Forging Zero (11 page)

“
Nuajan,
”
Joe began.  “Uh…”

“A
recruit must address every ranked Ooreiki member of the Congressional Army as
oora,
”
Tril said harshly.  “Either that, or address me by my caste title. 
Uretilakki
ni diirok Ooreiki oghis ni jreekil rrenistaba yeeri jare.
”

Joe
stared at him stupidly.

Commander
Tril looked pleased.  “You cannot pick, Zero?  Perhaps I should activate your
modifier until you decide.”

Joe’s
eyes fell to the shock collar on his ankle. 
He’s gonna do it anyway.

He
opened his mouth to tell the alien to go stuff himself, but caught the other
kids in his team watching him, frightened. 
It’s their butts as well as mine,
now,
Joe realized, uncomfortable.  What would Tril do to
them
if Joe
started mouthing off?

“
Oh-ra,
”
Joe muttered. 

“
Oora.
” 
Tril made it sound like the second O was a consonant.

“Oh-
oh-
ra,”
Joe tried again.

“Your
pitiful attempt will do for now.  Recite today’s words.  Food, yes, no, left,
right, commander, battlemaster, Congress.”

Joe
tried.  He stumbled over every syllable until Tril took over.  “Everyone repeat
after me.  Food. 
Nuajan.
  Yes. 
Kkee.
  No. 
Anan.
  Left. 
Ki.
  Right. 
Po.
  Commander. 
Diirok.
  Battlemaster. 
Nkjanii.
 
Congress. 
Jare.
”

Once
they repeated to his satisfaction, Tril said, “Keep in mind you’re now expected
to use the words we learned.  The translators will no longer interpret them for
you.  As an aside, I was impressed with your progress.  I have faith you all
will be speaking Congie within a rotation or two.  Dismissed. 
Haagi.
”   

Battlemaster
Nebil met them in the hall outside and took them to a clean white room that
reminded Joe of the waiting area of a doctor’s office.  After the unyielding
black of the rest of the ship, the white surfaces should have been a relief,
but Joe felt a sense of dread as the Ooreiki instructed them to remove their
crisp white shirts and fold them neatly at their feet.

The air
in the room was cooler than the rest of the ship.  It felt like they were
standing in a refrigerator.  Joe’s skin prickled with goosebumps.

At the other
end of the room, Battlemaster Nebil pulled a long-haired blonde girl out of
formation and shoved her inside the door opposite the exit.  Everyone waited,
confused.

Three
minutes later, the girl came back sobbing.  She had a new scar on her abdomen
and her long blonde hair was gone.  Nebil pushed her back into line and led a
black-haired boy into the room.  The boy came out a minute later utterly bald,
but otherwise didn’t seem too worse for wear.  The process continued, the girls
returning from the door crying and bald, the boys just bald.

Joe
started when someone tugged on his arm.  Libby was looking up at him, her eyes
wide and red.  She was clutching a puff of her curly black hair.

“Libby?! 
Get back in line!”

“They’re
cutting off our hair,” she whimpered.

Joe
glanced at Nebil.  “Libby, you’re gonna get in trouble.  Get back in line.”

“I need
my hair,” Libby said, tears tracing her ebony cheeks.

“That’s
crazy, why?!”

“Because
it’s the only thing on me that’s pretty!” she cried.

Behind
them, Scott and Elf snickered.  Joe rounded on them with a scowl.  When they
looked away, he said, “That’s bull.  Who told you that?”

“My
mom,” she whimpered.

Joe was
taken aback.  Her…
mom
?  “Then your mom’s a dumb bimbo who doesn’t know
her ass from her head,” he blurted.  “You’re plenty pretty.  Now
please
get back in line.”

“You
don’t mean it,” she whimpered.

Joe
glanced at Battlemaster Nebil, who had finally noticed his group.  He turned
and squatted in front of Libby.  “I mean it.  You got pretty eyes, Libby. 
Dragon eyes.”

“
Kreenit
eyes?” she whispered, her eyes widening.  “But they’re green.”

