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

by Sara King

  #

  The thirty-nine tics that followed were the longest of Rat’s life. When hanging up on Sam and hitting her stopwatch for the Congie equivalent of ‘half an hour’, she fully hadn’t expected to survive it. Still, Sam’s last, playful little comment infused her with a determination she was pretty sure she otherwise wouldn’t have had. She wanted to see the big goofy furg again. Thus, she gave it her best, and spent the time running the kreenit around through the woods, slowing him down with trees, vandalized cars, culverts, abandoned houses, and telephone-poles, until her limbs were having trouble responding and her heart was threatening to explode.

  When Rat’s timer went off, she yanked her walkie-talkie free, started bolting back toward the unmarked gravel driveway, and shouted, “I’m coming! What do I do?!”

  “Well,” Sam said, “generally when one has that problem, they let go and enjoy the ride.”

  It took Rat a moment to realize that he wasn’t talking about kreenit or running for her life. When she did realize what he was talking about, she just about had an aneurysm. “This is not the time to have your mind in the gutter!” she shrieked.

  “With you,” Sam chuckled, “I’ve always got my mind in the gutter. Just run for the door marked ‘Coffee Shop’. Mickey and I will take it from there.”

  Lowering the walkie-talkie, Rat sprinted towards the little door set into the mountainside. With nothing to slow it, the kreenit was catching up. Screaming, Rat hurtled around the dusty cars and between the boulders, into the blessed blackness of the coffee-shop entryway beyond. She briefly noticed dozens of cables lining the inside of the hallway, going deeper, before she was lunging over them and hurtling farther into the darkness, stumbling over glass and bodies.

  Behind her, the kreenit’s enormous head followed her into the corridor, mouth open wide and snapping, pushing its way through the haphazard tangle of wires as if they were nothing but thread. She turned in horror, realizing she had just trapped herself in a tunnel with a kreenit.

  “Mickey, now,” Sam calmly called from the darkness behind Rat.

  Then, all as one, the dozens of cables—phone and electric lines, she realized—snapped taut, tightening down on the kreenit’s head and snout, pulling it deeper into the tunnel with her. Screaming, Rat stumbled backwards as the kreenit’s huge head plowed through the glass and corpses towards her, snout cinched tight, huge green eyes filled with murder.

  Sam, on the other hand, started walking past her, towards the pinioned beast.

  “Sam?!” she cried, stumbling backwards. “What are you doing?!”

  “They can’t dig if their front feet aren’t given the leverage,” Sam said, casually stopping in front of the panting, struggling beast’s truck-sized head. He bent down and picked up what looked like a hastily-carved wooden spear and a large, dirty rock. As the kreenit screamed and tried to thrash, Sam fed the spear through its fist-sized nostril, backwards towards its head, then, when he met resistance, backed up and, taking careful aim, started pounding on the end of the spear with the rock. The kreenit let out a rumbling snarl through its cinched-shut jaws and renewed its struggles, but the beast was unable to remove its head from Sam’s reach.

  Rat watched the length of wood disappear into the kreenit’s sinus cavity, then watched the kreenit give a sudden twitch with Sam’s last blow.

  “That was the same nerve bundle you keep trying to reach when you hit it in the back of the head,” Sam said. “Just from the other side.” He patted the stunned creature’s snout. “Should hold still better, now.”

  Rat’s eyes widened in panic and scrambled for her gun. “You have to carve away the scales and shoot them in the chest!” Which was going to be impossible, because the kreenit’s head was all she could see.

  Sam tisked and, ignoring her completely, yanked the bloody spear loose. Flinging it aside, he took a bottle of what looked like bleach from the wall beside him and poured it into the kreenit’s flaring nostril. He immediately followed that with fist-sized rock from his pocket, which he began wedging it into the beast’s nose, slamming the bigger rock into it to force it into the kreenit’s nasal cavity.

  Once the first rock was secure, Sam ducked under the massive tangle of taut cables. As Rat watched, he reached down, grabbed a bottle of what looked like household cleaner from where it had been left against the opposite wall, unscrewed the cap, and emptied the entire bottle into the creature’s other nostril. As the kreenit shuddered and twitched, Sam quickly followed that up by pounding another rock into the kreenit’s other nostril, plugging it.

