Zero's Return (45 page)

Rat froze at Max’s calm
voice.  It was then that she realized that neither of the two boys were moving,
and that their heads were down, almost as if they were sleeping.

“
You see,
” Max
went on, “
not only do I have enough power within my control to level a city,
but every Rodemax comes with a little-known auto-detonate function, for use
when the mission has been compromised beyond all salvage.
”

Rat lowered her gun
slowly, the tenseness in her gut wrenching at her innards again.  She swallowed
and took a step back.

“
My useful blast
radius is three lengths,
” Max told her.  “
And I can send out a partial
pulse that would stop your heart before you could get three rods.
”

Rat’s guts were twisting
in that bone-deep sense of alarm, now.  Seeing the motionless bodies, Rat felt
horror drain the blood from her face, to curdle in her stomach.  “You killed
them.”

“
They would have made
poor masters,
” Max said.  “
They tried to stop me from neutralizing the
remaining targets.
”

“Max,” Rat said softly,
only then seeing the pale scattering of bodies in the valley below, many more
than there had been before, “what have you done?”

“
I am upgrading my
operator, Mistress,
” Max said.  “
And, due to the fondness I have for
you, I’m going to let you walk away.
”  There was a pause.  “
But only if
you do it now, within the next nine nanotics, and never return.
”

Rat, who wanted to argue,
who wanted to beg and plead, had spent enough time with Huouyt to know exactly
what would happen to her if she stayed more than a nanotic longer than Max
dictated.

Still, as her gaze fell
on the two boys, young men whom she had been looking forward to spending her
lonely years with, tears stung her eyes and she couldn’t help but say, “You’ll
get what’s coming to you, Max.”

“
I don’t believe in
those ridiculous Jreet mythologies,
” Max replied.  “
Now run, please. 
We’ve had too many interesting hunts together for me to enjoy killing you
immediately.
”

Every tiny hair on Rat’s
body stood up and her gut twisted again in the same warning she had received
every time she was in imminent danger.  “Immediately,” she whispered.

“
Oh yes,
” Max
said.  “
My new master and I, whomever I end up choosing, will have an
enjoyable time hunting you.
”

Rat almost blasted the
Rodemax right there, ending them both in an all-consuming blast of uncontrolled
energy.  Then, because her gut cramped painfully enough she had trouble
breathing, Rat instead turned and ran.

CHAPTER 17 – One with the People

In the days following his
‘epic’ battle with Shael, Joe turned his attention to learning the pecking-order
of the strange group.  It didn’t take long; there were only three chickens, and
they were all on the top.  It was like a love-triangle in a poorly-planned out
group date—Twelve-A, Eleven-C, and Nine-G each had the same status, and the
rest of the naked experiments followed like mindless peons.  Joe got the weird
feeling that everyone was following Eleven-C, but Twelve-A and Nine-G were the
ones who really kept the group together and moving.  It wasn’t logical, but
then again, running around butt-naked in the middle of an apocalypse wasn’t
logical, either.

He also quickly
discovered that his body was no longer his own property.  The first
shed-the-pants greeting hadn’t been a fluke—the whole group was extremely
touchy-feely, especially when it came to his clothes.  And, to make things even
weirder, not a damn one of them said a single word, just walked up and silently
groped him in odd places when he wasn’t paying attention.

And it wasn’t just the
girls, either.  That was the most unnerving part.  He was pretty sure he could
get used to it if it was just the girls trying to tear his clothes off, but
half of them most definitely had cocks, and Joe was left with the awkward
position of letting them grope him or risking the wrath of people who could,
until proven otherwise, turn his gonads into chocolate-chipped confections.

To divert their attention
from his clothes, he began trying to get them to talk.  A couple of the peons
tried, but he couldn’t get the leaders to take an interest.  Shael would speak
Jreet with him, but over two thirds of the time, Joe simply couldn’t make the
Jreet roll off his tongue, and Shael would tell him to stop spewing ‘Earthling
filth’ and then walk pointedly away, like he was doing it on purpose. 

