Colonization_ Aftershocks Part 5

They didn't go to the administrative buildings in the camp, which surprised Liu Han: it wasn't some new interrogation, then. She got another surprise when the scaly devils led her and Liu Mei out through the several razor-wire gateways that walled off the camp from the rest of the world.

Outside the last one stood an armored fighting vehicle. Another little devil, this one with fancier body paint, waited by it. He confirmed their names, then said, "You get in."

"Where are you taking us?" Liu Han demanded.

"You never mind that, you two of you," the scaly devil answered. "You get in."

"No," Liu Han said, and her daughter nodded behind her.

"You get in right now," the scaly devil said.

"No," Liu Han repeated, even though he swung the muzzle of his rifle in her direction. "Not till we know where we're going."

"What is wrong with this stupid Big Ugly?" one of the other scaly devils asked in their own hissing language. "Why does she refuse to go in?"

"She wants to know where they will be taken," answered the little devil who spoke Chinese. "I cannot tell her that, because of security."

"Tell her she is an idiot," the other little scaly devil said. "Does she want to stay in this camp? If she does, she must be an idiot indeed."

Maybe that conversation was set up for her benefit; the little devils knew she spoke their language. But they were not usually so devious. Liu Han had feared they were taking Liu Mei and her out to execute them. If they weren't, if they were going somewhere better than the camp, she would play along. And where, on all the face of the Earth, was there anywhere worse than the camp? Nowhere she knew.

"I have changed my mind," she said. "We will get in."

"Thank you two of you." The little devil who spoke Chinese might not be fluent, but he knew how to be sarcastic. He was even more sarcastic in his own language: "She must think she is the Emperor."

"Who cares what a Big Ugly thinks?" the other scaly devil replied. "Get her and the other one in and get them out of here."

He evidently outranked the scaly devil who spoke Chinese, for that male said, "It shall be done." He opened the rear gate on the mechanized combat vehicle and returned to Chinese: "You two of you, get in there."

Liu Han went in ahead of Liu Mei. If danger waited inside, she would find it before her daughter did. But she found no danger, only Nieh Ho-T'ing. The People's Liberation Army officer nodded to her. "I might have known you would be coming along, too," he remarked, as calmly as if they'd met on the streets of Peking. "Is your daughter with you?" Before Liu Han could answer that, Liu Mei climbed up into the troop-carrying compartment of the combat vehicle. Nieh smiled at her. She nodded back; she couldn't smile herself. "I see you are here," he said to her.

"Where are they taking us? Do you know?" Liu Han asked.

Nieh Ho-T'ing shook his head. "I haven't the faintest idea. Wherever it is, it has to be better than where we have been."

Since Liu Han had had the identical thought, she could hardly disagree. "I was afraid they were going to liquidate us, but now I don't think they will."

"No, I don't think so, either," Nieh said. "They could do that in camp if they decided it served their interests."

Before Liu Han could answer, the scaly devils slammed the rear gate shut. She heard clatterings from outside. "What are they doing?" she asked, still anything but trusting of the little scaly devils.

"Locking us in," Nieh Ho-T'ing answered calmly. "The gates on this machine are made to open from the inside, from this compartment, to let out the little scaly devils' soldiers when they want to fight as ordinary infantry. But the little devils will want to make sure we do not go out till they take us wherever they take us."

"That makes sense," Liu Mei said.

"Yes, it does," Liu Han agreed. It went some distance toward easing her mind, too. "Maybe we are being taken to a different camp, or for a special interrogation." She a.s.sumed the little devils could hear whatever she said, so she added, "Since we are innocent and know nothing, I do not see what point there is to interrogating us any more."

Nieh Ho-T'ing chuckled at that. There were, surely, some things of which they were innocent, but carrying on the proletarian revolution against the small, scaly, imperialist oppressors was not one of them.

