Overkill (4 page)

Orion covered his hand and my forearm with hers, and whispered, “Jazen’s not my son, not by blood. But he’s someone’s son. He needs to find his past, and he can’t find it with me. I’m fine.” She blinked, then turned away. “Tatt him before I cry.”

I patted Orion’s arm, then nodded at the sergeant. The laser crackled and my forearm burned so hot that I bit through my lip.

“Parker?” On the Dead End runway, fingers touched my arm, just below my tatt. Kit the Line Wrangler peered up at me, her brow furrowed. “Your arm okay? You were rubbing it.”

“S’fine. For a lady who carries a Barrett, you worry a lot about the welfare of strangers and poison spiders. Would anybody on Dead End weep if Cutler managed to kill a grezzen?”

She smirked as she shook her head. “If Cutler carpet bombed the grezzen to extinction, they’d rename the planet after him.”

I climbed down off the Abrams, rubbed my eyes, and stretched. “As long as Cutler lets me get a meal and a shower within the next three hours,
I’ll
rename the planet after him.”

My Handtalk vibrated. I tugged it from my pocket and turned away as I answered.

“Parker?” It was Zhondro. “My darling arrived in good health?”

“Not a scratch. Even Cutler’s special rounds.”

He sighed. “Good. Maybe that will calm him down.”

I rolled my eyes. “Cutler? Now what? Fuel?”

“No. The local kerosene tests quite satisfactorily. Those old turbines were designed to run even on rubbish. The outfitter wishes to discuss the local guide situation.”

I gripped the Handtalk tighter. “There’s nothing to discuss. Cutler’s people vetted Bauer months ago. He knows the ground, he knows these grezzen better than anybody alive, and they prepaid the outfitter for him already.”

They had to make arrangements months in advance and sight unseen, and nobody did it better than Cutler’s people. Cutler’s family built its empire on moving information around the Human Union. Nothing moved through normal space faster than light, and light took decades to move through normal space, even among the inworlds. Human communications, from contracts to Cutlergrams, had to shortcut through jumps. Only C-drive vehicles like cruisers could jump. So information traveled just as slowly as every tourist, legionnaire, or plasti of Coke traveled.

“Apparently that is not what this fellow has just told Cutler. The outfitter has demanded a meeting in person in one hour.”

Meeting. I smiled. “Aha!” Outworld cultures, despite their differences, shared one hatred. Well, Outworlders didn’t precisely
hate
Earthlings, but they hated Earthlings’ wealth, privilege, and attitude. Outworlders lived by the maxim that it’s easier to take a Trueborn’s money than it is to take a Trueborn. “They’re trying to retrade the deal, Zhondro. Tell Cutler to take the board out of his ass and give them five percent more. Arguing will cost us more than that in delay.”

“No.”

I rolled my eyes. “Okay, leave out the board part. But tell him! Blame me if you want to.” I swallowed. Cutler was both blue-nose enough and prick enough to do just that, and fire me on the spot.

“I meant no, he’s not meeting the outfitter. Cutler said that is precisely the sort of triviality resolution for which he overpays you.”

Crap. I sighed. “I don’t even know where the outfitter is. If I knew, we wouldn’t need a damn guide in the first place.”

“An excellent point. But it will be lost on Mr. Cutler if it delays us, Jazen. I put my faith in you, my friend, only behind God.” Zhondro cut the connection, and I turned back, frowning, toward Kit Born.

Kit shook her head. “No meal, no shower?”

I thumbed off on a manifest that a stevedore held out to me, then shook my head at her. “Maybe no paychip, if I can’t get to a meeting in town in an hour. What are business meetings like here?”

“If you’re here to kill grezzen and pay cash, everybody will love you.”

“Does the mag rail to town stop in walking distance of a place called Eden Outfitters?”

She snorted and rolled her eyes. “Mag rail. On Dead End. You said your
boss
was the idiot.”

She turned her back on me, then walked, shaking her head, toward the exit gate. Palms out, mouth open, I stood alone on the tarmac.

After ten steps, Kit turned back and waved me toward her. “Move your ass, Parker. With the Cageway closed, Eden’s fifty minutes from here. You’ve already wasted two.”

Seven

Three minutes later, Kit Born’s caged, open six-wheel diesel careened up a ramp and out into the steaming haze that passed for a nice day on Dead End. The dash display read 104 Fahrenheit, which made the Sixer’s unmuffled roar worth the breeze it generated.

I had never seen or heard of Cutler, much less of Dead End, until a couple of months before, so I twisted in my seat to recon a world new to me.

