The Legend of ZERO: The Scientist, the Rat, and the Assassin

by Sara King

  Without looking at Tyson, Slade grabbed a ‘lock’ of his ‘hair’ between thumb and forefinger and gave it a sharp tug. When he released it, the white filaments continued to wriggle in protest, much like intestinal worms.

  Tyson blinked at him. “You let them experiment on you?”

  Slade sighed deeply, then decided to explain exactly why the smartest man on Earth had spent thirty-two years with cranium-cracking headaches and the sexual potency of a three-legged giraffe. “Not exactly,” Slade said. “One day I was searching the web for something interesting, found a badly-concealed government site claiming to be an out-of-business hair salon, hacked a joke of a security system, found a neat experiment in there about long life and increased intelligence and figured I was already the smartest guy on the planet—hell, maybe the whole Outer Line—bored out of my mind, and richer than most Regency Representatives, and very recently laid, so I didn’t have much to lose.”

  “You experimented on you.” Tyson didn’t sound surprised about that, either.

  “Yeah, and just look at the good it did me,” Slade said, gesturing disgustedly at his crotch. “Thirty-two years without so much as a boner, then she wakes everything up and decides to use me as target practice. I might as well be dying a virgin, man. That’s like living to sixteen without getting laid…twice. Damn it!”

  “You could run,” Tyson suggested.

  Slade raised a brow at his friend. “You do realize that she is a top-tier assassin that has been working for the known universe’s second most powerful politician killing the Regency’s most dangerous and high-profile targets for the last twenty turns, including Dhasha princes and Va’gan Huouyt, which has earned her a kill-on-sight order from the Triad on Va’ga, and she is still alive to talk about it?”

  Tyson bit off a chunk of apple. Around the pulp, he said, “Figured it was something like that.” He seemed to consider. “She that ‘Rat’ hero from Neskfaat who supposedly died?”

  “The very same.” Slade sighed, deeply. “She’s so super-secret they faked her death, and I’ll bet you anything that Rodemax that disappeared was hers.”

  Tyson’s brow went up and he turned to look at the darkness where Slade had gestured. “She’s got a Rodemax?” His excitement made the enormous blond look like a kid who’d just been told he was getting a Zero action figure for Christmas, complete with deceased Dhasha and a shoulder-Baga.

  “Please try not to alert the assassin with the gun trained on my forehead that I know exactly where she is,” Slade said.

  Tyson quite believably modified his look into a stretch and a yawn, then, after a languid moment, leaned forward and said, “She’s got a Rodemax?” Again, like a kid in a candy store.

  “Probably not anymore,” Slade said. “Seeing how twitchy she is, I’d say the thing probably went rogue. They do that, especially to non-Huouyt owners who piss them off. They like to get their kicks that way. Hunt the hunters, you know?”

  Tyson’s blond brow furrowed. “She’s got a Rodemax after her? Her Rodemax?”

  “Fits the evidence,” Slade said. He shrugged.

  The big Viking blinked. “And why is she not dead?”

  “Two reasons,” Slade said. He held up a finger. “First off, no operator that her Max is gonna find on this backwards shithole would equal her in skill. Just isn’t gonna happen. Two,” he held up another finger, “I’ve been keeping an eye out.”

  Tyson raised an eyebrow brow. “You.” The way he said it, Slade might as well have just told him he liked the feeling of pregnancy.

  “Yes, me,” Slade cried, deeply insulted. “What do you think I was doing when I had everyone distracted with the thong-a-thon?”

  “Sleeping?” Tyson said.

  “No,” Slade replied. “I was scouting the perimeter for weaknesses.”

  “You were sleeping,” Tyson replied. “I checked.”

  “In my head,” Slade cried. “I was scouting the perimeter for weaknesses in my head.”

  Tyson grabbed another apple. Like any self-respecting three-hundred-pound gay gorilla, Tyson ate a lot. He bit into it thoughtfully, watching Slade. Then, “Well, looks like she’s having second thoughts.”

  “I know,” Slade said, his back still pricking. “I wish she’d just hurry up and choose. I need to take a dump.” The very last thing he was going to do was die with a half-baked turd sticking out his butt, an industrial-strength pink ‘thong’ around his ankles.

