[The Legend of ZERO 01.0] Forging Zero

by Sara King

  Jreet (Jreet) – One of the Grand Six. Red, gray, or cream-colored serpentine warriors who guard the First Citizen and the Tribunal. Have the ability to raise the energy level of their scales and disappear from the visible spectrum. Believe in ninety hells for cowards, and that each soul splits into ninety different parts so they can experience all ninety hells at once. Their rravut within their teks is the most powerful poison in Congress. Bluish blood. Short, engine-like shee-whomp battlecry. Cream colored bellies. Diamond-shaped head. Tek- the talon protruding from their chests.

  Ooreiki (Ooh-reh-kee) – One of the Grand Six. Heavy aliens a lot like boneless gorillas. Five hundred pounds on average. Four tentacle fingers on each arm. Big brown ostrich-egg sized snake-eyes, brown legs, skin turns splotchy when frightened. Huge mouths. Wrinkle their big faces to smile. Grunting rattle of speech. Five feet tall on average. Laugh by making a guttural rapping sound in the base of their necks like a toad croaking. Average age is 400. Outnumber humans ten thousand to one. Only the Ueshi are a more populous species.

  Shadyi (Shad-yee) – The species of the First Citizen, Aliphei. There is only one surviving member of this species. Shaggy blue alien, walks on four feet, elephant-sized, black tusks, red eyes.

  Takki (Sounds like: Tacky) – The ancestral servants of the Dhasha. Reviled throughout Congress as cowards and betrayers. Purple scales, very dense bodies, upright humanoid lizards. Crystalline, blue, ovoid eyes.

  Ueshi (Oo-eh-she) – One of the Grand Six. Small blue or blue-green aliens with excellent reflexes and rubbery skin. Aquatic ancestry. Headcrest.

  Measurements:

  ST – Standard Turns 9 standard rotations (1.23 years, 448.875 Earth Days to a Standard Turn)

  SR – Standard Rotation 36 standard days (49.875 Earth Days to a Standard Rotation)

  SD – Standard Day 36 standard hours (33.25 Earth Hours to a Standard Day)

  SH – Standard Hour 72 standard tics (55.42 Earth Minutes to a Standard Hour)

  St – Standard Tics (1.299 tics to an Earth Minute, .7698 Earth Minutes to a Standard Tic)

  Standard Dig- approx. 1 foot

  Standard Rod- approx. 9 feet

  Standard Length - approx. 4,000 feet

  Standard March- approx. 9,999 rods (90,000 feet)

  Standard Lobe- approx. 2.5 pounds

  Ranks:

  Multi-Specieal Galactic Corps – Prime Corps Director

  18-unit Galactic Corps – Secondary Corps Director

  3-unit Galactic Corps – Tertiary Corps Director

  Single-Species Sector Corps – _____(species) Corps Director Single solid silver eight-pointed star with a solid black interior.

  Sector Unit – Prime Overseer. Silver eight-pointed star and four inner circles of a Prime Overseer

  Solar Unit – Secondary Overseer. Silver eight-pointed star and three inner circles of a Secondary Overseer

  Planetary Unit – Tertiary Overseer

  Force – Petty Overseer

  Regiment (8,100)- Prime Commander - eight-pointed star

  Brigade (1800)- Secondary Commander - seven pointed star

  Battalion (900)- Tertiary Commander OR Secondary Commander -six pointed star OR 7-pointed star

  Company (450)- Small Commander - five-pointed star

  Platoon (90)- Battlemaster - four-pointed star

  Squad (18)- Squad leader (Squader) - triangle

  Groundteam (6)- Ground Leader - line

  Grounder - point

  SNEAK PEEK

  And here’s a brief glimpse of ZERO #2,

  Zero Recall:

  The Legend of

  ZERO:

  Zero Recall

  by

  Sara King

  CHAPTER 2: Zero Recall

  “Have you seen this man?” Joe held up the age-progression photo of his brother to the dirty glass window.

  The hollow-eyed man behind the booth scratched his greasy beard and said, “A man like that don’t come cheap. You a cop?”

  “I’m his brother.”

  The man looked him up and down and snorted. “Yeah. Right.”

