Overkill (8 page)

Cutler said, “I don’t. All I want you to do is put me in position to shoot the animal. Then you winch it onto the C-lift trailer and haul it back here. Another team is landing in Eden today. They’ll bring another trailer out to this camp, stabilize the animal’s sedation, and take it from there.”

So the second trailer rental wasn’t overkill. Neither was all the equipment in the overlarge warehouse. Cutler just might be smarter than I gave him credit for.

Kit’s jaw dropped.

She shook her head. “Are you insane? The people on this planet will lynch you if you try to bring a live grezzen inside the Line.”

“Ms. Born, each of my major subsidiaries fires more people in a year than the entire population of this planet. I haven’t gotten where I am by knuckling under to the irrational fears of timid people.”

Irrational? Cutler hadn’t seen the striper. Which grezzen apparently ate for breakfast. Literally.

Cutler said, “But that’s why I didn’t disclose my plans to the locals. And why you won’t, either. You’re bound by the confidentiality clause in Bauer’s contract, just like Parker and Zhondro are bound to theirs.”

I scratched my head. “Mr. Cutler, why? A pet? An advertising stunt?”

He shook his head. “I don’t deal in trivialities or stunts, Parker. That’s as much as you need to know. Now, if you all don’t mind, would you continue with the work for which I pay each of you generously?” Cutler spun on his heel, and returned to the Sleeper.

Kit stalked away, then stood, arms folded with her back to us, gazing out across the jungle beyond the Line.

Zhondro stood beside me, the crowbar he had used to open the crate in one hand. We both stared at Kit.

I said to Zhondro, “Contrary to what our fearless leader just said about our pay, she took this job for practically nothing. You think she took this job because she suspected Cutler was up to something like this?”

He shrugged. “At home we say, ‘hold friends close, but enemies closer.”’

“We say that, too.”

By the next day, the fearless leader and the gunslinger had each decided to pretend they were friends, not enemies.

Zhondro and I had expected to instruct Cutler and Kit in Tank 101 before we left Eden, but Cutler had accelerated our departure. So we did it out here.

First, we taught each of them to drive. They say a child’s first two-wheeler is harder to learn than an Abrams. I wouldn’t know, because I’m still waiting for my first bike, but driving an Abrams is cake.

The start sequence isn’t much more than a button push. The control yoke is a stubby handlebar. To turn left, turn the bar left. The left track slows relative to the right track. The more you turn the bar, the sharper the tank turns. Twist the right grip to go fast, twist back to go slow. You can’t confuse the brake and accelerator pedals, because there’s just a centered brake pedal wider than even the biggest GI’s boot.

Cutler had originally insisted on the tank commander’s seat. VIPs always did. Unbuttoned, the TC rode standing on his chair, waist-high out of the hatch in his cupola, which was wind-in-theface fun. Also, topside the TC controlled the best toy on the tank, the .50 caliber machine gun. The .50 was enormous for a machine gun, more an ancient rapid-fire cannon. It was wicked fun to shoot, too, since the VIP didn’t have to break down and clean the weapon later.

But Dead End didn’t even have a navigational satellite network for the Abrams’ Earth-oriented old computer to interface with. That meant that any map-and-compass help Kit needed, in which Cutler had zero expertise and less interest, fell to whoever sat in the Commander’s seat.

Once Cutler realized we would run buttoned up most of the time, he opted for the gunner’s station. Down there he could fiddle with his Reader more privately while we rolled. But he could still play Great White Hunter, because the main gun could be aimed and fired from either the tank commander’s or gunner’s position.

That left Kit to do the job normally done by the person who occupied her chair, the loader. The loader has an overhead hatch, and time to look around when the tank’s not shooting. So it seemed a perfect job for the only person who knew where we were going and what to watch out for.

I stood down in the turret with Kit, facing the main gun ammunition, which was stored in the turret’s rear bustle. The rounds’ bases faced us, like racked wine bottles.

I waved my spread palm across the rounds. “Some tanks this old loaded the main gun automatically. But autoloaders jam. And manual lets the Tank Commander select ammunition type.”

“A slaughter smorgasbord. How nice for you.”

I ignored her and laid my palm on the various sections of the ready rack. “Practice rounds here. Armor-piercing discarding sabot here. Cutler’s tranquilizers here.”

