The Lost Boy

The word zero comes through the Arabic literal translation of a Sanskrit word meaning void or empty... Through transliteration this became zephyr or zephyrus in Latin. The word zephyrus already meant "west wind" in Latin; the proper noun Zephyrus was the Roman god of the west wind (after the Greek god Zephyros). With its new use for the concept of zero, zephyr came to mean a light breeze "an almost nothing."... The Italian mathematician Fibonacci … used the term "zephyrum". This became "zefiro" in Italian, which was contracted to "zero" in Venetian, giving the modern English word.

The Evolution of Mathematics, S. Kalyanaraman

1.

The planet was a small, long-abandoned world. One of many in that particular sector of space it wandered around a mediocre main sequence star which had never been given a name beyond its catalogue designation, its highly elliptical orbit giving it extreme seasonal variations, except near the equator, where most of the derelict townships left behind when most of the populace had left aboard leaky transport ships towards the end of the Homecoming fiasco over a century ago were situated. The planet had been marginal for human life at best, never supporting more than a few thousand settlers. Now it was home to the inbred remnants of those settlers who had either refused to leave, or couldn't afford to. These scratched out a living in the old townships where they could, scavenging for recyclable materials which could be traded with the occasional passing salvage ship for food and other goods. A few hardy souls still tried to eke a living out of the poor soil, but there were fewer of those coming into town with their wilting wares every year.

It was this forgotten mediocrity which made the small planet a regular stop for the less desirable elements who made their living out on the fringes of human occupied space. The Machinners avoided it because the picking were thin - it just wasn't worth partly filling one of their massive, two kilometre long transports with the scrawny, half-starved inhabitants. Legitimate trade passed it by because there was no-one who could afford their wares, and the SDF didn't bother patrolling because it was a long way off the established shipping lanes and very few ships ever moved between these lost worlds.

But this isolation made it ideal for pirates, slavers, smugglers, claim-jumpers and the less scrupulous corporations, all of whom preferred to keep most of their business quietly off the radar of the Space Defence Force and their less personable counterparts, the Space Panzer Grenadiers.

They tended to forget that it wasn't just the SDF who had a vested interest in putting a stop to the more unpleasant trades that the unnamed planet hosted…

It had rained in the night, although the only proof of that lay in the fact that instead of choking clouds of dust being kicked up by booted feet, the cracked plascrete underfoot was slick with a thin layer of mud punctuated by puddles already evaporating in the early morning sun. Two men picked their way through the crowded thoroughfare, avoiding the scramble for barely-fresh wares at the stands selling ramen, coffee, and don't-ask-in-a-bun to those who could afford them, whilst the natives scrambled for leftovers in the waste bins. Both were tall - over six foot - dark-haired and slim, wearing scruffy spacer leathers which - had anyone taken a close look - were surprisingly well-repaired under what was actually a cosmetic layer of grime and some strategically applied scratches. Both wore their hair long, almost brushing the bottom of his jacket collar in the case of the lighter haired of the pair, who was also the younger of the two - though by how much, very few people would have guessed correctly. Both wore pistols openly on their hip, in well worn, low-slung holsters. The younger had a short scar crossing the left side of his face from the bridge of his nose to midway along his cheek. Hazel eyes regarded his surroundings with what might have been an air of studied boredom bordering on distaste.

His companion had hair so dark it was almost black, and despite the dim sunlight, wore dark sunglasses. When he occasionally adjusted them to clean off the fine particles that seemed drawn to them, his eyes were a vivid blue. Broader and slightly heavier than his friend, he also had a few streaks of silver in his dark hair. A conservative guess would have pegged him anywhere between thirty-five to forty-five, and his companion in his early twenties. They'd have been almost right about the younger man, who had turned thirty about a week previously, but the older was in fact closer to seventy. And where the younger man had chosen a well-worn jacket to cover his turtleneck sweater and provide some protection against the cold of the thin atmosphere, the elder had gone with a long tan coat, unfastened currently, and he walked along with his hands in his pockets, looking far more relaxed than the younger man.

'Yama - will you at least try to look as though you're not about to blow the head off anyone who so much as looks sideways at you?' The older man thumped his companion lightly on the arm to get his attention. 'We're supposed to be low profile, remember?'

'I don't know how you stand it.' Yama made an attempt to smooth the frown from his face, but a vertical crinkle still stubbornly refused to move from above the bridge of his nose. 'What the hell is so wrong with humanity that we let populations get into this state?'

An expansive gesture with his right arm almost smacked a cycle courier in the face, but since the idiot shouldn't have been coming up on him far too closely from behind on his blind side in the first place, Yama refused to feel guilty when the bicycle swerved and wobbled past him accompanied by a torrent of abuse dopplering into the distance.

'Apathy, corruption and considerable resistance from vested interests,' the older man replied calmly. 'You can't save them all.'

'There are days I feel like I can't save anyone,' Yama muttered. He kicked at a loose stone with the tip of his boot and watched it skitter across the plascrete to land in a nearby puddle of muddy water. 'Coming in all guns blazing would only clear out the current crop of bottom feeders - it wouldn't feed these people, or rebuild the infrastructure. And unless I squat around these planets in orbit, more would just come to take their place.' He sighed. 'Don't you ever wonder why we still care, Rei?'

'Terminal hero complexes, according to Selen,' Rei replied with a faint smile. 'You need to stop looking at the bigger picture sometimes my friend. Take smaller bites out of the problem.'

'Like today?' Yama asked, a sly smile playing around his mouth. Rei smiled back.

