Read Zero World for Free Online

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 beenfriends. 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.

“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.
    Without warning the lander turned around to face the Sun. Her engines powered up, filling the cabin with a deep, unsettling hum. The sensation of gravity returned as if some