Authors: Robert Buettner
Balance Point (2 page)
TWO
Ten minutes later I left the hellcat idling at the base of the ridge, and low-crawled up alongside the squad leader where he lay in the middle of the line. Howard had radioed ahead that I was coming. The sergeant’s visor was up, and when he turned and saw my civvies, his eyes widened.
He shouted to be heard over the grezzen, which bellowed beyond the smoke. “Where’s your armor, Captain Parker?”
I shook my head. “I’ve seen grezz claws cut main battle tank armor. There’s no point.” The sergeant was new, and it was as much of the truth as he needed to know. “What do you make the range now, Sarge?”
He glanced up at his visor display. “Three hundred yards, sir. The animal’s moved farther east since we got here. Running out of trees to punch, I guess.”
I squinted at the smoke and saw nothing. Maybe I should have armored up just to access the snoops and visor data. “The warden out there. It’s Buford? And he’s still down?”
“Yes, sir. I suppose he’s waiting until the animal gets farther away before he makes a run for it.”
I shrugged. This squad leader was on duty because the experienced security troops had holiday passes. A grezz can cover sixty yards in a bound and sustain seventy miles per hour across open country. There was no making a run for it, and the warden and I knew it even if the newbie didn’t.
I levered myself up, stood and brushed damp soil off my civvies while I stared into the smoke.
The squad leader’s eyes widened again. “Sir?”
“I’ll walk over there and have a look.”
He frowned, shook his head. “Sir, you can’t. The animal’s berserk. And they say nothing short of a hovertank main gun can take a grezz down.”
“They say right, Sarge. But work with me on this.”
He swallowed. “Yes, sir. One fire team to maneuver with you and the other to provide covering fire?”
I shook my head. “No. I’ll go alone. Nobody fires, covering or otherwise. Have your squad safe their weapons. I don’t want to get shot or fried by friendly fire. Especially while I’m on leave.”
He shook his head again. “Sir, may I suggest—”
“Safe ’em, Sarge. And everybody stays put. Period.”
Pause. “Yes, sir.” He thumbed the safety lever on his carbine, then spoke into his helmet mike.
I waited until he had confirmation back from every member of his squad, then I walked down the ridge’s front slope and skirted the fire around the upwind side.
Ten minutes later I got to ten yards away from the warden, then I knelt and hissed. “Buford!”
Nothing. But I could see that he had drawn his sidearm and laid it across his belly, and his visor was open. Buford knew better than to bother firing a pistol at a grezzen. He had also seen the grezzen eat many times and probably preferred a bullet in the mouth to ending his life as a dismembered canapé, if it came to that.
But if Buford was that jumpy, I didn’t want to sneak up on him and get shot.
“Sergeant Buford!” This time I yelled loud enough to be heard over the fire.
He turned his head, saw me, and twitched his free hand in a half-ass wave.
I low-crawled to him and peered down. His face inside his helmet was so shiny with sweat, and so rigid, that he looked like a black marble. “You’re okay, John?”
He nodded, wrinkled his forehead. “Captain Parker? Sir, you’re on leave.”
“Life’s a bitch, Sarge. What happened?”
He turned his head toward the grezzen, which was screened from our view by brush. Buford paused, then, when the bellowing and the flying shrubbery didn’t change in intensity, answered. “I trailered the holiday woog out here, sedated like usual. I cut it loose, dumped it off the trailer and shot it with wake-up juice. Then I backed off in the hellcat. The woog was up and wobbly after five minutes, frisky after ten. Then the grezz showed up.”
“Showed up how?”
Buford shrugged. “Trotting on all six, like usual. The woog made a couple good runs, a pretty strong threat display—it was a big bull with a good rack—the grezz ran with him, back and forth. When the woog’s head finally came down . . .” Buford pantomimed chomp-chomp with his free hand’s gauntleted fingers, then shrugged. “’Nother day at the office.”
I nodded. “But you stuck around?”
