Zero World E-Book

Jason M. Hough

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 861

Beschreibung

Technologically enhanced assassin Peter Caswell has been dispatched on a top-secret assignment unlike anything he's ever faced. A spaceship that vanished years ago has been found, along with the bodies of its murdered crew—save one. Peter's mission is to find the missing crew member, who fled through what appears to be a tear in the very fabric of space, emerging into an even more confounding reality: a world that appears to be Earth's twin.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Also by Jason M. Hough

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part 1: Integrity Assured

1

2

3

4

5

6

Part 2: Stranger on the Inside

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

Part 3: Truth of Origin

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

Part 4: Reversion

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

Acknowledgments

The Dire Earth

Part 1: Wave of Infection

1

Part 2: Promise of Violence

1

Part 3: Barrier of Sanity

1

2

3

4

Part 4: Distance of Hope

1

2

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

ALSO BY JASON M. HOUGH AND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

The Dire Earth Cycle

The Darwin Elevator

The Exodus Towers

The Plague Forge

Zero WorldPrint edition ISBN: 9781783295258E-book edition ISBN: 9781783295272

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: August 20152 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Copyright © 2015 by Jason M. Hough. All rights reserved.

This edition published by arrangement with Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

Dire Earth by Jason M. Hough was originally published in digital form by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, in 2014.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

FOR NANCY

THE END.THAT’S WHERE IT STARTED.OR SO THEY THOUGHT.

PART 1

INTEGRITY ASSURED

1

IN A LUXURIOUS FLAT overlooking Hyde Park the assassin’s mind reverted.

He lay on a stiff mattress in a dark room, naked between silk sheets, cool conditioned air gentle against his face, when the rewind occurred.

Time had just been taken from him. He knew this because he’d been exhaling, a slow, measured breath that suddenly and quite inhumanly changed to a sharp inhale. He’d prepared for this, but even with all his measures to reduce the effect, the moment of reversion always left him disoriented and more than a little nauseous.

The routine he’d developed over the last dozen years involved a careful arrangement of his environment and physical state so that when his mind suddenly lurched backward to the trigger moment, the similarities would far outweigh the changes. He always used the company flat. The same bed, the same sheets, the same pillow. Set the thermostat to exactly 20 degrees Celsius. Kill the lights, draw the curtains, and send his handler, Monique Pendleton, the message: I’m ready.

Then he’d lie down, face up, hands at his sides. As agent Peter Caswell waited for her to trigger the implant, he would silently recite an old song lyric. Not aloud, just in his head. It was his secret anchor. His bridge across time.

Speak the wordThe word is all of us

Again and again he would recite the words until the reversion moment arrived. It never took long.

This ritual was key. Days ago had been the trigger moment. Monique would activate the implant from her perch a few hundred miles above, and he’d get up and dress and go off on some clandestine job. He’d conduct his particular business, and then return here, to this same exact room, and put everything back just the way it had been. Once again he’d send I’m ready. He’d lie down in the same position, and he would wait for reversion.

And so here he was. Mission over, brain chemically reverted to that same trigger instant despite the days that had passed. The first half of the lyric—Speak the word—front and center in his mind. A bridge over the memory gap. He crossed it, silently. The word is all of us.

Three or four days deleted. That was the average duration, and so a safe assumption. All memory of his deeds wiped away. Conscience cleared.

To jump ahead in time like this, as any drunk would know, can really fuck with the head. To trigger in a London office and revert in an alley in Cairo produced a sensation of disorientation and vertigo that bordered dangerously on the unbearable. Even to go from day to night, or one meal to something totally different, could leave one a vomiting wreck for hours.

Caswell had learned all this the hard way, years ago. Gone from a beach cottage in Mexico, belly full of beer and fish tacos, to drifting in null gravity on an Archon Corporation ore processor with nothing in his gut but nutrition paste. That experience had nearly killed him. It had certainly made a mess of the Archon orbital. More important, the event had forced him to do the thing he detested most in this bizarre life: plan. So he invented the ritual.

Yet preparation went only so far. In four lost days there were thousands of minute differences both to the body and his surroundings, no matter how carefully controlled. Each tiny variation was quite easy to overlook viewed individually, but added together all at once the effect could crush an unprepared mind.

Here now, in this room, the differences began to fall inside his head like sudden rain on dry pavement. A relaxed heartbeat had shifted to a racing one, the rhythm slightly off. One instant he’d been exhaling, then abruptly breathing in. Such things made the mind want to react, and react he did. A sputtering cough racked his body. He let it pass and forced himself to focus, to continue the catalog of differences that allowed him to acclimate.

Before the trigger he’d been relaxed and ready, and was now out of breath. Okay, he could deal with that. He must have rushed to get here in time. Not so strange. What else?

A new ache in his left shoulder. Another on his ribs, though less intense.

Stubble on his chin that itched. That was odd; he’d shaved beforehand like always. Why hadn’t he had time to shave again before reversion? Because he’d been in a hurry. Right. Focus, Peter. He filed that and moved on.

He opened his eyes. The room was pitch black, but that was expected. A sudden shift from day to night could really disorient him, so he always pulled the thick drapes fully closed. Slowly he lifted the blackout curtain beside his left hand. Just a hair, enough to get a sense of things. Gray daylight spilled in. Raindrops on the window. The Thames winding off into the distance between a forest of skyscrapers. London in the fall. That was good.

He let the curtain go, sat up, then stood. Muscles across his body were sore. He felt tired and hungry, yet seconds ago he hadn’t been. There was something else, too: a faint antiseptic odor that reminded him of a hospital. Caswell felt his way to the bathroom and switched on the nightlight. He stared at himself in the mirror. A square patch of white gauze was taped to his left shoulder. There were sutures visible on the left side of his torso. Six stitches, recently administered. That explained the hospital smell. The stubble on his face was barely visible, representing perhaps four days’ growth, thanks to the curse of Korean genes. What could he infer from a four-day beard? He’d gone somewhere where shaving had not been an option. Somewhere remote. A battlefield, maybe? There was no shortage of those around the world. Or had his cover required a disheveled appearance? His unkempt black hair said yes, maybe so.

