Overkill (12 page)

Then I seemed to be floating.

Blam
-
blam
-
blam
.

Kit, topside on the Abrams’ turret, one hand on the smoking .50, one hand cupped to her mouth, shouted at Zhondro and me. “Get in here! I got a grezz inbound!”

Cutler was already safely inside the tank, presumably burrowed into the gunner’s well. Waiting.

I clambered up the tank’s front fender toward the commander’s hatch, slipped on the wet steel, and skinned a knee so badly that it bled. I wondered whether a grezz was attracted to the smell of human blood, and if so, from how far away.

And then I realized why Cutler, who normally made for the comfort of the Sleeper at every opportunity, was waiting in the gunner’s well with an itchy trigger finger.

He had not only used the carcasses of the animals he had slaughtered as grezzen chum, he had dangled Zhondro and me as live bait. As I dropped down into the Commander’s hatch, and pulled it closed against the rain, I muttered, “Cutler, you bastard.”

I looked around the turret. Kit peered intently through the loader’s movable periscope, hands on its grips like a U-boat commander in a Trueborn war holo. Below me, Cutler hunched forward, hands on the gunner’s yoke, face pressed against his sight. Zhondro had scrambled forward, and was levering his seat into driving position. But, as I had the night before, I felt like someone was listening to me breathe. I peered into my screen. Dead ahead, obscured by the rain, something moved.

Twenty-two

The grezzen felt them before it saw or heard or scented them. The strongest presence that the grezzen felt was so assured, so—the grezzen did not comprehend the concept of arrogance—so
like itself
that the grezzen at first assumed it had invaded the territory of another.

But there was in this other the strangeness of viewpoint common to humans. Also, the grezzen felt three more intellects in physical proximity to the strong one, and adult grezzen found physical proximity not merely superfluous but noxious. So the intruders were not its kind.

In that moment, the grezzen heard the distant bellow and scented the stench excreted by a human shell, the peculiar communal skin they fabricated, and in which they sheltered their frailty, when they moved about.

“There! Step on it, Zhondro!” The strong one evidently had observed the grezzen, though the grezzen still did not see the humans or their shell.

Grezzenkind, perfectly adapted to the world that it dominated for thirty million years, had no need of tools, least of all translational computers. But throughout the thirty years since Grezzenkind had first noticed Mankind, grezzen had felt humans’ thoughts. Grezzen had compared those thoughts with the coordinated images and sounds that stimulated and followed human spoken language. And so the collective grezzen intellect had functioned like a translational computer. The grezzen could eavesdrop on human conversation and understand the words. But he seldom grasped the communicative nuances.

The grezzen sorted through the other humans’ identities. One, it recognized. The female who called itself Kit.

The other two remained indistinct. Male, clever, dangerous in the way that a lemon bug, though puny, was dangerous if one was careless. But the males were subservient, most probably to the strong one.

The grezzen had no need to measure the speed at which its six great legs carried it, as it leapt and dodged among primeval tree boles, nor any concept of its own bulk.

So it didn’t care when it felt the female, Kit, say, “Cutler, don’t chase it! You’ve got no clue what a carbon-12–based organism’s capable of. Its skeletal architecture is so dense that it supports eleven tons of muscle. It can double back on you at seventy miles an hour, and it’s mean enough to do it.”

Indeed. These humans had ventured beyond the protection of their ghosts-that-could-not-be-felt. They had invaded his domain. And so he would kill them.

Twenty-three

I clutched a handhold as I rocked in the commander’s cupola, while Zhondro gunned the Abrams forward like a thoroughbred on a track it had been bred for. The old warhorse had been designed to rule tree-studded, rainy, rolling plains a century and a galaxy away. But this was not Earth, much less northern Europe, and a carbon-12 based monster was not a Warsaw Pact crawler tank.

The old tank’s ride wasn’t a Kodiak’s silk float, but with the fire control stabilization engaged, Cutler had no trouble keeping the sight reticle on the grezzen’s retreating backside. We were making thirty-five miles per hour, and the beast wasn’t pulling away, which didn’t match Kit’s predictions about its speed.

Ahead, the grezzen dove left, into brush taller than it was. And was gone.

“Stop!” Kit shouted into her mike.

