Forging Zero

by Sara King

  CHAPTER 8: Kihgl’s Prophecy

  The next morning, Commander Kihgl stormed into the chow hall during their meal. He looked furious. The six battlemasters in charge stomped their feet in unison and everyone rose at once to stand at attention behind their bowls.

  Kihgl stood at the front of the room, scanning the faces quickly. “Prime Commander Lagrah just informed me that a spatial shift has occurred ahead of our pod. We will arrive in Kophat’s system tomorrow, two weeks later than the rest of the regiment. Today’s classes are on what to expect planetside. Understand?”

  As taught, the children shouted out, “Kkee oora!”

  “Good. There’s a good chance we’ll be inspected by Representatives from Koliinaat once we arrive. If we are, you treat them like the gods they are, you understand? They are so far above you that if you fart, and they find the odor unpleasant, their Jreet will skin you alive if they so much as wrinkle their noses.”

  Kihgl scanned the kids’ faces and his sticky brown eyes settled on Joe. The little frills in the base of his neck started fluttering rapidly. “Zero. Get up here.”

  Gut sinking, Joe reluctantly trotted to stand before Kihgl. He’d actually managed to go two days without getting pummeled, and the bruises were starting to heal.

  “What is that?” Kihgl demanded.

  “What is what?”

  “Recruit Zero does not understand the question. Oora.”

  Joe flushed. “I don’t understand the question.”

  Kihgl could have hit him, but he didn’t. He pointed with a tentacle.

  Joe stared down at his bicep in confusion.

  Maggie’s crude imitation of Popeye’s anchor stood out in harsh black tones upon his pale skin and he felt a sudden settling of dread in his gut. “Oh.”

  “Well, Zero?” Kihgl demanded. “What is it?”

  “A drawing,” Joe said warily.

  “Are you trying to say you defaced Congressional property?”

  Knowing he was already in deep shit, Joe just straightened and got it over with. “‘Defaced?’ No, sir. That doesn’t do it justice, sir. It took several hours to create this masterpiece.” And it had, at that. Joe had fallen asleep while Maggie worked. He was lucky he hadn’t woken up with a mustache.

  Behind him, he heard several children giggle, Maggie among them.

  Kihgl did not hit him, as Joe had expected. Instead, he turned to Nebil. “Battlemaster, deal with them while I jettison this sootwad.”

  Joe had just enough time to see Battlemaster Nebil’s face scrunch in a fearsome alien smile before Kihgl’s stinging python grip on his arm yanked him from the room. Joe tried to dig in his heels to slow him down, but the Ooreiki commander might as well have been a bulldozer for all the good it did him.

  He was beating at the stinging coils around his forearm in desperation, knowing he was about to become flash-frozen, bulging-eyed space-debris, when Kihgl shoved him inside a small room with a desk and a huge round, scoop-shaped bed. It was more lavish than any other room Joe had seen, actually boasting two glowing pictures of Ooreiki on the walls. Obviously not an airlock.

  Kihgl slapped his tentacles to the side of the door and it dripped shut. Then they were alone. Just Joe and Kihgl.

  Commander Kihgl turned from the door slowly, making Joe back up until his calves hit the hard round bed.

  “What is it?” Kihgl said, his pale brown eyes fixed on him in deadly seriousness.

  “What is what?” Joe asked, wondering if he could outmaneuver Kihgl in the tiny room. Probably not. The Ooreiki’s tentacles were at least four feet long when fully stretched. The room was only twelve-by-twelve, giving Joe a four foot window. Fat chance of escape.

  “The drawing on your arm,” Kihgl growled. “What is it?”

  “You gave us markers,” Joe retorted. “You never told us not to.”

  Kihgl lunged at him and within two startling seconds had a stinging grip around Joe’s throat. The Ooreiki yanked him down until his unnaturally huge, sticky brown eyes were less than an inch from Joe’s face. “Listen to me very carefully, Human,” Kihgl said, his voice low and deadly, “I do not care about why you drew it. I want to know what it means.”

  Choking, Joe managed, “It’s…an…anchor.”

  Kihgl released him and stepped back. “An anchor to what?” he insisted.

  Gasping, Joe collapsed to his knees, heaving in huge breaths of air. “It’s from a cartoon. This guy wore it around, beating people up.”

