Children of Zero

by Andrew Calhoun

  She could barely contain her excitement as she advanced on her younger foe. She exalted in the sensation flowing through her body. In a matter of moments, her sword would find its mark and the bloodletting would begin. She came crashing in with her sword swinging in a wide arc toward Saeliko’s head. The younger Saffisheen easily ducked under the flashing steel and thrust her scimitar toward Janx’s torso. Janx rotated out of the way and used her incoming momentum to lunge upward and plant her shoulder into Saeliko’s jaw. It was a bold opening move, one designed to send a message. You’re in trouble, kid.

  The dance of the Saffisheen ensued, both women jabbing, thrusting and parrying in calculated patterns born out of training and experience. Those that hadn’t fled to safety stood and watched in awe as steel banged against steel and will battled against will.

  Gradually, inevitably, Saeliko’s armor took its toll. Her movements – her blocks, her postures, her controlled stabs, the graceful oscillations of arcing steel – slowed incrementally. The sweat began to pour off her face; long strands of hair clung to her cheeks.

  Janx wasn’t able to deliver a crippling blow, at least not yet. Saeliko’s defenses were tight and well executed. Whenever the harker threatened with a mortal strike, the qarlden backed away elegantly, protecting each point of vulnerability. But Janx could easily see the solution. With a flurry of strategically placed hacks and slashes, she forced Saeliko bit by bit back toward a cluster of crates and barrels that were arranged in the shape of a horseshoe. If she could guide the qarlden into the narrow space between the two arms of the horseshoe, the deciding blow would come quickly. Saeliko’s defenses depended on being able to move unconstrained.

  It seemed that Saeliko suddenly understood Janx’s gambit, for she unleashed a furor of blows to escape from the trap. Janx wouldn’t have it. She continued to whirl and jab, cutting off any and all exits. “Shit,” Saeliko jabbered. It was the first time Janx had ever heard a hint of panic from her qarlden in all the years she had known her. A new rush of happiness pulsated through her.

  Into the crate and barrel horseshoe they went, Janx pressing in hard.

  “Wait!” Saeliko screamed. The qarlden stumbled backwards quickly, tripping on a stray length of rope and falling on to her armored ass at the deep end of the horseshoe. She put a hand up to ward off the incoming Janx. “I have something to say.” Her breathing was haggard. She was spent.

  “How does it feel?” Janx asked. The harker was enjoying every fraction of a second of this. She could see the despair written all over her victim’s face.

  And then something changed. The despair trickled away. The smallest hint of mischief glinted in those mysterious green eyes of hers. Somewhere in the deep recesses of Janx’s mind, she suddenly realized that her fury had blinded her. This was the trap.

  “Now!” Saeliko yelled at the top of her lungs. She then threw herself onto her back, flattening herself on the sand.

  Time slowed almost to a standstill. Janx whipped herself around just in time to see the 8-stone caliber cannon a dozen paces back. It was aimed right down the gut of the horseshoe, exactly where she was standing. That Lavic thug Ollan lowered the linstock with a burning slow match over the priming hole. The boom was deafening, but it was as quiet as a mouse’s squeak compared to the scream of rage that echoed inside the harker’s mind. She heaved herself to the side, desperately trying to escape the path of the cannonball.

  She almost succeeded. Almost.

  She managed to press her back against a crate, but the hurtling mass of lead ripped straight into her sword arm just above the wrist. In the blink of an eye, the lower portion of her arm was gone, ripped clean away. Janx stood there in abject horror, watching the blood spurting from the ghastly stump of bone and torn flesh.

  Janx never saw Saeliko get up. She was only dimly aware that the traitorous witch of a qarlden was now standing in front of her. The harker made no move to defend herself as Saeliko’s fist came straight for her face. She never even felt the impact. Everything went black.

  * * *

  When she came to, the sun was shining, the beach was empty, and the Epoch was gone. They had left her in the shade at least, tossed beneath the protective overreach of the broad, striated leaves of a windmark tree. Whatever pittance of relief the shade gave her paled in comparison to the pain that wracked her right arm, or what was left of it.

