by Sara King
“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 soot’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 pulled his father’s knife from his pocket, then stretched out on the bed and stared up at the ceiling, rubbing its familiar red surfaces. 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, still gripping the knife. He wasn’t going back. Maggie had seen to that. After fifty-three turns of completely screwing him over at every opportunity, 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 dropped the Swiss Army knife to the nightstand and picked up the phone, trying not to sound groggy, poring 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 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 creeps 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.
Joe’s heart pounded like a hammer as he set the handset back onto the receiver. He sat at the edge of the bed, staring at the phone, willing it to ring again. He stayed up the entire night. It didn’t ring.
Not that night, not that week, not that rotation.
The next time Joe spoke with his brother was nine weeks after Joe had moved into his permanent apartment.
It was a rainy afternoon in September when Sam called.
“Yeah?” Joe said curtly, trying to get a foot into one of the new tennis shoes he had bought the day before. He was late for his morning run.
A girlish voice giggled. “Do you always answer your phone like that?”
Joe dropped the tennis shoe, his heartbeat quickening. “Sam?”
“How bad do you want to meet me, Joe?” Her voice had a flirtatious ring to it, like a cheap, mail-order hooker.
Joe hesitated. “That a trick question?”
“No. It’s a warning. You might not like what you see. I’m probably not what you’ve been picturing in your head.” Her voice lowered, sad and seductive at the same time.
“Burn that,” Joe said. “I want to see you.” He held back all the things he had wanted to say to his brother over the turns, respecting Sam’s wish for privacy.
“Thursday. I’ll be working at the Hungry Kitten in Nevada. Talk to Mindy. She’ll set you up with something.”
“Sure,” Joe said. Then, sensing his brother was about to hang up, he said, “Lookin’ forward to it.”
There was a pause on the other end, then, “Me too.”
The line went dead before Joe could say any more.
Joe had to fight the impulse to hop on the first flight to Nevada. Instead, he forced himself to put on his other shoe and step outside for a jog.
Two five-foot-tall Ooreiki Peacemakers were waiting for him on his front steps, dressed in Congie black. Their long, tentacle arms were twisted politely in front of them, their huge, sticky brown eyes mournful, their fleshy rows of air-exchanges in their necks flapping as inconspicuously as possible, the way they always did before giving bad news.
Upon seeing him, the brown-skinned Ooreiki flinched. They had obviously been waiting on his steps some time, and yet neither had dredged up the courage to knock.
“Commander Zero?” one of them managed. “The Commander Zero?”
Joe’s heart began to pound, his mind returning to the conversation he had just had with his brother. “What?”
The Ooreiki who had spoken glanced to his partner, who continued to stare at the ground, mute. The first one turned back to Joe. His huge oblong eyes were filled with humble brown apology. “I’m sorry, Commander, but you’ve been re-activated.”
It took Joe a moment for that to register. “On whose order?”
“Prime Overseer Phoenix, sir.”
Joe ground his jaw and twisted his head away. Even retired, Maggie was going to screw with him. “Look, if this is a prank, I’m not falling for it. Phoenix would rather lube up her ass with a plasma grenade than put me back into Planetary Ops. She’s the one who retired me. Just walk your happy asses back to headquarters and tell the Overseer I thought it was very funny and she can go burn herself.”
“It’s not a hoax, Commander.” The sincerity in the Ooreiki’s sticky eyes was plain. “You…didn’t hear?”
Joe stiffened at the outright fear in the young Ooreiki’s wrinkled brown face. “What happened?”
“The Dhasha declared war, sir.”
Joe’s chest seized. Every Congie knew it was going to happen, and every Congie prayed it wasn’t within their lifetime. “Ash,” he whispered. He thought of all of his friends and groundmates who were going to die. Billions. “How many of them?” he finally asked. If it was just one prince, like last time, perhaps it wouldn’t decimate the Corps.
The Ooreiki that had been speaking glanced again at his partner. The second Ooreiki hadn’t taken its sticky eyes off the ground.
It was the second one who finally spoke. In a whisper, he said, “All of them.”
CHAPTER 3: Daviin ga Vora
“Time to die, Voran scum.”
The announcement jolted Daviin awake as it was broadcast to thousands of spectators, not all of which were Jreet. He uncoiled his great length to face his latest enemy.
At first glance, he was stunned. At second glance, he was resigned.
The Aezi had finally tired of him defeating their warriors. They were ending it now. With a kreenit.
Beda’s bones, Daviin thought, furious—but unsurprised—at the Aezi’s cowardice. Even compared to the Welu Jreet clans, the Aezi were honorless vaghi.
