Zero World (14 page)

She ducked beside the doorframe and chanced a glance in. A chin-up lay on the ground in front of Caswell, scrambling backward in abject surprise. Another, an NRD officer she thought, stood in her kitchen, pistol clasped between two hands, vapor curling from the barrel.

Caswell dove on the one that had fallen, simultaneously avoiding the aim of the shooter in the room beyond. The man in the kitchen held fire, and retrained his weapon—on her. She ducked to her left as another whipcrack sound shattered the air. Shards of wood exploded from the doorframe just inches from her right ear. The impact shifted something within her. She had to act. She’d die here if she didn’t. Caswell, too. Melni swung herself around the door. She grabbed a heavy book from the table beside the door and flung it toward the kitchen. The volume spread open like a bird taking flight, pages flapping. The gun went off again, right through the thick mess of flying
paper, throwing a plume of scraps outward like tossed snow. The book sailed on and hit the agent square in the face with more force than she’d dared hope. The man twisted as the impact came, slipped on the tile floor, and went down behind the serving counter.

Caswell and the chin-up grappled on the floor, fighting for another drawn pistol. Melni leapt over them and rounded the corner of the serving counter at a half crouch. She had to fight back her own mind, dash away her own screaming conscience that urged caution. Melni had trained in close-quarters combat; all Riverswidth agents did. But that had been almost two years ago, and she’d never once needed to use it. Some part of her suddenly understood the constant repetition of those sessions. Her actions happened before she could think. Indeed her own thoughts were contrary to what her body did. She came in fists raised just as the NRD agent managed to recover. He swung his weapon up. Melni slapped it aside with the palm of one hand as he fired. Compressed air exploded from the barrel, tore at the side of her cheek. The violent noise drowned her sense of hearing into a mess of muffled tones under a high-pitched ringing. She jabbed with her other hand, extended knuckles into his neck, hard. Her aim was off, hit the collarbone as the man’s gun clattered across the countertop and over the other side. Now they were equal. He squared on her, fists up and ready. In his eyes she saw nothing but calm calculation, and fear coursed through her. An NRD agent, one of their elite. Against her, an analyst. The girl who could speculate.

He struck, his punch grazing her forehead as she leapt back. The kitchen was tiny, her back now inches from the wall. He advanced, his mouth curling into a snarl. Another punch, she blocked with her forearm. Pain exploded from wrist to elbow. Somehow she countered with a jab toward his abdomen. He’d expected it, took it with clenched teeth and a groan, then retaliated. A fierce swing, meaty left fist. Melni ducked under it, a mistake. His right was the real blow, and it came in a blur and crashed brutally against her jaw. Stars swam before her eyes. Her knees buckled. Melni tried to get her fists up in desperate defense for what was to come next.

A hiss-crack sound filled the air, loud despite her already stinging ears. The NRD agent’s head snapped to the right, and suddenly the cabinet beside him was dotted with blood and clumps of brain matter. The man collapsed where he stood, his eyes on her the whole way down.

She glanced left, stupefied. Caswell stood there, holding the agent’s own pistol in one hand. His other hand was covered in blood, and behind him the chin-up lay motionless on the floor, facedown.

“Whatever you needed to get here, you’d better do it fast,” he said.

Melni blinked away her shock and the blinding pain in her jaw. “Watch…watch the door,” she managed.

He nodded and moved out into the hallway, glanced in both directions, then came back inside and pushed the door closed. Melni left him there and went to the darkroom.

There was paper everywhere, scattered like the red leaves of return. Bottles of solvent lay in their own spilled contents on the floor. Her camera on the table had been smashed to pieces. The finality of what she’d just been through numbed the sight of all this. Her mission was over, there could be no doubt about that now. Her life here, everything she worked for, was gone. Worse, it would set back the South’s efforts to unravel Alia Valix’s genius for a year or more.

What now? Alone she would have no doubts about the next step: Go south, as quickly as possible. Contact no one, do not look back. Just…flee.

