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And then, to Gorppet’s astonishment, another male spoke up: “Superior sir, the small-unit group leader is right. As long as the Deutsche are in the field, they are dangerous. Underestimating them will do nothing but get good males killed to no purpose. I mean no disrespect when I say this, for it is a manifest truth.”
In a deadly voice, the regiment leader said, “Give me your name, Mid-Group Leader. Your statement will go on the record.”
“Very well, superior sir: I am Shazzer,” the other male replied. The regiment leader spoke into a computer hookup. There, all too probably, went Shazzer’s reputation and hope for advancement. They would surely be gone if the regiment leader turned out to be right. They were also likely doomed even if the regiment leader turned out to be wrong. The Race did not like those who disagreed with duly constituted authority. The regiment leader’s eye turrets swung toward Gorppet. “Give me your name, too, Small-Unit Group Leader.”
“Superior sir, I am Gorppet,” he answered. He’d never expected to become an officer. If he stopped being one, the eggshell of his world wouldn’t shatter.
“Gorppet,” the regiment leader repeated, this time into the computer hookup. Having finished that, he continued, “Now let us turn to the business at hand: wiping out the surviving remnants of the Deutsche.”
“It shall be done, superior sir,” the assembled officers chorused. Gorppet mouthed the words along with the rest, though they were bitter on his tongue. He longed for ginger to rid himself of their taste, but made himself hold back.
Out of the barn trooped the officers. Gorppet checked his radiation meter. This particular area wasn’t doing too badly; he didn’t need a breathing mask, let alone protective wrappings. The winds blowing the radioactive wreckage of the Reich to the east had been relatively kind here.
As the officers began to scatter and return to their units, Gorppet hurried over to Shazzer and said, “I thank you, superior sir, for what you tried to do in there. I fear you did not help yourself by doing it.”
Shazzer shrugged. “You spoke plain truth, Gorppet. Any male who has ever fought the Deutsche knows you spoke plain truth. Only pity is, we could not make that male see it.” He sounded not in the least concerned about what would happen to him.
Before Gorppet could say how much he admired that, aircraft streaked toward him out of the west. Concern about careers suddenly evaporated. “Those are Deutsch!” he shouted, and dove into a shell crater.
Shazzer dove in right behind him. Some of the other males were slower to take cover. Flames rippled under the wings of the enemy killercraft. “Rockets!” Shazzer screamed. He tried to scrabble deeper into the earth. Gorppet didn’t blame him. He was trying to do the same thing.
The killercraft wailed past and were gone. Gorppet stuck up his head and looked around for the regiment leader who’d said the Deutsche were at the end of their tether. He didn’t spot him. Maybe that meant the optimistic officer had found himself a hole in the ground, too. Maybe it meant he’d been blown to bits. Gorppet didn’t much care, one way or the other.
He didn’t keep his head up very long, either. Hisses in the air rose swiftly to shrieks. He shrieked, too: “Artillery!” He dove down into the crater once more.
He thought the shells that burst around him were of heavier caliber than most of the ones the Big Uglies had thrown during the last round of fighting. He cursed. The Race’s artillery remained essentially the same as it had been when Home was unified a hundred thousand years before. Why change? It did the job well enough. The Big Uglies, unfortunately, didn’t think that way.
Splinters whined overhead. The ground shook under Gorppet’s prostrate body, reminding him of the earthquakes he’d known when stationed in Basra and Baghdad. Shazzer said, “I think these are all explosive shells. The ones with gas in them sound different when they burst.”
“Praise the spirits of Emperors past for small favors,” Gorppet said. “I truly hate the masks we have to wear to protect ourselves against the gas.”
“And who does not?” the other veteran officer replied. “But I hate dying even more.”
“Truth,” Gorppet agreed.
If the Deutsche were short on ammunition, the bombardment they laid down gave no sign of it. Shells fell from the sky like rain. Shazzer said, “They are going to try to break through here. They would not be pounding us so hard if they were not.”
“How can they do that?” Gorppet said mockingly. “We have smashed them. They are completely destroyed. The regiment leader has said so.”
Shazzer laughed-it was either laugh or curse. “I do not think the regiment leader bothered informing the Deutsche of this fact-if it is a fact.”
“I wish I could get back to my small group,” Gorppet said. “They should have their commander with them.”
