Zero World

by Jason M. Hough

  “My landing craft.”

  “Some kind of submersible?”

  He pressed something hard against her shoulder, then began to expertly wind bandage around the double wound. “Yes, very much like that. Drink.”

  Something tickled at her lips. She opened her mouth and felt a firm yet spongy tube slide between. She sucked timidly. The water tasted like nothing at all, blissfully cold. She drank eagerly until he pulled the tube away.

  “That’s enough for now. Can you eat?”

  “I’ll try,” she said.

  She heard the sound of paper, or something like it, tearing. Then another brush against her lips. She opened her mouth and felt the squared end of some sort of hard bread or biscuit slip in an inch. Melni bit down into a dry, crumbling bit of flavorless nothing. She did her best to chew while Caswell held the remainder against her closed mouth. The biscuit thing turned into mush in her mouth and left a slightly sour mineral aftertaste. “What is that? Besides awful, I mean.”

  “Nutrients,” he said. “Sterilized and utterly bland, I’m afraid. Designed not to interfere with the painkillers. Hopefully you won’t react to it as I do to the food here.”

  Melni took another few bites and shook her head at a fourth. The pain in her arm had vanished, and the flutters in her stomach were indeed much reduced. “What happened?”

  “You were shot, lost a fair amount of blood.”

  “That part I recall. Vividly. I mean after that.”

  She heard metal clinking against a pan. Then a hiss of air.

  “I drove,” Caswell said. “Hard at first, on the glowing roads.”

  “They did not chase?”

  “For a while, yeah. Until I left the road for a frozen river. I followed it most of the way here. No small feat with the lights off and without that glow. Didn’t see a single light behind us after the first few miles.”

  She gradually became aware of a myriad of strange noises: soft chirps, the low constant breath of circulation fans. And a warmth, as well. He’d removed her coat and overshirt, yet the room felt like a hearth-side table in a mealhouse.

  He offered her another bite of the inoffensive biscuit. She shook her head. Her stomach felt on the verge of betrayal. “What happens now?”

  Caswell leaned into her limited field of view where her nose held up the blinding fabric. He pressed something against her forehead and slid it down to her temple, then studied it. Next he removed a band she hadn’t realized was there from her left forearm. It was white with a blue stripe, and had some words printed on it she couldn’t quite read. To her surprise they changed when he ran his finger across them. He tossed the strange bracelet aside, out of her narrow view. “I’ve been thinking. It’s best I work alone. Sorry, but each minute I spend with you is an enormous risk, however aligned our goals might be.”

  “That poses a bit of a problem.”

  “I know.”

  “If you succeed, I’ll lose my chance to interrogate her.”

  “Nothing to be done about it. I’m running out of time, Melni, and my mission is too important.”

  “So you’re going after her alone.”

  “Yes.”

  Melni swam inside her own head. Every coherent thought felt like a physical thing she had to grasp and yank free from the two-fisted clutch of fatigue and drugs. She needed time. Even an hour. “I may be ordered to stop you.” It was an empty threat given her wound but she could think of nothing else.

  “Possible. You’ll note, however, that I have you strapped to a chair. I could just leave you this way, sedated, until I’m done. I could kill you, if it comes to that. Your people have no idea where you are.”

  “Would you?” she asked. Of course she had made contact with Riverswidth. And they had been very clear: Bring Caswell in. Keeping that from him now oddly felt more like a betrayal than prudent spycraft. Still, she felt sure he wouldn’t heal her wound only to shoot her himself.

  He took his time to respond. “You seem a decent person, but I’d be lying if I said your life is more important than my objective. Don’t force me to make that choice.”

  “I…” She gritted her teeth. Damn the moons, whatever he had given her had extraordinary power. She felt as if floating in a warm bath. Her left arm felt fine, if numb, despite the bullet that had torn through her muscle and nerves. She had almost bled to death. She damn well should have. Had she stumbled into a Midstav doctor’s office with a wound like that, she’d be in bed for weeks, at a minimum. “Caswell, listen. I do not know who you work for or what their ultimate objective is, but removing Alia Valix should be a last resort. The South could benefit more if we gain intelligence on her invention process. Surely you can see that?”