She frowned. “Got any canister?”

Canister was the clumsy grandparent of the modern flechette round. Either round shotgunned soft targets into hamburger, across a broad front. Like troops in the open. Or sleeping children. Hair rose on my neck.

“Why?”

“We might need to turn a woog stampede. Canister would do that.”

“Oh.” I pointed down and right. “Canister’s down here. But listen sharp when I call for ammunition type. From habit I might call for flechette.”

“—Flechette, yet? What the hell are you talking about, Parker?” The captain’s voice crackled to me across five miles of Tassin desert.

I adjusted my helmet mike. “We haven’t fired yet. Autoloader relay won’t select flechette, sir.”

My gunner covered his own mike with his fingers and hissed, “Jazen, that’s bullshit!”

I waved him off with one hand.

The captain said, “Parker, I ordered you to—Goddammit! Something just spooked the Tassini. Their column’s turned back, short of the kill zone.”

My gunner whispered, “I
told
you they had a radio down there!”

Below, in the thermal’s sight picture, Tassin women, robes flapping, dragged children by the hands, or clutched babies as they fled the tents and disappeared over the opposite dune, like green-lit ghosts. Within fifty seconds, nothing moved below us but tent canvas. The camp had emptied out faster than a nightclub on fire. I switched to platoon net. “Fire!”

Whoom
.
Whoom
.
Whoom
.
Whoom
.
Whoom
.

Five rounds of flechette left nothing of the camp below but canvas tatters and shattered pots. But nobody in it was dead that wasn’t dead before we fired.

I switched back to command net. “Red One, this is Red Three. We cleared the autoloader malfunction. Target destroyed. Over.”

“Outstanding, Parker. Truly outstanding. Five simultaneous malfunctions is incredibly bad luck. And clearing them all within one minute is incredibly fast work. I’ll put Third Platoon up for a unit citation. Right after your court martial.”

My gunner laid his palm across his visor while he lowered his head and shook it.

The captain said, “Meantime, get your platoon out of there, max mil speed. You got thirty Tassini crawlers inbound full-gas. And if you think
I’m
pissed off... ”

“Parker?” Kit rapped her knuckles on my helmet. “After you call for a round, what do I do?”

I showed her. The loader’s job is female-unfriendly. The rounds weigh as much as fifty-three pounds, and have to be wrestled out of the ready rack tubes, then cradled across the turret rear-tofront, dodging sharp steel corners, then slammed into the main gun breech. Speed and accuracy count, and errors cost fingers.

After an hour of practice reps, Kit’s hands and one elbow were bruised and bleeding, her lips stretched tight across her teeth, and I could see spasms in her forearms, but she never complained.

Late that afternoon, Zhondro drove the Abrams out to the east tree line that bordered Kit’s camp, and I inflated a threedie target intended to represent a grezzen. It was actually a life-sized pink elephant advertising balloon. Kit pronounced it too small, but adequate.

Then we backed the tank across the plateau to the opposite tree line. That put Cutler a thousand yards from his target. The wooded terrain beyond the Line wouldn’t allow a clear shot near that long, but I reasoned that if Cutler could hit a target smaller than a grezzen at a thousand yards, he could certainly hit a full-sized one at five hundred.

Everybody strapped on helmets, so we could converse over the intercom, but really, so the earphone flaps would protect our hearing. Not from engine noise. Abrams’ gas turbines are actually so quiet that adversary infantry used to call them “whispering death.” But a 120-millimeter fired live doesn’t whisper.

Cutler sat hunched forward in the Abrams’ gunner well, his eye to the rubber reticle of the standard sight. He waggled the turret, and the gun, left and right with two hands on the gunner’s yoke, then slid his thumbs to the two red buttons atop the yoke arms. He depressed both buttons once. “Got it!”

I watched the commander’s image screen, which was slaved to Cutler’s sight. Cutler had succeeded in centering the grezzen in the rectangular sight reticle, which was easier than playing a holo game. Cutler’s button push pulsed a laser beam out that struck, then bounced back off the target. The tank measured the travel time out and back, then calculated range to target.

