Zero World (43 page)

“Is that why you triggered me again, when I came through?”

Her lips extended in a condescending smile. She blinked, twice. “Came through what, exactly?”

Shit.
He swallowed, buried suddenly under the crushing weight that mere knowledge of the Conduit could spell not only his demise, but Earth’s and Gartien’s as well. Melni’s.

Melni.
Jesus. Another thought, cold and terrible, coursed through him. She represented an intelligence coup for Prime, and he’d brought her right to them. Not only had she lived on that hidden world her whole life, but she’d been deeply integrated into its political and military intrigues. She remembered everything the Warden had said, and she had no implant with which to defend herself against forced interrogation.

“Came through what, Agent?” Monique repeated.

“My…my mental stupor. The pain meds on that boat were twelve years old, Monique, a bit beyond their expiration date.”

A pause followed. Her eyes bored into him, just long enough to raise the hairs on his neck. “Well,” she finally said, breaking eye contact to glance down at her screen, “it looks like the data from the lander has finished downloading.”

He tensed, cursing his own lack of foresight. Of course the damned ship would have recorded everything, and he hadn’t thought to manipulate or, at the very least, erase the evidence.

Monique leaned forward, her eyes scanning information Caswell couldn’t see. “Hmm. Either you were talking to yourself a lot, or…”
Then she tapped something, and his own voice came booming out of the walls of the conference room.

Caswell pushed away from the chair, but in that same instant a pair of hands, strong as vise grips, wrapped around his upper arms and yanked him to the table, thrusting him into the seat.

“Well, well,” Monique said, pausing the recording.

Caswell fought against the guard, but in the lack of gravity he couldn’t get any leverage. A black strip of plastic came across his field of view, pressed against his chest, and tightened. The restraint constricted until it bit into his skin. He could barely breathe. His arms were pinned helplessly to his sides. His legs, though, were free. Caswell tried to kick out against the table, hoping to topple the chair. But of course in a zero-g situation it had been securely fixed in place, and his effort accomplished nothing.

“Enough of that,” Monique snapped. “Shoot him in the foot if he resists further.”

“Yes, Warden,” the guard replied.

Warden.
So these men knew of her true role.

“Search the lander,” she said to the other man. “It seems we have a visitor. Let’s get her into quarantine, hmm?”

“Yes, Warden,” the second guard replied.

“There’s no one else aboard,” Caswell said in desperation. “I put her out the airlock. She was a spy.”

“Forgive me if I don’t believe you,” Monique said. She looked past Caswell then. “You have your orders, Cento.”

“Warden,” the guard said. He left.

Monique leaned back in her chair. Her movements were fluid, utterly comfortable in the lack of gravity. “A rather illuminating bit of audio to hear, that,” she said, smiling slightly at Caswell. “Specifically the use of that word.
Conduit
. How could you have learned that, I wonder? Its proper name. Even Alice Vale wouldn’t have known that.”

Caswell leaned forward and reached up at the same time, to rub his temples. He searched for his implant, ready to flood his brain with anything available to give him some advantage here. But he found only emptiness there.

“You didn’t think I’d leave you that option, did you?” Monique asked. “Give me a little credit.”

“I…I didn’t know you could do that.”

“There are many things you don’t know about that little gland in your neck, Agent. Granted, the device was invented on Earth. Among the most interesting harvests we’ve made. We took it and improved it for our agents, however. Orders of magnitude more sophisticated than the slimy little blobs most Earthlings walk around with. You yourself received a very special model indeed.”

To prove the point, Caswell’s hands lifted from his lap. As if of their own volition, the limbs raised and reached out to the left, one thumb extending. Unable to control himself, he swung across his own body, fists crashing in against his right biceps. The tip of his thumb bore straight into the bullet wound. Fresh, blinding pain flared there. And then utterly vanished. Then returned. Like an on-off switch, he was flung to the limits of agony and then hauled back, panting, crying, as the thumb continued to press against the bandaged entry hole.

His hands finally relaxed. The pain vanished entirely. Artificially suppressed, lurking in the darkness of his mind.

