Zero's Return (37 page)

But, of course,
it was the telepath’s distinct lack of warrior spirit that would keep him from
ever recognizing his true potential, or even one day ruling a clan for
himself.  Even now, he simply blushed and picked at a scab on his arm rather
than face the fact Shael had found his weakness.

Thus, Shael felt
secure in offering him a bargain. 
By the blood of my Welu ancestors, tell
no one of my dreams, Twelve-A ga Test Tube, and I will forget to mention to
Joedobbs that you are helpless to influence a warrior in his war-mind.

Twelve-A lifted
his head suddenly, making his short, sun-colored hair move around his face as
he met Shael’s gaze with visible startlement.  For a long moment, he simply
looked like a panicked melaa.  Then, slowly, he nodded once.

Grunting in
satisfaction, Shael nodded and coiled back under Joedobbs’ blankets.  Perhaps
he wouldn’t have to challenge the pointy-eared furg, after all.  Joedobbs, on
the other hand…  The Voran definitely could be removed of a few extra
segments.  That night, he had actually tried to distribute the blankets to the
worthless, drooling, mindless furgs following Eleven-C.  As if
they
had
the capability to safeguard such wealth.

More likely, it
had been a backhanded comment on Shael’s abilities as a warrior to protect the
camp’s valuables, a barely-concealed attempt to humiliate him.  Not only had
Shael
not
conceded, but he had refused to allow any of the mindless
furgs near the fire after that, deciding that they needed to harden themselves
in the cold like any good warrior-in-training on Welu.

Joedobbs,
softling that he was, had gone to the other side of camp and built them another
fire.

Yes, Shael
decided, he and the Voran were definitely destined to come to blows.  He just
hoped they didn’t kill too many bystanders when it happened.  He was growing
rather fond of Eleven-C and her ‘cookies.’

CHAPTER
13 – The Runaway Rodemax

On the day of
their departure, the aliens still hadn’t blown up the shopping mall, which
pleased Slade very much.  It meant, among other things, that he might actually
live through this knuckle-dragging clusterfuck.

Traveling by
foot, however, wasn’t as easy as Slade had imagined, back when he had been
planning this trek in the air-conditioned mall manager’s office, a notepad in
one hand and a Playboy in the other, his ice-cold soda attracting pleasing
amounts of condensation on the desk.  It
should
have been easy…  All
that was required was a little bit of walking, and how hard could walking be,
right?

What Slade had
failed to take into account was the fact that smoke blotting out the sun
actually made it
hotter
, and his gear was
heavy
, and when one had
to carry heavy objects for long distances, one’s feet began to hurt. 
Especially in brand new footwear.  Slade, who had picked out five new pairs of
badass-looking combat boots for himself, was now hobbling after only three
hours of walking, his heavy pack making his back hurt, that little spot between
his shoulder blades feeling like someone was driving a knife through it.

“Can we stop
yet?” Slade heard himself whine.  “I think I feel a disc slipping.”

Tyson gave him a
look that definitely contained amusement.  The bastard.  The big ape hadn’t so
much as slowed over all three hours.  Casually, he said, “So the tendonitis,
plantar fasciitis, shin splints, abdominal cramps, dehydration headaches, and
aerobic polycarbonate intoxication all went away, then?”

“No,” Slade
said, scowling, irritated that Tyson had been keeping tally.  “Now my spine is
going to dislocate, too.”

“Of course.” 
Tyson kept walking.  Behind them, three hundred and fourteen people followed in
an impressive horde, which was even then ransacking every house, vehicle, or
storefront that happened to fall in its path.

“And how the
hell did you remember all that?” Slade demanded in a disgruntled mutter. 

“I’m not
stupid,” Tyson said, shrugging his massive shoulders.  “And you said them like
fifteen times each.”

Plenty of stupid
people, Slade had found, said, “I’m not stupid,” whenever they were being just
that.  He was also pretty sure that Tyson would shoot him if he said as much.

“This is
grueling
,”
Slade groaned.  “How far have we gone?  Like fifteen
miles
?”

