Turtledove, Harry - World War 01 - In the Balance by Turtledove Harry

Author:Turtledove, Harry [Turtledove, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf_fantasy
ISBN: 0345388526
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 1994-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

12

Ussmak cursed the day the Race had first discovered Tosev 3. He cursed the day the probe the Race had sent to this miserable world returned safely. He cursed the day he’d been hatched, the day he’d gone into cold sleep, the day he’d awakened. He cursed Krentel, something he’d been doing every day since the blundering idiot replaced Votal. He cursed the Big Uglies for killing Votal and then Telerep and leaving Krentel alive.

Most of all, he cursed the mud.

The landcruiser he drove was built to handle difficult terrain. On the whole, it did well. But Tosev 3, being a wetter place than any of the three worlds already in the Empire, had mixtures of water and dirt more thorough and more spectacularly gloppy than any of the Race’s engineers had imagined.

Ussmak was in the middle of one of those mixtures. As far as he could tell, it was most of a continent wide and most of a continent long. The Russkis only made matters worse by not paving any of their stinking roads. Once the rain soaked into what was allegedly a roadbed, the mud there was most of a continent deep, too.

He pressed his foot down on the accelerator. The landcruiser lurched forward. So long as he moved every little while, he was all right. If he stayed too long in one place, the machine started to sink. Its tracks were more than wide enough to support it on any reasonable surface. This gluey, slimy stuff was a long way from reasonable.

Ussmak accelerated again. The landcruiser plowed through the bog. Its tracks flung muck in all directions. Some of the muck-dead Emperors only knew how-splashed down onto Ussmak’s vision slit. He pressed a button. Detergent solution sprayed the armorglass clean. That was a relief. At least he wouldn’t have to unbutton and stick his head into the refrigerator outside.

Krentel had his cupola in the turret dogged down tight, too. A landcruiser commander was supposed to look out over the top of that cupola as much as he could, but Ussrnak, though he blamed Krentel for a lot of things, couldn’t blame him for not wanting to freeze his snout off.

At that, the driver thought, gunning the landcruiser forward once more, things could have been worse. He could have been driving a truck instead. The wheeled vehicles the landcruiser was supposed to be protecting had a much rougher time in this accursed bog than he did. He’d already used his towing chain to pull two or three of them out of places where they’d sunk worse than axle-deep. That the trucks had to be shielded just made them heavier and the sticking problem worse.

For that matter, Ussmak could have been one of the poor wretches in radiation suits who guddled around in the freezing Tosevite slime for the bits of radioactive material their detectors found. The radiation suits weren’t heated-no one had foreseen the need (no one had foreseen that the Big Uglies would be able to blow the 67th Emperor Sohrheb all over the landscape, either).

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