Where’d you go this time? he asked the lithe form in the mirror. Not aloud; they’d be monitoring the room. Do the injuries mean you screwed up? That you’re losing your edge? Did you fail?

For a minute he stared at himself, as if looking into his own eyes might reveal some hint as to what exactly he’d done in the last four days. This burning need swept through him every time, but he always battled it back. Not knowing was the whole point. And truthfully he didn’t want to know.

A clear conscience was his greatest asset, the reason for his extraordinary success.

Caswell showered. First scalding hot, then ice cold. He toweled off, shaved, and dressed. Dark slacks, a maroon polo, light gray casual coat. Comfortable Italian shoes. A tungsten biometric bracelet he slipped onto his right wrist. The band performed all the usual functions but also interfaced with the implant, automatically regulating certain aspects of his brain chemistry according to his personal desire.

Phone, wallet, passport. This last he thumbed through quickly, looking for new stamps. There were hundreds of stamps inside, but none were new. No surprise there. Wherever Archon had sent him, they would have provided the required documents. This passport was his, and he had a few more pages yet to fill.

Now came the moment of truth. Clear conscience or not, there was one thing he simply had to know. He went to the kitchenette and gripped the handle of the fridge. Steeling himself against what lay within, he pulled the door open. White light bathed him from inside, along with a rush of frigid air that brought goose bumps to his skin.

The space was completely empty save for the one thing he always made sure they stocked for him: exactly twelve bottles of Sapporo beer. They were in a neat row across the top shelf, from one side to the other. Each had its famous label facing him, save for the last three on the end. Those three were turned to face away.

Peter Caswell felt his stomach tighten. Over the last few days, under the Integrity-Assured status his implant provided, he’d killed three people. All memory of this had just been deleted. Since he’d come up with this way to keep track a decade ago, he’d now assassinated a total of 206 human beings, and the only thing he knew about any of it was the number. That’s all he wanted to know.

He could have tried to learn more: taken clandestine pictures, scrawled a secret coded diary, left himself a voice mail on some personal unlisted number. There were a thousand ways to drop such hints that fell outside the safeguards already built into the implant. But part of the reason for his top-ranked status in this career was that he’d never attempted to tell himself these things. The beer bottles were his one allowance. If Monique or anyone else at Archon knew about this, they’d never mentioned it.

Caswell removed the three backward bottles, set them on the counter, opened them, and poured each into the sink. A silent memorial to the three lives he’d taken and the widows or orphans he’d left behind. Then he took a fourth bottle out and opened it with that satisfying tsuk. The cap rattled in the sink.

“May someone remember you,” he said for his victims, and drank.

* * *

On the elevator down he summoned an autonomous limousine on his phone. The sleek black vehicle waited for him outside the doors of the corporate-owned building. No one said a word to him as he exited. No one ever did. Friends, even acquaintances, did not suit him. Relationships were … difficult. Memories, the goddamn past, were not for him. He had only Monique Pendleton, the one person in the world who could understand his life, who knew what it was like to have bits of your memories stolen away for security’s sake. And though he’d never met her in person, she was enough. Besides, she had the power to remove from his mind the horrors of what he’d done out there. She was the reason he could live with himself.

Peter entered the car and immediately barked, “Turn that off.” The BBC news anchor on the seatback screen vanished. “Radio as well,” he added. Silence enveloped him as the car slid into traffic. He stopped on the way and bought a scone and coffee, diligently avoiding the magazines and newspapers on display just outside the café door. News was poisonous. To glimpse some headline like THREE TOP MALAY DIPLOMATS ASSASSINATED IN BALI, or something along those lines, would fill his mind with questions. Had it been me? Was I really capable of that? What if they were the good guys?

He didn’t want to know. He wanted to stay one step ahead of his past, his own version of Mr. Hyde.

But he also wanted to give himself every chance at success. He may have killed 206 people but he gained no benefit of experience from that. To him, they’d all been the first. And the next one to fall would be no different. The perpetual rookie, that’s what he was.

“Heathrow, terminal one,” he said to the car. His mouthful of scone mangled the words, but the vehicle obeyed without hesitation.

* * *

Caswell parked himself on a stool at Wetherspoons, the only pre-security pub in the terminal. He’d chosen the spot, and his mark, after several careful minutes of observation. Someone roughly his size, age, and build. A weary-looking Asian businessman fit the bill this time. Caswell ordered a brandy and ginger ale, plus a burger with chips. He made small talk with the man next to him.

To be good at his job he had to keep certain skills honed. This was the only gift he could give his professional self: training. Practice. He had no memory of past missions to guide his actions in the field, so he lived his personal life in such a way as to best prepare himself for his next first assassination.

Oddly, it was not knowledge of weapons or martial arts that he prioritized. It was travel. The ability to go anywhere, under a hastily assumed identity, and survive. Not just survive, but thrive. Play the role via total improvisation. Adapt to the surroundings. Live in the moment with only his wits to guide him.

Reversion meant he had five days, give or take, of cool-down time. It was physically impossible for Monique to trigger his implant again before then. Doing so would drive him insane, or worse. So after each mission came the mini-holiday, and with his rather obscene bank account balance, Caswell could literally go anywhere and do anything. That’s precisely what he did.

At the bar he ate and drank and made conversation with the mark he’d chosen. One Wei-Lin from Shanghai, a factory manager on his way to a conference in Brighton. Nice enough chap with a strong accent that Peter listened to carefully.

I am Wei-Lin, a Shanghai factory manager. That would do nicely. Caswell paid his bill and said his goodbyes. “I wish you all success in Brighton,” he said to Wei-Lin, with a slight bow. The man blinked in surprise, for the voice he heard nearly matched his own.

Caswell walked across the hall, past a crowded simkit parlor, and into the nearly empty bookshop. He meandered to the travel section. In the center of the bottom shelf was a book titled 300 Thrills in 300 Pages: The Adventure Traveler’s Guide to the World’s Most Exciting Destinations. Peter Caswell thumbed to page 206, one for each kill he didn’t have weighing on his blissfully empty mind.

