Page 48 of Upsetting the Balance (Worldwar 3)

“I don’t even like to think about it,” Mutt said. “How can you go to a weapons plant, work all day, know the Lizards are going to use whatever you make to blow up other Americans, and then go home at night and look at yourself in the mirror?”

“Beats me,” the bomb disposal man said. He and his companions stooped beside the bomb and got to work. Their talk reminded Mutt of what you heard in movie operating rooms, except they asked one another for wrenches and pliers and screwdrivers instead of scalpels and forceps and sutures. The real doctors and medics in the aid station he’d just escaped had been a gamier crew; they’d sounded more like ballplayers than anybody’s conventional notion of medical men. On the other hand, if they made a mistake on one of their patients, they wouldn’t blow themselves sky high. That might have a way of concentrating the mind on the job at hand.

One of the men grunted soffly. “Here we go, sir,” he said to the first lieutenant. “The fuse assembly in the nose is fouled up eight ways till Sunday. We could use this one for a football and it still wouldn’t go off.”

The first lieutenant’s sigh was long and heartfelt. “Okay, Donnelly. We’ve seen a fair number of those, too.” He turned back to Mutt and Szymanski. Sweat was pouring down his face. He didn’t seem to notice. “I think maybe the guys who work the bomb factory do a little bit of sabotage when they can get away with it. When the Lizards were using all their own ordnance, they hardly ever had duds.”

“So are they all out of theirs?” Mutt asked.

“Don’t know,” the bomb disposal man answered, with a shrug to dramatize it “If it blows up, who can say who made it?”

“Plenty of them blew up outside.” Captain Szymanski’s voice was harsh. “This probably wouldn’t have been the only Made in the U.S.A. bomb in whatever load that airplane carried. They may be sabotaging some, but they sure as hell aren’t sabotaging all of ’em.”

“Sir, that’s the God’s truth,” the first lieutenant said. He and his men set up what looked like a heavy-duty stretcher next to the bomb. With much careful shifting, they loaded it onto the stretcher and carried it away. Their chief said, “Thanks for calling us on this one, sir. Every time we get one of these guiding mechanisms in one piece, it bumps up the odds we’ll figure out how they do what they do, sooner or later.”

Staggering under the weight of weapon and stretcher, the bomb disposal crew hauled their burden out of the Chicago Coliseum. Mutt watched anxiously till they were gone. Yeah, Donnelly had said the bomb was harmless, but high explosive was touchy stuff. If one of them fell and the bomb went thud on the ground, the bad guys might still win.

Szymanski said, “Sabotage one in ten, say, and you hurt the enemy with that one, yeah, but the other nine are still gonna hurt your friends.”

“Yes, sir,” Mutt agreed, “but even if you’re just sabotaging one in a hundred, you’re making it so you can live with yourself afterwards. That counts, too.”

“I suppose so,” Szymanski said unwillingly.

Mutt didn’t blame him for sounding dubious. Being able to live with yourself counted, sure. But giving the Lizards a good swift kick in the balls counted for more in his book. Having them bomb American positions with American bombs… it stuck in his craw.

But if they were running out of their own, maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.

Crash!The shell smote Ussmak’s landcruiser in the glacis plate. The driver’s teeth clicked together. The shell did not penetrate. The landcruiser kept rolling forward, toward the village that topped the wooded hill.Crash! Another shell struck, with the same result, or rather lack of result.

“Front!” Nejas said, back in the turret.

“Identified,” Skoob answered. The turret hummed as it traversed, bringing the landcruiser’s main armament to bear on the little gun that was hammering away at them. Through his vision slits, Ussmak saw Tosevites dash about in the deepening twilight as they served the gun. The landcruiser cannon spoke; the heavy machine rocked back on its tracks for an instant from the recoil. At the same time, Skoob called, “On the way!”

He hadn’t finished the sentence when the high-explosive round burst alongside the Tosevite gun. The cannon overturned; the Big Uglies of its crew were flung aside like crumpled papers. “Hit!” Ussmak shouted. “Well placed, Skoob!” Even now, he could still sometimes recapture the feeling of easy, inevitable triumph he’d known when the war on Tosev 3 was newly hatched. Most of the time, he needed ginger to do it, but not always.

