Zero's Return (20 page)

When he looked
behind him at the way he had come, Shael saw that the entrance to his training
facility had been sunk into a mountainside.  Leading up to it were patches of
glistening red where Shael had passed.  The color seemed odd to him.  He had
bled before, and it had always been blue.  Again, he felt that painful heat in
his head as he tried to assimilate what he was seeing with what he knew.  It
didn’t make
sense
.  How did one’s blood go from being blue to being
red?  It took him some time, this time, to make the connection. 

Drugs
, he
realized, making the painful heat clear immediately.  Perhaps his betrayers had
injected him with some alien drug, something that had altered his perceptions
to better their escape.

Cowards,
Shael thought, with a rising fury.  He had always known they had been afraid of
him.  It had been in their looks, their flinches whenever Doctorphilip came to
feed him.  And, sure enough, not one of his underlings had shown his face since
he had discovered their treachery. 

He glanced back
at the wide swath of primitive stone roadway.  On undeveloped alien worlds,
roads led to settlements, and settlements had food.  Shael, whose stomach was
even then spasming in hunger, his body growing dizzy with need, decided that
only a Voran would skulk around in a cave, waiting for his underlings to feed
him.  Thus, he decided he would feed himself, and should any of the primitive
landowners object, he would simply kill them as blood-debt to their betrayer
weakling cousins.  At this point,
all
the skulkers were accountable.

Shael’s coils
started to burn the longer he slid along the alien roadway, until, despite his
natural Jreet immunity to all but extreme heat, his wounded undersides began to
blister.  The bleeding, despite his body’s normally rapid healing, had not
slowed.  Worse, he was having great pain in his abdomen, and when he looked
down, there was blood running down his coils from some unknown wound in his
guts.

They poisoned
me
, Shael thought, disgusted.  He was actually beginning to have trouble
staying upright, his perception zoning in and out of his war-mind as he found
himself having more and more trouble concentrating.

Eventually, as
the sun hit its zenith in the horridly bright alien day, Shael fell out of his
war-mind altogether.  His skin, scaleless for the first time in his life, felt
much too hot, its pale color transformed to an almost red.  He stumbled into
the shade, stunned that he was forced to.

They made me
weak
, he thought, his fury overriding even his exhaustion.  The sun, the
glass, the stone—none of it should have affected him in his normal state.  Yet
here he was, hiding in the shadows like a vaghi skulker, panting like an
overworked Takki.

He was coiled in
the shade, trying desperately to stay conscious, when he heard the voices of
weaklings along the road.  He sat up, realizing this was his chance to get
directions—and maybe a ride—to a spaceport.

Three weaklings
were approaching, striding down the center of the roadway, carrying backpacks
and bristling with primitive weaponry.  They had odd slouches and swaggers to
their walk, nothing at all like Doctorphilip, and Shael realized these might be
this planet’s warrior class. 

“I am Shael ga
Welu,” he announced, struggling upright.  “Prince of Welu, leader of the Clan
Welu.  On the name of my ancestors, I offer you trade with my clan and
two-nines standard ruvmestin coins for transportation to Welu.”  He had to
steady himself on a flimsy alien tree to fight the sudden dizziness that came
with rising.

The three soft,
delicate, cloth-covered aliens stopped in the road and stood there, staring at
his great body like furgs seeing an Ooreiki temple for the first time.  One of
them turned to his friends and said something that sounded much like the foul
tongue of Shael’s treacherous underlings, which sparked a new wave of fury in
his soul. 
They mock me,
he thought, remembering his lack of scales.  He
had to fight the instinct to kill them for the slight.

“Welu?” the
darker one said.  Then they babbled something to themselves and two of them
laughed.  The darker one pointed at Shael.  “Welu?”  The weakling then pointed
at himself, grinning ear to ear.  “Mahs-terr.”

The useless furg
wanted to exchange pleasantries.  Shael could tell by the imbecilic smiles on
their faces, however, that their simple minds were overwhelmed at the idea of a
great Welu prince deigning to talk to them.  Because it was all he could do not
to wrap one of them in his coils as a lesson to the others, Shael grated,
“Yes.  I want to go to Welu.  You will be paid well for your services.”

