AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The devil looked around his front room, its eye turrets swiveling independent of each other. That no longer unnerved Yi Min; he was used to it. He studied the scaly devil, the strong color inside its nostrils, the way its clawed hands had a slight quiver to them. Inside, he smiled. He might not know the devil, but he knew the signs. This one needed ginger, and needed it worse every second.
He bowed again. “Superior sir, will you tell me your name, that I may serve you better?”
The little scaly devil hissed, as if suddenly reminded of Yi Min’s presence. “Yes. I am called Drefsab. You are the Big Ugly Yi Min?”
“Yes, superior sir, I am Yi Min.” The Race’s insulting nickname for human beings didn’t bother Yi Min. After all, he thought of its males as little scaly devils. He said, “How may I be of assistance to you, superior sir Drefsab?”
The scaly devil swung both eyes in his direction. “You are the Big Ugly who sells to the Race the powder known as ginger?”
“Yes, superior sir, I am that humble person. I have the honor and privilege to provide the Race with the pleasure the herb affords.” Yi Min thought about asking the little scaly devil straight out whether it wanted ginger. He decided not to; though the devils were more direct about such matters than Chinese, they sometimes found direct questions rude. He did not want to offend a new customer.
“You have much of this herb?” Drefsab asked.
“Yes, superior sir.” Yi Min was getting tired of saying that. “As much as any valiant male could desire. If I may say so, I think I have given more males bliss with powdered ginger than all but a handful of Tosevites.” He used the little devils’ less offensive name for his own kind. Now he did ask: “If the superior sir Drefsab desires a sample of the wares here, I would be honored to provide him with one without expecting anything in return.” This time, he added to himself.
He thought Drefsab would leap at that; he’d hardly ever seen a scaly devil in more obvious need of his drug. But Drefsab still seemed to feel like talking. He said, “You are the Big Ugly whose machinations have turned males of the Race against their own kind, whose powders have spread corruption through the shining ships from Home?”
Yi Min stared; no matter how well he’d come to use the devils’ language, he needed a moment to understand Drefsab’s words, which were the opposite, of what he’d expected to hear. But the pharmacist’s reply came fast and smooth: “Superior sir, I do but try to give the valiant males of the Race what they seek.” He wondered what game Drefsab was playing. If the little scaly devil thought to muscle in on his operation, he’d get a surprise. Ginger powder had bought Yi Min the adjutants to several high-ranking officers, and a couple of, the officers themselves. They would clamp down on any scaly devil who got too bold with their supplier.
Drefsab said, “This ginger is a tumor eating at the vitality of the Race. This I know, for it has devoured me. Sometimes a tumor must be cut out.”
Yi Min again had to struggle to make sense of that; he and the scaly devils with whom he’d conversed hadn’t had any occasion to talk about tumors. He was still trying to figure out what the word meant when Drefsab reached inside his protective clothing and pulled out a gun. It spat fire, again and again and again. Inside Yi Min’s hut, the shots rang incredibly loud. As the bullets clubbed him to the carpet, he heard through the reports the girl in the bedroom starting to scream.
At first Yi Min felt only the impacts, not the pain. Then it struck him. The world turned black, shot through with scarlet flames. He tried to scream himself, but managed only a bubbling moan through the blood that flooded into his mouth.
Dimly-ever more dimly-he watched Drefsab take the head off the plump Buddha that sat on a low lacquer table. The stinking little devil knew just where he stowed his ginger. Drefsab took a taste, hissed in delight, and poured the rest of the powder into a clear bag he’d also brought along inside his coat. Then he opened the door and left.
The courtesan kept screaming. Yi Min wanted to tell her to shut up and close the door; it was getting cold. The words would not come. He tried to crawl toward the door himself. The cold reached his heart. The scarlet flames faded, leaving only black.
Harbin was falling. Any day now, the Race would be in the city. It would be an important victory; Harbin anchored the Nipponese line. Teerts would have been gladder of it had the town not been falling around his head.
