Worldwar_ Upsetting The Balance Part 21

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

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

"Front!" Nejas said, back in the turret.

"Identified," s...o...b..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, s...o...b..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, s...o...b.." 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.

s...o...b..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 s...o...b..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, s...o...b..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, s...o...b..pumped high-explosive sh.e.l.ls into the buildings that sheltered the gunners. The buildings, made largely of timber, began to burn.

"We'll seize that village," Nejas declared. "The native name is"-he paused to check his map-"Wargrave, or something like that. The height will give us a position from which we can look down on and sh.e.l.l the river beyond. Tomorrow we advance on the... the"-he checked again-"the Thames."

"Superior sir, should we consider a night advance?" s...o...b..asked. "Our vision equipment gives us a great advantage in night fighting."

"Orders are to stop at Wargrave," Nejas answered. "Too many casualties have been suffered and machines lost charging through territory still heavily infested with Big Uglies. The gas only makes that worse."

The sh.e.l.ling had not taken out all the British gunners. s...o...b..poured more rounds into Wargrave. The mechanized combat vehicles also opened up on the village with their smaller guns. Smoke rose high into the evening sky. Down on the ground, though, muzzle flashes said the British were still resisting. Ussmak sighed. "Looks as if we'll have to do it the hard way," he said, wishing for a taste of ginger. The resigned comment might have applied to the Race's whole campaign on Tosev 3.

"Landcruiser halt," Nejas said.

"Halting, superior sir." Ussmak stamped down on the brake pedal. Nejas, he thought approvingly, knew what he was doing. He'd stopped the landcruiser outside the built-up area of Wargrave, but close enough so it could still effectively use not only its cannon but also its machine gun. Firepower counted. Being literally in the middle of action didn't.

Ussmak had had a couple of commanders who would have charged right into the middle of Wargrave, guns blazing. One of them had got his bravado from a vial of ginger; the other was just an idiot. Both males would have wondered where the satchel charge or bottle full of blazing hydrocarbons or spring-fired hollow-charge bomb had come from... for as long as it left them alive to wonder. Nejas hung back and didn't have the worry.

The mechanized combat vehicles, unfortunately, did not enjoy such luxury. If they disembarked their infantrymales too far from the fighting, they might as well have stayed back at the base-enemy fire would chew those poor males to pieces. They pulled up right at the edge of the village. The infantrymales skittered out, automatic rifles at the ready. Ussmak wouldn't have wanted their job for all the ginger on Tosev 3.

One of those males went down. He wasn't dead; he kept firing. But he didn't advance with his fellows any more. Then a British male in the wreckage of Wargrave launched one of their antilandcruiser bombs at a combat vehicle. The thing was all but ludicrous against the landcruisers. It couldn't defeat their frontal armor, and usually wouldn't penetrate from side or rear, either.

But a mechanized combat vehicle was not a landcruiser, nor was it armored like one. Flames and smoke shot from the turret, and from the door by which the infantrymales had exited. Escape hatches popped open. The three-male crew bailed out. One of them managed to reach the second combat vehicle. The Big Uglies shot the other two on the ground. A moment later, the stricken combat vehicle brewed up.

"Advance, driver," Nejas said. "We're going to have to mix it up with them whether we want to or not, I fear. Move forward to the outermost buildings. As we clear the village of enemies, we may be able to go farther."

"It shall be done." The landcruiser rumbled forward. Sh.e.l.l casings clattered down from the machine gun to the floor of the fighting compartment.

"What's that?" Nejas said in alarm. With his limited vision, Ussmak had no idea what it was. Of itself, one eye turret swung up to the hatch above his head. If whatever it was. .h.i.t the landcruiser, he hoped he could dive out in time. Then Nejas said, "Rest easy, males. It's only a couple of combat vehicles bringing up fresh troops. These egg-impacted British are too stubborn to know they're beaten."

s...o...b..said, "If we have to send in more males here than we'd planned, so be it. We have to get across the river and link up with our males in the northern pocket."

