Zero World

by Jason M. Hough

  The suit fit him well, if a bit loose in the chest and shoulders. The dark gray cloth was tailored in a modern Southern style, Melni had explained, with an asymmetrical opening buttoned three times just above the heart, the gap falling diagonally away to end at a smart, hard corner before disappearing around the back. The material had a slight sheen to it, contrasted by a light gray shirt beneath that he’d clasped tight at the neck. The sleeve cuffs above each hand were hidden below the arms of the jacket. She stood and corrected these apparent gaffes for him, then stepped back.

  “It is obvious you have a pistol tucked in the coat, but that should not raise concern where we are going.”

  He patted the weapon, as if that might press it down enough to hide it. The compact vossen would have been ideal, but he’d spent every round fighting the Hollow, and discarded the empty, single-use tube.

  “How does it feel?” she asked him, referring to the clothes.

  “I’ll admit it looks quite smart, but I liked the Grim Runner garb better.”

  She stifled a laugh. “Me, too. However the diplomats will be wearing garments like this tonight for Alia’s speech. Our chances of being noticed are considerably reduced this way.”

  He sensed, or thought he sensed, a deeper reaction to his attire. The slight reddening of the cheeks, the uptick of the eyebrows, and the vaguest hint of some kind of animal desire. He couldn’t be sure he read these signs right, but were he on Earth he would have known instantly that his sudden attraction to this woman had been repaid in kind. She looked like a vision in her dress. The cut was severe, the type of thing you’d expect on a runway model in Milan for some provocative new designer, not a diplomat at a summit meeting. It accentuated a dancer’s body he’d barely noticed before, and, combined with the literally otherworldly hairstyle and her unsettling purple eyes, he’d found it difficult to keep his mind on the danger of their situation.

  Caswell took his seat again across from her. He’d had to keep his desert boots on beneath the widened bottoms of the pant legs, for there had been no footwear with the clothing. Hopefully no one would look down.

  For a time they sat in silence as the train thundered along toward Alice Vale’s summit.

  “Next comes the hard part,” he said, looking out the window. “Finding Alia before your people make their move. What time is it?”

  “Almost first hour, I think.”

  He nodded. “Cutting it close.” Damn close, he added to himself. Two days, almost to the minute, and he would revert. Ready or not, all this would be forgotten.

  Melni said something.

  He barely heard it, and then her words registered like a slap to the face. “Hold on. What did you just say?”

  She yawned, stretched. “I said we are lucky the summit was delayed. With this new information—”

  Caswell sat bolt upright, head swimming. He grabbed Melni’s hands, so tight her eyes went wide with fear. “Delayed? What the hell are you talking about?”

  She looked at him, confused. “The…While you were unconscious, in Riverswidth. From your injuries.”

  “Yes? Go on!”

  “Combra called for a two-day delay. So lucky for us. It bought you extra time to heal.”

  “I was in that bed for two days?”

  He shouted so loudly the window rattled.

  Melni flinched back, held fast by his grip. “Why are you so angry? It gave us more time to—” She stopped.

  Stopped because he wasn’t listening to her. Caswell leapt from his seat. Before he knew what he was doing he was at the door, then out in the hall beyond. He stopped there, looking off toward the far end of the car, where a clock hung on the wall.

  One minute left to reversion.

  “Goddamnit,” he growled to himself. “Goddamnit, goddamnit. Fuck.”

  “What is wrong?” Melni asked from the cabin door.

  “Look,” he stammered, pushing her back inside, closing the door. He urged her back to her seat, then he paced. What to do? He was fucked and he knew it. He sat down, saw the fear in her eyes, and felt a surge of guilt. “Look. Okay. Listen. I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you of this sooner. I thought I had more time.”

  “Tell me what? You are scaring me.”

  He fixed a gaze on her, tried to put every bit of urgency he could into it. “In less than a minute I’ll forget everything.”

  “You…what? You will forget? Forget what?”

  “My mission. This place. Laz, Alice, all of it. You. I’ll forget you.”

  “What are you talking about? How?”

  “There’s no time, Melni!” he shouted.

