Forging Zero (54 page)

Nebil
leaned forward, intense.  “It’s happening again.  A stray comment here, a
changed keycode there…  Tril thinks the turning is just a myth, but if we don’t
stop it now, it’s going to get worse.  For all their beautiful creations, Ooreiki
can be…dark…creatures sometimes, Zero.  We need to put an end to it now if
we’re going to keep you Humans out of the crossfire.”

“Were
you one of the ones who got transferred?” Joe asked.

Nebil’s
pupils narrowed.  “No.  I was Prime Commander of the regiment.  They took away
four ranks when I abandoned the Takki ashsouls out of shame.”

Joe
stared.  Nebil was a Prime Commander?

“Since
then, I’ve never trusted Ooreiki nature.  Commanders, especially.  They’re
always struggling to gain favor, to make the one bold move that will catch
their superiors’ attention and get them promoted to Overseer.  Lagrah’s the one
exception, and that just makes the ashy furnace we’re in all the worse because
he makes Tril look like a janja slug in comparison.”

Joe
glanced down at the silvery pad Nebil had given him.  “I’ll try to get his
flag.”

“Do
more than try, Zero.”  Nebil gave him a long, silent look, then turned and left
him alone in the barracks.

Joe
spent the next four hours deciphering the symbols of the PPU with the help of
Nebil’s lesson pad.  He was actually making good progress when he heard voices
on the balcony outside the door.  He hid it away under his pillow as his
groundteam returned, sweaty and covered in black dust.

“Joe!”
Maggie cried, breaking into a run.  She looked stunned he was alive.  They all
did.

Frowning,
Joe asked, “Where were you guys?”

Maggie made
a face.  “Nebil had the whole platoon raking the plaza because we got in a
fight with the other platoon.”

Joe
glanced at Libby, instinctively knowing she had started the fight.  “You didn’t
hurt that kid, did you?”

Libby
looked away, confirming his suspicions.  Joe felt a rush of pride—and shame—that
he was the cause.  “Libby,” he began, “you know it’s not cool to—”

“He
deserved it,” she interrupted.  “Tank cheated.”

“He
didn’t cheat,” Joe said.  “I was stupid.  I didn’t get out of the way fast
enough.”

Libby
shrugged and he knew he would get no more out of her on the subject.  “They fix
your guts?” she asked, giving him a dubious look.

“Tril
said you were
dead
,” Monk added, wide-eyed.

Joe
sighed and gently patted his stomach.  “The jenfurgling medics said they couldn’t
heal everything without putting six more turns on my service, so I told them to
go burn themselves.  As it was, they still gave me a turn.” 

“You
gonna be with us tomorrow?” she asked softly.

Wincing
inside, Joe held up his PPU.  “Guys, look at this.  Battlemaster showed me what
a few of the symbols mean.”  Libby’s gaze sharpened, but Joe blundered on,
trying to ignore her scowl.  “This one means Acquire, which beams out a signal
and maps out the terrain around you.  This one is Zoom, and you can pull back
so far you’re looking at the whole planet.  This one’s Orient, which twists the
map around until it’s facing the same way—”

“Somebody
said Second Battalion really kills kids on the hunts,” Maggie said.  She hadn’t
been paying attention.  None of them had.

Joe
reluctantly put his PPU away.  “They don’t.” 

“Yeah,
but they’re bigger than us,” Monk said.

“We eat
the same green crap they do,” Joe said.

“Yeah,
but…”  Libby glanced again at his bruised torso.  “If you’re not there…  Things
could get really bad.  Sixth Battalion looks up to you.”

Joe
snorted.  “You said yourself I almost pissed myself trying to crawl through a
tunnel.  They don’t look up to me.”

Libby
looked dumbstruck.  “They do.  You’re older than they are.”

“There’s
nobody in the regiment better at this than you, Lib.”

“Yeah,
but Joe, it’s
you
they like,” Libby insisted. 

“Just
keep Second Battalion from getting your flag tomorrow,” Joe said.  “I’ll be
there to help you next time.  Promise.”

