Zero World (4 page)

Inside he found a passage that bowed in from either side. Airlock doors faced one another at the center of the hourglass-shaped passage, one for each lander. He glanced through the porthole on the
first and saw the white-blue ESA markings on the hull of the craft nestled within. Caswell spun to the opposite window.

The other bay was indeed empty.

“Right then,” he said. He bookmarked the video feed recorded by his helmet and filed the clip for priority upload home. “Confirmed, Monique. One of the landing craft is missing, and it’s too clean to have been ripped away in whatever calamity happened here. Nothing aft of this point save a debris cloud. Advise.”

Had Alice Vale taken the boat? It would have been loaded with some supplies and fuel, though certainly not enough to survive a dozen years in the black. But then she wouldn’t have needed to survive so long. Perhaps she’d flown it home. Sold the weapons research that had gone on here and was safely back on Earth, living under a false ident on an island somewhere. Sitting on a beach in Mexico, perhaps. Biting into a fish taco and watching the glitter of sunlight on jade waves.

More likely she’d simply been yanked out of one of these holes when the station was damaged, and even now her body tumbled through space toward the Sun. As for the missing lander…well, Monique and whoever was feeding her the mission parameters would know what to do about it. He waited.

“Well done, Caswell,”
Monique sent after a lengthy delay.

Her next set of orders was even more surprising than the first, and frustratingly vague.

Preparation took several hours. As instructed, he left all the bodies in the C&C, moving them to one wall and fixing them in place with nylon straps to ensure they’d go down with the ship. “This station is a bloody mess, Monique,” he sent as he went about the grim business. A dozen bodies now rested in the doomed vessel. Six from the original crew, six fresh ones from the
Pawn.
The thirteenth, Alice Vale, probably drifted among the debris cloud that trailed the
Venturi
toward the Sun.

The grim task complete, Caswell shifted focus to the
Venturi
’s black box. He moved the device into the salvage ship. Following Monique’s instructions he gathered all of the food and water he could find on the
Pawn
and transferred it into the
Venturi
’s lone remaining lander. Once done, Caswell boarded the supply-filled landing boat and sealed himself inside. He sent Monique another update, then waited. The cockpit was cramped, every seat save his holding packages of food and water. His own gear and clothing lay safely tucked within one of the storage compartments.

The lander, guided by remote instruction from Earth, detached from the
Venturi
and drifted to the aft docking ring on the
Pawn Takes Bishop.
Caswell watched from his tiny porthole as the
Pawn
then detached itself from the doomed research vessel.

This little ballet of spacecraft continued as the
Pawn,
with Caswell’s lander attached, floated out to a safe distance and then powered up its engines. The thrust pushed him back into his chair and kept him pinned there as the salvage craft served as booster for the comparably small lander, powering the tiny craft onto its new trajectory. After eight hours of one-g burn the
Pawn
unceremoniously let him go. She fell away and, a few minutes later, turned to begin a long spiraling trek to Earth, empty of crew but carrying one tiny, and very valuable, black box.

In a few days Angelina and her salvage team would burn up with the
Venturi
. Weeks later the
Pawn
would arrive back at Earth. Monique had something else in mind for Caswell and his tiny lander, something Archon wanted both of them to forget about in due course.

The operative sat back. He studied the three-dimensional map before him as the lander zipped along. Thanks to the
Pawn
’s boost he now drifted away from the Sun at a touch over 150 kilometers per second. A dotted arc marked his trajectory, stable now after eight hours of growth as the boat had gained velocity. To his surprise this path did not arc and spiral out toward Earth, like the faint blue line that marked the
Pawn,
but instead implied a journey to an empty swath of nothingness directly above the Sun.

“You’re on a course to intercept the missing lander, where you will ascertain the fate of Alice Vale. This is all I can tell you for the moment.”

He sent back, “Why not take the
Pawn
?” and waited twenty minutes for the reply.

“You’ll find out,”
his handler said vaguely.

Caswell ate fried rice from a self-heating package, then napped for a few hours. When he woke another thought occurred to him. When Monique had ordered him to eliminate the
Pawn
’s crew she’d neglected to give him the regulation speech about thought-access orders. “What did you mean, ‘that’s all I can tell you for now’? We’re under IA already, so what the hell’s this about, Mo?”

Twenty minutes later she replied.
“All will become clear in due course, Peter. Trust me. This will be the most interesting mission you’ll ever forget. I guarantee it.”

To pass the time he played the craft’s computer in games of Go, chess, and several modern games that relied on stealth and patience. Between matches he studied Alice Vale’s dossier, but it had so little information he’d memorized it after only a few hours.

On a whim he used her picture to represent the computer opponent in his games, though after a particularly nasty round of Knife and Coin he decided against this. No need to paint her as an adversary. She’d simply survived. Escaped that doomed station only to realize too late that the tiny landing boat had little on board in the way of fuel or supplies. Granted she’d flown silently. A curious detail, but one that could be the result of a simple equipment malfunction.

He studied her face one last time. She’d be forty now if she’d lived. “How far did you get, young lady? How many weeks or months did you last out here?”

