Page 75 of Striking the Balance (Worldwar 4)

“Certainly seem longer, anyhow,” Groves said. Bradley chuckled, but sobered in a hurry. Groves didn’t blame him. He too had bigger worries than tobacco. He voiced the biggest one: “Sir, how long can we and the Lizards keep going tit for tat? After a while, there won’t be a lot of places left. If we keep on trading them the way we have been.”

“I know,” Bradley said, his long face somber. “Dammit, General, I’m just a soldier, same as you. I don’t make policy, I just carry it out, best way I know how. Making it is President Hull’s job. I’ll tell you what I told him, though. If you want to hear it.”

“Hell, yes, I want to hear it,” Groves answered. “If I understand what I’m supposed to be doing, figuring out how to do it gets easier.”

“Not everybody thinks that way,” Bradley said. “A lot of people want to concentrate on their tree and forget about the forest. But for whatever you think it’s worth, my view is that the only fit use for the bombs we have is to make the Lizards sit down at the table and talk seriously about ending this war. Any peace that lets us preserve our bare independence is worth making, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Our bare independence?” Groves tasted the words. “Not even all our territory? That’s a hard peace to ask for, sir.”

“Right now, I think it’s the best we can hope to get. Considering the Lizards’ original war aims, even getting that much won’t be easy,” Bradley said. “That’s why I’m so pleased with your efforts here. Without your bombs, we’d get licked.”

“Even with them, we’re getting licked,” Groves said. “But we aren’t getting licked fast, and we are making the Lizards pay like the dickens for everything they get.”

“That’s the idea,” Bradley agreed. “They came here with resources they couldn’t readily renew. How many of them have they expended? How many do they have left? How many more can they afford to lose?”

“Those are the questions, sir,” Groves said.“The questions.”

“Oh, no. There’s one other that’s even more important,” Bradley said. Groves raised an interrogative eyebrow. Bradley explained: “Whetherwe have anything left by the timethey start scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

Groves grunted. “Yes, sir,” he said.

Nuclear fire blossomed above a Tosevite city. Seen from a reconnaissance satellite, the view was beautiful. From up at the topmost edges of the atmosphere, you didn’t get the details of what a bomb did to a city. Riding in a specially protected vehicle, Atvar had been through the ruins of El Iskandariya. He’d seen firsthand what the Big Uglies’ bomb had done there. It wasn’t beautiful, not even slightly.

Kirel had not made that tour, though of course he had viewed videos from that strike and others, by both the Race and the Tosevites. He said, “And so we retaliate with this Copenhagen place. Where does it end, Exalted Fleetlord?”

“Shiplord, I do not know where it ends or even if it ends,” Atvar answered. “The psychologists recently brought me a translated volume of Tosevite legends in the hope they would help me-would help the Race as a whole-better understand the foe. The one that sticks in my mind tells of a Tosevite male fighting an imaginary monster with many heads. Every time he cut one off, two more grew to take its place. That is the predicament in which we presently find ourselves.”

“I see what you are saying, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “Hitler, the Deutsch not-emperor, has been screaming over every radio frequency he can command about the vengeance he will wreak on us for what he calls the wanton destruction of a Nordic city. Our semanticists are still analyzing the precise meaning of the termNordic.”

“I don’t care what it means,” Atvar snapped petulantly. “All I care about is carrying the conquest to a successful conclusion, and I am no longer certain we shall be able to accomplish that.”

Kirel stared at him with both eyes. He understood why. Even when things seemed grimmest, he had refused to waver from faith in the ultimate success of the Race’s mission. He had, he admitted to himself, repeatedly been more optimistic than the situation warranted.

“Do you aim to abandon the effort, then, Exalted Fleetlord?” Kirel asked, his voice soft and cautious. Atvar understood that caution, too. If Kirel didn’t like the answer he got, he was liable to foment an uprising against Atvar, as Straha had done after the first Tosevite nuclear explosion. If Kirel led such an uprising, it was liable to succeed.

