Zero World (55 page)

Suddenly everything that had happened in the last few days made sense. At least he could see a possible explanation. Novak had sent Nigel to Darwin knowing what happened after wouldn’t matter. Rebecca,
desperate, had sought a new buyer for Nigel’s extraordinary knowledge of Nightcliff’s vault. Whoever had wanted inside before didn’t matter. Outside this garage a great reshuffling was going on, the smart people grabbing what power and resources they could before the dust settled.
Rumble on the pitch.
“Nightcliff Secure Storage,” he said carefully.

Kip nodded. “Nightcliff Secure Storage. My boss needs access, and Neil Platz cannot make the trip down just now.”

“If I help, I’m guessing your boss might not want me walking around afterwards?”

The man across the table gave the slightest of nods.

“And if I refuse, same thing?”

Again a nod. “Those were my orders.”

“What do you do in Nightcliff?” Nigel asked.

“Traffic control. Elevator logistics.”

“Hmm. That’s interesting.”

A hint of surprise flashed across Kip’s face, as if this were the first time anyone found his work interesting. “Is it?”

“Absolutely. Look, this city,” Nigel said, his thoughts only a short distance ahead of his mouth, “is a powder keg. A time bomb. There’s a million people here, not to mention whoever slipped in before the disease hit. I assume some did?”

“Plenty. An avalanche. Please, make your point, I’m due back—”

Nigel held up his hands. “Think about it. Just for a moment. The city is cut off from the world, yes?”

“Yes,” he said carefully. “For now.”

“What will people eat and drink?”

“Whatever they have?”

Nigel shook his head. “That will only last a week, perhaps two.”

Kip pondered that for a moment. “Maybe that’ll be enough.”

Nigel gave a shrug. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. Suppose for a second this scenario will go on indefinitely.”

The other man’s brow furrowed. His eyes darted back and forth.
For a brief instant he looked like a child who’d just been told that maybe, just maybe, there is no Santa Claus.

“Look,” Nigel said. “I’ll open the safe for you, no problem. In exchange, you let me live. Given your role in Nightcliff, you’ll know what’s needed. You’ll hear things. I’m a man who can find things and move them. We’d make a great team.” Nigel could see his little house of cards growing with every lie he spewed, but if it could buy him a few days to sort things out…

The look in Kip’s face, though, was priceless. A kid who’d just learned how to perform a magic trick. He was nodding, his beady little weasel eyes suddenly bright and alive. “So…you use your connections in the underworld—”

Don’t have any. A minor inconvenient detail.

“—and I use my inside position in Nightcliff.”

“Exactly,” Nigel said.

After a few seconds Kip said, “Clever.”

Nigel grinned, and tapped his temple with his index finger. “See? People like us, we need to carve out a new role for ourselves. Make ourselves valuable. So, do we have a deal?”

The weasel of a man extended his hand. “What’s your name, anyway?”

“Pr—” Nigel started to say Proctor, Nigel Proctor. But it struck him that his ties to Novak & Sons might be found somehow. Not to mention his total lack of connections to Darwin’s underworld. Besides, Nigel Proctor was not the name of a crime lord. At that moment the news screen from the bar in Sydney popped into his head.
RUMBLE ON THE PITCH
, the headline had been. “Rumble,” he said.

“Prumble?”

Sure, why not.
“That’s me.”

“First name?”

“No.”

Kip slowly rose to his feet. “Well, then, Mr. Prumble. It’s time I took you to Nightcliff.”

An hour later, after a harrowing journey through the chaos of Darwin’s streets in the back of an armored personnel carrier, Nigel found himself kneeling before the Kastensauer Mark 8 locking mechanism of Nightcliff’s vault door.

The room itself was exactly as he remembered it. White tile floor, bare white walls, white-paneled ceiling lined with rows of white LEDs. Sterile as they come. Meant to instill confidence in those who needed to store their belongings here before making an extended trip to the space stations high above. Virtually every megabillionaire in the world had probably stepped through this gigantic door at some point in the last few years, Neil Platz at their side, as they stowed a one-of-a-kind watch or a sensitive datacube for safekeeping while they made their pilgrimage up to see the remnant of the Builders’ vessel at Anchor.

