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16
Inside the landcruiser, which was inside the heavy transporter, Ussmak was thoroughly shielded from the outside world. What he was not shielded from was fear. After all he and his crewmales had endured in Britain, he knew he would never again be shielded from fear.
He spoke into the intercom microphone: “How does your wound feel today, superior sir?”
“Getting better all the time,” Nejas answered. “High time I was back on duty.” He hesitated, perhaps making sure the crew of the transporter could not hear the next thing he had to say. Once he was sure they were out of the circuit, he went on, his words all at once quick and breathy: “Do you by any chance happen to have another-taste of ginger, landcruiser driver?”
“I’m sorry, superior sir, but I don’t have any even for myself,” Ussmak answered. He wished he hadn’t had to start his commander tasting. If he hadn’t, though, he and Skoob would have had to leave Nejas behind. The landcruiser commander would never have made it to Tangmere and evacuation. Maybe none of them would have made it out of Britain alive.
“Too bad,” Nejas said. “Oh, too bad. How I crave the herb!”
“As well you can’t get it, then, superior sir,” Skoob told him. The gunner and commander had been crewmales since long before Ussmak joined them; Skoob had earned the right to speak bluntly to his chief. “That filthy stuff’s no good for any male, believe you me it’s not.”
He’d said as much back in Britain, but he hadn’t turned Ussmak in to the disciplinarians once they’d escaped the chaos of evacuation and reached the relative safety of southern France-relative safety, because even there the Big Uglies proved themselves able to lob poison gas at males and females of their own kind who labored on behalf of the Race. And Skoob had turned both eye turrets away from Nejas when his commander kept tasting while recovering. Skoob disapproved, but was too loyal to do anything about it.
Shame licked at Ussmak like the flames from a burning landcruiser. Hidden away in the driver’s compartment, he had several-maybe more than several-tastes of ginger. He told himself he’d lied to Nejas because he didn’t want to see the landcruiser commander plunge into degradation as he had done. It was even true-to a degree. But the main reason he’d said he had no more ginger was simple and selfish in the extreme-he didn’t want to share it.
“Attention, landcruiser crews.” The voice of the transporter pilot filled the audio button taped to Ussmak’s hearing diaphragm. “Attention, landcruiser crews. We are beginning our descent to the landing. Please be alert for possible abrupt motions of the aircraft. Thank you.”
“Thankyou — very much,” Ussmak muttered, having first made sure he was not transmitting even to his crewmales.Please be alert for possible abrupt motions of the aircraft, indeed! He’d flown into Britain in a landcruiser aboard a heavy transporter. He knew too well what that innocent-sounding euphemism meant. Had the pilot wanted to be honest, he would have said something like,We may have to dodge like maniacs because the stinking Big Uglies are doing everything they can to shoot us down.
What Ussmak didn’t know was how much the local Big Ugliescould do to shoot him down. Britain had been a dreadful place to fly into or out of. Not only was it a cramped little island, but the locals had a great many killercraft, some of them jet-powered, and radar to help guide those killercraft to their targets. No wonder, then, the transporters had taken such a beating over British skies.
Here in the eastern portion of the SSSR, that part of the mission was supposed to be easier, although Ussmak had grown heartily tired of experts telling him things about the Tosevites that soon turned out not to be so. But he’d fought in the SSSR before, if farther west, and knew that the Soviets, while they made good landcruisers by Big Ugly standards, lagged behind in other areas of the military art and lacked the doctrine to get the best results from the equipment they did have.
Or rather, he knew the Sovietshad lagged behind in other areas of the military art andhad lacked proper doctrine. He hadn’t fought them in two of his years, one of Tosev 3’s. Against his own people, or the Rabotevs, or the Hallessi, that wouldn’t have mattered. For the mutable Big Uglies, it was as good as an age. Fearfully, he wondered what new destructive skills the Soviets had learned while he was busy elsewhere on this planet. Suddenly he shuddered. They were the ones who had used atomic weapons.
Nejas said, “Pilot, how bad is the weather in the area to which we’re flying?”
“It’s cold, landcruiser commander,” the pilot answered. “There’s frozen water on the ground already, for instance.”
“That seems to happen a great deal on this planet,” Nejas said, his tone halfway between weary resignation and making the best of things. “I don’t suppose this Siberia place can be too much worse than the rest.”
“Last Tosevite winter, we were on duty in the southwestern part of the great land mass, what the Big Uglies call Africa,” Skoob said. “That would have been downright pleasant if it hadn’t been so damp. It was warm enough, anyhow, which is more than you can say for a lot of Tosev 3.”