And so Atvar also answered cautiously: “Abandon it? By no means. But I begin to believe we may not be able to annex the entire land surface of this world without suffering unacceptable losses, both to our own forces and to that surface. We must think in terms of what the colonization fleet will find when it arrives here and conduct ourselves accordingly.”

“This may involve substantive discussions with the Tosevite empires and not-empires now resisting us,” Kirel said.

Atvar could not read the shiplord’s opinion of that. He was not sure of his own opinion about it, either. Even contemplating it was entering uncharted territory. The plans with which the Race had left Home anticipated the complete conquest of Tosev 3 in a matter of days, not four years-two of this planet’s slow turns around its star-of grueling warfare with the result still very much in the balance. Maybe now the Race would have to strike a new balance, even if it wasn’t one in the orders the Emperor had conferred upon Atvar before he went into cold sleep.

“Shiplord, in the end it may come to that,” he said. “I still hope it does not-our successes in Florida, among other places, give me reason to continue to hope-but in the end it may. And what have you to say to that?”

Kirel let out a soft, wondering hiss. “Only that Tosev 3 has changed us in ways we could never have predicted, and that I do not care for change of any sort, let alone change inflicted upon us under such stressful circumstances.”

“I do not care for change, either,” Atvar answered. “What sensible male would? Our civilization has endured for as long as it has precisely because we minimize the corrosive effect of wanton change. But in your words I hear the very essence of the difference between us and the Big Uglies. When we meet change, we feel it is inflicted on us. The Tosevites reach out and seize it with both hands, as if it were a sexual partner for which they have developed the monomaniacal passion they termlove.” As well as he could, he reproduced the word from the Tosevite language called English: because it was widely spoken and even more widely broadcast, the Race had become more familiar with it than with most of the other tongues the Big Uglies used.

“Would Pssafalu the Conqueror have negotiated with the Rabotevs?” Kirel asked. “Would Hisstan the Conqueror have negotiated with the Hallessi? What would their Emperors have said if word reached them that our earlier conquests had not achieved the goals set for them?”

What he was really asking was what the Emperor would say when he learned the conquest of Tosev 3

might not be a complete conquest. Atvar said, “Here speed-of-light works with us. Whatever he says, we shall not know about it until near the time when the colonization fleet arrives, or perhaps even a few years after that.”

“Truth,” Kirel said. “Until then, we are autonomous.”

Autonomous,in the language of the Race, carried overtones ofalone orisolated orcut off from civilization. “Truth,” Atvar said sadly. “Well, Shiplord, we shall have to make the best of it, for ourselves and for the Race as a whole, of which we are, and remain, a part.”

“As you say, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel answered. “With so much going on in such strange surroundings at so frenetic a pace, keeping that basic fact in mind is sometimes difficult.”

“Is frequently difficult, you mean,” Atvar said. “Even without the battles, there are so many irritations here. That psychological researcher the Big Uglies in China have kidnapped… They state it is in reprisal for his studies of a newly hatched Tosevite. How can we do research on the Big Uglies if our males go in fear of having vengeance taken on them for every test they make?”

“It is a problem, Exalted Fleetlord, and I fear it will only grow worse,” Kirel said. “Since we received word of this kidnapping, two males have already abandoned ongoing research projects on the surface of Tosev 3. One has taken his subjects up to an orbiting starship, which is likely to skew his results. The other has also gone aboard a starship, but has terminated his project. He states he is seeking a new challenge.” Kirel waggled his eye turrets, a gesture of irony.

“I had not heard that,” Atvar said angrily. “He should be strongly encouraged to return to his work: if necessary, by kicking him out the air lock of that ship.”

Kirel’s mouth fell open in a laugh. “It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord.”

“Exalted Fleetlord!” The image of Pshing, Atvar’s adjutant, suddenly filled one of the communicator screens in the fleetlord’s chamber. It was the screen reserved for emergency reports. Atvar and Kirel looked at each other. As they’d just said, the conquest of Tosev 3 was nothing but a series of emergencies.

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