Overkill (23 page)

The grezzen skidded all six legs to a stop in the confined space, then slammed a forepaw against the bars above his head, as though he might strike down the shell in which Cutler had escaped him. His effort served only to release his frustration, as well as his sorrow at his mother’s passing.

Now what? He felt and heard humans behind him, but none close ahead, so he continued to trot forward, out of curiosity. Soon he arrived at a pair of great doors, like the ones that protected the hole into which Kit and Jazen had retreated. These were barred, like the canyon roof, and against them, on the side away from him, lay a massive but wrecked human shell.

He advanced to the doors, then slapped at the bars. Most things that humans made he could slice with his claws, less easily than flesh, but more easily than a grezzen’s bone. These bars were made of sterner stuff. He scratched them at other spots, but with the same failed result.

Finally, he simply put his shoulder to the obstacle and shoved. The doors and the heap of human debris groaned, but did not give way.

He turned and trotted back the way he had come. He had covered half the distance to the canyon mouth when he heard a great thud that echoed toward him. Simultaneously he felt humans exult.

“Got him!”

“Yeah, well, maybe he’s got us. Keep your distance and keep your weapons sighted on those doors.”

“For how long?” The speaking human displayed a feeling of weariness.

“It’ll take most of the night to get the piping and hoses up the hill.” This the grezzen did not understand.

“You sure it’s in there? What if it breaks out the other end, then doubles back on us?” The weary human was also anxious.

“The gates on the other end are strong as these. And they got a bus lying against them. Every bar in the Cageway’s newsteel. We’ll be fine.” The dominant human spoke with a confidence that the grezzen felt was false.

“Those dead mercs in town were supposed to be fine.”

The grezzen slowed as he approached the end of the canyon through which he had entered. As he feared, the humans had now blocked it with doors similar to those at the canyon’s opposite end. They had trapped him.

No. He had trapped himself. In his rage, and his disdain for human capability, he had underestimated them again. And they had surprised him again.

He now found himself confined. Restrained. Humiliated in the way that Cutler had humiliated his mother.

He peered ahead toward the closed gates. Unlike the gates at the opposite end, which he had been unable to budge, no heavy debris buttressed this obstacle.

He paused in the darkness. Each breath rumbled and echoed as he filled his lungs. He allowed his rage, at his mother’s death, at Cutler’s escape, at his own miscalculations and hubris, to swell, knowing it would strengthen him.

Crouching back on his haunches, he gathered himself, then sprang forward. He accelerated over the distance that separated him from the gates, speed multiplying his mass. His shoulder struck the gates at the hinge point where one gate connected to the rock wall. At that hinge point, the gates should be most vulnerable, just like a striper’s knee was vulnerable.

The gates held fast, and he rebounded and staggered backward.

A crackling storm of human stinger pellets struck the gate bars, exploding bits of fire in all directions. The pellets couldn’t penetrate his integument, but if one struck an eye, he could be injured.

He retreated as the humans beyond the gates yelped.

One shouted, “Shut up! And hold your fire!”

“Sonuvabitch! Did you see that thing? It’s as big as that Trueborn’s crawler tank back at the warehouse.”

“Bigger. Reload. The little one back there nearly wrecked that tank. This one could still wreck those gates.”

The humans need not have worried. The gates at both ends of the canyon had proven robust. Given time to study them for weaknesses and nuance, it might be possible to solve them, but not while harassed by humans with stingers.

For thirty million years, grezzen had taken any and all competition head on, because that had been the easiest way to win. That didn’t mean that they weren’t clever enough to take on competition obliquely, if need be.

He twisted his head, and looked up at the dark and light stripe pattern made by the roof bars and clouds far above them.

The grezzen stretched tall, teetered on his hind legs, and extended his mid legs for balance. Then he reached up with his forepaws and sawed at the thick roof bars with his claws. Historically, the materials the humans used to make their shells were harder than bone, harder than most rock, but when grezzen had tried, they had been able to cut through them.

