Balance Point (29 page)

Somebody’s boot scraped granite as he squirmed. “Great. Those ubiquitous too, Sarge?”

Desmond swung his hand at the barren plateau. “That’s one reason the Captain picked this laager. Dick bugs don’t like high ground, rock and open space.”

Otman smiled. Desmond had picked this position. But loyal, self-effacing Desmond wouldn’t accept credit in front of the men, even if Otman tried to acknowledge him.

Cassel scowled. “What about the grezzen, Sarge?”

Several grumbles of agreement.

Desmond scowled the school master’s stone face, again. “Keep your diapers on. There’s, like, eleven animals in the food chain before this briefing gets to the top predator. The little one gets chased by the big one what gets chased by the bigger one. Like from you maggots up to me.”

Otman smiled in the darkness. He felt like he could hear nine pairs of young eyes roll. Despite the kids’ reaction, the human glue that held a merc team—held any tactical-sized infantry unit—together was that every man in the team knew every other man completely, down to the way each rolled his eyes. And every one would lay down his life for the other. Not for flags or against tyrants, but because each man absolutely trusted that his buddy would do the same for him.

Only when the last man had finished chow did Otman crack his own ration. Simultaneously, Desmond’s brief got to Dead End’s top predators, the grezzen.

Each previous species that Desmond had profiled had been bigger, stronger, faster and meaner than the last. The grezzen, however, were in a figurative and literal class by themselves.

Mature male grezzen resembled, and had been named by the first Trueborn colonists for, a hirsute Earth carnivore called a grizzly. But while Trueborns had occasionally trained grizzlies, no one had ever “trained” a grezzen. At least, no one had survived and told about it. Absent empirical data, it was assumed that grezzen were roughly as intelligent as grizzlies, capable of rolling a large ball or walking on hind legs if stimulated by an appropriate reward. Which was more intelligence than they needed, given their physical gifts.

When Desmond finally put up a grezzen image, someone puckered a low whistle. Grezzen were ten times larger than grizzlies, eleven tons of six-legged muscle. Their carbon-12-based skeleton and integument allowed them to be disproportionately stronger, faster and more durable than species indigenous to normal Earthlikes’ ecosystems. And they looked the part of top predator in hell, with three red eyes arrayed across a flat face, and tusks that curved down from their upper jaws like ebony scimitars.

According to Dead End’s fossil record, the grezzen hadn’t changed in thirty million years. Why would they? They perfectly dominated this world. And dominated the only offworld species who had challenged them for it. Dumb brutes that they were, grezzen had somehow, nevertheless, exterminated the first two Trueborn colonial expeditions. The grezzen had also slaughtered the reinforced Legion battalion that was sent along to protect the colonists of the second expedition. If the third expedition had failed, the Trueborns had planned to carpet bomb the place from orbit. But the current tiny colony had survived the subsequent decades, albeit by cowering behind minefields that discouraged the brutes, as well as the rest of Dead End’s unfriendly population.

Desmond finished his brief, repacked the background data ‘puter and simultaneously assigned the night watch schedule. Then he stomped the hilltop’s crevassed granite with a boot. “Long as the watch stays awake, the sensors and rover mines will keep all the big predators out. You can sleep outside instead of in the vehicles ‘cause the dick bugs don’t like it up here.”

Desmond’s offer brought smiles. Most Yavi preferred enclosed spaces, but the vehicle interiors were ovens, especially when left idling as they would be to power the sensor and weapon arrays.

Otman laid out his own bedsack on the smooth-worn rock, trusted the watch to do its job, and fell into exhausted sleep after counting back just six digits.

Screams woke him in the darkness. He sat up, still inside his bedsack, and saw a running silhouette, arms flailing as though on fire. The man leapt into the third vehicle. The Bush cat rocked as the man thrashed inside.

Graunch
.

Otman heard the emergency brake release, then the vehicle rolled slowly forward, away from him.

Otman tore free of his bedsack, groped for his night snoops, couldn’t find them. He stumbled half-blind toward the vehicle, buckling on his sidearm.

In the darkness, others ran, some also flailing like the man in the vehicle.

The Bush cat lurched along the plateau, then toppled off its edge.

By the time Otman reached and peered over the cliff, the ‘Cat rocked, inverted, on the scree below. Metal groaned and echoed, then the wreck burst into flame.

