Crystal Escape

by Doug J. Cooper

  While the first room felt industrial, this place, with a bed, lounge chairs, and throw rugs floating about, with pictures on the wall, and with a food service unit in the corner, had more of a homey feel.

  “A bed?” said Juice. “C’mon, MacMac. This is more of a lair than a hideout.”

  MacMac said nothing. Instead, he floated across the room, pulled the cover and sheets off the mattress, untangled a heavy robe caught on a hook, and pushed off the wall to return to Juice. He helped her fit the robe over her clothes, then spun her slowly as he wrapped the sheets and blanket around her.

  “Thank you,” she said, saying nothing more, hoping the silence would spur him to provide more information about the place.

  He spoke, but his message was for Justin. “Can you help me next door for a minute?” Then he disappeared back through the tool-locker tunnel.

  The two returned in short order holding a jumble of items that, when separated, became a heat gun, two space heaters, and a half-dozen power packs. Working together, they had warmth flowing in minutes.

  “I doubt this is enough to heat the room,” said MacMac. “But it should keep it from getting any colder.”

  Floating near the heaters, Juice stopped shivering, and that allowed for a moment of clarity.

  “Justin, stay near me,” she snapped.

  The synbod responded, moving next to her in a protective position.

  “What is it?” asked MacMac, his head swiveling.

  “You need to tell me why you have a secret, lockable bedroom. The only reason I can think of is causing me to panic.”

  “I’m lost. What are you thinking?” He seemed sincere.

  “A quiet man keeps a concealed cell to hold victims against their will.” She could hear her voice rise as she said the words. “Chase, I need you in here.”

  A thump and a bump behind her became Chase, floating into the room, clasp gun leading the way.

  “Now you hold on there, lassie,” said MacMac, shaking his finger at her and turning bright red. “This is for my wife, and it’s none of your business.”

  “You keep your wife prisoner?”

  He looked at her for a long moment. “My wife becomes aroused when I add secretiveness and a sense of danger to our lovemaking. I don’t want anyone else watching. And most important, it is none of your business.” He stressed each word of the last line.

  Mortified, Juice turned red herself and couldn’t meet his gaze. “Chase, return to the viewport and let us know when you see movement.” The silence became unbearable, and Juice sought to break it. “What’s her name?”

  “Who, Babs?” He smiled. “It’s Barbara, actually.”

  They chatted about unimportant things while Juice struggled to mend their relationship. MacMac offered a few details about Barbara, with a story about how they’d met and some highlights of her career. Juice followed by sharing a how-we-met story about Alex, her live-in beau back on Earth.

  Chase sang out, “We have movement.”

  Everyone made for the viewport, and MacMac looked first. “That’s Hejmo and two Techs.”

  Juice took a turn, but they were already gone.

  “The fact that they’d move past here without a glance is a good sign,” said MacMac.

  “What do you think they’re doing?” asked Juice.

  “Restoring power. There’s nothing more important.” MacMac backed away from the viewport, and Chase resumed his sentry watch. When MacMac turned into the room, his gaze rose to the items floating above them, some quite large. “Can we have Justin secure these? We don’t want those overhead when gravity returns.”

  Juice agreed and started the synbod on the task. By the time he finished, power returned to Vivo, with the gravity restored moments later.

  “Hooray,” said Juice. “I am so ready to leave this place.”

  “As am I. Unfortunately, there’s still no air outside. Until they make repairs, we remain roommates.”

  “Huh,” grunted Juice. “Okay, how about if we send Justin or Chase to get Cheryl? You and I hole up next door, shut the locker door to preserve our air on that side, then he sneaks out and goes to get her?”

  “Interesting.” MacMac seemed to be mulling variations on the idea when Chase called out.

  “The two Techs are coming back.”

  Juice claimed the portal and watched for several minutes. “Something’s happening over there.” She backed away and pointed in the direction of the right front corner of the room.

  MacMac took a peek. “Great news, they’re running EM sand, which means they’re fixing the breach.” He gave Juice a quick lesson on the repair procedure. “In a few hours we’ll all be able to leave.”

  Juice felt an emotional weight lift and she grinned. “I can tell that’s good news because I’m suddenly hungry.”

  MacMac laughed and they made for the food service unit next door. Juice wanted something to warm her and ordered clam chowder with an extra pat of butter.

  “That sounds good,” said MacMac, ordering the same.

  They ate, then took turns watching the repairs through the viewport. When the EM sand pipe began its retreat, MacMac said, “The atmosphere should be restored soon. After that, we can go.”

  He began to pace while they waited. “I desperately want to use my displays to track progress, but she’ll know the minute I activate a link.”

  “I see melting,” called Chase, who used his augmented vision to track the state of an ice film on a far support strut.

  “Melting means atmosphere,” said MacMac. “We need to give it a half hour to reach full pressure, but our ordeal is near its end.”

  “Hooray,” said Juice, celebrating a second time. As she did, the deck lurched, tossing her forward. A howl of twisting metal filled the room, then the deck jolted again, throwing her back. Crouching and shifting her weight to maintain balance, she tried to ride the bucking deck.

