Overkill (6 page)

Cutler disappeared down the passage to the guest rooms.

She said, “He called me a stripper!”

I shrugged. “Let it go.”

Compared to merc’ing, stripping was an honorable profession. I had found strippers as a class to be better spoken than jarheads and less girly than squids.

Slowly, her stiff back softened.

I said, “Welcome to my world. No, he’s not always such a prick. Usually, he’s worse.”

She turned on me with eyes as cold as they were beautiful. “Parker, I don’t like Cutler. I’m pretty sure I don’t like you. But I always do my job. Here’smy first local guide tip: When you’re in town, where you can do it safely, do outdoor work at night. It’s cooler. Clean up, eat, get started. I’ll stop by later.”

She turned and walked back to the up stairway that led to the street.

I sighed as I watched her walk away. Well, she was only pretty sure she didn’t like me. It was a start.

I checked in, showered, then slept until my Handtalk woke me. Zhondro’s voice crackled in my ear. “Shall we dine together, downstairs?”

I checked my ’puter. Six
P.M.
, local.

Zhondro asked, “Did the guide business end well?”

I sighed. “See you in ten.”

Twelve

The Dead Grezzen Lounge (Full Bar, Open from Breakfast ‘til ???) comprised hewn-rock walls enclosing six empty wood tables, one waitress, and a whiskey bottle on a corner table alongside four shot glasses. Zhondro, leaning on forearms as thin as mahogany twigs, looked up and smiled when I sat down across from him.

A smoldering tobacco cigarette dangled from our waitress’ lips and she wore a single-action Ruger in a belt holster. I made a mental note to overtip.

I pointed at my chest. “Whiskey, neat?” Then I pointed at Zhondro. “Cold tea.”

She stared at Zhondro. “You’ll have to leave.”

Tassini mark their caste by indigo dye on the face, the purpler, the nobler. A tribal headman is dyed from hairline to chin. A single indigo line no wider than spider silk crossed Zhondro’s forehead, which marked him as a slave.

I stiffened, and pushed back my chair. “You don’t serve my friend, you don’t serve me! Slavery is—”

She shoved me down in my chair. “Back off, Lincoln. On Dead End we serve slaves. We serve pirates. We serve anybody, except poofs who drink tea at cocktail hour.”

“Oh.” I pointed at Zhondro again. “Whiskey with a tea chaser?”

She pumped her fist at Zhondro. “Attaboy.”

When our drinks arrived, I slammed my first whiskey, then Zhondro slid his across to me. I raised it to meet his tea glass while he toasted, “May Paradise spare you from allies, my friend.”

I nodded, sipped, and let the whiskey burn down my throat. “It may have. Our guide says you and I should work all night, because it’s cooler.”

He smiled. “She sounds as charming as our waitress.”

I set my glass down. “Bigger gun, though.”

After dinner, we drove a rented Sixer, towing a C-lift flatbed floater, back out to the port to pick up the Abrams. Theoretically, we could have driven the tank itself. The old heaps could make seventy miles per hour over pavement. They were governed to forty-two to protect them from their drivers, who drove like, and were, teenaged boys. Cutler had the governor disconnected on his. Trueborns were as realistic about their limitations as prepubescent males.

But the more unnecessary miles with which we wore down the old machine, the more spares we consumed, and the nearest spares in addition to what we had brought with us were jumps away.

The floater was one of two flat bed C-lifts on this planet, the only modern, gravity-manipulating ground transport technology within one hundred trillion cubic light years. Cutler’s people had pre-leased both, even though the Abrams could only tow one. The Netionary definition of overkill is a holo of a Trueborn with a wallet.

Zhondro and I chose the higher-capacity unit, which was rated to support seventy tons. Zhondro rode shotgun, literally, and plinked the obligatory gort.

It was midnight before we stopped in the floodlit mud yard of the warehouse I had rented on Eden’s south side.

I dropped through the commander’s turret hatch of the Abrams, scooted feet-first forward into the Abrams’ driver’s compartment, then raised the seat so my head poked out through the open driver’s hatch in the tank’s prow. Zhondro spooled his hand and nodded, I thumbed the starter, and the gas turbine whistled up as smoothly as it had out at the port.

Zhondro gave me a thumb up and smiled. Then he stood in front of me, hand signaling me to adjust left or right while I backed sixty-nine tons of steel off into the yard, blind.

