Zero World

by Jason M. Hough

  Confused, Caswell took a tentative step toward the pair. “My job,” he said flatly, yet he could hear the doubt in his own voice.

  “No,” the woman said. Melni, she’d said her name was. “Caswell, the guards came before I could tell you everything. Your goal was to kill her, but it changed. You and I learned much since you arrived. We need to save her. She must live.”

  He swallowed. The woman’s words were sincere, yet it didn’t matter. Alice Vale was already dead; it was only a matter of time now. “Explain yourself, Melni. Learned what?”

  She spoke of something called the Conduit, of worlds linked by similarity, and the powers that sought to control these planets in order to harvest their ideas. A group called Prime.

  “The person who sent you here, Monique, is one of them.”

  —

  Melni sat on the floor beside Alia and cradled her in her arms, laying the wounded inventor sideways across her lap so blood would not pool in the mouth. It dribbled out into a rapidly spreading puddle on the floor instead.

  For the last two years Melni had spent virtually every waking moment studying this woman, spying on her, trying to comprehend her genius. Then she’d learned the truth, that it had all been an elaborate lie. This should have filled Melni with rage if not for the motivation for that deception. She’d been trying to protect Gartien from something much worse.

  And now here she lay, dying in Melni’s lap. Gartien’s golden daughter. Earth’s cunning escapist. Her breaths came shallow and rapid. Whatever Caswell had done, the internal damage seemed massive and entirely fatal.

  “So she killed her crew and came here—” Caswell started.

  Alia’s face came alive then. She cast a glance at the man and said, “It was you who killed them. You tried to get me, too, but I hid….” She paused and coughed up a mouthful of blood that splattered across the floor. “So you set a bomb and left me there, but I figured out how to escape. I took everything I could and fled in the lander before the station was destroyed.”

  Caswell stared at her. His expression, hard as stone, began to crack. “It was me,” he whispered. “I killed them.”

  It was not, Melni realized, a question. “Caswell, there is so much you don’t know. So much you’ve forgotten.”

  The assassin grimaced. Squeezed his eyes shut and shook away whatever doubt had begun to creep in. “Why not contact Earth? Tell them what happened, and what I supposedly did.”

  “Because that would have led them to the Conduit,” Melni said for Alia. For Alice. “If Earth became aware of the Conduit, that would trigger Prime to take action against both planets. The Warden said—”

  Alia glanced up at her. Her eyes were cloudy now, half-closed, but the surprise there came through. “You spoke with him,” she said. She’d only just realized it. “Before the airships I sent bombed the site?”

  “He told us much,” Melni replied, nodding. “But not all. The bombs fell too soon. He seemed unsure of your intentions, Alia.”

  The dying woman closed her eyes. Her lips moved, but no words came. A silent apology, perhaps. Melni would never know.

  Several seconds passed. Alia’s face became very still. There were sounds of commotion in the square outside. Somewhere below she could hear boots on the steps. Melni pressed her palms to Alia’s chest, the left side instead of right. A weak pulse beat there. As if Melni needed any more proof that Alia and Caswell were of the same origin.

  Alia groaned. Her eyes flickered open. Caswell came and knelt beside Melni. He’d put his weapon away.

  The dying woman’s words were barely audible. A liquid, feeble whisper almost drowned by the voices from beyond the window. She said, “The Warden and I had our differences, but our goal was always the same: Help Gartien reach space as quickly as possible. Block the Conduit, or at least be prepared for the day that Prime finally discovers the Zero Worlds beyond Earth. Your presence here means we failed. They’ll come soon. They’ll come for Earth as well. We were…too late. Unless…”

  Caswell leaned in. “Unless what, Alice?”

  “Unless you finish what we started.”

  The last word fell from dead lips.

  Alia Valix was gone.

  —

  “We need to leave,” Caswell said.

  Melni rocked back on her feet and closed her eyes. She’d been wrong. She’d devoted her career to hindering Alia’s. How much had she and her fellow spies delayed the woman’s efforts? What state of preparation would her world be in right now had only the petty war between North and South been ended long ago?