Echoing footfalls in the long hallway behind coaxed Nigel out of his semi-trance. It sounded like an entire brigade approached, their boots slapping against the marble tiles like hammer blows.

“Look,” he said to Kip, who stood lamely in the corner, “call me Nigel in front of these people, all right? I’d prefer my, uh, reputation, not precede me.”

“Fine,” Kip hissed.

At the door all but one of the pairs of boots stopped. Two people entered.

“Is this him?” a gravelly voice asked.

“Yes, Chief Constable,” Kip stammered. “His name is Nigel.”

Prumble remained facing the lock, pretending to be busy with it. He cast a quick vague glance over his shoulder and saw a gaunt elderly man in a police uniform. The man next to him wore army fatigues, and was powerfully built. Not muscular per se, just…hard. Chiseled, the ladies might say. His jaw, his eyes, everything about him said “fuck you.”

“G’day,” Prumble said. When in Rome, he figured.

“Hello,” Braithwaite said. “This is Lieutenant Blackfield, in charge of ground security.”

“Tough times ahead for you, eh, mate?” Blackfield asked.

“How do you mean?”

“Maintaining that belly in our little tomb of a city is going to be rough, I wager.”

“Hmm,” Prumble said. He’d learned over the years that individuals who sought to goad him with comments about his weight were individuals of microscopically small intellect. On any other day he would have devastated the asshole in the way only words can. “I can be resourceful,” he replied, instead.

“That’s quite enough Mr. Blackfield,” Braithwaite said. “Let’s talk about the vault.”

“Indeed. I assume you’d like to select a new code?”

“Quite,” the old man said. “Mr. Platz has asked me to look after affairs here for now, hence the need.”

“None of my business, really,” Prumble said.

He set about fiddling with the lock, leaning over it to see the digital readout of numbers on a hooded display at the top. He dialed in the installer’s code he’d set up years earlier. The wheel spun smoothly under his hand, resisting slightly as the mechanism within used this rotation to generate the electricity needed to operate. It made it difficult to dial the wheel quickly, but Prumble, being used to this sort of thing, still managed to select the proper six-digit sequence on his first try. The dial itself, which was free of any visible numbering, betrayed nothing. Only the digital readout on top indicated what number he’d selected, and whenever he stopped and started turning in the other direction, the display began at a random number. So even memorizing how far he turned the dial each time would not help someone trying to sleuth out the code.

The mechanism made a soft chirp as the installer’s code was verified. Prumble let out a long breath and dialed through the maintenance options. “Right,” Prumble said. “Use the little screen here and
pick your combination. Four numbers between one and a hundred. Your fingertips will be scanned by the dial itself and combined with the code. Your retina will be scanned by a camera behind the readout panel. It will truly be a code that works only for you.”

“Why even have the code?”

Prumble shrugged. “The code can be discovered. Your fingerprints can be obtained and replicated, as can your retina. All three combined, however…” Again he shrugged, then moved aside as Braithwaite leaned over the dial and began the process. Prumble had been in this very place, three years earlier. An administrator had escorted him then, and he’d been forced to leave the room and wait in a janitor’s closet nearby whenever Neil Platz himself had to come in and do this part of the keying. Neil had demanded this conceit, a perfectly normal request when configuring vaults for the rich and powerful.

After ten seconds or so Braithwaite moved away. “Is that it then?”

“That’s it. The vault is keyed to you.”

“Excellent. Now if you don’t mind…” To Prumble’s surprise, instead of leaving, Braithwaite dialed in his code and opened the vault door. He stepped inside, alone. Seconds passed in total silence before the man emerged again, a datacube in one hand. He snapped his fingers and a guard came forward, holding out an open aluminum case. Braithwaite slipped the cube into a foam support, then took the offered case from the man. “Thank you, everyone. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a climber to catch.”

“Enjoy the ride,” Prumble said amicably.

Braithwaite nodded, then cast a second awkward nod at the silent form of Kip Osmak, who stood in the corner of the room, fidgeting. “Kip will see you safely back to…well, wherever.” Then Braithwaite left, plunging the room into a sudden, uncomfortable silence. Blackfield remained.

“Am I free to go?” Prumble asked the soldier.

Blackfield held up a finger and waited until the sound of Braithwaite’s footfalls faded to nothing. “Not exactly. I’ve got a bit more in mind.”

