Zero World

by Jason M. Hough

  At the top of the ravine she found herself at the edge of a wide field of boneweed grass that sloped gently away to a tree line perhaps a quarter mile distant. Viewed from here, the passage of the Hollow strike team was even more obvious. No amount of care could mask the trampled grass. Their path traced a gently waving line from the rappelling rope spikes to a particularly large shade tree opposite. Melni walked fifty feet to her left and, keeping low, traced a parallel path to the one the Hollow had made, using the umbrella-like dome of the tree as a guide.

  Twenty feet from the tree she came upon a shallow Desolationera crater, invisible in the tall grass unless you stood right beside it. Their vehicles rested in the basin: sleek, disguise-painted thumpers and a single, low-slung quadcruiser covered with storage packs of varying size. None bore any kind of label or identifying marker, not that she had any doubt where they’d come from.

  Movement caught her eye. A man, sitting in the passenger seat of the quad, dressed in the black garb of the Hollow. He hunched forward and fiddled with something on the instrument panel before him that she could not see. He held one hand to his ear. Reporting the calamity that had just befallen his squad, no doubt. Melni kept to the trees and circled behind the vehicle, then moved in, pistol held level before her. She could hear the man’s voice now. Low, urgent. “Please acknowledge. Anyone, please!”

  He froze when Melni pressed the muzzle of her weapon to the side of his neck.

  “Keep your hands visible,” she whispered.

  The man nodded once.

  “Did anyone else stay back with you?”

  He hesitated. Melni pushed the barrel harder against his skin. “I am alone,” he finally said. A young man. Communications and support, probably. Trained in the basics of combat but likely not of the aptitude normally required for fieldwork. He’d still be a competent fighter, just not the elite. Or so she hoped.

  From the dash the radio chirped. “Acknowledged, oh-nine-deso. Report your status.”

  The unmistakable voice of Rasa Clune. Melni urged the Hollow Man away from the vehicle. With one eye on him she leaned in and switched the communicator off.

  “What happened down there?” the Hollow Man asked. If he harbored any fear of her or her weapon, it did not manifest in his voice.

  “Combran airships bombed the entire site. Your squad was annihilated.”

  “What of the stranger?”

  Melni studied the man before her. She decided to lie. “Vaporized along with the rest of them.”

  “Yet you survived.”

  The accusation behind his words stung. Melni retrained her aim on his chest and did her best to look unperturbed. “Go back. Tell Clune and the others that I have seen proof of the stranger’s story.”

  “Show me.”

  “Unfortunately it was just bombed into nothing more than shrapnel.”

  “How convenient.”

  “The truth sometimes is. Now go and tell her, or I will leave one more corpse here.”

  “What do you intend to do, Agent Sonbo? You should know if you set foot in the South you will be killed on sight. If you go anywhere near the summit—”

  Melni stopped listening. Sonbo, he’d called her. Her real name still felt uncomfortable, like clothes that no longer fit. Had she really left that person behind?

  It wasn’t that, she suddenly realized. It was the world that person had lived in, now no longer relevant. What she’d heard and seen inside that vessel below the lake rendered everything that had happened before moot. Sonbo, and all the rest, no longer mattered.

  But she was not Melni Tavan, either. Not of the North or the South or even the disjointed area in between. She was of Gartien.

  She shook her head to dispel these thoughts. True or not, she had a more immediate problem. Both North and South wanted her dead. The ramifications slid home like a knife in the gut. She was an exile, and would be forever more. Despite all she’d learned today, about Conduits and oppressive alien empires, it was all useless without proof. No one would believe a word of it. Except Valix.

  Valix, in the end, was the key. She had to get to her, with or without Caswell, and help her in her cause.

  Mentally Melni donned the exile’s coat and renewed her aim on the man. She had claimed her land and must sleep under the sky above it, as the old saying went. “I am not sure what I will do,” she said. “Tell Clune I remain loyal, despite all appearances, and that…and that…I will find a way to prove what I have learned.”

  “Tell her yourself,” the man said through a sudden, nasty grin.