Page 206. Inland Patagonia, Chile.

“Right,” he said to himself. Then he pulled his phone from his pocket and purchased a first-class ticket on the next flight to Santiago, plus a room at a five-star hotel. Wei-Lin had worn a Rolex and fine shoes, so it seemed appropriate for this borrowed persona. Clothes and luggage Peter would get on-site. Adapt and improvise. He’d introduce himself to everyone as Wei-Lin, just in from Shanghai, and strike up dinner conversation about his life as a factory manager. Make up lies on the spot about why he was in Chile, and anything else that came up. Perhaps even have an affair. Should he ever be sent there to remove someone from this world, he’d have a little firsthand knowledge of the place.

He’d practice, and hope it helped. After all, 206 bottles of Sapporo facing away from him might tell him his body count, but they implied something else, too: He was brilliant at his job. Whatever he was doing, it was working.

* * *

Peter Caswell was sitting in the concourse waiting for his flight when a little chime in his ear broke the monotony.

“Status, Mr. Caswell?”

“Hello, Ms. Pendleton,” he said. “I’m fine, though the shoulder and ribs are sore. But other than that, all good. I’m at Heathrow, just off for holiday, you know?”

She knew of his post-mission activities: trips taken at random to dangerous, thrilling places. She approved with open jealousy, her office being in orbit at Archon headquarters. “Well, cancel your plans. Something urgent has come up.”

“Urgent?” He sat up a little. Urgent had promise, but the timing made him skeptical. “What is it?”

“Are you familiar with the Venturi?”

For a second he thought he’d misheard. “You mean the Venturi?”

“I’ll take that as an emphatic yes.”

Dusty memories swam through Caswell’s mind. Everyone knew at least something about the Venturi. A spacecraft where, allegedly, banned weapons research had been conducted. The whole thing had vanished about twelve years ago, leaving behind no shortage of conspiracy theories as to what had happened. Caswell figured the ESA had been up to something truly terrifying and, given UN rulings on how international laws apply to off-Earth activities, they’d scuttled the whole operation before any penalty might arise. “Okay, you’ve got my attention. What’s happened? Details about their research finally leak?” he asked.

“Not exactly. Not yet, anyway. Someone found the damn ship.”

Caswell closed his eyes and waited for the other shoe to drop. It was the nature of the job. Archon had obviously learned of this discovery early. Maybe Monique had been asked to eliminate whoever had spotted the thing. Perhaps she had a drone rifle for him to place, pointed at the front door of some astronomer’s flat in Cambridge. It couldn’t be much more than that. Caswell wasn’t used for trivial tasks. He was a hammer, and a hammer drove nails. In his entire career she’d sent him on only a few missions that didn’t rate the Integrity-Assured status his implant provided, and they’d almost always been gimmes. Right place, right time sort of stuff, never anything sensitive. And if the rumors were true, you couldn’t get much more sensitive than the Venturi. “Fuck,” he managed to say.

“Indeed. Now listen, I might have figured out a way to get you a seat on the salvage boat.”

“What do you mean? What salvage boat?”

“The one that’s going to try to reach her before the wreck falls into the Sun.” She let that settle in for a few seconds. She always knew when to do that. “There’s a flight leaving for Mysore in one hour. Be on it. I’ll have papers waiting at our drop there. Full ident kit, plus a few other goodies the team is working on. Use the travel time to get familiar with the Venturi, because your cover requires you to know all about it.”

“You realize I’ve just reverted, right? This is a lot of detail you’re giving me, Mo.” He felt uncomfortable knowing anything at all. It defeated the purpose.

“It can’t wait five days, Peter,” she said. “That salvage boat is our only shot. And anyway it’s a long ride out there. I can activate your implant remotely before you reach the destination. This is, by the way, assuming they take you on as crew, which they had better, if you take my meaning.”

So much for ritual, he thought bitterly. No posh flat above London, no comfortable bed, no silk sheets. No row of Sapporo in the fridge. He’d trigger somewhere off-planet on a damned spacecraft. And reversion? Who knew where the fuck he’d be. It was going to hurt.

“Triple pay,” Monique added, as if reading his mind.

He snorted. “Throw in four weeks off and you’ve got a deal.”

“Done.”

Caswell puffed his cheeks and let out the breath. He glanced at the gate where his flight to Santiago had started to board. “Hell. Okay, Mo. I’m on my way.”

The money didn’t matter so much as the time to spend it. But it was the chance to remember, at least a little, that left his gut twisting with equal portions of excitement and trepidation.

2

THE DEAD SHIP TUMBLED through space toward the fiery surface of the Sun.

Peter Caswell studied the wreck that had been the Venturi. A spherical bulk constituted the largest piece, rolling end over end. Jutting from this was a severed portion of the truss that had once led out to the cargo bays and, behind those, the fuel and engines, all of which was now not much more than a cloud of debris trailing along like a comet’s tail. Mentally he reassembled the research craft from the schematics he’d reviewed on the flight out. Everything seemed to be here, just shattered.

“Still holding air?” the mission commander, Angelina, asked, her deep, gritty voice thick with a Central African accent that left little doubt as to who was in charge.

Her question was directed to the man she floated next to, who went by the name Iceberg. He pulled back from his scope and glanced at his superior. “There’s holes in it big enough to fly through.”

Angelina smacked the back of his head. “Answer without being a jackass for once. What about power?”

Iceberg shrugged and pressed his eyes against the black rubber hood. “No way to tell, Angel. But it’s not transmitting shit. Not even an SOS, and the lights are all off.”

The captain hovered in silence. Caswell tried to imagine the mental deliberation going on behind her eyes.

The stated goal was simple enough: recover the black box. Someone wanted the Venturi’s data and was willing to pay a fantastic sum for it. Angelina and her crappy little independent salvage boat, the Pawn Takes Bishop, had known—and possibly paid—the right person at the right time, and won the contract.

