Zero World (6 page)

A timer appeared on-screen below Monique’s face and held steady at fourteen days, zero hours, zero minutes, zero seconds.

He spent the days that followed studying video logs recorded aboard the station. As a nonscientist it helped him immensely to hear their discussions, their debates and hypotheses. Before the betrayal that would kill them, the crew of the
Venturi
had done a remarkable job during their brief visit to the world. At the time they had no idea if they would ever return home to share their discovery, making their efforts all the more impressive.

No matter. Whatever the tipping point had been, it had happened and Alice had embarked on this scheme.

She’d rigged a bomb. And a clever one at that. Killed the rest of her crew and departed with that data trove and, presumably, supplies to the planet below.

On a whim he checked for Lander One’s transponder again. The scan showed negative. Of course nothing would come up. In his professional estimation Alice Vale was simply too smart for a mistake like that.

He’d have to track her down the old-fashioned way: detective work, spycraft.

“With 1950s technology.” He collapsed back in his chair, overwhelmed as the enormity of the task ahead of him crashed down like an avalanche.

He must step onto this world with nothing but the clothing on his back, and even that he’d have to swap for local garments as quickly as possible. He didn’t know their customs or, hell, know the first damn thing about the life-forms he would meet. Yet somehow in two weeks he needed to acclimate, find his target, perform the task, and leave? Monique had been right, he was the perfect man for the job.
Every one of his adventure holidays had been in preparation for this mission. Only this was no holiday. A life would be taken. An entire world’s course of history was potentially at stake.

Peter Caswell decided to follow the spirit of Monique’s orders, if not the letter. A little extra risk of contaminating this place he could stomach if it meant his chances of success increased.

No matter what, he’d have to return to his ship before his implant released the biochemical agent in his brain. Every neuron, every synapse and dendrite in his brain that had changed since the moment his implant had first flooded them with the marker, would suddenly and irrevocably rewire itself back to that moment. Mentally he would find himself in that weightless instant staring at Angelina Monroe, only to emerge who knows where with a song lyric on his tongue.

The word is all of us…

The implant had other uses, though. And being hidden within his body it was perhaps the one technological marvel he could take with the confidence it would remain hidden.

Caswell closed his eyes and massaged his temples. He pressed his fingers hard into the skin there, savoring the slight pain that would signal his implant. A smartwatch he wore usually handled such tasks, regulating him automatically in subtle ways. This manual approach, by pressing the temples and thinking deliberate thoughts, he’d not done in years. He needed to be sure it still worked. The artificial gland in his neck released chemicals per his desire, calming him, sharpening his focus. He’d regret it soon, but for now he needed the edge. He had to get this right.

He turned to selecting a landing site.

It seemed likely that Alice would seek familiar ground. He studied her birthplace in the mountains of Colorado, but that area lay within the path of destruction. In one of the recordings Caswell had studied she’d mentioned a village in France called Olargues, some sort of childhood vacation spot, but it lay too in the wasteland of craters. He glanced at Alice’s file on another screen. According to the dossier she’d lived the last few years of her time on Earth near
the ESA’s British headquarters in Lancaster, England. He scrolled there.

The culture on this world favored densely packed towns and cities, leaving much of the landscape wilderness, including the outskirts of Lancaster where Alice’s flat on Earth had been. In the end he picked a clearing near a lake roughly eighty kilometers from there. High ground near plenty of fresh water, and no roads anywhere nearby. Curiously, the water levels of just about every lake and river he saw were lower than Earth’s. The coastlines, too.

There seemed nothing else to do. His finger hovered over the landing sequence icon, though, as he tried to think of anything else he might have forgotten. He was no good at this sort of thing. Improvisation was his specialty.

The screen bleeped at him. The landing window was closing. He tapped the button and settled back, a shiver coursing through his body. Soon he would set foot on an alien world.

Within seconds the tiny ship began to reorient itself for atmospheric entry.

