Zero State

by Jameson Kowalczyk

  He wondered how many were left alive up top. If they'd seen the vehicle fall into the crevasse. If they'd look down and see him.

  The fall had been so disorienting, he'd forgotten what he was standing on. That it was a vehicle that had been speeding along on its treads a few minutes ago. That there were people inside.

  The hatch opened, reminding him.

  ***

  The transport was thirty feet long and fifteen feet wide, and the hatch was near the center. Not a very large surface for a fight. The blue walls and endless drop made it seem even smaller.

  Logan killed the first man out of the hatch with an ice ax to the side of the neck. Blood spurted from the wound, freezing the instant it touched the air. A red icicle fell off the man's neck as Logan pulled the blade free.

  The body started to fall back down the hatch. The next man in line had to force it back through, pushing on the dead body's heels and driving it upward. This was done with enough force that Logan had to dodge to avoid being tackled by the corpse.

  The body landed facedown and then started to slide, its weight carrying it over the edge.

  The second man out of the hatch raised an assault rifle. Logan hooked the barrel with one ax and swung with the other. Bullets ricocheted off the armored surface at their feet while the blunt side of the axe bashed the shooter's skull. Logan used both ax blades like hooks to throw the stunned combatant toward the edge of the roof. The icy metal surface and gravity did the rest.

  The third man out of the hatch slammed Logan backward with a punch to the center of the chest. Logan felt body armor rupture inside his suit and the breath was knocked from his lungs. He lost his footing and fell against the wall of ice at his back.

  Logan raised the marker and aimed it at the soldier's head. He tapped the trigger and a pair of bullets punched through the back of the man's neck and blew out through the chest. Half-frozen gore sloshed across the vehicle's roof.

  Another body tumbled into the void. Another emerged from the hatch to take its place. Followed by another and another.

  ***

  The roof of the armored vehicle was slick with bloody ice. Logan crouched at the center, his balance unsteady, his head throbbing with concussion. Throughout his body he could feel fractured bones, sprained ligaments, and deep bruises. His goggles were nothing more than a pair of goggles now—no comm line, no information displays, no night vision or thermals, all the electronics inside destroyed by one blow or another. He'd lost the marker and his other weapons. He'd been stabbed and beaten. He'd been sprayed with shrapnel when someone had tossed a grenade out of the hatch.

  But he was still alive, still breathing. The fight had gone on for a very long time but now it was over. A dozen men and women had been inside the hollow metal platform underneath him and he'd fought each one to the death. Some of them had been human, others had been the super humans he'd met on the island.

  His skin was bruised and lacerated. His body armor had been pulverized and hung on his battered frame like wet laundry. The outer layer of his clothing was cut to ribbons, and he was getting cold, but at least it numbed his wounds.

  He felt tired, like he could fall asleep. He thought about going down inside the transport and taking a nap, but even through these clouded thoughts he knew this was a bad idea. If he went to sleep now he wouldn't wake up.

  He needed to climb.

  He stood, using one of the ice axes like a cane.

  ***

  Logan had been on the wall for a long time. Or what felt like a long time.

  He hadn't made much progress. The crevasse seemed endless when he looked up. And when he looked down, the vehicle wedged between the walls looked more and more inviting. It would be so much easier to climb down, crawl inside, and sleep. Maybe he'd made the wrong decision.

  He'd lost some gear in the fall and the fight that came after, but he still had his pack, which meant he still had his climbing gear and rope and crampons. At least he was climbing with a safety line. He had some margin for error, however small, and he needed it.

  One end of the rope was anchored to a rung on top of the transport. The armored vehicle was rooted in the ice as strongly as any tree or rock he'd anchored to in the past.

  His first bolt was set ten meters up and the second bolt five meters after that, hammered into ice that had been frozen and compacted for millennia.

  His rope was clipped into carabineers that dangled on the end of each bolt. The rope ran through a brake on the front of his harness. If he fell, the rope would catch on the bolt and carabineer, and tighten at the brake, arresting his fall.

  Cold continued to bleed into his body. His muscles became harder to use as blood retreated into his core, protecting his heart. The ice axes felt impossibly heavy, like he was trying to climb with a pair of dumbbells. He'd been peeled raw by exhaustion. There was no energy left anywhere in his body, no strength. What was left of his mind forced his limbs through every movement, big or small.

  "Zoe?" he said.

  "Right here, Logan." He heard the voice and remembered the comm line was dead. He was hallucinating. But he understood he was hallucinating.

  He'd been trained for this. To see through the fog of physical exhaustion, sleep deprivation, concussion, and blood loss, and concentrate on small individual tasks. Load a gun. Tie a knot. Read a map. The people who had trained Logan so many years ago had thrown every disadvantage they could think of at him and demanded that he perform perfectly and with precision.

  That training had saved his life in the past.

  It would save his life now.

  He continued to inch up the wall. Driving the axes into the ice. Kicking in with the spiked crampons on his boots. Setting a bolt every five meters.

  He was halfway up the wall when he fell.