Outside the Venturi grew larger.

“How the fuck did they lose track of something that big?” Caswell had asked Monique, reviewing the mission dossier in his bunk on the first night out from Earth. The ship dwarfed most space stations.

“My guess,” she’d replied, “is deliberate forgetfulness to hide a rather embarrassing cock-up.”

He could appreciate that. “Deliberate Forgetfulness” could be the title of his life story.

For the hundredth time he let his gaze casually flick across the other members of the salvage team. They were all older than his thirty-two years, rejects from the corporate asteroid mining operations that no doubt brought them off-planet in the first place. A tough and jaded bunch.

Their ship, Pawn Takes Bishop, constituted a pretty typical salvage boat—a corporate discard deemed unfit for work in the Gefion asteroid fields.

Another crewman, Klaus, cleared his throat. “Why’s it up here, anyway?” He was looking at Caswell.

Angelina replied without turning her head. “What do you mean?”

“Up here. Above the Sun. There’s nothing around, so what were they doing?”

“Classified,” she replied with more than a little irony. She kept her gaze firmly on the display before her. “Ask the geek.”

Caswell offered an apologetic smile, not really looking at any of them. “I was never privy to that—don’t have the clearance, I’m afraid. But feel free to speculate. I’m curious myself.”

The crew shifted uncomfortably.

Now the captain glared at him. “At some point it would be nice if you earned the air you’re breathing, Dr. Nells.”

Caswell raised his hands in defense. “You wanted a subject matter expert, so here I am.”

“Tell me this, then: What are we going to find in there?”

“A black box,” Caswell said simply. Then he nodded toward the wreckage on the display. “If you’re lucky.”

* * *

Pawn Takes Bishop docked with Venturi three hours later.

Everything had to be done manually given the lack of even backup power on the other side, but once the rings were secure a tap linked the two crafts’ grids and some emergency lighting came on. Faint red light spilled in from the porthole. Iceberg studied the readouts. “Vacuum. Told ya.”

Expecting this, Angelina had made everyone suit up an hour ago, save for Iceberg and the mousy engineer, Bridgette, who would remain at the Pawn’s controls.

To Caswell the suit felt like being wrapped in tape. The smart fabric allowed for a full range of movement, loosening just enough to let muscles flex, constricting again the instant they relaxed. It all added up to a sort of permanent state of evenly applied pressure, which his brain refused to translate as anything other than stiff-as-cardboard.

The round hatch swung inward and Caswell fell in line just behind Angelina. The big son of a bitch Klaus drifted inside without preamble, headlamp sweeping across a chamber lined on all sides with labeled storage lockers. Two other Pawn crew members followed behind Caswell, carrying the tools of their trade.

“IA6,” came a voice in his ear. Monique Pendleton, transmitting from Earth a good nine minutes away. “We’ve been studying the data from that scanner you’re carrying, and only six of the Venturi crew are accounted for. One is missing. It’s possible her transponder was damaged. Details inbound.” Seconds later a private message indicator blipped on the inside of his visor. “Once you’ve installed the tap, your next objective is accounting for this person.”

Caswell turned off his local transmission option and sent a reply. “Understood. If she’s here, I’ll find her.”

Monique’s message contained a brief dossier on a scientist named Alice Vale. He scanned it with practiced efficiency, absorbing the important details. The motion pic showed a thin woman with short, stylish brown hair. Her eyes, close together, were large and brimming with intelligence. She hadn’t smiled during the ID scan. Her gaze had a mixture of both intensity and distance that suggested someone who lived to multitask.

Caswell’s eyes flicked across the details as the portrait spun around. A tall woman at nearly 180 centimeters, and rail thin. She’d been twenty-eight years old at the time of the Venturi’s disappearance. Parents, deceased. No husband. No children. Born in Chicago, educated at Dartmouth, tested out early straight into a graduate program at Cambridge. Studied biology and cognitive science. Accepted into the ESA at twenty-six, joined the crew of the Venturi just one year later. And then, a year into the mission, it had all ended.

“Sad,” he muttered. A promising scientist, lost in her prime.

The team continued forward to the inner airlock door, which lay ajar and showed signs of fire damage around the lip and on the surrounding wall. Debris floated about. Angelina swatted aside a clump of charred fabric and moved up to help Klaus pry the damaged door aside. Together they wrestled its bent shape until a gap wide enough to pass through had opened.

A junction waited within, each wall scorched black by the same explosion or impact that had blown open the airlock door. Compartments led off in all directions.

Angelina and Klaus stopped in the center, letting the rest of the salvage team catch up. Caswell moved aside and steadied himself in the junction, letting the last two in behind him.

“C-and-C is that way,” Caswell offered, pointing.

“He’s useful after all!” Angelina cried. She turned to face the team. “Okay, the geek is with me. Klaus, you, too. Douglas, check the landers. Harai, see if any of the reactor vessels are intact.”

“I thought you were just here for the black box?” Caswell asked.

“You don’t know shit about salvage, so just keep quiet unless we ask you something, okay? Okay.” She turned and drifted toward the command room. Klaus followed her. The other two turned and went in the opposite direction. Caswell soon found himself alone.

Exercise equipment adorned the surfaces of the room straight ahead. A treadmill. Some handles attached to pulleys embedded in the wall. A used water bulb floated lazily across his view. At the far end a hatch led to the medical bay. It appeared to be fully sealed. Looking at it triggered something in him: a sudden irrational unease, like a child staring down a basement stairwell into blackness. He shook the feeling away.

Satisfied the others were gone, Caswell floated to a blackened panel on the wall. From a pack on his midsection he removed an orange torque wrench, then used one finger to wipe away soot on the locking nuts. The magnetized wrench connected easily, and despite sitting out here for a dozen years, each bolt turned easily. He nudged the panel away from the wall and let it float next to his head.

“Captain?” one of the crew said. Douglas, it sounded like.

“Go ahead,” came Angelina’s reply.

“Lander zero-one is missing.”

Silence. Caswell listened. He marked his audio recording minus ten seconds, just in case.