  “Look at him, damn it,” Joe said, pointing at the picture. “We’re obviously related. Same chin. I’m just trying to find him. I haven’t seen him since the Draft. He could be going by the name Sam or Slade, okay?”

  The druggie’s hollow, skull-like gaze sharpened on Joe, for the first time taking in the rash that had developed around the newly-activated hair follicles of Joe’s face and scalp. Immediately, distrust tightened his features. “You’re a Congie?”

  Joe closed his eyes to keep from putting his fist through the glass and strangling the doping bastard. “Not anymore. I was forcibly retired a couple months ago. Please. I’m just trying to find my brother. I hear he’s still alive. Some sort of rejuvenation technology or something.”

  The druggie’s face darkened. “Thought you sounded funny. Get out of here ‘fore I get my gun.”

  “Listen, you sootwad,” Joe snapped. “I’ve gone through eight other furgs just like you, all of whom said the same thing, and all of whom ended up telling me exactly what I wanted to know. Think about it. I was a Prime Commander in the Congressional army. Been working in Planetary Ops for fifty turns. It was my job for a good number of those turns to make ashers like you sing like canaries. You really wanna piss me off?”

  The druggie eyed him sullenly. “You weren’t in no Planetary Ops.”

  Joe slapped his right palm to the window, displaying the tattoo of a green, single-moon planet with a headcom, a PPU, and a species-generic plasma rifle leaning against the debris ring. The tattoo glowed slightly, a cell-by-cell gene modification that caused Joe’s skin to bio-luminesce. It was a government nannite tat, and no ink in the world could duplicate it.

  Even as the druggie’s eyes were widening with shock, Joe once more pressed his brother’s picture to the window.

  “Oh, shit, man.” The addict behind the window looked paler than ever. “You’re asking the wrong person. He’s a big-timer. I’m just a wanna-be, man. I ain’t got no idea where the Ghost is.”

  Joe had to fight back the frustration he had felt ever since returning to Earth to find his mother twenty years dead, his brother vanished into the world of crime. As of yet, every single person Joe had interviewed had responded in the same maddening way. They recognized his picture, but didn’t know anything else about him. It was like Sam really was a…ghost.

  “So tell me what you know of him,” Joe said, as calmly as he could. “Everything you can remember.”

  “Shit, man. Shit. I ain’t never seen him before, man. Just heard of him. Shit, I shouldn’t even be sayin’ nothin’.” The guy swallowed and looked around like he expected the very walls to be watching them. “Don’t care if you are his brother, he wanted to talk to you, he would’ve found you already.”

  “I’ve only been here a week,” Joe growled.

  The druggie nodded emphatically. “Yeah, man. If the Ghost had wanted to talk to you, he definitely woulda talked to you by now.”

  Joe was fed up. The last seven days of civilian life had been hell. Not only did they question him, but sometimes they outright refused to talk to him—something that had blown Joe’s mind the first time they did it. People were rude to him, especially when they realized he’d been a Congie. His PlanOps tattoo tempered that a little bit, but the hostility was still there. While he got along with every alien species even better than a Jahul, Humans, his own kind, hated him.

  Once more, Joe wondered if he’d made a mistake in going back to Earth instead of settling on an Ueshi pleasure-planet like Kaleu or Tholiba. On Kaleu, he would’ve been treated with the same welcome and respect as any other of the three thousand, two hundred and forty-four sentient species in Congress. Here, he was just one of those kids that got brainwashed by aliens. Here, he was the alien. He might as well have Ooreiki tentacles or a Huouyt’s breja for the nervous looks and outright sneers he got. Earth simply didn’t want him.

  And
yet, the Ground Force didn’t want him, either. Not anymore.

  Not after Maggie’s final bitch-slap in front of half of Congress.

  Thank you for your latest reenlistment application, Commander Joe Dobbs, but the Congressional Army is over-capacity and is no longer in need of your services. We’ve scheduled your shuttle back to Earth for tomorrow morning…

  Bitterly, Joe said, “Just tell me what you know about him, okay?”

  “They call him Ghost,” the druggie said. “Not because he’s hard to find, huh-uh. Because he—”

  “—bleached his hair white and wears contacts,” Joe interrupted. “Yeah, I know. What else?”