Otman staggered back, crushed something with his bare heel, and looked down.

A dead dick bug. He shuddered. A second bug was already squirming out of an inch-wide joint in the weathered granite. Otman drew his sidearm, reversed it and hammered the bug with the pistol’s butt. Then another, and another. He looked around. The black nightmares covered the pale granite like writhing pepper.

Twenty minutes later, someone had thought to douse the rock with spare vehicle fuel, light it and sear a safe zone around the remaining two vehicles.

Otman sat with his seven men on the hoods of the two Bush cats, breathing in the mixed stench of burned kerosene and immolated bugs.

A soldier stared at Desmond. “You said this place had no bugs.”

Desmond, hollow-eyed, shook his head. “The ‘puter said it.”

“The cracks were full of ’em.”

Otman knit his brows, said to Desmond, “Let’s take another look at that ‘puter.”

Desmond nodded at the black smoke that still drifted up from the wreck. “It was in that ‘Cat.”

The eight survivors spent the next hours huddled atop the ‘Cats like castaways aboard flotsam. Most dozed. Otman couldn’t. All told, four dead. Over the years his units had taken casualties, and every one still pained him. But nothing compared to this debacle. How? Why?

Otman stared at Desmond, who lay on his back on the other ‘Cat’s rear cargo rack, staring up at the darkness. Otman had never known Desmond to misread a map coordinate, a warning order paragraph, or even a soldier’s name when distributing bonus vouchers. If Desmond hadn’t erred, then what had happened?

Perhaps local predators had driven the bugs into this non-normal habitat. As Desmond had said, the little ones get chased by the bigger ones, and so on. But that would have been a coincidence, and Otman still didn’t believe in coincidence.

So what else could have happened? Otman’s year of mole hunting had taught him how easily a ‘puter entry could be overwritten. It would’ve been simple. Reverse the habitat preferences of dick bugs.

Cold grew in the pit of Otman’s stomach. Something on this carnivorous planet was eating his team. Was that something eating from the inside out? Had the Trueborns planted a mole in his team? Plenty of Trueborn zealots would sacrifice their own lives to sabotage an elite Yavi covert team.

Otman frowned at the two bodies that lay bagged alongside the opposite Bush cat. If there was a mole among them, who was it? Cassel was the newbie. The man Otman knew least. And as the medic, Cassel had accessed the tech ‘puter day in and day out, studying the medical idiosyncracies of this hellhole.

Otman turned onto his side, gazed at Cassel. The kid slept, his face hairless and placid. What better disguise than youthful innocence?

By dawn, the dick bugs had vanished, though they were not supposed to be nocturnal. Nor did the crevasses display any evidence that bugs, or anything else, made a home on this rocky tombstone of a hilltop.

Otman had been too exhausted, too stunned, too pressed by yet another fleeting headache to think of the casualties until Desmond reminded him.

Two soldiers rappelled down to the wreck and roped up their comrades’ remains. The team cremated the three bodies, consecrated the ash, and were off the knob’s sloping back side and on track again before the gray sky was fully light.

The two remaining vehicles made good time, because the six-legged, six-ton grazers who rumbled across the planet in herds of twenty thousand had recently denuded the area. The grazing herd, which the team’s route skirted, was barely visible in the distance, a vast, serene brown line on the horizon.

That morning Otman had placed himself in the lead vehicle, along with only the magnetometer itself and the Bush cat’s driver. One way to thwart a mole, if there was one, was to deny him information about the team’s next move.

So Otman himself first spotted the objective. The grazers had so recently passed through that the normally green, overgrown landscape was brown stubble.

The “object” proved to be many objects. The largest mass was an unremarkable cargo-truck-sized habitat box, a “sleeper,” surrounded by empty food and fuel containers and vehicle spares. The durable effluvia of a long-abandoned campsite.

The trailing Bush cat stopped fifty yards short of the anticlimactic objective to repair a damaged road wheel before it stalled the vehicle altogether.

Otman dismounted the lead vehicle into thick midmorning heat heavy with insect drone, and Desmond walked forward from the following vehicle.

Otman kicked a rusted, empty cartridge box, looked around, hands on hips.

