Overkill (29 page)

As he backpedaled, he tried to think. He could simply stand still. These little stingers wouldn’t harm him, and the hard shells were disciplined, pragmatic little things. Eventually they would calm down. But the cage that would replace the one he had just destroyed would be as strong as the one in which he had almost burned alive back home. There would be no escape, no pursuit of Cutler.

Despite the damage to his plan, he still felt that his reflexive intervention to prevent Jazen’s death had been unavoidable, and not even inconsistent with the role of beast that he was playing. But it had complicated matters without advancing his cause. Slaughtering these humans would make matters even worse.

He continued backing up, through a series of tubular chambers of decreasing diameter, until he could retreat no further.

Now what? These humans were subservient to Captain Halder, who always seemed to know what was going on. He sifted threads, searching for Halder’s.

Three of the humans in front of him brought forward a larger stinger, one with attached legs. Why, among all the human apparatus he had seen recently, did it look familiar?

Then he found Halder’s thread, and brought it forward. Halder’s heart rate was elevated, and he was moving quickly for an elderly human, so he puffed as he spoke aloud. “What’s up, Russ?”

“Sorry to wake you, Sir. Firearm discharge alarm aft.”

“False, I hope? ‘Cause I’m tripping over my pants running for the bridge.”

“Keep running, sir. A passenger got hold of a checked weapon prior to disembarkation.”

“How the hell did that happen?”

“Convinced a steward that a pistol case was a camera bag. Said he wanted to take a picture of the Moon as we went by. Sir, I had the Marine detachment armor up on the move. They’re engaged back there now.”

“Good boy. A hard-shell platoon to take down one nutball may be overkill. But there’s no such thing as overkill where my ship’s concerned.”

“Uh. It’s not the shooter they’ve engaged. The animal’s loose.”

“What? Has it killed anybody?”

“Apparently not yet. The animal’s too big to enter the populated spaces forward. The Marines’ve forced it aft, into the engineering spaces. When it’s cornered inside the starboard impeller boom, they’ll kill it.”

“What’s Colonel Born say about that?”

“Dunno. We paged her. No response yet.”

“She said that thing eats small arms rounds for breakfast.”

“I remembered. When the Marines drew armor, I had ’em draw a rocket launcher, too.”

There was a long silence. Then Halder said, “Russ, your first posting was internal security officer aboard the
Iwo Jima
.”

“Boo-yah, sir.”

“How could a terrorist bring down a cruiser?”

“Sir, a terrorist couldn’t. A
Bastogne
—class can take any punch. And this guy’s a goof, not a terrorist.”

“Hypothetically, then.”

“Hypothetically? Sever a cruiser’s impellers and it flies like a brick. Actually, just cut one boom and residual momentum would snap the other one like straw. I suppose a small explosion in a confined—oh, Jesus!”

“Russ, freeze those jarheads! Now!”

The humans in front of the grezzen did, indeed, have jars covering their heads. The grezzen recognized the stinger. It was the kind that had killed his mother. The jarheads intended to use it to kill him, and based upon Halder’s extraordinary anxiety, that would be a very bad thing.

The grezzen crouched and watched the three jarheads manipulate their stinger.

One said, “Fire!”

The grezzen leapt over their jar heads, landed beyond them, and ran forward, into the larger chambers through which he had retreated.

Boom
.

A flash brighter than a lightning strike bloomed. He turned as he ran, and saw a great black void open behind him. A maelstrom sucked him back toward the void, so violently that he was forced to dig his claws into the deck plates to arrest his slide. The jarheads tumbled like insects on the wind, and vanished into the blackness.

Then a great door behind him contracted the way a prey animal’s eye did when exposed suddenly to bright light, and closed out the void.

Calm and silence surrounded him. He found himself once again alone in the cargo bay.

He found Halder’s thread again.

The Captain said, “Oh, shit.”