  A sound behind her. The slightest scuff of a boot against dirt. She’d missed one of them. A minute earlier and her hearing might not have recovered enough to detect the noise. But now…Melni reacted on pure instinct, as Caswell would have. She dove to one side, firing her gun at the Hollow Man before her even as she fell. The bullet caught him in the stomach and he doubled over. Then Melni was rolling. Something whooshed past her head and thudded into the soil. Melni came up at a crouch and instantly ducked. Another black-clothed Hollow. A huge man, two feet taller than her with arms as thick as her thighs. He swung a black trunch that sizzled with live electricity. It passed inches in front of her face and knocked the pistol from her hand with a shuddering jolt. The weapon sailed six feet and vanished into the weeds.

  Melni took a step back and positioned herself into a fighting stance. One leg behind for stability, both hands raised chin level, fists balled. The huge man in front of her flexed his fingers on the crackling baton. She could not see the bottom half of his face, but the grin was obvious. She did not stand a chance. He was a Hollow, the most elite of trained killers, and judging from his gigantic hands could probably break her in half if given the chance, sizzling trunch or not. She could hear the hum of the electricity flowing across its surface. All he had to do was graze her skin and she’d be writhing on the ground, her tongue half-bitten off. She had to run. Or get that pistol. She glanced where it had fallen. The man danced a step in that direction, sensing her move. Toying with her. He stepped closer. Melni matched it with a step back. She tried to picture the layout of the clearing, where the vehicles were parked. That quadcruiser, there must be some kind of weapon there. The brute would never give her time to find one, though. She had to run.

  Beside her, on the ground, the man she’d shot made a muffled groan. He lay in a fetal curl in the trampled grass. Melni took two steps back and to the side, her eyes darting between the wounded man and the brute. The giant stepped forward in tandem with her, happy to push her farther from the dropped pistol.

  Melni glanced at the wounded man. He had both arms wrapped around his stomach. Blood welled freely between the black sleeves of his shirt. A wretched smell permeated the air. Digestive fluid. A fatal wound, more than likely. Melni glanced back at the brute, almost too late. He was in midair, leaping for her, the baton raised. Melni lurched into a sideways somersault, back on her feet just behind the wounded man as the brute’s misaimed jump crashed into the ground where she’d been, his overhand swing converted into a wild sidelong swipe that sizzled inches from her face. She felt the heat of it, and the hair on her skin tugging toward the electric force.

  With a dexterity she didn’t know she possessed, Melni yanked the wounded man’s pistol from the holster at his side without breaking stride. She clutched the weapon in her off hand, transferred it as she ran sideways. The giant sensed her find and dove as the gun coughed—once, twice, and a third time. Thunderous bursts echoed off the trees and the sides of the shallow crater. The big man dove behind the pack vehicle, hidden by its fuselage and the tall grass.

  She had no idea if she’d hit him. Melni took the weapon in both hands and crept forward. The man on the ground let out a long, gurgling wail. In one swift motion Melni swung the pistol in his direction and fired her fourth shot. His head jerked sideways and he went limp.

  Melni put her focus into controlling her racing heart and shallow breaths. A bead of sweat slid down the side of her fac
e. She loosened her grip on the weapon. She drew in a long breath through her nose and let the aroma of combat flow in, strangely calming.

  There was more movement, now from her left. Melni turned too late. A thrown rock struck her sternum. The impact sent her stumbling, shooting blind. A waste of ammunition. Her foot caught on something and she toppled over onto her back. He’ll press, she managed to think, and rolled to one side as the heavy form of the man slammed into the soil where she’d been. Again the thrum of naked electricity roiled near her face. Half-blinded, Melni did not bother to stand. She aimed and fired, and kept on firing until the trigger pulls resulted in the dull click of a spent cartridge.

  The giant lay five feet away, half-hidden by grass, blood seeping from wounds on his chest and neck. He twitched. A bubble of blood formed on his lips and, when it popped, his eyes became still as glass.