“Missing as in ripped away in the explosion?”

“Uh. Not sure. Zero-two is still here, looks intact.”

“Copy that. Keep me posted.”

The radio went silent. Caswell marked the exchange as interesting and sent it off to Monique, then returned his focus to the section of wall he’d just exposed. Within, neatly bundled cables in a variety of colors ran in every direction. In the center, a grid of gold indentations gleamed under the light from his headlamp. From another pocket on his torso he produced a small dark green plastic box with ridged edges. He powered the box on and waited a few seconds for the tiny LED on it to wink from red to a flashing green. Caswell flipped the device around and pressed it against the gold grid within the wall, then fetched the hovering panel.

He activated his private Archon channel. “Mo, the keg is tapped. You should be receiving data now. IA6, out.”

Around him, rows of white lights flickered on, so bright that his visor darkened to compensate. He switched back to the standard channel. “How’s it going in there, Captain?”

“Thought you were with us,” Angelina replied, her voice curt in his ear.

“Just, you know, soaking it in. Surreal to actually set foot in such a famous—”

“Get the hell up here, Doctor. We’re on a schedule.”

While she spoke he reinstalled the access panel. “Any … uh, any sign of the original crew?”

“Negative.”

“And the black box?”

“I’m staring at it right now. Which means I need you here, right now.”

“Sorry. On my way.”

His gaze went to the exercise compartment again, however, and that round hatch beyond adorned with medical signage. The sight tickled something in his mind. Memories just beyond reach.

A thought began to worm into his mind—the inevitable conclusion whenever something like this happened to him. Déjà vu, or an infuriatingly familiar face. His particular skill set, his augmentation, made all such phenomena candidates for something else entirely: the remnants of a reality forcibly removed.

He willed the thought away. Down that path lay madness. Ignorance, he reminded himself, was bliss.

Yet he couldn’t resist the pull. There was … something. Despite his better judgment he found himself floating in front of the round hatch marked MED BAY. He wheeled the lever to the open position and pulled. Something pushed against his suit. Air, rushing out. His visor fogged before sensors could compensate. Dry air hissed through fans in his helmet and then condensation retreated.

A monster rushed toward him, arms flung wide as if to grapple. Caswell’s heart lurched before his brain fully understood: A male corpse was moving on the current of air that had just been sucked from the room. Caswell shoved the hatch back just in time to feel the limp body flop against it and repel away.

With a deep breath he opened the door again, a few centimeters at a time.

Six bodies floated about within. They were remarkably well preserved, considering the room had still held air. Air, he realized, that would have been stagnant for twelve years.

None of the bodies looked like Alice Vale, so he slipped the hatch closed and sealed it again. If Monique needed to know cause of death he’d explore further, but for the time being he felt no desire to mingle with the dead. He fired off another report to Archon. “Found the six crew you mentioned. They’re all in the medical bay—no comments on the irony there, all right? I only glanced but given the room still held air, I’m going to guess sudden and very rapid acceleration did them in.” Then he added, “No sign of our missing seventh. Continuing my search.”

Caswell drifted into the C&C to find Angelina in the pilot’s chair, tapping away at a foldout computer. Klaus knelt beside an open panel at the far end, fiddling with some gear he’d hauled in.

The room had the basic size and shape of all mass-produced station compartments. Five meters on a side, fifteen long, studded with attach points to serve virtually any purpose.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

“Waiting for you,” Klaus replied.

“Computers are up, huh?” he asked, more reproach in his voice than he’d intended.

Angelina’s fingers paused for the briefest instant. “Nothing in the contract about not accessing them.”

“If you say so. Find anything interesting?”

“Just—”

An urgent override from Monique clipped the captain’s response. “Agent IA6, this mission will continue under Integrity-Assured protocol. Sorry, Caswell, with the time delay there’s no chance to offer opt-in. This came from the very top.”

His pulse swelled to a steady war drum on his temples. Integrity-Assured protocol, or IA, meant nasty business lay ahead.

Monique went on. “Time critical, I’m afraid. I’m sending the remote command to enable your implant in exactly twenty seconds.”

Peter Caswell swore. His ritual may be impossible here, but she could at least wait for consent. She’d always given him that much. Time to be relaxed. Opted in. Having fucking agreed. Caswell glanced about, feeling the clock tick away like a time bomb. He did the only thing he could think to do and slipped his free hand and both feet into the nearest stabilizer handles on the Venturi’s wall.

Ten seconds.

What was so damn important that they couldn’t allow twenty minutes for him to opt in? Of course, Monique had answered that: time critical. If he were to decline it would take weeks to get someone else out here. By then the crippled station would have fallen into the Sun. He told himself not to worry. Monique had opted in, obviously. For him to be activated meant she had been, too. They were paired. Agent and handler, experts in their respective roles, recruited and linked because their bodies happened to be the rare sort that wouldn’t reject the IA-class implant.

Caswell shut his eyes. He took two deep breaths and started to chant the lyric. He could do that much, at least. She couldn’t take that away.

This mental anchor had not been part of the training. He’d simply thought it wise to have something familiar on the tip of his tongue when he eventually made the mental leap back across the reversion gap. Sometime, in the next four days or so, he would forget everything that happened from here to that moment. He wondered where he’d be when the time came. Could he get close to this exact set of circumstances? Unlikely in the extreme. But he could do one thing.

Microphone in his suit safely off, he used the seconds left to recite the old song lyric over and over, aloud in case that would help. “Speak the word, the word is all of us. Speak the word, the word is all of us. Speak the word, the—”

At the base of his neck an artificial gland received the specially crafted trigger message sent by Monique from more than 160 million kilometers away. The gland flooded his brain with a biochemical marker.

He lost track of the song lyric, wincing as engineered chemicals sought out every last neuron like a creeping poison. A hot tingling sensation unfolded from somewhere in the back of his head, thorny pressure that started from the bottom of his skull and pushed up and out until his very scalp felt as if it were being prodded by a million tiny needles from the inside.

