Children of Zero

by Andrew Calhoun

  “Hey, Janx! They’re here,” the man called out. Saeliko noted that he was speaking in Maelian.

  “Okay. Be right out,” came the reply.

  This was all wrong, Saeliko thought. This was too easy, too casual. She reached back and pulled out her scimitar. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Ollan wield his crossbow and Brenna lift her flintlock.

  A few moments later, Janx walked out of the front door pushing an older man ahead of her, his hands bound behind his back. As soon as the man descended the steps, he slumped down onto his knees and rested his chin on his chest. This is Radovan Mozik in the flesh, Saeliko realized. He was shirtless, and his torso was covered with welts and open cuts. His face was a mess, too. Janx had been torturing him, milking information out of him one cut at a time.

  A voice in Saeliko’s brain piped up and said, Hey, look! It’s the Madman of Laventhene kneeling right there in front of you. Neat! Saeliko told that voice to go away. She then set her eyes on the object in Janx’s left hand. She had absolutely no idea what it was, but the way Janx was smiling, it had to be something dangerous.

  It was roughly the same shape as a blunderbuss. In fact, Saeliko was certain that it was a weapon of some sort. It was much bulkier than a blunderbuss, all flat, angular panels and sharp edges instead of the rounded features of the traditional pirate weapon, but by the way she carried it with ease suggested it wasn’t that heavy. The sides were light grey and had blocky writing in a script she didn’t recognize. Worryingly, there were two openings at the front that appeared very much like barrels, the top one smaller and the bottom one fatter. Even more worryingly, Janx’s hand was wrapped around a handle, her finger on a trigger.

  “Saeliko!” Janx yelled out and cracked a smile. “How have you been?”

  This was not how Saeliko imagined her day was going to go. She decided to dispense with whatever verbal game Janx wanted to play and get straight to the point. “What is that?”

  “Really, my old friend? No chit chat? No catching up? I have so many questions for you. For instance, how’s my ship?” Janx tilted her head and retracted her smile. “Sorry. How’s your ship?”

  “Gone.” Saeliko watched the one-handed man walk into the house and re-emerge moments later with an identical weapon in his own hand. She also noted that while the two of them were bold enough to stand in plain sight, they weren’t advancing. The flintlock pistols that Brenna and the other women held were effective at short range, but virtually useless otherwise. At their current distance, Ollan might get lucky with a crossbow bolt, but the pistols weren’t going to be a factor. On the other hand, Saeliko guessed that Janx’s weapon wouldn’t have that problem.

  “What do you mean gone?”

  “Bottom of the sea. What is that?” she asked again.

  “Bottom of the sea?” Janx offered a frown that creased the lines on either side of her eyes. “Well that explains the cannon fire we heard earlier. It’s also very disheartening. You had the most feared ship in the Sollian and you couldn’t keep her afloat for a single season. The Epoch wasn’t just a ship, you know. Countless good and honorable women willingly gave decades of their lives to keeping that ship afloat. Don’t you know what the Epoch was? It was sweat equity. As harker, you should have understood that. Although I could have told you back on Butterfly Island, you were never cut out to be harker of the Epoch. Sorry, you just don’t have the brain for it. Now, Deshi, she would have been my choice. Where is she, by the way?”

  “She retired.”

  One eyebrow lifted. “Not by choice, I bet.” This was followed by a shrug. “In any case, all things considered, I’d say lucky her.”

  “It’s some kind of weapon, isn’t it?”

  Another frown creased her lips. “You’re an irritating woman, Saeliko.” Janx hefted up the beefy but sinister looking object and turned it this way and that for her former qarlden to see. “Yes, fine. It’s a weapon. A gift from Radovan to me and good ol’ Seventy-two over here.” She tilted her head sideways to the silent man holding the identical object in his own remaining hand. “Did you know his name was Seventy-two? Funny, isn’t it? Anyway, Radovan didn’t want to tell us any of his secrets at first, but . . . well, as you can see, we were persuasive, and he eventually coughed up these beautiful things.”