'Just so.' He checked the street sign over their heads - faded, bent, graffitied and rusting, the few remaining blinking lights attempted to spell out the name the thoroughfare had been given two or three hundred years ago, and failed miserably. 'Does that look like "Gunther Strasse" to you?'

'It looks like a nasty case of chickenpox, but what do I know?' Yama stared down the four arms of the crossroads. 'There's a large building down that way…' he pointed to the left. 'Could be large enough for the complex we're looking for?' He pulled a face and scuffed at the ground again. 'Is there any reason why we have to do it this way rather than just bring down fifty of our people and clean this cess-pit out?'

Rei pushed his glasses up his nose with the index finger of his right hand. 'Did you sleep through Selen's briefing? Again?'

'You have heard of rhetorical questions?' Yama began to walk in the direction of the crowd, a couple of hundred yards away, threading himself in and out of the milling throng that loitered, slouched, wandered aimlessly and shoved carelessly, letting his elbows and a couldn't-give-a-shit attitude clear his path, Rei trailing in his wake. 'Damn, I wish I'd been able to bring Ali along on this jaunt,' he muttered, as the road narrowed and the crowd thickened. 'He's got a way of clearing people out of his path which has to be seen to be believed… the man's a human bulldozer.'

Rei choked back a laugh. 'Seriously? He's a stubborn, foul-tempered asshole who refuses to give way to anyone and flattens anything that gets in his way…'

Yama flashed him a beatific smile over one shoulder. 'Isn't that what I just said?' They both laughed, drawing the attention of a couple of tired-looking women in an open window nearby. Both sported hair-colours no human had ever been born with, and for the win, the purple-haired woman's long mane clashed with her deep turquoise skin.

'Well aren't you two a sight for sore eyes,' she called out. 'An' ya finish whatever it is ya doin' round here, ya mi' thin' of lookin' fer a good time?'

'Earth n' stars, Alice - I'd do 'em both fer fe-ree, they's so clean an' pretty!' the other one replied with a saucy wink at the men. 'Gwaan… whaddya say? Bit o'father/son action?' She laughed, revealing a couple of broken teeth.

'Son?' Rei sounded affronted.

Yama laughed again. 'You do remember that I'm actually two months younger than your eldest, right?' He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of credits, mostly small denominations. 'We're happily married, ladies - but have a meal on us.' He handed the coins over and smiled at the girls, and they instinctively smiled back, both shedding several years in the process. He realised the blue-skinned girl couldn't have been much older than seventeen or eighteen. The other girl's cropped top was barely pushed away from her chest by her tiny breasts.

'Awww… The nice ones is always gay…' the purple-haired girl pouted at him and smiled shyly. 'You take care of yerselves, lads!' she called out as he drifted back to Rei's side. The pair walked on with the sound of excited chattering trailing into the background noise.

Rei snorted. 'You really need to rethink your small talk. Did they really think you meant…?' He shook his head and raised a hand to forestall the reply. 'No. Never mind. I didn't realise we looked so couple-y…' He risked a quick glance back over his shoulder and the younger girl waved at him, her pink hair falling over her face. 'How do you know they won't just blow that on drugs? Or send someone to roll us? Or have to hand it over to a pimp?'

'Now you sound like Ali… I don't. But you have to have a little faith.' His expression was slightly sombre and Rei waited, knowing his friend would elaborate. 'There was a crib behind them. I saw a tiny foot move.'

Rei sighed. 'I hope you didn't hand over the lot…'

'Are you suggesting I'm a soft touch?' He reached over and flicked a small white cylinder out of his friend's fingers. 'Nice try - where did you stash the rest?'

'One. Because these jaunts always make me nervous,' Rei shot back, only mildly annoyed. 'And I wish my wife would stop recruiting you to do her dirty work.'

'It's a filthy habit, and I'm doing you a favour. Why can't you take up an annoying addictive habit that's less offensive to bystanders?'

'Too many long, lonely nights lurking under lamp-posts on stakeouts in my youth,' Rei replied amiably. 'That, and it really, really pissed off my half-brother…'

'Annoying one's uptight siblings is a noble calling,' Yama nodded sagely, but his quiet facade, Rei knew, was a thin veneer of calm over an old wound that had never really healed. 'Out of interest - why, if you're on surveillance, would you stand under a street-light? I mean, surely the whole point is not to be seen…?' Rei's long-suffering sigh was his only reply and he stuffed his hands in his pockets and smirked. 'Oh - hello - I do think we're on the right road at least…' He stopped in his tracks and looked around. Some time back the crowd had thinned as they walked away from the bustling centre of the town, and they now stood on the corner of a narrow side street where it met a larger road. Opposite was a large swath of waste ground, on the far side of which stood the remains of a chain-link fence topped with razor wire, behind which squatted a large, derelict carbuncle of a once-pristine white plascrete, now blackened and in places molten. One entire wing had been scattered over a fair area of the wasteland.

'Are you sure it's the right building?' Rei sounded doubtful. Yama kicked at the ground and used his boot to scrape away some of the rubbish covering a sign, twisted and scored with scorch marks.

'Hell yes. I'm sure…'

The sign read "Westwind Inc.".

Rei took his glasses off, peered at the building, gave the lenses a clean, hooked the earpieces into place and pushed them back up his nose. 'Damn… Looks like we're too late. Whatever this weapon was that Westwind were working on, someone was keen to cover their tracks...'

Yama looked at him in puzzlement. 'What makes you so sure this was arson and not just that mysterious experimental weapon we're here for going tits-up?'

Rei pointed to a blackened piece of molten plascrete lying next to the sign, the toe of Yama's scuffed brown boot almost on top of it. 'Because I can still smell the thermite compound someone used less than forty-eight hours ago…'