In the Balance

9

Moscow! The winter before, German troops had seen the spires of the Kremlin from the Russian capital’s suburbs. None came any closer than that, and then they’d been thrown back in bitter fighting. Yet now Heinrich walked freely through the streets the Wehrmacht had been unable to reach.

Beside him, Georg Schultz looked this way and that, as he did every day going to and from the Kremlin. Schultz said, “I still have trouble believing how much of Moscow is still in one piece. We bombed it, the Lizards bombed it-and here it is still.”

“It’s a big city,” Jager answered. “It can take a lot of punishment and not show much. Big cities are hard to destroy, unless…” His voice trailed away. He’d seen pictures of Berlin now, and wished he hadn’t.

He and Schultz both wore ill-fitting civilian suits of cheap fabric and outdated cut. He would have been ashamed to put his on back in Germany. Here, though, it helped him fit in, for which he was just as glad. He would not have been safe in his tankman’s uniform. In the Ukraine, the panzer troops had sometimes been welcomed as liberators. Germans remained enemies in Moscow, even after the coming of the Lizards.

Schultz pointed to a poster on a brick wall. “Can you read what that says, sir?”

Jager’s Russian was better than it had been, but still far from good. Letter by unfamiliar Cyrillic letter, he sounded out the poster’s message. “Smert means ‘death,’ ” he said. “I don’t know what the second word is. Something to do with us.”

“Something nasty,” Schultz agreed. The poster showed a pigtailed little girl lying dead on the floor, a doll beside her. A footprint in blood led the eye to a departing soldier’s marching boot, on the heel of which was a German swastika.

Before he got to Moscow, Jager had been certain down to the very core of him that the Wehrmacht would have beaten the Red Army for good this year had the Lizards not intervened. Now he wondered, though he’d never said so out loud. It wasn’t just that Russia was so much bigger than Germany; he had known that all along. But despite the stubbornness of Soviet resistance, he hadn’t believed the Russian people were as firmly behind Stalin as the Germans were behind Hitler. Now he did, and it was a disturbing thought.

His shoes scuffed on the paving of Red Square. The Germans had planned a victory parade there, timed for the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. It hadn’t happened. Russian sentries still paced back and forth in front of the Kremlin wall in their own stiff version of the goose step.

Jager and Schultz came up to the gateway by which they entered the Kremlin compound. Jager nodded to the guards there, a group of men he saw every third day. None of the Russians nodded back. They never did. Their leader, who wore a sergeant’s three red triangles on his collar patches, held out his hand. “Papers,” he said in Russian.

As usual, he carefully examined the documents the Germans produced, compared photographs to faces. Jager was certain that if he ever forgot his papers, the sergeant would not pass him through even though he recognized him. Breaking routine was not something the Russians did well.

Today, though, he and Schultz had everything in order. The sergeant started to stand aside to pass them through when someone else came trotting across Red Square toward the checkpoint. Jager turned to see who was in such a tearing hurry. As he did, his mouth fell open. “I’ll be Goddamned,” Schultz said, which about summed things up.

Unlike the tankmen, the fellow approaching wore a German uniform-an SS uniform at that-and wore it with panache. His every aggressive stride seemed to warn that anyone who gave him trouble would have a thin time of it. He was tall and broadshouldered and would have been handsome had a scar not seamed his left cheek. Actually, he was handsome anyhow, in a piratical sort of way.

Instead of bristling at him as Jager had expected, the Russian guards grinned and nudged each other. The sergeant said, “Papers?”

The SS man drew himself up to his full impressive height. “Stuff your papers, and stuff you, too!” he said in a deep, booming voice. His German held an Austrian accent. The sentries practically hugged themselves with glee. The sergeant came to an attention stiffer than he might have granted Marshal Zhukov, waved the big bruiser into the Kremlin.

“Why didn’t we ever try that?” Schultz said admiringly.

“I don’t have the balls for it,” Jager admitted.

The SS man spun toward them. For all his size, he was light on his feet “So you are Germans after all,” he said. “I thought you might be, but what with those rag-pickers’ getups, I couldn’t be sure till you opened your mouths. Who the devil are you, anyway?”

“Major Heinrich Jager, Sixteenth Panzer,” Jager answered crisply. “Here is my tank gunner, Sergeant Georg Schultz. And now, Herr Hauptsturmfuhrer, I might ask you the same question.” The SS rank was the equivalent of captain; however much brass this fellow had, Jager was his superior.

The SS man’s brace was almost as rigid-and as full of parody-as the Soviet sergeant’s had been. Clicking his heels, he declared in falsetto, “SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Otto Skorzeny begs leave to report his presence, sir!”

Jager snorted. The scar on Skorzeny’s cheek partly froze the left corner of his mouth and turned his smile into something twisted. Jager asked him, “What are you doing here, especially in that suit? You’re lucky the Ivans haven’t decided to take your nose and ears.”

“Nonsense,” Skorzeny said. If he ever had doubts about anything, he didn’t show them in public. “Russians only know how to be one of two things: masters or slaves, if you convince them you’re the master, what does that leave them?”

“If,” Georg Schultz murmured, too softly for the SS man to hear.

“You still haven’t said why you’re here,” Jager persisted.

“I am acting under orders from-” Skorzeny hesitated; Jager guessed he’d been about to say from Berlin. He resumed: “from my superiors. Can you say the same?” He gave Jager’s Russian suit a fishy stare.

Beside Jager, Schultz stirred angrily. Jager wondered if this arrogant Hauptsturmfuhrer had ever seen action that required him to get those polished boots dirty. But that question answered itself: Skorzeny wore the ribbon for a wound badge between the first and second buttons of his tunic. All right, he had some idea of what was real, then. And his counterquestion made Jager think-what would the authorities have to say about how he was working with the Red Army?

He briefly summarized how he had come to be in Moscow. Maybe Skorzeny had done some fighting, but could he say he’d taken out a Lizard panzer? Not many had, and not many of those who had still lived.

When he was through, the SS man nodded. Now he blustered less. “You might say we’re both in Moscow for the same reason, then, Major, whether with official approval or without. We have a common interest in showing the Ivans how to make themselves more effective foes for the Lizards.”

“Ah,” Jager said. Just as the Soviets no longer treated Germans caught on Russian soil as prisoners of war (or worse), the surviving pieces of the government of the Reich must have decided to do their best to keep the Russians in the fight now and worry about their being Bolshevik Slavic Untermenschen later.