Flame roiled outside the tiny porthole. The craft bucked and hummed, every surface shaken to the verge of tearing apart. Then, as quickly as it had started, the flames gave way to blue sky. Clouds whipped past. A jarring lurch almost made him pass out as the landing rockets fired. The craft floated down the last hundred meters toward a blanket of snow.

On the screen in front of him, the IA timer turned yellow and ticked down by one second. Then another. Thirteen days, 23 hours, 59 minutes, 57 seconds.

Caswell started a timer on his wristwatch to match. His gaze lingered on the device. It was sleek, just a thin strip of titanium around his wrist inlaid with a curved, organic screen. A luxury smartwatch, packed with the latest tech. More powerful than all the world’s computers combined a hundred years earlier. What about here? What would happen if someone in England circa 1956 found it lying on the ground?

Not much, he realized. Their biometrics would fail to activate it. To them it would probably resemble a rather modern bit of jewelry.

There seemed no debate. He needed a timer synced to the one Monique had started. On Earth time, not Duplican. Even a small difference in the planet’s rotational speed could shave minutes each day off his window. He would leave it on, he decided. Absolutely worth the risk.

Get in, do the job, get out, forget. Ignorance is bliss; consequences require recollection. If Archon needed him to know anything about this place after the fact, they’d rebrief him.

EVEN A STIFF BREEZE
off the ocean could not banish the smell of smoke and burned flesh.

Two state coroners emerged from the façade of the ruined laboratory, a white body bag held between them. The shiny fabric was sealed to hide the charred horror within. Then another pair of coroners came out, followed seconds later by a third.

Melni Tavan watched from the front row of a crowd of onlookers that dwindled rapidly. With the flames extinguished little remained to hold their attention, and anyway people had things to do. Only the youth and the retired stood their ground, huddled in a dozen quiet conversations as the dead were tucked away.

She’d gleaned next to nothing since her arrival. The chin-ups, so
named from the way their helmet straps compressed and lifted their chins, made no special allowance for her reporter’s credentials. They all recited the same birdshit line. “Accident, officially. All I can tell you, miss.”

Of course the expected rumor of a bombing spread through the crowd. Those damned Southern insurgents, at it again. So easy to tack that card to anything bad. Melni couldn’t really blame them. She would do the same when she wrote her article for the
Weekly.
She must or else risk becoming the target of rumors. Whispers that she sympathized, or worse.

She bit her lip, her eyes never leaving the three white-wrapped corpses now being slid into protective casings for the ride to the city morgue.

Was he among them? She shuddered despite the layers of clothing draped over her body. It had taken her an entire season to turn Onvel. All of her careful plans hinged on him and his position at the laboratory. To lose him now would set her back a year, a year the South didn’t have. Worse, the situation presented immediate and dire risk to her cover. Onvel’s office would be packed, his belongings sifted through. All that research, assigned to someone else. Had he been careful? Had he really taken all the precautions she’d urged, or only said as much?

A knot of fear began to fester within her. She had to know. She had to get to Onvel’s office before anyone else, or at least know that the fire had cleansed it. Melni followed a narrow lane beside the blackened building until she came to an alley that ran along the back. There was a door there, but also a lot of people. Detectives milled about, flanked by representatives from Valix Corporation, the lab’s owner. Some bore smudges of black ash on their otherwise impeccable corporate suits, but most looked fresh off the roller from the company’s Upwest headquarters.

Three doors slammed in quick succession from around front. The coroner vans began to rattle away, tires crunching on bits of ash and ice in the road. Melni went back the way she’d come, before
anyone saw her. The vans rolled by her, sleet crushing beneath their tires. A shopkeeper hosed the sidewalk in front of his business, his face as gloomy as the ash he washed away.

Melni tried to get answers from the Valix suits out front. They muttered scripted apologies and moved farther inside the police line. She peppered the ranking chin-up with zero success. She had to do these things. Her cover demanded it.

