Zero World (33 page)

“—heavily armed and in a foul mood. I suggest you enter from both sides at once if you want to live. Also, the water is quite cold, so be ready for that.”

“Quiet,” the leader snapped.

“You really should heed my warnings!” Caswell was shouting now, on the cusp of hysterics.

What the blix is he up to?
Melni tried to rock back on her feet. She still had a pistol. She needed easier access to the pocket she’d thrust it in. But the Hollow only pushed on her neck harder.

“Be still, traitor!” she growled. Through it all Caswell had kept
talking, louder and louder. “Silence! I mean it!” the leader shouted at him.

“Melni, down!” Caswell roared.

She was already down. She pitched forward anyway. The shift in her posture, her sudden lack of resistance to the pressure on her neck, allowed her to dive face-first into the dirt and flatten herself. The leader of the Hollow squad stumbled, one knee driving hard into Melni’s back. She lost her grip on Melni’s neck.

There came a hiss that grew from the edge of inaudibility to an ear-splitting roar in less than a second. Then the world shattered.

Even with her lying flat on the edge of the trail’s incline down to the boathouse, the explosion slammed Melni sideways into an awkward roll. Debris, dirt, and a wall of blistering hot air hit her all at once. The roar of the blast forced her sense of hearing into some kind of self-preservation dormancy. Vaguely, as if miles away, Melni heard the brief scream from the lips of the Hollow Woman followed by a muffled distant noise of what Melni could only think of as meat thrown against a brick wall. She pressed herself into the dirt and screamed as the shrapnel-laden inferno rolled over her and away.

How much time had passed, Melni couldn’t be sure. Intense heat licked at her back. Her clothing, on fire. She rolled in the dirt, extinguishing the flames, and glanced toward the river.

The boathouse was nothing more than a blackened crater. Debris still rained down from the sky in fiery chunks that smacked into the ground and splashed into the river. Water rushed in to fill the sudden hole in the ground where the structure had been. Of the vessels—Alia’s or the Warden’s below it—nothing remained. The bomb must have been massive.

Gathering her senses, ears ringing, Melni completed her roll and looked to where Caswell had stood, just on the other side of the rise. Amid smoke and flame she saw him, lying prone like her. Around him were the splayed bodies of the Hollow. Half bodies, in truth. The legs and pelvises, sheltered by the crest of the trail, were largely undamaged. Waist up, however, all that remained of each was a horrific
mess of shredded muscle, bone, black fabric, and various unrecognizable chunks of human innards. The four who had gone to search the boathouse had been completely obliterated.

Caswell was shouting something at her. He sounded a mile away and underwater. Melni crawled toward him, happy to find that her arms and legs still worked. She ignored the bits of fire starting to catch within the clumps of tall grass, and the sting of a dozen lacerations along her left side and back. “Are you all right?” he shouted as she reached him.

Despite her proximity she still had to read his lips. A bright, all-consuming ringing filled her head. Melni managed a nod and took his outstretched hand. Caswell kept glancing up as he began to pull her away from the boathouse. His jog turned into an urgent sprint, tugging her along. The cuts and scrapes across half her body forced her into a lurching, stumbling fall that barely served to keep up. Suddenly Caswell twisted, grabbed her by the shoulders, and shoved her bodily between two mounds of dirt. The two graves. Another explosion behind them. The air seemed to rip apart. Melni tasted the soil and felt the flash of warmth and then Caswell was on top of her, shielding her.

She barely had time to suck in a breath and then he was up and dragging her to her feet. “Run!” he shouted, the muffled sound almost inaudible. Melni tried to, but half her body now felt as if aflame. Maybe it was. She limped and plodded through tall grass, away from the trail, the ruin of the boathouse, and the cottage. Caswell seemed to be pushing her toward a cleft in the valley wall so she forced her mind to focus on that. Bits of dirt and other unrecognizable debris rained out of the sky. Another explosion, this time to her right, shook the ground beneath her feet. The cottage vanished in a ball of fire and smoke.

