Zero World (37 page)

Immediately ahead a large, long building loomed. It looked different from the rest. Simple flat walls, no windows. Utilitarian, and built recently. As it grew closer he saw it for what it was: a train depot, of sorts. There were platforms to either side, but only the one on the left had people standing on it. They carried lanterns, of all things, and some appeared to be armed. The other side, to Caswell’s right, was very dark and empty. He started to run forward along the
top of the train car. From the back of his head came a subtle tingling sensation. A warning that his reserve of elhydrine had been used. His advantage would only last a few more seconds.

Caswell scanned the dark platform as the train lumbered into the station. It was easy to fool oneself while on elhydrine. Confuse slow movement for safe. The mind’s natural calculations of risk and ability could not be trusted. Every instinct told him to just jump, to land and roll and dash into the shadows. Only his training kept him from doing so. The car seemed to be moving about ten kilometers per hour, which meant sixty in reality. Still too fast to jump. Caswell forced himself to keep moving ahead. He ran to the end of the car and slowed only when he saw the top of someone’s head emerging over the lip. Caswell jumped the gap, kicking as he went, a solid connection right to the eye socket of some poor, uniformed woman. Her head began to recoil backward as he sailed past. Caswell landed easily on the next car, rolled, came up in a jog. A bullet whistled past his head, very wide. A deliberate miss? He filed that, too risky to rely on that assumption just yet.

There was a pile of debris in the shadows on the empty platform. A mass of leaves and long, knobby reeds. Gardening waste. It was his best hope. Caswell took one last step and launched himself toward the heap of dead vegetation.

In that instant his world sped up, physically, visually, audibly. The neurons and synapses in his brain began to process signals slower and slower until, just as his knees hit the pile, everything became human-normal again. It felt like sinking toward the bottom of a pool only to have all the water suddenly, instantly, vanish. He managed to fling his arms up around his face as he slammed into the dead leaves. Cut lengths of vine and weed lashed at him. The pile smelled of soil and cut grass. Fresh, not brittle. It cushioned him and then sprang back. Caswell practically bounced off. He fell on his ass to the hard, gravelly floor of the old platform. Cries of alarm went up from the train and beyond. English words, but the accent he couldn’t place.

Caswell forced himself to stand. He loped off into the shadows,
the sounds of soldiers and a slowing train filling the space behind him.

Melni lay on a vibrating metal floor, dimly aware of a throbbing pain emanating from her guts. She tried to lift her head and heard a wet tearing sound for the effort. The smell hit her then. Her own vomit, in a pool around her face.

“She is awake,” someone said.

Blurred shapes swam into focus.

Melni tried to move, only to find herself bound at the wrists and ankles with strips of rubber.

“Sit her up,” the familiar voice of Rasa Clune said.

Hands slipped under Melni’s armpits and she was hauled bodily from the sticky mess she’d made, flipped around, and slammed down again, this time on her back. The hands tugged her until her back and head rested against a solid surface. The room swayed and vibrated. Somewhere behind her came the clattering sound of an air motor. The movement made her nauseous and dizzy. A new pain manifested: a throbbing from the back of her skull.

Melni tried to focus on her surroundings. She blinked and concentrated. “How long have—” she started.

Clune cut her off with a backhanded slap that stung Melni’s cheek. The hand whipped back in the opposite direction and left an identical impression on the other.

Bright pain nearly blinded her. She could do nothing save lower her head and wince until the heat on her cheeks faded to something manageable. It took a long time. All the while the room swayed.

Not a room,
Melni realized. A special roller cabin. Armored walls, floor, and ceiling. A military troop carrier.

Clune stood in front of her, one hand pressed up against the ceiling to steady herself. With slow, deliberate motion she raised her free hand and gripped Melni by the jaw, her nails digging painfully into the skin. Melni could do nothing but clench her teeth and stare into
the woman’s emotionless face. The bandage across her nose should have made her seem weaker, yet somehow the dressing only added to the cold, disciplinary stare.

“What happened,” Rasa said, “to the team we sent to fetch you?”

Fetch us. What birdshit.
Melni met Clune’s gaze. “Speculate,” she hissed.

Clune’s eyes narrowed. She gripped so hard the nails drew blood. Then harder still, until the pain became unbearable.

“They were not there to fetch us,” Melni managed to utter through the compressed circle her lips had become. “And they are all dead.”

