Zero's Return (83 page)

He saw his own face amongst
the dead in Mike’s mind and stopped to stare at it.  He steeped himself in the
malice he felt there, reveling in Mike’s hatred for him.  Mike not only wanted
him to die, but he wanted him to die in
pain
.  In
fear
.  Because
Twelve-A had challenged his power over his little group.  Threatened his right
to lead.  Because Twelve-A controlled something that Mike wanted, resources
that Mike could use to rule.  But it was more than that.  He despised Twelve-A
because he had such power, but refused to use it.  He despised what Twelve-A
could do, because
he
couldn’t do it.  He contempted him because he was
harmless.  Because Twelve-A was soft, weak.  Because Twelve-A
believed
him.  Because he
trusted
him.  Because he didn’t see it coming.

Swallowed by that pit of
disdain for him, personally, Twelve-A floundered.  Lost in his own misery,
paralyzed by the sickness of the Human race, he struggled in the ether, caught
between the urge to give up and the urge to get even.

He lied to me,
Twelve-A digested, ashamed that he had fallen for the deception, ashamed at his
own naïveté, ashamed of his
hope
.  For a brief instant, he wanted to
kill Mike for it.  He wanted to show him every pain he’d wrought upon others
throughout his lifetime, every humiliation, every act of greed and avarice,
every hurt and cruelty in his jostling for position.  Then, just as quickly as
it had come, it passed.  Mike, like everyone else on Earth, was broken. 
Twelve-A didn’t want to break them more.

He decided he needed to
send Mike and his band away forever, make them forget…

The cold barrel of a gun
touched the back of Twelve-A’s head.  In a sneer, Mike said, “And they thought
you
were the greatest weapon ever made?”

#

“I’m sorry for pushing
you down the mountain, Voran,” Shael said.  “You are weaker than me and it was
not a fair fight.”

A few minutes ago, they’d
reached the place where they’d left the experiments, only to find the furgs had
wandered off, back in the direction of the lake, the exact
opposite
direction that they’d been headed the last rotation.  Joe had tried to attract
the minder’s attention, to tell him to turn them the hell around, but Twelve-A
had not responded.  Joe was even then showing Shael how to track an inept
Human’s passage through the dry grass and parched shrubbery. 

Weaker than her, huh? 
Joe grunted and glanced down at Shael.  At one and a half digs shorter than
him, she wasn’t exactly a spawning Hebbut.

Then again, she could
crush every bone in his body with a thought, so perhaps she had a point.

“I think we have
different strengths,” Joe said, as diplomatically as he could.

She gave him a
challenging smirk.  “You have a
strength
?”  Like it was definitely news
to her.

Joe pointedly ignored the
obvious—that he could pound her dainty female body to a pulp with his elitely-trained
pinkie—and said, “I’ve got more extensive combat experience.”

“Ha!” she cried.  “You’re
no older than me.”

And
that’s
where
she would be wrong.

His snort must have
carried his meaning across, because Shael blinked.  “You
are
older than
me?”

“Oh, only about seventy
twists of the Coil,” Joe replied.  She, like Twelve-A, and Eleven-C, looked to
be one of the youngest of the group, probably in her twenties, at most.

She blinked confused
green eyes up at him.  “But you look younger than Doctor Philip.”

“Congie tech,” Joe said. 
“They don’t like their soldiers to wear out on them before they’ve had a chance
to serve out their terms.  Means the data-crunchers have to spend money
training new ones.”

“Oh.”  She seemed to
consider that.  “Well, nonetheless, it was beneath me to sully my tek on half a
warrior.”

“Half a…”  Joe stumbled
to a halt.  “Do you even know who I
am
?!”

She stopped and lifted
her head in supreme challenge.  “You are Beda ga Vora, second prince of the
upland clans.  A middling warrior, at best.”

The same thing, almost
verbatim, that she had said to him about twenty times before.  This time,
instead of letting her simply go with it, Joe squinted at her.  “I’m Joe
Dobbs,” he said.  “Some people call me Commander Zero.  Otherwise known as
Hu-man.”  He pronounced out the species name slowly, for her easier
understanding.  “I’m Human, not Jreet.”

“And yet you speak to me
in a language fouled by the Voran tongue,” she retorted, crossing her arms over
her chest.

