Striking the Balance

“No, I tell you,” Lidov said again, this time in the language of the Race. He added an emphatic cough for good measure. When neither Ussmak nor Gazzim took the slightest notice of him, he strode forward and knocked the bowl out of Ussmak’s hands. It shattered on the floor; a brownish cloud of ginger fogged the air.

Gazzim hurled himself at the male from the NKVD, rending him with teeth and claws. Lidov let out a bubbling shriek and reeled away, blood spurting from several wounds. He threw up one arm to protect his face. With the other hand, he grabbed for the pistol he wore on his belt.

Ussmak leaped at him, grabbing his right arm with both hands. The Big Ugly was hideously strong, but his soft, scaleless skin left him vulnerable; Ussmak felt his claws sink deep into Tosevite flesh. Gazzim might have been a wild thing. His jaws had a grip on Lidov’s throat, as if he was going to feed on the male from the NKVD. Along with the smell of the spilled ginger, Ussmak’s chemoreceptors filled with the acrid tang of Tosevite blood. The combination brought him close to beasthood, too.

Lidov’s shrieks grew fainter; his hand relaxed on the grip of the pistol. Ussmak was the one who drew it out of its holster. It felt heavy and awkward in his grip.

The door to the interrogation chamber opened. He’d expected that for some time, but the Big Uglies were too primitive to have television cameras monitoring such places. Gazzim screamed and charged at the guard who stood in the doorway. Blood dripped from his claws and his snout. Even armed, Ussmak would not have wanted to stand against him, not drug-crazed and insane as he was at that moment.

“Bozhemoi!”

the Tosevite shouted. But he had extraordinary presence of mind. He brought up his submachine gun and fired a quick burst just before Gazzim got to him. The male of the Race crashed to the ground, twitching. He was surely dead, but his body hadn’t quite realized it yet.

Ussmak tried to shoot at the guard. Though his chance of escape from this prison was essentially nil, he was a soldier with a weapon in his hand. The only problem was, he couldn’t make the weapon fire. It had some kind of safety, and he couldn’t figure out what it was.

As he fumbled, the muzzle of the Big Ugly’s submachine gun swung to cover him. The pistol didn’t even bear on the guard. In disgust, Ussmak threw down the Tosevite weapon, which clattered on the floor. He wondered dully if the guard would kill him out of hand.

Rather to his surprise, the fellow didn’t. The sound of gunfire in the prison had drawn other guards on the run. One of them spoke a little of the language of the Race. “Hands high!” he yelled. Ussmak obeyed. “Move back!” the Tosevite said. Obediently, Ussmak stepped away from Boris Lidov, who lay in a pool of his own blood.It looks the same as poor Gazzim’s,

Ussmak thought.

A couple of guards hurried over to the fallen Soviet male. They spoke back and forth in their own guttural tongue. One of them looked toward Ussmak. Like any Big Ugly, he had to turn his whole flat face toward him. “Dead,” he said in the language of the Race.

“What good would saying I’m sorry do, especially when I’m not?” Ussmak answered. None of the guards seemed to understand that, which was probably just as well. They talked some more among themselves. Ussmak waited for one of them to raise his firearm and start shooting.

That didn’t happen. He remembered what Intelligence had said of the males of the SSSR: that they stuck to their orders almost as carefully as did the Race. From what he’d seen, that seemed accurate. Without orders, no one here was willing to take the responsibility for eliminating him.

Finally, the male who had led him to the interrogation chamber gestured with the muzzle of his weapon. Ussmak understood that gesture; it meantcome along. He came. The guard led him back to his cell, as if after a normal interrogation. The door slammed behind him. The lock clicked.

His mouth fell open in amusement.If I’d known that was all that would happen if I killed Lidov, I’d have done it a long time ago. But he didn’t think it was going to be all… oh, no. And, as the ginger euphoria leaked out of him and after-tasting depression set in, he wondered what the Russkis would do with him-to him-now. He could think of all sorts of unpleasant possibilities, and he was unpleasantly certain they could come up with even more.

Liu Han walked past theFa Hua Ssu, the Temple of Buddha’s Glory, and, just west of it, the wreckage of the Peking tramway station. She sighed, wishing the tramway station were not in ruins. Peking sprawled over a large area; the temple and the station were in the eastern part of the city, a good manyli from her roominghouse.