Overkill (3 page)

“But it would hurt?”

He shook his head. “Nah. Your hand would swell up like a sweet potato for a while. You’d puke for a couple days.”

He jerked his thumb at a door behind him. “I sleep in there. It’s cramped. But you’re welcome to sleep out here in the freight bay ‘til the shuttle taxis over from the passenger terminal.”

I stared down at the yellow goo on the floor. “Any more of these in here?”

He pointed at the space behind his counter, and rapped on the countertop. “I spread Bugout back here every morning. You can bed down fine. And I keep a shovel under the counter to whack ’em before they get too close.”

A ringing testimonial for Bugout.

Ten minutes later the clerk retired to a back room and turned out the lights. The room seemed uncomfortably vast to a Yavet native like me. I wedged behind the clerk’s counter, curled on the Bugoff-dusted floor, then laid the shovel close at hand and kneaded my duffle into a pillow. Lemon bug legs tapped, somewhere in the dark. Like a bounty hunter’s boots in the corridor outside a down-level Kube’s wall back home, when I was four.

With my eyes squeezed shut, I could still hear Orion’s voice as I clung to her warmth.

She touched her fingers to my lips and whispered, “It’s all right, babe. He’ll walk right on past.”

The bounty hunter coughed, a squealing wheeze.

Orion said, “It’s Jack, alright. I should’ve killed him the first time he came after you. The smoking will, but not soon enough.”

“Why didn’t you?”

She sighed. “All life is precious, Jazen. Even a killer’s. And especially an Illegal’s. That’s a thing that should never be forgotten.”

“Am I one?”

My fingers rested on her lips, so even in the dark I could feel her smile. “A killer? Never. An Illegal? Sure, but that’s just a stupid name thought up by stupid people.”

“No. I mean am I a thing that should never be forgotten?”

“What? I’d never forget you. Why would you ever even wonder about a thing like that?”

“They forgot me.”

She squeezed me tighter. “Oh, sweetheart, your parents didn’t forget you. Never, ever.”

I hugged her tighter, and I felt her tears on my fingertips.

She said, “It’s complicated. You’ll understand, someday.”

“Will Jack get me before someday?”

“Never, ever. I persuaded him. Now he won’t mess with us.”

“What’s persuaded?”

“They call him One-eyed Jack, now. We’ll leave it at that.”

The coughing outside faded, then disappeared.

Like she did every night, Orion rocked me, hummed, and I closed my eyes.

I woke in the warehouse on Dead End to gray daylight, and someone whispering, “Come to momma.”

I creaked to my knees, peeked over the counter, out across the warehouse, and Dead End surprised me again.

Five

Twenty feet across the warehouse, the speaker knelt, back to me, silhouetted in an up-angled ramp that ended in an open roll-up door through which showed a sagging gauze of morning fog. She wore dusty khaki bush shorts, a scale-armor tunic, and over-theknee leather boots that I guessed reached just higher than lemon bugs could jump. The bare limbs that showed were tan and lean. She held her broad-brimmed leather hat at ground level, while she scooped at a lemon bug with it.

The little monster sprang at her. She trapped it in her hat’s upturned crown, then flicked it outside, where it landed legs-tosky, on moist asphalt. The creature righted itself and scurried away.

The woman turned away from the door, re-creasing her hat crown with short-nailed fingers. She moved with the weary economy of an infantry soldier, or at least of someone used to hard work and grit.

I stood, cleared my throat, and she jerked her eyes up toward me.

I sucked a breath. Weary she might be, but her eyes were Caribbean blue. So were Cutler’s wife’s, however this woman’s looked not only luminous but birth-natural.

I rubbed circulation into the repaired leg, then limped up the ramp and joined her at the door. Then I pointed at the spot where the lemon bug had been. “I thought lemon bugs were eight-legged rats.”

She turned, unsurprised, and shrugged. “Everything in this universe has its place. I take it you’re claiming freight, too.” She nodded to me. “I’m Kit Born.”

“Jazen Parker. I—” The thunder of chemical engines cut me off, as the shuttle that had brought me down taxied into the thick barred cage that formed the shuttle hangar. The place was big enough that it enclosed two more parked shuttles.

Even at idle, the shuttle’s engines shook the floor beneath my boots, and the tang of their kerosene exhaust sank down the ramp into the warehouse.

