Zero World

by Jason M. Hough

  Melni felt paralyzed. She had no idea of what to expect, of what they were up against. Trapped in a palace swarming with NRD goons she could at least wrap her mind around, but this? What were all these alarms? What object was in such close proximity that all this chaos was warranted? There was no time to ask. Something clanged against the ship. “I…Caswell, I am afraid….”

  “It’s okay. Don’t worry. I’ve got an idea,” Caswell said, ending the worst silence Melni had ever known. “It relies entirely on you, though.”

  Melni managed a nod, grateful he’d come up with a plan for once. “Tell me what I must do.”

  —

  He had no idea if it would work. If Monique had any inkling that he was not alone, the ruse would die before it could even start.

  A sound wormed its way into his mind. The uplink, notifying him of an incoming transmission. He drifted back to the command console and hauled himself back into the seat. With a deep breath, Caswell accepted the call.

  The face of Monique Pendleton appeared on the screen. “You made it!” she exclaimed, the delight on her face genuine.

  “Barely,” he said. He tried to impart exhaustion, weakness, confusion. “I’m not quite sure what happened, Mo. I was on the Venturi, then—”

  “Let’s talk in person,” she said. “I’m here, right outside.”

  The surprise on his face required no acting. He’d never been in the same room with her. To get this chance now, to confront her with what the Warden had apparently told him, was far more appealing than this—

  He realized then what he should have noticed immediately: no time lag in the brief conversation. Monique was here. She’d come to him. “Yeah. Yeah, okay,” he managed.

  Monique must have seen the comprehension dawn across his face. She offered her usual brilliant smile. “Come through,” she said. “I’m to debrief you personally. They’ve really got a lot riding on this mission, Caswell. You scared the hell out of us not coming back on time.”

  “I can imagine. Right, see you in a minute,” he said, and killed the link.

  He checked the vossen gun. Only one needle left. It would have to count, and he’d have to fire it before she could trigger his implant, something she could probably do with the push of a button. No easy task.

  —

  Monique did not greet him outside the airlock. Instead he found himself staring into the impassive faces of two soldiers in full vacuum-rated combat gear, armed to the teeth. Archon logos were visible on each shoulder and across the breast.

  “Search him,” one said.

  The other complied, drifting over to Caswell and patting him down. “Clean,” the man said.

  “What the hell is this?” Caswell asked.

  The voice that replied was Monique’s, cast through speakers embedded in the walls. “Welcome aboard, Agent IA6. Sorry about the welcome committee, but given your reversion state we have to be sure you aren’t compromised.”

  One guard fell in behind him. The other led Caswell along a corridor segmented by bare metal bulkheads and lined with snaking bundles of colorful cables tucked into latticework aluminum trays. Exposed pipes and ventilation ducts wormed their way across the walls, floor, and ceiling. All of this was concealed beneath clear hard-plastic panels, bolted at each corner. Under acceleration, whichever way would be “down” would be made semi-opaque, and all of the panels could be removed to allow easy access to the ship’s support systems. Standard Archon layout. He’d seen it a dozen times before.

  Some of those clear panels began to glow softly blue. He drifted along the tunnel. His escort took a left at a T junction, then a right, then “up.” One of Archon’s executive flagships, Caswell thought. Everything looked clean, and despite the surface veneer of chaos in the way the cables and pipes snaked their way around the walls, a trained eye such as his could recognize the layout had been very carefully planned. The vessel made the Pawn Takes Bishop look like some kind of thrown-together garbage scow.

  Finally they came to a bulkhead door. The forward guard levered it open, revealing an opulent room within. Decades ago spacecraft had left behind their “only as big as we can fit inside a shuttle bay” size restrictions thanks to the advent of orbital construction yards. Yet even by modern standards this room was enormous, ten meters long and ten wide, with porthole windows along the far wall that showed a muted view of the Sun. A disk-shaped conference table made of black marble dominated the space, with room for twenty or more to sit around its circumference in high-backed, ergonomically perfect chairs. Lacking gravity the room’s layout seemed rather silly, but Caswell imagined the normal use would be for meetings between corporate heads or visiting dignitaries, and the ship would be placed under thrust for the duration simply to make the occupants feel more comfortable.

