Читаем Upsetting the Balance полностью

“Forward!” Nejas ordered, and Ussmak took his foot off the brake. A moment later, to his surprise, the commander said, “Landcruiser halt.” Halt Ussmak did, as Nejas went on, “We can’t move forward, not against positions like those, without infantry support to keep the Tosevites from wrecking us as we slow down for their egg-addled obstacles.”

“Where are the infantrymales, superior sir?” Ussmak couldn’t see them, but that didn’t prove anything, not with the narrow field of view his vision slits gave. He wasn’t about to unbutton and look around, either, not with gas shells still coming in. “Have they got back into their mechanized combat vehicles?”

“Some of them have,” Nejas said. “They don’t do us much good in there, though, or themselves, either; the combat vehicles will have to slow down for the wire and trenches. But some of the males”-his voice sputtered in indignation-“are running away.”

Ussmak heard that without fully taking it in at first. A few times, especially during the hideous northern-hemisphere winter, Tosevite assaults had forced the Race to fall back. But he slowly realized this was different. These infantrymales weren’t falling back. They were refusing to go forward. He wondered if the like had ever happened in the history of the Race.

Skoob said, “Shall I turn the machine gun on them, superior sir, to remind them of their duty?” His voice showed the same disbelief Ussmak felt.

Nejas hesitated before he answered. That in itself alarmed Ussmak; a commander was supposed to know what to do in any given situation. At last he said, “No, hold fire. The disciplinarians will deal with them. This is their proper function. Hold in place and await orders.”

“It shall be done.” Skoob still sounded doubtful. Again, Ussmak was taken aback. Nejas and Skoob were a long-established unit; for the gunner to doubt the commander was a bad sign.

Orders were a long time coming. When they came, they were to hold in place until the field guns in Henley-on-Thames and the bigger British cannon farther north could be silenced. Aircraft and artillery rained destruction on the town. Ussmak watched that with great satisfaction. All the same, gas shells and conventional artillery kept falling on Wargrave.

Fresh hydrogen eventually reached the landcruiser, but the ammunition resupply vehicle never came. The males of the Race did not move forward, save for a probe by the infantry that the entrenched Big Uglies easily repulsed.

Ussmak wasn’t very happy about where he was. He would have been even less happy, though, he decided, had he been in the northern pocket. That one wasn’t just stalled. It was shrinking.

Atvar paced back and forth. That helped him to think, to some degree. It didn’t mean he wasn’t always staring at the situation map of Britain; one eye always swiveled toward it, no matter how his body was aligned. That kept the pain constant, as if it were festering in several tooth sockets at once.

He hissed in rage and frustration. “Perhaps you were right, Shiplord,” he said to Kirel. “Perhaps even Straha was right, though his egg should have addled before it hatched. We might have done better to deal with the British by means of a nuclear weapon.”

“Exalted Fleetlord, if that be your pleasure, we can still accomplish it,” Kirel said.

“Using nuclear weapons is never my pieasure,” Atvar answered. “And what point to it?”

“Securing the conquest of Britain?” Kirel said.

“The accursed island is so small, it’s scarcely worth having after a couple of these devices detonate on it,” Atvar answered gloomily. “Besides, our losses there have been so dreadful that I fear even keeping pacification forces on it will be more expensive than it’s worth. And besides-” He stopped, unwilling to go on.

Kirel, a reliable subordinate, did it for him: “And besides, now that the British have introduced the use of these vile poisonous gases, every Tosevite empire still in the field against us has begun employing them in large quantities.”

“Yes.” Atvar made the word a hiss of hate. “They were not using them against one another when we came to this miserable iceball of a world. Our analysis leaves no possible doubt as to that point. And yet all their leading empires and not-empires had enormous quantities of these munitions stored and ready for deployment. Now they know we are vulnerable to them, and so bring them out. It seems most unjust.”

“Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel agreed. “Our historical analysis unit has perhaps uncovered the reason for the anomaly.”

“Seeking rational reasons for anything the Big Uglies do strikes me as an exercise in futility,” Atvar said. “What did the analysis unit deduce?”

“The Big Uglies recently fought another major war, in which poisonous gases played an important part. Apparently, they were so appalled at what the gases did that, when this new war broke out among them, no empire dared to use them first, for fear of retaliation from its foes.”