Zero World (16 page)

“Go! I’m right behind you,” he hissed.

She darted up the icy slope in three steps, almost slipping, Caswell right on her heels. He pressed his hand into the small of her back and urged her onward, faster. One arm useless, Melni staggered awkwardly ahead to the NRD cruiser. The vehicle lay fifty feet away, in the middle of an undulating slope covered in snow. To her right she saw a frozen lake surrounded by hills. Patches of dark gray exposed rock jutted from an otherwise perfectly white landscape.

Melni chanced a look back, desperate for additional details to the supposed submersible buried in the ice, beside a lake rather than in it, on a mountain peak that must be a hundred miles or more from the ocean.

What she saw instead flooded her with all-consuming fear.

Three hundred feet upslope a gigantic dirigible drifted along. She’d never seen one so big, though there’d been rumors of the North working on such things. The massive airship was fifty feet off the ground and moved as lazily as a whale. The thrumming noise she heard came from its lifters: four massive circular blurs mounted on boom arms that jutted from a central spine atop the bulbous monstrosity.

Slung on its underbelly was a cabin. Porthole windows dotted the length of it, but more concerning were the doors, three that she could
see, and three more on the far side. Outfitted soldiers stood in each. And below, dangling from black ropes, were more. The first of them reached the ground even as she watched, and immediately unslung rifles from their shoulders.

“Down!” Caswell shouted, and then he was on her, diving, driving her to the snow, as bullets
thwapped
into the ice around them.

She had time only to register the sting of cold on her cheek before he hauled her to her feet and they were running again. He guided her by the collar of her shirt to one side of the stolen cruiser and thrust her behind it as more gunshots rang out. Something whistled over her head. Another round hammered into the fuselage of the little vehicle, cracking the front window.

Caswell flung himself to the ground next to her and immediately set to rummaging about in his oversize white bag. Despite the bullets sizzling through the air around her, and the renewed throb from her wound, she managed to glimpse the word ARCHON printed on the side of that bag. The word had no meaning to her, but stylized as it was she thought it must be a corporation or brand name. She filed that, something to look up later. A clue to his employer, perhaps.

He’d pulled a hard rectangular case from his bag and now leaned over the contents of it. He snapped two objects together and twisted in a third. Then he was up, leaning over the canopy of the cruiser and sighting down the barrel of a very strange-looking rifle. The barrel was unusually thick.

Melni managed to twist around and glance over the tail end of the vehicle as he fired. She expected a booming crack, perhaps followed by one of the eight approaching officers falling dead. Instead the sound produced was a flaring sigh. The projectile that emerged flew on a brilliant yellow flame that left a trail of thick smoke in its wake.

The missile rose above the heads of the oncoming soldiers and lanced straight into the nose of the gigantic airship. She braced herself for an explosion. None came. Instead she saw what looked like rolling lightning dance across the skin of the mechanical floating
whale. At once all four rotors stopped spinning. Without the benefit of their lift, the craft nosed downward and began to fall. Whatever gas filled the huge body, it was not enough alone to support the weight of the thing. The dirigible plummeted faster and faster, the NRD soldiers already on the ground scattering, those still shimmying down the ropes dropping ten, twenty, even thirty feet into the snow just to get away.

The nose hit the ground with a grinding crash. The explosion came a split second later. Yellow-white flame erupted from the nose and then, faster than the eye could track, began to slice through the seams of the fabric hull. A blinding, white-hot light bloomed from the entire doomed ship, followed by a deep
whump
sound that she felt more than heard. The light roiled, transformed into a rising inferno that licked up from every gaping hole in the tattered skin. Fireballs rolled upward until consumed by their own smoke clouds.

A grating crash followed as the cabin slammed into the ice. She could not see it through the flames, but the noise said everything. Nobody could survive such a horrid, fiery impact.

Most of the operatives on the ground had fallen or flung themselves from the explosion. A few still moved.

Suddenly Caswell had her by the arm. He yanked her viciously to the open cruiser door and shoved her into the backseat. Without a word he tossed his large white bag across her legs and slammed the back canopy door shut around her. He took the tiller’s chair and they were off in a violent spray of white, bounding down the mountainside, away from flames and death, away from his vehicle.

