Overkill (20 page)

I shook my head. “I didn’t. Like I said,
you
told
me
something was coming.”

We stared at each other. Then we each turned around and peered out into the gathering morning ground fog.

Forty-six

The grezzen sat again on the bluff, peering down. Below, the two humans, stings cradled in their forelimbs, skittered across the dripping bench of the falls. Low morning fog swirled around their tiny feet, and they teetered beneath bundles nearly as large as they were.

Grezzen needed to buy nothing, and had less to sell. So the grezzen had no concept of business. But business was what he was back in this morning. With him as unseen escort, the humans continued toward their home base.

Regrettably, the humans’ suspicions about the capabilities of his kind were now heightened. But his warning had been subtle enough that they remained uncertain of his presence, much less of his capacity to feel them.

Meanwhile, the humans, their foot placements on the slippery rock ledge obscured by fog, extended their forelimbs like gort wings for balance. The female stumbled, and the male enveloped her with both forelimbs to prevent her from plunging into the water, six of her body lengths below.

“Thanks, Parker.”

They lingered, ventral side against ventral side, longer than necessary for her to regain her balance, and the grezzen felt from each of them mutual affection, and pleasure at the physical contact.

The grezzen shook his head, surprised in three ways.

First, he was surprised that a species which balanced on just two limbs of its meager four had survived the engine of evolution at all.

Second, Parker had last night endured pain, indeed risked his continued existence, to protect another human who was not his mother. Kit—a corollary, lesser surprise was that he now thought of them by their human identifiers—seemed to have developed a reciprocal attachment to Parker, who was not her son.

The grezzen’s brief, anonymous warning to them the previous night was the first grezzen-to-human communication made since the first humans tried to sting the first grezzen decades ago. That first encounter had ended badly for the humans. So would this one.

The third surprise was that the prospect of dismembering Kit and Parker, inevitable though it remained, no longer pleased him.

While he waited for Kit and Parker to make their way out of sight of the river, so that he could replicate their crossing, he reached out. “Mother?”

No reply. His contacts with her during Kit and Parker’s labored passage to the river had been spotty. He had attributed it to her advancing dotage. But it became apparent that Cutler and his subservients were able to induce lethargy in her, similar to what he experienced from his recent sting.

He was bounding down from the bluff, testing his forepaw and finding it fully recovered, when his mother’s reply came back to him, at last.

“I am here.” Her thread was so weak that it flickered.

He felt, and saw through her, that she was now enclosed in a human nest far beyond the ghosts, and therefore inaccessible to him. Just beyond this enclosure he felt humans as numerous as a woog herd. So her prison was one chamber within a vaster human nest. The vision of humans scurrying and tumbling, often touching, reminded him of splitting a log and finding larvae swarming within.

He watched as Cutler approached the round-headed Liu. “I should fire you! All of you!”

Liu’s anger welled as he responded. “He was off duty. He had a drink.”

Cutler responded, “Duty? A discharged legionnaire’s duty is to do what he contracted to do. And that was keep his mouth shut.”

Liu waved his forelimb at the grezzen’s mother. “The locals got nothing to worry about from this thing. It’s half-dead. Invite ’em in to see for themselves.”

“That’s beside the point! The natives are restless, thanks to him. I paid for discretion.”

The prospect of pay withheld swelled anxiety in Liu. “Mr. Cutler, the main thing you pay us for is security. My men can handle anything a bunch of civilians got.” Indeed, Liu thought. “And we’d like to.”

Cutler expelled his breath. “This Libertarian republic’s nothing but a mob armed to the teeth. If they come after the monster, it won’t be with torches and pitchforks.”

Liu’s anxiety turned to anger, and he touched a small stinger attached to his waist. “Tell ’em to bring it on!”

“My scientists won’t be able to work if your goons are out there cracking skulls. I’ve brought a lot of resources across a lot of space for this.”

The grezzen thought, “Mother, what if there really is more space than the world? What if the humans are from another place?”

“Nonsense. There is nowhere else. The others are within this nest. I will simply wait for them to show themselves.”