Interstellar cruisers drifted down to most planets’ spaceports quieter than eight-legged rats, because C-drive manipulates gravity. But drift approaches take time, and time is money. Cruisers served downgraded outworlds like Dead End only by dropping off in parking orbit containerized freight, mail, and passenger modules in a constant parade. It was up to the locals to shuttle the modules down to surface. The heat-scorched wedges out on the tarmac were old-tech, but they were the thread that tied Dead End’s tiny colony to the rest of mankind.

As the Downshuttle’s brakes squealed, a ’bot tug clamped the nose gear of one of the other two, which would become the morning Upshuttle.

The rear cargo ramp of the Downshuttle that had delivered me here whined down.

The first container that skated down the shuttle’s ramp was unpainted plasteel the size of a family electrovan, labelled “Danger—’bots contain explosives,” and far smaller than the one I was waiting for.

Somewhere beneath Kit Born’s armor lurked a female form, which meant . . . When the shuttle’s roar died, I displayed my detective skills. “You must be the Line Wrangler I heard about.”

She turned to me, hands on hips, and rolled her eyes. “And you must be the fool who’s come to hunt grezzen.”

“No. I just work for him.”

“They say only fools work for fools.”

I shrugged. “They might say different if they knew the job I quit.”

She flicked her eyes to my bare forearm, nodded at the Legion Graves-registration bar code tatt lasered there, then fingered a carrot-sized cartridge looped in her belt. “Recognize this, merc?”

I blinked past the slur, nodded. “I’ve seen a Barrett Double Express split a Hovee’s engine block, then drop a forty-foot wronk in its tracks.”

She frowned when I mentioned the wronk. “You served in the Marin Suppression?”

I frowned back. “Legionnaires don’t choose their enemies.”

She opened her mouth, closed it, then blinked. She shook her head, pointing through the hangar’s open cage walls at the distant tree line. “My Barrett’s just for the small fry out there, Mr. Parker. It barely aggravates a grezz. Which is redundant, because you’ve never encountered a nastier disposition.”

Well, there had been Platoon Sergeant Leto at Basic Armor School.

Kit said, “Grezzen are the deadliest game in this universe. Money can’t buy enough gun to drop one. Go home, and take your boss with you.”

Crackle
.

A stevedore lased the plasteel’s top and side slabs. They fell to the asphalt, booming spray clouds into the saturated air.

I followed Kit Born across the vast cage. She counted the folded, six-legged ’bots, each cocooned in frothy plastipak like spider prey, then thumbed the manifest that the stevedore held out.

She knelt beside the nearest ’bot, drew a bush knife as long as her forearm from her belt, and de-cocooned the ’bot like she was gutting moonfish.

I peered down at it. “Hell. It’s just a mobile limpet antitank mine.”

She nodded. “Reprogrammed. Rover ’bots home on grezzen just like they would on a Lockheed Kodiak in combat. Scuttling under a grezz is about like scuttling under a hovertank’s skirt.” She tapped her knife on the upward-firing shaped charge housing. “Shaped charge detonated into the belly disembowels either one.”

“Stationary mines would be cheaper.”

“That’s what the armorers who equipped the second colonial expedition thought.”

“Second?”

She opened the ’bot’s access panel, punched in a code, and it whined to its six feet like a camo-painted cockroach six feet across. “The first colonial expedition came to DE 476 armed to the teeth, to combat the hostile fauna the initial ’bot surveys found. Even so, all that survived was a distress transmission so ugly that the tourism board still has it sealed from the general public. The second expedition was escorted by a merc battalion. Same result. The third expedition suffered equivalent casualties, until they deployed the limpets. Since then, the grezz avoid the settlers and vice versa.”

I toed the mobile mine’s camo limb with my boot. “What’s magic about the Rover ’bots?”

She stared down at the ’bot’s panel, shrugged. “They work. They work cheap. That passes for magic on an outworld. Come on, Parker. Mercs don’t usually overthink killing.”

My heart sped up and I pointed at her. “Don’t judge what you don’t—”

Rumble
.

A plasteel forty feet long, eight feet high, thirteen feet wide, and stenciled “Cutler Communications” slid down the ramp and thumped to a stop behind us. The shuttle’s ramp clamshelled shut, and the stevedore lased the container until its roof and sides toppled. The slabs jostled the ground fog into twists as they thumped the apron.

