One of them pointed his rifle right at Bobby Fiore. “Who you?” he demanded in lousy Chinese. He was standing no more than a foot and a half from the weapons Bobby had stashed. Bobby was dreadfully aware he hadn’t stashed them all that well, either. The Lizard repeated. “Who you?”
“Name is, uh, Nieh Ho-T’ing,” Fiore said, stealing a handle from the Red officer. “Just farmer. Like rice?” He pointed to the plants peeping out of the water all around him, hoping the Lizard wouldn’t notice how bad his own Chinese was.
He might not have fooled another human being, with his accent, his nose, his eyes, and the stubble on his cheeks, but the Lizard wasn’t trained to pick up the differences between one flavor of Big Uglies and the next. He just hissed something in his own language, then switched back to Chinese: “You know these bad shooters?”
“No,” Fiore said, half bowed so he looked down into the murky water and didn’t show much of his face. “They eastern devils, I think. Me good Chinese man.”
The Lizard hissed again, then went off to ask questions of somebody else. Bobby Fiore didn’t move until all the males got back into the half-tracks and rolled away.
“Jesus,” he said when they were gone. “I lived through it.” He scrambled up out of the rice paddy and reclaimed the weapons he’d stashed. He’d started to feel naked without a pistol, even if it wasn’t any good against armor-and having a grenade around made you warm and comfortable, too.
He wasn’t the only one scuttling for guns, either. The Japs were all communing with their ancestors, but most of the Chinese Reds had played possum the same way he had. Now they came splashing from the paddies and grabbed their rifles and pistols and submachine guns.
They searched the corpses of the Japanese, too, but added little to what they already had. Nieh Ho-T’ing made a sour face as he walked over to Fiore. “Scaly devils are good soldiers,” he said disappointedly. “They don’t leave guns around for just anybody to pick up. Too bad.”
“Yeah, too bad,” Fiore echoed. Water dripped from his pants and formed little puddles and streams by his feet. Whenever he moved, the wet cotton made shlup-shlup noises right out of an animated cartoon.
Nieh nodded to him. “You did well. Unlike these imperialists”-he pointed to a couple of dead Japs not far away-“you understand that in guerrilla war the fighter is but one fish in a vast school of peasants. When danger too great to oppose confronts him, he disappears into the school. He does not call attention to himself.”
Fiore didn’t understand all of that, but he got the gist. “Look like farmer, they not shoot me,” he said.
“That’s what I was talking about,” Nieh answered impatiently. Bobby Fiore gave an absentminded emphatic cough to show he understood. Nieh had started to go off; his soaked pants went shlup-shlup, too. He spun back around, spraying small drops of water as he did so. “You speak the language of the little scaly devils?” he demanded.
“A bit.” Bobby held his hand close together to show how small a bit it was. “Speak more Chinese.” And if that wouldn’t make my mama fall over in a faint, what would? he thought, and then, She’s gonna have a half-Chinese grandkid eveniIf she doesn’t know it. That oughta do the job.
Nieh Ho-T’ing didn’t care about grandkids. “You speak some, though?” he persisted. “And you understand more than you speak?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Fiore said in English. Feeling himself flush, he did his best to turn it into Chinese.
Nieh nodded-he got the idea. He patted Bobby on the back. “Oh, yes, we will gladly take you to Shanghai. You will be very useful there. We do not have many who can follow what the little devils say.”
“Good,” Bobby answered, smiling to show how happy he was. And he was happy, too-the Reds could just as easily have shot him and left him here by the side of the road to make sure he didn’t make a nuisance of himself later on. But since he made a good tool, they’d keep him around and use him. Just like Lo, Nieh Ho-T’ing hadn’t asked how he felt about any of that. He had the feeling the Reds weren’t good at asking-they just took.
He started to laugh. Nieh gave him a curious look. He waved the Red away: it wasn’t a joke he knew how to translate into Chinese. But of all the things he’d never expected, getting shanghaied to Shanghai was right up at the top of the list.
“Exalted Fleetlord, here is a report that will please you,” the shiplord Kirel said as he summoned a new document onto the screen.
Atvar read intently for a little while, then stopped and stared at Kirel. “Major release of radioactivity in Deutschland” he said. “This is supposed to please me? It means the Big Uglies there are a short step away from a nuclear bomb.”
“But they do not know how to take that next step,” Kirel replied. “If you please, Exalted Fleetlord, examine the analysis.”
Atvar did as his subordinate asked. As he read, his mouth fell open in a great chortle of glee. “Idiots, fools, maniacs! They achieved a self sustaining pile without proper damping?”
“From the radiation that has been-is being-released, they seem to have done just that,” Kirel answered, also gleefully. “And it’s melted down on them, and contaminated the whole area, and, with any luck at all, killed off a whole great slew of their best scientists.”
“If these are their best-” Atvar’s hiss was full of amazement. “They’ve done almost as much damage to themselves as we did to them when we dropped the nuclear bomb on Berlin.”
“No doubt you are right, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “One of the main characteristics of the Tosevites is their tendency to leap headlong into any new technology which comes within their capabilities. Where we would study consequences first, they simply charge ahead. Because of that, no doubt, they went in the flick of an eye turret from spear-flinging savages to-”
“Industrialized savages,” Atvar put in.
“Exactly so,” Kirel agreed. “This time, though, in leaping they fell and smashed their snouts. Not all ventures into new technology come without risks.”
“Something went right,” Atvar said happily. “Ever since we came to Tosev 3, we’ve been nibbled to pieces here: two killercraft lost in one place, five landcruisers in another, deceitful diplomacy from the Big Uglies, the allies we’ve made among them who betrayed us-”
“That male in Poland who embarrassed us by recanting his friendship is back in our claws,” Kirel said.
“So he is. I’d forgotten that,” Atvar said. “We’ll have to determine the most expedient means of punishing him, too: find some way to remind the Tosevites who have joined us that they would do well to remember who gives them their meat. No hurry there. He is not going anyplace save by our leave.”
“No indeed, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “We also need to consider the effect of stepping up our pressure on Deutschland in light of their failure with the atomic pile. We may find them discouraged and demoralized. Computer models suggest as much, at any rate.”
“Let me see.” Atvar punched up detail maps of the northwestern section of Tosev 3’s main continental mass. He hissed as he checked them. “The guerrillas in Italia give us as much trouble as armies elsewhere… and though the local king and his males loudly swear they are loyal to us, they do cooperate with the rebels. Our drives in eastern France have bogged down again-not surprising, when half the local landcruiser crews cared more about tasting ginger than fighting. We’re still reorganizing there. But from the east-something might be done.”
“I have taken the liberty of analyzing the forces we have available as well as those with which the Deutsche could oppose us,” Kirel said. “I believe we are in a position to make significant gains there, and perhaps, if all goes well, to come close to knocking the Deutsche out of the fight against us.”