Forging Zero Read online

  The Legend of

  ZERO:

  Forging Zero

  by

  Sara King

  Copyright © 2013 Sara King

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this work may be photocopied, scanned, or otherwise reproduced without express written consent (begging) of the author. For permissions and other requests, email Sara King at [email protected].

  (Don’t worry, she’s really cool.)

  Published by

  Parasite Publications

  Cover Photography by

  NASA and STSci

  and the

  Hubble Telescope

  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 a kid getting abducted by aliens and life on other planets. 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.

  Books in The Legend of ZERO Series:

  Listed in Chronological Order

  (because nothing else really makes sense):

  Forging Zero

  Zero Recall

  Zero’s Return

  Zero’s Legacy

  Forgotten

  Dedication

  These are the people most responsible for The Legend of ZERO:

  Tom Brion.

  My first exposure to storytelling.

  Fortunately for me, I learned from the very best.

  Chancey King.

  His gift for brainstorming was instrumental in creating so many aspects of this world, and his genius is surpassed only by his humility. Thanks, bro.

  David Mackey.

  Awesome covers, man.

  Logan Brutsche.

  The devious mastermind behind Forgotten.

  Kyle Brutsche.

  It all started with his homework assignment.

  Stephen Buchanan.

  If ‘moral support’ were a job description, he’d have the Ph.D.

  Sarah Liu.

  My supremely talented editor on these books.

  She has the eyes of an Ueshi and the brain of a Geuji. (Well. At least a small Geuji.)

  Patricia Brion.

  She taught me to read. That kinda trumps it all.

  Author’s Note

  Forging Zero is the darkest book I’ve ever written. Not by desire, but by necessity. Because, at the heart of every great epic, there is something awful happening, something that demands change.

  Forging Zero tells that story.

  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.

  Furg – Anyone who believes the best fiction makes your eyes glaze over. (Unless, of course, the glazing happens because you stayed up all night reading it and you can't keep your eyes open the next day. Then you’re a parasite, not a furg.) ;)

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 – An Alien Mistake

  Chapter 2 – Little Harry Simpson

  Chapter 3 – The Origin of Zero

  Chapter 4 – Joe’s Groundteam

  Chapter 5 – Early Balding

  Chapter 6 – Bullies

  Chapter 7 – An Unexpected Gift

  Chapter 8 – Kihgl’s Prophecy

  Chapter 9 – Kophat

  Chapter 10 – Kihgl’s Choice

  Chapter 11 – The Tribunal’s Visit

  Chapter 12 – Representative Na’leen

  Chapter 13 – Trained to Kill

  Chapter 14 – Gracious Lord Knaaren

  Chapter 15 – Called Out

  Chapter 16 – Storytime

  Chapter 17 – Kihgl’s Fall

  Chapter 18 – Christmas Songs

  Chapter 19 – A Battlemaster’s Folly

  Chapter 20 – Yuil

  Chapter 21 – Sleeves

  Chapter 22 – Capture the Flag

  Chapter 23 – Second Battalion

  Chapter 24 – Contraband

  Chapter 25 – Getting Ready for War

  Chapter 26 – The Punishment for Failure

  Chapter 27 – The Trouble With Takki

  Chapter 28 – Finding the Flag

  Chapter 29 – Night Terrors

  Chapter 30 – Elf’s Release

  Chapter 31 – Mourning the Dead

  Chapter 32 – Ka-par

  Chapter 33 – New Rules

  Chapter 34 – Visions of Trith

  Chapter 35 – It’s in the Blood

  Chapter 36 – War with the Huouyt

  Chapter 37 – Into The Lion’s Den

  Chapter 38 – Loyal to the End

  Chapter 39 – The Tug of Fate

  Chapter 40 – Loyalties

  Chapter 41 – The Congie

  About the Author

  Afterword

  Meet Stuey

  Sara Recommends

  Other Parasite Novels

  Glossary

  Glossary – Dhasha Terms

  Glossary – Huouyt Terms

  Glossary – Ooreiki Terms

  Glossary – Universal Terms

  Glossary – Species

  Glossary – Measurements

  Glossary – Ranks

  Zero Recall

  CHAPTER 1 : An Alien Mistake

  Joe Dobbs was fourteen when Congress discovered Earth.

  The day they set their ships down in Washington, Joe found it hard to move from the TV. His whole family, from his little brother Sam to his great-aunt Lucy…even his dad’s old Marine buddies who came over for beer on Fridays…all of them huddled together in his parents’ living room, attention locked on the broadcasts from all over the world. Outside Joe’s house, there was relative silence. Nobody was driving. Nobody was playing football or going to the zoo or having picnics in the San Diego sun. Everybody was inside their homes, watching the invasion. Joe’s dad had gotten a huge TV for Christmas, so his house had twelve bodies packed in the room like sardines, filling all the empty space, breathing and re-breathing the same stuffy air, leaning forward in their chairs and sofas in silence, watching the live feeds from the frantic mass of reporters surrounding the capital with the total, rapt attention of the condemned.