  It started with a bad swing of the ice ax in his left hand. The blade punched into the ice, but not far enough. When he put weight on the limb to reach up with the next ax, the blade slipped out. He fell back, the ice ax in his right hand scraped uselessly against the wall, and then he started to slip from the toeholds.

  He fell past the last bolt he had set and the rope caught him by the waist, hard.

  It took a moment for him to understand what had happened.

  "Zoe?" he said. He remembered the comm line was still dead.

  "You fell. You need to climb back up again."

  "Thanks."

  He dangled on the end of the rope and reached for the wall with an ice ax, looking for one of the holds he'd made on his first pass of this section.

  ***

  Logan opened his eyes and realized he'd blacked out. He was still hanging on the safety line. His ice axes dangled from wrist straps.

  "Zoe?" he said.

  No answer, not even a hallucination.

  He started to slip away again, black crowding his vision, when something punched hard into the wall above his head. He looked and found a long black dart sticking into the ice, about a meter above him. It looked like an arrow or a bolt. A thin cable was attached to one end, drawing a black line that connected to the top of the crevasse. Logan looked up and saw a shape moving down that line. As it moved closer, he could see it was a person bundled in layers of white clothing. Someone was coming for him.

  ***

  The next time he woke, he was clipped onto that black line. The person in white was above him, pulling them both up the wire with some kind of hand crank. It was like riding a zip line in reverse. Below, the transport vehicle was nothing more than a flake of metal, barely visible against the bottomless crack in the ice.

  ***

  Logan woke again. This time he was on a sled, on his back, being dragged across the snow. He felt warmer, and realized he'd been wrapped in a blanket or a sleeping bag. He looked toward the person who'd rescued him and saw a body wrapped in layers of insulation and armor, trudging forward across the white desert.

  CHAPTER 32

  It had bee
n twelve hours since the last sign of life from Logan.

  Zoe had watched the entire battle on her monitors, through the video feed from the two cameras Logan wore. She'd kept track of his position on an overhead map of the area. They'd kept an open comm line. She could see the data that scrolled across the inside of his goggles and his vital signs. The signal had been strong inside the valley.

  All of it had dropped off in a matter of seconds when the transport fell through the ice. First the comm channel, followed by Logan's vitals, his position, and then the video feed. She'd been over those last few seconds of video a thousand times in the past twelve hours, frame by frame.

  She was doing it again, now.

  Most of what was there was shake and static. Logan had been on top of one of the armored transports they'd sent out after him. He'd caught on as the thing had tried to run him over, probably figuring they wouldn't fire a tank at their own men and machinery.

  The vehicle hit something buried in the snow and then the image pixelated. When it picked back up, there was motion. Like a wall of blue was rising up out of the ground. No, not rising, she'd realized, the fourth or fifth time she replayed it. The vehicle was falling past something. Into something.

  She copied an indistinguishable section of video, three and a half seconds in length, about a hundred and fifteen frames. She ran the section through a piece of software that pulled each frame apart pixel by pixel and compared it to all the other frames, trying to reconstruct the missing pieces with surrounding information. When the new frames rendered, she had a series of images that showed the armored vehicle tilting down into a wide crack in the surface. A layer of snow and ice was crumbling away, revealing a blue canyon underneath. It was like the frozen ground had unclenched its jaw and swallowed the vehicle whole.

  The next few seconds showed the fall. Fast, then halting. The last few seconds of audio were an ear-splitting shriek, like metal on glass amplified a billion times. The fall slowed, the video feeds flickered and went black. The last transmitted frame showed Logan's face, twisted into some expression of pain or terror or shock or maybe prayer. The timestamp on that final image was a full half-second after the last read on Logan's vital signs. His pulse and blood pressure had zeroed out before that image was cast. He'd been alive when the fall ended. And if he'd been alive when the fall ended, he could be alive now. At least that's what Zoe was trying to convince herself.

  The falling vehicle could have continued falling after the feed went black. It could have caught on a shelf or choked into a narrow section before the sheer weight of the thing pulled it through.

  Logan could have survived the fall only to be killed by one of the enemy combatants inside the armored hull underneath his feet. Or captured by those that had survived the battle up top.

  He could have frozen to death over the past twelve hours.

  Or any of a hundred other possibilities.

  ***

  The door opened and Zoe looked away from the monitors.

  Holden walked in. He was alone.

  "Anything?" he asked, though he could have probably figured out the answer based on her posture and the expression on her face.

  Zoe shook her head.

  Holden was dressed in sweatpants that tapered at the ankle and a blue t-shirt that fit tightly over his V-shaped frame. The veins of his forearms and biceps bulged, like he'd just finished a workout. He looked and smelled clean, like he'd showered afterward.

  She'd been awake and staring at a computer screen for thirty-something hours. Her shift had started with her dropping an antimatter bomb on a few hundred people. She'd witnessed the deaths of a hundred more at Logan's hands. And now Logan was gone and she had a growing certainty that he was dead.

  "There's still a chance," Holden said.

  She forced a small smile.

