Fifteen
In the morning, the woogs were gone but not forgotten. The swath they ate and trampled through the trees that had surrounded us looked like twenty thousand bulldozers had wandered past. And compared to woog dung, wobblehead crap smelled like roses.
Zhondro and I broke down the night laager while Kit sat atop the Abrams’ turret with her Barrett at the ready, but after she winged the obligatory gort, nothing bigger than lemon bugs interfered. Before full light, we were rolling north again, to Kit’s Line camp.
Every kid has played holos set in a Kodiak crew compartment. However nobody born this century has seen an Abrams’ gut except museum curators. But the two vehicles don’t look all that different inside.
Neither space welcomes claustrophobes. Most of the crew volume in either tank is the roughly tubular, rotating basket inside of, and extending below, the turret. The Abrams’ crew space is larger, because it accommodates an extra, third crew member, who loads the main gun. The loader, gunner, and tank commander sit in the turret, and move with it, like diners in a revolving restaurant. The fourth crew member, the driver, reclines in a fixed, forward-facing, coffin-sized compartment in the prow.
Even a Trueborn with his feet on the Abrams’floor can stand upright in the center of the turret, and can reach out from there with a yardstick and touch most anywhere inside.
Everything except the seating surfaces and controls is steel, white-painted to show fluid leaks, and as forgiving as your first drill instructor. An Abrams will break you before you break it, a lesson rookies learn nose-first. Rolling with the vehicle had become habit for me, but Cutler, and, to a lesser extent Kit, death-gripped one handhold after another and fought every lurch as Zhondro whistled the tank north across the uneven road surface.
Zhondro reclined up front, driving. I occupied the commander’s throne, to the right rear and high. Cutler sat in the gunner’s seat, below and in front of me. Kit sat on the turret’s left side, facing us, at Cutler’s level, in the loader’s position.
Kit predicted visits from the gorts’ less sociable relatives, so we rolled buttoned up, with the driver’s, loader’s and commander’s hatches closed.
Buttoning up makes a tank less like a limo in four ways. First, except for the gun sights, one sees the world only through periscopic prism windows, which is like peeking through cereal boxes with both ends cut out. Second, it’s hot. Third, it’s hot. Fourth is a corollary of two and three. Hot people sweat buckets, and stink.
So, when we arrived at Kit’s Line camp, everybody was ready to dismount, even into a cloudy, humid, one hundred two Fahrenheit afternoon. Cutler made for the air conditioned Sleeper. Cloudy or not, Zhondro scooted beneath the Abrams’ shade from habit, for a Tassini siesta.
I sat atop the Abrams’ turret, faced sideways with my legs dangling down through the open commander’s hatch. Kit mimicked my position, but seated on the loader’s hatch edge.
Zhondro had parked us atop a bald, granite plateau, looking out at a rolling green blanket of forest below, and a rolling gray blanket of cloud above, that stretched to the horizon.
Distant shrieks and bellows echoed, then hung in the damp air.
I rested my elbow on the receiver of the commander’s .50 caliber. ‘‘It’s safe to sit out like this?’’
Kit pointed at the Triple-A ’bot atop the rock knob beside us. Steel clamshell doors bolted into the rock led into the artificial cave that was the Line Wrangler’s station. ‘‘The Wrangler’s station’son this plateau because the fields of observation and fire are clear. The Triple A ’bot and stationary mines out at the tree line have been emplaced long enough to teach the local predators lessons.’’
Five hundred yards below and to our left front, where the barren rock surrendered to the encroaching jungle, trees moved.
I scooted on my butt behind the .50, rattled back the charging handle, and sighted down the barrel at the movement. Twenty feet above the ground, a fanged lizard head, tiger-striped black and yellow like an overripe banana, poked out through the branches. The head was as long as a squad mess table, and attached to a six-legged body the size of a forty-passenger bus. The beast stared up at us, a prey item just bigger than an overweight woog. I swallowed, then slid my thumbs toward the gun’s butterfly trigger.
The monster snarled, then lunged toward us.
Kit leaned toward me and touched my elbow. ‘‘Don’t—’’
Boom! Where there had been a monster, the mine’s explosion left red mist adrift among shivering tree limbs. Bleeding ribs and drumsticks bigger than I was arced away in all directions.
‘‘—Bother.’’ Kit sat back and sighed. ‘‘Lessons taught aren’t always lessons learned. It’s a good thing stripers are dumb, because they’re a handful up close.’’
I shook my head. ‘‘Everything here has six legs, not just the bugs. Animals don’t eat plants. The sun never shines. This place makes no sense.’’
She shook her head back at me. ‘‘You sound as condescending as Cutler, Parker. Since the War, we’re the only intelligent species left in this universe. Therefore, we think everything in this universe has to conform to our paradigm of what makes sense. Do you have any idea how arrogant that view is? And on how little of this universe we base it?’’
I cleared the ‘fifty, slapping the charging handle harder than I needed to. ‘‘Apparently you have an idea. I find that arrogant coming from a backwater gunslinger.’’
Zhondro rolled out from beneath the tank and called up at us, ‘‘What was that?’’
The Sleeper’s door banged open, and Cutler ran out, his Reader in one hand. He squinted at the smoke that drifted away from the spot where the beast had stood. Then he pointed at my hands on the .50. ‘‘Was it a grezzen? Did you just kill a grezzen?’’
Kit shook her head. ‘‘Just a striper. A big pred. Tried to cross the stationary mine perimeter.’’
‘‘Oh.’’ Cutler waved a pointed finger at us. ‘‘Nobody fires on a grezzen unless I say so. Understood?’’
Kit said, ‘‘The Rover ’bot perimeter’s a mile further out from here. The grezz keep even more distance back than that. But don’t worry. You’ll get your kill.’’
Cutler walked to the C-lift, rested his hand on one of the three ammunition crates, then shook his head. ‘‘Ms. Born, I have no intention of killing a grezzen.’’