“You should know,” Monique said casually, “that I’d love to hear what happened in your own words, Caswell. But rest assured I’ll have every memory pulled out of your skull in perfect fidelity. Even, by the way, the ones you think you forgot.”

He glared at her, too stunned to say anything.

“That’s right,” she said. “It’s all still there. Everything, since day one. No memories were ever deleted, Agent, they were simply fire-walled.”

Rage erupted within him. All this fucking time. All the murder he’d committed, all the deeds he’d done with the confidence that he would be absolved, mentally and legally, of the consequences. All of it, still inside him.

“Here,” Monique said. “Have this one back. A little taste.”

He felt a slight tingle deep inside his skull. And then, unbidden, Peter Caswell saw the interior of a luxury condominium. The evening skyline of Hong Kong gleamed just outside expansive windows. He stood at the center of a large mattress, white sheets and maroon blankets pooled haphazardly around his feet. And limbs. Naked flesh. A man, a woman, their faces just smears of blood and gore. In his hand he held a kitchen knife. Another body lay not far away. A…
No,
he thought.
God, no.

“Surprised at what you’re capable of?”

“That wasn’t me,” he stammered.

“Of course it was. It was the real you. The man who emerges when he knows he won’t remember. Intoxicated, as usual. Drunk on his lack of accountability.”

“Who were they?” he asked before he could stop himself.

“Dr. Huang was an astrophysicist,” Monique replied, her voice sickeningly even. “He was two weeks or less away from discovering the Conduit. That particular mission was eight years ago.”

The words confirmed what he already feared, yet this did nothing to soften the blow. Monique had recruited him specifically for this role. The implant made him the perfect enforcer. Everything he’d done since joining Archon had been to protect the secret of the Conduit. And if he himself ever caught even the slightest hint of the thing, she’d just revert him and that would be that. He took fucking
pride
in not asking questions, in never seeking to know what had lain within the myriad of gaps throughout his memory. He’d been a tool,
a blunt instrument for her to wield. He did the fucking
work
. Worse, he’d genuinely relished the lack of consequences that gave other, unaugmented agents that perpetual haunted look. He relied utterly on Monique’s summations of his success or failure in the field.

Just a hammer, driving nails.

All the people he must have killed over the years. All the labs he’d probably demolished. Every one of them on the verge of, or perhaps even just beyond, discovery of the Conduit. Now just bottles of beer, facing backward. How fucking juvenile. How willfully ignorant.

Alice Vale had eluded him, though. She must have been one of his first missions. Perhaps
the
first. He’d been sent to kill her on the
Venturi,
and failed. She’d slipped the net, simultaneously dooming humanity and, most likely, Gartien as well.
Gartien
. Alice and the Warden, both dead. Sacrificed everything to try to build a culture that could challenge Prime. Or at least to keep Prime away from the other branches of the Conduit, and the Zero Worlds besides Earth.

“Earth,” Monique said, as if reading his mind.

Could she do that? Christ, what exactly was she capable of? His plan would fail if she could read his mind.
Hurry, Melni
. “What about Earth?”

“We’ve worked so hard to keep the Conduit’s secret from that world. That was only possible because you never retained any knowledge of it yourself. Now, however…the situation is different.”

“No shit. Finally some memories you can’t, what was the word, ‘firewall’?”

“I’ll just have one last mission for you, Peter Caswell. Agent IA6.”

“If you think I’m going to help—”

“Before we start,” Monique said, ignoring him, “perhaps you’d like to know the real you?”

A stinging electric shock rippled outward from the base of his neck. Caswell’s entire body spasmed, vibrating like a struck drum. Thoughts, memories, impressions by the millions fell upon his mind like an avalanche. Too much to bear. So vast in quantity that it all
blurred together, too vague and jumbled to grasp any one thing. In that instant he knew no more than a newborn babe.

Basic instincts.

Fight or flight.

How to breathe.

The true self. Satisfying, in an animalistic sense. But the feeling did not last. The blurred vastness began to crystallize. When the feeling subsided he found more than just a single new memory in his mind.

