Overkill (32 page)

He kicked the animal’s black snout, as he crawled farther from the exposed water. The son slid back, its grief and frustration penetrating his own consciousness.

The episode explained why the tusked creature had displayed fear when the grezzen had first felt him. In a land where predators were otherwise unable to conceal themselves, predators could prowl unseen beneath the stiff water. Then, at places where an opening was found, they could rise up and snatch prey.

The realization that he was now in a world that he neither understood nor dominated made the grezzen feel as no grezzen had felt in thirty million years. Humble. And afraid.

He huddled alone in the darkness of the storm, cold, wet, hungry, and, most of all, far and forever away from home, and alone.

Jazen sometimes seemed to have felt that way. The grezzen reached out, searched halfheartedly among the uncountable numbers of human threads in this enormous world, and hoped to find the little human. But he did not.

There was little that the grezzen could do to improve his misery, but there was something.

He crawled through the storm to the dead animal that had so recently been a son’s mother. With one great claw he peeled off a massive strip of integumentary fat, and began to eat.

She tasted awful.

Eighty-eight

We stumbled on through the howling storm, blind and weakening. I hobbled on two numb knees and one numb arm, while I held out the compass in the other. I’ve never been much of a land navigator. If we had drifted left or right, we might already have missed the wreck altogether. In that case, we would just wander until we died. It seemed we should have reached the
Midway
hours ago. If we had been moving for hours, which was how it felt.

I screamed over my shoulder at Jack, “I think we missed the ship!”

He didn’t answer. I turned. He was gone. Lost? Passed out? It didn’t matter. I was free!

I tried to crawl forward faster, to put distance between me and Jack, wherever he was. But my feet and hands were so numb that it was like trying to swim with lead flippers.

In my misery, I was enjoying knowing that I had shortened the life of a son of a bitch who didn’t deserve to live.

Thunk
.

Something struck the top of my head as I crawled forward. No, I had crawled into something. I thrust my face forward, and forced my eyes open in the wind. It was a hull plate, vertical in the snow. Probably just debris, but . . . my heartbeat quickened.

I pressed my numb, mittened hands along the plate until I found its edge. It joined another. I crabbed sideways. Another, then another. I pounded with a mittened fist on the plate and a hollow echo came back. My heart leapt. It was the
Midway
, or what was left of her. Blankets. Shelter. Maybe even things that could make a fire.

But now what? I was probably still going to die, alone in the snow. Or maybe I would be rescued after the storm blew out.

Either way, for the rest of my life, short or long, I would live it knowing that I had abandoned Jack to die, that I was no better than Jack, or Cutler.

Orion always insisted that my parents hadn’t abandoned me. I always believed her and always would. And she had spent her life saving the lives of kids like me who somebody said didn’t deserve to live.

I sighed. Then I turned around and felt my way back along the hull until I returned to the spot where my tracks butted up against the hull plates. Then I turned into the wind, and crawled back, away from the safety of the wreck, along my own trail. It was already being wiped away by the storm.

Eighty-nine

The grezzen lay atop the stiff water, alongside the bloody carcass of its kill. He was cold. Though he had eaten, he felt no stronger.

He didn’t realize that the number of calories required to support his gargantuan metabolism was even greater in the cold. He didn’t realize that his body was chemically incapable of extracting nourishment from whale flesh, or from any other flesh on Earth.

He tried to stand, and his legs wobbled beneath him. He collapsed.

For all the things that he did not realize, he suddenly realized one thing. He was dying. Grezzen had no literature, much less a concept of literary irony. But now, contemplative in his weakness, he remarked the inversion of events that had brought him to this. He had been forced to this place by his fear of death by fire. Now the opposite of fire was killing him.

He felt his cousins, faint and inconceivably distant. But they couldn’t help him, and, in the grezzen way, would not help him if they could
.

Then, through the storm and through his weakness, he heard a thread, strong and close.

“Where are you?”

It could not be his cousins. It was female. In the confusion of his weakness, he thought it could be his mother, and so he reached out. “I am here.”

He felt relief and excitement surge back to him along the thread. “I can help you. And you can help me. But I need your help to locate you.”

Horrified, he realized that the female he felt was Kit. He had just touched her thread. He had confirmed the capabilities of his race to a human, and worse, to an influential human, who already suspected the truth, who would not dismiss his reply as a fantasy of her own mind.

She thought, “I’m flying as low as I dare in this weather, just above the coast line—the boundary between the land and the water. Are you close to the boundary? Look, there’s no possibility that I’ll be able to see you through this storm. And you can’t see this tilt wing, either. You may be able to hear it though. It has turbine engines, so it will make the same whistling sound as our tank did. If you hear that sound, just think to me.”

The grezzen heard and saw nothing, but if he had, he would not have acknowledged it. It was bad enough that now she knew. He wouldn’t make things worse. He would lie here silent, and die, first.

“I know you don’t want to acknowledge me. And you’re so god-damn arrogant that you think you’re invincible. But believe this: Your metabolic rate is extraordinarily high. Especially in this cold, you have to eat a lot to stay alive. But your body can’t convert the tissue of this world’s animals to energy.”

He turned his head and stared at the shredded body of the aquatic predator, blood stiffening on its clean-picked vertebrae. He felt his ebbing strength, and knew that Kit was speaking, as a grezzen would of course, truth.

She thought, “No matter how much you may have eaten, you’re starving. I have catalytic supplements on board that I think can help you, that can keep you alive. Otherwise, you
will
die.”

If he survived this, he might yet find Cutler and avenge his mother. So Kit’s proposition tempted him. But he had already resolved to die rather than risk exposing his intelligence and his ability to feel others’ thoughts. Kit would claim that he had touched her thread, but he had learned that humans were profound skeptics. On balance, it was best to lie here and die.