The three Germans walked together toward the Kremlin. The heart of Soviet Russia still wore the camouflage it had donned after the Russo-German war began. Its bulging onion domes, an architecture alien and oriental to Jager’s eyes, had their gilding covered over with battleship gray paint Walls were mottled with patches of black and orange, yellow and brown, rather like the hide of a leprous giraffe, to confuse attackers from the air.

Such tricks had not entirely spared it from damage. Stolid, wide-shouldered women in shawls and drab dresses carried bricks and chunks of wood away from a recent bomb hit. The sick-sweet stink of day before yesterday’s battlefield hung over the place. That smell always made Jager’s heart beat faster in remembered fear.

Skorzeny grunted and put a hand over the right side of his belly. Jager thought the SS man’s reaction similar to his own until he realized Skorzeny’s face held real pain. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“My fucking gall bladder,” the Hauptsturmfuhrer answered. “It had me in the hospital for a while earlier this year. But the doctors say it isn’t going to kill me, and lying around on my backside is a bloody bore, so here I am up and doing again. A good thing, too.”

“You were here on the Eastern Front before, sir?” Georg Schultz asked.

“Yes, with Das Reich,” Skorzeny said.

Schultz nodded and said nothing more. Jager could guess what he was thinking. A lot of people who saw action on the Eastern Front would fall down on their knees and thank God for an illness that got them sent back to Germany and safety. Skorzeny, by the way he talked, would sooner have stayed and fought He didn’t sound as though he were bluffing, either. Jager’s respect for him went up a notch.

In spite of the Lizards’ air raids, the Kremlin still swarmed with life. Occasional holes merely showed Jager the soldiers and bureaucrats bustling about within, in the same way as he could have seen the humming life inside an anthill with its top kicked off.

He was not surprised to find Skorzeny heading for the same doorway as he and Jager used: naturally, the SS man would also be meeting with officers from the Defense Commissariat. The doorway into the Kremlin itself, like the one into the compound around it, was guarded. The lieutenant who headed this detachment put out his hand without a word. Without a word, Jager and Schultz gave him their documents. Without a word, he studied and returned them.

Then he turned to Skorzeny, his hand still outstretched. An impish grin lit the big man’s face. He seized the Russian lieutenant’s hand, vigorously pumped it up and down. The guards stared in disbelief. The lieutenant managed to return a sickly smile. A couple of his men had raised their submachine guns. When he smiled, they lowered them again.

“Talk about balls, one of these days he’s going to get his blown off, playing games like that,” Schultz said out of the side of his mouth.

“Maybe, maybe not,” Jager answered. He’d known a few people who simply bulled their way through life, charging at the world with such headlong aggression that it gave way before them. Skorzeny seemed to be of that stripe. On a larger scale, so did Adolf Hitler… and Stalin.

It was easier to think of the Soviet leader than of Hitler as Jager let the immensity of the Kremlin swallow him and Schultz. Skorzeny followed. Just inside the doorway stood a pair of Russian lieutenant colonels: no Germans would go wandering unescorted through the Red Army’s holy of holies.

One of the Russian officers wore a tankman’s black collar patches. “Good morning, Major Jager, Sergeant Schultz,” he said in excellent German.

“Lieutenant Colonel Kraminov,” Jager said, nodding back politely. Viktor Kraminov had been assigned to Schultz and him since they came to Moscow. They might have traded shots with each other the year before, for Kraminov had been part of Marshal Budenny’s southern Soviet army before being transferred to staff duty in Moscow. He had an old man’s wise eyes set in a face of childlike innocence, and knew more about handling panzers than Jager would have expected from the Russians’ battle performance.

The other lieutenant colonel, a fellow Jager had not seen before, wore green collar patches. Georg Schultz frowned. “What’s green stand for?” he whispered.

Jager needed a minute to think. Russian infantry patches were maroon; tanks, artillery, and engineers black; cavalry dark blue; air force light blue. But what Soviet service wore green as its Waffenfarbe? Jager stiffened. “He’s NKVD,” he whispered back.

Schultz flinched. Jager didn’t blame him. Just as no Russian soldier would want to run across the Gestapo, so the Germans naturally grew nervous at the sight of an officer of the People’s Commissariat for the Interior, if he’d come across the NKVD man a year ago, he would have shot him at once; German orders were to take no secret policemen or political commissars alive, regardless of the laws of war.

After one brief glance, the NKVD lieutenant colonel ignored the two Germans in civilian clothes; he’d been waiting for Otto Skorzeny. “A very good day to you, Herr Hauptsturmfuhrer,” he said. His German was even better than Kraminov’s. He sounded fussily precise, like about half of Jager’s old Gymnasium teachers.

“Hello, Boris, you skinny old prune-faced bastard,” Skorzeny boomed back. Jager waited for the heavens to fall. The NKVD man, who really was a skinny old prune-faced bastard, just gave a tight little nod, from which Jager inferred he’d been working with Skorzeny for a while and had decided he’d better make allowances.

The NKVD man-Boris-turned toward Lieutenant Colonel Kraminov. “Perhaps all five of us will work together today,” he said. “In chatting before you gentlemen arrived, Viktor Danielovich and I discovered that we all may be able to contribute to an operation which will benefit both our nations.”

“It is as Lieutenant Colonel Lidov says,” Kraminov agreed. “Cooperation here will aid both the Soviet Union and the Reich against the Lizards.”

“You mean you want German help for something you don’t think you can do on your own,” Skorzeny said. “Why do you need us for an operation which I presume will be on Soviet soil?” His gaze came to a sudden, sharp focus. “Wait! It’s on territory we took from you last year, isn’t it?”

“That may be,” Lidov said. The noncommittal reply convinced Jager that Skorzeny was right. He made a mental note: the SS man might bluster, but he was anything but stupid. Lieutenant Colonel Kraminov evidently saw dissimulation was useless, too. He sighed, perhaps regretting it “Come, all of you.”

The Germans followed the two Russian officers down the long, high-ceilinged halls of the Kremlin. Other Russian soldiers sometimes paused in their own duties to stare at Skorzeny’s SS uniform, but no one said anything: they seemed to accept that the world had grown stranger these past few months.

The office Jager and Schultz entered was not the one Kraminov used. Like Kraminov’s, though, it was surprisingly light and airy, with a large window that gave a view of thegrounds of the Kremlin compound. Jager had looked for nothing but dank gloom at the heart of Soviet Russia, but a moment’s reflection after finding the opposite told him that was silly. Even Communists needed light by which to work. And the Kremlin was far older than either Communism or electricity; when it was raised, the only light worth having came from the sun. So, large windows.

