Daniels thought about it. “Yeah, probably. Not that that was any fun, mind you, but it’s always easier bein’ on the long end of the stick. And this here fightin’ in factories-I didn’t used to think they made anything worse’n trenches, but I’m comin’ round to believe I was wrong.”
An airplane roared by, just above rooftop height. “Ours,” the tommy-gunner said in glad surprise. Daniels shared it; American planes were all too few these days. The aircraft pounded the advancing Lizards for a few seconds, machine guns bellowing. Then came another bellow, an almost solid wall of noise, from the ground. The airplane’s engine stopped screaming; the machine guns cut off at the same time. The plane crashed with a boom that would have broken windows had Aurora had any windows left to break.
“Damn!” the tommy-gunner and Daniels said together. Mutt added, “I hope he came down on top of a whole pile of the bastards.”
“Yeah,” said the soldier with the Thompson gun. “I just wish he could have got away so he’d be able to hit ’em again tomorrow.” Daniels nodded; he sometimes thought no American ever lived to fly more than one mission against the Lizards. Using up pilots as fast as planes was a losing way to do business.
The tommy-gunner squeezed off a burst in the direction of the Lizards. He said, “Corporal, I’ll cover you if you want to slide away from here. You ain’t much good in this fight with just your old Springfield.”
Had he left off the second sentence, Daniels might have taken him up on the offer. But he discovered he had pride left to flick. He could think of himself as old and he’d already thought of his rifle as antiquated, but he wasn’t about to let this punk kid tell him he couldn’t cut it “I’ll stick,” he said shortly.
“However you want it,” the tommy-gunner said, shrugging. Mutt got the idea that only his stripes kept the kid from tacking Pop onto the end of the sentence.
The Lizards skittered forward, firing as they came. The flames that leapt from the burning beam lit them up but also helped screen their movements. Daniels snapped off a shot. A skitter turned into a tumble. He raised a Rebel yell his grandpappy would have been proud of. “No good in a fight, am I?” The soldier beside him looked innocent “Did I say something?”
The kid got up on one knee to fire, then went over backward with almost the grace of a circus acrobat. Something hot and wet splashed Daniels. The flickering firelight showed red-streaked gray on the back of his hand. He violently wiped it against his trouser leg. “Brains,” he said, shuddering. When he glanced over at the tommy-gunner, the top of the youngster’s head was clipped off, as if by a hatchet. A spreading pool of blood reached toward him.
He didn’t have time to be as sick as he would have liked. As far as he could tell, he was the forwardmost American still fighting. He fired at one Lizard-a miss, he thought, but he made the little monster duck-then whirled through a quarter-circle to shoot at another.
He had no idea what, if anything, that second round did. He did know that if he had to keep using a bolt-action rifle against what were in essence machine guns, he was going to get his ass killed-and the rest of him with it. He snatched up the tommy gun. The kid lying dead beside him was carrying another couple of drums of ammo, so he could use it for a while.
It bucked against his shoulder like an ornery horse when he opened up. He sprayed bullets hose-fashion out in front of him. The prolonged muzzle flash nearly blinded him before he dropped back behind cover. Hell of-a way to fight, he thought-lay down a lot of lead and hope the bad guys walk into it.
It was, he realized, a hell of a place to fight, too: gloom-filled ruins lit only by fires and muzzle flashes, echoing with gunshots and screams, the air thick with smoke and the smells of sweat and blood and fear.
He nodded. If this wasn’t hell, what the hell was it?
The hospital ship 13th Emperor Poropss-the Merciful should have been a taste of Home for Ussmak. And so, in a way, it was: it was heated to a decent temperature; the light seemed right, not the slightly too blue glare that lit Tosev’s third world, and, best of all, no Big Uglies were trying to kill him at the moment. Even the food was better than the processed slop he ate in the field. He should have been happy.
Had he felt more like himself, he might have been.
But when the Big Uglies blew the turret off his landcruiser, he’d bailed out of the driver’s escape hatch into a particularly radioactive patch of mud. The detectors had chattered maniacally when males in protective suits got near him. And so here he was, being repaired so he could return to action and let the Tosevites figure out still more ways to turn him into overcooked chopped meat.
Radiation sickness had left him too nauseated to enjoy the good hospital food at first By the time that subsided, his treatment was making him sick. He’d had a whole-blood-system transfusion and a cell transplant to replace his damaged blood-producing glands. The immunity-suppressing drugs and the others that resuppressed triggered oncogenes made him sicker than the radiation had. He’d spent a good many days being a very unhappy male indeed.
Now his body was beginning to feel as if it might actually be part of the Race again. His spirit, however, still struggled against the most insidious hospital ailment of alclass="underline" boredom. He’d done all the reading, played all the computer simulations he could stand. He wanted to go back to the real world again, even if it was Tosev 3 full of large ugly aliens with large ugly cannon and mines and other unpleasant tools.
Yet at the same time he dreaded going back. They’d just make him part of another patched-together landeruiser crew, another piece of a puzzle forced into a place where he did not quite fit. He’d already had two crews killed around him. Could he withstand that a third time and stay sane? Or would he die with this next group? That would solve his problems, but not in a way he cared for.
An orderly shuffled by, pushing a broom. Like a lot of the males who did such lowly work, he had green rings painted on his arms to show he was being punished for a breach of discipline. Ussmak idly wondered what he’d done. These days, idle wondering was about the only sort in which Ussmak indulged.
The orderly paused in his endless round of sweeping, turned one eye toward Ussmak. “I’ve seen males who looked happier, friend,” he remarked.
“So?” Ussmak said. “Last I heard, the fleetlord hadn’t ordered everybody to be happy all the time.”
“You’re a funny one, friend, you are.” The orderly’s mouth fell open. The two males were alone in Ussmak’s chamber. All the same, the orderly swiveled his eyes in all directions before he spoke again: “You want to be happy for a while, friend?”
Ussmak snorted. “How can you make me be happy?” Except by leaving, he added to himself. If this petty deviationist kept bothering him, he’d say it out loud.
The orderly’s eyes swiveled again. His voice fell to a dramatic half-whisper: “Got what you need right here, friend, you bet I do.”
“What?” Ussmak said scornfully. “Cold sleep and a starship ride back Home? And it’s right there in a beltpouch, is it? Tell me another one.” He nodded slightly while opening his own mouth: a sarcastic laugh.
But he did not faze the other male. “What I’ve got, friend, is better than a trip Home, and I’ll give it to you if you want it.”
“Nothing is better than a trip Home,” Ussmak said with conviction. Still, the fast-talking orderly stirred his curiosity. That didn’t take much; in the middle of stultifyingly dull hospital routine, anything different sufficed to stir his curiosity. So he asked, “What do you have in there, anyhow?”
The orderly looked all around again; Ussmak wondered if he expected a corrector to leap out of the wall and bring new charges against him. After that latest survey, he took a small plastic vial out of one of the pouches he wore, brought it over to Ussmak. It was filled with finely ground yellow-brown powder. “Some of this is what you need.”