Zero's Return (38 page)

“Um,” Slade
said, scanning the strangely silent undergrowth.  Now they were actually within
the tree-cover, it didn’t look like a
rabbit
could hide out there, much
less a person.  Even the dead bodies, slumped in the low-lying grasses, were
easy to see.  “I hate to break this to you, my very large gay friend, but
there’s nowhere to hide out there.”

“Yeah,” Tyson
said.  “That’s what’s making me so fucking nervous.”  He had lowered his voice
to a whisper, and was looking quite thoroughly spooked. 

“Oh, come on,”
Slade sighed, after several minutes had passed with no action at all from their
‘watcher.’  “I’m sure the gun’s around here somewhere.”  Impatient to get back
to his palanquin, he stood to go find it.

Tyson grabbed
his arm and yanked him down.  “I got
instincts
, man, and every alarm
bell I’ve got is ringing like it’s New Year’s Fucking Eve.  You go looking,
you’re gonna die.”

Slade rolled his
eyes.  ‘Instincts’ were nothing but the subconscious brain, quietly analyzing
data, unbeknownst to the conscious monkey awareness.  And he, Samuel Dobbs,
a.k.a. Slade Galvin Gardner, a.k.a. Ghost, a.k.a. the Tesla of the
Congressional Era, happened to have a subconscious that worked while he was
awake
,
and at about a hundred times the normal capacity, and he wasn’t even getting a
ping of alarm.

“Look,” Slade
said, standing anyway.  “I’m sure there’s absolutely nothing out ther—”

A high-efficacy
plasma round dissolved the branch beside his head, making a neck-thick slab of
oak only two inches from his ear disappear completely with a groan of twisting
wood and leaves that scraped at Slade’s scalp as they fell.

“Oh,” Slade
said, frozen in place.  He quickly fell back to his crouch.  “Well, at least
he’s a bad shot.”  He tugged his beanie back into place, having almost lost it
to the falling branch.

“He wasn’t
trying to kill you,” Tyson said.  And, at that, he held up his gun and stood,
then very visibly tucked his weapon back in its holster.  “We’re leaving!” he
called into the woods.  He stood there a moment in awkward silence.  Then, with
nervous cheerfulness that seemed odd coming from a gigantic gorilla of a man,
he added, “Have a nice day!”

Have a nice…
day
? 
Slade blinked at his friend, wondering if he’d gone mad.

Then Tyson
wrapped a meaty fist around Slade’s collar and started dragging him back to the
clearing.

“Wait,” Slade
cried.  “We’re
leaving
?  But I thought you wanted the gun!”

“My guess,”
Tyson said, “is me killing the incompetent dude that had the gun gave the
rightful owner a chance to get it back.”

“Rightful
owner?” Slade snorted.  “If we
took
it,
we
would be the rightful
owner.”

“No,” Tyson
said, “we’re leaving.  Now.”  He continued hauling Slade away from the scene of
the crime.

“
Ohhhh
,”
Slade said, realizing what Tyson’s game was.  Back to the shooter, he winked at
his companion.  “We’re
leaving
.”  Lowering his voice, he said, “You’re
gonna circle back and annihilate them later, right?”

“No,” Tyson
said.  “We’re leaving.  That was a Congie.”

Slade felt an
automatic ounce of bile rise into his esophagus at the idolatory tone that
every ‘Warrior’ archetype seemed to use whenever talking about Congies.  As
someone who fully understood the brainwashing, science, and drugs involved in
making Congressional soldiers the good little puppets they were, he was
really
sick of the almost sacred reverence modern Humans seemed to bestow upon their
alien-trained, drug-enhanced brethren, like they were immortals or something. 
Especially
his brother.  He’d already informed the group that if he heard
one more
person
ask him what it was like to be Zero’s brother, Slade would
personally shave splinters into a broomstick and shove it up his ass, then
leave it there for a hundred years to really give him a feel for the irritating
asshole. 

“So it was a
Congie,” Slade said, dragging his feet.  “Big deal.  They die like anyone
else.”  When Tyson didn’t slow, Slade pouted.  “Seriously, man, if
you
don’t want that gun,
I
want that gun.  Do you
know
how useful a
Rodemax power-source would be?”