Ussmak had spent most of the previous winter in a hospital ship, recovering from radiation poisoning after he’d had to bail out of his landcruiser into plutonium-contaminated muck when the Big Uglies raided the area for metal for their nuclear devices. The climate inside the ship had been salubrious enough. Getting there by way of radioactive mud was not a route he recommended, though.
Even through the steel and ceramic armor of the landcruiser in which he rode now, Ussmak could hear the roaring whine of the transporter’s turbofans. He listened closely for any abrupt change in their tone, and braced himself in his seat. Especially on its landing descent, the huge, clumsy aircraft wasn’t much faster than a Tosevite killercraft. Instead of feeling safe within the twin eggshells of transporter and landcruiser, he felt doubly trapped.
A swing to the side set his heart pounding. A moment later, the pilot came on to say, “We are experiencing some violent crosswinds, you males in there who can’t see out. Nothing to worry about; radar reports no Tosevite killercraft airborne in our vicinity. We’ll be on the ground shortly.”
“What do you know?” Skoob said. “Good news for a change.”
“The Emperor knows we could use some, after the fiasco in Britain,” Nejas said. He sounded like a male who needed a taste of ginger. When you hadn’t had any for a while, the world seemed a grim place indeed. Ussmak had slowly learned that it was the herb-or rather, the lack of it-talking, not the world itself. Some tasters took a long time to figure that out. Some never did.
The transporter jet jerked in the air. Ussmak jerked in his seat. You didn’t want to try to sit bolt upright; you’d smash your head against the roof of the driver’s compartment. He remembered just in time. The pilot said, “Flaps are down. We’ll be landing momentarily. Landcruiser crews prepare to roll out the cargo bay.”
Another jolt announced the landing gear coming down. Then the transporter hit the runway. Despite its bulk, it bounced back into the air for an instant, then rolled to a stop. The turbofans screamed as they reversed thrust to help slow the enormous aircraft.
Ussmak was eager to escape from the transporter. Tosev 3 had too much water and not enough land, but they’d just flown one of the longest all-overland routes possible on the planet. He wanted to get out, look around at his new duty area (or as much of it as he could see through the vision slits of a landcruiser), and, more important still, meet some of the males here and find out where he could get some more ginger after his present supply ran out.
The nose of the transporter swung up, filling the cargo bay with light other than that of its own fluorescents. The light was white and very cold. “Driver, start your engine,” Nejas said.
“It shall be done, superior sir,” Ussmak said, and obeyed.
No sooner had he obeyed than Nejas slammed the lid of the cupola down with a clang. “It’s a freezer out there,” he exclaimed. “Worse than a freezer! You’d go into a freezer to warm up.” A
s if to support him, the landcruiser’s heating elements came on, hissing gently as they blew warm air through the interior of the machine.
When Ussmak saw the male with a light wand who came up to direct the landcruiser out of the aircraft, he believed every word Nejas had said. The poor guide had an electrically heated suit of the sorts pilots used in the chilly air of high altitudes, and over it a hooded coat and boots made from the furry hides of Tosevite animals. In spite of all that, he looked desperately cold as he waved the landcruiser ahead.
Ussmak put the machine in gear and rumbled down the ramp. Snow blowing almost horizontally greeted him. The landcruiser’s heater hummed as it worked harder. He hoped it was made to withstand a challenge like this. Snow also started clogging his vision slits. He flicked the button that sent a stream of cleaning liquid onto them. It got rid of the snow, but froze in place, so it was as if he were trying to see out through a pane of ice.
“Careful!” Nejas shouted. “You almost ran down the guide.”
“Sorry, superior sir,” Ussmak answered. “If you have vision out your cupola, command me.” He explained what had gone wrong with his own optics.
Between them, the male with the light wand and Nejas directed Ussmak to a point in front of a building he saw only as a large, solid lump of snow in the midst of all the swirling stuff. A door opened in the side of the solid lump. The guide gestured. “We’re supposed to bail out and go in there, I think,” Nejas said. “I just hope we don’t freeze to death before we make it”
With a single convulsive motion, Ussmak threw open the hatch above his head and scrambled out. The cold was stunning. His nictitating membranes drew over the surface of his eyes to protect them from the icy blast of the wind, but he had to blink hard to make them return to where they belonged; they had started to freeze in place. His lungs felt as if he were breathing fire. His skin burned for a moment, too, but then went cold and numb.