The mechanized combat vehicle started moving. The seats in the fighting compartment were too small for human fundaments, and the wrong shape to boot. Liu Han felt that more when the ride was jouncy, as it was here. Along with her daughter and Nieh, she braced herself as best she could. That was all she could do.

It had been cool outside. It soon became unpleasantly warm in the fighting compartment: the little scaly devils heated it to the temperature they found comfortable, the temperature of a very hot summer's day in China. Liu Han undid her quilted cotton jacket and shrugged out of it. After a while, she had a good idea: she put it on the seat and sat on it. It made things a little more comfortable. Her daughter and Nieh Ho-T'ing quickly imitated her.

"I wish I had a watch," she said as the scaly devils' vehicle rattled along. Without one, she could only use her stomach to gauge the pa.s.sage of time. She didn't think they would be giving out the midday meal in camp yet, but she wasn't sure.

"We will get where we're going, wherever that is, when we get there, and nothing we can do will make that time come sooner," Nieh said.

"You sound more like a Buddhist than a Marxist-Leninist," Liu Han teased. With only him and her daughter to hear, that was safe enough to say. Had it reached anyone else's ears, it might have resulted in a denunciation. Liu Han didn't want that to happen to Nieh, who was not only an able man but also an old lover of hers.

"The revolution will proceed with me or without me," Nieh said. "I would prefer that it proceed with me, but life does not always give us what we would prefer."

Liu Han knew that only too well. When the j.a.panese overran her village, they'd also killed her family. Then the little scaly devils drove out the j.a.panese-and kidnapped her and made her part of their experiments on how and why humans mated as they did. That was why Liu Mei had wavy hair and a nose unusually large for a Chinese-her father had been an American, similarly kidnapped. But Bobby Fiore was long years dead, killed by the scaly devils, and Liu Han had been fighting them ever since.

She peered out through one of the little openings in the side wall of the combat vehicle-a viewport for the closed firing port just below. She saw rice paddies, little stands of forest, peasant villages, occasional beasts in the fields, once an ox-drawn cart that had hastily gone off to the side of the road so the combat vehicle wouldn't run it down.

"It looks a lot like the country around my home village," she said. "More rice-I liked eating it in the camp. It was an old friend, even if the place wasn't. I'd got used to noodles in Peking, but rice seemed better somehow."

"Freedom would seem better," Liu Mei said. "Liberating the countryside would seem better." She was still a young woman, and found ideology about as important as food. Liu Han shook her head, somewhere between bewilderment and pride. When she was Liu Mei's age, she'd hardly had an ideology. She'd been an ignorant, illiterate peasant. Thanks to the Party, she was neither ignorant nor illiterate anymore, and her daughter never had been.

With more jounces, the mechanized combat vehicle went off the road and into a grove of willows. There, with newly green boughs screening off the outside world, it came to a stop, though the motor kept running. A rattle at the back of the vehicle was a male undoing whatever fastening had kept the rear gate closed. It swung open. In the language of the Race, the scaly devil said, "You Tosevites, you come out now."

If they didn't come out now, the little devils could shoot them while they were in the troop-carrying compartment. Liu Han saw she had no choice. Out she came, b.u.mping her head on the roof of the vehicle.

She looked around as soon as she had her feet on the ground. The turret of the combat vehicle mounted a small cannon and a machine gun. Those bore on the Chinese men with submachine guns and rifles who advanced toward the machine. In their midst were three woebegone little scaly devils. One of the Chinese called, "You are Nieh Ho-T'ing, Liu Han, and Liu Mei?"

"That's right," Liu Han said, her agreement mixing with those of the others. She added, "Who are you?"

"That doesn't matter," the man answered. "What does matter is that you are the people for whom we are exchanging these hostages." He swung the muzzle of his submachine gun toward the unhappy little devils he and his comrades were guarding.

Negotiations between the men of the People's Liberation Army-for that was what they had to be-and the little scaly devils who made up the crew of the combat vehicle did not last long. When they were through, the little scaly devils in Chinese hands hurried into the vehicle while Liu Han and her daughter and Nieh hurried away from it. The scaly devils slammed the doors to the troop compartment shut as if they expected the Chinese to start shooting any second.

