Zero's Return (19 page)

She was
definitely
not
going to lose it to a bunch of thieving Human furgs.

Hobbling to her
feet, putting as much pressure as she dared on her freshly-healed leg, and the
rest on her one-and-a-half-days-healed leg, Rat started looking for signs of
their passing.

It wasn’t hard
to find.  The furgs were like Hebbut in mating season, thundering around
without any regard whatsoever to the placement of their feet.

Deciding that
she was dealing with amateurs, and therefore that she could take a few more
minutes to root through the rubble, Rat went looking for her biosuit.

Her suit, along
with four-fifths of the ship, was a charred, crispy plate of fused nannites.

“Ash,” she
whispered, dropping it back to the ground.  No weapon, no food, no suit…

The weapon, at
least, she could handle.  Rat snatched up the medkit, then started searching
the rubble for her pack of supplies.  Her pack, having been in the cockpit, was
less damaged than the rest of her gear, and inside, she found a combat knife
and its corresponding leg-strap.  She found a relatively unscathed canister of
rations under one of the pieces of shrapnel, but she only took a couple,
unwilling to put any more weight on her leg than she needed to.  The guns,
however, had all become unsalvageable parts of the wreckage, most of their
energy-packs having exploded and fused to the ruvmestin-laced hull.

Still, she had a
knife.  She strapped its sheath to her thigh and immediately felt better about
her lot in life.  Going unarmed on an alien planet was…unacceptable.

So was going
without Max.  She’d been with him too long, sadistic bastard that he was, to
give him up now.  Leg throbbing with every step, Rat hefted her pack over her
back and started after the furgs who had run away with her favorite gun.

CHAPTER
9 – S.H.A.E.L.

Shael opened his
eyes, realizing the light inside his bed had gone dark, the voices and images
having stopped.  He was, he realized, hungry. 

Gingerly, Shael
tried to lift his hands, but, as always, they were locked into place.  “Why am
I still here?” he demanded.  “Give me my melaa and let me take a piss, you
skulking cowards!”

Doctorphilip,
the only one of the weakling bipeds who could speak his language, did not
respond.  His bed remained dark, the images withdrawn, the voices silent. 
Outside his bed, Shael heard nothing.

Locked into
place so that his powerful body wouldn’t destroy their insignificant dwelling
with any twitchings in his sleep, Shael’s heart nonetheless began to pound.  It
was abnormal, being left in the darkness.  Not once, in all his turns with the
weaklings, did they forget to feed him.  “How
dare
you leave me here?!”
he snapped.  “I’ll make you all dance on my tek for ignoring me, you
soot-eating furgs.”

The threat
evoked not a single sound from the room beyond his bed.  In a growing fury, he
yanked on his arms to break the restraints that held him in place.  Despite his
great strength, however, the metal sheaths remained solidly attached to his
massive wrists.

“Quivering
Takki!” he screamed.  “Release me!”

More time
passed.  Too much time.  No matter how Shael called or fought his bed, his
caretakers ignored him.  Eventually, Shael had to piss himself.

It was the shame
of the hot liquid running from his bladder to pool under his coils that flipped
a switch in Shael’s mind.  He, the greatest warrior of Welu, had been forced to
lie in his own piss like a penned Takki.  Letting out a scream, he slipped into
his war-mind and watched the world around him shift.  Everything, even the air,
became a foggy blue-green stew of motion.

Shael wrapped a
mental wall around the sea-green motion of the bed-cocoon’s husk, and, with a
squeeze of his consciousness, crushed it, compacting it above him with a scream
of tearing metal and puny electronics.  Because that wasn’t terrifying enough
for the inbred Takki to take a proper lesson from their superior—and because he
was angry—Shael slammed the shattered lid of his bed across the room, through
the concrete wall that separated his room from others, and into the bedrock of
the mountain on the other side.  Though he didn’t see it with his eyes, his
war-mind had a complete, 360-degree view, as far as he wanted to go in any
direction, and he watched the foggy particles of air slip around the heavier
movement of the door until it finally came to a rest embedded in the
mountainside.