Lieutenant Colonel Lidov pointed to a samovar. “Tea, tovarishchii?” he asked. Jager frowned; Kraminov didn’t call Schultz and him “comrades,” as if they were Reds themselves. But then, Kraminov was a tankman, a warrior, not NKVD. At home, Jager drank coffee thick with cream. But he hadn’t been at home for a long time. He nodded.

Lidov poured for all of them. At home, Jager didn’t drink tea from a glass, either. He had done that before, though, with captured samovar sets in steppe towns and collective farms overrun by the Wehrmacht. Lidov brewed better tea than he’d had there.

The NKVD man set down his glass. “To business,” he said. Jager leaned forward and looked attentive. Georg Schultz just sat where he was. Skorzeny slouched down in his chair and looked bored. If that disconcerted Lidov, he didn’t let it show.

“To business,” he repeated. “As the Hauptsturmfuhrer has suggested, the proposed action will take place in an area where the, fascist invaders had established themselves prior to the arrival of the alien imperialist aggressors commonly known as Lizards.”

Jager wondered if Lidov talked that way all the time. Skorzeny yawned. “By fascist invaders, I presume you mean us Germans.” He sounded as bored as he looked.

“You and your lackeys and running dogs, yes.” Maybe Lidov did talk that way all the time. However he talked, he didn’t retreat a centimeter, though Skorzeny could have broken him over his knee like a stick. “To resume, then: along with bands of gallant Soviet partisans, German remnant groups remain in the area under discussion. Thus the apparent expedience of a joint Soviet-German operation.”

“Where is the area in question?” Jager asked.

“Ah,” Lidov said. “Attend the map here, if you please.” He stood up, pointed to one of the charts tacked onto the wall. The lettering, of course, was Cyrillic, but Jager recognized the Ukraine anyhow. Red pins showed Soviet positions, blue ones surviving German units, and yellow the Lizards. The map had more yellow measles than Jager liked.

Lidov went on, “We are particularly concerned with this area north and west of Kiev, near the town of Komarin. There, early in the struggle against the Lizards, you Germans succeeded in wrecking with heavy artillery two major ships of the common enemy.”

That made Georg Schultz sit up straighter. So did Jager-it was news to him, too. Skorzeny said, “And so? This is no doubt excellent, but how does it concern us here?”

“In and around the wreckage of one of these ships, the Lizards appear to be making no more than an ordinary effort at salvage. This is emphatically not the case at the other.”

“Tell us about the second one, then,” Jager urged.

“Yes, that is what I was getting to, Major,” the NKVD man said. “We have reports from witnesses that the Lizards are operating as if in an area of poison gas, although no gas seems to be present. Not only do they wear masks, in fact, but also bulky full-body protective suits. You see the significance of this, I trust?”

“Ja,” Jager said absently. Except for helmets and sometimes body armor, Lizards didn’t wear clothes, if they felt they needed to be protected from something, whatever it was had to be pretty fierce. As for gas-he shivered a little as he remembered his own days in the trenches back in the first war. A gas mask was torment, made worth wearing only because it warded against worse.

“It is not gas, you say?” Skorzeny put in.

“No, definitely not,” Lidov answered. “There has been no problem due to wind or anything of that sort. The Lizards appear to be engaged in recovering certain chunks of metal strewn about over a wide area when their ship exploded. These are loaded into lorries which seem to be very heavy for their size, judging by the tracks they leave in dirt.”

“Armor-plated?” Jager asked.

“Possibly,” Lidov said. “Or possibly lead.”

Jager thought about that. Lead was good for plumbing, but for shielding? The only time he’d ever seen anyone use lead for shielding was when the fellow who’d X-rayed him after he was wounded put on a lead waistcoat before he took his pictures. He made a sudden connection-he’d heard inside these very Kremlin walls that the weapon which destroyed Berlin had had some sort of effect (not being a physicist, he didn’t know quite what) related to X rays.

He said, “Is this salvage related to these dreadful bombs the Lizards have?”

Skorzeny’s dark eyes widened. Lidov’s rather narrow ones, already constricted by a Tatar fold at their inner corners, now thinned further. In a voice silky with danger, he said, “Were you one of ours, Major Jager, I doubt you would long survive. You speak your thoughts too openly.”

Georg Schultz surged halfway out of his chair “You watch your mouth, you damned Red!”

Jager set a hand on the gunner’s shoulder, pushed him back into the seat. “Do remember where we are, Sergeant,” he said dryly.

“That is an excellent suggestion, Sergeant Schultz,” the NKVD man agreed. “Your loyalty does you credit, but it is foolish here.” He turned back to Jager. “You, Major, may be too clever for your own good.”

“Not necessarily.” Otto Skorzeny spoke up for the panzer officer. “That we are here, Lieutenant Colonel Lidov, that you have said even so much on this sensitive matter, argues that you need German assistance for whatever you have in mind. You shall not get it unless Major Jager here remains unharmed. You do need us, do you not?” In other circumstances, his smile would have been sweet. Now it mocked.

Lidov glared at him. Lieutenant Colonel Kraminov, who had let the other man do the talking till now, said, “You are right, worse luck, Herr Hauptsturmfuhrer. This area has only Russian partisans, no regular Red Army forces, as you Germans drove these out last fall. While brave enough, the partisans lack the heavy armament required to attack a Lizard lorry convoy. There are, however, also fragmentary Wehrmacht units in the area-”

“In regard to the Lizards, these are hardly more than partisan forces themselves,” Lidov interrupted. “But they do retain more arms than our own glorious and heroic partisans, that is true.” By his expression, the truth tasted bad in his mouth.

“Thus we suggest a joint undertaking,” Kraminov said. “You three will serve as our liaison with whatever German units remain north of Kiev. In the event we succeed in despoiling the convoy, our two governments will share equally in what we capture. Is it agreed?”

“How do we know you won’t keep everything for yourselves?” Schultz asked.

“You fascist aggressors were the ones who brutally violated the nonaggression pact the great Stalin generously granted to Hitler,” Lidov snapped. “We are the ones who tremble at the thought of trusting you.”

“You would’ve jumped us if we hadn’t,” Schultz said angrily. “Comrades,” Lieutenant Colonel Kraminov said-in German, which gave the word a different feel from the harsh Russian Lidov had used. “Please, comrades. If we are to be comrades, we shall need to work together. If we go at each other’s throats, only the Lizards will benefit”

“He’s right, Georg,” Jager said. “If we start arguing, we’ll never get anything done.” He hadn’t forgotten his own dislike and contempt for nearly everything he’d seen in the Soviet Union, but could not deny the Russians fought hard-nor that they were masters of partisan warfare. “For now, let ideology wait.”