Now, hitting the target had little to do with Cutler and everything to do with the tank. Once Cutler had ranged the target, the Abrams’fire control system was so good and so durable that the Kodiak’s was basically just an update of a century-old design. The tank now adjusted for its own tilt, cross wind, even gun tube droop on a hot day. It did so whether the tank was stationary, like we were, or rumbling across uneven ground. The tank would even lead the target if the target was moving. This one wasn’t even doing that.

All Cutler had to do was point and shoot.

If he could hit a target out here in the rain forest as well as his simulator results showed, Kit wouldn’t have to move much ammo. These old crawlers delivered first-round kills almost as reliably as a modern Kodiak did.

I said into my mike, “Load, load practice round.”

To my left, Kit pressed the knee switch that opened the blast door covering the ready rack, pulled the round, pirouetted and fisted it home in the main gun breech. She snatched her fist back, fingers intact as the breech snapped shut, then said, “Practice round loaded.”

I glanced at my ’puter. Practice rounds didn’t hit like tacticals, and accordingly weighed less. Still, an experienced loader loaded in three to five seconds. Kit had just done the job in four flat. I nearly said “Good girl!” out loud, then realized that would piss everybody off, all for different reasons.

We took the shot stationary and unbuttoned, with me topside out of the commander’s hatch, joined by Kit, out the loader’s hatch.

I said, “Fire, fire practice round.”

Below, Cutler depressed the red buttons a second time, triggering the gun.

Whoom
!

The Abrams lurched as if sucker-punched by God. A fireball the size of a small house lit the main gun’s muzzle and kicked up a dust cloud the size of a large house. Two blinks later, the target remained.

Cutler muttered, “What the—?”

Then the target sagged flat, undulating on the breeze like struck regimental colors. The practice round mimicked an armor-killing discarding sabot round. When an armor piercing discarding sabot round left the gun muzzle, most of the “bullet” fell away, leaving a central, sharp, dense penetrator rod howling toward the target at thirty-five hundred feet per second. The penetrator had needled through the unresisting target so cleanly that it took a breath before the balloon deflated.

Cutler scrambled out of his seat, then squirmed up alongside me smiling. “That was great! How soon can we kill something?”

Kit glanced at me and rolled her eyes.

Seventeen

Once we got inside the Wrangler’s station, which was a series of chambers blasted out within the granite knob, Kit’s first job was to report our safe arrival to Eden Outfitters. Radios didn’t work much better on Dead End than Handtalks, but old hard-wired field telephones worked fine.

Kit sat at a stool in front of a camp table, speaking into an ancient pedestal microphone, while the voice of Oliver, her boss, crackled through an analog speaker box alongside the mike.

After the usual unpleasantries, he said, “Tell Mr. Cutler his people downshuttled last night.”

I thought
we
were Cutler’s people. Surprise!

Oliver continued, “They’re moving gear into the warehouse he rented.”

Kit glanced at Cutler, and he nodded. “He’s got the word, Oliver.”

“Kit, people here aren’t stupid. Cutler’s crew look more like pirates than taxidermists. And it doesn’t take thirty ex-Legion psychos to stuff a dead grezzen.”

“So what are you saying, Oliver?”

I could almost hear the shrug over the land line. “I dunno. Just that even the prospect of a dead grezzen inside the Line makes people jumpy.”

Kit shrugged back. “Okay.”

“Kit, you don’t take any ’bots off the Line for escort when you go out in the bush, got it? Mr. Cutler doesn’t know what a grezz loose in here could do.”

She nodded. “The ’bots stay in place. Got it. Oliver, I wasn’t planning on pulling them out anyway—” While Kit had been talking, she had been gazing at the glowing Animap that hung on the cave’s wall.

Whoop
-
whoop
-
whoop
!

An alarm echoed in the chamber. Kit pointed to a red dot that inched across the Animap. “Gotta go, Oliver. A ’bot just went live.”

She stood while Cutler, Zhondro, and I stood behind her and followed her stare.

Two dozen red dots shone against the map’s green background, but only one had begun to move.

Kit said, “That ’bot’s sensed a grezz within a half mile of it.”

Cutler stood, then stepped to the map and stared at it, hands clasped behind his back. “Are you sure? The ’bot could be chasing one of those buffalos, or a striper that’s stalking them.”

She shook her head. “The Rover ignores anything as small as a woog or as slow as a striper. And a grezz makes random direction changes. The Rovers are also programmed to respond to that.”