He worked until the lack of circulation to his uplifted limbs weakened them, then dropped down on all sixes. When he examined the bars, he saw that his efforts had barely scratched them.

His ancestors’ good hunting in this canyon had taught the humans yet another lesson. He examined the points at which the bars that imprisoned him were attached to the rock walls. The humans had extended the bars into the rock walls in the way that a tree extended its roots into soil, probably deeply. Trees were deceptively difficult to uproot, rock was harder than soil, and the humans apparently planned some further action against him by the time daylight returned.

He paced the narrow canyon that imprisoned him. Now what?

Sixty-one

The Abrams, scarred by its earlier encounter with the grezzen that Cutler’s goons had killed, squatted in the fenced yard of the warehouse amid smoldering rubble. I ran to it, and mounted over the intact fender. Dropping inside, I wriggled into the driver’s seat, and pressed the starter. My heart thumped, then it whined to life like an old friend.

With my head poked up through the open driver’s hatch, I pumped my fist. “Alright!”

Kit had followed me, and crouched on the fender. “Parker, what are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that you’re right. If somebody kidnaped my mother then killed her, I’d be mad, too.” I jerked my thumb at the turret. “Crawl in there, and check the ammo and fuel.”

She pointed in the direction that the fuel tanker had gone. “Ammunition? Parker, you can’t make war on those people! Idiocy’s not a crime. And if it was, nobody elected you sheriff.”

“I thought you were on the grezzen’s side.”

“I am! But I don’t kill people just because they act in reasonable fear for their lives.”

“Just tell me two things. Will that thing do what you tell it to?”

“The grezzen? The only orders it’s ever taken were from its mother.”

“I’m not talking about orders. Is it smart enough to act in its own self interest?”

Kit cocked her head. “I think so. Probably more rationally than you do, because this sounds—”

I held up my palm. “Second question. Do you know how to fly? Seriously?”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m certified on everything from sailplanes to multi-engine shallow orbitals. If there was a lesson my parents could buy me, they did.”

I jerked my thumb at the turret again. “You’re hired. Climb in.”

She crossed her arms and stared at me. “What are you thinking?”

I levered the driver’s seat up so that, with passive night goggles, I could see ahead and drive without Kit directing me from the commander’s cupola. “I’ll tell you on the way. You expected the grezzen to trust you. How ‘bout you trust me, for once?”

Ten minutes later, we were out of town and winding uphill along the narrow gravel road that detoured around the Cageway.

I finished explaining my plan to Kit, then drove on in silence.

After five minutes, she said over the intercom. “Parker, that’s insane. But I like it.”

Sixty-two

The grezzen paced its prison while it sifted among the threads of the humans beyond the gates.

“We’re gonna need more piping. And a portable welder.”

“I just talked to Tucker. That’s on the way.”

“And an inline pump. Kerosene doesn’t flow uphill.”

“And fast.”

“Look, that thing’s not going anywhere.”

“Don’t underestimate a grezz. I’ll believe it’s done when I see it burn.”

Burn? Humans controlled fire. The grezzen was beginning to suspect that they controlled a great many things beyond what his race had understood. But at the moment, fire was his immediate concern.

He probed deeper into the humans’ consciousness. He saw humans moving thin logs, dragging them up the hill alongside the canyon. That was actually happening. He also found a vision of water poured down onto him. But it wasn’t water, it was fire.

Was that a vision of something the humans could do, or merely something they wished they could do?

He searched his prison until he located a narrow overhang beneath which he could shelter a part of his bulk. Water extinguished fire. He found a rain-filled depression on the canyon floor as long and wide as he was, but no deeper than his ankles. Perhaps he could roll in the water.

But the more he thought the more he understood that he had no satisfactory options.