  “That’s why you didn’t set any traps for me on the trail.”

  “Oh, you’re going to be impressed, Saeliko. You really are. And since you’re obviously not interested in having a proper conversation with me, perhaps we should just get on with it.” She pointed the barrels at her adversary and asked, “Do you have any last words?” Before Saeliko could offer a retort, the man called Seventy-two cleared his throat loudly. Janx looked annoyed for a moment before she suddenly shook her head and smiled again. “My apologies. My friend here needs to ask you about some members of your crew before I murder all of you.”

  Saeliko looked to the man questioningly. At the same time, she scanned her peripheral vision on either side to plan her escape route. Things were about to get very bad very quickly.

  “The two with the attachments on their necks,” he said. Apparently he wasn’t interested in having a lengthy conversation either. “Where are they?”

  “Bottom of the sea, I’d wager,” she replied honestly.

  “Did you see them drown?”

  “No.”

  “So you don’t know for sure that they’re dead.”

  “No. I suppose they could’ve swum for shore. I didn’t wait to find out.”

  “Where did it happen?”

  “In the bay where the waterfall outlets to the sea.”

  Seventy-two paused to consider this before turning to Janx and declaring, “I need to go check.”

  “Certainly,” Janx said. “Help me kill them first?” She had the forward section of the weapon resting on the stump of her right arm, the index finger of her left hand still poised on the trigger.

  “Sure.” Seventy-two began to aim his own weapon.

  Saeliko launched herself to the right, yelling out “Scatter!” to her sisters and then throwing herself toward a depression in the ground behind a jumble of rocks and logs that offered a modicum of protection.

  Her mind struggled to understand what happened next.

  A cacophony of different sounds reached her ear drums, some of which she recognized, others foreign. The sharp thrum of Ollan’s crossbow releasing its bolt was followed almost instantaneously by two or three pistol shots, but the subsequent deep-throated tthwop sound, which she was pretty sure came from Janx, was all new to her. And then, just as Saeliko reached the apex of her dive through the air toward her chosen safe point, an insanely violent explosion erupted in the space she had been standing a moment ago.

  The blast deflected her trajectory in exactly the same manner as if an invisible giant had punted her in the side of her body with a big boot. The Saffisheen harker flew sideways, slammed into a scrawny tree and broke it in half before crashing into the dirt and smacking the side of her face into a pile of hard-caked mud. More dirt and debris rained down all around and on top of her as she struggled to breathe. There was smoke in the air. Her ears were filled with a deafening ringing sound, though she somehow recognized the sound of shots coming from Seventy-two’s weapon. Something must have been wrong with her senses because the shots were coming one after another impossibly fast.

  She had to move. She willed herself back into a crouching position and then lurched forward in search of shelter, just as another explosion ripped the air apart behind her and threw her airborne again. She felt shards of something tear into the skin of her back and shoulder blades.

  Luck – if you could call being slammed in the back by a shock wave lucky – was on her side; her body miraculously avoided being slammed into a cairn of loosely piled medium-sized rocks at high speed. Instead, the blast deposited her face down with a wet slap into a mud puddle behind the cairn, which all in all was probably the best result she could have hoped for.

&nb
sp; Janx and Seventy-two were out of her line of sight, so she spun around onto her butt, ignoring the pain pulsating through her back, and tried to discern how the rest of the Epoch’s crew was doing.

  Everyone she could see was dead.

  Jren had been thrown backwards into a tree, which had managed to hold her in a vaguely upright position. At least a dozen projectiles had entered her chest, stomach and legs, blood still oozing out of the holes. Another pirate named Yargrette was lying face down with the side of her head punched inward and one leg torn clean off. Another woman had been so torn apart that Saeliko couldn’t make out who she was.

  Then she spotted movement. Someone was pulling themselves backwards from the pile of bodies, dragging themselves along the ground, either unwilling to stand up and place themselves back in the line of fire or unable to stand due to injuries. It was Ollan. That big bastard was once again proving hard to kill.

