Upsetting the Balance

“Plenty of them blew up outside.” Captain Szymanski’s voice was harsh. “This probably wouldn’t have been the only Made in the U.S.A. bomb in whatever load that airplane carried. They may be sabotaging some, but they sure as hell aren’t sabotaging all of ’em.”

“Sir, that’s the God’s truth,” the first lieutenant said. He and his men set up what looked like a heavy-duty stretcher next to the bomb. With much careful shifting, they loaded it onto the stretcher and carried it away. Their chief said, “Thanks for calling us on this one, sir. Every time we get one of these guiding mechanisms in one piece, it bumps up the odds we’ll figure out how they do what they do, sooner or later.”

Staggering under the weight of weapon and stretcher, the bomb disposal crew hauled their burden out of the Chicago Coliseum. Mutt watched anxiously till they were gone. Yeah, Donnelly had said the bomb was harmless, but high explosive was touchy stuff. If one of them fell and the bomb went thud on the ground, the bad guys might still win.

Szymanski said, “Sabotage one in ten, say, and you hurt the enemy with that one, yeah, but the other nine are still gonna hurt your friends.”

“Yes, sir,” Mutt agreed, “but even if you’re just sabotaging one in a hundred, you’re making it so you can live with yourself afterwards. That counts, too.”

“I suppose so,” Szymanski said unwillingly.

Mutt didn’t blame him for sounding dubious. Being able to live with yourself counted, sure. But giving the Lizards a good swift kick in the balls counted for more in his book. Having them bomb American positions with American bombs… it stuck in his craw.

But if they were running out of their own, maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.

Crash!The shell smote Ussmak’s landcruiser in the glacis plate. The driver’s teeth clicked together. The shell did not penetrate. The landcruiser kept rolling forward, toward the village that topped the wooded hill.Crash! Another shell struck, with the same result, or rather lack of result.

“Front!” Nejas said, back in the turret.

“Identified,” Skoob answered. The turret hummed as it traversed, bringing the landcruiser’s main armament to bear on the little gun that was hammering away at them. Through his vision slits, Ussmak saw Tosevites dash about in the deepening twilight as they served the gun. The landcruiser cannon spoke; the heavy machine rocked back on its tracks for an instant from the recoil. At the same time, Skoob called, “On the way!”

He hadn’t finished the sentence when the high-explosive round burst alongside the Tosevite gun. The cannon overturned; the Big Uglies of its crew were flung aside like crumpled papers. “Hit!” Ussmak shouted. “Well placed, Skoob!” Even now, he could still sometimes recapture the feeling of easy, inevitable triumph he’d known when the war on Tosev 3 was newly hatched. Most of the time, he needed ginger to do it, but not always.

Skoob said, “The British here, they don’t have such good antilandcruiser guns. When we were down there fighting the Deutsche, now, and they hit you, you knew you’d been hit.”

“Truth,” Ussmak said. Deutsch antilandcruiser guns could wreck you if they caught you from the side or rear. The British didn’t seem to have anything to match them. Even the British hand-launched antilandcruiser weapons weren’t a match for the rockets the Deutsch infantry used. Unfortunately, that didn’t make the campaign on this Emperor-forsaken island any easier. Ussmak shivered, though the inside of the landcruiser was heated to a temperature he found comfortable. “The British may not have good antilandcruiser guns, but they have other things.”

“Truth,” Nejas and Skoob said in identical unhappy tones. Nejas went on, “That accursed gas-”

He didn’t say any more, or need to. The landcruiser crew was relatively lucky. Their machine shielded them from the risk of actually being splashed with the stuff, which, if it didn’t kill you, would make you wish it had. They’d stuck makeshift filters over all the land-cruiser’s air inlets, too, to minimize the danger of getting it into their lungs. But the landcruiser wasn’t sealed, and minimizing the danger didn’t make it go away.

In a pensive voice, Skoob said, “You couldn’t pay me enough to make me want to be an infantrymale in Britain.”

Now Ussmak and Nejas chorused, “Truth.” Gas casualties among the infantry had been appalling. They moved from place to place in their combat vehicles-a couple of those were advancing up the hill toward the village with Ussmak’s landcruiser-but when they got to where they were going, they had to get out and fight. Getting out was dangerous at any time. Getting out with the gas in the air and clinging to the ground was worse than dangerous.

Machine-gun fire pattered off the landcruiser. At Nejas’ orders, Skoob pumped high-explosive shells into the buildings that sheltered the gunners. The buildings, made largely of timber, began to burn.