Overkill (17 page)

We stood still and silent and watched oily black smoke that was Zhondro and his prayer scarf twist into the sky. Gliding dragons slid through the smoke, wolfing down glowing ash scraps that never reached the clouds.

To me, Zhondro’s Paradise was a security-blanket myth, his cause quixotic, and his family unmet strangers. But I wept for him because he had become my friend.

I caught Kit staring at me, and wiped my eyes. “Smoke.”

She reached up and touched my cheek with her fingers. “Soot. You missed a spot. Parker, I’m so sorry.”

“Thanks. But Zhondro and I didn’t know each other that long.”

“Not just because you lost him. Because I made very wrong assumptions about you. Parker, Zhondro knew how badly he was injured when I found him. I did everything I could for him, but we both knew it wasn’t enough. So I sat up with him all night and he told me about you. About what you could have done to innocent people, but didn’t. And about what it cost you.”

“Oh.” I stared up into the deluge and sighed. “And all it’s come to now is the two of us stranded here in a zoo that’s run by the animals.”

We stood there until the flames ebbed, then walked back to the Sleeper together in the rain.

She stepped inside the Sleeper, I closed the hatch behind us and we slumped on the dining table bench. She asked, “Tired?”

I nodded while I pulled out two fresh plastis, opened them, and set one on the table in front of her. “You?”

She nodded back as she drained it, then said, “Thanks. Why do you think Cutler did that?”

I shrugged. “I’ve seen better men than him panic in the face of less danger. But that’s charitable. I think the son of a bitch left us to die. I’m gonna walk out of here. Then I’m gonna find Cutler and beat the shit out of him.”

“Not if I get to him first.” She patted my shoulder and yawned. “But we worry about that tomorrow, huh? Best not to walk any farther in the rain out here. You can’t see or hear what’s catching up to you. We both need to sleep.”

The magic word. It had been a bad couple days. For the first time in what seemed like years, nothing was about to eat me. I wilted like a switch had been thrown, and my eyelids drooped.

Kit dimmed the illumination, stepped out of her fatigues, and climbed into her bunk. It measured my exhaustion that I didn’t even notice what she had on underneath.

My top bunk suddenly looked accessible only if somebody winched me up, so I flopped into the coveted lower, just below Kit’s, that had been Cutler’s inviolable domain. When I rolled over, the corner of something poked my back, and I dug out Cutler’s Reader, leather-bound, monogrammed, and slimmer than a Trueborn supermodel. My first impulse was to punch it as though it was Cutler’s square-jawed face. But when you grow up with nothing you don’t break stuff for the hell of it.

Reflexively, I moved my thumb to the off button. When I read in bed, I always forgot to encrypt and turn off. Apparently, so did Cutler.

Before I switched it off, I glanced at the screen, and read:

Prepublication Copy

Observations of Cognitive and Communication

Capacities in
Xenoursus grezzenensis
, a Sextapodal Top

Carnivore, Native to Designated Earthlike

I rolled my eyes. Now, there was a sleeping pill.

But the next line read, “By Aaron Bauer, Ph.D.”

I sat up so fast that my head nearly thumped the bottom of the bunk above, where Kit already breathed deeply and regularly. Bauer. Kit’s predecessor. Who said that dead men tell no tales?

Forty minutes later, I dimmed Cutler’s Reader display and lay staring up at the bottom of the bunk above me while my heart raced and alien rain drummed the roof.

“Kit?” I reached up and jostled the bunk above me. “Kit! Wake up.”

She moaned. “Parker?”

“We need to talk.”

She moaned again. Then she said, “Parker, a half inch of hammock foam doesn’t alter the fact that you’re groping my left breast. If that doesn’t change in five seconds, I’ll break your fingers.”

I withdrew my hand like her bunk was on fire. “Sorry.”

“Forgiven. G’nite.”

“Wait! I have something down here that you’ll want to see.”

“I’m sure. Most men offer dinner and a show first, Parker.”

“No. It’s Cutler’s Reader. The dead guide, Bauer? Cutler’s got a copy on here of a paper Bauer was going to publish.”

Her face, framed in tousled hair, poked over the bunk edge above me, then her arm dangled down while she flapped her hand. “Give it here.”

