Zero's Return (23 page)

Then he was
jolted from his reverie by her desperate cry of, “
Answer me
, skulker, or
I will find your father’s tek and bury it in a Dhasha’s ass!”

Joe tucked his
canteen into a pocket on his cargo belt, stood, and leaned casually against the
wall, considering her.  Standing there, clinging to the bannister, cursing in
Jreet, she seemed almost as alien in this place as Joe himself felt.

“So,” Joe said,
“you’re looking to go back to Welu?”

“Immediately,”
she growled.  She had started, very carefully, step-by-step, descending the
stairs, her fists gripping the bannister with white knuckles.  “Just point me
in the right direction and I’ll get there myself.  I don’t need the company of
a scaleless softling slowing me down.”

Considering that
she was probably only
alive
because Joe had deigned to save her, Joe
said, “How about you put on some clothes and tell me why you think you’re a
Jreet.”

She paused,
mid-step, and her head snapped up to give him a dangerous look.  “Warriors do
not wear the sheaths of cowards and weavers.”

…Which sounded a
lot like what Daviin would have said, had Joe demanded he put on a 12XL shirt.

Still, Joe
didn’t intend to let her leave the house without something on her back.  Even
then, his nannite tube was half empty, and he was pretty sure the ransacked
local grocery stores weren’t going to resupply him.  As she reached the final
step, he pointedly blocked her way off the stairs with his body.  “You should
put something on,” he said. 

The woman
blinked up at him as if he had just picked his own brains out through his
nose.  “You
dare
stand in the path of Shael ga Welu?”

Joe
unconcernedly itched his cheek, deciding that the tiny, five-dig woman needed a
reality check.  “Uh.  Yeah.  I do.”  He crossed his big arms over his chest and
peered down at her, perfectly willing to rough her up a little in order to get
her over her Jreet fetish.  After all, his hand still hurt.

Her pretty green
eyes narrowed.  And, in one moment, Joe was casually standing at the base of
the stairs, blocking her path, arms crossed, a smug look on his face.  The
next, something huge grabbed him and threw him with all the force of a Dhasha’s
backhand, embedding Joe in the far wall, only a few feet from the stove and its
grisly contents. 

“Buuuuurn,” Joe
groaned, pulling himself out of the sheetrock.  He ended up doing more falling
than walking, and kind of collapsed into a ball on the floor.  “Burn me,” he panted. 
“Burn me.”

On the
staircase, the woman unconcernedly finished her descent and walked past him as
if he were a fly she had just swatted.  And Joe, being at least as smart as the
average bear, stayed down and watched her go, frantically trying to figure out
what the hell she’d done to him.  She hadn’t
moved
.

Her Jreet fetish
suddenly took on new meaning.  It had
felt
like he’d been hit by a
Jreet.  He had felt the massive fist clamp down on his torso and throw him with
all the regard of an apple core.  And, considering that Jreet could shift the
energy-level of their scales and go completely invisible at will… 

Did she have a
Sentinel
? 
Joe had thought there were only two Humans in the universe who had earned
themselves the dubious honor of having Sentinels—himself and Rat.  Not even
Fred Mullich, that worthless Human Representative back at Koliinaat, had
attracted a Sentinel.  How could some nameless, barcoded naked chick on Earth
have a
Sentinel
?  That made no
sense
.

Oblivious to his
frantic mental scramble, the naked girl stepped through the huge, gaping hole
in the wall and disappeared in the overgrown grass on the other side.

“What…” Joe
managed, prying himself painfully from the floor, “…the soot?”  He checked
himself to see what had survived, found broken ribs and a knee that no longer
worked correctly, then carefully got to his feet, clinging to the stove for
support. 

Aching from head
to toe, dizzy from what he was beginning to think was a concussion, crushed
ribs making breathing difficult, Joe hobbled over to the base of the staircase,
where his gun and his sack of gear still lay neatly against the wall,
abandoned. 

Again.

Groaning, he
slumped down beside it, pulled out his medkit, propped it on his knee, fumbled
through it until he found a nano solution, and clumsily dosed himself.  Then he
leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes, waiting for the pain
to go away.  By the time Joe’s head cleared, he’d thought of twenty different
things he could say to the woman in reply, and most of them involved Jane.

