Overkill Read Online Free

people.”
    “No. I mean am I a thing that should never be forgotten?”
    “What? I’d never forget you. Why would you ever even wonder about a thing like that?”
    “They forgot me.”
    She squeezed me tighter. “Oh, sweetheart, your parents didn’t forget you. Never, ever.”
    I hugged her tighter, and I felt her tears on my fingertips.
    She said, “It’s complicated. You’ll understand, someday.”
    “Will Jack get me before someday?”
    “Never, ever. I persuaded him. Now he won’t mess with us.”
    “What’s persuaded?”
    “They call him One-eyed Jack, now. We’ll leave it at that.”
    The coughing outside faded, then disappeared.
    Like she did every night, Orion rocked me, hummed, and I closed my eyes.

    I woke in the warehouse on Dead End to gray daylight, and someone whispering, “Come to momma.”
    I creaked to my knees, peeked over the counter, out across the warehouse, and Dead End surprised me again.

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-theknee 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