Zero World (11 page)

He gave a casual shrug of his shoulders and renewed his aim.

“Wait,” Melni said.
What in all of Garta’s light were they talking about?
“Just…please—”

“Lights off!” Alia shouted, very loud and carefully clear.

Incredibly the lights obeyed her voice. Darkness swept back into the room, absolute save for the dimly glowing disk of the aquarium’s surface, high above.

Four gunshots barked in rapid succession. The rounds zipped past Melni’s ear and gave little
thawps
as they burrowed into the wall somewhere behind. She dropped to the ground, heard footsteps where Alia had been and a muttered curse from the assassin.

“Intrusion scenario!” Alia shouted.

A vibration coursed through the floor. The sound of grating metal mixed with snapping electrically activated locks. Another whipcrack from the gun. Sparks erupted from the wall to Melni’s left, where Alia’s voice had been. There was a heavy ringing thud from the direction of the small desk. Somewhere on the far side of the room she heard an almost imperceptible hydraulic hiss and then a deeper, heavier metallic clang.

The man had his flashlight back on and was frantically swinging it about the room. Melni rolled to her stomach and came up in a crouch, her knife held out despite the lack of opponent. The weapon felt suddenly pitiful.

Alia had vanished. Where the desk and chair had been there was now a metallic dome studded with rivets. Before Melni could ponder the reason for this she heard a series of thin mechanical whirs from all around. The man heard it, too, and swung his beam across the circular wall of the chamber. At every compass point, up close to the ceiling, a panel had opened, each perhaps one foot on a side. Concealed within were circular openings: pipes, like cannons lurking behind their gun ports.

A queer noise filled the room. Behind the walls, above the ceiling, came the rattling of pipework and the gurgling, uneven sounds of rushing water.

Above this came Alia’s voice, amplified and made tinny by a concealed sound system. “I’m sorry it has to end like this, but I cannot let you ruin what I’ve started here.”

The pipes coughed, each spraying a fine mist of water.

“This way!” Melni shouted. Without looking she turned and ran for the secret hallway she and Alia had entered through. All around her the hidden pipes began to belch little blasts of water. Then the deluge came. Six massive streams poured into the room and began to pool on the floor. Before Melni could even reach the opening there was an inch of water on the floor. She slipped as she tried to take the corner, slammed into the hallway wall, and began to slide along it on the torrent of frigid liquid pouring into the Think Tank. The impact ripped her backpurse from her shoulder. It splashed into the water and sank, gone. Without the benefit of the stranger’s torch she found herself in near-total darkness, carried by the flood of water.

Panic filled her as the current slammed her bodily into the far end of the narrow passage. In the impact she lost her grip on the knife and it splashed near her feet. She imagined the razor-sharp blade swirling around violently in the vortex of current around her legs.
Forget it!
her mind screamed.
Get out, get away!

Somewhere to her right would be the concealed bookshelf door she’d entered through. She came to a shaky stand, groped around in the inky blackness for any kind of handle. Nothing. The water came to her waist now. She took a gulp of air and dove, fumbling along the base of the door for a foot latch. Again, nothing. Melni stood again and heaved against the surface with her shoulder, to no avail. She pressed her back against the opposite wall and kicked. The door did not so much as budge. The water, now at her chest, gave no indication of slowing. No drainage. A perfect seal. In the chamber behind her, the dome over Alia’s desk made a sudden and terrible sense. That tiny table and its computer were the only things in the room worth protecting.

The hallway turned from possible exit to virtually certain death trap. She kicked hard, cupped her hands, and pulled toward the vast chamber of the Think Tank, but against the torrent she made no progress. The water came on too fast, grinding in a violent maelstrom where the narrow hallway ended.

Less than a foot of air remained. Without an exit the water pressure
would soon equalize, so she shifted focus to breathing, craning her neck out of the sloshing surface until her lips met the ceiling. One last swallow of air, then Melni pushed off and down. The pressure against her vanished as the hallway filled to capacity. She kicked off and kept kicking. Her arms were almost useless in the narrow passage so she pressed one to her side and held the other out to feel her way through the pitch black. She thrashed her feet, kicking hard. The frigid water bit into her skin. Her lungs burned for air.