Caswell, she realized, was muttering a single nonsensical word, over and over.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck—”

THE CRUISER BOUNCED
and lurched down the long slope.

Between spine-jarring impacts Caswell stole glances over his shoulder at the snowy hillside lit orange by the roiling skeleton of the blimp. “Should’ve told me they had aircraft.”

“I did not…just rumors. Odd shapes floating high above the rolltowns of the Desolation. I have never seen—”

“Forget it,” he said. “Keep quiet for now, will you?”

Caswell drove like an animal spooked and routed from its den. The cruiser leapt off each undulation on the long slope, crashing down an instant later with teeth-rattling force.

After an agonizing minute the slope eased. Wisps of tall grass
poked through the heavy snowpack and scraped along the cruiser’s body like probing, bony fingers.

“I see no one following,” Melni said.

“They don’t need to,” Caswell replied.

“Why?”

“Have a look.”

The tandem two-seater offered a fantastic panorama for the driver, but Melni had to lean and press her face close to his seat to see. She gasped.

He yanked hard on the V-shaped steering control. The cruiser lurched right in a huge spray of snow, and stopped.

At the base of the hill, along an imposing wall of trees, were lights, a dozen at least, evenly spaced at fifty meter intervals.

“Garta, they must have the whole mountain surrounded!”

As they watched, some of the lights burst from the tree line and surged onto the slope. NRD cruisers, spewing huge plumes of white powder from their rear tires.

“Maybe,” he said. “Let’s see how well they play chicken.”

“Chicken?”

“Uh. A bird, about—”

Melni grunted. “I know what a chicken is, just not how to play it.”

“Two opponents on a collision course, knowing the impact means certain death, both expecting the other to swerve.”

“Ah. We call it who-flinch. Everyone calls it who-flinch, actually. Except you,” she said, a bit more terror in her voice with each word as Caswell sped toward the approaching lights.

The gap closed. The cruiser directly ahead suddenly tilled to one side and vanished in a violent spray of snow. Caswell crashed through the icy wall and bounced off the ridge of snow the enemy’s tires had left.

Melni fell back into her seat. She grunted in pain.

“Buckle in!” he shouted, hoping for once that his words made immediate sense.

The cruiser’s motor strained to give the power he sought. Suddenly the vehicle bounced once, then again. Caswell saw the trees approaching and turned slightly to one side, aiming for a gap. The ground smoothed, and glowed dimly. A road, as he’d hoped. “They must have cleared it on the way up,” Caswell said. “Bloody kind of them. Which way do we go?”

“I have no idea where we are.”

Caswell reached into a pocket under his seat. He’d discovered it while looking for a first-aid kit. He pulled the folded paper from it and handed it over his shoulder.

“What is this?”

“You’re navigating.”

She fumbled about with the paper, then turned on an interior lamp. “This is practically useless. NRD patrol guidelines.”

“Find something better, then. Once we lose them, we’ll head to Portstaff, or whatever the hell.”

“Portstav.”

“That.” In his rearview mirrors lights suddenly danced, close. “Shit. Hold on!”

He threw the vehicle into a turn toward a connecting road, tires shrieking with strain. Melni yelped as he applied the handbrake and sent them into a spin. The vehicle went backward off the road and settled into the snow between two trees. Caswell killed the lights, popped the canopy, and stood on his seat.

“What are you doing?” Melni asked.

He ignored her. Instead he focused on the intersection of the road, twenty meters away, and raised his hands. Gripped in his fingers was a vossen gun, one of four he’d left Earth with. One he’d used on the
Venturi
. Another, intended as a spare, just went up in the airship crash. The last was in his bag on Melni’s lap.

The weapon felt good in his hand. The weight of it, the quality of the materials so unlike all the antiques they ran around with here, reminded him of home, of progress. Holding it filled him with a natural confidence his implant could never quite produce with chemicals.
This tiny weapon likely dwarfed anything these people could wield against him. He kept his back to Melni, careful to hide the device from her. Best she not know its power.

He let the first car round the corner and come on. The NRD agent at the tiller veered to his right in a spray of snow.

