Here in the eastern portion of the SSSR, that part of the mission was supposed to be easier, although Ussmak had grown heartily tired of experts telling him things about the Tosevites that soon turned out not to be so. But he’d fought in the SSSR before, if farther west, and knew that the Soviets, while they made good landcruisers by Big Ugly standards, lagged behind in other areas of the military art and lacked the doctrine to get the best results from the equipment they did have.
Or rather, he knew the Sovietshad lagged behind in other areas of the military art andhad lacked proper doctrine. He hadn’t fought them in two of his years, one of Tosev 3’s. Against his own people, or the Rabotevs, or the Hallessi, that wouldn’t have mattered. For the mutable Big Uglies, it was as good as an age. Fearfully, he wondered what new destructive skills the Soviets had learned while he was busy elsewhere on this planet. Suddenly he shuddered. They were the ones who had used atomic weapons.
Nejas said, “Pilot, how bad is the weather in the area to which we’re flying?”
“It’s cold, landcruiser commander,” the pilot answered. “There’s frozen water on the ground already, for instance.”
“That seems to happen a great deal on this planet,” Nejas said, his tone halfway between weary resignation and making the best of things. “I don’t suppose this Siberia place can be too much worse than the rest.”
“Last Tosevite winter, we were on duty in the southwestern part of the great land mass, what the Big Uglies call Africa,” Skoob said. “That would have been downright pleasant if it hadn’t been so damp. It was warm enough, anyhow, which is more than you can say for a lot of Tosev 3.”
Ussmak had spent most of the previous winter in a hospital ship, recovering from radiation poisoning after he’d had to bail out of his landcruiser into plutonium-contaminated muck when the Big Uglies raided the area for metal for their nuclear devices. The climate inside the ship had been salubrious enough. Getting there by way of radioactive mud was not a route he recommended, though.
Even through the steel and ceramic armor of the landcruiser in which he rode now, Ussmak could hear the roaring whine of the transporter’s turbofans. He listened closely for any abrupt change in their tone, and braced himself in his seat. Especially on its landing descent, the huge, clumsy aircraft wasn’t much faster than a Tosevite killercraft. Instead of feeling safe within the twin eggshells of transporter and landcruiser, he felt doubly trapped.
A swing to the side set his heart pounding. A moment later, the pilot came on to say, “We are experiencing some violent crosswinds, you males in there who can’t see out. Nothing to worry about; radar reports no Tosevite killercraft airborne in our vicinity. We’ll be on the ground shortly.”
“What do you know?” Skoob said. “Good news for a change.”
“The Emperor knows we could use some, after the fiasco in Britain,” Nejas said. He sounded like a male who needed a taste of ginger. When you hadn’t had any for a while, the world seemed a grim place indeed. Ussmak had slowly learned that it was the herb-or rather, the lack of it-talking, not the world itself. Some tasters took a long time to figure that out. Some never did.
The transporter jet jerked in the air. Ussmak jerked in his seat. You didn’t want to try to sit bolt upright; you’d smash your head against the roof of the driver’s compartment. He remembered just in time. The pilot said, “Flaps are down. We’ll be landing momentarily. Landcruiser crews prepare to roll out the cargo bay.”
Another jolt announced the landing gear coming down. Then the transporter hit the runway. Despite its bulk, it bounced back into the air for an instant, then rolled to a stop. The turbofans screamed as they reversed thrust to help slow the enormous aircraft.
Ussmak was eager to escape from the transporter. Tosev 3 had too much water and not enough land, but they’d just flown one of the longest all-overland routes possible on the planet. He wanted to get out, look around at his new duty area (or as much of it as he could see through the vision slits of a landcruiser), and, more important still, meet some of the males here and find out where he could get some more ginger after his present supply ran out.
The nose of the transporter swung up, filling the cargo bay with light other than that of its own fluorescents. The light was white and very cold. “Driver, start your engine,” Nejas said.
“It shall be done, superior sir,” Ussmak said, and obeyed.
No sooner had he obeyed than Nejas slammed the lid of the cupola down with a clang. “It’s a freezer out there,” he exclaimed. “Worse than a freezer! You’d go into a freezer to warm up.” As if to support him, the landcruiser’s heating elements came on, hissing gently as they blew warm air through the interior of the machine.
When Ussmak saw the male with a light wand who came up to direct the landcruiser out of the aircraft, he believed every word Nejas had said. The poor guide had an electrically heated suit of the sorts pilots used in the chilly air of high altitudes, and over it a hooded coat and boots made from the furry hides of Tosevite animals. In spite of all that, he looked desperately cold as he waved the landcruiser ahead.
Ussmak put the machine in gear and rumbled down the ramp. Snow blowing almost horizontally greeted him. The landcruiser’s heater hummed as it worked harder. He hoped it was made to withstand a challenge like this. Snow also started clogging his vision slits. He flicked the button that sent a stream of cleaning liquid onto them. It got rid of the snow, but froze in place, so it was as if he were trying to see out through a pane of ice.
“Careful!” Nejas shouted. “You almost ran down the guide.”
“Sorry, superior sir,” Ussmak answered. “If you have vision out your cupola, command me.” He explained what had gone wrong with his own optics.
Between them, the male with the light wand and Nejas directed Ussmak to a point in front of a building he saw only as a large, solid lump of snow in the midst of all the swirling stuff. A door opened in the side of the solid lump. The guide gestured. “We’re supposed to bail out and go in there, I think,” Nejas said. “I just hope we don’t freeze to death before we make it”
With a single convulsive motion, Ussmak threw open the hatch above his head and scrambled out. The cold was stunning. His nictitating membranes drew over the surface of his eyes to protect them from the icy blast of the wind, but he had to blink hard to make them return to where they belonged; they had started to freeze in place. His lungs felt as if he were breathing fire. His skin burned for a moment, too, but then went cold and numb.
“This way! This way!” the guide shouted. Stumbling, Ussmak and his crewmales threw themselves at the entrance to the building. It was only a couple of his own bodylengths away, but he wondered if he would freeze into a solid block of ice before he got to it.
As soon as the landcruiser crew was inside, the male who had guided them off the transporter slammed the door and dogged it shut. Then he opened the inner door to the chamber. Delicious warmth flowed out. The chamber between the blizzard outside and the oasis of comfort within might almost have been a spaceship airlock. As far as Ussmak was concerned, the environment from which he’d just escaped was far more hostile than the unchanging vacuum of space.
“New hatchlings!” the guide called as he went into the barracks room that seemed a tiny piece of Home magically transported to Tosev 3. “I’ve got some new hatchlings here-poor fools don’t know they’ve just been stuck up the cloaca of this miserable world.”
Males in the body paint of landcruiser and fighting vehicle crews crowded round Ussmak and his companions. “Welcome to Siberia,” one of them called. “This place is so bad, they say even Big Uglies got exiled here.”