Injection Burn

by Jason M. Hough

  “Okay, boss. Okay.”

  Four hundred klicks per second came up only minutes later. Gloria braced herself for the nausea to come. The confusion maneuver was hardest on her stim-free body.

  Four-fifty. Five hundred. Gloria slammed her eyes shut.

  The Wildflower rocked to one side, so abruptly she almost mistook it for an impact. Then it lurched again. And again. Up, left, down. She felt as if in free fall, then as if climbing an eighty-degree incline in a rocket-powered sled. Now she flew sideways as if kicked by a giant. Then back.

  “Gnnnnh,” she cried. With one eye partially open, she reached out and activated her portion of the plan. “Signature masking in effect!” she shouted over the howls of displeasure that came from every corner of the ship. The custom program analyzed the closest enemy and then manipulated the ship’s radiators and heat sinks so as to effectively make it invisible, at least at this extreme range. Instead of venting waste heat in all directions, the hull would work at capacity on the edge opposite their opponent, and chill the closest surfaces to match the background radiation.

  Gloria, battling the intense desire to heave her stomach’s contents, chanced a look at the navigation display. If the closest Scipio vessel reached visual range—a distance humanity could only guess at—all bets were off. The masking system could do nothing in the visual wavelengths.

  Xavi’s movement of the ship, on the other hand, would create a rapidly growing cone of potential future locations. Given their enemies were on the order of light-minutes away, each randomized shift in velocity would make the Wildflower difficult to shoot at, much less intercept.

  Gloria winced as the craft jolted itself into a hard climb, then slammed her down into her seat with a force that sent her unconscious for several seconds.

  When she came to, the ship had settled, once again accelerating hard in a straight line. “Xavi? Status.”

  “That’s enough to get them guessing. Lose your lunch?”

  “I skipped my last meal for just this reason.”

  “Aw, now don’t say ‘last meal’ like that. You’ll put a whammy on us.”

  “Did it work? Our maneuver?”

  “We’re not dead,” he replied. “What we can infer from that is that I am a bona fide genius.”

  “It was my suggestion.”

  “Details…”

  Back to business, Gloria told herself. “Aim for the gap the Sporting Chance made for us, and get me as much velocity as you possibly can.”

  The Wildflower raced along, engines pushed to maximum burn. Gloria forced her eyes to stay open now, staring at the long range and hoping against hope they’d breach the blockade before the gap closed up. It was going to be close.

  A screeching roar filled her ears, coming from all directions at once. In that instant the screens before her went haywire, flickering, their graphics skewed.

  “Fuck!” Xavi shouted.

  Something popped in front of Gloria. Sparks flew out from behind the display panel, showering upward and then ahead due to the ship’s path. Smoke filled her bridge, then everything went absolutely dark. All sense of gravity faded as the engines went silent.

  “What in the world was that?” she said.

  Xavi, coughing, growled a reply. “Hell if I know. EMP maybe. Christ. Total power loss.”

  “Beth!” Gloria shouted, already out of her harness and drifting aft. No reply came. She’d stimmed, Gloria reminded herself. Probably sleeping like a baby.

  The ship had gone black again, save for glow-in-the-dark tape used to label the cabinets and drawers that lined the interior walls. Not enough to see by, but useful to get her bearings. Gloria pushed herself down the central shaft, a hard hollow feeling in her gut. If the Scipios had hit them with a strong enough EM pulse, all systems would be fried. The Wildflower, like any spacecraft, had significant shielding, but only to a point.

  Everything smelled of ozone and burned rubber. The only sounds came from the shifting bodies of the crew. Nothing functioned. Not the machines that scrubbed their air, nor the sensors and heat sinks that kept the interior temperature regulated. Nothing.

  Seventeen minutes, Gloria recalled. Seventeen precious minutes before the conditions inside became unsuitable for life.

  Red emergency lights winked on, lining the rings of each deck along the shaft. A few screens flickered to life, warnings flowing across their surfaces. Gloria allowed herself a quick breath of relief. “Xavi, I’m out of harness! Keep the engines at standby!”

  “Assuming they even work. Those assholes really nailed us that time.”