  “Melni,” Caswell said. “They’re coming.”

  “What difference does it make? We can do nothing now but wait for Prime—”

  “No,” he said. He grabbed her by the upper arm and hauled her to her feet. “I’m still baffled as to just what the hell is going on here, and there’s a gigantic gap in my memory being filled by bits of cryptic jargon. But I know this: Though I forgot you, I trusted you enough to tell you my anchor phrase, and that’s good enough for me. So you listen: My lander is here. It still works, and I plan to take it.”

  She shook her head. “It was destroyed in the mountains—”

  “No. It’s here. I saw it. I went inside.” He produced a tube from his pocket. It gleamed in the moonlight. The weapon he’d used on the guards below. In the battle she hadn’t had time to contemplate where he’d found it. “The ship is in the terminal next door. Come with me.”

  “Where…where will we go?” she asked, thinking of all the remote corners of Gartien and how easy it would be for Rasa Clune and her Hollow to find them.

  Caswell looked into her eyes, searching for something. Whatever it was, he evidently found it. “Alice sought to blockade this Conduit. She failed.” He squeezed her arms. “Failed because this world doesn’t have the tech, but Earth does….”

  She watched as his eyes scanned some horizon in his mind. He stood that way for many seconds. Footsteps in the hallway snapped him back to the present. He whirled and tugged her along by her bound hands. At the door he let go and pressed his palms against his temples in a gesture she now felt a great deal of fascination with.

  Caswell, in his formal meeting suit, which now bore numerous bloodstains, dove through the door. As he flew out into the hallway he raised his weapon and it spat those tiny glowing dots that hissed away on puffs of gas. Caswell hit the floor and rolled into the far wall, grunting with the impact and yet somehow positioned perfectly to keep his weapon pointed toward the top of the steps. She heard the sound of toppling bodies, and cries of alarm from farther off. She took a chance and peeked around the corner. Three plain-clothed Northerners lay on the floor, utterly still.

  Across the hall Caswell pushed himself up the wall to a shaky stand. “Get behind me,” he said.

  She obeyed. Together they backed down the hall toward another room that faced the rear of the building rather than Summit Square. He kept guard at the door and ordered her to go to the window. “What do you see?” he asked, his voice low.

  “There is a street, maybe twenty feet wide, then a large building with a flat, dark roof.” As she spoke she sawed her wrist bindings apart on a shard of old, broken glass protruding from the window frame.

  “That’s the terminal. Anyone down there?”

  She glanced left and right and told him no, it seemed to be quiet. Everyone, North and South, had likely entered the palace. She could only imagine the tense standoff below.

  It was a forty-foot drop to the street, not something she thought either of them could handle without breaking bones. “There’s a pipe attached to the wall,” she said. “It might be sturdy enough to climb.”

  A rattling sound filled the air. Bullets thudded into the wall and doorframe, forcing Caswell to duck inside the room.

  Melni swung her legs over the window frame and grabbed the metal pipe, two feet away. Brackets bolted into the much older bricks held the pipe in place. As soon as she put some weight on it the bolts squealed
in complaint. Bits of rubble and dust fell to the ground below. She let go. “This will not hold us.”

  A hand at the center of her back forced her out the window. Melni grabbed the pipe with both hands as her body swung out and smacked into the bricks. She glanced back, ready to curse Caswell’s haste, only to see him perched on the windowsill and coming out. There was a pop as one of the brackets came free of the wall. The pipe tilted outward. She hung in space, ten feet from the wall now, and she could see the shapes of people in the window. Caswell leapt from the sill, angling himself toward the pipe. He hit the metal length and clanged against it. Another bracket popped free from the bricks, and they were both falling.

