Forging Zero (89 page)

Multi-Specieal
Galactic Corps – Prime Corps Director

18-unit
Galactic Corps – Secondary Corps Director

3-unit Galactic
Corps – Tertiary Corps Director

Single-Species
Sector Corps –  _____(species) Corps Director  Single solid silver
eight-pointed star with a solid black interior.

Sector Unit –
Prime Overseer.  Silver eight-pointed star and four inner circles of a Prime
Overseer

Solar Unit –
Secondary Overseer.  Silver eight-pointed star and three inner circles of a
Secondary Overseer

Planetary Unit
– Tertiary Overseer

Force – Petty
Overseer

Regiment (8,100)-
Prime Commander - eight-pointed star

Brigade (1800)-
Secondary Commander - seven pointed star

Battalion
(900)- Tertiary Commander OR Secondary Commander -six pointed star OR 7-pointed
star

Company (450)-
Small Commander - five-pointed star

Platoon (90)-  Battlemaster
- four-pointed star

Squad (18)- Squad
leader (Squader) - triangle

Groundteam (6)-
Ground Leader  - line

Grounder -
point

And
here’s a brief glimpse of ZERO #2,

Zero
Recall:

The
Legend of

ZERO:

Zero
Recall

by

Sara
King

CHAPTER 2:  Zero Recall

“Have you seen this man?”  Joe
held up the age-progression photo of his brother to the dirty glass window.

The hollow-eyed man behind the
booth scratched his greasy beard and said, “A man like that don’t come cheap. 
You a cop?”

“I’m his brother.”

The man looked him up and down
and snorted.  “Yeah.  Right.”

“
Look
at him, damn it,”
Joe said, pointing at the picture.  “We’re obviously related.  Same chin.  I’m
just trying to find him.  I haven’t seen him since the Draft.  He could be
going by the name Sam or Slade, okay?”

The druggie’s hollow, skull-like
gaze sharpened on Joe, for the first time taking in the rash that had developed
around the newly-activated hair follicles of Joe’s face and scalp.  Immediately,
distrust tightened his features.  “You’re a Congie?”

Joe closed his eyes to keep from
putting his fist through the glass and strangling the doping bastard.  “Not
anymore.  I was forcibly retired a couple months ago.  Please.  I’m just trying
to find my brother.  I hear he’s still alive.  Some sort of rejuvenation
technology or something.”

The druggie’s face darkened. 
“Thought you sounded funny.  Get out of here ‘fore I get my gun.”

“Listen, you sootwad,” Joe
snapped.  “I’ve gone through eight other furgs just like you, all of whom said
the same thing, and all of whom ended up telling me exactly what I wanted to
know.  Think about it.  I was a Prime Commander in the Congressional army. 
Been working in Planetary Ops for fifty turns.  It was my job for a good number
of those turns to make ashers like you sing like canaries. You
really
wanna piss me off?”

The druggie eyed him sullenly. 
“You weren’t in no Planetary Ops.”

Joe slapped his right palm to the
window, displaying the tattoo of a green, single-moon planet with a headcom, a
PPU, and a species-generic plasma rifle leaning against the debris ring.  The
tattoo glowed slightly, a cell-by-cell gene modification that caused Joe’s skin
to bio-luminesce.  It was a government nannite tat, and no ink in the world
could duplicate it.

Even as the druggie’s eyes were
widening with shock, Joe once more pressed his brother’s picture to the window.

“Oh, shit, man.”  The addict
behind the window looked paler than ever.  “You’re asking the wrong person. 
He’s a big-timer.  I’m just a wanna-be, man.  I ain’t got no idea where the
Ghost is.”

Joe had to fight back the
frustration he had felt ever since returning to Earth to find his mother twenty
years dead, his brother vanished into the world of crime.  As of yet, every
single person Joe had interviewed had responded in the same maddening way. 
They recognized his picture, but didn’t know anything else about him.  It was
like Sam really was a…ghost.

“So tell me what you know of
him,” Joe said, as calmly as he could.  “Everything you can remember.”

“Shit, man.  Shit.  I ain’t never
seen
him before, man.  Just heard of him.  Shit, I shouldn’t even be
sayin’ nothin’.”  The guy swallowed and looked around like he expected the very
walls to be watching them.  “Don’t care if you
are
his brother, he
wanted to talk to you, he would’ve found you already.”