  Pundits took over the news channels, talking nonstop, twenty-four hours a day, debating the endless pictures of aliens, alien ships, and alien weaponry. They said that their squat, tentacled forms were semi-aquatic, and the flipping gills that fluttered in the sides of their head were an evolutionary throwback, like an appendix in humans. Sudah, they were called. Humanity knew that because a reporter’s autistic kid was killed for touching them during a press conference, and the live alien tirade that followed included the word ‘sudah’ about three hundred times as the alien screamed at the bleeding, dismantled corpse of the kid, his parent, and two otherwise innocent bystanders.
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  Sam, however, disagreed. As usual.

  “That’s stupid,” Sam snorted loudly, once when it was just him and Joe in the room and they were listening to yet another lecture about the cultural importance of ‘sudah.’ “It’s not an evolutionary throwback. It’s obvious they’re using them to breathe. That means they came from a planet with something in the air. They’re filters. They keep stuff out. They just don’t like someone touching them there ‘cause it’s like putting your hand over someone’s mouth and nose. Cutting off your air, you know?”

  All the adults had left to discuss whether it was safe enough to attempt driving out to Uncle Davvie’s place for some meats and vegetables—which had quintupled in price since the aliens had landed—leaving just Joe and his ten-year-old brother Sam to watch the aliens in the living room.

  With just Joe in the room, Sam didn’t have to pretend to be ‘kiddy’ for the adults. The skinny turd actually liked showing off to Joe. He got out a pencil and walked up to the screen like an indignant college professor. “See that?” Sam asked, slapping the pencil to the picture of a tentacled creature’s thick, ropy arm. “So what if they’re boneless? That right there is built like a snake. There’s no aquadynamics. It’s meant for swinging through trees. Like an orangutan. They’re land-dwellers.”

  “Just shut up, Sam,” Joe muttered. He tried to peer around his brother.

  Sam, however, had other ideas. He turned to face the TV. “And they’re not a hundred fifty pounds,” he snorted, speaking directly to the bald, sweating Talking Head on the other end of the live news feed who was lecturing them on body size. He crossed his arms over his chest and sneered, as if the very idea was ridiculous. “They’re denser than us, you dipshit. Look at the way it hit that car—” there was a famous video of a kamikaze attack by a drunken motorist on one of the aliens…which had resulted in a crumpled car, a dead motorist, and a very pissed off alien, “—it was obviously at least four or five hundred pounds. Just the impact alone should’ve told you that.”

  “Shut up, Sam,” Joe muttered, irritated. “Get out from in front of the TV. I can’t see through your scrawny ass.”

  Sam rolled his eyes and turned to face him, but remained firmly planted in front of the television. “Not like you’re gonna learn anything new. They’ve been saying the same stuff for the last three days.”

  “Now!” Joe snapped. “Go find a coloring book or something.”

  Sam sighed deeply and went to check on the adults.

  Joe watched him go, scowling. He hated the way his younger brother seemed so cocky about the whole affair; like he had everything completely under control.

  Or, at least, Dad did.

  Must be nice to be a kid, Joe thought, returning his attention to the aliens. Something about them seemed…familiar, and it was giving him a nagging sense of dread that he just couldn’t shake. Almost like he’d had a bad dream like this a very long time ago and it was starting to unfold before his eyes.

  …and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

  More than once during his vigil, Joe found his hands sweaty, his skin broken out in goosebumps. As each new snippet of information came in from the White House, the feeling of dread intensified, congealing in his guts like a cold, hard rot. Unlike Sam, Joe knew what it meant for their family. For Dad. A few hours after the aliens first landed, Joe had heard Dad and Manny discussing the military’s order to stand down. He had heard their furtive whispers about a group of Marines ‘taking things into their own hands.’

  Joe wasn’t an idiot. He knew what that meant. He also knew his dad didn’t stand a chance. Not against that.

  Tens of thousands of massive, skyscraper-sized ships, their sleek black bodies gleaming like obsidian, had landed on whatever building, parking lot, shopping mall, or school that got in their way. The news helicopters that hadn’t been shot down had caught live pictures of the masses of aliens that came marching out of each ship, looking like glossy black ants marching in perfect synchronicity.

  There were too many of them. Some experts said they’d unloaded a tenth of the population of Earth from those ships, and each one a hardened warrior sporting advanced weaponry and glistening black suits that seemed to be utterly impenetrable to anything humans had to throw at them.

  Dad didn’t stand a chance. Nobody did.

  Thus, Joe ignored Sam’s know-it-all bullshit and clung to every scrap of information, listening to the same tiny tidbits replayed over and over until he could repeat them by heart, praying to God that it was a bad dream and his Dad wouldn’t have to go to war.

