Overkill (14 page)

Twenty-nine

Now standing side-by-side in the brush, Kit and I stared across the clearing as Zhondro ran for his life, away from the firing signature that the HATT had left behind.

The grezzen caught up with him in a single bound, but as its forelimbs landed, the right one gave way, and the beast rolled in the brush like an elektruk that took an offramp too fast.

The left paw of the grezzen seemed to nick Zhondro, and the Tassini cartwheeled through the mist and crashed down in brush twenty yards from the grezzen.

The grezzen righted itself as nimbly as an eight-pound housecat, though it favored its right forepaw. Zhondro’s round might have hit and injured the grezzen, after all.

Even on five legs, the monster would kill Zhondro within seconds, if he even remained alive.

I leapt out of the brush with my HATT at port arms, screaming like a basic trainee running the combat skills course.

Kit grabbed for my arm. “Parker! Stop!”

The grezzen remained focused on Zhondro.

I got within twenty yards of the beast, then knelt. I shouldered the HATT, sighted on the grezzen’s gargantuan center of mass, and thought to myself, “Adios, big boy.”

For some reason, the grezzen turned its face to me.

I depressed the firing detente, and tried not to cringe away from the impending impact, which would come when recoil thrust the sight cup against my eye socket. Nothing happened.

The grezzen stared at me with three red eyes.

With trembling hands, I executed the weapon’s troubleshoot sequence, which was stenciled on the barrel. First, I slapped the firing slide smartly with my palm. I depressed the battery reset button, assuring that an audible click resulted. I waited while the sequence light array in the sight display winked from red to amber to green.

The grezzen rumbled from deep inside itself, a bass so low that I felt it through my boots. He was hungry. Or it could have been a laugh.

I gulped, and depressed the firing detente again.

Nothing.

The grezzen just stared down at me, while saliva oozed down its fangs like cream of mushroom soup, then plopped into the weeds.

The next step in the troubleshoot sequence read, “Taking care not to damage the sight mechanism, refold stock. Promptly return weapon to unit armorer for battery replacement.”

“Aarrgh!” I reversed the weapon so that I held it two handed by the muzzle, spun like a hammer thrower, and slung it at the beast. I didn’t even refold the stock. It bounced off his flank like a toothpick off a watermelon.

The grezzen crouched to spring.

I ran like my hair was on fire.

Thirty

The grezzen crouched in the clearing, his numb right paw elevated.

He swung his head in one direction, then another, and considered conflicting options.

The ghost remained immobile, but the grezzen kept it within his field of physical vision. The grezzen could no longer feel the human that had stung him. He had no need to feel the rabid, squealing one that had tried to sting him, because it was now fleeing. The female remained near, but was again denying him her location. All he could feel from her was her sorrow for the male that had stung him, coupled with abnormally high anxiety for the rabid one. Perhaps that one was her offspring.

He probed for the fourth human from this pack, Cutler, and saw that the human shell had carried him, and the grezzen’s mother, closer to the territory that the ghosts had stolen, into which the grezzen dared not go.

The lethargy that impaired his forepaw seemed to have infected his decisiveness, as well. He rocked his head and blinked each eye in succession, but felt no better.

He reached out again. “Mother?”

“I am here.”

“What happened?”

“I felt the female, Kit, enter my territory, outside the protection of the ghosts. Like the male, Bauer, she knew. Like Bauer, she had to be eliminated.”

Three decades before, the first humans had sprung from nowhere, or at least from nowhere credible to the grezzen, who had never seen the stars that sparkled above their eternal cloud ceiling. It astonished the grezzen to find intelligence not in their own image but in a puny, hairless, bipedal package. Also astonishing was the new species’ capacity to inflict efficient, wholesale violence. However incredible their genesis, humans posed the first credible threat to the natural balance to evolve since the grezzen had inherited the world thirty million years before.

The grezzen pursued an eradication strategy, but humans proved pernicious and persistent. Containment and coexistence was determined to be repugnant, but preferable.

