Eighteen
In the hand that she hadn’t raised, Kit gripped a handheld Animap that mimicked the one back on the Line station’s wall, and she stared down at its screen. She spoke into her mike. ‘‘Come right twenty yards.’’
Zhondro pivoted the tank, and nudged over a barrel-round tree like it was a garden stake.
Kit looked up at me, then poked her thumb up toward the hatches. ‘‘Okay. Let’s open the hatches.’’
I pressed my earpiece. ‘‘What?’’
Kit mopped her cheek with her fleece glove back. ‘‘It’ll be cooler.’’
‘‘The birds will get us.’’
She shook her head. ‘‘Not a problem any more. Meet me topside and I’ll explain.’’
The two of us scrambled up and stood, torsos exposed, forearms resting atop the Abrams’ turret.
I looked around, my first real view of Dead End au naturel. Beneath low, gray clouds, green-leaved trees as big around as drive-up pharmacies rose three hundred feet. They were set far enough apart that the Abrams—or herds of big animals—could navigate among them easily. Clumps of orange, yellow, and red flowered brush carpeted the gently rolling forest floor. ‘‘I didn’t expect this.’’
She nodded. ‘‘This rainforest surprised me too. I expected triple canopy jungle you had to hack through with a machete, not open forest. And the color surprises everybody. Flowers are supposed to have evolved as food. To attract birds and insects that carry plant pollen. So if the birdlikes and insectlikes here can’t digest fruit and flower nectar, why did fruit and flowers evolve?’’
‘‘I guess.’’ I hadn’t known why it didn’t add up. I just knew it didn’t. The lovely Ms. Born not only knew answers that I didn’t, she knew answers to questions I hadn’t even thought of.
‘‘The birdlikes and insectlikes here don’t eat fruits or visit flowers to eat the plant, but to eat the insectlikes that live in the plant. The woogs do the same thing. It doesn’t fit our idea of a natural scheme, but that doesn’t make it less true.’’
I fingered my helmet chin strap while I craned my neck at dragon shapes silhouetted against the clouds. ‘‘I dunno. I know the birdlikes will eat us. I saw them. That’s part of the natural scheme, too.’’
‘‘Not really. The scheme you experienced inside the Line’sno longer natural. Grezzen can jump forty feet straight up. They swat gorts down, like flies.’’ She pointed at the dragons carving figure eights overhead. ‘‘The gorts learned thirty million years ago to nest in the trees, up there, and fly above a floor of plus-fifty feet. Out here, you’re seeing Dead End in its natural balance.’’
She said, ‘‘Inside the Line, grezzen were killing us. So we got rid of the grezzen. But then the gorts that the grezzen kept at bay modified their behavior, and started killing us. Planetologists call it the conundrum of unforseen ecological consequence. I call it the whack-a-mole rule of human meddling.’’ She clasped both hands, like a child hammering. ‘‘Whack! We change something here. Oops. That makes another problem pop up there, where we didn’t expect it. Whack! So we whack that mole. Oops. We’re so smart that we’re a menace.’’
My heart skipped. ‘‘You’re saying that the gorts are staying away because there’s a grezzen around here?’’ I laid my hand on the .50’s receiver and scanned the distant treeline.
She shook her head. ‘‘Nope.’’ She pointed at the ground ten feet beyond our right track. One of her camouflaged Rover ’bots lay powered down in green stuff that looked like weeds. ‘‘That’s the ’bot that moved last night, because a grezz was in the area at that time.’’
I moved my palm to the .50’s charging handle as I swiveled my head.
She sighed and shook her head again. ‘‘Parker, relax. A shutdown Rover ’bot’s the perfect grezz alarm. If a grezz moves within eight hundred yards of us, that ’bot will wake up. As long as the ’bot’s still, we couldn’t be safer.’’
Cutler shouldered his way up alongside me. ‘‘Then I’ll switch places with you, Parker.’’
I frowned at Kit. There were roughly sixty things Cutler could reach from the tank commander’s station with which he could inadvertently strand or kill us. But it was his tank.
Twenty minutes later, we were headed toward the next of Kit’s ’bots, rocking along at sixteen miles per hour across rolling terrain when Cutler, torso out of the cupola, whooped.
Down in the gunner’s well, I peeked through the optical sight, to see what he saw. Sixty yards to our front, four tapioca-colored, fanged, bug-eyed, featherless ostriches loped through the trees in a nose to tail line, from our right to our left, like shooting gallery ducks.
Blam-blam-blam-blam.
One .50 round is bigger than a cigar. The four-round burst that Cutler had just fired would kill an elephant wearing a flak jacket. Still, after his first shots, Cutler ripped off three more bursts, sixty rounds, total.
Cutler insisted that Zhondro roll us up close, so Cutler could climb down and be holoed kneeling alongside his first trophies. But after he got close he saw the only thing left of what had been a family was a dumpsterful of guts. Cutler decided to wait on making a holo until he murdered a victim that could be recognized.
While Cutler was off the tank, I bent a link in the .50’s ammo belt with my trench knife, so the gun would jam after Cutler fired his next round. When the gun jammed, I explained that the .50 was an ancient design, prone to require frequent head space resetting, which was true. I also explained that meant the gun was out of service for the day, which was crap.
At noon we arrived at Kit’s outermost Rover ’bot, hunkered down asleep in the weeds. Cutler, deprived of his toy, had tired of eating bugs and dust topside, so he swapped back into the gunner’s well.
Kit and I stood again in the turret, side-by-side, surveying the open forest.
Alongside the tank, hydraulics whined. Kit’s ’bot levered up on six legs, skittered forward ten yards, then paused, anterior sensors twitching like roach antennae.
Hair stood on my neck.
Kit whispered, ‘‘Uh-oh.’’