Skoob said, “The British here, they don’t have such good antilandcruiser guns. When we were down there fighting the Deutsche, now, and they hit you, you knew you’d been hit.”

“Truth,” Ussmak said. Deutsch antilandcruiser guns could wreck you if they caught you from the side or rear. The British didn’t seem to have anything to match them. Even the British hand-launched antilandcruiser weapons weren’t a match for the rockets the Deutsch infantry used. Unfortunately, that didn’t make the campaign on this Emperor-forsaken island any easier. Ussmak shivered, though the inside of the landcruiser was heated to a temperature he found comfortable. “The British may not have good antilandcruiser guns, but they have other things.”

“Truth,” Nejas and Skoob said in identical unhappy tones. Nejas went on, “That accursed gas-”

He didn’t say any more, or need to. The landcruiser crew was relatively lucky. Their machine shielded them from the risk of actually being splashed with the stuff, which, if it didn’t kill you, would make you wish it had. They’d stuck makeshift filters over all the land-cruiser’s air inlets, too, to minimize the danger of getting it into their lungs. But the landcruiser wasn’t sealed, and minimizing the danger didn’t make it go away.

In a pensive voice, Skoob said, “You couldn’t pay me enough to make me want to be an infantrymale in Britain.”

Now Ussmak and Nejas chorused, “Truth.” Gas casualties among the infantry had been appalling. They moved from place to place in their combat vehicles-a couple of those were advancing up the hill toward the village with Ussmak’s landcruiser-but when they got to where they were going, they had to get out and fight. Getting out was dangerous at any time. Getting out with the gas in the air and clinging to the ground was worse than dangerous.

Machine-gun fire pattered off the landcruiser. At Nejas’ orders, Skoob pumped high-explosive shells into the buildings that sheltered the gunners. The buildings, made largely of timber, began to burn.

“We’ll seize that village,” Nejas declared. “The native name is”-he paused to check his map-“Wargrave, or something like that. The height will give us a position from which we can look down on and shell the river beyond. Tomorrow we advance on the… the”-he checked again-“the Thames.”

“Superior sir, should we consider a night advance?” Skoob asked. “Our vision equipment gives us a great advantage in night fighting.”

“Orders are to stop at Wargrave,” Nejas answered. “Too many casualties have been suffered and machines lost charging through territory still heavily infested with Big Uglies. The gas only makes that worse.”

The shelling had not taken out all the British gunners. Skoob poured more rounds into Wargrave. The mechanized combat vehicles also opened up on the village with their smaller guns. Smoke rose high into the evening sky. Down on the ground, though, muzzle flashes said the British were still resisting. Ussmak sighed. “Looks as if we’ll have to do it the hard way,” he said, wishing for a taste of ginger. The resigned comment might have applied to the Race’s whole campaign on Tosev 3.

“Landcruiser halt,” Nejas said.

“Halting, superior sir.” Ussmak stamped down on the brake pedal. Nejas, he thought approvingly, knew what he was doing. He’d stopped the landcruiser outside the built-up area of Wargrave, but close enough so it could still effectively use not only its cannon but also its machine gun. Firepower counted. Being literally in the middle of action didn’t.

Ussmak had had a couple of commanders who would have charged right i

nto the middle of Wargrave, guns blazing. One of them had got his bravado from a vial of ginger; the other was just an idiot. Both males would have wondered where the satchel charge or bottle full of blazing hydrocarbons or spring-fired hollow-charge bomb had come from… for as long as it left them alive to wonder. Nejas hung back and didn’t have the worry.

The mechanized combat vehicles, unfortunately, did not enjoy such luxury. If they disembarked their infantrymales too far from the fighting, they might as well have stayed back at the base-enemy fire would chew those poor males to pieces. They pulled up right at the edge of the village. The infantrymales skittered out, automatic rifles at the ready. Ussmak wouldn’t have wanted their job for all the ginger on Tosev 3.

One of those males went down. He wasn’t dead; he kept firing. But he didn’t advance with his fellows any more. Then a British male in the wreckage of Wargrave launched one of their antilandcruiser bombs at a combat vehicle. The thing was all but ludicrous against the landcruisers. It couldn’t defeat their frontal armor, and usually wouldn’t penetrate from side or rear, either.

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