“Can you get me a telegraph line to Germany?” Otto Skorzeny asked. “I must have authorization before proceeding with this scheme.”

“Provided the latest Lizard advances have not cut it, yes,” Lidov said. “I can also let you transmit on the frequency arranged with your government You must talk around what you truly wish to say there, however, to keep the Lizards from following if they intercept the signal, as they very likely will.”

“The telegraph first, then,” Skorzeny said. “That failing, the radio. The mission strikes me as worth accomplishing. Other concerns can wait” He studied the NKVD lieutenant colonel as if through the eyepiece of a panzer cannon sight Lidov scowled right back at him. Without words, both men said that, while other concerns could wait, they were not forgotten.

Liu Han sat naked on the shiny mat in her room in the giant airplane that somehow never fell down from the sky. She made herself into the smallest bundle she could, legs drawn up tight, hands clasped on her shins, head pressed down till it touched her knees. With her eyes closed, she could imagine the entire universe around her had disappeared.

Her world view did not include the concept experimental animal, but that was what she had become. The little scaly devils who held her here wanted to discover certain things about the way people functioned, and were using her to help them learn. They cared not at all what she thought of the process.

The door to the chamber slid open. Before she could will herself to stillness, she looked up. Two Lizards marched in, with a man-a foreign devil, not even decently Chinese-between them. The man wore no more clothes than she did. “Another one here,” one of the scaly devils said in his hissing Chinese.

She lowered her head again, refused to answer. Another one, she thought. When would they be satisfied that she could indeed fit the prongs of however many men they brought her? This was-the fifth? The sixth? She couldn’t remember. Maybe, after a while, it ceased to matter. How could her defilement grow any greater?

She tried to recapture the feeling of power, the feeling of being her own person, she’d known for that little while when Yi Min was helpless and afraid. Then her own will had mattered, if only for a short time. Before then, she’d been held in her place by the customs of her village, and her people, afterward by the terrifying might of the Lizards. Just for a moment, though, she’d almost been free.

“You two show what you do, you eat. You not, no food for you,” the devil said. Liu Han knew he meant it. After the first couple of men in this grim series, she’d tried to starve herself to death, but her body refused to obey her. Her belly cried louder than her spirit. Eventually, she did what she had to do to eat.

The other Lizard spoke to the foreign devil in a language that was neither Chinese nor the Lizards’ own speech-Liu Han still tried to pick up words of that whenever she could. Then the scaly devils went out of the chamber. They were probably (no, certainly) taking pictures, but that was not the same as having them in the room. She still drew the line there.

Reluctantly, she looked up at the foreign devil. He was very hairy, and had grown a short thick beard that reached to within a couple of fingers’ breadth of his eyes. His nose seemed nearer a hawk’s beak than what a proper person should grow. His skin was not too different in color from hers.

At least he did not simply ravage her, as one man had the second the door closed behind him. He stood quietly, watching her, letting her look him over. Sighing, she stretched herself out flat on the mat. “Come ahead; let’s get it over with,” she said in Chinese, her weary voice full of infinite bitterness.

He stooped beside her. She tried not to cringe. He said something in his own language. She shook her head. He tried what sounded like a different tongue, but she understood no better. She expected him to get on top of her then, but instead he let out hisses and grunts which, she realized after a moment, were words in the Lizards’ speech: “Name-is.” He ended with the cough that showed the sentence was a question.

Her eyes filled with tears. None of the others had even bothered to ask. “Name is Liu Han,” she answered, sitting up. She had to repeat herself; the accents she and he gave the Lizards’ words were so different that they had trouble following each other. Once she’d given her name, she saw she ought to treat him as a human being, too. “You-name-is?”

He pointed to his furry chest. “Bobby Fiore.” He turned toward the doorway by which the little scaly devils had departed, spoke their name for themselves. “Race-” Then he delivered an extraordinary series of gestures, most of which she’d never seen before but all obviously a long way from compliments. Either he didn’t know his picture was being taken or he didn’t care. Some of his antics were so spirited, almost like those of a traveling actor in a skit, that she found herself smiling for the first time in a long while.

“Race bad,” she said when he was done, and gave the different cough that put extra stress on what she said.

Instead of answering with words, he just repeated the emphatic cough. she’d never heard a little scaly devil do that, but she followed him well enough.

No matter how they despised their captors, though, they remained captive. If they were going to eat, they had to do what the scaly devils wanted. Liu Han still didn’t understand why the Lizards thought it important to prove that men and women didn’t go into heat and could lie with each other any time, but they did. She lay back again. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad this time.

As far as skill went, Yi Min was three times the lover the foreign devil with the unpronounceable second name proved to be. But if he was rather clumsy, he treated her as though it were their wedding night, not as if she was a handy convenience. She hadn’t imagined foreign devils had so much kindness in them; few enough Chinese did. She hadn’t known any kindness since her husband died in the Japanese attack on her village.

To thank him, she did her best to respond to his caresses. she’d been through too much, though; her body would not answer. Still, when he closed his eyes and groaned atop her, she was moved to reach up and stroke his cheek. The beard there was almost as rough as a bristle brush. She wondered if it itched.

He slid out of her, sat back on his knees. she drew up one leg to hide her secret place-foolish, when he’d just been inside her. He pantomimed smoking a cigarette with such nimble gestures that she started to laugh before she could catch herself. He raised a bushy eyebrow, took another drag on the imaginary smoke, then made as if to crush it out on his chest.

He’d so convinced her the nothing between his two fingers was real, she exclaimed in Chinese: “Don’t get burned!” That set her laughing again. She groped for words in the Lizards’ tongue, the only one they had in common: “You-not bad.”

“You, Liu Han”-he said her name so strangely, she needed a moment to recognize it-“you-not bad also.”

She looked away from him. she didn’t know she was crying till the first scalding tears ran down her cheeks. Once she started, she discovered she could not stop. She wailed and keened for all she’d lost and suffered and endured, for her husband and her village, for her very world and her own violation. she’d never imagined she had so many tears inside her.

After a little while, she felt Bobby Fiore’s hand on her shoulder. “Hey,” he said. “Hey.” she didn’t know what it meant in his language. she didn’t know if it meant anything or was just a sound. she did know his voice held sympathy, and that he was the only human being who’d shown her any since her nightmare began. She twisted around and clung to him till she’d cried herself out.

