Deathworld (Vienna audio story)

The planet Mercator. Twenty trained assassins enter a game arena, armed only with their wits to compete against each other in a harsh environment. Twenty killers go in. One comes out.

Amongst the killers is Vienna Salvatori. This is the moment she has trained her whole life for, honing her skills as an assassin to become the best in the galaxy.

As the killers are wiped out one by one, Vienna fights on in the hope of finally learning the truth about her past. In the last battle, only one can be the last assassin standing.

Plot

Vienna wakes up after three months of training simulations at the Assassin Academy, including her missions to assassinate Jamela K'lynn, the Kreyfin and Percival Kendrick, and is given a score of only 43%. She and fellow assassin Malrick, who scored 98%, listen to Felman Shazarel's speech about the imminent Tournament of Death in which the various assembled assassins will fight to the death and are flown away in a hovership. On the journey, Vienna tells Malrick that she believes that the training simulations were based on her memories as she can remember what happened following the last simulation. She learnt from her ship upon leaving Percival and Kendra Spendlove on Miradox that she had wiped her memories of Crevo Finn after uploading them to her ship's storage drive to make her more efficient and had them restored, allowing her to remember how Crevo broke in and attacked her parents when she was a child in the Ultracity of Mercator. Whilst her father was killed, her mother was left in a coma and Vienna has been paying for her care on Miracle 3.

Vienna forms an alliance with Malrick and they head to high ground to set up a base, sneaking up on the attacking Galaron Darvil on the way and causing him to accidentally swallow one of his own poison darts. She tells Malrick how she broke into the Magisterial Palace on Kazbar and threatened a defence robot with mind-erasure to get it to take her to Crevo, who claimed that he did not know who she was and that he would have been too young thirty years ago to have attacked her parents. When he claimed to have proof of his innocence, she saved him from people attacking the palace so that she could kill him herself at a later date and they fled from the defence robots, whose loyalty circuits had been reprogrammed, in a hover skimmer. She then performed a memory scan on Crevo, but he was shot and killed when the scan was only 85% complete.

Exploring a cave with Malrick in the hopes of finding food, Vienna kills an attacking sabre-toothed creature with a giant icicle and they eat it. She continues her story and tells Malrick how Crevo's memory scan revealed that he was not on Mercator on the day that Vienna's father was killed and that she feigned a crash as she left Kazbar to deceive an attacking ship. When the other pilot entered her ship, she held him in a stasis field and removed his mask, finding that it was Malrick and that he believed that she had killed his father on Mercator. She deduces that he has been given an altered version of her own memory to trick him into killing her and shoots him dead when the stasis field is lowered. Malrick starts to remember this encounter and wins the Tournament when Darvil shoots Vienna with a poison dart and he uses the opportunity to throw Darvil from a cliff.

Shazarel presents Malrick as the Tournament's winner before the Assassin Academy, after which Malrick speaks with him in private and confronts him with the fact that they are in a simulation whilst the missions were in the real world. The real Malrick was killed by Vienna aboard her spaceship and this avatar of him transforms into Vienna, who has been using his avatar all along. She explains that she scanned Malrick's mind posthumously and found that he had been implanted with the false memory whilst in a training immersion pod on Mercator, leading her to travel there and discover Death Incorporated's operation of turning orphans and unwanted children into assassins. Shazarel reveals that Vienna's memories of childhood trauma are fake and that she was sent to kill Crevo at the request of one of his business rivals, the Vernagulos Empire. The money that she has been sending to Miracle 3 for her mother has actually been going into Death Incorporated's accounts.

Vienna tells Shazarel that her own avatar was controlled by her ship's computer to remind her of the truth and wakes up, fleeing whilst the computer scrambles the security systems to stop Shazarel from finding her. He resorts to waking up all of the assassins to go after her and she is found by Darvil, who convinces Shazarel to kill Vienna herself. When Shazarel joins them, Darvil holds him at gunpoint and Vienna explains that her computer implanted a false memory into all of the assassins' minds; Shazarel killed all of their fathers when they were young. She promises to let him live if he tells her who her parents were, but she allows Darvil to kill him even after he checks the system and informs her that Death Incorporated bought her from Carlo and Delta Tuvala on Forest Gala I. Ordering Death Incorporated's files to be wiped, she leaves.

Vienna sets a course to meet her parents on Forest Gala I, but quickly changes her mind and uploads her memories of learning about her parents to the computer before having it deleted as she does not want her parents to know that she is a murderer. This way she believes she will have a fresh start. Elsewhere, a man orders her the computer to take Vienna to Focal Magnus and muses on the fact that Vienna has wiped out his rivals single-handedly and that she has been unknowingly working for him for years despite her not knowing that he is still alive.

Cast

Worldbuilding

The rules of the Tournament of Death deny the use of weapons, allow the recording of all progress and state that only one person may win.
A fake memory was implanted into Vienna's memories of her mother in a coma on the planet Miracle 3. Vienna's fees were being sent there to cover the costs of her treatment. In reality, all of it was a false memory and all payments were sent to the bank accounts of Death Incorporated.
The Simulacrum is an invention of Death Incorporated that takes orphans and inducts them into a fake reality, training them to be assassins.

Notes

to be added

Continuity

The simulations taken by the students entail Vienna's previous adventures onboard the Custodian and with the New Church of Wonderment were part of a training simulation. (AUDIO: Dead Drop, Bad Faith)
Vienna's payments to Miracle 3 have been paying for her mother's treatment following Crevo Finn's attempted murder. (AUDIO: The Memory Box et al)
Shazarel explains that all payments to Miracle 3, in fact, went to Death Incorporated.
Vienna notes that the real Malrick could have been using a memory box to hide true memories. She notes that memory boxes would not appear on her memory scan. (AUDIO: The Memory Box et al)

External links

Official Deathworld page at bigfinish.com