Zero World

by Jason M. Hough

  “We’re here,” she said.

  Her companion made no reply. She turned and saw he’d fallen asleep, his bag of supplies clutched tight to his chest like an infant in need of comfort.

  Melni turned back and studied the brick building. One boarded window, on the corner of the top floor, had a small symbol drawn on it. Two vertical lines with a single horizontal one bisecting them. A symbol for Riverswidth. She’d found the right place, and tried to envision the interior. A team of communications specialists. Cipher experts, engineers. Rows of equipment perhaps concealed in a basement or hidden central room.

  She opened the canopy. Caswell did not stir, so she shut and locked the glass and walked as casually as one could in such a place to the other side of the street. The roads were utterly empty, so she took her time, making a circuit around the building. The only entrance seemed to be the front door, boarded with thick planks of sentinel wood nailed securely to a frame bolted into the bricks themselves. Beneath a first-floor window to the left of the entrance there was a large crack in the bricks. A section had fallen out, hit by an errant cruiser, perhaps. The filthy building was otherwise unmarred. She went to the window above the crack and turned to face the opposite direction. Directly across the road stood the dark pole of a dead streetlight. She crossed to it and stood at the base. Every other light on the street that she could see had an empty socket where a bulb had once been, but not this one. Melni knelt and examined a small square panel at the bottom. With some prying it came loose. She reached into the dark cavity within and probed about until her fingers brushed a switch. It clicked when she tugged at it, and the bulb above began to emit an ugly brown light that slowly grew to a murky yellow that barely reached her. She stood in the little pool of ruddy light and watched the brick building. Long, silent minutes passed.

  The board across the first-floor window at the crack in the wall shifted and swung outward. A shadowed person loomed inside, one hand gesturing come-hither. Melni flicked the light back off and jogged across the street. Using the crack as a foothold she vaulted herself into the dark interior.

  Melni landed in a roll and would have come to a stand had she not forgotten about the wound. Her arm hit the hardwood floor and flared with fresh pain. She knelt there, clutching at it.

  “Oh my, oh dear,” the person within said. It was an elderly voice, a woman’s. She helped Melni to unsteady feet and spoke in a matronly tone. “In from the cold, are we? And who might you be? A poor little runaway?”

  “14772, traveling as Melni Tavan,” she said, gently probing the wound.

  The old woman shifted roles instantly. “Hmm. A one-four, are you? A long way from Midstav.”

  There came a dull click. Melni flinched, then a handheld lantern bloomed to life. It lit the craggy, lined face of a very old Northern woman. She had the robust form of a life lived on the frozen frontier. Flabby jowls hung from her cheeks and shook when she moved, matching the motion of great saggy unbound breasts under a loose blouse. “You are the first visitor in some time,” she said with a kind smile that revealed two rows of uneven, yellow teeth.

  “You are alone here?” Melni asked.

  “I am hardly here at all,” the woman said. “Come by twice in ten to check the reel, but there is all kinds of chatter tonight so I stayed. 19220 is the number they gave me but Anim Corda is what they called me on my firstwords. Pleased to know you.”

  “Pleased,” Melni agreed. “Sorry to come in unannounced but I have an emergency report to file. Can you help with that?”

  “I can.”

  “I also need to arrange passage on a boat to Tandiel. Is that possible?”

  “It is possible. Not easy, but possible.”

  “No one can know.”

  “That is what I assumed. There are people at the port, sympathetic to us, who can help.”

  “Gratitude,” Melni said earnestly. “I have a companion in the cruiser. A friend. He is not one of us, though.”

  “Use your judgment, dear. I will not tell anyone if you want to bring him in, too.”

  “Again, my gratitude.”

  “Yes, yes. Enough birdshitting about. Come up. I will make you something warm to drink and you can tell me what your business is.”

  Melni nodded and went back out the way she’d come. Caswell came alert the instant she cracked open the door of the cruiser. “Come with me,” she said.

  He followed without a word, clutching his overstuffed bag.