He didn’t do much but let her hold him. He ran a hand through her hair once or twice and quietly said “Hey” a few more times. She hardly noticed, so consumed was she by her own grief.

As her sobs at last slowed to gasps and hiccups, she felt his erection pressed against her belly, hot as the tears she’d shed. She wondered how long he’d had it. It didn’t surprise her; she would have been surprised if a naked man in the arms of a naked woman failed to rise. What surprised her was that he’d been content to ignore it. What could she possibly have done to stop him if he’d decided to take her again?

His restraint made her want to cry again. She realized how desperate she’d grown when simply not being raped became a kindness worth tears.

He asked her something in his own language. She shook her head. He shook his, too, maybe angry at himself for forgetting she couldn’t understand. His eyebrows came together as he looked thoughtfully past her shoulder toward the blank metal wall of the chamber. He tried the scaly devils’ speech: “You, Liu Han, not bad now?”

“Not so bad, Bobby Fiore.” When she tried to say his name, she botched it at least as badly as he had hers.

“Okay,” he said. she did understand that; a city person in one of the films she’d seen had said it. People in the city picked up foreign devils’ slang along with their machines and funny clothes.

He let go of her. She looked down at herself. she’d held him so tight, the smooth skin of her chest had the marks of his hair pressed into it. His erection started to droop now that she no longer lay against him. She reached out and closed her hand around him. The Lizards had taken everything she’d ever had, leaving her with only her body with which to thank him.

That eyebrow of his went up again. So did what she was holding. Somehow, the heat of it against the palm of her hand brought comfort. If it was good this time, if she lost herself in her body, sheer sensation might let her forget for a little while the metal room in which she was trapped and the scaly devils who kept her here to satisfy their own perverse curiosity.

She moaned softly as she lay back on the mat once more. She wanted it to be good, hoped it would be. Bobby Fiore moved beside her. His lips came down on hers; his hand roamed her body. A bit sooner than she would have liked, his fingers found their way between her legs. They didn’t go quite to the right place. After a few seconds of frustration, she reached down and moved them to where they belonged.

He frowned for a moment. She hoped she hadn’t angered him. Who could say what might anger a foreign devil? He didn’t put his hand back where it had been, though. And now it was better, now her eyes closed and her buttocks clenched and her back began to arch. As if from far away, she heard him laugh, deep in his throat.

She was at the edge of the Clouds and Rain when he took his hand away. Her eyes opened. It was her turn to start to frown. But his weight pressed her against the slick surface of the mat. His tongue teased her left nipple as he guided himself into her. Her legs rose, clenched around him. With her inner muscles, she squeezed him as hard as she could. “Ah,” he said, in surprise or delight or both at once. Then she stopped listening to anything but what her body told her.

Afterward, they were both sweaty and breathing hard. The only thing wrong with making love, Liu Han thought as the afterglow faded, was that it didn’t really help. All the troubles pleasure had let her ignore were still here. None had got any better. Ignoring troubles was not meeting them. She knew that, but what else, here, could she do?

She wondered if foreign devils had the wit to be disturbed by such worries. She glanced over at Bobby Fiore. His hairy face had turned serious, his own gaze distant and inward. Surely thoughts much like her own were passing through his head.

But when he noticed her looking at him, he smiled and sat up in one smooth motion. He might have been imperfectly skilled in matters of the mattress, but he had a well-muscled body which he handled well otherwise. He also had a sense of foolishness-this time he pretended to smoke two cigarettes at once, one in each hand.

Liu Han laughed. A few seconds later, she rolled over and gave the foreign devil with the funny name a long, grateful hug. Whatever private fears or worries he’d been brooding about, he’d set them aside to make her feel better. That was something else that hadn’t happened since the scaly devils came (and not often before then; she was, after all, only a woman).

As if thinking of the little devils was enough to make them appear, the door to the hallway outside her chamber slid open. The devils who had brought Bobby Fiore in now returned to take him away again. That was how it went: they forced a man on her, then took him away so she never saw him again. Up till now, that had been only a relief. Now it wasn’t, or not so much. But the devils didn’t care one way or the other.

Or so she thought, until the scaly devil who spoke Chinese after a fashion said, “You do mating two times. Why two times? Never two times before.” Absurdly, he sounded suspicious, as if he’d caught her enjoying herself at what was supposed to be hard work. Well, in a way, he had.

she’d learned honest answers worked best with the little devils. “We did it twice because I liked him much more than I liked any of the others. I just wanted to be rid of them. But he is not a bad man; if he were Chinese, he might be a very good man.”

The other devil was talking with Bobby Fiore. He answered in his own language. It wasn’t Chinese, so Liu Han could make nothing out of it. Because it had no tones, it sounded to her more like animals grunting than speech. She wondered how-and if-foreign devils managed to understand one another. But compared to the hisses and coughs the scaly devils used, Bobby Fiore’s foreign devil language was as lovely as a beautiful song.

The little scaly devil who had been talking with her turned and spoke to the one who’d been talking with Bobby Fiore. They made their snaky noises back and forth. Liu Han tried to follow what they were saying, but couldn’t: they talked too fast. She worried. The last time she’d had a moment of feeling partway safe and secure, the scaly devils had turned her into a whore. What new horror were they plotting now?

The one who spoke Bobby Fiore’s language said something to him. He nodded as he answered. That seemed to mean the same thing to him as it did to her, so he’d probably just said yes. But yes to what?

The Lizard who knew a little Chinese turned both his eyes back to her. “You want come back again this man?”

The question took her by surprise. Again she gave an honest answer. “What I really want is to go back to the camp you took me from. If you will not do that, I wish you would just leave me alone here and not make me give my body for food.”

“This one choice not for you,” the scaly devil said. “This other choice not for you, either.”

“What choices do you give me?” Liu Han asked bleakly. Then she realized this was the first time the little scaly devils had offered her any choices at all. Up till now, they’d simply done with her as they pleased. Maybe she had reason to hope.

“Come back again this man one choice,” the little devil said. “Other choice come in here new man. You pick choice now.”

Liu Han felt like screaming at him. He would not free her, he just let her choose between two kinds of degradation. But any choice was better than none. Bobby Fiore had not hit her; though he’d gone into her, he hadn’t forced her; he’d let her clutch at him when she cried; he’d even made her laugh with his silly imaginary cigarettes. And he hated the little scaly devils, maybe nearly as much as she did.