A light swung through the darkness. There, the end of the tunnel. Melni kicked harder and reached out. Her fingertips brushed the end of the hallway and she turned, pressed her feet against the wall, and thrust her body back into the Think Tank. She kicked upward, pulled with her hands and arms. Her lungs demanded air, burned for it. Any second now her body would disobey the force of will.

With a splash her head broke the surface. Melni gulped fresh air and treaded water. Around her the pipes near the ceiling still spewed water at a colossal pace, the deafening streams churning the surface. Already half the room lay submerged. The cool blue column of the aquarium jutted from the center of the pool. Below, in the murky depth, she saw the beam of the stranger’s electric torch swinging about. He was frantic. Drowning. Perhaps he didn’t know how to swim.

Despite the pain in her lungs and the tremors running through her cold body, Melni paddled toward the light and, once over it, dove and kicked downward. Near the bottom she spotted the blurred shape of the man. He was near the dome that had covered Alia’s desk. She reached for him, grabbed him tight by the neck of his shirt. Feet against the bottom she thrust upward, letting bubbles stream from her mouth to guide the way. He struggled against her. A slap at her arm, then his fingers wrapped around her wrist and he pulled. Melni held on, fighting him, wanting to slap sense into the blixxing idiot.

Her face broke the turgid surface. The ceiling was only a few feet above now.

The man came up next to her. He gulped air and then whirled, mouth twisted into a snarl. He shouted over the crashing water. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

“You were drowning. I saved your life!”

“Save yourself, Melanie, or whatever your name is. I’ve got a job to do.”

One foot of air space remained. The pipes had submerged, leaving only the sound of water lapping against the walls and the giant glass cylinder.

“We need to work together,” Melni said. “Find a drainage point and force it open.”

“Do as you like. I’m getting into that dome.”

“Drain the water first! Think about it. You will only get one more chance to swim down there before we have no air left. Drain the water and you can hack at that steel ball all you like.” The tumultuous water had them bobbing like toy boats. Melni’s head bumped the ceiling. “Please, there is no time to argue.”

The water reached his chin. They both pressed one hand against the ceiling now to keep their heads from smacking into it with each churning wave. He stared at her, weighing options, gauging her wisdom and, she sensed, her authority. “The fish tank,” he said. “Any flesh eaters in there? Anything poisonous?”

The question surprised her. She glanced toward the ring of thick glass now just barely visible in the shrinking gap between water and ceiling.

“Think!” he shouted at her. “You saw it, right?”

Melni nodded vaguely. She hadn’t paid attention to the species within. Ocean life had never been a subject of much interest to her. “I did not. I—”

“Ah, fuck it. It’s a risk we’ll have to take. Move to the tank and get ready to swim up. Get as much air as you can.”

With that he plunked below the surface and kicked downward, his beam of light scanning the floor about twenty feet below.

Baffled, Melni did as he asked. Hands on the ceiling, she pawed
and kicked over to the glass and pressed herself against it. A silvery fish with huge impassive eyes swam past her face.

There came a deep, muffled thud from below, followed by a second and then a third. Without warning the glass in front of her spidered with cracks and then shattered. The shards held for an instant and then, all at once, vanished, sucked downward into the dark water. Melni felt herself hauled under as the two bodies of fluid warred for equilibrium. The downward pull reversed a split second later. An invisible fist threw Melni into the ceiling. Turbulent water surged all around her. She hadn’t taken the breath the man had advised. Now she swam, panicked yet again and hating herself for it. A ring of dim light marked the space where the glass had met ceiling. Something slid across her shin and with it came a searing pain. Another jagged bit of glass, thrown about by the swirling currents in the pool, ripped across her forearm. Melni bit back the urge to scream and powered to the circular opening. Her lungs burned. She groped around and found the rim, took hold of it, and heaved herself up.