“If
kreenit
had brown eyes, they’d look like yours.” Joe said.  “They’re dragon eyes,
sure as spit.”  He heard Battlemaster Nebil come up behind him and turned.

Joe
flinched, but the blow did not come. 
“You’re next,”
Battlemaster Nebil
said, calmly grabbing Joe by the hair.  He tugged him out of line and through
the little blue door.  Nebil shoved him inside the blue door and slammed it
behind him, startling the Ooreiki doctors inside.  He hadn’t waited long enough
to let the last girl finish, so Joe had a first-hand view of what they were
doing to the girls to make them cry.

A
little bald-headed girl was in surgery.  Ooreiki doctors were running a machine
that slid back and forth over her abdomen, cutting into the skin with rapid,
delicate precision while she struggled against the restraints holding her in
place.  The machine continued, heedless of her cries, and while Joe watched in
horror, its mechanical tentacles reached into her stomach cavity and removed a
bloody lump of flesh.  This it tossed into a growing pile in a wastebasket to
the side of the table.  Then, as the girl screamed herself hoarse, the machine
patched her up and the Ooreiki doctors injected a silvery solution into her
arm.  The wound stopped bleeding and began to mend before Joe’s eyes. 

The
whole thing had taken less than a minute.

Then
the girl was pulled off the table and shoved toward the exit, still crying.

Joe
felt an involuntary wave of fear as the Ooreiki doctor grabbed him and shoved
him down onto the chair.  The doctor strapped his arms down and picked up a
device that looked much like a gun.  Joe started to panic.

“Don’t
breathe,”
the doctor ordered through his
translator.  Then he pressed the barrel of the gun to Joe’s chest and pulled
the trigger.

An
instant flash of agony made Joe gasp.  The pain was intense, like someone was
jamming a knife deep into his flesh.  He gritted his teeth and tried to yank
his hands free, but the doctor was already moving away, replacing the gun on
the table.  Joe looked down.

A red
mark about the size of a zit stood out to the right of his breastbone.

Then
the doctor was back, this time with a syringe.  The alien jammed the tip into
Joe’s arm and depressed the end, pushing the blue-silver liquid into Joe’s
body.

Almost
at once, Joe was hit with a blinding headache.  Joe groaned and closed his eyes
as his vision started to swim.  He doubled over against the chair’s straps,
feeling as if his brain was being ripped apart.

The
doctor pulled the needle loose and set it beside the gun.  Then he reached up
and started rubbing Joe’s head with his sticky brown tentacles.

Joe sat
there dumbly as the alien gave him a scalp massage.  It felt good, nothing like
the painful, brute force that the other Ooreiki had used on him so far.  Only
as Joe saw his hair fall away in little tufts did he finally understand—the
alien had injected him with something that made him go bald.

That
made him struggle.  He tried to jerk
his head away from the alien, but it took his scalp in a stinging, tentacled
grip and went on, heedless. 

“Asshole,”
Joe said, watching his hair fall away.  He had always feared going bald.  His
father had been bald as a cue ball at thirty and Joe had secretly harbored the
hope that his dad was just a genetic freak and it wasn’t inheritable.  Now
these aliens hadn’t even given him the chance to find out.

The
doctor rubbed the rest of Joe’s hair from his head and tossed it into the same
wastebasket as the bloody pieces of flesh.

“What’d
you do to that girl?” Joe said.

The
doctor looked him over, clearly considering whether it was worth his time to
respond.  Finally, he said, “
We removed her ability to breed.
”

Joe
felt a rising surge of fury.

The
Ooreiki doctor found his anger amusing.  “
Congress has no need of
reproductive behavior in its soldiers.  Be glad we only need to sterilize one
sex in Humans.
”  At that, the alien released him from the chair.  Without
waiting for Joe to leave, the doctor swept up a few loose strands of his brown
hair and dropped it in the bloody wastebasket.

Joe
felt like he’d been hit with a hammer.  “You don’t have the right.”

The
doctor looked up at him and the skin on its head scrunched up in an imitation
of Commander Tril’s smile. 
“I assure you, Human, we do.”

