Zero Recall (4 page)

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 pulled
his father’s knife from his pocket, then stretched out on the bed and stared up
at the ceiling, rubbing its familiar red surfaces.  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, still gripping the knife.  He wasn’t
going back.  Maggie had seen to that.  After fifty-three turns of completely
screwing him over at every opportunity, 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 dropped the
Swiss Army knife to the nightstand and picked up the phone, trying not to sound
groggy, poring 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.”

Joe’s brows
furrowed.  “Do I know you?”

“You want to,”
the girl said happily.  “I can make all your dreams come true.”

Joe rolled his
eyes and hung up.  He was taking off his shoes so he could go to bed properly
when the phone rang again.

“Look,” Joe
snapped, “I didn’t give out my number so I could get propositioned by every
whore in the East Side.”

The girl on the
other end giggled.  “You couldn’t buy my services if you wanted to, Joe.”

“Then I won’t.” 
He hung up again.

When the phone
rang the third time, Joe was just starting to fall back to sleep.  He
considered turning the ringer off.  Instead, he yawned, lifted the receiver,
and said, “I tell you, lady, you’re starting to get on my nerves.”

“And you’re
starting to get on mine.”

Joe blinked.  It
had been a man’s voice.  “Who the hell are you?”

“Who the hell do
you think I am, Joe?”

“I don’t
know…that little girl’s pimp?”

“Oh my God, you
have the mental density of a block of ruvmestin, don’t you?”

Joe blearily
glanced at the clock again.  “Look, buddy, it’s almost three-twenty in the
morning.  I’d be a lot more likely to buy whatever you’re selling if you
weren’t pissing me off.”

“I take it being
a Congie wasn’t very stimulating.”

“What the hell
are you talking about?”

“The last sixty
years of what would have been my life, before I saw the light.” 

“So you decided
not to join the Army.  Good for you.”

“There were
hundreds of them.  All different colors.  Sounded like bombs going off
overhead.  I remember them because they scared me just as much as they scared
the ugly creeps I was with.”

As Joe’s
sleep-starved mind tried to make sense of this, the caller added, “So did you
ever end up in that cave killing dragons?  ‘Cause mine pretty much came true.”

He’s crazy.

Joe started to
hang up again, then an ancient memory tickled the back of his mind.  A fortune
teller, telling Sam he’d grow up to be a drug-dealer, and that Joe would grow
up to slay dragons.  With that memory came the memory of the fireworks Joe had
used to distract the Ooreiki that had been kidnapping his little brother for
the Draft—and of Joe getting captured in his place.  Joe brought the handset
back to his face in a panic, his exhaustion-haze vanishing.  “Sam?”

The line went
dead.

Joe’s heart
pounded like a hammer as he set the handset back onto the receiver.  He sat at
the edge of the bed, staring at the phone, willing it to ring again.  He stayed
up the entire night.  It didn’t ring.

Not that night,
not that week, not that rotation.

The next time
Joe spoke with his brother was nine weeks after Joe had moved into his
permanent apartment.

It was a rainy
afternoon in September when Sam called.

“Yeah?” Joe said
curtly, trying to get a foot into one of the new tennis shoes he had bought the
day before.  He was late for his morning run.

A girlish voice
giggled.  “Do you always answer your phone like that?”

Joe dropped the
tennis shoe, his heartbeat quickening.  “Sam?”

“How bad do you
want to meet me, Joe?”  Her voice had a flirtatious ring to it, like a cheap,
mail-order hooker.

Joe hesitated. 
“That a trick question?”

“No.  It’s a
warning.  You might not like what you see.  I’m probably not what you’ve been
picturing in your head.”  Her voice lowered, sad and seductive at the same
time.

“Burn that,” Joe
said.  “I want to see you.”  He held back all the things he had wanted to say
to his brother over the turns, respecting Sam’s wish for privacy.

“Thursday.  I’ll
be working at the Hungry Kitten in Nevada.  Talk to Mindy.  She’ll set you up
with something.”

“Sure,” Joe
said.  Then, sensing his brother was about to hang up, he said, “Lookin’
forward to it.”

There was a pause
on the other end, then, “Me too.”

The line went
dead before Joe could say any more.

Joe had to fight
the impulse to hop on the first flight to Nevada.  Instead, he forced himself
to put on his other shoe and step outside for a jog. 

Two
five-foot-tall Ooreiki Peacemakers were waiting for him on his front steps,
dressed in Congie black.  Their long, tentacle arms were twisted politely in
front of them, their huge, sticky brown eyes mournful, their fleshy rows of
air-exchanges in their necks flapping as inconspicuously as possible, the way
they always did before giving bad news. 

Upon seeing him,
the brown-skinned Ooreiki flinched.  They had obviously been waiting on his
steps some time, and yet neither had dredged up the courage to knock.

 “Commander
Zero?” one of them managed.  “
The
Commander Zero?”

Joe’s heart
began to pound, his mind returning to the conversation he had just had with his
brother.  “What?”

