Zero's Return (29 page)

Dripping,
covered with a tingly bubbly sensation, Slade handed the squirt-gun to Tyson,
who took it gingerly between thumb and forefinger.  Once he was sure the entire
room got a
good
look, Slade said, “I’m off to take a much-needed shower,
as I still have gore from that fifteen-ton lizard clinging to my scalp.  Anyone
else wants to fuck with me, bring it on.”  At that, he turned and walked from
the room.  Hygiene was important.

CHAPTER
12 – The Rescue of Furgs

Shael hunkered
against the glass-smooth, iridescent rainbow leg of the vanquished beast,
trying not to let the Voran see how much he’d needed his fire and his meat. 
And it was
good
meat, too.  The savory scents of the alien food was
nothing like the pitiful
melaa
he’d been fed for turns in the weaklings’
compound.  Even then, Shael’s digestive glands were watering, soaking his mouth
with the need to fill his stomach.  It was shameful, sharing food and heat with
a Voran, but, drugged and maimed, abandoned on an alien planet, Shael had been
running out of options. 

As he watched
the Voran cook their meal, his mind wandered back to that memory of
Doctorphilip locking him back in his bed.  “
You think you’re a Jreet? 
You’re a
lab-rat
.”

Shael didn’t
know what a ‘lab-rat’ was, but he had the nagging suspicion that his Voran
campmate did.  To show him his ignorance and desperation, however, was
unacceptable.

“That was a neat
trick you did with the kreenit,” the Voran offered, after he had cooked in
silence for some time.  He lifted his brown eyes to peer at him over the
flames.  “Can all Welus do that?”

Shael snorted. 
“Of course not.  I am the
prince
.”

“Huh.”  He
turned the meat-covered sticks.  “Any Welus read minds or melt stone or any of
that fun stuff?”

Shael thought of
Twelve-A and grimaced.  “No.”  Whatever he was, Twelve-A was
not
Welu.

“Oh.”  The Human
sounded almost…disappointed.  “So you were all alone…wherever you were?”

“Of course.  The
weaklings were afraid of the politicians, so we had to keep our work secret. 
Doctorphilip would come to deliver my food and study my warrior traits, but the
other servants did not speak Jreet.  It helped keep what we were doing secret
from the skulkers.”

“I’ll bet,” the
Voran said softly.  He was watching Shael with an odd look.  “So this
Doctorphilip…  Did he die or something?”

Shael thought
again of the tekless vaghi locking him back in his bed, calling him a
‘lab-rat,’ and his heart started to pound in fury.  “If he isn’t dead yet, he
will be,” he swore.

His campmate
seemed to read his expression correctly.  “He wasn’t that nice of a guy, then,
huh?”

“He was a lying
skulker.”  Shael grunted and looked away, ending the conversation.  The awkward
silence fell between them again.  Shael felt too hot along his shoulders, back,
and arms, and rubbed them unconsciously.  The odd stinging worried him.  Had
some of the plants been poisoned?

“You got
sunburned again,” the Voran offered as he cooked.  It hadn’t
looked
like
the Voran had been paying attention, which made Shael’s flush of shame all the
deeper.  He pulled his hands from his shoulders, irritated that he had shown
weakness.  The Voran looked up from twisting the skewers and gave Shael a
tentative glance.  “If you would wear some clothes, you wouldn’t get
sunburned.”

It was the
second time the softling had tried to dress him.  The third time, Shael would
introduce his brains to his tek.  He told him so.

The Voran sighed
and went back to his brooder’s work.

“Voran, what is
a lab-rat?” Shael demanded, after he’d given the furg a few minutes to
contemplate his threat.

His companion’s
hand hesitated in turning the meat-sticks.  “That’s, uh…”

“Tell me the
truth,” Shael snapped.  “I don’t care how bad it is.  Tell me what this insult
means.”

The Voran
coughed and his brown eyes flickered to Shael’s face for a searching moment
before they dropped back to the fire.  “A lab rat is something scientists run
experiments on.”
 

Shael frowned,
now, utterly confused.  “Then it wasn’t an insult?”

The Voran
glanced at him with a flash of uncertainty.  “It’s uh…”  He winced.  “Yeah,
it’s an insult.  Sure.”

