Forging Zero (6 page)

Of course Joe was afraid.

Apparently, though, the other
kids didn’t catch his lie.  They seemed to take it for granted that the big kid
hadn’t gotten scared, and drew strength from it.  Joe felt like shouting at
them,
Of course I was scared!  We’re going to die here, can’t you see that?!

But they couldn’t see that.  They
clumped around him like he was the designated soccer dad, with three of the
littlest ones even clinging to his stinky, piss-covered leg.  It was when
silence began to hum in their prison that Joe realized that all the little kids
were waiting for him to do something, so they could follow.

Grimacing, Joe took a good look
at the huge, three-tiered, round, bunk-like objects lining the walls.  They each
had six sheets of what looked like folded tinfoil laid out on their surface and
were shaped almost like bowls.  He was pretty sure they were beds.  Or
industrial-sized microwaves.

Eventually, though, he broke away
from the clingy, frightened kids and went over to inspect the apparent shelves
of bowls.  When he gave a test-push on the surface, he found it depressed
easily, almost as if it were made of foam.

Beds, then
, Joe thought,
running his hand under the crinkly metallic blanket.  Even from that brief
contact, he could tell that the flimsy metal blanket was going to be warmer
than anything he’d had back on earth.

The kids, still clinging to the
far wall, were watching him nervously.

“They’re just beds,” Joe said,
crawling into one of the big bowls on the bottom and pulling the metallic
blanket over himself pointedly.  Still, no one moved.

“My daddy works in a morgue,” one
of the older kids said, giving the beds a dubious look.  “That looks like the
incinerator.”

“Or a packet of popcorn,” another
kid said.  “Like you make on the stove.”

Joe groaned.  “Everyone just get
in bed, okay?  It’s fine.  See?”  He stretched out over the bed, though the odd
scooped slope felt strange on his back.

Most of the kids tentatively came
over to check it out, but a few hunkered down by the wall and refused to get
any closer.  They just spent the rest of the night like that, huddled and
whimpering by the door.

Joe lay staring at the bunk above
him, stewing over his problems in exhausted, hungry silence.  The other kids
weren’t so discreet.  One kid huddled along the wall spent the entire night whining. 
It was a low, primal sound that grated on Joe’s nerves until his every muscle
was taut, his fists itching to plant themselves into the idiot’s face.

What does he know about being
scared?

Images of the days before Joe’s
capture returned to haunt him.  Bodies had littered the streets like trash,
their chests burned open or dripping purple glop.  The constant whimpering
reminded Joe of the sound Sam had made the night their father didn’t come back—

Joe got out of bed and went over
to the boy.  He opened his mouth to tell him to shut up, just shut the hell up
and stop whining, that everyone there was dealing with the same crap and he wasn’t
special, but the kid mistook his intentions and jumped up from the wall,
wrapping his scrawny arms around Joe’s torso.  In a flood of tears, the little
boy cried for his Mom.

Joe
held him, startled, before he felt his own eyes start stinging.  Awkwardly, he
tightened his arms around the little boy in a hug.  “It’s okay,” he finally
said, though he knew it was stupid, that it wasn’t okay, that they weren’t
going to see their families again for many years…maybe never.  But he said it
anyway and the boy eventually relaxed in his arms and stopped crying.  It was
at least an hour before his breathing quieted and his grip loosened enough to
allow Joe to carry him over and tuck him into a bunk. 

The boy
didn’t whimper again after that, but although Joe returned to his own bed to
the perfect sound of silence, he couldn’t sleep.  Lying there, remembering how
the aliens had executed
kids
, Joe didn’t know if he would ever sleep
again.

It was
probably because of this that he was the only one who noticed the tiny tubes
that emerged from the walls several hours later.  One was a few inches from his
head and Joe could hear the hissing of gas.

“Oh shit!”
Joe cried, lunging away from the wall.  “Everybody wake up!  Wake up!  They’re
gassing us!  Shit!”  He threw his shirt over his mouth and backed to the center
of the room, heart hammering painfully in his ears.

