by Sara King
The Legend of ZERO:
The Scientist,
the Rat,
and the Assassin
By Sara King
Copyright © 2016
All Rights Reserved
Sara King
No part of this work may be photocopied, scanned, or otherwise reproduced without express written consent (begging) of the author. For permissions and other requests, email Sara King at [email protected].
(Don’t worry, she’s really cool.)
Disclaimer
(a.k.a. If You Don’t Realize This Is A Work Of Fiction, Please Go Find Something Else To Do)
So you’re about to read about badasses with plasma pistols, a devastating alien apocalypse, and people who move stuff with their minds. In case you’re still confused, yes, this book is a complete work of fiction. Nobody contained within these pages actually exists. If there are any similarities between the people or places of The Legend of ZERO and the people or places of Good Ol’ Planet Earth, you’ve just gotta trust me. It’s not real, people. Really. Yet.
Also! Unlike in ZERO1 and ZERO2, this book contains profanity, namely because it deals with the people of Earth, and people on Earth use profanity, especially people on Earth involved in the criminal element, or, coincidentally, brilliant-yet-reclusive Alaskan writers. If you can’t stand profanity, or likewise, if you want to bitch about it, this probably isn’t the book for you.
You have been warned.
Books in The Legend of ZERO Series:
Listed in the Order They Should Be Read
Forging Zero
The Moldy Dead
Zero Recall
Zero’s Return
Flea, Agent of Chaos
The Scientist, the Rat, and the Assassin
Zero’s Redemption
Zero’s Legacy
Forgotten
*World Glimpses (ZERO Short Story Anthology)
* = whenever
Author’s Note
This is not book 4 of the ZERO series. It USED to be, but for the sake of actually finishing the series, I’ve pulled it out to make sure Joe gets the proper limelight in Book 4. This is a novella detailing the relationship between Rat and Sam and what they discover along the way, one of several ZERO novellas taken from Book 4 that I’m going to be publishing soon.
Fans of the series will be happy to know that I finally figured out why my editing fiasco with Book 3 of the ZERO series went so downhill, and why my Muse was refusing to help me finish what became Book 4. It is because, after I introduced so many new elements in the first 3 books, I was trying to force about 450,000 words (and that’s a conservative estimate…it’s probably more like 600k) of novellas into the beginning of Book 4, making Joe’s first scene come in at least halfway through the main storyline. Deep down, I felt that was unacceptable.
On the other hand, these 8(ish) stories needed to be told. I couldn’t bring myself to abandon them, because they were good and necessary, which is why I was at an impasse. This is my compromise…
And now, to give those of you who need it a refresher, here’s what is (images by Lance MacCarty)…
WHAT IS A DHASHA?
These guys are intelligent predators that rely upon slave labor to feed themselves, stay clean, and manipulate anything more complicated than a corpse. They’re ultra-violent, are covered with nigh indestructible scales, have monomolecular razor talons, and eat people for fun. They are the apex predators of Congress, clawing their way to the top (literally) of the Congressional hierarchy. Representative Mekkval is a Dhasha prince.
WHAT IS A KREENIT?
They’re big. Ancestrally, they ate Dhasha. And now they’re on Earth. Eating people.
WHAT IS A HUOUYT?
Huouyt are nasty. Sociopathic—they stick together as a species only for the common goals of wealth and power over other species—and they can use the genetic material of other creatures to transform into that creature. They are a boneless, semi-aquatic species with three legs and three fingers on each arm, entirely covered in a downy white cilia that wriggles. The best assassins are Huouyt, and they can produce poisons and drugs within their own bodies from many years of training. Jer’ait Ze’laa and the former Representative Rri’jan are Huouyt.
WHAT IS A JREET?
Big earthworms. Very, very big earthworms. With arms, scales, and predator teeth. The hardcore warriors of Congress (think Spartans), shunning both battlefield and medical technology because anyone who needs that crap is a weakling. They also have the ability to energize their scales and disappear from the visible (and heat) spectrums. Oh, and they carry a gross fang in their chests that they both mate with and kill people with. Unfortunately, due to the habits mentioned above, they’re also considered an endangered species in Congress. Daviin ga Vora is a Jreet.
WHO IS RAT?
Rat is Representative Mekkval’s assassin, sent to Earth on one final mission to destroy the genetics experiments that escaped Judgement. She’s a badass. Unfortunately, her super-high tech AI sniper rifle, a Huouyt-made Rodemax, went rogue and is now out to kill her.
WHO IS SAM?
Sam (or Slade, depending on who’s talking), is a mad scientist. Half Einstein, half utterly insane, he styles himself as the Tesla of the Congressional Era. He experimented on himself thirty-two years ago, essentially hybridizing himself with the genetics of a Huouyt. He’s also the famous Joe Dobbs’ brother and, because of that, developed an inferiority complex.
WHAT IS KA-PAR?