That was literally true. During the most recent raid on Harbin, bombs hit so close to his prison that chunks of plaster rained down from the ceiling and just missed knocking out what few brains he had left after so long in Tosevite captivity.
Outside, an antiaircraft gun began to hammer. Teerts didn’t hear any planes; maybe the Big Ugly was just nervous. Go ahead, waste ammunition, Teerts thought. Then you’ll have less to fire off when my friends break in here, and then, dead Emperors willing, they won’t have to suffer what I’ve gone through.
He heard a commotion up the hall, orders barked in loud Nipponese too fast for him to follow. One of the guards came up to his cell. Teerts bowed; with this kind of Big Ugly, you couldn’t go far wrong if you bowed and you could go disastrously wrong if you didn’t. Better to bow, then.
The guard didn’t bow back; Teerts was a prisoner, and so deserving only of contempt. Behind the armed man came Major Okamoto. Teerts bowed more deeply to his interrogator and interpreter. Okamoto didn’t acknowledge him, either, not with a bow. He spoke in Teerts’ language as he unlocked the cell door: “You will come with me. We leave this city now.”
Teerts bowed again. “It shall be done, superior sir.” He had no idea how it would be done, or if it could be done, but wondering about such things was not his responsibility. As a prisoner, as had been true in the days before he was captured, his duty was but to obey. Unlike his superiors of the Race, though, the Nipponese owed him no loyalty in return.
Major Okamoto threw at him a pair of black trousers and a baggy blue coat that could have held two males his size. Then Okamoto put a conical straw hat on his head and tied it under his jaws with a scratchy piece of cord. “Good,” the Nipponese said in satisfaction. “Now if your people see you from the sky, they think you just another Tosevite.”
They would, too, Teerts realized dismally. A gun camera, maybe even a satellite photo, might have picked him out from among the swarming masses of Big Uglies around him. Bundled up like this, though, he would be just one more grain of rice (a food he had come to loathe) among a million.
He thought about throwing off the clothes if one of the Race’s aircraft came overhead. Reluctantly, he decided he’d better not. Major Okamoto would make his life not worth living if he tried it, and the Nipponese could spirit him away before his own folk, who were none too hasty, arranged a rescue effort.
Besides, Harbin was cold. The hat helped keep his head warm, and if he threw aside the coat, he was liable to turn into a lump of ice before either the Nipponese or the Race could do anything about it. Okamoto’s hat and coat were made from the fur of Tosevite creatures. He understood why the beasts needed insulation from their truly beastly climate, and wondered why the Big Uglies themselves had so little hair that they needed to steal it from animals.
Outside the building in which Teerts had been confined, he saw more rubble than he ever had before. Some of the craters looked like meteor strikes on an airless moon. Teerts didn’t get much of a chance to examine them; Major Okarnoto hustled him onto a two-wheeled conveyance with a Big Ugly between the shafts instead of a beast of burden. Okamoto spoke to the puller in a language that wasn’t Nipponese. The fellow seized the shafts, grunted, and started forward. The guard strode stolidly along beside the conveyance.
Tosevites streamed out of Harbin toward the east, fleeing the expected fall of the city. Disciplined columns of Nipponese soldiers contrasted with the squealing, squalling civilians all around them. Some of those, females hardly larger than Teerts, bore on their backs bundles of belongings almost as big as they were. Others carried burdens hung from p
oles balanced on one shoulder. It struck Teerts as a scene from out of the Race’s prehistoric past, vanished a thousand centuries.
Before long, the guard got in front of the manhandled conveyance and started shouting to clear a path for it. When that failed, he laid about him with the butt end of his rifle. Squeals and squalls turned to screams. Teerts couldn’t see that the brutality made much difference in how fast they went.
Eventually they reached the train station, which was noisier but less chaotic than the surrounding city. The Race had repeatedly bombed the station. It was more debris than building, but somehow still functioned. Machine-gun nests and tangles of wire with teeth kept everyone but soldiers away from the trains.
When a sentry challenged him, Major Okamoto flipped up Teerts’ hat and said something in Nipponese. The sentry bowed low, answered apologetically. Okamoto turned to Teerts. “From here on, we walk. No one but Nipponese-and you-permitted in the station.”