Joe
stumbled back into the waiting room, numbed.  He couldn’t meet the others’
gazes as he returned to the line.

“What happened
in there?” Scott whispered.

Joe
closed his eyes and wondered if he was ever getting home. 

“Joe?”

“Just
leave me alone,” Joe whispered.

Everyone
took their turns, and Joe never looked up.  They were in Hell.  All the
churchgoers back home were wrong—it wasn’t fire and brimstone; it was an
Ooreiki troopship filled with little kids a billion miles from Earth.

Once
everyone was bald, Nebil led them back to their rooms and locked them inside.  Ignoring
his teammates, Joe went over to a bunk, slumped into its concave surface,
yanked the blanket over himself, and closed his eyes.

“I’m
hungry, Joe,” Maggie said, tugging on the blanket covering him.

“Me,
too,” Elf said.  “Are they going to feed us, Joe?”

“I have
to pee,” Libby said.  “Where do I go pee?”

“I
don’t wanna sleep in a bowl,” Monk whined.  “I want a
bed
.”

“Why
can’t we have real blankets?” Maggie asked.  “I want real blankets.”

“So
what are we supposed to do now, Joe?” Scott asked.  “There’s not enough beds
for everybody.  Do they want us to
sleep together
, Joe?”  He scrunched
his face and glanced at the girls.

“Yeah,
I don’t wanna sleep with him.  Do I have to sleep with him, Joe?” Monk
demanded.

“How
the
hell
should I know?” Joe snapped, throwing the cover back and rounding
on them all.  “Start thinking for your own damn selves.”  He got out of bed, brushed
past them, snatched up a metallic blanket, and lay down in a corner, his back
to the five of them.

Back
beside the bunk, Maggie began to cry.

“Oh
shut up!” Joe shouted.

“
You
shut up!
” Maggie screamed back.

And Joe
did.  Guiltily, he listened as the children climbed into the big round bed and
began wrapping themselves up in the stiff, reflective blankets.  They all lay
down with their backs to Joe, snuggling together for warmth.  Other groundteams
did the same, leaving Joe the only one not in a bed.

Joe
realized his feet were cold.  He pulled them back under the blanket, tucking
into a fetal position in order to keep his toes from being exposed.  The
blanket wasn’t big enough to wrap around his scrunched-up body, so he ended up
hugging his chest with his arms and wishing he was part of the dog-pile on the
alien bed across the room. 

After what
seemed like an eternity, Scott said into the silence, “We aren’t getting out of
here, are we, Joe?”

For a
long moment, Joe almost didn’t respond.  Then, softly, he whispered, “I don’t
think so, Scott.”

CHAPTER
6:  Bullies

It
seemed like they’d been asleep only moments.  Too soon, Battlemaster Nebil was
kicking them awake, screaming,
“Rise and shine, lazy Takki scum!  Get up and
get in line, you miserable little janja turds!  You have half a tic!”

As Joe
scrambled to line his groundteam up for the march to the gymnasium, Maggie
ignored him completely, crossing her little arms over her chest and pouting.  She
was, Joe realized with frustration, still upset with him for sleeping on the
floor. 

What
was worse, as the aliens counted down their allotted time to arrange
themselves, no amount of desperate begging, pleading, or cajoling would get her
to move.  Joe finally had to bodily yank her into line, which she immediately
fell out of the moment he let go of her arm.  “Damn it, Maggie!” Joe snapped. 
He grabbed her by a chubby little arm and held her wrist tightly as she
struggled, leading her back to formation.  She responded by screaming and
pounding her stubby fist against his leg in an all-out tantrum. 

“Maggie,
shhh,” Scott hissed, eying Joe nervously.

Maggie
ignored him and continued shrieking and slamming her fist into Joe’s thigh.  Thankfully,
Nebil and the other aliens didn’t seem to notice.

Grimacing,
Joe endured her assault and dragged her down the hall and into the brightly-lit
gymnasium in silence, knowing that, because Joe was under Tril’s microscope,
the rest of his groundteam had become targets of his wrath.