“I’ve only been here a week,” Joe
growled.

The druggie nodded emphatically. 
“Yeah, man.  If the Ghost had wanted to talk to you, he
definitely
woulda talked to you by now.”

Joe was fed up.  The last seven
days of civilian life had been hell.  Not only did they question him, but
sometimes they outright refused to talk to him—something that had blown Joe’s
mind the first time they did it.  People were rude to him, especially when they
realized he’d been a Congie.  His PlanOps tattoo tempered that a little bit,
but the hostility was still there.  While he got along with every alien species
even better than a Jahul, Humans, his own kind, hated him.

Once more, Joe wondered if he’d
made a mistake in going back to Earth instead of settling on an Ueshi
pleasure-planet like Kaleu or Tholiba.  On Kaleu, he would’ve been treated with
the same welcome and respect as any other of the three thousand, two hundred
and forty-four sentient species in Congress.  Here, he was just one of those
kids that got brainwashed by aliens.  Here, he
was
the alien.  He might
as well have Ooreiki tentacles or a Huouyt’s breja for the nervous looks and
outright sneers he got.  Earth simply didn’t want him.

And yet, the Ground Force didn’t
want him, either.  Not anymore.

Not after Maggie’s final
bitch-slap in front of half of Congress.

Thank you for your latest
reenlistment application, Commander Joe Dobbs, but the Congressional Army is
over-capacity and is no longer in need of your services.  We’ve scheduled your
shuttle back to Earth for tomorrow morning…

Bitterly, Joe said, “Just tell me
what you know about him, okay?”

“They call him Ghost,” the
druggie said.  “Not because he’s hard to find, huh-uh.  Because he—”

“—bleached his hair white and
wears contacts,” Joe interrupted.  “Yeah, I know.  What
else
?”

The druggie’s greasy brow
wrinkled.  “No, man.  Who told you that?”

“Look,” Joe snapped, “Do you know
anything
that might be helpful?  As I see it right now, you’re just
wasting my time.  Just like I told all the other assholes I’ve come across, I
grew up with the little shit and he’s got
blue
eyes and
brown
hair.  Even if he went all the way and had his eye color permanently changed—which,
if he’s really as smart as everyone says he is, he didn’t—his eyes don’t
fucking
glow
.  How stupid
are
you people?”

The guy raised his hands in
surrender.  “Man, I just know what I been told.”

“Really?” Joe barked.  “Then who
told
you
?  Maybe I’ll get some answers from him.”

“I don’t know, man,” the guy
said, rapidly shaking his head.  “I know a lot of people.  I was prolly stoned
at the time.  Karwiq bulbs, you know?  The one good thing Congress brought with
‘em.  You get a good one and it’s like you died and went to heaven.”

Joe narrowed his eyes and leaned
in close to the glass.  “You wanna find out what that really feels like?” Joe
growled.  “I’ll show you, you Takki piece of shit.”

The druggie sobered, really
looking at him now. 

Joe tensed, realizing that this
could be the break he’d been looking for.

“Gum,” the druggie said finally.

Joe waited, then when that was
all that was offered, he blinked at him.  “Gum.”

“Yeah, you know.”  The druggie
made exaggerated chewing motions.  “I hear he likes gum.”

Joe stared at him for several
moments, then his face tightened in a scowl.  “I should break your stupid
neck.”

“Hey, man, you asked.”

“I asked for something I can
use
,”
Joe growled.

“You never know.  Maybe the Ghost
owns a gum factory or something.”

Joe stared at the druggie for
several moments before turning and stalking from the building.  In the
parking-lot, he took out the picture of his brother and threw it aside.  He
slipped inside his civilian
haauk
and pressed his head to the climate-controlled
steering panel.

The hasty plans he had made of reuniting
with his family and returning to his roots had crumbled to dust over the past
week he’d been on Earth.  Fifty-five turns after Joe had been Drafted, everyone
was dead except Sam, and Sam did not want to be found. 

Joe had spent over fifty turns—over
sixty-one years
—hunting down people who didn’t want to be found, and yet
somehow he hadn’t even got a whiff of the little druglord shit’s whereabouts.

