him. We know each other.”
“I gathered that. Though I don’t understand it.” She nodded. “Okay. I’ll play, for now.” She turned and walked away, then she turned back, and stared at me with the blue eyes again. “What you did, Parker? With the .50? You surprised me. And I liked it. I liked it a lot.”
She turned again, and I swallowed. I had just hatched a conspiracy that could cost me my life, or save it, with a woman about whom I knew only that she wasn’t what she seemed to be.
But as I watched her walk away, all I could think about was the way she had looked the previous night, when she slipped into her bunk in her skivvies.
I didn’t get over it until first thing the next morning.
Twenty-one
In the gray dawn we rolled across the Line like a wagon train in a Trueborn western. We towed the floater laden with gear to deal with a presumably passive grezzen, fuel, the Sleeper, spares, and the maintenance ’bot. I didn’t like that the floater reduced the Abrams’ mobility to that of a fifteen hundred horsepower oxcart. But there were no convenience stores beyond the Line, and we were going far enough for long enough that, if we broke down, walking back would be no option.
Rover ’bots were programmed to rove no farther than eight hundred yards out beyond the Line. Once we got more than eight hundred yards out, they would provide no warning, much less kill any grezzen we might encounter, until and unless we returned to their protective umbrella. I had lobbied to take along a couple of Rovers as early-warning outriders, in spite of the ban I had heard Eden Outfitters impose on Kit. But Cutler vetoed my suggestion. And, in fact, it made no sense to take along something programmed to automatically kill the very animal we were trying to take alive.
So we kept the machine guns loaded. The main gun, too. With a real bullet, this time. I checked.
We had even loaded up handheld anti tank tubes. Even the Legion, which was even less concerned than Eden Outfitters about protecting its valued employees, hadn’t forced us legionnaires to go into battle equipped with HATTs. HATTs were junk against tanks, inaccurate beyond even twenty-five yards, prone to dud, and therefore every arms merchant’s loss leader.
Which was probably why Eden Outfitters had cases of them, which it shipped out to its Line Section stations. Kit assured us that, while a HATT wouldn’t drop a grezzen, it was a dandy noisemaker to scare off anything else we might encounter.
The first obstacle we encountered was a broad river imaginatively named Broad River. Kit charted our course so that we could cross the river at the point where it tumbled over a thirty-foothigh rock bench that she called Broad Falls. She said that we had to ford there because the river was too deep elsewhere. Also, elsewhere the river was infested with things that Kit said were big enough and mean enough to drag even an Abrams under like a crocodile poaching a wallaby.
I didn’t want to die like a poached wallaby, whatever it was, so I was glad to learn that the river rose and fell in multi-day cycles with the rains. So great was the fluctuation that the falls could be driven across on the dry rock bench if we were patient.
Patience and Cutler were strangers, and an Abrams can ford a stream four feet deep. So we blew across the falls’ half-mile-long lip while the river still covered it, rooster tailing spray like a speedboat.
Four hours beyond Broad Falls, the ground shook so hard that we felt it even through the Abrams’ tracks.
Kit halted us, while woogs stampeded around us like a dusty tsunami. They thundered past us, so thick that every few seconds little, dog-sized, blue-skinned creatures would skitter up and across our prow, then down the other side. Kit said they were symbiotes, who lived scurrying around, protected within the herd from medium-sized predators, living on parasites they nipped off the woog’s bellies.
Rather than wait for the herd to
“I gathered that. Though I don’t understand it.” She nodded. “Okay. I’ll play, for now.” She turned and walked away, then she turned back, and stared at me with the blue eyes again. “What you did, Parker? With the .50? You surprised me. And I liked it. I liked it a lot.”
She turned again, and I swallowed. I had just hatched a conspiracy that could cost me my life, or save it, with a woman about whom I knew only that she wasn’t what she seemed to be.
But as I watched her walk away, all I could think about was the way she had looked the previous night, when she slipped into her bunk in her skivvies.
I didn’t get over it until first thing the next morning.
Twenty-one
In the gray dawn we rolled across the Line like a wagon train in a Trueborn western. We towed the floater laden with gear to deal with a presumably passive grezzen, fuel, the Sleeper, spares, and the maintenance ’bot. I didn’t like that the floater reduced the Abrams’ mobility to that of a fifteen hundred horsepower oxcart. But there were no convenience stores beyond the Line, and we were going far enough for long enough that, if we broke down, walking back would be no option.
Rover ’bots were programmed to rove no farther than eight hundred yards out beyond the Line. Once we got more than eight hundred yards out, they would provide no warning, much less kill any grezzen we might encounter, until and unless we returned to their protective umbrella. I had lobbied to take along a couple of Rovers as early-warning outriders, in spite of the ban I had heard Eden Outfitters impose on Kit. But Cutler vetoed my suggestion. And, in fact, it made no sense to take along something programmed to automatically kill the very animal we were trying to take alive.
So we kept the machine guns loaded. The main gun, too. With a real bullet, this time. I checked.
We had even loaded up handheld anti tank tubes. Even the Legion, which was even less concerned than Eden Outfitters about protecting its valued employees, hadn’t forced us legionnaires to go into battle equipped with HATTs. HATTs were junk against tanks, inaccurate beyond even twenty-five yards, prone to dud, and therefore every arms merchant’s loss leader.
Which was probably why Eden Outfitters had cases of them, which it shipped out to its Line Section stations. Kit assured us that, while a HATT wouldn’t drop a grezzen, it was a dandy noisemaker to scare off anything else we might encounter.
The first obstacle we encountered was a broad river imaginatively named Broad River. Kit charted our course so that we could cross the river at the point where it tumbled over a thirty-foothigh rock bench that she called Broad Falls. She said that we had to ford there because the river was too deep elsewhere. Also, elsewhere the river was infested with things that Kit said were big enough and mean enough to drag even an Abrams under like a crocodile poaching a wallaby.
I didn’t want to die like a poached wallaby, whatever it was, so I was glad to learn that the river rose and fell in multi-day cycles with the rains. So great was the fluctuation that the falls could be driven across on the dry rock bench if we were patient.
Patience and Cutler were strangers, and an Abrams can ford a stream four feet deep. So we blew across the falls’ half-mile-long lip while the river still covered it, rooster tailing spray like a speedboat.
Four hours beyond Broad Falls, the ground shook so hard that we felt it even through the Abrams’ tracks.
Kit halted us, while woogs stampeded around us like a dusty tsunami. They thundered past us, so thick that every few seconds little, dog-sized, blue-skinned creatures would skitter up and across our prow, then down the other side. Kit said they were symbiotes, who lived scurrying around, protected within the herd from medium-sized predators, living on parasites they nipped off the woog’s bellies.
Rather than wait for the herd to
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