Overkill (24 page)

“Where’d it go?”

“Maybe it’s dead.”

“Smell that? We burned it, alright.”

Twenty body lengths down the canyon, away from the area where the flaming kerosene lakes crackled, the grezzen paused. Hidden from those above by roiling smoke, he twisted around and examined himself. His fur was singed, but the skin and muscle beneath undamaged. The odor of his own burned hair caused him to snatch his head back. He realized as he did so that he had eaten his meager ration of stored snake hours before, and there was no prey in this cage to restore his strength. Soon his weakness would slow his reflexes.

“Now what?”

“Let the fire burn out. Breeze down the canyon’ll clear the smoke. Meantime, have somebody walk a box of grenades up here.”

“.44 magnum rounds didn’t faze it. Grenade fragments are smaller and slower.”

“Nothin’ to lose trying. Ask ’em how long to get another kerosene tanker connected to the line.”

The grezzen felt a dull flicker of life, saw, then snatched, a fiftylegger as big as a tree branch out of a wall crevasse. He wolfed it down without even peeling its exoskeleton.

He sighed as he realized that the energy he had expended to catch the thing almost equaled the energy its digestion would provide him.

“They say an hour to get the next load. What if that doesn’t kill it?”

“That thing’s gonna run out of places to hide before we run out of kerosene.”

He sat back and tried to comb out his singed fur with a foreclaw. The human was right. Unfortunately, the grezzen was learning that when the subject was killing, they usually were.

Cutler had escaped. The grezzen’s plan was a ruin. Grezzenkind’s secret would be out soon enough. And he was going to die here, restrained and then drowned in liquid fire. He rumbled softly as he raised his forepaws to his face and held it between them.

“Can you hear me?”

At first the grezzen thought it was his executioners above, talking amongst themselves. Then he thought that he had become delirious from exhaustion, fear and smoke, and imagined his mother was speaking to him, the way humans imagined things that were not. The contact he felt was, after all, female.

“It’s Kit. We can help you.”

He felt back along the thread until he found her, just beyond the blockage at the canyon’s far end.

“I’m sorry about your mother. But it wasn’t anything we did.”

He sat up. Wrong! She and Jazen were human, and humans had killed her. Trust? Cooperation? What had it gotten him?

Kit reached to him again. “Goddammit! Talk to me! It’s bad enough for you to decide you’re going to die. But you have no right to take the rest of your race down with you!”

He sat in his human prison, hidden for the moment from the humans above by smoke, hidden from Kit’s nagging by his silence.

“Bombs away!” The humans above whooped.

Clang.

Through the smoke he saw an egg-shaped black rock, the size of a lemon bug, bounce through the bars and drop to the rock floor. There it spun. He felt glee, and a flinch, from the humans above. He turned his face away from the little rock, and closed his eyes.

Boom.

Shrapnel buzzed and swarmed around the grezzen, but didn’t penetrate his fur, which was more protective than steel cable. The instant’s warning, that he gained from the human flinch that he felt, saved his eyes. But the grenade’s concussion, confined between the canyon walls, rocked him.

He felt Kit. “What was that? Get out of there!”

Dazed, he blinked.

Clang. Clang. Clang.

He stared at the three new eggs, then leapt across them.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

He dashed through the thick smoke, sprang through the flames that leapt up at him from the kerosene pools, and ran toward Kit and Jazen.

Sixty-five

I maneuvered the Abrams alongside the wrecked bus that leaned against the Cageway’s gate. Kit stood in the road in front of the tank and directed me with hand signals.

The sounds of grenade detonations and the roar of flames echoed beyond the gates.

I shouted to her, “You think it’s still alive?”

Whump
.

Before she could answer, something struck the gates like eleven tons of wet leather. The gates groaned, but didn’t budge.

We both spun and stared through the bars, where the grezzen peered back at us through three red eyes. Its ochre fur was singed black in places, and its breath rumbled in ragged gasps.

