Forging Zero (90 page)

Joe’s brows furrowed.  “Do I know
you?”

“You want to,” the girl said
happily.  “I can make all your dreams come true.”

Joe rolled his eyes and hung up. 
He was taking off his shoes so he could go to bed properly when the phone rang
again.

“Look,” Joe snapped, “I didn’t
give out my number so I could get propositioned by every whore in the East
Side.”

The girl on the other end giggled. 
“You couldn’t buy my services if you wanted to, Joe.”

“Then I won’t.”  He hung up
again.

When the phone rang the third
time, Joe was just starting to fall back to sleep.  He considered turning the
ringer off.  Instead, he yawned, lifted the receiver, and said, “I tell you,
lady, you’re starting to get on my nerves.”

“And you’re starting to get on
mine.”

Joe blinked.  It had been a man’s
voice.  “Who the hell are you?”

“Who the hell do you think I am,
Joe?”

“I don’t know…that little girl’s
pimp?”

“Oh my God, you have the mental
density of a block of ruvmestin, don’t you?”

Joe blearily glanced at the clock
again.  “Look, buddy, it’s almost three-twenty in the morning.  I’d be a lot
more likely to buy whatever you’re selling if you weren’t fucking pissing me
off.”

“I take it being a Congie wasn’t
very stimulating.”

“What the hell are you talking
about?”

“The last sixty years of what
would have been my life, before I saw the light.” 

“So you decided not to join the
Army.  Good for you.”

“There were hundreds of them. 
All different colors.  Sounded like bombs going off overhead.  I remember them
because they scared me just as much as they scared the ugly fucks I was with.”

As Joe’s sleep-starved mind tried
to make sense of this, the caller added, “So did you ever end up in that cave
killing dragons?  ‘Cause mine pretty much came true.”

He’s crazy.

Joe started to hang up again,
then an ancient memory tickled the back of his mind.  A fortune teller, telling
Sam he’d grow up to be a drug-dealer, and that Joe would grow up to slay
dragons.  With that memory came the memory of the fireworks Joe had used to
distract the Ooreiki that had been kidnapping his little brother for the Draft—and
of Joe getting captured in his place.  Joe brought the handset back to his face
in a panic, his exhaustion-haze vanishing.  “Sam?”

The line went dead.

Joe’s heart pounded like a hammer
as he set the handset back onto the receiver.  He sat at the edge of the bed,
staring at the phone, willing it to ring again.  He stayed up the entire
night.  It didn’t ring.

Not that night, not that week,
not that rotation.

The next time Joe spoke with his
brother was nine weeks after Joe had moved into his permanent apartment.

It was a rainy afternoon in
September when Sam called.

“Yeah?” Joe said curtly, trying
to get a foot into one of the new tennis shoes he had bought the day before. 
He was late for his morning run.

A girlish voice giggled.  “Do you
always answer your phone like that?”

Joe dropped the tennis shoe, his
heartbeat quickening.  “Sam?”

“How bad do you want to meet me,
Joe?”  Her voice had a flirtatious ring to it, like a cheap, mail-order hooker.

Joe hesitated.  “That a trick
question?”

“No.  It’s a warning.  You might
not like what you see.  I’m probably not what you’ve been picturing in your
head.”  Her voice lowered, sad and seductive at the same time.

“Fuck that,” Joe said.  “I want
to see you.”  He held back all the things he had wanted to say to his brother
over the turns, respecting Sam’s wish for privacy.

“Thursday.  I’ll be working at
the Hungry Kitten in Nevada.  Talk to Mindy.  She’ll set you up with
something.”

“Sure,” Joe said.  Then, sensing
his brother was about to hang up, he said, “Lookin’ forward to it.”

There was a pause on the other
end, then, “Me, too.”

The line went dead before Joe
could say any more.

Joe had to fight the impulse to
hop on the first flight to Nevada.  Instead, he forced himself to put on his
other shoe and step outside for a jog. 

Two five-foot-tall Ooreiki
Peacemakers were waiting for him on his front steps, dressed in Congie black. 
Their long, tentacle arms were twisted politely in front of them, their huge,
sticky brown eyes mournful, their fleshy rows of air-exchanges in their necks
flapping as inconspicuously as possible, the way they always did before giving
bad news. 

Upon seeing him, the
brown-skinned Ooreiki flinched.  They had obviously been waiting on his steps
some time, and yet neither had dredged up the courage to knock.

 “Commander Zero?” one of them
managed.  “
The
Commander Zero?”

Joe’s heart began to pound, his
mind returning to the conversation he had just had with his brother.  “What?”

The Ooreiki who had spoken
glanced to his partner, who continued to stare at the ground, mute.  The first
one turned back to Joe.  His huge oblong eyes were filled with humble brown
apology.  “I’m sorry, Commander, but you’ve been re-activated.”

It took Joe a moment for that to
register.  “On whose order?”

“Prime Overseer Phoenix, sir.”

Joe ground his jaw and twisted
his head away.  Even retired, Maggie was going to screw with him.  “Look, if
this is a prank, I’m not falling for it.  Phoenix would rather lube up her ass
with a plasma grenade than put me back into Planetary Ops.  She’s the one who
retired
me.  Just walk your happy asses back to headquarters and tell the Overseer I
thought it was very funny and she can go fuck herself.”

“It’s not a hoax, Commander.” 
The sincerity in the Ooreiki’s sticky eyes was plain.  “You…didn’t hear?”

Joe stiffened at the outright
fear in the young Ooreiki’s wrinkled brown face.  “What happened?”

“The Dhasha declared war, sir.”

Joe’s breath caught.  Every
Congie knew it was going to happen, and every Congie prayed it wasn’t within
their lifetime.  “Fuck,” he muttered, his breath leaving him.  He thought of
all of his friends and groundmates who were going to die.  Billions.  “How many
of them?” he finally asked.  If it was just one prince, like last time, perhaps
it wouldn’t decimate the Corps.

The Ooreiki that had been
speaking glanced again at his partner.  The second Ooreiki hadn’t taken its
sticky eyes off the ground. 

It was the second one who finally
spoke.  In a whisper, he said, “All of them.”

-END SNEAK PEEK-

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