Striking the Balance

Ttomalss spoke with what sounded like spiteful satisfaction: “As you see, the hatchling is now used to the company of males of the Race, not to your kind. Such language as it has learned is our language. Its habits are our habits. It looks like a Big Ugly, yes, but its thoughts are those of the Race.”

Liu Han wished she had somehow smuggled a weapon into the tent. She would cheerfully have slain Ttomalss for what he’d done to her daughter. The baby kept twisting in her arms, trying to get away, trying to go back to the slavery with Ttomalss that was all it had ever known. Its cries dinned in her ears.

Nieh Ho-T’ing said, “What has been done can be undone. We shall reeducate the child as a proper human being. This will take time and patience, but it can be done and it shall be done.” He spoke the phrase in Chinese.

“It shall be done.” Liu Han used the little devils’ language, throwing the words in Ttomalss’ face and adding an emphatic cough of her own for good measure.

Her daughter stared up at her, eyes wide with wonder, at hearing her use words it understood. Maybe it would be all right after all, Liu Han thought. When she’d first met Bobby Fiore, the only words they’d had in common had been a handful from the speech of the little scaly devils. They’d managed, and they’d gone on to learn fair amounts of each other’s languages. And babies picked up words at an astonishing rate once they began to talk. Nieh was right-before long, with luck, her daughter would pick up Chinese and would become a proper human being rather than an imitation scaly devil.

For now, she’d use whatever words she could to make the baby accept her. “All good now,” she said in the little devils’ language. “All good.” She grunted out another emphatic cough to show how good having her daughter back was.

Again, the little girl gaped in astonishment. She gulped and sniffed and then made a noise that sounded like an interrogative cough. She might have been saying, “Is itreally?”

Liu Han answered with one more emphatic cough. Suddenly, like the sun coming out from behind rain clouds, her daughter smiled at her. She began to cry, and wondered what the baby would make of that.

“Ready for takeoff,” Teerts reported. A moment later, the air traffic control male gave him permission to depart. His killercraft roared down the runway and flung itself into the sky.

He was glad he’d climbed quickly, for an antiaircraft gun not far west of the Kansas air base threw several shells at him. The Race had been in nominal control of the area for some time, but the Big Uglies kept smuggling in weapons portable on the backs of their males or beasts and made trouble with them. It wasn’t so bad here as he’d heard it was in the SSSR, but it wasn’t a holiday, either.

He radioed the approximate position of the antiaircraft gun back to the air base. “We’ll tend to it,” the traffic control male promised. So they would-eventually. Teerts had seen that before. By the time they got around to sending out planes or helicopters or infantrymales, the gun wouldn’t be there any more. But it would pop up again before long, somewhere not far away.

Nothing he could do about that. He flew west, toward the fighting outside of Denver. Now that he’d carried out several missions against the Tosevite lines outside the city, he understood why his superiors had transferred him from the Florida front to this one. The Big Uglies here had fortflied their positions even more strongly than the Nipponese had outside Harbin in Manchukuo. They had more antiaircraft guns here, too.

He didn’t like thinking about that. He’d been shot down outside Harbin, and still shuddered to remember Nipponese captivity. The Americans were said to treat captives better than the Nipponese did, but Teerts was not inclined to trust the mercies of any Tosevites, not if he could help it.

Before long, he spied the mountains that ridged the spine of this landmass like the dorsal shields of aneruti

back on Home. Rising higher than any of the peaks were the clouds of smoke and dust from the fighting.

He contacted forward air control for guidance to the targets that most urgently needed hitting. “We are having success near the hamlet known to the Tosevites as Kiowa. The assault they launched in that area has failed, and they are ripe for a counterattack.” The male gave Teerts targeting coordinates, adding, “If we break through here, we may be able to roll up their line. Strike them hard, Flight Leader.”

“It shall be done,” Teerts said, and swung his killercraft in the direction ordered.

For Rance Auerbach, the war was over. For a while there, he’d thought he was over. He’d wished he was, with a bullet in the chest and another in the leg. Rachel Hines had tried to drag him back to the American lines after he was hit. He remembered coming to in the middle of that, a memory he wouldn’t have kept if he’d had any choice in the matter.