“What difference does it make?” Moishe said. “Life hasn’t cared what I want ever since the war started.” After a moment’s thought, the Greek solemnly nodded.
Like all the other landcruiser drivers at the Siberian base, Ussmak had installed grids of electrically heated wire over his vision slits. They melted the frozen water that accumulated on the slits and let him see what he was doing. Nejas had mounted similar grids over the panoramic periscopes in the cupola. The local mechanics had slapped white paint on the landcruiser, too, to make it less visible as it ranged across the icy landscape.
Ussmak let his mouth fall slightly open in a bitter laugh. Making the landcruiser less visible was a long way from making it invisible. The Big Uglies might not realize it was there quite so soon as they would have otherwise, but they’d get the idea too quickly to suit him any which way.
“Steer a couple of hundredths closer to due south, driver,” Nejas said.
“It shall be done.” Ussmak adjusted his course. Along with two others, his landcruiser was rumbling down to smash a Soviet convoy trying to cross from one end of the break in their railroad to the other. The Russkis had probably hoped to get away with it while camouflaged by the usual Siberian blizzards, but a spell of good weather had betrayed them. Now they would pay.
Clear weather,Ussmak corrected himself.Not goodweather. From what the males unlucky enough to be longtimers at the base said, good weather in Siberia was measured in moments each long Tosevite year.
“Let’s slaughter them and get back to the barracks,” Ussmak said. “The faster we do that, the happier I’ll be.” He was warm enough inside the landcruiser, but the machine was buttoned up at the moment, too. If the action got heavy, Nejas, good landcruiser commander that he was, would open up the cupola and look around-and all that lovely heat would get sucked right out All the crewmales had on their cold-weather gear in case of that dreadful eventuality.
Wham!Ussmak felt as if he’d been kicked in the side of the head. The round from the Soviet landcruiser hadn’t penetrated the side armor of his own machine, but it did make the inside of the land-cruiser ring like a bell.
“Turn toward it!” Nejas shouted, flipping the cupola lid. Ussmak was already steering his landcruiser to the left-you wanted to meet enemy fire head on, to present your thickest armor to the gun. He knew they’d been lucky. Soviet landcruiser cannon could pierce some spots in the side armor.
He peered through his defrosted vision slits. It was already getting cold inside the landcruiser. Where among the dark, snow-draped trees and drifts of frozen water was the enemy lurking? He couldn’t spot the Big Uglies, not till they fired again. This time the round hit one of the other landcruisers, but did no damage Ussmak saw.
“Front!” Nejas sang out.
“Identified,” Skoob answered.
But instead of smoothly going on with the target-identifying routine, Nejas made a strange, wet noise. “Superior sir!” Skoob cried, and then, in anguish, “Sniper! A sniper killed the commander!”
“No,” Ussmak whispered. Votal, his first landcruiser commander, had died that way. A good commander kept standing up in the cupola, which let him see much more than he could through periscopes and made his landcruiser a far more effective fighting machine-but which also left him vulnerable to small-arms fire he could have ignored if he’d stayed snug inside the turret.
As if the snow and ice themselves had come to malignant life, a figure all clad in white stood up not far from the landcruiser and ran toward it “Bandit!” Ussmak shouted to Skoob, and snatched for his personal weapon.
Skoob fired, but by then the camouflaged Big Ugly was too close to the landcruiser for its turret-mounted machine gun to bear on him. He tossed a grenade up and through the open cupola. It exploded inside the turret Ussmak thought he was dead. Fragments of the grenade ricocheted off the inside of the fighting compartment. One scraped his side; another tore a long, shallow cut across his right forearm. Only as he felt those small wounds did he realize the grenade somehow hadn’t touched off the ammunition inside the turret. If it had, he never would have had the chance to worry about cuts and scrapes.
He shoved the muzzle of his personal weapon out through a firing port and sprayed the Big Ugly with bullets before he could chuck another grenade into the landcruiser. Skoob was screaming: terrible cries that grated on Ussmak’s hearing diaphragms. He couldn’t help the gunner, not yet. First he had to get away from the fighting.
With one male in the turret dead and the other disabled, the land-cruiser was no longer a fighting machine. Ussmak could operate the gun or he could drive the vehicle. He couldn’t do both at once. He put it into reverse, moving away from the Soviet landcruisers in the forest.
The audio button taped to a hearing diaphragm yelled at him: “What are you doing?” The cry came from the male who commanded one of the other landcruisers. “Have your brains addled?”
“No, superior sir,” Ussmak said, though he wished for ginger to make the answer yes. In three or four short sentences, he explained what had happened to his landcruiser and its crew.
“Oh,” the other commander said when he was through. “Yes, you have permission to withdraw. Good luck. Return to base; get your gunner to treatment as soon as possible.”
“It shall be done,” Ussmak said, above Skoob’s wails and hisses. He would have withdrawn with or without orders. Had the other commander tried ordering him to stay, he might have gone up into the turret and put a round through his landcruiser. Keeping a crewmale alive counted for more than killing Big Uglies. You could do that any time. If your crewmale died, you’d never get him back.
When he’d withdrawn far enough from the fighting (or so he hoped with all his spirit), he stopped the landcruiser and scrambled back to do what he could for Skoob. By then, the gunner had fallen silent. His blood and Nejas’ had puddled on the floor of the fighting compartment. With the cupola still open-no one had been left to close it-the puddles were starting to freeze.
As soon as he saw the wounds Skoob bore, Ussmak despaired of saving him. He bandaged the gunner all the same, and dragged him down beside the driver’s seat. Then he scrambled past Nejas’ corpse and slammed the lid of the cupola. That gave the landcruiser’s heater some chance against the stunning Siberian winter. Skoob would need every bit of help he could get.
Ussmak radioed back to the base to alert them that he was coming. The male who took the call sounded abstracted, as if he had other things on his mind, things he reckoned more important Ussmak switched off the radio and called him every vile name he could think of.
He took a large taste of ginger. He wasn’t in combat now, and decided he could use the quickened reflexes the herb gave him without endangering himself or the landcruiser. He tried to get Skoob to taste ginger, but the gunner was too far gone to extend his tongue. When Ussmak opened Skoob’s jaws to pour in the stimulant powder, he realized the gunner wasn’t breathing any more. Ussmak laid a hearing diaphragm over the gunner’s chest cavity. He heard nothing. Some time in the last little while, Skoob had quietly died.
The ginger kept Ussmak from feeling the grief that would otherwise have crushed him. What filled him instead was rage-rage at the Big Uglies, rage at the cold, rage at the base commandant for sending males out to fight in these impossible conditions, rage at the Race for establishing a base in Siberia and for coming to Tosev 3 in the first place. As the base drew near, he tasted again. His rage got hotter.
He halted the landcruiser close by the anticold airlock. The crew of mechanics started to protest “What if everybody wanted to park his machine there?” one of them said.