Zero's Return (76 page)

Twelve-A was crammed into
his mind in an instant, a mountain squeezed into a cardboard box. 
Why are
you screaming?  You’re scaring the People.
  He sounded more concerned by
the fact that Joe was scaring the experiments than by the fact that he was
screaming.

Groaning at the pressure
in his skull, Joe doubled over, holding his temples.  “Just…a dream…  Soot. 
Stop
,
you long-eared furgling asher!  Go back to your sootpile.”

Twelve-A reluctantly
pulled back, returning the controls.

Joe swallowed and
straightened, shivering in the cool mountain air.  His body was still soaked
with an icy sweat, his heart hurting from pounding, his throat still rough from
screaming. 

Another Neskfaat dream. 
Joe felt a pang of dread hit him like a round to the chest.  He hadn’t had a
Neskfaat dream since flashbacks had forced him to leave Der’ru, when he had
spent the next seven rotations—and several million credits—letting a shrink
tinker with his head.  He’d thought he’d
fixed
it.  Joe thought of all
the screaming fests, the cold sweats, the insomnia-induced rages he had
inflicted on his groundmates during his final days on Der’ru.  He thought about
how his Second had finally come to him with the private code to a Jahul
head-doctor.  He thought about going back to that, berserking over nothing,
once more unable to control himself or his temper, inflicting that on the
People, and his left hand again started to shake. 

Yet
another
thing
that he had thought he’d gotten more or less under control.  Immediately, Joe
balled his hand into a fist and tried to clear his mind like the Jahul had
tried to teach him.  Instead, the fear of losing what little civility he had
managed to regain dropped him into a cold sweat, and he felt his heart speeding
up, his mind starting to race, dragging him back to distant battles, to the
faces of people he had failed, wounds he had taken, weapons he had fired.

Not again,
Joe
thought, realizing he was on the verge of something he’d managed to stave off
for three turns. 
Sweet Mothers’ talons, not again.
  He closed his eyes
and pressed his fist against his forehead, trying to clear it of the images
that were trying to climb out, demanding to be seen.

As if summoned by his own
anxiety, the very thing he feared began to spread out before him in vivid,
three hundred and sixty degree color detail.  A field of death, Dhasha princes
carving swaths of blood through moving slabs of meat, friends that had fallen,
pickups that never came…

His panic must have
carried to Twelve-A, because the telepath grabbed Joe’s mind in a vise and
squeezed, yanking him back to the present. 
What happened?  What are you
doing?

When Joe looked, the
minder had sat up fully, all pretenses of being sick gone, giving Joe a deeply
anxious look.

Nothing, you control-freak
furg,
Joe muttered, dropping his eyes to his shaking left hand, suddenly
very ashamed. 
Flashback.  I get them.
  In that moment, he would have
given anything not to be in the meadow with the People, but alone in some bar,
drowning his sorrows in whisky and strangers.

Twelve-A cocked his blond
head slightly.  There was a slight pause, then,
You want me to make the
flashbacks stop?

The simple words hit him
like a Dhasha paw.  Joe had the startling realization that, after seventy-four
turns of drugs, therapies, and visits to Ooreiki shrinks, all to no avail,
Twelve-A was utterly serious.  And utterly capable.  With a thought.  And it
terrified the soot outta him.

Don’t you dare,
Joe thought in sudden anxiety, realizing he was about to become some sort of
drooling, gun-toting zombie. 
You need those memories.  They’re what are
keeping you furgs alive.

But I can fix them…

No, goddamn it!
Joe snapped. 
You’re not going to ‘fix’ them.  Get out!  My mind, my rules.

Twelve-A held his mind
for a moment longer, in which Joe was acutely aware that the telepath was
thinking about doing it anyway, then reluctantly released him.  Joe let out a
huge, shaky breath, realizing how close he had come to being just like the
drooling, happy-go-lucky, crotch-groping idiots around him.

Across the camp, Shael
was watching him with confusion.  Unlike her challenging stare from earlier,
when she was stealing his stuff, now her Dhasha-green eyes looked
almost…worried for him?