And then, quick as it had come on, the sensation subsided. Caswell fought to get his breathing under control and carefully opened his eyes. His vision swam, distorted by tears that would not fall away in the absence of gravity. He blinked rapidly to no avail and then gave up.

“I’m sorry to do that to you in the field, Peter.”

You’d better be. He desperately wanted to speak with her, to have a real conversation. He bit his lip instead and waited to hear what task he had to perform.

“Your new mission is still being designed, I’m afraid. The reasons will become clear. For now, your new goal is as follows….”

Caswell swallowed, waiting for the tears to dry and the pain in his head to abate. God, he missed the flat above Hyde Park. The ritual of it. “Never again, Mo.” He growled the words, made all the more bitter by the knowledge that he’d forget them. He’d forget all of this.

“First,” Monique Pendleton said in a flat, all-business tone that told him things had gotten very grim indeed, “you are to eliminate the crew of the Pawn Takes Bishop. Immediately and with extreme prejudice.”

3

AGENT PETER CASWELL BOBBED against the wall, flexing his free hand and staring at the form of Angelina Monroe, captain of the Pawn. She flicked a finger across the display in front of her, reading about what had happened here, no doubt. Her curiosity and greed, that had caused this. Her mission had been to recover the black box, nothing more.

Nothing more.

She’d done it to herself, really. Signed her own death warrant along with the rest of her crew.

This was why Archon had inserted him on this mission. In case these people learned too much. Peter Caswell steeled himself to the task at hand. The murder he’d now perform. However much it might seem like the first, he reminded himself of the true tally: 206.

He found little comfort in that. It was the fact that he would forget everything that served to wind his pulse back to something manageable.

There was a dark red case about the size of a deck of cards on his left arm. Caswell opened the lid. Inside, nestled in a bed of custom-cut gray foam, was a gleaming black tube. He coaxed it free, taking care not to send the weapon floating away. With one quick shake of his left arm the case snapped closed.

Caswell flipped the object around in his hands. A “vossen” gun: Vacuum-Optimized Smart Needler. He’d trained with one, months ago. If he’d ever used it in the field he had no idea.

He gripped it and looked up.

Angelina was staring at him, her lips moving, one hand raised in a “What the fuck is wrong with you?” gesture. He pointed toward his ear and gave a shrug. The woman rolled her eyes and turned back to her work. If she’d noticed the object in his hand, paid it any thought at all, she gave no indication. Probably thought it a flashlight or screwdriver.

Caswell floated until he was beside her and aimed the vossen’s business end at the glass of her face mask. Through the gland in his neck he communicated his intent to the weapon: a quick, quiet death that would leave zero mess.

One of the holes on the weapon puffed a tiny cloud of light gray smoke. Caswell caught the briefest hint of the missile’s flight. Tiny flashes of yellow as the microscopically small thrusters propelled the toothpick-size projectile through the vacuum.

It hit her helmet and bored inside.

Resin burped out the back end, sealing the hole. Angelina’s head snapped sideways. A puff of black sprayed across the inside of her visor, coating the surface from within. A blinded victim could hardly retaliate. Her body began to spasm.

Caswell listened on the open channel. Not even a yelp of surprise had come through because the needle had shorted the electronics in the helmet. Angelina bucked in her chair, clawed uselessly at her now-opaque mask. In seconds her panic and terror turned into a thrashing as the needle’s payload went to work on stopping her heart.

Finally she went still, her arms drifting out to either side.

He felt almost nothing for her. It wasn’t a lack of compassion, either. That realization struck him as most peculiar. Caswell fully recognized that he’d just taken a life. Someone with friends, perhaps a family. A past and a future. But despite recognizing all that, he found he simply couldn’t see this floating, limp body as that person anymore. It was just a corpse now, not something to be mourned. Any grief or regret for those slain would be something he’d deal with …

Later.

A chill coursed through him. This is why he was successful. He knew with total certainty as he stared at the body of Angelina Monroe that he’d feel remorse for this later. Or he would, except his memory of this would be taken away, his conscience cleared.

Movement caught his eye. Across the room, Klaus still faced the compartment where the black box waited. He hadn’t turned, hadn’t noticed anything going on behind him. He’d just stretched his arms, still waiting.

Caswell drifted past the dead captain and plugged him, too.

The big man took longer to die. He thrashed as she had, then suddenly kicked out from the wall and groped wildly in the emptiness for his assailant. Perhaps he’d heard of a vossen, or perhaps he’d just made assumptions. Either way, his fingers twitched and flailed for Caswell. But Caswell had moved to rest beside the black box. Klaus’s frantic motions eventually found the prone form of Angelina and he just managed to gather her in his arms before he, too, went still.

The embraced pair drifted free in the room, faces hidden behind ink-stained glass.

Caswell let out a breath. How can I feel nothing? Delayed mourning, was that really it? Really him?

Another theory presented itself. His implant might be short-circuiting the emotional response automatically. It could do things like that, if he didn’t mind the fevers that would follow. Force him to focus, even fire his neurons faster, which made everything else seem to slow down. Maybe it could also dampen whatever part of his brain felt compassion. He wanted to believe that. The alternative was too horrifying.

Monique had her reasons, he reminded himself again. This wasn’t in cold blood. These people, their captain at least, must have accessed highly sensitive information in the Venturi’s computer. She must have been about to transmit it to Earth when he’d plugged her. Monique had seen it coming. She’d employed him to prevent it. Maybe he’d just saved a million lives back on Earth. A fantasy, perhaps, but he had to believe it. Above all he trusted Monique, without reservation. This was just a job and he was the tool for it.

And, he thought, I seem to be pretty good at this.

Sliding into the rhythm of the task, he turned back toward the Pawn. He felt calm now, despite what his brain had been through only minutes earlier, despite the nasty business he’d just performed and the conclusions he’d drawn. He pushed back to the central junction, glanced at the Pawn—airlock still sealed—and drifted on toward the aft of the station.

The one called Harai rounded a corner ahead, directly in Caswell’s path. Caswell ignored the man’s puzzled glare. He floated straight to him and fired the needler at point-blank range.

