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Since he was flight leader, he had a display Rolvar and Gefron lacked, one that showed they’d also launched their rocket packs. A moment later, ground explosions confirmed that: there were far more of them than his own munitions load could have accounted for by itself.
“Let’s see how they like that!” Gefron shouted jubilantly. “We should have given it to them a long time ago, by the Emperor.”
Pilots got special training so their eyes did not leave their instruments when they heard the Emperor’s sacred name. Teerts kept on paying attention to his cabin displays. He felt the same excitement Gefron had shown; it was as close to arousal as a male could know in the absence of females.
He also wished his flight had been able to attack the Nipponese sooner. But there were only so many killerplanes, and so many Tosevite positions to smash. This one had had to wait its turn. It would have waited longer still had the shiplords not thrown his flight east against it.
His aircraft roared low over the shattered trench line. Little dots of flame sprang into being on the ground as the surviving Big Uglies fired blindly at him. The Nipponese were not the only Tosevite army to do that. Teerts had listened to the briefings. He supposed shooting back made the Big Ugly soldiers feel less like the helpless victims they really were. Its probability of doing anything more than that was very small.
Teerts didn’t gamble. Gambling was a vice of support for males who had time to kill, which was not one of his problems. He’d been in action from the start. But if he’d sat down with the little plastic dodecahedrons a few times, he would have understood with his gut rather than just with his brain the difference between a small probability and zero probability.
The left engine made a horrible noise, then died. His killercraft lurched in midair. A small town’s worth of warning lights came on all over his instrument panel. At the same time, he keyed his radio: “Flight Leader Teerts, aborting mission and attempting to return to base. I must have sucked a bullet or something right into one turbofan.”
“May the spirits of departed Emperors take you safely home,” Rolvar and Gefron said in the same breath. Rolvar added, “We will finish the attack run on the Tosevites, Flight Leader.”
“I’m sure you will,” Teerts said. Rolvar was a good, reliable male. So was Gefron, in a different, more primitive way. Between the two of them, they’d make the Nipponese wish they’d never been hatched. Teerts swung his killercraft westward, back toward the base from which he’d set out He could fly on one engine, though he wouldn’t be very fast or maneuverable. Get repairs made and he’d be good as new tomorrow-
The right engine made a horrible noise, then died.
All at once, Teerts’ instrument panel was nothing but warning lights. This isn’t fair the flight leader thought. His hard-won altitude began to slip as the aircraft became nothing more than an aerodynamic stone in the sky.
“Ejecting! I say again, ejecting!” he yelled. His thumbclaw hit a button he’d never expected to have to use. Something about the size of the invasion fleet’s bannership booted him in the base of the tail as hard as it could. His eyes stayed open, but he briefly saw only gray mist.
Pain soon brought him back to his senses. One of the three bones in his left wrist had surely broken. At the moment, though, that was the least of his worries. Still strapped into his seat, he floated above the Nipponese lines like the biggest, most tempting target in the whole Empire.
The Big Uglies blazed away at him for all they were worth. He watched in fearful fascination as holes appeared in the ripstop fabric of his parachute. Too many holes, or three or four too close together, and ripstopping wouldn’t matter much. Then a bullet smacked the armored bottom of the seat. He hissed in fright and tried to draw up his legs.
Not fair he thought again. The whole killercraft was armored, not just the bottom of the seat. Bullets that hit were nearly harmless. But turbofan blades, immensely strong though they were, couldn’t chew up lead. If you were colossally unlucky enough to lose both engines that way…
If you were that unlucky, you had to hope the Big Uglies wouldn’t catch you and do the frightful things rumor said they did to prisoners. You had to hope you landed a little ways away from them, so you could unstrap (one-handed, it wouldn’t be easy or fast) and try to evade until the rescue helicopter got there to pick you up.
But if you were that unlucky, who cared what you hoped? Teerts had spilled wind from his canopy, trying to float as far back toward the Race’s lines as he could. That would have made rescuing him a lot easier… if he hadn’t come down right in the middle of a Nipponese trench.
