Nineteen
We buttoned up, then followed the Rover ’bot, Zhondro dancing the tank between monstrous trees, over a series of shallow rises. The wind was coming toward us, stiff enough to cover the turbine’s whisper.
We topped a rise and movement flickered four hundred yards ahead. I goosed my magnification, and my heart skipped. Cutler was seeing exactly the picture through his gunner’s sight that I saw through mine. Zhondro must’ve seen it too, through his hatch periscope. He stopped us clean and silent without a word from me.
The grezzen stood facing away from us, a shaggy, six-legged grizzly of a beast, bigger than an elephant. Its head seemed to be buried in something hidden by a fallen log. Maybe what Kit would call a prey item. Cutler’s whisper rasped in my ear. ‘‘Perfect. Absolutely perfect.’’ He ranged the target.
I whispered into my mike to Kit. ‘‘Load, load trank round.’’
The grezzen was a stationary target the size of a truck, four hundred yards away, and we were stationary, too. A potshot for Cutler. The round that Kit loaded rang against the breech, but the animal didn’t react.
Kit whispered back, ‘‘Trank round loaded.’’
I said, ‘‘Fire, fire trank round.’’ Then I held my breath.
Below me, Cutler’s thumb depressed the the firing button.
Whoom!
In the nanosecond before the round flashed downrange, it seemed the animal moved. But it also seemed to me that the grezzen was dead center in the sight reticle when the round would have struck.
Still, an eye blink later, the beast was gone.
We chased, and so did the ‘Rover ’bot, but within the seconds it took us to reach the fallen log where the animal had stood, the Rover had shut down. There was no grezzen anywhere in the vicinity, dead, alive, or doped. Kit dismounted, knelt with an elbow on a knee, and pronounced a series of six divots, deep enough to have been backhoe trenches, to be grezz tracks. There were just the six prints, then nothing until a bus-sized, beaten down tunnel through brush, thirty yards away.
I whistled. An elephant that could standing broad jump thirty yards.
Kit said. ‘‘Might as well stand down. It’s gone.’’
‘‘Gone? I hit it! I know I hit it!’’ Cutler pounded his fist against the turret wall.
Kit said, ‘‘A grezz can make seventy miles an hour in this country. The ’bot’s shut down. That means there’s no grezz within a half mile. More likely, it’s already three miles away and moving faster than we can. Tomorrow’s another day.’’
At Cutler’s insistence, we located the grezzen’s tracks, then followed them, bulldozing through the brush, until they disappeared at the edge of a granite patch. Then we traversed the area for two hours, in case the animal was sleeping off the round’s tranquilizer juice someplace.
We returned to Line camp before dark. Cutler was half exhilarated, half frustrated, and turned in early with his Reader after a couple whiskeys. Zhondro and Kit likewise, except for the Reader and the whiskey.
On a hunch, I climbed back in to the Abrams, powered up the engine and electricals, and ran the fire control system diagnostics. Then I kneed open the blast door and eyeballed the ready rack.
Hands on hips, I nodded to myself. ‘‘Well, well.’’