Harai’s reaction was different. He all but ignored his sudden blindness and took a vicious swing at Caswell with his right arm. In zero-g the punch had little behind it, and served only to send them both careening off each other. Caswell flopped into the wall and whirled. His target hit the opposite wall, pushed hard with both legs, and came rocketing back. Midway across, his whole body spasmed, then again, more violently. Caswell uncoiled himself and moved aside, letting the now-limp body bounce off the surface next to him and drift.

That’s three, he thought. Three more.

He turned and stared straight into the wide, shocked eyes of Douglas. “What the fuck?” the man shouted. He had a toolbox in one hand and frantically groped through it with the other until he found what he wanted. A meaty, half-meter-long wrench.

“What’s going on?” someone asked. Iceberg, back in the Pawn. “Report.”

“That prick we brought on just killed Harai!” he shouted, swinging the wrench.

Caswell ducked under the metal bar. It rebounded off the wall, sending a jolt up Douglas’s arm. Caswell fired the vossen gun at the same moment. He missed, the tiny missile rocketing into the distance. Caswell fired again, but Douglas was spinning now, his momentum all wrong. The second needle slid into his suit just under the left armpit, burrowing through the Kevlar fabric to worm in under the collarbone.

Payload delivered so close to the heart, Douglas’s entire body jerked absolutely rigid. The man became a stick figure. His face contorted, eyes bulging outward. Blood burst from his nostrils and mouth as the man began to spasm uncontrollably.

“Iceberg,” Caswell said. “I don’t know what Douglas is talking about. He’s acting … strange. Bring a med kit.”

“Where’s Angelina?”

“Unknown. She came back to inspect the lander bays with him, and went silent. Klaus followed, same thing, so I came to see what was wrong.”

“I didn’t hear them discuss any of this.”

“Neither did I,” Caswell said.

A pause. “Then how do you know why the captain left C-and-C?”

“Can we talk about it later? Douglas is curled in a ball here hitting the sides of his helmet with his fists, and I think I can see one of the others down in the cargo bay, drifting limp. Harai maybe. Bring a stretcher while you’re at it.”

“Jesus,” Iceberg said. “Fuck. Okay. Bridgette, meet at the airlock.”

The waiflike engineer’s voice came through in a rasp. “You believe that guy over Doug? Have you ever known the float to get to him?”

Iceberg said, “No, that’s why you’re meeting me there. Bring—”

Caswell tuned out the rest. He floated back to the main junction. A quick glance at the airlock door that led to the Pawn showed no one on the other side, yet. Good. He whirled and propelled himself to the eerily familiar MED BAY door and whirled it open, killing the lights via a panel beside it.

The Venturi’s mummified crew bobbed about inside. Caswell grabbed the collar of the nearest man’s suit and hauled him out. Corpse between him and the airlock door, Caswell braced his feet against the wall. He waited there, coiled, vossen gun in one hand and human shield in the other.

Motion at the airlock. Iceberg’s sky-blue-tinted hair, then his beady eyes peering through the tiny window. If he saw Caswell or the corpse in the darkened room it didn’t slow his entrance.

Good, Caswell thought, and braced for the attack.

The airlock door began to move. Caswell pushed off hard with both feet, propelling the limp body before him. Halfway to the door he shoved it ahead. The body lurched forward, arms flung wide. The effort slowed Caswell’s own progress. As the gap widened he raised his needler and waited, drifting in behind his shield.

A blast of white fog hit the corpse at point-blank range. Fire extinguisher. It stalled the body and then pushed it backward, sending it cartwheeling. Caswell had streamlined himself to reduce his own target area and, somehow, managed to slide right past the flailing corpse. He flew past just as the extinguisher’s blast let up. The girl, Bridgette, held the device. She saw him an instant too late. The microscopic missile hit her face mask and instantly clouded it black from the inside. Her fingers squeezed on the extinguisher reflexively, sending another cone of white that arced across the tiny airlock. Unable to stop himself, Caswell barreled right into her as her body began the death throes. He caught a glimpse of Iceberg behind her. The man held a med kit in both hands, his eyes wide with terror.

Caswell plugged him from a meter away and floated lamely in the middle of the room until both bodies grew still.

His pulse raced. His whole body felt cool with sweat. He wanted to scream, “I’m a monster!” so loud that he’d hear it himself on the other end of this. But he did not scream. As he drifted between the dead and his pulse began to slow, Peter Caswell decided that he would mourn these people, just as soon as the job was done. Before Monique took the memory away. Did he always do this? Yes, he must. He had to believe that.

He let a full minute pass before he signaled on the Archon channel. “The Pawn’s crew is retired. God damn, this vossen gun is a nasty bit of kit, Mo. Advise on next steps. IA6, out.”

No handhold within reach, Caswell drifted for a while. He could do nothing but stare at his handiwork. “I’m a killer,” he muttered. “A heartless fucking killer.” For the length of the mission anyway. Then he’d go back to being a man merely trained to kill. The rookie.

He could hardly wait.

Finally a handhold came within reach. He secured himself to the wall and considered his situation. “Mo,” he said finally, “that missing lander. Might be that our absent crew member, Alice Vale, tried to flee this disaster all those years ago. I’m investigating.”

He left the dead to drift. Back inside the Venturi he weaved his way around bodies and debris and kept on toward the rear of the smashed vessel.

Inside he found a passage that bowed in from either side. Airlock doors faced one another at the center of the hourglass-shaped passage, one for each lander. He glanced through the porthole on the first and saw the white-blue ESA markings on the hull of the craft nestled within. Caswell spun to the opposite window.

The other bay was indeed empty.

“Right then,” he said. He bookmarked the video feed recorded by his helmet and filed the clip for priority upload home. “Confirmed, Monique. One of the landing craft is missing, and it’s too clean to have been ripped away in whatever calamity happened here. Nothing aft of this point save a debris cloud. Advise.”