All
around him, kids on the beds were sitting up in wild-eyed confusion…

…Only
to have their eyes roll up into the backs of their heads and their little
bodies slump limply back to the beds.

They’re
gassing us,
Joe thought on a surge of panic,
watching the kids fall all around him like little lifeless puppets. 
The aliens
are gassing us…

Though
Joe tried to keep his mouth protected, he nonetheless caught an overpoweringly acrid
tang that shot biting waves of acid through his lungs and up into his brain.  He
was dimly aware of the bitter tang turning to pounding waves of ice before his
legs went limp beneath him and he surrendered to oblivion.

CHAPTER 3
:  The Origin of Zero

“Commander Tril?”

Kihgl’s voice at his door was
soft, sympathetic.

“Not now, Commander,” Tril said,
barely able to keep his voice under control.  “I need some time alone, please.”

Tril’s Secondary Commander
remained in his doorway for long moments in silence.  “This was your first
time, wasn’t it?” Kihgl finally asked.

Tril refused to look up.  He was
staring at his desk, where he had plucked his potted
ferlii
to pieces. 
It was a gift from Corps Director Niile from when he had left her service for
the excitement of teaching a newly-discovered species to speak Congie. 
Somehow, in the last hour, he had snapped the stone-hard limbs into
pebble-sized chunks without even knowing it.  It confused him.  Surely he would
have heard himself doing it.

Kihgl came in, unbidden.  “What
you did today is unfortunate, but it must be done.”

Of course it was.  Tril knew
that.  It was a leftover tradition from the formation of Congress, when the
Jreet had to teach the first Ooreiki the art of war.  The Ooreiki, artists and
craftsmen all, had refused to fight.  The Jreet, pitiless warriors that they
were, began executing ten percent of every incoming class on principle, keeping
only the strongest, killing the weak as an example.

Yet, in forcing the peace-loving
Ooreiki to adapt the skills of war, the Jreet had hit upon such an
overwhelmingly successful tactic that it would be passed down from generation
to generation of the Congressional Army for almost two million years.  Kill the
rebels and the sickly as a warning to the others.  Show them the consequences
of failure.  Prove to them that it wasn’t a game.  Give them
incentive
to succeed.

As a former intelligence officer,
Tril was well-versed in the psychology behind it, but he had still never
thought it would be so hard.  They were
aliens
.  Why should it have
bothered him to shoot
aliens
?

The answer was simple: The large
Human.  The one who almost scraped the low ceiling of the ship corridors with
his head when he walked, and whose body should have been floating through space
in their backwash, not protected by Congressional law as a recruit in his own
unit.  The Human’s condemnation still rang in his ears, his disgust and disdain
like acid against his soul.

“We’ve all got to do it, one day
or another,” Kihgl said softly.

Tril idly began to try and piece
the
ferlii
back together.  The fragments kept falling back to the desk
with a stony clatter.  As he stared at it, Kihgl moved forward and gently
pushed the plant away.  “It’s never easy.  I’ve done it too many times myself.”

“That sooty Human didn’t make it
any easier,” Tril managed.  Abruptly, he picked up the remains of the
ferlii
and threw it against the wall, shattering what was left. 

Kihgl watched the pieces settle
on the floor.  He looked apologetic.  “I made a mistake.  I shouldn’t have
taken him.”

Tril said nothing, but he felt a
pang of satisfaction at his secondary commander’s admission.

“He ran again,” Commander Kihgl
offered.  “Embarrassed me in front of the entire regiment.”

Tril
picked at the crumbled black stone littering his desk.

“Now I’ve got to deal with him
for the next three turns.”

Softly, Tril said, “There’s
plenty on this ship willing to get rid of him for you.  Especially after what
he did on Earth.”

“I know.”  Kihgl brushed a few
pieces of the
ferlii
plant into his balled fist.  “But I chose him. 
I’ll live with my decision.”

“Even if the rest of the regiment
thinks it’s ridiculous?” Tril demanded.