When I thumbed off the turbine, I noticed that Kit Born’s Sixer had pulled up and parked in the yard. The person who leaned against its fender was blonde, and wore a businesslike khaki blouse and slacks that still left no doubt about her gender. She was unarmed, by Dead End standards, just a demure gunpowder revolver in a waist holster, and it took me a heartbeat to realize that the lady was Kit.

I waved to Zhondro to replace me in the driver’s seat, then crabbed backward, up, and out of the Abrams the way I came in, as Zhondro dropped through the loader’s hatch then slid past me, to finish moving the tank.

I smiled when I reached her. “You clean up well.”

She didn’t look at me, but stood staring, hands on hips, mouth open, at Zhondro’s indigo-striped forehead, which poked out of the driver’s hatch.

I sighed. Shaved, showered, cleaned and pressed, I expected at least a glance, if not a “you, too.”

Zhondro restarted the Abrams, pirouetted it like a sixty-nineton ballerina, and I chained the now-empty floater to the Abrams’ rear tow mounts. Then Zhondro drove the tank and the floater down the ramp, and through the warehouse’s open double doors with six spare inches on each side.

I said, “Zhondro’s a Tassini, from Bren. Most people are surprised—”

“To know that his family were slaves? Privileged house domestics by the curve of his caste line, but slaves.”

I raised my eyebrows. I had fought almost a full year tour on Bren, and even I didn’t know that you could tell a slave’s sub-caste by line orientation. “Then what
did
surprise you?”

“Not that he can handle a crawler, either. The post-emancipation rebels survive on obsolete arms that they get under the table from the Marini monarchy.”

I wrinkled my forehead. She spent her days in a jungle at the end of the known universe, but she knew more about the realpolitik of an obscure civil war than most of us who had bled in it.

The warehouse was three times larger than necessary to house and work on a tank. But we were cramped. The place was crammed to its ceiling with crates bearing Cutler shipping labels that had apparently arrived before us. Whatever was in that pile, we didn’t need it to maintain a tank or hunt a monster. More Trueborn overkill.

Once Zhondro had rumbled the Abrams down the ramp and into the warehouse, I waited while he scuttled back from the driver’s compartment up to the commander’s seat. An Abrams’ interior resembles a Kodiak’s.

Zhondro rotated the turret out of opposite lock, so the main gun tube swung from its position pointing aft until it pointed ahead, off the tank’s prow. An Abrams’ turret hydraulics also whine exactly like a Kodiak’s turret hydraulics. The way they had on the day, ten months ago, when I first saw Zhondro.

Thirteen

Hydraulic whine faded, inside the turret of the Kodiak I commanded, as the hovertank slipped laterally along the Tassin Desert dune crest.

My company commander’s voice crackled in my helmet earpiece. “For the third time, Red Three, do you copy? Parker!”

“Copy, Red One.” I eyed the thermal display on the tank commander’s screen in front of me, and stared at the green-enhanced Tassini encampment in the midnight darkness below. “I’m looking at Position Victor, sir. But it’s no tank park. Just family flappers.” Fifty nomad tents, flap sides rolled up to take advantage of the desert’s night breeze, had been pitched around a rude stone water well.

“No mech?”

I shook my head, invisibly to my captain, as I spoke. “No fuel trucks, no soft rollers, nothing but hobbled wobbleheads grazing.”

The captain paused, then he whispered across the eight miles that separated my five-tank platoon from him and the rest of our company. “You sure?”

“We got the hatches open, and we’re upwind, skipper.” Of the three indigenous planetary faunas that Legion Heavy Brigade VI had encountered during my tour, the Brigade Webzine’s ask-atanker poll voted Bren’s dinosaurids foulest-smelling. And the wobbleheads that the Tassini rode won “foulest of the foul.”

The captain came back. “Well, over here we finally got the purple people eaters in our sights.”

The plan of this raid had been for a softside vehicle convoy to drive along a Tassini controlled road, to make a demonstration that would bait the Tassini tank unit in our area of operations away from their support base. There, the captain and our company’s other two tank platoons would ambush and destroy them. Yes, the big, bad Legion was reduced to sneaking up on rag-tag rebels.

Theoretically, Kodiaks were a century ahead of the rebels’ black market crawlers. So the brass allocated a single brigade to this war, figuring that even one Kodiak per five rebel crawler tanks would be overkill.