And why did they have to do that? Ussmak wondered. The short answer was, because the males in the northern pocket not only weren't beating the British, they were having a dreadful time staying alive. Neither Nejas nor s...o...b..seemed to notice the contradictions in what the two of them had just said. They were both solid males, gifted militarily, but they didn't examine ideas outside their specialties as closely as they did those within them.

Ussmak's lower jaw fell slightly open in an ironic laugh. Since when had he become a philosopher fit to judge such things? Only alienation from the rest of the Race had let part of his mind drift far enough from his duties to notice such discrepancies. Those who still reckoned themselves altogether part of the great and elaborate social and hierarchical web were undoubtedly better off than he was.

Night had fallen by the time the males either killed or drove out the last British defenders of Wargrave. Even then, small-arms fire kept rattling from the woods below the crest of the hill atop which the village sat.

An aggressive officer would have sent males into those woods to clear out the nuisance. The local commander did nothing of the sort. Ussmak didn't blame him. Even with infrared gear, Tosevite forests were frightening places at night for males of the Race. The Big Uglies belonged in amongst those trees and bushes, and could move quietly through them. The Race didn't and couldn't. A lot of males had ended up dead trying.

"Shall we get out and stretch our legs and wiggle our tailstumps?" Nejas asked. "The Emperor only knows when we'll see another chance."

As he'd been trained, Ussmak cast down his eyes at the mention of his sovereign. s...o...b..said, "It'll be cold out there, but I'll come. Even a Big Ugly town is better than looking at my gunsight and autoloader all day."

"What about you, driver?" Nejas asked.

"No thank you, superior sir," Ussmak said. "With your permission, I'll sit tight. I've already seen more Big Ugly towns than I ever wanted."

"You don't want to hatch out of your nice steel eggsh.e.l.l," Nejas said, but jokingly, not in a way that would cause offense. "As you will, of course. I can't say I disagree with you for not caring about Tosevite towns. They're generally ugly before we smash them up, and uglier afterwards."

He scrambled out through the cupola. s...o...b..opened his escape hatch and joined him. Ussmak waited till they both jumped down from the landcruiser. Then he reached under the mat below the control pedals and pulled out his little jar of ginger. He'd been twitchy with need for it all through the fighting, but made himself refrain. Males who went snarling into combat with a head full of the herb were braver than they would have been otherwise-and also stupider. It was a bad combination.

Now, though-He pulled off the stopper to the vial and hissed in dismay. The little bit of brownish powder that poured into the palm of his hand was all he had left. His forked tongue flicked out and lapped it up.

"Ah!" he said. Well-being flowed through him. Fear, loneliness, even cold fell away. He felt proud to be a male of the Race, bringing the benighted Tosevites into the domain of civilization. He thought he could singlehandedly force a crossing of the Thames ahead and effect a junction with the rest of the Race's males north of London.

With a distinct effort of will, he made himself keep his hands away from the wheel and his foot away from the accelerator. He'd been using ginger a long time now, and knew he wasn't as omnipotent as he thought he was.

He hadn't been all that smart before he tasted, though. Had he remembered how low on the herb he was, he could have got out of the landcruiser and found an infantrymale who had more than he could taste at the moment. Now, though, he'd look foolish if he emerged. Worse, he'd look suspicious. Nejas and s...o...b..both had untainted tongues. They thought he did, too. If they ever found out otherwise, he'd be sent off for punishment, with green stripes painted on his arms.

But if he didn't find some ginger somewhere, before long his condition would be apparent to them anyhow. He'd be a red-nostriled nervous wreck. Once you started tasting ginger, it got its claw in you and you had to keep doing it.

The exaltation from the herb faded. He sank as low as he had been high. Now the only thing he wanted to do was sit quietly and pretend the world outside the landcruiser didn't exist. Nejas had had the right of it: he was using the vehicle as an eggsh.e.l.l to separate himself from everything around him. The world couldn't come in here.

