Zero World Read Online Free PDF Page B

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