Zero World (44 page)

Monique ducked under the body and popped her head back up, just her eyes visible across the slab of marble.

“Get up where I can see you,” a voice said. Melni’s voice.

Caswell kept his body carefully still. The morphblade still protruded from his neck, only a centimeter of the tip inside him. The rest just dangled at the edge of his field of view, bouncing horribly with each beat of his heart.

His chair rocked again. Caswell winced in pain as his body, and thus the blade, moved in reaction.

Melni must have seen the knife then. She gasped. Her hand reached for the grip.

Her other hand came into view. She held the vossen gun in an iron grip, pointed straight at Monique.

“Careful,” Caswell said. His eyes were blurred with tears from the pain of the blade and the burned skin around its edge. “Grip it with your thumb on that red switch and pull straight out.”

She did as he instructed. When her fingers curled around the handle, though, the room plunged into absolute darkness.

“
PULL THE BLADE!
” Caswell said.

Blinded, her nostrils full of the smell of his burned flesh, Melni renewed her grip on the knife’s handle and yanked outward. A brief glow of reddish yellow light, like a candle just extinguished, illuminated her hand as the strange weapon melted Caswell’s skin around the entry wound, sealing the flesh. The stench made her want to vomit.

Caswell emitted a low groan. “Cut the binding,” he croaked.

A sound came to her from across the table. The slight scuff of fabric against stone. Monique, on the move.

Thumb still on the blade’s activator, Melni pushed herself back and down. She had to move her face in close to see anything more than
a few inches from the glow of the blade. There, against the back of the chair, was a black strap an inch wide. She sawed across it with the knife, smelled the sour acrid fumes of burned synthetic fabric. Caswell shifted in the chair, free from the torso up. She heard him frantically pulling at a second strap that presumably held his feet in place.

Melni let go of the knife. As reassuring as the little flare of light might be, it made her the only distinguishable target in the room. Besides, she had something else in mind. Another weapon, one she’d taken from the guard who’d come to search the lander. She’d ambushed him before he’d even reached the entrance, strangling him with a grapple hold she’d learned many years before, improvised to work in this damnable lack of gravity. “Stay low,” she whispered, unsure if Caswell could hear her. She pushed off the floor with both feet to make sure she was well above his head. Pushed harder than she’d planned to. By the time she had the gun in her hands the top of her head smacked into the ceiling. Out of pure reflex she pulled the trigger. Rapid little plumes of fire erupted from the weapon.

The gun did not chatter like a machine rifle back home. This sang a steady hum like the chant of a Tibetan monk. She’d listened to a sample on Caswell’s electric book.

Little explosions of sparks and debris began to erupt on the far side of the dark room. Melni fought for control of the weapon as it tried to push back into her, her own body being shoved with each round that flew from the barrel. And fly they did. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of muffled coughs from the barrel that ran together in a numbing, bone-shaking roar. She managed to guide the weapon to the place Monique had been sitting. Electrical sparks and little bolts of lightning flared out from the screen that protruded from the table. Something shattered and a huge shower of sparks erupted like a holiday burster. Of the enemy there was no sign. Something broke loose from the far end of the room, allowing a jagged triangle of brilliant white light through the back wall. The beam poured through the room like a coastal beacon, the shaft of brilliance swirling with the smoke and dust that now clouded the space.

The weapon’s tone abruptly became a rapid click. Emptied.

Melni tumbled over backward from the momentum she’d created. She saw the ceiling, then the door she’d come in through, only upside down. Then the floor. The knife she’d discarded floated across her field of view, tumbling. Finally the table came into view. Caswell was nowhere to be seen. The table had a line of craters across its center like the Desolation. It continued across the mess of the computer screen and right up the backrest of Monique’s empty chair, which sat in the center of that single beam of blinding white light, bits of foam cushion in a small cloud around it.

Suddenly the whole back wall of the room became horizontal lines of brilliant light. The lines grew, letting in knifelike bands of white across the entire space. They grew and grew until they merged together, just a single wall of luminance now. Melni shielded her eyes to look in that direction. Seconds passed before she could see anything at all. She was looking at a ball of white flame surrounded by a shifting milky haze. A star. Earth’s star, she hoped, which Caswell had called Sol.

Against that dazzling radiance Melni saw a blurred shadow begin to move near the top of the wall.
No,
she thought,
that’s the bottom. I’ve flipped over.

It was Monique, coming out from where she’d hidden. Wounded or perhaps just shocked from the barrage of gunfire, Melni couldn’t be sure, but the woman was in motion and had something in her hands. A tiny thing like a baton. No, Melni realized. One of those little cylindrical missile weapons. Melni, adrift, could do nothing to take cover. She couldn’t even stop herself from tumbling, and soon the so-called Warden of Earth would be out of view again. She tried to twist around and only made things worse.

“Whoever you are,” Monique said, “you’re a terrible shot.”

Melni braced herself. The weapon seemed capable of anything. What would her death be? An explosive that tore her innards to shreds? A molten lance through her heart?

Something punched her in the back. A white-hot pain tore
through her chest before the projectile ripped out between her ribs and embedded itself in the wall near the door.

Melni felt her breath catch as unbelievable pain seared through her. She couldn’t think, couldn’t focus. She could do nothing save mentally curl into a fetal ball against the staggering, all-consuming heat of agony in her breast.

Her body continued to tumble, bringing Monique back into view against the inferno of the star behind her, outside the expansive windows. The woman glided to the side of the room and slipped through a gap in the wall Melni hadn’t seen before. A concealed door. It began to slide closed silently behind her, a queer echo of when Alia Valix had confronted Melni before fleeing into the Think Tank.

