They’re the enemy and they’re only Big Uglies, so of course we call their courage fanatical, Ussmak thought. Saying they’re just doing their best to stay alive like anybody else would give them too much credit for sense.
The males trooped out to the revetments that protected the landcruisers, Ussmak guiding his new commander and gunner. The earth was scored with hits from Tosevite mortars; bomb fragment scars pocked the sides of buildings. Nejas and Skoob rapidly swiveled their eye turrets. Ussmak guessed they hadn’t seen resistance like this from the Big Uglies.
Once in place in the driver’s position, he stopped worrying about what they’d seen and what they hadn’t. He had a vial of ginger stashed in the landcruiser’s fuse box, but he didn’t open it up and taste, not now. He wanted to be clear and rational, not berserk, if he saw action unexpectedly soon.
Helicopter gunships took off with whickering roars audible even through the landcruiser’s thick armor. They’d reach the target area well before the ground vehicles did. With luck, they’d soften up the Deutsche and not take too much damage themselves. Ussmak knew somebody reckoned the mission important; as he’d told his crewmales, helicopters had grown too scarce and precious to hazard lightly.
Through the streets of Besancon, past the busy-looking buildings with their filigrees of iron railings and balconies. Engineers preceded the landcruisers, to make sure no more explosive surprises awaited. All the same, Ussmak drove buttoned up and regarded every Big Ugly he saw through his vision slits as a potential-no, even a likely-spy. The Deutsche would know they were coming even before the helicopters arrived.
Ussmak breathed easier when his landcruiser rumbled over the bridge across the Doubs and headed for open country. He was also taking the measure of Nejas as a landcruiser commander. The new male might not have seen much action, but he seemed crisp and decisive. Ussmak approved. He hadn’t felt part of a proper landcruiser crew since a sniper killed Votal, his first commander. He hadn’t realized how much he missed the feeling till he saw some chance of getting it back.
Somewhere off in the trees, a machine gun opened up with harassing fire. A couple of bullets pinged off the landcruiser. Nejas said, “Take no notice of him. He can’t hurt us, anyway.” Ussmak hissed in delight He’d seen males with heads abuzz with ginger badly delay a mission by trying to hunt out Tosevite nuisances.
The column rolled north and east. Reports came back that the helicopters had struck hard at the Tosevite landcruisers. Ussmak hoped the reports were right. Knowing the Big Uglies could hurt him put combat in a new light.
A flash, a streak of fire barely seen, a crash that made the landcruiser ring like a bell. “Turret rotate from zero to twenty-five,” Nejas called-urgently, but without the panic or rage or excessive excitement a ginger taster would have used. “Machine-gun fire into those bushes.”
“It shall be done, superior sir,” Skoob replied. The turret swung through a quarter of a circle, from northeast to northwest. The machine gun yammered. “No way to tell whether I got him, superior sir, but he won’t shoot another rocket at one of our landcruisers for a while, I hope.”
“Let us hope not,” Nejas said. “We’re lucky that one hit us on the turret and not in the side of the hull, where the armor is thinner. Briefings say the results can be most unpleasant.”
“Briefings don’t know the half of it, superior sir,” Ussmak said. Vivid inside his head were flames and explosions and unremitting fear, fear that had come flooding back at that impact against the turret and now receded only slowly.
The landcruiser column rolled on. Every now and again, bullets from the bushes struck sparks off armor plate, but the column did not slow. Ussmak kept driving buttoned up. He felt half blind, but didn’t care to have one of those rounds clip off the top of his head.
“Why don’t they keep those pests from harassing us?” Nejas asked after yet another band of Tosevites sprayed the column with gunfire. “This is our territory; if we can’t keep raiders from slipping in, we might as well not have conquered it.”
“Superior sir, the trouble is that almost all the Tosevites hereabouts favor the raiders and shelter them, and we have an impossible time trying to figure out who really lives in the farms and villages and who doesn’t. Identity cards help, but they aren’t enough. This is their planet, after all; they know it better than we can hope to.”
“It was simpler down in Africa,” the landcruiser commander said mournfully. “The Big Uglies there had no weapons that could hurt a landcruiser, and did what they were told once we made a few examples of those who disobeyed.”
“We tried that here, too, I’ve heard,” Ussmak said. “This was before I arrived. The trouble was, the Big Uglies had been making examples of one another yet fighting just the same. They ignored the examples we made, the same way they’d ignored their own.”
“Mad,” Skoob said. Ussmak didn’t contradict him.
The landcruisers began passing old battlefields, some still showing the scars of fires set by shot-up landcruisers. The hulks of destroyed Deutsch armored fighting vehicles still sprawled in death. Some of them were the angular little machines Ussmak had encountered on the plains of the SSSR, but others were the big new ones that could endanger a landcruiser of the Race if well handled-and the Deutsche handled them well.
Nejas said, “Those are impressive looking hulks, aren’t they? Even holograms don’t do them justice. When I first saw one, I wondered why our males hadn’t salvaged it; I needed a moment to realize the Big Uglies had made it. I apologize for wondering about some of the things you said, Ussmak. Now I believe you.”
Ussmak didn’t answer, but felt a burst of pleasure more subtle than the jolt he got from ginger, and perhaps more satisfying as well. It had been too long since a superior acknowledged that the Race’s obligations ran down as well as up. His last pair of landcruiser commanders had taken him for granted, as if he were just a component of the machine he drove. Not even being a ginger buddy with Hessef had changed that. No wonder he’d felt isolated, alone, hardly part of the Race at all. Now… it was almost as if he’d come out of the eggshell anew.
Smoke rose from the woods up ahead. An artillery shell burst off to one side of the road: the helicopters hadn’t routed the Deutsche, then. Ussmak had hoped he’d be going in to mop up. He hadn’t really believed it, but he’d hoped.
A cannon belched fire and smoke from behind some bushes. Wham! Ussmak felt as if he’d been kicked in the muzzle. But the landcruiser’s heavy glacis plate kept the Tosevite shell from penetrating. Without being ordered, Ussmak swung the vehicle in the direction from which the round had come. “I almost fouled my seat,” he said. “If the Big Uglies had waited till we passed and shot at the side of our hull-”
Nejas took the time to give him one word: “Yes.” Then the landcruiser commander snapped an order to Skoob: “Gunner!” A moment later another single-word command followed: “Sabot!”
Skoob put the automatic loader through its paces. A round of armor-piercing discarding sabot ammunition clattered into the breech of the gun, which closed with a solid thunk. “Up!” the gunner reported.
“Landcruiser, front!” Nejas said, noting the target for Skoob.
“Identified,” Skoob answered: he had it in his thermal sight.
“Fire!”
“On the way,” Skoob said. The report of the landcruiser cannon was less than thunderous inside the hull, but the massive vehicle rocked back from the recoil and a sheet of flame billowed across Ussmak’s vision slits. Again the driver knew pleasure almost as intense as ginger gave: this was how a crew was supposed to work together. He hadn’t known anything like it since Votal got killed. He’d forgotten how satisfying it could be.