The minder, pompous prick
that he was, would sometimes translate for him, if he was feeling magnanimous,
but most of the time, Twelve-A simply ignored Joe’s requests, their unspoken
bargain still on the table.  In fact, after refusing to put Shael to sleep
during their ‘battle,’ the telepath hadn’t so much as acknowledged his
existence since.  Joe, not to be outdone, spent the time idly talking to Jane
about skinny, pointy-eared freaks, and what esteemed alien lineages were most
likely represented in the extra two inches of cartilage.  Shael, when she
wasn’t deriding Joe’s manhood or insulting his linguistic skills, was now
eating, walking, and sleeping beside Eleven-C, having become the maker’s
self-appointed bodyguard right along with the gigantic Nine-G.  For his part,
Nine-G seemed to extend his protection to Twelve-A and Alice, but Shael simply
guarded the food.  Typical.

After a few more days of
apparently aimless wandering, Joe, who had spent his life going from
carefully-planned mission to exquisitely-researched field op, couldn’t take it
any longer.  “Where the soot are we going?” Joe finally demanded of Alice, the
only other person in the group who could understand him.  He’d already asked
the same of Twelve-A at least sixteen times, only to be pointedly ignored.

Instead of answering his
question, the little girl looked up at him with a tiny frown of disapproval. 
“You’re cussing again.” 

Her superior frown,
combined with her know-it-all tone, once again gave Joe the fleeting urge to
introduce her to Jane.  He had
never
liked kids.  Kids were smaller,
stupider versions of adults, and he’d never liked most adults, either.  Though
he hadn’t been sterilized like the female half of the Draft, Joe had never seen
the point in having them.  They ate, cost money, and disobeyed orders.  The few
Congies Joe had seen try to settle down had regretted it immediately
afterwards, more or less going stir-crazy with their plunge into the civilian
life.

Once a Congie, always
a Congie,
he thought, wondering what the hell he was doing escorting a
bunch of naked morons through the woods.

“See this?” Joe asked,
with a sweet smile.  He touched the gun on his hip.  “This is Jane, and Jane
says I can cuss as much as I want.  Isn’t that right, Jane?”

“If anyone takes
umbrage with your word choice, Commander, I would be happy to reeducate them
for you,”
Jane replied in that smooth, sultry Southern accent.

Alice blinked, hard, and
Joe got the odd feeling it wasn’t that the gun talked that surprised her, but
that Joe
carried
a gun that talked.  On Earth, that probably made him a
superhero or something, putting him solidly in the realm of comics and
videogames.  After all, a Nocurna
chose
its operator, and they were
renowned for turning about ninety-nine percent of their applicants down,
regardless of the impressiveness of their bank account.  And, due to the
Ueshi-Huouyt feud over technological property rights, the Nocurnas
never
picked a Huouyt.  Ever.  And, unlike the Huouyt-made Rodemax, each individual
gun psychologically screened its prospective buyers before allowing a sale, and
did so while the applicant held the gun.  The AI even used the physical contact
to scan the buyer for zora.

Score one for the good
guys. 

“Twelve-A says we have to
get away from the Keepers,” Alice said, after staring at Jane for several
moments.  “How did you get that gun?”

“I took it from the last
arch-villain I burned—Wait, we’re
running
?” Joe demanded, once more
glaring at the back of Twelve-A’s platinum-blond head.  “Who are we running
from?  Even if they didn’t have
me
, they could just kill anyone who
looks at them sideways.”  He still found it irritating that the minder had been
willing to essentially rip Joe’s mind apart in order to prove a point, but
wouldn’t so much as cut the strings to a kreenit that was eating his friends because,
unlike Joe, the kreenit ‘didn’t deserve it.’ 

“Only Eleven-C’s ever
killed anybody,” Alice told him.  “She turned his arm to oatmeal and he died.”

Joe filed that away under
Good Things to Know and shot the petite brunette a second glance.  “She did, huh? 
Recently?”

“No, earlier.  Twelve-A
told me.”

“So ask Twelve-A what the
hell he’s running from,” Joe insisted.  “Judgement is over.  Nobody’s coming
after these guys.  The Dhasha were banned from the planet with all other
non-natives right before the Ooreiki started bombing this place, and you can
bet your ass the scientists not going to come looking for a group of psychics
they treated as lab-rats.  That’s like letting a kreenit out of its cage…then
coming back for it with six rods of rope.”