Tyson snorted. 
“Try five.  Herding three hundred people that are stopping to ransack
everything we pass isn’t exactly making for a quick getaway.”

“True,” Slade
said, “but it’s pleasing the masses.”

Even then, his
followers were jealously guarding their hauls of prescription drugs, jewelry,
women, and guns they had found in the ‘abandoned’ houses.

Tyson grunted
and gave him a sideways look.  “Guess I couldn’t really expect much better,
seeing how we freed a prison full of inmates and all, but are we really going
to let them start up a slave trade?”

“I figured,”
Slade said, “that our hold on leadership is still tenuous, and the best way to
control the mob is by funneling it into the direction you want it to go, rather
than trying to jerk it around by the collar.  We’re putting rules on the
number
of people they can hurt and are dragging them out to the desert, where people
are scarce, rather than letting them all run around rampaging wherever the hell
they want.”

“Still bothers
me,” Tyson muttered.

To be truthful,
it bothered Slade, too, but he’d been forced to intellectualize the matter,
because, at the core, he’d had to choose between his own life—the loss of which
would be catastrophic for the rebuilding of Earth’s technologies—and his
principles.  Killing the prisoners made no sense after spending so much time
and energy freeing them, so the only reasonable choice was to do his best to
gently guide them into less-criminal activities.

“I think I’m
tearing a tendon in my foot,” Slade said.  “It
hurts
.”

Tyson glanced at
the massive hiking backpack that Slade had clinging to his shoulders like a
very heavy and uncomfortable barnacle.  “You’re the one who insisted we bring
all this gear with us.  Besides.  I
saw
you pack double of almost
everything.”

“It’s about
survival
,”
Slade said, unable to keep the whine out of his voice.  “In a few years,
there’s not going to be anything left of the world.  We have to try and salvage
what we can, now, before everyone else figures out that the same stuff will be
useful and take it for themselves.”

Tyson raised an
eyebrow.  “Porn vids?”

Slade flushed. 
“They’re an investment.  Long-term gains.”

“Uh-huh.”

“They are!”
Slade cried.

“Not arguing
with you,” Tyson said.  “Just giving you the facts.”

Facts.  Slade
bristled.  As if
he
, the Tesla of the Congressional Era, needed to be
reminded of facts.  Slade was about to retort, but he stumbled on a rock,
almost twisting his foot off.  “That’s
it
!” he cried, stopping and
yanking his much-too-heavy backpack from his back and throwing it to the
ground.  He jabbed his finger at the group of startled men with guns behind
them.

“You!” he
shouted at the men in general.  “Go find me eight porters!  As your fearless
leader, I am tired of this shit and I want to ride a palanquin.”

The men with
guns peered at him, then at each other.  One of the braver ones said, “Um, you
want wine?”

Slade blinked at
them, and it actually took him a moment to retrace his steps and figure out
what the hell had happened in the moron’s pea brain to create such a
catastrophic /fail.  Realizing the inebriates probably had no idea what a palanquin
was—and that they had heard the ‘port’ part of porter and thought he meant a
sweet red wine, Slade almost walked over, took Tyson’s gun, and blew off his
own head rather than spend one more minute surrounded by such painfully clear
dumbassery. 

When Slade just
glowered at them, the man cleared his throat and asked Tyson, “He mean wine?”

Eyes on Slade’s
face, Tyson shrugged.  “Not quite sure.”

Slade forced
himself to smile through the violent urge to decapitate himself.  “Find me
slaves.  Big ones.  Strong.  Six feet or more. 
Male
, preferably.  I
will be having them carry something heavy.”

The men glanced
at each other, seemed to consider, then shrugged and went off to do what they
were told, the blind obedience of which actually eased Slade’s exasperation at
their stupidity.

God
he
loved having lackeys. 

Four hours
later, Slade reclined with his backpack on a makeshift platform carried by
eight pale-yet-subdued litter-bearers that easily could have worked as bouncers
in his favorite nightclubs.