Had Alice Vale taken the boat? It would have been loaded with some supplies and fuel, though certainly not enough to survive a dozen years in the black. But then she wouldn’t have needed to survive so long. Perhaps she’d flown it home. Sold the weapons research that had gone on here and was safely back on Earth, living under a false ident on an island somewhere. Sitting on a beach in Mexico, perhaps. Biting into a fish taco and watching the glitter of sunlight on jade waves.

More likely she’d simply been yanked out of one of these holes when the station was damaged, and even now her body tumbled through space toward the Sun. As for the missing lander … well, Monique and whoever was feeding her the mission parameters would know what to do about it. He waited.

* * *

“Well done, Caswell,” Monique sent after a lengthy delay.

Her next set of orders was even more surprising than the first, and frustratingly vague.

Preparation took several hours. As instructed, he left all the bodies in the C&C, moving them to one wall and fixing them in place with nylon straps to ensure they’d go down with the ship. “This station is a bloody mess, Monique,” he sent as he went about the grim business. A dozen bodies now rested in the doomed vessel. Six from the original crew, six fresh ones from the Pawn. The thirteenth, Alice Vale, probably drifted among the debris cloud that trailed the Venturi toward the Sun.

The grim task complete, Caswell shifted focus to the Venturi’s black box. He moved the device into the salvage ship. Following Monique’s instructions he gathered all of the food and water he could find on the Pawn and transferred it into the Venturi’s lone remaining lander. Once done, Caswell boarded the supply-filled landing boat and sealed himself inside. He sent Monique another update, then waited. The cockpit was cramped, every seat save his holding packages of food and water. His own gear and clothing lay safely tucked within one of the storage compartments.

The lander, guided by remote instruction from Earth, detached from the Venturi and drifted to the aft docking ring on the Pawn Takes Bishop. Caswell watched from his tiny porthole as the Pawn then detached itself from the doomed research vessel.

This little ballet of spacecraft continued as the Pawn, with Caswell’s lander attached, floated out to a safe distance and then powered up its engines. The thrust pushed him back into his chair and kept him pinned there as the salvage craft served as booster for the comparably small lander, powering the tiny craft onto its new trajectory. After eight hours of one-g burn the Pawn unceremoniously let him go. She fell away and, a few minutes later, turned to begin a long spiraling trek to Earth, empty of crew but carrying one tiny, and very valuable, black box.

In a few days Angelina and her salvage team would burn up with the Venturi. Weeks later the Pawn would arrive back at Earth. Monique had something else in mind for Caswell and his tiny lander, something Archon wanted both of them to forget about in due course.

The operative sat back. He studied the three-dimensional map before him as the lander zipped along. Thanks to the Pawn’s boost he now drifted away from the Sun at a touch over 150 kilometers per second. A dotted arc marked his trajectory, stable now after eight hours of growth as the boat had gained velocity. To his surprise this path did not arc and spiral out toward Earth, like the faint blue line that marked the Pawn, but instead implied a journey to an empty swath of nothingness directly above the Sun.

“You’re on a course to intercept the missing lander, where you will ascertain the fate of Alice Vale. This is all I can tell you for the moment.”

He sent back, “Why not take the Pawn?” and waited twenty minutes for the reply.

“You’ll find out,” his handler said vaguely.

Caswell ate fried rice from a self-heating package, then napped for a few hours. When he woke another thought occurred to him. When Monique had ordered him to eliminate the Pawn’s crew she’d neglected to give him the regulation speech about thought-access orders. “What did you mean, ‘that’s all I can tell you for now’? We’re under IA already, so what the hell’s this about, Mo?”

Twenty minutes later she replied. “All will become clear in due course, Peter. Trust me. This will be the most interesting mission you’ll ever forget. I guarantee it.”

* * *

To pass the time he played the craft’s computer in games of Go, chess, and several modern games that relied on stealth and patience. Between matches he studied Alice Vale’s dossier, but it had so little information he’d memorized it after only a few hours.

On a whim he used her picture to represent the computer opponent in his games, though after a particularly nasty round of Knife and Coin he decided against this. No need to paint her as an adversary. She’d simply survived. Escaped that doomed station only to realize too late that the tiny landing boat had little on board in the way of fuel or supplies. Granted she’d flown silently. A curious detail, but one that could be the result of a simple equipment malfunction.

He studied her face one last time. She’d be forty now if she’d lived. “How far did you get, young lady? How many weeks or months did you last out here?”

The picture did not reply, of course. Caswell sighed. How many hours had passed for her inside a ship just like this before she’d regretted not simply staying with her crew? They would have been friends. Like family, even. And they’d died a quick death, from the look of it. Preferable, surely, to starving out here in the chilly void. Yet she’d fled, and transmitted not a single word about any of it back home. This fact he found most odd.

With a tap of his finger her image vanished. He played six more rounds of Knife and Coin before dining on a packet of vegetable korma—spicy and surprisingly good. Then he slept.

The faces of those he’d killed haunted his dreams.

He woke eager to forget.

4

“HEY, MONIQUE,” HE SENT as his craft approached the destination marker on its navigation screen. “What’s the bounce timer on this activation, anyway? Just occurred to me you never said, and we’re already flirting with the record.”

Any activation of his implant included an automatic reversion timer. If he were to run, or fall into enemy hands, this ensured there would be at least some hope of clearing his memory of any sensitive information before a potential disclosure—voluntary or otherwise—could occur. In his career he’d never gone more than one week under IA.

Her reply amounted to yet another disquieting detail of this entire affair: “I haven’t set it yet.”

Caswell shifted uneasily, a frown growing the more he thought about what she’d just said. A trigger without a reversion fail-safe? Was that even possible?

An hour later a blinking red message on the main screen caught his eye. He’d been locked out of manual control.

The short-range nav showed nothing other than a few tiny chunks of debris he’d been tracking for days now. In his six days flying it had barely changed. Zero sign of the other lander, or Alice Vale’s body.

His little craft sped away from the Sun at a blistering clip, his distance to the star now roughly equal to Earth’s, his position exactly perpendicular to her orbital plane.