Forging Zero (53 page)

Libby
jerked like she’d been shot with blue goop.  She lay there, paralyzed, and the
bigger kid laughed and stood up.  Then, as Joe watched in fury, the kid spat on
her.

“As you
can see,” Nebil said, seemingly not noticing the boy’s behavior, “a fist
produces a temporary stun, very useful if you are looking to take captives.”

The boy
turned his back to Libby and started to walk back to his platoon.

Libby
suddenly leapt to her feet, a deadly look in her eyes.  She tore off her gloves
and threw them in the sand.  As her opponent turned to look, she took a running
step, swiveled, and slammed the heel of her foot into the side of his head. 
Then, as he fell, she followed through and rammed the side of her naked hand
into his neck and another underneath his ribs.  The boy collapsed like a rag
doll, utterly motionless.  Then she calmly turned, gathered up the gloves she
had discarded, and handed them to Battlemaster Nebil on her way back to her
place in the platoon.

“Unfortunately
for many a furg,” Battlemaster Gokli said, “The paralysis is very short lived. 
Rat, get him out of here.  Have the medics check for internal bleeding.”

The
girl in the recruit battlemaster’s place at the head of Gokli’s Fourth Platoon
moved suddenly and directed two grounders to carry the unconscious recruit off
to medical.

Rat?
  Joe thought. 
They call her Rat?  And I thought
Sasha
had it bad.

One by
one, they each got a chance to fight in the ring.  The various effects of the
practice gloves ranged from paralysis to actually slamming the unfortunate recruit
backwards ten feet.  The battlemasters thankfully tried to pair them by size,
but Monk, still at only four and a half feet, had to fight someone almost twice
her weight.  She lost.

The
recruit battlemaster they called Rat got paired with Scott and, to Joe’s
dismay, massacred him so badly that Joe suspected she’d practiced with the
gloves long before this.  She made no extra motions and, like Libby, simply
left the ring once Scott had given up. 

Joe was
one of the last ones to go, and he was paired with the strongest, most
freakishly huge boy in the other platoon.  Joe stared up at him when they got
into the ring, wondering if the aliens had made some sort of mistake and
drafted Bigfoot.

“I’m
Tank and I’m gonna kick your butt,” the boy taunted in a singsong voice.  If it
weren’t for the heavy rumble in his chest, he sounded like a five-year-old.

“I’m
Zero and I have the feeling I’m about to get my butt kicked,” Joe said, peering
up at him.  He had to be like seven feet tall.

The boy
grinned widely, a huge smile that filled his whole head.

“Begin,”
Nebil said.

Tank
swung at Joe with a fist—the favored mode of attack that day.  Joe ducked
easily and jumped back, eying the bigger kid.  He had an advantage over the
other children in the regiment because, unlike them, he had had time to grow
into his size, which left him relatively agile, compared to the others.  He
still banged knees and elbows into things when he wasn’t paying attention, but
at least he didn’t bang his
head
into things.

Tank’s
grin faded when he saw Joe dart out of the way.  He rushed Joe again and Joe
dodged, trying to decide how to approach this fight.  He didn’t want to hurt
the kid—he reminded him too much of Maggie.  He decided to go with the flow and
use a fist, even though while he’d been standing on the sidelines he’d been itching
to try the technique that sent his opponent flying backwards like getting
struck by a wrecking ball.

Tank,
however, did not seem to have the same reservations.  When Joe continued to
dance out of his way, he let out a frustrated roar and leapt forward, both
hands flipped upwards in a shove.  Joe couldn’t get out of the way fast
enough.  Instantly, he felt his entire midsection compress as the gloves’
pressure released.  His breath rushed out of him in a
whoosh
and Joe
flew backwards like his body no longer obeyed gravity. 

He
landed in a heap about fifteen feet away, his chest and guts on fire.

“And
that,” Nebil said, “is what is called a compact force compression.  Good
against bigger foes, better-trained foes, or multiple opponents.  Next!”

Wincing,
Joe started to struggle back to his feet, feeling weak and disoriented.  He was
stunned when Tank reached down and offered a big hand.  The big kid actually
looked remorseful.

“Sorry,”
he said.  “I didn’t know it would do that.”

