Zero's Return (58 page)

“Very fun,”
Doctor Molotov said.  “I’m sure Charles would love to get in on the rush to
help you.”

“Oh,
that
drug-juggling furg would jump at the chance.  What do you think he would use to
help the colonel first?  Oxygenation?  Arsenic?”

“Too clean,”
Molotov said.  “Hyper-Ebola would be more his style.  I hear he took a recent
trip to Africa to study the monkeys there.”

“Isn’t that the
one where they start bleeding from the eyes and shitting out their own
intestines in the first sixteen hours?”

“And it’s
horribly
contagious,” Molotov agreed.  “Could be transmitted through…say…a toilet seat.”

“Or a favorite
travel mug,” Doctor Philip added.

“Fuck you,”
Codgson said.

Both the doctors
smiled at him coolly.

“Colonel,”
Doctor Molotov said into the following silence, as Colonel Codgson just stood
there, reddening, “a note from your medical staff:  We’re smarter than you. 
Please
keep pissing us off.”

“Fuck you,”
Codgson said again.  He looked like he would say more, face a dark shade of
purple.  But then, without another word, he turned and left.

Doctor Philip
immediately dropped his arms from his sides.  “Twenty bucks he goes and kills
another kid,” he sighed. 

“God I hate that
bastard,” Doctor Molotov muttered. 

“Needs a good
dirt nap,” Doctor Philip agreed.  Both he and Doctor Molotov turned to look
down at Six Six Five, who was still lying in place, strapped to her half-egg of
a bed.  They studied her in silence a moment.

“Take good care
of Six Five,” Doctor Molotov eventually said.  “I know you’re trying to beat
out Codgson, but don’t rush it.  She’s special…and she isn’t any good to us
dead.”  Then she glanced at her watch.  “Damn.  Morning formation’s in twenty. 
I’ve gotta go run damage control.”

“Sure thing.” 
Doctor Philip waited until she had left, heels clicking as she crossed the
tile, then turned back to Six Six Five.  “Well,” he said, on a huge sigh.  He
retrieved his syringe and leaned down to stick it into Six Six Five’s arm. 
“Let’s see if we can turn you into a Jreet…”

 “Shael!  Shael,
goddamn it,
Shael
!”  The Voran’s voice broke through his terror, yanking
him from yet another of the horrible dreams.

Shael opened his
eyes with a groan, struggling to focus on the beard-stubbled face in front of
him.  “Voran?” he whimpered.

The Voran, who
had been holding him, quickly dropped him and scrambled back, arms up in
peace.  “Just checking on you!” he cried, sounding more than a little nervous. 
“You were yelling in your sleep again…”  He swallowed.  “We’re good, right?”

Shael, despite
the shame of being comforted by a Voran, actually craved the contact.  It felt
like something he’d been missing…something he’d been denied for much too long. 
Even as Beda ga Vora rubbed the back of his neck anxiously, Shael cleared his
throat and glanced down at his lap.  He knew what Beda ga Vora was
thinking—that their relationship had taken a step beyond that of fellow
warriors and campmates, and that soon one of them would have to duel the other
for the right to keep his tek.

Shael had no
delusions of exactly who would lose such a match.  He stared at his coils, Six
Six Five’s terror still clawing at his chest, electrifying his limbs and body. 
Unexpectedly, the pain in his throat brought wetness to his eyes, and he sat
there, the world a blur around him, trying to imagine what it might be like to
be female.  Was that what Six Six Five’s dreams were trying to tell him?  To
prepare him for that horrible fate?

He wasn’t a
warrior.  Not like Beda ga Vora.  Despite everything he’d tried, he had not
regained his strength.  He hadn’t regrown his scales or his tek.  He couldn’t
fight
. 
He was a warrior that couldn’t
fight
.  All he could do, as the Voran had
jeered, was fling weaklings around with his war-mind. 
Anyone
could do
that.  It was as he spiraled into that endless void of despair when Twelve-A
gently reached out to him and said,
Remember what I told Six Six Five as he
closed the lid?

