Zero World (27 page)

When Melni spoke she tried to sound relaxed. “I do not think they are dangerous. We call them Grim Runners. Desolation scavengers. Sometimes they smuggle between South and North.”

“All the way to the other frontier?”

“Not so far. There are rolltowns in places, well hidden.”

“Rolltowns?”

“Like…a place to unroll your bed and sleep, nothing more.”

“We call it a campsite.”

She thought about that and nodded. “Grims from both sides meet and trade what they can, barter for maps and food. I wrote a report about them, years ago, when a miniature war flared between their factions and our agents needed to avoid such places. Those tensions later eased.” Melni glanced up and down the beach. “I do not see any other boats. There are usually three, maybe more.”

“What do we do? Steal it?”

Melni placed a hand on his arm, a sudden fear in her that he might march up the beach and slay the couple before she could shout to stop him. “Be calm. The boats are shared. We wait for them to leave, then we take it across. Nine miles to the other side.” It had been a clear day and she could see the rocky hills of Cirdia across the water.

“Suppose they don’t leave. It’s late; they might camp here.”

“Then we risk approaching. I’d prefer no one see us here but we cannot delay much.”

He picked at some pebbles on the boulder in front of them, tossing them down into the sand below. “Maybe we should approach now. This waiting is—”

“You are right,” Melni said. “Look.”

The pair had moved the bag up the beach about fifty feet and buried it under sand. That task complete, they’d returned to the boat and now worked to turn it around. “They are going back across,” Melni said, already up to her knees.

Caswell followed her, leaping down from the boulder and jogging behind her, slowed by his still-healing wound. Sandflies erupted from a clump of seaweed and clouded around. Melni swatted the black insects aside and sprinted ahead. She shouted, “Ahey! May we approach?”

The woman stood in the sailboat, legs wide for balance, untying the sailcloth. Her companion stood knee-deep in gentle waves, struggling to push the craft out of the sand and into the glittering black water. Both froze at the sight of two strangers approaching. They glanced nervously at each other and abandoned their work. The woman cast a quick, sidelong glance at the place on the beach where they’d just buried their haul.

“Close enough!” the man called out. He had a thick Cirdian accent, not uncommon this close to that old country. Survivors had streamed both north and south two centuries before, and lived today in clusters of their own kind.

Melni stopped and held out her hands. Caswell came to stand just behind her.

“State your business,” the woman by the boat said.

Melni took a tentative step forward. “We had hoped to use the boat to cross when you finished. But since you appear to be going back, perhaps—”

“Your business,” the woman repeated, her raspy voice sharp as the knife at her hip.

“Careful,” Caswell whispered.

“It is all right,” she whispered back. She raised her hands higher. “A simple message swap in Rolltown Calis.”

“Swap? Who with?” the man asked.

“That is not your concern,” Melni said. She tried to make it sound matter-of-fact. It came out defensive. “What I mean is, our
task is not of importance. Wealthy families, separated by the craters, who wish—”

“Calis is
gone,
young lady.”

“Gone?”

The man nodded, his face grave. The woman spoke. “Along with all the other rolltowns. Destroyed. Not heard this? Maybe we are ahead of the news.”

Dread began to seep through Melni’s bones. “What news? How did this happen?”

“Those floating monstrosities from Combra started bombing them lasterday. Plus two caravans.”

“That we know of,” the man added.

“That we know of,” the woman agreed.

Melni bit her worry back, swallowed. “So far south,” she said. “That is a breach of treaty.”

The scavenger pair both laughed bitterly. Again the woman spoke. “Treaty, a-yah. Also says no travel in the Desolation save for the Vongar.”

“According to treaty, enforceable only on their own frontier,” Melni pointed out.

“You tell them that,” the woman replied. “And those who died in the rolltowns.”

Caswell cleared his throat. “Despite all this you appear to be going back across.”

They tensed at his strange accent. Both squinted in his direction, as if noticing him for the first time.
At least he is well disguised,
Melni thought.

“A-yah, so we are. Ferrying our stores here until the whalebirds are gone.”

Caswell stepped in closer to Melni and spoke under his breath. “Whalebirds. Like the one we saw in the North?”

“What do we do?”

He shifted his feet in the sand. “You can turn back if you want. I have no choice.”

She nodded and raised her own voice to the couple at the waterline. “Can you take us across? We can pay.”

The woman stepped closer and studied them both, up and down. “No gear with you?”

“We have thumpers. Two. Back in the ravine.”