The man laid out his plan. The real reason Kip had sought out Prumble. A pretty simple ruse, but then the best are, aren’t they? He wanted the lock rekeyed for Nightcliff’s new commander, as was now done, but he also wanted the maintenance access Prumble had just demonstrated for himself, to use “in an emergency.”

“What’s in it for me?” Prumble asked.

“Your continued existence on this Earth,” Blackfield shot back. “I can’t exactly let you leave here knowing you can break into our vault.”

“That’s a good start,” Prumble said. It took a force of will to keep the anxiety from his voice.

“Okay, fine. And a willingness on my part, and my boys, to pretend we don’t know what sort of work you did before the shit went down. Kip here tells me you had quite the operation going.”

“He mentioned that, did he?” Prumble suddenly doubted the wisdom of his chosen persona. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Famous last words if there ever were any.

Blackfield waved the comment away. “The slate’s wiped clean, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Well…I’ll need some special equipment to pull off what you’re asking for,” Prumble said truthfully. Mostly. There was another reason, one he’d only just thought of, but this oily bastard didn’t need to know that.

“Special equipment? What the fuck for?”

“Only the ‘owner’s code,’ which I’ve just configured for Mr. Braithwaite, can be reset without extra gear. To set or reset the maintenance code—what you’re asking for—one needs a special transponder box plugged into a recessed port inside the vault itself.”
And then I can reset the master code for myself. Everybody wins.

“You have this box?”

Prumble thought about answering truthfully, then about lying and saying yes. He settled on the in-between option. “I can acquire one.”

“Do it,” Blackfield said. “Kip, make the arrangements. I want this handled ASAFP.”

Kip squirmed in the corner. “Okay. I mean, yes, sir.”

Blackfield fixed a nasty stare on the thin man, then spun on his heel and walked out, army boots smacking against the white-tiled floor. His soldiers fell in behind him, obedient as dogs.

A silence stretched to fill the space left by the lieutenant. Prumble glanced at Kip, and found the stringy-haired, dour son of a bitch looking directly back.

“You can actually get this thing, right?” Kip asked.

Prumble shrugged. “Depends. Know anyone who can leave the city?”

Distance of Hope

DARWIN, AUSTRALIA

20.APR.2278

She sped down the center of the road on a stolen motorcycle. The tach read 100 kph. The wind in her hair felt like a blast furnace. Mounted on the back of the bike, an ancient portable stereo blared Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.”

Sam muttered with the lyrics, leaning the bike into a quick weave around the loping form of something previously human. She shot the creature from only three meters away, a shotgun blast that shredded through the animal’s filthy clothes.

Behind her a few dozen of the beasts bellowed anger and grief at the action. They surged, unable to comprehend the fact that they’d never quite catch her. The bike’s electric motor churned out its low whine and would continue to do so for days.

The street, bisecting a suburb of Darwin just east of Lyons, was littered with abandoned cars and the bodies of those who fell when the ailment hit. The corpses had shocked her at first. Filled her first with rage and then later a sadness unlike any she’d ever known. So many dead. Everyone she’d ever met.

Now the bodies were just scenery. Not worth thinking about. The formerly human that survived the infection were the only things worth sparing a thought for.

And that thought was
Kill
.

Whatever reservations she’d held back at the lodge about killing
the infected died in East Palmerston. Their numbers were staggering, and Sam, lacking the burden of familiarity with any of them, found her remorse dissolve with each pull of the trigger, each swing of the ax, each windpipe crushed by her own two hands. She’d left a sea of corpses behind, and felt no remorse. She’d done them a favor, as far as she was concerned.

Sam ran the gap between a bus and a smashed pickup. She glanced back in time to see the diseased chasing her funnel through the space. A few of them, at least. Most scrambled over the vehicles. Still others fanned around to either side. Persistent bastards, she had to give them that.

Movement to the right caught her eye. In the gaps between a row of two-story condominiums she saw something that made her almost crash.

Standing on top of a row of abandoned cars were people. Normal people. Fifty or more, just standing there. Some held weapons; rifles, shovels, even cricket bats. And all of them, she realized, were cheering. Cheering for her.

There are plenty of ways you can hurt a man,
Freddy Mercury crooned from the speaker,
and bring him to the ground.