Buford nodded back. “Like I said, it was a big bull. I figured there might be some leftovers worth freezing. The grezz really prefers wild meat, even dead and cold.”
I glanced up. In the distance, the tantrum continued unabated. “You must have done something.”
Buford shook his head so hard that his helmet neck ring squeaked. “Not one goddam thing, Captain. I swear! I was just sitting behind the wheel, reading the news on my handheld. The grezz had torn off the first drumstick. Then I heard him growl. Different. Angry.”
“Then?”
“He was on the ‘cat in two bounds. He took it in his forepaws and shook me out like I was cereal in a box. Then he trampled the ‘cat like it was cardboard.” The range warden shook his head. “Sir, he’s never done anything like that. Ever. He goes to The Barn when the tech nerds arrive, like he was a big dog. Wags his tail, usually. I think he likes the company.”
“The flamer?”
“It fell out of the ‘cat when I did. It’s, you know, for absolute last ditch deterrence only, sir. I know the animal’s valuable. But the way it was going, I figured I was in the last-ditch, you know?”
“I understand.”
“So I just triggered a burst. Not even at him. Just into the grass between him and me, to back him off. He hopped the fire like it wasn’t there, cuffed me once, with the back of his paw, not the claws. Knocked me face-down. Then he tore the flamer off my back and pounded it like a biscuit.” Buford raised his head six inches like he was afraid it would fall off if he raised it higher. “Since then he’s just been chewin’ the scenery like this, sir. And I been holdin’ still ‘til he wears out.”
“What were you reading?”
Buford squinted. “Sir? Why would that matter?”
“Humor me, John.”
Buford reached into his armor’s thigh pocket, tugged out his ‘puter and unrolled the screen. He clicked a bookmark, then drew a trembling finger across the displayed page. “Ah . . . Cold day for the parade. Inaugural Ball. Bla-bla. Outgoing pardon scandal. Bla-bla. Tycoon freed. Bla—”
I grabbed his wrist, turned the screen toward me, and read. “No!” I closed my eyes, then opened them and watched a tree trunk spin as it arced beneath the clouds. Then I sighed and held up the warden’s ‘puter. “Mind if I borrow this a minute, John?”
He wrinkled his forehead and sat up when I stood. When I walked past him, toward the grezzen, he grabbed for my arm. “Sir!”
I jerked my head at him. “Don’t worry, John. Get back behind the ridge.”
“It’s not my ‘puter that worries me, Sir. I seen men commit suicide by walkin’ into a mine field. Whatever’s been bothering you—”
“Is my problem. Do I have to make it a direct order?”
He shook his head, stood and backed in a slow crouch toward the relief squad.
Ten minutes later I had left Sergeant Buford behind and was crossing a muddy clearing that ended at a tree line fifty yards to my front. Then the grezzen’s bellowing and tree ripping stopped, like the sound had been cut off with a knife. For a moment, the only sound was the distant crackle of the fire, and, I was sure, my heart pounding.
I stood still, and ten seconds later trees crashed again. The treetops nearest me swayed as something big came toward me. The grezzen’s head poked out of the tree line, sixteen feet above the ground. Its three red eyes, set in a line across its great, flat face, glared above a mouth large enough to swallow a man whole. Two curved black tusks walrused down from the grezzen’s upper lip, and dripped saliva the color and texture of oatmeal.
He rumbled a growl that shook the mud in which I stood.
I swallowed. “Oboy.”
THREE
The grezzen peered out across the clearing at the human, as tiny as Buford, who brought his meals, but pale. Unlike Buford, this one was uncovered by the stiff shell in which humans normally wrapped themselves before they came close to him.
Even unshelled like this one, the little bipeds were visually indistinguishable. Even their sexual dimorphism was unobvious, unless one peeled away the artificial integument in which they wrapped themselves. And that was scarcely worth the energy expended because, at least according to those of his race who had sampled humans, the females were as bony and tasteless as the males.