Teerts walked, Okamoto on one side of him and the guard on the other. For a little while, a surviving stretch of roof and wall protected them from the biting wind. Then they were picking their way through stone and bricks again, with snow sliding down from a gray, dreary sky.
Out past the station in the railroad yard, troops were filing onto a train. Again a sentry challenged Okamoto on his approach, again he used Teerts as his talisman to pass. He secured half a car for himself, the guard, and his prisoner. “You are more important than soldiers,” he smugly told Teerts.
With a long, mournful blast from its whistle, the train jerked into motion. Teerts had shot up Tosevite trains when he was still free. The long plumes of black smoke they spat made them easy to pick out, and they could not flee, save on the rails they used for travel. They’d been easy, enjoyable targets. He hoped none of his fellow males would think the one he was riding a tempting target.
Major Okamoto said, “The farther from Harbin we go, the more likely we are to be safe. I do not mind losing my life for the emperor, but I am ordered to see that you safely reach the Home Islands.”
Teerts was willing to lay down his life for his Emperor, the Emperor, but not for the parvenu Big Ugly who claimed the same title. Given a choice, he would have preferred not to lay down his life for anyone. He’d been given few choices lately.
The train rattled eastward. The ride was tooth-jarringly rough; the Race hit the rails themselves as well as the trains that rolled on them. But the Big Uglies, as they’d proved all over the planet, were resourceful beings. In spite of the bombs, the railroad kept working.
Or so Teerts thought until, some considerable time after the train had pulled out of Harbin, it shuddered to a stop. He hissed in dismay. He knew from experience what a lovely, tasty target a stopped train was. “What’s wrong?” he asked Major Okamoto.
“Probably you males of the Race have broken the track again.” Okamoto sounded more resigned than angry; that was part of war. “You are sitting by the window-tell me what you see.”
Teerts peered through the dirty glass. “I see a whole swarm of Tosevites working at the curve ahead.” How many Big Uglies labored there? Hundreds certainly, more likely thousands. No one carried anything more impressive than a pick, a shovel, or a crowbar. If one of the Race’s aircraft spied them, a strafing run would leave great red steaming pools in the snow.
But if no aircraft came over, the Big Uglies could perform astonishing feats. Before he came to Tosev 3, Teerts had taken machinery for granted. He’d never imagined that masses of beings armed with hand tools could not only duplicate their results but also work nearly as fast as they did.
He said, “Forgive the ignorant question, superior sir, but how do you keep them from perishing of cold or from being injured at this hard, dangerous work?”
“They are only Chinese peasants,” Major Okamoto said with chilling indifference. “As we use them up, we seize as many more as we need to do what must be done.”
For some reason, Teerts had expected the Big Uglies to treat their own kind better than they did him. But to the Nipponese, the Tosevites here were not of their own kind, however much alike they seemed to a male of the Race. The reasons for distinction at a level lower than the species,as a whole were lost on Teerts. Whatever they were, though, they let the Nipponese treat their laborers like pieces of the machines in whose place they were used, and with as little concern about their fate. That was something else Teerts hadn’t imagined before he came to Tosev 3. This world was an education in all sorts of matters where he would have preferred continued ignorance.
The vast swarms of workers (Teerts thought not so much of people as of the little social hive-creatures that occasionally made nuisances of themselves back on Home) drew back from the railroad track after a surprisingly short time. The train rolled slowly forward.
Three or four laborers lay in the snow, too worn to move on to the next stretch of broken track. Nipponese guards-males dressed far more warmly than those in their charge-came up and kicked at the exhausted peasants. One managed to stagger to his feet and rejoin his comrades. The guards picked up crowbars and methodically broke in the heads of the others.
Teerts wished he hadn’t seen that. He already knew the Nipponese had no compunctions about doing dreadful things to him if he failed to cooperate or even failed to be useful to them. Yet now he discovered that having knowledge confirmed before his eyes was ten times worse than merely knowing.