Through the narrow bars of his prison, Daviin watched the scaly, rainbow-colored monster mindlessly grunt and tear at the floor of the fighting pit. The very ground shuddered with enough force to throw Daviin off-balance as its muscles bunched and its great weight slammed against the earth again and again. In its animal rage, the kreenit threw huge chunks of solid rock aside, some of which assaulted Daviin’s scales through the bars separating them. Though this was not the beast’s intention, it left Daviin with an understanding of the raw power behind the massive, flesh-shredding talons and a healthy anxiety of what was to come.
Daviin glanced down at his own claws and tried to subdue his nervousness. He had fought and killed to stay alive, though thus far all his opponents had been other Jreet. Knowing that in moments they would pit him against a creature that could tear his body to pieces with a single bat of its paw, Daviin felt a shameful pang of fear.
He closed his eyes and repeated the mantra he’d maintained since the Aezi captured him. The day will come when I will see every Aezi ruler enter the ninety hells for what they have done, and I will follow them through it so that I may watch them suffer for every Voran life they took. Then I will return, challenge Prazeil for his seat, and make him dance on my tek before the masses.
He still wasn’t sure how he would accomplish the last part, considering the fact that it took a billion credits to secure a challenge for the Jreet seat in the Regency and Vora would pledge him a hundred million, at best, but it was a pleasant thing to fantasize about as he awaited his doom.
The door to Daviin’s cage lifted, leaving nothing to protect him from the kreenit on the other side. The beast jerked at the sound and lunged, its soulless green eyes locating him in an instant. Daviin’s skin tingled as his instincts reacted and plunged him into the higher energy level required to disappear from the visual spectrum.
The fighting arena went black.
No light, not even the tiniest sliver of shadow, marred the void that was his vision.
Before him, Daviin heard the kreenit hesitate, obviously startled that its prey had disappeared. Daviin slid forward, feeling his way along the edge of the cage, praying that the beast was too confused by his sudden disappearance to register the tiny, echo-locating pings that Daviin was now emitting on a supersonic level to help him navigate. He was not sure if kreenit could hear them, but he knew Dhasha could, and they were from the same planet, sharing the same common ancestor.
He had to strike fast.
Daviin slid around the kreenit, until he was the one outside the cage. He had no hopes of escaping—the sides of the pit were glass-smooth and sloped inward almost ten rods. As a Voran heir, the Aezi would keep him here until he died. What he needed, however, the cage could provide.
A distraction.
As the massive kreenit—over ten rods long from snout to tail, one and a half times Daviin’s own length of seven—began to back out of the cage, Daviin located a chunk of stone that the animal had dislodged and carefully lifted it from the ground. As the kreenit snorted and huffed, sniffing for him, Daviin threw the chunk so that it clattered loudly against the bars.
With a roar, the kreenit began ripping through the metal that had held Daviin for so lon
g, its mono-molecular black talons shredding it as if it were made of mud. Listening to it, feeling the curls of metal assail his scales as they were thrown aside by the mindless beast, a new plan formed in Daviin’s mind. He abandoned his ideas of killing the kreenit and instead began moving across the floor of the pit, made rugged by the kreenit’s claws. He moved as fast as he dared, keeping his movements as silent as possible over the rubble the kreenit had spread across the floor. Here, in the open, he had no protection should the kreenit realize where he had gone, and both he and his enemies realized it. All around him, he could hear the echolocating pings of the Aezi spectators as they excitedly charted his course to doom.
Daviin stopped near the center of the pit and picked up another chunk of rock. He hefted it once, pinged to judge the distance to the door to the vast underground Aezi gladiatorial pens, then threw it.
The kreenit turned.
Even as the stone was clattering to the ground, the kreenit was atop it, systematically tearing holes in the floor, the wall, the door. The monster that had, millions of turns ago, driven the Dhasha underground, now drove the Jreet guarding the exit of the pit deeper into the narrow corridor. He heard shouts of terror from the Aezi cowards inside the gladiator halls, which only drove the kreenit onward, through the hole it had created, into the chaos beyond.
Daviin waited. Three seconds later, he heard the kreenit’s scream as its handlers activated its collar. Daviin lowered the energy level of his scales and instantly the scene appeared in gory color. Ivory Aezi body parts covered the inside of the tunnel, which was all but blocked by the enormous body of the ancient, iridescent-scaled kreenit. Daviin plunged through the opening, sliding over the kreenit’s rainbow-colored tail.
The lone surviving Aezi on the other side had her back to him, her three-rod body stretched out in the corridor, staring at the monster spread out on the floor in unconsciousness, a dozen Jreet warriors lying in tattered shreds beneath it. Daviin pushed his tek from its sheath and slammed it forward with every ounce of his strength, puncturing the ivory scales of the Aezi’s back, delivering every ounce of poison he had. Before his victim even had a chance to fall, Daviin was yanking his tek free and fleeing through the hall, seeking escape. He raised the energy level of his scales again and took random paths down the cavernous intersections under the fighting pit, backtracking whenever he ran into gladiator cells or beast pens.
