Zero's Return (31 page)

Joe sighed.  “I
was asking if Twelve-A is inside the compound.”

Shael regarded
him disdainfully a moment, then Shael’s pretty green eyes went slightly
distant.  “No,” she said, after a moment.  “He took the others over the hill. 
They’re getting eaten by another kreenit.”

Joe froze and
waited for her to correct herself.  When she didn’t, he said, “What?”

She gestured
disgustedly at the mountain.  “The weaklings don’t know how to fight.  They’re
holed up in a cave, whimpering like cowards.  He says Nine-G is getting tired
and the kreenit is digging them out one at a time.  It’s eating them slowly
because it’s swallowed enough it’s no longer hungry.”

Joe blinked. 
“Well, go tell him to kill the kreenit.”  He knew that was more than possible. 
He’d seen the Dhasha regiment get murdered on live feed.  Kreenit were, in
essence, just much larger and stupider Dhasha.

Shael’s eyes
went distant, then she gave a snort of disgust.  “Twelve-A says he’s not going
to kill anything, ever again, and the others are too scared to reach their
war-minds.  Nine-G is getting tired, but he can’t kill it.  The furg is too
stupid to understand its weaknesses.”

Joe blinked at
the idea that the minder—a military experiment in genetic weaponry—was refusing
to kill anything.  When she didn’t correct herself, he demanded, “Twelve-A’s
just gonna let the kreenit
eat
them?”  When that was clearly exactly
what was going to happen, he said, “Fine.  Tell me where they are. 
I’ll
go kill it.”  Knowing just how little time it took a kreenit’s monomolecular
talons to dig through solid stone, and how voracious its appetite was, Joe
slammed Jane back into her holster and said, “Which way?”

Shael frowned at
him.  “Which way to what?”

“
Save
them!” Joe cried.

Her scowl
deepened.  “You want to
save
them?”  As if he’d suggested he wanted to
give himself gangrene.

“Yes, damn it,”
Joe growled.  “Ask Twelve-A where he’s at.”

She gave a
derisive snort.  “They’re not worth your time, Voran.  They can’t even defend themselves,
thus they deserve to die.”

Joe decided
not
to mention the way he’d found her, tied up, naked, and the object of a
shoving-match between three hygienically-challenged thugs in the middle of an
abandoned road.  “Yes, but you told me you enjoyed Twelve-A’s company.”

Her face
fluttered with momentary uncertainty before she raised her chin and said, “He’s
a weakling.”  And that, apparently, was that.  She started walking around the
trucks and SUVs, paying special attention to the tires.  “These are only usable
on flat ground,” she snorted.  “Just how primitive
is
this species,
anyway?”

Realizing that
she was completely content to let Twelve-A die due to the Jreet belief that
warriors were the only legitimate breathers of air, Joe went out on a limb and
chanced, “Twelve-A might be able to find Doctor Philip.”

Shael frowned a
little, her eyes going unfocused.  “He says he killed Doctor Philip.”

“You see?!” Joe
demanded, his voice growing thin with desperation.  “A warrior.  He avenged the
wrongs done to you.  He’s just tired from the fight.  Now where is he?”

Shael sniffed
and picked gravel from the treads of the tire.  “Killing a weakling does not
make one a warrior.”  Her fingers found half a dragonfly and pried it loose,
then held it up to the light, apparently fascinated by its wings.

Joe narrowed his
eyes and was about to give her the straight scoop about weaklings and Jreet and
naked chicks with attitude problems letting her friends get killed, when a
titanic mental sledgehammer hit the gong of his mind and a gentle voice said,
We’re
west.  Past the fence that Nine-G broke.  Up the hill.  Please hurry.  It just
ate another one.  I’m too close to the exit.  I’m going to be next.

Flattened by the
mental voice, Joe grunted and steadied himself on a car.  “Burn me,” he
whispered.  “Oh burn me, burn me.”  Feeling that kind of inescapable power, his
first, gut-deep instinct was to run.  Run hard, run fast, and never look back. 
He swallowed and glanced at Shael, who was still examining her dead dragonfly, apparently
not having heard the mental plea.

Nine-G is too
tired to keep it away anymore and I can’t make the others go into their
mindspace,
Twelve-A told him. 
I tried making it go away, but it keeps
coming back.  Its mind is too…repetitive.  I can’t stop it.  Please help.

