Overkill (7 page)

Kit stood, arms crossed, brow wrinkled.

Cutler motioned to the hire’s driver to carry the luggage into the warehouse, and watched while the man waddled, until he passed out of earshot. Then Cutler stared at Kit and me. “I’ll explain when you need to know.”

Fourteen

Zhondro and I finished our checklists, and had everything stowed on the C-lift, by midmorning. Cutler wanted to leave Eden for the Line immediately, and drive all night. Kit recommended that, once we cleared Eden’s Triple-A umbrella, we only drive during daylight.

The Abrams, with the C-lift in tow, made eighty miles outside the city limits of Eden along the dirt single track road that led out to Kit Born’s Line section. That put us twenty miles south of Kit’s Line camp, and would give us plenty of daylight the following day in which to travel the remaining distance.

At fifteen minutes before End of Evening Nautical Twilight, we laagered for the night.

The fifteen minutes allowed for the four of us to exit the Abrams, button it up, then get buttoned up inside the Sleeper before full dark. We had electrified nets to set out, but Kit told us not to bother. The good news about the hours of darkness on Dead End was that the gorts didn’t fly at night. The bad news was that the reason they didn’t was that night on Dead End was too dangerous for them.

To Cutler, the Sleeper was “a Boy Scout camp in an armored box, and a damned cramped one.” To a Yavi like me, the Sleeper was a capacious and luxurious portable apartment for four, though Zhondro prayed to his God for dispensation to bunk stacked four-high, separated from a woman not his wife only by a forearm’s length and a thin foam hammock.

Evidently Zhondro’s God returned calls promptly, because thirty minutes after we four finished dinner, he lay snoring in his bunk.

Kit and I sat facing Cutler across the Sleeper’s fold-down dining table while we sipped coffee, ours from thermcups, his from private stock he had brought along. Outside, something—several somethings—snorted, then thumped the armor plate hard enough that my coffee sloshed. Cutler’s eyes widened. I suppose mine did, too.

Kit waved her hand as she shook her head. “Woogs. Closest thing to grazing vegetarians on Dead End. They actually eat plant matter, which doesn’t nourish any animal on Dead End. It’s the insects inside that actually nourish the woogs. But that means they move and eat all day and all night, every day and every night, to process enough fodder to survive. A mature female weighs six tons. Think your electric fence would have bothered them, Parker?”

Another woog bellowed as it brushed the Sleeper.

I steadied myself with a hand against the wall. “Something’s bothering them.”

Kit shrugged. “Would it bother you to crap a pound of sand every time you ate a raisin?”

Cutler asked, “How long will this go on?”

“All night, probably. Herds average twenty thousand inside the Line. Two predator species eat woogs. Grezzen, and stripers, which are kind of six-legged tyrannosaurs. If there’s a grezzen around, the stripers look for smaller prey. Beyond the Line, there’s no doubt about who’s the species-in-charge.”

Cutler paused. He cupped his chin in his hand, stared at her, and asked, “Why do you think the grezzen have been so dominant for so long?”

She shrugged, stared down into her cup. “Speed. Power. Size. Durability.”

Cutler asked, “You think it’s that simple?”

She shrugged again. “Why not? Grezz are perfectly adapted to an ecosystem that’s been static for thirty million years. On Earth, sharks have succeeded for even longer.”

Cutler asked, “But these robot bombs have upset their applecart. Why do you think that is?”

Kit shifted in her chair, then stared at Cutler. “Why do
you
think the grezz have done so well?”

It was Cutler’s turn to shrug and stare into his cup. “I suppose you’re right.”

Zhondro mumbled in his sleep.

Cutler stretched, then exercised his
droit du seigneur
and claimed first dibs on the sanex.

After Cutler was gone, I turned to Kit. “If either of you actually believed what you were saying just then, I’m a duck.”

Kit just stared at me. Then Zhondro muttered in his sleep again, louder. Our company medic had said that Tassini did it because they smoked janga, which superanimated their dreams. Whatever. They all talked in their sleep.

The same night breeze that carried wobblehead stink up the dune to me also carried sleepy female murmurs. One woman seemed to yelp in her sleep, and the kid with his nightshirt pulled up looked away from his business in response.

Third Platoon’s engines were in whispermode, softer than cat farts, and the wind blew toward us. But at that moment, Red Four, jockeying forward to come on line with the other four tanks, poked its prow beyond the military crest of the dune.

