Zero's Return (70 page)

You know,
Twelve-A
told him weakly,
she likes you.

Joe blinked.  “Huh?”

The minder’s blue eyes
fluttered open and focused on his face. 
Did you let her keep the guns?

“Do I look stupid to
you?” Joe growled.  “What do you mean, she likes me?” 

She didn’t kill you,
Twelve-A said. 
I was pretty sure she was going to kill you.

Joe peered down at
Twelve-A.  “And you wouldn’t have stopped her?” he demanded, hurt.

Twelve-A took a couple
weak breaths. 
She wears her mindspace like a shield.  I can’t reach her
through it.
  His anemic gasps caught in his lungs and with a wracking
cough, he started to hack up chunks of what looked like nano-encapsulated lumps
of blood and toxins.

“But you can sense what
she’s thinking?” Joe prodded, completely unmoved by his friend’s pathetic
choking fit.  “And you think she likes me?”  The idea was making his heart
pound.

What
is
that
stuff?
the minder said weakly, staring at the black globules, looking
totally appalled.

“How
much
does she
like me?” Joe demanded.  He chanced a glance back at the woman’s retreating
form and he once again had that startling realization that she could totally
kick his ass, and, horrifyingly, he found that oddly thrilling. 

Twelve-A slowly turned
from his inspection of the gelatinous nannite wastes to scowl at him. 
I
just coughed up black globs of snot from my lungs, furg.
  He pointed, for
Joe’s clarification.

“It’s normal,” Joe said. 
“Answer my question.  Is she like…interested?”  His heart was starting to
hammer painfully at the thought of kissing her.  Which was scaring the hell
outta him.

She likes you enough,
Twelve-A muttered. 
She thinks you might be the better fighter.

“Define ‘enough’, you
Nansaba-eared freak!” Joe cried.  “Does she like me or not?”

Twelve-A narrowed his
blue eyes. 
Ten minutes ago, I was dying.

“Well, you’re not
anymore.”  Joe’s heart was pounding so hard he was having trouble thinking
straight.  “Does she
want
me to kick her ass?  Is that what the
child-bearing crap was about?”  Though it was rare, sometimes a Jreet picked a
suitable mate and
chose
to be female, though requested a good
ass-kicking to save face.  The idea that she was choosing to be female, for
him, left Joe oddly warm and fuzzy inside.

I could still be
dying, you know,
Twelve-A told him, pale face glaring up at him.

“You’re not,” Joe said,
his mind in overdrive.  Maybe he
should
thoroughly kick her ass, at
least once.  By Jreet rights, that would make her female, which would at least
put her on the right side of the gender divide.  Maybe, once he vanquished her
and proved himself to be the male of the relationship, she would stop being
unreasonable and let him kiss her.  Ash, he wanted to kiss her…

Twelve-A frowned at him. 
What you are thinking is stupid.

And if he could just
kiss
her, he could make her realize that maybe her new, big,
strong
Voran
could protect her, say, at night.  Warm her bed, even.  Keep her new, tekless
body safe from all those other horrible Jreet warriors out there…

I took him a moment to
realize that Twelve-A was peering at him like he’d just picked out his left
eyeball. 

After it went on for
several awkward moments, Joe began to fidget.  “What?”

I think I’m going to
go take a nap.  Last night someone tried to beat me to death.
  Carefully
leaving his globs of black mucous where they lay, Twelve-A sat up and glanced
in the giant’s direction with a tiny crease to his brow.  Immediately, Nine-G
shoved his way to the front of the gawkers, snagged the skinny cretin up into
his beefy arms, and walked off, hairy buttcheeks flexing as he carried the
minder away.

Unfortunately for Joe,
the
feasibility
of legitimately kicking her ass seemed to have decreased
exponentially with the fact that, ever since Mike’s assault on the People,
Shael now seemed perfectly willing to use her ‘war-mind’ to win.  Or take his
guns from him.  Or shove him around.

“Soot,” Joe muttered,
feeling the lost opportunity like a knife in his chest.  Jreet respected
strength, and compared to Shael, he was a gnat up against a baseball bat.  He
should’ve broken a few bones when he had the chance. 
That
would’ve
shown her.

