Zero World

by Jason M. Hough

  She took all this with her, Peter. She killed the rest of her crew and ran back to this place as the sole representative of Earth, armed with all our collective knowledge. We don’t know why, but we can guess.

  “To play God,” Caswell said aloud.

  We think she’s going to give it to them, probably hoping they’ll reward her with wealth and prestige beyond anyone’s dreams. She’ll be a curiosity, a celebrity like no other. Perhaps even heralded as some kind of messiah.

  “What a brilliant, crazy, ambitious play.” Caswell grunted in admiration, and then he brought Alice Vale’s image back to his screen. He found he could view her as an adversary now, and a formidable one at that. In her face now he saw the drive, the ambition, and perhaps a hint of the ruthless selfishness that drove her to take these actions. He’d mistaken it all before as pure intellectual intensity.

  She must be stopped, Peter. I’m sure you can understand why, but let me make this very clear: She could ruin this place. Contaminate it in more ways than what is obvious. Perhaps she has already. Her weapons knowledge alone is very dangerous, but this goes way beyond that.

  This is a sovereign world, full of unique cultures and intelligent human life. We should have done what the rest of her crew advocated: study them, make contact when the time was right, take every possible measure not to alter their course. This world is not yet spacefaring, and we should have waited until they were ready to meet us before introducing ourselves. We should have chosen what we told them very carefully. For all we know they’re vicious and bloodthirsty, and perhaps Alice Vale has told them where we are. She has the information required to educate them on every major weapon program embarked upon by humanity in the last two centuries. The sorts of things we’ve taken great pains to remove from Earth, and prevent ever being built again. And there was the weapon she and the rest of the Venturi crew were working on, which goes far beyond anything that came before. If she gives it to them, the results could be catastrophic. For Duplica, and possibly even for Earth.

  Your mission is to eliminate Alice Vale. Secondarily, destroy any artifacts of Earth she brought along, most especially that data trove.

  With any luck she never even made landfall. Or if she did, they saw her as completely mental and threw her in an asylum. Whatever the case, do the job and get away with minimal impact. For all our sakes leave nothing behind.

  Due to the circumstances of this mission, I’ve set up a delayed IA reversion trigger. Upon landing on Duplica, you’ll have fourteen days to complete your objectives.

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

  Be back aboard your ship in eight days, since it’ll take you six to reach the wormhole again. If that is not possible, then at a minimum get off the ground before the timer hits zero. Log your results in the secure drop, lock in the reverse course, and sedate yourself. It should have just enough fuel to get you back to this side and we’ll be waiting to pick you up.

  I know this will test you to the very limit, Peter, but I have every confidence. It’s not so unlike one of your holidays, right? You’re the perfect man for the job.

  Good luck, IA6.

  ~Monique Pendleton, IH6, out.

  These details are classified per your contract with Archon Corporation. Any attempt to speak, write, or otherwise divulge your objectives will trigger immediate reversion. Thought-access lock ends.

  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 mealh
ouse 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.