What the grezzen felt from, and saw of, humans shaped their strategy. Bloody-minded though many humans were, some strains displayed a grezzen-like appreciation of natural balance. So, overall, the human species tolerated dangers in nature.

What humans did not tolerate were rivals. Like the grezzen, humans expected rival intelligence to arrive in their own image. So the grezzen had simply presented their race not as co-intelligent rivals, but as the dumb brutes that the humans expected. The humans believed that their ghosts kept the grezzen out. The grezzen knew that the ghosts kept the humans in. For thirty years the system had worked. But the survival of the grezzen race depended on continued human ignorance.

The grezzen limped along the edge of the clearing, probing to feel or see or smell the human female. The males didn’t know the truth, so they didn’t matter. While he walked, he reached out. “But something went wrong, Mother?”

There was no response.

He rumbled a growl that a human would have called a sigh. Lately, he had to prompt her to respond. But this hesitation was more than just a function of her advancing age. The humans must have stung her as they had stung him.

“Yes and no. I was careless. These humans have a new sting that makes one sleep.”

“I know. They just wounded me with it, too.” He felt her anxiety. “Only a scratch. You seem out-of-sorts.”

She said, “A human is attempting to take me in beyond the ghosts. I am . . . restrained.”

Restrained! The grezzen howled, leapt, swatted drunkenly at a gort, and missed. In a society of free-roaming individuals, where even proximity to one another was an insult, involuntary restraint was an atrocity that required redress.

“I will free you, Mother. Then I will kill the female.”

“No.”

“But she is the one who knows who we are!”

“There is another.”

The grezzen again unconsciously put one plus one together. “Cutler.”

“Yes. I am close to him. He suspects our capabilities. But he believes he has rendered me incapable. When I have regained my strength, I will strike him as I struck Bauer. You will remain there and regain
your
strength. Then you will kill the female.”

“It will be better if I free you, first. Then I will kill the one who restrained you myself.”

“No. You will follow my way.”

The grezzen did not know that his race was organized as a libertarian anarchy of intertwined, absolute matriarchies. He did know that there was no arguing with his mother.

Thirty-one

I crashed through brush and into thicker trees while I unslung the Barrett from my shoulder, then loaded it on the fly with rounds from the bandolier. Kit said a Barrett might annoy a grezzen, and it had to be more effective than throwing a dud bazooka at one.

I sprinted until I was reduced to a panting stagger, and my hands and face bled from the scratches of unheeded thorns. Finally, I stumbled over a root, fell face-down in something green and slimy, and waited for a grezzen fang to skewer me.

Instead I heard flies buzz and, up beyond the tree canopy, gorts screech.

The only thing crashing through the brush had been me.

I levered myself up on my knees, looked around at the silent forest, and pumped a fist. “Hah!”

Then my heart sank. As I ran, I had indulged the heroic notion that I had drawn the grezzen away from Kit and Zhondro. Apparently not.

I stood, hands on knees, sucking air. Then I checked the Barrett’s safety, brought it to port arms, and began retracing my staggers, back to help my friends. I made fifty yards.

Chirr
.

A big-eyed, elongate head, covered in skin that looked like a raw, plucked chicken’s, poked out from behind a tree trunk, chest high. It was one of those running, featherless ostriches that Cutler had mangled with the .50.

It cocked its head at me, opened a mouth filled with fangs like knitting needles, and hissed. Branches crackled to my left and right. From the corners of my eyes, I saw the other two in the pack creep toward me from my left and right, like shadows in the deepening twilight.

According to Kit, I was empty calories to carbon-12 based predators, but these three hadn’t taken xenobiology. To them I looked like a duck and quacked like a duck, so duck soup was on.

I swung the Barrett, in one hand, aiming from one to the other as they inched closer to me. At the same time, I backed up slowly, feeling behind me for a tree trunk and hoping I wouldn’t find out the hard way that they were a foursome.

My heart rattled in my chest. I couldn’t miss them at this range, and a Barrett round would stop something no bigger than these like a sidewalk stops a suicide jumper. But two rounds and three targets added up poorly.

