Zero World (20 page)

Melni took the bracelet from Caswell and slipped it on her own wrist. She fetched the needler from his bag and stuffed it back into her sock.

Then she waited. Waited to emerge from the depths in the belly of a great sea monster, to face the unknown.

MELNI SAT
with an engineer in the communications office, just opposite the captain’s quarters. The thin woman held a headset to one ear, like a young version of Anim Corda. She was probably the one who transcribed Corda’s meager reports from the Portstav listening post.

Repair crews rushed through the hallways of the submersible with each shrill sound of the alarm. Dozens of pipes had burst, spraying frigid water in fine mists. A number of the crew had been injured, bumps and bruises mostly, as the depth bombs took their progressive toll on the vessel. But they had made it. A near thing, judging by the constant congratulations offered to Captain Liso by her crew.

Fifty minutes earlier the vessel had passed under a blockade, hastily arranged by the Southern Naval Alliance on the loosely agreed border that bisected the Endless Sea along the path of the devastation. Captain Liso had fetched Melni from the medical berth sometime later, as if she had come to escort a prisoner to execution. “Quite the storm you have started, Agent,” was all she’d said.

“Did they clash? Are we being pursued?” Melni had asked.

Liso had scowled. “No, they did not pursue. That should be obvious. But neither did they turn back. Right now they sit at the edge of range, waiting. A standoff, one they could easily win if they wish to press. You and your companion have brought us right to the cliff of war.”

Melni had said nothing. Liso had brought her to the communications office, ordered her to sit and wait, and then stormed off.

The room had no door or even a back wall, but the hall beyond had been cleared to give her privacy. Melni wore the bulky set of earphones all the same, and kept her voice low.

Dials and meters covered the three walls around her, along with dozens of indicator lights and sheaves of laminated papers that hung from the ceiling on chains, swinging slightly with the waves outside the hull.

“You are connected,” the engineer said. Then she backed away toward command, leaving Melni alone.

Melni put the headset on and leaned over the microphone. “14772 here,” she said.

“Go ahead, 14772. Speak quickly. The Council is meeting right now to discuss this…incident, and they need information.”

Melni spoke slowly and clearly, relating everything that had happened from the moment she’d set foot inside Alia Valix’s den to the current situation aboard the submersible. Out of pure instinct she left out the details of what she’d seen inside Caswell’s vessel, partly because she didn’t fully understand it herself but mostly because she feared they would think she’d lost her mind or been drugged. Much of the story already sounded crazy; no need to add logs to that fire.

The person she spoke with was the same woman who’d spoken so tersely to her when she’d made contact from Midstav. This time she listened without interruption. Melni thought she could hear a pencil scrawling across paper when she finished her story.

The note taking went on for some time. Voice muffled, the woman said to someone, “Run this up to the Chamber. Tell them I sent you. Tell them whatever you have to, just get it into their hands.” Her voice became clear again. “14772, remain on the link while this is reviewed.”

“Understood,” Melni replied. “May I ask a question?”

“Go ahead.”

“Has there been any news of Valix? The way we left her…she may have drowned in there.”

“Oh, there is news. You have poked the sleeping giant, Sonbo.”

Melni grimaced, both at the news and the use of her real name. Her cover, gone, just like that. “What happened?”

“What has not? Troops amassing along the Desolation. Warships streaming out of every Northern naval base. Word of a whole squadron of airships approaching the Cirdian wastes.”

“But Valix—”

“At first we received demands that her ‘kidnapped employee’ be returned immediately. She says this man with you is one of her top scientists, and their Triumvirate considers our snatching him an act of war.”

Melni clenched her fists to stop them shaking. “At first, you said?”

“The tone changed as soon as Captain Liso beat them to the Desolation. A formal request for a summit was made, by Alia Valix herself. Top-level diplomats from the Northern Triumvirate and our Presidium will meet in four days in Fineva. Alia Valix has asked to speak to both sides.”

The motivation, the ramifications, eluded Melni. Too many things were happening at once. “Why?”

“Speculate.”

Not this again
. She tried, as she often had when sitting alone at
night in her flat, to think as Alia Valix. Airships, police in relentless pursuit, the attack on Anim’s listening post, and then a fleet of warships chasing this submersible to the dividing line. Right to the edge of war. Yet the instant Caswell crosses to the South, she asks for a summit.
She knows she has lost,
Melni thought.
But has she, really?
The North had enough might to get their supposedly kidnapped employee back. Maybe Valix didn’t want to risk him dying in a full-scale battle. But that didn’t resolve, either. They’d tried their hardest to kill him in Combra. They’d come perilously close. Why stop now?

She said, “Valix is afraid of what he might tell us. They could come after him, kill him, but not quickly enough. Not now.”

Silence from the other end.

Melni went further. Alia Valix, always one step ahead of everyone. “So…whatever he might give us, she…she is going to give it to us first. That must be it. Own the conversation, take away the value he provides, the leverage he gives us.”

“Not bad, Agent Sonbo.”

“What will the speech be about?”

“Nobody knows. Except perhaps for the man with you. If he really is her top scientist—”

“That part is birdshit. Forgive my language. He is an assassin. He was there to kill her.”

“Are you so sure? Absolutely sure, Agent?”

The question, the tone, made Melni pause.