She thought, “There’s something else you should know. I damn near stole this aircraft because I figured that if you and Parker were alive, you had come down near the wreck. Now I don’t have enough fuel to get back, and I can’t land this thing in this crap without help. If you can’t help me not only will you die, I will.”

Her words helped him recognize the proper course. If he did nothing, he
and
Kit would die. The secret would be as safe as he could make it under these circumstances. The solution was imperfect. Cutler would escape retribution.

“Goddamn it! I’ve bet my life on you! Say something!”

In the distance, ragged on the wind, he heard the whistle of a human shell. This sound differed from the buzz of the shell of Herbert that he had heard before. It had to be Kit.

The sound came close, closer, passed directly overhead, invisible, then faded.

He lay still, and he felt her despair.

She thought, “He was never there. This was idiotic. Christ, fuel’s down below a hundred pounds.”

Then he felt her audibilize, softly, though there was clearly no other intelligence nearby. “I know this is hypocritical. But you must get first prayers like this a lot . . . ”

Suddenly inspiration came to the grezzen. He reached along her thread. “You just passed directly above me.”

“What?”

“Moments ago.”

“Yeah! I knew it! I knew that was you before! I’m circling back. I’ll drop flares. Red lights. If you see them, tell me where you are in relation to them. Then guide me to a flat, solid spot.”

He heard Kit’s flying shell come closer, again.

She thought, “I only need a space maybe twice as big as you are, okay? Just so I’m not on thin ice. You understand?”

He understood thin ice only too well, now. He wouldn’t direct her to thin ice. He would guide her safely to him, and allow her to feed him. When he had recovered his strength, he would kill her brutally, in a way consistent with the behavior of a simple animal. Then he would find Cutler, and kill him in the same way. Eventually, he would die, but his mother would be avenged, and the secret would remain safe.

Above him in the maelstrom, the whistling sound changed to a cough.

Kit thought, “Lost one engine. The other’s on fumes.”

She thought to him, “I’m dropping flares. If you don’t see them, we’ll both be dead soon.”

That, the grezzen thought, would be true in any case. He stared upward into the opaque, blowing whiteness and waited.

Ninety

I shoved Jack’s limp, unconscious body up against the
Midway
’s hull. I tried to sit him up, to keep his face out of the snow, but my hands and feet were as clumsy as clubs, and my arm and leg muscles refused to move them, anyway.

It had taken hours to find Jack, half-buried and unconscious in the snow, then drag him back to the wreck. Now I was too weak and exhausted to move left and right along the hull until I found a way in.

I tugged my mitten off, then held my bare fingers beneath Jack’s nostrils. I thought I could feel a faint flutter as he breathed, but, really, my fingers were too numb to be sure.

I sat back. The hell of this would be if I had dragged Jack’s sorry, frozen ass back here just so he could die beside me.

I sighed, then I rummaged in the rucksack until I found the lifeboat’s first aid pouch. It proved to be pretty high-powered, more like a platoon medic’s pouch. That was unsurprising because it had been packed to serve a lifeboat population of twenty people.

It took me minutes to find the pouch’s HTS syrettes. That was partly because they didn’t look like the modern versions I knew, mostly because my fingers barely functioned.

A hypothermic treatment syrette, like any good field med, is idiot proof. It’s a fat, pressurized stab-and-click hypodermic. It injects a timed cocktail of circulation boosters, depressants and stimulants that will keep a temperature casualty in the big game until real medical help arrives.

I got HTSd during my first tour on Weichsel. The aftereffects suck, but not as bad as the alternative.

The cocktail’s so strong that intravenous injection can kill the casualty. The injection has to be done by stabbing a big muscle, preferably the thigh or ass. I chose Jack’s ass, in the hope that it would hurt him more, and stabbed harder than necessary. Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to notice. By the time I got him bundled up again, I could barely lift my arms, much less feel any fingers at the end of them.

The storm still howled.

I sat beside Jack and rested my aching back against the hull, and hugged myself, just for a minute. A reward to myself, I supposed, for being a good guy.

If I had just left Jack to die in a cold sleep, I could have used my energy to get in out of the weather, inside the hull. Now, I had just prolonged things for us both for a few uncomfortable hours.

It occurred to me that I probably should give myself a thigh stab, too. But I was so tired. My eye lids drooped. Then I drifted off and slept.

Ninety-one

The grezzen lay in the snow, watching Kit as she struggled in the swirling whiteness that surrounded them both. Encased completely within an artificial skin the color of a lemon bug, she reclined ventral side up, then scuttled beneath the shell that had plummeted out of the sky with her in its belly. The shell’s tapered form resembled that of the whale, but with spatulate appendages on both sides that apparently functioned like a gort’s wings and allowed it to fly.

At least, that was what Kit said. All he had seen it do was fall from the sky, almost on top of him, with such force that it had been crippled.

She muttered, then wriggled back across the ice, out from under the damaged flying shell, and stood staring at the shell’s twisted lower appendages, her forelimbs folded across her thorax. “Got the transponder and the antennae, too.”

It had been so long since he had communicated with another. And her fate was not in doubt, so how much she knew of him was unimportant. He reached to her, “What does that mean?”

“That I have totaled a very expensive government tilt-wing that I signed for.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It means I’m fucked.”

“I thought that meant—”

“It doesn’t. At least not in this case. Look, in your world, you know exactly what things mean. But in this one, you only think that you know. And the difference can kill you. And the rest of your race.”

She reentered the crippled flying shell, and returned dragging a sack like a seed pod as large as her thorax. She slid it across the stiff water until it rested alongside his kill, then straightened up, panting as she stared at the carcass.

She said aloud, “Wow. I would’ve bought a ticket to watch that fight. Were you injured? Either by the crash or by the whale?”

“Just weak.”