Caswell pushed her on, a strong hand at the center of her back guiding her. She stumbled and screamed in pain. His arm slipped under hers and in one motion he lifted her and swung her up over his shoulders. Caswell carried her like that for fifty feet and then dove,
the pair of them slamming into a natural earthen pocket carved from the valley wall. She lay there, arms over her head, body pressed against Caswell’s, as six more bombs demolished the entire length of the path. The home, the graves, the boathouse, all reduced to craters. Nothing remained but charred dirt and a choking cloud of smoke. It filled the air, stung Melni’s eyes and nostrils. Her mouth tasted of ash and blood. Each breath came with racking coughs.

She lay there for a long time, wrapped in Caswell’s arms, until the dust cleared. Ten minutes passed, maybe more. “We need to get away from here,” she said.

Caswell didn’t reply. In fact he hadn’t moved in many minutes. Suddenly his body felt like an unbearable weight upon her.

Filled with sudden dread, Melni pressed her hand to his right breast.

SHE FELT NO PULSE
. Despair began to crash upon her like a wave, until a tiny voice inside her said,
This happened before!
Yes, on the boat as they fled Portstav. She’d felt no pulse then, and yet he lived. Then she remembered what the doctor in Riverswidth had said, how all his organs were flipped from the normal layout, as if reflected in a mirror. She pressed the other side of his chest. His skin thudded rhythmically against her palm. Quite strong, in fact.

Sighing with relief, ignoring the hundred aches her body had on offer, Melni slid out from beneath the unconscious man and rolled him onto his back. “Caswell? Caswell?” she asked, slapping his cheek gently. Her own voice sounded distant and muted to her tortured ears.

He did not react. Melni forced herself to stand and surveyed the devastation all around them. Even the vaunted Hollow, it seemed, were no match for surgical bombing from Valix’s airships. She lifted a hand to shield her eyes from Garta’s glare and surveyed the sky. High above, like bloated birds circling on some impossibly strong updraft, three Combran airships traced circles against the darkening ceiling beyond.

As she watched they began to peel away and fly northeast in a loose V formation. Melni waited until they were well out of sight. In that time nothing save the wind and small critters stirred around her. Of the Hollow, or any support teams that might have been with them, she saw nothing. The bombing had wiped them out. Those that she and Caswell hadn’t killed, she corrected herself, feeling a surprising surge of pride.

His augmented senses had saved them. He’d heard the engines, the whistle of that first bomb, before anyone else. There’d been no time to do anything other than dive to the ground, but that had been enough.

Fires burned all around, casting plumes of gray smoke high into the air, a light breeze drawing the haze out over the river to the north.

Melni took a last glance at the placid face of Caswell and slid the pistol from her pocket. She left him there, in the cleft along the valley wall, and crept south toward the smoking ruin of the cottage. The Hollow had come from that direction. Masters of stealth they might be, but their footprints had told the story. They would have vehicles nearby. Supplies. And though they had probably left someone behind to guard such things, maybe whoever it was had rushed to the riverbank after that first bomb, to help, and been annihilated by the second fusillade.

Pistol held before her, the brand of “traitor” still echoing in her ears, Melni entered the smoke. It filled the air like a morning Combran fog, only black, and stung the eyes to the point that tears streamed down her cheeks. She saw nothing but shadowy trees and the orange glow of a hundred small fires. Then the husk of what had
been the cottage, now a ruin in a blackened crater, loomed out of the haze. Melni skirted it and kept on. The ground began to slope, then a cliff wall emerged from the haze.

Black rappelling ropes with knotted segments trailed down from high above. Melni took one last glance back toward the cleft where Caswell lay. She drew a mental line from cottage to a lone greencloud tree, then his body a ways beyond that. Then she turned and started to climb, up and out of the smoke, away from the death.