  Kihgl cocked his head, his eyes staying on Joe’s arm. “So you believe you can act like this cartoon? Beat us up?”

  “No,” Joe muttered. The truth of that had been made painfully clear the longer he stayed with his captors. Despite all the Hollywood movies about humanity kicking alien ass, Congress was just too big. Earth’s independence—what so many phony movies celebrated when humans fought off their aggressors with projectiles and jets—wasn’t going to happen. Not by force. “I don’t.”

  Kihgl brushed past him, leaving behind the pungent scent of oregano as he moved to a smooth spot in the wall and slapped his tentacle against it. The aliens, Joe had noted, had taken an extreme interest in a couple of Earth’s spices, and had begun wearing oils of oregano and rosemary as if it were some great honor. He had to snort, wondering if they knew they smelled like Sunday dinner.

  A round cubby opened, revealing several odd-shaped alien artifacts, none of which were the standard black. It stunned Joe to see color again for the first time since they’d lost their clothes.

  Kihgl drew out a little yellow-green sphere, only five or six inches in diameter. He brought this over to Joe and shoved it at him.

  “Is it the same?”

  Joe was not about to touch what looked like a globular ball of snot. “What?”

  “The picture. I can’t read Human script. Perhaps there is a detail I missed.”

  Reluctantly, Joe took the greenish sphere and immediately lost all interest in dropping it. It was wet and spongy, but when he peered into the gelatinous core, he saw a black-lined image floating in its center on a sheer white background. It looked exactly like the rough anchor Maggie had drawn on Joe’s arm.

  “Where did you get this?” Joe asked.

  “Is it the same?” Kihgl snapped.

  Joe peered at it, then examined the lines on his arm. They were exactly the same, right down to the stray line Maggie had accidentally drawn when he shifted in his sleep. “Yeah,” he said, his skin puckering with goosebumps. “It’s the same.”

  “Exactly?” Kihgl insisted.

  “Yeah,” Joe said, getting nervous.

  Kihgl let out a sudden breath through the flaps in the side of his neck, looking like he had been punched. For a long moment, the Ooreiki just stared at the snot-ball. Then, slowly, he lifted his sticky brown eyes to Joe’s face.

  In that moment, Joe got the distinct feeling that Kihgl was thinking about killing him. Nervous, he took a step backwards, lowering the ball to his side.

  His movement seemed to snap Kihgl out of his reverie, because, seeing Joe step away with his precious snot-glob in hand, his eyes hardened. He stepped forward and wrenched the spongy ball from Joe’s grip and shoved it back into his cubby. Then, without another word, he went to the door to the hall and opened it, the incident apparently forgotten. “Return to your platoon, recruit.”

  “What was that thing?” Joe demanded.

  “It’s my concern, not yours, Human.”

  Joe didn’t move.

  The door dripped shut again as they stood there. When Joe made no motion to obey, Kihgl scowled. “It’s something that was given to me when I was a battlemaster.”

  “Uh, by who?” Joe asked. From what he knew of the alien ranking system, battlemaster had been a long time ago, for Kihgl.

  “By a damn Trith, that’s who.” Kihgl cursed. The way he said it, that was supposed to mean something.

  Joe, however, had no idea what a Trith was. It certainly hadn’t been mentioned in any of Linin’s
Species Recognition classes. “So what’s it mean?” Joe asked.

  “It means my destruction.” Kihgl slapped the wall again and the door opened. “Now get out.”

  Joe’s goosebumps returned, that weird nightmare-that-you-can’t-stop feeling coming back in force. “What do you mean, ‘your destruction?’”

  Kihgl narrowed his slitted brown eyes. “If I had wanted to tell you the intimate secrets of my life, Human, I would have done so. Now return. To your. Platoon.”

  Joe stayed well out of reach, making no attempt to leave. “It’s not fair for you to just whip that thing out, ask me about it, tell me it means your destruction, then expect me to go.”

  Kihgl slapped the door shut again, the tiny frills in his neck fluttering rapidly. “You have no idea what ‘fair’ is, Zero.”

  They stood facing one another in silence a moment before Joe tentatively said, “What did that picture mean? Come on, man. I’m the one with it on my damn arm.”