“At least wait for me.”

“That’s not an outcome I can force.” Her thread weakened again. “I will rest, now.”

The grezzen’s ability to see and feel the humans faded as her awareness lapsed again. He picked up his pace and wished his humans here would do the same.

Forty-seven

The night following the night by the river, when we stopped, Kit and I traded off sleep and turns on watch. It was less fun than getting acquainted, though more fun than getting eaten. But except for the river snake, nothing much bothered us on our walk back.

On the fourth day, our packs were lighter by what we had eaten and drunk along the way. They weren’t lightened by expended ammunition, because we hadn’t had to shoot much. All in all, we covered ground faster than either of us had expected to.

We had been forcing our pace for three hours when Kit pointed up at a tree, higher than a woog’s shoulder would rub, and pumped her fist. “The TAP Line, Parker!”

A day-glo lime marker tacked into the tree bark winked down at us. The visual marker designating the Transponder Array Perimeter was meaningless to the local fauna, but a welcome sight to a couple of scared, tired humans. In neither of our minds had we expected to cross it today, much less this morning.

A homing-limpet mine field, which was basically all the Rover ’bot line amounted to, was bordered by transponders augured into the ground at intervals, and by durable visual markers, like an invisible fence for livestock. The TAP line prevented the Rovers from wandering out while it also warned friendlies not to wander in.

I glanced up at the marker. We were now five hundred yards from safety, at least safety from grezzen. “Almost home.”

Ahead of me, Kit nodded. “Almost. Once we make another five hundred yards, if a grezzen comes after us, it’s committing suicide.”

“You think rat bastard Cutler made it back to Eden with the female?”

Kit shrugged. “Probably. The Rovers are adjusted to respond to the mass and motion of a grezzen. As far as they’re concerned, she’s just part of a cargo trailer. Cutler had enough fuel to make it back here and top off his supply. We made it back
without
a tank. I don’t know why Cutler would have had trouble making it back
with
one.”

In fact, except for the river snake, we had walked without incident for four days through a forest so deadly that I had barely survived it one night.

I shifted my pack against my sweat soaked shirt back. “You ever wonder why it was so easy? On Yavet we say that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.”

She sighed. “On Earth, we say don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Parker.”

I rolled my eyes. There was a polite word the ‘zines used to smooth over these Trueborn references that the rest of us were assumed to understand. Terracentric.

I shook my head, as if a bug had crawled under my hat, and shuddered. Somehow, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t the only party to this conversation who had never seen a horse.

Forty-eight

The grezzen planted all six legs in the moss of the forest floor and stopped still and stunned as his two humans’ thoughts struck him. He had trailed them, undetected, at a distance that he had come to understand represented a half mile to them. He had been prepared to creep stealthily even closer, and thereby secure safe passage through the ghosts. Now, without warning, his plan was shattered.

Grezzen didn’t tell jokes, much less good news-bad news jokes. But the good news for a telepath was that he knew exactly what the other guy was thinking. That was also the bad news. The grezzen’s two humans had been surprised when they so suddenly were about to walk beneath the Rovers’ protective umbrella. And so he had also been surprised.

Also, Kit and Jazen had never until now had occasion to think about precisely how Cutler had provided the grezzen’s mother safe passage through the ghosts. So he had not known. The grezzen had simply extrapolated from what he observed in his world. He knew that small runners moved closely among the woogs, and thereby avoided mid-sized predators. He assumed he would be able to avoid the ghosts in the same way, by staying close to his humans. But now he saw that his two humans—he didn’t know when, precisely, he had begun to think of Jazen and Kit as his—would not have kept the ghosts away in any event. What now? His mother would know. She always knew.

“Mother?” No reply.

He waited. “Mother?” Again, nothing. Her inattention was becoming intolerable.

Finally, he exhaled so vigorously that brush stirred. His two humans suspected, and so remained a threat to his race. His mother’s last instructions to him had been to kill the two humans. Kit and Jazen weren’t protected yet. But if he delayed even an instant longer, killing them would become impossible for him.

