Overkill (15 page)

He turned his head toward me, to hear me with his good ear. “You, me, Arcuno’s crew.”

My tears welled up, I swallowed, then turned my face away.

I had killed them all. My first and last command had been a catastrophic failure.

I sobbed, not for my failure but for my friends.

Jelly said, “No. You did good, skipper. I counted twenty-one Abramses lit. We broke the people eaters’ back.”

I blinked, then stared past the wreck of my tank, at a boiling, opaque wall of oily smoke, part burned fuel and part burned flesh. The smoke obscured our view of the depression where the dependents’ camp that had precipitated this slaughterhouse had been.

A Tassini emerged from the smoke, running, one hand holding his scarf across his face against the stench. Something dangled from his free hand.

He ran to us, released his scarf, and I saw that tears streaked his face. He bent down, thrust his bearded face next to Jelly’s, and snarled in Tassini. Another Tassini, a corporal, grabbed the man by the shoulder, but the man pushed the corporal away. The screamer was a sergeant by his scarf, and the outranked corporal drifted away, his eyes wide.

The screamer held up a tattered strip of tent canvas, and a shark-tooth shaped flechette, and screamed at Jelly again. Then he pointed at me and repeated himself.

I shook my head. “We didn’t hurt them. They all ran away. We
let
them run away.”

He stared at me. He understood as much Standard as I understood Tassini, which was none.

I made a walking motion with two numb fingers of one bound hand. “Ran away. All fine. Got it?”

Blank stare.

Jelly rolled his eyes at the screamer. “You dumb fuck. Untie me and I got next. You understand next?”

Jelly was pugnacious, even for a legionnaire. He had enlisted to escape a bar brawl murder charge. Legionnaires weren’t
all
psychopaths, but the Legion was a tough enough hitch that if somebody had joined up to dodge a crime, the crime probably wasn’t misdemeanor shoplifting.

The screamer howled, then cuffed Jelly with the back of his hand so hard that Jelly’s lip split. Then the man held another object in front of Jelly’s eyes. It was a coarse cloth stuffed doll, made in the image of a wobblehead. The man’s hand shook as tears streamed down his cheeks. He pointed again, first at Jelly, then at me, and he spat in the sand.

Again I shook my head. “Your child is fine. They’re all fine. You didn’t find any bodies. That should tell you something.”

Jelly spat blood alongside the man’s sputum, then he raised his hands and pointed a finger at my mouth. “Do you understand the words that are comin’ outta of this man’s mouth, dumb ass? Do you?”

I wagged my head at Jelly. “Shut up, Jelly! You’ll just piss him off worse.”

The Tassini sergeant narrowed his eyes, and the stuffed doll quivered in his hand. Then he nodded. “Understand. Mouth.” He lunged at Jelly, pressed his weight down on the bound soldier, and rammed the cloth wad into Jelly’s mouth with one hand until Jelly gagged. With the other hand, he pinched Jelly’s nostrils shut.

Jelly screamed, a muffled moan. His eyes bulged, and he thrashed.

I screamed, “You’ll kill him! Stop it!

The Tassini bore down, and Jelly’s movements became spastic.

I twisted my body and kicked at the man with my good leg. “You stupid fucker! The reason we’re dead and your kid’s alive is me! Don’t kill him, kill me!”

The fires burned on. Jelly’s struggles weakened. So did mine.

Finally, he lay still.

The Tassini sergeant sat back, gasping. Then he stood, hands on hips, and stared down at Jelly’s body. The eyes stared up, and the cloth toy protruded obscenely from Jelly’s mouth.

The man had spent his rage, and I had spent mine. I stared up at him and whispered. “You don’t understand. You don’t understand.”

He stepped over Jelly’s legs and stood above me, silhouetted against smoke and flame. His eyes stared down, black and empty as he pointed at me, then jerked his thumb at his own chest. “Understand.” He shifted his finger to point at Jelly’s corpse, then back at me. “Next, you.”

Then he raised his boot, and stomped on my broken leg so hard that I felt the cracking sound, like an electric shock through my bones, more than I heard it.

I screamed.

I woke inside the dark log in the rainforest, sat up, and banged my forehead so hard that it bled. Sweat soaked my jungle fatigues, but I shivered inside them so hard that my teeth chattered.

Outside, something snarled, scraped across the log, then shuffled away.

I didn’t sleep the rest of the night. Better the nightmare you don’t know than the nightmare you know.

