Zero's Return (10 page)

CHAPTER
5 – Rat’s Mission

Rat stepped into
her prince’s chambers to the overwhelming stench of shit and rotting skin.  She
found Mekkval hunched in the center of his chambers in a pile of his own filth,
watching the same ten-minute vid he’d had on replay for the last week.  The
Dhasha hadn’t allowed his slaves to groom him since the Jreet had helped the
Humans escape punishment, and he hadn’t eaten in longer.

“I hear you
haven’t been getting any sleep, my lord,” Rat offered gently.

“A Dhasha
doesn’t need sleep,” Mekkval said, his eyes never leaving the wall-screen.

Rat, who had
been petitioned to approach the Dhasha by his desperate Takki steward, watched
Keval’s death-scene play out twice more in silence before she offered, “This
cannot be healthy, my lord.”

“I trained that
boy for a hundred turns,” Mekkval snarled.  “Swore to my brother I’d care for
him like my son.  He had just started a family.  All his sons were killed, his
mates and female children stolen by a competitor the moment he was dead.”

Rat grimaced. 
“You’d like the Dhasha responsible dead, then, my lord?”

“He broke no
law,” Mekkval said, rage leaving his words a bare whisper.

“Benva and I owe
you a favor,” Rat said.

“It’s already
being taken care of,” Mekkval said, his voice as frigid as ice.  And, hearing
it, Rat had no question in her mind that the Dhasha in question would die
slowly, in great fear and pain.  She actually took a step backwards, a little
alarmed at Mekkval’s vehemence.

Continuing to
watch the screen, Mekkval said, “I have a different task for you, Leila.”

Rat flinched. 
He only used ‘Leila’ when he was about to ask something especially heinous,
something that would likely kill her.  Still, willing to do anything to help
break her friend from his self-imposed prison, Rat said, “Anything.”

“We think a
group of experiments survived.”  Mekkval’s voice was cold, ruthless.  “I want
you to go destroy them.”

Rat gave the
Dhasha prince a reverential bow.  “Of course, my liege.”  Keval had been on
Koliinaat often after hunting down Prime Sentinel Raavor with Zero, and much of
that time had been spent in Mekkval’s chambers, discussing rebel Dhasha with
Rat and her team.  Even being the son of a traitor, Mekkval’s nephew was
probably one of the most decent Dhasha that Rat had ever known, as he refused
to own slaves or participate in the trade of females.  Even
Mekkval
did
those things.  All her prince needed to do was say the word and Rat would have
gladly died to kill the vaghi responsible.

“No one else
knows,” Mekkval went on, “but I hired a Bajnan to analyze the numbers.  There
is just enough inconsistency in Earth’s finances for there to have been one
more installation.  One that still hasn’t been found.”

“I’ll take my
team and head to Earth tonight,” Rat agreed.  Anything to ease her liege from
his morbid melancholy.

“You will go to
Earth,” Mekkval said slowly, turning from the screen to face her for the first
time.

There was a
hesitation to the way Mekkval said it, however, that gave her pause.  Frowning,
Rat said, “Is there a problem?”

“You have to go
alone,” Mekkval said.  “And you can’t come back.”

Rat froze.  She
had spent the last twenty turns sworn to Mekkval, and she trusted him with her
life.  He had become one of her greatest friends.  Though she hadn’t trusted
him at first—had actually fought the idea of working for him—he had proven to
be a wise and benevolent leader, something she never would have guessed from a
Dhasha.  After the first tense two turns of dispatching rogue Dhasha for him,
she had eventually begun to see the depth of his empathy and understanding for
the universe.  Never once after her initial capture had she questioned his
requests, disobeyed his orders, questioned his directives.

“No.”

The word left
her lips before she realized what had happened.  Once said, however, she did
not take it back.

Instead of
responding with anger, Mekkval gave her a long, unhappy look, his green eyes
like dying, egg-shaped emeralds set into his rainbow-scaled head.  “You can no
longer work for me, Human.  After Earth begins its Sacred Turn for penance, any
Human caught off Koliinaat will be killed.”

“Let them try!”
Rat snapped.  “I follow you to death, my prince.”