At the top of the ravine she found herself at the edge of a wide field of boneweed grass that sloped gently away to a tree line perhaps a quarter mile distant. Viewed from here, the passage of the Hollow strike team was even more obvious. No amount of care could mask the trampled grass. Their path traced a gently waving line from the rappelling rope spikes to a particularly large shade tree opposite. Melni walked fifty feet to her left and, keeping low, traced a parallel path to the one the Hollow had made, using the umbrella-like dome of the tree as a guide.

Twenty feet from the tree she came upon a shallow Desolationera crater, invisible in the tall grass unless you stood right beside it. Their vehicles rested in the basin: sleek, disguise-painted thumpers and a single, low-slung quadcruiser covered with storage packs of varying size. None bore any kind of label or identifying marker, not that she had any doubt where they’d come from.

Movement caught her eye. A man, sitting in the passenger seat of the quad, dressed in the black garb of the Hollow. He hunched forward and fiddled with something on the instrument panel before him that she could not see. He held one hand to his ear. Reporting the calamity that had just befallen his squad, no doubt. Melni kept to the trees and circled behind the vehicle, then moved in, pistol held level before her. She could hear the man’s voice now. Low, urgent. “Please acknowledge. Anyone, please!”

He froze when Melni pressed the muzzle of her weapon to the side of his neck.

“Keep your hands visible,” she whispered.

The man nodded once.

“Did anyone else stay back with you?”

He hesitated. Melni pushed the barrel harder against his skin. “I am alone,” he finally said. A young man. Communications and support, probably. Trained in the basics of combat but likely not of the aptitude normally required for fieldwork. He’d still be a competent fighter, just not the elite. Or so she hoped.

From the dash the radio chirped. “Acknowledged, oh-nine-deso. Report your status.”

The unmistakable voice of Rasa Clune. Melni urged the Hollow Man away from the vehicle. With one eye on him she leaned in and switched the communicator off.

“What happened down there?” the Hollow Man asked. If he harbored any fear of her or her weapon, it did not manifest in his voice.

“Combran airships bombed the entire site. Your squad was annihilated.”

“What of the stranger?”

Melni studied the man before her. She decided to lie. “Vaporized along with the rest of them.”

“Yet you survived.”

The accusation behind his words stung. Melni retrained her aim on his chest and did her best to look unperturbed. “Go back. Tell Clune and the others that I have seen proof of the stranger’s story.”

“Show me.”

“Unfortunately it was just bombed into nothing more than shrapnel.”

“How convenient.”

“The truth sometimes is. Now go and tell her, or I will leave one more corpse here.”

“What do you intend to do, Agent Sonbo? You should know if you set foot in the South you will be killed on sight. If you go anywhere near the summit—”

Melni stopped listening. Sonbo, he’d called her. Her real name
still felt uncomfortable, like clothes that no longer fit. Had she really left that person behind?

It wasn’t that, she suddenly realized. It was the world that person had lived in, now no longer relevant. What she’d heard and seen inside that vessel below the lake rendered everything that had happened before moot. Sonbo, and all the rest, no longer mattered.

But she was not Melni Tavan, either. Not of the North or the South or even the disjointed area in between. She was of Gartien.

She shook her head to dispel these thoughts. True or not, she had a more immediate problem. Both North and South wanted her dead. The ramifications slid home like a knife in the gut. She was an exile, and would be forever more. Despite all she’d learned today, about Conduits and oppressive alien empires, it was all useless without proof. No one would believe a word of it. Except Valix.

Valix, in the end, was the key. She had to get to her, with or without Caswell, and help her in her cause.

Mentally Melni donned the exile’s coat and renewed her aim on the man. She had claimed her land and must sleep under the sky above it, as the old saying went. “I am not sure what I will do,” she said. “Tell Clune I remain loyal, despite all appearances, and that…and that…I will find a way to prove what I have learned.”

“Tell her yourself,” the man said through a sudden, nasty grin.

