Overkill (9 page)

Cutler stroked his chin. “Why does it change direction?”

“The grezz didn’t used to do it. Even now they only do it near the line. It’s probably proactive evasive maneuvering. They’ve learned that the Rovers can sneak up on them.”

Cutler nodded. “Rovers aren’t as dumb as these woogs of yours.”

The red dot on the map stopped moving.

Cutler leaned forward. “Did the ’bot blow the grezzen up?”

Kit shook her head. “The grezz just moved out of range, so the ’bot shut down again. When a ’bot detonates, its dot flickers out. This dot’s still there. This was no big deal. Grezz are solitary hunters. They forage over defined territorial loops. But as they orbit within their territories, their territories rotate. Like planets around a sun, and moons around each planet.

I said, “You mean one grezz knows what the other ones are doing?”

Kit shrugged. “Does one moon know what the other moons are doing? Lots of predators warn peers away by marking territory. The grezz that triggered that ’bot was just foraging its territory, and its loop took it close to the Line, then away from it. So the Rover activated when the grezzen came close, then shut down when the grezzen moved away.”

I said, “Well, at least we know it’s here. Fortunately, it doesn’t know we’re here.”

Zhondro nodded. Kit, however, didn’t. Neither did Cutler.

The workshop cavern just inside the station’s armored doors was big enough not only for the Wrangler’s vehicles and the ’bot armory but for us to park the Abrams and the floater. Therefore, after dinner, Kit reprogrammed a Rover, and Cutler disappeared into the living quarters in the adjacent chamber.

Zhondro and I sat on a parts crate, legs dangling, watching while our six-legged maintenance ’bot replaced the third right-side road wheel. The job, if performed by last-century tankers, or by this-century Tassini, was a muddy wrestle that cost a couple of soldiers several square inches of knuckle skin.

I smiled at Zhondro. “How many tankers does it take to change a road wheel?”

There are no comedy clubs in the desert. He frowned, counted on his fingers, scratched his head, then said. “I don’t know.”

“Ten. Two to change the wheel, and eight to stand around and criticize their technique.”

After a heartbeat, he threw back his head, laughed, and slapped my thigh. He hadn’t been laughing the first time we met.

“Max mil speed my ass!” I coughed a mud of spit and Tassin powder sand into my glove as the captain’s voice vanished from the command net. Tassin powder was four microns finer than Saharan Desert sand on Earth. It was also four microns finer than the sand on every outworld the Legion had operated on before Bren.

Therefore, the geniuses at Lockheed who had designed the filters that protected a Kodiak’s moving parts were shocked— shocked—that Kodiaks choked themselves to death in seconds if operated in the Tassin desert at more than half of maximum military speed. Filter redesign was the manufacturer’s current top priority. Meaning that in the meantime our enemy could run circles around us with antiques.

I was in command of five nano-’puter guided, composite-armored, gunned-to-the teeth war machines that could outrun any armored land vehicle in the universe, over rock, mud, water, or grass. Except here and now, where they could barely outrun dismounted infantry.

I toggled back to platoon net. “Red Group, this is Red Three. Come about and withdraw echelon left, at one eight zero. Maintain best speed but hold formation. Red Three will take left flank.” We couldn’t flat outrun the Tassini, so our best chance was to back up, presenting the enemy our heavier, frontal armor, in an orderly withdrawal that allowed us to fire on the bad guys, and protect one another. And hope that help arrived.

“How many, Jazen?” Edwards asked.

“Thirty. Inbound, hot.”

“Thirty? Echelon, my ass! Jazen, just turn around and boogie full gas!” The trouble with a brevet command is subordinates still think they’re debating over coffee with their buddy. Edwards was a tank commander, like I had been. In fact, by date of rank he was senior. He should’ve been breveted, not me, when Lieutenant Haren closed his real estate deal.

“Run? Then the people eaters blow your ass off for sure, Edwards!” Suarez was a tank commander, too. Edwards had a point, but Suarez and I had a better one. Kodiaks, like most tanks, had thinner armor on their rear and flanks. They were designed to fight facing their adversaries.

I said, “Stuff it! Echelon. Now. Move.”

The chatter died.

My driver slewed Red Three around.

“Jazen?” Edwards again.

I rolled my eyes, though he didn’t sound argumentative.

“Jazen, my forward impellers just quit.”

