Overkill (21 page)

I asked Kit, “Why would it protect us? Because of the grezzen that Cutler took?”

She nodded. “Unless I’ve misread this, she’s his mother. The bond between a grezzen and her offspring’s closer, and more enduring, than between a human mother and child.” Kit talked to the beast, like he was a big Labrador retriever. “She raised you, taught you everything, didn’t she? You’re inside her head, and she’s inside yours, even now. You want her free again.”

I flexed my hand on the Barrett’s stock. This imaginary conversation was all very well. But this monster might just be momentarily curious. I often admired a cheeseburger for a second before I dug in.

I said, “Kit, I don’t see a lot of ice breaking between you two, here. Could he tap his foot for yes?”

“He won’t respond, Jazen.” Kit actually smiled at the giant hair-ball. “You’re keeping your options open, aren’t you? For now, you’re pretending that you’re just another animal?”

The grezzen stood up on all six legs, lifted the right rear, and peed a rumbling, steaming stream into the mossy forest floor, enough gallonage to sink a dinghy. That was the action of just another animal. Or the action of an intelligent mind reader who wanted someone to think that he was just another animal.

Kit slung her Barrett over her shoulder, and walked back around the grezzen to retrieve her pack. Finally, I followed, but I didn’t turn my back on the beast. It turned slowly, keeping us both in its sight, and a paw swipe away from becoming raw meat.

As I shrugged my pack back on, I said, “Should I pet it?”

“No!” Kit shook her head. “Grezzen only touch other animals to kill them or eat them. They live alone. This one probably hasn’t been within five hundred yards of another grezzen, not even his mother, since he was weaned. He hasn’t needed to be. He’s got a built in cellular ’puter with unlimited networking to every other grezzen on this planet. He’s got plenty to eat, no natural enemies he can’t whip or avoid. He never has to compromise on the thermostat setting because it never gets too hot or too cold for him here. Accommodation and cooperation are as foreign to him as, well, we are.”

Kit walked toward the Line, saying to the air, “So listen to me, my big friend. Yes, I can get you past those things up ahead that can kill you. I know that’s part of what you want from me. Now I’m going to tell you what I want from you in return. We call it compromise.”

The grezzen stood motionless, breathing like thunder in the distance, while it watched her walk away.

I held my breath and followed her.

If the grezzen was a beast, it would pounce on us. If it was intelligent, and was reading our minds, it would pounce on us, because it knew that it had to kill us now. Otherwise we would slip through its claws and regain the protection of the ‘Rover ’bots.

She turned back and faced the eleven-ton monster, hands on hips. “I’m trusting you. Now you have to trust me.”

The grezzen crouched like it was about to pounce.

Fifty-two

The grezzen growled as he watched the two humans walk away. He should kill them. And he could, with a single paw swipe. But Kit was right. His mother’s fate, his ability to snuff out Cutler and his suspicious ilk, depended on cooperating with these two for the time being.

But what if they were—what did they call it?—lying? He couldn’t be sure he understood
all
of what they felt. Humans were devious in a way that stripers and woogs lacked the intelligence to be. The humans seemed to be leading him safely to his mother. But they could be leading him into a trap, where the ghosts would kill him. The prospect of death frightened him. He felt the same fright in the two of them as they walked ahead of him.

Yet they now walked with their backs to him, stingers lowered.

Trust. Compromise. That was what Kit had called it.

Grezzen would never trust humans as a species. Grezzen would never compromise with humans as a species.

But Kit and Jazen were no longer a species to him. They felt fear, like he did. They felt affection, like he did. It was easy to dislike a species, hard to dislike an individual who was like you. And it was much easier to trust, and to compromise with, someone you knew.

He trotted toward the ghosts, alert, but following carefully in the tiny footsteps of his new allies.

He could always kill them later.

Fifty-three

We arrived at Kit’s Line camp at noon. The predators gave us a wide berth, or more accurately gave a wide berth to our bodyguard.

