Overkill Read Online Free PDF

wouldn’t need a damn guide in the first place.”
    “An excellent point. But it will be lost on Mr. Cutler if it delays us, Jazen. I put my faith in you, my friend, only behind God.” Zhondro cut the connection, and I turned back, frowning, toward Kit Born.
    Kit shook her head. “No meal, no shower?”
    I thumbed off on a manifest that a stevedore held out to me, then shook my head at her. “Maybe no paychip, if I can’t get to a meeting in town in an hour. What are business meetings like here?”
    “If you’re here to kill grezzen and pay cash, everybody will love you.”
    “Does the mag rail to town stop in walking distance of a place called Eden Outfitters?”
    She snorted and rolled her eyes. “Mag rail. On Dead End. You said your boss was the idiot.”
    She turned her back on me, then walked, shaking her head, toward the exit gate. Palms out, mouth open, I stood alone on the tarmac.
    After ten steps, Kit turned back and waved me toward her. “Move your ass, Parker. With the Cageway closed, Eden’s fifty minutes from here. You’ve already wasted two.”

Seven
    Three minutes later, Kit Born’s caged, open six-wheel diesel careened up a ramp and out into the steaming haze that passed for a nice day on Dead End. The dash display read 104 Fahrenheit, which made the Sixer’s unmuffled roar worth the breeze it generated.
    I had never seen or heard of Cutler, much less of Dead End, until a couple of months before, so I twisted in my seat to recon a world new to me.
    The obvious thing about Spaceport DE 476 was that it wasn’t obvious. It was flat land from which the rainforest had been scraped back to clear runway space. The only visible above-ground structure was the hangar cage, the three heat-scorched shuttles sheltered behind its bars.
    The briefs I had read, which were Trueborn-authored, pronounced Dead End colony “splendidly noble, redolent of the libertarian sod dugouts of America’s sadly past frontier.”
    To me, Dead End colony, with its hole-in-the-ground non-architecture, was redolent of trench warfare. Trueborns measured the universe against cultural referents meaningless to the rest of us, and expected us to catch up.
    Dead End’s human habitations weren’t cage-roofed dugouts because of a noble connection to The Land. Below grade was cooler and trenching was cheaper than tunneling. And trenches were safer, because everything on Dead End that wasn’t monotone moss-green would sting you or eat you.
    Except the low, gray clouds, which the briefs said had not dissipated for thirty million standard years, give or take a few eons. The few colonial kids born and raised on Dead End had to take the existence of Earth and its frontier on faith, because they had never seen a moon or a star in the night sky.
    Ahead of us as we drove loomed Dead End’s most important—in fact, only—commercial artery, the Cageway, which I had also read about. It ran through a slim canyon that connected the planet’s two human habitation nodes, the spaceport and the town of Eden. Eden sat fortresslike in the bowl of an extinct volcano’s crater. The Cageway was protected by a newsteel bar roof, and vaulted newsteel doors sealed the passage’s ends against large animal intrusions. The Cageway had been enclosed in the early days because grezzen had lain in wait there and attacked vehicles channelized in the canyon. On Dead End, humans didn’t make road kill, they were road kill.
    Kit braked as we approached the Cageway. Its massive doors were closed, and an example of reverse road kill wedged up against the Cageway’s closed doors, in the form of a few tons of trampled plasteel that appeared to have once been an electrobus. Moss had begun to grow on the wreck’s north side, and its steel bits had rusted.
    Kit sighed. “Bus-woog collision. The only paved road on the planet and it’s been closed for two months. Welcome to Dead End.”
    “The Government’s slow clearing wrecks?”
    “Government on Dead End