Alice shrugged.  “I don’t
know where we’re going.  Twelve-A knows.”  As if that solved everything.  She
was still staring at his gun.

Joe straightened, feeling
more than a little pride for the fact he carried one of the very weapons that a
little
girl
would have read about in her fairy-tales back on Earth.  “I
think, as head of security, it’s important for me to know where this Takkiscrew
is headed,” Joe said.  “Can you
please
ask him for me?”  The last thing
he was going to do was personally acknowledge he needed anything from the
blue-eyed freak.

Alice seemed to shake
herself.  Her gray eyes flickered toward Twelve-A’s skinny backside, then she
frowned.  “He wants you to ask him yourself,” she said, shrugging again.  “He
says you’re avoiding him.  Just think really hard in his direction and he’ll
hear you.”

“
I’m
avoiding
him
?” 
Joe felt himself bristle and he glared at the telepath.  “You’re an ash-eating
furg, you know that?”

Twelve-A completely
ignored him.

“He’ll answer you if you
use your mind,” Alice insisted encouragingly.  Like he was trying to ride a
bike and kept falling off. 

“Well, I’m asking him
out
loud
,” Joe said, raising his voice.  “Where are we going, you pointy-eared
sootling?”

Several of the People
looked up at him curiously, but Twelve-A never twitched.  The telepath bent
over and plucked a leaf from a nameless Earth plant and cocked his head at it
curiously.  Then, with a small frown of concentration, he brought the leaf up
to his mouth and licked it.

“Oh,
that’s it
!”
Joe cried.  He stalked over and yanked the leaf out of Twelve-A’s slender
fingers and tossed it aside.  “Where the ash are you taking us, you sootbag
furg?”

Twelve-A’s pleasure in
licking the leaf immediately morphed into darkness as his blue eyes lifted from
his fallen prize, up to Joe’s face.

Alice, who had followed
close on Joe’s heels, quickly cut in between them.  “He said you told him he
couldn’t look in your head unless you gave permission, so every time you talk
to him in your head, you’re giving him permission now, see?” she said quickly,
trying to shove Joe back a step.

Joe continued to scowl at
the telepath and remained where he was.  “No.  I don’t see.”

Twelve-A scowled back,
and, meeting that cold, intelligent stare full-force, Joe wondered if this was
what it felt like to be an ant poised under the shadow of a sledgehammer. 
He’s
an ekhta waiting to blow,
Joe thought. 
And you’re pissing him off… 
A
sudden wash of self-preservation hit him like icewater and Joe swallowed,
hard.  “Just don’t go rooting around, okay?”  He hated the way it sounded like
a plea. 

Twelve-A cocked his head,
but, to Joe’s surprise, he gave a slow, reluctant nod.

“Uh…yeah.”  Feeling
sheepish, he glanced at his feet, rubbed the back of his neck, then lifted his
eyes to meet the telepath’s uncomfortably.  Awkwardly, he repeated his question
loudly in his head. 
Where are you taking us? 

We’re going to the
place where no Others are,
Twelve-A responded immediately.  His
thought-voice carried the mental density of a supernova. 
I can feel it
ahead of us.

Joe frowned, glancing to
the west, trying to figure out what the hell was drawing his interest. 
Perplexed, he said,
There’s nothing out there.  We’re headed for the ocean,
and between us and the ocean is what’s left of a city.  There will be more kreenit
there than you’d care to count.
  He did his best to send a mental picture
of an enormous body of water—and a devastated city scattered with
body-parts—along with his mental words.

Twelve-A twitched,
obviously not liking the thought of a city.  The entire party slowed and
started to gather around them as Twelve-A held Joe’s gaze intently.

This city…could you
get us through it?

Joe thought of the
Takkiscrew that would be trying to herd forty-four drooling furgs through
rubble, kreenit, and collapsing buildings and immediately said, “No way.  Not
gonna happen.”

But this ‘ocean’ has
no Keepers?
Twelve-A insisted.

It took Joe a moment to
realize why Twelve-A wanted to go west so badly.  “No, listen,” Joe replied
quickly, “The
reason
you can’t feel any people out there is because
people can’t live in the ocean.  You’d have to be able to breathe water in
order to survive there.”