Forging Zero (80 page)

Libby
picked up another recruit’s plasma rifle and fired it point-blank at the
Jreet’s torso.  The Jreet forgot about Bailey.  It made another
shee-whomp
sound as it swiveled and slammed its fang into the recruit standing beside
Libby.

The
girl crumpled instantly, the plasma rifle falling from her hands.  Joe dodged
under the Jreet and picked it up, then tumbled out of the way as the Jreet
launched itself at another recruit and disappeared again.  Joe’s eyes fell to
Bailey.

Bailey
was still pinned by the Jreet’s weight on his biosuit.  Joe lifted his rifle,
making Bailey’s eyes widen.  “I’ll kill you later,” Joe promised him.  As
Bailey gave him a look of horror, Joe shot directly at his chest.

The
Jreet uncloaked and slammed its lower half into Joe, sending him sprawling. 
Joe scrabbled for his rifle and began firing at the creature’s throat.  The massive
Jreet screeched another defiant battle-cry and continued killing until the
plasma ate its lower half away from its torso and its head fell from its neck. 
It died with its fang sunk deep into a boy’s biosuit, a pile of dead recruits
scattered around it. 

They
were down to eight.

Libby
and Rat were leading the others at the front.  They were shooting down the
hall, trying to hit the Huouyt who were holding their positions from behind the
doors Joe did not have the codes to open.  Joe fell in beside them.

Out of
the corner of his eye, Joe saw Tank take a plasma round full to the chest. 
Tank’s eyes opened wide and he dropped his rifle in terror.

“Get
your suit off!”
Rat screamed.

Tank
ignored her and reached into his belt.  He took out a
fahjli
grenade and
activated it.  Already, his face was contorting in pain.  As he threw it, his
chest became an open purple wound where his biosuit should have been.  Instead
of bouncing down the corridor, the grenade hit the corner of the wall and
bounced back at them.  Libby bent down and swept it up, deftly twisting the two
halves back in place before stuffing it into her boot.  Tank was already dead.

“There’s
too many, Joe,” Maggie said.  “Take us back!”

“So
they can follow us back out?” Joe demanded.  “No.  Everybody follow me.  We’ll
take a different corridor.”

“You
want to go
deeper
?!” Bailey demanded.

“It’s
either that or get shot!” Joe shouted.  “We don’t have any cover and they do. 
Now everybody
run.”

They
found a corridor perpendicular to the last and took it, delving deeper into the
enemy warren.  Libby frowned as they retreated down the hall.  “It’s almost
like they’re herding us.  Those Huouyt are shooting the walls more than
anything.”

“Maybe
that means we’re close to the bottom,” Joe said.  “They could be bad shots
because they’re Representative Na’leen’s secretaries, not warriors.”

Libby
scowled at him.  “Representative Na’leen has
assassins,
Joe.  And Jreet
can kill
Dhasha.
  I don’t like this.  We should fight our way back out,
wait for Lagrah.”

Peering
down the endless rows of red lights illuminating the corridors, Joe had to
agree with her.  His heart sank.  With so few of them left—only seven, now—fighting
their way back out would get them killed just as quickly as staying.

“We
can’t go back,” Joe said.  “We’ve got to keep going and hope Lagrah will show
up with reinforcements.”

“Maybe
we should surrender, Joe.”

Libby
swiveled on Maggie and hit her hard, knocking the shorter girl to the ground. 
She was standing over Maggie in an instant, her rifle in her face, her finger
touching the trigger.

“No!”
Joe snapped.  

Libby
made a grim face, but moved away.

As
Maggie stood, Joe stepped in front of her, putting his back between her and the
rest of the platoon.  Watching her gray eyes light up with hope, he said
softly, “Mag, if you say something like that again, I’ll kill you myself.”

“But—” 
She looked startled, betrayed.

“Just
get moving, Mag,” Joe said.

