Overkill (31 page)

The grezzen also skidded to a stop, and simply cocked its head from curiosity.

The creature was as large as some of the smaller shells in which the humans moved, near in size to his mother’s memory of his own size as a yearling. Just two eyes stared at the grezzen out of the creature’s flat, broad-nosed face. The creature’s most striking features were two down-curved tusks, each as long as a human forelimb. The creature’s overall appearance was pleasantly grezzenlike. And it bellowed and swayed in a display of defiance that would have made a grezzen yearling proud.

Grezzen as a race had no concept of cute, but to him that’s exactly how a hauled out, bellowing, two-ton bull walrus looked.

The grezzen paused as he stared at the calf-sized animal and felt its rage. He also felt the animal’s fear, because it had encountered something completely unexpected, and much larger and faster than itself.

The grezzen paused. Had he mistaken this creature’s simultaneous, conflicting reactions of rage and fear for two separate creatures? The grezzen looked around. He and this animal, that he intended to make his meal, were the only objects visible for as far as he could see.

Yet the grezzen felt the presence of another hunter, quite near.

As he stood eyeing his prey, he heard a creaking, as though a storm-weakened tree, pushed by the wind, was about to topple. The sound grew louder, and was joined by additional creaks. He glanced down at his forepaws planted on the ground. Angular, black lines radiated from them, and grew in all directions.

Then the ground opened and swallowed him whole.

Eighty-six

I once heard a Trueborn complain about abrupt and violent cyclonic ice storms on Weichsel. But the Earth blizzard that now enveloped and blinded One-eyed Jack and me was no less deadly.

We staggered in the direction where we hoped we would encounter the wreck of the
Midway
. We had more going for us than blind hope, though not much more. In among the survival supplies, I had found a magnetic compass. I was pretty sure Trueborns had invented compasses, which suggested that Earth had a reliable magnetic field. According to the compass, the black hump which we assumed was the wreck lay along a line due northeast. So even though we could no longer see the wreck, we could still see the compass’ face.

At least one of us could. Jack assigned me to read the compass and stumble ahead, while he covered me and followed the trail I broke.

We staggered northeast for fifteen minutes. The wind and visibility worsened until we were reduced to crawling through snow in which we sank to our elbows.

Jack, crawling behind me, grabbed my ankle and shouted over the wind. He had to pause after each sentence, short of breath. “We’re going back to the boat! Wait this out.”

I looked back. The wind had already covered our tracks.

“No! The boat’s too small a target. In this stuff if we miss it by ten feet we’ll never see it, Jack!”

It was true, but I also didn’t want to try to return to the lifeboat because I knew what waited for me there. A bullet, eventually. The wreck was a bigger place. There might be survivors inside, there might be stuff inside, ergo options for me. There I might be able to think of something.

Jack coughed. “Yeah. You’re right. Now we find the wreck or we die.” He prodded me with the pistol, then pointed it ahead, in the direction we had been moving. “You first, Parker.”

Eighty-seven

Dark water surrounded the grezzen and he plummeted downward, flailing all six limbs as he struggled to regain the surface, to breathe. The water tasted of mineral, and seemed even colder than the stiff water that had turned to liquid in the warmth of his mouth.

He had first seen snow scant hours before, yet had divined its basic nature in moments. But the concept that stiff water could coalesce and form a hard substrate eluded him. Snow-covered ground and snow-covered pack ice were indistinguishable to his three inexperienced eyes. Equally alien was the idea that ice thick enough to support a two-ton walrus would crack beneath the grezzen’s eleven tons, and plunge him into the near-shore shallows of the Beaufort Sea.

The waters beneath the ice remained liquid even at temperatures below the normal freezing point of water, because dissolved salt lowered sea water’s freezing point.

What it all meant was that this frigid, salty surprise was drowning him. But the salts dissolved in the sea water also rendered the solution denser. He was more buoyant than he was in the fresh water in which he often swam at home. Therefore, his struggles lifted him back toward the surface. But his head crashed against the underside of the ice. He butted the translucent ceiling, slashed at it with a forepaw, but without success.