His
friends grimaced and muttered under their breath, but in the end, he managed to
convince them it would be worth it…if only to see the shocked expression on
Second Battalion’s faces when they stole their flag right out from under them,
making them look like unprepared Takki.  That seemed to make his friends
happy.  They actually went to bed grinning, obviously seeing it in their
dreams.

CHAPTER
24: 
Contraband

Joe
spent the next day in bed, scowling at the little symbols on his reader.  A
Takki brought him food and water, and Joe ate it while he worked.  He was so
focused that his friends startled him when they returned.

“We
held it,” Monk said, jumping up into bed beside Joe, not noticing as he
hurriedly tucked his reader out of sight.  “They didn’t get our flag!”

“See?”
Joe said.  “You guys were worried for nothing.”

At
that, everyone sobered. 

“They
set up command posts,” Libby said.  “They were organized.  They attacked from
one side, then, when we went to defend, they attacked on the other.  They are
good,
Joe.  Better than us.  The only reason they didn’t make it to the flag was they
didn’t know where it was.  They invaded three of the five deep dens.  It was
just dumb luck they didn’t get the one with the flag in it.”

Joe
grimaced.  “What time is it?”

“Past
bedtime,” Libby said.  “We were fighting all day.  We only ate once because it
took so long to kill them all off.”

“We’re
tired,” Maggie added.  “And hungry.”

“They
didn’t feed you?”  Joe glanced at the other groundteams filing into the
barracks, all of them looking like the walking dead.

“Commander
Tril was pissed,” Scott said.  “He told us losers didn’t need to eat.”

“You
didn’t lose,” Joe said, his brow furrowing.  “You kept your flag.”

Libby
shrugged and began getting out of her gear.  Joe, who had been noticing her
sleek, feminine curves more and more by the day, quickly decided he had a
couple more hours to decipher the PPU.  He hastily gathered up his devices and
got out of bed.  “I’m gonna go study the PPU.  If you guys are hungry, there’s
something you can eat in my locker.”  Then, before Libby could unbutton her
jacket, he left the barracks.

Carefully
descending the stairs outside, his abdomen still sensitive from the Ooreiki
medics’ attentions, he passed two patch-wearing recruits.  Unlike the blocky D
of Sixth Battalion, the writing on these patches was diamond-shaped with a dot
and half-circle inside.  So far only Second and Sixth ranked patches.

 Apparently,
the recruits realized the same thing.

“Hey!”
one of them shouted.  “You’re one of those charhead pussies we wasted on the
hunt today!  How’s it feel to be a loser, sooter?  You run home to mama and
tell her all about it?  How badly we spanked you sootbag furgs?”

Joe
hurried to hide the reader as he turned to face the two recruits.  He
recognized them immediately.  The speaker was the same kid who’d paralyzed
Libby, and the one standing beside him was Tank.  The grinning, soft-faced
five-year-old was now scowling at Joe through a mass of bruises, his ham-sized
hands bunched in angry fists at his sides.  Joe instantly felt bad.  He’d never
meant to get the kid hurt.

“Well,
look who it is,” the shorter of the two jeered.  Joe realized it was the same
kid Libby had dropped with a kick to the head.  “You’re the one who got Tank
beat up for whipping your ass.”  The speaker stepped toward him, eyes dancing. 
“What’s the matter, Zero?  Gotta get others to do your dirty work?  Too much of
a pussy to do it yourself?”

“Bailey!”
someone roared.  For a startled moment, Joe thought it was one of the battlemasters,
then he realized it was a recruit bearing a Second Battalion badge—as well as
the four-pointed star of recruit battlemaster.  I took him a moment to realize
it was the same girl that Battlemaster Gokli had called Rat.  Despite being
fully grown, she was as flat-chested as an ironing board and had arms made for
wrestling.  Even her voice had sounded male.

“Get
your ass back to the barracks, Bailey!  You’re already in enough soot with
Gokli for spitting on that girl.  You start getting Tank in trouble and I’ll
make your life a Jreet hell.”  She paused and held Joe’s gaze a moment, her
gray eyes almost purple in the reddish light.  “Stop screwing around.  Zero’s
got things to do and so do you.”