  God wasn’t listening.

  The invasion wasn’t a game, wasn’t a huge hoax, wasn’t a dream. It was real, and the longer the aliens stayed camped out in the headquarters of every major government on the planet, secretly talking to world leaders behind closed doors, the more agitated the populace got. A thousand different debaters on television had a thousand different opinions. They claimed the aliens were invaders, there to take humans as slaves. Or liberators, there to raise human consciousness, end war, and give humanity great new technology. Or diplomats, there to invite them into a vast alien democracy.

  In the end, they were all right.

  They called themselves Ooreiki. When they weren’t encased in inky black suits and bulbous ebony helmets, they were squat brown creatures with huge, glistening eyes, tentacles protruding from their heads and bodies, and four parallel slits along each side of leathery necks that fluttered like gills, though they breathed air as well as any human. They also lived a really long time. Some said four, even five hundred years.

  The Ooreiki claimed they were not alone. They said they came from an immense alien society, one that spanned the entire universe, swallowing whole galaxies and all the species within. Earth was only one of hundreds of thousands of planets to fall under its dominion, the latest in its ever-expanding search for the ends of space.

  And, in their very first press-release, translated by a terrified-looking woman in a rumpled business suit, they told humanity what would be expected of it, now that it had been tested and accepted as a sentient race and given a seat in Congress. The woman’s mascara-smeared eyes darted continually to something behind the camera as she listed out new law after new code after new regulation. It was the end, however, that made every hair on Joe’s body stand on end.

  These are your rights and responsibilities during your probationary period, as your formal rights have not yet cleared Congressional committees. In summary, you will do as you are told. Do not attack, confront, or in any way impede the movement or actions of Congressional forces. Relinquish all of your projectile weapons to our collection stations, which will be set up in every major city by the end of the day. For a full list of prohibited weapons, see the local collection center. Anyone found with a weapon on this list will be killed as a saboteur. We say again, anyone who stands in our way will be annihilated.

  The matter-of-fact way the aliens spoke of Earth’s submission was accentuated by the way the government did nothing to stop them. There were no brilliant aerial battles, no brave last stands. Jets remained grounded, guns remained quiet, missiles remained siloed. As Joe agonized over every news clip, Earth simply gave up without a fight.

  With no one to challenge them, all that was left was to listen to their demands. Endless demands, ranging from the mundane; a few odd souvenirs for individual aliens to bring home to their families as gifts, to the outrageous; a global meeting to pick a single representative to speak for Earth. And still their demands came. Rules for living, rules for government, rules for population…

  Joe’s mom kept getting distracted watching the news and burned so many nightly meals she ended up screaming, throwing pots of spaghetti and burnt Brussels sprouts across the kitchen. She didn’t cook after that.

  His father’s troubled heart was not as obvious, but Joe could see it. His dad had a lot of the old Celtic blood in him, blood that left him smiling and constantly at play, even when things went w
rong. He wasn’t playing now. The way he held his broad shoulders, the constant tension in his muscular body, the way he looked at Joe and Sam when he thought they were distracted—together, these things were even more disturbing than their mother’s spaghetti-fest.

  For once, Joe was glad he was still a kid. He was glad this was somebody else’s problem.

  And yet, he couldn’t stop watching the newsfeeds, his lungs aching from holding his breath for too long. He knew something bad was happening inside the White House, that the worst of the aliens’ demands was yet to come. Something about the way the aliens stood guard on the lawn, their onyx suits matching their sleek obsidian guns like they were stone statues in a museum of freaks, left Joe sick with apprehension.

  Then they murdered a Secret Service Agent on live TV.

  The young man had been trying to get the President to safety through a secret tunnel out of the White House when the aliens caught him. As Joe watched, they dragged him out onto the lawn and shot him in the face with some flesh-dissolving bluish goo that made his bloody neck look like it was oozing purple snot, then went right back into the White House without saying a word, pushing the president ahead of them like a criminal. The picture of the grinning young man that the news crews flashed all over TV only a few minutes later showed him holding a baby, wearing a Marine uniform in front of an American flag. Seeing it reminded Joe of similar pictures of his dad and he quietly locked himself in the bathroom until his queasiness went away. He knew the worst was still to come.

  When CNN broadcasted the aliens’ final list of demands, it read like something the conquistadors might have dictated to the South Americans. They wanted allegiance. They wanted hostages. They wanted supplies.

  And they wanted children.

  Ninety-eight percent of the healthy ones. Boys and girls. Everyone five to twelve. To start a human section of their vast alien army.

  And, just that suddenly, Sam wasn’t such a smartass anymore. He actually got kind of quiet—a first for Sam—and spent a lot of time in his room. Their mom spent a lot of time with him, crying.