  She immediately recognized Lofi’s handiwork. The surgeon had done the best she could to make sure her ex-harker would live, probably on Saeliko’s orders. Why, she wasn’t sure, but it was most likely so that Saeliko could enjoy the knowledge that Janx was suffering. Lofi had dealt with the splintered forearm bone by simply making a clean cut higher up on the arm, just below the elbow. She had then cauterized the leftover stump. Janx thanked whatever cursed luck she had left that she hadn’t been awake for that part.

  Even with Lofi’s surgery, she felt as if she were perched on the edge of a precipice between life and death. Her head throbbed violently. Spittles of vomit lined her mouth and ran down the front of her clothes. She was drenched in sweat. Her mouth was parched, and her lips were cracked open. And beneath all that, she raged at the savagery of her fate.

  And then she noticed that she wasn’t alone after all.

  A man lay on the beach, apparently asleep, one tree down from her. He had funny-looking hair and a suit of clothing that was completely orange. She could also see that he was missing his left hand. Next to him, there was a piece of parchment held down by a rock.

  Janx willed herself to her knees and immediately threw up from the effort. She held herself still and squeezed her eyes shut while the intense waves of agony slowly subsided. When the pain was finally back within the just barely tolerable region, she used her good arm to leverage herself up onto her feet. There was no need to hide her emotions now; she let out a series of soft whimpers.

  It took her the better part of ten minutes and two more vomit sessions to stagger over to the message under the rock. She lifted the parchment up and read it.

  J,

  We decided to leave you a retirement present for all your years of service to the Epoch. Consider him your right hand man.

  Kindest regards,

  S.

  2.3 KETTLE

  “I can understand what they’re saying,” Kettle said. He disbelieved his own claim even as he said it. How was that possible? He was unilingual. Nevertheless, these people were speaking a different language, and he was comprehending each and every word. More than that, he was understanding the structure of the language. He saw the logic in the order of the words and the way that order shifted depending on usage needs such as transitioning from statements to questions. He even elicited meaning from subtle nuances in tone and derived connotations from idiomatic expressions. The only thing he couldn’t understand were some specific names of people and places that he had no knowledge of. For all intents and purposes, however, he was fluent. He even knew what he was fluent in. It was called Maelian.

  “Me too.” This was Haley. She was sitting on the floor opposite from Kettle with a very confused look on her face. “I’m not translating it. I just . . . I just know it.”

  Kettle thought about this and realized she was right. In his mind, he wasn’t going through the tiresome process of translating each word into English and then deciphering meaning. He supposed that he could translate it if he wanted to, but the point was that he didn’t have to. He could think in Maelian, whatever that was.

  “Hey, brah. Does that mean you know where we are?” Dallas sat next to Kettle. The muscular Marine was shirtless. He had taken off everything above the waste when they went into the water. Actually, Kettle had absolutely no idea where they were. He couldn’t even hazard a guess, other than somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

  On a more local scale, he knew they were inside a ship, somewhere deep down in its inner bowels. The seven of them had been locked up in what looked like an old jail house in the Wild West, except with a lower ceiling.
Walls of thick wood surrounded them on three sides, the fourth wall consisting of steel bars running floor to ceiling. A metal-framed section of the bars sat on hinges; this was the only way in or out, and it was currently locked. Two benches ran the length of the cell, one on each side, and a wooden bucket sat at the back of the room. This was meant to be their toilet. It seemed like the seven of them had been held captive in the room for a good five hours. Dallas and two of the other guys had both urinated in the bucket, but no one had dropped off the kids at the pool yet.

  On the other side of the bars, the interior of the ship spread out before them. It was mostly being used for storage, but they could also see hammocks strung up near the outer walls. Sailors came in from time to time via a staircase at the far end, but for now, at least, they paid the prisoners no mind.

  With their captors entirely inattentive, the seven survivors of the crash – minus the orange-suited fellow – were able to talk freely. Strangely, the first thing they had done was introduce themselves. It had felt surreal. Maybe it was the shock of all they had been through, but each and every one of them seemed somehow disconnected from the horror and confusion that they had witnessed.

