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“On the whole, yes,” Elifrim answered, though for a moment his eyes looked to the side walls of the office, a sign he wasn’t telling everything he knew. When he spoke again, he attempted briskness: “Any further questions, Flight Leader? No? Very well, dismissed.”
Teerts was glad to leave the office, lit only by a weak electric bulb left over from the days when the Tosevites had controlled the air base, and to go out into the sunlight that bathed the place. He found the weather a trifle cool, but pleasant enough. He walked over to his killercraft to see how the technicians were coming along in readying it for the next mission.
He found a senior armorer loading shells into the aircraft’s magazine. “Good day, Flight Leader,” the male said respectfully-Teerts outranked him. But he was an important male, too, and everything in his demeanor said he knew it.
“Good day, Innoss,” Teerts answered. He saw that some of the shells the armorer was using were shiny ones of the Race’s manufacture, others with the duller finish that marked Big Ugly products. “What do you think of the munitions the Tosevites are making for us?”
“Since you ask, superior sir, the answer is ‘not much,’ ” Innoss said. He lifted a Tosevite shell out of the crate in which it had come. “All the specifications are the same as they are for our own ammunition, but some of these don’t feel quite right.” He hefted the shell. “The weight is fine, but the balance is off somehow.”
“Are all the ones the Tosevites produce like that?” Teerts asked.
“No,” the armorer answered. “Only a few. With their primitive manufacturing techniques, I suppose I should not be surprised. The miracle is that we get any usable shells at all.”
Suspicion flared in Teerts. “If it is not a universal trait, these shells with the odd balance will be somehow flawed,” he predicted. “Believe me when I say this, Innoss. I know the Big Uglies and their tricks better than I ever dreamt I would. Sure as I had an eggtooth to help me break out of my shell, some ingenious Tosevite has found a way to diddle us.”
“I don’t see how,” Innoss said doubtfully. “The weight is proper, after all. More likely some flaw in the process. I have seen video of what they call factories.” Derision filled his hiss.
“Their weapons may be outdated next to ours, but they are well made of their kind,” Teerts said. “I’ll bet you a day’s pay, Innoss, that close enough examination of that misbalanced shell will turn up something wrong with it.”
The armorer sent him a thoughtful look. “Very well, Flight Leader, I accept that wager. Let us see what this shell has to say to us.” He carried it away toward his own shack by the ammunition storage area.
Teerts thought about how he would spend his winnings. Reaching a conclusion didn’t take long: I’ll buy more ginger. Amazing how easy the stuff was to get. Every other Big Ugly who swept up or brought food onto the air base seemed to have his own supply. Every so often, Elifrim caught a user and made an example of him, but he missed tens for every one he found.
Teerts was still busy inspecting his aircraft when Innoss returned. The armorer drew himself up in stiff formality. “Superior sir, I owe you a day’s pay,” he said. “I have already requested a file transfer between our accounts.” He spoke more respectfully than he ever had before; till now, Teerts had been just another officer as far as he was concerned.
“What did the Big Uglies do?” Teerts asked, doing his best not to show the relief he felt. He’d gained prestige by being right; only now did he think about how much he’d have lost had he been wrong.
“I X-rayed three shells: one of ours, one of theirs with proper balance, and one of theirs with improper balance,” Innoss said. “The first two were virtually identical; as you said, superior sir, they can do good enough work when they care to. But the third-” He paused, as if still not believing it.
“What did the Big Uglies do?” Teerts repeated. By Innoss’ tone, he guessed it was something perfidious even for them.
“They left out the bursting charge that goes behind the penetrating head,” the armorer answered indignantly. “If they’d just done that, the shells would have been light, and quality control would have found them easily. But to make up for the empty space within the shells, they thickened the metal of the head just enough to match the missing weight of powder. I wonder how many shells have done far less damage to the enemy than they should because of that.”
“Have you any way to trace down which Tosevite plant turned out the sabotaged shells?” Teerts asked.