Ka-par is a Dhasha social ritual used to establish dominance without death. It’s essentially a staring contest between two predators, with the loser accepting complete submission as the winner’s slave. Sam in declaring (and losing) ka-par with Rat, bargained his way into only a partial loss, in that he gets Tuesdays as if Rat had lost, whereas Rat gets the rest of the week.
WHAT IS CONGRESS, KOLIINAAT, THE REGENCY, AND THE TRIBUNAL?
Congress is the conglomerate alien super-state pieced together over the last two and a half million years. Earth is just another newly-acquired planet in its never-ending march to expand its borders throughout the galaxy. It contains 3244 sentient species. Koliinaat is the artificial planet it created to house its hub of government, which is called the Regency. Each species in Congress has one Representative that is sent to the Regency to look after its interests. The Tribunal is an elected three-Representative panel that wields the most power of the Regency (think three presidents who have to vote before something can get done).
Hopefully that was enough to get you back into the ZERO universe groove. Good luck!
Dedication
To Kim and Robert, because I’d stumbled, and you guys helped me get back up.
Table of Contents
Disclaimer
Books in The Legend of ZERO Series:
Author’s Note
WHAT IS A DHASHA?
WHAT IS A KREENIT?
WHAT IS A HUOUYT?
WHAT IS A JREET?
WHO IS RAT?
WHO IS SAM?
WHAT IS KA-PAR?
WHAT IS CONGRESS, KOLIINAAT, THE REGENCY, AND THE TRIBUNAL?
Dedication
Table of Contents
The Scientist
The Rat
Max
The Secret to Good Chicken
The Runt
The Paper Man
Guerilla Warfare
The Problem with Scalpels
Braving The Dark
A Dead Frog Doesn’t Count
With a Rock…
The Assassin
About the Author
; Afterword
Other Titles by Sara King
Sara Recommends
The Scientist
Monday Night, 48 Days after Judgement…
Slade threw another rock aside, making the purple thong jiggle against his groin. Tuesday had come and gone in a blur of massages, sex, and, because they had run out of food, tough and stringy native plants that tasted like crap but that he had confirmed as edible in his survival books. Then Wednesday had followed, and the Congie had passed out an order to march south, destroyed his palanquin, and massacred his chickens. Then, to add insult to injury, Rat had then passed the lifeless carcasses out to his flock, saying they were starving and needed the energy. Then she had complained when Slade had insisted on saving the feet. She’d tried to get him to throw them into the fire, but Slade, resourceful man that he was, had quickly distracted her with sex and stuffed them into his pillowcase.
Thugs.
Their short-sightedness was mind-blowing. Already, the Congie had undermined his power structure, pissed off about eighty-five percent of the convicts in the group, and made him run around in a thong as if that were somehow appropriate attire in the middle of an apocalypse.
Of course, he had set fire to her clothes at the last minute last Tuesday, thinking he could force her to wear something other than military combat gear and Congie black, maybe even a skirt, but Rat had proceeded to acquire a second set—as far as Slade knew, by pulling it directly out of her ass—and had then, at the stroke of midnight on Wednesday morning, proceeded to burn his clothes and parade him around in a purple spandex thong that Tyson had spent way too much time appreciating.
But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that his flock thought he was the one making all the weird proclamations and ultimatums. No slaving. No eating people. Marching ten hours a day. Chicken on Wednesday. Pfft.
Sure, the proclamations were coming out of his mouth, but they were nudged forth by the primed barrel of an automatic plasma weapon. Or a monomolecular blade. Or a beat-stick. Or a laser knife. Or her boots. Especially her boots.
Damn, he needed to think, and he couldn’t think around this woman. This was not what he’d had in mind when he challenged her to ka-par. He had assumed she would realize he was a genius, that he had a delicate constitution much better suited to intellectual and interpersonal pursuits that needed to be shielded from manual chores like, oh, gathering firewood or walking—anywhere—and not that she would spend six hours a day making him exercise in every heinous way possible as if his Body Mass Index had just become her sole interest in life.
Everyone else Slade had ever met had quickly realized how brilliant he was and had decided to defer to him on all things afterwards, alternately making his dinner or washing his garments when he was too preoccupied to do it himself. But Rat, this Congie that was supposed to be his soul-mate according to some patch-wearing vagrant fortune-teller who had predicted her arrival from before the Draft, hadn’t seemed to have gotten the memo. In fact, because he thought maybe she had missed the fact that he could save—or destroy, depending on his preference—the world with his brain, Slade had attempted to illustrate it over the last week of hell, creating devices and projects to awe and amaze her.
If anything, the hours she’d made him spend exercising had increased.
Slade scratched at a mosquito that landed on his arm, smearing the glow-in-the-dark body paint into little half-moons under his fingernails.
While that had been fun to apply, it was beginning to itch. And the thong chafed. And it was getting cold and the high heels were doing nothing to keep his feet warm. Slade liked to keep his feet warm. Poor circulation and all that. And now they hurt because she’d made him walk for hours in heavy combat boots rather than the sandals he would have preferred. He threw another rock.
