Forging Zero

by Sara King

  The others nodded at him.

  Joe’s heartbeat quickened. He had been hoping it had been some sort of oxygen-deprived hallucination. If there were Takki nearby, then there might be Takki tunnels nearby. If there were tunnels nearby, they might want Joe to go down them. And that wasn’t going to happen. Ever.

  “You look scared,” Maggie said. “Don’t be scared. They’re a little smaller than you, Joe. They don’t even have really big teeth. And they’re pretty. Like Mommy’s necklaces.”

  Monk nodded vigorously. “They looked like big rubies.”

  “Rubies are red,” Scott said. “Not purple. Amethyst is purple.”

  Monk glared. “I was the one that saw them, Scott. You were passed out.”

  Scott rolled his eyes. “If you knew anything, you’d know—”

  His words were interrupted by a deep rumbling sound that sounded like someone gouging a chalkboard with an ice pick. Immediately, everyone grouped up closer to Joe, nervously looking at the open doorway.

  “What is that?!” Joe said, standing. He could feel the vibrations in his lungs, the reverberations rattling his very bones. It sounded like an upended freight train screeching sideways down a highway.

  “It’s been doing that ever since we got here,” Libby said.

  “But what is it?” Joe asked.

  “We don’t know,” Scott admitted. “But it’s been coming from all over. And sometimes it’s quiet, too, like it’s a long ways off.”

  “I wanna go home,” Elf said softly.

  “I don’t. I wanna see what’s making that noise,” Monk said, sticking out her tongue at Elf. Immediately, Elf looked like he was going to cry.

  “Hey, guys,” Joe said, “calm down. Be nice, Monk. I’m gonna go see what I can figure out, okay?” He stood, then caught himself on the wall as an immediate wave of dizziness hit. A sharp pain in his palm made him yank his hand back, however, and when he examined it, his hand was cut from where it had slid across the glassy black surface. Seeing himself bleed, Joe felt a surge of panic once again welling up from within. Since when did walls cut people?

  Fighting his growing alarm, Joe took two deep breaths, trying to ignore the sickening way the putrid air clung to his lungs. When he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to vomit all over himself, Joe opened his eyes and scanned the corridor of beds to the door. The exit was only a rounded hole in the wall, and yet it appeared to be several stories above the ground. Between the door and himself, the ridges and waves of the floor rose in deceptively elegant lines—enough to cut his feet to shreds.

  “They give us boots and gloves for this?” Joe asked, eying the floor apprehensively.

  “Yeah,” Scott said, pointing to the pile of black gear atop the chest. “But Battlemaster Nebil told us not to put anything on until he teaches us to do it right.”

  Joe snorted. “I can dress myself.” As the kids watched, he gingerly stepped across the floor and examined the pile. He found the largest outfit, pulled it loose, and unfolded it. His breath sucked in.

  It was identical to a Marine cammi jacket. The material, the feel, the bagginess, the cut…the only thing that was different was that it was jet black.

  Joe slipped his arms into the sleeves and settled it over his shoulders. It felt good to have something substantial on his body again. The flimsy white shorts and T-shirts from back on the ship had left him feeling exposed. Probably their intention, the jackasses, Joe thought, disgusted.

  As he had seen his father do a thousand times before, Joe buttoned the jacket, then pulled up his pants and stuck his feet into the hard black boots. He laced them up, pulled the pant legs over the tops, and stood up. He didn’t have any way to secure the cuffs of his pants like he’d seen his dad do because he had no bootbands, but he made do by tucking them into the tops of his boots. Then he pulled the heavy, leathery gloves over his hands, marveling at how the material seemed to mold to fit his fingers, almost like a liquid, yet remained tough and durable.

  Once he was fully dressed, Joe took a moment to look himself over. It felt like he was missing something, but he couldn’t put his finger on what was nagging at him. He glanced at the others. “So what do you think?”

  “I think you’re gonna get clobbered,” Scott said. Libby nodded her agreement.

  Joe scoffed and strode to the door. He could feel the eyes of the other children following him as he walked.

  The Ooreiki hadn’t even bothered to place a guard.

  And why would they? Joe’s heart began to hammer painfully as he stared out at the foreign landscape. They were a good fifty feet from the ground. Even from here, he could see the purple sparkles where the black rock of the plaza reflected the sky. It was a deep glassy ebony, apparently the same material the building was made of, but crushed.