Shael closed his
eyes, shuddering as Doctorphilip’s words haunted him. 
“Let’s see if we can
turn you into a Jreet…” 
He remembered his terror as the needle sank into
his arm.  He remembered the lid closing, the sounds and images all around him,
the inability to turn his head and look away.  He remembered the Black Jreet on
the screen in front of him, begging him to help her, to seek out this new race
called Humanity…

Suddenly,
Twelve-A was kneeling before him, holding both his cheeks with slender fingers,
forcing Shael to look up into his utterly pure blue eyes. 
Remember what I
told you?

…You?

For a moment,
Shael couldn’t understand what Twelve-A was trying to say. 

Remember what
I said to you as Doctor Philip closed the lid?
Twelve-A insisted.

He was talking
about him. 
Shael
. 

Shael jerked in
horror, but didn’t pull away.  He frowned at the telepath, reflexively wrapping
himself in his war-mind.  Had he just tried to insinuate that Shael had been in
the room?  That he had
witnessed
this injustice and had done nothing
about it?  That he had been a
part
of it?

If the telepath
realized or cared that Shael was only a ninth from obliterating him for the
insult, he gave no outward appearance of it.  His azure eyes intently focused
on Shael’s face, Twelve-A said,
Remember what I said when he locked you in
the machine?
 

When he locked…
Shael
…in
the machine?  True, the machine had looked very similar to the bed that Shael
had used to save the weaklings around him from the thrashings in his sleep. 
Oddly, that thought brought with it a sudden rush of memories that strained
Shael’s being, threatening to shatter his core, and Shael floundered in their
midst, desperate to hold them back.

“I don’t want to
remember,” Shael whimpered.

Try
,
Twelve-A begged of him.

Shael swallowed,
hard.  He closed his eyes against the ache in his chest, the rawness in his
throat, the churning in his gut.  He felt as if his world had imploded, a
delicate tower of scales that had been slapped to the ground around him.  Now
he felt adrift, anchorless,
afraid…

Please try,
Twelve-A asked softly. 
You’re so very close.

Shael shivered
in his grip, but did not pull away.  Something was happening to him in his very
spirit, something overwhelming, something so
profound
that, once it
tipped him over that dangerous edge, spilling him into the endless rift that
now faced him, he would never be able to go back.  His whole body felt afire
with some inner truth, something deep and desperate to emerge.  He felt it
surging upward, tugged out of his being on a rising tide of understanding…

“I’ve got a good
shot of whiskey, if that would help chill her out,” Joedobbs offered.  “It
helps me.  Total obliteration in like two tics.”

Shael frowned,
recognizing the Earthling-speak…and that he could understand it.  Was he
offering to give
Alice
whiskey?  Surely he knew the budding warrior was
too young…

Ignore the
furg,
Twelve-A insisted, holding Shael’s head when he blinked and tried to
turn.
  Remember what I told you.

“That is, if the
leprechaun will let you drink whiskey,” Joe added wryly, in Jreet.  “What’s he
doing to you, anyway?”

Twelve-A’s forehead
pinched, but he never took his eyes from Shael’s. 
Think back to that moment
when Doctor Philip was closing Six Six Five in the bed.  I told you something. 
Something important…

Shael felt his
body start to shake, trembling like one of the delicate Earth leaves in an
arctic Welu breeze.  He felt his consciousness start to shift, much like it did
when he took to his war-mind, but on a deeper, much more basic level.  He felt
that hidden part of himself start to surface from the dark pool of his being,
terrifying in its intensity…

“Well,” Joedobbs
said, heaving a huge sigh of regret.  “So much for the blankets.”

The sense of an
impending explosion subsided on a cold rush of dread.  Shael jerked out of
Twelve-A’s grip and twisted to look over at the Voran’s feet.  He froze,
aghast, when he saw the devastation that had been wreaked upon their camp. 
Everything within three rods of him—even the blankets—had been shredded.  “The
blankets
,”
Shael gasped, his chest wracked with paralyzing horror at the loss.

Beside him,
Twelve-A heaved a huge, audible sigh and gave Joedobbs an irritated look, then
abruptly got up and wandered off.  Still standing above Shael, Joedobbs frowned
at the minder’s departing back.  “What?” he cried.

The telepath
found a spot with a cluster of People just at the edge of the ring of firelight
and lay down with his back to them, ignoring the Voran completely.