Kit shouted to be heard over the tank engine’s idle, which seemed superfluous if it was reading her mind. “You know that even you’re not strong enough to break out of there. We can break you out. If we do, you can probably kill us. Then maybe you can hide from all those angry humans who are trying to burn you. But you can’t kill them all, you can’t get back out through the robot mines, and they’ll get you eventually.”

The grezzen just stared at us, but if it was reading her mind and was as smart as we thought, it knew she was right.

She shouted again, “When you get free, we’re going to ask you to do things that you won’t like. I’m asking you to trust us again.”

He just kept staring.

Kit turned to me and nodded.

I shrugged, which she couldn’t see because my shoulders were buried behind sixty-nine tons of steel.

An Abrams can pivot on its tracks in no more space than its own length, so I spun it, dug its prow into the back end of the wrecked bus, and gunned the turbine. I’ve never seen a horse, but an Abrams engine pushes with the power of one thousand, five hundred of them.

The bus creaked, then sheet metal crumpled.

I backed off a couple feet, then butted the wreck again. A fifteen-hundred horsepower truck might spin its wheels trying to push a bus, but a tank’s tracks, held down by gravity tugging on sixty-nine tons, just dig in and push.

Chassis members groaned, then snapped. Then the wreckage moved. Slowly and messily, but it moved. I cleared a space in front of the gates as wide as the tank, then backed away.

Kit shouted to the grezzen again while she made shooing motions with her hands. “Back off!”

The beast tiptoed back from the gates. As a GI, I understood divulging nothing but name, rank, and service number. But I, at least, no longer bought the grezzen’s mute act.

My original idea had been to blow the gates with a main gun round. But we might have hurt our big friend, and the noise might have alerted the posse. Based on the grenade explosions, small arms fire, and smoke plume still coming from over the hill, they still thought our friend was trapped below them. Also, they had no idea that Kit and I were in the mix. If we got as far as part two of the plan, we wanted to keep things that way.

Kit scrambled aboard and I backed the tank off while she rotated the turret to opposite lock, with the main gun tube pointing backward, to avoid damaging it.

I dropped back into the driver’s seat, dropped it down, then pulled the driver’s hatch shut over my head, to avoid damaging myself. Then I released the brake and rumbled the tank straight at the gates.

My emotions were mixed. As a tanker, I hated to abuse the old girl. But she was Cutler’s, and the thought of running up his insurance premiums made me smile.

Ten seconds later sixty-nine tons of Abrams rammed the grezzen-proof Cageway gates at forty miles per hour.

From where I was sitting, I’ve hit speed bumps that were worse. The gates collapsed onto the turret as they were carried along, then they slid off on both sides, and crashed to the canyon floor.

I reversed the tank out onto the road that led to the port, then peered out through my periscopic windows. The grezzen trotted out of his prison, stopped, and stared.

My heart pounded. He could run away. Based on the damage that his elderly mother had already done to this tank, he could probably rip our armor like a MUD tube filled with buttery alfredo, then gobble us both alive.

Sixty-six

The grezzen blinked as he emerged uninjured from the shadowy prison in which he had expected to be burned alive. He cocked his head at the shell that held Kit and Jazen, which sat, rumbling, two body lengths from him.

He felt Kit, hidden inside the shell. “I told you we would free you. We did what I told you we would do. Now I am asking you to trust me again. I am inviting you to accompany us on a journey. It will be difficult for you. You will be confined for a long period.”

The grezzen snorted. He had just experienced what confinement by humans meant for him, and for his mother. Never! He turned away. He would regain his strength, then he would hunt and kill humans until either they were all dead or he was.

“The worst of the confinement will only last a short time. Aboard a small ship like the one you saw. The one that Cutler just left on.”

Cutler! The grezzen paused.

Kit continued, “Most of the journey you’ll spend on a much larger ship. Cutler’s on one like it now. If you come with us, you can stop conflict between our species. What happened to you won’t be allowed to happen again. You need to decide now. Those people aren’t going to keep dropping grenades into smoke forever.”

The shell spun round, and clattered off, away from the prison from which Kit and Jazen had rescued him.

