Zero's Return (71 page)

“And when were you going
to tell me this?” Slade asked softly.  “After I had sent men to investigate and
they didn’t return?”

The guard gulped.  “No,
sir.  I wasn’t thinking straight.  It was a long run, and I was scared…”

“Scared?” Slade snapped. 
Tyson took two steps toward the man on the ground and hovered over him
threateningly.

“She—they got Brent and
Dave and Richie and Mick,” the man stammered.  “Almost got me.”

She…
  Slade hadn’t
missed the priest’s slip-up.  That usually meant a retired Congie.  Fuck.  “And
why are they attacking us?” Slade growled.  “Did you provoke them?”

The man’s eyes slid
sideways and he licked his lips.  “Well, I mean, we saw her—them—and Dave
decided he wanted to do some target practice, just a little bit.  Brent was
against it from the start, but I—”

“Joined in,” Slade
finished for him.  He was furious.  “How many Congies?”

The man hesitated, his
eyes going wide.

Tyson backhanded the man,
sending him sprawling.  “Ghost asked you a question,” the big Aryan bellowed.

“O-o-one th-tha-hat I
kn-know-of,” the man whimpered.

Slade narrowed his eyes. 
“One.  And it’s a girl.”

“Yes, Ghost, sir.  A
girl.”

“You kill her?” Slade
demanded.

The man flinched.  “Uh…no
sir.”

Slade glanced in the
direction of the back of the camp.  “What was she doing when you attacked her?”

The man reddened again. 
“Uh, she, uh…”  He swallowed hard.

Tyson raised his arm in
warning.

“Taking a piss,” Derek
whimpered.  “We were gonna grab her, have some fun.”

“And she killed four of
you,” Slade growled.

His priest’s face went
red.  “Eight,” Derek managed.

Slade was impressed.  He
glanced at Tyson, who was similarly staring at their priest.  Together, he and
his Second eyed their backtrail.  Slade had put their best guns to guard their
rear.  Even then, the Congie woman was probably back there, picking through
their weapons, taking what she wanted.

“Damn it,” Tyson
muttered.  “She’s gonna take the guns.” 

Slade glanced at Derek. 
“
Tell
me you injured her.”

“Mick got a rope around
her throat before she kicked him,” Derek babbled.  “Strangled her a little
while he gettin’ his pants off.”  He went on to explain how they’d run across a
pretty piece of ass with her guns leaning against a tree, taken her by
surprise, tied her down, stripped her naked, and were arguing about who would
get to have his way with her first when she broke free, went alien-kung-fu on
them, and killed them all.  Lovely.

Tyson’s eyes had grown
icy as he listened to Derek’s rendition of the day’s events.  Tyson had been
serious about the No-Raping-Women-That-Don’t-Belong-To-You law, and Slade
realized that Derek was very close to taking a round from Tyson’s pistol
through his forehead.  “Careful,” Slade warned his second.  “We just lost
eight.  Possibly more, if she’s feeling vengeful.  We need our priests.  As…” 
his face twisted, trying to come up with the right word, “…repugnant as they
are.”  He had, after all, collected most of his followers from a
penitentiary—beggars couldn’t afford to be choosy.

Derek started babbling
his thanks, crawling forward and kissing Slade’s boots.  Looking down at the
display in distaste, Slade quietly told Tyson, “We have to kill her.”

“Yeah, fuck that, Sam,”
Tyson growled.

Slade tore his eyes from
the boot-kissing imbecile to glare at his second.  “Seriously?  You wanna let
her
live
?  You
did
hear what they just tried to do to her,
right?”

“Ain’t killin’ no women,”
Tyson growled.  “She gave ‘em what-for, she deserves to go on with her life.”

“Yeah, if only it were
that simple,” Slade muttered.  He turned to look down at the boot kissing
idiot.  “Tell ya what,” he said thoughtfully.  “We’ll test the theory.”  He
raised his voice to the sobbing priest and nudged him with a foot.  “You get in
on the action, there, Derek-boy?  Grope a little titty while you were waiting
your turn?”

“No,” Derek babbled.  “No
way, huh-uh.  That’s one of the
laws
, man…”  He held up both hands,
shaking his head.

Slade narrowed his eyes
at his priest.  “You can’t lie to me, Derek.”

