Читаем In the Balance полностью

Teerts wondered why he didn’t draw it and use it. Why else had the others drawn back, but to give their commander the privilege of the kill? But the officer did not strike. Instead, he gestured for Teerts to free himself from the straps that held him in his seat.

The flight leader obeyed, awkwardly because his left hand wouldn’t work. As soon as he’d moved a couple of paces away from the seat, the Nipponese did take his sword from its sheath. He slashed two-handed at the lines that held Teerts’ parachute to the ejection seat. The sword must have had good metal in it, for the tough lines parted almost at once. The parachute canopy blew away.

The officer said something to his males. Several of them raised their rifles and fired repeatedly into the seat. The blasts almost deafened Teerts. They also dismayed him right down to the claws on his toes. Those bullets were certain to smash the homing beacon buried in the padding.

Baring his small, flat teeth, the Nipponese pointed east with his sword. He barked out a phrase that probably meant something like get moving. Teerts got moving. The officer and several of his males followed, to make sure the flight leader didn’t try to run.

Teerts had no intention of running. Since he hadn’t been killed out of hand, he expected to be treated fairly well. The Race held far more Tosevite captives than the other way round, and mistreatment of prisoners, could be avenged ten-thousandfold. Not only that, the Big Uglies, barbarous though they were, fought among themselves so often that they’d developed protocols for dealing with captured enemies. Teerts couldn’t remember offhand whether Nippon adhered to those protocols, but most Tosevite empires did.

Jets screamed overhead, back where the ejection seat had landed. That would be Gefron and Rolvar, trying to keep him from being captured. Too late, unfortunately; not only had he landed among the Big Uglies, but this officer was alert enough to have wrecked the beacon and got him away from it in a hurry.

Still, he didn’t think things would be too bad. The officer first took him to a medical station. A Nipponese doctor with corrective lenses held in front of his eyes by a weird contraption of bent wires bandaged his wrist and poured a stinging disinfectant over the cuts and scrapes he’d got in his ejection and landing. By the time the doctor was done, Teerts felt halfway decent.

Then the Nipponese officer started hustling him away from the front line again. The jets’ wail vanished; the other two pilots in the flight must have expended their munitions and had to head home. Artillery shells whistled overhead every so often. Most came from the west and landed on Tosevite positions. The Big Uglies kept firing back, though. They seemed too stubborn to know when to give up.

Teerts walked toward the dawn that was breaking in the east. As light grew, Nipponese artillery fire also picked up. Lacking night-vision gear, the Tosevites were limited to targets they could actually see. Each salvo of theirs drew quick counterbattery fire from the gunners of the Race.

Back at the rear edge of the Nipponese trench system, a new party of Big Uglies took charge of Teerts. By the way the officer who had captured him acted toward the one who now received him, the latter was far more prominent. They bowed to each other one last time before the junior officer and the males who had accompanied him headed back to their position.

Teerts’ new keeper surprised him by speaking the language of the Race. “You come this way,” he said. His accent was mushy and he barked out his words, but the flight leader followed him well enough.

“Where are you taking me?” Teerts asked, glad for the chance to communicate with something more expressive than gestures.

The Nipponese officer whirled and struck him. He staggered and almost fell; the blow had been cleverly aimed. “Not talk unless I say you can talk!” the Big Ugly shouted. “You prisoner now, not master. You obey!”

Obedience had been drilled into Teerts his whole life long. His captor might be a savage, but he spoke as one who had the right to command. Almost instinctively, the flight leader responded to his tone. “May I speak?” he asked, as humbly as if he were addressing a shiplord.

“Hai,” the Nipponese said, a word Teerts did not understand. As if realizing that, the Tosevite abandoned his own jargon. “Speak, speak.”

“Thank you, exalted male.” With no notion of the officer’s rank, Teerts laid the honorifics on with a trowel. “Without asking where, exalted male, do you have places in which you keep your captives from the Race?”

The Nipponese showed his teeth. Among the Big Uglies, Teerts knew, that was a gesture of amiability, not amusement The officer, however, looked not the least bit amiable. He said, “You prisoner now. No one care what happen to you.”