Thirty-three

The moment gray light slivered in between the log and my rock doorway, I kicked the rock aside, then inched out on hands and knees with the loaded Barrett in one hand and my trench knife in the other. Nothing pounced.

I was hungry, a condition to which childhood as an Illegal had accustomed me.

But I was also so thirsty that my upper lip had cracked overnight. The leaves on some of the low growth were as large and concave as dinner plates, and rainwater filled them like they were green teaspoons. I’ve been places where drinking rainwater unleashed bacteria that turned your anus into a storm drain outflow valve. But Kit had said that the bugs here were so different that I couldn’t even catch a cold. And dehydration could kill me in days, either directly or by weakening me until I became an easy snack.

I crawled toward a leaf bouquet, dragging my stiff leg. Since that night in the desert the right one took longer to wake up than the left.

After the Tassini sergeant who murdered Jelal stomped my leg, I lost consciousness. I was roused by the turbine whistle and track clatter of an approaching Abrams.

The Abrams screamed through the wall of smoke through which Jelal’s murderer had run at us, then the tank bore down on me at twenty miles per hour. I shuddered. Had the Tassini sergeant fetched his tank to crush my legs and pelvis so that I would die as painfully as possible?

Then the tank tilted forward, as it braked and stopped with its left track four feet from my boots.

Through the red fog of pain, I realized that the track hadn’t crushed Jelly’s body, because it was gone. Probably field-cremated by throwing it into a burning wreck.

The Abrams’ commander’s hatch opened, and a head-dressed Tassini swung up and out. It wasn’t the sergeant. The corporal who the sergeant had chased away offered the man his hand, but the guy slid off the fender on his own, like a pro.

Then he stared down at me, hands on hips. He looked forty, lighter bronze than nomad Tassini, and a thin indigo line wound across his forehead. By his scarf, he was a full-bird colonel, no less. He frowned.

I clenched my teeth. “You must be the good cop. The bad cop was a doozie.”

Staring down at my leg, the colonel said something in Tassini to the corporal, and the subordinate turned and walked away. The colonel spoke again, and made a shooing motion with one hand. The corporal double timed.

The colonel turned back to me. “I’m not a cop. I’m Zhondro.”

I raised my eyebrows. Zhondro. The Spooks said the dashing tank commander Zhondro was propaganda, a composite myth combined out of the best moments of several lesser commanders. Or Zhondro was the hallucinogenic product of a janga blow. But this guy wasn’t smoke. Not only did he speak standard, he spoke it with a diplomat’s accent. Or, with that slave line on his forehead, more likely a butler’s accent.

He peered at the red patch on my sleeve, then flicked his eyes up to the red commander’s pennant on the Kodiak behind him. “You’re the commander of this unit?”

God, my leg hurt. “Parker, Jazen. Brevet lieutenant. Service number—”

He raised his palm. “This isn’t an interrogation. I already know what you did.”

I coughed and my chest hurt. “Kicked the great Zhondro’s ass, apparently.”

He nodded. “More a product of my carelessness than your skill, I think. But my wife told me that you could have fired on our families.”

The corporal returned, still at double time, with another Tassini in tow. The second Tassini slowed, then took a knee alongside me as he set a beaded hide bag in the sand. Most of his wrinkled face was purple.

Enslaved Tassini were literate enough to have served Marin’s nobility and planters for centuries. And they could learn to maintain and use machines as complex as main battle tanks only too well. But they remained grounded in a nomadic medieval theocracy that preferred a tribal shaman to a medic.

The shaman rummaged in his bag until he found a two-pronged carved bone pipe, which he tried to slip into my nostrils.

I twisted my head away. He whispered something, pressed the side of my neck, and I couldn’t twist away any more. Once he got the pipe up my nose, he tapped powder from a smaller bag into his palm, then blew the janga into the pipe. It prickled the insides of my nostrils.

I wheezed. Whoa! Somewhere, my leg still hurt. But I absolutely, positively did not care any more. I smiled at the old man, at Zhondro, even at the corporal. “No wonder you people talk in your sleep.”

This was all very nice, but it didn’t change the fact that Tassini thought they were doing prisoners a favor by burning them alive. “The condemned man smoked a hearty breakfast?” I giggled.

Zhondro knelt beside me. “Lieutenant, did your commanding officer order you to hold your fire?”