Lungs near bursting, he saw an area of light, and kicked toward it with all six limbs.

His head broke the surface into open air, he breathed, then he looked around while he trod water. He was afloat in a pool of open water perhaps twice the size of his body. Within the pool floated chunks of stiff water. He recognized that this was the place where he had broken through the stiff water, as though he had stepped on a rotted log.

Three body lengths from the pool’s edge the legless, tusked brown creature regarded him, now with more curiosity and less dread. The creature’s outline had become indistinct, partly obscured by windblown flakes of stiff water.

The grezzen paddled to the edge of the pool, splayed its forepaws on the stiff water to distribute its weight, and kicked its hind legs to propel itself forward.

The tusked creature watched long enough to satisfy itself that the grezzen no longer posed an immediate threat. Then it turned and waddled away, eventually vanishing in the swirling clouds of stiff water.

Hunger pangs overtook the grezzen as his meal escaped. He realized that the creature’s spatulate appendages adapted it to live awkwardly on solid ground and stiff water, but gracefully down here, in the sea. If one species lived in this water, others did too. The grezzen was accustomed to diving for meals. Indeed, river amphibians were a favorite.

He paused there, half in and half out of the water, weighing the hazards of hunting in the frigid and roofed over liquid water below, versus pursuing the tusked waddler through the fog of stiff water above.

Beneath the water, something bumped his left rear leg. The ungainly waddler’s dull intellect had receded. But now the hunter’s presence that the grezzen had felt before had returned.

The grezzen kicked, then felt the unmistakable prick of teeth as jaws clamped his leg, and tugged him backward.

Whatever clamped his leg represented a threat, to be sure. But it also represented food. He had already let one meal get away, and meals appeared to be few and far between in this world.

The grezzen opened his mouth, gulped cubic yards of air into its great lungs, and plunged back into the water.

Among the evolutionary gifts that had sustained the grezzen’s species were transparent ocular membranes, similar to the nictitating membranes that protected the eyes of less formidable predators like sharks and housecats. The grezzen’s membranes flicked down and protected his eyes like goggles, and they enabled him to see and hunt underwater. He knew nothing about nictitating membranes. He simply knew what he saw in the dim, murky sea.

The creature that held his leg in its mouth was of streamlined shape, with spatulate limbs, adapted for swimming. The limbs were in the places analogous to forepaws and hind legs. The form was familiar, the animal’s great size and power were not. It was fully as long, nose to tail, as the grezzen, and of similar bulk. Its body was black, with white patches surrounding its eyes, and covering its belly.

It clamped harder on the grezzen’s leg, then shook its head with power as great as a striper’s. The animal’s teeth did not penetrate the grezzen’s integument. The grezzen could feel that this annoyed and puzzled the animal.

And that was the most remarkable thing about the animal. A striper, a woog, the peculiar tusked creature that the grezzen had just encountered, all exhibited a low level of awareness. In the grezzen’s experience, only humans displayed grezzenlike intelligence. But this animal was more aware than prey and lower predators. In some ways it was like himself.

The grezzen didn’t know that in fact he
had
encountered the animal on Earth most like himself. A killer whale was eleven tons of perfectly adapted top predator, gifted with more intelligence than it needed to dominate its environment. Toothed whales had ranged unchallenged throughout the environment that covered two thirds of their world for a lazy thirty million years. Killer whales organized socially into matriarchal pods, and communicated by high-pitched waterborne sound over distances as vast as those across which grezzen telecommunicated.

At the moment, however, the animal was nothing but an adversary, and one that he had to dispatch quickly, while he held his breath.

The grezzen twisted around beneath the water, then clasped his middle paws around the black and white predator’s midsection.