  Melni stood. Tried to. Her legs folded under her. She collapsed into a kneeling position in the dirt, laid the pistol across her legs, and let it dangle from shaking fingers. “So much death,” she whispered to the soil. To Gartien. These people were supposed to be on her side. With each dead body left along her trail the world felt a little darker, joy and hope and everything in between slowly bleeding out.

  Only now, instead of one final death at the end, Melni found a spark. A tiny glimmer of something good to come of all this. She would save Alia Valix, not assassinate her. She would save her and, in doing so, save the world. Not North from South or South from North, but Gartien from Prime. She would do this. The desoa journalist and failed spy. A deep chuckle rolled out of her at the absurdity of it all.

  “What’s so funny?” someone asked.

  Caswell.

  She glanced up, startled. He stood over her, his face filthy and dotted with mud or maybe blood. Probably both. He held out one hand for her.

  Too numb to react otherwise, Melni took it and let him pull her to her feet. The world tilted beneath her like a boat on the ocean. She let the sensation pass. “I was laughing because,” she said, and stopped until the mirth in her faded. “I was laughing because now we have to save Alice.”

  His brow furrowed, the humor lost on him.

  Melni frowned. “It is one thing to fire the gun and let the consequences be,” she said. “Now we have to save her from everyone else.” She gestured at the two dead bodies in the grass. “From these people. They want her; the North will go to war to stop them from getting her. Two great foes, intent to either have her on their side or none at all. And the two of us are supposed to walk in there and…do what, exactly? Steal her away? Hide her? And all the while some alien civilization spanning hundreds of planets is on their way to annihilate Gartien? And Earth, too? What do we do? Where do we even start?”

  A breath exploded from Caswell’s lips. “I was hoping you’d have a plan.”

  Now Melni really did laugh, softly at first, but she couldn’t control it no matter how hard she tried. It grew and grew until tears came. Caswell just stood and waited, and that sobered her. She took a deep breath. “What does your instinct tell you?”

  “Get to her.”

  Melni waited. He said nothing else. “Get to her? That is it?”

  “Get to her. Find out what she intends to do. Find out if she still believes in the Warden’s mission.”

  “Why wouldn’t she?”

  He gestured to the plume of smoke still rising from the valley. “She just bombed the only real evidence for what he told us.”

  “It might not have been her that ordered the bombing.”

  “Right, yes. But if anyone had the power to stop that from happening, Alice did. So why didn’t she?”

  Melni looked away. He was right and she knew it. Alia…Alice, had deliberately destroyed the place rather than let it be discovered. Or perhaps because it had been discovered. Some silent alarm alerting her, perhaps.

  Caswell went on. “We have to face the possibility that she’s gone mad with power here. You saw the condition he was in down there. That was a tomb, not a hiding place. I doubt they’ve spoken, at least on friendly terms, in years.”

  “And if that is true? If she no longer works toward preventing Prime’s discovery of Gartien?”

  He grimaced. “I don’t know. It’ll be up to us, I guess.”

  “We need a better plan than that.”

  It was his turn to laugh. “You know I’m not much of a planner.”

  “Well, then,” Melni said, “you are lucky I am around.”

  —

  It should have revolted her. Blood and bits of intestine, partially digested food, a gruesome fluid that surely was on its way out the other end of the body. All of it spilled from the communication officer’s belly as she pulled his outfit off. It should have revolted her, but for the absurdity of the whole situation.

  Instead of revulsion, she fought to keep the laughter in. She imagined herself of two years prior, sitting at the conference table above the Loweast in the Weekly’s modest office tower, surrounded by other reporters and editors, interviewing for her new role. Someone had asked, “Where do you see yourself in two years?” She pictured herself, leaning back, casting a confident glance at the faces around the table, and deadpanning the response. “I will be crouched in a snowy Desolation crater in Southern Cirdia, tearing the clothes from a dead Hollow Man that I shot in the gut, trying not to vomit onto his large intestine. And beside me, an assassin from another world, one of many worlds, will be singing a song of his world called ‘Dead Man’s Party’ while he tries on a pair of boots taken from corpse number two, another Hollow that we, together, murdered. That is where I see myself.”