Via his gland, Caswell gave the weapon its task and let it handle the rest. There was a thin sound like a snake’s hiss. The projectile lanced from the tip of the weapon and across the stretch of road, riding its tiny rocket plume. It hit the enemy cruiser’s window and half the canopy went black from the inside. Caswell fired again toward the backseat, then adjusted himself as the next vehicle came around. He repeated the process with infinite calm, only this cruiser skidded off to the other side, stopping virtually even with the first but on his right.

A third came. Caswell did not let this one get so far. Another pinpoint of light, as thin and brilliant as a shooting star, zinged across the road and vanished into the glass window of the oncoming cruiser, painting it from within. The panicked driver yanked hard, lost control. The vehicle flipped, throwing snow high into the air, and crashed down with a thunderous wrenching of metal, glass, and the jumbled contents within. It came to a rest with its rear wheel still spinning madly, engine wailing like a dying animal.

He shot the fourth car. The fifth. They could not see the calamity before them until they rounded those trees, and by then it was too late. Behind him Melni began to mumble, a mixture of a scream and something like delighted surprise. Caswell’s weapon spat a pinpoint of deadly light each time a cruiser came into view. Zip, puncture, the
whoomp
of obscuring ink, then the inevitable crash. Eight cars met this fate until finally the intersection became so choked with disabled cruisers that the ninth stopped well short, just beyond the vossen’s meager range when fired in gravity and atmosphere.

“Time to go,” Peter Caswell said.

He fell back in his seat and slammed the canopy shut. The car lurched into action, tire spinning in place as he pushed the motors to
their limit too quickly. Then the rear tire found traction, spitting snow and glow-in-the-dark gravel as the full force of acceleration took hold. The speed pressed him back into his seat.
Like a night run on the Nürburgring,
he thought, with juvenile satisfaction. Confidence built within him again. He’d eaten and drank, filled a duffel with extra food packets and water bulbs. He knew on a conscious level that he was more skilled in the art of killing than these relentless “rassies.” All he had to do was find Vale, and use the vossen on her. If he could get close enough.

Then he could go home, and become a rookie again.

THE LITTLE NRD CRUISER
tore down a rural road toward the coast. Snow whipped past like angry insects. Giant sentinel trees pressed in like canyon walls on both sides.

A cold fear had seeped into Melni’s mind. Not the fear of enemies after them, nor even the fear of this man sitting a foot in front of her. No, her fear came from within. The sense that her own soul had cracked in the last two days, and might shatter if this went on. There must be twenty dead in her wake now. A whole squad, plus their cars and, Garta’s light, that gigantic airship.

How many more would this man kill before his cool wrath finally found Alia Valix?

Speeding toward the west coast of Combra, she realized she knew
the answer: quite a lot. She’d have blood up to her own elbows, too. So what? They were of the North, were they not?

The problem, she now realized, was that this insanity had crossed over into act-of-war territory. Snooping around the Think Tank was one thing, easily made to look like industrial espionage. Even assassinating Alia Valix herself could be made to appear a result of the same intra-Northern feuds, at least to the extent of plausible deniability.

None of that would be possible now. This had become a tactical strike, and not even very tactical at that. A lot of well-trained and well-equipped rassies had died up on that mountainside. The dirigible was not the type of thing the North would lose to such an action and stay quiet about.

The idea that what had just transpired might be the spark that ignites a war seemed suddenly very real to her.

“Caswell,” she said.

“How’s the wound?”

“Manageable.”

“Look. I’m sorry about what happened back there. Couldn’t be helped.”

“About the…about that ‘landing craft’ you took me to.”

He leaned them hard into a tight turn and then the road leveled out, cutting a narrow gouge through trees for miles ahead. In the far distance she could see the waters of the Endless Sea glimmering softly in the blue-gray light of two full moons. “It’s best you forget what you saw there. I warned you to keep the blindfold on.”

“I have to ask you a question.”

“I’d prefer you didn’t,” he said.

Melni thrust the outdated map aside, heat rising in her cheeks. “This is not much of a partnership if you can ask me all manner of strange questions but I cannot ask you one simple thing.”

“Our partnership ends at Portstav, remember?” he rasped.

She saw his fingers clamp down on the tiller and then flex.