  #

  Rat hated this. She hated it. It was simple. Just pull the trigger. Just pull. The. Burning. Trigger.

  But as the night wore on, her inner turmoil grew, and the minutes to Tuesday dwindled in her mental clock. What if it was Tuesday? If she killed Slade on Tuesday, would she be violating the terms of ka-par? Technically, he hadn’t told her not to kill him…

  Rat watched Slade get up and walk over to the edge of the firelight, and her finger started to depress in a moment of panic, thinking he was trying to escape or come looking for her. Then Slade yanked the bungie cords off his waist and squatted and she quickly gave him a moment of privacy.

  Sure enough, a few minutes later, he walked back to the fire and returned to an animated conversation with his friend.

  Pull the trigger, Rat screamed at herself. Pull it. You owe it to Mekkval to pull it.

  But she liked Slade. Really liked him. She got…along…with him. Better than any man she’d ever met. And she was never getting off this damned planet. Ever…

  #

  Tyson peered at him. “You had sex at fourteen?”

  Slade raised an eyebrow. “You mean you didn’t?”

  The big man reddened and grunted, obviously ruffled.

  Slade waved a dismissive hand. “It’s all right. I was the Wunderkind of the Congressional Era. Everyone from scientists to government goons to librarians wanted a piece of me. I was cracking Huouyt code in my basement—stuff that supposedly couldn’t be done except by a Bajna or a Geuji—in between cheeseburgers and shooting shit up in Ueshi HAIS games. Even before I was rich, every four-eyed egghead that survived the Draft would’ve loved to get me in her pants, and most tried. After I was rich, well, let’s just say I had that shit on tap.” He waved another disgusted hand at his crotch. “‘Had’ being the key word. Now I can’t get it up for anything but yon fair lady.”

  “I pinned your picture up on my wall once,” Tyson said.

  “I mean, sure,” Slade went on, “maybe it made it a little easier to do nannite computational theory in my head, but at the cost of sex? Life is so unfair.” Slade sighed, thinking of the three decades he had gone without being able to even get a hardon after downing his glowing purple Elixir of Headaches, Blindness, and Impotence. Like a cursed object in a damned D&D game.

  “Right next to Lee Doriath and Ottle Ooreikund. Not much of a Zero fan, myself.”

  What a waste. The only benefit was that it had made him smarter, and able to instantly and totally concentrate on whatever task was at hand at the time. That had actually been a plus, though he only gave himself a fifty percent chance of doing it again, should he be magically transported back to his less cautious Pre-Impotency days. Still, stuff that had taken his full attention back then, could now be compartmentalized and worked on with several projects of the same magnitude at once, sometimes up to six or seven. In the end, though, it had just made him even more bored because everything interesting he had to work on or contemplate was solved in a fraction of the time. It made it even more exciting to take risks—like ka-paring a Congie—and Slade, feeling that telescopic lens boring into his forehead, could recognize that much more thrill-seeking of that magnitude wasn’t going to serve him well in the future.

  “I gotta tell you, you got exceptional volume. Always had a thing for smart studs.”

  If he had a future. Granted, the patch-wearing, fate-predicting vagrant had delivered unto him a soul-mate—who was currently peering at him through a self-stabilizing, thermal capable, auto-correcting, one-thousand-power sniper scop
e—but she hadn’t said how long he would have a soul-mate, a fact that Slade had unfortunately overlooked for the last ninety years. He’d been naively looking forward to this moment since the instant he’d realized that becoming a crime kingpin was more profitable than going to work for some soulless corporation wanting him to do something inane like produce wonder-drugs, improve Huouyt AI programming, manufacture a better nannite, or even predict the stock market, but now he was beginning to question the merit of his ‘plan.’

  “Took it down when West Tassel hit the scene, though. Jesus that guy was hot.”

  Fact: Patch had told him he’d become a thief and a gang leader.

  Fact: A good portion of his billions pre-Judgement had come from high-tech thievery, and his current flock could quite conceivably be considered a gang.

  Fact: The vagrant had predicted he would snare his soul-mate with a pack of gum.