“I would be
breaking Congressional law if I brought you back afterwards,” Mekkval said. 
“The same laws I am tasked to uphold.”  He twisted to face her, lowering his
massive head to touch her chest with his scaly lips in a gesture of Dhasha
friendship.  “And I would be tossed from the Tribunal if I sent non-native
species back to Earth at the start of its Sacred Turn.  What if your Jreet or
Huouyt found a mate and bred?  I can’t have that on my conscience.  But the
abominations and their stewards
will
die.  You understand?”

Shaking, Rat
looked away.  She lived for her prince.  She had blood-bound to him, in a
ritual overseen by her Sentinel.  She had chosen to serve, and, as the turns
had passed, she had been able to imagine no other life for herself.

“These
experiments that escaped must be killed,” Mekkval said.  “If they live, it
could…change everything.”

Frowning, Rat
jerked her head back up to look at Mekkval.  The enormous Dhasha was once again
watching the video of his nephew’s death forever playing out on the wall behind
her, examining the way a single, shaking, naked female Human had stepped up to
the lines of Dhasha and closed her eyes.  A moment later, Keval and two dozen
other Dhasha commanders simply jerked and collapsed in lifeless piles of flesh
and scales.

The perfect
weapon
, Rat thought. 
With one of those at our backs, the Dhasha would
never rise again.

Then, belatedly,
she realized that
nothing
would ever rise again—because there could be
no freedom.  Personal choice, individual thought, all of it would be gone.  The
weapons, once loosed, would take over.  The telepaths would kill their way to
the top of the Congressional hierarchy…

…and stay there.

Mekkval was
right.  It would change everything.  She swallowed down bile.

“You see how
important this is?” her prince asked softly. 

Watching the
scene of his nephew’s death continue to replay on the wall, Rat slowly nodded.

“My vote was to
annihilate the planet,” Mekkval said.  “Start over.  Aliphei was with me.  But
the soft-hearted Ayhi petitioned Daviin and the damned Jreet refused to put in
his vote.” 

Rat frowned. 
“The
Ayhi
backed Earth?  Why do they even
care
?”  She knew from
her decades with Benva that the Jreet believed, wholeheartedly, that the
Ayhi—the gentle, harmless, algae-eating Ayhi—were living demons of their ninety
hells.  Aside from the black Jreet herself, there was nothing that could calm a
room of warring Jreet faster than a single Ayhi raising its proboscis for
silence.  That they had taken Humanity’s side was odd enough it made her spine
prickle.

But Mekkval
wasn’t paying attention.  Instead, he was gnashing his teeth again at the
screen.  “Cowardly worms.  Takes three votes to authorize an ekhta, and Daviin
instead insists on leniency due to that stupid Jreet legend.  First time in ten
thousand turns the Ayhi raise a single voice of dissent in the Regency, and
it’s over
this
.”  Mekkval made a frustrated backhanded swipe at a
priceless piece of Ooreiki yeeri pottery, shattering it and scattering
head-sized pieces across the filthy room in a spray of colorful glass shards. 
Most of the room was in similar disarray, as Mekkval hadn’t allowed any of his
Takki inside to clean it up.

Rat watched the
pieces of priceless artifact glitter and spin where they had fallen in smears
and clumps of Dhasha shit for a moment before she said, “Do you know where the installation
is?”

Mekkval
hesitated and gave her a long look.  “The North American continent.  Between
the western coast and the desert.”

Rat took a shaky
breath and let it out between her teeth.  “I’ll need coordinates.  Best that
you can provide.”

Mekkval, who
obviously hadn’t expected her to agree, hesitated.  “It’s your last mission. 
If you go, you will die on Earth.”

“Then I will die
in your service, as was my oath,” Rat replied.  “How do you plan to get me past
the telepath?”

For a long
moment, Mekkval just peered at her.  Then, almost suspiciously, he said, “It
took my Bajnan team three rotations to hack enough files to come to that
conclusion.  How did you know there’s a telepath?”

She smiled at
him.  “How else would an entire installation go unnoticed?  It paid off a
Geuji?”

Mekkval
grunted.  Then, almost reluctantly, he said, “I had a device made.  It imitates
random human brain-waves.  Thousands of them at once.” 

“To blank out my
signal,” Rat agreed.

“We can’t black
you out completely, but we can make you a mite in a refuse heap,” Mekkval
replied.  “It will be hard for a telepath to single you out, but it could be
possible, so kill them before they have a chance.”