But the stranger changed everything. An assassin. A damned good one by all appearances, despite his strange mannerisms and…well, strange everything. She’d been ordered to bring him in. And he wanted her to take him farther north, away from the Desolation and the safety that lay beyond.

Melni opened the air duct under the table. It showed no signs of being tampered with. Still, she held her breath as she reached inside, so far her shoulder pressed painfully against the opening in the wall. She gasped with relief when her fingers brushed the small piece of
twine. Some gentle coaxing and she had it. Seconds later the bundle of fabric to which the twine was attached came sliding out. She took the whole thing under her arm and left the room.

Caswell had dragged both bodies behind the kitchen counter. He offered her one of their guns, but she declined. “I have my own in here,” she said, patting the bundle.

He nodded at that and stuffed the extra weapon in the belt of his pants. She saw the glint of metal inside his coat, and a wooden handle. One of her carving knives, concealed with a makeshift harness of string from one of the cabinets. Resourceful, this one.

“We really must leave now,” she said.

“Right. Lead on.” His voice bore the hint of pain.

Melni glanced at him. Again she saw the pale skin, the sweat on the brow, and the colorless lips. He shivered despite the warmth in the room. “Do you become ill after every fight?” she asked.

He grunted a laugh at that. “Another mental trick,” he said, as if that explained everything.

She wanted to ask more, but there were sirens outside. Distant but growing.

ON THE TRAIN
—what they called a “roller” here—Caswell slept. The urge to use his implant for a chemically augmented rest came on strong the moment they’d reached their cabin, but he’d fought down the craving. That form of sleep, where portions of the brain were shut down in careful sequence, and then brought back up so that the next could rest, was useful in a pinch but no substitute for the real thing. Besides, he was a wreck, and he knew it. No food or drink in five days, and not for lack of trying. Everything he tried his body rejected instantly, even boiled water. This had left his chemical reserves low. Even if they weren’t, though, he didn’t think he could handle another boost from the engineered organ on such an empty
stomach. His reactions had grown steadily worse. How Alice Vale had survived all this time he had no idea.

He slept fitfully, distracted by a litany of fears. Would they come for him and the girl? What if he talked in his sleep, said things that would clue Melni into his true origin? And beyond that, the reversion moment loomed. His watch ticked slowly, irrevocably toward it. He had to get this business over with and be gone from this place, preferably well before all memory of Gartien left him.

A porter brought a wheeled tray in. Complimentaries, Melni had called them. Hot cham and cold pastries—and a demand to see the two passengers’ tickets. The outfit Melni had picked for him had worked well, much better than the farmer’s garb he’d stolen the day after landing. No one paid him much notice, and the ingrained social norm here seemed to be an assumption that the woman of any pair was the authority. Well, Caswell had no problem with that at all. He lay across one of the two bench seats, his back to the cabin, and listened as Melni provided their papers and accepted the snacks with a simple “Gratitude.”

“Boarded where?” the porter asked.

“Mealhouse Row,” Melni said. Then added, “In Midstav.”

The porter clipped each ticket. Caswell listened as he handed the slips of paper back without further query, then proceeded to set the snack tray beside the window.

When the door slid shut Caswell rolled onto his back and sat up. She handed him a cup but he waved it off.

“Thanks—Gratitude, but no. My stomach,” he said.

Melni nodded, concern plain on her face. How he must look. How confused she must be at the highs and lows his body moved through.

Outside, trees whipped by in rapid flashes of dark green and brown. Beyond, rolling plains hidden under white snow moved steadily from north to south as the train hummed along. Midday sunlight glinted off the blanket of ice on the ground.

She sipped in silence. He watched the scenery blur across the window.

“This is going to be a boring partnership if you will not speak,” she said.

Caswell grinned. He glanced at her, saw the curls of steam rising from her drink. He offered a smile and hoped that would be enough.