  “You’re wrong. I can’t explain why, but you’re wrong. And anyway I have strict orders.” He sighed. Started to move.

  Melni fought to concentrate, aware and embarrassed at how feeble and stammering her voice sounded. “Take me to the coast, at least? One of the logging towns? There’s one called Portstav west of here. I can buy passage south from there.” No need to tell him there was a listening post in that seaside town. She could make contact, report to Riverswidth. She’d suggest a new plan: Let him go but follow him. Let him lead her to Valix, then stop him before he can kill her.

  Betray him, that is what you really mean.

  The kinship she’d felt for him in their hasty flight from the Think Tank, from Midstav, felt suddenly like a chain of brittle links. So they’d both been in the Valix house. So what? Her duty to the South outweighed whatever power had sent him here. In that sense they were adversaries. She had to start acting that way. For all she knew he was lying about his intention to kill the woman. To let him go, to not do everything in her power to stop him, might be seen as treason back home.

  He had moved out of sight again. She could hear him rummaging through various unknown objects. Filling a travel pack, perhaps. Preparing to leave. “Right, okay. Fine,” he said. “Rest for a bit while I get my kit sorted, and we’ll be off. We’ll part ways at Portstav.”

  Melni lay still—she had no other choice, really—and resisted the strong urge to sleep by concocting yet another plan: Get to the coast, figure out some way to delay Caswell there, make contact with Riverswidth via the agents at the listening post. They could provide her with supplies, papers.

  Perhaps they’d know the scope of the hunt for her and the stranger. Fleeing south may already be impossible. Suddenly she could see herself, holed up in some dank room in Portstav with the local listening team for weeks, even a whole month, until the search abated.

  After a time she felt the strip of fabric across her face shift, then tighten.

  Caswell nudged her. “Lift your head.” When she did he tied the strip in a quick knot and helped her sit upright.

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “The arm is fine. My stomach, however, is not happy with you.”

  “Sorry. I’m worried about giving you anything more complex. We’ll get something proper for you to eat at the first opportunity.”

  “You sound better.”

  “A thousand times better,” he agreed. “Chicken tikka masala.”

  “Huh?”

  He hauled her by the right elbow off the…it wasn’t a doctor’s table, she decided. Just a reclined chair. Not unlike the formfitting style found in the NRD police cruiser, actually. Strange to have it in a larger space. She reached out her hands to feel for him and a second later his fingers brushed hers. He grasped her firmly but gently by the wrist of her good arm and guided her to a few paces from the chair.

  Something above them ticked and then rattled. There was a hiss of air, and something plopped on the floor near her feet. Snow, she realized.

  “I’ll go up first,” he said. “Clear any fresh snow, and get the cruiser ready.”

  “All right.”

  “Do I need to tie your hands behind your back or will you leave the blindfold in place?”

  “I will behave.”
>
  He laid her coat gently over her shoulders, expecting a wince of pain and apparently pleased at the lack of one. “Gratitude,” he said quietly. Before she could reply his boots were tapping against the rungs of what must be a scalesteps pulled down from the ceiling.

  She heard a heavy mechanical whir and then a sharp rising hiss that ended in a pop. Cold air rushed inside, startling against the almost uncomfortable warmth of the…submersible, or whatever it was.

  Next came the sound of boots crunching on snow. He didn’t climb down anything, so this vehicle must be completely buried in a drift or even underground. This gave her a shiver. The noise abated as he moved away.

  Melni could not help herself. She reached up and lifted the blindfold from her eyes.