And the Chinese leader said, "Hurry. We have to get out of here. We can't be sure the little scaly devils don't have an ambush laid on."

Fleeing through the willow branches that kept throwing little leaves in her face, Liu Han said, "Thank you so much for freeing us from that camp."

"You are experienced revolutionaries," the People's Liberation Army man answered. "The movement needs you."

"We will give it everything we have," Nieh Ho-T'ing said. "The Kuomintang could not defeat us. The j.a.panese could not defeat us. And the little scaly devils shall not defeat us, either. The dialectic is on our side."

The little scaly devils knew nothing of the dialectic. But they, like the Party, took a long view of history. Eventually, history would show which was correct. Liu Han remained convinced the proletarian revolution would triumph, but she was much less certain than she had been that it would happen in her lifetime. But I'm back in the struggle, But I'm back in the struggle, she thought, and hurried on through the willows. she thought, and hurried on through the willows.

Not even during the fighting after the conquest fleet landed on Tosev 3 had Gorppet seen such devastation as he found when the small unit he commanded moved into the Greater German Reich. Reich.

One of the males in the unit, a trooper named Yarssev, summed up his feelings when he asked, "How did the Big Uglies stay in the war so long when we did this to them? Why were they so stupid?"

"I cannot answer that," Gorppet said. "All I know is, they fought hard up till the moment they surrendered."

"Truth, superior sir," Yarssev agreed. "And now their countryside will glow in the dark for years because of their foolish courage."

He was exaggerating, but not by any tremendous amount. Every male moving into the Reich Reich wore a radiation-exposure badge on a chain around his neck. Orders were to check the badges twice a day, and the troops followed those orders. Nowhere on four worlds had so many explosive-metal bombs fallen on so small an area in so short a time. wore a radiation-exposure badge on a chain around his neck. Orders were to check the badges twice a day, and the troops followed those orders. Nowhere on four worlds had so many explosive-metal bombs fallen on so small an area in so short a time.

But not every area of the Reich Reich had had a bomb fall on it. In between the zones where nothing was left alive, the Deutsche who had survived the war struggled to get on with their lives, to raise their crops and domestic animals, to care for refugees and demobilized soldiers, to rebuild damage from conventional weapons. had had a bomb fall on it. In between the zones where nothing was left alive, the Deutsche who had survived the war struggled to get on with their lives, to raise their crops and domestic animals, to care for refugees and demobilized soldiers, to rebuild damage from conventional weapons.

As the occupying males of the Race moved into the Reich, Reich, the local Tosevites would pause in what they were doing to stare at them. Some of those Tosevites would have fought against the Race in earlier conflicts. Others, though, females and young, were surely civilians. The quality of the stares was the same in either case, though. the local Tosevites would pause in what they were doing to stare at them. Some of those Tosevites would have fought against the Race in earlier conflicts. Others, though, females and young, were surely civilians. The quality of the stares was the same in either case, though.

"Nasty creatures, aren't they, superior sir?" Yarssev said.

"No doubt about it," Gorppet agreed. "I have seen stares from Big Uglies who hated us before-I have served in Basra and Baghdad. But I have never seen such hate as these Deutsche display."

"Better they should hate their own not-emperor, who was foolish enough to think he could beat us," Yarssev said.

"They never hate their own. No one ever hates his own. This is a law through all the Empire, as sure as I hatched out of my eggsh.e.l.l."

The detachment came to the sea not much later, came to the sea and headed west. Gorppet had seen Tosevite seas before. The one south of Basra was quite tolerably warm. The one off Cape Town was cooler, but of an interesting shade of blue. This one... This one was cold and gray and ugly. It splashed lethargically up onto the mud of the coastline, then rolled back.