But she tried again. “Can you tell me anything about yourself? This mental block only relates to your objective, yes?”

Caswell considered that for a moment. He settled back into his seat, rested his head against the suedelike red cushion. “Pretend for a moment that I’ve been away for a long time,” he said. “Or…no, better yet, pretend I’m a child. A small child just learning of the world beyond my own isolated home.”

“I…I shall try.”

“Educate me.”

She raised an eyebrow, confused.

He tried again. “Teach me. Start with this rift between North and South.”

Melni leaned back in her seat and tucked her feet up underneath her legs. She cupped the mug in both hands and smiled warily at him. “A history lesson,” she said.

“Yes. I’m someone who knows a lot about certain things, and virtually nothing about others. Strange, but true.”

“Not so strange,” she said.

“Oh?”

“I noted the same peculiar feature in Alia Valix, just before she tried to have me arrested for spying. So you are not the only one with such an upbringing. Odd that she seemed to know you, given that.”

Caswell didn’t like this line of thinking one bit. He said, “Just…table that for now, okay? I’m a child. Explain the world to me.”

Melni considered this for a long minute. Evidently she didn’t like the shift in focus back to her, but finally her face softened. “All right, then. We have an hour before we reach Hillstav. Where to begin…”

So she talked, and he hung on every word like, well, exactly like a curious child.

Melni started two centuries ago, with the single defining moment in this world’s history: the Desolation. Before then Gartien had been made up of fifty or so nations, with dozens of small alliances and petty rivalries that produced only the occasional war. Then came the rocks from the sky. A string of fireballs that lasted a whole day. They rained down. Some as small as pebbles, some as big as cities, and as the planet turned they drew a wavy line of craters, annihilating everything they fell upon.

The Desolation, this area came to be known. An uninhabitable, charred wasteland strewn with smashed cities and millions of dead, never to be properly “returned,” whatever that meant.

The meteor strikes neatly divided Gartien in two halves, North and South, and filled the atmosphere with ejecta from the impact events. The planet cooled, the coastlines changed. Survival became everyone’s focus as the cold years went on and on. Nations began to band together out of mutual need, naturally separated by the swath of destruction. At first the people of Gartien had banded together, as best they could, in a spirit of overcoming this catastrophe. Somehow this degraded into suspicion and jealousy, even skirmishes at sea.

An equilibrium eventually came to exist. The nations of the North were allied and working together. The South was much the same. And between them was a vast disputed no-man’s-land. Open hostilities were hampered by this gigantic divide, and anyway both sides were happy to focus on simple survival. It was as if Gartien had become two worlds. Interaction became the occasional diplomatic meeting surrounded by the Quiet War. Spying. Assassination. Secret plots. Both sides not wanting to invest in a vast military, given all their other worries, while simultaneously worrying the other would do just that.

Caswell marveled at both the similarities to Earth’s own Cold War, and the differences. More than that, he began to see the potential ramifications of Alice Vale’s influence here. Near as he could tell
this world had no weapons capable of mass destruction. Nature had warned them away from such things with this Desolation event. Now Alice Vale, under the guise of Alia Valix the genius inventor, had embarked upon an exceedingly clever and careful plan to unleash inventions on this world that all seemed geared toward one eventual conclusion, ending the hostilities here in the same way the United States had brought World War II to its sudden, shocking finale.

“We had a balance so long as neither side gained some advantage,” she said. “And I think, in a way, this balance is preferable to true war. Armies are expensive. Death is expensive, and we had had enough of death. This was better. Is better.”

“But not as good as peace.”

She shrugged. “There have been a few attempts at such, but they always crumble. The history of mistrust is too deep.”

Caswell nodded, as thoughts of Berlin and Moscow, the Pentagon and Vauxhall Cross floated through his mind.

“You know all this,” she said.

Caswell glanced up at her. He shook his head. “I know a similar…version, you might say. A story.”

“How did it end? The story.”

