Nejas and Skoob were good crewmales, the best he’d had since his first commander and gunner. They didn’t know he had his own little stash of ginger stowed away under one of the flameproof mats in the driver’s compartment of the landcruiser. He wished he’d never got the habit, but when good males died around you, when half your orders made no sense, when you were hurt and bored and didn’t look forward to more combat but knew you had no choice, what were you going to do?
He was no fleetlord or shiplord or grand strategist of any sort, but pulling the landcruisers back from the thrust they’d made struck him as stupid. They’d reached an important river (the locals called it the Rhine) and were poised to strike deep into Deutschland if they could force a crossing-and now this.
“You have to give the Deutsche credit,” he said reluctantly. “No matter how hard we hit them, they hit back. And the Swiss-is that what the other tribe’s name is? — are like that, too. They don’t have weapons as good as the Deutsche, but-”
“I know what I want to give the Deutsche,” Skoob the gunner said. He pointed to the main armament of the landcruiser, a thin black line against the dark blue of the night sky. “Better that than credit, if you ask me.”
Ussmak didn’t argue. The landcruiser was pulled off the road north of Mulhouse (and hadn’t going back through the wrecked Tosevite town been a delight?), parked in a meadow. Tosev 3’s big moon spilled pale light on the mountains to the west, but only made the closer woods seem blacker and more forbidding.
Even by day, Tosev 3 was an alien world to Ussmak. It was too cold to suit him, while the light from the star Tosev paradoxically seemed whiter and brighter than he was used to. At night, though, the planet turned into the sort of haunted place a female might have used to frighten hatchlings.
Everything felt unfamiliar. The odors the chilly breeze brought to the scent receptors on Ussmak’s tongue, some spicy, some bland, others redolent of decay, were all strange to him. The air itself felt heavy and wet to breathe. And the sounds-the chirps and tweets and occasional snarls-were none of them like those night creatures made back on Home. That was one reason Ussmak found them frightening. Another was that he could never be certain which of those night noises came from a Big Ugly sneaking up with the intent of doing him permanent bodily harm.
He said, “I’m going to get my rest while I can. We’ll probably be fighting tomorrow.” Somewhere altogether too close for comfort, the Deutsche were camped with their landcruisers, too, waiting for Tosev to rise. The landcruisers themselves weren’t much, though the new models could sting. But by the way the Deutsche handled them, they could have served as instructors at any training center in the Empire.
New models.The thought ran through his head as he slid down into the landcruiser through the driver’s hatch. The weapons with which the Race fought on Tosev 3 were not much different from the ones they’d used to conquer the Rabotevs and Hallessi, thousands of years before. They’d been on Tosev 3 a bit more than two years (only a little more than one of this planet’s slow turns around its sun), and already the landcruisers and aircraft with which the Big Uglies fought them were vastly more dangerous than those they’d first met.
That was frightening in and of itself. Worse than frightening was the atomic bomb the Russkis had used. If the Big Uglies got nuclear weapons, the Race was liable to lose the war. Ussmak hadn’t imagined that, not when he rampaged across the plains of the SSSR just after the Race landed.
He closed the hatch after him, dogged it tight. Nejas and Skoob would sleep by the landcruiser, they didn’t have enough room for comfort in the turret. But his seat reclined to make a fair bed. He lay there for a while, but sleep eluded him.
Ever so cautiously, he reached under the mat and took out a little plastic vial. It was full of brownish powder. He pulled off the top, poured a small mound of powder into the palm of his hand, and brought the hand up to his mouth. His scent receptors caught the ginger’s spicy tang even before his tongue flicked out to lap up the powder.
As it made its way to his brain, well-being flowed through him: he felt wise and quick and powerful all at the same time, as if he were the fleetlord and part of the fleetlord’s computer scrambled together. But he also feltgood, almost as good as he would during mating season. With no females within light-years, mating hardly ever crossed his mind; to the Race, the habits of the Big Uglies seemed a planetwide dirty joke.
When ginger coursed through him, the Big Uglies were laughable, contemptible. Better yet, in his mind they weresmall. With ginger, the war looked not only winnable but easy, the way everyone had thought it would be before the conquest fleet left Home.
But Ussmak had learned better than to taste just before he went into combat. Ginger made you think you were smart and strong, but it didn’t really make you smart and strong. If you roared into action convinced the Tosevites couldn’t possibly hurt you, you were all too likely to end up dead before you realized you’d made a mistake.
Tasting ginger had two other problems attached to it. One was that the first thing a taste made you want was another taste. Ussmak knew he was an addict; he fought against it as best he could, but an addict he remained.
The other problem was what happened when you didn’t take that second taste. Ginger didn’t just lift you. When it was through with you, it dropped you-hard. And the drop seemed all the worse because of how high you’d been before.
Ussmak made himself not reach for the vial again when exhilaration faded. “I’ve done this a lot of times by now,” he said aloud, willing himself to stillness. Depression and fear crashed down on him just the same. He knew they weren’t real, but they felt as real as the pleasure that had gone before them.
Infantrymales screened the landcruisers. In Ussmak’s worried imagination, they fell asleep at their posts or simply failed to spy Deutsch males creeping through what were to the Race alien woods. The first the crewmales would know of their blunders was satchel charges chucked at their landcruisers. Ussmak dozed off shivering in terror.
He woke with a fresh spasm of alarm when the turret hatches clanged shut, but it was only Nejas and Skoob getting into the landcruiser. “I thought you were a couple of Tosevites,” he said resentfully.
“If we were, you’d be dead meat,” Skoob retorted. A short pause showed he was letting his mouth fall open in laughter.
“Let’s get moving,” Nejas said. “Driver, start the engine.”
“It shall be done, superior sir.” The return to routine heartened Ussmak; however battered by fate he’d been, he was still a male of the Race. The hydrogen-burning turbine caught on the first try. He would have been astonished at anything else. The Race’s engineering was solid.
“We’ll clean up the Deutsche here and then resume our advance,” Nejas said as the landcruiser began to move. “A little delay won’t matter.” Ussmak wondered if he’d had his tongue in the ginger jar, too. But no. Nejas and Skoob had never developed the habit. They were everything a male of the Race should be, and so unselfconscious about it that he couldn’t even resent them.
Landcruisers and troop carriers rumbled up the road together. The farmland to either side had probably been fertile once, but armies going back and forth across it hadn’t done much to help that. Ruins, craters, and the tumbled corpses of Tosevite animals were appalling. Ussmak didn’t see any Big Uglies. They weren’t too stupid to get out of the way of the war.
Not far ahead, a male in the gray sacks the Deutsche wore to protect themselves from their world’s beastly climate popped up out of a concealed hole in the ground and pointed something at a troop carrier. Flame shot from the rear of the device; a projectile rocketed toward the carrier. Without looking to see whether he’d scored a hit, the Big Ugly ducked back into his hole.