Seventy-nine

I ran through the deserted passages that honeycombed the aft engineering spaces until I dead-ended against the outer hull, in the circumferential passage of the aft portside lifeboat deck. I looked both ways. Nothing. There was never a purser’s mate around when you needed one. The low lighting reflected from cold rows of hatches that had once led to lifeboats for an infantry division that wasn’t here.

Jack staggered into the lifeboat deck, wheezing, his shirt sweated through, but his gun aimed at my chest.

I had counted four shots, and his automatic held nine, even if he hadn’t reloaded.

I said, “Smoking’ll kill you, Jack.”

“You wish, you little prick. You’ll pay—”

A deep and distant groaning vibrated the deck beneath our feet. Suddenly, I felt lighter. That meant that the
Midway
’s rotational gravity had decreased, which was bad. Or something had interfered with the main impellers, and the whole gravity cocoon had gone south, which was far worse.

Red lights flashed above all the lifeboat hatches, and the alert klaxon hooted.

The purser, the one to whom I had been a dick extraordinaire about lifeboats, voiced over the klaxons.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have encountered mechanical difficulties. Captain Halder has requested that you move calmly, but immediately, to the lifeboat station nearest you. Please do not, I repeat, not, try to reach your assigned station but proceed to the nearest available boat, and await assistance from a uniformed crew member.”

Crap. It was worse. The purser was blowing off assigned lifeboat stations. That meant that whatever had gone wrong, it was going wronger fast.

Jack coughed, and raised his eyebrows. “Goddamn!” He paused, his only eye wide. Then he waved his pistol at the hatches that stretched to our left and right. “Lucky us, Parker. You and me got lifeboats out the ass. All we need’s a uniformed crew member.”

Something else groaned, then there seemed to be a great snap, and the
Midway
shuddered. Objects a mile long seldom shudder.

I pointed at the hatches. “Jack, the embarked infantry used to bunk back here. About twenty years ago. You think there are still lifeboats behind those hatches?”

He paled beneath his beard, then he stood and waved his pistol barrel to march me ahead. “Then we go forward. To the front of the ship. We know there’s boats there.”

I shook my head and stayed put. “Those groans? Hull breaches. There’s probably sixteen decks between us and the nearest functional lifeboat station. Every hatch in every bulkhead in every deck on this ship locked down automatically at the first pressure drop. We can’t get anywhere that’ll do us any good.”

His jaw dropped. “Son of a bitch.”

The purser’s voice came on over the klaxons again. “Ladies and gentlemen, if you haven’t boarded a lifeboat at this time, please board any available boat. Family groups may have to separate, but there’s plenty of room.” She spoke slowly, but her voice was an octave higher.

I stepped to the nearest hatch, scrubbed years of grime off its inspection porthole, and peered out. Where there should have been the ass end of a lifeboat there was only an empty tube that led to black, open space.

As I watched, a red spark flew past the opening. The
Midway
was already skipping across the thin upper wisps of the Earth’s atmosphere. It was free falling so much faster than the speed of sound that friction was spalling red-hot steel bits off the hull. As the dead ship dropped into thicker air, it would arc across the fleecy skies as a streak of flame, then strike the cool green hills of Earth in the biggest explosion Trueborns had seen since the War.

I stepped to the next port while I pointed Jack in the opposite direction. “Start checking those other ports. And pray somebody was too lazy to scrap every one of the boats that used to be in these bays.”

Eighty

The grezzen felt an upwelling of panic, the sort he felt when woogs were stampeded by his scent. The panic shuddered the thousands of threads of the humans with whom he now rushed through space. He understood that the jarheads had inadvertently wounded the
Midway
. But he didn’t know what that meant for his future. Or for the futures of Jazen and Kit, an ungrezzenlike concern that he now found entirely natural.

He sifted until he found Kit’s thread. She was trapped in a mass of humans moving in one direction, while she struggled to move in the other. One of the others wept.

A male thrust his foreclaw against Kit’s shoulder.

Kit said, “Let me go!”

“Ma’am, get in the boat.”

“There’s somebody aft.”

“I’m sure they just boarded another boat. There’s plenty of capacity. You really need—”

Kit folded a foreclaw and struck the male with it. “I’m not taking your word for it!”