Joe opened his mouth to
object, realized he really had no way of arguing with that, and started walking
again.  When she caught up to him, she said, “It’s all right, Voran.  I
understand.  I was in your same position, weeks ago.  I found my body stolen,
my strength abandoned me.  What you are experiencing is just a result of what
they did to you.”

Joe stopped again.  “No,”
he bit out, “I’m Human.  I’m not Jreet.  I have
never
been Jreet.”

“Then why do you speak
Jreet?” she demanded.

Joe scowled at her for
long minutes, trying to think of a rebuttal.  How
did
he speak the Jreet
language, when he’d never even
seen
a Jreet until he was fourteen? 
Could
he have gone through something similar as her?  Maybe something the Congies did
to him, en route from Earth after the Draft? 
Could
he have been
brainwashed?  Then, shaking himself, he said, “No,” and kept walking again.

“You are just as Jreet as
I am,” Shael said, catching up again.  “I can sense it within you, Voran.”

Joe groaned, but didn’t
stop walking.  As they continued to track the well-off-course experiments, he
tried to think of something definitive, something completely undeniable that
would clearly prove to her that she was not, indeed, a Jreet. 

“Okay, how about this?”
Joe said.  He’d heard enough about Beda and Shael from his starry-eyed Sentinel
that he was sure he could go more in-depth into the legend than any Human
researcher.  “When you captured Beda on Vora and took him home with you to
stake before the masses, how did he escape?”

Immediately, her eyes
grew guarded.  “You hijacked my personal ship and took me home with you to
dismember before your people for the insult.”

Ah, a good ol’ Jreet love
story.  Joe nodded.  “All right,” he said.  “So why’d you end up fighting
Dhasha with the Vorans?”

She scowled at him.  “The
Dhasha insulted the Jreet on Vora by breaking a blood-pact, attacked us during
a festival with their slaves using grenades and gasses.  I am Jreet first, clan
second.  I fought with my brothers.”

Joe blinked.  He had
expected her to say, “I fell in love with my Voran captor and we decided to
make babies,” just like any good brainwashed Human would say.  A little
confused, he said, “And you helped save the Voran homeworld.”

“And my own!” she
snapped.  “We got there in time to stop the second wave headed for Welu.  The
cowards were attempting to rid themselves of their only barrier to conquering
Congress, using the tactics of skulkers and deserters, hiding behind their
slaves like the dishonorable vermin they are.  We annihilated them, then led
the attack on the Dhasha homeworlds and obliterated six of them before the
cowards surrendered, and the Regency could stake itself when it told us not
to.”  She snorted in the complete contempt of Congress’s most powerful
politicians that only a Jreet prince could manage.

Joe peered at her.  “And
then you allowed yourself to be impregnated by a Voran…why?”

She scowled at him. 
“That didn’t happen.”

“History says it did,” he
challenged.

She stepped up and
grabbed his jacket collar in a petite fist.  “It didn’t.”  She jerked him to
eye-level.  “Happen.”

Interesting.  So the
brainwashing hypocrites only gave her half of the story.  Great.

But, since the pretty
woman had a penchant for mentally frisbeeing people, Joe kept his mouth shut
until he could reliably prove otherwise.  “So what did happen?” he asked.

She grimaced.  “I went
back to Vora.”

Of course you did,
Joe thought. 
Because Shael ga Welu wanted to breed.
  Why
else
would she have latched onto Joe as her arch-nemesis, a long-dead Voran folk
hero?  It
had
to have been part of the story somehow.

“And why would you do
something like that?” Joe asked, innocently.

“Because you and I had
unfinished business,” she growled.  “We still had to fight to the death.”

“On Vora.”

“Yes.  I had been a
prisoner there.  It was my duty to return to my place of capture before the
Dhasha intervened and face my fate with honor.”  Which was true to the legend.

 “And who won?” Joe asked
casually.  Every fool knew Beda had won.  That was the fabled love story.

“I did.”  She lifted her
head.  “I pumped you so full of rravut that you couldn’t move, and it would
have been an easy thing for me to slice you open and be done with it.  You put
up a good and honorable fight, though, so I wasn’t about to dishonor you in
front of your own kind.”

Joe frowned.  That was
definitely
not
how the story went.  Beda won gloriously, made her
surrender, and took his bested opponent to mate.  “So what did you do?”