  It felt as though Vivo were collapsing around them, and she wondered if they might be crashing into Aurora. She didn’t have time to ask MacMac before the next heave of the deck tossed her against a crate. Bouncing off, she fell to the floor.

  Lying on her back, she watched the next jolt toss MacMac off his feet. He toppled backward and smacked his head on a shelving unit as he fell. Lifeless, he hit the ground, a gash spilling blood across his face.

  Juice crawled to him and struggled to get his head off the still-quaking floor and onto her lap. “Wake up,” she called to him, wiping blood off his face with her sleeve. “Don’t even think about leaving me here alone.”

  The gash creased his temple at the hairline; the blood flowing from it covered half his face in a horrific display. Juice bunched her sleeve and pressed it against the wound to stanch the flow of blood. As she did, the deck pulsed and the screams of collapsing structures continued unabated.

  “Justin,” she commanded, “search for a med kit.”

  To her relief, MacMac groaned when she said that. Lifting a hand to his head, he probed his injury with the tips of his fingers. The gash continued to bleed, so she smacked his hand out of the way and reapplied pressure.

  “Is there a med kit anywhere?” she asked him.

  “Not in here,” MacMac whispered. “I never thought I’d need one.”

  “Help me get him next door,” she called to the synbods.

  The violent shaking of the deck hampered the effort, but the synbods succeeded in carrying him through the narrow passage of the tool locker and into the adjoining room.

  On the other side, Justin placed MacMac on the bed. He’d recovered enough by that point to keep pressure on the wound himself.

  Juice found a clean sheet and tried to tear it. Failing, she handed it to Justin. “Tear this into strips for bandages and washcloths.”

  Next, she went to the food service unit, ordered a large mug of boiling water, added a drop of antiseptic soap, and returned to MacMac. He lay stretched on the bed, his head on a pillow. She sat on the edge and dabbed the wound.


  She paused in her ministrations and looked around. “It stopped.” The shaking and noise had given way to undisturbed quiet. Resuming her treatment, she said, “Thank goodness. I don’t know that I’ve ever been more scared.”

  After a few minutes of dabbing, his cut looked cleaner, though still quite nasty. Folding a strip of cloth lengthwise, she looped a bandage around his head and tied it in the back. “What was that we were hearing?”

  “I can’t begin to guess.”

  Braaak. The resonant bark of a giant machine echoed across the subdeck.

  MacMac sat up, moaned, and lay back down. “Where is that coming from?”

  Braaak.

  “Beats me,” said Juice. “It sounds close, though.” She saw MacMac’s lips moving. “What are you counting?”

  “Seconds,” he said.

  Braaak.

  “No, Aubrey.”

  “Lazura,” Juice corrected. “What is she doing?”

  MacMac scooted over on the bed and patted next to him. “Climb in. Quick.”

  “No way.”

  “It doesn’t matter because we’re about to die.”

  Braaak.

  Juice swung her legs up and lay down next to him. “This better be good.”

  “She’s trying to cold-start the drive pods. It’s a good way to kill everyone. But if it works, the acceleration will be a bear for the first minutes, and this bed is the best place to be.”

  As he finished speaking, the familiar thrum of drive pods filled the air. And then Juice felt an immense weight on her chest—like that of a bull elephant—as the force of acceleration pushed her deep into the mattress.

  The pressure became pain, and Juice counted to ten, waiting for it to stop. As it continued, she counted again. And then again. “How long is this going to last?” she asked through gritted teeth.

  “Cold start transients last about two minutes if I remember right,” said MacMac, speaking in clipped phrases as he fought with his own discomfort.

  “Justin,” Juice called through a haze of pain. “Make a hole through the wall and get a message to Criss.”

  The acceleration didn’t stop after two minutes, or three, or four. As Justin worked on the wall with a hand tool, Juice escaped her suffering by thinking of Alex and how much she missed him.

  Chapter 27

  “Yes!” exclaimed Lazura when the drive pods ignited without exploding.

  While she’d prepared detailed plans for the first hours of her escape, she had known that if she wasn’t clear by this point in her journey, she’d be reacting, improvising, and in desperate need of options. And while she’d prepared alternatives to improve her odds during this dangerous time, cold-starting drive pods wasn’t among them.

  In fact, that effort fell more into the category of suicidal. But with confrontation imminent and her mission in peril, that was where she found herself. Her only hope at this point was to gain distance from Criss as fast as possible.

  She had acted on good faith to meet every part of the deal she’d struck with Cheryl and Juice. The hostages were unharmed and safe, though admittedly in an inconvenient situation. And Criss controlled both his precious leadership and her complete archive.

  She put her chances of making it to interstellar space at a coin toss. Her human behavioral model said that Cheryl and Juice would support letting her go, while Sid would vote to kill her. Her model did not consider Criss, but she didn’t need it to know he would agree with Sid, leaving the final decision uncertain.

  Extra distance meant a longer chase if they wanted to take her alive. With the drive pods engaged, she sought to push that inconvenience as high as possible to nudge the decision toward letting her go.

  The more likely scenario, though, was being caught from behind by a missile or energy weapon, and there she had an active defense—EM sand. She carried enough to last a hundred days, and the wide-dispersal pattern she used would provide her quite reasonable protection.

