Overkill (30 page)

The open path that the grezzen had opened between the cargo bay and the virtual vacuum of Earth’s ionosphere had depressurized the cargo bay and starved both him and the fire of oxygen. That, in turn, had rendered him unconscious and snuffed out the fire.

He felt for Halder’s thread and felt it faint and near. Then it ebbed and died. The grezzen felt no other living threads within the
Midway
.

The other factor that had saved the grezzen’s life was the sheer strength of his body, a physicality that neither Halder nor any human shared.

The crash taught the grezzen one more lesson about the differences between humans and grezzen.

He was strong of bone and muscle and so he had survived the great crash. Humans were weak, yet nearly all of them had survived, too. They had compensated for their weakness by communal cleverness, and by the sacrifice one of their number chose to make for the rest.

Now, alone in the great ship, he was enveloped in steel and in total darkness, and he knew that the
Midway
had fared more poorly than he. The cargo bay’s collapsed bulkheads pressed against him, but he peeled back the sheet steel as a yearling would shrug off a moss blanket. Then he clawed and dug through twisted girders and hull plate until he encountered the outer hull panels. When he slashed an opening in the panels, they tumbled away.

He peered out and saw that he was a body length above the ground. At least, he presumed it was the ground. It was pure white. It stretched away, featureless and as flat as a lake, toward a dim, blue sky horizon.

He leapt the body length to the ground and sank to the first joint of his limbs. The ground had less substance than river sand, than water, than moss. And it, like the air he breathed, imparted a curious feeling, like wading a stream, but more intense. Similar to the sensation of mouthing the meat his jailers had offered.

He swatted at the ground with a forepaw, and it exploded and sparkled in the light.

The grezzen had never known a temperature of less than fifty degrees Fahrenheit, so snow was a mystery.

As he watched the particles adrift in the air, something appeared on the horizon, gliding through the sky toward him. A gort, he thought at first. It had wings, like a gort, but it was larger, much larger. As large, in fact, as himself.

He backed beneath the wreckage, so it could not see him.

It was intelligent. He felt it speak to another.

“Kaktovik Temporary Deputy Three to Kaktovik base, over.”

“This is Kaktovik base. What you got, Herbert?”

“I just earned my deputy fee, Lowell. I’m lookin’ at the wreck.”

“I got you on the scope two mile south of the coast and twenty mile east. I’ll call it in to the Fairbanks.”

The flyer’s voice became a high-pitched sound. Then it said, “You ever seen a cruiser? Holy crap, she make a gray whale look small. Like a seal pup. What’s left of this one’s flat as a hotcake.”

“You see any debris strung back southwest? FAA say when she came down she was breaking up. Dropped a junk heap six hundred mile long, from Nome up to us here.”

“There’s plenty junk down there.”

“They say people got out in lifeboats. They should have come down along the debris field axis. You see anything orange?”

“Nope. Nothin’ movin’ around the wreck, either. I can set down on the river and take a walk round, if you want.”

Walk? Ah! It was a shell with a human inside, like the flying shell that had carried him away from home. But this one was smaller.

“No. FAA says concentrate every available resource around Nome. That’s where most of the lifeboats came down. You get on back here, Herbert. Big blow comin’ in over the pole.”

“Roger. I can see the front out to the north. Hope all those folks did come down around Nome. ‘Cause anybody alive up here’s gonna get a whuppin’ from that storm. Kaktovik Temporary Deputy Three returning to base. Out.”

The shell of Herbert turned and buzzed away and out of sight.

Silence returned. The grezzen was hungry. He was terribly thirsty, too. He reached out. Six times sixty humans clustered in the direction toward which the shell of Herbert had disappeared. A nest. Food. But the humans there would have stings. Perhaps kerosene. He wouldn’t head in that direction.

In this world he felt a distant human buzz far vaster than he had ever before felt. But the only other consciousness nearby lay in the direction opposite to the debris. He felt two individual intellects. One was dull, the other rather brighter. He crawled out from his hiding place beneath the wreckage, and trotted off in search of a meal.

