Tilting The Balance (9 page)

But it didn’t quite die. The little scaly devils hadn’t said no.

A blank-faced Nipponese guard shoved a bowl of rice between the bars of Teerts’ cell. Teerts bowed to show he was grateful. Feeding prisoners at all was, in Nipponese eyes, a mercy: a proper warrior would die fighting rather than let himself be captured. The Nipponese were in any case sticklers for their own forms of courtesy. Anyone who flouted them was apt to be beaten – or worse.

Since the Nipponese shot down his killercraft, Teerts had had enough beatings – and worse – that he never wanted another (which didn’t mean he wouldn’t get one). But he hated rice. Not only was it the food of his captivity, it wasn’t something any male of the Race would eat by choice. He wanted meat, and could not remember the last time he’d tasted it. This bland, glutinous vegetable matter kept him alive, although he often wished it wouldn’t.

No, that was a falsehood. If he’d wanted to die, he had only to starve himself to death. He did not think the Nipponese would force him to eat; if anything, he might gain their respect by perishing this way. That he cared whether these barbarous Big Uglies respected him showed how low he had sunk.

He lacked the nerve to put an end to himself, though; the Race did not commonly use suicide as a way out of trouble. And so, miserably, he ate, half wishing he never saw another grain of rice,

half wishing his bowl held more.

He finished just before the guard came back and took away the bowl. He bowed again in gratitude for that service, though the guard would also have taken it even if he hadn’t finished.

After the guard left, Teerts resigned himself to another indefinitely long stretch of tedium. So far as he knew he was the only prisoner of the Race the Nipponese held here at Nagasaki. No cells within speaking distance of him held even Big Ugly prisoners, lest he somehow form a conspiracy with them and escape. He let his mouth fall open in bitter laughter at the likelihood of that.

Six-legged Tosevite pests scuttled across the concrete floor. Teerts let his eye turrets follow the creatures. He had nothing in particular against them. The real pests on Tosev 3 were the ones who walked upright.

He drilled away into a fantasy where his killercraft’s turbofans hadn’t tried to breathe bullets instead of air. He could have been back at a comfortably heated barracks talking with his comrades or watching the screen or piping music through a button taped to a hearing diaphragm. He could have been snapping bites off a chunk of dripping meat. He could have been in his killercraft again, helping to bring the pestilential Big Uglies under the Race’s control.

Though he heard footsteps coming down the corridor toward him, he did not swing his eyes to see who was approaching. That would have returned him to grim reality too abruptly to bear.

But then the maker of those footsteps stopped outside his cell. Teerts quickly put fantasy aside, like a male saving a computer document so he can attend to something more urgent. His bow was deeper than the one he’d given the guard who fed him. “Konichiwa, Major Okamoto,” he said in the Nipponese he was slowly acquiring.

“Good day to you as well,” Okamoto answered in the language of the Race. He was more fluent in it than Teerts was in Nipponese. Learning a new tongue did not come naturally to males of the Race; the Empire had had but one for untold thousands of years. But Tosev 3 was a mosaic of dozens, maybe hundreds, of languages. Picking up one more was nothing out of the ordinary for a Big Ugly. Okamoto had been Teerts’ interpreter and interrogator ever since he was captured.

The Tosevite glanced down the hall. Teerts heard jingling keys as a warder drew near. Another round of questions, then, the pilot thought. He bowed to the warder to show he was grateful for the boon of leaving the cell. Actually he wasn’t as long as he stayed in here, no one hurt him. But the forms had to be observed.

A soldier with a rifle tramped right behind the warder. He covered Teerts as the other male used the key. Okamoto also drew his pistol and held it on Teerts. The pilot would have laughed, except it wasn’t really funny. He only wished he were as dangerous as the Big Uglies thought he was.

The interrogation room was on an upper floor of the prison. Teerts had seen next to nothing of Nagasaki. He knew it lay by the sea; he’d come here by ship after being evacuated from the mainland when Harbin fell to the Race. He didn’t miss seeing the sea. After that nightmare voyage of storms and sickness, he hoped he’d never see – much less ride upon – another overgrown Tosevite ocean again.

The guard opened the door. Teerts walked in, bowed to the Big Uglies inside. They wore white coats rather than uniforms like Okamoto’s. Scientists, not soldiers, Teerts thought. He’d come to realize the Tosevites used clothing to indicate job and status as the Race used body paint. The Big Uglies, however, were much less systematic and consistent about it – typical of them, he thought.