“I’ve gathered my supplies,” he added. “You have my thanks—gratitude, whatever—for helping me get there, a debt I believe I’ve
repaid. As for the rest of our deal, I’ll drop you at this town on the coast as you requested and continue with my mission.”

“Fine. I just want to know one thing—”

“No,” he said, barely contained anger behind the single word. “I cannot tell you anything about me, or what you think you saw back there.”

“Hmm,” she said, looking down. “All right then. Can you tell me anything about the contents of this bag on my lap?”

His head jerked to try to see.

Melni pulled a random item out. A square of some kind of flexible foil with a spongy center and a little capped tube extending from the top. With some effort she sounded out the words printed across it. “Readi-Eat Meal Pack. Pork in Curry Rice with Carrots. I wonder what those things are.”

“Put that away.”

Melni did so. And then grabbed another item. A cylindrical tube. “Vac…Vac-um…Vacuum-Optimized Smart Needler.”

“Knock it off! If you think I’m joking—”

“Property of Archon Corporation. Another strange word, Archon.”

He swerved hard toward the side of the road, rear tire shifting under sudden heavy braking.

“Ibuproxin, five hundred em-gee? Am I saying that correctly? Plus—”

“ENOUGH!”

The car had stopped. He hauled the canopy open and snatched the tiny pill bottle from her hand. Then he grabbed the bag itself and, after a brief battle with her grip, pulled it from her lap. He almost fell backward into the snow when it came free.

Melni watched him carefully even as she tucked the “Smart Needler” tube under her right thigh.

“Get out,” he said.

“What?”

“You heard. Out. Now. I’m leaving you here. I should have left you in that pool at Alice’s house. At every opportunity you insist on ignoring the ground rules I laid out, and if this—”

“Alice?”

He stammered to a stop.

“You called her Alice.”

“Alia,” he corrected himself. “Slip of the tongue. Now, out. I mean it.”

Melni thought of another approach. “Do you read much history, Caswell?”

“Come on, I’m losing patience.”

“Because those who don’t study history…”

He sighed. “…are doomed to repeat it. I know, I know. Enough stalling.”

“Familiar with that phrase, are you?”

He rolled his eyes as if she were some petulant child, and started to reach for her. Then he slowed, and stopped. His gaze was on her now, cold as the frigid air in which he stood.

Melni looked straight at him. “Alia used that phrase in my interview with her. I had never heard it before. I thought it so clever I asked if I could quote her, and she agreed. She seemed rather proud of it, actually.”

He backed off a half step, his gaze now searching the space between them.

“So,” Melni went on, “either you were listening, which is possible. But I don’t think so. Or, you know this phrase as if it were absolutely common knowledge. Like the game of chicken, despite the fact that I, and everyone else I’ve ever met, calls it who-flinch.”

The steam went out of him then. His gaze fell to the side of the car and then the snow at his feet. His shoulders slumped inward.

“What was that room you took me to, Caswell? No submersible gets buried in snow halfway up a mountain.”

Silence wedged between them and grew.

“That,” he said finally, “was my ride home.”

She thought he would open up then, but the silence stretched on. He just drove. The little cruiser continued to wind toward the coast.
Dark waters shimmering with diamond reflections of the moons, Gisla and Gilan.

Twice he killed their lights and pulled off the road. She’d start to ask why and then hear what he’d heard well before her: vehicles. Through the gaps between dark trees they watched caravans of vehicles—NRD, Fire Suppression, and Medical Emergency—thunder inland toward the site of the airship crash. Caswell would sit and watch until their flashing blue and white lights could no longer be seen in the distance, then he’d creep their vehicle back out onto the road and continue on.

Ten miles from the coast the cruiser sputtered and began to drift silently to a stop. She helped him push it off the road and behind a thick bramble. He found an emergency spade in one of the side compartments and used it to shovel snow atop the spent vehicle.

“According to the map there is a village about two miles away,” she said. “We can borrow another cruiser there.”

“Will they be watching for us?”

“I would be,” she said. “But I do not see a better option.”

“How’s your arm?” he asked.

Melni tried for a casual shrug, but her expression must have said otherwise. Caswell immediately fished through his bag and handed her a pair of tiny white lozenges. Her forearm throbbed. A two-mile hike without some of his truly impressive medications was out of the question. She swallowed them without further hesitation.