  “THIS IS ANIM,” Melni said, gesturing to the old woman inside. “She is going to help us.”

  Caswell nodded. He’d learned by now to speak as little as possible, his accent and strange phrasings an instant giveaway of some intangible wrongness with him.

  Anim led them up creaking stairs to a vast room on the fourth floor.

  Fifteen meters on a side and dotted with a grid of square pillars, the room housed abandoned machines apparently for woodworking, concealed under greasy linen sheets. Paint peeled from the walls in great dingy white strips, crushed to powder where they’d fallen to the mottled hardwood floor.

  In the center of the space, well away from boarded windows and the interior hallway doors, was a workspace made of four mismatched tables arranged around one of the square support pillars. A single work lamp cast a small pool of dim yellow light over heaped, crude electronics. A bulky earphone rested in the center of the light’s focus, next to a thick sheaf of papers and a mug that bristled with writing implements.

  “This have something to do with the explosion up on Law’s Peak? Lots of chatter about it an hour ago, then someone ordered all quiet and it has been just that ever since.”

  “We,” Melni paused. “Uh…”

  “If you cannot say, that is all right. I take no offense. Old Anim has little in the way of clearance.”

  “Gratitude. Where is the rest of your team?”

  Anim chuckled dryly. “Just me here, regret to say.”

  Caswell saw Melni deflate somewhat at that. She’d expected much more, clearly. How well did she know her own “side” in this so-called Quiet War? When it came to Alice Vale’s mansion she’d memorized every last detail. The only conclusion he could reach was that she’d been in deep cover for some time, isolated from the wider scope of Riverswidth’s intelligence apparatus.

  “Only one chair, I fear,” Anim said. She gestured for Melni to take a seat in the rickety antique and then bustled off into the darkness. Seconds later another light winked groggily to life, on the far wall between two covered windows. Beneath it was a narrow counter. Anim set to work making cham and heating soup, or something like it, over a portable stove.

  “What is this place?” Caswell asked under his breath.

  Melni nodded toward the stacks of radio gear. “Listening post. Coded transmissions from up and down the west coast of Combra are transcribed and sent south for analysis.”

  “What sort of transmissions?”

  Anim bustled over with two steaming mugs. “You name it,” she said, cutting off Melni’s thanks. “Shipping lines coming in from Tandiel. The Navy base up at Highstav. The NRD officers are our primary objective, though they went quiet last month. Not much to hear now, regret to say. That is why the others have left.”

  “Went quiet?”

  The woman nodded apologetically. “Just a loud hiss where there used to be voices. Sometimes it abruptly ends, and when it starts back up you can hear birds chirping.”

  “Birds?” Melni asked.

  “Yes, birds. But sort of mechanical, like a child’s toy.”

  Caswell pondered this. “Can I hear some?”

  The old crone seemed to notice his accent then. But she only shrugged at him. Perhaps she’d never been outside this secluded town. Maybe all accents were exotic to her. She leaned past Melni, plucked the earphone from the table, and took to wiping the cushioned oval on her shirt. Satisfied, she handed it to Caswell. As he put it on, she arranged dials on several of the machines.

  He listened for a t
ime, inhaling the scent of his cham without drinking any as he held the worn earphone to the side of his head.

  When the chirping happened he knew it instantly. A sound of Earth. He knew this not from direct experience, but old films and television shows. More of Alice Vale’s influence, clearly. Another stepping-stone toward whatever goal she sought here.

  Monique’s orders kept him from telling Melni or the old woman any of this, though. He pretended to listen for another minute, then gave a bored shrug and handed Melni the earpiece.

  She listened intently, her eyes on him. Caswell turned away, studying one of the bundles of wires snaking up the pillar and along a beam on the ceiling. Anim wandered back to her pot of soup. It smelled wonderful, much better than the packets he’d stuffed into the bag.

  “Caswell?” Melni asked, her voice carefully quiet.

  “Hmm?”

  “Do you know what it is?”

  “Not really.”

  “But you know something.”