A rippling surface loomed above. She kicked hard and pulled against the water with both hands, buoyed by the raging, swirling current. Her hands found air, then her face broke the surface and she inhaled. A metal grate ceiling greeted her. The dim light came from above it. Melni clawed at it with one hand to stabilize herself, then methodically went from panel to panel, pushing with what little strength she had left. There, near the center, a section budged. She shoved at it again and kept shoving, kicking despite the glass all around her feet and legs. The panel rotated up and over, smacking against the floor with a deep, reverberating clang. Melni gripped the edges and pulled herself through. She wanted to scream when her shin scraped along the edge. The cut bit deep. The water tinged red.

For a second she lay panting on the cold metal grate. A splash below brought her back to the moment. The man surfaced, tried to shout, gurgled instead.

“Here!” Melni yelled, reaching down through the open panel. A
stream of blood ran from her arm down to her wrist. She bit her lip and shoved her hand into the cold reddish pool. A second passed, then another, then fingers brushed hers and she had him. She hauled, gripping his forearm with her other hand and heaving until his torso lay on the platform. For a heartbeat she thought he’d drowned. Then his mouth opened and he drew in a long, desperate breath.

His clothes had protected him from the glass. She grabbed two fistfuls of shirt and hauled him the rest of the way out. The man came to his knees and fought to control his breathing. Twice he coughed, spewing water onto and through the grated floor.

Finally he got his knees under him and sat upright, hands at his sides, breaths still coming in huge, anxious lungfuls.

“What now?” Melni asked.

PETER CASWELL STARED
at the grated floor. In the murky depths below his feet he could see the dome. In his mind’s eye he could see Alice Vale cowering beneath it.

She’d been ready for this. She could probably last days inside that iron dome. If only he’d had more time. If only he’d recognized the drainage pipes through which he’d entered for what they were. A thousand “if onlys” ran through his head, but none mattered. What happened in that room had already slipped away, like the water dripping from his chin through the grate in the floor. Just memories now, and memories were of no value to him.

“What now?” the native repeated, imparting more authority into her voice.

He glanced over at the sprite of a woman, seeing her clearly for the first time. Short and thin, with a pixie cut of light blond hair that served to offset unsettling purple eyes. Pale white skin a stark contrast to the chocolate brown of virtually everyone else he’d seen on this world. He’d learned early after landing that his Korean looks marked him as those of Gartien’s South, what he thought of as Africa.

I have authority over this asset,
she’d said.
From Station N
. The words of a spy. But for whom? Some corporate adversary of Vale? He’d heard about a rivalry between North and South but put little thought into it, preoccupied instead with the fact that he could understand about ninety percent of what was said around him. Had Alice taught them? Converted a whole world to a new language in a dozen years? Impossible, surely. So how, then? Everything else was different. Race, culture, politics, none matched Earth. Only the lay of the land and the language were similar, and no matter how hard Caswell tried, he could find no relationship between the two.

No matter. Whoever this woman was, she seemed to think they were on the same side. A useful misconception if he played it right.

Caswell shook away the thought. There was nothing here to play. He should ditch her, immediately. She represented complication and risk. She didn’t even carry a weapon, her knife evidently lost in the water.

“What is your marker?” she asked. “To whom do you report?”

“Quiet,” he said, more harshly than he’d intended. “I’m thinking.”

The opportunity to complete the mission had come easily, then gone in catastrophic fashion. Annoyance welled up inside him. It would have been a work of art. Neat, tidy, and quick. To come this far having only landed five days ago? Idly he wondered if he was always so efficient. He willed focus and pain suppression from his implant. The gland responded in an instant, and then it started to tingle slightly, a signal that the chemical reservoirs were running low. He’d no way to replenish them, save the food on the lander eighty kilometers away. Everything he tried to eat or drink here came right back up, violently.

Survival became the immediate goal. Flee this fiasco, go to ground, and figure out a way to salvage the op. Complication or not, this girl had made it in here. A place, by all accounts, impregnable to outsiders. So maybe she could help him escape. Maybe she could help him find something, anything, his body could digest.