Eighty-two

I woke with a headache worse than any hangover, shivering. My breath puffed out as fog. I sat on the floor of the leftover lifeboat that we had found and ridden down. I was bent forward at the waist, with my wrists bound to my ankles by breathing mask cords of transparent plastic.

“Well, Parker. The sleeper has awoke.” Across from me, Jack leaned against the padded inner hull of the lifeboat while he lit a tobacco cigarette with one hand. In the other he held his automatic.

From the stink and haze in the lifeboat, it wasn’t his first cigarette in here. I had been out for awhile.

“Fuck you, Jack. Where are we?”

“Alive. On the ground. Someplace goddamn cold.”

I dragged myself upright and peeked out the lifeboat window opposite the one Jack looked out of.

When I touched my nose to the porthole quartz I recoiled. Goddamn cold was right. If this was Earth, where were the cool, green hills? What I saw was snow windblown into shallow drifts, twisted hull plates, girders, and unrecognizable debris. Out at the horizon rested a black lump that was either the wreck of the
Midway
or a wind-scoured mountain. It was logical that we had wound up close to the wreck, because we had probably been the last boat out, and had followed the
Midway
’s trajectory.

This boat’s momentum had probably burrowed it into the snow, its orange hull as invisible as the fire extinguisher’s tank. There could be other boats buried around us, that we couldn’t see. But I had seen scatter diagrams of airborne operations gone wrong, which basically described lifeboat deployment from a crippled star cruiser. If any other boats had made it down, they would probably be dispersed over an area of hundreds of square miles.

Jack tapped the boat’s control panel. “Heater’sgone. We stay here, we freeze and starve. Or we make for the ship. I vote we make for the ship.” He waved the pistol. “My vote counts. Yours don’t.”

Actually, I could hardly disagree with him. A lifeboat’s not much more than an upside-down, insulated bucket, with a heat shield like a ceramic dinner plate welded over the open end of the bucket. Retro rockets are strapped to the dinner plate, parachutes to the other end of the bucket. Twenty can ride, if they get friendly. They’re barely more than the cans Trueborns used to lob monkeys into low orbit before the War.

And this one seemed about that old.

Jack untied my hands, rummaged in a gear locker, then tossed me an orange jacket that cracked when I unfolded it. After I put it on, he made me pull out another jacket and lay it out, so he could cover me with his gun while he put that one on.

Then he made me load my jacket’s pockets and a rucksack with everything in the lifeboat that wasn’t screwed down. The lifeboat radio’s batteries had probably been dead for decades. But we ripped the radio loose because we might find fresh batteries in the wreck. There were rations, which have a surprisingly long shelf life if you’re hungry enough, even old-school chemical flares. I sighed. Jack was keeping me alive as a pack mule. For now.

Once we got over to the ship, my utility might be ended.

By the time we were ready to exit the boat, our breath had fogged both portholes. He motioned to me to crack the hatch. When I did, wind slammed my face like a side of frozen beef. The sky had darkened.

He shouted over the wind, “Just in time. Storm coming.”

Storm already here, it seemed to me.

We climbed out into the snow and started for what was left of the
Midway
.

As we trudged off, me leading, Jack following, gun trained on my back, snow cut at us blown horizontal by the gale.

Eighty-three

The grezzen bounded across the flat landscape, tracking the two nearby intelligences. They had begun to move, but slower than a grazing woog.

He knew his body well enough to know that his faculties were impaired. By thirst, most prominently and immediately. Also by hunger, perhaps by the alien absence of warmth. Perhaps even by some undefined injury he might have suffered when the crippled nest
Midway
had struck the ground.

For whatever reason, he felt the two intelligences that he sought in an uncharacteristically indistinct way. One of the intelligences he was approaching was wary, threatened. The other was aggressive, dominant, and quite prepared to kill. It exhibited a cold guile no simple predator like a striper did.

