He bent to kiss Liu Han. She liked that-not just that he did it, but that he made a production of it. She needed to know he kept caring for her. “Baby, you’re brilliant,” he said. Then he had to stop and explain what brilliant meant, but it was worth it.

Ussmak was unenthusiastic about leaving the nice warm barracks at Besancon. The cold outside made his muzzle tingle. He hurried toward his landcruiser, whose crew compartment had a heater.

“We’ll kill all the stupid Deutsch Big Uglies as far as the eye can see, then come back here and relax some more. Shouldn’t take long,” Hessef said. The landcruiser commander let the lid to his cupola fall with a clang.

That’s the ginger talking, Ussmak thought. Hessef and Tvenkel had both tasted just before they started this mission: ginger was cheap and easy to come by here in France. They’d both laughed at him for declining-he’d used even more than they had while sitting around waiting for something to happen.

But he still thought combat was different. The Big Uglies were barbarous, but he knew they could fight. He’d had landcruisers wrecked around him; he’d lost crewmales. And the Deutsche were supposed to be more dangerous than the Russki had been. That was plenty to make him want to go at them undrugged.

Tvenkel had sneered, “Don’t worry about it. The landcruiser just about fights itself.”

“Do what you want,” Ussmak had answered. “I’ll taste plenty when we get back, I promise you that.” He missed the confidence and exuberance ginger gave him, but he didn’t think he really was smarter when he tasted-he only felt that way. A lot of tasters failed to draw the distinction, but he thought it was there.

At Hessef’s blithe order, he started the landcruiser’s engine. Part of a long column, the big, heavy machine rumbled out of the fortress and through the narrow streets of Besancon. Big Uglies in their ridiculous clothes stared as it went past. Some of the Big Uglies yelled things. Ussmak hadn’t learned any Francais, but the tone didn’t sound friendly.

Males of the Race, aided here and there by Tosevites in low, flat-topped cylindrical hats, held back local traffic until the column passed by. Most of the traffic was Big Uglies on foot or on the two-wheeled contraptions that used their own body energy for propulsion. Others sat atop animal-drawn wagons that seemed to Ussmak something straight out of an archaeology video.

One of the animals let a pile of droppings fall to the street. None of the Big Uglies rushed to clean it up; none of them seemed to notice it was there. Hessef spoke to Ussmak from the landcruiser’s intercom: “Filthy creatures, aren’t they? They deserve to be conquered, and we’re going to do it.” An unnatural confidence filled, his voice.

But for the landcruisers, only a couple of motorized vehicles moved in Besancon. Both of them had big metal cylinders rising from the rear like tumors. “What are those things?” Ussmak asked. “Their engines?”

“No,” Tvenkel answered. The gunner went on, “They’re built to burn petroleum by-products, like Tosevite landcruisers. But they can’t get those by-products any more. The gadgets you see extract burnable gas from wood. They’re ugly makeshifts like most of what the Big Uglies do, but they work after a fashion.”

“Oh.” Up in the fortress that overlooked Besancon, Ussmak had grown used to smells he’d never smelled before. Now that he saw what produced some of those smells, he wondered what they were doing to his lungs.

The operations order said the landcruisers were to proceed northeast from Besancon. Through the town, however, they rumbled northwest. Ussmak wondered if that was right, but didn’t say anything about it. All he was doing was following the male in front of him. You couldn’t possibly get in trouble if you did that.

The male in front of him-and all the males in the column, right up to the lead driver, who had to make his own decisions-proved to know what they were doing. They rattled across a bridge (to the relief of Ussmak, who wasn’t sure it would take his landcruiser’s weight), past the earthworks of yet another fort, and then out onto a road that led in the proper direction.

Ussmak undogged his entry hatch and stuck out his head. Driving unbuttoned gave him the best view, even if the breeze in his face was chilly. Shouldn’t be dangerous here, he thought. Nothing even slightly out of the ordinary had happened since he came to Besancon. He’d become convinced the area was thoroughly pacified.

Up ahead, something went whump. Ussmak recognized that noise from the SSSR: somebody had driven over a land mine. Sure enough, landcruisers started going off the road on either side to get around a disabled vehicle. From the commander’s cupola, Hessef said, “Ah, will you look at that? It’s blown the track right off him.”

The ground to either side of the paved road was soft and soggy: not surprising, Ussmak supposed, since the highway ran parallel to the river that flowed through, Besancon. He didn’t think anything of it until a landcruiser, and then another one, bogged down in the muck.

From the woods to the north of the road came another sound with which Ussmak had become intimately familiar in the SSSR: a sharp, fast, harsh tac-tac-tac. He slammed the hatch with a clang. “They’re shooting at us!” he screamed. “That’s an egg-addled machine gun, that’s what that is!” Bullets ricocheting from the landcruiser’s composite armor underscored his words.

In the turret, Hessef shouted in high excitement. “I see muzzle flashes, by the Emperor! There he is, Tvenkel, right over there! Bring the turret around-that’s the way. Give him some with the machine gun, and then a round of high explosive. We’ll teach the Big Uglies to fool with us!”

Ussmak let out a slow hiss of wonder. Hessef’s sloppy commands weren’t anything like the ones that had been drilled into the landcruiser crews in endless days of simulator training and exercises back on Home. Ussmak realized he was listening to the ginger talking again. An adjutant monitoring Hessef would have swelled up as if he had the gray staggers.

However unorthodox the orders, though, they accomplished their purpose. Hydraulics whirred as the turret smoothly traversed. The coaxial machine gun opened up. Heard from inside the landcruiser, it wasn’t loud at all. “Fool with us, will they?” Tvenkel yelled. “I’ll teach them this world belongs to the Race!” He fired a long, long burst. Not being turned toward the Big Uglies with the machine gun, Ussmak at first had trouble judging how effective Tvenkel’s shooting was. But then more bullets pattered off the landcruisers like pebbles thrown at a metal roof. They did no more damage than pebbles would have, but showed the Tosevite gunners were still in business.

“Give ’em the real thing,” Hessef said. Again, thick armor muffled the cannon’s roar, though the landcruiser rocked slightly on its treads as it took up the recoil.

“There, that’s done it,” Tvenkel said with satisfaction. “We put enough rounds on that machine gun so the Big Uglies running it won’t bother their betters again.” As if to underscore his words, bullets stopped hitting the landcruiser.

Ussmak peered through his forward vision slits. Some of the other vehicles in the column were already moving ahead. A moment later, Hessef said, “Forward.”

“It shall be done, superior sir.” Ussmak released the brake, put the landcruiser into low gear. It rumbled forward. He steered very close to the machine that had thrown a track, keeping one of his own on the paved road to make sure he didn’t bog down. As soon as he was past the crippled landcruiser, he sped up to try to recapture some of the time everyone had lost shooting at the Big Uglies and their machine gun.

Hessef said, “Not bad at all. The column commander reports only two wounds, neither serious. And we obliterated those Tosevites.”