Five
Twenty feet across the warehouse, the speaker knelt, back to me, silhouetted in an up-angled ramp that ended in an open roll-up door through which showed a sagging gauze of morning fog. She wore dusty khaki bush shorts, a scale-armor tunic, and over-the-knee leather boots that I guessed reached just higher than lemon bugs could jump. The bare limbs that showed were tan and lean. She held her broad-brimmed leather hat at ground level, while she scooped at a lemon bug with it.
The little monster sprang at her. She trapped it in her hat’s upturned crown, then flicked it outside, where it landed legs-tosky, on moist asphalt. The creature righted itself and scurried away.
The woman turned away from the door, re-creasing her hat crown with short-nailed fingers. She moved with the weary economy of an infantry soldier, or at least of someone used to hard work and grit.
I stood, cleared my throat, and she jerked her eyes up toward me.
I sucked a breath. Weary she might be, but her eyes were Caribbean blue. So were Cutler’s wife’s, however this woman’s looked not only luminous but birth-natural.
I rubbed circulation into the repaired leg, then limped up the ramp and joined her at the door. Then I pointed at the spot where the lemon bug had been. ‘‘I thought lemon bugs were eight-legged rats.’’
She turned, unsurprised, and shrugged. ‘‘Everything in this universe has its place. I take it you’re claiming freight, too.’’ She nodded to me. ‘‘I’m Kit Born.’’
‘‘Jazen Parker. I—’’ The thunder of chemical engines cut me off, as the shuttle that had brought me down taxied into the thick barred cage that formed the shuttle hangar. The place was big enough that it enclosed two more parked shuttles.
Even at idle, the shuttle’s engines shook the floor beneath my boots, and the tang of their kerosene exhaust sank down the ramp into the warehouse.
Interstellar cruisers drifted down to most planets’ spaceports quieter than eight-legged rats, because C-drive manipulates gravity. But drift approaches take time, and time is money. Cruisers served downgraded outworlds like Dead End only by dropping off in parking orbit containerized freight, mail, and passenger modules in a constant parade. It was up to the locals to shuttle the modules down to surface. The heat-scorched wedges out on the tarmac were old-tech, but they were the thread that tied Dead End’s tiny colony to the rest of mankind.
As the Downshuttle’s brakes squealed, a ’bot tug clamped the nose gear of one of the other two, which would become the morning Upshuttle.
The rear cargo ramp of the Downshuttle that had delivered me here whined down.
The first container that skated down the shuttle’s ramp was unpainted plasteel the size of a family electrovan, labelled ‘‘Danger—’bots contain explosives,’’ and far smaller than the one I was waiting for.
Somewhere beneath Kit Born’s armor lurked a female form, which meant . . . When the shuttle’s roar died, I displayed my detective skills. ‘‘You must be the Line Wrangler I heard about.’’
She turned to me, hands on hips, and rolled her eyes. ‘‘And you must be the fool who’s come to hunt grezzen.’’
‘‘No. I just work for him.’’
‘‘They say only fools work for fools.’’
I shrugged. ‘‘They might say different if they knew the job I quit.’’
She flicked her eyes to my bare forearm, nodded at the Legion Graves-registration bar code tatt lasered there, then fingered a carrot-sized cartridge looped in her belt. ‘‘Recognize this, merc?’’
I blinked past the slur, nodded. ‘‘I’ve seen a Barrett Double Express split a Hovee’s engine block, then drop a forty-foot wronk in its tracks.’’
She frowned when I mentioned the wronk. ‘‘You served in the Marin Suppression?’’
I frowned back. ‘‘Legionnaires don’t choose their enemies.’’
She opened her mouth, closed it, then blinked. She shook her head, pointing through the hangar’s open cage walls at the distant tree line. ‘‘My Barrett’s just for the small fry out there, Mr. Parker. It barely aggravates a grezz. Which is redundant, because you’ve never encountered a nastier disposition.’’
Well, there had been Platoon Sergeant Leto at Basic Armor School.
Kit said, ‘‘Grezzen are the deadliest game in this universe. Money can’t buy enough gun to drop one. Go home, and take your boss with you.’’
Crackle.
A stevedore lased the plasteel’s top and side slabs. They fell to the asphalt, booming spray clouds into the saturated air.
I followed Kit Born across the vast cage. She counted the folded, six-legged ’bots, each cocooned in frothy plastipak like spider prey, then thumbed the manifest that the stevedore held out.
She knelt beside the nearest ’bot, drew a bush knife as long as her forearm from her belt, and de-cocooned the ’bot like she was gutting moonfish.
I peered down at it. ‘‘Hell. It’s just a mobile limpet antitank mine.’’
She nodded. ‘‘Reprogrammed. Rover ’bots home on grezzen just like they would on a Lockheed Kodiak in combat. Scuttling under a grezz is about like scuttling under a hovertank’s skirt.’’ She tapped her knife on the upward-firing shaped charge housing. ‘‘Shaped charge detonated into the belly disembowels either one.’’
‘‘Stationary mines would be cheaper.’’
‘‘That’s what the armorers who equipped the second colonial expedition thought.’’
‘‘Second?’’
She opened the ’bot’s access panel, punched in a code, and it whined to its six feet like a camo-painted cockroach six feet across. ‘‘The first colonial expedition came to DE 476 armed to the teeth, to combat the hostile fauna the initial ’bot surveys found. Even so, all that survived was a distress transmission so ugly that the tourism board still has it sealed from the general public. The second expedition was escorted by a merc battalion. Same result. The third expedition suffered equivalent casualties, until they deployed the limpets. Since then, the grezz avoid the settlers and vice versa.’’
I toed the mobile mine’s camo limb with my boot. ‘‘What’s magic about the Rover ’bots?’’
She stared down at the ’bot’s panel, shrugged. ‘‘They work. They work cheap. That passes for magic on an outworld. Come on, Parker. Mercs don’t usually overthink killing.’’
My heart sped up and I pointed at her. ‘‘Don’t judge what you don’t—’’
Rumble.
A plasteel forty feet long, eight feet high, thirteen feet wide, and stenciled ‘‘Cutler Communications’’ slid down the ramp and thumped to a stop behind us. The shuttle’s ramp clamshelled shut, and the stevedore lased the container until its roof and sides toppled. The slabs jostled the ground fog into twists as they thumped the apron.
Silhouetted against mist-obscured jungle, Cutler’s weapon of choice squatted in the dank morning.
Kit Born stared at it, and her head shook slowly. ‘‘Parker, your boss might not be a fool. But he might be a menace.’’