He led
them on in silence, the only sound that of their boots on the hard black
diamond.  Every face in the group had grown older in the last two hours, and
even Rat had stopped questioning him, resigned to their fate.  At their backs,
they heard several mechanical
shee-whomps
in rapid succession, spurring
them forward.

We’re
dead,
Joe thought. 
I should’ve never taken us
in here alone.  I should’ve waited for Lagrah. 
All of Joe’s friends were
going to die because he’d tried to prove the Trith wrong.  He hesitated,
wondering if he still had some way to save them.

“There’s
a door open up here!” Rat cried.  “Zero, a door!”

Joe jogged
with Libby to inspect it.  The opening was narrow enough for one person to
pass, and it had an exit to another room out the back.

“Looks
like a crypt,” Libby muttered.

“So we
should keep going?” Joe demanded.  Behind them, the Jreet were getting closer. 
They could hear their scales scraping on the floor.

“It
might be a good place for a last stand,” she said, shrugging.

“Screw
that,” Joe snapped.  Still, when he looked at the straight, never-ending tunnel
in front of them, he said, “Everybody get inside.”  He ducked his head under
the doorjamb as he ran.  “Libby, watch that end.” 

He was
jogging to the back of the room to check to see where it led when the door
began to drip shut ahead of him.  A black-clad Ooreiki stood on the other side,
tentacles still touching the control pad. 

“No,
wait!” Joe said, upon seeing the Congie uniform.  The door dripped shut and
stayed shut.

He
wheeled at a run.  “Everybody get out!  They’re locking us in!”

“But—”
Maggie began.

“Ash!”
Bailey shouted.  “Libby pushed me and ran out!”

Joe
felt a flutter of fear in his gut.  What if Libby had been fighting for the
other side all along?  Then he realized that she probably hadn’t survived the
fall off the
ferlii,
after all.  A Huouyt could have mimicked her and
then come back to take her place.

Joe
felt bile rising in his throat at the thought of her dead. 
No,
he
thought frantically. 
That was her.  I’d know an impostor. 
So why had
she abandoned them?

Violet-colored
steam began seeping out of the ceiling and Joe jerked. 
Our own side is
gassing us. 
“Shoot the doors!” Joe cried.  “Cover your faces!”

The
ragged remnants of their group huddled along the edges of the walls and fired
their weapons at the two locked exits.  Plasma ate the heavy material of the
door, albeit too slowly to do them any good.  His shirt wrapped over a hand and
pressed to his face, Joe tried fiddling with the control pad on the door. 
Nothing worked.  Yuil’s tale of simple locks and easy codes could not have been
further from the truth—every door required an eighteen-digit PIN, plus a
rank-scan of Overseer or higher.

Around
him, his recruits were slumping over, dead or unconscious. 

After
repeated denials from the control panel, Joe ripped his shirt from his face and
slammed his fist into the controls. 
“We’re on your side you son of a
bitch!”

Joe
thought he smelled oranges before he collapsed.

CHAPTER
38: 
Loyal to the End

“How
many of them are there?!”

“I
only see the one!”

“Well
where’s the rest of them?”

“Is
anyone injured?”

“Stop
looking at the sky you furgs!”

“What
are they firing at us?!  Poison gas?”

“Suits
aren’t registering it.  Either he’s a kamikaze or its just smoke and lights.”

“It’s
coming from that rooftop.  Send someone to investigate.  The rest of you, round
up as many of the recruits as you can find.”

“What
do we do with this one, sir?”

Stinging,
python limbs reached through the broken window and tore Joe out of the
bashed-in driver’s door of the Ford pickup, throwing him down on the pavement
in front of one of the aliens.  Joe, still stunned from colliding with the side
of an apartment building without airbags, hit the concrete and he stared at the
creature’s glossy black boot in a daze.  He could feel the alien in charge
staring down on him, could feel the other alien’s gun brushing the back of his
head, waiting to blow him away.

“Commander
Lagrah?”

“How
old do you think it is?”

