Forging Zero (14 page)

Joe felt a moment of
triumph—until he realized the big kids hadn’t listened to him.  They were still
out wandering, stealing food wherever they saw a weakness.  The littler ones
cowered, saying nothing, allowing themselves to be bullied.

Joe spotted a boy across the room
taking bowls from a group of little kids just sitting down to eat.  He walked
over to him, yanked the bowls out of his hands, and shoved him to the ground so
hard the kid started to cry.

Something about the bully having
the audacity to cry after taking food from hungry little kids made Joe snap. 
He grabbed him by the white T-shirt, dragged him to one side of the room, and
slammed him against the wall.  Into the boy’s face, Joe shouted, “Do you think
you’re better than them?  Is that why you take their food, you piece of shit?!”

The whole cafeteria went silent
again.

The boy’s blue eyes opened to
wide circles of terror.  “I won’t do it again, Zero.  Please.”  His fingers
were half the size of Joe’s where they feebly tried to loosen Joe’s hold on his
throat.  Joe smelled fresh pee. 

Realizing that, Joe felt sudden,
overwhelming self-disgust.  He pushed the kid away from him and turned away,
wiping his palms on his pants.  He felt dirty.  Like he’d just helped his
father dig up the septic tank and had accidentally fallen in.

He was halfway to his own table,
shrinking under the accusation he saw in the hundreds of round, childlike faces
around him, when Libby’s voice made him turn back.  She had hopped onto a table
and was telling the kids how the new bully patrol was going to work.  “From now
on, anytime you see someone taking food, let us know.  The bully patrol will
come stop it.  We’ve got twelve kids on the patrol so far, including Zero. 
Anyone else wanna join us?”

Three dozen hands went up.

Joe stared at Libby.  Was she
really eight?  Up on the table, in front of all the kids, she seemed like she
was five times that. 

“From now on,” Libby intoned,
“You’re all members of Zero’s patrol.  Any time you see someone stealing,
shout, and the rest of the bully patrol will come help you.”

“How are we supposed to eat if we
can’t take food?” a big kid asked.

“Share,” Joe said, despite
himself. 

Libby glanced at him and jumped
down from the table.  Reluctantly, Joe took her spot.  He peered over the sea
of little faces and tried not to remember he had just made a sixth-grader piss
himself.  “
If
you’re nice to your other group members,
maybe
they’ll share,” Joe said.  “It’s what you all learned in kindergarten.”

Behind him, Maggie raised her
hand.  “Joe?”

“Yeah,” Joe said, turning to
her.  “What is it, Mag?”

“I haven’t been to kindergarten
yet, Joe.”

Joe sighed.  “Can someone tell
Maggie what it means to share?”

“I know what it means,” Maggie
said, puffing up.  “It means everybody eats a little less so nobody starves.”

Nebil came back ten minutes later
to an entire cafeteria of kids all sitting down, eating or talking.  His pale
eyes flickered over to Joe once, finding him at a far table in the back of the
cafeteria, before going back to silently scanning the tables from the front of
the room.

After lunch, Nebil took them to
the gymnasium to run laps for two hours.  By this time, all of the children had
bald heads and scars, and several were still red-eyed from crying.  After
everyone rinsed the sweat from their bodies in the noxious alcohol showers,
Nebil herded them to another amphitheater-style classroom.

Joe’s heartbeat quickened when he
recognized the array of weapons upon the tables in the center of the room. 
Trying to look casual, he brought the others to sit in the very front row, as
close as he could get to the guns, wondering if they were loaded.

The battlemasters moved to stand
along the walls as an Ooreiki with a secondary commander’s seven-pointed star
emblazoned on its chest stepped into the room.  Their eyes met and Joe knew
that Kihgl immediately understood why Joe was sitting in the front row.  The
secondary commander gave Joe a baiting look, even stepping away from the table and
gesturing to give him easier access. 

