Zero World (42 page)

“Something’s happening,” Caswell said, his voice trailing off even as he spoke.

Outside, the stars were fading away.

For a time of unknown length she felt
something
.

Something like the fog of inebriation.

Something like the dizziness after a head injury.

Something like being yanked from a deep sleep.

Something like dreaming.

Something like death and, also, like birth.

Then the stars returned, but not the stars she knew.

Caswell let out a sharp breath as if waking from a nightmare. He practically attacked the control display in front of him, fingers dancing across the virtual controls, eyes darting from one readout to the next. Sounds of alarm came from all over the cabin. A synthetic voice calmly repeated, “Proximity alert. Proximity alert.”

“Is something wrong?” she asked. “We’ve arrived at the wrong place, haven’t we?”

“No,” he said. He sounded angry. “We made it.”

“So what is the problem?”

“The problem is they’re here, waiting for us.”

Then he gripped the sides of his head, howling in pain, and slumped forward in his chair.

THE LIGHTS
in the cabin winked from sunlight-white to a pulsing red. A shrill sound began to rise and fall, grating on Melni’s ears. Against her better judgment she released the clasp that held four belts together across the center of her chest. She began to drift, and pushed off toward the slumped form of Caswell.

“Warning,” the artificial voice cooed. “Proximity alert. Proximity alert. Proximity alert.”

Entire swaths of the display bank in front of Caswell vanished, replaced by various warnings and red or yellow flashing iconography. She ignored it all and reached out for the back of Caswell’s chair. Unused to the lack of gravity, Melni almost bounced away. She just
managed to hook the headrest with one finger as her body tried to rebound across the space.

“Errmmh,” her companion groaned. Caswell stirred and shook his head. His hands rose to rub at his temples, a gesture she’d come to trust and fear in equal quantity. Only this time, he seemed to simply be trying to ease pain.

“What is going on?” she asked him. “What has happened?”

He gave his skull one last violent shake and tried to focus on the monitors. “My implant.”

“Do you remember me?”

“Yes,” he said. “This is the trigger moment, the reversion marker. I’ll forget whatever happens next, unless we can neutralize it. Which I doubt.”

“Blixxing bastards.”

Caswell turned and met her eyes, deadly serious. “You remember the anchor phrase?”

She nodded.

“Good.” He shifted his focus back to the riot of alerts in front of him. “A ship is here, right on top of us. Earth or Prime, I have no idea. We need a plan, Melni. Right now.”

Melni felt paralyzed. She had no idea of what to expect, of what they were up against. Trapped in a palace swarming with NRD goons she could at least wrap her mind around, but this? What were all these alarms? What object was in such close proximity that all this chaos was warranted? There was no time to ask. Something clanged against the ship. “I…Caswell, I am afraid….”

“It’s okay. Don’t worry. I’ve got an idea,” Caswell said, ending the worst silence Melni had ever known. “It relies entirely on you, though.”

Melni managed a nod, grateful he’d come up with a plan for once. “Tell me what I must do.”

He had no idea if it would work. If Monique had any inkling that he was not alone, the ruse would die before it could even start.

A sound wormed its way into his mind. The uplink, notifying him of an incoming transmission. He drifted back to the command console and hauled himself back into the seat. With a deep breath, Caswell accepted the call.

The face of Monique Pendleton appeared on the screen. “You made it!” she exclaimed, the delight on her face genuine.

“Barely,” he said. He tried to impart exhaustion, weakness, confusion. “I’m not quite sure what happened, Mo. I was on the
Venturi,
then—”

“Let’s talk in person,” she said. “I’m here, right outside.”

The surprise on his face required no acting. He’d never been in the same room with her. To get this chance now, to confront her with what the Warden had apparently told him, was far more appealing than this—

He realized then what he should have noticed immediately: no time lag in the brief conversation. Monique
was
here. She’d come to him. “Yeah. Yeah, okay,” he managed.

Monique must have seen the comprehension dawn across his face. She offered her usual brilliant smile. “Come through,” she said. “I’m to debrief you personally. They’ve really got a lot riding on this mission, Caswell. You scared the hell out of us not coming back on time.”

“I can imagine. Right, see you in a minute,” he said, and killed the link.

He checked the vossen gun. Only one needle left. It would have to count, and he’d have to fire it before she could trigger his implant, something she could probably do with the push of a button. No easy task.

Monique did not greet him outside the airlock. Instead he found himself staring into the impassive faces of two soldiers in full
vacuum-rated combat gear, armed to the teeth. Archon logos were visible on each shoulder and across the breast.

“Search him,” one said.

The other complied, drifting over to Caswell and patting him down. “Clean,” the man said.

“What the hell is this?” Caswell asked.

The voice that replied was Monique’s, cast through speakers embedded in the walls. “Welcome aboard, Agent IA6. Sorry about the welcome committee, but given your reversion state we have to be sure you aren’t compromised.”

One guard fell in behind him. The other led Caswell along a corridor segmented by bare metal bulkheads and lined with snaking bundles of colorful cables tucked into latticework aluminum trays. Exposed pipes and ventilation ducts wormed their way across the walls, floor, and ceiling. All of this was concealed beneath clear hard-plastic panels, bolted at each corner. Under acceleration, whichever way would be “down” would be made semi-opaque, and all of the panels could be removed to allow easy access to the ship’s support systems. Standard Archon layout. He’d seen it a dozen times before.

Some of those clear panels began to glow softly blue. He drifted along the tunnel. His escort took a left at a T junction, then a right, then “up.”
One of Archon’s executive flagships,
Caswell thought. Everything looked clean, and despite the surface veneer of chaos in the way the cables and pipes snaked their way around the walls, a trained eye such as his could recognize the layout had been very carefully planned. The vessel made the
Pawn Takes Bishop
look like some kind of thrown-together garbage scow.