Nonetheless, he was glad not to face another panel of officers. The military males had been much quicker than scientists to resort to the instruments of painful persuasion in the interrogation room.

One of the men in white addressed Teerts in barking Nipponese, much too fast for him to follow. He turned both eye turrets toward Major Okamoto, who translated: “Dr. Nakayama asks whether, as has been reported, all members of the Race who have come to Tosev 3 are male.”

“Hai,”Teerts answered. “Honto.” Yes, that was the truth.

Nakayama, a slim male on the small side for a Tosevite, asked another long question in his own tongue. Okamoto translated again: “He asks how you can hope to keep Tosev 3 with males alone.”

“We don’t, of course,” Teerts answered. “We who are here make up the conquest fleet. Our task is to subjugate this world, not to colonize it. The colonization fleet will come. It was being organized even as we set out, and will arrive in this solar system about forty years from now.”

So long a gap should have given the males of the conquest fleet plenty of time to get Tosev 3 into good running order for the colonists. It would have done just that, had the Big Uglies been the pre-industrial savages the Race thought they were. Teerts still thought they were savages, but, worse luck, they were anything but pre-industrial.

All three Nipponese in white started talking volubly at one another. Finally one of them put a question to Teerts. “Dr. Higuchi wants to know whether you mean your years or ours.”

“Ours,” Teerts said; would he waste his time learning Tosevite measurements? “Yours is longer – I don’t remember how much.”

“So, then, this colonization fleet, as you call it, will arrive on our planet in fewer than forty years’ time as we reckon it?” Higuchi said.

“Yes, superior sir.” Teerts suppressed a sigh. It should have been so easy: smash the Big Uglies, prepare the planet for full exploitation, then settle down and wait till the colonists arrived and were thawed out. When at last he smelled mating pheromones again, Teerts might even have sired a couple of clutches of eggs himself. Raising hatchlings, of course, was females’ work, but he liked thinking of passing on his genes so he could contribute to the future of the Race.

The way things looked now, this world might still be troublesome when the colonization fleet got here. And even if it wasn’t, his own chance of being around to join the colony’s gene pool wasn’t big enough to be visible to the naked eye – he couldn’t see it, at any rate.

He had a while to think of such things, because the Nipponese were chattering furiously among themselves again. Finally the male who hadn’t addressed him before spoke through Major Okamoto: “Dr. Tsuye wishes to know the size of the colonization fleet as opposed to that of the conquest fleet.”

“The colonization fleet is not opposed to the conquest fleet,” Teerts said. Clearing up the idiom took a couple of minutes. Then he said, “The colonization fleet is larger, superior sir. It has to be: it carries many more males and females as well as what they will need to establish themselves here on Tosev 3.”

His answer produced more sharp colloquy among the Nipponese. Then the one named Tsuye said, “This colonization fleet – is it, ah, as heavily armed as your invasion fleet?”

“No, of course not. There would be no need-” Teerts corrected himself. “There was thought to be no need for including many weapons with the colonization fleet. It was assumed that you Tosevites would already be thoroughly subdued by the time the colonists arrived here. We hadn’t counted on your resisting so ferociously.” I hadn’t counted on being shot down, the pilot added to himself.

His words seemed to please the Nipponese. They bared their flat, square teeth in the facial gesture they used to show they were happy. Major Okamoto said, “All Tosevites are brave, and we Nipponese the bravest of the brave.”

“Hai,”Teerts said. “Honto.” The interrogation broke up not long after that. Okamoto and the guard, who had waited outside, escorted Teerts back, to his cell. That evening, he found small chunks of meat mixed in with his rice. That had only happened a couple of times before. Flattery, he thought as he gratefully swallowed them down, had got him something.

Mutt Daniels looked at his hand: four clubs and the queen of hearts. He discarded the queen. “Gimme one,” he said.

“One,” Kevin Donlan agreed. “Here you go, Sarge.” The new card was a diamond. None of the other soldiers in the game would have known it from Mutt’s face. He’d played countless hours of poker on trains and bus rides as a minor-league (and, briefly, major-league) catcher and as a longtime minor-league manager. He’d played in the trenches in France, too, in the last war. He didn’t care to risk a big roll of money when he gambled, but he won more often than he lost. Every so often he’d stolen a pot on a busted flush, too.

