Zero's Return (39 page)

Hearing that,
Rat got a weird chill that wouldn’t go away.

#

Rat began to
starve on the seventh day.

Unfortunately
for her, the burden of staying alive and out of sight was eating up a lot of
energy, which she didn’t have the rations to replace.  Which meant she had to
hunt.  Which, while it wasn’t new, was difficult with a plasma rifle. 
Acquiring other forms of weaponry was at the top of her list of priorities,
right under the immediate task of finding something to eat.

Thus, Rat was
stalking through the alien suburbs, hunting the perfectly-manicured parks,
searching for something that looked edible, when a hair-raising chitter made
her jump and twist, Max in hand.

A small creature
much like a vaghi, only hairier, clung to the tree above her head, the sound it
was making so similar to the flesh-eating horde-vermin that Rat took several
steps back, gun raised.

“Back off!” she
hissed, her heart hammering as she looked for its friends.  She didn’t
remember
there being a vaghi-like infestation on Earth, but after seventy-four turns
dealing with aliens and their many ways of killing the unprepared, she wasn’t
about to write off the idea that it was calling its hatchmates from their vast
underground warrens to surround and eat her alive.

The chittering
creature let out another string of vocalizations, the pitch and tone of which
suggested it was communicating with others of its species.  Its bushy tail
began to twitch, obviously some sort of important body-signal.

“Damn it!” Rat
gritted, backing up until her calves hit an outcropping of rock.  “By the
Sisters’ bloody teks, back the hell off!”  Shooting horde-spawn, she had long
ago learned, only drew more of them to the scent of blood, which often resulted
in a feeding-frenzy.  Without her biosuit, that would end poorly for Rat. 
“Get!” she hissed, as loudly as she dared.  She wanted to keep her voice down,
because, only hours before, she had watched a gang of forty-odd swaggering
street thugs wander through the park, bristling with weapons.

Despite her
warnings, the hairy little monster continued to sit there on the branch, its
black eyes boring into hers, irrefutable evidence that it was a predator
waiting for her to show weakness.  It leaned onto the trunk of the tree and
sharpened its huge teeth against the bark, still watching her.  Then it
chittered again and started down the branch toward her.

Heart hammering,
Rat pulled the trigger, dissolving the tiny beast in a spray of blood, fur, and
plasma.  As soon as its diminutive corpse hit the ground, Rat scrambled to the
relative safety of the top of a boulder, waiting for its hungry hordemates to
emerge to devour their fallen comrade.

For long
minutes, nothing happened.  Rat listened, finding it hard to hear over her own
breath.  There was no scuttling, no slithering, no pattering of feet…  Not a
peep from the forest around her.  It was almost as if the creature had been alone. 
Rat was just beginning to relax when, deeper in the alien jungle, she heard
another chitter.

Heart giving a
startled thump, she swallowed and propped her back against a rock to wait.

Hours passed. 
The horde-vermin of Earth were either incredibly smart—something that,
considering the low-nutrient content of Earth and general lack of evolution of
even its most sentient species, Rat found highly unlikely—or they weren’t
interested in following up their advantage.

Still, she had
been tricked before.  Rat waited another hour, listening to the screams and
gunshots and explosions in the distance.  When the chittering did not return,
Rat reluctantly climbed down from her perch.  After a moment to make sure her
movements hadn’t attracted attention, she started down the street at a run. 
Darkness was falling, and she wanted to be as far away from the tiny body as
possible before the sun went down, as it was equally possible that only the
scouts or workers of the horde-spawn came out during the day, and the rest emerged
to feast at night. 

I should have
researched this,
Rat thought, frustrated with herself. 
It’s my
homeworld
. 
I should know what these things are!
  Her reasoning for just sleeping
through most of her flight had been that Earth was the birthplace of Humanity,
so there couldn’t have been anything there as bad as things like the vaghi, the
Dhasha, the Huouyt, the janja slugs, the Dreit, or the Jikaln.  And, since she
had killed vaghi, Dhasha, Huouyt, janja slugs, Dreit, and Jikaln, she hadn’t
been too concerned.  She had simply assumed that, by virtue of landing,
everything would come back to her, and her instinctive Earth-based genetics
would take over.