But we had no air support, with which the Kodiak was optimized to interface in combined-arms operations. The dune topography limited line-of-sight engagements to a thousand yards or less, which cancelled the Kodiak’s main gun range advantage. A hovertank’s over-water mobility advantage was worthless in the desert, and the Kodiak’s speed was slashed by engine breathing problems unique to the Tassin desert.

Also, Tassini tankers didn’t cower like escaped slaves and amechanical nomads, as the brass expected. The Tassini fought so hard and so well that we called them the purple people eaters.

The captain presumably had visual on the Tassini crawlers, approaching the ambush kill zone, as he spoke to me. Meantime, my platoon had looped in behind the Tassini tanks, to destroy their logistic support. The captain understood his operation, and he understood what he was seeing. But he wasn’t understanding what I was seeing.

What I was seeing through the thermal wasn’t a tank park emptied out of tanks. There were no fuel trucks, no spares vans, no sentries. It was a movable tent cluster occupied by sleeping noncombatant nomads.

Below me, something moved. I leaned forward toward the display again and watched, then I radioed, “Red One, I’m watching a little kid who just wandered out from one tent in his nightshirt. He’s taking a leak against some rocks.”

“Sergeant, you’re brevet Third Platoon commander because Haren let a Tassini kid like that get too close, with a satchel charge under his nightshirt.”

I sighed. The captain liked Lieutenant Haren. We all had.

The captain asked, “No bunkers? No hard-shell vehicles?”

The hardest things in that encampment were fired clay milk jugs. “Uh, no, sir.”

“Then load flechette, and stand by.”

I swallowed. One 145-mm anti-personnel flechette round from a Kodiak’s main gun distributed razor microdarts in an expanding, conical pattern. The pattern spread at this range insured that, within the tent cluster, no object larger in circumference than a child’s fist would remain unpenetrated. Five tanks, one round each, to assure overkill. Three seconds after the order to fire, those tents would be confetti on the breeze. Every living thing within that encampment larger than a sand flea would be dead, or hemorrhaging life faster than pee splashing rocks.

I toggled to platoon net. “Red Group, this is Red Three. Load flechette. Then form up, on line with visual on the target, and stand by.”

I looked away from the thermal’s eyepiece, across at my gunner, who faced me in the turret, separated from me by the recoil path of the main gun breech and its autoload ramp. As assistant tank commander, he had heard my exchange over the Command Net. Beneath his helmet visor his eyes were wide.

“Parker?” In the mud yard of the warehouse on Dead End, Kit Born poked my shoulder.

I blinked, then turned and faced her.

She said, “to answer your question, Parker, no, it wasn’t your friend’s caste line that surprised me. What surprised me is that a man brave enough to engage hovertanks with crawlers, like horse cavalry against panzers, would have anything to do with a merc like you.”

I’ve never considered slugging a woman before, but when I looked down at my right hand, it had balled into a fist.

Then another Sixer, this one a fresh-washed hired car, with a climate-sealed cabin, bounced into the yard.

Kit and I turned as it stopped, and Kit’s new boss, who was already mine, stepped out into the mud. Cutler wore a designer’s flap-pocketed idea of battle dress uniform, and a bush hat with one side pinned up. Behind him, his driver unloaded matched luggage. We already had a warehouse full of crap that we didn’t need, so it hardly bothered me that Cutler was going to dress for dinner in the jungle.

Cutler tugged one booted foot out of the mud, turned his boot sole up to examine it, then turned his frown on Kit. “Right now, how many obstacles stand between us and a live grezzen?”

She ticked items off on her fingers as she spoke. “A hundred miles of bad road. One river ford. Lots of lesser monsters. That’s three.” She raised her thumb. “Four would be if you suffer an outbreak of common sense.”

He sniffed, ignored her, and faced me while he pointed at the Abrams. “How about the equipment?”

“The C-lift trailer’s got to be loaded. Fuel bladders, spares, all three ammunition lockers, Sleeper, repair ’bot. Then we run the checklists on the Abrams, remount the auxiliary guns, and we’ll be good to go. We could finish tonight, but three days would make better sense. Unless we need any of that other stuff.” I pointed at the equipment mountain.

He pointed at us. “The other stuff doesn’t concern you. We leave in the morning, then. Also, none of you leave here in the meantime. Nobody phones or texts anyone.”

I did a mental eye roll. Radio silence? For a hunting trip? Really? I spread my palms. “Who would we call? Sir.”