When Joe remained in his seat,
hands fisted, Kihgl made a derisive snort and began making his introduction. 
“You
know who I am.  I’ll be teaching your first class on Congressional weaponry,
after which, Battlemaster Nebil will take over for me.” 
He scanned the
children in the room with his sticky brown eyes. 
“Believe me when I tell
you we will not be able to teach you every single weapon and how to use it.  We
will only go over the basics, and if after you graduate your unit decides to,
say, go after mud-dwelling janja slugs, then they will teach you then how to
use the weapon that corresponds with that task—in that case a Viscous Burrowing
Motionseeker, or an VBM.  Because there are three thousand different species of
soldiers in the Congressional Army and ten times as many different species
Congressional Soldiers have to burn on any given day, Congressional troops have
over thirty thousand different kinds of weapons in their arsenal.  What you see
here are just the most basic forms of Ooreiki Ground Force weaponry.  These are
specifically built for Ooreiki use, which are heavier than can be comfortably
carried by Human hands.  But don’t worry, you Humans will receive your
customized weapons once we reach Kophat.  Until then, the concept is the same. 
We’ll teach you to use these and more, though like Linin said, we’re wasting
our time training you.  Humans are weak, stupid, and ill-prepared to fight what
Congress has to throw at them.”

The alien’s four slender
appendages caressed a gun. 
“I know this because I’m an Ubashin veteran. 
That means I survived the last Dhasha rebellion.” 
Kihgl’s fingers stopped
and he looked up. 
“Only two Ooreiki grounders made it off Ubashin alive. 
Does anyone know why the two of us survived?
”

Hesitantly, one girl suggested,
“You’re good shots?”

Kihgl snorted.  “
Anyone else?
”

“You
captured the Dhasha leader?”

“
Are you an imbecile?
”
Kihgl snapped.

It was Libby who said, “You were
really good at hiding.”

Kihgl’s face folded into wrinkles
of pleasure. 
“Exactly.  The only reason I’m here today is because I was
better at hiding than the rest of my Corps.”

“You
hid?
”
a boy said.  “I thought you were gonna teach us to
fight.”

The little brown frills in
Kihgl’s neck began to flutter as he gave the boy an icy stare. 
“You will
learn soon enough, Human, that some things can’t be fought.”
  He turned
back to the rest.  “
I survived.  That’s why Congress forsook me with this
wretched job in the first place—they thought I might have some insights to keep
you weaklings alive if we see another Dhasha rebellion.
”  Kihgl laughed, a
guttural grunting sound that boomed across the room from the base of his stubby
throat.  It reminded Joe of a toad’s croak.  “
Well, I don’t.  None of this—
”
he spread his tentacles over the equipment on the table, “
Will do you any
good.  It’s all luck and wits, and, since Humans have neither, your survival
will be up to the ghosts, not my teachings.”
 

Kihgl paused, scanning the room. 
“Questions?
”

“Yeah,” Joe said.  “Are those
guns loaded?”

Kihgl locked gazes with him
before he lifted a gun and pointed to a black cylinder above the trigger. 
“If
it were loaded, it would have a glowing blue plasma charge in the chamber,
here, and a plasma clip attached here.”
  Kihgl pointed to an empty notch
settled in the top of the gun.  Then he set the alien weapon down. 
“Any
other questions?”

“How
far can those things shoot?” Joe asked.

Kihgl gave him an irritated
look.  “
Accurately?  Two ferlii lengths, if you’ve got a scope.  The laser is
much more, though it depends on particle and atmospheric interference.
” 
Kihgl touched a longer, lighter gun.

“Which is the better weapon?” Joe
said.

“Depends on what you want to
do.  Plasma packs a lot of punch, but laser is better for—”
  The Ooreiki
stopped and scowled at him. 
“Why do you care, Human?”

“I want to learn to fight.” 
So
I can blow the rest of your head off.

Kihgl stared at him for so long
that Joe thought he was about to get clobbered.  Abruptly, he said,
“I’m
wasting my time.  You’re all Dhasha fodder, anyway.”
  He gathered the guns
into his boneless arms and strode from the room.

Joe was outraged.  Kihgl hadn’t
even bothered to tell them the names of the weapons.

Joe led the others back to their quarters,
ruminating on this.  When they got back to the barracks room, black Congie gear
lay in piles beside their beds, neat and new.  Compared to the flimsy white
skivvies they’d been wearing, the rugged black gear seemed…ominous.  Joe,
Scott, and Libby were the only ones who could even lift the rifles.  After
determining they weren’t loaded, then determining there were no actual
clothes
to wear in the mess, Joe fiddled with the alien buckles, harnesses, and straps,
trying to figure out how to put his gear on.  Finally, he threw it aside in
frustration, startling the other kids.