While he thought through this she removed her shawl and tore it into strips, tying one around her calf and the other her forearm. Red stains blossomed on the sopping wet fabric.

Peter checked his pistol, shook his head in dismay at what he saw inside, and tucked the weapon into his waistband. He walked a circuit around the tiny room, studying the walls and ceiling. There were two tables off to one side, each piled with containers of varying size and shape. In another corner, a green metallic box roughly one meter on a side stood. White pipes linked it to receptacles on the wall. Machinery hummed within. “This must be where they maintain the aquarium.”

While the girl stood and watched he began to open the containers on the table, boxes first and then some of the bottles. He sniffed at them. Unidentifiable chemicals.
Fuck it,
he decided. He opened all of them and motioned for the girl to back away. She did, pressing herself against the opposite wall. She gasped when he heaved the first table and flipped it over. The containers tumbled off with a crash, their contents spilling through the grated floor and into the dark water just below. Powders of varying color, chemicals that stung the eyes and made the nose twitch. He toppled the second table over next, then stood back and admired his work.

“Why did you do that?” she asked.

He shrugged. “To buy time. Instead of simply draining the room, now they’ll have all sorts of headaches to deal with. It’s a chemical stew, full of razor-sharp glass and frenzied fish. If she’s in that dome, and I suspect she is, it might be hours before they can safely get her out.”
Maybe they never will,
he thought but did not say. Perhaps he’d accomplished his goal after all.

The burst of speech was the most he’d said in one go since landing. The people here spoke with precision, sounding each word. It
was English, but strangely accented and sprinkled with many unfamiliar words and subtle differences. He’d avoided conversation almost entirely since landing for this reason. But this woman, Melanie or whatever her name was, she’d overheard some things in that room below. Perhaps simply ditching her would not be enough.

She stared at the water, her eyebrows raised. “But we need to swim out through that water.”

“Not true,” he said, pointing up.

In the center of the low ceiling there was a circular groove, perhaps a meter in diameter. Next to it was a second much smaller panel, square in shape. Caswell pressed on the square and it rotated open from a concealed hinge, revealing a red handle within. He pulled it. With a hiss of air the circular section rotated down. An access tube ran upward into darkness. From this a ladder slid down, stopping just above the grated floor.

“I should have noticed that,” the woman said, quietly, for herself.

“Let’s go,” he replied, and climbed.

The rungs led up about two meters. Caswell reached the top and began to open the second hatch. He stopped himself and looked down. The native waited on the floor below, staring up at him. Caswell pressed his index finger to his lips, demanding silence. Her eyebrows raised expectantly for some reason. Not as if the need for silence confused her, but that she expected him to follow up with another sign. A confused second passed. Finally he turned away from her and, with slow, precise movements, pulled the lever.

Darkness beyond. He climbed out and found himself in a small, frigid room that featured only the hatch on the floor and a single door, a line of pale light marking its edge.

Seconds more passed and the woman did not appear at the hatch. He glanced down at her and she stood exactly where he’d left her, staring, waiting. For a moment Caswell considered closing the hatch. Jamming the mechanism somehow and ridding himself of her.

He knelt and whispered just loud enough for her to hear. “What the hell are you waiting for? Come on!”

“You said you had something to say.”

“I didn’t.”

“You did!”

The confusion on his face must have matched hers. He shook his head. “I don’t have time for this. Get up here, or find your own way out.”

She climbed. He offered her a hand and she took it, wincing in pain when he hauled her up.

“You need to get those cuts looked at,” he said.

“I plan to, if we get out of here alive.”

She rubbed warmth into her arms while Peter closed the hatch. The metal disk came to rest with a loud, purposeful
boom
.

Sealing Alice Vale’s tomb, if he was lucky. Peter crossed to the door and used his foot, in their curious fashion, to open it a few centimeters. Outside he saw only a dark, overcast sky. Dawn had yet to break, but the clouds above reflected enough light from the great city around the house to illuminate the surroundings. The girl came to his shoulder, peering out from behind him. Gently she placed a hand on his arm and urged him to crouch. He complied, and to his surprise she pushed the door open the rest of the way.