Zhondro slammed the single brake pedal and the Abrams skidded from thirty to zero in ten feet.

Cutler turned to her, snarling. “Goddamit! Now we’ve lost it!”

She shook her head. “If we’d followed it into the brush, we’d all be dead.”

I turned to her and wrinkled my brow. A loaded Abrams weighed sixty-nine tons. Half of that weight was the most sophisticated armor plate that last century’s Trueborns could devise. I didn’t want to meet a grezzen outside this tank, but in here we were—

Blam
!

The tank rocked on its suspension, and torn metal screeched above my head. I stared up at the hatch above my helmet. It was creased as though it had been struck by a giant’s battleaxe. Through the cracked left prism I glimpsed an ochre flash that was gone before I could blink.

I shuddered. The grezzen had doubled back behind us, swinging so wide that we didn’t detect it in the rain. Then it had leapt across us, swiped our less-armored roof with a paw, and had gotten away clean. A dumb animal had nearly cracked a main battle tank open like a walnut.

I reached up and ran my fingers down the dent in the commander’s hatch.

Kit said, “Grezzen integument and skeletal elements have a Moh’s scale hardness of nine point nine. That’s just less than diamond. Steel’s five and a half. But steel can shatter diamond. It can’t shatter grezz claws.”

I rotated the turret and scanned the mist through the forward-looking sight while my heart hammered. “Is it done with us yet?”

The question about two minutes earlier had been whether we were done with it.

Cutler, his face pale beneath his helmet, stared over his shoulder at Kit, pointing at her handheld. “I thought that damn thing told you where it was?”

Kit raised her palm at Cutler. “A grezz moves too fast for us to react to anything this sensor can pass on to us. I can tell you it’s still out there. And it’s dead ahead.”

Cutler hunched over and peered into his sight. “Then we wait.”

We sat there listening to the turbine whine while rain drummed on the turret roof.

Kit raised her hand. “It’s moving! It’s off to our right.”

Cutler tweaked the controls, the turret hydraulics whined, and the main gun breech shifted as the gun adjusted.

This time, the grezzen came at us from two o’clock. I happened to be looking that way, so I saw it flash toward us from a thousand yards away, springing in great, six-legged bounds.

The computer, now slaved to Kit’s ’bot, twitched the turret.

The grezzen sprang toward us, a blur, landed its leap fifty yards from us, and raised its six-clawed forelimbs.

The beast flexed its massive legs to absorb the shock of its landing, then sprang toward us again.

Foom
.

Cutler fired the main gun.

The trank round passed forty yards, armed, then struck the grezzen in midair, between its outspread paws.

The great beast’s kinetic energy carried it forward, but it landed three yards in front of the Abrams, and its clawed forearms ripped at the tank’s prow.

The animal roared, then flailed at the tank. The left front fender peeled back like paper. The topside loader’s machine gun spun away, snapped off its armored skate mount like a twig.

The tank rocked under the onslaught. Which was impossible. Nothing alive can rock a sixty-nine-ton tank. I thought.

Then the beast slowed its assault. It sagged back on four legs, while one paw scrabbled at its great face. Saliva the color of old mushrooms dribbled from its jaws, and the grezzen staggered side to side. It meandered in a circle ten yards in front of us, like a dog searching a rug for a spot to nap.

The animal’s legs quivered, then it collapsed in the weeds, and lay still, its enormous torso rising and falling as it breathed.

Cutler whooped, then pounded his fist against the turret wall.

I exhaled. I hadn’t realized that I was holding my breath.

Cutler scrambled out of his seat as he shouted into his mike, “Zhondro, go back and hook us up to the floater. We need to get that thing loaded, strapped down and hooked up to sedation before it wakes up.”

I looked over at Kit, and she held my eyes. It was almost time for me to decide whether to cross the mutiny bridge. And for her to answer my questions.

I pointed beyond the tank, toward the great beast. “First, we make sure that thing can’t kill us.”

She nodded. “No argument.”

Zhondro apparently felt the same way. He had already pivoted the tank around, and headed back so he and I could reattach the floater and get the beast up aboard it.