  Joe’s stomach cringed when he glanced up. The buildings were huge onyx cylinders a thousand times bigger than any skyscraper. Framing the purple sky, they were so tall it seemed like they bent inward, creating a barred dome above him. Joe looked away before he fell over.

  Out across the crushed black stone plaza, the massive bases of the huge obsidian buildings had stone stairways carved into the outer rims, snaking around the buildings and attaching to wide, railed balconies that encircled every story like the one upon which Joe stood. Black elevators moved up and down the sides carrying a flood of purple lizards and colorfully-garbed Ooreiki. The glow of electricity lit up the windows of the enormous structures, reminding him of the office buildings back home. Massive, arched bridges hung between them, allowing four lanes of traffic in either direction.

  Joe stared, feasting his eyes upon the skyscraper city. The Ooreiki, in particular, fascinated him. Instead of a constant, uniform black, these wore every color of the rainbow, their clothes shimmering oranges and reds and purples that fluttered around them in shawls and scarves and skirts and ribbons. Those that weren’t walking along the highways encircling the buildings were traveling between the skyscrapers over the massive bridges with little open platforms that hovered over the ground without wings or any other visible means of keeping themselves afloat.

  When Joe finally pulled himself back inside the barracks, Maggie said, “They made them from the trees.”

  Joe blinked at her. “Huh?”

  “The buildings.” Maggie tapped the wall behind the bed with a tiny knuckle. “They’re trees.”

  Joe gave a derisive snort. “They’re not tr—” Then his mouth fell open as he stared at the glossy, obsidian-like material. He glanced outside again, looking at the enormous circular skyscraper pillars in a new light. It was so obvious, once he thought about it. The buildings were the same size and shape as the massive white alien ‘trees’ surrounding the city.

  From somewhere outside, the scraping sound came again, a distant rumble that seemed to come from beyond the city limits.

  “I want to go home,” Elf whimpered, cringing closer to the wall. “Can I please go home, Joe?”

  “Scaredy-cat,” Monk taunted. “Elf’s a scaredy-cat, nie-ner nie-ner nie-ner—”

  Joe scowled at Monk. “We’ll go home, Elf. We just gotta find a ship to take us.”

  Elf’s hazel eyes flickered up to Joe’s face in wretched, painful hope. “Really?”

  Joe winced, suddenly understanding exactly why none of those parents ever told their kids where the Congies were taking them. “Uh, yeah. We’re just waiting for our ride. As soon as we find us a ship, I’ll hotwire it and get us home, okay? No sweat.” He patted Elf’s shiny bald head.

  Despite how stupid it sounded, Elf seemed to take that at face-value. “Okay, Joe,” he said, giving him a shaky grin. He glanced outside at the huge skyscrapers and swallowed, taking visible courage from his lie. “A ship. Okay.”

  Joe turned and realized Libby was watching him much-too-closely, a small scowl of disapproval on her young face. He flushed and immediately dropped his hand from Elf’s head. Feeling guilty, he cleared his throat. “Uh, yeah, Elf? There’s really no way to—
”

  Joe was interrupted by the heavy boot tread of an Ooreiki behind him. When he turned, Secondary Commander Kihgl was standing in the corridor of big circular beds. The Ooreiki’s sudah were fluttering, reminding Joe of the motion of the fins on a cuttlefish.

  Kihgl motioned at the door. “Come with me, Zero.”

  Joe tensed, sensing that something was not quite right about the secondary commander’s abrupt appearance. For one, he wasn’t flanked by battlemasters and tertiary and small commanders. For two, Kihgl’s stiff, almost nervous demeanor was sending warning signals through Joe’s brain, his body language utterly opposed to the calm, confident—and always angry—façade the aliens put on for training their recruits. The normal Ooreiki reaction would have been to pound Joe senseless for disobeying orders and putting his clothes on. Kihgl, on the other hand, kept glancing over his shoulder like he was worried someone would see him.

  “Where you going?” Joe asked, nervous that Kihgl hadn’t called forth any of the other children. That was never good.