“I would rather have this man come back again,” she said as fast as she could, not wanting to give the little devil a chance to change his mind.

He turned to the other devil. They talked back and forth once more. The one who spoke Chinese said, “Big Ugly male say he want come again, too. We do that, see what happen, you him. We learn plenty, maybe.”

She couldn’t have cared less what the scaly devils learned, except insofar as she hoped they learned nothing whatever. But she smiled her thanks to Bobby Fiore. If he hadn’t been willing to come back to her, then whatever she wanted probably wouldn’t have mattered. He smiled back. “Liu Han-not bad,” he said, and gave the emphatic cough.

The two scaly devils both made noises like kettles bubbling over. The one who spoke Chinese asked, “Why use our tongue, talk you, him?”

“We don’t know each other’s languages,” Liu Han answered, shrugging. The scaly devils could do all sorts of things she’d never imagined possible, but sometimes they were genuinely stupid.

“Ah,” this one said. “We learn again.” He and his companion led Bobby Fiore out of the chamber. Just before the door slid shut and hid him, he raised yet another pretended cigarette to his lips.

Liu Han stood for a while, staring at the closed door panel. Then she noticed, or rather paid heed to, being messy and dripping. The cubicle had a faucet that released a few seconds’ worth of water when she pushed a button by it. She went over and cleaned herself as best she could. When she was done, she didn’t feel the need to wash again and again and again, as she had several times before. Once was enough. That, to her, meant progress.

Flight Leader Teerts felt like a longball. Back on Home, two males would toss a ball back and forth, starting out at arm’s length from each other. Every time one of them caught it, he’d take a step backward. Good longball players could keep the game going until they were a city block apart. Championship players could go almost twice that far.

The shiplords of the invasion fleet had them all beat. They’d thrown Teerts and his flight of killerplanes back and forth across the whole length of Tosev 3’s main continental mass. He’d begun the campaign by swatting Britainish bombardment aircraft out of the sky. Now he was attacking Nipponese ground positions almost halfway around this cold, wet world.

“There they are.” Gefron’s voice came through the flight leader’s headphones. “I have them on my terrain mapper.”

Teerts checked the display. Yes, those were the Race’s landcruisers and other fighting vehicles up ahead, their IFF transponders all glowing cheerily orange. Ahead of them lay the Nipponese trench lines in front of-what was the name of the town? Harbin, that was it-which the killerplanes were supposed to soften up.

“That is affirmative, Gefron,” Teerts said. “I say again, affirmative. Pilot Rolvar, have you also acquired the target?”

“I have, Flight Leader,” Rolvar answered formally, Then his voice changed: “Now let’s go smash it!”

Teerts would not have wanted to be one of the Big Ugly soldiers down there. The peaceful night was about to turn hideous for them. At the precise programmed instant, rockets leapt away from his killercraft to slice into the gashed earth in which the Nipponese huddled. The flames from their motors reminded him of knives of fire.

Since he was flight leader, he had a display Rolvar and Gefron lacked, one that showed they’d also launched their rocket packs. A moment later, ground explosions confirmed that: there were far more of them than his own munitions load could have accounted for by itself.

“Let’s see how they like that!” Gefron shouted jubilantly. “We should have given it to them a long time ago, by the Emperor.”

Pilots got special training so their eyes did not leave their instruments when they heard the Emperor’s sacred name. Teerts kept on paying attention to his cabin displays. He felt the same excitement Gefron had shown; it was as close to arousal as a male could know in the absence of females.

He also wished his flight had been able to attack the Nipponese sooner. But there were only so many killerplanes, and so many Tosevite positions to smash. This one had had to wait its turn. It would have waited longer still had the shiplords not thrown his flight east against it.

His aircraft roared low over the shattered trench line. Little dots of flame sprang into being on the ground as the surviving Big Uglies fired blindly at him. The Nipponese were not the only Tosevite army to do that. Teerts had listened to the briefings. He supposed shooting back made the Big Ugly soldiers feel less like the helpless victims they really were. Its probability of doing anything more than that was very small.

Teerts didn’t gamble. Gambling was a vice of support for males who had time to kill, which was not one of his problems. He’d been in action from the start. But if he’d sat down with the little plastic dodecahedrons a few times, he would have understood with his gut rather than just with his brain the difference between a small probability and zero probability.

The left engine made a horrible noise, then died. His killercraft lurched in midair. A small town’s worth of warning lights came on all over his instrument panel. At the same time, he keyed his radio: “Flight Leader Teerts, aborting mission and attempting to return to base. I must have sucked a bullet or something right into one turbofan.”

“May the spirits of departed Emperors take you safely home,” Rolvar and Gefron said in the same breath. Rolvar added, “We will finish the attack run on the Tosevites, Flight Leader.”

“I’m sure you will,” Teerts said. Rolvar was a good, reliable male. So was Gefron, in a different, more primitive way. Between the two of them, they’d make the Nipponese wish they’d never been hatched. Teerts swung his killercraft westward, back toward the base from which he’d set out He could fly on one engine, though he wouldn’t be very fast or maneuverable. Get repairs made and he’d be good as new tomorrow-

The right engine made a horrible noise, then died.

All at once, Teerts’ instrument panel was nothing but warning lights. This isn’t fair the flight leader thought. His hard-won altitude began to slip as the aircraft became nothing more than an aerodynamic stone in the sky.

“Ejecting! I say again, ejecting!” he yelled. His thumbclaw hit a button he’d never expected to have to use. Something about the size of the invasion fleet’s bannership booted him in the base of the tail as hard as it could. His eyes stayed open, but he briefly saw only gray mist.

Pain soon brought him back to his senses. One of the three bones in his left wrist had surely broken. At the moment, though, that was the least of his worries. Still strapped into his seat, he floated above the Nipponese lines like the biggest, most tempting target in the whole Empire.

The Big Uglies blazed away at him for all they were worth. He watched in fearful fascination as holes appeared in the ripstop fabric of his parachute. Too many holes, or three or four too close together, and ripstopping wouldn’t matter much. Then a bullet smacked the armored bottom of the seat. He hissed in fright and tried to draw up his legs.

Not fair he thought again. The whole killercraft was armored, not just the bottom of the seat. Bullets that hit were nearly harmless. But turbofan blades, immensely strong though they were, couldn’t chew up lead. If you were colossally unlucky enough to lose both engines that way…

If you were that unlucky, you had to hope the Big Uglies wouldn’t catch you and do the frightful things rumor said they did to prisoners. You had to hope you landed a little ways away from them, so you could unstrap (one-handed, it wouldn’t be easy or fast) and try to evade until the rescue helicopter got there to pick you up.