Goddamn powder sand.

“What’s your best speed, then?”

“Zero.”

My gunner pressed his earpiece. “I got purple chatter. I can’t make out a word, but there’s lots of ’em.”

Normally, we didn’t pick up Tassini intercom chatter until they were close, minutes away, and so committed to battle that they didn’t care who knew it.

The school solution was leave Edwards’ tank to the wolves, and save the other four. Pick him and his crew up, if there was time. But there wasn’t time. And the school solution didn’t say how four tanks could outrun thirty that could move twice as fast as the four, anyway.

Surrender was no option. Intel said the Tassini, purple people eater nickname notwithstanding, didn’t actually cannibalize captured legionnaires. But they did burn Legion prisoners alive on the spot, as a favor, so we could enter Paradise as warriors.

I sighed. “Red Group, this is Red Three. Form up on line and blow down.”

One thing a hovertank can do that a crawler can’t is put itself into hull defilade. In other words, by concentrating all the tank’s impeller power, coupled with its weight, a hovertank on loose substrate can blow out a hole beneath itself, and bury itself turret-deep. Blowdown piles the displaced substrate around the tank, and basically turns a tank into a revetted pillbox, protected by the earthworks it throws up around itself. If you’ve ever seen a nature holo of a flounder flapping itself down into the sand, you’ve got the idea.

Of course, in the nature holo, once the flounder has immobilized itself a shark swims into the picture and eats it. Like the flounder, we would get eaten. Unlike the flounder, we would bite back first.

My gunner’s eyes met mine. “Yes, sir.” He raised his thumb as he firewalled the impeller throttles.
Clang
.

Clang
.

In the man-blasted cave on Dead End, our maintenance ’bot laid down the dog-bone tool that allowed it to change the road wheel, then sank down on all six legs and whined into sleep mode.

Zhondro stretched, yawned, then tapped my thigh again, smiling. “Tonight we sleep, too. Tomorrow, we find out how many tankers it takes to make a monster sleep.”

Across the room Kit stood up from the ’bot she had been working on, and stretched, too. She watched Zhondro walk away from me, shook her head, then dragged off to bed herself.

That left me alone with the Abrams and Kit’s sleeping Rover ’bots, in silence so complete that it echoed. I lay back and stared at the pocked granite ceiling for a moment. I didn’t think I dozed, and when I sat up and looked around the cavern was as empty as before. But I felt as though a stranger was listening to me breathe.

The next morning, we pushed off for the Line at Break of Morning Nautical Twilight, for a four-hour sightsee beyond the Line, just a risk-free toe-dip along the edge of the big pond that was grezzen land.

We were topped up with diesel, the turbine purred, not a bad light showed on the boards, and I sipped coffee that actually tasted good from the thermcup. Everybody’s helmet radios were operating static free, and all hatches were safely buttoned up against avian predators.

I rocked in the commander’s cupola, humming. Kit sat in the loader’s seat, facing Cutler down in the Gunner’s well, and both actually were smiling. I smiled, too. The only downside was that our closed steel box was already an oven and the morning was young. But this was shaping up as a safari after all, not a bus wreck.

Two miles later, Kit raised her palm. “Stop!”

Eighteen

In the hand that she hadn’t raised, Kit gripped a handheld Animap that mimicked the one back on the Line station’s wall, and she stared down at its screen. She spoke into her mike. “Come right twenty yards.”

Zhondro pivoted the tank, and nudged over a barrel-round tree like it was a garden stake.

Kit looked up at me, then poked her thumb up toward the hatches. “Okay. Let’s open the hatches.”

I pressed my earpiece. “What?”

Kit mopped her cheek with her fleece glove back. “It’ll be cooler.”

“The birds will get us.”

She shook her head. “Not a problem any more. Meet me topside and I’ll explain.”

The two of us scrambled up and stood, torsos exposed, forearms resting atop the Abrams’ turret.

I looked around, my first real view of Dead End
au naturel
. Beneath low, gray clouds, green-leaved trees as big around as drive-up pharmacies rose three hundred feet. They were set far enough apart that the Abrams—or herds of big animals—could navigate among them easily. Clumps of orange, yellow, and red flowered brush carpeted the gently rolling forest floor. “I didn’t expect this.”