The grezzen acted neither intelligent nor dumb. It just followed us like an eleven-ton puppy. A puppy that had swatted dead a green toad the size of a two-passenger Urban that had been unfortunate enough to be in our way. The grezzen had then gathered the carcass in the crook of a forepaw and carried it along for a snack, the way a human hiker might pick an apple to eat when he stopped for lunch.

When we entered the cleared area, the grezzen curled up on the knob’s warm granite. It plopped the two-ton toad carcass down, wrenched off a seven-hundred-pound drumstick, and stuffed it into his mouth bones and all.

I winced, but what the grezzen was doing was no different than converting a cow into cheeseburgers, with the middleman eliminated. Feeding eleven active tons is a full-time job, I suppose.

Still, I was glad when Kit waved me to follow her across the clearing and into the camp’s cavern. When we swung the armored doors closed behind us, putting six inches of supposedly grezzenproof armor between us and our new puppy, I exhaled. I knew that I hadn’t held my breath since the grezzen had appeared, but I couldn’t remember taking one, either.

I let my pack plop to the cave floor and the thud echoed. I asked Kit, “Now what?”

She stepped to the land line phone. “First, we figure out what Cutler’s been up to.”

Before she rang back to Eden Outfitters, I stepped alongside her. “How about first I find out what you and I have been up to?”

“What do you mean?”

I pointed at the armored doors, toward the beast cracking bones just outside. “I mean what do you expect to do with our new friend? You can’t book him a room at the Eden Hotel. And if you could I don’t think the Dead Grezzen Lounge would serve him.”

“He hasn’t killed us. That should prove something to the locals.”

“It doesn’t even prove anything to you! He still may be planning to kill us both. If he doesn’t, the locals will shoot him on sight. Then hang you for letting him inside the Line.”

“I’m not going to march beside him down Main Street. I just need to persuade him to acknowledge that he, and his species, are intelligent.”

“Isn’t Cutler doing that?”

“For my purposes, I need proof. For Cutler’s purposes, he needs to extend the absence of proof, at least until his R&D people synthesize telepathy.”

“Why does Cutler need to extend anything? Dead End has the social order of a plane crash. He’s already gotten away with murder by grezzen.”

She sat on a stool alongside the mike, then tugged me down onto the stool across from her. “You’re half-right. Trueborns suck at rooting out evil on the frontier. But we’ve got centuries of guilt stored up when it comes to exploiting indigenous races. Cutler’s an Earthman. His corporate assets are Earth-centered. I can trip him up back home, even if I can’t here. The Intelligent Species Protection Act was passed after the War.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Why would you? After a half century and five hundred planets, we haven’t found any intelligent species for ISPA to protect. But if Cutler violates ISPA, he kicks over a big barrel. Felony prosecution for him and his officers and directors, delisting of stock, loss of government contracts. A tycoon’s worst nightmare.”

“Hasn’t he already kicked over the barrel?”

Kit shook her head. “ISPA only applies after a finding that a new species is intelligent. That sounded easy when the act was written. We’d land on a planet. We would find bipeds that would smile and wave, then cure cancer for us. People who write endangered species legislation expect an intelligent species to be cute and helpful, not eleven tons and grumpy. They especially don’t expect that species to be so intelligent that it would play dumb.”

“ISPA’s why Cutler’s keeping this quiet? To the point of letting us die?”

“You know the man. You put it past him?”

I pointed at the doors again. “But if you get that thing to stand out there and recite Shakespeare, Cutler can’t exterminate the species?”

“By the time the bureaucrats even fund a study on a planet ten jumps out, Cutler will have his alternative telepathy in place. The grezzen will be exterminated before the first ISPA inspection team packs its bags to leave Earth.” Kit shook her head. “It doesn’t matter what that grezzen does on Dead End. We need him to recite his Shakespeare on Earth.”

“Earth? You can’t even transport an alien banana on a starship.”

“Dead End organic exports have been off quarantine for years.”

“Organic export? A grezzen’s not a banana! No starship Captain would ever let you bring an eleven-ton killing machine—”

She raised her palm. “I can take care of that.”

I snorted. “Right. Assuming, which I don’t, that you could, how is kidnaping an intelligent being better than what Cutler’s doing?”

“Who’s kidnaping? I’ll talk the grezz into making the trip.”

