“If I told lies about things like that, you-or somebody-would throw my fanny out of here and bring in a man who delivered on his promises,” Groves answered. He cocked his head to one side. Off in the distance, artillery still rumbled. Denver did not look like falling, though, not now. “And you, sir, you’ve done a hell of a job defending this place.”
“I’ve had good help,” Bradley said. They both nodded, pleased with each other. Bradley went on, “Doesn’t look like we’ll have to use that second bomb anywhere near here. We can try moving it someplace else where they need it worse.”
“Yes, sir. One way or another, we’ll manage that,” Groves said. The rail lines going in and out of Denver had taken a hell of a licking, but there were ways. Break the thing down into pieces and it could go out on horseback-provided all the riders got through to the place where you needed all the pieces.
“I figure we will,” Bradley agreed. He started to reach into his breast pocket, but arrested the motion halfway through. “All this time and I still can’t get used to going without a smoke.” He let out a long, weary exhalation. “That should be the least of my worries-odds are I’ll live longer because of it.”
“Certainly seem longer, anyhow,” Groves said. Bradley chuckled, but sobered in a hurry. Groves didn’t blame him. He too had bigger worries than tobacco. He voiced the biggest one: “Sir, how long can we and the Lizards keep going tit for tat? After a while, there won’t be a lot of places left. If we keep on trading them the way we have been.”
“I know,” Bradley said, his long face somber. “Dammit, General, I’m just a soldier, same as you. I don’t make policy, I just carry it out, best way I know how. Making it is President Hull’s job. I’ll tell you what I told him, though. If you want to hear it.”
“Hell, yes, I want to hear it,” Groves answered. “If I understand what I’m supposed to be doing, figuring out how to do it gets easier.”
“Not everybody thinks that way,” Bradley said. “A lot of people want to concentrate on their tree and forget about the forest. But for whatever you think it’s worth, my view is that the only fit use for the bombs we have is to make the Lizards sit down at the table and talk seriously about ending this war. Any peace that lets us preserve our bare independence is worth making, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Our bare independence?” Groves tasted the words. “Not even all our territory? That’s a hard peace to ask for, sir.”
“Right now, I think it’s the best we can hope to get. Considering the Lizards’ original war aims, even getting that much won’t be easy,” Bradley said. “That’s why I’m so pleased with your efforts here. Without your bombs, we’d get licked.”
“Even with them, we’re getting licked,” Groves said. “But we aren’t getting licked fast, and we are making the Lizards pay like the dickens for everything they get.”
“That’s the idea,” Bradley agreed. “They came here with resources they couldn’t readily renew. How many of them have they expended? How many do they have left? How many more can they afford to lose?”
“Those are the questions, sir,” Groves said.“The questions.”
“Oh, no. There’s one other that’s even more important,” Bradley said. Groves raised an interrogative eyebrow. Bradley explained: “Whetherwe have anything left by the timethey start scraping the bottom of the barrel.”
Groves grunted. “Yes, sir,” he said.
Nuclear fire blossomed above a Tosevite city. Seen from a reconnaissance satellite, the view was beautiful. From up at the topmost edges of the atmosphere, you didn’t get the details of what a bomb did to a city. Riding in a specially protected vehicle, Atvar had been through the ruins of El Iskandariya. He’d seen firsthand what the Big Uglies’ bomb had done there. It wasn’t beautiful, not even slightly.
Kirel had not made that tour, though of course he had viewed videos from that strike and others, by both the Race and the Tosevites. He said, “And so we retaliate with this Copenhagen place. Where does it end, Exalted Fleetlord?”
“Shiplord, I do not know where it ends or even if it ends,” Atvar answered. “The psychologists recently brought me a translated volume of Tosevite legends in the hope they would help me-would help the Race as a whole-better understand the foe. The one that sticks in my mind tells of a Tosevite male fighting an imaginary monster with many heads. Every time he cut one off, two more grew to take its place. That is the predicament in which we presently find ourselves.”
“I see what you are saying, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “Hitler, the Deutsch not-emperor, has been screaming over every radio frequency he can command about the vengeance he will wreak on us for what he calls the wanton destruction of a Nordic city. Our semanticists are still analyzing the precise meaning of the termNordic.”
“I don’t care what it means,” Atvar snapped petulantly. “All I care about is carrying the conquest to a successful conclusion, and I am no longer certain we shall be able to accomplish that.”
Kirel stared at him with both eyes. He understood why. Even when things seemed grimmest, he had refused to waver from faith in the ultimate success of the Race’s mission. He had, he admitted to himself, repeatedly been more optimistic than the situation warranted.
“Do you aim to abandon the effort, then, Exalted Fleetlord?” Kirel asked, his voice soft and cautious. Atvar understood that caution, too. If Kirel didn’t like the answer he got, he was liable to foment an uprising against Atvar, as Straha had done after the first Tosevite nuclear explosion. If Kirel led such an uprising, it was liable to succeed.
And so Atvar also answered cautiously: “Abandon it? By no means. But I begin to believe we may not be able to annex the entire land surface of this world without suffering unacceptable losses, both to our own forces and to that surface. We must think in terms of what the colonization fleet will find when it arrives here and conduct ourselves accordingly.”
“This may involve substantive discussions with the Tosevite empires and not-empires now resisting us,” Kirel said.
Atvar could not read the shiplord’s opinion of that. He was not sure of his own opinion about it, either. Even contemplating it was entering uncharted territory. The plans with which the Race had left Home anticipated the complete conquest of Tosev 3 in a matter of days, not four years-two of this planet’s slow turns around its star-of grueling warfare with the result still very much in the balance. Maybe now the Race would have to strike a new balance, even if it wasn’t one in the orders the Emperor had conferred upon Atvar before he went into cold sleep.
“Shiplord, in the end it may come to that,” he said. “I still hope it does not-our successes in Florida, among other places, give me reason to continue to hope-but in the end it may. And what have you to say to that?”
Kirel let out a soft, wondering hiss. “Only that Tosev 3 has changed us in ways we could never have predicted, and that I do not care for change of any sort, let alone change inflicted upon us under such stressful circumstances.”
“I do not care for change, either,” Atvar answered. “What sensible male would? Our civilization has endured for as long as it has precisely because we minimize the corrosive effect of wanton change. But in your words I hear the very essence of the difference between us and the Big Uglies. When we meet change, we feel it is inflicted on us. The Tosevites reach out and seize it with both hands, as if it were a sexual partner for which they have developed the monomaniacal passion they termlove.” As well as he could, he reproduced the word from the Tosevite language called English: because it was widely spoken and even more widely broadcast, the Race had become more familiar with it than with most of the other tongues the Big Uglies used.
“Would Pssafalu the Conqueror have negotiated with the Rabotevs?” Kirel asked. “Would Hisstan the Conqueror have negotiated with the Hallessi? What would their Emperors have said if word reached them that our earlier conquests had not achieved the goals set for them?”