“Preach it, brother,” Sam said, sighting on another diseased. This one was just standing in the middle of the road, laughing maniacally as some of them were prone to do. Sam’s blast took out the former-woman’s legs below the knee. She fell forward, still laughing.

Sam leaned again, trailing a line of sparks with the tip of her shotgun. Three rounds left. The line of people—actual sane human-fucking-beings—was still two hundred meters off, across a wide avenue. Sam twisted the accelerator and crouched over the handlebars as the bike surged forward, caps screaming with release. She shot the gap between two buildings. At the far end a wooden fence had been knocked down, forming a natural ramp. She grinned and plowed toward it.

The bike sailed into the air. She lifted the shotgun over her head and let out a triumphant shout to the line of people watching her.
They roared in appreciation, a sound that filled her with a strange and sudden joy.

Sam saw the corpse too late.

The body lay just beyond the fence, halfway in the road. It had been run over by a car, from the look of it, and she was about to add a motorcycle to the poor thing’s fate.

Her rear tire landed on the dead man’s back and slid out to the left. Sam fought it for an instant and then knew the folly of it. She eased her hands and thighs off the bike and let it fly out from under her, metal screeching on the hot asphalt. Sam hit the ground a split second later, her thigh scraping along the baked hardpan. She slid for a few meters and felt blinding hot pain all along her leg as the road tore through her denim pants, flesh, then muscle. Somehow she managed to turn the slide into a roll. Her shotgun clattered away.

Those along the line to the west emitted a gasp.

The ancient portable radio emitted a few last triumphant notes before shattering as the motorcycle slammed into the burned husk of a taxicab.

Sam could hear the animals now, skittering through the alley and over the wooden slab of fence. Grunting with agony she somehow managed to push herself to a shaky stand. She started to limp toward the line of people. They were across four lanes of road, and none seemed willing to rush to her aid.

“Help me, you pricks!” she shouted, voice cracking from the sting that burned along her leg.

None of them moved. Not a goddamn inch.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she shouted. They were shouting back, but with so many voices she could understand none. Their tone implied only one message:
Run.

She hobbled instead. Sam remembered her pistol then. Taken from a dead policeman outside East Palmerston. She fished it from the holster at her side and aimed behind her. The gun thudded against her palm with each echoing crack of a round fired. The first two creatures over the fallen barricade fell. The third she missed, but
it tripped on its fallen packmates and landed awkwardly. Sam took careful aim and put a round in its skull.

More appeared in the alleyway. Still others began to filter through from other passages to either side.

Sam fired until the pistol had no more bullets to offer. She almost threw it, but thought better of the idea and kept it in her grip instead.

Fifty meters now. She tried to run but couldn’t. The jog she could manage would never work, she realized with growing fear. Not unless—

The gunfire that erupted from the line of onlookers made her heart sing. Especially given the fact that they weren’t shooting at her. “I’m going to make it,” she said aloud. “I’m going to make it.”

She raised her arms above her head as she moved, eyes skyward, grinning in relief. Far above the fray, she spotted an aircraft soaring, its engines adding to the cacophony of the weapons fire.

A long, worrying silence followed first contact with the tower. Skyler set the aircraft to circle, bleeding altitude instead of fuel. With each trip around he caught a glimpse of the Australian coastline. Somewhere to the east, hidden in a haze of rain, Darwin and its space elevator waited.

Finally the radio crackled. “
Dutch Cargo,
you’re clear to approach.”

Skadz tapped Skyler’s shoulder.
“Dutch Cargo?”

“That’s what our transponder broadcasts on the civilian band.”

“Worst name ever, mate. Gotta do something about that.”

“Who cares?” Skyler replied. “They’re letting us land, that’s the important part.” He increased power to the engines, simultaneously ending their downward spiral and leveling off. Then he mumbled acknowledgment to the tower at Nightcliff. “Ten minutes until we’re down.”

Skadz offered a hunk of naan to Skyler and groaned at the refusal
before munching loudly on the crust. He chewed thoughtfully for a time as the ocean below drew nearer.

“Valkyrie,”
Skadz said. “That’s a proper name for an aircraft.
Phoenix. Nighthawk.
Fuckin’…
Angel of Death
.”