A second male seized Kit’s opposite shoulder. “Colonel Born?”

“Tell this clown to let me go aft, Lieutenant!”

“Ma’am, every hatch aft of us is locked down. There’s no way to get back to the animal—”

“It’s not the animal who I’m—”

“—And they’ve killed it by now, anyway.”

“What? No!”

“Went rogue back there.”

“That’s ludicrous.”

“Certainly, Ma’am. In the boat. Now.”

“Get your hands off me, you fucking squids!”

The two males hurled her into a small space, then sealed her in with several other humans.

Kit’s irrationality confused him. She usually made sense.

Halder, also, usually made sense. The grezzen sought and found Halder’s thread.

“All the boats are loaded, sir. Including this one. But I’d prefer to be on the bridge with you, Captain.”

“And I’d prefer you to be right where you are, Russ. As I recall the chain of command, Captain’s preference wins.”

“Then you should be in a boat, too. Sir, you can’t steer a flaming rock. With respect, going down with the ship is old school crap.”

“I’m not staying for show, Russ. If one system on a B-class is over-engineered, it’s the auxiliary electrics. This thing’ll be in pieces on the ground and the lights’ll still be on. If I vary the aerodynamics by opening and closing the docking bay doors, I can
steer. A little.”

“Sir?”

“I may be able to hold her stable ‘til all the boats are clear. Then skid her down on the oblique someplace out in the middle of nowhere. That beats auguring in on top of downtown Seattle. Old school can be a pretty good school, Russ. Remember that when you get your own ship.”

Halder and the younger male were silent for a time.

Then Halder said, “Hull temperature’s rising. All boats. Prepare for release on my mark.”

The grezzen’s heart beat twice.

Halder said, “Mark!”

The grezzen physically felt hundreds of tiny shudders through the
Midway
’s hull, and felt thousands of anxious threads recede as they fell away from him.

Halder’s thread remained serene, and focused on manipulating the
Midway
’s travel through the sky, though it was now apparent that he was soon going to die. Halder could have left the
Midway
along with the others. For such a self-absorbed species, humans could be so selfless.

Selflessness was so ungrezzenlike. But the grezzen thought that perhaps it could be a good thing.

Now the
Midway
began to shudder and buck in the way that the ground could shake if lightning struck close by. Also, the walls that confined him began to radiate heat.

He reached out and found the threads of a handful of humans, not those who had been within the
Midway
. They rode atop a shell that bobbed upon blue water, many human miles below him. Through their eyes he saw the
Midway
, and so, in a way, himself. The ship boiled high above the humans, across a sky without clouds, that was the color of the water. The
Midway
had become a flaming streak, moving so fast that the thunder of its passage arrived only later.

One of the humans on the water whispered,
“Madre de dios!”

The warm walls around the grezzen glowed red, and then white, and the air became hot as he breathed. Heat expanded metal, and he heard bulkheads groan and metal creak and tear. Electrical conduits twisted and sparked.

Something else had changed about the air that surrounded him in the cargo bay. It was filled with smoke.

Kerosene poured from one of the ruptured vessels in the cargo bay. Sparks ignited it, and fire swept toward him. He retreated until he was backed up against the elevator shaft that led back to the docking bay through which he had been brought aboard the
Midway
so long ago.

He turned toward the shaft and began tearing at its steel wall, seeking any escape from the encroaching flames. The roar of the fire, and of the
Midway
’s passage across the sky, increased to thunder.

The more he tore at the steel, the weaker he felt. It troubled him that he was about to die not proudly, but in panic like a stampeded woog.

Finally, consciousness slipped away.

Eighty-one

The great ship was still, and the grezzen found himself alive within it. There was no fire.

He didn’t know that he had saved his own life. In his panic, he had torn open an elevator shaft that led to a docking bay that Captain Halder had opened to the atmosphere. In this way he had slewed the
Midway
onto a new trajectory, toward a landing site where it would do less damage.