  Dallas sat on Kettle’s right. On his left sat a slightly chubby black kid with a buzzcut and a pair of rectangular Liberty eyeglasses – the sports plastic type that were advertised for active lifestyles. Kettle considered him a kid because he was only eighteen. A lot of eighteen-year-olds were cocky, but this guy seemed unassuming and polite. When he talked, his words were accompanied by sheepish smiles.

  Amazingly, his name was Soup Bell. As soon as he had said it, Dallas had laughed loudly. When Kettle asked Soup to fess up, the young Marine had dutifully explained that his real name was actually Supra, which had inevitably led to a variety of nicknames in school, the stickiest of which was Soup. “Why in the hell would anyone in their right mind name their kid Supra?” Dallas had asked. Again, that sheepish smile. “I was born in the back of one on the way to the hospital.” To Kettle, this was almost as unbelievable as his name. He had seen the back seat of a Toyota Supra.

  Another U.S. Marine, this one a specialist rather than a private (E-4 rather than E-2), sat next to Soup. His name was Curtis McDavid. He was a few years older than Soup, though certainly none the wiser. He was nearly as jock-ish as Dallas. He looked ready to be a wide receiver for Ohio State, although it turned out that he was from Brooklyn. Like many others in his trade, his hair was shaved off on the sides of his head but left to grow a little on top. He had a broad nose and full lips, and freckles were just barely visible across his cheeks.

  Haley was framed by the remaining two guys. Nathan “Nate” Billings was twenty-four. On Diego Garcia, he had worked for Naval Facilities Engineering Command Far East as a computer technician. He was all skin and bones. Like Soup, Nate needed glasses. However, unlike Soup, he had lost his in the drink, making life post-crash a lot blurrier than pre-crash.

  Tyler Grabowski, twenty-six, was a Lieutenant with the Navy. Kettle could tell by the way he talked that he was by far and away the most patriotically American of the bunch. He had fully bought into the red-white-and-blue-peak-of-civilization propaganda. Kettle didn’t like him.

  “Hey,” Dallas said, nudging Kettle. “Where are we?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “Forget that,” Nate blurted out. “How are you two understanding what they’re saying?” The computer technician had one hand pointing at Haley and the other at Kettle.

  Haley spoke up first. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I can’t explain it. It’s like I just unlocked some part of my brain that I didn’t know existed. It’s not just that I can understand the words I’m hearing; it’s that I know all the other words of their language. I can talk to them if I want.”

  “But it’s more than that,” Kettle stated.

  Haley’s eyebrows furrowed. “How so?”

  “Your English is better. You’re not making any grammar mistakes anymore. Your pronunciation seems better, too. I mean, it’s not totally natural, but your consonants and vowels are clearer now. They’re like, I don’t know, crisper or something.” This made Haley’s forehead crease up even more, a reaction that stirred something in Kettle. She was cute when she was confused.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “I think you’re right.” The Americans looked at her as she brushed her hair back and held her head in her hands. “I think I’m fluent in English now, too. I can say . . . anything.” Her eyes were wider as this new revelation sunk in. “Oh my God,” she repeated.

  “How many other languages are in your head?” Nate asked.

  “Umm, none, I think. I don’t know. I’m really confused right now.”

  “It’s the thing on your neck,” said Nate. “You and Kettle both. That’s the only explanation. Must be some NSA top secret doohickey." Without thinking, Kettle reached behind his neck and touched the patch that the pilot had installed on him with the big red staple gun before the crash. He had already felt it at length a dozen times before. So had Haley. He had examined Haley’s, and she had examined his. They seemed very permanent. When he tugged at it, it felt as though he were tugging at a piece of his skin. The edges of the material, whatever that material was, seemed to be flush with the skin around it. It was like a part of himself. A very disturbing, unwanted part of himself.

  “So it’s like an onboard dictionary,” Kettle mumbled.

  “No,” Haley said, shaking her head. “Way more than a dictionary. Dictionaries are really simple. I’ve got two of them loaded on my phone. They just translate words, but language is way more complicated than just going word for word. Every language has a different structure, a different syntax.”