Not tonight, though. One of the privates in his squad, a big hunkie named Bela Szabo who was universally called Dracula, had drawn three cards and raised big when it was his turn to bet. Mutt pegged him for at least three of a kind, maybe better. When the action came round to him, he tossed in his cards. “Can’t win ‘em all,” he said philosophically.”

Kevin Donlan, who couldn’t possibly have been as young as he looked, hadn’t learned that yet. Calling Szabo was okay if you had two little pair, but raising back struck Mutt as foolhardy. Sure as hell, Dracula was holding three kings. He scooped up the folding money.

“Son, you gotta watch what the other guy’s doin’ better’n that,” Daniels said. “Like I told you, you ain’t gonna win ‘em all.” If nothing else, years of managing in the minors had pounded that home as a law of nature. Mutt chuckled. The life he’d lived beat the hell out of the one he’d have had if he hadn’t played ball. Likely he’d still be watching a mule’s hind end on the Mississippi farm where he’d been born and raised.

Like trains in the distance, shells rumbled by overhead. Everybody looked up, though the roof of the barn where they sheltered held the sky at bay. Szabo cocked his head, gauging the sound.

“Southbound,” he said. “Those are ours.”

“Probably landing on the Lizards in Decatur right now,” Kevin Donlan agreed. A moment later, he added, “What’s funny, Sarge?”

“I reckon I’ve said I was managing the Decatur team in the Three-l League when the Lizards came,” Mutt answered. “Matter of fact, I was on the train from Madison to Decatur when we got strafed right outside o’ Dixon, upstate. This here’s the closest I’ve come to makin’ it to where I was goin’ since, and most of a year’s gone by now.”

“This here” – the barn – was on a farm just south of Clinton, Illinois, about halfway between Bloomington and Decatur. The Americans had taken Bloomington in an armored blitz. Now it was slow, tough work again, trying to push the Lizards farther back from Chicago.

More shells hissed through the sky, these from the south. “Goddamn, the Lizards are quick with counterbattery fire,” Donlan said

“They’re dead on, too,” Mutt said. “I hope our boys moved their guns before those little presents came down on “em.”

The poker game went on by lantern light, shelling or no shelling. Mutt won a hand with two pair, lost expensively to a straight when he was holding three nines, didn’t waste money betting on a couple of others. Another American battery opened up, this one a lot closer. The, thunder of the big guns reminded Mutt of bad weather back home.

“Hope they blow all the Lizards in Decatur straight to hell,” Szabo said.

“Hope one of ‘em lands on second base at Fan’s Field and blows the center-field fence out to where it belongs,” Daniels muttered. It was 340 down each foul line at the Decatur ballpark, a reasonable poke, but dead center was only 370, a pain in the
ERA
to every Commodore pitcher who took the mound.

Small-arms fire rattled only a few hundred yards away, some M-ls and Springfields, some from the automatic rifles the Lizards carried. Before Mutt could say a word, everybody in the latest hand grabbed his money from the pot, stuffed it into a pocket, and reached for his weapon. Someone blew out the lantern. Someone else pushed the barn door open. One by one, the men emerged.

“You want to be careful,” Mutt said quietly. “The Lizards have those damn night sights, let ‘em see like cats in the dark.”

Dracula Szabo laughed, also softly. “That’s why I got me this here Browning Automatic Rifle, Sarge. Put out enough lead and some of it’ll hit somebody.” He wasn’t much older than Donlan, young enough to be gut-sure no bullet could possibly find him. Mutt knew better. France had convinced him he wasn’t immortal, and several months fighting the Lizards drove the lesson home again.

“Spread out, spread out,” Daniels called in an urgent whisper. To his ear, the men sounded like a herd of drunken rhinos. Several were new recruits; by virtue of having lived through several encounters with the Lizards, Mutt was reckoned suitable for showing others how to do likewise.

“How many Lizards you think there are, Sarge?” Kevin Donlan asked. Donlan wasn’t eager any more; he’d been through enough of the tough defensive fighting outside Chicago to be sure his number could come up. The question came in a tone of intelligent professional concern.

Daniels cocked his head, listened to the firing. “Damfino,” he said at last. “Not a whole bunch, but I wouldn’t peg it tighter’n that. Those rifles o’ theirs shoot so fast, just a couple can sound like a platoon.”