“You would not last long if you climbed out of this hole,” Shazzer said. “Have you never seen that, without its officers, a small group often fights about as well under the command of its underofficers? I would not say that to every male, but you do not strike me as the sort it would insult.”
“No, superior sir, it does not insult me,” Gorppet answered. “I have been an ordinary trooper and an underofficer myself. I never expected to be anything more. My opinion of officers is not far removed from yours.”
“Then trust your soldiers,” Shazzer said. “I think we may have to do some fighting of our own here.”
Sure enough, Big Uglies started falling back past the barn where the regiment leader had held his briefing. They were not Deutsche: they were the local Tosevites, as loyal to the Race as any Big Uglies were. But if they had to retreat, that meant the Deutsche were advancing. “I wish we had more landcruisers in the neighborhood,” Gorppet said fretfully, “more landcruisers and more antilandcruiser rockets.”
With a shrug, Shazzer answered, “The Deutsche previously concentrated their efforts farther south, in the direction of the city of Lodz-or what was the city of Lodz. Naturally, we concentrated our resources there, too.”
“Naturally,” Gorppet said bitterly. “And then the Big Uglies shifted their forces and did something we failed to anticipate. This has happened too many times.”
Before Shazzer could reply, a clanking rumble announced that the Deutsche had landcruisers in these parts, even if the Race didn’t. Gorppet stuck his head out of the hole again. The artillery barrage had moved on, and was now pounding positions farther east. Even if it hadn’t been, he needed to see what was going on. The greater the distance at which he and his comrades engaged the landcruisers, the better.
“We have to fight as a small group ourselves now,” he told Shazzer. The other male made the gesture of agreement.
And here came the landcruisers, three of them, much bigger and no doubt much more heavily armored than the ones the Big Uglies had used during the last round of fighting. A Tosevite stood up in the cupola of the closest one. Landcruiser commanders had a habit of doing that; it let them see much more than they could if they stayed buttoned up inside their machines and peered out through periscopes.
It also left them much more vulnerable. The Race had lost many fine landcruiser commanders-it was commonly the good ones who did stand up and look around-to Tosevite snipers. Now Gorppet did his best to redress the balance. He fired a quick burst from his rifle at the Big Ugly in the cupola. The Deutsch male toppled. “Got him!” Gorppet shouted.
But the rest of the landcruiser crew had spotted his muzzle flashes. The turret and the big gun it carried swung toward his hole. Before it could fire, though, a Tosevite leaped from cover, scrambled up onto the landcruiser, and threw something down through the open cupola into the turret. Flames and smoke rose. Escape hatches popped open. Big Uglies bailed out. Gorppet gleefully shot them. A moment later, the landcruiser blew up.
“One of those nasty bottles of burning hydrocarbon distillate,” Shazzer said. “Remember how they gave us fits?”
“I am not likely to forget,” Gorppet answered. “And I am not sorry
to see them used against the Deutsche by Tosevites on our side.”
A second Deutsch landcruiser exploded, this one even more spectacularly-a hit from another landcruiser’s big gun. Gorppet shouted in glee. Before his shout was through, the third Tosevite landcruiser went up to flames. One of the Race’s machines rattled past the barn, heading west.
“Maybe the regiment leader was right after all,” Gorppet said. He turned his eye turrets this way and that. “Maybe he is even still alive to find out he was right after all-but I do not see him.” He shrugged. “I do not miss him very much, either. My guess is, we have a better chance against the Deutsche without him.”
Ever since the fighting stopped-in fact, since before the fighting stopped-Ttomalss had devoted himself to the exhausting task of raising a Tosevite hatchling. From all he’d gathered, the task of raising a Tosevite hatchling was difficult and exhausting even for the Big Uglies themselves. It was doubly-odds were, a lot more than doubly-difficult and exhausting for him, since he was the first male of the Race to try it. He had neither instincts nor accumulated wisdom upon which to fall back.
Years of patient work had made Kassquit into a female very nearly independent of him. He was grateful for that; it let him analyze some of the work he’d done with her so that others who came after him could do it better, and it also let him do some work unrelated to her. After so long without it, he’d rediscovered the joys of having time to himself again.
And now the war had broken out once more, confining him to the starship for the time being. That would have been annoying enough by itself, but there was worse. Because he’d raised Kassquit, he was also expected to take charge of Jonathan Yeager, the wild Big Ugly who’d been brought up to the starship to mate with her.