Finally they came to a bulkhead door. The forward guard levered it open, revealing an opulent room within. Decades ago spacecraft had left behind their “only as big as we can fit inside a shuttle bay” size restrictions thanks to the advent of orbital construction yards. Yet even by modern standards this room was enormous, ten meters long and ten wide, with porthole windows along the far wall that
showed a muted view of the Sun. A disk-shaped conference table made of black marble dominated the space, with room for twenty or more to sit around its circumference in high-backed, ergonomically perfect chairs. Lacking gravity the room’s layout seemed rather silly, but Caswell imagined the normal use would be for meetings between corporate heads or visiting dignitaries, and the ship would be placed under thrust for the duration simply to make the occupants feel more comfortable.

Monique Pendleton sat alone in the huge room, directly opposite Caswell, the Sun glinting majestically behind her like an angelic halo. He squinted, raising one arm to block the light, until she made the windows go opaque. Soft yellow light from recessed bulbs along the wall joints replaced the sunlight.

“Where’s our betters?” he asked, the use of “our” a deliberate attempt to paint him and her as a team, joined at the proverbial hip, just as they’d always been. As he spoke he drifted to a seat, then decided sitting at a table in zero-g was stupid. Besides, deliberately strapping himself down when he might need to flee at a moment’s notice was tactically dumb. He floated beside the chair instead, holding it with one hand to keep from drifting away.

“Just us for now,” she replied. With a gesture of her hand the two guards came in, positioning themselves to either side of the now-closed door. “Only a skeleton crew aboard, I’m afraid. We came out to rendezvous with you, guessing you’d be low on supplies. When you didn’t emerge…Tell me, how do you feel?”

“Like shit. It’s not fun reverting like that.”

She frowned in sympathy. “If there had been time I would have re-created your Hyde Park apartment in one of the shuttle bays.”

“That would have been nice.”

“Alas, we arranged this in a hurry.”

Caswell feigned humility. “An expensive journey to pick up one man,” he said. “Not that I’m complaining.”

“Worth it, in this case.” With a smile she added, “The mission, and our coveted Agent IA6. What happened? What do you remember?”

“I was on the
Venturi,
watching the salvage team do their work, when Angelina made the mistake of accessing the station’s database. You triggered IA as a result. Then…I was in the lander, drifting, unable to lock on to the SPS or even the background stars. The whole navigation system, fubarred.”

“What do you make of that?”

He shrugged. “Malfunction, I guess.”

“Did you access the ship’s logs to troubleshoot this?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I’d gone through reversion. First time that’s ever happened to me during a mission, but I remember my training, Mo. I isolated myself from any potential mission artifacts and awaited contact. You know all this, of course.”

“Did you record any imagery or notes while under IA?”

“No.” Then he added, “None that I remember. I didn’t look in the ship’s secure log.”

The person he’d spent more than a decade thinking of as his partner gave a matronly nod. With great care she said, “So, the mission, was it a success?”

He let a little anger slip into his voice. “That question is insulting, Monique. How would I know? I don’t even know what the mission was. The implant did its job. Have the fucking analysts figure it out and send me on holiday.” If he could get her to believe him ignorant of what had happened, indeed of the very existence of Gartien, maybe she would leave it at that. Maybe she’d send away the two soldiers. He needed all of them to lower their guard, to suspect him of nothing, so that he could be ready when Melni was found.

“Relax, IA6. You have your protocol, I have mine. These are standard questions.”

“I…of course.” He almost said “regret,” turned it into a cough. “Apologies. Go on.”

She gathered herself. Tapped a few notes into a terminal on her right. “You left no indicator for yourself?”

“If I logged anything it would be with the key only you can decrypt. I know the protocol, Mo.”

She leaned forward, considering him.

Caswell tried to look at her with fresh eyes, to see her not as the handler he’d become so intertwined with over the years, but as an alien. A so-called Warden of Prime, monitoring Earth to make sure humanity didn’t find the Conduit. And, if Melni’s fantastic story was all true, then Monique—indeed all of this group called “Prime”—had been unaware of Gartien’s existence until the moment that evidence of Alice Vale’s escape had been uncovered on the
Venturi.

He imagined the situation from her perspective. He almost certainly knew more about Gartien—the planet and its relation to this Conduit—than she did. He’d watched video logs from the
Venturi
’s brief visit to the world, a bit of intel Monique had provided him with when he was under IA and something he rediscovered on the return journey while Melni slept. The footage contradicted some of the things Alice Vale had said, most specifically that it had been Caswell who had blown up the
Venturi.
In the video, Alice did that. But such things could be faked, and on closer inspection he thought he saw slight clues in the imagery that confirmed such doctoring. Archon had made Alice out to be the villain, when all along it had really been him.

Monique knew of Gartien’s existence now, thanks to the
Venturi
data, but probably not much more than that. He figured she’d sent him to kill Alice Vale as something of a knee-jerk reaction. Alice had been there for many years by then, but given her goals and how they differed from the way this outfit called Prime operated, Monique had to take the first chance to put an end to Alice’s perceived poisoning of that world. If he succeeded, Prime could treat it like any other world on the Conduit. If he failed, well, they had their ways of dealing with that, too, from what Melni recounted from the Warden’s story.

Caswell cleared his throat, realizing she was waiting for him to say more. “I assume I succeeded, whatever the goal may have been,
but didn’t make it back in time to avoid field reversion. I hope that’s the case, anyway. That’s all I can tell you.”

“But you were aboard the lander when you reverted.”

“Yes.”

Monique steepled her fingers. “Archon appreciates your optimism, Agent Caswell. It’s an unfortunate drawback to our implants that such a situation might arise, and in any other circumstance your involvement would have ended already. This is a special situation, however.”