“Especially then.”  Kihgl dropped
the fragments into the waste system.  “You should prepare for stasis.  Ship’s
shutting the crew down for travel in an hour.”  He walked to the door, then
hesitated at the jamb to turn back.  “I’m sorry it was your turn today.  It’s
never easy.”  He turned and left.

In the silence that followed,
Tril stared at his empty desk.

#

they’re gassing us…

Joe groaned as something lit up
his brain on the inside, like a flashlight of God poking up against his
eyeball.

“I think this one made it. 
Had a bit of a severe reaction to the forced metabolic stasis, but he’s still
showing life signs.”

“This sooter’s dead.  Wonder
if the other regiments had similar reactions.

“Damn.  We got another corpse
over here.” 

“These sooty things are so
delicate.”

The searing light in Joe’s retina
retreated and his eyelid slapped shut.

“These two are fine.”

“Yeah, this whole section is
good.”

“That’s it.  Fourteen total. 
Not bad, for the first time shipping Humans.  Grab the bodies, we’ll let the sootbag
furgs sleep while they can.  They won’t be getting much of it for the next
three turns.”

Joe groaned and felt himself
slipping back into the deepest sleep he’d ever known.

A few hours later, he was woken in
a disorienting rush of guttural alien shouting and sudden, blinding light. 
After Joe stumbled to his feet on strangely lethargic limbs, their Ooreiki captors
bustled Joe and the other kids out of their room and into the same huge
auditorium where they had shot Harry. 

They had, Joe noticed, cleaned up
the shit stains in the center of the room.

As the aliens lined them up, Joe concentrated
on learning as much as he could about them.  After enduring the ubiquitous
crimson haze on the rest of the spacecraft, the glaring white light of the
gymnasium was a welcome change for his aching eyes, and he was able to see them
clearly for the first time since yesterday’s slaughter.  The aliens weren’t
wearing their glossy black suits again today, leaving the elephant-like skin of
their brown bodies exposed along their necks and a V down their chests where
their robe-like uniforms tied like a karate gi at the front.  Though initial
pundits’ impressions suggested they were some sort of water-dwelling creatures
by the gills and tentacles, Joe was beginning to think that Sam was right—they
really looked like fat, squat monkeys with tentacles instead of arms.

Then, in front of three hundred
other kids, the aliens made Joe strip.

Sure,
they made everybody strip, but Joe felt his cheeks burn because he was one of
the only kids with pubic hair, and he could
feel
a bunch of the little
kids staring at it.  He gritted his teeth and tried to ignore them.  Didn’t
anyone nowadays teach their kids not to stare?  It was
rude
. 

Joe was
folding his jeans on the floor in front of him as the aliens instructed when something
metallic fell from his pocket, hitting his toe.  Joe bent to snatch it up.

His
dad’s pocketknife.  A cheap little Swiss Army deal that his dad had always
carried with him, whether he was in the woods or at a business meeting.  Joe
had kept it in his pocket ever since he’d found Dad’s friend Manny, strung up in
a parking meter, half his chest blown apart, the knife clasped in the guy’s
dead fingers.

Joe
glanced up to see if any of the aliens had seen the weapon.  They hadn’t—they
were too busy forcing the kids that wouldn’t strip out of their clothes.  He
straightened, one hand fisted around the knife, the other grasping his crotch,
and he tried not to flinch when one of the Ooreiki took his clothes away.

After the kids who refused to
strip had their clothes ripped off of them and discarded while the aliens taunted
them and made them cry, the Ooreiki had them re-form into lines. 

Commander Tril inspected them
like this, walking among the naked ranks and peering at them with slitted brown
eyes.  He stopped at Joe and gave him a smug look.

Tril turned away from Joe as the
one called Kihgl went to the front of the room to address the entire
gathering.  Through the little black translator around his neck, Kihgl loudly
said,
“Listen to me, frightened Takki scum.  I am Secondary Commander Kihgl
of the Ooreiki Ground Force.  That Ooreiki over there is Small Commander Linin,
and the one standing at the head of the ranks is Small Commander Tril.  You are
now a part of Sixth Battalion.  Commander Tril, Commander Linin, and myself will
be your commanding officers throughout training.”