She considered this for a moment. The man whispered something to her. She raised her chin and looked at Melni with renewed skepticism. “You take a big risk for a simple message ’tween families.”

“And I think I comprehend now,” Melni said, “why they offered us such an impressive payment.”

“Which we won’t receive,” Caswell added, quick to follow her lead, “if it’s not delivered.”

The couple debated in hushed voices for some time. In the end they turned and faced Melni and Caswell in a united front. The woman spoke. “Five hundred. One way.”

“Done,” Caswell said. “Wait. Do we have that much?”

Melni pressed her flat hand across her lips, hoping he’d remember the meaning of the gesture. “We can only spare two hundred and fifty.”

“Exactly half of the proposed fee,” the man said, more to his partner than to Melni. “How convenient.”

“Three hundred,” the woman countered. “And I will have that camera, too.”

Melni paid with the last of their stolen money, the camera she’d purchased in Gylina Square, and only as much gratitude as tact required. She left Caswell to wait with the couple while she made two trips back to the rocky cleft to fetch their thumpers. He helped her lift them aboard while the ragged couple looked on, impatient.

Ten minutes later the small craft set sail. In the darkness, as the boat tacked on a stiff wind against brutal waves, flashes of light began to illuminate the underside of clouds to the north. Thunder rolled across the stretch of water and, as the far shore grew close, began to rattle the brass catches of the decaying sail rig.

“That’s some storm,” Caswell said.

“No storm,” the woman at the till replied. “The blixxing Combs have started bombing again.”

They rode in the weak light of tiny Gisla, her lover Gilan having set.

Melni took the lead. She shunned the more direct coastal path, turning inland and up into the foothills of southern Cirdia—an area Caswell said was called “Spain” on his world. She relied on overgrown trees and partially collapsed crater walls to shield their passage from the Combran airships high above. She glimpsed the elongated egg-shaped behemoths twice through fleeting breaks in a cloud bank that split the sky in half. Gisla hovered just above the eastern horizon, below the cloud layer as if holding the gray mass at bay.

Three times they stopped to refill the pressure vessels, eat, and use the smallberry bushes as an improvised lav. Obstacles on the ill-maintained arterial scavenger trails hampered their progress. The dirt path weaved between craters old and, in a few disturbing cases, brand-new. By the time Garta began to chase darkness from the sky they’d only made one hundred and sixty miles.

Near dawn, however, the Combran airships vanished, apparently unwilling to be seen directly, or perhaps chased away by the invisible hand of diplomacy going on.

Or maybe they have killed everyone they can find, and now they lurk, waiting.
Melni’s skin crawled at the thought.

Despite a raging ache across her lower back from the thumper’s worn old saddle, and a weariness that now seemed ingrained in every cell of her being, she suggested they should push on without sleep.

Caswell agreed instantly.

If anything he seemed to have become more alert since leaving Riverswidth. No grimaces of pain, or tentative movements. He’d been silent since landing on the coast, answering her questions with nods or simple shakes of the head. On one of their stops he’d sat still for almost ten full minutes with the thumb and forefinger of one
hand pressed against his temples. At first she’d thought he was shielding his eyes from a sudden ray of sunlight, but even when the clouds blocked Garta once again his hand remained there. She watched him for some time. What was he doing? She thought of the object in his neck, and how advanced the technology on his world was. Was he communicating, right now? With his Earth? Sending his thoughts back there like some kind of antenna? The distance must be incredibly vast, but did that make such a thing impossible? Another idea crept into her head. He had come down from space, landed here. He’d implied so, at least. So maybe he didn’t have to contact another world, but a nearby craft waiting to take him home. “Tell me something,” she said.

He glanced up, as if woken from a light sleep. His gaze met hers. After a second, he nodded.

“Are you and Valix the only of your kind here?”

“Yes.”

“I do not mean on the ground. Does someone wait for you”—she pointed to the zenith of the sky—“up there?”

Caswell shook his head. “I wish. But no.”

“Are you in contact with your world?”

“No.” He sighed and stepped closer to her, offering his hands. An odd gesture, but she understood he wanted to hold her. She let him, placing her hands in his. They were warm and rough. A scar ran along one palm. A gold band graced one finger of his right hand. “I have no way to contact home. No way to let them know if I’ve succeeded or failed.”

Melni looked into his dark eyes. She thought of her own time in the North, in Combra. How exhilarating it had been to be entirely on her own, in constant danger, making decisions. Yet at any time she could have left. Fled south to be among allies. She’d had a way out. Caswell had no such options. He would never be able to leave. Utterly alone, except for her. “And then? They will send someone else to find out?”