Before she could reply, the stern voice from Riverswidth went on. “You just happened upon this ‘assassin’ inside the supposedly impregnable Think Tank, which I may add you also just happened to gain entry to simultaneously. Two incursions on the same night? And there is just enough birdshit oddities in this man’s story to keep us confused but curious? You will forgive us if we are skeptical.”

“I…are you saying it is all a ruse? They have tried to kill us at every turn.”

“And just barely missing, at every turn.”

Melni swallowed. She considered that, refused to believe it. She’d
been there. Herself, shot through the arm. Caswell, even now, near death in the medical berth three decks below. “To what end?”

“I should think exactly the end we now fall helplessly toward. A Valix operative, from the Think Tank to inside Riverswidth in less than a week’s time. A brilliant plan, is it not? Worthy of a genius, you might say.”

The floor beneath Melni’s feet seemed to drop away from her, and not from any motion of the boat. Her stomach twisted in knots. A cold sweat suddenly coated her brow, her neck, her arms, as if pushed out by the pressure within. She gripped the edges of the table until her knuckles turned white as snow.

“Are you there, Agent?” the voice asked.

“What am I to do now?” Melni asked through gritted teeth. She saw her own career, not just her covert mission in Combra but the entirety of it, ending. “Do you want me to kill him? Say his injuries were fatal?”

“If you do that I am certain the summit will be canceled, and I would very much like to hear what Valix has to say.”

“What do you plan to do, then?”

“Ah,” the stern voice replied. “Here is the runner now with a reply from the Chamber.”

The dull hum of static filled Melni’s ears as the woman apparently read the leadership’s response.

“Exactly as I had hoped,” the woman finally said. “14772, I have revised orders for you.”

“Prepared to comply, with gratitude,” Melni said automatically, picturing herself entering Caswell’s room and covering his mouth and nose until the life drained from him.

“The man with you will be,” the woman said, “brought here. To Riverswidth.”

Melni let go of the desk. “Is that not exactly what you just—”

“Precisely, Agent.”

“I do not follow.” But she did, in her heart. She understood exactly what they intended to do. She pictured Caswell, shivering,
naked, chained up and groveling for rancid food in one of those dank cells above Riverswidth.

“Should he wake you are to maintain the impression that he is seen as friendly. Tell him you have resources here that can help both you and him accomplish your missions. Should he suspect our true intentions you will apprehend him and bring him in against his will. Either way, we shall learn everything we can from him before this summit takes place. Does that resolve?”

Melni’s gaze slid to the bracelet. That small betrayal, that infernal seed. “It resolves,” she said.

He woke once, a few hours later. Confused, brow beaded with sweat, lips pale and as thin as his eyes. He kept those eyes closed despite the dark room and managed only to whisper a single question: “Did she survive?”

“She did,” Melni told him. “In fact she has invited both sides to a summit. In a neutral place, four days from now.”

“Four days,” he repeated. He repeated it several times, and this seemed to content him.

Caswell drifted back into his fitful sleep after that.

He did not wake again on the sub. Nor during transfer to the
WS Bright Fragment,
a sleek new warship named for the famous folktale. Nor during the day and night that followed as the massive boat powered along the Lungwyn coast toward South Vorseland and finally to Dimont.

Bright Fragment
was a massive ship with a full hospital. They gave Melni her own quarters, then confined her there for the voyage. The captain and her senior crew were kind enough, but it had become clear to Melni within a few minutes of stepping aboard that, at least while Caswell remained comatose, she was to be treated as potentially under the influence of the enemy.

She could not find it within herself to blame them. More unsettling than this treatment was the promise of what waited within the
soaring towers of Riverswidth, only just visible on the dusty horizon out her porthole window.

Melni’s mission, so near success, had in truth been a failure. Alia, Valix Corp., the NRD…all of them had known of her role and the turning of Onvel from very early on. Every thing she’d reported, every scrap of intelligence slipped into that drawer in Croag & Daughters, was now just so much paper. All of it would be considered unreliable, useless.

And as if that weren’t bad enough, she might now be bringing a trained killer into the very heart of the Southern opposition. The fact that this possibility had never even occurred to her hurt her most of all. She felt like a fish swimming with serpents. A child among adults, sipping juice while they drank cham, speaking as if she knew everything there was to know and not realizing just how shallow that well really was.

She opened her window to breathe the air coming in off the azure waters. It smelled less of the ocean and more the machinery of the ship. She stayed anyway, eyes closed and nose poked proudly through the opening, until the first scents of her homeland came carried in on the warm breeze. Pleasant smells, a flood of nostalgia. The scents of home, of childhood, of memory. Dust and sand and baked bricks. Olives and spices beyond count. Phantom scents, she felt sure, but memory had a way of filling in such blanks and she had no desire to complain.

She was home. A second-class
desoa,
maybe, but she was home.

Whatever they planned to do with her, this at least they could not take away. She would face their questions and whatever consequences followed, and with any luck, she’d be dismissed to a civilian life. She could see her sister again, perhaps repair the rift that had formed between them so many years ago. She’d never see the man Caswell again, or know his fate, of that she felt sure. The mystery would grate on her for the rest of her life, but at least it would be a life lived out of danger. Unless the North came. Airships and soldiers and naval monstrosities all powered by equipment directly or indirectly
invented by Alia Valix, the woman Melni had been sent to spy on. To convert, if possible. Interrogate and eliminate if not.