  She recoiled as if slapped.

  He grasped her hands again, gently this time. “Just—Listen to me, carefully. I won’t know you. I may even try to kill you.”

  “Kill me? Caswell, what—”

  “Don’t say anything, just listen. I will reset. Do you understand? You must explain to me why I’m here. What we’re doing and why it’s important.”

  “I…Garta’s light. Yes. Anything.”

  “There’s more.”

  “What?” she asked, breathless.

  “I won’t trust you. But there’s a chance. When I come back, I may whisper something. Part of a song. You have to finish the lyric or I will never believe you. I’ll say: ‘Speak the word.’ ”

  “Speak what word?”

  “No time, just listen! You must finish it.”

  “But what word?”

  “Not a word, it’s a song. I’ll say, ‘Speak the word.’ You say: ‘The word is all of us.’ ”

  “Caswell, this is too much. I don’t—”

  His body suddenly spasmed, and then his eyes screwed shut as every neuron in his head flipped back to where it had been, two weeks earlier.

  EVERYTHING CHANGED. He’d been exhaling, now he was inhaling. Weightlessness, and now the familiar tug of gravity. Stale air became heavy, full of exotic scents. He felt the sway of motion. His stomach suddenly clenched so hard he felt as if shot in the gut. Pain from a dozen new injuries registered. The weight of his spacesuit, gone, replaced with something light and flexible. His body spasmed involuntarily at the change. His neck throbbed, too, low on chemicals.

  Fuck, I’ve reverted, he managed to think through it all.

  Despite the tears in his eyes he coaxed them open. “The word…speak the word,” he realized he was still saying, and stopped.

  He was sitting now, not clinging to the Venturi’s wall. A fashion model with pixie hair and fake purple eyes sat across from him, looking like she’d just been pummeled by street thugs. He hoped he hadn’t been the one to do that. Caswell blinked tears away and fought to get his mind around this shift in realities. “Who…” he said, then waited as a wave of nausea passed. He willed focus from his implant only to realize his smartwatch was gone. He tried the manual method of activating the implant instead, rubbing his temples, hoping for something. Anything. Clarity, concentration. It gave a little. He sat up, more alert now. “Who are you?” he barked.

  The exotic party girl opened her mouth to reply, and suddenly it occurred to him that he’d been compromised. Captured. Why else would he not be in his bed in London or, barring that, at least somewhere safe? To revert in the field was unthinkable.

  Before she could utter whatever lie waited on her lips, Caswell reached out. He grasped her neck and shoved her bodily back into the red-cushioned seat. He gripped hard. She clawed at fingers that felt stiff as iron, gasped for breath, and croaked something. “The…word…all of us.”

  Had she just…? He eased off. His hands did not move, but he loosened his grip just enough to let her speak.

  “The word is all of us,” she said, eyes wide with terror.

  Caswell let her go. She scrambled away from him to the corner of the small room and got her breathing under control.

  “Who are you?” he rasped. “Where am I? Some sort of simkit?”

  “I do not know what a simkit is,” the woman replied.

&
nbsp; The sway of the room suddenly registered. The vibration in his seat, and distant sounds. “Are we…is this a bloody steam train, for fuck’s sake? Who are you?”

  “Please, one question at a time,” she said. She willed calm and allowed herself several full breaths, her fingertips still massaging her neck where he’d grabbed her. “My name is Melni Tavan.”

  “Melanie?”

  She grinned at that, though it vanished in an instant. “Melni. And you are Caswell.”

  Her accent he could not place, and her looks…probably all artificial. The eyes, the hair, the skin tone…none of it worked. She looked like some Eastern European sim-raver in a dress made by a fashion school genius the world just wasn’t fucking ready for. “How do you know me? Why am I here?” He glanced down at himself. “Jesus Christ, what the hell are we wearing?”

  “Your implant has caused you to forget,” she said.

  “Obviously.” He stared at her. “You knew the lyric, so…that’s something. I’ve never told anyone that. What happened? Tell me why I’m here.” He glanced around again. Where on Earth did people still ride steam trains? “Wherever here is.”