"Why would anyone want to live in a country like this?" a male asked. "Chilly and flat and horrible... "

"Sometimes you live where you have to live, not where you want to live," Gorppet answered. "Maybe some other Big Uglies chased the Deutsche into this part of the world and would not let them live anywhere better."

"Maybe, superior sir," the other male said. "And maybe having to live here is what makes them so mean and tough."

"That could be," Gorppet agreed. "Something certainly has."

He wished he had a taste of ginger. He had plenty-more than plenty-stashed away in South Africa, but it might as well have been on Home for all the good it did him. He'd been very moderate all through the fighting. Males who tasted ginger thought they were stronger and faster and brighter than they really were. If they went into action against coldly pragmatic Big Uglies with the herb coursing through them, they were all too likely to do something foolish and end up dead before they could make amends.

When we stop for the evening, he thought. he thought. I'll taste when we stop for the evening. I'll taste when we stop for the evening.

They came to the vicinity of Peenemunde as light was failing. They would have gone no farther had it been early morning. Teams of the Race's engineers had already taken possession of the princ.i.p.al s.p.a.ceport the Deutsche used. They had also set up warning lines to keep other males from venturing too far into the radioactivity without proper protection. No site in the Reich, Reich, Nuremberg probably included, had taken as many bombs as Peenemunde. Nuremberg probably included, had taken as many bombs as Peenemunde.

"Nothing will grow here for a hundred years," Yarssev predicted. "And I mean a hundred Tosevite years, twice as long as ours."

"I suppose not," Gorppet said. "And yet... wasn't it here that the Big Ugly who calls himself the Deutsch not-emperor these days was holed up during the fighting?"

"I think so," Yarssev replied. "Too bad the miserable creature came out alive, if you want to know how I feel."

"Truth," Gorppet said, for he agreed with all his liver. But if any Tosevite could emerge alive from the slagging the Race had given Peenemunde, that bespoke some truly formidable engineering prowess. He let out a wry hiss. The Race had seen as much in the fighting in Poland. The weapons the Deutsche used there were alarmingly close to being as good as the ones the Race owned-and the Big Uglies had had a lot more of them. If the Race hadn't pounded their not-empire too flat to let them keep supporting their army, things might have gone even worse than they had.

As usual, field rations tasted like the mud that lined the southern sh.o.r.e of the local sea. Gorppet fueled himself as he would have put hydrogen into a mechanized combat vehicle. Having fueled himself, he did taste ginger. He was sure he wasn't the only male in the small group who used the Tosevite herb. Penalties against it had grown harsher since females came to Tosev 3, but that hadn't stopped many males. Except for making sure his troopers didn't do anything that would get themselves and their comrades killed in combat, Gorppet didn't try to keep them from tasting. That would hardly have been fair, not when he had the ginger habit himself.

He poured some of the herb into the palm of his hand. Even before he raised palm to mouth, the heady scent of the ginger was tickling his scent receptors. He never tired of it; it always seemed fresh and new. His tongue shot out almost of its own accord.

"Ahhh," he murmured as bliss flowed through him. He felt bigger than a Big Ugly, faster than a starship, with more computing power between his hearing diaphragms than all the Race's electronic network put together. Some small part of him knew the feeling was an illusion, but he didn't care. This side of mating-maybe not even this side of mating-it was as good a feeling as a male of the Race could have.

While it lasted. Like the pleasure of mating, it didn't last long enough. And when it faded, the crushing depression that followed was as bad as it had been good. One solution was to have another taste, and then another, and... Gorppet chose the harder road, waiting till the depression faded, too. Over the years, he'd come to take it as part of the experience connected to the herb.

When they set out again the next morning, the road along which they were traveling west came together with another, on which were about their number of Deutsch soldiers coming home from Poland. No one had disarmed the Deutsche: they still carried all their hand weapons, and several of them wore bandoliers of bullets crisscrossed on their chests.