Clune’s face betrayed nothing. Her grip, however, tightened. “Impossible.”

If Melni could have spat in the woman’s face she would have. The gesture came out as a bubble of drool that dripped down her chin. She gagged involuntarily as Clune’s fingers dug in even harder.

“You are the one who is going to die,” Rasa said. “Very slowly and very painfully, if you do not tell us everything you know about the man you helped escape. Talk, and I promise a quick and painless end to your miserable traitorous life.”

Melni held her head steady and tried not to gurgle under the press of sharp fingernails. The stern woman searched Melni’s eyes for a few seconds and then, abruptly, let go. She took a step back. “How did you elude the Hollow agents?”

“I told you,” Melni rasped, working her jaw to ease the pain. “They are all dead.”

Clune apparently believed it this time because her complexion, already pale, flushed to bone white. It matched her bandaged nose. “Impossible. You are not so well trained—”

“Caswell went through them like a farmer clearing boneweed,” she lied, then instantly regretted it. With Caswell painted that dangerously, Clune would probably have him killed immediately.

Except
…that was not shock on the woman’s face, it was fear. “He knows you sent them,” Melni added. “And he is out there.”

All he actually knows is that he was sent here to kill Alia Valix
. A man who managed to penetrate the Think Tank in his first few days on a completely alien world. Now he was in a virtually deserted city, with a million places to hide, and Alia would be out in the open. For a speech, to diplomats.

“Why have you brought so many soldiers to this event?” Melni asked, the truth slowly dawning on her.

“Simple,” Clune replied. “After you helped our only negotiating piece escape, only one option remains to us. We are going to capture Valix, or eliminate her. She will either work for us, or work for no one. There is no other outcome that will suffice. Not now. Even you must realize that.”

“Why not just hear what she has to say?”

Clune laughed. “That is exactly what we cannot do. She is far too clever to propose anything other than a scenario that will advantage her and her allies in the North. Even if she proposes sharing her genius equally, the North is already too far ahead of us. We would never catch up. No, we must get to her before she can take the tiller of this conversation. And as for your friend, well…if he really killed a whole squad of Hollow, his punishment will match the crime.” The woman came in closer, her lips just inches from Melni’s face. “The same goes for you, Sonbo.”

“I…” Melni paused, almost gagging on the director’s wretched breath. What could she say that would stay Clune’s hand? She had no way to prove the Warden’s story. Melni’s only hope was to get to Alia Valix before anyone else. Before Caswell, before Clune and her strike team. Find her and tell her that Melni and Caswell had met the Warden. Maybe if she knew she wasn’t alone with that burden of knowledge she’d change her course.
And then all I’d have to do is stop everyone from trying to kill her anyway
. Melni tugged at the chains holding her arms and feet. She glanced at the guards and then at their cold, disgusting leader, and she saw no path that would lead toward this goal.

CLUMPS OF PALE GRASS
poked from every crack in the gravelly gray bricks. Small tricolored flowers with angular petals grew across knotted vines that wormed through every empty window and doorframe. The buildings were old, Caswell thought, though not of any architectural style he’d ever seen. They’d been abandoned long ago, that much was obvious. Or at least made to appear so, if this was some kind of elaborate training ground or simkit scenario.

Virtually all of it hid in darkness. Row after row of buildings with black windows, lined on one deserted street after another. Only a small pocket near the center of the city had working lights that chased away the black of night.

Caswell avoided that area for now. It seemed to be the only place around where people were, so it made sense that the summit that woman Melni had spoken of would take place there. Thus his target would be there, too, but he wanted to make sure he’d well and truly lost his pursuers before he turned his focus to that goal. One thing at a time.

He darted through a small square, the cobbled ground hidden beneath the snaking vines with their little blue-white-red flowers. At the center of the space—it was more of a hexagon in truth—Caswell froze. He could see the night sky clearly from here, and in that sky hung not one but two moons.

Two goddamn moons.

Caswell stood for a long moment and stared at the two dark gray orbs, baffled. Certainly no training sim would bother with such a deviation from reality. Besides, he knew instinctively that this was not a sim. No synthetic environment had this kind of tactile fidelity. The technology existed to fool one’s visual cortex on this level, but every other sense told him this place existed and he was really here.