“Show
yourselves, skulkers!” Shael snarled.  Surrounding the heavy density of the
cuffs with his mind, he formed a barrier between his wrist and the metal, then
wrenched upwards, easily tearing them free.  “Come out of the shadows you’re
hiding in and face me!”

The cowards left
him in darkness. 

Of course they
did.  Any skulking fool like Doctorphilip would know that he was soon to dangle
from his tek for the slight.  Even then, Shael’s coils were prickling into hard
bumps where the air hit his cooling piss.

“
Face me
!”
Shael screamed.  This time, he wrapped his mind around his bed and hurled it
through the front door, which Doctorphilip kept locked to keep lesser creatures
from wandering upon Shael and wasting his air.  There was a resounding crash as
his bed disintegrated upon impact with the solid stone wall on the other side,
but other than that, there were no challenges, no movement in the corridor
whatsoever.

The skulkers
were…hiding?

The door open
and the hallway outside exposed, Shael saw none of the weaklings in his
war-mind.  When he extended his awareness outward, seeking the furg who would
dance on his tek for leaving him there, everything felt…deserted.  The only
life he could see in the maze of tunnels nearby was a cluster of soft-skinned
weaklings like Doctorphilip who were even then spiraling the foggy green air
away from their mouths in panting whimpers of terror as they huddled together
in the dark.

Frowning, Shael
slid through the door and up the hallway, shoving softly glowing green
particles aside with his body, using his war-mind to guide him in the total
blackness.  He found the group of weaklings huddled by the war-room, staring at
the door in panic.  Shael snorted and wove past them.  More cowards.

“Doctorphilip!”
he shouted into the hall ahead of him, making the weaklings at his back cringe
and whimper.  Shael ignored them.  “Come out and face me!  You die today,
skulker!”

If Doctorphilip
heard him, he did not respond.  Of course not.  Like all the quibbling, sticky
furgs who lived on this miserable planet, he was a coward at heart.  Shael
again regretted ever taking up the task to train them.  He had sworn, on his
honor, he would give these furgs the tools they needed to have a fighting
chance in the Army.  Yet, he had done much less fighting than he had sleeping,
and the furg Doctorphilip didn’t seem to care that Shael hadn’t been given a
chance to do his duty and teach his underlings yet.  What was worse, every time
Shael brought up the fact he hadn’t done any training of his assigned
weaklings, Doctorphilip would tell him ‘tomorrow’ or that his underlings were
out on a training exercise in tunnels much too small for Shael’s massive
coils.  Then he would feed him and send him to bed.  Like a hatchling.

Scowling, Shael
glanced back the way he had come.  He
was
hungry, he reminded himself,
and his servants had always delivered his melaa to his room.  If he wasn’t in
his room when the lazy aliens decided to get off their coils and bring him
food, he might miss it entirely…

No
, Shael
decided,
I will find my own food.  I’m tired of their incompetence.

He had been
begged by the Black Jreet herself to teach these useless furgs battle tactics
and the basic code of a warrior, but thus far, he had spent more time in his
bed than actually instructing his subordinates.  For untold twists of the Coil,
they had intentionally delayed their training.  They had fed him and kept him
happy.  Satiated him.  Lied to him. 
Procrastinated
.  Shael found
himself tired of the planet and its tiny, soft,
stupid
inhabitants.  It
was time for him to go back to Welu. 

And, right
there, he decided he was done trying to train furgs who skulked in the shadows,
hiding from him, avoiding their assemblies, quietly trying to fatten up their
commander so he would be too corpulent to stake them all for their ineptitude. 

As such, Shael
started stalking up the hall, looking for the exit. 

After many
convoluted turns through the twisted maze his weakling underlings had given to
him to oversee, Shael found another group of softling furgs huddled by the
exit, staring with wide, terrified eyes at the outside, a barrier of broken
glass between them and the open air.  They saw him approach from the shadows of
the corridor, noticed the fury in their commander’s face, and huddled in on
themselves in panic, blubbering like melaa.  Shael snorted and moved past them,
too.

He had made it
several digs before he realized the glass was cutting through his scales.

Confused, Shael
glanced down at his coils.