He was sure he was dead. The Big Uglies swarmed around him, shouting at one another and brandishing rifles with knives stuck onto the end of their barrels. He waited for them to shoot him or stick him. A little more pain, he told himself, and everything would be over. His spirit would join those of the Emperors now departed, to serve them in death as he had served the Race in life.
One of the Nipponese outshouted the rest. By the way they cleared a path for him, he must have been an officer. He stood in front of Teerts, hands on hips, staring at him with the small, immobile eyes that characterized the Big Uglies. Instead of a rifle, he carried a sword not too different from the one borne by the Tosevite warrior in the picture the Race’s probe had sent Home.
Teerts wondered why he didn’t draw it and use it. Why else had the others drawn back, but to give their commander the privilege of the kill? But the officer did not strike. Instead, he gestured for Teerts to free himself from the straps that held him in his seat.
The flight leader obeyed, awkwardly because his left hand wouldn’t work. As soon as he’d moved a couple of paces away from the seat, the Nipponese did take his sword from its sheath. He slashed two-handed at the lines that held Teerts’ parachute to the ejection seat. The sword must have had good metal in it, for the tough lines parted almost at once. The parachute canopy blew away.
The officer said something to his males. Several of them raised their rifles and fired repeatedly into the seat. The blasts almost deafened Teerts. They also dismayed him right down to the claws on his toes. Those bullets were certain to smash the homing beacon buried in the padding.
Baring his small, flat teeth, the Nipponese pointed east with his sword. He barked out a phrase that probably meant something like get moving. Teerts got moving. The officer and several of his males followed, to make sure the flight leader didn’t try to run.
Teerts had no intention of running. Since he hadn’t been killed out of hand, he expected to be treated fairly well. The Race held far more Tosevite captives than the other way round, and mistreatment of prisoners, could be avenged ten-thousandfold. Not only that, the Big Uglies, barbarous though they were, fought among themselves so often that they’d developed protocols for dealing with captured enemies. Teerts couldn’t remember offhand whether Nippon adhered to those protocols, but most Tosevite empires d
id.
Jets screamed overhead, back where the ejection seat had landed. That would be Gefron and Rolvar, trying to keep him from being captured. Too late, unfortunately; not only had he landed among the Big Uglies, but this officer was alert enough to have wrecked the beacon and got him away from it in a hurry.
Still, he didn’t think things would be too bad. The officer first took him to a medical station. A Nipponese doctor with corrective lenses held in front of his eyes by a weird contraption of bent wires bandaged his wrist and poured a stinging disinfectant over the cuts and scrapes he’d got in his ejection and landing. By the time the doctor was done, Teerts felt halfway decent.
Then the Nipponese officer started hustling him away from the front line again. The jets’ wail vanished; the other two pilots in the flight must have expended their munitions and had to head home. Artillery shells whistled overhead every so often. Most came from the west and landed on Tosevite positions. The Big Uglies kept firing back, though. They seemed too stubborn to know when to give up.
Teerts walked toward the dawn that was breaking in the east. As light grew, Nipponese artillery fire also picked up. Lacking night-vision gear, the Tosevites were limited to targets they could actually see. Each salvo of theirs drew quick counterbattery fire from the gunners of the Race.
Back at the rear edge of the Nipponese trench system, a new party of Big Uglies took charge of Teerts. By the way the officer who had captured him acted toward the one who now received him, the latter was far more prominent. They bowed to each other one last time before the junior officer and the males who had accompanied him headed back to their position.
Teerts’ new keeper surprised him by speaking the language of the Race. “You come this way,” he said. His accent was mushy and he barked out his words, but the flight leader followed him well enough.
“Where are you taking me?” Teerts asked, glad for the chance to communicate with something more expressive than gestures.
The Nipponese officer whirled and struck him. He staggered and almost fell; the blow had been cleverly aimed. “Not talk unless I say you can talk!” the Big Ugly shouted. “You prisoner now, not master. You obey!”