He flexed his limbs until his belly brushed the ground, then peered at this one. No tiny mammaries pushed against its ventral integument, which was patterned in multiple colors. Its lower jaw was smudged, a recurring condition the humans called “five o’clock shadow” for incomprehensibly complex reasons. Male.
The human extended one forelimb behind himself, with one digit extended, toward the smoke and the human shell the grezzen had trampled. “Not exactly a people person today, are we, Mort?” The human audibilized the thought, tiny mouth opening and closing as though eating, but the grezzen understood without the auditory cue.
The grezzen also felt the human’s inner fear, of which the little biped gave no outward sign. The fear was understandable. The grezzen’s current intemperate rage created the very real apprehension that he might kill any human who came near him.
The grezzen responded to the human without sound. “I have not eaten people in years. Ha-ha.”
His response relaxed the human, as intended, and the little creature audibilized, “Not funny. Better. But your joke-telling skills need more work.”
“I felt it was you, Jazen.”
“You’ve made a mess here, Mort.”
“You know why. I felt you communicate with John Buford.”
Jazen tilted his head forward and back. The grezzen understood that this indicated agreement. Humans communicated by patterned sound, but also by body displays, much like prey animals did.
Jazen raised a tiny white leaf in front of his eyes with one hand while he pointed at it with the other. “You eavesdropped on Buford while he was reading the news on his handheld. But Mort, when the news is bad, you can’t just kill the messenger.”
The grezzen rocked back on his third legs, a pose humans used to communicate affront. “And I did not! John Buford tried to burn me with the fire stinger, so I removed it. That is all I did.”
“All? You know what a hellcat costs?”
The grezzen dropped back onto all six. Cost. Grezzen had no need for tools, much less a system by which to value them. Humans, however, valued the tools they communally created and shared, like the hellcat. Only by community and tools had a species so tiny and fragile survived. It was but one reason the little creatures fascinated him. “Perhaps I over-reacted.”
Jazen swiveled his head, pointed his foreclaw at the vast expanse of spoiled and burned vegetation that surrounded them. “Ya think? And you scared John shitless.”
“Such news would have upset any individual of normal intelligence and sensibility.”
“John doesn’t know you have intelligence and sensibility! To him you’re just a big dog.”
The grezzen extended his forelimb and pointed a claw at the leaf. “Read the rest for me. Of the news that John Buford was learning from the leaf.”
Jazen crossed his forelimbs, shook his head. This indicated both displeasure and intransigence. “You’re a goddam telepath. Go find a mind that’s not pissed off at you and read it yourself.”
“You know it does not work like that.”
How it worked, in fact, was that Dead End’s entire grezzen population, the tiny apex atop that planet’s predation pyramid, were telepathically connected in real time, cousin-to-cousin, like ‘puters wired to a single server. Mort accessed his grandfather’s memories as easily as his own, and saw, heard and smelled what any other grezzen experienced whenever he chose.
But with other species, Mort couldn’t rummage through individuals’ memory banks. He could only see, hear, feel, sense what any individual did, in the moment. As if that individual wore a head-cam with earpiece, and Mort could access the feed anytime he wished.
Grezzen attacked and defended using sight and sound and smell when convenient. And fell back on their gift when they chose. Evolution had upgraded them from physically dominant predators to lords of their world.
However, when eavesdropping on aliens in an alien world, Mort’s gift underperformed.
“Jazen? Please?” The grezzen stroked the old scar tissue on his face where the kerosene rain had burned him. “If not for me, for the memory of my mother.”
Invoking his dead mother, killed by humans, was a tactic he had learned from the humans. They used it to induce sympathy in another. Although neither party moved in any direction, it was called a guilt trip.
Jazen expelled breath, indicating reluctant assent. The humans called it a sigh. “If I do, you’ll calm down?”
The grezzen lay on his back, laced the claws of four limbs across his belly, then remained motionless, like an inanimate vegetable. “There. I am as calm as a cucumber.”
