Zero's Return (32 page)

He was just
throwing his guns and gear back over his shoulder when Shael burst out of the
forest nearby, panting, red-faced, sweaty, and looking utterly furious.  She
saw the kreenit corpse and stumbled to a halt, her visage first one of shock,
then becoming a thunderhead.  “You fought
without
me?” she demanded.

Remembering the
Amazing Exploding-Headed Man, Joe quickly held up his hands in peace and said,
“It was going to kill more of our allies.  I wear special gear that gave me an
advantage.  I didn’t have time to…let you take the lead like I should have.” 
Even then, half a redheaded Human body was sliding out from between the
kreenit’s teeth, regurgitated in the alien’s death-throes.

Shael’s face
twisted in disgust.  “Cowards use such crutches as ‘gear’, Voran.  A true
warrior needs only himself and his ovi.”  Shael looked like she would say more,
but a sound behind them made her turn.

Almost four
dozen naked men and women had climbed out of their crack in the mountain and
now stood in a ragged line facing them on the hillside, several sucking their
thumbs or holding each others’ hands, examining Joe and the kreenit with wide-eyed
curiosity.  Caught under their childlike stares, Joe got the sudden, nagging
feeling of being a new and interesting creature on display at the local
naturals preserve—along with the acute understanding that he was looking at
one-hundred-percent cranium-popping goodness.  He cleared his throat and gave
the newcomers a nervous grin, realizing, yet again, he hadn’t thought something
quite through before he charged in, guns blazing. 

A habit that
he’d been trying to break his whole life.  In Jreet, he said, “Hey.  Uh.  I’m
Joe.”

They stared. 
One of them picked her nose.  A few moments later, one started chasing a
butterfly.  Another bent to pick flowers.

“They don’t
understand you,” Shael noted.  She was frowning at her fellow experiments,
eying them with the same reserved interest a Dhasha would give a diseased
vaghi.

“Yeah,” Joe
said.  His hairs were standing on end at the childlike stares that the
experiments were giving him—those that hadn’t simply wandered off.  Joe cleared
his throat and tried Congie.  “You guys okay?” he asked, scanning the faces. 
“Twelve-A?  I’m the guy you talked to.  You asked for some help?”  His words
produced the same vacant-eyed, slack-jawed response as Jreet.

“They didn’t
understand that, either,” Shael commented, brilliantly.

Joe scooted
closer to his traveling companion, realizing he was standing in the middle of
his very own powder keg.  “So which one is Twelve-A?” he asked her quietly,
silently willing none of the brain-dead experiments to get the idea he was
there to take their butterflies and steal their flowers.

“How by the
Sister’s bones should I know?” Shael demanded, scowling at the other naked men
and women as if they had personally affronted her with their slack-jawed
stares.  “I never saw him, just heard him.”

“And he’s not
talking anymore?”  Joe demanded.  He was trying very hard to ‘send’ his
questions at the men and women gawking at them, but he’d gotten no response.

Her green eyes
went distant a moment, then she grunted.  “No.  The softling is dead or in hiding.”

Dead
… 
Joe swallowed and glanced at the severed torso that was sliding out onto the
ground between the kreenit’s jaws in a wave of regurgitated blood and orange
saliva and felt a wave of disappointment.  “Soot.” 

Seeing the dead
man, Shael grimaced.  “We were too late for Twelve-A.”  And, for a moment, Joe
actually thought he heard
regret
in Shael’s voice.  Then she seemed to
shake herself and added, “But that is the order of things.  A
true
warrior would have defended himself better.”

Joe looked up at
the other experiments, trying to figure out how to communicate with them. 
Congie was out, Jreet was out…  He tried a few words that he knew in Bagan and
Morinthian Huouyt, even trying Mekkvalian Dhasha, but none of it got so much as
a blip of recognition from their intellectual radar.

Getting
desperate, Joe tried hand-signals, doing his best to act out We’re Here To
Help, then waited for one of them to say something, anything, but they just
stared
at him like brain-dead furgs—those who were even paying attention to him
anymore.  The rest were wandering around gawking at foliage, or even climbing
on the kreenit.  Joe watched one of them cut himself on a kreenit claw, then
slump to his butt and start to cry. 

“They aren’t
very smart,” a child’s voice noted solemnly. 