  Silence descended around Radovan’s house once again. The two attackers had ceased fire because there was no one left standing to shoot at. Saeliko put herself back into a crouching position behind the cairn and shook her head in a futile attempt to get the last of the ringing out of her ears.

  “What do you think?” Janx yelled out. “Do you like it? Radovan calls it a Saad 3 tactical rifle. I call it a problem solver. It’s bloody brilliant, isn’t it?” Saeliko could tell that Janx was in motion, her voice was moving laterally toward the right of Radovan’s house. She guessed that Seventy-two would be moving forward from the other direction. They were going to flank her and flush her out.

  “Radovan’s not from here, you know,” Janx continued. “He’s from a different world; a world with lots of big weapons like this. Just think of the possibilities. Imagine what I could do with a hundred good women armed with these tactical rifles. Imagine the short work I could make of anyone that got in my way. Well, you don’t have to imagine, do you. Look at what I just did to your crew.”

  While Janx was talking, Saeliko realized that her scimitar was no longer in hand. She must have dropped it when the first blast knocked her out of the air. She still had a flintlock in a belt holster, but that wasn’t going to do her a whole lot of good.

  “You should really just come out from behind there,” Janx said. “I’m feeling quite happy with the way this has turned out, so I’m going to do you a favor. You see, at first I was going to make your death as painful as possible. I’ve been dreaming about torturing you. You know, making it last for days and days until you lose your sanity. That’s what you deserve, you traitorous sack of dog shit.”

  Saeliko knew it was a lie. Not the traitorous sack of dog shit part; the quick death part. There was no way Janx was going to let her off easy.

  She bolted. It was her only choice. She sprinted directly away from the house, straight back into the forest. Gunfire cracked to life and filled the air. Big chunks of tree and dirt exploded on either side of her. The power was staggeringly savage, and judging by the continued hammering of bullets into the forest around her, the range was astonishing as well.

  Saeliko had hoped to put as much distance between herself and Janx as possible, but she quickly saw the flaw in her plan. Another karst formation, this one much broader, jutted upward and blocked her escape route like a massive castle wall. She spotted tree roots and cracks all over the rock’s surface that would have allowed her to climb it, but doing so would have exposed her to a quick death.

  She ducked down behind an unusually large tree and commanded herself to calm her nerves. She searched for anything that she could use to give her an advantage. She didn’t know how far Janx and Seventy-two were behind her, but they had obviously seen her move behind the tree. Both of them were firing occasional shots on either side of her position, keeping her pinned down. It was only a matter of time before they would finish flanking her and turn her into a sitting duck.

  Fifty paces off to her left, she spotted another woman hiding behind a fallen log. This surprised Saeliko; she had thought all of her crew had been immobilized in the first onslaught. It was Lofi. She was bleeding from a wound in her abdomen. She looked pale and exhausted. Sweat covered her brow and ran down over her face.

  The two women looked at each other. Lofi smiled despite the obvious pain she was in and calmly nodded at Saeliko. It wasn’t a nod that indicated some sort of plan or hope for the future. It was a nod that said, “It’s been a pleasure sharing company with you all these years.” Lofi was getting ready to die.

  Saeliko nodded back.

  “What the fuck is that?” Janx hollered. At first, Saeliko thought Janx had spotted Lofi, but then she heard a commotion coming from somewhere behind Janx.

  “Someone’s at the house,” Seventy-two reported. “A lot of people, I think.”

  “That’s Lavic,” Janx said, recognizing the language being spoken. “Did those fucking villagers come up here?”

  Saeliko could hear it too. Voices. Lots of them. It wasn’t the villagers; it was the crew of the Black Star, probably led by Harker Mikka, and probably discovering that a battered, shirtless Radovan Mozik was lying on the ground ready to be picked up and taken back to the ship.

  “Go take care of them. I’ll finish off Saeliko.”

  There was no verbal response, but Saeliko heard footsteps moving back toward the house. She dared to peak out from her hiding spot to see if she could catch a glimpse of Janx. She did in fact catch a glimpse, but it was just in time to see the one-handed Saffisheen pull the trigger. The rifle made another tthwop sound, forcing Saeliko to hurl herself back behind the cover of the tree and as low as possible to the ground. The tree exploded and disintegrated all around her.

