Forging Zero (45 page)

That
was an unpleasant thought.

Joe
folded his jacket and was putting it away when the cause for the nagging
wrongness that had plagued him since first trying the garment on finally dawned
on him.

It’s
the sleeves.

They
were baggy and cumbersome, getting in the way when he was trying to move his
arms.

Joe
tentatively took a cuff and folded it back on itself.  It looked horrible.  He
winced and tried again, folding it carefully, smoothing the wrinkles out with
his hands.  He made five folds, smoothing it tightly each time, creasing the
upper bicep area over itself to keep the roll skin-tight.  Then he tugged the
jacket over his head and pushed his arm down through the narrow opening he had
created with the sleeve roll.

The
material fit around his bicep like Kihgl’s
kasja.
  It felt good. 
Real
good.  Joe tugged his jacket off and laboriously did the other side.  He was
just putting it on again when Battlemaster Nebil unlocked the barracks and
stepped inside.  Instantly, the entire barracks came to life as kids jumped out
of their beds, trained to wake at the sound of their battlemaster’s footsteps. 
Joe quickly buttoned his jacket back in place and turned to face the Ooreiki.

Nebil
stopped halfway down the rows of round, six-person groundteam bunks, peering at
him like a wary cat.

Joe
glanced down at himself and immediately felt a rush of pride at how good he
looked.  Almost like his dad before he stepped out into the swirling chaos of
the Draft.

“Zero,
what in the fire-loving
hells
do you think you’re doing?”

The
other recruits paused in the middle of dressing to stare at Joe’s sleeves.

Seeing
their confusion, Joe flushed and blinked down at his arms.  What
had
he
been doing?  He’d known Nebil would only make him undo them.  “I modified my
uniform.  See?  It moves better with the sleeves rolled up like this.”  He swung
his arm for Nebil’s perusal, then held his breath, watching Nebil’s reaction.

Battlemaster
Nebil stared at him as if he had grown purple scales and big sapphire eyes. 
“Zero, you sooter, fix it.”

“It
is
fixed,” Joe said stubbornly.

Battlemaster
Nebil glanced from Joe to his sleeves and back.  “Now.”

“No,”
Joe said, even as he thought,
What the hell are you doing?  You just got Battlemaster
and you’re about to blow it!

Battlemaster
Nebil walked up and cuffed him.  “All right you stupid furg.  You’ll run
later.  Eighteen laps a night for as long as you insist on looking like a sootbag. 
In the meantime, get your platoon together.  We’ve got another hunt today.”

Then
their battlemaster turned and began striding down the length of the barracks,
throwing fistfuls of white clothes at the bunks.

“Get
dressed!  Get your gear! 
Not
your blacks!  You’re defending today, you soot-eating
furglings!  Get
up!
  Don’t think I won’t march you till you bleed if you
don’t move fast enough!  Get
dressed!
”

Everyone,
of course, was already out of bed and trying to make sense of the piles of
clothes he had thrown at them, but Nebil was running around the room and
screaming as if they were still sleeping soundly, ignoring him.

Joe
shrugged into his new white garments and made it to attention faster than half
the rest of the recruits.  Unfortunately, they were the slower, dumber half. 
He was still tucking in his shirt when Nebil stalked by and saw him.

“You’re
not finished, Zero?  And you think you’re fit to be a battlemaster?  Get on the
ground!  Two hundred pushups.  No,
one
arm.  What do you think you are,
a spacer?”  Nebil started walking around him as Joe dropped and started doing
his pushups.  “Keep your back straight!” he ranted on.  “This isn’t Second
Battalion.  Take some
pride
in yourself, you jenfurgling Human.  Each
time you fall on your face, you run a lap.  And you!  You think that’s funny? 
Get down there with him.  Ah, burn it!  All of you get down!  Two hundred
pushups!  You females can use two hands, if you weaklings feel you have to. 
Now
,
recruits!”