The cetacean clung to the grezzen’s leg, its teeth too soft to break through matted fur tougher than carbide steel cable, its jaws too weak to crush the dense bone and tissue beneath. The animal squealed, frustrated and puzzled, as it rolled its body in the water, trying to shake the grezzen loose.

In that moment, the grezzen felt the animal’s realization that its adversary was not simply a much larger version of land animals that it hunted and devoured routinely. This was something vastly stronger, vastly stranger.

The animal’s blood lust turned to fear. It released its hold on the grezzen’s leg, and struggled to withdraw.

The grezzen slashed a forepaw across the animal, just below its jaws, and tore at its belly with a hindclaw.

A cloud of red blood infused the dark sea, even as a cloud of astonishment exploded in the animal’s consciousness.

Another slash, lower on the body, and entrails spilled from the mighty predator’s gut and drifted in the water.

The beast thrashed, rolled. The grezzen held fast, avoiding the jaws that were the animal’s sole weapon.

Finally, the beast weakened. None too soon. The grezzen swam upward, clutching its prize, broke the surface, exhaled explosively, and breathed.

Then the grezzen felt another presence. Three, in fact.

Something blunt pounded his left side, another his right, so powerfully and painfully that he released the dead carcass.

Ducking back below the surface, he saw the rear limbs, joined into a single, horizontal tail, of another animal like the one he had killed, flapping as it disappeared into the murky water.

He felt the approach of his next assailant. It shot at him out of the clouded water and tried to ram his midsection with its head. He twisted in the water, and the beast brushed by him harmlessly.

The grezzen had been wrong when he evaluated the killer whale’s available weapons. A killer whale pod’s coordinated and multidirectional ramming, six-to eleven-ton bodies hurtling headfirst at thirty miles per hour, could defeat even sperm whales, far larger than himself. Nearly as large, in fact, as the river snakes he contended with at home.

He felt a surge of combativeness. He felt his adversaries, hovering beyond his sight, preparing to rush him again. And he felt something else.

The female that had attacked him had separated from her pod. She had ventured beneath the pack ice because smooth-backed prey like seal and walrus sheltered there. They sheltered there because killer whales’ tall dorsal fins dangerously reduced their mobility when they squeezed beneath the shallow sea bed and the hard ice ceiling in the shallows. She had accepted the risk because her pod was hungry and she was its matriarch.

And so he felt the outrage of her sons, who sought revenge against him just as he sought revenge against Cutler.

In their anger, they would take disproportionate risks, as he had. If he waited for them, he could slash open the gut of each of them as it passed by him.

He paused beneath the water and reflected. He had made his kill. He was out of his element, in a strange place. He was outnumbered. He was starving. And he felt something unfamiliar to a grezzen. Empathy. Empathy for fellow orphans.

Based on what his mother had taught him, he would cede the field. She had taught him to act pragmatically in all things, because that was the grezzen way.

He decided that he would cede the field. But as he decided, he realized that pragmatism was no longer all that drove him. His recent experiences, first with humans and now with these alien but kindred creatures, had begun to teach him that the grezzen way was not the only way.

While the animals regrouped, he maneuvered himself below the dead female’s carcass, swam up beneath it, and pushed it with his forepaws until it slid out of the liquid water and onto the stiff water. The stiff crust cracked beneath the carcass’ weight, and it slipped back into the water. He pushed again. The crust gave way again, this time more slowly.

He felt the three sons rush him again, and had to abandon his efforts while he repelled them again.

He repeated his exercise until he had pushed the carcass onto stiff water thick enough to support both his weight and the weight of his prize.

Then he lay sprawled on his belly, gasping. The wind robbed heat from his soaked body. Alongside him the blood of the orphan’s mother, who would now preserve his life, ran in a small river down to the open water.

Crash
.

One of the sons hurled itself up and out of the water and wriggled forward, much in the way that the river snake had hurled itself after Jazen and Kit, so long ago and so far away. The enraged male’s dorsal appendage wobbled side to side above it, and its toothed jaws snapped.