  Kihgl’s pupils narrowed on him in icy black slits. “Today is not the day to question me, Zero. Come with me. Or don’t.” The way the Ooreiki said it sounded almost…permanent. Then he turned and trod back down the hall, his booted feet clunking hard against the stone, giving Joe the option to follow or stay behind. Having heard something dangerous in Kihgl’s voice, Joe reluctantly fell into step at a wary distance.

  The Ooreiki led Joe to a small floating platform resting on the deck outside.

  “Get on the haauk.”

  Kihgl climbed aboard the platform, then waited impatiently as Joe first nervously put one foot, then the other, on the inexplicably hovering device. It had no buzzing or whirring, no mechanics that he could see at all. When it began to slide sideways, Joe clenched the railing until his knuckles were white and he kept his eyes on the floor to keep from seeing how unnaturally the thing moved…almost as if gravity didn’t even exist to it. Joe’s stomach clawed its way toward his feet as the craft jumped over the banister and out into open air with the grace of a gazelle.

  As the haauk dropped away from the barracks and skimmed above the plaza below, Joe nervously eyed the glittering black courtyard surface, knowing it would cut like shards of glass if the haauk tumbled them out onto it.

  But it didn’t. They shot smoothly across the plaza then dove between the first of the skyscrapers, Kihgl navigating the narrow roads between the massive buildings a little too quickly. Joe watched uneasily, but held his tongue thinking that the Ooreiki had a quicker reaction time than humans. When the craft scraped against a staircase hard enough to leave a streak of metal, however, Joe knew something was wrong.

  “What the hell?” he shouted.

  Kihgl ignored him.

  “Hey!” Joe cried, touching Kihgl’s arm. “Where are you taking me?!”

  Without taking his attention from the road ahead, Kihgl lashed out viciously, nearly knocking Joe from the platform. Joe caught himself—barely—on the railing and backed away, his nerves giving rise to panic. Oblivious to Joe’s rising fear, Kihgl pulled onto a main avenue that shot between the enormous trees. The sixty-foot-wide road was strangely empty.

  On either side, utterly mind-bendingly massive white trees towered above them, increasing Joe’s anxiety. Unnatural black things that looked like barnacles clumped together on the surface of the white trunks, each one the size of a small car. Joe noticed a house-sized, turtle-like creature clinging to a trunk. As he watched it, the thing closed its jaws over a barnacle and its flat upper tooth scraped the surface of the protrusion. The screeching chalkboard sound that followed was enough to shatter glass. Joe slapped his hands over his ears, but Kihgl never even looked up, focused entirely on the road in front of him.

  He’s taking me out of the city, Joe realized, his heart beginning to thunder in his ears. Where there’s no witnesses.

  Kihgl flew for hours in silence, saying nothing, not even acknowledging Joe’s presence on the skimmer. Joe had begun planning how he was going to try and make a break for it when Kihgl brought them to a halt in a huge, circular clearing with only a few jagged stumps where buildings should have been.

  No, Joe realized, getting a better look. They were buildings. The clearing looked like it had been flattened by a bombing run. Shattered alien megaliths—the massive tree-like formations in which the Ooreiki made their homes—lay everywhere, honeycombed with caves and the remnants of sidewalks and bridges.

  Kihgl veered from the road and took them across the ruined landscape, the destroyed buildings passing beneath them.

  “Was there some sort of war?” Joe asked, watching the shattered ebony edifices over the edge of his skimmer. Everywhere, he could see pits of varying sizes whose shadowy entrances seemed to fade into darkness, almost like…

  …tunnels.

  Joe’s fists clenched on the railing and he suddenly felt weak. Please let it be some sort of war, he thought. Please let it be some sort of horrible war and those be bombing holes.

  “Training-ground,” Kihgl grunted. It was the first thing he had said to Joe the entire trip.

  Kihgl brought them to a halt at the edge of the ring of destruction, almost touching the root system of one of the massive alien trees. He put the haauk down between three of the ruined buildings, the stumps shielding the hovercraft from view of the distant roads.

  This is where he kills me, Joe thought. His lungs began to labor for air and he grew painfully close to another gasping attack.

  “Here.” Kihgl shoved a white cylinder at him.

  Joe stared at it. Would Kihgl really give him oxygen if he was going to kill him?