The normal red
of his powerful body had been replaced by a soft, fleshy pink.  Something
seemed to twist in Shael’s mind as he stared down at himself, a connection that
burned as he tried to make sense of it.  It took Shael several long moments of
staring before he realized what had been done to him.

The cowards
de-scaled me?!
  His chest clenched so hard it hurt.  Beneath his coils,
crimson blood began to seep into the glass.  Yet his body, now soft and pink,
bore the truth of the horror.

They had
descaled him in his sleep. 
Descaled
him.  Heart hammering, Shael
reached up to his chest, trying to find the tek sheathe between the large,
fleshy lumps that had been revealed by the descaling.  His tek’s sheath, too,
had been sewn shut, his fingers not even finding the opening.

I’ll kill
them all,
Shael thought, horror mingling with shame.  No wonder they had
left him in his bed and fled.  One of the deserters had defiled him.  Of
course
they would run.  They rightly feared his wrath.

“By the graves
of my ancestors,” Shael swore, watching his blood leak out to slowly puddle
between the glass shards, “I will gather my clan and hunt down every weakling
who ran from me this day and hang their teks and their children’s teks to dry
upon my wall.”  He turned to glance behind him at the soft-bodied skulkers. 
They had made no move to run like the others, and he recognized none of their
faces, so he decided to let them live.  Scowling, he turned back to the exit
and kept moving.  More glass punctured his coils, but he ignored it.  A warrior
could withstand pain.

Once he was out
in the light, Shael hesitated.  He peered up at the alien sky, curious at the
odd yellow ball.  On Welu, the skies were constantly writhing with green, blue,
red, pink, and yellow strands of color, even during the daylight.  Here, it was
just a solid blue, with what appeared to be a sliver of a moon or nearby planet
in the distance.  Odd, how he couldn’t remember seeing anything similar to this
upon his arrival on the planet.

Again, his mind
began to heat and buzz uncomfortably, the headache that followed quickly
forcing him to focus on other thoughts.  Shael needed a ship.  He’d wasted
enough time with these soft-bodied weaklings.  They were too useless to learn
the ways of the Jreet.  One could sooner haul a melaa from its herd and slap a
spear between its jaws than teach these tiny, ignorant bipeds anything about
war. 

Shael set out
across the textured flat stone, seeking a skimmer that could take him to a
spaceport.  It was time for him to go home.

There were
plenty of skimmers laid out on the square of stone, interspersed between
primitive alien land-going vehicles, but none of them would respond to Shael’s
commands.  It appeared that the skulkers here were afraid of theft, something
that was a staking offense on Welu.  Even Shael, having been descaled and his
tek disabled by those he had counted as his allies, would have paid a spaceport
attendant to return the skimmer to where he found it once he was done with it.

Frustrated,
Shael set off along the alien pathway, scanning the thin vegetation on either
side for any hint as to where the spaceport would be located.  The sporadic
undergrowth, tiny trees, and dry grasses were nothing like the thick, vibrant,
life-sustaining vegetation of Welu’s great swamps and jungles.  His snout
twisted with disgust.  The furgs must have been desperate to live in an ugly,
barren place like this.

He continued
down the dirt path until he reached another section of flat stone, this one
stretching as far as the eye could see in either direction.  Shael hesitated,
not knowing enough about this miserable planet to pick the proper direction to
the spaceport.  He glanced at the sky, expecting some sort of traffic overhead,
but the place seemed oddly empty…almost
lifeless
.  Shael’s scale-pores
tightened as he realized he could hear nothing but alien pests and the wind. 

Where
is
everyone?
he thought, confused.  This was supposed to be a great empire,
one with massive militaries and incredible commerce, yet as Shael stood there
in the middle of their road, staring at their sky, he saw
nothing
.

Faced with such
alien terrain, such
silence
, Shael supposed he could go back and wait
for his less craven subordinates to return and pay for their brethren’s
betrayal with a ride to the spaceport.  Perhaps they would even bring him food.

Ruled by your
stomach like a Takki
, he thought, disgusted at his weakness.  Still, it had
been some time since his servants had fed him last.  His great body felt
almost…weak.