  Monique Pendleton sat alone in the huge room, directly opposite Caswell, the Sun glinting majestically behind her like an angelic halo. He squinted, raising one arm to block the light, until she made the windows go opaque. Soft yellow light from recessed bulbs along the wall joints replaced the sunlight.

  “Where’s our betters?” he asked, the use of “our” a deliberate attempt to paint him and her as a team, joined at the proverbial hip, just as they’d always been. As he spoke he drifted to a seat, then decided sitting at a table in zero-g was stupid. Besides, deliberately strapping himself down when he might need to flee at a moment’s notice was tactically dumb. He floated beside the chair instead, holding it with one hand to keep from drifting away.

  “Just us for now,” she replied. With a gesture of her hand the two guards came in, positioning themselves to either side of the now-closed door. “Only a skeleton crew aboard, I’m afraid. We came out to rendezvous with you, guessing you’d be low on supplies. When you didn’t emerge…Tell me, how do you feel?”

  “Like shit. It’s not fun reverting like that.”

  She frowned in sympathy. “If there had been time I would have re-created your Hyde Park apartment in one of the shuttle bays.”

  “That would have been nice.”

  “Alas, we arranged this in a hurry.”

  Caswell feigned humility. “An expensive journey to pick up one man,” he said. “Not that I’m complaining.”

  “Worth it, in this case.” With a smile she added, “The mission, and our coveted Agent IA6. What happened? What do you remember?”

  “I was on the Venturi, watching the salvage team do their work, when Angelina made the mistake of accessing the station’s database. You triggered IA as a result. Then…I was in the lander, drifting, unable to lock on to the SPS or even the background stars. The whole navigation system, fubarred.”

  “What do you make of that?”

  He shrugged. “Malfunction, I guess.”

  “Did you access the ship’s logs to troubleshoot this?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’d gone through reversion. First time that’s ever happened to me during a mission, but I remember my training, Mo. I isolated myself from any potential mission artifacts and awaited contact. You know all this, of course.”

  “Did you record any imagery or notes while under IA?”

  “No.” Then he added, “None that I remember. I didn’t look in the ship’s secure log.”

  The person he’d spent more than a decade thinking of as his partner gave a matronly nod. With great care she said, “So, the mission, was it a success?”

  He let a little anger slip into his voice. “That question is insulting, Monique. How would I know? I don’t even know what the mission was. The implant did its job. Have the fucking analysts figure it out and send me on holiday.” If he could get her to believe him ignorant of what had happened, indeed of the very existence of Gartien, maybe she would leave it at that. Maybe she’d send away the two soldiers. He needed all of them to lower their guard, to suspect him of nothing, so that he could be ready when Melni was found.

  “Relax, IA6. You have your protocol, I have mine. These are stan
dard questions.”

  “I…of course.” He almost said “regret,” turned it into a cough. “Apologies. Go on.”

  She gathered herself. Tapped a few notes into a terminal on her right. “You left no indicator for yourself?”

  “If I logged anything it would be with the key only you can decrypt. I know the protocol, Mo.”

  She leaned forward, considering him.

  Caswell tried to look at her with fresh eyes, to see her not as the handler he’d become so intertwined with over the years, but as an alien. A so-called Warden of Prime, monitoring Earth to make sure humanity didn’t find the Conduit. And, if Melni’s fantastic story was all true, then Monique—indeed all of this group called “Prime”—had been unaware of Gartien’s existence until the moment that evidence of Alice Vale’s escape had been uncovered on the Venturi.