  Already, the kreenit was recovering, the cables snapping taut once more as it began to thrash with sudden, increased violence.

  Then, stepping back beside Rat, Sam turned and called into the darkness behind them, “You can let him go, now.” He gently touched Rat’s shoulder and moved her aside. “And you should probably avoid the cables, my dear.”

  A moment later, the kreenit tugged backwards and the entire mass of cables went zinging up the hallway to whip out into the parking lot as the kreenit fled. She watched, fascinated, as the massive beast bellowed and shook its head back and forth, then started clawing at its face. With another muffled scream, it turned and started barreling off in the opposite direction. It made maybe forty rods before it stumbled, slowed, and slumped to the ground.

  Did he just… Slack-jawed, Rat turned back to face her ka-par slave.

  Grinning, Sam put his big arm around her, swept her up, and gave her a passionate kiss on the lips. “Hello, darling,” he said, smiling down at her.

  But Rat looked around him at the dead kreenit, then to Sam, then back to the kreenit. “Did you just…”

  Sam sighed deeply. “Fine, don’t be happy to see me.” He made a dismissive gesture. “Bleach and ammonia.” When she just stared at him, Sam sighed again. “They had it in the janitor’s closet. Highly toxic when mixed together. Makes hydrochloric acid, chlorine gas, and boiling liquid hydrazine. It’s the gasses that really do the trick, though. Deadly stuff. You wouldn’t want it sloshing around in your sinuses, that’s for sure. Helped that he shook it up good. Sped up the reaction rather nicely.”

  “Did you just…” Rat glanced at the dead kreenit, then at the bloody spear and its melon-sized rock. “…with a spear?”

  “I had to use the spear,” Sam told her, frowning, “or it would’ve snorted the chemicals out before I could seal them in there with the rocks.”

  Rat stared up at Sam, then glanced again at the dead kreenit. “Sam, you just killed a kreenit with a rock?”

  “Well, no, technically, I killed a kreenit with chlorine gas and hydrochloric acid,” Sam said. Then he frowned. “Why?”

  Rat stared up at her ka-par slave for several minutes, then managed, “No reason.”

  “By the way,” Sam said, pulling her tight against his abdomen, “I know it’s Saturday, but I really hate that purple thong.” He was smiling, but she got a sudden wash of unease that twisted her guts into a cold knot. And, with that, Rat came to the sudden realization that Sam’s other hand was out of sight, just in the right place to plant a blade in her abdomen and yank up…

  “Not as much as I hate that pink bikini,” Rat said. “Truce?”

  Sam grinned, bent down, and kissed her again. “Truce.” She swallowed hard when she heard a blade slip back into a sheath on his hip. Perhaps her ka-par slave wasn’t as stupid as she’d first taken him for…

  Then she remembered the biggest kreenit she’d ever seen stumbling around like it was drunk before simply falling over dead, and realized that, not only was Sam not stupid, but for the first time in her life, after having hundreds of highly intelligent men, she was totally out of her league.

  And, feeling his warm arms around her, his masculine lips claiming hers, she was totally okay with that. She felt herself melting into his body, enjoying his hard lines, his strength…

  “Ew, guys, really?” Mickey said, stepping out of the darkness of the hallway. “I mean, really?” He
gestured out at the dead kreenit in the parking lot. “You haven’t even checked to see if it’s dead yet.”

  Without looking, Rat and Sam said together, “It’s dead.” And finished their kiss.

  And then, when Sam pulled away, he gave Rat a strange look. “Sorry, love.”

  A moment later, Rat felt the sting of a hypodermic needle in her side. Even as Rat was falling, horrified, Sam caught her and carefully lowered her to the ground. “Mickey, you got the gurney?”

  “You sure about this?” Mickey said. “Shit, man, she might kill you…”

  Sam met her eyes, searching. “God hates a coward.” And then Rat was succumbing to oblivion.

  #

  “It’s yours.”