  She stood in an oblong room, like the inside of an egg. White walls, floor, and ceiling, all merged together to form one contiguous space. Above her head was a round door with an inlaid window, now open. Another identical door lay opposite it, at her feet. It had a circular window in the middle, damp soil pressing against it from beneath. The other walls consisted of rectangular tiles in varying size. Each had a small metal handle embedded in a circular depression in the center, and a label just above that. Many were studded with tiny circular lights glowing in green, though here and there a few showed red.

  Melni turned around and her breath caught in her throat. The other side of the room was dominated by a sleek chair that reminded her vaguely of a teethright’s office, only instead of cleaning instruments dangling before it there were display screens, similar to what she’d seen inside Alia’s Think Tank, but impossibly thin. Each was full of vibrant-colored, fantastically sharp text and images.

  “What in Garta’s light—”

  “Mel!”

  The shout came from directly above her. She glanced up in time to see Caswell’s feet falling toward her and just barely moved out of the way before he crashed into her.

  “You really shouldn’t have done that,” he growled.

  “Regret, I—”

  “Save it. We’ve got to go, now.”

  He shoved her toward the scalesteps and forced her to clamber up. She saw him kneel and grab a large white bag that he’d placed on the floor, then turned her focus to the patch of gray sky directly over her head. White flakes of snow drifted lazily across the circular view.

  Outside she found herself standing atop the scarred outer part of an egg-shaped vessel. At least she thought it was egg shaped. Most of it was buried in ice.

  The vessel lay in a pit about ten feet in diameter; slick shiny walls of ice about six feet high and steeply sloped were all around the portal through which she’d climbed. Water ran in rivulets down to the exposed surface of the ship. Had its internal heat carved this hole? She thought it must be so. A deep thrumming sound became evident, though it sounded far away. Melni whirled about for the source and saw instead a patch that had some regular snow piled like a ramp at the edge of the depression. Her companion’s boot prints were all over it.

  “Go! I’m right behind you,” he hissed.

  She darted up the icy slope in three steps, almost slipping, Caswell right on her heels. He pressed his hand into the small of her back and urged her onward, faster. One arm useless, Melni staggered awkwardly ahead to the NRD cruiser. The vehicle lay fifty feet away, in the middle of an undulating slope covered in snow. To her right she saw a frozen lake surrounded by hills. Patches of dark gray exposed rock jutted from an otherwise perfectly white landscape.

  Melni chanced a look back, desperate for additional details to the supposed submersible buried in the ice, beside a lake rather than in it, on a mountain peak that must be a hundred miles or more from the ocean.

  What she saw instead flooded her with all-consuming fear.

  Three hundred feet upslope a gigantic dirigible drifted along. She’d never seen one so big, though there’d been rumors of the North working on such things. The massive airship was fifty feet off the ground and moved as lazily as a whale. The thrumming noise she heard came from its lifters: four massive circular blurs mounted on boom arms that jutted from a central spine atop the bulbous monstrosity.

  Slung on its underbelly was a cabin. Porthole windows dotted the length of it, but more concerning were the doors, three that she could see, and three more on the far side. Outfitted soldiers stood in each. And below, dangling from black ropes, were more. The first of them reached the ground even as she watched, and immediately unslung rifles from their shoulders.

  “Down!” Caswell shouted, and then he was on her, diving, driving her to the snow, as bullets thwapped into the ice around them.

  She had time only to register the sting of cold on her cheek before he hauled her to her feet and they were running again. He guided her by the collar of her shirt to one side of the stolen cruiser and thrust her behind it as more gunshots rang out. Something whistled over her head. Another round hammered into the fuselage of the little vehicle, cracking the front window.

  Caswell flung himself to the ground next to her and immediately set to rummaging about in his oversize white bag. Despite the bullets sizzling through the air around her, and the renewed throb from her wound, she managed to glimpse the word ARCHON printed on the side of that bag. The word had no meaning to her, but stylized as it was she thought it must be a corporation or brand name. She filed that, something to look up later. A clue to his employer, perhaps.