He considered that and shrugged. “Probably. But they won’t risk
further contact with your world just to fetch me. If I succeed, I’ll be stuck here. If I fail, well, who knows? They may try again but that will take time, and now that Alia knows we have found her, she’ll take measures to hide herself. Or worse…”

“Worse? How?”

His mouth tightened into a line, and his hands gripped hers more tightly. To speak of this pained him in a very literal sense, she forced herself to remember. “I fear she’ll try to give Gartien everything she has all at once. All our history, our science, inventions. Including our weapons. What if that’s her play at the summit?”

“You fear we will destroy ourselves?”

To her surprise, he shook his head. “What I fear, Melni, is that Earth will then see Gartien as a threat.”

For a while they just stood there in the cold dawn air, her hands in his, as Garta’s light began to spill across the desolate land. She kept opening her mouth to ask what that meant, what Earth would do to such a threat, but there was no point. She already knew. His tone said far more than the words he’d spoken.

Minutes passed. A breeze stirred the leaves. Caswell finally let her hands go, so that he could rub at his temples again.

“This device, in your neck,” she said, “works by rubbing your temples?”

“Yes.”

“Your scientists could not think of a better interface?”

He let out a single astonished laugh. “They could, and did. My watch,” he said, and made a circle with one hand around the other wrist, “handled certain functions of the implant automatically. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to manually perform such tasks.”

The mention of the bracelet stung. Giving it to Rasa Clune had been an act of loyalty. Now it felt like a betrayal, to him. Knowing its function, she wondered what intelligence would be gleaned from the device. “What functions?”

“I’ve used it sparingly, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Melni tilted her head deliberately, and squinted at him. “Wait. I
saw what you did at Riverswidth. They sought to kill you. Yet it seemed as if you were merely dancing with them. Are you telling me you were holding back?”

“You know I can’t go into details.”

“Caswell,” she said, grabbing his hands again and squeezing hard. “Can you not trust me? I will keep your secrets. Your goal resolves for me. I agree with the principle of it. Please, do not jeopardize our success out of fear of my tongue.”

He sighed, then nodded. “It’s more complicated than that. The gland requires a reservoir of certain chemicals to work, and without food I am dangerously low on most. I don’t want to waste what I have left, because I think I’ll need it very soon. So I hold back. The meal packet I found in Riverswidth I ate and used because I saw no other way to get us out of there.”

A tingling sensation ran up her spine and across her scalp. “That was hardly a meal. What can you do when fully, er, supplied?”

Caswell stared at her for a long moment. A grin tugged at the corners of his mouth. “Sweetheart, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” At her blank, uncomprehending expression he chuckled. “Right now I am trying to keep my pain, hunger, and fatigue from overwhelming me. If and when I’m able to really let loose…well, I suspect you’ll be happy I’m on your side.”

She returned his grin, warmed by the foreign and wonderful term
sweetheart,
yet also chilled with imaginative visions of what this man might become when truly unleashed.

HE’D LIED TO HER.
A white lie, but it still gnawed at him.

The implant kept him awake by shutting down parts of the brain in a carefully controlled sequence, letting one bit rest at a time instead of the lot. He hadn’t yet used this capability since landing because he’d always felt it a last resort. There were dangers, not the least of which was simply operating your brain in a way that went against everything the body knew. He saw no alternative, though. He was battered, starving, and dehydrated. If he fell asleep he feared he might never wake.

He’d also allowed a trickle of pain suppression. All that had been true, more or less.

What he’d left out was the heightened state of his senses. Hearing,
specifically. He thought it best to keep this to himself, in the spirit of his mission.

Just after midday that became impossible.

“We need to get off the road!” Caswell shouted over the snare-drum rattle of the air engine.

The Sun, Garta, battled scattered clouds. Midafternoon light tinged slightly yellow. They had not stopped since dawn, when he’d told her the basics of what his implant could do.

“Agreed,” Melni shouted back. “I am so hungry, and this seat is—”

“I mean now!”

He accelerated ahead of her and swerved off between two giant trees. The ground, blanketed by dry fallen leaves of vibrant yellows, oranges, and reds, crunched beneath the cycle’s tires. Caswell weaved a tight path between thin gray trunks and skidded to a stop in the shade of a low rock outcrop.

Melni roared in after him, too fast. She jerked the bike to the left, skidding in a wild slide that threw autumn leaves and clods of damp earth into the air. “Blixxing cur—” she started, fighting to keep the cycle upright. The curse died on her lips because she saw him. Caswell held one hand flat across his mouth in the Gartien sign of silence, his eyes scanning the clouds above.

