Grown Men

constellations of dreaming moths shifted overhead as they flexed their wings and waited for night.
    Then a caterpillar caught his eye, not on the trays but on the wall. It crawled down one of the new walls Ox had welded together out of his transport container and planted directly in the earth. The caterpillar drew Runt’s eye, but the knife kept it.
    Knife?
    It lay on the sandy floor against the wall. A vat-grown bone grip, its blade hid inside like a stiletto, but not steel. This was a sonic knife, which made molecular cuts using vibration focused with atomic precision. Squeeze the grip and the blade would shisk into position. Piercing noise, literally, and it cost a small fortune.
    The shining caterpillar inched over the burnished ivory curve. Without a hand to wield it, the blade stayed out of sight. The weapon was so intelligent, a pro could cut an artery almost without breaking the skin. A distinguished end to any career.
    Chance’s pants!
    He crawled to the hive corner and found a gap in the wall a few centimeters from the knife. A panel had popped in the heat. Runt tugged it open.
    And saw a small box of death. He knew full well what he was looking at: a high-end HardCell retirement package, the kind they issued to noncompetition assassins to eliminate heads of state. A kill-kitstraight out of a holo-vid, half-open and tucked inside the wall. High temperatures had loosened the lid and the knife had fallen free.
    Easily worth an island or two.
    Even as a spaceport runaway, he’d never seen so much slaughter per square millimeter. Careful not to trip any booby traps, Runt lifted the case out and opened it on the sand.
    He saw a fully stocked murderer’s toy box: hitwire, smart-darts, a pair of grenades, four stacked tubes of neurotoxins, a set of throwing daggers, adrenal pens, even a plasma shunt. All of the materials were organic with no actual metal anywhere, so you could walk this through any security scan. A fortune in death buried here under the insects. This case must have arrived with Ox, hidden in his container.
    Ox marks the spot, huh?
    Had Ox hidden them on purpose? Ox would never have wasted such valuable tools. He might not even know what was concealed in the walls of his transport. Why leave them out here if he had known? HardCell didn’t fritter away resources. A mix-up at transport, maybe. A robbery or retirement gone wrong. Ox wasn’t a killer. He couldn’t be . . .
    Runt picked up the fallen sonic knife. Even in his hands, the cloned-bone weight felt elegant and certain . . . like peaceful resignation. Every corporate executive dreamed of this kind of stylish termination. He popped it back in its cradle next to the other unhappy endings.
    He shook his head. His giant partner must’ve welded the kill-kit into the walls by mistake. He had no idea and HardCell had packed them in error or wanted these things lost. Maybe these were evidence in some trial and some swanky corporate lawyers wanted them offworld.
    Unless they did belong to Ox. Unless the weapons were a key to the past he couldn’t discuss. If Ox wanted to kill him, he stood no chance.
    Except, he hasn’t killed me.
    Runt closed the case, then opened it. Best if he said nothing about it to Ox. If the weapons were his, the discovery would antagonize him, and if they weren’t, the kill-kit might make him nervous or give him a reason to make Runt nervous.
    No .
    This retirement package had become an expensive brick in a hive wall and Runt chose to leave it there. If Ox decided to explain, he’d listen, but he certainly didn’t want to create a crisis with the farm climbing toward solvency.
    Runt clicked the case shut, shouldered the wall to close the gap, and promised himself to come out with a hammergun and seal it properly, first thing this afternoon.
    He moved the rogue caterpillar-snoop back to the trays and its leafy lunch.
    When he got back to the habitat, the HardCell order blinked on his terminal and Runt forgot about the deadly kit . . . until much later.
     

     
    With Ox’s oversized hands clearing away the grunt work, Runt managed to sneak up sideways on some of their larger problems. He engineered a new well system that watered the germination racks and simultaneously purified the ocean water for intake. He rigged extra storage space for harvests within the pumice cliff that sheltered their habitat. He constructed an eel nursery in the greenhouse that halved production time on both produce and protein.
    Runt knew