In the Balance

“Was it-?” But it wasn’t, Ussmak knew, for there was Krentel, nattering away over nothing in particular up in the turret. Telerep, the driver thought with a surge of pain. They’d been together all through training; they’d awakened from cold sleep side by side, within moments of each other; with Votal they’d fought their landcruiser across this seemingly endless plain. Now Votal was dead, and the landcruiser, and Telerep. And there was Krentel, nattering.

“The Big Uglies are getting too stinking good at this ambush business,” the driver of the other landcruiser said.

Ussmak didn’t answer. He’d never felt so completely alone. Among the Race, one always knew one’s place in the mosaic, and the places of those all around one. Now all those around Ussmak were gone like fallen tesserae, and he felt himself rattling around in the middle of a void.

The landcruiser grunted into motion once more, and sensibly so. No point to staying still an instant longer than needed; the Tosevites didn’t need more than a moment to work the most appalling mischief. As the armored fighting vehicle built up speed, Ussmak began to rattle around literally as well as in the bitter corners of his mind.

Here, though, he was not in the middle of a void. The driver’s compartment barely had room to hold an extra male. Worse, everything from foam spray nozzle to the bracket that held the driver’s personal weapon on the wall was hard and had sharp edges. He’d never noticed that while he was in the driver’s chair. The chair, of course, had padding and safety belts to hold him where he belonged. Now he was just jetsam, tossed in here at random.

“Too bad about your other crewmale,” the other driver said as he shoved the landcruiser up into the next higher gear. “How did your machine get hit?”

So Ussmak had to tell him about the Tosevite animal with the mine on its back, and how a moment’s kindness had cost so much. He felt half-strangled as he spoke; he couldn’t begin to say what he thought about either Krentel or Telerep, not even to a male who was a squadronmate. He hissed helplessly. That void around him again…

The driver hissed, too. “Yes, I know the beasts you mean. We haven’t bothered them, either. Now I suppose we’ll have to shoot them on sight, if the eggless Big Uglies have taken to strapping mines on their backs. Too bad.”

“Yes,” Ussmak said, and fell silent again. Rattle, rattle, rattle…

A little later, the driver of the other landcruiser made a sharp, disgusted noise. “They’re gone,” he said.

Recalled to himself, Ussmak asked, “Who’s gone?” He had no vision slits, not in his present awkward perch, and no way of seeing outside.

“The Big Uglies. All that’s here is a couple of wrecked launcher boxes for their stinking rockets. Not, even any dead ones lying around. They must have touched them off at long range, then run away.” The driver clicked off the intercom switch that connected him to the turret before he added one quiet sentence more: “This whole trip back here was for nothing.”

For nothing. The words reverberated inside Ussmak’s head. For nothing Krentel had ordered them to turn around. For nothing his landcruiser had been wrecked. For nothing Telerep had caught a bullet. For nothing Ussmak huddled here on a steel and ceramic floor, about as useful to the Race as the sack of dried meat he felt like. For nothing.

The other driver, still secure in his web, of duties rather than all alone and falling, let out a sigh of both annoyance and-infuriating to Ussmak-resignation. “So it goes,” he said.

7

Two or three times, in his travels through the bush leagues, Sam Yeager had had to dig in at the plate against every hitter’s nightmare: a fireballing kid who couldn’t find the plate if you lit it up like Times Square. Whenever he did it, he faced a deadly weapon. At the time, he hadn’t thought about it in quite those terms, but it was true. The worst sound in baseball was the mushy splat of a ball getting somebody in the head. He’d seen friends lose careers in an instant of inattention and bad lights. He knew it was only luck he hadn’t lost his the, same way.

All that helped now, against weapons more overtly deadly. When bombs and bullets flew, a tin hat seemed small protection. For that matter, a tin hat was small protection. Yeager had seen more than one man gruesomely dead, helmet holed or smashed in or simply blown right off. But he wore his gladly, as better than nothing. Come to that, he wouldn’t have minded wearing it, or even something that covered rather more, whenever he went to bat against a hard-throwing righthander.