  “Walk with me.” Kihgl climbed off the hovercraft and started through the jagged forest of broken trunks, his gun gleaming on his hip. Reluctantly, Joe followed him.

  “What’s going on?” Joe asked once he caught up. He eyed the gun, wondering if he could take it before Kihgl broke a few more bones.

  Remembering how fast the Ooreiki could move—and how violently—Joe quickly amended his plan.

  “So, uh,” Joe said, trying to break the ice as Kihgl marched them silently toward the undisturbed edge of the utterly enormous alien forest. “Where are we going?” There was something about Kihgl’s mood that reminded Joe of his Aunt Caroline the day she bludgeoned her three dogs to death. The same week, they had put her into the mental institution.

  Kihgl ignored his question and kept walking.

  Nervously, Joe glanced up at the colossal pillars stretching to the sky above him. Because the silence was making him nervous and he’d never been good at keeping his mouth shut when his Dad gave him the quiet treatment, he babbled, “What are those things? Trees?”

  Kihgl scowled, and for a moment, it looked like his secondary commander wouldn’t answer him. Then, reluctantly, Kihgl turned his sticky brown eyes up at the canopy. “Not trees. The closest approximation I can give you is a form of mold. The branches at the top are not there to consume light, like Earthling trees, but to spread spores. That is what makes the sky purple and the air sweet.”

  “Sweet?” Joe snorted. “It stinks like my grandpa’s porta-potty.”

  Kihgl immediately gave him an irritated glare. “Your Human home was a rotting ball of biowaste and the air was as stale and tasteless as the inside of a ship. It’s a pity our ferlii cannot grow on such a fetid mishmash, or I would have brought some along.”

  The idea of Earth suddenly becoming a dark, sweltering, stinking ball of huge alien mold spores left Joe with a whole new respect for ‘invasive species’. He swallowed, hard. “So, uh, ferlii? That’s what they’re called? What are they made of? Are these—” he rapped his knuckles on one of the black stone foundations of a fallen building, “—ferlii?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is this stuff?” Joe asked, frowning at the black stuff. “It’s like glass, but harder.”

  “It is a carbon composite. The ferlii deposit it on the inside as they grow. Hundreds of billions o
f them make up one tree. They draw carbon from the air and digest it.”

  Joe stared at the building, remembering his last geology class. Mostly-pure carbon, he knew, came in a few very useful forms: oil, coal, and diamond. The little hairs on the back of his neck started to raise as he considered that. “Wait a minute. That’s too hard to be coal.”

  “It’s not coal, furg.”

  “It’s diamond?” Joe blurted. No way. Just no way.

  “It’s carbon. Diamonds are only valuable on your backward, carbon-poor planet. Congress controls whole planets made of diamond.”

  Joe squatted and touched the stone at his feet. It was crushed, as he had thought, a glittering mat of sharp black crystal. He stood up, bringing a diamond with him. When he held it up, he could see through it. It was at least ten carats, totally flawless except for the near-obsidian darkness to it. Enough to buy him a palace, back on Earth. Joe dropped it back to the ground.

  Standing again, he hurried to catch up with Kihgl, who was still walking towards the multi-layered alien forest. “Where are we going?” he asked again.

  Kihgl ignored him and kept walking. “Ferlii are a blessing to a planet,” he went on. “They create ten times the living-space. If you look, the branches of ferlii are woven together so tightly that you cannot see the ground. Many species exist in the upper canopy that have not seen the underbrush in millions of years, when their ancestors decided to climb to the top to see what was up there. It was so with the Ooreiki, back on Poen.”

  Nervous that he wasn’t answering his question, Joe nonetheless asked, “And what is up there?”

  “Spores,” Kihgl responded. “The richest concentration of nutrients on the planet. It can be eaten raw or gathered by the shipload and distributed to factories for distillation. Any planet with ferlii will not starve.”

  “It won’t see the sun, either,” Joe muttered, “And it’ll stink like crap.”

  Kihgl kept walking. Something about this little jaunt toward the woods was bothering him. Joe’s palms grew sweaty and he watched Kihgl closely, planning out his next move. Humans could run a lot faster than Ooreiki. Almost twice as fast. At the first sign of Kihgl reaching for his gun, he was going to sprint back to the hovercraft and try to get it running before Kihgl caught up.