Conventional wisdom said to slip into a role where no one would notice you. Be someone who could move about without earning attention from the chins or the NRD. A nighttime delivery driver, that sort of thing. That’s what her instructors back in Riverswidth trained the recruits for. It did not matter that these methods had never produced significant results. It was the way things were done, the only way they knew.

And then Melni came along. The student journalist, one of many hired part-time to write news briefs for senior government officials. She’d been thorough, sifting through obscure sources and connecting things others failed to notice. And, despite being told not to, she’d analyzed and offered conclusions. She couldn’t help it. Melni was a
desoa,
descended from refugees of the Desolation. Her pale skin, purple eyes, and golden hair marked her as such and made her a second-class citizen among the native peoples of both North and South. Her mother had taught her that to succeed in life she’d always have to do more than she’d been asked, or risk going unnoticed. So she had, in all things, including that government job. She feared they’d dismiss her for inserting her opinions in the news summaries. But instead her work had been noticed by the powers that be in Riverswidth, and she’d been recruited to the role of intelligence analyst. Her
desoa
looks were, for once, a benefit. Her people were the only kind rightfully found on either side of the great crater belt.

But she was young and untrained. She lacked confidence. They told her she’d never make a good field agent. Being
desoa
she’d faced that sort of discriminatory conclusion her whole life. Naturally she immediately applied for a field position. To her surprise, they’d accepted.
They put her on a boat for South Valgarin before she really comprehended what it all meant. After barely a month of training on local customs of the region she was given fake papers and confusing instructions. She made the harrowing journey through Central Valgarin alone, across the vast wasteland that was the Desolation. The land of her ancestors. Finally she found herself in the North, and fell into her prearranged cover as a reporter for a small newsprint.

In truth she was nobody. An agent of the lowest rank and skill, shipped off to the other side of Gartien, where she could someday prove herself without risking too much damage. All they’d asked her to do is send back any information she might come across related to military deployments along the border there.

Something else had caught her attention, though. Locals were grumbling because of major changes in the mining industry, which was moving jobs and equipment east to Tandiel. Melni investigated and uncovered something interesting: All these changes in the mining industry were due to demands made by Valix. There were orders for vast quantities of processed minerals with no known use. Originally her goal had been to send this information south, but a companion at the press happened to read her notes and thought it equally fascinating. The paper printed it. All this in her first week on the job. Things only spiraled from there, because that small press was owned by the
Weekly
in Combra, home of the North’s leadership and the Valix Corporation as well. Her article made the rounds, and as it had in Riverswidth her aptitude gained instant notice. Melni soon found herself on a boat again, on her way to Combra, to join the team covering Valix at the source. Almost overnight she’d landed in a front-and-center position on the South’s stage of covert assets. Their top agent, like it or not.

A familiar face snapped Melni back to the moment. One of the newly arrived detectives was a man she knew, a source within the department she’d used in the past and become friendly with, Boran Kulit. He shrugged at her probing questions but his eyes darted to
and lingered on a small mealhouse across the street. She nodded understanding and moved on.

The crowd soon melted away entirely. Melni completed her show of asking questions, enough to warrant the birdshit story she would write that evening, and then hurried across the street to the café. She fetched ginger water and a curd biscuit from the counter, paid, and found a table by the window where she could see the door.

“What a blixxing mess,” Boran said, sliding onto the bench across from her a few minutes later. He placed his blue tented hat on the table and flicked a bit of ash from it, then ran both hands through his long black hair. Dark bags of weariness hung under his eyes, marring his otherwise smooth Northerner’s brown skin.

“Biscuit?” she asked him.

The detective declined. He ordered cham with a quick hand signal to the man behind the counter, then just sat there, eyes distant.

“I have questions,” she said.

“Shitpipe Southern bastards,” he muttered, not hearing her.