The obvious thing about Spaceport DE 476 was that it wasn’t obvious. It was flat land from which the rainforest had been scraped back to clear runway space. The only visible above-ground structure was the hangar cage, the three heat-scorched shuttles sheltered behind its bars.

The briefs I had read, which were Trueborn-authored, pronounced Dead End colony “splendidly noble, redolent of the libertarian sod dugouts of America’s sadly past frontier.”

To me, Dead End colony, with its hole-in-the-ground non-architecture, was redolent of trench warfare. Trueborns measured the universe against cultural referents meaningless to the rest of us, and expected us to catch up.

Dead End’s human habitations weren’t cage-roofed dugouts because of a noble connection to The Land. Below grade was cooler and trenching was cheaper than tunneling. And trenches were safer, because everything on Dead End that wasn’t monotone moss-green would sting you or eat you.

Except the low, gray clouds, which the briefs said had not dissipated for thirty million standard years, give or take a few eons. The few colonial kids born and raised on Dead End had to take the existence of Earth and its frontier on faith, because they had never seen a moon or a star in the night sky.

Ahead of us as we drove loomed Dead End’s most important—in fact, only—commercial artery, the Cageway, which I had also read about. It ran through a slim canyon that connected the planet’s two human habitation nodes, the spaceport and the town of Eden. Eden sat fortresslike in the bowl of an extinct volcano’s crater. The Cageway was protected by a newsteel bar roof, and vaulted newsteel doors sealed the passage’s ends against large animal intrusions. The Cageway had been enclosed in the early days because grezzen had lain in wait there and attacked vehicles channelized in the canyon. On Dead End, humans didn’t make road kill, they were road kill.

Kit braked as we approached the Cageway. Its massive doors were closed, and an example of reverse road kill wedged up against the Cageway’s closed doors, in the form of a few tons of trampled plasteel that appeared to have once been an electrobus. Moss had begun to grow on the wreck’s north side, and its steel bits had rusted.

Kit sighed. “Bus-woog collision. The only paved road on the planet and it’s been closed for two months. Welcome to Dead End.”

“The Government’s slow clearing wrecks?”

“Government on Dead End doesn’t clear a bus wreck. It
is
a bus wreck. If anarchy’s too structured for you, immigrate to Dead End.”

Apparently, the noble libertarian frontier needed fine tuning before Eden lived up to its name.

One hundred yards before the pavement entered the blocked Cageway, Kit spun the wheel. The Sixer leaned left up a dirt ramp, then bellowed as it climbed a switchbacking gravel trail up the hill, parallel to the closed main road.

I smiled at the empty road ahead of us, then realized that beyond the gravel’s edge, a foot from my elbow, the hillside dropped away in a hundred-foot cliff. A Sixer’s high ground clearance is handy in negotiating swamps, fording streams, and crossing boulder fields. But its top-heavy center of gravity has a literal downside. I glanced at Kit while I gripped the door handle. “Should you slow down?”

She muttered, let the wheel go, and ducked two hands beneath her seat.

I sucked in a whistling breath as the Sixer drifted toward the cliff.

Kit straightened back up, and wrenched the armored car back on course. In her hand shuddered a sawed-off Barrett Double Express. She thrust it toward me, stock-first. “Make yourself useful, Parker.”

I broke it at the receiver, peered in. Loaded. I clicked the weapon shut, felt the safety with my thumb, and frowned. “What am I supposed to do with—”

Whump
!

The Sixer, all two armored tons of it, shuddered on its suspension like a baby buggy hit by a bowling ball.

I ducked as, inches above my hairline, a fanged, red-eyed, armored bat as big as an anti-ship missile wedged a winged claw between the overhead bars. The beast’s other claw thrashed, tangled in the armored cage by the impact when the diving monster had struck us.

“The gun, Parker!”

The shrieking beast’s weight rocked the Sixer like a dinghy in a gale, hanging me out over empty space.

Pus-yellow liquid drizzled onto my forearm, and singed the hair off it. “Crap!”

Kit swung the wheel back so hard that the driver’s side door screeched against the rock wall. “Gort drool’s not fatal, Parker. But the fall will be if you don’t get that weight off our roof!”

A sawed Barrett’s a close-quarters-battle weapon to a GI, a saloon peacekeeper to a civilian. It fires just two rounds, from side-by-side barrels, like a vintage shotgun.