“Now
this
is how to travel,” Slade sighed, leaning back on his array of pillows.  He felt
rather proud of himself, as yet another plan had come to fruition.

From the ground,
Tyson glanced up at him.  “You know, you’re only making yourself a target.”

“To who?” Slade
scoffed.  “There are three hundred people around me with guns that would be
perfectly willing to shoot anyone who looks at me funny.”  He plucked another
nut from the can someone had found in one of the ransacked houses and popped it
into his mouth.  Immediately, he grimaced and spat it back out.  It was a
peanut.  He hated peanuts.  He would be sure
not
to preserve peanut
agriculture in his brave new society.  That was one thing that Humanity could
lose with his blessing.  He flicked the peanut off the platform, onto the
ground.

“Other people
out there have guns, too,” Tyson said, watching the nut fall before returning
his gaze to Slade and looking him over.  “And they’re not going to like what
they see.”

“They wanna
shoot me?”  Slade snorted and tugged a cute knitted yellow Minion beany over
his head that he had found whilst casually looting one of the nicer estates. 
Looking at Tyson from under his knitted black and white monocle, he imperiously
raised his head and said, “Let them try.”

A few days
later, someone did try.  Sometime around six in the evening, Slade heard the
high-pitched sizzle of a plasma blast whiz past his beanie-covered ear—as well
as felt the brush of its passing gently raise the hairs of his cheek—and he
screamed and scrambled off his palanquin.

“Where’d it come
from?!” Slade cried, yanking down his Minion beanie and huddling on the ground
behind a burned-out car.

Tyson squatted
down beside him, gun in his hands.  “From the woods. 
Shit
.  Look at all
those bodies!”

When Slade looked,
he paled.  They had been walking down a car-choked road through a clearing
that, now that Slade was looking under the cars blocking their view, had bodies
filling both ditches further up ahead.  Dried blood was even then caking in
pools upon the road for the next two hundred feet.

Another plasma
burp
echoed through the clearing and one of Slade’s followers let out a startled
sound and fell, blood oozing from a disintegrating hole in his head.  The shot
was quickly followed by two more, also resulting in corpses.

“He’s a good
shot,” Slade noted.  That was bad.

“He’s up there
on the hill, picking people off,” Tyson cried, yanking out his binoculars and
peering at the hill in question.  “And he waited until we were all out in the
middle of the clearing to start firing.  We’re sitting ducks. 
Shit
!” 
Indeed, the Harmonious Society of God was now struggling to hide behind the
paltry handful of cars in the center of the road, their bodies crammed together
with increasing panic.

“You’re saying
there’s a
Human
up there firing at us?” Slade demanded, squinting up at
the copse of trees.  “That is Congie weaponry.”  He had a brief rush of
paranoid fear that the Peacemakers had come back for him, then quickly squashed
it as ludicrous.  After Judgement had been sealed and the bots had begun their
six-hundred-and-sixty-six-turn timers, even Peacemaker ships would be attacked
if they tried to land on the surface. 

Two more shots
came, resulting in two more of his Society screaming and bleeding on the
pavement.

“He’s a
really
good shot,” Slade commented.

“Yeah,” Tyson
said as he hastily put the binoculars down, yanked off his pack, and began
prepping the scoped rifle he’d acquired from a wealthy home along the walk. 
“And he’s got a good vantage point, too.  Shit.”  He checked the magazine, then
slapped it back into place and, after wetting his finger and holding it up,
adjusted the scope for windage.  “Some asshole trying to eliminate the
competition, pick supplies off people trying to escape the city.” 

Seeing his Second
work, Slade frowned.  There was a…proficiency…to Tyson’s smooth actions that
bespoke of more than a common thug.  “So why don’t we fire back?” he demanded. 
All around them, more of their gun-toting priests were screaming and dying.

“I’m going to,”
Tyson said.  He looked over his shoulder at the eight big guys that had been
carrying Slade’s palanquin.  “Hey, you.  You guys wanna earn your freedom?”

The big dudes,
who had dropped the litter and were huddled beside them, nodded. 

“Those are my
litter
bearers
,” Slade complained.

