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.