Overkill (13 page)

The grezzen neither needed or understood communication tools nor, for that matter, tools of any sort. So he did not understand the concept of background noise. He simply and reflexively filtered out the low, ubiquitous buzz generated by the consciousness of uncountable trillions of dumb organisms, and by the distant clamor of billions of irrelevantly distant intelligent ones. The filtering behavior had served his species well for thirty million perfectly adapted years.

There. He felt his mother, but she ignored him. Asleep. That was normal enough. But during the daily rain? When prey that relied solely on what it saw and smelled and heard was disadvantaged?

He had no idiom for putting one plus one together, though he manipulated numeric concepts in a base-six system when he counted herds, estimated distance, or established new territory.

But he deduced that one vaguely troubling thing had happened, followed quickly by another. The human intrusion had been followed by his mother’s unresponsiveness. His mother had taught him that, in such cases, the first thing had often caused the second.

Within the vastness of eternal background noise, he sifted until he again felt the consciousness of the dominant human, the one that called itself Cutler. Then the grezzen brought that consciousness forward.

The grezzen froze, two legs up, four down, like a woog at the first scent of a striper. The grezzen felt what the human felt. More importantly, he saw what the human saw, and heard what the human said to its subservients.

Then the grezzen growled, a low rumble so powerful that tree leaves a body length away trembled. He shifted from a canter to great, six legged bounds. As he searched, he splintered trees with his forepaws. Not because they blocked his passage, but because he was angry.

Twenty-five

I cocked my head, pressed one hand on Kit’s arm, and the other on Zhondro’s as we stood along side the floater and its alien cargo. “Did you hear that?”

Kit had her handheld’s earphones on. She looked up, eyes wide. “Incoming!”

I shouted, “Cutler! There’s another grezzen coming! We’re moving out as soon as we get inside the tank!”

Kit and Zhondro were already running for the Abrams. We would mount over the front fender, and I looked up to give Cutler, atop the cupola, the signal to spool up the idling engine.

He wasn’t up there, and the turret hatches were already closed.

A sound like twigs snapping echoed, too distant to be mere twigs.

I sprinted past Kit and Zhondro, and was the first of the three of us to pass the turret, where I could see the driver’s hatch, below the main gun.

Cutler’s head poked out through the hatch, and he glanced over at me, wild-eyed.

I screamed at him, “Let Zhondro drive! Get out of that seat! And open the top hatches for Kit and me!”

Cutler stared at me. Then he pulled the driver’s hatch shut, gunned the engine, and the Abrams lurched at me.

I leapt aside, but the crumpled fender caught my sleeve as the tank sped past, then dragged me like a combat-med practice dummy, until the sleeve tore away and I splashed face down in mud.

I got to my knees and wiped my eyes, as Kit and Zhondro, one on each side of me, grabbed an arm and pulled me upright.

I flung a handful of mud at the Abrams and the floater as they bounced away from us, then disappeared into the mist. “Goddamn you, Cutler!”

The turbine’s whine faded as Cutler ran for his life, abandoning us but taking his prize with him. I kicked the ground and exploded mud clods. And I had worried about mutinying against him.

Zhondro muttered something, then spat. I didn’t speak much Tassini, but I think it had something to do with feeding Cutler his own genitals.

Crash
.

The twig crunches that weren’t twig crunches grew louder.

The three of us stood, naked inside our clothes, while an angry monster bore down on us.

Kit pointed. Unloaded supplies, the maintenance ’bot, and the Sleeper lay alongside the fat plastretch fuel bladders, and our trash containers.

My eyes bugged. “An old grezzen just made scrap out of a main battle tank. That Sleeper’s armor isn’t worth—”

She raised her palm. “I know. But there’s stuff we can use over there. Including a couple more Barretts.”

I ran with her toward the supplies, panting. “I thought a Barrett wouldn’t stop a grezzen.”

“It won’t. But if the grezz bypasses us, we’ll need more than trench knives to make it back to the Line alive on foot.”

I asked her, “Bypass? How do we make it do that?”