“Shush,” Tyson
said.  “This is one of those moments where you need to just shut up and nod
your head while I keep you alive.  They put me away for two counts of murder. 
In reality, it should have been more like two hundred.” 

Slade frowned. 
The rich family, the knack with guns, the quiet broodiness, the recognizing of
Ghost…  All of it was starting to make sense, now.  “You were a hit man.” 
Which meant he’d probably been sent after Slade at least once.

Tyson grunted. 
To the big dudes, he said, “Okay, look.  Here’s what we’re gonna do.  I want
all eight of you to bolt in different directions, at the same time.  Make it
hard for the shooter to get a bead on you.  Don’t run in a straight line, and
for the love of God, bounce and jump a little.  It’s
really
hard to hit
a running target with a rifle from that distance.”

The eight guys
swallowed and their eyes flickered toward the still-twitching corpses of
several of their gun-toting captors.

“A couple of you
probably won’t make it,” Tyson told them, “but it’s better than carrying
his
ass around the rest of your lives, isn’t it?”

Several of the
men grimaced and looked at the ground.  In the end, only three of the eight of
them had the balls to risk their lives for freedom.  Which Slade found
extremely telling of the Human Condition.  Sheeple and poddites.  The world was
filled with them.

“Okay,” Tyson
said.  “When I say go, I want you three to bolt in
different
directions.  Don’t make it easy for him to snipe you, ok?  Keep your head down
and zigzag.  You.  You’re going east.  That way.  You’re going west.  Over
there.  And you’re going over the ditch, there, north.  And don’t stop running
until you hear me call the all-clear.”

The three men
nodded.

Tyson readied
his gun, then said, “Ready?  Go.”

The three men
bolted.  The shooter began firing at them almost immediately, like some kid
picking off cannon fodder in a simulated combat game. 

Tyson seemed to
count under his breath, then spun and raised his rifle over the hood of the
car, took a firing position, and began peering through the scope.

Several more
shots came, and one of the three runners screamed and slumped to the ground. 
He kept screaming until two more shots effectively silenced him.

“It’s
autocorrecting for him,” Tyson muttered.  “Fuck, it’s an AI of some sort. 
Those guys are gonna be like sitting ducks.”

“Can you get him
from here?” Slade demanded.  “That’s high-grade sniper plasma.  Expensive
shit.”  Indeed, the rate at which it ate through its targets was unnerving. 
“He could be two miles out.”

“No, he’s hiding
in the trees,” Tyson said.  “I think he’s former Global Police.”

“Well…yeah,”
Slade said.  “Who else is gonna have that kind of plasma rifle around here?”

Tyson didn’t
reply, peering through his scope with intense concentration.  The second runner
was getting shot at, and had begun screaming, though Slade was pretty sure it
was in terror and not pain. 

“You gonna shoot
him?” Slade urged.

Tyson continued
to ignore him, squinting through the circle of glass.  A few more heart-rending
seconds passed, with the second man dodging like a lunatic as he bolted.

Then, without a
word, Tyson squeezed the trigger.  The single retort of the old-fashioned
bullet startled Slade, who had tensed with each sizzling plasma round that came
at the running man, quietly rooting for him to make it into the trees.

Tyson fired a
second time, a mere heartbeat after the first, and then yanked his gun back
over his shoulder.  “All clear!” he shouted to the running guys.  Neither of
them stopped bolting for the trees.  Oh well.  Slade could find other
litter-bearers.

Then Slade
frowned.  “You mean there was only one of them?”  Indeed, the plasma retorts
had ended, leaving only an uncomfortable silence and six dead men sprawled on
the roadside.

“Two,” Tyson
said, getting to his feet.  “And you’re right.  They’ve got a
wicked
-ass
gun.”  He almost sounded…excited.  He was already throwing his gear over his
shoulder and heading in that direction.

Seeing that
excitement, Slade had to follow.  “Now hold on,” Slade said, running to catch
up.  “Someone with that kind of weaponry…he would’ve had friends, right?”