Ten seconds passed in near-total silence. Just the sound of rustling leaves. The emerald-green canopy swayed in the breeze. Nothing else moved.

“What is it?” Melni whispered.

“Airships,” he said.

She glanced around. “I hear nothing but the wind.”

Caswell reached up and lightly tapped the back of his neck. “I can.”

If the revelation of this ability surprised her, she hid it well. “I thought you were holding that in reserve?”

“I am, for the most part. But I also don’t want a bomb to drop on us.”

“Gratitude.”

Minutes passed before Melni finally craned her neck toward the sound. Caswell let his augmentation ebb, hearing the world again as she did. The growing noise resembled the nearby buzzing of a persistent fly, coming from everywhere and nowhere. For minutes it went on, joined by others in a droning chorus. Any second now Caswell expected to see an entire fleet of those bulbous monstrosities fill the sky, but then the sound faded until only the wind remained. Caswell rubbed his temple, listening for another few minutes before he glanced at Melni and nodded. “I suggest we move as fast as possible when they’re not around.”

“I need a bite to eat.”

“You know,” he said, “the first thing I’m going to do when we find Alice is ask what the hell she’s been eating and drinking all this time.”

The look of guilt on Melni’s face was priceless. “Regret! If you would prefer I—”

“It’s fine,” he said. “You eat. I’ll top us off.”

His wording earned a quizzical look that evaporated from her face when he began to compress more air into the thumper’s pressure canisters. While she ate he repeated the process for the other bike.

Caswell stowed the pump gear and swung his leg over the bike’s saddle. “Want me to lead for a while?”

A shower of leaves cut off his words. Melni, astride her bike, had gunned the accelerator to full and tore away from him in a flurry of sprayed debris that peppered his goggles. She looked back at him and flashed a childish grin.

“Going to be like that, is it?” he said to himself, and raced off after her.

The bumpy dirt “road” was studded with rocks and fallen branches, riddled with long trenches carved by rain, and rife with blind curves. Still, he managed to close the gap, grinning like a fool when the trail opened up into a long, straight passage through a flat patch of forest.

Hidden from the sky by a cathedral ceiling of tangled branches,
Melni pushed her cycle to its limit. Caswell followed her example. Five miles into the straightaway he managed to overtake her, his grin echoed by a mischievous smile on her face. He weaved in front of her and laughed aloud as dark soil and churned leaves sprayed across her body.

The air, thick with the rampant vegetation all around, had an almost intoxicating effect. He lost himself in the race. All the fear and worry at what lay ahead was suddenly forgotten in a rush of wind and the simple competition. Every ten seconds they traded positions. She could ride, no doubt about that. And, to his delight, she displayed a competitive streak that seemed to equal his own. At one point she pulled up next to him and they playfully traded halfhearted attempts to kick the other off balance. Then Melni leaned forward, streamlining herself, and shot ahead on a burst of speed he hadn’t expected. She took a bump, left the ground, landed in a puddle that splayed mud across his borrowed army coat and splattered across his goggles. Caswell roared with laughter and leaned so far forward his face almost touched the handlebar.

Melni glanced back at him, a sly grin plastered across her face. She never saw the sharp bend in the trail. He tried to shout a warning, but it was too late.

Trampled ground gave way to raw soil, thick and muddy, strewn with obstacles. He watched helplessly as she fought for control. Her focus shifted to the immediate obstacles, not on the change looming just beyond. He felt his heart lurch. Ahead, the forest fell away. Open sky replaced the dark crowd of tree trunks. At the last instant Melni swerved right, leaned into the turn, and let the cycle kick out in a vicious skid that sent a wave of dirt and leaves over the precipice she’d almost crossed.

She stopped just inches from the cliff edge. Caswell followed her, more slowly, his heart racing. “That was close,” he managed, pulling off his goggles.

“I was holding back,” she said.

“Not the race. Christ, you almost flew right over the edge, Melni.”

She turned to look, and seemed to see the crater edge for the first time. Propping the thumper on its stand, she walked to the drop-off and stood, mouth agape, at the view below.

Caswell came up beside. “Shit,” he whispered.

The great wound had leveled forest, cleaved away hillsides and floodplains, and demolished a small village on the visible perimeter far to his left. A river—he could almost see its original winding path from before the event—entered one side, pooled into a great semicircular lake in the basin, then drained out of a dozen low points along the eroded edges. Despite plenty of trees and plants growing in the massive basin, the shape and scale of the impact zone was still apparent, even after two centuries.