The boy
snorted.  “They only thing I saw him doing was crying for his mama.”

“Too
bad she didn’t show up because she would’ve whipped your ass,” Rat retorted. 
The girl glanced at Bailey’s companion.  “Tank, take Bailey back to the
barracks.  I don’t want to see him out here again before lockup.  He tries to
run off, you beat his jenfurgling face in.  Get me?”

Tank
nodded and silently plodded back down the stairs, dragging the smaller recruit
behind him.

The
girl gave Joe one last look, obviously summing him up—and finding him lacking—then
turned and left him there.

So,
Joe thought,
That’s the competition.
  The way the girl
walked reminded him of Libby.  That connection worried him.

Once she
was gone, Joe found a quiet corner on the stairway to sit down and research the
symbols on his PPU.  He was concentrating intently on trying to memorize the
difference between Scroll, which looked like a box with wings, and Mode, which
looked like a box with flexing arms, when he realized somebody was watching
him.

Joe
hurriedly pushed the lesson pad aside and looked up.

It was
the old, pale-eyed commander of Second Battalion.

Burn
me.

Joe
felt himself freeze up just like the first time he’d been under that cool,
unreadable gaze.  Joe had been staring up at him from the ground, two Congies
holding his face into the concrete, guns trained on his head, their owners
waiting on Lagrah’s command to let him live or die.

“Where
did you get that, boy?” Lagrah asked.  He was looking at where Joe had hidden
Nebil’s lesson pad.

“I
stole it,” Joe said.  “I’m gonna sell it for some food that doesn’t taste like soot.”

“Really.” 
The Prime Commander held out a hand.  “Give it to me.  I’ll check the register
to see who held it last.”

Joe’s
heart began to pound.  He didn’t want to get Nebil in trouble.  Nebil had taken
the brunt of Tril’s fury after losing the flag to protect Joe.  If everyone
found out he had tried to cheat to help his battalion win…

“No.” 
Joe pushed the lesson pad behind him, wedging it between a corner of the stair
and the building.

“No.” 
The droopy Ooreiki limb did not even twitch.  “Do you realize what I could do
to you for disobeying me, Human?”

“Probably
something pretty crummy,” Joe muttered.  This was not going well.  Not well at
all.

With
the speed of a striking snake, Lagrah lashed a stinging tentacle around Joe’s
neck.  Despite Lagrah’s ancient appearance, his grip was just as powerful as
any other Ooreiki Joe had managed to piss off.  He held Joe to one side as he
reached for the lesson pad.

Then
Joe remembered what Lagrah had said about checking the reader’s register.  If
Lagrah checked the register, Nebil could lose his command.  If Nebil lost his
command, that left no one with the balls to stand up to Tril, and Sixth
Battalion would end up being sold to the Dhasha by the end of the year.

I’ve
got to stop him,
Joe’s panicked mind shrieked.

Joe let
his legs go slack, choking himself as he slumped low enough to grab the lesson
pad.  As soon as he had it, he started bashing it against the side of the
building as hard as he could.  Even as his vision was darkening around the
edges, Joe realized with dismay that the device wasn’t suffering even the
slightest bit of damage under his assault.

Just as
he was about to pass out, Lagrah pulled his arm back.  “Interesting.  What’s
your name, Human?”

Joe
stepped back, gasping.  The underside of the Ooreiki’s arm had ripped his skin
with its tiny suction cups, leaving a burning red streak around his throat.  He
touched his neck warily, surprised he wasn’t bleeding to death.  “Zero.”

“Your
real name.”

Joe
froze.  Was this some sort of trick? 

Lagrah
waited.

“Joe,”
he said quietly.  It was the first time any of his commanding officers had
asked.

“You’re
the one from the alley.”  It wasn’t a question.  “The son of that rebel.”

Joe bit
his lip and nodded.

Lagrah’s
eyes caught on Joe’s chest and stayed there.  “And you’re Recruit Battlemaster
now.”