Striking the Balance

Moishe climbed down from the buggy. He helped his wife and son down, too. Gesturing with the pistol, the hijacker on the street led him through a nearby gate and into a courtyard where a couple of other men with guns waited. One of them set down his rifle and efficiently blindfolded the Russies.

As he tied a cloth over Moishe’s eyes, he spoke in Hebrew-a short sentence that, after a moment, made sense to Moishe. It was, in fact, much the same sort of thing he might have said had he been blindfolder rather than blindfoldee: “Nice job, Menachem.”

“Thanks, but no chatter,” the man who’d been on the street said in Yiddish. He was Menachem, then. He shoved Russie lightly in the back; someone else grabbed his elbow. “Get moving.” Having no choice, Russie got.

Big Uglies pushed munitions carts toward Teerts’ killercraft. Most of them were of the dark brown variety of Tosevite, not the pinkish-tan type. The dark brown ones on this part of the lesser continental mass were more inclined to cooperate with the Race than the lighter ones; from what the flight leader had gathered, the lighter ones had treated them so badly, rule by the Race looked good in comparison.

His mouth fell open in amusement. As far as he was concerned, a Big Ugly was a Big Ugly, and no more needed to be said. The Tosevites themselves, though, evidently saw things differently.

These Tosevites had stripped off the tunics that covered the upper parts of their bodies. The metabolic water they used for bodily cooling glistened on their hides. As far as they were concerned, it was hot.

To Teerts, the temperature was comfortable, though he found the air far too moist to suit him. Still, the humidity in this Florida place was the only thing about its weather he didn’t care for. He’d spent winters in Manchuria and Nippon. Next to them, Florida seemed wonderful.

A couple of armorers began loading the munitions onto Teerts’ klllercraft. He looked at the load. “Only two air-to-air missiles?” he said unhappily.

The senior armorer said, “Be thankful you’ve got two, superior sir.” He was a solid fellow named Ummfac. Though he was nominally subordinate to the killercraft pilots, wise ones treated him and his ilk as equals-and often got better loads because of it. Now he went on, “Pretty soon it’ll be nothing but cannon fire, we and the Big Uglies hammering away at each other from short range.”

“There’s a nasty thought,” Teerts said. He sighed. “You’re probably right, though. That’s the way the war seems to be going these days.” He patted the skin of the killercraft’s fuselage. “The Emperor be praised that we still fly superior aircraft.”

“Truth,” Ummfac said. “There’s the question of spares even with them… “

Teerts climbed up into the cockpit and snuggled down in the armored, padded seat as if he were a hatchling curling up inside the eggshell from which he’d just emerged. He didn’t want to think about problems with spares. Already, the Big Uglies were flying aircraft far more dangerous to his machine than they had been when the Race first came to Tosev 3.

He laughed again, bitterly. The Big Uglies weren’t supposed to have been flying any aircraft. They were supposed to have been pretechnological barbarians. As far as he was concerned, barbarians they were: no one who’d ever been in Nipponese captivity could possibly argue with that. Pretechnological, however, had turned out to be another matter.

He went through his preflight checklist. Everything was as it should have been. He stuck a finger into the space between a loose piece of padding and the inner wall of the cockpit. No one had found his vial of ginger. That was good. The Nipponese had addicted him to the herb while he lay in their hands. After he’d escaped from captivity, he’d discovered how many of his fellow males tasted it of their own accord.

He called the local flight controller, got permission to take off. The twin turbofans in the killercraft roared to life. The vibration and noise went all through him, a good and familiar feeling.

He taxied down the runway, then climbed steeply, acceleration shoving him back hard into his seat. His horizon expanded marvelously, as it did whenever he went airborne. He enjoyed that expansion less than he had from other bases, though, for it soon brought into view the ruins of Miami.

Teerts had been flying down to Florida when that area went up in an appalling cloud. Had he been a little ahead of himself, the fireball might have caught him, or the blast might have wrecked his killercraft or flipped it into a spin from which it never would have recovered.