The grezzen watched the shell crawl away. He felt in Kit her confidence that the future would unfold as she predicted. But he also knew now that all humans were not of a single mind, in the way that all grezzen were. Her proposal was physically repugnant to a grezzen, dangerous, and unlikely to yield the results she promised.

But wherever Cutler had gone was where Kit now proposed to take him. It was his only chance to get to Cutler and then to kill him. And that was all that mattered.

The grezzen trotted off after his two humans.

Sixty-seven

The port would have been an hour away, but after an hour it remained miles distant. That was mostly because we made an unscheduled stop while the grezzen picked up lunch, in the form of an unlucky woog that crossed our path.

Between Cutler’s wild ride and all the maintenance we had skipped, the tank’s tranny was grinding, and she was running hot and grumpy. If the Abrams quit on us out here, the posse would catch us. Aiding and abetting a grezzen may not be a crime, but Kit and I would probably be lynched for it anyway.

I begged and pleaded with the tank like it was a living thing for the remaining miles.

The Abrams delivered us to the port’s drop-off entrance, squealing like she was wounded. Which she was.

The bald guy who had cleared me through customs appeared at the top of the stairs that led down into the dugout terminal building to investigate the noise. One hand was visored above his eyes, and after a heartbeat, he ran back inside and clanged the door shut behind him.

A visit from a main battle crawler tank will do that. More so when the tank is accompanied by an eleven-ton monster with a bloody water buffalo carcass dangling from its jaws.

Two minutes later, a Sixer shot up and out from the warehouse’s ramp and roared away from us in the opposite direction. I saw a driver and one passenger inside. The night shift, as I recalled, consisted of two employees, one in the terminal and one in the warehouse, so we now had the place to ourselves for awhile.

I drove the Abrams to the hangar, and pulled it between the two shuttles parked there. The tank’s engine died before I killed it.

All frontier outworlds follow the same routine. One shuttle’s always either in parking orbit, or coming or going. One, usually the most recent Downshuttle, is being unloaded, cleaned, and repaired. Because an outworld’s only links to the rest of mankind are its shuttles, a third, “hot” shuttle always sits fueled and ready in case of emergency.

This, it seemed to me, was an emergency. It was also a crime, but I was already a convicted felon.

Kit climbed down from the Abrams’ turret while I lifted myself out of the driver’s hatch.

I paused a moment and laid my hand on the Abrams’ rock-solid forward armor. The old girl’s armor was scarred and muddy. One fender was pretzeled, and soot coated all of her paint that wasn’t blistered. Her chassis had rolled off an assembly line on Earth, which was now an invisible light point in the sky, during a year when the first two digits on the calendar read 19. There was no telling where she had been and what she had seen over the course of the next century and change, but if steel was capable of expectations, I think she had exceeded hers. I gave the tank a pat. “Good girl.”

Kit turned to me. “What?”

“I was talking to the tank. When you think about it, she’s actually a Trueborn. But I don’t suppose she realizes it.”

Kit looked up at the clouds. “Yeah.”

Then we stood staring up at the enormous old wedge that was the hot shuttle.

I said, “You really can fly this?”

She nodded. “Flies itself, really. A space plane’s more automated than a single-engine atmospheric. The hard part’s landing, and we aren’t doing that.”

“What’s the penalty for grand theft space plane?”

She smiled, arms crossed. “Let me worry about that.”

I jerked my thumb at the grezzen, who was enjoying a snack behind us. A woog thigh bone is as thick as a roof beam, and makes the same sound when pulverized. “You can worry about him, too.”

We walked up the shuttle’s cargo ramp into its hold.

The grezzen trotted up behind us, but stood at the base of the ramp on all six legs. It plopped the bloody woog carcass in front of it, then peered up with three blinking eyes.

Our footsteps echoed in the hold, which had been big enough to transport the Abrams, crated, with room to spare. I said to Kit, “Cozy stateroom for our friend. For how long, you think?”

Kit called up a schedule on the bay’s bulkhead flatscreen, read it, then said, “The
Yorktown
broke orbit seventy minutes ago. The
Midway
’s due to match orbit day after tomorrow.”