“Not my problem,” he whispered. Monique, and Archon, had sent him here to do a job. Wherever or whatever “here” was didn’t matter. Clearly this place, real or some hyperadvanced simulation, was something he wasn’t meant to know about, hence the IA status of the mission. He’d failed in that regard, but the goal must still be critically important or he wouldn’t have trusted a total stranger with his anchor phrase. That was a tool he’d kept primed for almost thirteen years and never once used. He had to trust the side of him that he did not know. The version of Peter Caswell that killed for a living. The man who had never screwed up a mission before, at least not like this. Whatever repercussions would come from retaining memories, he could still be a professional.

Caswell turned his eyes away from the moons and darted into the shadows across the square. He worked his way through the abandoned streets, keeping the pool of lights off to his left. After ten minutes or so he began to angle toward the activity those lights represented.
He found a tall building and climbed a dark and rickety old stairwell to the top floor. There he found a few small rooms that had probably been flats, though they had no kitchens. A hotel, perhaps? The place reeked of stagnant water and old vegetation. He crossed to a round-top window frame, partially occluded by grimy broken glass, and looked out upon a grand square bustling with activity.

Caswell pulled an old stool over to the window and sat down to watch. His feet ached now, and his stomach grumbled audibly. A fever raged behind his forehead. He wondered at his own lack of gear. No survival pack, no vossen gun, not even his smartwatch. Just a weird, retro-futuristic tuxedo, a pistol unlike any he’d seen before, and a virtually empty implant.
What the hell have you gotten me into, Monique?

Tents dotted the square, and people milled about in the gaps and small spaces between. Caswell scanned them with a practiced eye. To his surprise, despite the train full of uniformed soldiers he’d just fled, everyone—
everyone
—in the space below his window wore civilian clothes. Hundreds of individuals, milling about a tent city in the middle of a dead city, and not a policeman or private security detail in sight. If those walking about were dressed in rags he might have understood. Some squatter town erected in an old-world city condemned due to some chemical spill, perhaps in Belarus or Moldova, from the quirky architecture. Yet these people were not in rags. They wore clothes like his. Fine suits, however avant-garde in style, on the men. The women mostly wore what he could only think of as the stiff, heavy fabric dresses politicians’ wives had worn a hundred years ago. Nineteen-sixties chic with some local flair.

The more he looked the more he realized the square had been divided neatly into two camps, with a wide aisle between. Here some of the men and women, though dressed like all the others, stood alone and spoke little, their gazes sweeping the crowd, their passive faces betraying nothing. So, policed but not overtly. Interesting.

The woman on the train had said something about a summit.
Now it made sense. He was looking at two factions, gathered perhaps in secret to hear Alice Vale give a speech.

Caswell took a long breath and willed himself to be calm, no easy feat without the aid of his extra gland. He took stock, lining up what little he remembered and what he’d experienced since reversion. He’d been on the
Pawn Takes Bishop,
undercover as an expert on the famously lost
Venturi
. His briefing had confirmed the theory of weapons research going on there. Something so nasty they’d done it far from Earth’s prying eyes. Monique, via the powers that be within Archon, had snuck Caswell onto the black-box recovery mission so that he could try to siphon data before the old wreck dove into the Sun. Mo had also asked him to account for the crew. All there, dead of course, except one: Alice Vale. And there’d been a shuttle missing. Then he’d seen the
Pawn
’s captain accessing the
Venturi
’s computer, and Monique had initiated the IA protocol moments later without allowing for consent.

Recalling this soothed his nerves, like the warmth from a strong drink. He welcomed it, and his little roost here. The post-reversion nausea had gone. He let his mind wander through possibilities. Clearly Alice Vale had survived. Killed the rest of her crew and come here, or perhaps was brought here against her will. She likely had intimate knowledge of the research that had gone on aboard that ship. Hell, she’d probably been one of the masterminds. Maybe she’d run. Maybe she’d taken whatever nasty weapon they’d developed there and brought it here. Perhaps to sell it.

His calm dissolved into cold calculation. What if she was here to unleash the secret weapon she’d been researching? What if she planned to kill all these people, here, tonight? Had that been what was so urgent that he’d given up his mnemonic to some stranger on a train?

It must be that. Or something like it. Archon had probably been hired to prevent the weapon’s use. Caswell scanned the crowd again. He allowed his vision to glaze, letting his mind see the whole scene rather than the individual people. “Where are you, Vale?” he whispered.