  “Talk to me, Beth! Wake up!” Gloria said, reaching her engineer’s acceleration couch. She shook the woman by her shoulders, hard.

  Beth Lee shifted, then her eyes fluttered before finally opening. She coughed once, her gaze unfocused. “What time is it?”

  “They hit us with something. Almost everything’s offline. I need you.” Without asking approval, not that she needed it as captain, Gloria swung the engineering screen toward herself and tapped the command to pump more drugs into her engineer’s system. A concoction that would negate the effects of the sedatives. Beth would pay for it later, but Gloria saw no alternative.

  A few seconds passed, then the engineer sat bolt upright and began to study her displays. The words tumbled out. “Reactor is still functional. The shutdown was a fail-safe precaution. I’ll clear it.”

  “How long?”

  “Three minutes. Maybe five. I don’t know the ship.”

  Gloria nodded, gave the woman’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze, then pushed herself back to the bridge and settled into her chair.

  She’d just buckled her own harness when the missile hit.

  A rending sound screamed through the air, rattling every bone in her body. The ship heaved sideways in an uncontrolled end-over-end spin that made Gloria feel as if she was hanging upside down from the ceiling. Centrifugal force wanted to toss her out of the Wildflower’s nose.

  Something flew past her head and slammed into the main display. The rattle of shrapnel filled the ship. “Report!” she shouted.

  “Direct hit to engine two,” Xavi replied, anger, not panic, in his voice. “Control thrusters also offline. Beth, I need engines and I need them now!”

  “I’m trying,” the engineer replied, though the strain in her voice said more than her words. She couldn’t get out of her chair, much less perform repairs, with the ship spinning so violently. “I don’t…I’m sorry. I can’t move. Can’t think.”

  Gloria racked her mind. No control thrusters meant Xavi couldn’t negate this tumbling motion easily. His only option was to fire the one remaining engine in such a way as to kill the spin, but that would also take them wildly off course. His only option, she realized, but not hers. Gloria, already being pulled toward her control displays, worked through the menus until she found what she needed: plumbing. The ship had a series of bladders just beneath the outer hull, filled dynamically with water, waste, or any of a number of other fluids. These served to regulate the heat within the ship, balance its mass, and absorb radiation from outside. Gloria swept her fingers over a dozen options, then found the two she needed. “Xavi, hold off, I’m going to try something.”

  “Don’t tell me, mate, just fucking do it!”

  Tapping with two fingers simultaneously, Gloria vented two of the bladders into space at the same instant. Usually this was done extremely slowly so as to not impact the ship’s course. Rapid venting was only done in extreme circumstances, such as contamination. Emptied explosively, the effect was like a temporary and very hard control thrust. Another gut-wrenching change of velocity made her feel like her lungs were going to squirt right out of her nose. She groaned, a sound matched by the others below.

  Gloria had no idea how much to vent and overestimated. The trick worked so well that the Wildflower now rotated in the opposite direction as before, though thankfully at only a fraction of the rate. She repeated the technique with two more bladders on opp
osite sides, this time venting just a few percent of their capacity. The spin ended. The Wildflower was coasting in the right direction even if her nose now pointed at an oblique angle to that vector.

  “Brilliant,” Xavi said.

  “It’s not going to matter much if we don’t get our engines back,” she said. Or if we get hit again. She left that unsaid. The Scipios’ strike had been surgically precise, which meant not only had the confusion maneuver’s effect worn off, but the enemy now shot to wound rather than destroy. The Scipios wanted a working imploder too badly to take risky shots. They’d aimed to disable the Wildflower, not knowing she no longer carried any of the precious devices, and they’d succeeded. For now.

  “Beth? I need some good news.”

  “I can only tell you what’s really going on.”

  Gloria winced. The stress in Beth’s voice bordered on shock. The captain swallowed hard, trying to draw on Xavi’s calm. “Tell me what you know.”

  “Engine one overloaded and dropped into safe mode. It’s coming back but…Captain, engine two is all but slag.”

  “Can it be fixed?”

  “Does it matter?” she cried back, seized by fear. “Does it really matter if we can’t fold?”