  The druggie’s greasy brow wrinkled. “No, man. Who told you that?”

  “Look,” Joe snapped, “Do you know anything that might be helpful? As I see it right now, you’re just wasting my time. Just like I told all the other assholes I’ve come across, I grew up with the little shit and he’s got blue eyes and brown hair. Even if he went all the way and had his eye color permanently changed—which, if he’s really as smart as everyone says he is, he didn’t—his eyes don’t fucking glow. How stupid are you people?”

  The guy raised his hands in surrender. “Man, I just know what I been told.”

  “Really?” Joe barked. “Then who told you? Maybe I’ll get some answers from him.”

  “I don’t know, man,” the guy said, rapidly shaking his head. “I know a lot of people. I was prolly stoned at the time. Karwiq bulbs, you know? The one good thing Congress brought with ‘em. You get a good one and it’s like you died and went to heaven.”

  Joe narrowed his eyes and leaned in close to the glass. “You wanna find out what that really feels like?” Joe growled. “I’ll show you, you Takki piece of shit.”

  The druggie sobered, really looking at him now.

  Joe tensed, realizing that this could be the break he’d been looking for.

  “Gum,” the druggie said finally.

  Joe waited, then when that was all that was offered, he blinked at him. “Gum.”

  “Yeah, you know.” The druggie made exaggerated chewing motions. “I hear he likes gum.”

  Joe stared at him for several moments, then his face tightened in a scowl. “I should break your stupid neck.”

  “Hey, man, you asked.”

  “I asked for something I can use,” Joe growled.

  “You never know. Maybe the Ghost owns a gum factory or something.”

  Joe stared at the druggie for several moments before turning and stalking from the building. In the parking-lot, he took out the picture of his brother and threw it aside. He slipped inside his civilian haauk and pressed his head to the climate-controlled steering panel.

  The hasty plans he had made of reuniting with his family and returning to his roots had crumbled to dust over the past week he’d been on Earth. Fifty-five turns after Joe had been Drafted, everyone was dead except Sam, and Sam did not want to be found.

  Joe had spent over fifty turns—over sixty-one years—hunting down people who didn’t want to be found, and yet somehow he hadn’t even got a whiff of the little druglord shit’s whereabouts.

  “Damn this place,” Joe muttered. For seven days, he’d been wandering the planet, wasting his retirement money, getting no more than four hours of sleep at a time, trying to pin down a ghost.

  Joe gave a tired scoff and wondered what his groundteam was doing on Falra. It had to be more interesting than trying to find a career criminal who probably didn’t remember him or even care he existed.

  Joe lifted his head and glanced at the list of contacts he still had to visit. Six names, none of which he recognized, all of which had been given to him by the same unsavory sorts that in the last seven days had tried to murder him, rob him, drug him, rape him, and in one case, harvest his organs.

  Joe had known from the beginning he wouldn’t get a hero’s welcome upon his return to Earth. What he had experienced here, however, left him feeling numb.

  They hated them.

  They hated every one of them. As if the Congies were responsible for Earth’s woes. As if the kids who had been Drafted sixty years ago were to blame for Congressional rule.

  They didn’t understand. None of the Earth-bound furgs would ever understand. Congress was the only thing protecting them from something far more dangerous—the Dhasha, the Jreet, the Jikaln, the Dreit, the Huouyt, and all the other warlike creatures Congress had found along the way.

  Sighing, Joe wiped the rest of the destinations from his haauk memory. He set it on autopilot and told it to take him home.

  “You’re back early,” the smiling young receptionist at the desk of the hotel said as he stepped inside, “You find your brother, Mr. Dobbs?”

  “No,” Joe said.

  Her smile faded. “Oh. I’m sorry, sir.”

  “Don’t be,” Joe said with a sigh. “He sounds like a prick anyway.” He passed the ornate receptionist booth and took the plushly carpeted stairs to his room—Human buildings still hadn’t fully adapted to the introduction of the haauk, with the older ones still requiring ground-level entry. Joe had had the poor sense to choose one of the more archaic hotels, longing for the memories of his childhood. At least the locks were reasonably high-tech.