The kid below leaned toward us. Maybe he couldn’t hear us, but he could see Red Four. The thermal’s magnified image showed his mouth open as he stared up in the dark. He couldn’t see us as clearly as I saw him, but he saw enough. He turned, then ran back to the tents, shouting and pointing back and up at us.

My gunner reached across the turret and tapped my bicep. “Jazen, they may not be combatants, but they’re sure as hell combatant dependents. They got a radio down there tied in to their tank column. If you don’t take the shot right now—”

Bam
.

In the Sleeper, Cutler banged open the sanex door, yawned, and rolled into his bunk. He waved the lights low, pulled out his Reader, and lay bathed in its glow, absorbing bed-time stories.

Kit sidestepped past him, then closed the sanex door behind her.

Somewhere distant, something very large and un-wooglike bellowed so loudly that the Sleeper’s wall armor vibrated. Then the ground beneath the Sleeper shook, as thousands of woogs stampeded in response.

In his bunk, Zhondro thrashed beneath his sheet, muttering in Tassini.

Kit slipped out of the sanex like a shadow in the dimmed light, visible for a blink wearing thoroughly utilitarian skivvies that on her looked anything but. She vaulted herself into the rack just below the one that would be mine, like a silent gymnast, and vanished beneath the sheets.

As Cutler lay on his back in his bunk, studying his Reader, he said to me, “Big day tomorrow, Parker. Sleep well.”

Fat chance.

Fifteen

In the morning, the woogs were gone but not forgotten. The swath they ate and trampled through the trees that had surrounded us looked like twenty thousand bulldozers had wandered past. And compared to woog dung, wobblehead crap smelled like roses.

Zhondro and I broke down the night laager while Kit sat atop the Abrams’ turret with her Barrett at the ready, but after she winged the obligatory gort, nothing bigger than lemon bugs interfered. Before full light, we were rolling north again, to Kit’s Line camp.

Every kid has played holos set in a Kodiak crew compartment. However nobody born this century has seen an Abrams’ gut except museum curators. But the two vehicles don’t look all that different inside.

Neither space welcomes claustrophobes. Most of the crew volume in either tank is the roughly tubular, rotating basket inside of, and extending below, the turret. The Abrams’ crew space is larger, because it accommodates an extra, third crew member, who loads the main gun. The loader, gunner, and tank commander sit in the turret, and move with it, like diners in a revolving restaurant. The fourth crew member, the driver, reclines in a fixed, forward-facing, coffin-sized compartment in the prow.

Even a Trueborn with his feet on the Abrams’ floor can stand upright in the center of the turret, and can reach out from there with a yardstick and touch most anywhere inside.

Everything except the seating surfaces and controls is steel, white-painted to show fluid leaks, and as forgiving as your first drill instructor. An Abrams will break you before you break it, a lesson rookies learn nose-first. Rolling with the vehicle had become habit for me, but Cutler, and, to a lesser extent Kit, death-gripped one handhold after another and fought every lurch as Zhondro whistled the tank north across the uneven road surface.

Zhondro reclined up front, driving. I occupied the commander’s throne, to the right rear and high. Cutler sat in the gunner’s seat, below and in front of me. Kit sat on the turret’s left side, facing us, at Cutler’s level, in the loader’s position.

Kit predicted visits from the gorts’ less sociable relatives, so we rolled buttoned up, with the driver’s, loader’s and commander’s hatches closed.

Buttoning up makes a tank less like a limo in four ways. First, except for the gun sights, one sees the world only through periscopic prism windows, which is like peeking through cereal boxes with both ends cut out. Second, it’s hot. Third, it’s hot. Fourth is a corollary of two and three. Hot people sweat buckets, and stink.

So, when we arrived at Kit’s Line camp, everybody was ready to dismount, even into a cloudy, humid, one hundred two Fahrenheit afternoon. Cutler made for the air conditioned Sleeper. Cloudy or not, Zhondro scooted beneath the Abrams’ shade from habit, for a Tassini siesta.

I sat atop the Abrams’ turret, faced sideways with my legs dangling down through the open commander’s hatch. Kit mimicked my position, but seated on the loader’s hatch edge.

Zhondro had parked us atop a bald, granite plateau, looking out at a rolling green blanket of forest below, and a rolling gray blanket of cloud above, that stretched to the horizon.