Joe jerked and
turned to the little girl that was standing at the front of the group, her
young face frowning at the crying man on the ground.  She couldn’t have been
more than eight, but was the only one of the group wearing clothes.  The fine
hairs on the back of Joe’s neck and arms bristled, however, when he saw the
massive man holding her tiny hand.  Up close, he was
huge
.  At least a
rod tall.  And wide.  At least two, maybe three times Joe’s weight.  Built like
a battering ram.  Joe had to tear his eyes off of him so he could look back at
the girl.

“I don’t know
what’s wrong with them,” the girl told him.  “I found them a few days ago. 
Eleven-C can make food.”

Joe knew exactly
what was wrong with them, and that knowledge was making him more and more
nervous as the seconds ticked by in what seemed an eternity.  He swallowed
hard, wondering again what the hell he’d been thinking.  Being around
one
of
them was bad enough. 
Forty
, though, was starting to make him itch all
over, like he had three dozen mental crosshairs aimed at his aorta. 

“Look, kid,” Joe
said to the girl, carefully scanning the curious faces of the group, trying not
to envision exploding craniums or exposed brains.  “I
really
need to get
off on the right foot with these guys.  Can any of them understand me?”

“You’re speaking
the weakling tongue,” Shael said, in obvious disapproval.

“A necessary
evil when dealing with an inferior race,” Joe replied distractedly.  To the
little girl, who had shaken her head, he said, “Have you heard any of them
talk?  Maybe in a language you can’t understand?”  Joe carefully examined the
other experiments, the rest of whom seemed to be of normal proportions, except
for a staggering number of weird deformities.  Lots of them had extra fingers or
pointed ears or oddly tilted skulls or eyes that seemed just slightly too big
for their heads. 

“Nope. 
Twelve-A’s the only one who can talk, and he only talks to you if he likes
you,” the girl said.  “Otherwise, he makes you go away.”

Halfway through his
perusal, Joe’s eyes caught on a blue-eyed, pointy-eared, platinum blond who was
huddled behind the giant, looking nervous as hell, more or less using the big
guy as a Human shield.  Painfully aware of Shael’s head-popping habit whenever
she felt threatened, Joe got another gut-curdling wave of unease.  “Hey,” he
said to the girl, keeping a wary eye on the blond, “how about you and I go have
a quick chat somewhere quiet, huh?”

“Why?” the girl
asked, giving him an innocent frown.

As Joe tried to
figure out how to tell her the experiments could kill her, instantly and
without remorse, for, say, stepping on their toes or stealing their
caterpillars, the gigantic man let loose a stream of urine right where he was
standing, while scratching his enormous ass with a hairy hand.

“They pee in
front of everybody,” the little girl informed Joe, wrinkling her face.  “It’s
really gross.  Only my little brother peed in front of people, and he was only
two.  He pooped on the floor, too.  Mama didn’t like that.”

Still feeling
the forty stares around him like the crosshairs of a sniper rifle sighted in on
his spine, Joe said as nicely as he could, “Can you
please
get one of
them to talk to me, you jenfurgling little twit?”  By this point, Joe would
have happily taken his leave—if he hadn’t thought one of them wouldn’t squish
him for the slight.  He more or less felt like a bug stuck in place by a pin
through his shoulder-blades, and it was making him cranky.

“What’s a
jenfurgling?” the girl asked in a curious, singsong voice.

“Something like
you,” Joe replied.

The child gave
him a suspicious look.  “I’m not afraid of you.  Nine-G could turn you into a
pretzel if he wanted to.”  She patted the giant on a thick, hairy calf.  The
dark-haired giant grunted and crossed his beefy arms over his beefy chest,
brazenly showing off his beefy cock.

Fighting the
urge to throw his gear over his shoulder and bolt for the other side of North
America, Joe eyed the kid, then the gawking adults.  Raising his voice in the
most
non-threatening
way he could manage, he said, “Okay, so can anyone
else read minds, now that Twelve-A is dead?  Maybe Eleven-C and Nine-G?  Come
on,
one
of these ashers has to be able to talk…”  He was all-too-aware
of how, with
dozens
of the furgs standing around, badly things could go
if one of them, say, sneezed. 

Even then, the
man that had cut himself on the kreenit claw had stopped sniffling and was
awkwardly climbing up on top of the kreenit’s head, suckling his thumb.

But the child
frowned.  “Don’t cuss in front of them,” she said.  “They’re nice people.  Only
Congies cuss.”