Twenty-six

The grezzen broke out of brush and saw in the distance a rectangular human shell, surrounded by scattered, smaller bits and pieces. The grezzen reached out and felt three intellects near. The female Kit, and the two male subservients. He could not see them easily, but, like all weak species, humans hid well.

His mother was not among them, nor was the male, Cutler.

The minds of the grezzen’s mother and cousins, and of any of his race, were transparent to the grezzen, but he couldn’t rummage through the memories of other species, like humans. He could, however, skim the sensory inputs of human conscious thought, eavesdropping on what individual human intellects saw, heard, felt, and spoke.

He brought forward Cutler, the dominant male.

“Cutler calling Cutler Xenobiology team two. Christ! Where are you people?”

“This is team two. We’ve arrived at the Line Wrangler’s station. Sir, are all of you okay? You sound—”

“I have the animal, alive, sedated, and restrained. I’m inbound toward you in the tank. Christ, it was horrible!”

“Sir?”

“Another one attacked us. It slaughtered the others. I’m the only survivor.”

The grezzen paused, cocked its head. Slaughter? At this moment he could feel the other humans. His mother had not even scratched them. Humans often described the way things were in a way that things were not. The grezzen found this incomprehensible.

Grezzen didn’t know that the seamless transparency of their race’s consciousness made them the universe’s sole perfect telepaths. They could not keep secrets from one another, or lie to one another, and so could not comprehend that other species could.

The grezzen saw what Cutler saw. Through tiny openings in the shell within which Cutler traveled, Cutler, and so the grezzen, saw a copse of four trees. One was distinctively lightning-split into a blackened fork. The grezzen recognized the place. Within his current territory, the spot was close enough to reach easily. The grezzen had enough time to reach his mother. First, he would transform the slaughter of the three other humans from that which was not into fact.

The logical hiding place for the three subservients was in their rectangular shell. He could split the object as easily as he split fruit, to get at the worms inside.

The grezzen trotted toward the shell.

Twenty-seven

Kit and I lay belly down beneath overhanging brush, motionless and barely daring to breathe, while we peered out at the Sleeper, fifty yards away. Fifty yards to our left, Zhondro hunkered down the same way, where the grezzen couldn’t see us or, with the wind in our faces, smell us. Our trash now littered the ground in a belt that arced twenty five yards in front of Zhondro’s hiding place, and in another arc twenty-five yards in front of Kit and me.

I fingered the HATT at my side, a twin to the one Zhondro carried. We had jury-rigged the business end of a trank round onto the projectiles in each HATT. A HATT’s normal warhead couldn’t kill a grezzen, but we might be able to use one to put this grezzen to sleep long enough that we could get away from it.

All we had to do was get close enough. That meant distracting the grezzen from hunting us, and channeling it close to Zhondro or to me so that one of us could take a shot.

I whispered to Kit, “You mind telling me how this is going to work?”

“When the time comes, do what I say.”

“That’s what you always say. When the time comes, how are you gonna tell Zhondro?”

“I already did. He’s not like you.”

I felt blood surge in my cheeks. “Goddammit! What’s your problem with me?”

She sighed. “You mean besides what your Legion did on Bren?”

“
My
Legion?” I jerked my thumb at my chest. “You don’t know—”

“Shh!” Kit clamped my forearm with one hand while she pointed with the other.

The grezzen emerged from the mist and bounded toward us.

The female had weighed in at eight and a half tons. I raised my eyebrows as this one approached. Mama’s boy had grown up to eleven tons, give or take a woogburger.

His ochre integument—Kit had corrected me when I called it fur—hung off him like a shaggy rug, but couldn’t obscure muscle rippling beneath. The curved, ebony claws on each of his forelimbs protruded from six digits—two of which, Kit advised, were opposable. They were longer than the claws on the four rear limbs—AKA posterior locomotor appendages.

The animal’s flat-faced, hirsute head swung side to side as it moved. Three ruby eyes, lined in a row beneath a brooding brow and above jaws rowed with pointed ebony teeth, surveyed the world. Where a mammal had its canine teeth, great fangs walrused down from the grezzen’s upper jaw, as long as scimitars and as thick as human thighs. The fangs gave the beast a permanent scowl, an intimidation display that was overkill.