Swallowing hard,
Joe fought the dual vertigo and desire to bolt, then steadied himself and
thought very strongly of what passed for a kreenit brain, and how one could
dismantle it from the inside.

There was a
momentous wave of uncertainty on the minder’s part. 
I don’t kill things
anymore,
he said.  Which meant, to all appearances, he wasn’t going to help
Nine-G kill things, either.

“Why not?!” he
cried, still feeling the colossal mental fingers grasping Joe’s mind in their
palm.  “The kreenit is killing your friends!”

There was a
long, nervous hesitation.  Joe could feel the agonized mental debate on the
other side. 
A Human shares life, just like a kreenit.  The kreenit is only
doing what it’s meant to do.  Why kill it?
  Then, just like that, the voice
and the mountainous presence was gone, leaving his mind ringing with the
contact.

“Ash,” Joe
grunted, holding his head.  “Burning ash.”

Shael scowled at
him over her dragonfly carcass.  “What is this beast?  Does it actually fly?” 
She jiggled the gossamer wings in the harsh afternoon sun.

“Your friend
needs help,” Joe said, turning to look west.  He found the torn fencing at the
far end of the parking lot, where a large section of the razor-wire fence had
been ripped apart and wadded up by some great force.  Leaving Shael with her
insect, Joe found the trampled flora of many dozens of bare feet, and he
immediately took up the trail, moving as quickly as he dared.

Behind him, the
woman shouted, “Where are you going, Voran?!”

“I’m off to kill
a kreenit,” Joe shouted back.  “Huddle here and stay out of sight if you’re
afraid, Welu.  This is
warrior’s
business.”

And, though she
could have popped his cranial zit for the slight, her eyes widened and she
raced after him like he was headed to a pleasure-palace on Kaleu.  With his
longer legs and Congie boots, however, Joe easily outdistanced Shael up the
steep and rocky terrain.  Behind him, he heard her yell of frustration and the
snaps of trees as the forest started to flatten again in her bid to keep up.

Joe heard the
kreenit—or, rather, the man it was eating—long before he saw it.  His ragged
cries came from the terrified lips of a dying thing, which Joe recognized from
many places, many battles.  Desperate, wondering if it was the telepath’s
screams, Joe put on a final burst of speed to reach the experiments.

The kreenit lay
in a circular swath of annihilated forest, playing with a screaming redheaded
man like a Dhasha with a Takki.  The man was missing an arm and part of his
face, displaying white cheekbone underneath.  As Joe slowed to find a good
firing position, the beast grew tired of its game, snatched up the man’s body
in its jaws, and swallowed what was left of him whole.  Then, almost lazily,
the kreenit stretched and turned back to the dark hole it had torn into the
mountain.  In the shadows beyond the jagged claw-marks in the stone, Joe could
see dozens of terrified faces huddled together before the kreenit’s head
disappeared into the cavern with them.

Inside the
cavern, men and women started screaming.

Desperate, now,
Joe brought up Jane and sighted in on the back of the kreenit’s skull.  There
was a greasy, purple, six-inch sexual scent-gland that Human PlanOps lovingly
referred to as the G-spot right between the horns, and it was one of the only
patches on a kreenit that wasn’t covered with ultra-hard, reflective scales. 
If hit with enough energy, it could short-circuit the kreenit’s equivalent of a
cerebral cortex for a few minutes, giving its handler enough time to put it
back under restraints.  Or, in this case, kill it.

Unfortunately,
Joe didn’t have a clear shot at the back of the kreenit’s head—which jerked up
and out with a new screaming victim in its mouth—so as a last resort, he
hurriedly put two blasts in the tip of the kreenit’s tail—the last dig of which
was a scaleless sensory appendage used as much for feeling as for balance.  As
the kreenit jerked its head back and screamed, the pain suddenly giving it
something else to think about than the moving hunks of meat inside the cave,
Joe ducked behind his hillock and waited for the thing to give him an
opportunity to hit the tiny vulnerable patch at the back of its head.