Distant shrieks and bellows echoed, then hung in the damp air.

I rested my elbow on the receiver of the commander’s .50 caliber. “It’s safe to sit out like this?”

Kit pointed at the Triple-A ’bot atop the rock knob beside us. Steel clamshell doors bolted into the rock led into the artificial cave that was the Line Wrangler’s station. “The Wrangler’s station’son this plateau because the fields of observation and fire are clear. The Triple A ’bot and stationary mines out at the tree line have been emplaced long enough to teach the local predators lessons.”

Five hundred yards below and to our left front, where the barren rock surrendered to the encroaching jungle, trees moved.

I scooted on my butt behind the .50, rattled back the charging handle, and sighted down the barrel at the movement. Twenty feet above the ground, a fanged lizard head, tiger-striped black and yellow like an overripe banana, poked out through the branches. The head was as long as a squad mess table, and attached to a six-legged body the size of a forty-passenger bus. The beast stared up at us, a prey item just bigger than an overweight woog. I swallowed, then slid my thumbs toward the gun’s butterfly trigger.

The monster snarled, then lunged toward us.

Kit leaned toward me and touched my elbow. “Don’t—”

Boom!
Where there had been a monster, the mine’s explosion left red mist adrift among shivering tree limbs. Bleeding ribs and drumsticks bigger than I was arced away in all directions.

“—Bother.” Kit sat back and sighed. “Lessons taught aren’t always lessons learned. It’s a good thing stripers are dumb, because they’re a handful up close.”

I shook my head. “Everything here has six legs, not just the bugs. Animals don’t eat plants. The sun never shines. This place makes no sense.”

She shook her head back at me. “You sound as condescending as Cutler, Parker. Since the War, we’re the only intelligent species left in this universe. Therefore, we think everything in this universe has to conform to
our
paradigm of what makes sense. Do you have any idea how arrogant that view is? And on how little of this universe we base it?”

I cleared the ‘fifty, slapping the charging handle harder than I needed to. “Apparently
you
have an idea. I find
that
arrogant coming from a backwater gunslinger.”

Zhondro rolled out from beneath the tank and called up at us, “What was that?”

The Sleeper’s door banged open, and Cutler ran out, his Reader in one hand. He squinted at the smoke that drifted away from the spot where the beast had stood. Then he pointed at my hands on the .50. “Was it a grezzen? Did you just kill a grezzen?”

Kit shook her head. “Just a striper. A big pred. Tried to cross the stationary mine perimeter.”

“Oh.” Cutler waved a pointed finger at us. “Nobody fires on a grezzen unless I say so. Understood?”

Kit said, “The Rover ’bot perimeter’s a mile further out from here. The grezz keep even more distance back than that. But don’t worry. You’ll get your kill.”

Cutler walked to the C-lift, rested his hand on one of the three ammunition crates, then shook his head. “Ms. Born, I have no intention of killing a grezzen.”

Sixteen

Two hours later, Zhondro and I dragged the last crate off the C-lift. Kit and Cutler stood back and watched as Zhondro pried the crate lid from Cutler’s mystery ammo.

Most tank-gun rounds look like forty-pound hypodermic needles, a shell casing with a depleted uranium arrow’s pointed tip sticking out the front. Cutler’s specials replaced the arrow tip with an oversized tin can that had a straw sticking out its top center.

Cutler bent over the crate, hands on knees, and pointed. “This ammunition was designed by the best cryptozoologists on Earth. It’ll inject a quart of dope that will knock a carbon-12 based organism the size of a grezzen cold for an hour.”

Zhondro, Kit, and I turned and looked at one another. We were here to fire off the biggest tranquilizer darts in the universe? He had to be kidding.

Cutler said, “I assure you, I’m quite serious.”

I asked him, “Where do we have to hit it?”

“They say anywhere on the body. Just so the agent gets injected into the bloodstream. Just like tranquilizing an elephant. These grezzen may look like ogres, but their circulatory plumbing works like any Terran mammal’s.”

Zhondro frowned. “What if this drug doesn’t work? They say also that these grezzen are the deadliest animals in the universe.”

Cutler sighed. “We’ve got conventional rounds, too.”

Kit had her arms crossed, and feet planted. “Why do you want to play catch-and-release with the deadliest animal in the universe?”