The ruined gray stone castle before which Ussmak had halted his landcruiser seemed to him immeasurably old. Intellectually, he knew the frowning pile of stone could hardly have stood there for more than a couple of thousand years (half that, if you counted by Tosev 3’s slow revolutions around its primary)-hardly a flick of the nictitating membrane in the history of the Race.
But his own people had not built such structures since days now more nearly legendary than historical. None survived; a hundred thousand years and more of earthquakes, erosion, and constant construction had seen to that. Chugging up the hill to the castle at Farnham, Ussmak had felt transported in time back to primitive days.
Unfortunately, the British were not so primitive now as they had been when they ran up the castle, either. Otherwise, Ussmak’s landcruiser would not have had to retreat from its attempted river crossing to aid the males in the northern pocket. The northern pocket had no males left in it now. Some had been evacuated. More were dead or captured.
Back in the turret, Nejas called out, “Front!”
Ussmak peered through his own vision slits, trying to find the target the landcruiser commander had spotted. He waited for Skoob to answer, “Identified!” Instead, the gunner said doubtfully, “What have you found, superior sir?”
“That group of Tosevite males advancing along the highway, bearing as near zero as makes no difference,” Nejas answered. “Give them a round of high explosive. It will teach them not to show themselves so openly.”
“It shall be done, superior sir,” Skoob said. The autoloader clanged as it slammed a shell into the branch of the landcruiser’s main armament. “On the way,” Skoob said, an instant before the big gun roared and the landcruiser rocked back on its tracks, absorbing the recoil.
The Big Uglies knew enough to move forward in open order, which left them less vulnerable to artillery fire. Even so, several males went down when the shell burst among them. Those who had not been hit quickly joined their comrades on the ground. “Well aimed, Skoob!” Ussmak exclaimed. “One round and you stopped the advance cold.”
“Thank you, driver,” Skoob answered. “I’m not used to retreating. Of course I obey for the good of the Race, but I don’t much fancy it.”
“Nor I,” Ussmak said. Every time he sneaked a taste of ginger, he was filled with the urge to charge forward into the ranks of the Big Uglies, smashing them with the landcruiser’s tracks while the gunner and commander used the weapons in the turret to work a great slaughter. He knew that was the herb doing his thinking for him, but knowing it made the urge no less urgent.
“No one fancies retreating,” Nejas said. “Landcruiser males are trained to be first into battle, to tear holes in the enemy’s force through which others may pass. Now our task is to keep the British from tearing holes in our force and to be the last ones out of battle. Difficult, I grant you, but less far removed from our basic role than you might think.”
“Truth,” Ussmak said, “but not satisfying truth. Forgive me for speaking so boldly, superior sir.”
“I do forgive you, driver, but I also remind you of our task here,” Nejas said. “The Race has but one airstrip on this island out of range of British artillery: that at the place called Tangmere south of here, not far from the sea. As long as we can hold the British away from it, we can freely bring in supplies and evacuate wounded males as well as those being withdrawn.”
“Truth,” Ussmak repeated. He followed the strategy, but giving up ground to the Tosevites still seemed strange to him. The Deutsche were probably better warriors in a technical sense than the British, but here every Tosevite, whether formally a warrior or not, was an enemy. He hadn’t felt that in the SSSR or France; some there had seemed willing to serve the Race on its terms. Not in Britain. Here they fought with everything they had.
As if thinking along with him, Nejas said, “We can’t let them get within artillery range of Tangmere. If they do, they’ll plaster the airstrip with the hideous poison gas of theirs.” He paused for a moment, then went on, “And from what I’ve heard, we have it lucky. The Deutsche are using a gas that makes this one seem tame: one good whiff and you fall over dead.”
Ussmak said, “Superior sir, if what we have here is good luck, I don’t ever want to see the bad.”
“Nor I,” Skoob agreed. To Nejas, he added, “I see more Big Uglies in the fields and along the road to the north. Shall I give them another couple of rounds of high explosive?”
“Pick your own targets, Skoob,” the landcruiser commander answered. “Remember what ammunition resupply has been like lately, though. We have to hold this position and keep on holding it till we’re ordered to fall back again. That probably won’t be until our time for evacuation comes up: they’re using armor for a shell, and pulling back all the soft meat behind it.”
“Back when we first started the campaign on Tosev 3,” Ussmak said, his words punctuated by the deep rumble of the landcruiser’s main armament, “one of our landcruisers could sit out in the middle of open country and dominate as far as its cannon could reach.” He let out a long, hissing sigh. “It’s not like that any more.”
“Not here, that’s certain,” Nejas said. “Britain hardly has open spaces worthy of the name. There are always trees or hedgerows or stone fences or buildings to give cover to the Big Uglies. When we first landed, too, they didn’t have any antilandcruiser weapons worthy of the name: nothing this side of big guns, anyway, and big guns are easy to spot and neutralize. But now any sneaking infantrymale can carry a rocket or one of those spring-launched egg-addlers the British use. They still can’t hurt us from the front, but from the sides or rear… we’ve lost too many landcruisers that way.”
Skoob traversed the turret a couple of hundredths and fired again. Two other landcruisers held positions slightly lower on the hill that led up to Farnham Castle. They also sent high-explosive rounds into the loose ranks of the oncoming British males. Again and again, the British went to ground. Again and again, the survivors got up and kept moving forward.
“I wish we had more infantrymales in the ruins of the town down there,” Ussmak said. “Some of those Big Uglies will get in among them-as you said, superior sir-and work their way toward us.”
Neither of his crewmales argued with him. He wondered if this was what the Tosevites had felt at the outset of the campaign, when for a while the Race swept all before it: the numbing sense that, try as you would to stop it, something would go wrong and you’d end up dead or maimed on account of it.
A flight of killercraft roared low overhead from out of the south, dropping bombs on the Big Uglies and strafing them with their cannon. A series of runs like that, by multiple flights, would have ruined the British, but the Race had neither the aircraft nor the munitions to expend in such lavish quantities.
That meant the British would not be ruined. It also probably meant the Race’s forces in Britain would. Ussmak desperately wanted a taste of ginger. Without the herb, the world was a depressing, gloomy, cold place-not that he’d ever found Tosev 3 anything but cold, even with a taste or two inside him. But the cloud that settled over his spirit when he’d gone too long without ginger made the world feel even worse than it was and defeat seem a certainty.
No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than something exploded against the side armor of one of the landcruisers farther down the hill. One of the revolting things about the British spring-launched antilandcruiser bombs was that they gave no clue about their launch site, as, say, a missile did.
This bomb, by good fortune, did not penetrate the landcruiser’s armor, perhaps because it hadn’t landed squarely. After the initial blast, no smoke mounted skyward. No escape hatches popped open. No males bailed out of the landcruiser. Instead the turret slewed rapidly through a quarter of a circle. The machine gun coaxial with the main armament chattered angrily. But if anything in the ruins of Farnham stirred, Ussmak didn’t see it.