The furgs
laughed some more.  One of the larger ones shook his head and jabbered
something in the pathetic softling tongue, then jabbed a thumb at himself and
said, “Mas-ter.”

“Take me to a
spaceport, Mahster,” Shael snarled, fed up with their stalling, “or you shall
feel the wrath of my coils before your eyes burst from your oily, useless head
for the wrongs that your brethren did to me.”

The three
underlings snickered and glanced at each other.  As Shael stood there in
growing rage, one of them pointed at him and laughed something in the alien
tongue.  The other two cackled like Ueshi on karwiq bulbs.

Fury burning in
the core of his tek, Shael lashed out and put his fist around the closest
alien’s neck, intending to heave him off the ground and throw him into the
forest to educate his mindless friends.  “Prepare for your journey through the
ninety hells, weakling,” he snarled.  He heaved.

The alien
remained firmly in place.  And, oddly, Shael found himself looking
up
at
the aliens, almost as if they had grown larger by his getting closer.

What
treachery is this?
Shael’s panicked mind cried.  He tried to remember some
alien that could change form, alter its size.  All he could come up with was
the Huouyt, who could only produce a body of equal mass or less.  Nothing, as
far as he knew, could
grow
.

Even more
disturbing, the now-giant alien took hold of his hand and wrenched it from his
throat as easily as if Shael were a stunted hatchling.  The weakling’s glacial
blue eyes—bigger than a Jreet’s, more suited to the crude hunter-gatherer
lifestyle of their ancestors—were like twin chips of ice in his face as he
grabbed both of Shael’s hands and jerked them in front of him, then pulled him
close and leaned down to speak his linguistic dirt into his face.  There was no
mistaking the malice in the creature’s cold tone, despite the fact that Shael
could not understand their filthy tongue.

Shael snorted. 
“You
threaten
me?”  He attempted to jerk his hands free, but the drugs
his betrayers had fed him had left him too weak to hurl the lesser creature
away from him.  Grinning, showing his crooked, flat teeth, his assailant
wrapped his big hand—bigger than Shael’s, he realized in horror—around his
wrists and started pulling something out of his pocket, laughing with his
fellows.

Upon seeing the
rope, Shael stared at it, uncomprehending.  When it became clear that they
intended to use the flimsy strands on
him
, Shael just laughed.  “Only a
furg would be stupid enough to bind a Jreet warrior,” he declared. 

If the vaghi
understood him or cared, they made no sign.  Instead, they wrenched his arms
behind his back and Shael felt the sharp bite of ropes digging into his
scaleless skin…

#

Almost a
rotation after the Ooreiki asher running the Space Force decided to open up on
Earth three days early, Joe woke with the weird urge to go north when he had
originally been planning to head west, towards San Diego.  He packed up the
remnants of his latest kill—the near-rancid hindquarters of a feral animal that
he was pretty sure had been a pig—and went west, anyway, because the cities
collected kreenit, and there were reports of at least six females digging dens
along the ocean.

Joe had made it about
twenty digs when he remembered what happened the last time he was in San
Diego.  Four sootwad furgs had taken one look at his Congie blacks, saw his
high-tech weaponry, realized they couldn’t take it from him, and spat on him,
instead.  This while Joe had been smiling, his hand out in the typical North
American Earth greeting, another dead kreenit twitching on the ground behind
him. 

Still marching
west, Joe stopped in his tracks.

In the rotation
since he’d landed, Joe had killed twenty-two kreenit.  More than any man had a
right to kill, and yet just a drop in the bucket compared to how many had been
left on Earth.  Or how many would be born the moment all those pregnant kreenit
had their young, thoughtfully inseminated en-route by overzealous Congie
Peacemakers.  It was a thankless, endless battle, and he was growing damned
tired of it.

He glanced
west.  Plenty more kreenit out there, waiting to meet Jane.  Plenty of people
to save.  Plenty of furgs to spit on him and curse him as if Congies were responsible
for Earth’s current Takkiscrew.

He glanced
north.