“They
don’t want to teach us,” Joe said.  “None of them do.”

“Why not?” Scott asked.

Joe sighed and sat down against
the wall.  “Maybe they’re afraid of us.” 

Libby looked up shyly from where
she was fiddling with the piles of black alien gear.  “They are.  They’re
holding Earth hostage.  That’s why they took us kids—they did it to ruin the
next ten years of our military.” 

Joe gave her a weary smile. 
“Even with our military at full strength, Lib, the government couldn’t stop the
Draft.”

“Yeah,” Libby said, gesturing at
the other kids in the room, “But what about twenty years from now, when we’ve
got our hands on their technology?  It would be a different story, wouldn’t
it?  We might not win, not with Dhasha fighting for them, but we could give
them a hard time.  It works out better for them if they don’t have to deal with
our generation until Earth’s had a chance to adjust.  See, if we grow up here,
in space, the little kids like Maggie won’t remember anything except what the
Congies tell them, so they’ll be able to make us like them and forget about
Earth.  Then, if Earth rebels, they send us back to fight and Earth ends up
being put down by
humans,
not
aliens,
so Congress isn’t the bad
guys, it’s us, the kids who got brainwashed and turned traitor.”

Joe stared at her.

Libby’s enthusiastic expression
suddenly disappeared, and she lowered her head and looked away.  “Never mind. 
I’m probably wrong anyway.”  She went over to a corner and sat down, refusing
to meet his eyes.

“I
wanna go home,” Elf whimpered.  He looked terrified by the piles of gear.  “Can
we do that, Joe?  I don’t wanna touch the guns.  I miss my dad.  He told me not
to touch guns.”

Joe tore his eyes off of Libby,
still a little stunned by what the eight-year-old had pieced together.  He
forced himself to smile at Elf.  “We’ll get you home.  It might be a hundred
years from now, at the rate they’re adding time to our enlistments, but I’ll
make sure of it, okay?”  He glanced at the alien rifles.  “Until then, you need
to do what the aliens tell us, all right?”

Elf’s eyes widened.  “A hundred
years
? 
You think we’ll live that long?”  He lowered his voice conspiratorially.  “I thought
only
Santa Claus
lived that long.”

Monk frowned.  “There is no—”

“With all the drugs they’re
feeding us?” Joe interrupted quickly and loudly, giving her a pointed scowl. 
“Hell, who’s to say we wouldn’t live three times that?” 

“Somebody who shoots us,” Libby
muttered from her corner.

Joe glanced at her.  “Yeah, I
guess there’s that.” 

Libby peered at the floor, the
bald ebony dome of her skull soaking in the reddish light.  Joe wondered what
she was thinking, and why she constantly refused to meet his gaze.  He still
couldn’t believe her mother had told her she was ugly.  She was one of the
cutest kids he’d ever seen, and had the pert chin and delicate features of a
future supermodel.  If it weren’t for her teeth, she’d be beautiful—the type of
eight-year-old they put in clothing magazines and on TV.  And teeth could be
fixed.

“Am I getting any bigger, Joe?”
Maggie asked, flexing her bicep.

Joe turned away from Libby,
suddenly feeling the injustices of the world as if they were leaden weights
strapped to his shoulders.  Halfheartedly, he said, “I’m not sure.  We should
start keeping track.”

“Okay!” Maggie cried.  “Mommy
used to mark it on the door with a pen.”

“Then we need a pen,” Joe said,
glad they didn’t have one.  The last thing he wanted to do was track just how
freakishly fast the younger kids were growing.

In silence, Libby got up, went to
her pile of gear, and rifled through it until she brought out a black marker. 
She handed this to Joe shyly, still not meeting his gaze.

He stared at her. 
She
memorized all of her gear already?
  Then he realized that a marker would be
the first thing an eight-year-old kid remembered seeing.  “Thanks, Lib,” Joe said,
taking it reluctantly.  He glanced around for something to write on, finally
deciding on his blanket.  “Okay, Mag, lay down.  Right there.  Hold still. 
Feet at the edge.  Stop
wriggling.
  Okay, we’ll check it again in a
couple days.  I’ll mark it Maggie Day One because I’m not sure how long we’ve
been on this stupid ship already.  What about you, Libby?  You interested?”