Kit fingered the remote that deployed our maintenance ’bot.

The ’bot raised up behind the Sleeper and began running the program she had reset it to perform.

The ’bot skittered out into the open, across the grezzen’s field of vision.

The belt of trash, shell casings, ration containers, fuel empties, anything noisy, lay visible on the ground. The ’bot shuffled through the belt, and tin clatters echoed.

The beast froze and stared at the ’bot. Distraction mission accomplished.

Kit whispered, “The ’bot looks like a Rover, as far as the grezz can tell. Grezz have learned to avoid Rovers, if they’re lucky enough to spot them.”

Kit fingered the controls, and the flat, six-legged ’bot charged the grezzen like a cockroach sprinting for a baseboard.

She said to me, “Close your eyes.”

“What?”

“Do it or we’re all dead. And shut up.”

I did both.

The grezzen’s roar shook the ground so hard that I felt it in my chest. Then I felt each thud of its footfalls, as eleven tons moved. I was blind, but they seemed to be getting stronger.

I tried to swallow, but I had no spit.

Twenty-eight

The grezzen saw the six-legged thing that ran across the clearing toward him, but he felt its intellect no more than he felt a stone. It was a ghost-that-could-not-be-felt, and the first one he had actually seen. The ghosts resembled lemon bugs, but with harder shells, and were almost as large as humans. Like the stings of lemon bugs and humans, a ghost’s sting could kill him. Unlike lemon bugs and humans, a ghost could get close enough to do it before he knew it.

So the grezzen stopped, blinked all three eyes, then backed away in fear.

Grezzen had not known fear, at least of any other animate species, since they ascended to the apex of Dead End’s animal pyramid thirty million years earlier. Grezzen were bigger, faster, stronger, and smarter than the competing species that had challenged them over those years, to be sure. But more critical to their race’s dominance was their ability to sense the presence, and to know the intent and the fear within, lesser, nontelepathic species.

Humans puzzled the grezzen enough. But these unconscious, animate fellow travelers of humans mystified the grezzen completely. The grezzen could feel no warning of their approach. Unaccustomed to relying on only five senses, the grezzen found themselves vulnerable. And afraid.

If this particular six-legged thing had not showed itself, the grezzen would have been totally unaware of its presence. Conversely, the grezzen was entirely aware that three humans were close by. Their stings also endangered him. Normally, he could precisely locate hidden prey or threats by seeing what they saw, and then determining where they were. But today when he brought these humans’ consciousness forward he saw nothing. But he could feel what they said to one another.

“When can I open my eyes?”

The grezzen felt not only what the male felt and spoke, but its fear.

“Just listen!”

The female was frightened, too, but confident.

The ghost, which the grezzen understood as its most immediate threat, advanced. The grezzen sidled left, out of the ghost’s path.

The ghost seemed to move aimlessly, but toward the grezzen, so the grezzen sidestepped, then moved forward.

The grezzen’s left center leg crushed tubular bits of human refuse that rattled and clanked.

The female shouted, “Zhondro! It’s in the debris field on your side! Open your eyes and shoot!”

Suddenly, the grezzen saw what the humans saw. Two were concealed to his left. Another was concealed just ahead, closer than he should have allowed. The little vermin had closed their eyes, then opened them!

Telepaths couldn’t deceive one another. Therefore, they were easily deceived by a species that excelled at deception. The tactic caused the grezzen to hesitate for just one heartbeat. But he hesitated.

Crack!

The grezzen saw the sting’s flash, leapt, and nearly dodged it entirely. Something pricked his right forepaw, weakly.

“Zhondro, get outta there!”

The grezzen turned toward the dual human cry that he both heard and felt. The grezzen felt anxiety in those two humans, and felt their anxiety that they were too far away from him to sting him. So the grezzen whirled away from those non-threats.

The ghost-that-could-not-be-felt crouched, now immobile, and so no longer immediately threatening, to the grezzen’s left. Ahead, one human fled, far too slowly, from the smoky residue left behind by its sting. The grezzen pounced.