Forging Zero (22 page)

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 of 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.

Still,
when Kihgl stopped suddenly, swung around, and put the barrel of his gun in
Joe’s face, Joe could only stare at it.  The tip was swirling with shimmering
waves of heat, an indication that it was charged and ready.

“Tell
me why I shouldn’t kill you, Zero.”
Kihgl said,
his voice cold.
  “What are you going to do that will make it worthwhile for
you to exist and me to die?  Why should you live when I’ll lose everything?”

Joe
lifted his eyes from the gun to Kihgl’s face.  A million reasons flooded through
his mind, but he could not pin down any one of them.  He was a kid.  He missed
his family.  He liked to play football.  He hadn’t said goodbye to his new
friends.  How would Maggie survive without him?  Scott wasn’t big enough to get
them a ball whenever Tril made them race.  They’d all starve until they grew
up, and neither Scott nor Elf would grow up to be more than five-eight or
five-ten from malnutrition.

“My
groundteam,” Joe said.

Kihgl’s
gun never wavered.  Despairing that he had said the wrong thing, Joe waited for
the shot to come, knowing that running would only make Kihgl pull the trigger
faster. 

Ages
ticked by.  Centuries.  Millennia, and still Joe stared down the barrel of that
gun, waiting.  Then, slowly, Kihgl lowered his weapon.  The moment of silence
seemed to stretch into eternity, Kihgl not offering anything and Joe afraid to
ask.

Finally,
the Ooreiki said,
“I was going to kill you, Zero.  I planned on it since the
day I saw your mark.  I planned out how I would hide your body, how I would
explain your disappearance to Lagrah, how I would take the penalty for losing a
recruit.  If you’d whined about your youth, about your family, about how you
wanted to be a good soldier, I would have shot you.”
 He tucked the gun
back into its holster.

Joe
held his breath. 
So that means he’s
not
going to shoot me?
 

Kihgl
was silent for several more moments, picking rock dust from a gouge-mark in the
black stone that almost looked like tooth marks in an apple.  With his back to
Joe, he said,
“I killed someone today.”

Joe
felt goosebumps break out all over his body.