Rat grunted. 
“And you want them all dead?  Not just the telepaths?”

“
All
of
them,” Mekkval growled.  “The experiment documentation listed out three types: 
Movers, minders, and makers—telekinetics, telepaths, and telemorphs.  There
were even some attempts at making Huouyt-Human hybrids, though we found only
one living example of it, and he escaped.”

Rat’s brow
creased in a frown.  “Escaped.”

Her prince
tightened his ebony claws into the floor, carving holes into the expensive
tile.  “Zero’s team freed him, after Neskfaat,” Mekkval growled.  “It was
quietly overlooked because that same team consisted of a Tribunal member, the
Peacemaster, a Bagan hive-lord, and a living legend.  The hybrid is not
important, though.  He’ll die in time, and his sexual organs are
non-functioning.”

Rat froze, picks
of ice suddenly carving away at her veins.  Thinking of Forgotten—and how
nothing the damn Geuji had done had been happenstance—she said, “Why would Zero
and his team free a Huouyt-Human hybrid?”

“Because the
Mothers hate us.”  Mekkval made an irritated clack of his triangular black
teeth.  “The experiment was Zero’s brother.” 

Rat felt a
sudden wash of tingles up her spine.  “The genius?  I thought he was dead.” 
She had
seen
the video of his execution.

Mekkval
grunted.  “Faked.  My agents wanted to interrogate him out of the public eye,
figure out where he’d gotten the experiment schematics.”

“What did he
say?” Rat asked.

Mekkval gave an
irritated bat of his paw.  “The maggot claims he got drunk, hacked into the
computer of one of the installations, downloaded the technology, and
experimented on himself because he was
bored
.  They say he was a genius
before, but now he’s…something else.”

“Half Huouyt,”
Rat breathed.  She would have no problem putting a round through something like
that, even if it
was
Zero’s brother.

“If you catch a
sniff of him down there, be careful,” Mekkval commanded.  “There’s reports he
might read minds.”

Rat’s frown
deepened.  “You’re joking.”

“Would I
joke
about something like this?” Mekkval snapped, slamming a paw into a support
pillar.  The hollow titanium alloy shredded, cutting the lights to one section
of the room and leaving electrical cables sizzling in the open air.  The Dhasha
had begun to pant, neon-orange drool slipping from between his razor-sharp
teeth to spatter upon the shit-covered floor.

“And Zero freed
him.  After he was already dead.”  Meaning they could no longer officially look
for the hybrid without admitting they had faked
another
death in front
of the masses.  Public perception was already at an all-time low with rumors of
mind-control chips and Regency corruption, and revealing another fraud like
Forgotten’s public ‘confession’ would have only increased tensions. 

As she
considered that, dread built in Rat’s gut, spawned by the knowledge that the
Geuji’s plan must have taken one more unseen step twenty turns ago, something
they could not have predicted.  That the same multi-species groundteam Forgotten
had hand-picked for Neskfaat had released Zero’s brother, a
genetic hybrid
,
could not be chance.  The idea that they were about to yet again take part in a
Geuji’s game was so unnerving to Rat that her back prickled.  That gut-deep
feeling of danger she always got before attempting to do something that would
get her killed started to send throbbing tendrils of anxiety through her lungs
and spine.  “You realize Forgotten is part of this somehow.”

“Yes!” her
prince snarled, hurling another priceless artifact across the room in voiceless
rage.  “And he killed my nephew!”  He started to pace again.

“But he
specifically
wanted this hybrid—Zero’s brother—to live.  Why?  What’s special about him,
other than he’s a genius?”

The prince
sneered.  “The hybrid is a secondary concern.  An itch, nothing more.  The main
concern is finding the telepath.”

Rat found Mekkval’s
dismissal somewhat odd.  The telepath could not possibly have been involved in
his nephew’s death, and according to Congressional law,
all
of the
genetic experiments were equally in need of extermination to prevent the spread
of artificial genes.  More importantly, Forgotten had obviously taken a
personal interest in Zero’s brother.  That bothered her.  The last time the
Geuji had taken a personal interest in something, a planet had been
obliterated, a Tribunal member died, and a hundred and thirty-four Dhasha
princes were executed.