Joe had no idea
what was due north.  It was mountainous, looked wild, and it hadn’t been in his
carefully-thought-out plan to spend the rest of his life crisscrossing the
North American continent with the love of his life attached to his hip.  He’d
planned to do a rough half-circle, starting with San Francisco, following the
coast down to Mexico City, then doubling back through Dallas, and finally
taking the coast up and ending with New York City.  He figured that’s about as
long as he could hope to live before he grew too old to fight, and the coasts
always had the biggest cities.

But Humans,
ungrateful furglings that they were, wouldn’t care if he killed ten kreenit or
ten thousand kreenit.  Joe had quickly discovered that they thought the only
good Congie was a dead Congie, and, in an entire
rotation
, Joe hadn’t
met a single Earthling that hadn’t tried to A) kill him, B) spit on him, or C)
tell him to go back home.

It was right
then that Joe stopped and kind of blinked, realizing he’d been mopping up
Earth’s mess for the last rotation, to absolutely no fanfare or any sort of
gratitude.  Remembering the hateful stares of the men and women he had just
saved, telling him to get off their planet, Joe decided that the Human race
could afford to spend a few turns rolling in its own flake while he explored.

Thus, Joe was
heading
north
, bristling with weapons, about to tackle the necessary
evil of crossing a road, when he heard the raucous laughter of several men—as
well as a woman’s indignant screams—and sighed.  He knew the routine.  He’d
busted up dozens of such parties since Judgement, and it was beginning to wear
on him.  The females of this planet, raised with pillows and primping and
perfumes, had no recourse when the lowlife scumbags, suddenly free of all the
rules and restrictions of society, started doing things like forming ‘tribes,’
‘claiming’ women and taking ‘slaves.’

Tugging Jane off
his belt, he went to investigate.

Around the bend
in the road, two tall white men and their tawny-skinned, shorter male companion
were standing out in the open on the sunbaked asphalt, shoving a small, naked
woman back and forth between them as she stumbled and screamed in terror. 
They’d shaved the poor girl’s hair to the scalp, removed every fiber of her
clothes, and bound her hands behind her back, obviously in yet another bid to
start up a slave trade with what was left of the dwindling Human race.  Joe
sighed and approached through the brush, staying out of sight of the three
thugs.

Upon getting
close enough to see the woman’s fierce expression, however, Joe did a double
take.  No, he thought, seeing her bared teeth, lips raised in a snarl, the
utterly savage look on her face, he was pretty sure that was
fury
, not
fear.  His heart actually gave a startled thump, having seen similar
ferociousness in wild Dreit right before they ripped men in half.

On the road, the
three men laughed as they manhandled their prize.  “No,
I’m
not gonna do
her.” 
Shove
.  “She’s bleedin’, man. 
You
do her.  I get the next
one.”

“She’s hairy as
my mother’s poodle,” the Hispanic snorted.  “To hell with that. 
You
do
her.”  Shove.

His other
Caucasian friend laughed.  “And let her bite me?  Dude, she took a chunk outta
your
ear
, man.  Fuck that shit.” 
Shove
.

Joe sighed and
raised Jane to take aim.  He was about to put a blast through something
essential when a string of invectives stopped him dead in his tracks, making
his hair stand utterly on end.

“Sniveling Takki
skulkers!” the woman shrieked.  “I’ll make you all dance on my tek like the
craven weaklings you are!  Release me!  Fight like warriors, you scaleless
alien filth!  Were your mothers impregnated with the shit of Takki? 
Fight
me!
”  The words sounded old, very old, and it took Joe a moment to
understand why.

When he did, his
heart gave a startled thump, then stopped entirely.

She’s
speaking ancient Jreet
, he thought, stunned.  His plasma pistol lowered
another few inches as he stared.  How he knew that—or how he knew it was Welu
by the odd lisp of some of her softer consonants—left him just as disconcerted
as the way the words seemed to be rolling off her tongue as if they belonged to
her.

…kind of like
Joe.

“She acts
rabid,” the Hispanic man was saying.  He shoved her back to the others.  He’d
already been bitten at least once, and he was holding a hand to the side of his
bloody face.  When they tried to shove her back to him, he held up a crimson
palm.  “Dude, she’s not worth our time.  Gotta be some foreigner or something. 
Maybe some mail-order bride that escaped, you know?  Doesn’t understand a word
we’re saying.  We should leave her.”