Harry Turtledove - Aftershocks

“Where are they taking us? Do you know?” Liu Han asked.

Nieh Ho-T’ing shook his head. “I haven’t the faintest idea. Wherever it is, it has to be better than where we have been.”

Since Liu Han had had the identical thought, she could hardly disagree. “I was afraid they were going to liquidate us, but now I don’t think they will.”

“No, I don’t think so, either,” Nieh said. “They could do that in camp if they decided it served their interests.”

Before Liu Han could answer, the scaly devils slammed the rear gate shut. She heard clatterings from outside. “What are they doing?” she asked, still anything but trusting of the little scaly devils.

“Locking us in,” Nieh Ho-T’ing answered calmly. “The gates on this machine are made to open from the inside, from this compartment, to let out the little scaly devils’ soldiers when they want to fight as ordinary infantry. But the little devils will want to make sure we do not go out till they take us wherever they take us.”

“That makes sense,” Liu Mei said.

“Yes, it does,” Liu Han agreed. It went some distance toward easing her mind, too. “Maybe we are being taken to a different camp, or for a special interrogation.” She assumed the little devils could hear whatever she said, so she added, “Since we are innocent and know nothing, I do not see what point there is to interrogating us any more.”

Nieh Ho-T’ing chuckled at that. There were, surely, some things of which they were innocent, but carrying on the proletarian revolution against the small, scaly, imperialist oppressors was not one of them.

The mechanized combat vehicle started moving. The seats in the fighting compartment were too small for human fundaments, and the wrong shape to boot. Liu Han felt that more when the ride was jouncy, as it was here. Along with her daughter and Nieh, she braced herself as best she could. That was all she could do.

It had been cool outside. It soon became unpleasantly warm in the fighting compartment: the little scaly devils heated it to the temperature they found comfortable, the temperature of a very hot summer’s day in China. Liu Han undid her quilted cotton jacket and shrugged out of it. After a while, she had a good idea: she put it on the seat and sat on it. It made things a little more comfortable. Her daughter and Nieh Ho-T’ing quickly imitated her.

“I wish I had a watch,” she said as the scaly devils’ vehicle rattled along. Without one, she could only use her stomach to gauge the passage of time. She didn’t think they would be giving out the midday meal in camp yet, but she wasn’t sure.

“We will get where we’re going, wherever that is, when we get there, and nothing we can do will make that time come sooner,” Nieh said.

“You sound more like a Buddhist than a Marxist-Leninist,” Liu Han teased. With only him and her daughter to hear, that was safe enough to say. Had it reached anyone else’s ears, it might have resulted in a denunciation. Liu Han didn’t want that to happen to Nieh, who was not only an able man but also an old lover of hers.

“The revolution will proceed with me or without me,” Nieh said. “I would prefer that it proceed with me, but life does not always give us what we would prefer.”

Liu Han knew that only too well. When the Japanese overran her village, they’d also killed her family. Then the little scaly devils drove out the Japanese-and kidnapped her and made her part of their experiments on how and why humans mated as they did. That was why Liu Mei had wavy hair and a nose unusually large for a Chinese-her father had been an American, similarly kidnapped. But Bobby Fiore was long years dead, killed by the scaly devils, and Liu Han had been fighting them ever since.

She peered out through one of the little openings in the side wall of the combat vehicle-a viewport for the closed firing port just below. She saw rice paddies, little stands of forest, peasant villages, occasional beasts in the fields, once an ox-drawn cart that had hastily gone off to the side of the road so the combat vehicle wouldn’t run it down.

“It looks a lot like the country around my home village,” she said. “More rice-I liked eating it in the camp. It was an old friend, even if the place wasn’t. I’d got used to noodles in Peking, but rice seemed better somehow.”

“Freedom would seem better,” Liu Mei said. “Liberating the countryside would seem better.” She was still a young woman, and found ideology about as important as food. Liu Han shook her head, somewhere between bewilderment and pride. When she was Liu Mei’s age, she’d hardly had an ideology. She’d been an ignorant, illiterate peasant. Thanks to the Party, she was neither ignorant nor illiterate anymore, and her daughter never had been.

With more jounces, the mechanized combat vehicle went off the road and into a grove of willows. There, with newly green boughs screening off the outside world, it came to a stop, though the motor kept running. A rattle at the back of the vehicle was a male undoing whatever fastening had kept the rear gate closed. It swung open. In the language of the Race, the scaly devil said, “You Tosevites, you come out now.”

If they didn’t come out now, the little devils could shoot them while they were in the troop-carrying compartment. Liu Han saw she had no choice. Out she came, bumping her head on the roof of the vehicle.

She looked around as soon as she had her feet on the ground. The turret of the combat vehicle mounted a small cannon and a machine gun. Those bore on the Chinese men with submachine guns and rifles who advanced toward the machine. In their midst were three woebegone little scaly devils. One of the Chinese called, “You are Nieh Ho-T’ing, Liu Han, and Liu Mei?”

“That’s right,” Liu Han said, her agreement mixing with those of the others. She added, “Who are you?”

“That doesn’t matter,” the man answered. “What does matter is that you are the people for whom we are exchanging these hostages.” He swung the muzzle of his submachine gun toward the unhappy little devils he and his comrades were guarding.

Negotiations between the men of the People’s Liberation Army-for that was what they had to be-and the little scaly devils who made up the crew of the combat vehicle did not last long. When they were through, the little scaly devils in Chinese hands hurried into the vehicle while Liu Han and her daughter and Nieh hurried away from it. The scaly devils slammed the doors to the troop compartment shut as if they expected the Chinese to start shooting any second.

And the Chinese leader said, “Hurry. We have to get out of here. We can’t be sure the little scaly devils don’t have an ambush laid on.”

Fleeing through the willow branches that kept throwing little leaves in her face, Liu Han said, “Thank you so much for freeing us from that camp.”

“You are experienced revolutionaries,” the People’s Liberation Army man answered. “The movement needs you.”

“We will give it everything we have,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said. “The Kuomintang could not defeat us. The Japanese could not defeat us. And the little scaly devils shall not defeat us, either. The dialectic is on our side.”

The little scaly devils knew nothing of the dialectic. But they, like the Party, took a long view of history. Eventually, history would show which was correct. Liu Han remained convinced the proletarian revolution would triumph, but she was much less certain than she had been that it would happen in her lifetime. But I’m back in the struggle, she thought, and hurried on through the willows.

Not even during the fighting after the conquest fleet landed on Tosev 3 had Gorppet seen such devastation as he found when the small unit he commanded moved into the Greater German Reich.