  Her ears were ringing again. She tried to get up and run, but shots slammed into the ground in front of her. She spun a hundred and eighty degrees and started to scramble in the opposite direction until another barrage of fire blocked her path. With nowhere else to go, she ducked back down behind the meager remnants of the tree and tried to pull her limbs in as tightly as possible to avoid getting shot.

  Fuck! There was nothing she could do. Fuck! She could hear Janx getting closer. The older Saffisheen started laughing. Saeliko looked back over at Lofi, but the surgeon’s eyes were closed. She wasn’t sure if Lofi was dead or just unconscious, but she definitely wasn’t going to be of any help. In the distance, she could hear Seventy-two spraying his weapon at the Lavic soldiers.

  “One more chance,” Janx called out. She was no more than ten paces away now. “Any last words, harker?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Saeliko yelled back.

  Janx stopped marching forward. “Finally! All right then. What do you have to say for yourself?”

  “I chopped up your chair.”

  “What?”

  “Your chair on the Epoch. I took an axe to it. Turned it into kindling. I just wanted you to know.”

  “I changed my mind. I think I will torture you.”

  “You were always going to torture me.”

  “Yeah, fair enough.”

  A final tthwop preceded a well-placed explosion not on the stump Saeliko was hiding behind but on a mound of rock and dirt a short distance in front of her. The resulting blast pounded into the already pummeled Saffisheen and left her reeling and disoriented. Before she could recover her senses, Janx was standing over her. Saeliko tried a sweep kick, but there was no air in her lungs and her muscles weren’t responding properly. Her toe connected feebly with Janx’s calf muscle to no effect whatsoever.

  Janx used the big rifle like a club, bringing it down in a sweeping arc to connect with Saeliko’s temple. The harker saw a blinding flash of light and nearly blacked out. She stared up through hazy vision, watching helplessly as Janx dropped the gun to the ground, pulled a long knife out of a sheath in her boot and knelt over Saeliko. She held the knife in a reverse grip so she could plunge the steel downward into her victim’s flesh.

  The strike never came. Janx suddenly turned in surprise as someone blindsided her with a wild tackle from
behind. Saeliko blinked rapidly, desperately trying to regain her vision and clear the thick fog from her head. She heard the sounds of a fight, but it took a frustratingly long time for her focus to return. When it did, she saw someone on top of Janx throwing a flurry of punches. Was that Kettle?

  * * *

  Dallas and Soup stood at the outskirts of Maglipan. A crowd of villagers was pointing at a trail that led up along the coast toward some hills. To a man, woman and child, they looked bored, almost as if they had already done this three times today.

  4.6 KETTLE

  Kettle straddled his prey and punched for dear life. He knew he was punching for dear life because this woman was Saffisheen. He knew she was Saffisheen because he could see the scrolling tattoos that covered the side of her face, and if there was anything Kettle had learned from watching Saeliko all this time, it was that the Saffisheen were tigers with a lust for blood. If you really had no other choice but to fight one, you didn’t give it a few hearty slaps and hope for the best; you swung for all you were worth.

  The fact that this particular Saffisheen only had one hand didn’t elicit his sympathy. He was certain that if he gave her a fraction of a chance, she would find a way to throw him off and then kill him until he died from it.

  Thrice she tried to torque her body and buck Kettle from his dominant position, but each time he used his legs and weight advantage to counter. Like an MMA fighter at the end of a fight, he kept raining down punches, looking for that knockout blow. All she could do was hold her arms over her face to ward off as many blows as she could.

  “Okay, I’ve got the gun,” Haley yelled.

  The sound of Haley’s voice must have been another surprise for the Saffisheen woman, because her arms lowered for just a moment, causing a chink in her armor that Kettle was more than willing to take advantage of. He punched her hard in the nose and saw the woman’s head bounce off the ground beneath them. She was clearly dazed now, her eyes glossy and unable to focus.