Upsetting the Balance

“If he didn’t, we’ll find out quite soon,” Skoob said. The silence that followed probably meant his mouth had fallen open in a laugh. He went on, “I haven’t come close to spotting him. He’s good at what he does. By now, on this planet, the males who aren’t good warriors are mostly dead, on their side and ours both.”

Ussmak was still alive, so he supposed he was good at what he did, by Skoob’s standard, at any rate. He wished he could taste some ginger. Then he’d feel alive, too. He hissed bemusedly. Even when he tasted, he imagined himself triumphantly wielding weapons, never inventing them. Somehow fantasy and hard work in a laboratory failed to come together.

Was that movement in the rubble, right at the edge of his field of vision? He moved his head to one side, trying to look farther in that direction. If it had been movement, it was stopped now.

He opened his mouth to speak up about it anyhow.Better safe was a motto drilled into the Race from hatchlinghood. Back on Home, it usually meant avoiding annoyance or discomfort. Here, it had more to do with preventing agony and gruesome death.

Before he could say anything, Skoob’s machine gun started rattling away. Hot brass cartridge cases clattered down onto the floor. “Gothim!” Skoob shouted, almost as excitedly as if he’d tasted ginger himself. “Tosevite male with a rifle-probably one of the ones who was shooting at you, superior sir.”

“Good riddance to him,” Nejas said.

The turret of the landcruiser that had taken the bomb hit swung back toward the north. The landcruiser started shelling the advancing British males once more. The flames that spurted from the muzzle, the smoke and dirt that flew with each shellburst, impressed Ussmak less than they had before. Armed Tosevites were already inside Farnham, sneaking toward the landcruisers like biters looking to slide needle-nosed mouths between a male’s scales. Swat as you would, you never could quite get rid of all of them. For that, you needed a spray-but here on Tosev 3, the biters were the ones with the poisonous gas.

Clang-pow!For a moment, Ussmak thought the main armament had fired. But this jolt slewed the landcruiser sideways. Warning lights blazed all over the instrument panel. A klaxon started to hoot, loud enough to make his hearing diaphragms feel like vibrating drumheads. That meant fire loose in the engine compartment in spite of everything the extinguishers could do, which in turn meant the landcruiser could brew up at any moment. Hydrogen wasn’t so enthusiastically explosive as the hydrocarbon fuels the Big Uglies used, but it burned. Oh, it burned…

All of that went through Ussmak’s mind far faster than conscious thought. Even before Nejas screamed “Bail out!” Ussmak had the hatch over his head open. He paused only to grab his little jars of ginger, stuff them into a belt pouch, and, almost as an afterthought, pick up his personal weapon. Then he was scrambling up and out, fast as legs and arms would propel him.

A rifle bullet whined past his head, close enough for him to feel, or imagine he felt, the wind of its passage. He skittered across the smooth, sloping surface of the glacis plate, jumped down, and landed heavily on torn-up asphalt, the bulk of the landcruiser between him and the Tosevite guns.

Skoob already sprawled there. “We can’t stay here,” he said, his eyes swiveling wildly as he looked for danger every which way at once. “This thing is liable to go up whenever the fire gets to the ammunition, or to the fuel, or if that cursed Big Ugly sends another bomb into the fighting compartment.”

“Tell me something I didn’t know,” Ussmak answered. “Where’s the commander?”

Just then, Nejas jumped down on both of them. Blood dripped from a surprisingly neat hole in his left forearm. “They hit me when I started to climb out,” he said, barely opening his mouth so as to show as little pain as he could. Skoob reached for a bandage, but Nejas waved him off. “We have to get clear first.”

The commander scurried away from the hull of the stricken landcruiser, keeping it between himself and the Tosevites. Ussmak and Skoob followed. Ussmak wanted to spray bullets back at the Big Uglies, but that would have reminded them he was there. He would sooner have had them forget all about him.

Clang-pow!The sound was quite different from outside the landcruiser, but unmistakable all the same. Another of those spring-launched bombs-Ussmak and his crewmates had got away just in time. Turning one eye backwards, he saw flame race over the whole vehicle. Then ammunition started cooking off inside. A perfect black smoke ring shot out through the opening atop the cupola.

The pyrotechnics finally alerted the crews of the other two landcruisers that something had gone wrong behind them. They both broke off shelling the advancing British Big Uglies and lashed the ruins of Farnham with fire, trying to rout out the fighting males already sneaking through those ruins.