  He closed his eyes and inhaled the steam from his cham. The urge to sip the wonderful drink almost got the better of him. Caswell set the mug aside. “Just a guess.” He debated giving her more, a hint, perhaps. The basics of an acoustic computer modem is what she needed, but that kind of influence is what he’d been ordered to avoid. Uncomfortable, feeling now more like he was betraying a friendship rather than being a loyal soldier, he wandered off to help Anim with the meal.

  They sat on cushions on the dusty floor by the windows and ate in silence. The thick “estu,” as Anim called it, consisted of chunks of stringy meat and some root vegetables in a greasy brown gravy. Caswell hoped his lack of eating would not offend their host too much. Anim didn’t ask.

  Melni ate voraciously, the way a native of Japan might attack a bowl of ramen. Slurping, chewing noisily. With her pixie cut blond hair, her large purple eyes, and her ragged black soldier’s garb, she looked like some kind of punk rocker from the eighties. The 1980s. He found it endearing.

  Bowl empty, she stretched and yawned, then excused herself to find the “lav.” When she returned Caswell went off to do the same. He stood in the closet-size room for a long time, staring at himself in the mirror. A strange sensation to see himself, here. The man in the mirror would be a stranger in a week’s time. He stared hard into his own face, as if by sheer force of will he could forge a memory that would survive reversion. “The most interesting mission you’ll ever forget,” he said to himself. “Fucking-A, Monique. What an understatement.” He splashed cold water on his face, dried it, and walked out without giving himself another glance. He’d forget that man, and the death he’d dealt, soon enough.

  When he returned he found two bedrolls had been laid out in a dark corner of the listening room.

  “Rest,” Anim was saying to Melni. “I will wake you when it is time to send off your report.”

  “How long until then?” she asked.

  “The submersible comes up at seventh hour, when Garta kisses the Endless Sea so as to hide her profile. There is plenty of time. Go and rest.”

  Lying on the musty folded blanket, one arm under his head to serve as a cushion, Caswell stared at the aging coffered ceiling: cracked, peeling paint over some sort of plaster. Funny how similar some things were here. As interesting as the differences, and equal in number.

  Melni’s bedroll was two meters away, but the silence between them seemed to stretch much farther. He felt sure she was watching him, still waiting for him to talk. He regretted saying anything at all in that car. He should have just kept his mouth shut. He really should have parted ways with her, long ago. After the confrontation at the Valix house. Why hadn’t he? Why take this risk? How would he explain it to Monique, to Archon? He supposed he wouldn’t, not if he could avoid it. Maybe that’s why he’d been so successful in his career. Maybe it was all bullshit, cleverly fed to Monique and the rest of the corporation. Perhaps it wasn’t that he was a good assassin, but that he was a great liar. A piece of shit who’d fooled everyone, including himself. Himself most of all.

  The line of Sapporos in the fridge came to him like a vision. He knew he wouldn’t make it back to South Kensington in time to arrange them. He’d probably never leave this world now. But what if he did? Would he add another row of bottles to the ones already there and turn all of them around? Would he lie to himself? Just two kills this time, old man. Not twenty. You’re not that much of a monster, honest. Have a drink and go bumble around in the Congo or something. Pretend you have some control of your fucked-up life.

  He shook his head, despite himself.

  “Caswell?” Melni whispered.

  Her voice brought him out of that cognitive pit of self-doubt. “Yeah.”

  “Are you going to tell me what you heard in that static? You could help us resolve it, could you not?”

  For a while he said nothing. His mind groped for some way to make her understand—resolve, as she said—why he couldn’t tell her such things, and why it was so dangerous for Alice to. Gaze firmly on the ceiling, he tried a new tack. “You know what a child is like if their parents do everything for them?”

  The question took her by surprise. She considered it, then nodded with vehemence. “I knew such children growing up. The sons and daughters of wealthy true-blood Southerners. Lazy. Dull. Entitled.”

  “Exactly.” He turned on his side to face her. “What happens to them when they’re suddenly on their own?”

  Melni swallowed. She shivered, visibly. She understood.