I handed her the Reader. “Bauer’s paper says that the grezzen—”

“I know what Bauer’s paper says. We probably tumbled to it the same time Cutler’s people did. What I want are any notes or studies they may have added.” She swung her bare legs over the side of the bunk, hopped down, then sat at the table in her underwear and read.

For the next five minutes, I watched while she scrolled through Cutler’s reader, the screen’s glow painting the curves of her face and bare shoulders.

Once she nodded and muttered, “Aha. So that’s what they’re after.”

Another time she frowned and whispered, “That rat bastard!” Then she looked up and saw me watching her. Her eyebrows rose. “Parker. You’re awake. You okay?”

I ached all over. I had spent the previous night in a bug-infested log. A rat-bastard tycoon had hijacked my tank and left me for dead among monsters who wanted to pick my brain, figuratively and literally. In four months I would have a price on my head, and a mysterious interplanetary spy had just threatened to break my fingers. On the other hand, I was alone with a smart, beautiful, half-naked woman who had allowed me to touch her for five seconds longer than she had to.

I said, “Never better.”

Thirty-six

The grezzen, reclining in the evening rain, split the striper’s thigh bone, by levering it under his right tusk with his left forepaw, then savored the bone’s marrow. His right forepaw remained numb, and he was convinced and annoyed that his overall lethargy was a product of the tiny wound that the dead human had inflicted. The two surviving humans had confined themselves in their immobile shell a brief run away, and were at rest. The grezzen ignored them and reached out. “Mother?”

The pause until she answered was too long. “I am here.”

The grezzen sensed weakness in her. And he saw what she saw, which was that humans and their moving shells scurried all around her. He sprang to his feet, and spoiled the marrow when he dropped the bone. The humans’ proximity to her disturbed him, but her location disturbed him more. Before the ghosts had come, the treeless rock knob had been a spot for lying out to catch the breeze on a fair day. Now the knob lay beyond the barrier formed by the ghosts. “Mother, you were going to kill him! What happened this time?”

“Listen.”

She lay bound by vines the humans had woven from unknown material, while a male human stood in front of her. They all looked alike, but for sexual dimorphism and head tufting. This one’s head was bare skin, and black markings decorated its bare forelimbs. It held a stinger between its forelimbs and thought, “You look like a tired, six-legged panda. Why would Cutler go through all this over you?”

Then the grezzen sensed the presence of the dominant male called Cutler. Within moments Cutler, who was fractionally larger head to feet than the skin-headed individual, appeared alongside him, and slapped his forelimb on the smaller one’s shoulder. “Some CEOs delegate the dirty jobs. But here she is, tied up with a bow, Mr. Liu.”

Liu, the skin-headed male, thought, “God, what an ego! Those bastards who died out there probably had more to do with catching this thing than he did.” But he audibilized, “It looks sick.”

Cutler audibilized, “Mr. Liu, I pay your gang to keep this animal in and the locals out until the xenobiologists get this lab up and running. I pay them to look after the animal.” But Cutler thought as he stared at the grezzen, “It does look sick. Christ, I really don’t want to go through this again. Maybe it’s just because it’s doped up, disoriented.”

The grezzen, through its mother, felt Liu think, “Gang? Every one of us is a decorated vet. Any one of us could kick your ass.” The grezzen saw in Liu’s mind the image of Liu striking Cutler with the blunt end of Liu’s stinger. But Liu did not reduce this image to action. This perplexed the grezzen, and his mother felt his question.

She said, “The world rarely presents us a circumstance upon which we cannot simply act.”

Indeed, the only new circumstance that the world had presented to the grezzen species and its collective consciousness during the last thirty million years was man.

To his mother, humans were annoying competitors who did not fascinate her. But they fascinated him. It was extraordinary. One human could simply withhold its feelings and intentions from another human by failing to audibilize. Or it could audibilize things that were not real. The other human would be aware only of what it heard, and would change its behavior in response to a nonexistent stimulus. They called it lying.

Particularly vivid were the humans’ lies about places beyond the clouds. In some cases those places were incompletely realized visions of destinations that the human would ascend to upon death. In other cases those places seemed fully realized visualizations, as though the humans actually, physically, came and went there during their lifetimes. Either was patent fantasy. There was one world, and grezzenkind intended to remain in control of it.