At that, she gave him a
blank look.  Cocking her head, she said, “I, uh…”  Looking befuddled, she said,
“I’m not sure.  It gets fuzzy there.”

That seemed an odd thing
for brainwashing crew to leave out, considering it was the pivotal point of the
legend.  Joe frowned.  Maybe they just wanted to leave her thinking she was a
badass.  But if so, why give her the part about Beda ga Vora at all?

“And now you’re Human.” 
There was still that one, teensy, tiny detail she seemed to be overlooking.

The statement seemed to
puzzle her.  “I’m Jreet.”

“But your
body
is
Human.”

She squinted at him like
he was speaking ancient Shadyi, though this time, Joe
knew
his Jreet
habit was working.  Again, he decided perhaps it was best to lay out the facts
and let her make her own decision.  “You’re hairy.”

She looked down at
herself blankly.

“Your body is covered
with skin, not scales.”

She made a face.

“You have no tek.”

Immediately, her green
eyes flashed like emerald lightning and he felt the air solidify around his
body with a
whoosh
.  “I have more tek than you’ll ever have, Voran!” she
snapped back at him, mentally linebacking him into the abandoned asphalt road.

She then turned and
walked away, leaving Joe staring at the sky.

Watching the horseflies
buzzing around his head, listening to the woman he’d held and comforted through
yet
another
random flashback walk as unconcernedly away as if he were
one of those insects she had just swatted, Joe narrowed his eyes.

“You know what?” he
demanded, sitting up.  “You
are
tekless.  And scaleless.  And tiny.  And
soft
.  The only thing you have is teeth, and those aren’t even very
sharp.”  He lunged to his feet, glaring.

For her part, Shael had
gone utterly still, back to him.

“You wanna fight me?” Joe
demanded.  “Then fight me, weakling.  Kick me, punch me, gimme a good
old-fashioned ass-whupping without your sneaky, underhanded tricks.  I
dare
you to fight me like a Jreet.”  Joe walked up to the
woman-who-now-wore-his-pants, bringing them chest-to-chest, scowling down at
her, daring her to throw the first punch so he could legitimately kick a girl’s
ass and win that little duel she kept talking about once and for all.

Instead, somewhere
between her fiery green eyes, flushed lips, and her pert chin tilted in
challenge, Joe forgot what he was angry about.  That weird heat was expanding
in his chest again, and his heart was pounding erratically.  Just being close
to her felt…thrilling.  As short as she was, Joe towered over her.  She
probably weighed half what he did, if that.  She wasn’t what he was used to in
a woman—a lot more curves, less muscle—but something about that just made his
heart pound harder.

As she narrowed her eyes
and opened her mouth to no doubt lecture him on his ill-documented ancestry,
Joe put his arms around her, dragged her mouth to his, and kissed her.

This time, when she put
him on the ground with enough force to make his ears ring, Joe laughed. 
“Tricks!” he shouted at her.  “You use tricks!” 

Her face flushed and hair
disheveled, she turned on heel and walked away.

Joe lifted his head to
grin at her backside, admiring the sexy way her hips swayed in his
much-too-baggy pants.  He thought about how spirited she was, how adorably
naïve, how intriguingly stubborn.  Then he thought about how easy it would be
for him to ruin that innocence forever, just by being near her, and his smile
faded. 

What was he
thinking
? 
He was Commander Zero, the sole survivor of just about every war he walked
into.  Everywhere he went, he found a storm of misery and death, with him
walking through it, untouched at its eye.

Sobered, Joe sat up and
stared at his feet, watching the flies crawl across his boots, the Earth
insects no doubt still smelling the blood from the man he’d castrated to get
them back. 

Seeing the tiny black
insects licking his Congie polymers with their proboscises, Joe felt worse than
he’d ever felt in his life.  He’d castrated a man over a pair of boots.  Now he
marched with a merry band of innocents, trying to make them dance to his tune. 
Kissing
them.

Eventually, Joe got back
to his feet and started forward at a walk, a sinking feeling in his gut.

He got people killed.

His shit rubbed off and
he got people killed.

He was still brooding
over this when a loud bang echoed over the hillside, followed by three more,
rolling almost like thunder.  Joe stopped and frowned, trying to figure out
what could the People could have gotten themselves into to make a sound like—

Heart lurching, Joe
yanked Jane from her holster and broke into an all-out run.  Having spent so
much time on advanced planets, dealing with impenetrable biosuits and advanced
weaponry, he had forgotten to associate that sound with death.