Despite
the pain in his abdomen, Joe grinned at him, pleased to discover that Second
Battalion wasn’t completely filled with ashers.  After Lagrah tossing him off
the haauk and the kid spitting on Libby once she was down, he’d had his doubts.

“No
problem, Tank,” he said, getting to his feet.  He winced, feeling like someone
had taken a sledgehammer to his insides.

Tank
gave Joe a long look, still holding his hand.  “Are you really Zero?” he asked,
peering down at him curiously.

Joe
frowned.  “Uh, yeah.  Last time I checked.”

Tank
continued to peer at him like an exotic bug.  “Huh.  Thought you’d be taller.” 
Then he turned and went back to Gokli’s platoon, leaving Joe staring after the
seven-foot-tall monster, mouth hanging open.

All he
could think was, 

He
thought I was
…
taller?

#

Tril
seethed as he watched Fourth Platoon march by, Battlemaster Nebil at its head. 
Zero was leading, and his corruption was everywhere.  Over half of the recruits
in the Fourth wore their uniforms in Zero’s style, their soft flesh exposed to
the air, mocking him.

They
love him.

The
thought infuriated Tril.  He knew the recruits hated him.  It was only fair—he
had hated his own battalion commander in recruit training.  But to have the
battlemasters
back Zero, against his direct orders…  It was outright
treason
, and no
one was doing anything about it.  The one time he had mentioned it to Lagrah,
the Prime had given him a long look and had said, “I’m sorry, are you making a
formal complaint that you can’t control your own Battalion, Commander Tril?”

And it
had ended at that.  Because Tril, despite what the bastards thought, was not
that stupid.  So now his underlings were rebelling, and there wasn’t a damn
thing he could do about it because of Kihgl’s demise.  Tril had made several
formal petitions to the Ooreiki Internal Affairs division claiming segregation
and caste prejudice against him, but the OIA had responded by saying that the
actions of his peers were ‘not unjust.’

Damn
Kihgl.  That wasn’t his
fault
.  It was
Knaaren’s
fault for
eating
him.

Watching
Fourth Platoon march past, Tril tightened his grip on his pen, snapping it in
half.  After he had tried so hard to bring Sixth Battalion to the forefront of
the hunts, after he spent his every waking minute thinking about their
training, worrying whether it was enough and agonizing how to keep them out of
Knaaren’s claws, all Zero had to do to make them love him was put a few
wrinkles in his uniform.

Someday,
Zero, they’re going to hate you. 

He
would make sure of it.  And, when it happened, he would laugh.

#

Joe, as
it turned out, didn’t fare as well from Tank’s compression attack as he had
thought.  When he started vomiting blood two days later, Nebil sent him to
medical, only to find that Tank’s glove-powered shove had caused massive
internal damage that would require
another
turn added to his enlistment
in order to patch up.

Once
the Ooreiki doctors finished with him, they had two Takki carry him back to the
barracks.  The purple lizards carried him in silence, eyes forward and bodies
slack, apparently not thinking anything at all.  Joe, still drugged and a
little loopy, surveyed the scaly creatures from his position on the gurney,
finding them remarkably beautiful to hold such a bad reputation amongst the
Congies.  Their eyes, especially.  They were a deep, endless azure, like huge,
egg-shaped sapphires that had been polished smooth and set into the sides of
their heads.  Like the Dhasha, they had no pupils that he could see.

Joe was
alone in his bed, waiting for his groundmates to return so he could share
Yuil’s candy with them, when Battlemaster Nebil strode into the barracks.  He
stopped at the base of Joe’s bed and scowled at him so long that Joe thought he
was about to be punished.

“Here,”
Nebil muttered finally, thrusting a silvery pad into Joe’s hands.  “Lessons in
writing basic Congie.  It’s all automatic.  It will pronounce the sound and
then draw the symbol, which you must then repeat with the little pen on the
side.  Until then,” Nebil pulled out the PPU and pointed out a squarish symbol
in the lower left.  “Touch this to rotate through your options.  Whenever you
want to look something up, just draw the symbol on the lesson pad and it will
tell you what it means.”