Joe gave her a
flat stare.  He allowed her a tic to take in his profusion of guns, his black
clothes, the short brown hairs on his itching scalp—the hair was only then
starting to grow in—his tattoo, and his drug-enhanced musculature.

Upon seeing the
glowing PlanOps tattoo on his left hand, the little girl blinked and lowered
her voice to a whisper.  “You’re a
Congie
?”  She wrinkled her nose at
him like she smelled something bad.  “Mama hated Congies.  She said they would
hump a goat if they had one, just like Uncle Tyler.  She said he humped goats. 
I’m Alice.  Dad called me Squirt, but you’re not my dad, so you can call me
Alice.  Where’s your uniform?”

Joe narrowed his
eyes.  Children irritated him.  They babbled incoherent, unnecessary nonsense,
asked questions they shouldn’t, and they didn’t do what they were told.  He’d
had the good luck of avoiding them until now, leaving the training of the boots
to Congies with more patience than himself, but on a planet filled with
breeding pairs of his own kind, it was unfortunately impossible to avoid them.

“I left my
uniform on my ship,” Joe said.  Not that he was ever going to use it again. 
With Joe’s sooty luck, it had probably already been discovered and ripped open
by a kreenit—or hijacked by survivors.

“You’ve got a
ship
?”
the little girl squealed, her voice high-pitched with excitement.  “I thought
only
rich
people had ships, not Congies.  Congies don’t get rich.  Mama
said so, except that goat-humper Zero, that’s why Daddy went to business school
instead of off to be a dumb Congie.  I’ve always wanted to see the inside of a
ship.  Did you bring it with you?”  She looked down the hill they’d come from
like she expected to see an interstellar squatting amidst the pine trees behind
them.

“No,” Joe said,
neck twitching, “I left it in a lake to the north.”  The Congressional bots
patrolling after Judgement had been given strict orders to shoot anything that
looked ‘post-Industrial’ in the first three hundred and thirty-three turns. 
That meant the safest place for something like a superlight interstellar was at
the bottom of a lake, ocean, or some other large body of water.

“Really?” Alice
squealed.  “Was it San Vincente?  My dad used to take me fishing there.”

“No,” Joe said. 
“It was up near San Francisco.”

Instead of
dropping the subject, like he’d hoped, her eyes lit up and the pebble-brained
little furg said, “My Aunt Jeanie lived in Sacramento!  Was it Lake Tahoe?  Dad
took me fishing there whenever we went to visit!  That’s a
big
lake.”

Joe peered down
at the child, caught between wanting to use some choice Congie words on her and
the urge to walk away to find some nice, big pine tree to talk to, instead. 
Children—especially
nosy
children—irritated him.  “There was a sign that
said Crystal Springs Reservoir.”

“Oooh…  Okay. 
Can you take me for a ride?” Alice said, clapping her hands excitedly,
obviously having no idea where that was.  “I’ve never been off planet.  Dad
went off planet on his business trips, but Mom wouldn’t let me go.  Will you
take me?  Please?”

Joe’s ship
computers were the best tech that the blackmarket had to offer, and he was
reasonably sure that they could outfly a Congressional Judgement bot, but he
wasn’t going to test the theory for an eight-year-old’s joyride.  “No,” he
said.

Her face
dropped.  “Please?” she whined.

“No.”

She made a
face.  “Well,” she said, taking a distinctly superior tone, “we’re not going
anywhere with you,” Alice said.  “Twelve-A says you’re mean.”  She clung to the
giant’s leg pointedly.

Twelve-A…said he
was
mean
?  Joe blinked at news that the minder was still alive.  He
frowned up at the big guy and his big display.  “So that’s Twelve-A?”  Somehow,
he didn’t seem…gentle…enough to have belonged to the booming mental mountain. 

Behind the
giant, the skinny blond flinched and quickly looked at the ground.

Seeing that, Joe
felt himself start to grin and quickly hid it with a cough.  “All right.  So
which one is Twelve-A?”

“Oh!”  Alice’s
face lit up and her eyes started to flicker towards the blond.  “He’s right
over—dead.”  She seemed to cough, then quickly looked back at Joe.  “Twelve-A
tells me to tell you he’s dead.”

“He tells you
that, huh?” Joe asked, crossing his hands over his chest.  This time, he couldn’t
hide his grin.  “In that case, I guess I’ll have to leave.”