Within minutes, he
recognized Alice’s thin scream up ahead.  Two more gunshots went off, closer,
now.

Pointy?
 Joe
demanded. 
What’s happening?  Are you okay?

He got no response.

Twelve-A!
Joe
snapped.

Joe,
Twelve-A’s
panicked mental voice babbled,
I made a mistake.  I was going to erase
Mike’s memories and send them away, but Nine-G started a fight!  I can’t stop
him in his mindspace.  I need help, Joe!

Mike. 
Soot
!  Joe
lunged up the hill and burst through a copse of trees to see two dozen men and
women hip-deep in grass, taking aim at a startled-looking group of People. 
Nine-G had put Twelve-A behind him, and no matter how much the minder tried to
get around him, the mover kept the much smaller man firmly in place, scowling
at the row of guns like they were spears, instead. 

Even then, one of the
gun-bearers squeezed his eyes shut and fired at the giant’s big chest.  Nine-G
grunted and stiffened, then he and Twelve-A went down together in a heap, the
minder crushed beneath the much bigger man.  A few rods away from a bawling
Eleven-C, Shael was in a twisted pile on the ground, obviously having fallen
from a similar wound.

Help!
Twelve-A
screamed. 
Joe help!

Seeing the People huddled
there, naked and helpless, a row of guns even then aimed for their exposed
bodies, Joe didn’t think—he just started firing.  He took out men, women,
children—he didn’t care.  Anything carrying a weapon became a target.  And
Jane, the sadistic, psychotic bitch that she was, sang with glee each time she
sent another soul off to meet its maker.

By the time he finished,
the field was littered with bodies and, yet again, Joe was the only one with a
gun still standing.  It had taken only seconds.

He went to Nine-G first,
because Nine-G was still breathing.  Alice was holding the giant man’s sobbing
head in her lap, her eyes glued to the blood spilling over his chest.  An
Earth-gun lay on the ground nearby, along with the would-be shooter.  Seeing
Mike’s twisted, caved-in torso, his legs and arms wadded up like crumpled
paper, Joe knew he was dead.

Nine-G, however, wasn’t
much better off.  Joe fell into a crouch beside him, viciously fighting down
his fears that he was too late.

The mountain of a man was
hyperventilating, his eyes round with pain and shock.  A spreading pool of
blood was soaking the ground around him, staining it dark red.  He was sobbing,
his huge hands feebly trying to keep all the blood inside.

“Did I get them all?” Joe
snapped.  He held Jane at ready with one hand, scanning the trees as he tried
to determine the severity of Nine-G’s wound with the other.  When the minder
didn’t answer him, he swiveled on the telepath and screamed, “
Are there any
more out there?!
”

You killed them all,
Joe,
Twelve-A said softly. 
One kid is still alive, but he’s running
away.

Joe tucked Jane away and
went into battle-medic mode.

“Twelve-A, get over
here!” he snapped, ripping his jacket off.  He tore his last shirt from his
chest and started shredding it.

Twelve-A appeared at his
shoulder, eying the dying man warily.

“Put Nine-G out.”

Why?  He’s dying.

“
Now!
” Joe
snapped.  He started wadding up the shirt shreds.  Nine-G didn’t want to move
his hands, so he had to pry the massive fingers away one by one.  Fighting a
giant, especially
this
giant, didn’t get him anywhere.  “
Now, the
Ayhi damn you!
” Joe shouted at Twelve-A, desperately tugging at the man’s
huge, blood-slickened fingers.

Suddenly, Nine-G went
limp.

“
Thank
you!” Joe
cried.  He pushed Nine-G’s hands away and wiped at the wound.  More blood
flushed out over the skin, pumped out in a weakening flood.  It was a full-on
chest wound, not a shallow graze as he had hoped.  The asher had shot him in
the heart.  He had nanotics to work.

Joe pressed the shirt
wads against Nine-G’s chest.  “Hold these here and press hard!” he snapped,
roughly dragging Twelve-A down to kneel beside the giant.

Without waiting to see if
the telepath would do as he was told, Joe ran back to his survival pack and
withdrew several tubes of battlefield powders from his kit.  He rushed back and
spread tiny amounts of battledust over the wound in succession, the final one
staunching the flow of blood for good.