  Melni dug her fingers into the brittle old pipe. A shrieking sound filled the air as the tube bent and began to collapse. Thirty feet above the ground the motion stopped abruptly. She felt as if her shoulders would pull from their sockets as the pipe wedged itself into the dark wall of the terminal and stayed there. She was only a few feet from the shadowed surface. Caswell clung to the pipe about ten feet back, halfway between the two buildings. He had one leg looped over the length of metal. As she watched he hauled himself up onto the narrow beam. He made eye contact with her, opened his mouth to speak.

  A popping sound from above filled the air. Bullets, fired out of desperation, hissed by her and thudded into the cobbles below.

  “Go!” Caswell shouted.

  She turned and started to shimmy toward the wall. Suddenly a line of light appeared in front of her. It grew into a rectangle. A shuttered window, opening. Someone was silhouetted within. Melni brought her legs up and kicked hard, sending the person sprawling backward into some sort of mealhouse. There were rows of tables behind the person, and he or she crashed into the nearest and went head over heels across the surface.

  Melni swung her legs back and then forward, letting go of the pipe as she did so. She flew through the open window and landed on her feet, crouched and ready for anything.

  The room was lit by a single lantern, upended when the table was knocked over. The brass cylinder rolled on the ground, casting long black shadows that slid across the floor, walls, and ceiling. The person she’d kicked lay in a scrambling heap a few feet away. She saw no one else but with the confusing shadows she did not trust that. Melni scurried across the floor to the Northerner—she could tell from the clothing—and slugged him four times on the back of the head until he went still. Outside bursts of gunfire rolled like thunderclaps off the building and echoed down the long streets. Caswell swung himself into the room, grunting as he landed on his rear. He held his left hand hard against his right biceps, and even in the swinging long shadows she could see blood oozing between his fingers.

  “How bad is the wound?” she asked him.

  “I’ll live,” he growled. “Keep moving, I’m right behind you.”

  Pushing herself to a shaky stand, Melni lurched for the open doorway and kicked the lantern in the process. Long shadows groped wildly about her. Bands of yellow chased by pitch black. The doorway, a gaping inky maw, felt welcoming against the chaos and confusion of the sliding shafts of muted light. Melni barreled through the doorway and kept going right across the hall, spinning to slam into it with her shoulders. Caswell was right behind her, a cutout against the room she’d fled. He gestured off to her left, down the hall. Melni nodded and began to navigate the unlit passage, probing with one extended hand to keep the wall to her left. Eyes now adjusted to the darkness, Melni saw a faint glow at the far end of the hall, a steady, dark blue pall that bathed that end of the passage and revealed a ninety-degree corner going off to the left.

  “Hurry,” Caswell whispered.

  That single word carried the reality of their situation. Hundreds of agents and soldiers from both sides of Gartien were all converging on her and him. Caswell’s instinct was exactly right. His ship was the only option. There was no turning back, no other conclusion to this that didn’t end in her execution. And then Prime would come, and “correct” Gartien. She had to flee her world if she wanted any chance to save it.

  So Melni ran.

  She ran ahead to the corner and took a quick peek at what lay around it. The pale glow in the hallway came from an eroded hole in the ceiling five feet down, spilling weak moonlight in. Water dripped from the edges of rotten shingles into a small puddle on the floor. The surface looked as weak as the ceiling above. Without waiting for Caswell she rounded the edge and skirted the bowed section of wet floor, then waited for her companion to appear. “Careful,” she whispered, pointing. He followed her example.

  Halfway down the length of the hall she came to a landing with stepwells leading down to the left and right. A waist-high wall that looked out over the station proper. Melni crouched and moved to the wall. When Caswell joined her she chanced a look over the edge.

  “It is just like when we dove into the canal in Portstav,” she whispered.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh. Yes. Regret.”

  “Focus, Melni. Do you see the craft?”

  “I see it.”

  “How many guards?”

  “Four,” she started to say.

  Something exploded outside in the alley. The whole building shook. Dust fell like thrown confetti from the iron rafters of the arched ceiling. A rattling volley of gunfire followed the blast, reverberating through the walls and floor like a tooth drill. The knowledge that North and South were fighting each other rather than banded together in pursuit of Alia’s killers gave her a surge of confidence. The guards shifted at the sounds of combat, alarmed and clearly worried. They took cover to be ready for enemies coming in from the street.