  For a long moment, Joe thought Kihgl was going to pummel him. He was actually surprised when Kihgl finally decided to answer him. “It means the termination of my soul. The knowledge that I’ll never walk the halls of Poen with my ancestors, adding my wisdom to that of every Ooreiki that has come before me. It means I will cease to exist, and can’t stop it because the choice has been made.”

  “The termination of your soul?” Joe said.

  Kihgl looked like he wasn’t going to respond, but then touched the baggy black Congie uniform covering his torso. “Our souls live here, within our oorei. If the oorei is destroyed before it can be taken to a temple, the soul that lives inside it is released, its spiritual essence dissolving into the world around it. It is why we ban fire on all of our planets. It is one of the only things that can destroy our oorei and the souls inside it.”

  “Is that what that little round thing was you showed me?” Joe asked, feeling a moment of awe. “An oorei?”

  Kihgl’s chest erupted in a froglike croaking sound. “No, you furg. That was a mental image recorder. The oorei are tiny spheres we Ooreiki develop as we grow and live. They fit in your fist—on rare occasions they are bigger, if the bearer had a particularly long and emotional life. They’re different colors according to the spiritual state of the Ooreiki who developed them. Mine, for instance, will probably be a dull brown or gray due to all the horrible things I’ve done in my life. A priest’s oorei will glow a golden yellow or white. The priesthood on Poen collects them all and puts them in hallowed sites in the temples so that people may visit their ancestors.”

  “Is this some technological thing?” Joe asked. “You record your lives?”

  “No,” Kihgl snapped. “Ooreiki had oorei back when we wandered beneath the ferlii canopies, living in the dark, hunting draak with poisons. The temples on Poen still have many souls from that time, though visitors seeking them out have to spend days to find one, and when they do, they need a priest to translate. There’s nothing technological about it.”

  Joe squinted at him. “Are you telling me you’ve got dead people wandering around on your home planet? Zombies or something?”

  “Ghosts,” Kihgl said. “Billions and billions of ghosts.”

  Joe stared at the Ooreiki, not quite sure Kihgl wasn’t utterly pulling his leg. After becoming Tril’s scapegoat on everything from dirty floors to kids peeing themselves, Joe somewhat prided himself on being able to more or less judge an Ooreiki’s mental state based on its scrunched brown face, and Kihgl looked utterly sober. “And you’ve seen them?” he asked carefully. “Ghosts?”

  “Kkee. I make a pilgrimage to Poen after every war.”

  Joe didn’t know what to say. Kihgl sounded serious. And afraid.

  Tentatively, he moved closer and touched Kihgl’s arm. The Ooreiki stiffened. Joe quickly withdrew his hand, realizing he had no idea what kind of alien etiquette he had just broken. He eyed Kihgl’s python tentacles, knowing the alien could strangle him with ease. Clearing his throat, Joe motioned at Maggie’s drawing. “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just some five-year-old’s scribble.”

  Kihgl’s eyes grew sharp. “Which five year old?”

  Hurriedly, Joe said, “The picture is just a bunch of lines. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a doodle.”

  “You saw the picture I showed you, Zero. It was given to me by a Trith. Of all the species in the universe, the Trith are the only ones that haven’t been swallowed by Congress. Do you know why?”

  Joe shook his head, confused. Until now, he’d never heard of a species to avoid Congress. Everyone had acted like it wasn’t possible.

  “The Trith have avoided Congress because the Trith see the future. Every Congressional attack, every strategy Congress used against them, they thwarted it so thoroughly that Congress gave up after only three attempts. Three!”

  “They see the future?” Joe repeated. “Seriously? The whole race?”

  “Every single Trith can see every single detail of every moment from now until infinity. And a Trith told me that picture represents the destruction of my oorei.”

  Joe’s lips formed an O.

  “So now you see.” Kihgl’s eyes shifted to Joe’s arm.

  Joe cleared his throat. “I think psychics are full of crap. There was one we went to at the Fair. She sucked.”

  Kihgl’s neck-slits began fluttering with irritation. “I told you about the Trith.”

  “I know,” Joe said, “but why would he warn you unless he thought you could change it?”