It was on days like these
where Joe wished he had his brother’s brains. 
Sam
wouldn’t have been
standing there like a furg, wondering how to best kick a five-digs woman’s
ass.  He would be schmoozing her into providing her firstborn child over the
wonders of a glowing martini and a heated swimming pool.

“Soot,” Joe swore again. 
His heart was still pounding at the idea of kissing her…which meant he had to
convince her she was a girl.  Which required a good ass kicking.  Which Joe had
about as much chance of giving her as flying back to Koliinaat on a spaceship
made of korja nuggets.

Joe’s starry-eyed quest
to find a way to kiss her ended abruptly as he realized that Shael had gone
over to his belongings and was rooting through his backpack and gear, squinting
at weapons and survival items before tossing them aside and continuing her
exploration.

Frowning, Joe went to
reclaim his stuff.

Which, he quickly found
out, she no longer considered his stuff.

“You left it here,” Shael
grunted, rifling through his equipment and taking his flashlight and emergency
flares while tossing aside his canteens of whiskey.  “That means you didn’t
want it anymore.”

“
Nooo
,” Joe said,
yanking the bag from her, “that means I trusted my fellow
campmates
not
to
steal
it from me.”  He started hastily gathering up his canteens.

Instead of having the intended
effect, however, Shael just snorted and moved on to his smaller satchel.  And,
as Joe watched her confiscate a pair of his pants and his best combat gloves,
he began to woefully realize that, despite her wholehearted belief she was
Welu, she was not as easily manipulated as a Jreet.  Or she was learning.

Seeing the intelligence
in her eyes as she examined one of his spare charge magazines, he had the
uncomfortable idea that she was learning.

“
My
pants,
my
flares,
my
gloves,” Joe said, yanking them out of her grasp.  “Look,
these won’t even fit you.  Too
big
.  Because you’re
tiny
.  See?” 
He held up the pants to his body, then to hers for clarification.

Shael’s eyes got wide and
she backed up three steps much too quickly, staring at the pants like they were
possessed by one of the Ooreiki ghosts.  Her eyes flickered to Joe and she
swallowed, face paling like she were staring down a hungry Dhasha.  Finding her
reaction strange, Joe frowned at the pants, expecting to see some sort of huge
Earth bug or something crawling across the fibers.  Seeing nothing but a few
loose strands of grass clinging to the energy-resistant cloth, he glanced back
at her, confused. 

Shael’s green eyes were
much too wide as she stared at him.  Without another word or even an argument,
she dropped his stuff and rushed away.

Joe blinked at his
unexpected victory.  He had
expected
her to flatten him again for the
insult, but instead, it seemed like he’d somehow
scared
her.  As he
watched, she climbed up onto a boulder overlooking the camp—the excellent
lookout post that Joe had staked out as
his
—pulled her legs to her
chest, and started hugging herself, her pretty green eyes staring off in the
opposite direction of camp.

Frowning, Joe glanced
down at the garment in his hand.  What
was
the People’s thing against
clothes, anyway?  He glanced at her again, saw that she was definitely rocking
and holding herself, then just shook his head at yet another of the
experiments’ eccentricities.

At least he’d gotten his
stuff back with minimal effort…

CHAPTER 23 – First Impressions

“Well, shit,” Tyson said,
staring up at the first of the many mountains between them and their
destination.  It was the first time the man had said anything since they’d
broken through the clearing to be faced with a looming cluster of rock that
looked to be half cliff.  Slade shared his unease.  The constant hills had been
bad enough, but
this…
  This was like looking up the skirt of a
ninety-year-old ogre—it wasn’t pretty.  “Any idea how far we’ve got left to
go?”  It was the thirtieth time he’d asked that day.

“I could give you an
exact number in miles as-the-crow-flies,” Slade replied in exasperation, “but
that number would be inherently inaccurate because we’re going to be crossing a
damned mountain range.  Just drop it, okay?  We can think about mountains in
the morning.  Right now, my barometric observations are telling me it’s going
to rain tonight and I want to be prepared.”  He flipped back to the description
of how to build a shelter from pine boughs and frowned.  It didn’t look very
comfortable.  And he sure as hell didn’t see how a few twigs were going to keep
him dry.