  Gloria spoke slowly and deliberately. “No, we can’t fold. But someone will come looking for us, and I mean to be out there, waiting. Can we fix it? Rig something?”

  A moment passed. Beth took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Captain Tsandi. The engine is beyond repair. That is not a judgment, that is the truth.”

  For the second time a deafening silence filled the ship.

  One engine, assuming it came back at full strength, which was by no means assured, meant they could not outrun the enemy. The Scipio Swarm would catch and surround them.

  Only a matter of time.

  Kepler-186f

  9.JUNE.3202 (Earth Actual)

  SKYLER LUIKEN FELT at home for the first time in weeks, as if he’d just opened the cargo ramp of his old beloved aircraft, the Melville, in preparation to jump on some ravaged city of Earth.

  Only this was far from Earth. And the Melville, well, his time as captain of that aircraft had not exactly ended well.

  But he was in his element, and he liked it. Even stray thoughts of his old life, and the planet he’d left behind, could not dampen his mood. He was outside. He had a mission. He was armed to the teeth.

  Below him stretched the opaque clouds of Kepler-186f. Shifting bands of orange and purple, alive with flashes of lightning, that completely obscured the terrain below. Near the horizon, what Skyler considered west, a great mountain range jutted up above the storm, steep icy slopes lit from the brilliant sporadic flashes below and the wan light of the distant red dwarf. Though Eve had said this was a small planet, roughly the size of Europa, from here it looked no less gigantic.

  An actual alien world, he thought. Not the one they ultimately hoped to reach, but if they couldn’t get what the plan required here, the final stage of the journey might well be impossible to accomplish.

  He tried to grasp once again the incredible distance and time they’d traversed since leaving. Earth was hundreds of light-years away now, and nearly a millennium had passed back home, though it only felt like a scant month to him.

  His fantasy of standing once again on the Melville’s open cargo ramp was further eroded by the current mode of transportation. A simple disk-shaped metal platform attached to a space elevator, making a sluggish descent in the weak gravity.

  “Just like heading out into the clear for a grab,” he said. “Eh, Sam?”

  Samantha stood next to him, towering a full head taller than he, with almost Nordic features that made her look like some kind of Viking warrior if not for the futuristic armor. “Whatever you say, Captain.”

  Would she ever be able to call him that and not have it sound like an insult or jab, subtle or otherwise? Long gone, at least, were the days she pointed out his every mistake as captain. Numerous and well-deserved criticisms, truth be told, but he thought he’d earned at least a modicum of respect. She was still the same Samantha Rinn he’d met in Darwin, though. That incongruous mixture of wanting to have orders, and wanting equal status to anyone who might give them to her. She called him captain as if the title were no more important than mister. And here, like back on Earth, he decided to let it go. She was miffed because he’d agreed to Tania Sharma’s plan, which called for stealth rather than the blazing guns and bravado that Sam preferred.

  He also thought perhaps she was trying to play the hardened badass in front of her fella, Vaughn.

  Of the landing party, only Samantha managed to look comfortable in the armored alien space suits their ship had made for them. The remarkably thin material wore like a second skin, and on her stout and muscular form that worked just fine. Vaughn, standing beside Sam, looked like a substitute player in some bizarre sporting event, not quite sure he was supposed to be there but ready to kick some ass all the same. The man rarely left Sam’s side. How long until Sam decided that was annoying rather than cute? Soon, probably. Maybe she wasn’t trying to impress him after all. Maybe she wanted to scare him off.

  The last of the landing party, Vanessa, well…she was Vanessa. Standing a bit apart from the group. Serious, composed, and if not comfortable at least she seemed confident. Once upon a time she’d been a lawyer in São Paulo, surviving the horrors inflicted on both Earth and herself through sheer force of will.

  Skyler wondered if he was the only one of them who found the alien gear profoundly uncomfortable. It wasn’t that it was abrasive or ill-fitting. Quite the opposite, in fact. The suit fit almost too well, surprisingly soft and flexible, only becoming armor when it sensed an approaching object of “problematic impact velocity,” as their machine-AI benefactor, Eve, had put it. The material somehow convinced his body that it was his skin, or an extension of it, and it weighed so little that it took a force of conscious effort to remind himself that he wasn’t completely naked. Only the helmet felt normal, and that only because his team had specifically told the alien machine that the skintight version she’d originally made was not going to work. Too claustrophobic.