The Ooreiki who
had spoken glanced to his partner, who continued to stare at the ground, mute. 
The first one turned back to Joe.  His huge oblong eyes were filled with humble
brown apology.  “I’m sorry, Commander, but you’ve been re-activated.”

It took Joe a
moment for that to register.  “On whose order?”

“Prime Overseer
Phoenix, sir.”

Joe ground his
jaw and twisted his head away.  Even retired, Maggie was going to screw with
him.  “Look, if this is a prank, I’m not falling for it.  Phoenix would rather
lube up her ass with a plasma grenade than put me back into Planetary Ops. 
She’s the one who
retired
me.  Just walk your happy asses back to
headquarters and tell the Overseer I thought it was very funny and she can go burn
herself.”

“It’s not a
hoax, Commander.”  The sincerity in the Ooreiki’s sticky eyes was plain. 
“You…didn’t hear?”

Joe stiffened at
the outright fear in the young Ooreiki’s wrinkled brown face.  “What happened?”

“The Dhasha
declared war, sir.”

Joe’s chest
seized.  Every Congie knew it was going to happen, and every Congie prayed it
wasn’t within their lifetime.  “Ash,” he whispered.  He thought of all of his
friends and groundmates who were going to die.  Billions.  “How many of them?”
he finally asked.  If it was just one prince, like last time, perhaps it
wouldn’t decimate the Corps.

The Ooreiki that
had been speaking glanced again at his partner.  The second Ooreiki hadn’t
taken its sticky eyes off the ground. 

It was the
second one who finally spoke.  In a whisper, he said, “All of them.”

CHAPTER
3:  Daviin ga Vora

“Time to die, Voran
scum.”

The announcement jolted
Daviin awake as it was broadcast to thousands of spectators, not all of which
were Jreet.  He uncoiled his great length to face his latest enemy.

At first glance, he was
stunned.  At second glance, he was resigned.

The Aezi had finally
tired of him defeating their warriors.  They were ending it now.  With a kreenit
.

Beda’s bones,
Daviin thought, furious—but unsurprised—at the Aezi’s cowardice.  Even compared
to the Welu Jreet clans, the Aezi were honorless vaghi.

Through the narrow bars
of his prison, Daviin watched the scaly, rainbow-colored monster mindlessly grunt
and tear at the floor of the fighting pit.  The very ground shuddered with
enough force to throw Daviin off-balance as its muscles bunched and its great
weight slammed against the earth again and again.  In its animal rage, the kreenit
threw huge chunks of solid rock aside, some of which assaulted Daviin’s scales
through the bars separating them.  Though this was not the beast’s intention,
it left Daviin with an understanding of the raw power behind the massive,
flesh-shredding talons and a healthy anxiety of what was to come.

Daviin glanced down at
his own claws and tried to subdue his nervousness.  He had fought and killed to
stay alive, though thus far all his opponents had been other Jreet.  Knowing
that in moments they would pit him against a creature that could tear his body
to pieces with a single bat of its paw, Daviin felt a shameful pang of fear.

He closed his eyes and
repeated the mantra he’d maintained since the Aezi captured him. 
The day
will come when I will see every Aezi ruler enter the ninety hells for what they
have done, and I will follow them through it so that I may watch them suffer
for every Voran life they took.  Then I will return, challenge Prazeil for his
seat, and make him dance on my
tek
before the masses.

He still wasn’t
sure
how
he would accomplish the last part, considering the fact that it
took a billion credits to secure a challenge for the Jreet seat in the Regency
and Vora would pledge him a hundred million, at best, but it was a pleasant
thing to fantasize about as he awaited his doom.

The door to
Daviin’s cage lifted, leaving nothing to protect him from the kreenit on the
other side.  The beast jerked at the sound and lunged, its soulless green eyes
locating him in an instant.  Daviin’s skin tingled as his instincts reacted and
plunged him into the higher energy level required to disappear from the visual
spectrum.

The fighting
arena went black.

No light, not
even the tiniest sliver of shadow, marred the void that was his vision.

Before him,
Daviin heard the kreenit hesitate, obviously startled that its prey had
disappeared.  Daviin slid forward, feeling his way along the edge of the cage,
praying that the beast was too confused by his sudden disappearance to register
the tiny, echo-locating pings that Daviin was now emitting on a supersonic
level to help him navigate.  He was not sure if kreenit could hear them, but he
knew Dhasha could, and they were from the same planet, sharing the same common ancestor.

He had to strike
fast.

Daviin slid
around the kreenit, until he was the one outside the cage.  He had no hopes of
escaping—the sides of the pit were glass-smooth and sloped inward almost ten
rods.  As a Voran heir, the Aezi would keep him here until he died.  What he
needed, however, the cage could provide.

A distraction.

As the massive kreenit—over
ten rods long from snout to tail, one and a half times Daviin’s own length of
seven—began to back out of the cage, Daviin located a chunk of stone that the
animal had dislodged and carefully lifted it from the ground.  As the kreenit
snorted and huffed, sniffing for him, Daviin threw the chunk so that it clattered
loudly against the bars.