“Oh, yes.” Innoss opened his mouth not in a laugh but to show off all his teeth in a threat display that made it clear the distant ancestors of the Race had been fierce carnivores. “Vengeance shall fall on them.”
“Good,” Teerts said. This wasn’t like vengeance on the Nipponese, where thousands who had done nothing to him had died simply because they lived near where the Big Uglies had chosen to undertake nuclear research. The Tosevites who suffered now would have earned what they got, each and every one of them.
“The Race is in your debt,” Innoss said. “I telephoned the base commandant and told him what you had led me to discover. You shall be recognized as you deserve; your body paint will get fancier.”
“That was generous of you,” Teerts said. A promotion, or even a commendation, would mean more pay, which would mean more ginger. After so many horrors, life was good.
Like Shanghai, Peking had seen better days. The former capital’s fall to the Japanese had been relatively gentle-Chiang’s corrupt clique simply cut and ran,Nieh Ho-T’ing thought disparagingly. But the Japanese had fought like madmen before the little scaly devils drove them out of Peking. Whole districts lay in ruins, and many of the palaces formerly enjoyed by the emperors of China and their consorts and courtiers were only rubble through which scavengers picked for bits of wood.
“So what?” Hsia Shou-Tao growled when Nieh spoke of that aloud. “They were nothing but symbols of oppression of the masses. The city-the world-is better off without them.”
“It could be so,” Nieh said. “Were it up to me, though, they would have been preserved as symbols of that oppression.” He laughed. “Here we are, arguing over what should be done with them when, first, they are already destroyed and, second, we have not yet the power to say what any building’s fate will be.”
“A journey of a thousandli begins with but a single step,” Hsia answered. The proverb made him grimace. “More than a thousandli from Shanghai to here, and my poor feet feel every stinking step I took.”
“Ah, but here we are in the hibiscus-flower garden,” Nieh Ho T’ing said with an expansive wave. “Surely you can take your ease.”
“Hibiscus-flower night soil,” Hsia said coarsely; he reveled in a peasant’s crudity. “It’s just another dive.”
The Jung Yuan (which meant hibiscus-flower garden) had been a fine restaurant once. It looked to have been looted a couple of times; soot running up one wall said someone had tried to torch the place. Those efforts were all too likely to succeed; Nieh wondered why this one had failed.
He sipped tea from a severely plain earthenware cup. “The food is still good,” he said.
Hsia grunted, unwilling to admit anything. But, like Nieh, he’d demolished thelu-wei-p’in-p’an — ham, minced pork, pigs’ tripes and tongue, and bamboo shoots-all in a thick gravy-that was one of Jung Yuan’s specialties. Pork and poultry were the only meat you saw these days; pigs and chickens ate anything, and so were eaten themselves.
A serving girl came up and asked, “More rice?” When Nieh nodded, she hurried away and returned with a large bowlful. Hsia used the lacquerware spoon to fill his own eating bowl, then held it up to his mouth and shoveled in rice with his chopsticks. He slurped from a bowl ofkao liang, a potent wine brewed from millet, and belched enormously to show his approval.
“You are a true proletarian,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said, not at all ironically. Hsia Shou-Tao beamed at the compliment.
A couple of tables over, a group of men in
Western-style suits was having a dinner party, complete with singsong girls and a raucous orchestra. Despite all Peking had been through, the men looked plump and prosperous. Some had their arms around singsong girls, while others were trying to slide their hands up the slits in the girls’ silk dresses. A couple of the girls pulled away; not all entertainers were courtesans. Most, though, accepted the attentions either as their due or with mercenary calculation in their eyes.
“Collaborators,” Nieh said in a voice that would have meant the firing squad in territory controlled by the People’s Liberation Army. “They could not be so rich without working hand in glove with the little scaly devils.”
“You’re right,” Hsia grunted. He filled his bowl of rice again. With his mouth full, he added, “That one there, in the dark shiny green, she’s a lot of woman.”