  The climber began to slow, ending its state of free fall as the clouds neared. The frothy, ethereal puffs slid by at a surprising clip. “Hold on to something!” Skyler shouted, then took his own advice before the winds hit. The climber Eve provided them was little more than a scaffold to cling to. She’d offered a fully enclosed capsule, but Skyler saw no point in that. Their suits were protection enough given the slow descent, and he wanted to see with his own eyes what they were getting into. But mostly he was just sick of being confined to her time-compressed hull, week after week, since leaving Earth. He might not be able to get fresh air here—it was poisonous in the extreme. He could damn well enjoy the open space, however.

  That desire felt a bit foolish as the clouds met them. A thin sound worked its way into the suit, like air being bled from a tire. It grew and soon became a howling wind that Skyler did not feel, protected so by the armor and the slab of material that served as the base of the climber. Vibrations rippled through the cord of the space elevator. A vicious thrum that crept up through Skyler’s boots and rattled his jaw. He forced himself to keep his eyes open, an effort soon rewarded as the cloud layer lifted upward to reveal the landscape below.

  Skyler’s breath caught in his throat.

  “Holy shit,” Sam said.

  “Yeah, holy shit,” Vaughn echoed.

  You’re trying too hard, Skyler thought, wishing the other man would get the hint.

  Tortured, rocky formations pushed up through the ground from horizon to horizon. Murky rivers of indeterminate fluid seemed to almost bleed from these protrusions, forming rivers that snaked across the land to ultimately pool in lakes of every size and shape imaginable. There were no oceans, at least not here.

  The ground itself was mottled with browns, whites, and mustard yellows, the coloration coming from thousands of species of someth
ing like fungi, according to Eve’s scans. It grew everywhere, in as much variety as the trees and flowers that so dominated Earth. Plant life was largely absent, with so little sunlight reaching the ground.

  “Look there!” Vanessa shouted over the wind.

  He glanced at her, then followed her pointed finger to a valley of sorts a few kilometers away. At first Skyler thought this basin must be covered with more of the rocky outcroppings, but those were all confined to the peaks and ridgelines of the planet’s surface. The lowest points of the surface were all smooth, undulating low hills. Yet this valley sported a row of giant, thin objects. Not quite rocks, not quite trees.

  “Those are what you seek,” Eve’s synthetic voice said through the comm. “The profile matches.”

  “I see them,” he said. “That’s our target, everyone. Those, er, things.”

  “They’re not things,” Tania Sharma said in his ear, from her remote viewpoint aboard their alien ship.

  “They look like things. Gigantic, upright, perfectly balanced, space-traversing things.”

  She sighed with strained patience. “They’re life-forms, Skyler. Think of them as, I don’t know, gigantic upright perfectly balanced snap peas.”

  “Snap peas,” he repeated, trying it on. He shook his head. “Nah, doesn’t work. How about—”

  “Space clams,” Samantha said.

  “That’s…better,” Skyler replied. They did look a bit like clams. “Agreed, team?”

  “Love it,” Vaughn said.

  Vanessa gave a shrug of indifference.

  “Why is it,” Prumble said over the comm, “that every time we have to name something it turns out shit.”

  Skyler stifled a laugh, then gave up. The big man was right, and his boisterous voice and kiwi accent served as a giant exclamation point.

  He knew they were not clams at all, but gigantic seedpods. Unfortunately, Eve knew little beyond the fact that they originated here and that, for some reason, they’d evolved an ability to traverse the vacuum of space. How they got off this rock in the first place, or why, remained a mystery. Her visual recordings of the life-forms, be they plants or fungi or something else, were not detailed beyond the general shape and size. Her briefing on the topic had been frustratingly vague, two days prior. The important thing was their size, the largest of them standing over a hundred meters tall, an attribute likely possible due to the minuscule gravity.