Immediately, Derek’s
tear-streaked face went pale.  “I was gonna go first.  I was gonna make it
fast, I swear.  Just had to get my rocks off, man.”

Tyson’s lip curled in a
snarl and he reached for his pistol, but Slade caught his arm.  To the priest,
Slade said, “All right, Derek.  Deed’s done, you learned your lesson.  No more
raping lonely women who are somehow making it on their own without any
gun-toting badasses to protect them.  Get back to your station.  We’re getting
out of here.”

Derek nodded, babbling
his thanks, grabbed his rifle, and scrambled away.

Tyson scowled, watching
the man go.  “They were gonna rape her, kill her, and never tell anyone about
it.”

“Yeah,” Slade said.  “A
pack of gum says she’s following us.”

Tyson continued to glare
at Derek’s back.  “I don’t have gum.”

“Too bad,” Slade said,
seeing a flash of black in the pines.

A moment later, Derek’s
head exploded.  Several of Slade’s flock screamed as the man jerked and fell
forward, the bloody stump of his neck spurting blood over a ten-yard radius.  A
moment later, another priest’s head erupted in a fine red mist.

“Right,” Slade said,
ducking out of sight and dragging Tyson with him.  “
Now
can we kill
her?”

Tyson was looking pale. 
“You have a plan?”

“Yeah,” Slade said,
patting his survivalist book.  “Snares.”

#

Rat was still trembling
when she stalked back to her camp.  The leftover fear and terror had finally
gone, released with each pull of the trigger, until twelve more dead had
replaced it with total numbness.

The ghost-burning vaghi. 
The disgusting, evil
ashsouls
.  Humanity was nothing like what she knew
in the Ground Force.  It was…like nothing she’d ever seen.  She finally
understood what the rest of Congress had meant by calling her species
unevolved, barely sentient.  These…beasts…were
nothing
like Congies. 
Whereas Congies were all brothers and sisters, all siblings at the core,
working together to survive, these Humans were genetic filth.  She had the very
vivid idea that, had she not broken free while they’d all been standing around
with their dicks out, arguing about who got the first turn, they would have
fucked her, slit her throat, and left her corpse for the flies.

Her chest still hurt from
the adrenaline, and her wrists and ankles burned from where they’d tied her
down.

The ashsouls.

A whimper broke from her
throat unbidden, and she once again felt the loneliness pounding at her from
all sides.  Everything she knew, everything she understood, was
gone
. 
She was left with monsters.

She missed Mekkval and
Benva and Sol’dan and Osteil and even the annoying little Baga.  She missed her
friends
.  Here, she was surrounded by brutes.  Animals.  She kept seeing
their starving, depraved, excited faces as they stood around her…

She fell to the ground
beside her bedroll and brought her legs up to her chest and hugged herself,
trying to remember why she was on this miserable planet.  When she couldn’t
remember, her mind still playing and replaying the events of the afternoon, she
closed her eyes, lowered her chin to her knees, and cried.

From the first moment
she’d entered her homeworld’s atmosphere, everything had gone wrong.  The
Ooreiki Corps Director had meted out Judgement early, bots had destroyed her
ship and her supplies, she’d broken most of the bones in her body in the crash,
she’d spilled her nanos, Max had turned on her… 

Then, in her mad dash to
escape the Rodemax, she’d lost all concept of where she was.  Hunger had won
out and she’d eventually stopped running and started to dig in, building a
small base camp in the woods, prepping to take Max out when he came for her—as
she knew he would.  Unfortunately, once she had built herself a small fortress,
it had taken most of the
rest
of her nano supply just to keep herself
alive after a damned kreenit had wrecked her camp, eaten what remained of her
food stores, and destroyed most of her weapons.  Since then, she’d been
wandering the planet looking for small Earth-fauna that she hoped was edible,
killing them with her throwing-knife because her gun would dissolve what flesh
they had to eat, afraid of building an open fire for fear of attracting
attention, sometimes so hungry she devoured her findings raw.

Rat, who hadn’t had
anything to eat in close to four days, just stared at the ground in front of
her feet.  It was part of what had given the bastards the jump on her.  She was
weak.  Really weak.  It was getting to be a lot of effort just to pick up her
rifle and move camp whenever she ran out of rodents to eat.

