Children of Zero

by Andrew Calhoun

  “Nah, it’s true. He told me the girl used some special tools to keep him going.”

  “You mean four times in one day and then a few days off? Or four times a day, day in and day out?”

  “The latter,” Fat Rat stated adamantly. His chins quivered, sweat falling off in big droplets. “You’ll see for yourself, and then you won’t be thinking I’m as dumb as I look.”

  “Sistren!” Saeliko called out. “I think we’re losing sight of the point. There are fuckhouses across the Sollian, but there aren’t many ports that will provide us with the skills to guide the Epoch to plunder and glory. And so I’m going to take it from your seeming satisfaction with the fuckhouse prospects at Myffa’s that you’re all in agreement with my choice. Unless any of you have anything important to add to the matter, we’ll call an end to that discussion, shall we?”

  Reactions were mixed but mostly positive. She could see shrugs and a few arms raised as if to say yep, sounds as good a plan as any.

  “Moreover, you need to know our course isn’t going to be in a straight line. We’ll be running in a low arc. This time of year, there should be a fair number of sloops and schooners sailing across Sunfish Straight. With luck we’ll hit a couple of ‘em, take some loot and then head north toward the Torches. After all, we’re going to need some coin for the Banana.” There was a loud roar of cheers again, thoughts of riches and sexual adventures never failing to rouse their spirits. Saeliko let her own smile be seen again. She didn’t bother explaining to them now that there would be repercussions for taking down merchants in Maelian waters. They had the advantage of surprise now since as far as the Concord of Mael knew, the Epoch was a privateer contracted by the Maelian government. But once the gig was up and the Empire confirmed that the Epoch had gone pirate, the hunting would begin. Then things would get tougher.

  “There’s one last piece of business to attend to,” Saeliko told them.

  “What’s on your mind, harker,” Brenna asked.

  “The whale in the pond. The thing we haven’t been talking about even though everyone is thinking about it.” She looked around and saw that only about half of the crew understood what she was talking about. “The seven guests we’re keeping in our brig,” she clarified. “This is a decision we need to make together. If they were normal pick-ups, I’d say we either recruit ‘em or throw ‘em overboard, but all of you saw that thing in the sky. Everyone here knows it wasn’t of this world. If anyone else had ever seen the likes, we’d o’ heard of it. Is there a woman or man here who doesn’t believe that was a machine made by the Five?”

  “You saying that we have one goddess and six gods in the brig?” Brenna asked.

  “I’m not saying that.” Ollan had convinced her of that much already. “Just because they arrived in a divine craft doesn’t make them divine. You saw them. You looked at the woman vomiting over the edge of the dinghy. Did she seem goddess-like to you?”

  “Well if they ain’t divine, why didn’t we just rape ‘em and leave ‘em on Butterfly Island?” Brenna had her arms outstretched to either side to emphasize her confusion.

  “What if the Five sent them to us for a reason?”

  “On the other hand,” Jren interjected, “if the Five really cared for the welfare of these beast riders, why did a bunch of ‘em get eaten by shimmers?”

  “Maybe only seven of them were supposed to survive. It could’ve been part of a plan.”

  “Eight,” Brenna said. “You’re forgetting about the one we left with Janx.”

  “Right, eight. Although the Five didn’t care much about him,” Saeliko said, holding her left hand up and wiggling her fingers. The crew laughed.

  “I have an idea,” Lofi said. Saeliko was surprised to hear the surgeon speak. In fact, Saeliko might have been the only one to hear Lofi’s voice; the others were still chuckling about the strange orange-clothed man with the missing hand. “I have an idea,” she repeated, a little bit louder this time. Saeliko nodded over to Brenna.

  “Shut it, you nut gobblers! Shut your ungrateful mouths! Doctor’s got something to say.”