Tyson stopped in
his tracks, twisted, grabbed Slade by the front of his shirt, and lifted him
entirely off his feet.  This resulted in Slade looking down at Tyson, since
Slade was already a couple inches taller than Tyson, but, like the two hundred
pounds he was now basically bench-pressing, Tyson didn’t seem to notice. 
Leaning up so he could get uncomfortably close to Slade’s face, the brute said,
“We ever come across a Rodemax or a Nocurna, or Jaywing, or any other gun that
could power its own city, you will
not
be taking it apart, you get me,
you tinkerbelle fuck?  That’s blasphemy.  Fucking blasphemy.”  Tyson hauled him
closer, until their noses were almost touching.  “You
do
take it apart
and I’m going to cut off your dick and feed it to you.”

Slade giggled,
delighted at the thrill that raced through him at Tyson’s perfectly plausible
threat.  “Well, um, I suppose we could rock-paper-scissors it.”

Tyson narrowed
his eyes and dragged Slade closer.  “You’ll eat.  Your dick.”

Considering that
Slade’s dick hadn’t been very useful in thirty-two years, it wasn’t that much
of a threat, but Slade wasn’t about to tell him that.  “So you
do
plan
to go back and get the Rodemax,” he hedged.  He was pretty sure he could get it
apart before Tyson noticed, and was damn sure he could do it in such a way that
Tyson couldn’t put it back together again, rendering the argument moot.

Tyson peered at
him much too long, then released him with a grunt.  As Slade settled awkwardly
back onto his feet, Slade glanced back at the copse of trees on the hill behind
them and said, “No.  Not a fucking chance.”

“Oh?” Slade
asked, curious as to what could have his badass Second so spooked.  “Why not?”

“It’s either a
Huouyt,” Tyson said, “Or something a hell of a lot worse.”

“Oh please,”
Slade snorted.  “A Huouyt would have shot us.”  He knew that from experience. 

“Exactly,” Tyson
said.

Slade frowned. 
“If he was such a badass, how’d he lose the gun in the first place?”  He was
dragging his feet, now, because he could
really
use a sustainable
power-source in the coming months.  “Obviously, he’s incompetent and therefore
unworthy of it.  We should go relieve him of it.”

Upon Slade’s
last words, Tyson grabbed both of the Minion beanie-thongs and yanked Slade
forward by them.  “Do you wanna die?” he asked.

“Uh,” Slade
said, trying to pry Tyson’s meaty fingers from his hat before the thug ripped
the delicate stitching.  “Not especially, no.”

“Then
forget
about the gun,” Tyson said.  “Anyone who rightfully owns a Rodemax is not
someone you wanna fuck with.”

Slade, who
wasn’t afraid of fucking with anyone, should it be for a good cause, managed to
keep himself from saying as much.  He smiled, instead.

Tyson’s eyes
narrowed.  The hulk yanked him closer, until their noses were again almost
touching.  “I keep you alive and put up with your shit because I think it’ll
give us an edge in the coming decades.  I’m doing it for our
kids
, see? 
My
kids.  You keep this up, you won’t be
having
kids.  They’d
probably turn out to be unsociable little freaks, anyway.”

Slade left it
unsaid that gay men generally had trouble producing children.  “You have to
admit that a gun like that would be really handy in an apocalypse,” Slade said,
prying one huge, callused finger at a time away from his beanie strings.  “And
the guy
must
be incompetent.  I mean, think about it.  Whoever it was
got overpowered by a couple
kids
.”

Tyson scowled at
him for much too long, then violently released him.  “Fine.  Go get the gun. 
I’m moving on. 
If
you survive, we’ll be following the road east.”  Then
he turned and left Slade there, standing in the clearing, back to the sniper
with the really cool gun.

Now that Slade thought
about it, he was pretty sure he could
feel the crosshairs of the Really
Cool Gun resting between his shoulder blades.  He wondered if that was some
sort of placebo effect, or if Really Cool Guns just did that to folks.  He
turned to face the hillside copse of trees, thinking about it.  Then his
forehead started to itch under the beanie and he had the really bad feeling
that the Really Cool Gun had shifted focus.

Swallowing,
Slade turned and followed Tyson back to the group at a jog.