  The woman swallowed. “You were sent here to kill a woman named Alice Vale.”

  “Right. Right. I know that name,” he said. The missing crew member. Monique must have located her, sent him to finish the job. “She wasn’t with the others.”

  “She goes by Alia Valix here.”

  “Where is ‘here,’ damnit?”

  “We are on our way to a summit where she is due to speak, but when we—”

  The door burst open.

  Shadows stood in the hall. Shadows with guns.

  THE GIRL REACTED before he could.

  Still in the post-reversion fog, Caswell watched the woman across from him lurch up and into the two figures in the hallway with surprising speed. Whoever she was, she was damned quick.

  The soldiers in the hall were dressed like none he’d ever seen. But then he was dressed in a completely bizarre outfit, too. It looked like someone from a hundred years earlier had tried to imagine what a business suit would look like in the year 2100, and failed miserably.

  Get it together, Cas. He reached out to his implant and willed a dose of elhydrine, ignoring for the moment that virtually every chembank was nearly empty. One thing at a time. There was danger here, and the post-reversion haze left him little to no chance of fighting it. The gland responded. Time seemed to slow down externally while remaining normal within his mind. Chemical reactions in his brain would trigger faster, much faster, now. The downside was heat. He’d get maybe thirty seconds of realtime advantage and then it would stop or he’d cook himself.

  The woman flung herself toward the door, one balled fist arching toward the jaw of the uniformed man standing there. Who was she again? Melni? A strange name. She looked like no one he’d ever seen, pale skin and blond hair cut almost mannishly short. Her eyes were a luminous, unearthly purple. Contact lenses, surely. She wore a dress that matched her eye color.

  Most important, she knew his mnemonic. Whoever she was, he trusted her. Or, at least, he needed her. Maybe he’d given her something for safekeeping, something too important to lose along with his memory. Something Archon needed?

  What Caswell needed was space. To gather his wits, find out just what the hell had led him here, then make contact with Monique and report.

  He forced himself into motion. With his brain firing at six times the normal rate it felt like slow dancing in a vat of heavy syrup. The woman’s fist was just reaching the first guard’s chin. The man was holding a completely bizarre-looking gun with tubing along the sides and some sort of pressurized canister extending well back above the wrist, but there was no mistaking the business end and it was coming up. Caswell adjusted his motion to lift his lower back away from the bench seat and, just as he suspected, the tip of the weapon suddenly unleashed a bright flame and then a bullet. The round sailed across the gap like a gently thrown dart, slapping into the cushion where Caswell’s rear end had been a second earlier. A split second from the guard’s perspective, unless he had an implant, too. His eyes did not move in the telltale hyperactive way elhydrine causes, though. Perhaps just a local soldier? The uniform was as bizarre as the suit Caswell wore.

  He kept himself in motion, and reviewed the last few minutes of his life before…this. He’d been aboard the Venturi, watching the crew of the Pawn Takes Bishop work to free the black box from that doomed, long-dead station. He’d sent off a report to Monique that one crew member was missing. Alice Vale.

  “You were sent here to kill a woman named Alice Vale.”

  Monique had forced him into an IA-protocol mission. A sudden request, no time to get his acceptance much less his ritual, spurned because the captain of that salvage crew had accessed the Venturi’s computers against orders. Then his implant had kicked in and everything between that moment and when he “awoke” on this train was now forcibly deleted. Forever. Whatever it had been, wherever they’d sent him to do it, he’d obviously failed to complete the objective and return to London, or at least a safe place, in time.

  He had to contact Monique. Find out what the fuck was going on. Find out if he should abort. Go to ground or return home.

  Or finish the job he’d been sent to do. Kill Alice Vale. Perhaps that was why he’d trusted the girl with his lyric. How the hell else would she have known his mission goal?

  A strangely muffled thud caught his attention: the woman’s fist smashing into the guard’s jaw. A tooth glided away like a leaf knocked from a branch. The man’s knees were going, his eyes rolling sickly up.