But it did, in the persons of Nejas and s...o...b.. The landcruiser commander said, "You were wiser than we, driver. Nothing here worth seeing, nothing worth taking. Better we should have stayed inside."

"We'll sleep in here, no matter how cramped it is," s...o...b..added. "I don't want to be out in the open if the British start throwing gas at us."

"No arguments there," Nejas said, whereupon they did start arguing about who would try to sleep in the turret and who would have the dubious privilege of stretching halfway out next to Ussmak's reclining driver's seat. Being the landcruiser commander, Nejas won the argument. The victory proved of dubious value because, among other things, he tried lying down on the spent machine-gun cartridges that littered the floor.

He sat up suddenly, cracking his head on the low ceiling of the driver's compartment, and hissed in pain. "Help me clean up these miserable things," he snapped. "You think my hide's armored in steel and ceramic?" There wasn't room for anyone to give him a lot of help, but Ussmak opened the hatch above his head. He and Nejas threw the spent cartridges out of the landcruiser. They jingled on the flagstones outside. As soon as most of them were gone, Ussmak dogged the hatch again. As his commander had said, poison gas made sleeping in the open even less attractive than it had been before.

Even for Ussmak, who had the best resting place in the landcruiser, sleeping in it was no bargain, either. He twisted and turned and once almost fell off his seat onto Nejas. Except for feeling elderly, he was glad to see light build up when he peered through his vision slit. Day came early at these lat.i.tudes.

Nejas started to sit up again, but thought better of it just in time. He called back to the turret: "Are you awake, s...o...b.."

"Superior sir, the question is, 's...o...b.. have you been asleep?' " the gunner replied in aggrieved tones. "And the answer is, 'Yes, but not nearly enough.' "

"That holds for all of us," Nejas said. "Toss down a couple of ration bars, would you?"

"It shall be done."

The ration bars almost landed on Nejas' toes. He twisted around so he could pick them up, then handed one to Ussmak. When they were done eating, the commander scrambled back up into the cupola with s...o...b..and said, "Driver, advance us to the point where we have a good view of the river and that town by it... Henley-on-Thames." After a moment, he added, " 'On' must mean something like 'alongside of' in the local Big Uglies' language."

Ussmak cared for the local Big Uglies' language about as much as he'd cared for his egg tooth after it fell off his snout in earliest hatchlinghood. He started the landcruiser engine. "Superior sir, we're a little low on hydrogen," he said as he studied the gauges. "We can operate today, I think, but a supply tanker should have come up last night."

"I'll radio Logistics," Nejas answered. "Maybe they did try to send one, and Tosevite bandits ambushed it behind the line. The Big Uglies are pestilentially good at that kind of thing."

The landcruiser rumbled forward. Ussmak listened with a certain malicious satisfaction to paving stones breaking under the pressure of the tracks. When Nejas ordered him to halt, he hit the brake.

He leaned forward and peered through the vision slit. It didn't give him anywhere near the view Nejas had from the turret, but what he saw, he didn't like. The Big Uglies had spent the night-and who could say how much time before that?-fortifying the slope that led down to the river. Belts of the spiky stuff they used in place of razor wire were everywhere. So were trenches, brown scars on green, plant-covered earth. Ussmak was willing to bet that greenery also concealed cleverly hidden mines.

"We shall begin sh.e.l.ling Henley-on-Thames," Nejas said.

"Gunner, high explosive."

"It shall be done," s...o...b..said, "but we are also low on high-explosive sh.e.l.ls. We used a good many yesterday, and, as with the hydrogen, we got no resupply afterwards."

Before s...o...b..began firing, the English down below opened up with their own artillery. Whitish puffs, different from the usual clouds of smoke and dust, rose from the Tosevite sh.e.l.ls as they burst. Nejas slammed the lid of the cupola down with a clang. "That's gas!" he exclaimed, with less than the equanimity a landcruiser commander should have displayed.