What she hadn’t
taken into account was that it had been ninety earth-years since she had lived
here, and in the interim, she had spent every moment of that time fighting the
biggest, the baddest, and the nastiest creatures the universe had to offer, so
the paranoia that had kept her alive back then was now seeing masses of
Rastarian blood-shae skittering in the shadows, or Voran eraaks sliding in and
out of pockets of the growing darkness, or Peroshi brain-larva wriggling from
the shade of tree-limbs.

This is
Earth
,
she told herself. 
Humans are the top predator here.  I can
naturally
kill anything on this planet.

When she put it
that way, it certainly made it easier to face the alien world around her. 
Unlike in the rest of the universe, where Rat was simply a unique new menu
course, here, she was an apex predator.  After years of dealing with fearsome
aliens like the Dhasha and the Jreet, Rat thought she could get used to that.

The first
creature that challenged her claim to apex predator was a knee-high animal with
long, red-orange fur and a cacophonic bark.  It was lying beside the gun-shot
corpse of a fat, elderly Human in a fenced backyard in a hillside wooded area. 
There was a lean look to its shaggy body, a snarl on its graying face.  It was
obvious that the animal had been guarding its bounty for some time—there was a
circle beaten into the grass around the huge corpse.

Rat shot it. 
Then she immediately cooked and ate it, only to find it strong-tasting and
stringy, with not an ounce of fat on its body.  Which she found odd. 
Considering the sheer amount of
fat
on the dead man, it
shouldn’t
have
been starving.  And the decayed state of the man’s body was inescapable—as hot
as it was, Rat started to catch unpleasant wafts from the corpse throughout the
planet’s nighttime cycle.  She frowned at the corpse, again wondering why the
creature hadn’t been gorging itself.

Could it have
been saving it for others of its kind?  Or laid eggs in the abdominal cavity? 
Was it
nesting
?

Realizing she
knew
nothing
about her home planet, Rat began to feel queasy.  She
didn’t know what she could eat and what would kill her.  She didn’t know what
produced larva that could devour their hosts at length from the inside.  She
didn’t know what water she could drink.  She didn’t even know if the place had
parasites, and if it did, how to avoid them.

Though the taste
and texture of her kill’s meat were hardly palatable, she cut up what was left
of the animal, wrapped it in sheets of plastic from the ransacked house, and
stuffed it into her backpack.  Then she got up and followed the thugs’ trail in
order to avoid being there when the smell attracted kreenit—or finding out why
it had been hanging around the corpse. 

The old man, Rat
soon found, wasn’t the only one in this subdivision to have been shot.  Corpses
were strewn everywhere, back doors awry, the insides ransacked, the front yards
trampled by hundreds of Human feet.

Seeing that, Rat
had a moment of disconcertion. 
It’s only been seven days,
she thought,
stunned.  Seven days since Judgement, and Humanity was already at each other’s
throats, killing itself for its neighbor’s valuables.  More than once, she saw
teenagers in groups of two and three—kids, really—bolting from a ransacked
house, primitive guns strapped to their hips, their arms and necks bedecked in
gold, gems, and ruvmestin.  Rat didn’t start shooting at them until she found a
still-bleeding corpse of a young woman inside one of the freshly-abandoned
houses, dress bunched up around her waist, and realized that
they
were
the ones doing the murdering and pillaging.  After which point, each time she
saw one of the honorless parasites, she shortened them by a head and left their
jewel-bedecked bodies to rot in the sun.

This place,
Rat thought over and over again, rage burning within her as she watched the
murder and mayhem inflicted by her own species,
has no honor.
  It was a
good thing Benva hadn’t come with her.  By the end of the first week, her
Sentinel would have declared a blood-oath to execute every last Human he came
across, and would have spent the rest of his very long life doing his best to
rid the planet of Humanity altogether.

