But this sound swelled and swelled. Teerts jumped to his feet, crying the Emperor’s name. From above, in a voice like thunder, came a call in his own language: “Male of the Race, show yourself! This is hostile airspace; we cannot stay long!” The accent was pure and clean-that of Home. Teerts had been listening to the mushy, barking way the Nipponese mangled his speech for so long, he needed a moment to recognize this was how it should be spoken.
He sprang from cover, waved his arms frantically, and did everything but turn backflips in the wild effort to make himself as visible as he could. His swiveling eyes caught sight of the helicopter-and one of the crewmales saw him, too, and the big, ungainly, ever so beautiful machine swung in his direction. Its rotor kicked up gravel and dust; nictitating membranes slid across his eyes to protect them from flying grit.
The helicopter hovered, its landing wheels not quite touching the ground. Its side door came open; a male inside let down a chain-link ladder. Teerts was already running toward the copter. He scrambled aboard. “We’ve got him!” the male shouted to the pilot and weapons officer in their cockpit forward.
The fellow hauled in the ladder, slammed and dogged the door. The helicopter was already gaining altitude and scurrying out toward the sea. “Thank you!” Teerts gasped. “The Emperor grant you bounty. You don’t know-”
“Don’t thank me yet,” the crewmale answered. He hurried to a machine gun that stuck out one of the windows. “We’re a long way from safe. We’ve got a killercraft overhead, but if the Big Uglies send enough aircraft after us, they’re liable to catch up with us and shoot us down. They’re a lot faster than we are.” He turned one eye back toward Teerts. “Who are you, anyway?”
“Teerts, killercraft pilot and flight leader,” Teerts answered. Stating his specialization and rank made him consciously aware for the first time in a very long while that he was without his body paint. That didn’t seem to bother his rescuer, who said, “Good. You know how to handle one of these things, then.” He patted the machine gun. “In case I get hit, keep shooting till we go into the water.”
“It shall be done, superior sir,” Teerts said. Actually, he outranked the male at the gun, but he was not part of the helicopter crew-and, after so long in Nipponese captivity, he was used to attaching honorifics to anyone with whom he spoke. As the land of Nippon receded behind them, his wits began to work again. “You couldn’t have flown straight here from any land the Race controls: you must have used in-flight refueling.”
“That’s right,” the crewmale said. “We’re on our way out for more hydrogen now, too. That should be enough to take us back to base.” He paused, listening to the microphone fastened to one hearing diaphragm. “Pilot says our killercraft cover just shot down three of the Big Uglies’ aircraft and the rest have broken off pursuit. Now I really start to think we’re going to be all right.”
“Emperor be praised,” Teerts said, dropping his eye turrets to the grimy mats on the floor of the helicopter. When he raised them again, he asked, “How is the conquest faring? I’ve been away from our kind for what has to be more than a year.”
“Between you, me, and this gun here, not so well,” the crewmale answered. “We were driving the Russkis hard, and then they somehow exploded an atomic bomb and made us stop there. These Big Uglies are a thousand times worse than we expected when we got to this stinking planet.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Teerts said feelingly. “The Nipponese told me about-gloated about-the Russkis’ atomic bomb. I was afraid they were telling the truth, but I wasn’t sure.” He suddenly sat bolt upright on the hard, uncomfortable seat. “They’re working on their own nuclear project, too. They spent endless time interrogating me about atomic energy. They got everything out of me, too. That’s how I managed to escape: they were taking me somewhere else so they could ask me about different things.”
“We’ll sendthat news upstairs, by the Emperor,” the crewmale exclaimed, lowering his eyes as Teerts had. “And after that, unless I miss my guess, we’ll have a present for these Big Uglies. You can show us where this work was being done?”
“The city was Tokyo,” Teerts answered. “Where in the city-”
“-Likely won’t matter,” the crewmale finished for him.
Teerts shivered. The male was probably right: the Nipponese would discover firsthand what nuclear weapons were like. They were only Big Uglies, and vicious ones to boot, but did they deserve that? Whether they did or not, he would have bet they were going to get it.
No point in arguing about that; the decision would come from levels far higher in the hierarchy than himself or the crewmale. He said, “Do you have any food here? The Nipponese didn’t give me a lot to eat.”
The crewmale unsnapped a pouch on the side of the helicopter wall, pulled out a couple of ration packs, and tossed them to Teerts. They were unheated and inherently unexciting: just fuel for the body to keep a male going until he had a chance to stop and rest and eat something better. Teerts thought he’d never eaten anything so wonderful in his life.
“After so long without the tastes of home, this may be the best meal I ever had,” he said ecstatically. His tongue cleansed the hard outer surfaces of his mouth. Every crumb it encountered brought him fresh delight.
“I’ve heard others we rescued say the same thing,” the crewmale answered. “That may be true for them, but I just can’t see it.” He let his mouth fall open to show he didn’t expect to be taken altogether seriously.
Teerts laughed, too; he remembered the rude jokes he and the rest of his flight had made about ration packs in the days before he’d been captured. He also remembered something else, remembered it with a physical longing more intense than anything he’d ever known outside of mating season. Hesitantly, he said, “The Nipponese fed me a Tosevite herb. They made me depend on it; my body craves it still. I don’t know what I’ll do without it.”
To his surprise, the crewmale laughed again. He rummaged in a pouch he wore on one of his belts, pulled out a tiny plastic vial, and offered it to Teerts. “Who says you have to do without it, friend? Here, have a taste on me.”
Liu Han grunted as the labor pain washed over her. “Oh, that is a good one!” Ho Ma, the midwife, said enthusiastically. She’d been saying that for a long time now. She went on, “Soon the baby will come, and then you will be happy.” She’d been saying that for a long time, too, which only proved she didn’t know Liu Han very well.
Several midwives had set up shop in the prison camp. Liu Han recognized the red-tasseled signs they set up outside their huts, and knew what the characters on those signs said even if she could not read them: “light cart and speedy horse” on one side and “auspicious grandmother-in-law” on the other. The midwife who’d worked in her now-wrecked village had had just the same sign.
Ttomalss said, “Move aside, please, female Ho Ma, so the camera can see as it should.”
The midwife grumbled under her breath but moved aside. The little scaly devils were paying her extravagantly in silver and food and even, she’d boasted to Liu Han, in tobacco they’d got from who could say where. They had to pay her extravagantly to ignore the bright lights they’d put into Liu Han’s hut, to ignore their presence and that of their cameras, and to ignore the way that, contrary to all custom and decency, they’d insisted on Liu Han’s being naked through the entire delivery so those cameras could do their work as the little scaly devils thought proper.
To the scaly devils’ payment, Liu Han had added several dollars Mex from her own pocket to persuade Ho Ma not to gossip about the humiliations she would witness. The midwife had agreed at once-for money, a midwife would agree to almost anything. Whether she would keep her promise afterward was a different question.