He grimaced. “One side had a better system than the other. Once this became obvious, the other side faced a choice: ditch their own system, or destroy the other.”

“What did they choose?”

“They chose to change.”

“And this worked?”

He shook his head. “It tore them apart from the inside.”

She fell silent then. Her gaze shifted slowly to the landscape that smeared across their window. Ice began to form in the corners of the glass, and soon the view became murky as a heavy snow fell. Caswell decided to let her ponder what he’d said. He let the sway of the train lull him, along with the low hum of its long rows of rubber wheels against the half-pipe track in which it moved. He tried to take his mind off the smell of the food and “cham.” It had tasted wonderful
when he’d tried it in that prop room, until it had wreaked vengeance on his alien gut.

“Tell me what happened in Hillstav,” she said after a time. “We left a lot of problems behind us. I should know about the ones ahead.”

“Fair enough,” Caswell replied. “I came upon a house. It was empty and I needed supplies, so I broke in. Used some, uh, lockright tools I’d stolen earlier. Then some men arrived, apparently searching for the person who’d robbed the lockright. They surprised me and I killed them. No choice in the matter.”

“And then?”

“I stole one of their…um…the three-wheeled thing….”

“A cruiser,” she said.

“Cruiser, yes. I stole one and fled.”

“But before that…”

He shrugged.

Melni squinted at him. “Four bodies were dragged away from the cottage and buried in a ditch.”

“Ah, yeah. I didn’t want anyone to find them.”

“A ditch beside a lake,” she said.

“That’s right.”

“You couldn’t return them to the water?”

“Huh?”

“It was right there. They may have been your enemies but to deny a proper return, that—forgive my saying, but that is unnecessarily cruel. No one would have found them either way, yet you chose to keep them from—”

Caswell understood now the gravity of the mistake he’d made when he’d buried those four police officers the day after he’d landed. In truth he’d wanted to dump the bodies in the lake and leave, but something had stopped him: the guilt of taking innocent lives on a world he had no business being on. Killing them was not like killing the crew of the
Pawn.
These were utterly innocent, being in his way their only crime. He’d wanted to make things right, at least a little. Honor them somehow,
not leave them in the pools of blood where they’d fallen. Instead, like a bumbling idiot abroad, he’d made mockery of their most sacred ritual. “I didn’t know the custom. Forgive me.”

“How could you not know that?”

Caswell fought to keep his face blank.

“Help me resolve,” she tried. “How could you know so little? You and Alia, both. And yet for all that she knew
you
! There is a connection here, I know there is, and if you want my help—”

“The roller is slowing.”

“What?”

Brakes squealed from beneath the car. Caswell leapt to the window and glanced in both directions.

“There are no platforms for miles,” she said.

“Yeah, well, we’re stopping.”

“Wait here,” she said. “I will go look.”

He nodded and tried to watch through the frosty glass.

Seconds later he saw two uniformed soldiers moving along the tree line. They hunkered down about halfway along the train’s length, almost parallel to the cabin Melni had picked. One raised a spyglass or binoculars to his face and began to scan the windows. Caswell ducked back and swore. This was no stop for an obstacle on the track.

Behind the roller, a cruiser streaked across the field of snow, white spray kicking high from the single rear tire. It stopped twenty feet from the tail car. The two occupants hopped out. They high-stepped through snow that came up to their knees. One carried a rifle. The other gripped a folder between two gloved hands.

“Curd,” Melni said, reentering the room. “NRD. They are searching the cars, starting at the back. Two of them inside already.”

He heard the panic in her voice. “What can we do?”

She looked at the floor, jaw moving soundlessly, at a loss, a deer in headlights. For all her planning, she’d not anticipated this.

He grabbed her by the arm. “The situation, Melni. Describe it for me. You can do that, can’t you?”

“Speculate,” she whispered, monotone.

“Yes. Please!”

In an almost robotic voice she rattled off the details. “They have surrounded us, watching all the doors. No cover for a hundred feet in any direction.”