Silhouetted against mist-obscured jungle, Cutler’s weapon of choice squatted in the dank morning.

Kit Born stared at it, and her head shook slowly. “Parker, your boss might not be a fool. But he might be a menace.”

Six

I stepped toward our newly un-crated cargo, and began my walk around.

She trailed me. “I thought civilians couldn’t own hovertanks.”

“They can’t. But they can own historical vehicles.” I rapped my knuckles on a rubber block of the left track. “Before hovertanks, there were crawlers. General Dynamics M1A2 Abrams main battle tank, manufactured Lima, Ohio, United States, Earth, 1998. Frame-off restored by Gustus & Son Forge, Marinus, Bren, 2081. Fully operational.”

She walked around the prow, then stood on tiptoe to touch the main gun tube. “Operational?”

I knelt and peered underneath at the suspension. No visible damage after a nine-jump trip. “My boss the fool had 120 mm ammunition recreated. Should be very annoying to your grezzen.”

I clambered across the sponson, peered into the commander’s hatch on the turret, then looked down at her, alongside.

She squinted up at me, a hand visored above her eyes. “Why?”

I shrugged. “Because some of the rounds are depleted uranium penetrators. They used to cut through crawler tank armor like blowtorches through ice cream. Trueborns believe in overkill.”

“I mean why does your boss want to hunt grezzen?”

“He’s Trueborn.” I shrugged again. “You can always tell an Earthman, but you can’t tell him much. I’m no mind reader.”

Kit levered herself up alongside me, and clutched my elbow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

I pushed her hand away. “Look, his people hired me sight unseen a couple months ago. I know Cutler’s rich. And used to doing what he pleases, like every other Trueborn.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Then he’s
the
Cutler? As in Cutler Communications?”

Why did people get excited because somebody had money?

It took me an hour to pry open the plasteels piggybacked above the engine, check the tank’s auxiliary machine guns packed inside, and the mechanicals. The three crates of main gun ammunition —practice, canister, armor piercing discarding sabot, and Cutler’s mysterious custom jobs—were also intact.

Kit Born disappeared back into the building, then came back and supervised while the stevedores loaded her cargo onto a trailer. Then she wandered back over to me. My work had earned a cosmoline goop streak on my forearm for my trouble.

I pointed alongside the left track. “Could you hand me that rag?”

She passed the rag over, and her fingers touched mine. “You told me about your boss. But why are
you
here, Parker?”

The Tassini say that all a man has is his story, but an Illegal keeps his to himself. “I joined the Legion to see the worlds. Mostly I saw the inside of transports. Now I’m out. I get to look around.”

“For your future?”

While I scrubbed cosmoline off the tattoo on my forearm, I straightened up and stared at the tree line. “For my past.”

Which was what Orion had told the Legion recruiting sergeant the day she took me to enlist, at sixteen.

The gray-eyed sergeant had locked his office door behind us, then shook his head. “I don’t like this, Orion.” He pressed my forearm against the laser’s platen, with a hand that was regrown clear back past the wrist.

Orion snorted. “Your site says a legionnaire can forget his past and discover his future, Frank. And that the Legion pays bonus to Yavis for armored because we fit in small spaces.”

“We do. But this kid’s as tall as a Trueborn.”

Orion frowned. “That’s why I need to get him off Yavet! It’s been tough enough raising an Illegal. Now he stands out.”

The sergeant sighed, then stared at me. “You sure about this, son? The tatt burns clear down into the bone, because sometimes that’s all that’s left. It’s indelible. Once it’s on, so’s your obligation. The Legion can get you off Yavet, but you’ll still be an Illegal under Yavet law. If you choose out after your hitch, you’ll earn a year without a bounty, as long as you’re off Yavet. After that any bounty hunter who finds you, anywhere in the Union, can deliver you to any Yavet Consulate, dead or alive, which means dead. And don’t even think about coming back here.”

Orion rolled her eyes at the Sergeant. “Save the boogie man lecture. He’s been dodging bounty hunters all his life. Frank, I’ve seen Legion recruiters tatt passed-out drunks on bar floors to meet quota. He’s clean as green and smart as a Trueborn.” Her voice softened. “And you owe me.”

The flint in the sergeant’s eyes melted, and he took Orion’s hand in his natural one. “We haven’t forgotten. We never will. It’s not him I worry about, Orion. You’re asking me to take your son from you.”