  They were biometric, forcing him to scan both eyes and a thumb before the door would open for him.

  Not that Joe had anything to steal on the other side. He would have disabled the security measures altogether, because they weren’t necessary. All his belongings—what little he’d acquired after a Spartan life in Planetary Ops—were still in transit, carried on a much slower freighter. He was due to pick them up in just over a turn—sixteen months, in Earth-time—and until then would have to get his apartment ready without them.

  Sighing, Joe stretched out on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. He felt lost. It had been almost three rotations since he’d held a gun or worn his biosuit. Three rotations since Maggie finally got what she’d been aiming for, ever since Kophat.

  Now, without his job, without his gear, without his life, Joe felt as if he were missing something. It was a burning ache in his gut, almost like the homesickness he had felt as a kid fresh off Earth. Congress could have chopped off an arm and he wouldn’t have felt the same pangs of longing he did now without his rifle and his biosuit.

  He felt lost.

  Joe rolled over on the bed and squeezed his eyes shut. He wasn’t going back. Maggie had seen to that. After fifty-three turns of completely screwing him over at every turn, she had finally won. Might as well get over it, Joe. You’re stuck on this heap. As he mulled over that, the lack of sleep finally caught up with him. Joe unwillingly began yet another disturbing dream about his inexplicably bitter former groundmate.

  The phone rang.

  Joe jerked awake, at first thinking it was an invasion siren going off. When he realized it was the blocky device on his nightstand, he frowned. Back at the front desk, the receptionist could have seen he was sleeping. He’d paid top dollar for all the amenities, and she had said herself that the staff would divert all calls when his heart and respiratory functions indicated he was sleeping.

  Joe picked up the phone, trying not to sound groggy, pouring through the list of possible emergencies in the back of his head.

  “Yeah?”

  “Joe Dobbs?” It was a woman’s voice, girly, almost teen.

  Joe checked the clock. It was 3:03 AM. “Let me guess. The freighter crashed and my stuff’s missing.”

  “This is Samantha,” the girl said, then giggled. “But you can call me Sam.”

  Joe’s brows furrowed. “Do I know you?”

  “You want to,” the girl said happily. “I can make all your dreams come true.”

  Joe rolled his eyes and hung up. He was taking off his shoes so he could go to bed properly when the phone rang again.

  “Look,” Joe snapped, “I didn’t give out my number so I could get propositioned by every whore in the East Side.”

 
The girl on the other end giggled. “You couldn’t buy my services if you wanted to, Joe.”

  “Then I won’t.” He hung up again.

  When the phone rang the third time, Joe was just starting to fall back to sleep. He considered turning the ringer off. Instead, he yawned, lifted the receiver, and said, “I tell you, lady, you’re starting to get on my nerves.”

  “And you’re starting to get on mine.”

  Joe blinked. It had been a man’s voice. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Who the hell do you think I am, Joe?”

  “I don’t know…that little girl’s pimp?”

  “Oh my God, you have the mental density of a block of ruvmestin, don’t you?”

  Joe blearily glanced at the clock again. “Look, buddy, it’s almost three-twenty in the morning. I’d be a lot more likely to buy whatever you’re selling if you weren’t fucking pissing me off.”

  “I take it being a Congie wasn’t very stimulating.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The last sixty years of what would have been my life, before I saw the light.”

  “So you decided not to join the Army. Good for you.”

  “There were hundreds of them. All different colors. Sounded like bombs going off overhead. I remember them because they scared me just as much as they scared the ugly fucks I was with.”

  As Joe’s sleep-starved mind tried to make sense of this, the caller added, “So did you ever end up in that cave killing dragons? ‘Cause mine pretty much came true.”

  He’s crazy.

  Joe started to hang up again, then an ancient memory tickled the back of his mind. A fortune teller, telling Sam he’d grow up to be a drug-dealer, and that Joe would grow up to slay dragons. With that memory came the memory of the fireworks Joe had used to distract the Ooreiki that had been kidnapping his little brother for the Draft—and of Joe getting captured in his place. Joe brought the handset back to his face in a panic, his exhaustion-haze vanishing. “Sam?”

  The line went dead.