Ten minutes later, Zhondro maneuvered the floater alongside the grezzen, sprawled belly-down in the weeds, and half the size of the tank. The beast’s torso rose and fell, and its great eyes, each the size of a grapefruit, were hidden behind opaque lids.

Unconscious or not, beasts like this one had slaughtered the ancestors of just about every colonist on this planet.

Cutler was anxious to claim credit for the kill but less anxious to come out from behind the Abrams’ imperfect but formidable armor. So he stayed aboard the tank and covered Kit, Zhondro, and me while we dismounted to restrain the beast.

When I got alongside it, the first thing I noticed was the smell. The next things were the monster’s massive foreclaws and jowl tusks. Six per paw, and one tusk per jaw, each was triangular in cross section, curved like a scimitar, and as thick and long as a grenade launcher’s barrel.

Zhondro tapped my shoulder, and when I turned to him, he pointed at the Abrams’ prow. A tank’s glacis, or front plate, is the heavy-armored, outthrust jaw that it dares the world to slug. I had seen an Abrams’ glacis absorb direct hits from shoulder-fired tank killer missiles like love pats.

The glacis was carved with a dozen inch-deep furrows, where the weakened grezzen had pummeled the tank when it attacked.

I whistled.

Kit turned her back on Cutler, then whispered to me. “Well?”

I glanced at my ’puter. Sixteen minutes had passed since the round had struck the grezzen. Cutler’s geniuses had correctly predicted that their trank round would put the grezzen to sleep. But I wasn’t prepared to bet my life on their estimate that the animal was now going to nap for two hours. “We both agree. First we restrain this thing, and get it on a tranquilizer diet. Then we confront Cutler.”

She nodded.

The rain stopped, and the ground fog thickened and swirled around our knees as we worked. It took an hour to offload the Sleeper, fuel, and spares from the floater, then winch the grezzen onto the floater in their place. We lashed it down with restraining cuffs as thick as my thigh, then juiced the beast according to the programs on Cutler’s machinery. The floater’s scale weighed Cutler’s prize in at eight tons.

I fingered the IV tube that connected the tranquilizer dispenser to the grezzen while I watched Cutler up in the commander’s hatch. He stood with his back to us, while he held a personal assistant at arm’s length, taking Two-D of himself with a prize he was still afraid to get to close to.

She shook her head at him, arms folded, while she muttered, “Mighty hunter.”

I stared at the beast. “This thing scared the crap out of me. It really is the most dangerous animal in the universe.”

“This?” She threw her head back and laughed, then pointed at the grezzen’s ochre-furred face. Gray ran in two jagged streaks from the crest of the head to the jowl tusks. “This is a female. And old. She’s a more frail example of her species than that blind, stumbling woog was of his.”

I stared again at the Abrams. Its glacis was shredded. The turret roof wrinkled like an unpressed uniform blouse. The commander’s hatch canted on twisted hinges. All that remained of the loader’s machine gun was the stub of its steel mount, twisted like a bent paper clip. One fender cocked skyward like a broken finger.

I cocked an eyebrow at Kit. “Frail?”

She smiled. “Never underestimate the power of a woman, Parker.”

A sound like an out-of-tune diesel ripped the mist as the grezzen snored. I cocked my head. “But we got Cutler his grezzen. If it’s a less dangerous one, that’s the best possible outcome.”

She sighed. “For a while, I was starting to think you might not be a dumb hired gun, after all. I just told you this is a female.”

I shrugged. “So?”

“Parker, Grezzen mate once in a lifetime, then part company. The female gestates for three years, then delivers one offspring. If it’s male, she bonds with her son and he becomes her life work, even after he matures, when they establish separate territories. A robust male weighs half again more than this petite lady. He’s disproportionately faster and stronger, too. And disproportionately more aggressive.”

“Then it’s a good thing we ran across her, not him.”

She pointed at the mist, then tapped the handheld, which she had disconnected before we turned Cutler loose in the Commander’s cupola. “He’s out there, somewhere. And he won’t like us picking on his mom.”

“If he knows.” I stared at our captive, then out at the mist, as hair rose on my neck. “He doesn’t. Does he?”

Twenty-four

“Mother?” The grezzen cantered through the rain, sweeping back and forth in sixty-jump arcs as it searched for the humans in their moving shell. He cocked his great head when she did not respond.