“Cool. Cool as a cucumber.”
“As you prefer.”
Then Jazen raised the leaf again, drew a foreclaw across its surface, and spoke.
“Turn in Tale of Tarnished Tycoon. Once the fourth richest man on Earth, and majority shareholder in its largest communications conglomerate, Bartram Cutler was serving the second year of a twenty-two-year sentence after conviction on criminal charges that remain sealed on national security grounds. That changed yesterday when Cutler’s name appeared on the outgoing administration’s list of midnight pardons—”
The grezzen raised one foreclaw. “I came here only because you and Kit told me that Cutler would be restrained because of his misdeeds. You, and so I, have just learned that you said that which is not.”
Jazen pointed a foreclaw at the grezzen. “We didn’t lie to you! Being wrong about the future’s not lying. Just because telepaths don’t know how to lie doesn’t mean you can’t understand the difference. You know humans by now.”
The grezzen did indeed know humans, at least his humans, now. He did not know when, precisely, he had begun thinking of Jazen and Kit as “his.” Nor did he know when he, a being who lived his adult life, save for mating, apart from others of his kind, came to enjoy proximate interaction with these two frail creatures.
Jazen made another tiny exhalation. “You think I like it? You felt my anger when John read it for me, didn’t you?”
The grezzen nodded. “I did. However, I have left my home and come to this place in reliance upon what you said. I have remained here because of what you said. I have endured bland food and miserable climate and the poking and prodding of the nerds at The Barn.” He stroked his old scar tissue again. “To say nothing of the attempts to burn me alive.” The grezzen turned his mouth up at its corners. “Ha-ha.”
Jazen’s tiny facial muscles mimicked the grezzen’s in response. “I was wrong. Your sense of humor’s improving. But remember, if you hadn’t come to Earth with us, Cutler would have killed half your cousins by now. Just like he killed your mother. And he would have enslaved the rest of you. He’s a bad human. Unfortunately, we have lots of those.”
The grezzen raised and lowered his chin in a human nod. “And so I have been content to endure the nerds. But now Cutler is unrestrained. He killed my mother and now he is out there somewhere.” He raised up on his back two and stared toward the distant perimeter fence, invisible beyond the trees. “That should not continue.”
Jazen’s small eyes widened and he raised both foreclaws and turned their inner surfaces toward the grezzen, as though he were pushing against a tree trunk. “Don’t even think about it!” He pointed with a foreclaw at the boundary which could not be seen from here. “Mort, you cross outside that fence and the villagers’ll go torches and pitchforks on you.”
The grezzen stroked his face again, where the kerosene had burned him, then shook his head vertically to punctuate. “Yes. Villagers. I understand. Humans acting together are even more dangerous than a human acting alone.”
“More powerful, yes. More dangerous? Not usually. Mostly, when humans act together, it’s to do something good. You like the London Symphony.”
“I do. But the Yavi act together. The nerds who study me act together. Unlike the musicians of the London Symphony, the Yavi and the nerds wish to kill the other not for food.”
“War brings out the worst in both sides. Some Yavi are very bad. But I was raised on Yavet. Most Yavi have nothing to do with what makes the others bad. And maybe a few of the nerds are bad. But most of them are like Kit and me. They just want to protect your race and understand your gift, not weaponize it.”
“If Cutler and the bad Yavi acted together, they would be very dangerous.”
The corners of Jazen’s mouth turned up again, and he shook his head horizontally. This signaled indulgent disagreement. “Cutler’s a Trueborn. The bad Yavi hate Trueborns. Especially rich jerk Trueborns. And even jerk Trueborns like Cutler hate the Yavi.” Jazen pointed a foreclaw at the woog, dead and warm in the distance. Already a cloud of scavenging local insects rendered its outline indistinct. “Mort, if Cutler and the Yavi ever act together, I’ll eat a rotten woog, flies and all.”