Nor was Ussmak delighted at having to drive the landcruiser through a thickening curtain of the horrid stuff. The filters that shielded the landcruiser's air intakes were makeshifts, and he distrusted them for no other reason than that. The Race did not think well of makeshifts. They went wrong too easily. Properly engineered solutions worked right every time. Trusting your life to anything less seemed a dreadful risk to take.

But at least Ussmak and his crewmales enjoyed, if that was the word, some protection against the poison the British spread with such enthusiasm. The poor males in the infantry had next to none. Some males wore masks, patterned either after those the Race used to fight radiation or based on Big Ugly models. But there weren't nearly enough masks to go around, and the gas also left hideous burns and blisters on bare skin. Ussmak wondered if that was one of the reasons the Tosevites wrapped themselves in cloth.

The landcruiser's main armament started hammering away, searching for the British guns. Not all the flying rubble came from that cannon's sh.e.l.ls. Radar-guided counterbattery fire also rained down on the sites from which the gas sh.e.l.ls had been launched. Low-flying killercraft poured rockets and their own cannon sh.e.l.ls into Henley-on-Thames.

"Forward!" Nejas ordered, and Ussmak took his foot off the brake. A moment later, to his surprise, the commander said, "Landcruiser halt." Halt Ussmak did, as Nejas went on, "We can't move forward, not against positions like those, without infantry support to keep the Tosevites from wrecking us as we slow down for their egg-addled obstacles."

"Where are the infantrymales, superior sir?" Ussmak couldn't see them, but that didn't prove anything, not with the narrow field of view his vision slits gave. He wasn't about to unb.u.t.ton and look around, either, not with gas sh.e.l.ls still coming in. "Have they got back into their mechanized combat vehicles?"

"Some of them have," Nejas said. "They don't do us much good in there, though, or themselves, either; the combat vehicles will have to slow down for the wire and trenches. But some of the males"-his voice sputtered in indignation-"are running away."

Ussmak heard that without fully taking it in at first. A few times, especially during the hideous northern-hemisphere winter, Tosevite a.s.saults had forced the Race to fall back. But he slowly realized this was different. These infantrymales weren't falling back. They were refusing to go forward. He wondered if the like had ever happened in the history of the Race.

s...o...b..said, "Shall I turn the machine gun on them, superior sir, to remind them of their duty?" His voice showed the same disbelief Ussmak felt.

Nejas hesitated before he answered. That in itself alarmed Ussmak; a commander was supposed to know what to do in any given situation. At last he said, "No, hold fire. The disciplinarians will deal with them. This is their proper function. Hold in place and await orders."

"It shall be done." s...o...b..still sounded doubtful. Again, Ussmak was taken aback. Nejas and s...o...b..were a long-established unit; for the gunner to doubt the commander was a bad sign.

Orders were a long time coming. When they came, they were to hold in place until the field guns in Henley-on-Thames and the bigger British cannon farther north could be silenced. Aircraft and artillery rained destruction on the town. Ussmak watched that with great satisfaction. All the same, gas sh.e.l.ls and conventional artillery kept falling on Wargrave.

Fresh hydrogen eventually reached the landcruiser, but the ammunition resupply vehicle never came. The males of the Race did not move forward, save for a probe by the infantry that the entrenched Big Uglies easily repulsed.

Ussmak wasn't very happy about where he was. He would have been even less happy, though, he decided, had he been in the northern pocket. That one wasn't just stalled. It was shrinking.

Atvar paced back and forth. That helped him to think, to some degree. It didn't mean he wasn't always staring at the situation map of Britain; one eye always swiveled toward it, no matter how his body was aligned. That kept the pain constant, as if it were festering in several tooth sockets at once.

He hissed in rage and frustration. "Perhaps you were right, Shiplord," he said to Kirel. "Perhaps even Straha was right, though his egg should have addled before it hatched. We might have done better to deal with the British by means of a nuclear weapon."

"Exalted Fleetlord, if that be your pleasure, we can still accomplish it," Kirel said.