The grezzen’s mother said. “It would not have been enough to kill only Cutler. The xenobiologists are not here yet, but they also suspect. There may yet be a way that I can destroy them all, and keep the secret from all the rest.”

“Mother, the risk if you fail is too great. The burden cannot rest on you alone.”

“You believe I am too weak, now, because I am old.”

“You are. That is the way of things. I also believe that two are stronger than one.”

“Of course. But I was only able to evade the ghosts by allowing Cutler to transport me. You have no such advantage.”

The grezzen paused. His race was perfectly adapted to dominate its world. Grezzen had no need for the mental deceits that humans used to survive their weaknesses. But that didn’t mean that his race couldn’t learn from humans, and quickly. Deception was unfamiliar to the grezzen, but the humans were excellent teachers by example.

He said to his mother, “Yes, I lack advantage. But I have a plan.”

Thirty-seven

I don’t know whether Kit stayed up all night burglarizing the contents of Cutler’s Reader. She woke me with fingers on my shoulder, while she wafted toward me the aroma of a cup of coffee brewed from Cutler’s private stock.

She said, “We need to start early, so we can stop before it rains this afternoon.”

I sat up and smiled. “Thanks. Does that taste as good as it smells?”

She smiled back as she set the cup on the table. “Nothing in the universe beats Truebean Colombian. Cutler notwithstanding, there’s a lot about Earth that you’d like, Parker.”

I sat at the table, massaged circulation into my right leg, and sipped.

Dressed already, in walking weight body armor, she held up a large-bore gunpowder revolver and squinted, counting cartridges. Then she pinwheeled the pistol around her trigger finger and plopped it into a belt holster, like a Trueborn-holo Earth cowgirl. Lifting Cutler’s Reader off the table, she wrapped it in plastek, then tucked it down behind her armor’s breastplate.

I smiled at her “You know a lot about Earth for a frontier gunslinger. Do you work for Cutler’s competition?”

She paused and stared at a ceiling corner. “You could say that.” Then she pointed at two overstuffed route-march packs alongside me. “There’s a pistol and holster next to your pack. We can’t carry those loads and unslung long guns too.”

I eyed the packs, each taller and thicker than I was from genitals to nose. “What are the odds against us walking out alive?”

Kit shrugged. “I don’t know. Nobody’s ever done it. At least nobody who survived to brag about it.”

It took us forty-five minutes to suit up. I tugged my pack onto my shoulders, and clucked as I adjusted its straps. “We carrying rocks?”

As she laid her Barrett on the table and field stripped it, she shook her head. “The packs are heavier than you would have carried in Legion basic, because we’re packing extra water. When we run out, we’ll have to drink local, but the purifying tabs make it taste like vomit.”

“I thought the local bacteria couldn’t infect humans.”

She shrugged into her pack, slung her Barrett, and clumped toward the hatch. I staggered out behind her into the morning heat and the humidity slapped me like a wet rag.

Kit said over her shoulder, “The local bacteria can’t hurt us. But when the rain runs over leaves, it picks up mite-sized insectlikes. They physically irritate the human bowel. Twenty-four hours after ingestion, the body starts expelling them. I drank rainwater off leaves when I first got here. Stupid. I lost eight pounds in two days. Be glad you weren’t that dumb, Parker.”

“Yeah.” My belly squealed as my pyloric valve suddenly decided it was a storm drain.

Thirty-eight

The grezzen limped just beyond the sight and hearing of the two humans as they inched back toward the ghosts that would protect them from him. Without their shell the two humans propelled themselves on two twiglike legs, slower than grazing woogs.

The journey they were attempting would take days to complete. More accurately, it would take forever to complete, because they were too slow and soft to survive the vast suite of predators that lay between them and their goal.

Unless, of course, they were protected. Already he felt a scavenger pack that had caught the two humans’ scent. The pack was closing on the pair from forward and left.

The grezzen, trotting on five legs with his numb forepaw elevated, gave the humans a wide berth and passed them. Then he interposed himself, unnoticed by the humans, between them and the pack. He displayed himself noiselessly to the scavengers, felt their astonishment and terror, then watched them scamper away to seek a less complicated meal.