Everyone
got to the ground, glaring at Joe as they did so.  Libby and Maggie were two of
the only girls who used only one hand.  Maggie fell on her face more often than
not, but Nebil did not seem to notice.  Sasha, on the other hand, used both
hands and still finished dead last.  It didn’t earn her much respect, and she
got as many nasty looks as Joe had for getting them into the mess in the first
place.

“That’s
enough!” Nebil snapped.  “Get your Jreet-loving rifles and get outside. 
Battlemaster, get up here to get your extra rounds.”

Joe
started forward, but Sasha brushed past him to take her usual place in front of
Nebil.  He hung back, waiting.

“What
are you doing?” Libby whispered, coming to stand beside him.  She had her rifle
against one shoulder.  “He made you battlemaster, didn’t he?”

Joe
took a deep breath and walked up to where Sasha was waiting for Nebil to notice
her.  When Sasha looked up at him with a poisonous scowl, he calmly said, “I’m
battlemaster now.  Go get your
groundteam
together.”

Sasha
ignored him.  Her face fell, though, when Battlemaster Nebil loaded the spare
rounds into Joe’s arms and not hers.  Sasha’s eyes fell on Joe’s burden and
stayed there.  The single line of a ground leader seemed pathetic on her chest.

“Go,
Sasha,” Joe said gently.

Eyes
brimming with hatred, she turned to leave.  Libby caught her arm.

“Told
you,” Libby said.

Sasha
ripped her arm away.  “My daddy said even Congo gorillas can play the stock
market and be right a few times.”

Libby
stiffened, every muscle taut.  Joe tensed, wondering if he was going to have to
wipe Sasha’s brainless face off of Libby’s boot. 

Libby,
however, shrugged and went to form up.  In the ranks, a Takki was passing out
prepackaged tubes of green slime, which the recruits were sucking down like
ice-pops as they listened to the plan for the day.  Then Nebil gave the order
and Joe took a deep breath.  In his best Congie, he shouted, “Fourth Platoon,
follow on your left foot!  March!”  Then he counted, “Left, left,
left-right-left, left, left…”  When they reached the main plaza, the battlemaster
took over and loaded them onto a huge haauk
.
 

As they
lifted off, Commander Linin shouted, “All right you Takki pukes!  Tril’s got us
on another practice run.  Same idea as last time, except this time you’re
trying to keep the other half of our battalion from reaching your flag.  You
have an extra thirty-six tics to arrange yourselves before they drop off the
attackers.  Zero’s got command of this one.  Third, Fourth, and Fifth platoons
on surface duty.  First and Second stay in the tunnels.  Keep in mind that Second
Company’s already been down those holes and they know them better than you do. 
You’re gonna have to be on your toes.  Squad leaders and above, your headcom
mics have been turned on.  Speak loud—the sets weren’t made to pick up your
gutless Takki whimpers.”

Commander
Linin scowled at the five recruit battlemasters.  “And just so you know, Second
Company put a bounty on battlemasters.  Each one the attackers kill gets them
an hour of free time.”

“What
about us?” Maggie asked.

Linin
scoffed.  “Burn that.  Each battlemaster you lose, you run for an hour.”

Then
they were landing, spilling from the skimmer like a flood of cottonballs.

As the
almost two hundred children in First and Second platoons descended into the
tunnels, Joe tried to find a high point to survey the situation.  He ended up
climbing one of the ruined diamond mounds, feeling the jagged crystal try to
cut him even through his thick Congie gloves. 

“This
is a good spot,” Libby said, coming to stand beside him.  “They’re gonna enter
from that side and we’ll be able to shoot them before they make it to cover.”

“Just
like they did to us,” Joe muttered, jumping down.  “All right.”  He glanced at
the three platoons waiting for his orders.  “Split up,” he ordered.  “I want
three recruits to a hole.  Squad leaders, make sure you stagger them so not all
the youngest ones go to a single hole.  Maggie, go with that team.  Libby, you
stay here.  I’ll go over there, so we don’t have all our spare ammo in the same
place.”

No
sooner had they taken their positions than Second Company was arriving—with
armored skimmers.