And, witnessing
the death, violence, and chaos around her, Rat wondered if that would have
really been such a bad thing, after all…

They’re not
normally like this,
Rat had to remind herself.  The Earth she was seeing
was one on the precipice, its population struggling to survive a society-ending
catastrophe orchestrated by aliens who had millions of years of experience
doing just that.

And yet, in
Rat’s long life—a life filled with days and weeks huddling in besieged fighting
holes with a fractional chance of survival, desperately relying on her
companions to survive—it seemed to her that a person’s true nature came out in
the event of a crisis.

The idea that
all of Earth would turn on itself like pregnant vaghi in a little over a week made
Rat increasingly sick.  Mekkval’s warning became ever more prominent in her
mind.  Humans, he had often warned her, were considered by Congressional
scientists to be one of the lesser evolved forms of sentient life.  They were
selfish.  They were materialistic and petty.  Just look at what they’d done to
earn themselves Judgement.  They’d experimented
on their own kind
. 
They’d fiddled with the Human genome with no thought towards its inevitable
spread.  They’d created monsters with the intent to use them on their
neighbors.  Like the Huouyt, they spawned sociopaths and psychopaths
regularly.  Their societies were based on selfishness, not the common good.

And,
Rat
thought, watching the world devolve around her,
it shows.
  As time went
on, more and more people banded together, but not to fight their common enemy,
the kreenit, nor to produce food and survive—it was to murder, loot, and steal
from their fellow Humans.  It was to overwhelm other surviving gangs with sheer
numbers, take their women as trophies and leave the men to bake in the sun.  It
was to kill each other for baubles and food.  Like animals.

Mothers
,
Rat thought, sickened to the core by the outright barbarism around her,
I
want to go home.

Despite her
attempts to relax, to accept this alien place as her new home, Earth’s very
air
kept Rat on edge.  Every planet that she had ever visited had a different
rhythm and feel to it, and Rat had naively thought that the cradle of Human
life would have been more instinctively familiar to her than the alien worlds
she had spent her life exploring.

Now that Rat was
trekking through the alien settlements, however, breathing the alien gasses
without protection, hearing the alien fauna rustling in the background, feeling
the alien insects crawling over her skin, smelling the alien microbes
decomposing the alien bodies, Rat couldn’t help but feel wrong, here. 
Different.  Like a Jreet in a throng of Ayhi. 

What was worse,
once she had realized she was going to be alone with Max for the rest of her
life, Rat had been agonizing over the idea of joining one of the many bands of
survivors that were forming in the wake of Judgement.  She didn’t
want
to be alone.  She missed her friends so badly her chest ached.  She liked
having someone to talk to, especially someone who wasn’t a Huouyt-made AI who
thought it was a reasonable use of resources to calibrate his systems on
unarmed civilians.

Which was how
Max put it.  Those eighty-four kills had been ‘calibrating.’  When Rat had
asked him how many of his victims had been armed, he had told her that none of
them had carried a single weapon.  Not one.  Zero.  They’d just been terrified
people trying to flee a bad situation, who ended up cannon-fodder for a couple
of psychotic kids and their sadistic new toy.

The longer Rat
thought about joining one of the Human groups to survive, the more appealing it
became.  Joining up as part of a security force would give her something to do,
some job to accomplish, and allow her to feel better about the fact that she
had just crash-landed on an alien planet with no means of escape and no allies,
for a friend she would never see again and a mission she could never fulfill.

Yet, the more
time that passed, the less enthusiastic Rat became about rejoining the Human
race.  As soon as the thin veil of custom and law had been stripped away,
Humans had more or less devolved into rabid vaghi.  From the safety of her
scope, Rat watched countless murders, rapes, pillagings, mob beatings, thefts,
muggings, kidnappings—all of that in only ten days without food, water, law, or
anywhere to hide from the massive, man-eating aliens.  Fear, it seemed, had
spread like panic, igniting her fellows’ animal sides, uncovering the very
worst in her own kind.  With so many of their number dying to kreenit or to
thugs, marauders, or rapists with guns, people began to shoot their own kind on
sight, only adding to the rising fear and chaos.  As Rat observed from her
blinds, Humanity’s numbers dwindled to nothing.