  Kihgl stared at him. The fleshy sudah in the side of the Ooreiki’s neck fluttered almost to a stop.

  “Why tell someone what’s gonna destroy them unless they can do something about it?” Joe went on. “If he really sees the future, he had to know you were going to try and avoid it.”

  “You realize you are advising me to kill you, don’t you, Zero?”

  Joe swallowed. Quickly, he went on, “I’m just saying a lot of it’s up to interpretation. I mean, shoot. We’ve got psychics on Earth that gaze into a crystal ball and tell your future. I had one tell me I’d end up living in a cave with a bunch of naked people who could slay dragons. She was supposed to be really good, a genuine psychic—”

  Kihgl scoffed.

  “Anyway, I didn’t take it to heart. And look. Here I am. It wasn’t a cave with naked people. It was a shipful of aliens with a bunch of little kids. Maybe she told me it would be naked people because kids are innocent and don’t carry all of the burdens of adults. So maybe instead of destroying your soul, the Trith was telling you something’s about to happen that’s gonna be really emotional, earth-shattering. Like you lose your mom or something.”

  Kihgl stared at him so long Joe flushed and started to fidget.

  “Even if I cared about my mother, a Trith is not going to leave its planet and track me down to a sootbag bar out near the Line just to tell me she’s going to die.”

  He had a point.

  Kihgl slapped the wall again, once more allowing the door to drip open beside him. “Go find Nebil. Let me deal with this in peace.”

  Joe didn’t want to go. He wanted to dig that little snot-ball back out of the closet and get a really good look. It had to be some sort of mistake.

  …Didn’t it?

  But then he caught the utterly serious—utterly creepy—look Kihgl was giving him. In that moment, Joe realized, again, that he was just an alien to this creature. An extra recruit. A cull.

  Joe quickly backed to the door and left.

  CHAPTER 9: Kophat

  “Kophat is an Ooreiki home planet. The air is low-oxygen and high in organic content, so you Humans will have to struggle a bit to breathe. That’s what Ooreiki sudah are for.” Small Commander Linin touched the little frills running down either side of his neck. “Today’s class will consist of Ooreiki anatomy, customs, and planets. Feel free to ask questions, because as soon as you step off of this ship, your training focus will become tunnel assaults.”

  Joe’s heart spasmed. “
Tunnel assaults?”

  Ignoring him, Commander Linin and the battlemasters passed among the children, allowing them to examine them up-close for the first time. Continuing his lesson, he said, “Aside from the Dhasha and the Ueshi, Ooreiki have the most planets in Congress—three thousand and twenty-three full members, six hundred and fifty-nine more applicants, all terraformed. We outnumber Humans ten thousand to one. Only the Ueshi are a more populous species.”

  “These are your fingers?” Maggie asked, tugging on the four little extensions of Linin’s muscular arm, careful to avoid the prickly stinging growths on the bottom. “Why are they so soft?”

  “They don’t have bones, Mag,” Joe replied.

  “We don’t have bones,” Linin said, casting Joe a glance, “But we do have special fibers we can stimulate into rigidity with electrical impulses. That is how I am standing here in front of you instead of pooling at your feet.”

  “I heard you guys came to Earth a long time ago and evolved into apes.”

  Joe glanced at the kid who had spoken, wondering if he was an idiot.

  The Ooreiki’s slitted pupils narrowed. “Whoever told you that was wrong.”

  “My dad told me that,” the boy said defiantly.

  Yep, Joe thought, Definitely an idiot.

  “Feel his arm,” Maggie said. “He doesn’t have any hair, stupid.”

  “Hair is a primitive trait,” the Ooreiki agreed. “More advanced species simply evolve ways to prevent evaporation and stave off freezing. Hair is not very effective, since only minor fluctuations in temperature can cause catastrophic damage.”

  “What are these?” Scott asked, touching the frills on the Ooreiki’s neck.

  The Ooreiki jerked back. “Never touch those. Sudah are an Ooreiki’s air supply. Many of my comrades would kill you for touching their sudah.”

  Battlemaster Nebil grunted his agreement.

  “So you’ve got gills?” a girl said.

  The Ooreiki stiffened. “No, they are not gills.”

  “They sure look like gills,” Joe said. “Hey, they even got the little red thingies!” He pointed.