Zeros return, p.1
Zero's Return, page 1
part #3 of The Legend of ZERO Series
The Legend of
ZERO:
Zero’s Return
by
Sara King
Copyright © 2012
All Rights Reserved
Sara King
No part of this work may be photocopied or otherwise reproduced without express written consent of the author. For permissions and other requests, email Sara King at kingnovel@gmail.com
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 Chronological Order
(because nothing else really makes sense):
The Moldy Dead (prequel)
Forging Zero
Zero Recall
Zero’s Return
Zero’s Redemption
Zero’s Legacy
Forgotten
Author’s Note
WARNING: Unlike the first two ZERO novels, Zero’s Return is not a stand-alone. As you know, this book was ‘finished’ about eight months ago. Despite my valiant attempts to contain it, however, Book 3 ended up being so overwhelmingly huge in the ‘edit’ (A.K.A. The Perfectionist Obsessive Streak That Would Never End) that I had to break the story arc into two parts (what is now Zero’s Return and Zero’s Redemption). To give you an idea of just how mind-numbingly huge ZERO3 got before I split it, each of these ‘parts’ ended up being substantially larger than any other novel I’ve ever published. Generally, this wouldn’t have stopped me from gleefully publishing a novel bigger than The Stand, but for my own sanity, I’m moving on to Redemption before I edit Return into the next Collected Works of Shakespeare.
For those of you who hung around while I obsessed for months over silly crap, I really appreciate your patience. And please. Do me a favor. The next time I say I want to ‘edit’ one of my books, please just haul off and slap me.
The Parasite Publications Glossary
(Because Somebody’s Gotta Tell You This Stuff!)
Character author – That rare beast who lets his or her characters tell the story. (And often run completely wild.)
Character fiction – Stories that center around the characters; their thoughts, their emotions, their actions, and their goals.
Character sci-fi – Stories about the future that focus on the characters, rather than explaining every new theory and technology with the (silly) assumption that we, as present-day 21st centurians, know enough to analyze and predict the far future with any accuracy whatsoever. I.e. character sci-fi is fun and entertaining, not your next college Physics textbook.
Parasite – The Everyday Joe (or Jane) who enjoys crawling inside a character’s head while reading a book; i.e. someone who enjoys character fiction.
Poddite – Someone who allows other people to tell them what they like.
Furg – Generally a poddite who believes the best fiction makes your eyes glaze over…unless the glazing happens because you stayed up all night reading it and you can't keep your eyes open the next day. ;)
Table of Contents:
Chapter 1 – Twelve-A
Chapter 2 – A Human Mistake
Chapter 3 – The Legend of Zero
Chapter 4 – Earth on Trial
Chapter 5 – Rat’s Mission
Chapter 6 – New Basil Harmonious
Chapter 7 – Eelevansee
Chapter 8 – Crash Landing
Chapter 9 – S.H.A.E.L.
Chapter 10 – How to Handle a Jreet…
Chapter 11 – Dominance Struggles
Chapter 12 – The Rescue of Furgs
Chapter 13 – The Runaway Rodemax
Chapter 14 – An Alien in an Alien Land
Chapter 15 – The Titans’ Struggle
Chapter 16 – Mind Games
Chapter 17 – One with the People
Chapter 18 – Dreams of Women
Chapter 19 – Bubble Manium
Chapter 20 – The Making of a Warrior
Chapter 21 – First Encounters
Chapter 22 – The Magnanimous Mike Carter
Chapter 23 – First Impressions
Chapter 24 – Ticktock
Chapter 25 – Stragedy
Chapter 26 – Warrior Troubles
Chapter 27 – To Grab a Congie by the Hair…
Chapter 28 – Tuesday
Chapter 29 – Wednesday
Chapter 30 – Shael
About the Author
Afterword
Meet Stuey
Sara Recommends
Other Titles
Glossary
Dedication
I owe this one to Kim Burling, the Muse behind the story of S.H.A.E.L. Without you, her tale would have never been told.
CHAPTER 1 – Twelve-A
This is our future.
Though their bodies were naked, their minds empty, the fearful, half-mad faces that followed Marie from behind the sanitized bars of their cages were Humanity’s hope.
Marie hurried her step. Despite almost thirty years on the project, the depraved gazes never ceased to bother her. They haunted her dreams, peeked at her from beneath her floorboards, watched her from the other side of her shower curtain, looked up at her from her morning cup of coffee, stared at her from between the lines of her medical charts. Unlike the other experts on the project, Marie had never been able to see past the source material they had used for the project, and every day, it ate at her.
A familiar voice entered her head, unbidden. It will be over soon, Marie.
Marie shuddered and gripped her pen, her eyes unconsciously drawn to the slender, blue-eyed experiment in the corner cell. His drip-bag had run out again and he was awake. Her heart started to pound as she met the deep cerulean eyes tucked behind the useless titanium bars. She knew, better than anyone, that Twelve-A could kill them all, should it ever cross his mind.