A sound behind her. The slightest scuff of a boot against dirt. She’d missed one of them. A minute earlier and her hearing might not have recovered enough to detect the noise. But now…Melni reacted on pure instinct, as Caswell would have. She dove to one side, firing her gun at the Hollow Man before her even as she fell. The bullet caught him in the stomach and he doubled over. Then Melni was rolling. Something whooshed past her head and thudded into the soil. Melni came up at a crouch and instantly ducked. Another black-clothed Hollow. A huge man, two feet taller than her with arms as thick as her thighs. He swung a black trunch that sizzled with live electricity. It passed inches in front of her face and knocked the pistol
from her hand with a shuddering jolt. The weapon sailed six feet and vanished into the weeds.

Melni took a step back and positioned herself into a fighting stance. One leg behind for stability, both hands raised chin level, fists balled. The huge man in front of her flexed his fingers on the crackling baton. She could not see the bottom half of his face, but the grin was obvious. She did not stand a chance. He was a Hollow, the most elite of trained killers, and judging from his gigantic hands could probably break her in half if given the chance, sizzling trunch or not. She could hear the hum of the electricity flowing across its surface. All he had to do was graze her skin and she’d be writhing on the ground, her tongue half-bitten off. She had to run. Or get that pistol. She glanced where it had fallen. The man danced a step in that direction, sensing her move. Toying with her. He stepped closer. Melni matched it with a step back. She tried to picture the layout of the clearing, where the vehicles were parked. That quadcruiser, there must be some kind of weapon there. The brute would never give her time to find one, though. She had to run.

Beside her, on the ground, the man she’d shot made a muffled groan. He lay in a fetal curl in the trampled grass. Melni took two steps back and to the side, her eyes darting between the wounded man and the brute. The giant stepped forward in tandem with her, happy to push her farther from the dropped pistol.

Melni glanced at the wounded man. He had both arms wrapped around his stomach. Blood welled freely between the black sleeves of his shirt. A wretched smell permeated the air. Digestive fluid. A fatal wound, more than likely. Melni glanced back at the brute, almost too late. He was in midair, leaping for her, the baton raised. Melni lurched into a sideways somersault, back on her feet just behind the wounded man as the brute’s misaimed jump crashed into the ground where she’d been, his overhand swing converted into a wild sidelong swipe that sizzled inches from her face. She felt the heat of it, and the hair on her skin tugging toward the electric force.

With a dexterity she didn’t know she possessed, Melni yanked the wounded man’s pistol from the holster at his side without breaking stride. She clutched the weapon in her off hand, transferred it as she ran sideways. The giant sensed her find and dove as the gun coughed—once, twice, and a third time. Thunderous bursts echoed off the trees and the sides of the shallow crater. The big man dove behind the pack vehicle, hidden by its fuselage and the tall grass.

She had no idea if she’d hit him. Melni took the weapon in both hands and crept forward. The man on the ground let out a long, gurgling wail. In one swift motion Melni swung the pistol in his direction and fired her fourth shot. His head jerked sideways and he went limp.

Melni put her focus into controlling her racing heart and shallow breaths. A bead of sweat slid down the side of her face. She loosened her grip on the weapon. She drew in a long breath through her nose and let the aroma of combat flow in, strangely calming.

There was more movement, now from her left. Melni turned too late. A thrown rock struck her sternum. The impact sent her stumbling, shooting blind. A waste of ammunition. Her foot caught on something and she toppled over onto her back.
He’ll press,
she managed to think, and rolled to one side as the heavy form of the man slammed into the soil where she’d been. Again the thrum of naked electricity roiled near her face. Half-blinded, Melni did not bother to stand. She aimed and fired, and kept on firing until the trigger pulls resulted in the dull click of a spent cartridge.

The giant lay five feet away, half-hidden by grass, blood seeping from wounds on his chest and neck. He twitched. A bubble of blood formed on his lips and, when it popped, his eyes became still as glass.