Vision blurred by tears, face contorted into a silent scream, Melni fought for control of her senses. The blinding sunlight pouring in made it almost impossible to see. The stinging tears in her eyes did not help.

A shape drifted in front of Melni’s face. She tried to bat it aside only to stop and grab hold of it at the last instant. The knife felt right in her hand. She focused on it, used it as a talisman to clear her mind. In that moment her back thudded weakly against a flat surface. The wall, just above the door. Melni gripped the object even as she launched herself. Her body rocketed across the room, over the table and the bolted-down chairs, in a perfect line to the corner where Monique had fled.

The hidden door was an inch from sealing. Melni thrust the knife into the gap, just managing to get the tip in. She braced her feet against the wall and floor and began to apply pressure to the hilt, pushing with all the strength she could muster, praying the tip wouldn’t snap off. The effort made her scream as something inside her chest tore. Her whole body trembled violently.

A band of light caught her eye. The door pried open a meager inch. She thrust the knife in farther, letting the door slide back, then levered it again. White spots began to swim across her vision. She felt as if her breast would erupt in flame, and wondered how much
blood had pooled inside her body as her breaths began to flutter wetly, her lungs filling with fluid. She’d drown herself in less than a minute. Even less than that, perhaps, given the lack of gravity. The blood would be freely sloshing about in there, blocking her windpipe instead of pooling at the bottom. Melni heaved against the blade, scrambling for purchase on the walls and floor around her, mind numb to the pain now, only dimly aware of the rip of flesh and muscle inside her. She screamed. She pushed. The band of light reappeared and widened.

Melni thrust her knee inside, then her arm. The task became easier, and soon she was through. The door caught her foot and she yanked it free, leaving her shoe behind, which kept the door from sealing. “Caswell!” she shouted, not knowing where he was or if he could hear her. The word came out more as a wet croak. “Going…after…”

She couldn’t finish. Her lungs felt heavy. Melni pushed off with her feet and rocketed down a narrow utility corridor. She hit a bend hard, taking the impact on her elbow, gagging as liquid in her chest flew up her windpipe. A numbing sting shot up her arm.

Then she was falling.

The floor came up to meet her. It was only a few feet to drop, but the impact could not be defended against and she shrieked as the metal surface slammed into her cheek. Something cracked there. Bone. Her cheekbone. In some corner of her mind, Melni heard the knife clatter away. She came shakily to her feet and groped around for it. Her body felt heavy and sluggish, each step a skirmish, the rest of the hallway looming like a war. At least, in gravity, she could breathe a little.

Her foot kicked the knife. She collapsed to the floor in her effort to pick it up, but her fingers finally encircled the cool metal handle. Just standing again made her dizzy. The edges of her vision began to darken, as if she’d entered a tunnel within this tunnel. The craft must be accelerating very fast, she realized. Twice what she and Caswell had endured on their flight to the Conduit.

Melni focused on each step.

One foot, then the other, shod in invisible boots of lead.

Again.

Don’t drop the knife.

Another step. Another breath.

Keep the knife, keep the knife, keep the knife.

She came through an open doorway at the far end of the hall, her only clue of the transition being a change in the sound her footsteps made. She recognized the sound. She’d heard it…when? Thoughts seemed to slide around the edges of comprehension. She shook her head violently, regretted it instantly. She just wanted to lie down. Rest, she needed rest. “A bit of sleep then right in Garta’s light,” old Gram used to say. Her grip began to loosen on the hilt until another part of her mind seemed to snap away the betrayal of the other. Her fist tightened. She glanced up and took in the room before her.

The Warden’s ship. No, just one like it. The slightly soft walls, the snaking lines of illumination—glowing faintly red here.

Monique stood at the far end, before a dizzying, enormous display. Her hands were extended out before her, light dancing around her fingertips as she performed some sort of interfacing communion with the ship.

The woman spun around, alerted by some unseen mechanism to her pursuer’s entrance.

Melni, barely able to move her heavy limbs, her breaths coming in wretched, bubbling sighs, watched in horror as the woman took aim at her again. At her eyes this time, and the brain behind them. Melni wanted to close those eyes but could not. Fear would not let her command her own body.

The press on Melni’s body eased, and then vanished. She was adrift again, too far from any wall to control her own movement. She floated helplessly. Monique, her feet fixed somehow to the floor, grinned, and aimed.

A dark shape ripped through the air. It flew past Melni toward
the surprised Warden. Caswell, launched out of the hallway like a cannon round.

She fired at him instead of her.

One of his hands exploded in a cloud of blood and bone and gore.

He did not slow. His body smashed into the woman’s legs, knocking her feet out of the apparatus that had held her in place. The two of them flew backward into the display, slamming against it with a hollow, blunt smack. The impact bounced Caswell away from her. His arms flailed, blood fountaining out as he tried desperately to grab hold of the woman. The fingers of his one good hand only found air. Monique managed to grab the edge of the control display. She kept herself from drifting away with him. She tilted her head back and laughed, then turned the vossen gun on him again.

Monique said something to Caswell. Gloating, goading. Melni couldn’t hear it, bloodlust pounding in her ears.

Her back bumped into something. A bulkhead. She gripped the edge with her off hand, pressed her feet against the wall. Blood dribbled from her mouth. Her nose stung from bile, filled her senses with the smell of copper and vomit. She couldn’t breathe. She had only seconds left. Kicking hard, pulling with her one free hand, Melni launched herself at the woman. In that motion her throat cleared long enough to suck in a lungful of air.

Monique noticed her. She tried to re-aim her weapon, yet even with her implant-enhanced reaction time she was too slow. Melni slammed into her as Caswell had, only against the woman’s chest instead of her legs. The impact lanced fresh pain through Melni’s body. Her own breast felt as if a white-hot ember had been reignited inside.