“Pointy-eared
furgling,” Joe muttered, scowling at the minder.  To Shael, he demanded, “What
did I say?”

But Shael was
staring at the ruined blankets scattered around them in open-mouthed dismay. 
They had been
his to protect
.  Valued treasures…and Shael had
destroyed
them.  The Sisters themselves would shun him for a thousand turns of the Coil
for such sacrilege.  Word of his failure would be sung in battle-song for ages,
his name called in the heat of battle by Vorans and Aezi alike, a symbol to be
scorned by every Jreet of every clan to the end of time.  He would be able to
face no other Jreet without mockery, could not even return to the head of his
clan out of humiliation for his failure.

“Yeah, you were
freaking out in your sleep,” Joedobbs said, oblivious to Shael’s shame.  He
cocked his head at Shael, who was clutching the ruined shreds to his chest in
disgrace.  “You, uh, remember what you were dreaming about?  You think that
has, uh, any
bearing
on this situation?”

Of course it
did.  Shael had been given dreams of this Six Six Five as a
warning
.  A
warning of what it meant to
fail
.  What it meant to be culled—to lose
his warriorship out of his own lack of resolve.  As the Black Jreet had
predicted, the Sisters themselves were watching over Shael, sending him
messages for his ears alone.  Cautions.  Admonitions of what would happen to
him should he forget who he was, should he lose sight of what it meant to be
Welu, to lose hope.  To become
female
.

Suddenly, Shael
understood.

“I,” Shael
growled, standing to glare up at Beda ga Vora, “will
never
lose my tek
to you, Voran.  I would rather writhe in the filth of Dhasha and massage the
tentacles of Huouyt than lose my tek to
you
.”

Joedobbs blinked
down at him, paralyzed by the power of Shael’s words.  “Uh.  Okay.”

Over near where
the minder had gone to lie down, there was a huge sigh.

Satisfied that
they both understood he would
never
back down,
never
surrender to
a Voran furg who hoarded scraps of cloth like they were made of ruvmestin,
Shael sneered and went to find a weapon.  If he had forgotten how to fight due
to a few turns of laziness and complacency while trying to train Doctorphilip’s
frightened, skulking Human cowards, that was nothing that diligence and many
hours of practice couldn’t remedy…

#

(Terror.)

The
strength
of it brought Twelve-A out of the numbing bliss of sleep, back into a world of
chronic pain, confusion, and unspeakable sorrow.  For several moments, he
simply stared at the ceiling of his cell, tired.  It hurt to feel, hurt to
think, hurt to
exist
.  The constant jumble of suffocatingly violent
thoughts and cloyingly twisted emotions floated around him like bits of debris
in his water dish.  He had access to so many minds, could accidentally become
any
of them, and yet
all
of them were broken, hurting, floundering in
selfishness and despair, so wrapped in their suffering they were mired in their
pain.  Just to brush their awarenesses for an instant left an indelible mark
within his being, like billions of perpetual fires that each had the capacity
to sear away parts of his soul.

Even now, it
sank into him, pounding him from all sides.  The sickness.  The misery.  The
corruption.  The acts of outright ruthlessness and the unnoticed, everyday
cruelties.  The immigrant hiding in the desert, starving and dehydrated,
because he was afraid of the authorities.  The factory worker who beat his
family because he still felt worthless inside from his own parents’ beatings. 
The old lady who was signing her life savings over to a young man who intended
to dump her in a cheap nursing home.  The librarian who planned to slit her
wrists in the morning.  The prison warden who enjoyed punishing his inmates. 
The bellhop who raped native girls from the Reservation in his off-time.  The
patron in the next town over who told the young server at McDonalds to keep the
change—for a trip to a cosmetic surgeon….  All of it
hurt
, draining him,
leeching into his soul, staining his spirit.

(Terror.)

Twelve-A
swallowed and tried to remove himself from the cracked, victimized flotsam that
was humanity, snapped from his drifting reverie by a powerful pang of fear much
nearer to home.  Still motionless in his bed, he pulled away from the perpetual
hurt of the world, struggling to ignore the pervasive inner agony.   He had
learned not to make sudden movements when he woke, because they would trigger
his cell’s motion alarms and the attendants would rush to put him back to
sleep.