He sprang forward, and accelerated across the few yards that separated him from Kit and Jazen. He wasn’t pleased at what he was about to do. But he was resolute.

Forty-nine

Crash
.

Kit and I took off running for the Line at the sound, unslinging our Barretts as we went.

I looked over my shoulder, hoping to see a blundering woog, maybe a striper that both barrels from a Barrett could discourage.

Instead I saw three red eyes, tusks, fangs, and claws bearing down on us so fast they were blurred. Stopping to fire the Barrett at a charging grezzen merely wasted time. I saw Kit drop her pack, and shrugged out of mine, too.

Maybe the grezzen would stop to investigate.

It roared as it trampled right over them.

We were still three hundred yards from the Line, and the grezzen would be on us in thirty yards. Hopeless. After all I had been through, after all Kit and I had been through, this was the way it would end for me. I thought of my mother who I would never find, now. I thought of Orion, who had sacrificed so much just to bring me to this.

Kit stopped running. She turned, and faced the grezzen.

It was fifty yards from us, now, looming larger than a house, glaring down at us. Its growl and footfalls shook the ground beneath my boots.

I spun, ran back, and grabbed her arm. “Come on!”

She shrugged off my hand and stood facing the grezzen.

The grezzen, twenty yards away, raised its clawed forepaws to swat us dead with a single blow.

I raised my gun.

Fifty

The grezzen raised a forepaw to strike as Kit stood tiny in the grezzen’s path on two hindlimbs, forelimbs folded, Jazen at her side.

Jazen raised his stinger, though the grezzen felt in Jazen that the male knew the gesture was futile. Jazen’s last thoughts were, as the grezzen supposed his own would be, for his mother.

Kit pushed down the tip of Jazen’s stinger, and the grezzen felt her, as strong a female presence as his mother had ever been. “If you kill us, you know that your mother will be lost. But alive we can help you save her.”

Kit’s thought so stunned the grezzen that he froze, barely a forepaw’s length in front of the two tiny humans. He peered down at them and cocked his head.

No, Kit couldn’t know. Not after all the efforts of all the grezzen over all the years to conceal their race’s ability and intelligence. She wasn’t sure. She was just casting out a thought. She, like all humans, understood him and his race to be inarticulate brutes. At least, she couldn’t be sure that grezzen were otherwise.

But even as he thought this, he realized his blunder. His pause had just confirmed for her his awareness and his intelligence. But he could still kill them and the secret would die with them, as it had died with the male called Bauer. He rumbled at the two of them, raised his paw again.

Fifty-one

I tugged at my Barrett, but Kit kept her hand wrapped around the muzzle, while the grezzen loomed, staring, above us, ten feet away. Its breath rumbled like a diesel and echoed through the forest that surrounded the three of us.

As she stared back at the beast, she said to me, “No, Parker! First, your gun can’t hurt him. Second, if he were going to kill us, he would have by now.”

I swung the Barrett back and forth from Kit to the grezzen. “You two are talking?”

She kept staring at the grezzen and it kept looking down at her with three giant eyes. It sat back on its four rear legs without taking its eyes off of us.

Kit shook her head as she stared up. “He’s not talking back. Not now, probably not for a while. But he’s been eavesdropping. Haven’t you?”

My jaw dropped. “Goddammit! You’ve been talking to him the whole time we’ve been out here?”

Kit shook her head again. “Not ‘til right now. There was no point trying unless the grezzen perceived a benefit in listening. Which they obviously haven’t for decades. But when this one reached out and warned us about the river snake, I realized that he wanted us alive. Jazen, our chances of walking out after Cutler abandoned us were less than one in ten. The reason we made it this far has to be that we’ve had a bodyguard.”

I squinted up at the monster. It didn’t look friendly or intelligent. Its mouth dripped greasy, gray saliva. What it looked was hungry. But it hadn’t killed us. And there was no doubt that it would have made a very effective bodyguard. And there had been the constant feeling that someone was listening to me.