Harry Turtledove - Down to Earth

When she entered her name and location, a signal flashed onto the screen. Due to the present unfortunate emergency, it read, delivery of the ordered item is subject to indefinite delay.

“Oh, go break an egg!” she snarled at the monitor. If only she could get out of her apartment, she could walk to the pet shop where she’d bought Orbit, buy an exercise wheel, and carry it back. But if she could walk to the pet shop, she could walk Orbit, too, and then she wouldn’t need the wheel.

Your account will not be debited until the ordered item is delivered, the computer told her. Thank you for your patience and cooperation during the present unfortunate emergency.

“It is not an emergency,” she said. “It is a war.” She knew a war when she got stuck almost in the middle of one. She’d never expected to do that, not when she’d gone into cold sleep in orbit around Home. Everything about Tosev 3 had turned out to be different from what she’d expected.

She went over to the window and looked out to the streets that were so silently, so invisibly, dangerous. Far fewer motorcars and other vehicles moved in them than they usually held. The ones that did move had all their windows rolled up. Some of them, she knew, boasted air-filtration systems of their own. Even so, she was glad to be inside here.

At the moment, she couldn’t launch out of the local shuttle-craft port even had she wanted to. Deutsch aircraft had pounded the site, doing their best to smash up all of the once-smooth landing surface. Repair efforts were supposed to be under way, but the radioactivity had inhibited them, and airfields had higher priority because more supplies and reinforcements went through them than through shuttlecraft ports, and there was generally too much to do and not enough with which to do it.

She was still peering out the window when a convoy of ambulances came racing into the new town from out of the west. Warning lights flickered atop them. Even through the double-paned insulated window, their alarm hisses hammered Nesseref’s hearing diaphragms. They sped on toward the hospital a few blocks away. She marveled that the hospital hadn’t been overwhelmed; war produced injuries on a scale she’d never imagined till now.

Orbit came up and stood on his hind legs, leaning his forepaws on the glass so he could get his head up high enough to see out. Nesseref scratched him on the muzzle; he shot out his tongue and licked her hand. She wondered what he made of the view, and thought he’d come over mostly because he wanted companionship: like befflem, tsiongyu paid more attention to scent than to sight.

Other alarms began to hiss. A voice from the computer monitor shouted stridently: “Air raid! Take cover! Deutsch air raid! Take cover at once!”

Nesseref said, “Come on, Orbit!” She dove under the bed. The new town had been attacked before; she knew how terrifying that could be.

Antiaircraft missiles roared out of launchers around the town. Antiaircraft guns-some made by the Race, others of Tosevite manufacture but pressed into service all the same-began to bark and crash.

And then, above those barking crashes, she heard the screams from the jet engines of several Deutsch killercraft. That the Deutsche should have killercraft with jet engines still struck her as wrong, unnatural, even though she’d been on Tosev 3 for several years now. That she should be a target for those killercraft stuck her as a great deal worse. If one of the bombs they dropped struck her building, if one of the shells they fired struck her…

She didn’t want to think about that. It was hard not to, though, when bombs burst in the town and when shells started slamming into the building. It shuddered, as if in an earthquake. Fortunately, it was harder to set on fire than a Tosevite structure. But fallout is getting in, Nesseref thought.

Even before the all-clear sounded, she left the shelter that probably wouldn’t have done her much good and stuffed plastic sheeting under the door. She didn’t know how much it would help; if polluted air was getting in through the ducts, it wouldn’t do much of anything. But it couldn’t hurt.

Orbit was intrigued. Nesseref had to speak sharply to keep the tsiongi from dragging away the plastic she’d used. The animal’s answering stare was reproachful. She’d had the fun of putting the plastic down. Why wouldn’t she let him have the fun of pulling it up again?

“Because it might not be healthy for either one of us if you did,” Nesseref told her pet. That made no sense at all to Orbit. She’d known it wouldn’t.

An ambulance hissed up in front of her building. Along with its flashing lights, she saw, it also had a red cross painted on top of it. That was no symbol the Race used; it belonged to the Big Uglies. It meant the vehicle was used only to aid the sick and injured, and so was not a proper military target.

Workers leaped out of the ambulance and ran skittering into the apartment building. When they came out again, they carried wounded males and females on stretchers or helped them get into the ambulance under their own power. The wounded left behind streaks and pools of blood Nesseref could see even from her upper-story flat. She turned away, more than a little sickened. She’d never imagined seeing so much blood, except perhaps at a rare traffic accident.

She swung an eye turret toward the monitor. This building’s filtration system is still functional, she read. Damaged windows are being resealed as rapidly as possible. Please remain calm.

“Damaged windows!” Nesseref’s mouth fell open in sardonic laughter. Did-could-anyone think the Deutsch cannon shells had penetrated only through window glass? They could have gone through the outer walls just as easily-and through several inner walls, too.

Anyone who thought would be able to see that in the flick of a nictitating membrane across an eyeball. But how many males and females feel like thinking right now? Nesseref wondered. How many will just want to seize any reassurance they can find?

Nesseref sighed. Colonists hadn’t come to Tosev 3 expecting the conquest to be continuing here. They’d come to reconstruct lives as much like those back on Home as they could make them. She wondered how they would react to being plunged into the chaos of war. By all she’d seen, Big Uglies took it for granted. That wasn’t so among her own kind-far from it.

The Deutsche will never have another chance to do this to us, she thought. But what of the other independent not-empires? If they didn’t walk soft, they would be sorry. She was sure of that.

Back in South Africa, Gorppet had more ginger than he knew what to do with. When the Race uprooted him from the comfortable post he’d won as a reward for capturing the fanatic named Khomeini, he’d brought barely enough to Poland to keep himself happy for a little while. And most of what he had, he couldn’t taste. He’d learned during the last round of fighting that a male who tasted too often thought he was braver and smarter and more nearly invulnerable than he really was. He usually found out his mistake by finding himself dead.

Gorppet had learned all sorts of things during the fighting. That, of course, was why the Race had summoned him back to combat. He could have done without the honor. He’d already given the Big Uglies too many chances to kill or maim him. That was his view of the matter, anyhow. As far as his superiors were concerned, he was just one more munition, to be expended as necessary.

At the moment, he waited in a barn that smelled powerfully of Tosevite animals. A regiment leader was briefing him and a good many other lower-ranking officers: “We can expect this latest Deutsch thrust to exhaust itself before long. The Big Uglies’ ability to resupply is almost entirely destroyed.”