Tilting the Balance

“Briefings don’t know the half of it, superior sir, ” Ussmak said. Vivid inside his head were flames and explosions and unremitting fear, fear that had come flooding back at that impact against the turret and now receded only slowly.

The landcruiser column rolled on. Every now and again, bullets from the bushes struck sparks off armor plate, but the column did not slow. Ussmak kept driving buttoned up. He felt half blind, but didn’t care to have one of those rounds clip off the top of his head.

“Why don’t oz-business.ru they keep those pests from harassing us? ” Nejas asked after yet another band of Tosevites sprayed the column with gunfire. “This is our territory; if we can’t keep raiders from slipping in, we might as well not have conquered it. ”

“Superior sir, the trouble is that almost all the Tosevites hereabouts favor the raiders and shelter them, and we have an impossible time trying to figure out who really lives in the farms and villages and who doesn’t. Identity cards help, but they aren’t enough. This is their planet, after all; they know it better than we can hope to. ”

“It was simpler down in Africa, ” the landcruiser commander said mournfully. “The Big Uglies there had no weapons that could hurt a landcruiser, and did what they were told once we made a few examples of those who disobeyed. ”

“We tried that here, too, I’ve heard, ” Ussmak said. “This was before I arrived. The trouble was, the Big Uglies had been making examples of one another yet fighting just the same. They ignored the examples we made, the same way they’d ignored their own. ”

“Mad, ” Skoob said. Ussmak didn’t contradict him.

The landcruisers began passing old battlefields, some still showing the scars of fires set by shot-up landcruisers. The hulks of destroyed Deutsch armored fighting vehicles still sprawled in death. Some of them were the angular little machines Ussmak had encountered on the plains of the SSSR, but others were the big new ones that could endanger a landcruiser of the Race if well handled-and the Deutsche handled them well.

Nejas said, “Those are impressive looking hulks, aren’t they? Even holograms don’t do them justice. When I first saw one, I wondered why our males hadn’t salvaged it; I needed a moment to realize the Big Uglies had made it. I apologize for wondering about some of the things you said, Ussmak. Now I believe you. ”

Ussmak didn’t answer, but felt a burst of pleasure more subtle than the jolt he got from ginger, and perhaps more satisfying as well. It had been too long since a superior acknowledged that the Race’s obligations ran down as well as up. His last pair of landcruiser commanders had taken him for granted, as if he were just a component of the machine he drove. Not even being a ginger buddy with Hessef had changed that. No wonder he’d felt isolated, alone, hardly part of the Race at all. Now… it was almost as if he’d come out of the eggshell anew.

Smoke rose from the woods up ahead. An artillery shell burst off to one side of the road: the helicopters hadn’t routed the Deutsche, then. Ussmak had hoped he’d be going in to mop up. He hadn’t really believed it, but he’d hoped.

A cannon belched fire and smoke from behind some bushes. Wham! Ussmak felt as if he’d been kicked in the muzzle. But the landcruiser’s heavy glacis plate kept the Tosevite shell from penetrating. Without being ordered, Ussmak swung the vehicle in the direction from which the round had come. “I almost fouled my seat, ” he said. “If the Big Uglies had waited till we passed and shot at the side of our hull-”

Nejas took the time to give him one word: “Yes. ” Then the landcruiser commander snapped an order to Skoob: “Gunner! ” A moment later another single-word command followed: “Sabot! ”

Skoob put the automatic loader through its paces. A round of armor-piercing discarding sabot ammunition clattered into the breech of the gun, which closed with a solid thunk. “Up! ” the gunner reported.

“Landcruiser, front! ” Nejas said, noting the target for Skoob.

“Identified, ” Skoob answered: he had it in his thermal sight.

“Fire! ”

“On the way, ” Skoob said. The report of the landcruiser cannon was less than thunderous inside the hull, but the massive vehicle rocked back from the recoil and a sheet of flame billowed across Ussmak’s vision slits. Again the driver knew pleasure almost as intense as ginger gave: this was how a crew was supposed to work together. He hadn’t known anything like it since Votal got killed. He’d forgotten how satisfying it could be.

And, just as ginger brought a burst of ecstasy as it shot from the tongue to the brain, so teamwork also had its reward: fire and black smoke boiled up behind the bushes as the Deutsch landcruiser that had tried to impede the progress of the Race paid the price for its temerity. The turret machine gun chattered, mowing down the Big Uglies who’d bailed out of their wrecked vehicle.

“Ahead, driver, ” Nejas said.

“It shall be done, superior sir, ” Ussmak said. Along with part of the column of landcruisers, he pushed the machine forward down the road past the ambush the Big Uglies had hoped to set. The rest of the Race’s armor went after the Deutsche who’d tried to waylay them. The fight was savage, but didn’t last long. When they weren’t caught by surprise in disadvantageous positions, the Race’s landcruisers remained far superior to those of the foe. They methodically pounded the Deutsche till no more Deutsche were left to pound, then rejoined the rear of the advancing column.

“These Big Uglies are better than any Tosevites I’ve seen before, ” Nejas said, “but they don’t seem to be anything we can’t handle. ”