  Lofi dipped her head in thanks to Brenna and then addressed the crew, pressing her glasses into a higher position on the bridge of her nose. “The man we left with Janx lost a lot of blood. I did my best to fix him up, but I’d count him lucky if he pulls through. This means that if the Five sent these people to us, they weren’t willing to use their power to protect the man in the orange clothes. That much seems plain to see. But the others . . . Well, that’s different. I gave the seven of them a pretty close examination. Sure, they have a few bumps and bruises, but for the most part they came through unscathed. You saw that thing crash into the water. It was moving faster than anything I’ve ever seen, and when it hit, it came apart into little pieces. Whatever it was, I’m almost completely certain it wasn’t intended to land on the water like that. And that means those people riding inside should’ve been a lot more injured than they actually were. Why didn’t they have broken bones? Why weren’t their limbs mangled along with the metal pieces?”

  “So you’re saying that these seven were definitely being protected?” Saeliko said.

  “Yeah, I’d wager on it. And if they were being protected during the crash, they’re still being protected now even if they don’t realize it. We could throw them in the ocean right now and bait the sharks with fresh blood; they won’t get a bite. And do you realize what that means?”

  “Oh,” Saeliko blurted, suddenly seeing the potential. Apparently no one else had; there were a lot of confused stares on the main deck.

  “They could be invincible,” Lofi continued. Voices picked up, other sailors seeing where Lofi was going. “No offense, harker, but these seven strangers could be even deadlier than you if we put weapons in their hands and sent them off into a fight. Imagine having divinely protected warriors on our side in a pitched battle.”

  Saeliko considered this. It wasn’t long ago that she didn’t believe that the goddesses still existed. Now she was willing to consider all sorts of notions.

  “What if you’re wrong?” Brenna asked. “What if we send them off into a fight and get them all killed?”

  “Then we’re no worse off,” Lofi stated plainly. “Seven fewer mouths to feed.”

  “And a lot of angry goddesses,” Brenna countered. “I doubt we’ll be welcomed into Karramoor if we get their playthings killed.”

  “No, you’re missing the point,” Lofi rebuked her. “If they all get killed, we’ll have made a mistake, but it’ll be a harmless one. If they die, it means they weren’t divinely protected. And if they’re not divinely protected, it means the goddesses don’t care if they live or die. We’re off the hook. But if we’re not wrong, and they are divinely protected, then we’ve just stumbled on something pretty incredible here. I don’t want to put too fine of a point on it, but in our brig, we might just have seven hammers of the Five just waiting to pound anyone and everyone that gets in our way.”

  Brenna looked ready to continue arguing, but Saeliko waved a hand to shush her up. “Lofi, how do we get them to fight for us? We don’t even speak their language.”

  “We put cutlasses in their hands and start training them right here on the deck. Don’t need language to swing cutlasses at each other.”

  “And what if they don’t want to fight?” Saeliko asked.

  “Well, that’s where it gets interesting. Judging by the way they reacted back on Butterfly Island and how confused and disoriented they looked when we put them in the brig, they don’t realize who they are. Some of them looked like they were afraid.”

  “So we could persuade them to cooperate.”

  “I reckon so, yeah.”

  “Okay,” Saeliko said. “What about the rest of you? Any of you got any better ideas?” No one spoke. A lot of them shook their heads. Again, Saeliko glanced quickly at Ollan, who was still declining to show any emotion whatsoever.

  “Well, I’ll be fucked if I can come up with a better pl
an,” she told them honestly. “Brenna, take a few women down below. Get our new recruits dressed properly. Use whatever we have in the spare garb trunk.”

  “Aye, harker.”

  “When you’re done, bring ‘em up here. Might as well get started.”

  “Aye.”

  “And Brenna . . .”

  “Aye?”

  “Find out their fucking names. Seems the least we can do.”

  “Aye, harker.”

  2.5 KETTLE

  “It was a phugoid,” Nate said. They had been talking about the plane crash.

  Dallas laid out a bored-but-I’m-going-to-ask-anyway expression across his face. “A foo-what, dude?”

  “Phugoid. It’s a flying pattern that planes can get caught in. Basically, phugoid is the word aviation people use to describe what happens when an airplane goes up and down like we did. Kind of like a rollercoaster ride. The plane slows down as it goes up, and then it pitches down and gains speed. Then it just repeats itself. Well, it repeats until the plane crashes.”

  “Aren’t you in the Navy?” Tyler asked. “How do you know what a phugoid is?”