Thinking of rodents made
her hands shake.  Rat glanced to the side at the tuft of grass growing near her
bed.  She’d been eying it for the last two days, knowing it would be the
beginning of the end, but she was to the point where anything—anything—in her
gut would be better than nothing.

You can’t eat grass,
Rat thought, miserable. 
It’ll take and give nothing in return.

But, even though her
mind
knew that, her body saw the grass and screamed at her to wrap her fingers
around it and put it in her mouth.  Anything to stave off the hunger.

Rat closed her eyes and
tried to think about something—
anything
—else.  The dead men.  She’d
taken their belongings, then gone on to kill their buddies.  She’d seen the bright
red blood flooding out onto the ground, had seen the flies congregating on it,
and had thoroughly sickened herself with the pang of hunger that followed.

She refused to eat
corpses.  It was the one thing she would not do.  She’d seen enough half-eaten Human
corpses—bodies of her
friends
—that she’d rather eat grass than dig into
that nice, warm thigh…

“Stop
thinking about
food!
” she screamed at herself, desperate, now.  She had filled her stomach
with water earlier that day, but she’d already pissed most of it out.  She
grabbed herself by the temples and tried to think of her friends, of the
Sentinel she’d had to leave behind, of her younger years, of the last big war,
of starving in the pits when they ran out of rations, of celebratory feasts
with her groundteam after another dead prince…

Rat lost it, then.  She
reached out, yanked up a clump of grass, and started stuffing it in her mouth. 
She had to chew it well, she found, to make it go down her throat, otherwise
the multitudes of built-in barbs of the leaves lodged in her esophagus.

Rat swallowed hard,
pushing the handful of grass into her stomach, then tore out another clump.

“You know,” a man’s voice
said, “I was going to go through all the effort to snare you, but I think maybe
I’ll just feed you, instead.”

Rat scrambled for her gun
and, rolling, brought it up and around to face the newcomer.

The big man standing a
few feet away had no weapon that she could see, but he was easily a good
two-thirds of a rod tall, with maybe an extra hand or two thrown in, and was
definitely well-fed.  He also had crazy blue-white eyes that reminded her of a
Huouyt, and weird, fluffy white hair.  Some sort of albino?

Watching him over the
gun, Rat spat out her last mouthful of grass and warily stood.  Backing up, she
put most of a tree between her and the stranger, then started looking for his
friends.

“I’m alone,” the big
stranger said softly in Congie.  He was watching her much too closely.  “When
was the last time you ate something?”

“Today,” Rat bit out.  It
was the first word she’d actually spoken in conversation since Max had betrayed
her.

The sootwad actually
grinned at her.  “I wasn’t talking about grass, sweetie.”

For that, she almost put
a round through his forehead.  Her whole body was trembling again, and it was
all she could do to stand up.  She was so exhausted she had to lean against the
tree to stay upright.

He pulled out a small
pink square from his pocket.  “Care for some gum?  It’s all I’ve got on me, but
you look like you could use it.”  The man held it up where she could see it.

Rat’s eyes flickered from
the pink square in his fingers, then back to his creepy white-blue eyes.  “Get
out of here, asher,” she growled.

The man was watching her
with outright curiosity.  Holding up the pink square for her perusal, he
pointedly squatted and lowered it to the ground at his feet.  Then he stood and
slowly backed up a good two rods and waited.

Rat’s eyes dropped to the
pink package, then back up to the man who was even then watching her with
intense interest.  She swallowed hard and felt the glands in her mouth working,
filling it with saliva.

“Back up more,” she
managed.

Obligingly, he backed up
another rod.

She glanced again at the
pink package, then warily scanned their surroundings for some hidden companion.

“I’m alone,” he said
again.  “Tyson heard my plan and told me to go fuck myself.”  He gave her a wry
grin.  “For some reason, he didn’t think trapping a Congie with a snare was
such a good idea.”

Rat raised her rifle
again, taking aim at his fluffy head.  “Nobody’s
trapping
me,” she
snarled.  “Get the fuck out of here. 
Now
.”  She looked again for his
companions, but part of the reason she had picked her current camp was its
protected location—it was almost impossible to be hit by snipers.  Unless the
stranger had a Jreet up his sleeves, he really was alone.