The slender experiment said nothing more, merely watched her from his thin, military-issue mattress.
Fighting the gut-deep urge to drop her charts and run, Marie hurried back through the foot-thick leaden doors separating the holding area from the lab and slapped the glowing red button inside the monitoring room. She allowed herself a soft breath of relief as the massive hydraulics of the holding area hissed shut, locking the experiments in their silent bunker of lead and concrete.
“Twelve-A needs another dose,” she told the techs at their stations, trying not to sound as unnerved as she felt. “He’s awake again.”
“Colonel Codgson wants him awake,” Sunny Carter, a young blonde Army lieutenant, said. The woman gave the holding area a nervous glance, then her eyes flickered back to her vitals monitor. “Codgson’s got us monitoring him, making sure his patterns stay level—he’s scheduled another demonstration for this afternoon.”
Marie cursed. Codgson was a bureaucratic furg. Ever since he had discovered their prodigy’s unique talents, the man had made every attempt to show him off to the board in every brutal way possible. Twelve-A had been pitted against everything the other labs could throw at him again and again—and had lived.
“Do you think Twelve-A will survive this one?” Lieutenant Carter asked, her face etched with worry. She cocked her head at the monitor that showed him hunched around his knees in one corner of his cell, staring at the wall. “What if they find a better minder and he doesn’t survive? Don’t we need him?”
Marie knew the lieutenant was partial to the handsome, blue-eyed young man in the last cage on the right. She didn’t think of him as a killer. Marie, having seen the lifeless bodies Twelve-A left behind in the Dark Room, knew better. She also knew there was nothing that could stand against Twelve-A. By some luck of the draw, it was their lab, of all of them, that had hit upon the lucky combination that no amount of desperate cloning had been able to reproduce.
“He’s survived all the others,” Marie said. Still, Marie felt dread creeping into her soul. Twelve-A hated the Dark Room. If left awake after he was pitted against another experiment, Twelve-A would go broody and silent—or sometimes just curl into a ball and cry for hours. Ridiculously, ‘Mental Fortitude’ was Codgson’s lowest rating for Twelve-A, just under ‘Emotional Resilience.’ What if, one day, their star performer just decided not to cooperate? What if he one day sat down and let the inferior creatures Codgson pitted him against simply end his misery? What if he just stopped caring? What if he grew angry? Or worse…what if he grew vengeful? Just the tiniest slip by the technicians monitoring him and he could wreak destruction on the whole lab. He could escape.
That, right there, introduced a whole new wave of horror to Marie’s nightmares.
“I know,” Lieutenant Carter said, observing the rows of monit ors displaying the experiment wing. “That’s what bothers me. He doesn’t like it…it hurts him. What if he doesn’t—”
A male voice behind her interrupted them. “We have his DNA. We can always make another, if he fails to cooperate.”
Marie stiffened and turned. The colonel stood in the hall, his perfectly crisp blue uniform accenting a bored demeanor, as if they were talking about cloning rats.
You don’t have a clue, you stupid furg, Marie thought. “We’ve tried that,” she reminded him, having to physically stop herself from adding something unpleasant. The colonel’s dull black eyes reminded her of the rodents they used in the early days of the project. Though she had said it a thousand times to the gun-happy thugs running the military side of the project, she explained it again. “Even an exact genetic match is no assurance of the same abilities manifesting in a clone. There is something more at work here, something that makes it all the more important to protect Twelve-A until we can figure it out.”
The colonel caught her gaze and smiled, a wormlike twisting of his lips that chilled her to the core. “The first rule of this project is not to become attached to the subjects, Doctor.”
Marie’s anger spiked, as it always did around the colonel. As usual, he had completely disregarded that there was more to their project than simple genetics, as it didn’t fit within his tiny mental box. Despite the outrageous and ingenious successes of the project, he had written off their failure to reproduce Twelve-A’s…unique…capabilities as simple Human error and fired a few technicians. Then, when the second, third, and fourth clone batches had failed to manifest more of Twelve-A’s special abilities, only telekinetics or telemorphs instead, he had reported it as ‘mechanical malfunction’ and ordered more equipment.
They were on the eighth and ninth batches now, though they were still in the pre-fetal stages. Several times, when walking past the incubation tubes, Marie had considered sabotaging them herself, to spare them the fate she knew awaited them if they disappointed their benefactor. Several months ago, after the seventh batch had been tested and confirmed negative for Twelve-A’s minder qualities, Codgson spent a night in the lab destroying all the previous clone batches—after Marie had made a specific request to keep them alive for study. Eighty-four blond, blue-eyed young men, some only five years of age, most with the strongest mover or maker abilities they had ever seen. Dead.
Security footage had shown Codgson stalking from the building that night drenched in red because the sadistic shit had used a combat knife, sort of a manly coup he could tell his drinking buddies about in the Officers’ Club. The next morning, because there were too many bodies for the technicians to take care of before they began to stink, Marie had been one of the ones on her knees mopping blood from their cells with a crimson rag.