  “I wanted to be a pilot when I was in high school, so I studied this kind of stuff. Then I found out my eyes weren’t good enough, and I had some other health issues, so I decided that being a pilot wasn’t going to be in the cards. Hence Navy.”

  “Wait a minute.” Kettle had his hand up. “What causes a plane to go into a foogoy, or whatever it was?”

  “Phugoid. P-H-U-G-O-I-D.” Nate was looking mildly agitated. “There are a few things that can cause it. In our case, the tail of the airplane was gone.”

  “What!?” said three of them at once.

  “The tail. The vertical stabilizer. The sticky-uppy piece at the back of the plane where companies usually put their logo. Whatever you want to call it, it was gone. When we were in the water, I watched the back of the airplane sink. The whole vertical stabilizer was missing.”

  “It probably came off in the crash,” Haley pointed out.

  “It’s possible,” Nate admitted, “but I don’t think so. The metal at the back of the plane looked like the stabilizer had been sheared right off. The end of the fuselage was crumpled a bit, but that could have happened from the impact.”

  “The impact of us hitting the water?” Kettle asked.

  “No, no. Sorry, I’m not being very clear. That’s my fault. Let me start again. From the phugoid we experienced before the crash and from what I saw of the plane when it was going under the water, the best explanation I can come up with is that we hit something in the air. I know it sounds weird, but it makes sense. If the stabilizer was whacked off and the resulting impact damaged the back end of the airplane, it could have also damaged a lot of the hydraulic systems that the pilots use to control the plane. Well, and plus the rear stabilizer itself would have been gone, so there’s another trimming mechanism no longer available. That means the pilots would have still been able to use the throttle to power up and power down the engines, but that’s about all, so when the phugoid started, it was just a matter of time before the plane became completely uncontrollable. The best way to get out of a phugoid is to trim the aircraft properly. You know, use the big paddles on the wings and the stabilizer. If you can’t do that, all you can do is delay the inevitable.”

  Lots of questions were popping into Kettle’s brain. “What could we have hit in a storm in the middle of the Indian Ocean?”

  “Another plane, maybe.” Nate sounded a bit doubtful even as he said it.

  “Lightning wouldn’t be able to do that, right? I mean, lightning can’t just cut off part of a plane.”

  “No. No way. Planes can handle lightning strikes. But there are lots of other possible causes. Actually, the worst plane crash ever in terms of the number of people that died was a Japanese plane crash that experienced a phugoid. Happened in the 70s or 80s I think. And they didn’t hit anything. There was some sort of flaw in one of the structural pieces at the back of the plane. It had a critical failure when they were in mid-flight, and that caused a big explosion that took the stabilizer right off.”

  Dallas looked over at Kettle and said “You know, dipshit, that’s not even the important thing.”

  “What do you mean?” Kettle ignored the insult.

  “Hitting something. A part exploding. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. We’re on the ground now, so it’s not really important anymore. In the Marines, we learn to deal with the most relevant problems first and then sort out the secondary stuff later. The plane crash is over and done, so it became secondary. Instead of focusing on that, we should be focusing on the things that are still affecting us.”

  “Like being in jail on a ship full of pirate-looking people and having to shit in a bucket?” Kettle suggested.

  “Nope. I mean like that thing that they put on your neck. That’s still affecting you. And the two injections they gave you on your shoulder. We still don’t know what those were for. Plus the pilot told you something before we crashed. I heard him. He said, Radovan Mozik Maglipan.”

  Kettle nodded slowly and looked around. “Anyone ever heard those words before?” No one spoke. “The other weird thing is that he knew my name. And Haley’s, too.”

  “My English name wasn’t on the manifest,” Haley told them. “I have to use my real name for that kind of stuff because it has to match the name in my passport. It would have been listed as Hyeji Yoon.”

  “You realize,” Tyler piped in, “that this guy was probably trying to help you.”

  Kettle guffawed at this. “You mean by assaulting us and doing things to us against our will? Oh yeah, big help there.” Again, the sarcasm was unveiled. He made a mental note to dial that down a bit. It was a defense mechanism when he felt weak, and now probably wasn’t the best time to tick off the people who might be able to help him.

