Zero State

by Jameson Kowalczyk

  ***

  The cargo bay door lowered. The sky outside was a solid wall of white violence. It was the type of sky that reminded you the earth was a ball of rock and liquid hurtling through a universe that was unbelievably harsh and utterly inhospitable.

  Logan pulled on his safety line, making sure he was secured to the cargo bay wall. He was glad he wouldn't be inside this plane much longer.

  He loosened the straps on the mule closest to the open ramp. He felt the exosuit's artificial muscles activate around his quads and lower back as he leaned his weight into the mule. A hard push got the metal beast moving and rails on the floor did the rest. The mule slid down the ramp and disappeared out the back of the plane.

  He repeated the process two more times.

  Then he got his gear and weapons. He secured his kit to his body with straps and then secured the straps with tape. He checked again that he wasn't leaving anything behind. The gear was divided between two bags, one on his lower back, below his parachute, and one on his chest. He looked less like a man and more like a bundle of luggage.

  He disconnected his safety line.

  He stood at the top of the ramp and waited.

  When the light above the cargo bay door changed from red to green, Logan walked down the ramp and jumped into a white, empty sky.

  ***

  Logan fell through a white void.

  For a full minute it was just him and gravity and nothing else.

  Then he was close enough to the ground to see that it was there, underneath him. He still had another minute of free fall before his parachute would deploy.

  He imagined what he must look like to anyone who happened to have their head tilted to the sky. A black dot against the white nothing.

  He felt smaller than he'd ever felt. He understood just how puny and insignificant one person was when compared to time and space and the forces driving the universe. How the human race, if it was destined for any level of greatness, was still taking its first steps.

  His parachute had a ripcord he could pull if the preprogrammed deployment didn't work. But it did work, and the canopy bloomed above his head. It slowed his descent to such a degree that he felt like he'd stuck on a spot in the sky. The hard pull of gravity versus resistance yanked him out of his thoughts and back into focus.

  He looked down on five million square miles of ice. He could make out the hard spine of a mountain range. He could see the shapes and contours of the cold desert. He could see other dark spots on the sky, the parachutes carrying the mules to the ground.

  There was an altitude meter on the inside of his goggles. There were two more, one on each wrist—backups, because things had a high rate of failure in the kind of extreme environment he'd been thrown into.

  Logan watched the altitude count down. If there had been a blizzard or a fog or if he'd been unable to discern the white earth from the white sky, he could have used the altitude readings to help time his landing.

  But the air was clear, and he watched the ground swell beneath him, watched it change from an abstract thing into something tangible.

  His feet came in contact with the icy ground and his first steps on the continent were taken at a run.

  The parachute pulled at his back. He slowed and thought: Seven. There were seven continents in the world and now he'd been on every one of them. He felt the satisfaction of having completed a set.

  Logan had landed inside a valley. Steep white mountains swelled up from the ground to the east and west. To the north, it was a flat white surface as far as his eyes could see. The section of sky he'd fallen through was clear, but in the distance, he could see storm fronts. Clouds that were a mix of gray and dark blue. The sun was a small red burn on the sky.

  He felt the same sense of perspective that he had when he'd been falling toward all this. In the course of a few minutes he'd gone from being a black speck on an endless white sky to a black speck on an endless white landmass.

  For a minute he just stood and looked around. It was like being on another planet.

  Wind wrapped his parachute around his body. He peeled it away and balled it between his gloves.

  ***

  "Gatsby."

  The password was coded to his voice, recorded at the airfield three days earlier and tested dozens of times.

  It took a few seconds longer than usual for the comm line to connect, and when it did, the connection was weak and staticky. Zoe's voice sounded faraway.

  "Logan?"

  "I'm here."

  "This connection sucks. It's like you're in space."

  "Feels that way over here too."

  Communication at the ends of the world would always be hit-and-miss. Even with the improvements in technology, the earth's poles were magnetic, and were sensitive to solar flares—giant tongues of fire and energy that lashed out from the sun, hundreds of miles long, that threw radiation across the solar system.

  It had been a week since Logan had seen Zoe in person. He'd left the day after Holden found out who they were and put them to work. Logan had escaped the city in scuba gear, swimming two miles out into the ocean where he was picked up by a fishing boat. Then it was eighteen hours on the open water. Two hours in a helicopter. Another ten by plane. And then nearly a week at an airfield. He'd tried to add up how much of his life he'd spent at airfields, waiting for an operation's pieces to come together.

  Packages had arrived by plane and by truck. The weapons and gear he would need. Some of it had been easy to acquire. Some of it he imagined had been nearly impossible. The weapons system packed on the backs of the mules was one example. He'd only asked for it because Holden had told him to ask for anything, and when Logan thought about the kind of devastation he would need to wield in order to take out an entire army of those lab-grown killers, it was the only thing that came to mind.