  And the chief editor, a half smile on her face, saying, “Lovely. When can you start?”

  This imagined conversation went on and on in her head as they searched all of the vehicles in the crater.

  Unfortunately Caswell could not wear the giant’s clothes. The smaller man’s outfit might have worked for him, but she already had it on. A bit loose, but good enough to pass a cursory inspection, except for all the blood.

  Caswell found a tactical vest in one of the cruiser’s sidebags and handed it to her. That covered the gore, mostly.

  “What about you?” she asked him. No other garments had turned up in the storage compartments.

  “I’m your prisoner. I look the part.”

  “They are looking for a female agent and an escaped prisoner.”

  Caswell snorted a laugh. “Then let us hope they think we are smarter than this,” he shot back, exaggerating the individual words like natives of Gartien did. He even mimicked her accent, or tried to.

  “Yur gunna wanna let me do the talking,” she replied, in his accent and smashed-together cadence. She thought she sounded pretty convincing, but Caswell reacted with laughter and by clapping his hands together.

  “Don’t quit your day job, Mel.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Come on,” she said, annoyed and a bit embarrassed. “We should get moving if we are going to reach Fineva in time.”

  “Agreed.”

  She took the tiller. The military-spec cruiser was choice-of-the-flock, configured with a powerful air-ram motor and everything needed for the rough terrain of the Desolation. It climbed out of the shallow crater with ease and ate up miles of scrubland forest beneath its tires with a voracious appetite. It being a rare quadcruiser, they were able to sit side by side in the cabin.

  “Look here,” Caswell said, yanking Melni from the lull of a smooth section of trail across a wide, flat plain dappled with colorful wildflowers. In a pocket affixed to the front of his seat a booklet had been stowed. Inside were maps and aerial photoprints. “They tracked us all the way from the shore,” he said, pointing at a waxpen circle marking where they’d landed.

  “They must have been behind us the whole time.”

  He nodded. “Damned impressive. I had no idea.” He showed her another page. “Looks like they charted a path from here to the sum
mit meeting. I guess they were supposed to take us there. Or our bodies, anyway.”

  “It makes sense,” Melni replied. “That is where everyone else will be. Including Rasa Clune, broken jaw and all.” She flashed Caswell a smile but he missed it, too engrossed in the papers on his lap. For the next twenty minutes, as mile after mile of cratered prairie vanished under the nose of the cruiser, he studied the map and compared it to the landscape around them. Eventually he pinpointed their location and guided Melni onto the course the Hollow had laid out. The path led mostly east into the mountains.

  “Where does this lead us?” she asked.

  “Something called the Vongar. Those Grim Runners mentioned that as well. What is it?”

  “A path between North and South. One of the few undamaged land routes. For a while after the Desolation it was one of the only safe ways to travel across. A roller track was even built, and that is how diplomats reach the city of Fineva even now.”

  “You sound…I don’t know, concerned.”

  “The Vongar,” she paused, choosing her words. “It’s the one safe path to Fineva, from either side. It’s guarded, patrolled. And, with the summit so close, it will be crowded.”

  “I see.” He grew silent for some time. “And Fineva itself? Tell me more about it.”

  Navigating around fallen trees and over countless erosion holes and miniature canyons carved by years of neglect, Melni recounted the same summary all recruits at Riverswidth received, which in truth was hardly more than what any child learned in school. Fineva had once been the cultural heart of the Cirdian nation, neither its capital nor possessing any real political significance. It was regarded as one of Gartien’s most beautiful cities even then, and the fact that it had been somehow spared by the bombardment of the shattered comet made the place perhaps the only beautiful city left in the world. Coupled with the winding path through the craters that surrounded it, after the Desolation occurred Fineva became a meeting place for refugees, disaster relief coordinators, and smugglers. As tensions rose between the planet’s two halves, and the two major alliances—North and South—began to solidify, Fineva evolved into the de facto meeting place. The city was made a military-free zone along with the rest of the Desolation, and so the city also became Gartien’s epicenter for the activities of spies.