  “No,” Haley said. “Tyler might be right. Think about it. What did he really do to us? He injected us with something in the shoulder twice, and I admit that we don’t know what those injections were. They might have been something really bad, but for all we know, they could’ve been something useful. He also put this patch thing on the back of our necks.” She reached a hand back to touch it. “If our guess is right, it’s the patch that is giving us the ability to be multilingual. It sounds strange to say this, but it seems like the pilot knew that we would end up here and knew that we would need to speak the language.”

  “Fair point,” Kettle acknowledged.

  “And it also means,” she went on, “that if he was trying to help us, then we should probably figure out who or what Radovan Mozik Maglipan is.”

  Haley was about to say something more when a commotion from outside of their cell startled them into silence. Eight women had made their way down the steps and into the hold and were now walking straight toward the cell. The woman in the lead was short and stocky with a gut that was partially showing due to her rather insufficient black vest, which didn’t quite cover her navel. Kettle wasn’t focused on her navel, however. Instead, his eyes were squarely focused on the old-fashioned pistol that she was pointing in his direction as she came closer.

  When she arrived at the cell door, she motioned for one of her comrades to unlock the cell. Once opened, she then gestured with her pistol for the seven prisoners to stand up. This can’t be good, Kettle thought.

  The next few minutes were filled with gradually increasing tension. One by one, they were led to the far corner of the hold where a big trunk full of clothes lay open. Like a surreal game of charades, the captors had the captives strip down to their dainties and then put on a ragtag assortment of obviously second-hand clothes. A lot of thoughts were tumbling and zigzagging through his brain, none of them holding still quite long enough for him to deal with properly. Why were most of the people on this ship women? Why were they being made to put on clothes that looked like they belonged at a Renaissance fair? Were those blood stains on the clothes they were giving him?

&n
bsp; He also couldn’t help taking a few glimpses of Haley undressing and redressing. He felt guilty about that. But he still did it.

  What the hell are these? he wondered as he pulled up a pair of brown trousers. One leg ended just below his knee. He could see the tattered material where the pant leg had been ripped away. Those were definitely blood stains around the edges. The other pant leg (fortunately for the previous wearer) did make it down to the ankle. The waist was too big, and as soon as he let go, the pants slid back down over his bum. One of the gun-wielding women tossed him a cloth sash. Kettle held it in his hands, not knowing what to do with it. He clued in, however, once the woman gestured at the roughly sewn-on loop holes at the top of his trousers. When he ran the fabric through and tied it off in a knot (a bow seemed a little too girly for the situation), the pants stayed up just fine.

  The grime-streaked formerly-white shirt they gave him was another matter entirely. Shirt probably wasn’t the best word to describe it. Whatever sleeves used to be there had been ripped off, though at least no bloodstains were visible. The v-neck at the front was deep. Severely deep. It ran down almost to his belly-button. He could see holes on either side where there must have been a string running through to keep the sides of the v-neck from flapping open. Both the pants and the shirt were stiff and scratchy in several places. If he had to hazard a guess, he would say the material had fallen victim to more than its fair share of sweat and God knows what other fluids.

  A look around at his fellow prisoners confirmed that from a fashion standpoint, they were all on par with one another. Dallas, of course, was pulling it off. This was in part because they only gave him a pair of black pants. Apparently they were satisfied with his abs, biceps, traps and all his other upper parts on display. They were also pretty interested in the ship tattoo on his upper arm, which Kettle now realized was suspiciously similar to the vessel they were now passengers on.

  Big Curtis McDavid was also shirtless. As the other athletic type among the seven of them, this probably wasn’t coincidence. Poor Soup, on the other hand, was decked out in what seemed to Kettle as a yellow blouse. Was that a blouse? Kettle wasn’t completely sure. It seemed feminine enough, billowing out in the arms and sporting some decorative lace around the collar. In any case, it was an absolutely terrible match with the red shorts they had forced him to put on, shorts that were now held in place by a green sash. All together, he looked like the result of an accident at a condiment counter.