The train picked up speed after it passed the repaired curve. “Is this not a fine way to travel?” Okamoto said. “How swiftly we move!”
Teerts had crossed the gulf between the stars at half the speed of light-admittedly, in cold sleep. He ranged the air above this main landmass of Tosev 3 at speeds far greater than sound. How, then, was he supposed to be impressed with this wheezy train? The only conveyance next to which it seemed fast was the one in which the poor straining Tosevite had hauled him to the station.
But that latter sort of conveyance was what the Race had expected to find all over Tosev 3. Maybe the train, decrepit as it appeared to Teerts, was new enough to be marvelous to the Big Uglies. He knew better than to contradict Major Okamoto, anyhow. “Yes, very fast,” he said with as much enthusiasm as he could feign.
Through the dirty window, Teerts watched more Tosevites-Chinese peasants, he supposed-struggling to build new defensive lines for the Nipponese. They were having a tough time; the miserable local weather had frozen the ground hard as stone.
He had no idea how sick he’d become of the train, of its endless shaking, of the seat that did not conform to his backside because it made no provision for a tailstump, of the endless jabber from the Nipponese troops in the back of the car, of the odor that rose from them and grew thicker as the journey went on. He even came to miss his cell, something he had not imagined possible.
The journey seemed to stretch endlessly, senselessly. How long could it take to traverse one small part of a planetary surface? Given fuel and maintenance for his killercraft, Teerts could have circumnavigated the whole miserable world several times in the interval he needed to crawl across this tiny portion of it.
He finally grew fed up-and incautious-enough to say that to Major Okamoto. The Big Ugly looked at him for a moment, then asked, “And how fast could you go if someone kept dropping bombs in front of your aircraft?”
After heading east for a day and a half, the train swung south. That puzzled Teerts, who said to his keeper, “I thought Nippon lay in this direction, across the sea.”
“It does,” Okamoto answered, “but the port Vladivostok, which is nearest to us, belongs to the Soviet Union, not to Nippon.”
Teerts was neither a diplomat nor a particularly imaginative male. He’d never thought about the complications that might arise from having a planet divided up among many empires. Now, being forced to stay on the train because of one of those complications, he heaped mental scorn on the Big Uglies, though he realized the Race benefited from their disunity.
Even when the train
came down close by the sea, it did not stop, but rumbled through a land Major Okamoto called Chosen. “Wakarimasen,” Teerts said, working on his villainous Nipponese: “I do not understand. Here is the ocean. Why do we not stop and get on a ship?”
“Not so simple,” Okamoto answered. “We need a port, a place where ships can safely come into land, not be battered by storms.” He leaned across Teerts, pointed out the window at the waves crashing against the shore. Home’s lakes were surrounded by land, not the other way round; they seldom grew boisterous.
Shipwreck was another concept that hadn’t crossed Teerts’ mind till he watched this bruising ruffian of an ocean throwing its water about with muscular abandon. It was fascinating to see-certainly more interesting than the mountains that flanked the other side of the track-at least until Teerts had a really horrid thought: “We need to go across that ocean to get to Nippon, don’t we?”
“Yes, of course,” his captor answered blithely. “This disturbs you? Too bad.”
Here in Chosen, farther from the fighting, damage to the railway net was less. The train made better time. It finally reached a port, a place called Fusan. Land ended there, running out into the sea. Teerts saw what Okamoto had meant by a port: ships lined up next to wooden sidewalks that ran out into the water on poles. Big Uglies and goods moved on and off.
Teerts realized that, primitive and smoky as this port was, a lot of business got done here. He was used to air and space transportation and the weight limits they imposed; one of these big, ugly Big Ugly ships could carry enormous numbers of soldiers and machines and sacks of bland, boring rice. And the Tosevites had many, many ships.
Back on the planets of the Empire, transportation by water was an unimportant sidelight; goods flowed along highways and railroads. All the interdiction missions Teerts had flown on Tosev 3 were against highways and railroads. Not once had he attacked shipping. But from what he saw in Fusan, the officers who gave him his targets had been missing a bet.