  The other man, though—shit. Caswell hadn’t noticed before but saw it now; the butt of the man’s gun was driving in hard toward Melni’s stomach. No time to do anything about that. He could think fast but his movements were still constrained by human capability and real-world physics. Caswell pushed his body into a leap, stretched himself out, hands extended. He aimed straight for the woman’s head knowing she would double over from the blow to her abdomen before he reached her. Sure enough she started to bend forward, an elongated grunt whooshing out of her lips. Caswell brushed the top of her head as he sailed past, his hands perfectly grasping the neck of the man who had struck her. Caswell caught a brief glimpse of snow-dappled trees blurring past outside. No landmarks to guide him. Planetside, clearly, but where? Russia? Canada? Some goddamned theme park for rich weirdos who liked to ride steam trains? Impossible to tell, and not the time to figure it out.

  Not the time because, despite everything else assaulting his mind, one fact stood out: He’d trusted the woman Melni. Trusted her enough to tell him his mnemonic, had to trust her because above all else he apparently thought his mission was important enough to continue beyond the expiration timer. Monique wouldn’t like that. IA-rated missions were not given unless a strict and carefully considered time frame had been agreed upon.

  Caswell’s momentum through the heavy clear molasses of thin-fucking-air took him and his victim straight across the narrow hall of the train car and into the wall beyond. He lowered his head as they flew, slow as a considerate nod from his perspective, aiming for the man’s jaw and succeeding.

  Caswell twisted with the impact, allowing his body to roll sideways into the wall and drop him to the floor on all fours. He took the impact easily, graced so with the luxury to ponder every motion, every angle. The man he’d hit was sliding down the wall, knees splaying. In realtime Caswell might have snagged his foot on the man’s knee while trying to stick his landing, but in this slowed frame of reference he managed to hook his foot out and around. As he did so he glanced back.

  The woman Melni was falling, limp as a mannequin. More guards were rushing up from her end of the hall, frantically trying to ready movie-prop weapons. Only they were real, Caswell thought. No one made props with that kind of detail just for a damned simkit fantasy.

  The guard Melni had punched was falling, too, one hand pressed across his face, a
weirdly deep scream beginning to hiss out of him like a slow leak of air. He spun as he fell, one arm flailing out to brace the impact. It made the men rushing up behind him begin to slow or leap to one side. That was useful. Caswell came up in a sprint for the other end of the train, running crouched, feeling like he was at the bottom of a pool. Suddenly he noticed the weight at his breast. As he ran he lifted one hand and slipped it into the strange, diagonally breasted coat he wore, where the grip of a pistol waited. He yanked the weapon free and considered his options. Turn and empty the clip? He had no idea what this weapon was, much less how big a cartridge it held, but he thought it reasonable to assume it had four shots and thus enough for the immediate problem. He could turn and drop the four guards in as many squeezes of the trigger, taking leisurely aim for each.

  But he’d never killed anyone before, not that he remembered at least. And he certainly didn’t know this gun. It could be empty, though he doubted he would have been carrying it if that was the case. Hell, glancing at it he began to wonder how to even fire the bloody thing, or which end was which. It was longer behind the grip than in front, and had a weird brace or something at the back. Caswell gripped the handle and found it all made a sudden sense. The brace rested on his forearm. The weapon’s weight seemed evenly distributed instead of in front of his trigger finger like a typical pistol, but this he thought he could compensate for with one or two practice shots.

  Caswell raised the weapon and fired it at a rounded window at the far end of the train car. The glass shattered and fell in splinters, like it would have a hundred years ago before aligned-hybrid glass became commonly used, or even the basic tempered stuff from half a century ago. This window spidered rather beautifully and then sucked inward, propelled by the forces of the wind outside. He saw the shards coming for him and knew he needed to dodge. The men behind him would be thinking he was going to leap through the broken pane. A suicide move he had no intention of making. He did leap, but aimed himself slightly off to one side. He started to bring his left leg up and began to twist himself bodily. The glass missed him by mere millimeters. His foot caught the sidewall and he pushed off, accelerating himself diagonally toward the dogleg corner of the hall beside the broken window. Cool air gently buffeted him. He rolled in midair, took aim behind.