“I warned you when you were striking the match last Tuesday,” Rat said, “That’s what you would get for burning my clothes. Thongs for a month. Stop sulking.” The tall, lithe brunette was dressed in Congie black tonight, as usual, from her black vest to her black hat to her black cargo-pants, with a black gun propped against her knee. Even her boots looked dangerous.
“I’m sulking because you murdered my chickens,” Slade said, hating the way his voice had morphed into a whine.
She blinked at him like massacring Humanity’s food supply wasn’t even on her mental radar. “I told you—your chicken experiment was stupid. Kreenit are going to smell it and come running like you’re ringing a dinner bell. We have to survive, not run around tending poultry.”
Which wasn’t fair, because Slade had made other people tend his poultry. He’d tried to explain that to Rat, but instead he had been forced to watch their group’s sole prospect of survival become masticated meat as she and Tyson cooked up all the birds that Slade had carefully collected and protected over the last month, even grabbing the eggs he was brooding in solar powered incubators because there wasn’t enough meat to go around. Slade had been preparing to launch a new civilization on the backbone of readily-available poultry, and all of his efforts had been reduced to various states of Human shit, all because his flock was hungry and Rat didn’t want them to eat people, instead. Weeks of work, gone.
The woman had no vision.
She was just like every other Congie out there, especially his infamous lizard-killing brother. Dumb as rocks, unable to see past their own stomachs to anything more than six rotations down the line, because that was their average lifespan out of bootcamp.
Tossing a leg-bone into the fire, Tyson conversationally said to Rat, “So which do you think came first? The chicken or the egg?” The big, blue-eyed Viking wiped chicken grease from his blond beard and eyed the pile of butchered, defeathered, and roasted Hope.
“It was the egg,” Slade snapped, “because the mutation began with the misreplication of DNA during fertilization of the embryo and its development. It wasn’t like an adult bird just magically became a mutant chicken that started popping out more chickens. I have always thought it was an incredibly stupid question, and whoever came up with it obviously had no background in or understanding of science.”
“Personally,” Tyson said across the fire to Rat, as if Slade hadn’t spoken, “I think it was the chicken. It had to have the genes inside it, right?”
“Aaaagh!” Slade clawed at his hair, which hurt, so he stopped. “They were the basis of a civilization,” he whined. “You can’t have an organized society if you don’t have domesticated livestock.”
“You can’t have an organized society if you starve everyone to death first,” Rat retorted, her sea-green eyes totally unsympathetic. “You’ll find more chickens.”
“Very unlikely, considering the current state of Human devolution,” Slade replied. “Because of course hungry Humans are going to forget to eat the chickens running around the neighbor’s yard when their children are starving to death.”
“You were going to let people die for some birds,” Rat said. “That is unacceptable on Wednesday through Monday. Tuesday, you don’t want to eat your chickens, that’s fine.”
“Speaking of that,” Tyson said, still eying the leftover chicken that had been portioned for Slade earlier that night, but which he hadn’t eaten out of protest, “you gonna eat that?”
“You know what?” Slade demanded. “Let them starve. Even one Human corpse would have been enough to feed my flock of chickens for at least—”
“Shut up, or I’m going to make you go get those disgusting feet you stuffed in your pillow and throw them into the fire.”
Slade’s mouth fell open. He had been reasonably sure she hadn’t been thinking about anything at all as he squirreled the feet away.
Tyson frowned. “Wait. I thought you guys were in there having… Wait. He was playing with chicken feet while you guys were having—”
“Yes,” Slade interrupted, “when we were having sex, Tyson, which I know obsesses you because you’re not getting any, but try to focus. Livestock—i.e. meat—is im
portant for Human survival as a species, because the protein facilitates brain development and muscle mass. Without it, we aren’t working at prime capacity, and if we’re not working at prime capacity, the kreenit are going to kill us all. I’m saving the feet because I want to have the genetic material on hand to reproduce my flock if we ever find ourselves in that laboratory Rat keeps talking about.”
“More food for us,” Rat said, shrugging.
“It would be, if you didn’t eat them,” Slade cried. Exasperated, he shrieked, “Do you even know what patience is?”
“I do when I’m looking down the scope of a rifle,” Rat said calmly. She had her Congie knife out again and was sharpening it needlessly.
“It takes a year or more to build a sustainable flock. If you could just wait a—”
“I thought you’re supposed to eat chickens,” the ignorant Congie interrupted, looking honestly perplexed. “I still don’t see why you’re upset we ate your chickens.”
Slade stared at Rat. Because he’d explained it. Six times. “You have to create a sustainable population,” Slade said. “A population can’t sustain itself if you wipe out all the adult specimens.”
“You have chickens,” Rat said, gesturing to the cardboard boxes of chicks that Slade painstakingly hatched in his self-made solar incubators only a week before. “They’ll make more chickens.”
“In a year,” Slade cried.
