No rescue helicopter appeared. Nejas sank further into sludgy semiconsciousness. Ussmak grew more and more sure they would have to retreat on foot. If they were going to do that, they needed Nejas on his legs and moving. Trying to carry him, they’d be separately slowed, and easy meat for any armed Big Uglies whose path they chanced to cross. Abandoning the landcruiser commander never crossed Ussmak’s mind; for all he’d been through, he was still in some ways a well-drilled male of the Race.
But how to get Nejas up on his legs? Skoob was looking around helplessly, perhaps for some males to lend them a hand. Ussmak did not think anyone would magically materialize, not unless another landcruiser got killed, in which case the crewmales would likely have wounded of their own.
He got an idea of a different sort. He reached into the pouch in which he’d stored his ginger, took out a vial, and poured some of the powdered herb into the palm of his hand. Skoob stared at him in astonishment. He ignored the gunner. Holding his hand just in front of the tip of Nejas’ muzzle, he said, “Superior sir? Taste this.”
His greatest fear was that Nejas was too far gone to hear him, or to respond if he did. But the commander’s bifurcated tongue flicked out, almost of itself, and brought into his mouth a fair-sized taste of ginger. Ussmak waited tensely to see if it would do any good.
The membranes that had fallen halfway across Nejas’ pupils suddenly peeled back, leaving the landcruiser commander’s eyes bright and alert. His tongue shot forth again, and cleared the last of the ginger from Ussmak’s palm. “By the Emperor, what is that stuff?” he demanded. “Whatever it is, it’s marvelous.”
Skoob spoke before Ussmak could: “That’s the Tosevite herb, isn’t it? The one we’ve had so much trouble with, I mean.” He turned one eye from Nejas toward Ussmak. “What are you doing with it? Possession of ginger is against regulations and subject to punishment.”
“What do you think I’m doing with it?” Ussmak snapped, irritated by the manifest stupidity of the question. “I’m a ginger taster, that’s what. And it was the only thing I could think of to get the commander moving again.” He shifted his eyes to Nejas. “I’m sorry, superior sir. This way, we can sort things out later. If I hadn’t given it to you, I didn’t think there’d be a later.”
“You were right,” Nejas declared, which silenced Skoob. The landcruiser commander’s voice was vibrant, full of life. Moments before, his wound had left him all but unconscious. Now he seemed to have forgotten he’d been hurt. “Where’s my personal weapon?” he asked, looking around for it. “If I can get my hands on it, the three of us should be plenty to drive all the Big Ugly fighting males out of this damp, grimy little town.”
Now Skoob stared at him, as if certain the ginger had robbed him of his wits. And so, in a way, it had. Ussmak recognized the symptoms from his own first tastes of ginger: the certainty that you could do anything, regardless of the odds. He still felt that when he tasted, but now he knew it was the herb’s illusion. Nejas didn’t have the experience to recognize it for what it was.
Gently, Ussmak said, “Superior sir, you remain yourself, nothing more, however powerful the herb may make you feel. Use logic, if you can: if we could not drive the Big Uglies from Farnham from inside our landcruiser, we won’t do it now that the machine is wrecked. We need to get out of here and get you and your wounded arm seen to.”
Ginger made you think faster than you did without it. It also made you think you were thinking better than you did without it, though that wasn’t always so. After only the briefest pause, Nejas said, “Truth. We must leave. Logic.” Ussmak wasn’t sure how clear his commander’s wits really were, but he wanted to get Nejas moving and get all three of them out of Farnham before the ginger’s exhilaration wore off and the first dreadful depression crashed down to take its place.
Without warning, Nejas broke cover, skittering southward toward another pile of rubble. A bullet kicked up earth between his feet; another struck sparks from the stonework behind him. With a headlong leap, he reached the new shelter. “Come on!” he called to his crewmales. “Nothing to it!”
Ussmak wished he’d also tasted; it would have helped nerve him for the dash across open, empty space. “Go on,” Skoob said. “I’ll cover you.” He fired a few shots as Ussmak poised, sprinted, dove. Ussmak returned the favor when Skoob made the dangerous crossing.
From rubble to wreckage, from wreckage to house, they made their way south out of Farnham. The houses, those few of them that hadn’t been ruined in the fighting, looked tidy and comfortable, at least by Tosevite standards. As he scurried from one of them to the next, always wondering when a bullet he never heard would hit him, Ussmak began to see how a Big Ugly who was faced with the loss of such comfort might fight hard to keep it.
Houses thinned out and gave way to open country. That worried Ussmak. It gave him and his crewmales fewer hiding places than they’d had in town. And untold enemies could lurk behind the hedgerows that separated one miniature field from the next. Ussmak eyed those hedgerows with mingled fear and respect. Some of them had been growing for the Emperor only knew how long; even a land-cruiser had trouble crashing through them.
Hedgerows, however, were not his only concern. As he’d known it would, Nejas’ ginger charge wore off, leaving the landcruiser commander very much a drained battery. Nejas slumped bonelessly to the rough asphalt of the road. “I can’t go on,” he moaned, after-tasting depression holding him in its teeth. “And even if I could, what good would it do?”
“Here, superior sir, taste this.” Ussmak got out more ginger. He didn’t know if a brand-new user could stand having so much course through him, but he did know the alternative was abandoning Nejas. He’d had commanders he would have happily abandoned, but Nejas wasn’t one of them.
“I don’t want it,” Nejas said; now he knew what Ussmak was giving him. But Ussmak had never heard a more obvious lie. Nejas’ eyes never moved from the palm that held the ginger. When Ussmak brought his hand close to the other male’s muzzle, Nejas’ tongue flicked out and licked it clean.
Quietly, Skoob said to Ussmak, “We ought to report you for punishment when we get to an area where such things are possible.”
“Do whatever you’re going to do,” Ussmak answered, as weary as he ever remembered being. “The point is that we get to one of those places, not what we do afterwards.”
“Let’s go.” Nejas surged to his feet again. His eyes had a hectic glow to them, as if fires burned uncontrolled in his brain. Ussmak knew about those fires, and the herbal wind that fanned them. He hoped he hadn’t given the commander too much ginger. Voice crackling with unassailable certainty, Nejas pointed south. “That way. Before long we shall surely encounter one of our bases intended to hold down this land.”
Unless we encounter Big Ugly infiltrators first,Ussmak thought.If they were in Farnham, no reason they can’t have slipped south of it. They’re good at such things. After all, this is their planet. Over the days since the Race came to Tosev 3, he’d got a thorough education as to what that meant.
Something moved at the bottom of a hedgerow. He didn’t pause to wonder about what it might be; males who hesitated once seldom got the chance to hesitate twice. He fired a short burst, his first bullet an instant ahead of Skoob’s.
Only after his finger came off the trigger did he see what he and the landcruiser gunner had been shooting at: a round little spiny animal with a pointed snout. It was dead now, dead and torn and bleeding, its tiny black eyes staring up in blind reproach. For the first time since he woke up from cold sleep on Tosev 3, Ussmak felt guilty about killing something.