CHAPTER 14 – An
Alien in an Alien Land

Rat lowered the
gun once she was sure the hat-wearing imbecile had flounced off after his much
smarter companion, and that the whole group had continued east.  She climbed
out of the grass slowly, in case anyone was watching through their scope.  She
had augmented her gilly-suit with pieces of local flora, and had been crawling
forward on her belly, about to cut the murdering kids’ throats, when the big
blond had done the deed for her.

Unfortunately,
he’d also gone looking for the source of the high-grade plasma, and Rat had
been forced to retreat up the hill and wait for him in her self-made
camouflage, ready to blow him and his companion completely away, should they
take three more steps in her direction.

The blond,
having found two corpses and no gun, had gotten the point pretty quick.  His
companion—the
dumb
one—had not.  He’d looked up the hill,
directly at
her
, and Rat had felt something like a weird déjà vu, the kind she got when
she’d accidentally watched the same vid-clip twice while waiting for Benva to
finish drinking his toxic burning-tire drug of choice in his favorite bar. 
When he’d started toward her, however, she’d made a split-second decision
between putting a charge through his forehead versus the tree behind him, and
mercy had won out because of the damn hat.  With the big knitted monocle set in
the center of his forehead, it was actually kind of…cute.

I’m getting
soft in my old age,
Rat thought with a sigh.  Once she was sure they were
out of sight, she snagged up her stuff and bolted for another area.  Her bones
had finally had a chance to fully heal, so now it was just a matter of finding
enough food on this alien planet to keep herself fed during her mission.

What mission?
she thought, bitterly.  She had no idea where she was, or where to find the
illegal government facility.  All she knew was that she was hungry, she was
missing the ring finger of her left hand, and she had a limp that she was still
trying to work out of her right leg.

At least she’d
gotten Max back.  The idea that the kids had used him to prey upon the exodus
out of the city for two whole days still made her guts roil.

“Why didn’t you
stop them, Max?” she demanded, once she deemed herself to be a safe enough
distance from the eastward-bound group.

“
You’ll have
to be more specific, Mistress,
” Max replied.  “
According to last
head-count, I stopped eighty-four of them.
”

Rat grimaced. 
That was one problem with an AI weapon—they did not distinguish between good
guys and bad guys.  Or, in the case of a Huouyt-made Rodemax, civilians and
combatants.  If there was one thing she didn’t like about Max, it was his
personality.  Being Huouyt-made, it was…lacking something.  Not at all like her
old Jaywing.

“Yeah, okay,”
Rat said.  “Next time you get picked up by strangers, you have an autoshutdown
sequence order until I can pick you back up again.”

Max sighed.  “
I
suppose I can do that.
”

Which meant he
would think about it.  Rat had given him the order before, but she had found,
to her disgruntlement, that Max liked to kill.  And, thus, when a couple of
kids grabbed him and tried to use him to massacre civilians, instead of
electrocuting the soot out of them for the audacity of picking him up, he’d
joined right in.  Another thing that unnerved her about her gun.

On the plus
side, whatever was wrong with him, Max liked her.  She knew this for a fact
because he’d refused to shoot her a couple times, when enemy Takki or Huouyt
got hold of him.  It was the first time, however, he’d let a random stranger
walk off with him.

“Why’d you let
them take you?” Rat demanded, feeling more than a little hurt.

“
You appeared
to be dying, Mistress, and I didn’t want to let my talents go to waste.
”

Ah, yes. 
Perfect Huouyt logic.  Rat sighed.  Sixteen turns ago, without any partner but
War, she’d realized she’d fallen in love with her Jaywing, and him with her. 
Zeus had ‘died,’ though, sacrificing himself to save her, and after a few years
of trying to go without AI at all, Sol’dan had insisted she replace him with ‘a
proper Huouyt Rodemax’.

Sometimes, Rat
wished she’d stuck with manual weaponry rather than make the Jaywing-Rodemax
switch.  Made by the Huouyt, whose psychopathic natures created more strife in
Congress than the Dhasha, the Ooreiki, the Jreet, the Ueshi,
and
the Jahul—the
rest of the Grand Six combined—a refusal to kill her was as good as Max could
ever give her.  Unlike the Nansaba-made Jaywing, Rat knew Max could never love
her.

Idly, she said
to the gun, “You keep forgetting to follow my orders and you and I are going to
have a problem here someday soon.”

“
I certainly
hope not,
” Max said pleasantly.  “
I don’t want to have to neutralize
you, Mistress.
”