As he ran, his great paws exploded sparkling clouds of whiteness with each landing. He breathed in the particles suspended in the air, and their form changed. In his mouth, they turned to liquid. Water, in fact. He dropped his head into the stuff, scooped it in, and in this way drank.

The grezzen had seen fire transform rain water into vapor, when lightning struck a tree during a storm. He assembled his previous observation together with this new phenomenon, and deduced that the heat of his body had transformed the stiff water into liquid in the same way that the heat of lightning transformed liquid water into clouds.

Grezzen seldom reasoned about their world. But it wasn’t because they lacked the capacity. For thirty million years they had simply lacked the need.

The stiff water yielded little liquid, so frequent pauses to slake his thirst slowed his progress. But the stuff was everywhere. His most life-threatening need, for water, was now satisfied.

Renewed, he bounded ahead, toward the two intelligences that would satisfy his need to eat.

As he ran, the wind strengthened, and bore distant gray clouds toward him from his left. He welcomed the familiar clouds as a reminder of home. But the cold that they brought with them numbed his extremities.

The ground was not entirely flat, after all. He moved up a shallow slope, crested it, then paused to drink while he peered down a shallow decline. Beyond that slope, even flatter terrain stretched to the horizon. In the distance, where the slope changed, something moved awkwardly.

Eighty-four

I stumbled forward, my eyes slitted against blown snow, bent beneath the rucksack Jack had made me hang on my back. At each step my booted leg punched knee deep through the snow, then I had to lift it and punch in the opposite foot. About every fourth step, under the weight Jack had piled on me, I stumbled. Each time, as I levered myself upright, panting frigid air and spitting out snow, Jack bitched.

Finally, he stepped alongside me, held my arm, and shoved the gun’s muzzle against my ribs while we walked side by side.

I peered off at the clouds racing toward us. At this rate, the incoming blizzard would envelop us before we made it to the wreck’s shelter. An infantryman in self-heating Eternad armor could survive for days in a blizzard. In aged, general-purpose survival gear, we would last hours, not days.

Eighty-five

The thing that lurched in the distance was scarcely more than a speck, black against the white ground. It seemed to have four legs. Though the grezzen still felt two intelligences, he saw only the single animate object.

However confusing that circumstance was, one thing was certain. This flat and empty place was utterly unlike the brushy forests that he had so recently thought constituted the entire world. This barren plain offered no possibility for a hunter to conceal itself while stalking prey. As visible as his prey was to him at this moment, so he would be to it. The wind was in his face, so his scent would not be carried to the prey. But the grezzen would simply have to dash forward and rely on speed and power, rather than surprise.

Normally, the long run to the kill would have been of no consequence. But thirst, hunger, and the debilitating strain of his long voyage had drained the grezzen. He could only hope that the unfamiliar creature could not outrun him once it became aware of his presence.

The grezzen gauged the distance between himself and the prey, painfully aware that he had no sense of scale against which to measure the creature’s size. If he could overtake the creature, he had no idea what its speed or capabilities might be. It could be as harmless as a woog, or as venomous as a lemon bug.

He drank one more time, then plunged headlong down the shallow slope toward his prey.

Even in his weakened condition, the grezzen covered the distance between himself and his prey in a few beats of his great heart.

At closer vantage, the creature became more distinct. Its body was covered in fur, closer and sleeker than his, but of a similar shade of brown. In plan the creature’s body was far more like his, thick yet elongate behind its head, rather than spindly and bipedal like humans. Like the humans, the creature had just four limbs, but unlike them it had the apparent good sense to walk on all of them. At the moment, the creature was walking rapidly because, as the grezzen had already felt, the creature already feared something even before he approached.

The creature turned its head toward the grezzen, and he felt its flight reaction strengthen. It ran away from him faster.

“Ran” was a poor description. Its limbs were flaccid and spatulate, so weak that the creature simply dragged along on its belly, not so different from the way a river snake moved when it hauled out on land.

When the grezzen came within a few body lengths of the creature, he felt its flight reaction turn to fight. It skidded across the white surface until it stopped, then turned and faced him, bellowing like a cornered bull woog.