  He went on anyway. “That child is Gartien if this business of Alia’s continues. And I’m no better than her if I start behaving as she does.”

  “But you must care a little about the South. You are one of us, more so than even me. A native—”

  “I’m not. Trust me on that. And anyway it doesn’t matter. The people who sent me here care about the well-being of all of Gartien, not one side or the other. It’s hard for you to see that—”

  “No,” Melni said, doubt in her voice. “No. I can see your point of view, I just wish I understood where it originated.”

  For a minute neither spoke. Melni started to drift off, her eyes dipping and then popping open several times. Caswell snuck a glance at his watch. Seven days until he forgot all about her. About what he’d done here, and to that innocent crew of the Pawn Takes Bishop. He sighed.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” Melni asked.

  He kept his gaze on the ceiling. “I was just thinking about home. After what happened today, I doubt I’ll ever see it again.”

  “Regret,” she offered.

  “Doesn’t matter. The mission remains the same.”

  He rolled away from her, rubbed at his temples, and waited for the chemically augmented sleep. It didn’t take long.

  —

  Whispers roused him from sleep some hours later. Day or night he couldn’t tell, for the windows were all boarded up.

  Caswell rolled onto his side. He saw Melni and Anim, lit by the soft glow of the single dim lamp, huddled around their communications gear. The machine resembled an old mechanical typewriter attached to some Soviet-era reel recorder. It whirred and clicked almost whimsically. Vacuum tubes probably filled its innards. How much of it had been invented by the people of Gartien, and how much had come from components “invented,” or at least inspired, by Alice Vale?

  He wrestled with that for some time. Melni wrote on a sheet of yellow paper as Anim worked the dials and held one cup of the earphone to her head, while Caswell pondered the efficacy of his mission. Monique, Archon, and whoever had hired Archon had sent him to this place having only clues of what had happened aboard the Venturi. They’d learned of Gartien, and Alice’s coldly calculated plan to return here with all that data. To play God, Monique had said. And they’d wanted him to stop her, to undo or at least end her influence so that Earth could try to get this right.

  Caswell didn’t consider himself a fool. He took his orders without question, yes, and only maintained his sani
ty via the miracle of clear conscience his implant provided. But he knew people. He knew politicians. He could see the angles, the other possible motivations for stopping Vale. This place, and the science it took to get here, were a gold mine like the world had never seen. Even more disruptive than the first mineral-rich asteroid hauled into low-Earth orbit. Lots of money involved meant all the ancillary birdshit, as Melni so quaintly said: greed, power, corruption.

  Yet at least that way there was a chance. Alice Vale was already on the wrong path here, perhaps irrevocably so, but if he could at least stop her before she gave them horrors like nerve gas, thermonuclear warheads, or the ability to construct a mass driver, at least there’d be a chance for the right leadership, the right approach, to come forward.

  Besides, I’ll forget all about it, he thought. And despised himself for it. An easy excuse and a pathetic absolution of evil.

  Across the room Melni spoke, more loudly now. “Could the NRD intercept this?” she asked the old woman.

  “Oh, it is unlikely, dear. Very narrow beam, you know. They would have to be parked right out there near the sub, between Spire Rock and the northern tip of the bay.”

  “How long until they reply?”

  Anim looked at the much younger agent. “Usually they make no reply. I report, I sign off. It is not for me to know if they do anything with the information.”

  “Oh,” Melni said, disappointed.

  “You require a response?”

  “I was hoping for one.”

  Anim shrugged. “Well, I’ll sit here and listen, I suppose. Make yourself useful and check the streets, will you? Spy holes are on the second-floor corners.”

  One of the radios let out a little squawk. Anim leaned over and immediately began to tap away at the keyboard, which instead of rows of offset keys had circular keypads, one for each hand, plus a foot pedal.

  Caswell waited for Melni to exit. He counted to ten, then rose and, being absolutely quiet, removed his shoes. Walking with slow, languid movements, he came to stand behind Anim Corda. The old woman was transcribing what Melni had written, he assumed.