  Fact: Slade had snared a Congie woman who could obliterate him…with a pack of gum.

  Assumed Fact: Soul-mates didn’t kill each other two weeks after first contact.

  “And, well, you were supposedly dead, and who wants to ogle a dead guy when they get off?”

  Here’s where he tested his theory. Was he simply taking a line of bullshit from some jabbering idiot over ninety years ago and forging his own future around it? Or was there something to this whole soulmate thing? His inner scientist had to know the answer, and this was the perfect test:

  Hardened warrior, personally recruited for a professional hit squad twenty turns ago, sworn by sacred oath to kill the enemies of her lord and his people, having no reason whatsoever to leave Slade alive since he had made a point to give her every ounce of information he knew or could deduce about the experiments to further his goals of proving his hypothesis. Logically, she would have every reason in the world to shoot him and get on with her mission. All that was standing between Slade and an oozing plasma wound through his cranium was her hard Congie heart.

  Thus, Slade continued to sit there, head bared, waiting for her to take her shot.

  “So you’re just gonna sit there?” Tyson finally asked. Not like he was urging Slade to take cover, just like he was mildly curious what it would look like when Slade’s head exploded. “That’s it?”

  “Yep,” Slade said. No need to panic the Congie into pulling the trigger with sudden movements.

  Tyson pulled out a piece of unidentified jerky and began gnawing on it, watching Slade thoughtfully. “You didn’t hear a word I said, did you?”

  “Of course I did,” Slade said, sighing for the pleb. “You were telling me about your fumbling teenage years and typically tragic ‘coming out’ story in an attempt to explain away your pathetic sex stats, trying to wow me with a glorious first encounter with a hot man’s man who you secretly fell for because he looked a lot like Zero, but probably conned old women and sold used skimmers, instead.” He rolled his eyes in boredom. “Let me tell you right now, my brother is not the sharpest tool in the shed. I don’t see what the big deal is, to be honest. Sure, he’s a beefcake, but really? He’s got a seventh-grade education and shoots things for a living. The muscles are a hormonal alteration brought about by his food supply, and he’s got fancy suits to throw people around and shoot lightning like that. It’s not natural, baby. Not like this.” He tapped his skull. “Now a brain… That’s something I can respect. If I were gay—which I’m not—I’d go for someone like me or maybe Ottle Oreikund. Hell, that new singer Tassel was pretty hot. In a totally heterosexual, academic sort of way.”

  Tyson chewed the jerky, watching him. “You disable her gun or something?” he finally asked.

  Slade could have, but that would have corrupted the outcome of his experiment. And, considering the long (or woefully short)-term ramifications, he really wanted to be right about this whole soul-mate thing. Sighing again, really hating the itch he was feeling where he was about ninety-eight percent sure that Rat was watching a point upon his forehead with a very nasty plasma rifle, Slade reached down, found his bag of Surviving The End Of The World books, and dug around until he found one about hydroponics: Tomatoes the Wet and Easy Way.

  Seeing the cover, Slade shuddered. He had expected his soul-mate to be brilliant like him and to let him cover the mechanics and physics while she took up the botanical and biological end of things—aspects of science he found personally distasteful and especially boring—but with a Congie as a soul-mate, he was going to have to bend over and take one for the team and study the concepts himself. He certainly couldn’t ask Rat to study ideal pH levels and algae infestations. That would simply be cruel and unusual for everyone involved, not to mention probably result in massive starvation…

  #

  Hydroponics.

  Ever since he’d pulled out the book, Rat had been peering at it through the scope, trying to figure out why in the Jreet hells a criminal mastermind could be studying hydroponics. The first idea that presented itself almost got him shot.

  Karwiq bulbs and other herbaceous drugs could be grown with hydroponics.

  But as she watched, Sam leaned forward to one of his highly-guarded ‘treasure-chests’ ringing the leader’s campfire and yanked out a handful of colorful envelopes that Rat recognized as vegetable seed packets.