“Why?” Shael
demanded, still not understanding.  Of course Doctorphilip had had to run tests
on him.  It was his superior body and mind, after all, that they needed to
study in order to emulate.

His companion
propped the skewers of meat against the fire, reached into his pocket,
retrieved a flask, and took a swig.  He regarded Shael a moment with thoughtful
dirt-colored eyes before he said, “It generally means someone’s worthless. 
Expendable.  Like a rat.”

The furg must
have guessed by Shael’s expression that he had no idea what a ‘rat’ was,
because he gestured with the flask, “Like pests.”

So. 
Doctorphilip had called him a pest.  The sniveling coward would
die
.

“I wouldn’t
worry about him too much,” the Voran said.  “I’m guessing he left you to your
own devices once Congress hit?”

Shael squinted
at him.

Joe gestured at
the sky.  “Congress.  When it
attacked
.”

Shael glanced at
the sky, frowning.  “Congress attacked already?”

The Voran
blinked at him.  “Kreenit?  Skimmers getting shot down?  Corpses everywhere?” 
When Shael didn’t respond, the Voran cocked his head at him.  “Where
were
you?  How could you miss it?”

Shael prickled
at the insinuation that he had intentionally missed the battle.  “My servants
left me underground,” he snapped.  “I would have annihilated our enemies if I
had been aware.”

“So he just
left
you there.”  The Voran sounded stunned.  “How’d you survive this long without
your…servants?”

“I have a
special bed that feeds me and stimulates my muscles,” Shael said, still
irritated that the skulkers had allowed him to miss the battle. 

“Huh.”  The
Voran peered at him, then stirred the fire.  “You know…”  Then he winced and
seemed to reconsider what he was going to say.

“Speak,
skulker,” Shael commanded.  “I’ll not kill you tonight.  You have my word as a
warrior.”

The Voran’s body
twitched pleasingly at ‘skulker’ and he gave Shael an irritated look.  “I was
going to say that there are government patrol bots programmed to blow away any
ships or vessels that make it three rods off the ground for the next Sacred
Turn.  But I’m sure you have the piloting skills to fly past a
bot
. 
Right?”

Shael froze,
because he did not.  “I will need a pilot.”

The Voran’s
snort of disdain was enough to tell him that there
were
no more pilots. 
Seeing that, realizing what it meant, Shael’s heart started to pound painfully. 
“Are you telling me I can’t get home?”

He squinted at
him.  “You can’t get to Welu, no.  They wiped out every spaceport, blew up
every ship, lined up and executed anyone who knew anything about technology
that they could catch.  They threw us back to the Stone Age.”

Shael felt his
confidence waver again, this new obstacle like an ovi to the gut.  “I can’t go
home?” he whispered.  His gut and chest hurt and he felt his eyes start to
water again—obviously another side-effect of the drug.

The Voran’s head
jerked up and his brown eyes found Shael’s.  He cleared his throat
uncomfortably.  “I…uh…”  He scratched the back of his neck, wincing.  “Let’s
just say you could probably make this place your home.  I’m doing it, and I
hate Earth.  Especially Earthlings.  Sisters’ bones, I hate Earthlings.”

“Was
Doctorphilip an Earthling?” Shael asked.

His companion
poked a stick at the fire.  “Probably.”

“Then I, too,
hate Earthlings,” Shael said, feeling his conviction in his soul.  “How do we
kill them?”

The Voran regarded
him a moment, then offered him a stick of meat.  “Earthlings can be hard to
find.”

Shael took the
stick and ravenously tore into his share, downing it in great gulps of his
massive jaws.  “I don’t care,” he said around bites.  “I welcome the challenge. 
I’ll search the ends of this planet until my coils rot off if I have to. 
Earthlings will die for what they did to me.”  He finished his skewer and
glanced longingly at the juices still flowing down the shaft.

The Voran, who
hadn’t yet bitten into his share of the meat, offered his stick to Shael. 
Casually, he asked, “Just what
did
they do to you?”

Normally
disgusted by the idea of accepting a Voran’s charity, Shael knew he would have
little vengeance if he could not rebuild his strength.  Saying an apology to
the Sisters, he took the stick and ate it quickly, before the Voran could think
better of it.  When he was done, Shael wiped the grease from his jaws and said,
“They descaled me, drugged me, sealed the sheath of my tek, and left me to die
in my bed.”

