Upsetting the Balance

No sooner had he obeyed than Nejas slammed the lid of the cupola down with a clang. “It’s a freezer out there,” he exclaimed. “Worse than a freezer! You’d go into a freezer to warm up.” As if to support him, the landcruiser’s heating elements came on, hissing gently as they blew warm air through the interior of the machine.

When Ussmak saw the male with a light wand who came up to direct the landcruiser out of the aircraft, he believed every word Nejas had said. The poor guide had an electrically heated suit of the sorts pilots used in the chilly air of high altitudes, and over it a hooded coat and boots made from the furry hides of Tosevite animals. In spite of all that, he looked desperately cold as he waved the landcruiser ahead.

Ussmak put the machine in gear and rumbled down the ramp. Snow blowing almost horizontally greeted him. The landcruiser’s heater hummed as it worked harder. He hoped it was made to withstand a challenge like this. Snow also started clogging his vision slits. He flicked the button that sent a stream of cleaning liquid onto them. It got rid of the snow, but froze in place, so it was as if he were trying to see out through a pane of ice.

“Careful!” Nejas shouted. “You almost ran down the guide.”

“Sorry, superior sir,” Ussmak answered. “If you have vision out your cupola, command me.” He explained what had gone wrong with his own optics.

Between them, the male with the light wand and Nejas directed Ussmak to a point in front of a building he saw only as a large, solid lump of snow in the midst of all the swirling stuff. A door opened in the side of the solid lump. The guide gestured. “We’re supposed to bail out and go in there, I think,” Nejas said. “I just hope we don’t freeze to death before we make it”

With a single convulsive motion, Ussmak threw open the hatch above his head and scrambled out. The cold was stunning. His nictitating membranes drew over the surface of his eyes to protect them from the icy blast of the wind, but he had to blink hard to make them return to where they belonged; they had started to freeze in place. His lungs felt as if he were breathing fire. His skin burned for a moment, too, but then went cold and numb.

“This way! This way!” the guide shouted. Stumbling, Ussmak and his crewmales threw themselves at the entrance to the building. It was only a couple of his own bodylengths away, but he wondered if he would freeze into a solid block of ice before he got to it.

As soon as the landcruiser crew was inside, the male who had guided them off the transporter slammed the door and dogged it shut. Then he opened the inner door to the chamber. Delicious warmth flowed out. The chamber between the blizzard outside and the oasis of comfort within might almost have been a spaceship airlock. As far as Ussmak was concerned, the environment from which he’d just escaped was far more hostile than the unchanging vacuum of space.

“New hatchlings!” the guide called as he went into the barracks room that seemed a tiny piece of Home magically transported to Tosev 3. “I’ve got some new hatchlings here-poor fools don’t know they’ve just been stuck up the cloaca of this miserable world.”

Males in the body paint of landcruiser and fighting vehicle crews crowded round Ussmak and his companions. “Welcome to Siberia,” one of them called. “This place is so bad, they say even Big Uglies got exiled here.”

“The ground is frozen half the year,” another male added.

“The atmosphere doesn’t freeze-it just seems that way,” said a third.

Ussmak had never run into such a cynical band of males. They had to be ginger tasters, he decided, and felt better for a moment.

Nejas waved his hands, trying to get a word in edgewise. “Where is this railroad we’re supposed to be interdicting? How can we even move about in this hideous weather, let alone fight?”

“The railroad’s south of here, but not far enough to do us any good,” their guide answered. “We’ve broken it; the trick is to keep the Russkis from hauling anything across the break and shipping it one way or the other. They have all sorts of animals, and sometimes they even use motor transport. When we come on one of their convoys, it’s usually a massacre.”

“Coming on them is the problem, though,” another male said. “Even radar has trouble seeing through these storms-when it’s not frozen up, that is.”

Yet another male said, “And we don’t even have it too bad-when we’re out there, we’re in our vehicles. It’s the poor infantrymales I really pity. They have to head out without a nice, warm eggshell around them.”

“Infantrymales!” Skoob exclaimed. “How could you possibly go out there and fight on foot in-that? And even if you could, why would you?”