“Did Valix invent these pills?” she asked.

“I’m sure she’d claim as much.”

They walked along the softly glowing packgravel road, her in front of him. The sky had cleared and both moons hovered a finger’s width apart at the zenith, full and bright. After a quarter mile she glanced back to ask him if he wanted to stop for water, only to find him staring up at the sky with unconcealed wonder written across his face. She held on to her question and turned her focus back to the road ahead.

“I’ve been thinking,” Caswell said suddenly.

“Oh?”

“Deciding how much I can tell you.”

“If you are worried about me divulging secrets—”

“It’s not that,” he said, a note of weariness in his voice. “Not exactly, anyway. It’s hard enough that I can’t directly reveal to you the specifics of my mission. It goes deeper than that, though. Because even sharing with you, generally, the truth about our mutual target could have dire consequences.”

Melni grinned, glad he couldn’t see her face. “So you do know where she is from.”

He didn’t say no.

“And,” Melni probed, “you know the truth behind her genius? All the inventions?”

“She’s smart, no question, but her genius is only in the manner, the precise sequence, in which she’s doled them out. She possesses a collection of knowledge that is…” He hesitated. “Very advanced, Melni.”

“Wait,” Melni said. “So are you saying she found some writings on all these topics and she pretends it is all the product of her own mind?”

“That’s not far from the truth.”

“And,” Melni went on, her mind racing from conclusion to conclusion faster than she could form the words, “you possess this knowledge, too? You both found it—”

“No,” Caswell said sharply. Then, with patience, “No. I’m vaguely familiar with some of it. And no, she did not find it.”

“So what then? She stole it?”

Silence.

“From where?”

“Can’t say. Before you object, hear me out. To even answer you in the most general of terms could have repercussions.”

Melni voiced a theory she’d come to before, but filed as insanity. “You came here from the future, did you?”

“Time travel is impossible, Melni,” Caswell said.

Not a lie. Not exactly. But something in his tone told her she was close. She said it again. “You are from the future.”

He smirked. “In a way I suppose I am.”

The village was barely more than a cluster of tall dormitories that looked a hundred years old, huddled around a single mealhouse and central square. There were dozens like it all over the North, built to house seasonal workers who once flocked to this part of Combra to work the mills and fisheries. As the world continued to cool, such work pushed farther and farther south, and then across the ocean, where the labor came cheaper. Melni doubted this village would be at half capacity even at the peak of season. Now, in the frigid month, it was possible the only people living here were those who maintained the place. Of the hundreds of windows that soared above them along the faces of the eight buildings, only three were lit. The two intersecting streets were empty, piled with snow. She saw signs of foot traffic on them, to and from the shuttered mealhouse. Given the dinner hour, she had expected nothing else, but still she sat among the trees with Caswell for a good five minutes before approaching. If the NRD was watching this place they’d concealed themselves expertly. Melni thought it more likely they just hadn’t fully pieced together what had happened on the mountain yet, and were probably too busy marveling at the remains of Caswell’s “ride” than investigating the whereabouts of the two fugitives who’d been inside.

Of six public cruiser sheds on the edge of town, only one had a vehicle inside. Melni set to work coaxing the old thing to life. However long ago manufactured, the cruiser had been well maintained and recently prepped for travel, judging by the air tubes still dangling from the tanks on its haunches. Compared to the NRD’s Valix-powered electric model, this one was pokey and loud, running on a compressed-air engine that rattled like a shallow drum.

She took the vee-tiller now and guided the creaky old thing around the perimeter road and then turned sharp left on the south
exit road. Between the faintly glowing surface of the road and the bright dual-moonlit sky she left the lamps off. The aging cruiser squeaked and groaned on every little bump. Her eyes tracked the air gauge carefully. Not much there, but enough to reach Portstav.

The coastal town finally came into view eight minutes later. A sprawling clump of lights and smoking chimneys huddled around a rocky bay where perhaps two dozen ships of varying size were moored. In its heyday Portstav would have been home to perhaps fifty thousand grim-faced frontier folk, but now fewer than five thousand remained. The structures farthest from the center were almost all shuttered and pitch black.