But if you were that unlucky, who cared what you hoped? Teerts had spilled wind from his canopy, trying to float as far back toward the Race’s lines as he could. That would have made rescuing him a lot easier… if he hadn’t come down right in the middle of a Nipponese trench.

He was sure he was dead. The Big Uglies swarmed around him, shouting at one another and brandishing rifles with knives stuck onto the end of their barrels. He waited for them to shoot him or stick him. A little more pain, he told himself, and everything would be over. His spirit would join those of the Emperors now departed, to serve them in death as he had served the Race in life.

One of the Nipponese outshouted the rest. By the way they cleared a path for him, he must have been an officer. He stood in front of Teerts, hands on hips, staring at him with the small, immobile eyes that characterized the Big Uglies. Instead of a rifle, he carried a sword not too different from the one borne by the Tosevite warrior in the picture the Race’s probe had sent Home.

Teerts wondered why he didn’t draw it and use it. Why else had the others drawn back, but to give their commander the privilege of the kill? But the officer did not strike. Instead, he gestured for Teerts to free himself from the straps that held him in his seat.

The flight leader obeyed, awkwardly because his left hand wouldn’t work. As soon as he’d moved a couple of paces away from the seat, the Nipponese did take his sword from its sheath. He slashed two-handed at the lines that held Teerts’ parachute to the ejection seat. The sword must have had good metal in it, for the tough lines parted almost at once. The parachute canopy blew away.

The officer said something to his males. Several of them raised their rifles and fired repeatedly into the seat. The blasts almost deafened Teerts. They also dismayed him right down to the claws on his toes. Those bullets were certain to smash the homing beacon buried in the padding.

Baring his small, flat teeth, the Nipponese pointed east with his sword. He barked out a phrase that probably meant something like get moving. Teerts got moving. The officer and several of his males followed, to make sure the flight leader didn’t try to run.

Teerts had no intention of running. Since he hadn’t been killed out of hand, he expected to be treated fairly well. The Race held far more Tosevite captives than the other way round, and mistreatment of prisoners, could be avenged ten-thousandfold. Not only that, the Big Uglies, barbarous though they were, fought among themselves so often that they’d developed protocols for dealing with captured enemies. Teerts couldn’t remember offhand whether Nippon adhered to those protocols, but most Tosevite empires did.

Jets screamed overhead, back where the ejection seat had landed. That would be Gefron and Rolvar, trying to keep him from being captured. Too late, unfortunately; not only had he landed among the Big Uglies, but this officer was alert enough to have wrecked the beacon and got him away from it in a hurry.

Still, he didn’t think things would be too bad. The officer first took him to a medical station. A Nipponese doctor with corrective lenses held in front of his eyes by a weird contraption of bent wires bandaged his wrist and poured a stinging disinfectant over the cuts and scrapes he’d got in his ejection and landing. By the time the doctor was done, Teerts felt halfway decent.

Then the Nipponese officer started hustling him away from the front line again. The jets’ wail vanished; the other two pilots in the flight must have expended their munitions and had to head home. Artillery shells whistled overhead every so often. Most came from the west and landed on Tosevite positions. The Big Uglies kept firing back, though. They seemed too stubborn to know when to give up.

Teerts walked toward the dawn that was breaking in the east. As light grew, Nipponese artillery fire also picked up. Lacking night-vision gear, the Tosevites were limited to targets they could actually see. Each salvo of theirs drew quick counterbattery fire from the gunners of the Race.

Back at the rear edge of the Nipponese trench system, a new party of Big Uglies took charge of Teerts. By the way the officer who had captured him acted toward the one who now received him, the latter was far more prominent. They bowed to each other one last time before the junior officer and the males who had accompanied him headed back to their position.

Teerts’ new keeper surprised him by speaking the language of the Race. “You come this way,” he said. His accent was mushy and he barked out his words, but the flight leader followed him well enough.

“Where are you taking me?” Teerts asked, glad for the chance to communicate with something more expressive than gestures.

The Nipponese officer whirled and struck him. He staggered and almost fell; the blow had been cleverly aimed. “Not talk unless I say you can talk!” the Big Ugly shouted. “You prisoner now, not master. You obey!”

Obedience had been drilled into Teerts his whole life long. His captor might be a savage, but he spoke as one who had the right to command. Almost instinctively, the flight leader responded to his tone. “May I speak?” he asked, as humbly as if he were addressing a shiplord.

“Hai,” the Nipponese said, a word Teerts did not understand. As if realizing that, the Tosevite abandoned his own jargon. “Speak, speak.”

“Thank you, exalted male.” With no notion of the officer’s rank, Teerts laid the honorifics on with a trowel. “Without asking where, exalted male, do you have places in which you keep your captives from the Race?”

The Nipponese showed his teeth. Among the Big Uglies, Teerts knew, that was a gesture of amiability, not amusement The officer, however, looked not the least bit amiable. He said, “You prisoner now. No one care what happen to you.”

“Forgive me, exalted male, but I do not understand. You Tosevites”-Teerts carefully did not say Big Uglies-“take prisoners in your own wars and mostly treat them well. Is it just to use us so differently from your own?”

“Not do so,” the Nipponese officer answered. “Be prisoner go against bushido.” The word was in Nipponese. The officer explained it: “Against way of fighting male. Proper fighting male die before become prisoner. Become prisoner, not deserve to live. Become-how you say? — sport for those who catch.”

“That’s-” Teerts caught himself before he blurted out insane. “That’s not the way most other Tosevites act.”

“They fools, idiots. We Nipponese, we-how you say? — people of the emperor. Our way right, proper. Same family rule us two thousand five hundred year.” He drew himself up as if that paltry figure were a matter for pride. Teerts didn’t think it wise to point out that the Emperors’ family had ruled the Race for fifty thousand years, which was twenty-five thousand revolutions of Tosev 3. A small pride, he reasoned, might be more easily hurt by a large truth.

He said, “What will you do with me, then?”

“What we want,” the officer answered. “You ours now.”

“If you mistreat me, the Race will avenge itself on your people,” Teerts warned.