The males in Gorppet's unit nervously eyed the Big Uglies. The Deutsche did not have the look of defeated troops. On the contrary; they looked as if they were ready to start up the war again then and there.

They might win if they did, too, at least in this small engagement. Gorppet was uneasily aware of it. Before either side could start spraying bullets around, he stepped away from the males he commanded and strode toward the Deutsche. "I do not speak your language," he called. "Does anyone among you speak the language of the Race?" If none of them did, he was liable to be in a lot of trouble.

But, as he'd hoped, a Deutsch male came out from among the Big Uglies and said, "I speak your language. What do you want?"

"I want my small group and your small group to pa.s.s by in peace," Gorppet answered. "The war is over. Let it stay over."

"You can say that," the Tosevite replied. His face was grimy. His wrappings were filthy. He smelled powerfully of the rank odor Big Uglies soon acquired when they did not bathe. He went on, "Yes, winners can say, 'The war is over.' For losers, the war is never over. Winners can forget. Losers remember. We have much for which to remember the Race."

"I have nothing to say to that," Gorppet said. "I am not a politician. I am not a diplomat. I am only a soldier. As a soldier, I tell you this: if you attack us now, you will be sorry and your not-empire will be sorry."

With a bark of Tosevite laughter, the Deutsch soldier said, "How can you make us sorrier, after what the Race has done to the Reich? Reich? How can you make this not-empire sorrier, after all you have done to it?" How can you make this not-empire sorrier, after all you have done to it?"

"If you attack us, you cannot kill us all before we radio the situation to our superiors," Gorppet replied, trying to hold his voice steady. "Helicopter gunships will punish you for fighting, and the Race will take further vengeance on the Reich Reich for violating the surrender. Is this a truth, or is it not?" for violating the surrender. Is this a truth, or is it not?"

"It is a truth," the Big Ugly admitted. "It is a truth about which few of my males care right now. Many of them have lost their mates and hatchlings. Do you understand what this means? It means they do not greatly care if they live or die."

"I do understand, yes," Gorppet said, though he knew he did so only in theory. Tosevite kinship ties, and Tosevites willing to kill without thought for their own lives once those ties were broken, had complicated life for the Race since the conquest fleet landed. Gorppet tried the only real direction in which he thought he could go: "What they want to do now, they may regret later. Is this a truth, or is it not? Do you command them?"

"Yes, I command them," the Deutsch soldier replied. "You make good sense. I almost wish you did not, for I am as ready as any of my males to seek revenge against the Race. But I will tell the soldiers what you have said. After that... we shall have to see. With the war over and lost, my hold over them is weaker than it was."

"We shall stay alert," Gorppet said. "We shall not attack you-the war is over. But if we are attacked, we shall fight back with all our strength."

"I understand." The Big Ugly walked back toward his own males, calling out in their guttural language. Some of the Deutsche shouted at him. They did not sound happy, nor anything close to it.

"Be ready for anything," Gorppet warned the males he led. "Do not open fire on them unless they fire on us, but be ready."

He was willing to let the Deutsche use the crossroads first, and held up his males so they could. The Tosevite officer led his Big Uglies forward. They towered over the males of the Race. Some of them shouted things. Some shook their fists. But, to Gorppet's vast relief, they didn't start shooting.

"Forward," he called after the Deutsche had pa.s.sed. Forward his own small group went. He kept one eye turret on the terrain, the other on the map he'd been given. Unlike the maps he'd had in the SSSR, this one seemed to know what it was talking about. When, toward evening, his males reached a town, he stopped a local and asked, "Greifswald?"

He made himself understood. The local nodded a Big Ugly affirmative and said, "Greifswald, ja ja."

Gorppet turned back to his males. "We have reached our a.s.signed station. Dismal-looking dump, isn't it?"

.3.

With a curse half in Yiddish, half in Polish, Mordechai Anielewicz used the hand brake on his bicycle. "How am I supposed to get anywhere if the roads are all kaputt? kaputt?" the Jewish fighting leader muttered.