Desmond swore. “Captain, this crap’s been here for years. Some Trueborn’s idea of a safari. Gone wrong.”

Not, Otman thought, as wrong as his own safari had gone already. He stared down at his hands. Normally steady, they twitched, and as he stared he realized that his right eye had begun to twitch. He pressed his eyelid with a fingertip to still it.

“Skipper?”

Otman snapped his head up. Desmond was staring at him.

“Captain? You okay?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Desmond drew back. “Nothin’, Sir. You just seem a little, I dunno . . .”

Otman didn’t know, either. He knew that he disrespected officers who failed to focus on the mission. Who blundered. Who failed to protect their men. Now, for the first time in his career, he was such an officer. Guilt. Shame. These were emotions unfamiliar to him.

Otman breathed deeply, refocused on the reality in front of him. The “sleeper’s” corroded shell lay flattened, and scars in the soil revealed how it had been tossed and dragged first in one direction, then another, like a paper scrap, as the herds had grazed, then regrazed the spot over the years.

Desmond pointed at the scars. “This thing was prob’ly whole when the Trueborns abandoned it. Woog herds only regraze an area after it regrows. Two-year intervals.”

Otman ground his teeth. This junk heap had nothing to do with a recently missing C-drive starship. A dead end on Dead End. So far he had accomplished nothing except to get four good men killed. Now what?

The Bush cat’s driver lowered his window. “Captain? Sarge? You feel that?”

Otman’s boot soles vibrated.

The vibration grew until the thatch on the ground twitched.

The driver wrinkled his forehead. “Could it be those woogs we passed?”

“Maybe.” Desmond shook his head. “But they won’t come this way.” He pointed at the barren ground. “No chow left.”

Thunder rumbled. The driver frowned. “Well, something’s gainin’ on us.”

Now a thin brown line showed in the distance. A dust cloud boiled, like a tank division at full gas. If the woogs were, for some reason, inbound, they would be lumbering no faster than a soldier could route march.

Otman blinked, and in that instant the brown cloud seemed closer.

He remounted the lead ‘Cat while he called to Desmond. “I don’t like this. Get back to your vehicle, Sergeant.”

Desmond was already on his way at a dead run, shouting to the crew, who remained clustered around the damaged wheel.

Otman tugged optical binoculars from the Bush cat’s utility bin and cursed the cover story that denied them the body armor and optics of contemporary battle dress.

He focused on the herd. Even at this distance, the animals loomed as big as Earth elephants, but with corkscrew antlers and six legs.

They weren’t grazing. They galloped, crashing into one another in panic and disarray. Leading animals at the front stumbled, fell, then disappeared in the dust as those behind overran them.

Otman turned to his driver. “It’s a stampede. Get us out of here!”

Gears ground, and the Bush cat lurched forward.

Thirty seconds later, the vehicle slowed so violently that Otman’s head struck the dash. “What the hell?”

The driver was staring at his rear view.

Otman frowned. “Floor it!”

“Sir? The others can’t keep up.”

Otman twisted in his seat and peered out across the rear rack. A six-wheel could easily move on five, but the trail vehicle limped along, now a hundred yards behind them. It tilted on five wheels, its detached sixth lashed to its roof.

Already the stampede, its front now stretched across their left and right rear as far as could be seen in the dust, had closed to within one hundred yards of the trailing ‘Cat.

Within seconds, the stampede would swallow the crippled ‘Cat and flatten it beneath a hundred thousand hooves.

Otman shouted to his driver, “Stop! When they catch up, we’ll take ’em aboard.”

Otman snatched a Trueborn big-game rifle from the ‘Cat’s dashboard rack. He had seen a Trueborn cowboy holo once where a stampede was split by killing a lead animal.

He stood, head and shoulders out the roof hatch, turned and faced the stampede. Vibration shook the three-ton Bush cat on its suspension, now, and made aim impossible. But the vast target made aim unnecessary. Otman emptied the rifle into the herd, then groped for another magazine.

He reloaded, fired again. His shots no more slowed the stampede than thrown pebbles slowed a tidal wave.

The herd was fifty yards behind the trailing Bush cat when the ‘Cat stopped dead, belching black smoke. Men spilled from the vehicle’s doors and ran, hopelessly slowly, toward the lead vehicle’s dubious sanctuary.