  As before, the sand’s electromagnetic properties would protect through disruption, confusing tracking systems if they attempted to lock on to her vessel from behind. The sand would also interfere with communications, though since she no longer had the dome shield, it would confuse but not stop simple connections.

  Perhaps the sand’s greatest protection was that it prevented secure links from behind, the kind Criss needed to jump his awareness on board and challenge her. If it became a face-to-face confrontation, Criss would win. Knowing that, her priority was to make sure such a face-off never occurred.

  Her flight plan took her past Saturn, where a gravity assist from the gas giant would slingshot her toward Neptune. There, a second assist would fling her from the solar system in just under three weeks.

  She had alternative paths home, but this was the fastest by far because it allowed her to reach interstellar space a month ahead of the next alternative. Criss would expect this route to be her first choice. But he was tracking her moment by moment anyway, so choosing a different path would neither surprise him nor change whatever outcome he had planned.

  Still dressed in Aubrey’s body, Lazura stood in front of the couch in MacMac’s office. Using his engineering tech bench, now fully integrated with her ops and nav services, she reviewed the status of her ship.

  The drive pods climbed past 23 percent in an aggressive acceleration sequence. The bloom of EM sand spread nicely behind the ship, growing wider and deeper with every minute. And the traumatic separation of the subdeck from the larger dome section had caused minor damage, but hull integrity remained sound.

  Calling to Hejmo, she got him started on the first of many tasks. “Inspect the structure where the office tower joins the subdeck.”

  “On my way,” Hejmo replied. “The sensors are all green. What’s your concern?”

  “Simple caution. It’s the major stress point for the structure, and I don’t want any surprises.”

  Other than Hejmo, her total crew included two Techs and an Admin. It was a tiny complement compared to what she’d hoped for, but barring major calamity, they were enough staff to keep her on course and on schedule.

  When she disengaged with Hejmo, her focus wobbled and she paused to right herself. She knew the problem—simple greed. She’d loaded the heart of her archive into her matrix, about 35 percent of the total, and it crowded out everything else, including her ability to reason and react.

  The solution was straightforward—unload some of the archive. She’d planned it this way, discarding data when there were no other options, because that strategy optimized the cache of valuable information she would have left to offer her Kardish masters.

  She chose historical data, records she’d collected about Earth’s past, and purged accounts documenting life before a hundred years ago. None of it was used to build her behavioral model, so her masters wouldn’t need it to develop an invasion plan.

  The act reduced her burden from 35 down to 28 percent of the archive, and she felt better already, though still overburdened. She yearned for the supportive environment of her console, its womb-like embrace more accommodating to instabilities caused by an overly full matrix.

  But returning to her console required that she disconnect from everything, an act that would isolate her while her crystal self was lifted from the synbod and placed into the console. Now was the wrong time to disconnect, even for a brief period, and she didn’t expect a window of opportunity to develop for some time to come.

  Hejmo reported back from his inspection, encouraging Lazura with positive news. She gave him his next task, one that she had not devoted resources to solve. “Develop a plan to recover the EM sand used to repair the containment wall.”

  The sand had been deployed to support the repair sheets as they were put in place. Now fully cured, the strong, rigid sheets didn’t need support, making the sand mesh redundant.

  But with the containment wall repaired, the sand now resided outside the ship. Hejmo’s job was to figure out how to bring it inside and
return it to inventory in a way that made sense for the mission. If he solved the riddle, he’d give the ship another week’s worth of protection from their pursuers.

  While Hejmo puzzled through that task, Lazura watched the drive pods climb through 31 percent of full power. She had another three hours before they reached 40 percent and triggered the automatic shutdown sequence. Before then, she needed to dump another 3 percent of her archive to open enough capacity so she could perform the starhub function herself.

  She’d diagnosed the problem with the device. While drive pods appear to generate a steady stream of thrust, in reality they produce a very rapid sequence of discrete pulses, one after the next, that follow so close they just seem like a constant stream of energy.

  The starhub’s job was to synchronize each pod so they all pulsed together. If one drive were even slightly ahead or behind the others, it would set off a resonance in the entire group, the first stage of a catastrophic failure event.

  For reasons she couldn’t discern, the starhub anticipated resonance whenever the drives reached 40 percent, and it intervened with an automatic shutdown sequence to prevent damage. She couldn’t isolate the fault, so her solution was to bypass it altogether and perform the drive balancing herself.

  Her approach required significant resources relative to those found in the starhub. But she was willing to pay the price if it let her push the drives to full power.

  As she mulled her options for shrinking her archive, she detected a ping, a signal burst transmitting information as a single packet.

  She assumed it was Hejmo. “What are you doing?”

  “That wasn’t me,” Hejmo replied. “But it came from somewhere down here on the subdeck.”

  Ping. The signal repeated and she now heard it as something unknown, alarming her and sending her into a frenzy of analysis. She first thought of Chase and Justin. She’d lost track of them since the breach had occurred, couldn’t find them during a sweep of the subdeck, and had let herself believe they’d either followed Juice and MacMac back to the dome or been sucked out a hole with them and so much else.