The one directly ahead of me screeched, then leapt at me, hind feet raised, claws out.

Boom
.

I dodged left, the ostrich from hell splattered me with its guts as it tumbled by, and the other two straightened up and looked at one another.

The one on the right must not have been the sharpest knife in the carbon-12 based drawer. He leapt and I shot him.

The third one crept forward while I broke the Barrett to reload, then tugged a round from my bandolier. I fumbled the round as I backed up. But when my adversary got to it, he just dropped his head, sniffed at it, and returned his attention to me.

I had chambered another round, and was about to snap the breech closed when something roared. Ostrich number three straightened up and swung his head around to peer into the half-lit brush. Branches snapped like a Sixer was driving toward me. From another heading, two more somethings roared, louder and louder as they crashed closer.

If you’re ever lonely in a rainforest full of monsters, drop a half ton of dead meat on the ground, make lots of noise, then sit back and wait for the phone to ring.

Ostrich number three squealed, chose a direction from which no crashing or roaring came, and ran like hell.

So did I.

I’ll never know whether whatever was inbound stopped to feed on the two dead ostriches, caught up with the third one, or just lost interest.

I know that fifteen minutes later the forest was quiet again and nothing had eaten me yet. I also knew that I was lost. Dead End had no GPS net with which my ’puter could interface. Because a legionnaire is always prepared, the commander’s locker aboard the Abrams contained hard-copy maps of the area and a lensatic compass, which helped me now like pants helped pigs. Even if I had known where to go, there was little chance that whatever came out at night on Dead End would let me go there.

I stumbled around in the blackness until I found a hollow log, and a stone nearby big enough to block the end with. I used my trench knife to evict a half dozen lemon bugs and two centipedes the size of boot socks, then crawled inside the log and pulled the rock across the opening. Then I lay on my back, and listened as things in the distance ate other things. I laced my fingers behind my head and closed my eyes. Confinement in a tube three feet in diameter was like home to a Yavi like me.

Behind my closed eyelids, I saw Zhondro pinwheel through the air again, after the grezzen had struck him. I suppose Zhondro would have hated it in here, because the open desert was home to a Tassini like him. Maybe that was why Tassini didn’t bury their dead in coffins, they burned them in the open. They burned a lot of them the night I met Zhondro.

Thirty-two

The next thing I knew after the Tassini round struck our sponson ammunition locker was that my arms throbbed, my right leg hurt worse, and someone was crying. I opened my eyes and saw the smoldering remains of our Kodiak, black against the sand, ten yards away from me. The only way I recognized it was the red platoon commander’s pennant, which still writhed in the night wind at the tip of the turret whip antenna.

Four bodies lay like cordwood in a row between it and me, and while I watched, two Tassini tankers in faded coveralls and native scarves laid two more corpses alongside the four.

I couldn’t tell if the charred human logs were theirs or ours. The Tassinis’ faces were orange. In fact, everything that wasn’t black was luminous orange, lit by the flames of the wrecked tanks scattered across the dunes, most still burning, bright against the night sky.

I was seated in the sand with my legs sprawled in front of me, and my arms tied above my head at the wrists, which was why they throbbed. I twisted around and saw that my back rested against a Tassini Abrams’ left rear drive sprocket wheel. The ropes that bound my hands were looped up and over the sprocket, and the steel teeth dug into my shoulders. My right leg screamed, and its boot lay flat against the sand, compared to the left boot, which pointed toes to the sky.

Whoever was crying screamed, “Medic! For chrissake, medic!”

I didn’t need a medic to tell me my leg was fractured below the knee, most probably a torsional fracture of both the tibia and fibula. I had field splinted too many.

Jelal, Suarez’ Gunner, sat propped alongside me, his feet hobbled together and his chubby hands bound and resting in his lap. His helmet was off, exposing his bald head, and a string of dried blood snaked down his neck from one ear, which dangled, half severed.

I turned my head toward him. “What’s the count, Jelly?”