“Just the one,”
Tyson said.  “And Saint Ebert save me, but I think that was a Sui’ezi Rodemax. 
Huouyt manufactured for the blackmarket. 
Real
expensive shit.”  He had
lowered his voice to a near-whisper, but hadn’t slowed at all.  If anything,
his long legs had sped up.  They were already picking their way through the
ditch of plasma-eaten bodies, toward the hill across the field.

“A Rodemax,
huh?” Slade grunted, impressed.  The guns were extremely rare, made by the
famous Huouyt Sui’ezi family, whose ancestors had been in the gun trade for
eighty thousand turns, and whose only contribution to gun technology in that
time period is that they had stolen the original schematics from the Ueshi
manufacturer of the Nocurna
and
the blueprints to the Nansaba Jaywing,
then combined them.  They went for over twenty million apiece.  He’d heard
enough raving about them from his gun-obsessed fellow billionaire friends
whenever he deigned to go drinking with them that he’d actually had to go look
them up out of vague curiosity.  Coincidentally, he’d also seen one up close,
in person, when a Va’gan assassin tried to use one on him after a Huouyt family
‘corporation’ found out he was the hacker responsible for liberating eighteen
billion of their hard-stolen credits from them and gifting it to the
Congressional Dhasha Mishaps Relief Fund.  He had not, however, really seen
what got the furgs so excited about a hunk of alloy with its own power supply. 
“So it’s a fancy gun,” he muttered.  “Slow down.”

“No,” Tyson
said, basically running, now, “it’s
the
fancy gun.  It never runs out of
charges, has a lightning-fast recharge rate, it’s got an onboard
course-correction AI, and it’s light.  It’s the Huouyt rifle version of the
Nansaba Jaywing, after the Huouyt broke into the Ueshi Nocurna headquarters and
stole the schematics for its power supply.  Top of the line shit.  Va’gan
assassin
shit.  People with waaay too much money and lots of people to kill.”  Tyson
almost sounded…jealous.

“Uh…huh,” Slade
said, rolling his eyes.  Gun nuts irritated him.  He’d heard the same
semi-religious spiel at least a dozen times before, usually from around a
cigar.  Now that the bad guys were dead, he was finding it very difficult to
care about a gun.  Though an unlimited charge could be useful.  It meant the
gun energy source was self-sustaining, which meant he could take it apart and
use it to power useful things, like marijuana grow lamps.

Tyson narrowed
his eyes at him.  “I know what you’re thinking.  You’re
not
taking apart
my new gun.”

Slade snorted. 
“
Your
new gun.”

“Yes,” Tyson
said, sounding dead serious.  “
My
new gun.”

Slade squinted
at the diverse range of weapons the man already carried.  “What, four’s not
enough?”

Tyson snorted
and started into the trees, towards where the shots had apparently been coming
from.  Indeed, after a cursory inspection, they found two scrawny Human bodies
crumpled in the undergrowth, their heads neatly blown off.  They looked like
teenagers.  Slade found it slightly embarrassing, because he would have chosen
a spot several hundred feet to the left as the origin of the projectiles,
whereas Tyson had led them straight to them.

Instead of
triumphantly searching the bodies for valuables like any good Boy Scout,
though, Tyson whipped a pistol from his hip and squatted behind a tree,
scanning the woods around him with something akin to…panic?

“What’s going
on?” Slade asked, dropping with his Second, figuring it was a good idea to
squat alongside the badass, ‘cause if the
badass
was afraid of
something, logic dictated that Slade should be, too.  Not that Slade actually
was
,
but he found it to be a handy survival technique.

“Someone else is
out there,” Tyson said.  “And they’ve got that gun trained on us.”

“What,” Slade
laughed, “you got spidey-senses or something?”

“For this,
yes.”  Tyson sounded dead serious.  Utterly dead serious.  He continued to
unobtrusively scan the forest, gun raised.

“Uh,” Slade
said, looking in the general direction of the woods.  “I don’t see anyone.”

“He’s out
there,” Tyson said.  Again, with the same conviction as if he’d said he had to
take a piss.