“What
the Hell?”
the recruit battlemaster of Second
Platoon demanded in Joe’s headset. 
“They’ve got armored plating!
”

Not
only that, Joe was seeing, but the skimmer was lowering them directly over an
unguarded tunnel and they were exiting through a special door in the bottom of
the skimmer.

“They’re
inside!” Joe said into his headset.

“Which
tunnel?”
one of the battlemasters below asked.

Joe
grabbed his Planetary Positioning Unit.  The symbols were in blockish Congie
squiggles, not English.  “Can anyone read the PPU?” Joe shouted back.  He was
clambering down his tunnel, seeing if there was a connection to the one that
the enemy was using to infiltrate.  There wasn’t.  He would have to double
back.  “What does North look like?”

“I
don’t know, but I can hear them!”
  Joe’s onboard
computer identified the speaker as Number 424, a squad leader from Fifth
Platoon.

“Everybody
retreat to the flag!”
Third Platoon’s battlemaster
shouted. 
“They’re in.  We’ve gotta fight them off inside!”

Up on
the surface, Joe could hear the skimmer lifting off.  He stuck his head out of
the hole to look.  No enemies were in sight.  The damage was done.  Even now,
their full force was descending to reach their flag.  They hadn’t even left a
guard.

“Fourth
Platoon, get out of your holes!” Joe shouted suddenly.  “Meet me on the
surface!”

“What
the hell are you doing?”
the battlemaster of Fifth
Platoon demanded. 
“They need us at the flag!”

“Burn
it, asher,”
came Maggie’s hot response. 
“Zero
can do what he wants.”

Damn
it, Maggie,
Joe thought.  But into his headcom, he
said, “Hurry up!”

“You’re
going to the surface?!”
Second Platoon’s battlemaster
cried. 
“We need your help!”

“You’re
getting it!” Joe shouted, jumping out of his hole.  Libby was already leading
an assault on the enemy tunnel.  The rest of Fourth Platoon fell in behind him,
eyes wide with excitement and fear.

“Just
slow them down until we can reach them,” Joe said into his headset.  He and
Libby charged down the tunnel, with only a handful of the squad able to keep
up.  Ahead, he heard the wet, sucking sounds of gunfire.  His stomach roiled,
remembering the last time he had gotten shot, but adrenaline was coursing
through his system, making the fear bearable.  He barely even noticed the tunnel
walls closing in around him.

They
found the enemy clumped together behind a wall of bodies, a mass of hundreds of
black-clad recruits firing at the defenders.  Black and white corpses littered
the floor and the noise was so loud it was hard to think.  The voices of the
other four battlemasters were clamoring in his head, shouting for help or more
ammo.  One was screaming.

Joe
fell to one knee and started firing.  Libby, Scott, Sasha, and the other big
kids from Fourth Platoon did the same, spattering the attackers with blue bile
from all sides.

In
three minutes, it was over.  Pinned in place, caught in the crossfire from
above and below, the attackers didn’t stand a chance.  They collapsed in shrieks,
their muscles spasming in agony.  A couple that hadn’t been hit dropped their
weapons, cold terror showing in their wide eyes as they surrendered.

“Are we
supposed to take prisoners?” the leader of Second Squad asked, standing beside
Joe.  She was a twiggy imitation of Libby, except she came from Mexican roots. 
In the headset, the other platoons still hadn’t realized they had won and were
still calling wildly for backup.  Joe ignored them, his gun sighted on one of
the two captives.  All the recruits around him were waiting for his answer.

“Maybe
Linin won’t make us run for losing a battlemaster if we have captives,” the
Mexican girl suggested.  He was pretty sure her name was Tina.

“Take
their headcoms,” Joe ordered.  “So they can’t talk to anyone we missed.”

“Put
their headcoms
on,
” Libby said.  “So
we
can talk to anyone they
missed.”

No
sooner had one of Joe’s squad members pulled the helmet from another boy’s head
and slipped it onto his own did he fall down in a dead faint.  Everyone stared
at him, confused.

“Did he
step on some goop?” Tina asked.  “What’s wrong with him?”