Free We Install by Harry Turtledove Page B

at the lance-corporal as if Sack had all the answers, he asked, “What do we do now?”
    â€œTry as best we can to get out, I guess,” Sack answered. It wasn’t going to be easy; firing came not only from in front of them and from both flanks, but from the rear as well. While their little piece of the battle hadn’t gone too badly, overall the Reds were forcing the breakthrough they’d sought.
    The two Germans started north, back toward Kiev. Sack hoped the enemy would take no special notice of them in the rain and the confusion. For a couple of kilometers, those hopes were realized. But just when he began to think he and Zimmer really might get away free, a burst of machine-gun fire sent them diving into a ditch.
    The fire let up for a moment. “Surrender or die!” a Red yelled in mangled German.
    â€œWhat do we do?” Zimmer hissed.
    â€œWhat can we do?” Sack said hopelessly. But if he stood up, even with his hands in the air, he was afraid the machine gunner would cut him in half. Then he remembered the propaganda leaflet he’d stuffed in his pocket, intending to use it for toilet paper. He dug it out, scanned it quickly. “Tow shong!” he shouted, as loud as he could. “Tow shong, tow shong!”
    â€œTow shong?” The Red pronounced it differently; Sack hoped he’d been understood. Then the enemy switched to German: “Surrender?”
    â€œ Ja , surrender. Tow shong! ” Now Sack did stand. After a moment, Zimmer followed his lead. Their assault rifles lay in the mud at their feet, along with their dreams.
    Several green-clad soldiers ran up to them. Grins on their flat, high-cheekboned faces, their almond eyes glittering with excitement, they searched the Germans, stripped off their watches, their aid kits, and everything else small and movable they had on their persons.
    One of the Reds gestured with his weapon. Hands high, Sack and Zimmer stumbled toward captivity. A soldier of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army followed to make sure they did not try to escape.

HOXBOMB
    We’ve built our technology on chemistry and physics. We’re just starting to get a handle on genetics and biochemistry. Most of the coming century’s big advances will probably be in those areas, and chances are people alive now would have no more idea what to make of what they’ll have in a hundred years than someone from 1850 swept forward a hundred years would know what to do with a television set … or an atomic bomb. And aliens who based their civilization on biotech would be just as wary of our mastery of the other stuff as we would by what they could do. This is a story of that kind of meeting.
    T hey met by twilight.
    The hours when day died and those when night passed away were the only ones humans and Snarre’t comfortably shared. Jack Cravath thought it was a minor miracle humans and Snarre’t shared anything on Lacanth C.
    You had to try to do business with them. Everybody said so. Everybody, in this case, was much too likely to be right. If the two races didn’t get along, they had plenty of firepower to devastate a pretty good stretch of this galactic arm. Black-hole generators, ecobombs, Planck disruptors, tailored metaviruses … The old saying was, they’d fight the war after this one with rocks. Not this time around—there’d be nobody left to do any fighting, and the rocks would be few and far between, too.
    By one of those coincidences that made you think Somebody had it in for both species, they’d found Lacanth C at the same time 150 years earlier. They’d both liked the world. What was not to like? It was a habitable planet, as yet unscrewed by intelligent life of its own. They both wanted it. They both needed it, too. In lieu of a coin flip, stone-paper-scissor, or that spiral-arm-wrecking war, they decided to settle it jointly.
    Codominium, they called it. On Earth, such arrangements