I thumbed the safety off, swung the saloon gun up between the groaning roof bars, and triggered the left barrel into the gort’s armored belly. The Barrett kicked gently, like a cough in church. After all, it’s recoil damping that makes a Barrett a Barrett. But the .60 caliber round’s impact sprung the monster up off our roof, where the vehicle’s slipstream somersaulted it away like wet cardboard.

I broke the breech, ejected the smoking shell, and rummaged splay-fingered under paper maps that littered the Sixer’s teetering dash. I panted, craning my neck at the clouds that seemed close enough to touch. “Where’s your ammo, Born?”

She wrinkled her nose while she drove. “Why?”

I jerked my thumb skyward. “Where there’s one monster, there’s more, right?”

She lifted off the throttle and smiled. “Exactly. Look behind us.”

I twisted in my seat and peered out through the rear cage. The gort, back flat against the gravel road, thrashed a shattered wing. A second gort fluttered onto its chest like a sparrow onto a birdbath.

The first one screeched while its predator splashed its beak into the downed monster’s wound. A third gort, wings back, talons out, dropped into the melee while two, then three, more circled, black shadows in the mist.

“Dead End lesson for today, Parker. You never have to shoot two gorts if you can shoot one.”

The road wound up, then over the hill ring that separated the port from town. We crested the crater’s barren lip, and, for an instant as we descended, we saw the settlement nestled in the natural bowl below. On my scale of planetary capitals visited, Eden looked to rank above only Weichsel City, which is three igloos.

“Eden.” Born snorted as she waved her hand at the criss-cross of mud streets pimpled with hatch domes. The domes led to the below-grade dugouts that passed for buildings. The only visible industry was the tea kettle refinery that made vegetable matter in the local rock into kerosene. “Impressed?”

I smiled. “You read my mind.”

Born snapped her eyes away from the road and narrowed her eyes at me. “What?”

I shrugged. “I dunno. I was just thinking the same thing, that—”

She turned her eyes back to the road, and detoured the conversation back to its original path. “Yeah. Ever see an Outworld planetary capital with a name that fit, Parker?”

I shrugged again. “Funhouse. And Jolly. ‘Til you wake up hung over and broke.”

Born downshifted as the road ramped lower. “Eden’s thin on soldierly delights, Parker.”

“What isn’t it thin on?”

She smiled. “Rainfall. An ecosystem in stable harmony for thirty million years. Native parasites, viruses, and bacteria don’t attack downshipped crop stock, or human tissue. Unless you bring a cold with you, you won’t catch one here. The local shale’s so full of kerogen that a tea kettle refinery exports designer kerosene to Earth. The locals could probably farm successfully if they’d quit self-depopulating in the name of living free.”

I slouched back in the passenger’s seat, but kept the reloaded Barrett across my thighs. The road hairpinned two hundred feet above the bowl’s flat, forested floor. Emplaced within the hairpin was an Oerlikon HU-40 Triple-A ’bot, dish rotating, barrels-tothe-sky. A plaque on its rusted turret read:
EDEN OUTFITTERS
.As we passed, the ’bot spun, locked, and its gatling spit. Against the gray clouds, a gliding shadow wobbled, then tumbled.

As we wound down the hill, we passed a dozen more emplacements. I pointed at one. “The Legion yard-saled their HU-40s years ago. Upgraded to units that could tell aircraft from birds. I wouldn’t recommend flying in this airspace.”

She smiled as she drove. “Nobody does. In fact, nothing’s flown over Dead End for years except gorts and the orbital shuttles. The early settlers lost so many aircraft to kamikaze gorts, cloud, and storms that aircraft were declared contraband imports. I suppose that’s why Cutler brought a tank. He seems like the kind of sportsman who’d just drop fragmentation grenades on game out the door of a tilt wing.”

With four minutes to spare Kit pulled her Sixer up in front of a plasteel entry dome that was gray except for the
EDEN OUTFITTERS
sign above the door. Another read,
HIRING TODAY
. It looked permanent.

Befitting a libertarian republic, traffic regulation was minimal. But then so was traffic. The only visible signage announced:
USE ALTERNATE ROUTE HIGH NOON TO 1 P.M. DAILY. MAIN STREET CLOSED FOR GUNFIGHTS
.

Ha-ha.

I hopped from the Sixer. My boots sank in the street’s mud, and I looked around.

A half dozen pedestrians walked the plank sidewalks, three of whom wore sidearms. The fourth’s right arm was a six-barrel Gatling prosthetic. The other two people on the street were a mother holding a baby on her hip with one hand. In the other she held an assault rifle. The baby appeared to be unarmed.