The Nipponese officer made a peculiar barking noise. After a bit, Teerts realized it had to be what the Big Uglies used for laughter. The officer said, “Your Race already hurt Nippon so bad, how you do worse on account of prisoners, eh? You try make me afraid? I show you. I not afraid to do this-”

He kicked Teerts, hard. The flight leader hissed in surprise and pain. When the Big Ugly kicked him again, he whirled round and tried to fight back-even, if he was smaller than a Tosevite, he had teeth and claws. They did him no good. The officer did not even bother reaching for the sword or the small firearm he carried on his belt He’d somehow learned to use his legs and arms as deadly weapons. Teerts couldn’t so much as tear his tunic.

The beating and stomping went on for some time. Finally the Nipponese officer kicked the flight leader’s broken wrist. Teerts’ vision blurred and threatened to go out, just as it had when the ejection seat hurled him away from his killercraft. As if from very far away, he heard someone screaming, “Enough! Enough!” He needed a while before he recognized the voice as his own.

“You talk stupid again?” the Big Ugly asked. He stood balanced on one leg, ready to kick Teerts some more. If the flight leader said no, the Tosevite might stop; if he said yes, he was sure he’d get kicked to death. He got the feeling the officer didn’t much care one way or the other what he answered. In a way, that indifference was even more frightening than the beating itself.

“No, I won’t talk stupidly again, or I’ll try not to, anyway,” Teerts gasped. The tiny qualification held all the defiance left in him.

“You get up, then.”

Teerts didn’t think he could. But if he failed, the Big Ugly would have another excuse to hurt him. He struggled to his feet, did his best to wipe the mud off his scales one-handed.

“What you learn from this?” the Nipponese officer asked.

The flight leader could hear the danger in that question. It wasn’t just rhetoric; he’d better answer it in a way that satisfied the Tosevite. Slowly, he said, “I learned that I am your prisoner, that I am in your power, that you can do whatever you want with me.”

The Big Ugly moved his head up and down. “You keep this in your mind, eh?”

“Yes.” Teerts didn’t think he was likely to forget.

The Nipponese officer gave him a light shove. “You come on, then.”

Moving hurt, but Teerts managed. He didn’t dare fail; maybe the Big Ugly really had taught him a lesson after all Dawn was breaking when they came to a transport center. The Race had worked it over at least once: truck carcasses lay here and there, some flipped over, others burnt out, still others both.

But the center still functioned. Nipponese soldiers, chanting as they worked, unloaded cloth sacks from a few intact motor vehicles and from a great many animal-drawn wagons. The officer shouted to the males there. A couple of them came rushing over. They exchanged bows with the flight leader’s captor, spoke rapidly back and forth.

The officer shoved Teerts again, pointed toward a wagon. “You go on that one.”

Teerts awkwardly climbed into the wagon. The Nipponese officer gestured for him to sit in one corner. He obeyed. The wooden bottom and sides scratched against his sore hide. The officer and a Big Ugly soldier got into the wagon with him. Now the officer took out his small firearm. The soldier kept his rifle aimed at Teerts, too. The flight leader’s mouth wanted to fall open. The Tosevites had to be crazy if they thought he was in any shape to try something.

Crazy they might have been, but they weren’t stupid. The officer spoke again in his own language. The males around the wagon obeyed with an alacrity that would not have shamed members of the Race. They snatched up a heavy, dirty tarpaulin and draped it over’ Teerts and his guards.

“No one see you now,” the officer said, and laughed his noisy, barking laugh once more.

Teerts was afraid he was right. From the air, the wagon would look like any other, hardly worth shooting up and certainly not worth investigating. Oh, in an infrared scan the wagon bed might show up warmer than it would have were it just carrying supplies, but no one was likely to bother scanning it.

Somebody with heavy, booted feet got up onto the front of the wagon, the part the tarpaulin didn’t cover. The wagon shifted under his weight. The newcomer said something, though not to Teerts or the Big Uglies. The only answer he got was a soft snort from one of the two animals tethered to the front end of the wagon.

The animals started to walk. In that instant, Teerts discovered the wagon had no springs. He also discovered the road over which it traveled did not deserve the name. The first two jounces made him bite his tongue. After that, with the iron taste of blood in his mouth, he deliberately clamped his jaws shut and endured the rattling as best he could. He was jolted worse here at a walking pace than he’d ever been inside his killercraft.

After a while, daylight began to seep through the space between the tarpaulin and, the top of the wagon. The two Tosevites did not seem to have so much as twitched since they sat down. Their weapons remained pointed straight at Teerts. He wished he were as dangerous as they thought he was.

“May I speak?” he asked. The Nipponese officer’s head moved up and down. Hoping that meant yes, the flight leader said, “May I please have some water?”

“Hai,” the officer said. He turned to the other male, spoke briefly. The soldier shifted his weight-he could move after all. He carried a water bottle slung on his right hip. He undid it with one hand (the other kept his rifle aimed at Teerts), passed it to his commander. The officer in turn gave it to Teerts, making sure all the while that the flight leader could not grab his small firearm.

Teerts found the water bottle hard to use. The Tosevites could wrap their flexible lips around its opening to keep from spilling it. His own mouthparts were less mobile. He had to hold the bottle above his head, pour the water down into his mouth. Even so, some of it dribbled out the corners of his jaws and made a couple of small puddles on the floor of the wagon.

Refreshed, he dared ask, “May I also have some food?” Saying the word told him how empty his belly was.

“You eat food like us?” The officer paused, tried to make himself clearer: “You eat food from this world?”

“Of course I do,” Teerts answered, surprised the Big Ugly could doubt it “Why would we conquer this world if we could not support ourselves upon it afterwards?”

The officer grunted, then spoke to the other soldier again. This time, the junior male moved slowly, grudgingly. He had to put down his rifle to reach into the pack on his back. From it he took out a cloth wrapped around a couple of flat, whitish grainy cakes. He handed one of them to Teerts, carefully refolded the cloth, and put the other cake back into the pack. Then he picked up the rifle again. By the way he held it, he wouldn’t have been sorry to shoot the flight leader.

Teerts stared down at the cake he held in his good hand. It didn’t look particularly appetizing-why was the male so unhappy to give it up? The flight leader took a while to realize the two cakes might have been the only food the soldier had. They’re barbarians, after all, he reminded himself. They still have things like hunger-and we’ve been hitting their supply lines as hard as we can.

He knew about hunger himself now. He bit into the cake. It tasted bland and starchy-given a better choice, it wasn’t anything he would have eaten. Of itself, though, his tongue flicked out to clean the last couple of crumbs off his claw. He wished he had another cake just like it-or maybe another three.

Maybe, he thought too, late, he shouldn’t have shown just how hungry he was. He didn’t like the way the Nipponese officer stretched out his lips and showed his teeth.