  Zoe stayed behind, at Paradime, where she was now. Logan had been in contact with her twice a day. First for a check-in with Holden and his advisors, an update on the status of the mission. And again, just the two of them, usually at night. Logan passed the rest of his time sleeping, eating, exercising, and reading as much as he could about where he was going. Which was where he'd picked up the bit about magnets and solar flares.

  "I've got you," Zoe said.

  A red waypoint appeared on the inside of his goggles, followed by two more. Each marked the location of a mule. Next to each was a number, the distance. The closest mule was a little under a mile away. The furthest, a mile and a half.

  Logan discarded the parachute and the instruments he'd needed during the jump. He repacked his gear into a bulky rucksack and loaded that onto a sled he dragged behind him. His guns were stowed in insulated pockets strapped to his suit.

  He pushed forward on his skis, heading for the nearest waypoint.

  ***

  Radio contact faded in an out. He heard white noise and Zoe's distant voice, or he just heard white noise. She talked and he could clearly hear the words, and then she would fade out for a minute, and then come back and have to repeat what she'd said. Sometimes he would have to do this. It was frustrating at first, less frustrating as they got used to it.

  It would be better once he hiked out of the valley and moved up into the mountains. There were cell towers installed there.

  ***

  The first mule paced in the snow as it waited for him. It moved forward, then back, then side to side. The movements looked like a half-hearted dance routine. Its parachute dragged behind it, paracord tangled around one of the legs.

  The movement pattern was dictated by a computer program Logan had installed earlier that week, when he'd greased the mule's leg joints and other moving parts with a special machine lubricant designed to withstand extreme cold. Normal lubricant would have frozen in a matter of minutes. Even the special stuff would stop working if the machinery stayed still for too long.

  Snow was falling, only flurries at this point, shaved off the ap
proaching storm by the wind.

  Logan used another password to activate a second comm channel. He gave a command and the mule stood still. Then he cut the parachute loose. He took extra care with the blade. The temperature reading on his goggles read sixty below. A rip or tear in his suit would mean keeping less of that cold on the outside.

  With the paracord cut, the parachute's canopy was carried off by the wind, a ghost skittering across the frozen surface. This was something Logan always felt bad about. The trash left behind on any mission.

  He gave another voice command and the mule followed him.

  ***

  Snow was falling harder by the time he reached the second mule. The storm front was closer, and Logan started to get a sense for the storm's immense size—a roiling blue and gray wall, miles high, like some Greek titan had reached down to drag its knuckles across the frozen desert.

  He found the second mule doing the same dance routine as the first. The parachute was pressed flat against its front and the paracord wasn't tangled on anything, which made Logan's work quicker and easier.

  ***

  There was no sign of the third mule. The distance next to the waypoint told him it should be twenty meters ahead. Right in front of him.

  "It's not here."

  "It has to be there," Zoe said. Even with the mouthful of static, he could tell she was annoyed—annoyed with him, annoyed with the barely-working comm line, annoyed with the missing robot, annoyed with the whole enterprise.

  He slid a few feet forward on his skis and saw what had happened.

  "Found it," he said.

  "Where?"

  A few meters in front of him the ground fell away. Logan inched forward, lifting one of his ice axes, ready to arrest his fall if he slipped or if the ground gave way underneath his feet. He stopped at the edge and looked down.

  "It fell into a crevasse."

  It was a giant crack in the ice, ten meters wide and at least fifty meters deep. The mule was at the bottom, upside down. The cargo box that had been strapped to its back was smashed open.

  Logan pictured how it had happened. The mule had probably landed safely. Once on the ground, it had started the pre-programmed movement pattern. The crevasse had been covered in a thin layer of snow and ice. The ground had seemed stable to the sensors in the mule's hooves, the same way it would have felt stable under a person's feet. Then the ground broke and the mule tumbled down, crashing against the narrow walls of ice, its payload scattering.

  Logan stood, looking down at it.

  "Any chance you can get it out?" Zoe asked.

  Logan thought about it. He thought about rappelling down there and attaching the climbing rope to the broken robot. He could use one of the other mules to haul it up.

  He looked at the fallen mule's legs. They were still, unmoving. He tried to activate them with the voice controls in his suit. One of the legs moved a few inches and stopped. He checked the time. He'd been on the ground for almost two hours.

  "It's broken. Or the hydraulics froze up. Or both. It's not worth going down there," Logan said.

  "The third set was more of a backup anyway."

  He stood another moment before moving on. He found a way around the crevasse. He kept the two mules ten yards in front of him. If any more of the ground fell away, they'd let him know.

  Another red waypoint appeared on his goggles, marking his next objective. A mountain, ten miles ahead.

  ***

  Wind tore at him. Snow flecked his goggles. But the storm kept its distance, staying in the background.

  Logan reached the mountain's foothills and started to climb. The artificial layer of muscles in his exosuit kicked in and the gear on his back felt lighter. The climb would drain the suit's battery, but he could siphon power off one of the mules if he needed to. The mules only needed to make it to the summit and then they would become expendable.