  He imagined the situation from her perspective. He almost certainly knew more about Gartien—the planet and its relation to this Conduit—than she did. He’d watched video logs from the Venturi’s brief visit to the world, a bit of intel Monique had provided him with when he was under IA and something he rediscovered on the return journey while Melni slept. The footage contradicted some of the things Alice Vale had said, most specifically that it had been Caswell who had blown up the Venturi. In the video, Alice did that. But such things could be faked, and on closer inspection he thought he saw slight clues in the imagery that confirmed such doctoring. Archon had made Alice out to be the villain, when all along it had really been him.

  Monique knew of Gartien’s existence now, thanks to the Venturi data, but probably not much more than that. He figured she’d sent him to kill Alice Vale as something of a knee-jerk reaction. Alice had been there for many years by then, but given her goals and how they differed from the way this outfit called Prime operated, Monique had to take the first chance to put an end to Alice’s perceived poisoning of that world. If he succeeded, Prime could treat it like any other world on the Conduit. If he failed, well, they had their ways of dealing with that, too, from what Melni recounted from the Warden’s story.

  Caswell cleared his throat, realizing she was waiting for him to say more. “I assume I succeeded, whatever the goal may have been, but didn’t make it back in time to avoid field reversion. I hope that’s the case, anyway. That’s all I can tell you.”

  “But you were aboard the lander when you reverted.”

  “Yes.”

  Monique steepled her fingers. “Archon appreciates your optimism, Agent Caswell. It’s an unfortunate drawback to our implants that such a situation might arise, and in any other circumstance your involvement would have ended already. This is a special situation, however.”

  “Is that why you triggered me again, when I came through?”

  Her lips extended in a condescending smile. She blinked, twice. “Came through what, exactly?”

  Shit. He swallowed, buried suddenly under the crushing weight that mere knowledge of the Conduit could spell not only his demise, but Earth’s and Gartien’s as well. Melni’s.

  Melni. Jesus. Another thought, cold and terrible, coursed through him. She represented an intelligence coup for Prime, and he’d brought her right to them. Not only had she lived on that hidden world her whole life, but she’d been deeply integrated into its political and military intrigues. She remembered everything the Warden had said, and she had no implant with which to defend herself against forced interrogation.

  “Came through what, Agent?” Monique repeated.

  “My…my mental stupor. The pain meds on that boat were twelve years old, Monique, a bit beyond their expiration date.”

  A pause followed. Her eyes bored into him, just long enough to raise the hairs on his neck. “Well,” she finally said, breaking eye contact to glance down at her screen, “it looks like the data from the lander has finished downloading.”

  He tensed, cursing his own lack of foresight. Of course the damned ship would have recorded everything, and he hadn’t thought to manipulate or, at the very least, erase the evidence.

  Monique leaned forward, her eyes scanning information Caswell couldn’t see. “Hmm. Either you were talking to yourself a lot, or…” Then she tapped something, and his own voice came booming out of the walls of the conference room.

  “Two hours until we initiate burn for the Conduit.”

  “How long will the journey take?”

  “Six days, give or take. Plenty of time to rest.”

  “And plan.”

  “If only we knew what to plan for. Anyway, doesn’t matter, we’ve got something more pressing to deal with.”

  Caswell pushed away from the chair, but in that same instant a pair of hands, strong as vise grips, wrapped around his upper arms and yanked him to the table, thrusting him into the seat.

  “Well, well,” Monique said, pausing the recording.

  Caswell fought against the guard, but in the lack of gravity he couldn’t get any leverage. A black strip of plastic came across his field of view, pressed against his chest, and tightened. The restraint constricted until it bit into his skin. He could barely breathe. His arms were pinned helplessly to his sides. His legs, though, were free. Caswell tried to kick out against the table, hoping to topple the chair. But of course in a zero-g situation it had been securely fixed in place, and his effort accomplished nothing.

  “Enough of that,” Monique snapped. “Shoot him in the foot if he resists further.”

  “Yes, Warden,” the guard replied.

  Warden. So these men knew of her true role.

  “Search the lander,” she said to the other man. “It seems we have a visitor. Let’s get her into quarantine, hmm?”