“One of the titan craters,” she said. “Fifteen miles across. There are only a half-dozen of this scale.”

“Unbelievable.”

She pointed off to the right. “If I am not mistaken, our destination is up that river valley about fifty miles. We are close.”

“How long until Valix’s summit, exactly?”

“Tomorrow evening. Fifteen hours from now.”

He converted that in his head. Thirty Earth-hours to get to Alice. And two days after that, reversion would come. Everything since the
Venturi,
forgotten. He’d have to isolate himself by then. Lose himself somewhere in this vast wasteland. What would he tell Melni? He resolved to worry about it later. “Will we make it?”

She summoned her mental map of the area. “It is five hundred miles from there to Fineva. It will be a near thing, especially if we spend a lot of time searching for our evidence.”

“No time to waste, then.”

The playful mood of the forest race evaporated in the face of the brush with death and the press of time. Melni took the lead, picking a path along the jagged crater rim. After a few miles a collapsed portion of the steep wall provided entry. She bounded down the recently
formed hillside and into the crater proper, the drumbeat rhythm of her cycle just meters ahead of his, the two machines both at the limit of their capability.

After fording two streams at their shallowest points, and another half hour of brutal riding out the other side of the crater, Melni found the cleft that led into the valley Caswell had identified on the map. A swift and narrow river gurgled down the center of the ravine. Melni followed its rock-strewn bank. Soon she began to weave, and almost fell. Her bike rolled to a sudden stop.

“What’s the matter?” Caswell asked, pulling up beside her.

“I am exhausted.”

He let her rest, sitting on a rock a few meters away where he could see most of the sky and the entire span of the crater they’d just crossed. A birdlike creature wheeled overhead, four brightly colored wings glinting in the morning light.

“Hear anything?” she asked him.

Caswell shook his head. “All quiet.”

“We should go then, before they return.”

“Rest awhile.”

She considered this for several seconds, then began to shake her head, slowly, then with more conviction. “There is no time. I will be okay if you lead. Navigating requires more focus than I can muster.”

“All right then,” he replied.

Caswell mounted up and, while Melni fiddled with her goggles, he rubbed his temples and mentally gave a series of commands. A familiar warm tingle began to spread across his scalp from the back of his neck as a chemical mixture crept through his brain. It used the last of his reserves, but he could see no alternative. Saving it for some shoot-out with Alice Vale’s bodyguards would not matter if he arrived too late. Better to make sure he arrived in time, and trust his natural skill as a killer to do the rest. He only knew that part of himself from what had transpired the last few weeks, but what he’d learned gave him confidence.
Just get me there,
he urged his implant,
and I’ll figure something out. It’s what I do
.

So he rode, like some maniac teenage motocross champion. He weaved between narrow gaps in the hairy bushes Melni called “loma plants,” darted around boulders like a fox in flight, and used the bumps in the ground to jump over dangerous eroded pits. Melni fell into some kind of trancelike zone, mimicking his path subconsciously. She fell behind now and then, but overall she held her own and their pace improved significantly.

A few hours later, a patch of color ahead caught his eye. Caswell began to slow.

“Are we here already?” she asked, sliding up next to him.

“No,” he said, “and yet…yes.”

She followed his gaze down a steep hill. Ten meters away a signpost protruded from the ground, partially obscured by tall, pale weeds. Old and rusted, tilting slightly in the soft dirt where it had been placed, the sign nevertheless had obviously been placed here recently. In the last ten years, he thought.

The sign warned of mines, if he understood it correctly. Best to be sure. “What’s it mean?”

Melni swallowed to clear her throat. “Toe-bombs,” she said. “A good thing you spotted this. I would have missed it.”

“Toe-bombs?” He could guess, but he wanted to hear it from her.

“Disk-shaped explosives buried just below the topsoil. They will explode if enough weight is detected by a sensor plate on top.” As she spoke she made a round shape with her fingers, about the size of a dinner plate.

“Mm. We call them land mines,” Caswell said. “Or, we did. They’ve been outlawed for a hundred years on Earth.”

“They are illegal here, too. For almost half a century. One of the few things both North and South agreed on. None have been placed since, so far as I know. And while many old fields still exist, I have never heard of one so far from either frontier.”

“That sign doesn’t look fifty years old. More like ten.”

“I thought the same thing.”

He knelt and shoved his fist into the soil, scooping out a handful
and letting it fall through his fingers. Soft dirt. Easy to conceal a land mine just a few inches below the surface. “Well,” he said, “one thing’s for sure. We’re in the right place.”