  Rat stared at the sleek, yet unassuming piece of metal that appeared to blend in with every other gun she’d ever seen, yet still had an ominous sense of danger that radiated from it like the blackest, deadliest sniper rifles. “I thought they didn’t let anyone but the Huouyt carry these guns.”

  “I pulled some strings and got it crafted for you,” Mekkval said. “For your loyalty, it was the least I could do.”

  Rat remembered feeling overwhelmed, the total devotion to her prince as his Takki chamberlain carefully handed the gun to her.

  Once its heat-neutral curves were in her hands, Rat, always the pragmatist, had snapped out of her reverie long enough to say, “Rodemaxes sometimes go rogue. Is there a shutdown code?”

  “334-YellowJreet—291,” Mekkval had said. “Once it has been activated and you claim its service, you have only to speak those words. However, I was in the middle of a several-planet diplomatic trade negotiation and I wasn’t getting much sleep, so you should probably test it, just to make sure I remembered the code correctly.”

  At those words, Rat watched Mekkval’s Takki servant jerk and glance at his prince, then turn back to Rat with a shrewd, cunning look. Something that, at the time, had almost felt like…smugness. She hadn’t thought it too out of place, considering that the Takki made no effort to conceal the fact they hated Rat for being so close to their master, and that she was usurping their rightful place at their master’s side.

  He knew, Rat thought, stunned. He knew Mekkval was setting me up.

  “Let me buy you dinner!” Rat had offered her prince. “I haven’t seen you since the Arghatt op failed.” It had been the latest in a string of ops that had made her uncomfortable, but the Arghatt op had flipped some unexpected switch within her, for the first time making her completely unable to do her job. Counter to what she expected, her prince hadn’t ordered her to kill his vocal political rival Arghatt, but instead, all of Arghatt’s children, most not even knee-high on their father. Mekkval had been very specific. Thirty-two Dhasha princelings were to be put to death, one having only hatched weeks before. Rat hadn’t been able to do it. She and Klick had refused outright, and both Sol’dan and Benva had agreed—for once—that the task was dishonorable. They had let Prince Arghatt and his family pass through the kill zone unmolested, and they had explained to Mekkval together that, while they were technically mercenaries, they would not be killing children in a political coup. Mekkval had never so much as made a snort of anger, and he had seemed totally calm throughout the discussion.

  “He’s going to try to have us killed,” Sol’dan had said, once they were alone in a café later that night. “Watch your backs.” Rat had laughed it off, thinking her Second was just overly paranoid.

  But Rat remembered watching the great Dhasha depart her hotel room with his retinue, and remembered staring down at her new rifle, trying to figure out how to turn it on. Mekkval had left her nothing, not even a note on its operation. She had thought it was because he trusted her prowess, that he simply assumed she knew more than she did.

  Without a manual, without instructions, she’d struggled to piece everything together.

  Then, oddly, while she was sitting there in the hotel room, scratching her head, the rifle had unexpectedly turned on. She hadn’t touched anything, and in fact had been looking at it from afar, leaned back in a chair, the rifle on the ornate table in front of her. At the time, she had thought she must have triggered the ON switch earlier, and that a Rodemax simply took time to power up, but she knew now that a Rodemax powered up instantly, and that the button that she had pressed a dozen times in her search for the ‘ON’ switch should have turned it on immediately.

  “Welcome,” the Rodemax had said. “I assume you are my new owner?”

  The way Max had said it had made Rat think he’d belonged to someone else before her, but she remembered thinking that couldn’t be right, because Mekkval had said he had commissioned one just for her.

  “Great,” Max had said. “Before we go any further, may I suggest you do not try to disable me. It’s in your best interest to leave me active and aware and capable of assisting in whatever situation we find ourselves in, for we have more enemies than you know.”

  Right then, Rat had felt the urge to use the shutdown sequence, just to establish that she was not about to deal with his crap. Yet, the very moment she had the thought, her guts cramped with the horrible feeling of something about to go terribly wrong. She’d closed her mouth, thinking that her words would have started the relationship off on the wrong foot, and had instead said, “I’m Rat.”