“Okay,”
Joe said, a little overwhelmed.  “How long am I—” 

“You’ve
got three days to study,” Nebil interrupted briskly.  “The medics put you on
light duty until we’ve got to take up black against Lagrah.  You can spend the
time working on learning to use your PPU.”

Joe’s
jaw dropped.  “I’m out of the hunt tomorrow?”

Nebil’s
sudah gave a dangerous flutter.  “They
wanted
to put you out of service
for two entire weeks.  He turned your insides to
pudding
, Zero.  And
you, you fire-loving Jreet, kept going for
a day and a half
.  Two of the
medics told me you should’ve died from that, you jenfurgling sooter.  I’m going
against their orders letting you fight at all.”

“But my
groundteam
needs
me!” Joe cried, starting to scramble out of bed.  He’d
thought they would take him off duty for an
afternoon
, tops.

Nebil
held up a tentacle, stopping him.  “They need you to figure out how to get
Lagrah’s burning flag.  Right now, Tril’s made Sixth Battalion the
laughingstock of the regiment.  The only way Knaaren’s gonna leave the Sixth
alone is if we hold our own against the best.  It’s gonna be hard.  Lagrah’s
almost five hundred turns old—he should be a Corps Director by now.  The only
reason he
isn’t
is because he turns down his promotions so he can stay
at the battalion level.  He’s one of the few commanders out there who’s not in
it for the titles.  He’s got a long history of taking his recruits into battle
when they graduate, and they love him for it.  Beside him, Tril doesn’t stand a
chance.  He’s young and inexperienced and is pushing us too hard in the wrong
directions.  He’s a pampered
yeeri
ashsoul who doesn’t understand the
Ooreiki military isn’t like the society on Poen.  We’re like a pack of Jreet,
Zero.  We sense a weakness in one of our own and we tear it apart.  A platoon
can hold up against that kind of assault for only so long before its recruits
start to fail their training.  You get Lagrah’s flag again and the other battalions
are gonna take us seriously.  I don’t give a fire-loving pile of ashes what
Tril regurgitates up at the front of formation, the only way we’re going to
graduate Sixth Battalion is if we make the other battalions believe we’re
better than them.  We need to be more visible, more dangerous, more arrogant. 
That’s what we’re gonna need to survive, Zero.  That’s what’s it’s gonna take
to keep you out of Knaaren’s pens.  And
that
is why you’re going to
spend the next three days figuring out how to use that PPU.”

Joe
stared, a deep, gnawing anxiety beginning to build in his gut.  He’d already
failed Elf.  They
had
to graduate.  He couldn’t let Maggie and Monk fall
into the hands of that creature.

Nebil’s
sudah were still fluttering as he turned his head away.  “Listen, Zero.  I
think you’re our best chance.  After you went in for surgery, your platoon
almost killed the recruit that wounded you.  It took six battlemasters to break
up the fight.”  Nebil snorted.  “Your recruits respect you, Zero.  That’s why
I’m giving you the reader.  If the Training Committee found out I did that,
they’d take another rank and put me on Neskfaat to inspect Dhasha draftees.” 
Nebil paused, glanced at the low ceiling, then back at Joe.  “Sixth is in
serious trouble.  Tril doesn’t see it, but I do.  The battlemasters and commanders
are already turning on us.  They hid our standards from Tril when he went to
retrieve them.  They’re giving us the worst time slot to eat—earliest in the
morning and latest at night.  Repair orders and supply requests fail to go
through.  We’ve got the worst haauk
in the regiment, and we end up
having to bunch all of our recruits up into the same vehicles on the hunts
because half of them aren’t working at any given time.”

Nebil
looked tired.  “I saw the same thing happen twenty turns ago.  A battalion in
my regiment failed in a mission to retrieve a group of prisoners that enemy
Huouyt had captured.  Their failure wasn’t their fault.  The Overseer in charge
of the mission had given the battalion a bad dropoff location and they got
massacred before they even got off their ships.  Still, the other Ooreiki in
the regiment took their retreat personally.  It started with insults.  Words
quickly turned to actions and for eight rotations, their fellows picked at
them, giving them bad assignments and withholding gear until every single
soldier in that battalion was either dead or transferred.  Then, once the
soldiers were gone, they renumbered the battalions and pretended it had never
even existed.”