“And then I’ll stuff a horse down my pants.” I rolled my eyes. “Trueborns!”

She raised her eyebrows. “You got a better idea?”

I shrugged.

Kit fired up the land line back to Eden Outfitters, but got no answer, which was odd. She rang her boss’ Handtalk, then put the call on speaker when he answered.

“Oliver?”

“Kit?” Crackles and pops broke behind the old man’s voice. At first I thought it was just old equipment and Dead End atmospherics, then I recognized a sound I’d heard before. Oliver was in the middle of a gunfight.

Kit said, “Oliver, what’s going on there?”

“Cutler said you were dead.”

“Long story. Parker and I are fine. Is that gunfire?”

“Cutler’s an idiot! He’s got a grezzen caged in that warehouse he rented. But I suppose you know that. There’s a disagreement in progress between Cutler’s thugs and a few of the neighbors who found out that they have a grezzen next door. Cutler asked me to stop by and visit with him about it.”

Boom
.

“What was that?”

“Fragmentation grenade.”

Kit and I turned our heads and stared at one another, mouths open.

I said, “Welcome to the neighborhood.”

Kit asked Oliver, “What did Cutler want from you?”

“An escort out of town. He went to the Port, to catch the evening Upshuttle. He left his goon squad to hold the fort.”

“He’s abandoning his project?”

“Don’t think so. Just leaving the kitchen ‘til the steam blows off the kettle.”

I shook my head at Kit. “That’s our boy.”

She leaned toward the mike. “Anybody hurt?”

“I’ve seen worse after a Saturday night fight. Unless you count the grezzen.”

“What?”

“The goons say they’re gonna kill it.”

Kit looked at me, eyes wide.

We both stood and raced to the armored doors.

Fifty-four

The grezzen lay outside the covered hole down which Kit and Jazen had vanished.

While he waited, he reached out to his mother. No response.

He sifted until he found Cutler’s thread.

Cutler, like Kit and Jazen, was in a hole. Light filtered down through a roof above the hole, but it was a hole. Cutler spoke to a subservient human, “No luggage to check.”

“Have a nice flight, sir.”

Flight. The reference was to flight like a gort flew, not flight to escape. He was learning slowly to distinguish between what humans imagined and what they actually experienced. The flight reference was clearly only something that was imagined.

Humans could no more fly than he could. However, the better he came to know them, the more convinced he became that humans were clever enough to construct flying shells for themselves. One of the first grezzen who had encountered humans claimed to have seen such shells. But that seemed illogical. Where in the world would they fly to?

Which made him wonder what Cutler and the other human were talking about, now.

“I am here.” His mother’s weakness was now too severe too ignore. And he felt anxiety surrounding her, in the way that smaller animals caught up in a woog stampede displayed anxiety.

She could see little, and therefore he could see little. He felt the smoke that hung in the air she breathed.

Grezzen were not prone to quotable cliche´s. Nonetheless, the grezzen thought that where there was smoke there was fire.

He clamped his jaw, fearful for her.

“Mother, what is happening?”

“The humans are fighting among themselves. Cutler has escaped.”

“What will you do?”

“There is little left that I can do. I misjudged this situation.”

Through his mother’s eyes, the grezzen saw Liu approach her, along with two others. One held a large stinger, the other a three-legged root. The second set the root on the ground, then both busied themselves attaching the stinger to it.

Liu said, “I didn’t sign up to get killed over some hunting trophy. Cutler’s run out on us. If these hicks want this thing dead, then we’ll give ’em dead.”

“Mother?”

“We’ll see whether this one can do what it visualizes.” She struck at the bars of her cage, and two of the humans retreated.

Liu turned and shouted at them, waving a forelimb. “Get your asses back here!” Then he crouched behind the stinger that the two had left behind.

The images faded. The grezzen couldn’t tell whether that was a product of his mother’s weakness, of his own anxiety over her predicament, or something that the humans had done to her.

He sprang to his feet, and ran to her.

Fifty-five

Kit ran out through the open armored doors, spun and looked in all directions. Then she threw her hat to the ground and kicked it. “Goddammit!”