High above him, beyond the barred ceiling of his prison, he heard clicks of metal against metal as the first humans arrived. He heard them whisper, but only when he felt them could he understand the meaning of their words.

“Can you see it?”

“I think so. Hell, I dunno. It could be a boulder.”

“Use the light.”

“I don’t want to spook it.”

Then the first whisperer spoke to others, distant. “How long ‘til we’re ready?”

“It’s slow work in the dark.”

“Be light soon.”

“Not soon enough for me.”

The grezzen turned onto his side, then scraped the canyon wall beneath the overhang with all six paws, to enlarge his shelter.

He paused and regarded the tiny pile of scrapings his efforts made, and the even tinier dent in the rock.

It was hopeless, but he kept digging because he had no better idea.

Sixty-three

“Parker! We’re sliding over the edge!”

I corrected our course, and the Abrams’ upslope fender squealed as it scraped rock, and sixty-nine tons teetered back onto the narrow trail that ran parallel to the Cageway.

I stopped the tank and flexed my fingers, stiff from clutching the steering yoke’s grips. The view through passive night snoopers was narrow, like seeing the world using a pair of toilet tissue roll spools as binoculars. Slow going.

The good news was the sky was lightening. The bad news was that we had been driving all night and our detour still hadn’t brought us to the Cageway’s port-end gates.

Kit was monitoring the vigilantes’ progress by eavesdropping on their Handtalk conversations. I asked her, “How close are they to finished?”

“Too close. But that doesn’t mean drive faster!”

I sighed, twisted the throttle, and we inched forward again, downslope.

Sixty-four

“Can you see it yet?”

Slowly, the grezzen pressed himself back beneath the overhanging ledge then froze. Every hunter knows that movement attracts attention. Now, for the first time, he was the hunted and not the hunter.

In the distance he now heard an ongoing metallic, human buzz that echoed off the hillsides that formed the canyon’s walls.

“No. Can’t see a thing.”

“Goddammit, it’s daylight!”

“Still dark down in the canyon, ‘til the sun gets higher. Spotlights won’t reach. I think maybe it’s hiding under a ledge.”

He felt conversation from a new voice. “Soak this and toss it down.”

A moment later something clanged the bars above his head, then fell through to the canyon floor, four of his body lengths distant.

Fire! He shrank back. The tree branch just lay there, wrapped in something, burning with an alien, smoky pungency. The odor resembled the scent humans’ shells left on the wind when they moved.

“I dunno. I maybe see something.”

“Try more torches!”

Four more flaming branches tumbled into his prison. Soon, black smoke filled the narrow space.

“Well, that was fucking brilliant. If it is down there, now we can’t see it for the smoke.”

The grezzen remained still and, in time, the small fires died.

“Still can’t see anything.”

“Pump down the kerosene and see what happens.”

The buzzing sound grew louder, then rain spattered the bars above, and trickled down onto the canyon floor.

It was not, he knew, rain, but the same pungent, greasy liquid that had coated the burning branches. The rain grew to a torrent, so drenching that puddles formed on the rock floor.

The liquid dripped down from the overhanging ledge, soaking the fur on his left rear thigh, which, no matter how small he compressed himself, was exposed.

Another burning branch tumbled down through the bars, landed in a puddle of the liquid, and set it aflame.

The grezzen shrank back even further as the flames spread across the dampened rock toward him. The flames sprang at his hind leg, and set his fur afire.

As he felt the heat, he howled, more from surprise and fear than pain.

“You hear that?”

He sprang from his hiding place, as though he could run from the flames, beating at them with his left middle leg.

“There! You see it?”

Bam. Bam. Bam.

The humans’ pellets struck around him, one glancing harmlessly off his flank.

“It’son fire! We got it!”

Bam. Bam. Bam.

“Damn, that thing’s fast!”

The grezzen sprang through the smoke and flame, found the water pool, and rolled through the muddy liquid. The flames on him died, and he darted through the smoke, away from the spot where he had hidden.