When he was
mobile again, the woman—or whatever she was—was long gone.

But Joe, the
highly-trained, Planetary Ops war hero that he was, could track her.  And he
was going to, too, if only to put a round through her brain for leaving him to
die…again.

CHAPTER
10 – How to Handle a Jreet…

As soon as Shael
slid out of the crude Human dwelling, he froze at the sight that lay beyond. 
He could see no roads, no pathways, just alien flora waving in the fetid alien
wind.  He hesitated, feeling a bit of his resolve undermined by the sheer
vastness of the empty alien landscape. 

You are the
greatest warrior of your time
, Shael reminded himself, as the awkward
unease tried to settle into his core. 
You can crush your enemies with all
the concern a Dhasha gives a vaghi. 
It was something that the sniveling
Doctorphilip had repeated to him, again and again, and Shael found courage in
it now.  Alien landscape or no, he
would
get home.  There was nothing—
nothing
—on
this pathetic planet that could stand in his way.

Still, without a
way to communicate with the weaklings, Shael knew he would have trouble getting
them to understand his commands.  He felt a little flush of concern that he had
abandoned the only other creature who seemed to be able to speak an
intelligent—if filthy—tongue, but decided that arrogance, in lesser creatures
like Takki and their close cousins the Vorans, deserved to be
removed—painfully, if necessary.

Lifting his head
to sniff the air, Shael considered his route.  He could pick up no nuances of
life from the stale air, no tell-tale scents of the passages of prey, not even
the smell of the earth or the dry, withered scrub.  For a brief, horrified
moment, Shael thought that perhaps Doctorphilip and his weaklings had somehow fiddled
with his senses, to keep him from tracking them.  Then, catching a strong smell
of rancid flesh from somewhere behind him, Shael decided that it was merely the
flat, tasteless air of the alien planet that was altering his perceptions,
nothing permanent.

Shael started
moving through the bladed alien flora.  It was sharp against his coils, biting
his scaleless skin.  The softling had obviously taken him off the road system
in an attempt to disorient him and keep him from returning with his clan.

Cowards
,
Shael thought. 
Cowards and skulkers, all of them.

He slid into the
brush, clambered through the twisted, scraggly undergrowth—which bit him with
spines and broken parts that lodged painfully in his skin—then, when his coils
should have simply glided through the sticks and stumps, they caught and he
fell forward on his hands, body afire.  He got up and tried again, then tumbled
back to the ground in a few more rods, helplessly tangled in the mass of alien
foliage.

They planted
traps for Jreet
, he thought, furious.  That they had planned this far
ahead, going so far as to prepare their foliage to slow him down, confused him,
because it was much more intelligent than Shael had given Doctorphilip credit
for.  Still, however, huddled in a mass of alien flora, unable to move for the
prickles, barriers, and deadfall, there was no denying that they had plotted it
all many turns in advance.  Which meant they never planned on letting him
return to Welu.  Which meant they had never planned to learn a warrior’s trade
from him.

Angry,
humiliated, Shael dropped back into his war-mind and found the moving foggy
essence of the land around him.  Putting up a mental barrier between himself
and the glowing green mist of the plant life, Shael pushed forward, wrenching
the flora away from him, shoving it in all directions, carving a clear path
down to the dirt.  His coils no longer hindered, he got up and slid forward,
plowing a road for himself in the terrain.  All around him, ugly organic
growths fell and snapped in half, the sound of his vengeance ringing along the
hillside with each new alien plant that Shael annihilated.  Seeing that,
feeling his power sing through him as it mowed down his enemies’ world, Shael
felt partially vindicated.

Partially, but
still unnerved.  What kind of
plant
could slow down a
Jreet
?  He
decided he needed to discuss this with the other warriors.  Perhaps, under the
guise of a joint training mission, the denizens of this planet were really
intending a war with the Jreet, and had used Shael as a test subject.

Even then,
descaled, drugged, his tek immobilized, his body hungry and weak, his coils
floundering in the alien foliage like a furg, Shael felt the betrayal like an
ovi through his guts. 

I trusted
them,
he thought. 
I trusted them as brethren.