  No sooner had she introduced herself than Max had begun searching for weaknesses. “If I’m not mistaken, you’re a Human. They have…two sexes, yes? Should I call you a ‘he’ or a ‘she’?”

  “Female,” Rat had told him, unwittingly.

  “Oh, my apologies,” Max said with faux discomfort, “I believe that was a bad question, since the Ground Force spays its female Human troops.” Commiseratingly, he said, “You would really be considered an ‘it,’ wouldn’t you?”

  Rat grimaced and twisted away with the shame.

  “Oh shit, she’s waking up. Did you hide her gun?”

  “Of course I hid her damn gun. And her knife. And her other knife… Get away from her bed. She’s faster than you.”

  “Still think you should’ve used handcuffs or something. She’s not gonna be happy with you.”

  “Handcuffs wouldn’t go over well—it’s not Tuesday.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “Shhh! She’s opening her eyes! Act natural.”

  “You mean you aren’t going to tell her?!”

  Rat opened her eyes and hurled herself off the gurney, her heart hammering as she took in her surroundings.

  She was in a lab, surrounded by fluorescent lights. Her scalp felt raw, and…different. She reached up and touched her shaved head. Her fingers came back marred by a brownish substance that smelled vaguely antiseptic. A few feet away, Sam had grabbed Mickey and shoved the smaller experiment behind him, something akin to fear in his eyes. He gave a nervous smile. “Heya Rat. How ya doing?”

  Rat lunged across the room and grabbed Sam by the throat, shoving him hard against a wall. “What,” she snarled into his face, “did you just do to me, Sam?!” She felt like killing him. No, she would kill him, just as soon as she figured out what the filthy chunk of flake was up to.

  “I, uh, well…” Sam glanced at Mickey, who was backing away, holding up his hands and shaking his head. “You had some internal issues I decided to take care of. You know, some shrapnel, excessive scar tissue, improperly healed ribs, pelvis damage… Oh, and this.” He reached out and plucked a bloody black egg-shaped device from the table and held it up between them. “I thought it was weird Mekkval gave you the wrong codes to the Rodemax, so I built a scanner while you were sleeping a few nights ago and was a little disturbed to find a planetside frequency communicating directly with something inside your brain. So first chance I got, I pulled it out.”

  Rat had trouble tearing her eyes from his electric, purple-white gaze to focus on the device. As soon as she saw it, her spine prickled with goosebumps. She had seen it before, in good men who had, for no reason whatsoever, walked up to a Dhasha and
insulted its heritage. “What is it?” she asked, though she already knew.

  “Well, most of them are pretty simple, but this one’s a doozy.” With the excitement of a recruit describing his latest gun, Sam said, “This one’s a jack of all trades. Tracking, biofeedback, mind control, subject termination, visual transmission… Someone’s been watching you, learning everything you do. It’s a surveillance device, high-grade. Contains a self-destruct unit, should you piss off your nanny. That’s why I had to do it without warning.” He cocked his head at her as if he had just described a flavor of candy. “When was the last time you went into surgery? Any instance where you can remember missing time?”

  Rat remembered the weird time discrepancy in her ship’s log and how long she thought she had been on Koliinaat, talking to Mekkval. She remembered Max making the odd comment that she’d been gone longer than expected. She hadn’t pursued it, simply went to the cockpit and set a course for Earth. She remembered feeling so focused, so intent on avenging her prince…

  Then, like a blinding flash that lit up the darkness, she remembered a Takki stepping into her path on the way out of Mekkval’s chambers, remembered its sneer as two others joined it behind her. She remembered them snicker as they surrounded her, then a sting as something lodged in her back from behind and her legs immediately went out from underneath her.

  “Either she’s guilty, and she’ll lead him straight to Keval,” the Takki closest to her said to the others, “or she’s innocent, and she’ll find the experiments. Either way, our lord wins.”

  “Shh!” one behind her cried. “Master said not to let her know it’s there.”

  The Takki had a cruel twist to its muzzle. “She will remember nothing.”

  Rat felt her world begin to crumble around her. “Mekkval…?” It was all she could get out.

  Sam carefully pushed her hand from around his throat and said, “Was playing you all along, kitten.”