  Right along with the marijuana he said was necessary for his budding ‘economy’, Sam had made a point to get his ‘minions’ to collect food seeds—Earth plants that Rat had absolutely no familiarity with, but which bore colorful and apparently edible fruit. And, when she had started pawing through them one afternoon while he was distracted shaving and had accidentally tipped one package upside down and spilled its contents onto the ground, Sam had dropped his razor and spent a full thirty tics on his hands and knees, still covered in shaving cream, plucking every single seed from the dirt and returning it to the packet.

  It was these packets that he was reading now, comparing the information on their backs to the pages of the book.

  As Rat watched this, guilt began to well in her gut. He’s studying how to feed the Guild, once they get to where they’re going, she thought.

  And, with that thought, she once again realized that Sam could probably rebuild society all on his own. So much of what they had lost in the first few hours of Judgement could be recreated with just a handful of his synapses.

  And she knew, without a doubt, that Samuel Dobbs could save the world.

  Or she could shoot him, and continue Mekkval’s mission to preserve Humanity’s genome.

  Wasn’t that the whole point of Judgement, though? To force Humanity to start over? Wouldn’t she be defeating the entire purpose of a Sacred Turn of penance if she allowed a walking encyclopedia to simply recreate everything that was lost?

  Sitting there, Rat was acutely aware that it was quite possible that the fate of the Human race—what was left of it—hung in the balance of whether or not she pulled the trigger.

  Yet she had sworn to pull the trigger. It was her oath. Her word.

  Then again, Mekkval had told her that the ‘Huouyt hybrid’ was not a priority—the telepath was. Maybe she could let it slide a bit longer, if she could get him to help her track down the bigger targets. She still wasn’t sure the necklace that Mekkval had given her to thwart the telepath’s mind-control would actually work, and Sam might be able to come up with something better.

  Besides. If she left Sam alive a little longer, she might be able to trace back Forgotten’s connection to all this. After jumping through all his hoops on Neskfaat, Rat knew better than anyone how to smell the Geuji’s involvement, and this whole thing stank of it.

  The very fact that Forgotten had put together an unstoppable ground team—one starring none other than Zero himself—to specifically spring Samuel Dobbs from his Peacemaker penitentiary meant that Forgotten specifically wanted Sam to live.

  Which meant that Sam should die.

  …Didn’t it? She hated the Geuji for what he had put her through on Neskfaat, but if she had to look at it
honestly, on the whole, Forgotten’s antics had bettered Congressional society, exposing corruption and deposing tyrants. Despite the millions of PlanOps deaths, Forgotten had saved lives.

  But he’d also destroyed an entire clan of Jreet. Annihilated a planet. While Forgotten didn’t strike her as entirely evil, he wasn’t exactly good, either.

  Rat groaned and winced, hating the convolutions. This wasn’t her forte. She was an assassin. She followed orders. She was used to simple black and white scenarios, with questions that only had one answer. She hated uncertainty. She hated not knowing what to do.

  As her Bagan scout, Klick, had pointed out, Forgotten certainly hadn’t hurt anyone’s feelings by ridding the world of Aez and its blood-thirsty, backwards, war-hungry zealots. Even the Tribunal itself had welcomed the sudden lack of conflict, torture, and heinous war-crimes in the Old Territory, though they would never condone the deaths of an entire fundamentalist Jreet clan publicly. And most of the Dhasha that Forgotten had lured to Neskfaat to die had been on Mekkval’s kill-list anyway, for illegal slaving, mass murder, and other atrocities. Further, Daviin made a much more mature Representative than Prazeil—if any Jreet could really be called ‘mature.’ And, miracle of miracles, the Huouyt had been banned from the Tribunal. Permanently. That alone made up for a single war that had been self-contained on a single planet. Didn’t it?

  But had those all been ploys to disguise Forgotten’s true motives? Some subtle plot buried within a question, shadowed by an enigma? He had brought the plight of his people to the attention of the masses. Was that the first step in a much more ominous goal? One that needed Sam, alive, as a figurehead?

  The very thought seemed ridiculous. What were Humans on the grand scale of the Congressional power struggle? With three thousand, two hundred and forty-four species all vying for power, most with dozens of planets terraformed and fully inhabited, Humanity wasn’t even a blip on the Regency’s radar.