In the Balance полностью

He also wished his flight had been able to attack the Nipponese sooner. But there were only so many killerplanes, and so many Tosevite positions to smash. This one had had to wait its turn. It would have waited longer still had the shiplords not thrown his flight east against it.

His aircraft roared low over the shattered trench line. Little dots of flame sprang into being on the ground as the surviving Big Uglies fired blindly at him. The Nipponese were not the only Tosevite army to do that. Teerts had listened to the briefings. He supposed shooting back made the Big Ugly soldiers feel less like the helpless victims they really were. Its probability of doing anything more than that was very small.

Teerts didn’t gamble. Gambling was a vice of support for males who had time to kill, which was not one of his problems. He’d been in action from the start. But if he’d sat down with the little plastic dodecahedrons a few times, he would have understood with his gut rather than just with his brain the difference between a small probability and zero probability.

The left engine made a horrible noise, then died. His killercraft lurched in midair. A small town’s worth of warning lights came on all over his instrument panel. At the same time, he keyed his radio: “Flight Leader Teerts, aborting mission and attempting to return to base. I must have sucked a bullet or something right into one turbofan.”

“May the spirits of departed Emperors take you safely home,” Rolvar and Gefron said in the same breath. Rolvar added, “We will finish the attack run on the Tosevites, Flight Leader.”

“I’m sure you will,” Teerts said. Rolvar was a good, reliable male. So was Gefron, in a different, more primitive way. Between the two of them, they’d make the Nipponese wish they’d never been hatched. Teerts swung his killercraft westward, back toward the base from which he’d set out He could fly on one engine, though he wouldn’t be very fast or maneuverable. Get repairs made and he’d be good as new tomorrow-

The right engine made a horrible noise, then died.

All at once, Teerts’ instrument panel was nothing but warning lights. This isn’t fair the flight leader thought. His hard-won altitude began to slip as the aircraft became nothing more than an aerodynamic stone in the sky.

“Ejecting! I say again, ejecting!” he yelled. His thumbclaw hit a button he’d never expected to have to use. Something about the size of the invasion fleet’s bannership booted him in the base of the tail as hard as it could. His eyes stayed open, but he briefly saw only gray mist.

Pain soon brought him back to his senses. One of the three bones in his left wrist had surely broken. At the moment, though, that was the least of his worries. Still strapped into his seat, he floated above the Nipponese lines like the biggest, most tempting target in the whole Empire.

The Big Uglies blazed away at him for all they were worth. He watched in fearful fascination as holes appeared in the ripstop fabric of his parachute. Too many holes, or three or four too close together, and ripstopping wouldn’t matter much. Then a bullet smacked the armored bottom of the seat. He hissed in fright and tried to draw up his legs.

Not fair he thought again. The whole killercraft was armored, not just the bottom of the seat. Bullets that hit were nearly harmless. But turbofan blades, immensely strong though they were, couldn’t chew up lead. If you were colossally unlucky enough to lose both engines that way…

If you were that unlucky, you had to hope the Big Uglies wouldn’t catch you and do the frightful things rumor said they did to prisoners. You had to hope you landed a little ways away from them, so you could unstrap (one-handed, it wouldn’t be easy or fast) and try to evade until the rescue helicopter got there to pick you up.

But if you were that unlucky, who cared what you hoped? Teerts had spilled wind from his canopy, trying to float as far back toward the Race’s lines as he could. That would have made rescuing him a lot easier… if he hadn’t come down right in the middle of a Nipponese trench.

He was sure he was dead. The Big Uglies swarmed around him, shouting at one another and brandishing rifles with knives stuck onto the end of their barrels. He waited for them to shoot him or stick him. A little more pain, he told himself, and everything would be over. His spirit would join those of the Emperors now departed, to serve them in death as he had served the Race in life.

One of the Nipponese outshouted the rest. By the way they cleared a path for him, he must have been an officer. He stood in front of Teerts, hands on hips, staring at him with the small, immobile eyes that characterized the Big Uglies. Instead of a rifle, he carried a sword not too different from the one borne by the Tosevite warrior in the picture the Race’s probe had sent Home.