Tyson was quiet for a few
minutes, then said, “Guess.”

“Christ!” Slade snapped
the book closed on his thumb and waved it at Tyson in frustration.  “I’ve been
reading this thing for the last three months and I still haven’t had a chance
to finish it!  Do you have something against books?!”

Tyson grunted.  “It’s not
my fault.  You read slow.”

He did, and Slade found
that fact slightly annoying.  He
did
have a photographic memory, but it
took him four or five times as long to read a single page.  Combined with the
headaches and his non-existent libido, his so-called ‘gift’ sometimes seemed
like more of a burden, especially since he now found it extremely difficult to
sit down and read some brain-candy of a novel just for the fun of it. 

“I read slowly because I
have to start over every time I get interrupted, and you interrupt me every
five minutes,” Slade growled.

Tyson shrugged and stuck
another piece of grass between his teeth.  After a moment of silence, he said,
“So are you gonna guess?”

Slade took a deep breath
and let it out through his teeth.  “I can’t guess.  There are too many
variables.  I’d have to pinpoint a certain location on the other side of the
Rockies and then calculate the distance between our point and that point, then
add all the different detours and account for shifts in elevation.  It’s quite
simply impossible without more data.”

Tyson brought out the
worn road map and slapped a finger to the miles and kilometers bar in the lower
right-hand corner.  “According to this, it’s about nine hundred miles to
Nebraska.”

“That is a gross
simplification,” Slade said disgustedly.  “It would be one and a half thousand,
at the very least, providing that we can find a relatively straight shot into
Nebraska.  If the Congies have blockaded the roads and destroyed the bridges,
the distance will be much more than that.”

Tyson nodded and folded
the map back together with a snap.  “Say it’s two thousand miles, just to be on
the safe side.  How long ‘till we get there?”

Slade scoffed.  “Another
equation with too many variables.  It depends on how fast we can climb, how
many people we accumulate in our travels, whether we can use any roads or not,
and how we handle unforeseeable weather conditions.”

Tyson rolled his eyes. 
“We walk about twenty, twenty-five miles a day.  Say twenty, to make up for
those weather conditions.  Then when will we reach Nebraska?”

Slade stared at Tyson,
dumbstruck.  “My God, man, that’s a simple division problem.  A hundred days.” 
At Tyson’s sudden flush, he quickly added, “But that equation is inherently
flawed because it does not take into account food supplies and seasonal
fluctuations.”

“You mean winter,” Tyson
muttered.  He was red-faced, obviously embarrassed that he had needed Slade to
work out such a simple math problem for him.  Slade could actually see all the
dollars Tyson’s rich parents had spent on Yale or Harvard evaporating as the
poor guy sat there, embarrassed.  Unless it was an act.  Slade still wasn’t
sure Tyson wasn’t smarter than he looked.  Unlike most people, Tyson was
sometimes hard to read.

“Yes, winter,” Slade
replied.  “I doubt we’ll get very far through Wyoming—which is where we would
be at the outset if we keep to the current pace—in the dead of winter.”

“I see,” Tyson said,
stuffing the map back into his pack and sucking some more on his grass.  “So
what are we gonna do, hang out until it thaws?”

“We’ll decide that when
we get there,” Slade replied.  He was about to tell Tyson to get the Harmonious
Society of God moving again when one of the Society’s gun-toting priests ran up
to them, panting exhaustedly.  Slade recognized him vaguely as Derek
Peters—whom Slade always thought of as Dick Peter because it was appropriate—a
man who had been one of the most vocal for the slaving of women, back in the
formative stages of their society.

“A large band, heading
north!” Derek gasped, dropping to his hands and knees before Slade.  “Gonna be
here any minute!”

Slade’s brain clicked
quickly into focus.  The man smelled like smoke, but it had a different taste
to it than their campfires.  It held the tinge of ozone.  That, and the fact
that the man had been stationed near the back of the unit, made Slade wonder why
he didn’t simply send runners forward with the message.

“They’re armed with
plasma,” Slade said, frowning.

Derek looked up at him
with a mingling of fear and respect.  He nodded.