  He’d pulled a hard rectangular case from his bag and now leaned over the contents of it. He snapped two objects together and twisted in a third. Then he was up, leaning over the canopy of the cruiser and sighting down the barrel of a very strange-looking rifle. The barrel was unusually thick.

  Melni managed to twist around and glance over the tail end of the vehicle as he fired. She expected a booming crack, perhaps followed by one of the eight approaching officers falling dead. Instead the sound produced was a flaring sigh. The projectile that emerged flew on a brilliant yellow flame that left a trail of thick smoke in its wake.

  The missile rose above the heads of the oncoming soldiers and lanced straight into the nose of the gigantic airship. She braced herself for an explosion. None came. Instead she saw what looked like rolling lightning dance across the skin of the mechanical floating whale. At once all four rotors stopped spinning. Without the benefit of their lift, the craft nosed downward and began to fall. Whatever gas filled the huge body, it was not enough alone to support the weight of the thing. The dirigible plummeted faster and faster, the NRD soldiers already on the ground scattering, those still shimmying down the ropes dropping ten, twenty, even thirty feet into the snow just to get away.

  The nose hit the ground with a grinding crash. The explosion came a split second later. Yellow-white flame erupted from the nose and then, faster than the eye could track, began to slice through the seams of the fabric hull. A blinding, white-hot light bloomed from the entire doomed ship, followed by a deep whump sound that she felt more than heard. The light roiled, transformed into a rising inferno that licked up from every gaping hole in the tattered skin. Fireballs rolled upward until consumed by their own smoke clouds.

  A grating crash followed as the cabin slammed into the ice. She could not see it through the flames, but the noise said everything. Nobody could survive such a horrid, fiery impact.

  Most of the operatives on the ground had fallen or flung themselves from the explosion. A few still moved.

  Suddenly Caswell had her by the arm. He yanked her viciously to the open cruiser door and shoved her into the backseat. Without a word he tossed his large white bag across her legs and slammed the back canopy door shut around her. He took the tiller’s chair and they were off in a violent spray of white, bounding down the mountainside, away from flames and death, away from his vehicle.

  Caswell, she realized, was muttering a single nonsensical word, over and over.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck—”

  THE CRUISER BOUNCED and lurched down the long slope.

  Between
spine-jarring impacts Caswell stole glances over his shoulder at the snowy hillside lit orange by the roiling skeleton of the blimp. “Should’ve told me they had aircraft.”

  “I did not…just rumors. Odd shapes floating high above the rolltowns of the Desolation. I have never seen—”

  “Forget it,” he said. “Keep quiet for now, will you?”

  Caswell drove like an animal spooked and routed from its den. The cruiser leapt off each undulation on the long slope, crashing down an instant later with teeth-rattling force.

  After an agonizing minute the slope eased. Wisps of tall grass poked through the heavy snowpack and scraped along the cruiser’s body like probing, bony fingers.

  “I see no one following,” Melni said.

  “They don’t need to,” Caswell replied.

  “Why?”

  “Have a look.”

  The tandem two-seater offered a fantastic panorama for the driver, but Melni had to lean and press her face close to his seat to see. She gasped.

  He yanked hard on the V-shaped steering control. The cruiser lurched right in a huge spray of snow, and stopped.

  At the base of the hill, along an imposing wall of trees, were lights, a dozen at least, evenly spaced at fifty meter intervals.

  “Garta, they must have the whole mountain surrounded!”

  As they watched, some of the lights burst from the tree line and surged onto the slope. NRD cruisers, spewing huge plumes of white powder from their rear tires.

  “Maybe,” he said. “Let’s see how well they play chicken.”

  “Chicken?”

  “Uh. A bird, about—”

  Melni grunted. “I know what a chicken is, just not how to play it.”

  “Two opponents on a collision course, knowing the impact means certain death, both expecting the other to swerve.”

  “Ah. We call it who-flinch. Everyone calls it who-flinch, actually. Except you,” she said, a bit more terror in her voice with each word as Caswell sped toward the approaching lights.