“Sixteen,
is my onboard’s guess, Commander Lagrah,” one of the glossy, black-suited
aliens said.  “Maybe fourteen, with growth irregularities.”

There
was cruel purpose in the alien’s pale brown eyes as he said,
“I’m sorry, Gokli. 
What did you say his age was?”

There
was a long pause.  “Twelve, sir.”

“Go
find his friends.  I want them all.”

“Yes,
sir.”

“No,”
Joe groaned.  He tried to pull himself to his feet, but the alien in charge
slammed a foot into his back, sending him back to the ground.  It peered down
at Joe through the obsidian suit, looking like a cold, calculating wasp.  Joe
groaned and closed his eyes.

“Sir? 
He had no accomplices, other than the one on the roof.  We’re still looking for
him, but the residents in this area are not cooperating.”

“He
got away?”

“Yes
sir.”
 

“They
all
got away?  All nine hundred?”

“Yes,
sir.  They had some sort of locomotion planned.  Hundreds of them.  They
scattered in all directions.  High speeds.”
  Joe
felt a wave of relief that his high school buddies had followed through and
pressed his face back to the concrete.  He didn’t care that the alien in charge
was glaring down at him, his gun shaking as it hovered over his head.  Sam was
safe.

“Take
him.”

“Kill
him, sir?”

“Take
him back to the ship.”

“To
use as an Unclaimed?”

“We’ll
see.”

“Why
don’t you take them both, my lord?”  The new voice was high-pitched, musical. 
Nothing at all like the raw fury in Lagrah’s voice as he ordered Gokli to take
him away.  Joe groaned and opened his eyes.

Representative
Na’leen stood above him, though he was looking at something across the room.  
His cloth-of-gold cape was still in pristine condition, with the eight circles
of Congress embroidered in precious metals on his chest. 

“Only
one
has a destiny to fulfill, Zol’jib.  Only
one
will come with me.  I will
not spend the rest of my life wondering which it is.”

“That
won’t be long, traitor.”

Joe
flinched and turned.  Battlemaster Nebil hung against the wall along with a
dozen other Ooreiki.  His head had collapsed into his neck, leaving a shapeless
brown mass protecting his eyes.  Sharp hooks driven through the meat of his
tentacles kept him from reaching the ground.  The delicate tips, those used for
grasping and manipulating objects, had been cut off.  The four-pointed silver
star of a battlemaster stood out on his tattered black uniform.  His boots had
been cut away, revealing for the first time the crude lumps of flesh Ooreiki
had for feet.  The pale skin there was dripping brownish fluid from numerous
cuts.  The Jreet responsible stood nearby, his lower body coiled beneath him,
yellow eyes fixed mercilessly on Nebil.

“Your
stubborn bravado is getting irritating, soldier,” Representative Na’leen
snapped.  “Help us or you’ll die here.”

“I’d
rather lose my
oorei
than help a Huouyt find water.”

“That
can be arranged, you stupid creature.”

Representative
Na’leen was scowling at Nebil.  Several Huouyt stood with him.  One of them
held Libby.  Like Joe, they had removed her biosuit.  She looked half-dead,
bruised and bloody from head to toe.  If her captors hadn’t been holding her
up, she would have fallen.  Joe felt his throat constrict upon seeing her limp
and helpless in their arms.  Then he realized one of her eyes was open
slightly.  She was
watching
him!

“Then
arrange it and stop wasting my time.”

At
Nebil’s unfavorable response, the Jreet casually lashed out, slashing a taloned
claw across his chest.  The four-pointed battlemaster star fell to the ground
along with a strip of cloth.  Nebil shuddered, but said nothing.

“Think
very hard, Battlemaster,” Na’leen said.  “One of these two will aid us.  One of
them is expendable.”

“The
female is the better fighter,” one of the dozen disabled Ooreiki hanging from
the wall said.  The Ooreiki’s voice was familiar, one that Joe had heard a
thousand times before in long, idiotic speeches.  He could not believe it. 
Commander Tril.