Subject Zero: Faceless

Dawn was three hours off, and nobody had sent an escort.

He understood the absence for what it was: some part of this base had stopped treating him as a problem that needed walking, and hadn’t decided yet what to treat him as instead. The liaison walked him anyway — from the barracks row, hands clasped behind her back, matching his pace instead of the transport’s schedule, and spending the whole distance on silence, as though rationing whatever she had left.

The route to the transport yard ran past the motor pool. He had decided, two corridors back, not to wake anyone for this. Voss kept mechanic’s hours when the base let her and slept like the dead when it didn’t, and a goodbye dragged out of a sleeping person counted for less than no goodbye at all. That was the plan, and it lasted as far as the gate.

The gate still stood open — dark, unbolted. Light showed at the far end of the yard anyway, one figure moving between two vehicles with a wrench and no urgency, and he understood that the decision had never been his to make. The liaison stopped at the gate and let the yard have him, as she had once before.

Voss met him at the yard’s edge, wiping her hands on a rag that had long since stopped being cleaner than the hands. ”Ninth Front,” she said, before he could reach for the slate. ”Word gets to the motor pool first. We fuel the thing that takes you, so we know before you do.” She looked him over once — the mask, the single bag someone had issued him for a life that fit inside it. ”They’ve got trucks out there too, you know. Badly kept ones. Somebody should do something about that.”

He reached for the slate anyway. She waved it off before the motion finished.

”Don’t. You’ll put something honest on it, and then I’ll be standing in my own yard at four in the morning having feelings in front of the vehicles.” She settled it in five words instead.

”Don’t be bad at that.”

She lifted the wrench an inch off her shoulder — a salute in the only denomination she carried — and went back to the engine before he could decide how to answer it.

She never did finish saying thank you in so many words. He decided, walking, that she had, in fact, just finished it: a joke, a raised wrench, five words chosen over every longer sentence available to her, and all of it worth more than the alternatives would have cost.

He looked for Bram on the way out — the crates where the card game lived, the barracks row where a window or two had gone amber with early risers — and Bram wasn’t anywhere in the yard to see him off. Some debts got settled in a look, and some simply stayed open, and Bram’s had always been the second kind.

* * *

The transport waiting in the yard hummed with a Core-cycled charge instead of any fuel a man could smell. A driver stood beside the open hatch, checking a manifest that had one name on it.

The liaison stopped three paces short of the hatch, and he understood, without being told, that this was as far as her orders let her walk.

”This is it,” she said. Not a question.

Say something. I don’t have a word ready for this one.

”Then don’t build one tonight.” She looked at the transport, then back. ”Whoever they give you out there — make them ask you questions. You answer better when somebody bothers to ask.” It was advice and a goodbye and a complaint about every room this base had put him in, folded into one sentence, and she left it at that.

She reached up and set his mask a fraction more true where the last checkpoint’s turn had knocked it loose. ”Go. Before I decide I have a better argument than the one I already gave you upstairs.”

He climbed into the transport without a further word between them, because for once the silence wasn’t a failure to find one. It was the whole message, delivered on time.

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* * *

The hatch sealed on a compartment built for six and carrying one. He sat where the manifest told him to, and the transport pulled out of the yard into a dark still thick with the last hour before dawn.

He didn’t watch the gate go by. He watched the window a moment longer than the gate deserved, on the chance that a figure standing three paces back from a hatch had stayed to see the transport actually leave. She had. He caught her once, small and still under the yard’s floodlight, before the road bent and took her out of the frame for good.

He thought, once the window had nothing left of her to hold, of the other thread he’d never been formally allowed to test — the colonel’s, opened once with real consent, refused a second look at only hours ago by a form that had come back stamped insufficient operational justification. Nobody waiting at the far end of tonight’s drive would know to countersign anything. Nobody there had ever agreed to be reachable at all.

He reached for it anyway — knowing the rule, knowing that no consent and no countersignature covered this, and that the one mind able to feel a door test its hinges was the mind at the far end of it — a single press against a door left merely unlocked rather than open, testing a fastening he already trusted rather than searching for a new one. It held, once more. No words went down it. The thread was there, fainter than he remembered it, stretched thin by however many miles sat between the transport and the base behind it. He confirmed that much, then let it go.

* * *

The road out ran through country he’d never been permitted to see and had no time now to look at properly. Dawn found him somewhere past the halfway point of a drive nobody had told him the length of, gray light finding the compartment through a window built for looking out of, not in.

Twice the transport pulled onto the verge and idled while traffic came the other way. The first time it was fuel bowsers, empty, riding high on their springs. The second time it was a column of gray ambulances with their Core-lamps dimmed to running-glow, six of them, close enough as they passed that he could see a driver’s hands on the wheel — steady, bored, a man who’d made this run enough times to have stopped counting what was in the back. Nobody in the column looked at the transport. Nobody on this road, he understood, had attention to spare for anything going toward the place they were coming from.

The driver’s voice came back through a grille he hadn’t noticed was there. ”That’s the rear-echelon run. Goes past at dawn most days. They don’t slow down for us and we don’t slow down for them.” A pause, the sound of a man deciding how much to say to a manifest with one name on it. ”Forty minutes out. You’ll want to be looking at the window for this part.”

He looked.

The Ninth Front announced itself before its gate did — a smear of movement on the horizon that resolved, mile by mile, into something too organized for a skirmish and too constant for a drill: convoy dust rising in three places at once, a formation of Core-lit aircraft crossing low enough to rattle something loose in the transport’s frame, a perimeter fence that kept unspooling past the window longer than any base he’d been held at had bothered to build one. Somewhere beyond the fence line, a low percussion reached the compartment, felt through the frame as much as heard — the sound, distant but steady, of something being fought over rather than merely guarded.

This place hadn’t been built around a clipboard corridor or a command wing’s patient lamps. If nobody had sent him a name yet, his best guess was that whoever ran it hadn’t had an hour to spare on one.

The transport slowed at a checkpoint manned by more rifles than he’d seen gathered in one place since the ruins. None of them lowered while a guard leaned in through the driver’s window to read a manifest with exactly one name on it, twice.

”Ashfall-Zero,” the guard said, not to him — to the manifest, as if checking the word for spelling. It was the first time a stranger had said it aloud, and it sounded, in a stranger’s mouth, like something a person could be called. The guard looked back along the vehicle to the compartment, to the mask in the window, and whatever he’d been told about what was coming, it hadn’t covered the face. ”That him?”

”That’s the manifest,” the driver said.

The guard held the look a moment longer, then waved the vehicle through with two fingers, and did not write anything down.

Nobody here had signed anything promising him a room instead of a cell, the command wing’s paperwork notwithstanding. Whatever decided that would decide it on its own schedule.

Whatever waited past that gate, it hadn’t sent a clipboard to meet him. Everything he’d learned so far about this world said that was worse.

The transport rolled through, and the gate began closing behind it before the vehicle had cleared the frame — a base with no spare seconds to leave anything open, even for a count of ten. Somewhere ahead, past the revetments and the tent rows and the low percussion that never paused, an officer who was still only a line on a transfer order — to be assigned on arrival — was, he supposed, going about a morning that didn’t yet include him.

The transport stopped. The hatch unsealed on air that smelled of dust and burned Core, and he stood up into it.