What the hell. I wasn’t going to die a liar. I shook my head. “Nope. I disobeyed a direct order to drill ’em all. Ka-boom! The Legion is
so
gonna burn my ass.” I cocked my head. “Not that it matters. When do we get to the part where you burn my ass first?”

Zhondro shook his head at me, as he tugged an aid pouch from the bandolier across his chest. Tearing the pouch open with his teeth, he spit the top into the sand. Then he cut the ropes that bound my hands, and applied the aid dressing to a wound on my forearm that I hadn’t even seen. He said, “Burn you? Never. You saved the lives of my family. Now I owe you mine until we meet in Paradise.”

“Cool.”

In the distance, one Tassini hollered. A Tassini long rifle snapped off a round.

An instant later, more shouts and a crackle of small arms fire followed the rifle shot. Tankers ran in all directions at once.

Zhondro sprang to his feet, shouted to the corporal, and remounted his tank. As he dropped through the commander’s hatch, I saw a Kodiak’s main gun tube poke over the dune line five hundred yards behind Zhondro’s tank.

Maybe the Tassini had grown careless in their anxiety to learn their families’ fates. Maybe they just had too few tanks and scouts left to set proper pickets. Maybe somebody had been blowing janga when he should have been on watch.

Whatever had gone wrong for the great Zhondro’s outfit, our dead-slow remaining platoons had not just caught up with them, they had caught the Tassini taking a figurative dump in the sand.

Zhondro’s tank rotated its turret toward the threat, and its main gun elevated. Too slow, and too little gun.

Along the dune crest, more Kodiak gun tubes appeared, while the lead Kodiak’s tube steadied as it acquired a firing solution on Zhondro’s tank, which remained four feet away from me.

I smiled at the shaman. “You know, this is the first time I’ve been blown up twice in one day.”

The old man cocked his head, then swung both arms, palms out, in an arc, chanting. It was the gesture that adults made to embrace everything around them, but also the gesture that a child made when it yelled, “ka-boom.”

Foom
! The Kodiak’s muzzle flash outshone the fires all around us, and blinded me.

In the chaos, it occurred to me that Zhondro and I would be meeting in Paradise sooner than he expected.

After the noise, there was only silence so loud that it startled me.

The forest turned silent when I shouted. I knelt just inside the tree line that bordered the clearing where Cutler had run out on us the afternoon before. The echoes of my voice died, then the forest’s background buzz resumed.

I shouted again, “Kit? Zhondro?”

It had taken me an hour to retrace the zig-zag path of broken twigs and trampled brush that I had made when I ran from the clearing.

I paused, straining to hear a voice that never came. I knelt in the brush for five more minutes, scanning the opposite tree line for anything waiting to pounce on me.

I knew that Zhondro could be too badly hurt to answer me. In fact, I knew that he was probably dead by now. But Kit shouldn’t have either followed me along the path I had just retraced, or stayed close to this spot waiting for me. Not because she liked an ex-baby killer. Because two guns were better than one. Besides, there was the lesson she had taught me about gorts. If we were together, she didn’t have to outrun the predator, she just had to outrun the baby-killer.

If I wasn’t getting an answer, it was because I was the only one left alive. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was listening to me.

Finally, I stood, stepped into the open, and ran toward the Sleeper.

Thirty-four

Forty seconds after I ran out of the tree line I reached the Sleeper, flattened my back against its armored outer wall, then panted, holding the Barrett across my chest. I craned my neck and examined as much of the armor as I could see. If there were dents or scuffs more than what the woogs had already put there, I couldn’t tell.

They could be alive inside, and hadn’t heard me. I banged the wall with the Barrett’s stock. “Kit? Zhondro?”

Nothing.

I looked up at the clouds. It seemed to me that the wheeling gorts were thicker above the clearing than normal.

I inched down the Sleeper’s side to the door, then tried the latch. It opened. I hissed, “Anybody home?”

Nothing.

I pushed the door back with the Barrett’s muzzle, paused, then stepped inside.

Empty. My heart sank, but it was better than finding bodies.

I latched the door shut behind me, pulled a ration pak out of the cryo, and squeezed it to warm. I also popped a plasti of Coke, and drained it in three gulps, while I sat at the table and stared across at the empty bunk stack. Zhondro’s prayer scarf lay neatly folded on his bunk, like it always did. A lump swelled in my throat. If he was dead, and it seemed certain that he was, that was the last place that scarf should be. At least, that was how he had explained it to me once.