The dark, flat rooftop of Alice Vale’s extravagant mansion came into view. Small puddles of rainwater dotted the black surface. White pipes and vents jutted up through the roof at seemingly random positions. None was large enough for a person to climb in. The girl leaned out and glanced quickly in every direction, then ducked back in. Next to him now, he noted, not behind. She let the door rest almost closed against the frame.

“Empty,” she said. “There is a servant’s stepwell at the southwest corner. Eight sections to the bottom, then a hall that leads out to the cruiser stable. What is your name?”

He blinked, surprised by the sudden question and simultaneously impressed with her knowledge of the house. “Caswell,” he managed.

“Caz-will,”
she said, trying it out. “An unusual name.”

Between the speed at which he’d found his target and his desire to
avoid unnecessary contact on this world, he’d yet to bother inventing a persona for himself. A mistake, in hindsight. He tried for a casual shrug, as if he heard this all the time. “Yes, I suppose it is. My parents were unusual.”

“Your
parents
chose your name?”

He shrugged again, lamely, aware he’d made some blunder of tongue or custom yet beyond the desire to care. He started out the door. He felt famished, and his throat was painfully dry. Worse, he had the come-down from use of his gland to look forward to soon.

“Unusual indeed,” she agreed, gripping his arm. “Let me go first, hmm?”

Caswell hesitated, then stood aside and made a sweeping gesture with one arm.

The woman cracked the door open again. A light rain now fell, pattering against the roof and bringing the stagnant puddles to life with circular ripples. She hesitated only a second and then sprinted off, barely making a noise. Caswell followed, once again impressed. Standing above the fish tank he’d thought her not much more than a frightened mouse, but now…

Her path weaved them around the jutting vents and the occasional skylight. She passed these on the side where their shadows would not fall on the hazy white surfaces. Very smart.

At the southwest corner she came to a door. She hiked her skirt up to her waist and knelt. Strapped high up on her thigh were a set of locksmith’s tools. Lockright, Caswell corrected himself. He’d stolen a set just hours after landing, just before the police had come for him. Four bodies still lay up there, somewhere, buried in the snow. Another four bottles of Sapporo, that made ten already on this mission, a new personal record. The girl selected one of the tools, so sure in her movements that he could guess she’d done this many, many times. She practically attacked the lock on the door’s handle. Within seconds the rather basic lock sprang and she toed the foot-high handle upward.

“Do you have a weapon?” he asked. They were halfway down the
stairwell. Sounds of alarm and panic filtered in from the house, too muffled to carry more meaning beyond that.

“I lost my knife in the water,” she said. “You?”

“It’s spent. I suppose I could throw it at someone.”

The steps ended at a pair of doors, one in front and one to the left. Melni listened at one and then opened it a crack. “Hold it open,” she said.

He slipped a finger through, eyeing the space beyond. She knelt beside him and pulled tools from her hidden set of picks.

“What are you doing?” he asked. “It’s open already.”

Her fingers trembled from the cold as she attacked the fasteners, which held an iron bar that linked the latch mechanism to the foot lever, or “foot latch.” The length of metal came free in seconds. She handed it to him and went to work on another.

“Good idea,” he said, testing the weight of it.

“Better than a fist.” She hiked her skirt again and secured the tool. Caswell looked away when she glanced at him, embarrassed. If she’d noticed, or cared, she made no sign. Instead she hefted her iron rod and coiled herself at the door. “It is about thirty feet,” she said, “then through the kitchen, then the stable, which has an exit at the back.”

“Fine. Let’s go.” Days earlier, hiding in a bedroom above a rural tavern, he’d learned from an old book that their measurement of a foot was roughly equal to Earth’s: a third of a meter. He’d learned a lot of things in that room, including the supposed life story of Alia Valix, genius inventor, savior of the North.