  “A what now?”

  “Okay, my mother tongue is Korean. For us Koreans, it’s really, really difficult to learn English, especially when we’re older, because the structures are so different. What seems normal to you is really awkward to me. Or, at least, it was awkward until today. Anyway, imagine this sentence in English.” She made little quotation marks with her fingers. “This morning, I met my friends. If I translate it word-for-word, it really doesn’t make much sense in Korean. And if I translate the correct Korean sentence word-for-word into English, it would be really weird for you. Umm, something like . . . today morning in, friend met.”

  “The verb goes at the end?” Nate asked.

  “Yep. And we don’t really use a subject. We wouldn’t say I; we would just infer it from the context.”

  “But when you speak now,” Nate continued, “it doesn’t seem awkward to you? Not at all?”

  “I don’t think so. It feels like I’ve been speaking it my whole life. I guess this is what it would be like to be perfectly bilingual. I can basically just flip a switch in my brain and change languages without having to do the cumbersome translation work.”

  “What about you, Kettle?” Nate put his finger to the bridge of his nose to adjust his glasses, obviously forgetting that they weren’t there anymore. “Can you do Korean?”

  “Nope.”

  “Have you tried?”

  “No, but . . .”

  “Ihae hal su isseoyo?” Haley said suddenly. She smiled when she said it.

  “Say what now?”

  “Je ireumi Yoon Hyeji imnida. Mannaseo bangapseumnida.”

  “Woah, woah, woah!” Kettle exclaimed. “I think I caught that last part. Say it again.”

  “Je ireumi Yoon Hyeji imnida. Mannaseo bangapseumnida. Ihae jigeum hal su isseoyo?”

  “Holy shit! I know Korean!”

  Dallas nudged him again. “What did she say, dipshit?”

  “She said her name was Hyeji Yoon and that it was nice to meet me. And then she asked if I could understand her.”

  “Hyeji?” This was Soup. He had been listening to the conversation carefully, but hadn’t made any verbal contributions himself until now. “Your name is Hyeji?”

  “Yeah.” She seemed a little shy all of a sudden. “That’s my Korean name.
Haley’s my English name.”

  Kettle had never thought about her name before. Of course Haley wouldn’t be her real name.

  Nate cut in once more. “Haley, your pronunciation isn’t quite right, but that would make sense, actually. Different languages use different sounds. The muscles in your mouth have to learn how to make those sounds, so even if you can recognize the sounds in your brain, your mouth might not be able to mimic them correctly at first. It would take time to really master each new sound.”

  “That’s right,” Haley said. “The English r and l sounds are really hard for Koreans to make. We don’t have those ones in Korean. We don’t have the t-h combination either. And then there are lots of sounds in Korean that don’t exist in English.”

  “So,” Soup said in a drawn out, contemplative tone. “This is like a Matrix-style language learning system.”

  “What?” Haley and Kettle asked in unison.

  “You know. The movie? Keanu Reeves?”

  “Oh yeah,” Dallas chirped up. “I remember that. When the hot chick needed to fly a helicopter, she just uploaded the skill into her brain and she was good to go.”

  “Exactly.” Soup had his arms outstretched to either side, indicating that this should have been common knowledge to all of them. “That device on the back of their neck is just uploading languages into their brain.”

  Nate frowned. “I’m not so sure it would work like that. That part of the movie actually really bothered me because it never took into account the differences between individuals.”

  “What do you mean?” Kettle asked.

  “I mean that in the Matrix, Keanu Reeves needed to learn kung fu, so they uploaded the program into his brain. Now, there’s the problem with muscle memory, which is obviously a significant problem since you two are still having pronunciation problems, but for the moment, let’s put that aside. The other big obstacle is that brains work differently. Think about mathematics. If I ask everyone here to subtract one hundred and twelve from two hundred and forty-five, you could all do it, but you might not do it in the same way. Some of you might visually place the small number under the bigger number and run the algorithm that we learned in elementary school. Subtract the ones column first, the tens column second, and the hundreds column last. Some of you might just subtract one hundred from two hundred and then subtract twelve from forty-five.”