She was here to give a speech. A dignitary then. She probably wouldn’t be out here in the open. He scanned the tents and then the buildings that fronted the square, looking for the best one. Then he noticed that not all the buildings were dark. Most of the structures immediately adjacent to the space were lit from within. Perhaps the upper echelon of this gathering were huddled in those places. Some were more ornate than others. Palaces or mansions. Maybe even churches, though clearly this was not a city that subscribed to any religion he knew.

Caswell glanced down at himself. He had a suit like the ones they wore, and a pistol of unknown capacity and capability. His implant was next to useless, unless he could find food, but even that would take a while to fully metabolize and find its way to the reservoirs in his neck. His current position, though it afforded a nice overlook, would not help him. Not without a preprogrammed drone rifle to place, or at the very least a decent hunting rifle. He needed to get down there, among that crowd, and start asking questions.

He needed to do what he always did: drop himself into an unknown environment and blend in.

Peter Caswell walked a jagged perimeter and kept to the shadows, unsure what to make of the event under way in this strange place. Two sides, gathered in a city that appeared to be all but abandoned, about to hear a speech from a woman who disappeared twelve years ago instead of dying with the rest of her crew.

Nothing made sense.

Near the far corner of the square he spied a two-story building that may have once been a restaurant. Urine-yellow lights bobbed around inside as people with handheld lanterns or candles busied themselves within. He could smell food cooking, though the scents were unusual. His stomach growled all the same. He pondered shifting tactics. Steal some food, wait for his implant to extract the needed resources, then find his target. But that would waste precious time.

A door at the back of the building opened abruptly. Caswell stood hunched over just a few meters away as a man emerged. He was taller than Caswell by a good ten centimeters, and heavyset. He held a steaming mug in his right hand. His clothing marked him as one of the “other” faction. Where Caswell’s own outfit looked like a designer’s vision for the “business suit of tomorrow,” this man wore something that, aside from a few stylistic variations, looked right out of a Cold War Kremlin meeting.

Condemned to think in realtime, Caswell worked his way behind the chap. He darted in the last two steps, swooped his left arm under the other man’s, and clapped his hand around the poor sod’s mouth. Caswell raised his elbow, forcing the man’s left arm awkwardly up and away from his body—no chance to fish a pistol from that coat.

The man emitted a surprised grunt and froze in place. The mug, still clutched in his right hand, trailed coils of steam up into the cool night air. Drops of hot liquid splattered on the ground. He did not flinch as Caswell groped around his chest, thighs, the small of the back. And there Caswell found a small, hard lump. He reached in and found a kind of holster attached in the curve of the lower back, angled so that one could, as long as he flipped his coat out of the way, reach behind himself and draw with relative ease. It took Caswell a few seconds to figure out how a small twist was required before the weapon would come free.

The gun was small, and shaped more or less like standard-issue Cold War fare, to match the suit apparently. For an instant Caswell wondered if he’d stumbled onto some kind of large-scale anachronistic role-play event. The gun was real enough, though, and certainly the soldiers on the train had not been pretending.

Caswell nudged the man forward. He guided him a good thirty meters out into the dark ruins of the city and forced him into a musty storefront. Broken grass crunched under their feet. Somewhere within came a rhythmic plopping sound of water on stone. There was another sound, too, a strange high-low chirp vaguely reminiscent of the cicada.

The man stumbled on a bit of rubble. Caswell held him upright and spun him around. He slapped the mug away, the drink spilling out in an arc as the cup fell and clattered on the ground. “This is far enough,” he said. “You’re going to answer some questions for me.”

The man rubbed his freshly uncovered jaw. The room, almost entirely pitch black, made facial expressions impossible to gauge, but Caswell sensed resistance in the man’s stance. Caswell flipped the pistol around in his hand and clubbed the man in the abdomen. Just once, and not hard. The suit crumpled to his knees all the same, coughing.

“Cooperate and that’s the worst you’ll get from me, understood?”

“Mmm,” the man managed.

Flipping the pistol around again, Caswell lowered himself to his knees and pressed the business end up under the man’s chin. “Now. Questions. What is this place? Where are we?”

The man’s brow furrowed. “How could you—”

“Just answer. I don’t have time for any bullshit.”

“What is bull?” the man said.

Caswell slapped the man’s cheek with the edge of the gun barrel. It would leave a nasty bruise. “Where, are, we?” he asked with all the patience he could muster.

“Fineva,” the man said. “The summit.”

“Where’s Fineva? What country? I’m not familiar with it.”