The wounded
alien screamed and ripped the man he’d pulled from the cave in half, ragdolling
and flinging the pieces in fury, spreading gore in all directions.  Then, once
there was nothing left of the man, it howled and tore at the mountainside
behind it in a blind rage.  In the tantrum that followed, the monster turned
toward Joe and started clawing up the hillside, shredding rock, undergrowth,
and trees and hurling the splintered pieces down the mountain, but not giving
him a good shot.  Getting desperate, knowing that it would only be seconds
before the kreenit—who saw with heat-vision in addition to the regular light
spectrum—noticed him, Joe raised his gun just above hillock-level and fired at
a good-sized pine behind the beast in an attempt to get it to turn around.  The
titanic creature roared and twisted, zeroing in on the buzz of plasma, then
immediately started tearing the tree to pieces with its two-foot-long black
talons, showering the surrounding area with wood-splinters the size of Human
legs.  Joe was pretty sure the beast even ate some of it, plasma and all.

Only after
reducing the tree to pungent debris did the kreenit lift its head to roar,
bringing its skull above the line of its back.  In that moment, Joe found his
shot.  He said a prayer to the Dhasha mothers, asked the Jreet Sisters not to
screw with him for just a few seconds, and pulled the trigger twice in rapid
succession. 

Even with Jane’s
AI targeting and Joe’s rotation of kreenit-killing behind him, the first two
charges dissolved one of the animal’s wicked black horns instead of their
target.  Joe inwardly cursed and, before the kreenit could twist to
investigate, fired again.

The Sisters had
apparently decided to only screw with him a
little
this time, because
the third shot hit the nerve bundle squarely.  The kreenit shrieked and
stiffened as the energy-burst to its pleasure-center temporarily
short-circuited its animal mind.  Then, like an AI that had gotten its
power-source yanked, the massive creature tumbled sideways, rolling down the
hill for several rods, its titanic body crushing trees and shrubbery until it
hit a boulder outcropping and stayed there.

Starting his
mental stopwatch, Joe threw his gun over his shoulder and bolted for the
twitching, rainbow-colored body, the thrashing legs of which were even then
tearing up huge swaths of the hillside.  Once he reached the massive animal,
Joe dropped his pack and yanked out Prime Sentinel Raavor’s ovi, then hesitated
to make sure the beast was still breathing.  Every once in a while, though it
was rare, an energy-burst to the back of the head could actually kill a kreenit.

Of course,
Joe
had no such luck.  The damned thing was actually starting to recover by the
time he got there, its huge sides heaving as it sucked air into its lungs in
hurricane-force pants that were flattening the undergrowth with each
out-breath.  Its legs had stopped twitching, a sure sign that it would soon
wake.

As quickly as he
could, Joe went to work cutting the shield-sized, glass-smooth rainbow scales
from the kreenit’s chest.  Under the unbreakable outer layer was another layer
of smaller, golden scales, which could be easily hacked away with his knife,
exposing thick purplish skin.  The kreenit’s hide was almost as tough as the
scales themselves, so he ended up quickly sheathing the ovi and using his full
strength to chop a hole into it with the axe he had taken from a ravaged sports
retail store a few towns back.  The kreenit began to bleed, a dark purple
liquid that was thin like water, but clotted quickly.  Even as Joe dropped the
axe and reached for the plasma rifle, the blood stopped flowing.

The kreenit snorted
and moved its legs, its monomolecular, scythelike talons slicing through
another layer of undergrowth a dig from Joe’s knees.  Joe grabbed his rifle
and, as the kreenit grunted and started to rise like a drunken colossus around
him, shoved the muzzle of the gun into the bleeding hole he’d created and
pulled the trigger.  Then he yanked the gun free and bolted as fast as he could
down the slope.

The kreenit let
out a scream and lunged to its feet with enough force to make the ground
shudder, pawing at the air and brush with ovi-sharp claws.  When it finally
realized that there was nothing physically attacking it, the kreenit started
thrashing, tearing up everything on the hillside around it.  By the time the
plasma had eaten through its internal organs, several acres of old pine had
been flattened.  It fell slowly, sliding to the ground more out of an inability
to move than a lack of willingness.

Once the
predator had stopped twitching, Joe tentatively walked back up the slope.  He
found his pack half-buried under the kreenit’s heavy tail, the contents of
which had been crushed in the animal’s death-throes.  His three scavenged MREs
from the ransacked Global Police base in the heart of the San-D/L.A.
megaborough were still good, but the haft of his axe had been snapped in half. 
He cursed and salvaged the head, planning to whittle another handle later that
evening.  His binoculars were miraculously intact, but his water canteen had
been crushed beyond repair.  The rest of his survival kit was still serviceable,
including the matches and the Congie flamestick.  He whispered a prayer to
whatever Jreet god was listening and repacked everything.