For months, Marie had wanted to kill him.
Looking into Codgson’s glinting, hollow eyes, she still did. It took all of Marie’s control to keep her anger in check as she said, “You shouldn’t leave Twelve-A awake. He could kill us all right now if he wanted to. He could empty our minds, make us all stop breathing just like he does in your Dark Room.”
The colonel snorted in complete disdain. “I doubt that. My techs—”
“—would die too,” Marie interrupted coldly. “You’re playing with fire, Colonel.”
The colonel laughed and rapped sharply on the thick leaden door separating them from the containment area. The sound diffused with the sheer density of the metal. The colonel gave her a smug look. “He doesn’t even know we’re here.”
Marie glared, but said nothing.
“If he did,” the colonel said. “He would have killed us a long time ago.”
“You don’t know that,” Marie said, remembering the curled ball of misery she had found so many times after a visit to the Dark Room. “Maybe he doesn’t like to kill.”
The colonel’s gaze sharpened, as if he were a hound breeder and she had suggested his dogs didn’t like to hunt. He turned to Lieutenant Carter abruptly. “Collect the experiment and take him to the Dark Room. Our visitors are waiting in the observation booth.”
As the tech went to get the necessary equipment, Marie fought another wave of dread. Reluctantly, she asked, “What’s he going to fight this time?”
The colonel’s wormy lips twisted again. “An experiment from another lab.”
Marie had expected as much, but she stiffened anyway. “Twelve-A represents thirty-two turns of work. If you want a friendly competition for the generals’ viewing pleasure, go get one of the Eleven-series to be your gladiator. Anything Twelve-series and above shouldn’t be risked.”
The colonel gave her a humorless smile. “There is nothing friendly about it. The lab that fails today loses its funding. If we lose our funding, every experiment will be killed and our data destroyed. We need to win. That’s why I chose him.”
For a moment, she thought the humorless, hardass shit was joking. When Marie blinked and saw the sincerity in his beady black eyes, however, it suddenly felt like all the energy of her body rushed out her feet. Softly, she whispered, “They would kill them all?”
The colonel inclined his head. “Now you see why it must be Twelve-A.”
“Why?” she whispered.
The colonel gave her a long look before he shrugged and said, “The bureaucrats got cold feet. We had someone hack into our system. We’re pretty sure it was Peacemakers. The board hopes we can stall them for a few years, and the fewer active labs we have, the better our chances will be of going undiscovered.”
“Can’t we combine the labs?” Marie blurted. “Throw them all into one building?”
The colonel shook his head. “We’ve established the genetic lines won’t fight each other if they’re kept in the same building.”
Remembering the horrible child deathmatches and psychopathic mind-screwing that Colonel Codgson had used to determine that, Marie felt sick. In all, Codgson and his military fuck-ups had killed over three quarters of their non-cull subjects, more or less as target practice for the others. “Then maybe we could find some other means to determine the success of the experiments,” Marie said quickly. Her chest was aching now. To lose so many lives, so many years of work… “Surely we can figure something out. Something that does not endanger their lives. There is evidence that latent brain activity is a clear indicator of—”
“We’re constructing a war, Doctor,” the colonel bit out, bristling like an angry dog. “The alien Congress will bathe in its own blood before it realizes it can no longer hold us. Twelve-A and his kind represent Earth’s hope for independence, and it will take many of their deaths to see it happen.” He gave her his zealot’s smile—the one that had made her so excited at her interview—and said, “I’m willing to make the sacrifice. Are you?”
What kind of stupid question is that? Marie thought, appalled. With the colonel, everything was either black or white. In his mind, there was no other alternative. She bit down the urge to tell him he wasn’t sacrificing anything, then decided to try a different tack, while she still had time to salvage her life’s work. “You’ve used Twelve-A three times in the last month. Why not Ten-F?”
Colonel Codgson gave her a flat look full of patronizing amusement. “You want to place all of their lives on her?”
Marie licked her lips. Ten-F, though potent, was insane. She had fingernail scars down her face from where she’d tried to take out her own eyes, and she was missing her pinkie fingers from where she’d gnawed them off after her last visit to the Dark Room.
“Colonel,” she began tentatively, “you don’t stay to see them after their experiences in the Dark Room. It’s obviously very traumatic for the minders, and you’ve already used Twelve-A many more times than my recommendations allow. I want you to retire him. He’s too valuable to the project for any more games.”
The colonel’s eyes narrowed. “This…” he flicked lint off of his uniform jacket, “…is not a game.” He gave her a glacial smile. “It’s war.” When Marie started to retort, he cut her off with a big, upraised hand. “Go find out what’s taking Lieutenant Carter so long. I told them noon sharp.” The colonel glanced at his big gold wristwatch and his mouth twisted in irritation. “We’re two minutes behind already.” Without another word, he turned sharply and strode off in the direction of the Dark Room, hard black boot-heels clicking briskly on the white tile as he departed.