Time to get back on my
meds,
Joe thought, sweating as he uncapped his canteen and took a long
swig. 
She’d rather shove a knife through your guts and leave wild animals
to eat you alive for being ‘weak’ than worry over a used-up Congie Prime. 
Once
he’d steadied himself, he tucked the flask back into his chest pocket and,
taking courage from liquid oblivion, took a moment to return her stare, looking
her completely over with what he hoped was the same disdain she had shown him
earlier.

It probably wasn’t.  She
was utterly gorgeous and topless and Joe hadn’t gotten laid in six turns.

Her emerald gaze was
startling in its intensity, and made his heart pound oddly to meet it.  The
vivid green eyes were set under a growing fringe of curly black hair, above a
delicate, sunburned nose.  Her full lips were pursed in amusement, her pert
chin lifted in challenge. 

She
still
thinks she’s the better warrior,
Joe thought, stunned and irritated. 
Seeing that, after all the ass-saving Joe had done in the last few weeks, was
the last little itch that set off the Dhasha.

Buoyed by Beam, Joe took
out Prime Sentinel Raavor’s ovi and decided to
show
her just how inept
she really was.  He got up, cut a spear-length sapling, whittled it down,
notched it, then used pieces he salvaged from her abandoned project to fasten a
more reasonably-sized stone to the head of his spear, all in the space of
sixty-six tics.  Finished with something that he was half-proud of, he held it
up, looked at her, looked at the scattered remnants of her own spearmaking
attempt, and smirked.

Shael, who had been
watching intently, flushed and quickly found something else to do.

Joe blinked as she
retreated, realizing he had quite unexpectedly won some sort of little war
between them. 

A moment later, Twelve-A
took his mind in a fist and squeezed hard enough to make Joe stagger. 
You
made Shael cry.
  Twelve-A sounded as if he felt he should return the favor,
with interest.

And Joe, realizing he had
just bested a naïve and ignorant ‘Jreet’ genetic experiment with his infinitely
more vast knowledge of death and warfare, suddenly felt like a sootbag. 
“Ash.”  Disgusted with himself, Joe dropped his spear.  One of the young men
who had been watching the operation immediately picked it up and carried it
off, to stick the pointy end in the fire. 

Is she still crying
now?
Joe demanded.

Yes, furg.  She was
trying very hard to impress you, earlier.
 

And once again, after
being repeatedly groped, thrown around, his belongings pawed, his psyche thrown
into all-out war flashbacks, and his mind outright assaulted,
Joe
felt
like the inconsiderate asher.  Realizing he needed to make amends, he sheathed
his blade and went after her.

He found Shael seated on
a hillock overlooking the valley, her arms crossed around her chest, chin on
her knees.  Seeing she wasn’t going to run off, Joe slowed and approached her
with all the caution one would use on an angry Dhasha.  He knew she heard him,
because she stiffened.

“Look, I’m sorry,” Joe
muttered, once he got close enough to be heard.  “I didn’t mean it.  All the
standing around is leaving me in a sooty mood.  I was just trying to make you
feel a little bad.”

Well, it worked,
Twelve-A said, obvious disapproval in his voice.

Shut up and shove off,
furg,
Joe growled. 
I’m taking care of it.

Twelve-A gave a derisive
mental snort, but then left him alone.

Very carefully, Joe
lowered himself to the hill beside her.  “That was a really cool spear you
made,” he said lamely.

She refused to look at
him.  He could see tears trailing down her cheeks.  And, no matter how much Joe
tried, he couldn’t say something she would understand. 
Doing
something
comprehensible had been easy enough, but
saying
it was like growing
wings.  Even now, she was huddled over herself, quietly sobbing into her knees.

“Sorry,” Joe muttered. 
“Sisters, I don’t belong here.  What did I think I was gonna do, really?  Kill
kreenit until I died of old age?  Just so they could…what…repopulate fifty
turns after I’m dead?  You know how utterly
worthless
my entire life has
been?”  He dropped his head into his utterly stable, robotic right hand and
stared out at the valley.  With his shaking left, he dragged J.B. from his
pocket, uncapped it, and took a swig.  “Just a dumb ol’ Congie waiting to die,”
he said, on a burning exhale of whisky fumes.  When tears continued to leak
down her face and she showed not a twitch of recognition, he just sighed and
took another swallow, sharing their moment of mournful silence. 