  “Yes, Warden,” the second guard replied.

  “There’s no one else aboard,” Caswell said in desperation. “I put her out the airlock. She was a spy.”

  “Forgive me if I don’t believe you,” Monique said. She looked past Caswell then. “You have your orders, Cento.”

  “Warden,” the guard said. He left.

  Monique leaned back in her chair. Her movements were fluid, utterly comfortable in the lack of gravity. “A rather illuminating bit of audio to hear, that,” she said, smiling slightly at Caswell. “Specifically the use of that word. Conduit. How could you have learned that, I wonder? Its proper name. Even Alice Vale wouldn’t have known that.”

  Caswell leaned forward and reached up at the same time, to rub his temples. He searched for his implant, ready to flood his brain with anything available to give him some advantage here. But he found only emptiness there.

  “You didn’t think I’d leave you that option, did you?” Monique asked. “Give me a little credit.”

  “I…I didn’t know you could do that.”

  “There are many things you don’t know about that little gland in your neck, Agent. Granted, the device was invented on Earth. Among the most interesting harvests we’ve made. We took it and improved it for our agents, however. Orders of magnitude more sophisticated than the slimy little blobs most Earthlings walk around with. You yourself received a very special model indeed.”

  To prove the point, Caswell’s hands lifted from his lap. As if of their own volition, the limbs raised and reached out to the left, one thumb extending. Unable to control himself, he swung across his own body, fists crashing in against his right biceps. The tip of his thumb bore straight into the bullet wound. Fresh, blinding pain flared there. And then utterly vanished. Then returned. Like an on-off switch, he was flung to the limits of agony and then hauled back, panting, crying, as the thumb continued to press against the bandaged entry hole.

  His hands finally relaxed. The pain vanished entirely. Artificially suppressed, lurking in the darkness of his mind.

  “You should know,” Monique said casually, “that I’d love to hear what happened in your own words, Caswell. But rest assured I’ll have every memory pulled out of your skull in perfect fidelity. Even, by the way, the ones you think you forgot.”

  He glared
at her, too stunned to say anything.

  “That’s right,” she said. “It’s all still there. Everything, since day one. No memories were ever deleted, Agent, they were simply fire-walled.”

  Rage erupted within him. All this fucking time. All the murder he’d committed, all the deeds he’d done with the confidence that he would be absolved, mentally and legally, of the consequences. All of it, still inside him.

  “Here,” Monique said. “Have this one back. A little taste.”

  He felt a slight tingle deep inside his skull. And then, unbidden, Peter Caswell saw the interior of a luxury condominium. The evening skyline of Hong Kong gleamed just outside expansive windows. He stood at the center of a large mattress, white sheets and maroon blankets pooled haphazardly around his feet. And limbs. Naked flesh. A man, a woman, their faces just smears of blood and gore. In his hand he held a kitchen knife. Another body lay not far away. A…No, he thought. God, no.

  “Surprised at what you’re capable of?”

  “That wasn’t me,” he stammered.

  “Of course it was. It was the real you. The man who emerges when he knows he won’t remember. Intoxicated, as usual. Drunk on his lack of accountability.”

  “Who were they?” he asked before he could stop himself.

  “Dr. Huang was an astrophysicist,” Monique replied, her voice sickeningly even. “He was two weeks or less away from discovering the Conduit. That particular mission was eight years ago.”

  The words confirmed what he already feared, yet this did nothing to soften the blow. Monique had recruited him specifically for this role. The implant made him the perfect enforcer. Everything he’d done since joining Archon had been to protect the secret of the Conduit. And if he himself ever caught even the slightest hint of the thing, she’d just revert him and that would be that. He took fucking pride in not asking questions, in never seeking to know what had lain within the myriad of gaps throughout his memory. He’d been a tool, a blunt instrument for her to wield. He did the fucking work. Worse, he’d genuinely relished the lack of consequences that gave other, unaugmented agents that perpetual haunted look. He relied utterly on Monique’s summations of his success or failure in the field.