“A bit epic for a Dutch transport,” Skyler said.

“Military transport!”

“Still.”

Skadz gave a kick to Skyler’s chair, a most annoying habit. “C’mon, mate. Anything’s an improvement.
Dutch
fucking
Cargo
. Jesus.”

“How about
Melville
?”

The eyebrow, impossibly, rose higher. “What? Are you joking? Have you heard a bloody word I said?”

“It’s a fine name,” Skyler said. “My grandfather’s, after the author—”

“I know who fucking Melville is. People are going to think we’re talking about a damned whale.”

“She does sort of resemble one.” Skyler shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “A winged whale, anyway. It’s a fine name. Professional. Respectable. Besides, billions of people have died. I don’t think we, as persons immune to this horror, should come riding in on the name ‘Angel of Death.’ ”

Skadz teetered on the verge of a profane rant. “Honestly, mate, I can’t tell when you’re joking or serious.”

A blip appeared on the main nav display. Darwin’s liftport, a designated no-fly zone by international agreement, slid onto the screen as a glowing red circle. Skyler nudged the flight stick until the line that marked his predicted path cut right through the center. Warnings about possible use of force lit up the top and bottom of the display, and a high chirp began to quietly ping through the cabin. Skyler ignored it all and locked in the landing option. Seconds later the acknowledgment came back, and the red circle changed to green. He relaxed a bit then. Altitude continued to fall, under a thousand meters now. Whitecaps drifted on the azure ocean beneath him, their
intensity growing where they traced the Australian coastline. From this height the world looked pretty normal.

“Last chance, I guess,” Skadz said.

“Last chance for what?”

“To have the planet Earth to ourselves. We can go anywhere, mate. The world is literally our fucking oyster.”

“We’ve talked about this….”

“I know, I know. I’m just saying. In case you’re having second thoughts.”

“I’m not.”

Skadz squirmed noisily in his seat, something he did constantly when he was actually in it. He’d spent at least half the flight aft in the cargo bay, pacing. Not much of a co-pilot, Skyler thought, though of course the man had never been anything more than a civilian passenger on a commercial plane before last week.

The two of them couldn’t be more different. Skadz, a Jamaican-born Londoner who described what he did for a living as “a little of this, a little of that” had been in Amsterdam enjoying the coffeehouse culture when SUBS hit. Street-smart and resourceful under the mess of dreadlocks that spilled from his head, he was not exactly the type of person Skyler would have befriended under normal circumstances. But company was company and that counted for a lot right now. Not so much, perhaps, once they landed, though Skyler kept that thought to himself.

Ahead, a line began to manifest along the window. A hairline crack, he thought at first, until he moved his head to get a better look and his brain worked out the perspective. The line was very far away. The space elevator. Despite everything he knew about it, proximity to the alien device still caught the breath in his throat.

It went from the horizon up to the limit of Skyler’s view at a ten-degree angle, disorienting in the same way the Leaning Tower in Pisa left visitors off balance. As he stared at the vague, finely drawn line, he could see little blobs along its length. Red lights winked at regular intervals from each.

A minute later the city began to take shape. Skyler saw the densely packed skyscrapers first. Crowded around the base of the cord were gleaming towers of glass, almost all built in the twelve years since the Elevator arrived. Their heights tapered off rapidly from there, giving way to squat warehouses and low-rent apartments, and finally slums. Docu-sensories had been made about the city’s explosion of growth resulting in the appearance of the alien artifact, and though Skyler remembered few details he could almost hear the narrator’s description of stratification that had occurred. The poor and uneducated living at the edges. Next were the skilled workers who filled factories, warehouses, and modest condominiums. Then came the powerful, the wealthy. Corporate headquarters and surprisingly large embassies. Huge hotels and luxury apartments. Finally, the Platz-owned land around the Elevator itself, marked by modest low buildings that created a buffer between the sentinel high-rise towers and the liftport, which marked the exact point where the Elevator connected to the ground.

He could see it now. A single conical tower matching the cord’s off-kilter angle, rising to match the height of the tallest skyscrapers, which surrounded it like a crowd of anxious onlookers. Warning beacons formed orange-red dotted lines along the tower’s length and in regular rings around its girth, before giving way to support structures that obscured the very bottom.