutschland and Italia; Britain and the U.S.A. and China against Nippon; but not, for some eggless reason, Nippon against the SSSR. If the Tosevites didn’t keep coming up with new things to throw at us, I’d swear on the Emperor’s name they were all mad.”

“Wait a bit,” Kirel repeated. “If Deutschland and Britain were foes until we landed, it’s not likely they’d share jet plane technology, is it?”

“ I wouldn’t think so, but who can tell for certain what the Big Uglies would do? Maybe it’s having so many different empires on so little land that makes them the way they are.” The scrambled, convoluted way the Tosevites played the game of politics made even the maneuvers of the imperial court tame by comparison. Dealing with any one Tosevite official made Atvar feel out of his league. As for playing them off against one another, as the manuals suggested, he counted himself lucky that they weren’t exploiting him.

But Kirel was still worrying over the jets: “Exalted Fleetlord, if they don’t share technology, that means they can only have each developed it independently. They are like a bad virus, Fleetlord; they mutate-not physically, but technically, which is worse-too fast, maybe faster than we can handle. Perhaps we should sterilize the planet of them.”

The fleetlord turned both eye sockets to bear on his subordinate. This, from the male who had urged giving the Big Uglies a chance to surrender before the Race choked off their communications? — or rather, failed to choke off their communications? “You think they represent so great a danger to us, Shiplord?”

“I do, Exalted Fleetlord. We are at a high level, and have been steady there for ages. They are lower, but rising quickly. We must smash them down while we still can.”

“If only the filthy creatures hadn’t hit the 56th Emperor Jossano,” Atvar said mournfully. If only we hadn’t kept so many of our bombs aboard one ship, he added mentally. But no, he was not to blame for that; ancient doctrine ordained entrusting large stores of nuclear weapons only to the most reliable shiplords. As an officer of the Race should, he’d followed that ancient doctrine. No one could possibly think less of him for that-except that in so doing, he’d suffered a disaster. The way ancient doctrine corroded whenever it touched matters Tosevite worried him even more than the fighting down on the surface of Tosev 3.