Free Overkill by Robert Buettner Page B

bounced back off the target. The tank measured the travel time out and back, then calculated range to target.
    Now, hitting the target had little to do with Cutler and everything to do with the tank. Once Cutler had ranged the target, the Abrams’fire control system was so good and so durable that the Kodiak’s was basically just an update of a century-old design. The tank now adjusted for its own tilt, cross wind, even gun tube droop on a hot day. It did so whether the tank was stationary, like we were, or rumbling across uneven ground. The tank would even lead the target if the target was moving. This one wasn’t even doing that.
    All Cutler had to do was point and shoot.
    If he could hit a target out here in the rain forest as well as his simulator results showed, Kit wouldn’t have to move much ammo. These old crawlers delivered first-round kills almost as reliably as a modern Kodiak did.
    I said into my mike, “Load, load practice round.”
    To my left, Kit pressed the knee switch that opened the blast door covering the ready rack, pulled the round, pirouetted and fisted it home in the main gun breech. She snatched her fist back, fingers intact as the breech snapped shut, then said, “Practice round loaded.”
    I glanced at my ’puter. Practice rounds didn’t hit like tacticals, and accordingly weighed less. Still, an experienced loader loaded in three to five seconds. Kit had just done the job in four flat. I nearly said “Good girl!” out loud, then realized that would piss everybody off, all for different reasons.
    We took the shot stationary and unbuttoned, with me topside out of the commander’s hatch, joined by Kit, out the loader’s hatch.
    I said, “Fire, fire practice round.”
    Below, Cutler depressed the red buttons a second time, triggering the gun.
    Whoom !
    The Abrams lurched as if sucker-punched by God. A fireball the size of a small house lit the main gun’s muzzle and kicked up a dust cloud the size of a large house. Two blinks later, the target remained.
    Cutler muttered, “What the—?”
    Then the target sagged flat, undulating on the breeze like struck regimental colors. The practice round mimicked an armor-killing discarding sabot round. When an armor piercing discarding sabot round left the gun muzzle, most of the “bullet” fell away, leaving a central, sharp, dense penetrator rod howling toward the target at thirty-five hundred feet per second. The penetrator had needled through the unresisting target so cleanly that it took a breath before the balloon deflated.
    Cutler scrambled out of his seat, then squirmed up alongside me smiling. “That was great! How soon can we kill something?”
    Kit glanced at me and rolled her eyes.

Seventeen
    Once we got inside the Wrangler’s station, which was a series of chambers blasted out within the granite knob, Kit’s first job was to report our safe arrival to Eden Outfitters. Radios didn’t work much better on Dead End than Handtalks, but old hard-wired field telephones worked fine.
    Kit sat at a stool in front of a camp table, speaking into an ancient pedestal microphone, while the voice of Oliver, her boss, crackled through an analog speaker box alongside the mike.
    After the usual unpleasantries, he said, “Tell Mr. Cutler his people downshuttled last night.”
    I thought we were Cutler’s people. Surprise!
    Oliver continued, “They’re moving gear into the warehouse he rented.”
    Kit glanced at Cutler, and he nodded. “He’s got the word, Oliver.”
    “Kit, people here aren’t stupid. Cutler’s crew look more like pirates than taxidermists. And it doesn’t take thirty ex-Legion psychos to stuff a dead grezzen.”
    “So what are you saying, Oliver?”
    I could almost hear the shrug over the land line. “I dunno. Just that even the prospect of a dead grezzen inside the Line makes people jumpy.”
    Kit shrugged back. “Okay.”
    “Kit, you don’t take any ’bots off the Line for escort when you go out in the bush, got