The picture did not reply, of course. Caswell sighed. How many hours had passed for her inside a ship just like this before she’d regretted not simply staying with her crew? They would have been
friends. Like family, even. And they’d died a quick death, from the look of it. Preferable, surely, to starving out here in the chilly void. Yet she’d fled, and transmitted not a single word about any of it back home. This fact he found most odd.

With a tap of his finger her image vanished. He played six more rounds of Knife and Coin before dining on a packet of vegetable korma—spicy and surprisingly good. Then he slept.

The faces of those he’d killed haunted his dreams.

He woke eager to forget.

“HEY, MONIQUE,”
he sent as his craft approached the destination marker on its navigation screen. “What’s the bounce timer on this activation, anyway? Just occurred to me you never said, and we’re already flirting with the record.”

Any activation of his implant included an automatic reversion timer. If he were to run, or fall into enemy hands, this ensured there would be at least some hope of clearing his memory of any sensitive information before a potential disclosure—voluntary or otherwise—could occur. In his career he’d never gone more than one week under IA.

Her reply amounted to yet another disquieting detail of this entire affair:
“I haven’t set it yet.”

Caswell shifted uneasily, a frown growing the more he thought about what she’d just said. A trigger without a reversion fail-safe? Was that even possible?

An hour later a blinking red message on the main screen caught his eye. He’d been locked out of manual control.

The short-range nav showed nothing other than a few tiny chunks of debris he’d been tracking for days now. In his six days flying it had barely changed. Zero sign of the other lander, or Alice Vale’s body.

His little craft sped away from the Sun at a blistering clip, his distance to the star now roughly equal to Earth’s, his position exactly perpendicular to her orbital plane.

Without warning the lander turned around to face the Sun. Her engines powered up, filling the cabin with a deep, unsettling hum. The sensation of gravity returned as if some invisible weighted blanket had been laid over him.

“I’ve turned about and am under thrust again, Mo. Hope that is expected. What’s this about? Mission aborted, or…?”

Something had been forgotten, perhaps. Surely it was too late to catch the
Venturi
again before she plummeted into the Sun.

He cursed the delay in Monique’s response for the hundredth time. All he could do was watch his velocity decrease. Caswell didn’t know much about astrodynamics, but this seemed like a horrendous waste of fuel. More disconcerting was the fact that he’d been locked out of manual control. It implied a lack of trust. That made him squirm in his chair. His trust in Monique, and hers in him, had always been absolute. It had to be.

Another thought struck him. “Mo, it’s possible this craft has been compromised. I’m locked out, and will soon be headed back toward the Sun.”

The calm, intelligent lines of Alice Vale’s face came to him, unbidden. Had something more sinister happened to the
Venturi
? Was she still out here, after all this time, and had she now sent him to the same fate as that doomed station? He discarded this idea as sheer paranoia. Certainly the woman could not have survived for so long.
Besides, the radar screen showed emptiness all around him. There was literally nothing out here.

He waited ten long minutes until Monique’s welcome voice filled his ears.

“Relax, Peter. This is expected. Your course was carefully programmed. I’m sorry to trickle information to you like this, but rest assured it will all make sense soon. Very soon. In fact, keep an eye on your velocity relative to the Sun. When it hits zero, I will finally be able to explain.”

Caswell settled back into the cushioned seat and waited, eyes never wavering from the tiny readout that marked his speed in relation to the Sun. What the hell did coming to a dead stop have to do with knowing his orders? He pondered this as the number dwindled, the lander’s meager rockets burning through fuel at an alarming rate. Then, the moment the display reached zero, the thrust stopped. Everything went perfectly silent. He was sitting perfectly motionless above the Sun, exactly perpendicular to Earth’s orbital plane.

“Godspeed, Peter,”
Monique Pendleton said.

“Meaning what?” he said aloud. Then, “Oh. Shit.”

Outside the stars began to vanish.

THE STARS DID NOT
vanish as if snuffed from existence. It was a gradual fade. Even the blazing Sun visibly dimmed. Baffled, Caswell reached to pull his helmet off, thinking visor malfunction. Only he wore no helmet.

The flight instruments began to flop about as all navigational markers faded. The craft switched to the crude secondary option—navigating by recognizable stars. This failed, too. Everything outside simply dwindled like the closing scene of a film.

Fade to black. The end.

His heart lurched. He would lose his link to Earth. To Monique. “What the hell is going on?” he shouted. “Monique! I’ve…everything…”
Of course, shouting was pointless. He was nine light-minutes from any help.

An icon blipped on the communications screen, a new encoded message. He let the tiny camera above the screen scan his retina and waited, swallowing a growing sense of panic.

Monique’s face appeared. He’d come to love her face. For security reasons they’d never met in person, and usually her transmissions were audio only, save for their twice-yearly joint assessment. She seemed to stare right at him. Her intense blue eyes gleamed with the reflection of displays. She’d cut her hair since the last time he’d seen her. The fine, dirty-blond strands were tucked behind her ears and falling away past her shoulders. The style accentuated her full lips and smooth, golden skin.

She smiled her conspiratorial half smile, her eyes slightly downcast as she did so, and then she began to speak in her rich, matter-of-fact way: “The following information is classified, and marked in memory as thought-accessible only. Say ‘begin’ to continue.”

“Begin,” he said.

She took a deep breath, then fixed her gaze on the camera. On him, her agent.

Outside the stars began to return. They were in different places now.