“Damn this place,” Joe muttered. 
For seven days, he’d been wandering the planet, wasting his retirement money,
getting no more than four hours of sleep at a time, trying to pin down a ghost.

Joe gave a tired scoff and
wondered what his groundteam was doing on Falra. It had to be more interesting
than trying to find a career criminal who probably didn’t remember him or even
care he existed.

Joe lifted his head and glanced
at the list of contacts he still had to visit.  Six names, none of which he
recognized, all of which had been given to him by the same unsavory sorts that
in the last seven days had tried to murder him, rob him, drug him, rape him,
and in one case, harvest his organs.

Joe had known from the beginning
he wouldn’t get a hero’s welcome upon his return to Earth.  What he had
experienced here, however, left him feeling numb.

They hated them.

They hated every one of them.  As
if the Congies were responsible for Earth’s woes.  As if the kids who had been
Drafted sixty years ago were to blame for Congressional rule.

They didn’t understand.  None of
the Earth-bound furgs would ever understand.  Congress was the only thing
protecting them from something far more dangerous—the Dhasha, the Jreet, the
Jikaln, the Dreit, the Huouyt, and all the other warlike creatures Congress had
found along the way.

Sighing, Joe wiped the rest of
the destinations from his
haauk
memory.  He set it on autopilot and told
it to take him home.

“You’re back early,” the smiling
young receptionist at the desk of the hotel said as he stepped inside, “You
find your brother, Mr. Dobbs?”

“No,” Joe said.

Her smile faded.  “Oh.  I’m sorry,
sir.”

“Don’t be,” Joe said with a
sigh.  “He sounds like a prick anyway.”  He passed the ornate receptionist
booth and took the plushly carpeted stairs to his room—Human buildings still
hadn’t fully adapted to the introduction of the
haauk
, with the older
ones still requiring ground-level entry.  Joe had had the poor sense to choose
one of the more archaic hotels, longing for the memories of his childhood.  At
least the locks were reasonably high-tech.

They were biometric, forcing him
to scan both eyes and a thumb before the door would open for him.

Not that Joe had anything to
steal on the other side.  He would have disabled the security measures
altogether, because they weren’t necessary.  All his belongings—what little
he’d acquired after a Spartan life in Planetary Ops—were still in transit,
carried on a much slower freighter.  He was due to pick them up in just over a
turn—sixteen months, in Earth-time—and until then would have to get his
apartment ready without them.

Sighing, Joe stretched out on the
bed and stared up at the ceiling.  He felt lost.  It had been almost three rotations
since he’d held a gun or worn his biosuit.  Three rotations since Maggie
finally got what she’d been aiming for, ever since Kophat.

Now, without his job, without his
gear, without his
life,
Joe felt as if he were missing something.  It
was a burning ache in his gut, almost like the homesickness he had felt as a
kid fresh off Earth.  Congress could have chopped off an arm and he wouldn’t
have felt the same pangs of longing he did now without his rifle and his
biosuit.

He felt lost.

Joe rolled over on the bed and
squeezed his eyes shut.  He wasn’t going back.  Maggie had seen to that.  After
fifty-three turns of completely screwing him over at every turn, she had
finally won. 
Might as well get over it, Joe.  You’re stuck on this heap.
 
As he mulled over that, the lack of sleep finally caught up with him.  Joe
unwillingly began yet another disturbing dream about his inexplicably bitter former
groundmate.

The phone rang.

Joe jerked awake, at first
thinking it was an invasion siren going off.  When he realized it was the
blocky device on his nightstand, he frowned.  Back at the front desk, the
receptionist could have seen he was sleeping.  He’d paid top dollar for all the
amenities, and she had said herself that the staff would divert all calls when
his heart and respiratory functions indicated he was sleeping.

Joe picked up the phone, trying
not to sound groggy, pouring through the list of possible emergencies in the
back of his head. 

“Yeah?”

“Joe Dobbs?”  It was a woman’s
voice, girly, almost teen.

Joe checked the clock.  It was
3:03 AM.  “Let me guess.  The freighter crashed and my stuff’s missing.”

“This is Samantha,” the girl
said, then giggled.  “But you can call me Sam.”