Buoyed by the
wrongs done to him, Shael lifted himself from his coils and kept going. 
Regardless of what the aliens had planned for him, he
would
find his way
home.

When the weak,
pitiful star began to sink below the horizon, however, Shael was no closer to
finding his way back to the road than when he had started.  As darkness fell
and the world cooled, waves of unease began to hit him like a Dhasha’s paw.

Shael could
never remember being cold before.  Unlike the weakling Doctorphilip and his
soft, cowardly assistants, a Jreet warrior did not need to wear clothes to
maintain his body temperature.  Jreet could naturally withstand whatever
elements a planet decided to throw at them, equally suited for the snowy
mountain slopes of Welu’s poles or the raging blazes of Vora’s firelands.

And yet,
something his comrades had done to him in their treachery had left Shael forced
to huddle in on himself, trying to trap his own body heat to his chest with his
coils.  Miserable, blind, Shael was awkwardly raking the alien flora around
himself in an attempt to keep warm, when he heard something big snap in the
nearby forest.  It sounded much like the way the alien shrubbery had snapped as
it fell before him, but more concentrated, and coming on fast…

It was the dry,
liquidy rustle of scales sliding against each other, rattling in the creature’s
charge, that marked it for what it was.

Dhasha
… 
Shael let out a battlecry and raised his energy level to drop beneath the
visible spectrum, then opened his war-mind to pinpoint the intruder.

Shael froze when
he realized the creature was much too big to be Dhasha.  While it carried the
same odd, utterly solid scales, its jaws alone were large enough to take a
Dhasha between them, and its head, neck, and body were more streamlined,
longer.  Watching it charge directly at him, despite the fact he had raised his
energy level to disappear from its spectrum, left Shael with a strange
sensation churning his insides, something he had never experienced before.

Terror.

He screamed and,
at the last moment, threw a wall between them in his war-mind.  The beast
plowed into the barrier in a clatter of scales and fell to its front knees as
its hindquarters and tail, still in motion, pushed its body onward, its massive
form rolling over him and his barrier like a mountain.

Sisters’
fury,
Shael’s panicked mind babbled. 
That’s a kreenit.

Finding their
snares ineffective, his betrayers had unleashed a kreenit, an
eater
of
Dhasha, upon him.  Not even the greatest Jreet could hope to wrap his coils around
a kreenit.  They were too big, too mindless, too
wild
.

Shael screamed
as the kreenit righted itself and charged him again, this time hitting the
barrier he’d constructed and slamming its open jaws against it, ovi-sharp black
teeth only a rod from snapping Shael in half.

More out of
instinct than conscious thought, Shael took the barrier between them and
pushed, shoving the creature backwards, its massive paws rending great furrows
in the forest floor as it went.  It roared in stupid alien fury and renewed its
attack, ripping away trees and foliage as it fought, giving Shael a
mind-splitting headache as it assaulted his mental wall, snorting, huffing,
tearing up earth, working its way around…

Shael screamed
again and ducked as he realized that the kreenit had found the edge of his
barrier and was shoving past it.  With nothing to stop the beast from snapping
him up in its titanic jaws, Shael threw up a hasty wall around himself, like
the bubble around an Ooreiki egg-sac.  The kreenit’s jaws came down and hit the
barrier only a dig from his head, locking him completely in the prison of its
teeth.

Stymied, the
monster shrieked and yanked him and his bubble completely from the ground,
flipping him back and forth in the air two rods above the treeline.  Shael howled
as it ragdolled his sanctuary, then shivered as it started to mindlessly gnash
at the invisible walls, its huge teeth grating against the barriers in his
mind, driving spikes of pain through his head as the beast struggled to break
the wall he had formed around himself.

Trapped in a
bubble of his own making, neither his coils nor his hands able to reach
something solid to aid in an escape, unable to focus on anything other than the
enormous teeth that were slicing at the barriers in his mind, Shael curled up
on the scoop-shaped floor of his refuge and shivered.  The incident was
triggering something, some horrible memory he’d long forgotten, and even as the
vicious teeth gnashed around him, orange saliva dripping down the walls of his
prison, Shael remembered that it wasn’t, in actuality, the first time he had
feared…