The Voran, who
had been staring at him, coughed and looked away.  “I…see.”  He cocked his head
sideways.  “Descaled you, huh?”

Shael felt his
face heat under the shame.  “Yes.”

“That’s…unfortunate.” 
He poked solemnly at the fire.  “And now you want vengeance?”

“Now I will hunt
Doctorphilip’s kin, his kin’s kin, and his spearmates and children and make
them face my wrath.”

“Ah.”  The Voran
let out a huge breath and dropped his head into his hands, staring at Shael
across the fire.  For several moments, the weakling just watched him.  Then,
“So this…training facility…you came from.  Think you could get us back?  It
might be a good place to start looking for Earthlings.”

Shael snorted
and said, “Of course I could,” even though he had no idea where they were.

The Voran
continued to watch him across the flames.  “I can get us back to the place
where you got attac—where you
annihilated
those men on the road.  From
there, we could follow the blood-trail you left from your previous combat back
to Doctorphilip and his doomed associates.”

Shael sniffed to
hide his own embarrassment.  “We could do that.”  He didn’t, of course, want to
admit that Doctorphilip had done something to his senses to make finding their
backtrail impossible, and that he had been irrevocably lost when the Earthlings
had loosed their kreenit on him.

The Voran
grunted.  “Agreed, then.  Tomorrow, we find this la—
den
you came out of
and begin our hunt for Earthlings.”

Which sounded
reasonable enough.  Without a spaceport or ships, Shael had little else to do
with his time.  Hunting those that betrayed him seemed a good way to entertain
himself.

“So, Welu…” the
man began.

“You may call me
Shael,” Shael offered.  “We shared a campsite.  We plan to hunt together. 
Custom requires it, however distasteful it may be.”

“I’m Joe,” the
Voran agreed, holding out his hand.  And, for some reason, when Shael just
stared at him, wondering when the Vorans started using the names of chattel, he
added “
Dobbs
.”  His campmate then waited expectantly, hand out.

Shael peered at
the Voran’s palm.  There was nothing in it.  Frowning, he peered back up at his
face.  “I already ate your food, Voran.”

The skin of the
weakling’s face reddened.  “No, it was a—it’s a Congie thing.”  When he saw
Shael was not about to offer him anything in return, he let out another huge
breath again and dropped his empty hand.  “Never mind.”

His hunger
satiated, their discussion over, Shael grunted and started curling into the
grasses to sleep.

“You know,” the
Voran said, watching him, “if you’re going to protect the camp, you should
probably lie out in the open, like on that blanket over there.  If you cover
yourself with grass, it almost looks like you’re hiding.”

Shael stiffened
at the idea of Earthlings thinking he, Shael, the killer of kreenit, was hiding
from anything.  He immediately went to lie on the blanket beside the fire.  It
took him longer to fall asleep, since his back was cold, but after being
maimed, drugged, burned, and bludgeoned, Shael was desperate to salvage that
much of his pride.

#

Once he was sure
the woman had fallen asleep, Joe gently lowered a second blanket over her, then
sat back with J.B. to contemplate his new direction in life.

If the one today
counted—which he was going to count even though he was pretty sure it
didn’t—he’d killed twenty-three kreenit since arriving on Earth.  He
could
have killed it—it wasn’t old enough to have the hardened sex-gland—but, looking
at the brains that were still glistening in the open air, he was pretty sure
that honor lay solidly with the sleeping science experiment.

And she
was
a science experiment.  From what little he’d managed to get out of her that
night, he’d put together that A) one of the labs of experiments had survived,
at least partially, B) someone had brainwashed her into thinking she was a
Jreet, and C) they had done a really,
really
good job.  And Jreet,
loveable furgs that they were, were easy to manipulate, given the proper
offerings to their pride.

So, tomorrow,
they were going to go back looking for more.

Why
Joe particularly
cared about finding and saving a bunch of science experiments that thought they
were Jreet was probably a lot more personal than anything else.  Congress had
taken a gigantic dump on every Human Congie that had ever died fighting for it,
including thousands of friends that Joe had known or served with over the
years, and Congress wanted the experiments dead.  Therefore, Joe wanted the
experiments to live long, prosper, and spread their genes across the
continent.  It was pretty simple.