Looking down into the
valley, he briefly found himself in another place, on a windswept hill on
Rastari, watching Jikaln lead his best friend off to be interrogated.

That’s what happened to
his friends.  They got killed, some by his own damn hand.  It was like some
cruel conspiracy between the Sisters, where Life took those who meant anything
at all to him and murdered them in the most brutal way possible.  Hell, with
the People, an incompetent band of idiots had already tried.

And, once again, he
hadn’t been able to save his friends.

Wondering what would
happen when the People ran up against someone with more skills and fewer
scruples, Joe took another swill in silence.

The shaking in his left
hand was now bad enough to make it hard to put the cap back on the flask. 
Remembering the dream, the flashback, his behavior afterward, he wondered if,
now that the Congie drugs were wearing off, all that alien death and dying he
had stuffed into his subconscious was going to start to resurface in ugly ways.

God I hope not,
he
thought, watching Shael whimper to herself. 
They’re too innocent for me to
go psycho Congie on them.

Sorry,” he muttered
again.

Shael gave him a sideways
look through tears.

“I’m a furg,” Joe said,
gesturing to himself with his flask so she couldn’t take it the other way
around.

She knew what ‘furg’
meant.  He used it enough times, generally when the People were doing something
lazy, slow, or mind-numbingly stupid, that the word had stuck.  Still, she
shuddered and glanced back out at the valley.

“Look,” Joe said, “I
don’t know what happened to you, but whatever you think you are, you gotta
start over.  Learn it all from scratch, you know?  I’ll teach you, if you want
to learn.”  At her tentative look, he leaned the flask against his ankle,
pulled one of the salvaged lengths of survival line from his pocket, tore up a
handful of grass, and knotted the line around it so she could clearly see how
he did it.

Shael’s eyes widened.

Seeing that he’d caught
her attention, Joe gingerly laid the survival line and its bundle of grass on
her knee.  “Now you try.”  He mimed untying it and starting over.

Surprising him, she immediately
did.  And, with startling accuracy, she was able to replicate what he had
done.  Then she untied it and re-tied it several times with the acute
concentration and precision that Joe recognized from PlanOps shooting ranges,
weapons drills, or species debriefings.  He frowned at that a moment, but then
shrugged it off. 
She just
thinks
she’s a warrior,
he told
himself. 
Of course she’s going to concentrate like one.

 “How about we start
over, Shael?” Joe asked.  It didn’t escape his notice that ‘Shael’ was the name
of the famous Welu folk-hero—probably one of the only Jreet names the majority
of Humanity even recognized.  “Hi.  I’m Joe.  I’m a big, badass Congie vet with
an attitude problem.  You’re innocent and ill-treated and I’ve been a furg.”

She gave him a blank
look, then, in Welu-flavored Jreet said, “How about we start over, Voran?  I’m
a hardened warrior.  You’re obviously unsuited to the strains of battle, so
from here on, I’ll protect you, and someday, you’ll give up your tek and take
my spawn.”

Joe blinked at her, jaw
going limp.  “What?”

She gave a satisfied nod
of her head.  “Good.  Agreed, then.”

Joe continued to peer at
her.  Straightening, he insisted, “No,
I’m
protecting
you
.”  He
pointed at his chest, then hers, for emphasis.

She scowled.  “No,
you’re
taking
my
spawn.”  She did the same.

Joe knew from his time
with the Jreet—first Daviin, then Edrin and Wiirik—that when a Jreet found
another Jreet he was interested in, those two had to decide which of them would
trigger the hormone change, drop their tek, and become female.  It was usually
decided by a battle-to-surrender, which, with a Jreet, often meant a
battle-to-the-death because they didn’t surrender.  Yet another reason their
numbers were so few.

Twelve-A,
Joe
thought hurriedly,
now would be a good time to convince her I’m not trying
to get her pregnant.

Why?  I’m amusing
myself, watching the two of you.  Everything else is so boring.

Six tics,
Joe
blurted, seeing the fire returning to her eyes.

Seven.  You reneged on
our deal.

Joe narrowed his eyes. 
Ignoring the minder, he said, “Look.  Shael.  You obviously got brainwashed by
some really bad men somewhere along the way.  You are
not
a Jreet.  You
can’t impregnate me.  That’s what I do to you.”