  ***

  Halfway up the mountain a cell tower came into view. It was two stories tall, sturdy-looking, made of metal that had been encased in something else. Something to keep the metal from breaking in the cold.

  The comm channel coughed away the last of its static and Zoe's voice became clear.

  "I can see you."

  Logan wore two cameras, one mounted above his brow on his helmet, the other positioned to look at his face. This had bothered him at some point in the past, that Zoe had spent so many hours looking at his face and he'd never even seen a photo of her.

  "How do I look?"

  "Cold. Also, it was slightly terrifying to watch your vital signs flatline every other minute when the connection would dip in and out. What's it like there?"

  "Cold. White. How did it go? The first part of this?"

  "Smoothly. The bomb did its job, I did mine."

  "How are things at the office?"

  "Quiet. They've still got me sequestered. I think they've started rationing the food on campus. Things in the city are getting worse. We can see more fires at night. We can hear gunshots. One of the teams was attacked while they were handing out supplies. The newsfeeds say the bodies are piling up faster than people can get rid of them."

  The conversation went on for another minute before Zoe said, "Logan, we've got to be quiet."

  She didn't need to say more. The people on the other side of the mountain might have gotten word about the antimatter bomb that had obliterated the other half of their operation. Or that bomb may have severed their only line of communication to the outside world, and they had spent the past eight hours waiting for a message that was never going to arrive, their paranoia compounding as the minutes ticked by.

  Either way, they'd be listening.

  Either way, Logan would be engaging an enemy that was alert and primed for battle.

  ***

  Logan climbed the next two hours in silence. The mules climbed behind him, traversing hard-packed ice and jagged rocks, moving like mountain goats.

  The exosuit was equipped with a motion sensor. Any movement within a fifty meter radius would register as a ghostly orb on the inside of his goggles. As he hiked the last hill before the summit, two orbs appeared. Then a third. Then a fourth.

  There were people up ahead, at the base of the cell tower.

  Logan whispered a command and the mules halted.

  He advanced, staying low, keeping behind whatever cover was available.

  He saw them. Four men in bulky white suits. Two were underneath the cell tower, huddled around one of the legs. Maybe trying to repair something, maybe trying to determine if something was broken.

  The other two were standing guard, looking down the sides of the mountain.

  Logan pressed his back against the chunk of rock he was using for cover. He looked down and could see the mules, standing still in the snow. If the two sentries above him were doing even a half-assed job, they'd have looked right at the mules already.

  He'd loaded his pack, skis, and sled onto one of the mules before beginning his ascent. The only thing he was carrying was a weather-proof sleeve strapped across the front of his chest. He unzipped it and reached inside and felt the familiar shape of an assault rifle. It had a short barrel and retractable stock, making it only slightly larger than a submachine gun, but with heavier ammo that could punch through body armor with greater ease.

  He slid the gun free and extended the stock, his eyes watching the motion sensor for any change. Snow and hail pelted the outside of his suit. Another five minutes like this and he'd start to worry that the mules' joints would stiffen up. Another ten and he'd have to weigh his options: continue remaining undetected and be forced to haul the cargo up by hand, or engage the four people up top and save himself time and energy.

  Minutes ticked by.

  He rolled his neck and shoulders, trying to stay loose. Soon he'd start to worry about his own joints freezing.

  Then the four bodies began to move. The orbs on his display retreated to the edge of h
is field of awareness and dropped off.

  Slowly, Logan extracted himself from his hiding place and climbed the remaining distance to the summit.

  He went prone in the snow, looking down the other side of the mountain. It took him a moment to spot them, four white suits moving through the snowfall. They hadn't gone far, a few meters outside the range of the motion sensor.

  They'd come up here to inspect the tower and found nothing wrong. They would have radioed to whoever was in charge before they started their descent.

  Logan looked through the scope of the assault rifle and chose his choke point, a narrow section where the four targets would need to move single file. They were spread out, each one five or seven steps behind the person in front of him.

  He scanned the valley below. Found their vehicle parked just beyond the foothills. Saw nothing else nearby. The base they'd come from was far off in the white distance. They had come out here alone. They wouldn't return. Others would come looking for them. This is what Logan wanted. To draw as many of them out onto the battlefield as possible.

  A hundred yards head of him, the four white bodies spread out.

  Now, he thought.

  He pulled the trigger.

  Shot the last man in line.

  Then the second to last.

  Then the third.

  Each in the back.

  The man at the front of the line turned at the last instant and Logan shot him in the chest.

  The blood spatter looked like spray paint on the white suits and the snow.

  The bodies tumbled out of sight, landing on whatever lay below. Logan replayed the one-sided exchange in his mind. He'd shot them all center mass. He'd seen blood, so any body armor they'd been wearing hadn't been enough to stop the bullets he was using. And they'd fallen the way people do when they're dead or incapacitated.