She nodded. “This rainforest surprised me too. I expected triple canopy jungle you had to hack through with a machete, not open forest. And the color surprises everybody. Flowers are supposed to have evolved as food. To attract birds and insects that carry plant pollen. So if the birdlikes and insectlikes here can’t digest fruit and flower nectar, why did fruit and flowers evolve?”

“I guess.” I hadn’t known why it didn’t add up. I just knew it didn’t. The lovely Ms. Born not only knew answers that I didn’t, she knew answers to questions I hadn’t even thought of.

“The birdlikes and insectlikes here don’t eat fruits or visit flowers to eat the plant, but to eat the insectlikes that live in the plant. The woogs do the same thing. It doesn’t fit our idea of a natural scheme, but that doesn’t make it less true.”

I fingered my helmet chin strap while I craned my neck at dragon shapes silhouetted against the clouds. “I dunno. I know the birdlikes will eat
us
. I saw them. That’s part of the natural scheme, too.”

“Not really. The scheme you experienced inside the Line’sno longer natural. Grezzen can jump forty feet straight up. They swat gorts down, like flies.” She pointed at the dragons carving figure eights overhead. “The gorts learned thirty million years ago to nest in the trees, up there, and fly above a floor of plus-fifty feet. Out here, you’re seeing Dead End in its natural balance.”

She said, “Inside the Line, grezzen were killing us. So we got rid of the grezzen. But then the gorts that the grezzen kept at bay modified their behavior, and started killing us. Planetologists call it the conundrum of unforseen ecological consequence. I call it the whack-a-mole rule of human meddling.” She clasped both hands, like a child hammering. “Whack! We change something
here
. Oops. That makes another problem pop up
there
, where we didn’t expect it. Whack! So we whack
that
mole. Oops. We’re so smart that we’re a menace.”

My heart skipped. “You’re saying that the gorts are staying away because there’s a grezzen around here?” I laid my hand on the .50’s receiver and scanned the distant treeline.

She shook her head. “Nope.” She pointed at the ground ten feet beyond our right track. One of her camouflaged Rover ’bots lay powered down in green stuff that looked like weeds. “That’s the ’bot that moved last night, because a grezz
was
in the area at that time.”

I moved my palm to the .50’s charging handle as I swiveled my head.

She sighed and shook her head again. “Parker, relax. A shutdown Rover ’bot’s the perfect grezz alarm. If a grezz moves within eight hundred yards of us, that ’bot will wake up. As long as the ’bot’s still, we couldn’t be safer.”

Cutler shouldered his way up alongside me. “Then I’ll switch places with you, Parker.”

I frowned at Kit. There were roughly sixty things Cutler could reach from the tank commander’s station with which he could inadvertently strand or kill us. But it was his tank.

Twenty minutes later, we were headed toward the next of Kit’s ’bots, rocking along at sixteen miles per hour across rolling terrain when Cutler, torso out of the cupola, whooped.

Down in the gunner’s well, I peeked through the optical sight, to see what he saw. Sixty yards to our front, four tapioca-colored, fanged, bug-eyed, featherless ostriches loped through the trees in a nose to tail line, from our right to our left, like shooting gallery ducks.

Blam
-
blam
-
blam
-
blam
.

One .50 round is bigger than a cigar. The four-round burst that Cutler had just fired would kill an elephant wearing a flak jacket. Still, after his first shots, Cutler ripped off three more bursts, sixty rounds, total.

Cutler insisted that Zhondro roll us up close, so Cutler could climb down and be holoed kneeling alongside his first trophies. But after he got close he saw the only thing left of what had been a family was a dumpsterful of guts. Cutler decided to wait on making a holo until he murdered a victim that could be recognized.

While Cutler was off the tank, I bent a link in the .50’s ammo belt with my trench knife, so the gun would jam after Cutler fired his next round. When the gun jammed, I explained that the .50 was an ancient design, prone to require frequent head space resetting, which was true. I also explained that meant the gun was out of service for the day, which was crap.

At noon we arrived at Kit’s outermost Rover ’bot, hunkered down asleep in the weeds. Cutler, deprived of his toy, had tired of eating bugs and dust topside, so he swapped back into the gunner’s well.

Kit and I stood again in the turret, side-by-side, surveying the open forest.

Alongside the tank, hydraulics whined. Kit’s ’bot levered up on six legs, skittered forward ten yards, then paused, anterior sensors twitching like roach antennae.