"Using nuclear weapons is never my pieasure," Atvar answered. "And what point to it?"

"Securing the conquest of Britain?" Kirel said.

"The accursed island is so small, it's scarcely worth having after a couple of these devices detonate on it," Atvar answered gloomily. "Besides, our losses there have been so dreadful that I fear even keeping pacification forces on it will be more expensive than it's worth. And besides-" He stopped, unwilling to go on.

Kirel, a reliable subordinate, did it for him: "And besides, now that the British have introduced the use of these vile poisonous gases, every Tosevite empire still in the field against us has begun employing them in large quant.i.ties."

"Yes." Atvar made the word a hiss of hate. "They were not using them against one another when we came to this miserable iceball of a world. Our a.n.a.lysis leaves no possible doubt as to that point. And yet all their leading empires and not-empires had enormous quant.i.ties of these munitions stored and ready for deployment. Now they know we are vulnerable to them, and so bring them out. It seems most unjust."

"Truth, Exalted Fleetlord," Kirel agreed. "Our historical a.n.a.lysis unit has perhaps uncovered the reason for the anomaly."

"Seeking rational reasons for anything the Big Uglies do strikes me as an exercise in futility," Atvar said. "What did the a.n.a.lysis unit deduce?"

"The Big Uglies recently fought another major war, in which poisonous gases played an important part. Apparently, they were so appalled at what the gases did that, when this new war broke out among them, no empire dared to use them first, for fear of retaliation from its foes."

"One of the few signs of rationality yet detected among the Tosevites," Atvar said with heavy sarcasm. "I gather this unwillingness to use the poisonous gases did not keep them from producing such gases in limitless quant.i.ties."

"Indeed not," Kirel said. "No empire trusted its neighbors not to do so, and no empire cared to be without means of retaliation should its neighbors turn the gases against it. And so production and research continued."

"Research." Atvar made that into a curse. "The blistering agent the British threw at us is quite bad enough, but this stuff the Deutsche use-Have you seen those reports?"

"I have, Exalted Fleetlord," Kirel said. His tailstump curled downward in gloom. "First a male finds the day going dim around him, then he has difficulty breathing, and then he quietly dies. I am given to understand, though, that there is an injectable antidote to that gas."

"Yes, and if you inject it thinking you have breathed the gas but are mistaken, it makes you nearly as ill as the gas would without treatment." Atvar hissed mournfully. "A perfect metaphor for Tosev 3, would you not agree? When we do nothing, the Big Uglies wreck us, and when we take steps against them, that presents problems just as difficult in a different way."

"Truth," Kirel said. He pointed to the map. "In aid of which, what are we to do about the northern pocket in Britain? We have not been able to suppress British artillery, and it can reach every spot within the pocket. The closer our males get to London, the more built-up areas they have to traverse, and fighting in built-up areas means heavy losses in males and materiel both."

"That's not the worst of it, either," Atvar said. "Flying transports over Britain gets riskier by the day. Not only do the British seem to keep pulling aircraft out from under flat stones, but the Deutsche in northern France strike at our machines as they fly back and forth to Britain. We have lost several transports, and cannot afford to lose many more."

"Truth," Kirel repeated glumly.

"If we have to start using starships instead, and if we start losing starships in significant numbers-" Atvar didn't go on. He didn't need to go on. If the Race started losing starships in significant numbers, the war against the Big Uglies would be within shouting distance of being lost along with them.

"What then is our course in regard to the northern pocket in Britain, Exalted Fleetlord?" Kirel asked.

Atvar hissed again. He heartily wished the northern pocket did not exist. If the British kept pounding on it, it wouldn't exist much longer. That, however, was not what he'd had in mind as a means for disposing of it. Bitterly, he said, "If only the sweep around London to the west from the southern force hadn't been halted at the river line, we could have withdrawn the males north of London without undue trouble."

"Yes, Exalted Fleetlord," Kirel said dutifully. Although he had every right to, he didn't remind Atvar that ifs like this had no place in military planning.