  Holden opened a cabinet and took out a bottle. Whiskey or bourbon or something like that. Zoe had never cared enough to learn about different alcohols. He poured two glasses, brought one over to her, and kept the other for himself.

  She took a sip, and supposed it was okay. She rarely drank hard liquor. Rarely did anything that would dull her mind, her reaction time, her physicality.

  Whatever was in the glass tasted good. She took another sip.

  Holden sat down across from her.

  "I've never asked about you two," he said. "You and Logan."

  "What about us?"

  "You work together. You're in a relationship."

  "What else did you want to know?"

  "What else is there?"

  "Not much. We met through a staffing arrangement a few years ago. Never met in person until last month, when all this started. There was always something there, between us. Tension, I guess you would call it."

  "Even though you'd never met in person?"

  She laughed. "You do realize what you do for a living? The company you run? How many relationships do you think have been carried out with Paradime? How many do you think are happening right now?"

  He smiled. "Sometimes I forget what I do. What we do here. We do so many things now."

  She realized what the question about her and Logan had meant. Holden was interested in her. He was asking if it was a committed relationship, a convenient arrangement, or something in between. Zoe didn't have an answer. She hadn't given it a label or definition herself. She'd just taken it for what it was: something she enjoyed with someone she cared about. She thought of the time she'd talked dirty to him, as he'd stumbled away from that burning car wreck on that deserted European highway, his lung on the verge of collapse. The idea that he was dead was a giant wound in the pit of her stomach.

  Holden was swirling the amber liquid in his glass. "Remember what I said the other day, when I first sat down with you and Logan?" he asked. "The thing they tell you to buy when your company's value reaches ten billion?"

  "I've never been in that position." She meant it as a joke, but he looked somber.

  "An army. They advise you to acquire a private military corporation. A staff of full-time mercenaries."

  "Company men."

  "Is that what you call them?"

  Zoe nodded.

  "I've started the process. Of acquiring some. I have advisors who know about this kind of thing. We're going to send a team in. Logan took care of most of the combatants on the ground. At least that's what it looks like. The team will go in to acquire the treatment and look for Logan."

  Holden was upset, Zoe realized. About Logan. Like he was the one who'd sent Logan to his death. Like he was responsible in some way. He was the only person Logan had ever worked for who would feel that way.

  She thought about what it would be like to be with Holden. He was close to her age. His body looked well-muscled, not like a soldier or an athlete, more like an actor or a model. His skin was smooth and without scars. He smelled good. She knew she would enjoy it. But at the same time, she felt guilty thinking about it.

  She reached out and put her hand over his.

  CHAPTER 33

  Logan was warm. A light glowed nearby, a small battery-powered lantern. He blinked his eyes a few times, letting them adjust. The room around him was small and dome-shaped. The walls were thick with insulation. Stacked crates took up half the floorspace.

  He was on the floor, cocooned inside a sleeping bag. The bag had a hood and covered everything but his face. A strip of insulation served as a sleeping pad, cushioning his back against the hard floor.

  A dozen different kinds of pain welcomed him as he sat up. His upper arms and back where puffy and tender with bruised tissue. His forearms were purple. Half his fingers wouldn't bend, the knuckles knobby and swollen. His neck was so stiff he could only turn it an inch to the left. Every muscle, tendon, and ligament in his body felt strained.

  He coughed and it was like a fist beating on his ribs.

  Just outside his sleeping bag, next to the battery-powered lantern, someone had laid out a large
canteen of water, a jar of ibuprofen, a half dozen high calorie snack bars. Logan took a few small sips and then gulped down half the water. He'd managed to protect his face during the brawl, and his jaw was the only part of him that didn't hurt.

  He ate an energy bar. It tasted like bacon and chocolate and peanut butter. He swallowed 800mg of ibuprofen and drank some more water and then zipped himself back into the sleeping bag and closed his eyes.

  There was no way to tell how long he slept, but when he woke again some of the pain had subsided. Enough that he could force himself out of the sleeping bag and into the cold air of the room. Black spots flickered across his vision when he stood.

  He was naked. His clothing and gear were in a pile on the floor. None of it was salvageable. The layers of insulation had been shredded, the body armor pulverized, the synthetic muscles designed to enhance speed and strength were dead weight, all of it damage sustained during the battle. All of his weapons were missing, but he believed those had been lost before he was hauled out of the blue chasm. His comm unit was dead.

  Laid on top of the stacked crates was a large duffle bag that contained boots, snowshoes, multiple layers of cold weather clothing, even body armor. Nothing fit well—some of it was too small, some too large—but it fit. At the bottom of the bag was a GPS unit, fully charged. He searched around for a weapon, but found none.

  He tucked the canteen inside his clothing, so his body heat would keep the water from freezing, and did the same with the remaining energy bars. He stuffed the sleeping bag, lantern, and some extra clothing into the duffle bag.

  The room had two doors. Each led into a narrow hallway with walls covered in thick insulation. He chose a door and followed it into another dome-shaped hut, this one larger, a communal area. And then another door, another hallway, and then outside, into the frozen desert.