“Spirits of Emperors past go with you, Nivvek,” Teerts said, gnashing his teeth in anguish. Urgently, he added, “Try to stay away from the Big Uglies on the ground. As long as you can keep clear of them, your radio beacon gives you some chance of being rescued.” How good a chance, here in the middle of Deutschland, he tried not to think about. His own memories of captivity were too sharp and dreadful.
Nivvek did not answer. Sserep said, “He has ejected, superior sir; I saw the capsule blast free of his killercraft and the parachute deploy.” He paused, then went on, “I don’t have the fuel to loiter till rescue aircraft come.”
After a quick glance at his own gauges, Teerts said, “Neither have I,” hating every word. He checked his radar. Only one of the Deutsch killercraft was still in the air, streaking away at low altitude. Sserep and Nivvek hadn’t been idle-nor had he. He turned and expended one of his missiles. It streaked after the strange little tailless aircraft and blew it out of the sky.
“That’s the last of those,” Sserep said. “The Emperor grant that we don’t see their like again soon.”
“Truth,” Teerts said feelingly. “The Big Uglies keep coming up with new things.” He said that as if he’d been accusing them of devouring their own hatchlings. Against what they’d had when the Race landed on Tosev 3, combat had been a walkover. Only males who were unlucky-as Teerts had been-got shot down. Now, at least above the western end of the main continental mass, you had to earn your living every moment in the air.
“We won’t even be able to cannibalize spares from Nivvek’s aircraft,” Sserep said, his voice sad.
Somewhere down there in a Deutsch factory, Big Ugly technicians were welding and riveting the airframes for more of their nasty little killercraft. Somewhere down there, Big Ugly pilots were learning to fly them. The Race made do with what it had brought along. Day by day, less and less of that remained. What would happen when it was all gone? One more thing to think about.
Teerts used satellite relay to call both his base in southern France and the nearest air base the Race held east of Deutschland, in the territory called Poland. Nivvek’s rescue alarm should have been received at both of them, but Teerts was taking no chances. He got the feeling the base in Poland had more things to worry about than Nivvek; the male to whom he spoke spent half his time babbling about a Deutsch rocket attack.
Teerts wondered why antimissile missiles didn’t protect the base. The most obvious-and the most depressing-answer was that no missiles were left. If that was so… how soon would he be flying without any antiaircraft missiles? What would happen when his radar broke down and no spare parts were left?
“We’ll be even with the Big Uglies,” he said, and shuddered at the thought of it.
Liu Han stared at the row of characters on a sheet of paper in front of her. Her face was a mask of concentration; the tip of her tongue slipped out between her lips without her noticing. She gripped a pencil as if it were a dagger, then remembered she wasn’t supposed to hold it that way and shifted it back between her index and middle fingers.
Slowly, painstakingly, she copied the characters written on the sheet of paper. She knew what they said: Scaly devils, give back the baby you stole from Liu Han at your camp near Shanghai. She wanted to make sure the little devils could read what she wrote.
When she’d finished the sentence, she took a pair of shears and clipped off the strip of paper on which she’d written. Then she picked up the pencil and wrote the sentence again. She had a great bundle of strips, all saying the same thing. She was also getting a new callus, just behind the nail on her right middle finger. A lifetime of farming, cooking, and sewing had left her skin still soft and smooth there. Now that she was doing something less physically demanding than any of those, it marked her. She shook her head. Nothing was as simple as it first seemed.
She started writing the sentence yet again. Now she knew the sound and meaning of each character in it. She could write her own name, which brought her its own kind of excitement. And, when she was out on the streets andhutungs of Peking, she sometimes recognized characters she’d written over and over, and could occasionally even use them to figure out the meanings of other characters close by them. Little by little, she was learning to read.
Someone knocked on the door to the cramped little chamber she used at the rooming house. She picked up her one set of spare clothes and used them to hide what she was doing before she went to open the door. The rooming house was a hotbed of revolutionary sentiment, but not everyone was to be trusted. Even people who did support the revolution might not need to know what she was doing. Living in a village and especially in a camp had taught her the importance of keeping secrets.
But waiting outside in the hall stood Nieh Ho-T’ing. She didn’t know whether he knew the secrets of everyone in the rooming house, but he did know all of hers-all, at least, that had anything to do with the struggle against the little scaly devils. She stood aside. “Come in, superior sir,” she said, the last two words in the scaly devils’ language. No harm in reminding him of the many ways she could be useful to the people’s cause.
Nieh knew next to nothing of the little devils’ tongue, but he did recognize that phrase. It made him smile. “Thank you,” he said, walking past her into the little room. His own was no finer; anyone who could believe he had become a revolutionary for personal gain was a fool. He nodded approvingly when he noticed trousers and tunic covering up her writing. “You do well to keep that hidden from prying eyes.”
“I do not want to let people know what I am doing,” she answered. As she shut the door behind him, she laughed a little before going on. “I think I would leave it open if you were Hsia Shou-Tao.”
“Oh? Why is that?” Nieh Ho-T’ing asked, a little more sharply than her comment deserved.
“You know why perfectly well, or you should,” Liu Han said, irritated at his obtuseness.Men! she thought. “All he wants to do is see my body”-a euphemism for doing other things with it than merely seeing it.
Nieh said, “That is not all Hsia Shou-Tao wants. He is a committed people’s revolutionary, and has risked much to free the workers and peasants from the oppression first of the upper classes and then of the scaly devils.” He coughed. “He is also fond of women, perhaps too fond. I have spoken to him about this.”
“Have you?” Liu Han said, pleased. That was more action than she’d expected. “Men usually look the other way when their comrades take advantage of women.”
“Er-yes.” Nieh paced around the chamber, which did not have a lot of room for pacing. Liu Han took her spare clothes off the table. Nieh not only knew what she was doing, he had started her on the project He came over and examined what she’d done. “You form your characters more fluidly than you did when you began,” he said. “You may not have the smooth strokes of a calligrapher, but anyone who read this would think you had been writing for years.”
“I have worked hard,” Liu Han said, a truth that applied to her entire life.
“Your labor is rewarded,” he told her.
She didn’t think he had come to her room for no other reason than to compliment her on her handwriting. Usually, though, when he had something to say, he came out and said it. He would have called anything else bourgeois shilly-shallying… most of the time. What, then, was he keeping to himself?
Liu Han started to laugh. The sound made Nieh jump. She laughed harder. “What do you find funny?” he asked, his voice brittle.
“You,” she said, for a moment seeing only the man and not the officer of the People’s Liberation Army. “When I complained about Hsia Shou-Tao, that left you in a complicated place, didn’t it?”