Peter Caswell remained, but there was another, now. His true self.

His mind drifted through this landscape of memories, him just a passenger. Looking out over a city of golden spires that kissed the clouds, studded with lavish gardens and connected by bridges of astonishing beauty. Far above those clouds, tens of thousands of tiny lights zipped across the darkening sky. Like Saturn’s rings, but all artificial. Cities in orbit.

Another memory beckoned. Trudging through a muddy jungle, wearing a full suit of mechanized body armor. A dozen more such augmented soldiers in a dispersed formation in front of him. They were on Conduit World 26, sent in to wipe out a primitive tribe that had found a crashed probe.

Now a third memory. His first day with the implant. He was just a boy. There were hundreds of others like him, standing in neat lines, practicing a martial art designed to work in the slowed reference frame of an overclocked mind. Behind the instructor, beyond massive windows, he saw the struts of the space station. A city in space, above Prime. Dozens more drifting along beside it.

“What,” Caswell said, struggling for the first time in what he thought of as his life to
not remember,
“is all this?”

“You, of course,” Monique replied. “The real you. An enforcer of Prime. Peter Caswell is just an invented persona. Your cover, here on Earth.”

“No. No, it can’t be true.”

“I think you’ll find it is. Or you would, if you had time. Now, about your final mission.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

She shook her head, patiently. “No need to be a willing participant this time. All I need is for you to die. Thomas, if you please,” she said, with a slight jerk of her chin toward the guard behind Caswell.

He heard the knife unsheathe. Saw the blade—ten centimeters of carbon morphblade—slide across his field of view and then push in toward his neck. Felt the heat of the cauterizing filaments as they crawled along the razor-sharp edge, ready to instantly seal the wound, bleed him out from the inside, nice and clean. A hand came around from the other side and pressed against Caswell’s forehead, driving his skull back into the headrest.

The blade bit. The heating elements began their terrible thrum. He smelled cooking flesh. He wanted to scream.

Monique’s lips curled into a horrible voyeur’s smile.

Melni. Melni! NOW! Now, goddamnit!

The blade slid against his skin, grating on stubble, carving through muscle tissue. A crackling sound followed, along with the sick smell of burning meat.

Unable to stop it, to stop any of it, Caswell shut his eyes hard and prepared himself for the end.

An alarm wailed.

The blade stopped, just millimeters from his jugular.

Monique’s expression shifted to concern. Her eyes darted to the display in front of her. “The lander,” she hissed. “It’s detached and moving away. She’s fleeing!” Then her gaze snapped up and she met Caswell’s eyes. “She’s headed for Earth.”

“She’s doing more than that,” Caswell said, growling out the words, his jaw clenched for the blade still embedded in his neck.

His former handler glared at him a moment until something on the screen pulled her attention away. She studied it, eyes darting back and forth. She could not help but open her mouth into a surprised circle at what she saw there. “You haven’t,” she hissed.

“I have.”

He didn’t know exactly what the screen displayed, but he knew what it meant. In ten minutes or so, the broadcast would reach Earth. It would hit every public source with equal, unstoppable abandon. And it would tell them the secret Prime had worked so hard to keep.

Monique’s fists clenched. “Do you realize what you’ve done?”

“I’ve given them a fighting chance.”

“This could have just been your life,” she said. “Yours and whoever is in that shuttle. Instead you’ve doomed the entire planet.”

Caswell managed a small, satisfied smile. “I’ve given them a chance. If you have any sense at all, you’ll know what a fight you’re in for, bitch.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“What do you want me to do?” the guard named Thomas asked, blade still held firm, the tip still inside Caswell’s neck.

“Finish that,” Monique replied, “then locate Cento, and meet me on the bridge. We have work to do.”

“Yes, War—”

His word ended in a hiss of breath. The man slammed against Caswell’s chair. An almost inaudible grunt escaped his lips. His body tumbled over the headrest in the morbid slow-motion ballet of a corpse in zero-g. He drifted across the table toward Monique, his eyes fixed and glassy, arms and legs splayed and limp.