  “They are distracted,” she said.

  “Go. Go now.”

  The firefight outside hid her footfalls. Melni took the steps two at a time. At the bottom she paused long enough to see Caswell making his way to her. He moved slowly, one hand still pressed hard to his arm. In the glow of the moonlight she could see a trail of dark droplets on the steps behind him.

  Another explosion ripped through the building, filling the terminal with light and heat and a cloud of shrapnel. Melni winced and cowered on instinct, distantly aware of a swarm of soldiers rushing into the murk from the opposite side of the building. Southern soldiers, her brain registered. She forced herself into the fog of dust and smoke.

  Ahead one of the Northern guards shouted into a portable radio. “We’re overrun! EXECUTE NUCLEAR OPTION—”

  Something hissed past her ear. Four little thwick sounds, like arrows given flight. Tiny glowing orbs lanced across the room from Caswell’s position to the man with the radio, and the other three. They never knew what hit them. A rapid popping sound followed and the four sentries toppled, lifeless, to the floor.

  She turned to Caswell. “What is ‘nuclear option’?”

  A deep vibration in the floor answered the question. Caswell glanced to his right, and Melni followed the gaze.

  In the distance, out on the roller track, a humming engine pulling a line of cars began to emerge from the shadows and move toward the terminal, gaining speed with each second.

  “Go!” Caswell roared.

  Melni went. Straight to the shrouded vehicle. She dove under the sheet that covered it. Caswell rolled through behind her, smearing a trail of blood across the floor in his wake. He took the lead now, scrambling up a ladder indented into the side of the craft. He grunted with each step but his pace never slowed. Outside the sound of the approaching roller filled the air. The whole building vibrated as the engine thundered toward them.

  At the top Caswell paused, fiddling with the hatch mechanism. The whole surface had been charred black by the crash of the airship on that mountain, but just as Caswell had said, it appeared otherwise undamaged. Time seemed to slow the longer Melni waited on the ladder. All around her she heard the growing thrum of the engine, blended with the frantic footsteps and tactical chatter of Northern soldiers converging on the craft.

/>   A hiss heralded success. Caswell hauled himself across the threshold and into the bowels of the vessel. She vaulted up the last few steps and over the same, crashing headfirst into the small cavity within. Caswell had already righted himself and was pulling the heavy door closed even as she landed. The portal slammed shut, cutting off a sudden, urgent warning cry from one of the pursuers outside.

  Silence enveloped her. Not absolute, though, because even the craft now shook from the approaching roller. She moved aside so Caswell could open the inner door, a wave of dread sweeping over her, the events of the last few minutes a sudden unbearable weight. Encased within the otherworldly vehicle she felt simultaneously secure in its embrace and terrified at what would come next.

  Caswell dropped into the vessel proper and she followed. Again he closed the bulky door, cranking a long yellow handle to seal it completely. He pointed to a seat inset into the back wall, one of three. “Strap in,” he said, already hauling himself into the tiller’s chair and pulling belts across his shoulders and waist. Numb, feeling no longer in control of her own future, Melni complied.

  A wide segmented screen rotated down from the ceiling and positioned itself in front of Caswell. He began to tap at the bright and detailed displays, his finger leaving little red smudges.

  “You need that bandaged,” she said.

  “Later,” came the reply.

  On the screen before him a series of white squares winked into existence. She didn’t understand it at first, until the shadow of a soldier raced across one, appearing on the next. External cameras, all showing the white tarp that covered the craft.

  A deep rumbling began to shake the entire cabin. The oncoming roller, seconds away. She braced for impact despite the futility. The very walls rattled around her. Everything hummed, so violent she was sure the whole craft would be torn to pieces before the roller even made impact.

  Then the white tarp on the screen vanished, blown up and away by the spacecraft’s powerful engines. Caswell had powered them on. A deafening roar drowned out even the noise of the roller.