Melni gave the words time to settle. She chewed and swallowed some of the biscuit. “The chin-ups said it was an accident—”

“Of course they did!” He remembered himself and lowered his voice. “That is what the Valix people told us to say. ‘Call it an accident and go about your patrols.’ Like they own us.”

They do, and you know it.
She only thought this, though. Aloud she asked, “You really think it was insurgents?” There were a few cells operating in the area. Melni had no contact with them; she only knew this because her handler had said as much. She made a mental note to ask him if they had anything to do with it. She doubted it, though. They didn’t make things look like accidents.

Boran grimaced. “All I know is something does not taste right. I would just prefer that we determined the truth on our own, not be handed it by Valix suits.”

Melni sipped her drink thoughtfully. Too sweet for her taste. Not the spicy variety like they served back home. “Mmm…” she breathed, pretending to enjoy it. Boran took no notice. His focus
remained on the lab across the street. She followed his gaze to black-scarred bricks around the windows and entrance. A thin waft of gray smoke drifted out from a hole in the roof. Beneath it all was the knowledge that three people had died here. Not just people, she reminded herself, but top researchers for Valix. Tantamount to an assault on the Triumvirate itself, these days.

“Boran,” she said, taking care to keep her voice level. “Do you have the names of the dead? I would like to do them honor when I prepare my article.”

“Hmm?” His gaze swung back to her. “Oh. Yeah.” The heavyset man pulled a weathered paper pad from his pocket and thumbed the empty pages up front until he reached the first with scribbled writing. “Let me see. Crall, Harginns, and Dumon.”

So there it was, just like that. She kept her hands on the cup and her face carefully blank. Inside her heart felt as if gripped by a fist. Onvel Harginns. Her insider, her informer, dead. The closest she and the South had come to unraveling the secrets behind the Valix Corporation’s incredible string of technological marvels. To die like this, so soon after Onvel had told her of the critical work he’d recently become involved in, work he promised to provide to her in the form of a stack of stolen documents.

“Tomorrow they will clean this place and completely rebuild it. I guess they can afford to, eh?”

Melni only nodded. Her mind raced.

“As gratitude,” Boran said, “for keeping our noses out of their shitpipes, Valix has invited all of the detectives to the returning ceremony.”

“I would love to be there,” she said, a little too quickly.

Boran waved a dismissive hand. “Take my place if you like. It would bore me to tears, but you…If you wish to honor the dead in your report, that is the place to go. This,” he said, gesturing at the ruin across the street, “is no place for honor.”

“Sure you do not mind?”

He shook his head. “I am too busy with the Hillstav incident.”

“What Hillstav incident?”

He shot her a glance and snorted a single laugh. “So that news has not leaked yet. Well, believe me, you will hear of it soon enough.”

“Is it related to this?”

The detective’s eyes widened at the question, and she knew it was something he hadn’t considered before. He thought about it for a moment and then shook his head.

Melni squeezed the detective’s arm in gratitude, paid for their food, and left. She walked the entire way back to her flat, taking side streets and alleys. The complicated path gave her time to think.

There seemed only one conclusion that mattered: If Onvel had left anything behind that might implicate her, everything would end. All the careful cultivation of this persona, all the contacts she’d made under the guise of a reporter, would disintegrate. She would have to make sure that didn’t happen. The South might never get a better chance to infiltrate the Valix machine. Melni’s pace quickened. She had a lot of preparation to do.

At zero hour, when the streetlights outside dimmed ten times to signal the end of the day, Melni slipped out of her building via the service entrance. An earlier rain had gone, leaving the paved roads as imperfect mirrors of the city they served. She’d dressed like what one would expect of a young, attractive, unattached woman abroad in the middle of the night: for a party. A black long-sleeved shirt, brown skirt that ended mid-thigh, and matching boots that came just below the knee. She wore fake spectacles and a semi-clear, hooded plastic shawl—quite fashionable these days for the under-thirty set—over her close crop of blond hair.