Injection Burn

by Jason M. Hough

  “No,” Sam said, the word sharp as a knife. “I’ll go. I mean, Vaughn and me.”

  Skyler looked to them, as did the other captain.

  Sam’s demeanor had changed. Her nonchalance, her cool “Vanessa will be okay” confidence, had gone, replaced with a steel gaze and set jaw Skyler knew well. “If she’s not with them then something really is wrong. I’m going, one way or another.” She jerked her chin toward Captain Tsandi. “You said it yourself, we’re not the enemy. So step aside.”

  “All yours, mate,” the man called Xavi said, backing off a step.

  Sam didn’t wait for Skyler’s okay. She moved for the airlock, Vaughn right behind her.

  “Wait,” Skyler said. An order, and for once Sam listened without complaint. She stopped at the door, Vaughn beside her. “I need you here,” Skyler added. “I need to know what you think about all this. Hear them out.”

  “Vanessa—”

  “Can handle herself, like you said. One extra minute, then you go after her. Right?”

  Sam, deflated, did not return to him, but didn’t leave, either. Skyler counted that as a small victory.

  Hands still upheld, Skyler gave the other captain a nod of gratitude for the trust she’d just shown. She’d been ready to let Sam go. He tried to channel some of her calm. “What happens now?”

  “Now,” Gloria said, “we need to figure out a way out of this. Our ship’s heavily damaged. Return imploder gone. We’re stuck here. Your ship…appears to have lost power entirely.”

  “Imploder?” Tim asked.

  She glanced at him, one eyebrow raised. Her features softened. “Forgive me. You left so long ago. There’s no time so I will sum up: Recently we figured out how to fold space, via a device we call an imploder.”

  “Fold space…,” Tim repeated, as if the words were in some foreign language.

  “Traverse vast distances instantaneously, yes. So equipped, naturally we wanted to visit the home of the infamous Builders.”

  “And,” Skyler concluded, “you arrived only to find the place hostile. The Captors ran you off, and you found us on your way out.”

  To his surprise, Gloria shook her head. “You misunderstand me. Our ship is not the first to come here.”

  “What do you mean? How many before you?” Tania asked.

  “There have been hundreds of attempts, most before the Restricted System Decree was enacted.”

  Skyler held up one hand, if only to gain a moment to digest all that he’d heard. To have come all this way, spent all this time traveling here with Eve to help her free her world, only to have been leapfrogged by descendants of those they had saved on Earth. It was an outcome he’d never imagined. More than anything, he wanted to know what Eve would think of this. She’d gone to Earth, found a species capable of helping her, ferried them all the way here, and now she’d learn that they’d made it anyway. “Amazing,” was all he could say. There was no other word.

  “Hundreds,” Tania whispered. “Then…what happened to the others?”

  “This system,” Gloria said, “is a graveyard of failed attempts to explore Carthage and the other worlds here.”

  “Carthage?” Prumble asked.

  The woman nodded. “The Builders’ home world. We named each planet in this system after a lost city of legend. Carthage, Troy, Skara Brae, and so on.”

  Prumble barked a laugh. “Finally some decent names! What about those who hold Carthage hostage?”

  “We call them the Scipios, after the Roman general who sacked Carthage.”

  “I love it,” he said, beaming, fingers twitching with excitement. “Much better than the crap name Skyler came up with. What about the Builders? The Creators?”

  “We kept those,” Xavi said.

  “Oh. Well. Can’t win them all, I guess.”

  “I am sorry we mistook you for enemies,” Gloria went on, talking to Skyler now, “but dressed the way you were, I hope you can understand.”

  “Forget it. At least no one was injured,” Skyler said.

  “Not yet,” Sam threw in. “We still don’t know where Vanessa is.”

  Gloria spread her hands, placating. “As I said, we know nothing of your missing friend. In the meantime, we should work together. There must be a way to get one of our ships operational and flee the coming enemy.”

  “Flee?” Skyler asked. “That is the opposite of our goal. We’re heading to…Carthage, as you’ve named it.”

  “I know the reasons you left Earth. Well, my engineer does, and has just filled me in on the specifics. So let me tell you, very plainly, that this is a fool’s errand,” Gloria said. “We’ve been trying for decades to get to the inner system, much less to Carthage itself. We’ve never made it past the Swarm Blockade. Besides, much has changed since you left. Earth is resurgent, and has learned to fold space, a capability the Scipios would kill for. Whatever problem the Builders hoped you would solve for them is long since irrelevant. The important thing right now is to make sure we avoid contact with the Swarm. If they capture any of us, or our ships, they could learn the location of Earth, and that would spell catastrophe on an unimaginable scale.”

  “You’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” Tania snapped, though Skyler could hear the doubt creeping into her voice. “If the Scipios are still here, still holding this system hostage, then our mission is still relevant.”

  “Wrong,” Gloria replied, still calm as a pond. “Nothing is more important than restricting the Scipios to this tiny corner of the galaxy.”

  “Look, no offense,” Skyler said, “but all that is your problem. We made our choice. We’re going to see this through.”

  Gloria bristled. “Your vessel is completely without power. What do you hope to accomplish?”

  How much to say? Skyler measured his reply. He needed to get a handle on this to have any hope of salvaging the situation. “Our ship is hibernating until we’re past this swarm, as you called it. Don’t get me wrong, lovely to meet you and all, we’d love to gather around the campfire-orb-thing and hear about what’s happened back home, but the sooner you get back on your ship and leave, the less likely they are to care about a dead seed drifting through their space.”

  “It may be too late for that,” Gloria said. “The Swarm chased us here. They’ll arrive within the hour.”

  The biome fell silent.

  “You’d better hope not,” Skyler replied, not pleased to be setting himself at odds with this woman but unable to temper his words, either. These people, from Earth or not, bearing incredible technological advancements or not, were uninvited guests. And they’d arrived at the worst possible time. “Once we have our missing crew member back, you leave. It’s as simple as that.”

  Gloria met his gaze. There was no anger in her eyes, nor even fear. What he saw there was more like confidence. “That is a death sentence for us,” she said quietly. “We are incapable of outrunning the Swarm and, I do not mean to be adversarial about this, but we’re the ones holding you at gunpoint.”

  Skyler grimaced. He considered going for her gun. Hard to surge forward in a lack of gravity, and this unflappably calm woman seemed alert and in control. He thought of how Sam and Vaughn would react. How this tough-looking fellow Xavi would, too. Blood would be spilled, no doubt about that. His thoughts turned to the mechanical switch installed in the cave. The one that would wake Eve in an emergency, which this surely was. A goddamn Earth spacecraft, of all things, attached to them like some barracuda, with Scipio scouts already chasing it. For all their efforts to conceal themselves, these people had brought the enemy right to their doorstep.

  “What if you send your ship away remotely,” Tania said.

  Everyone looked at her.

  She went on. “Make the Scipios think you stopped here, looking for…whatever, and that you gave up on that idea and left.”

  “Hmm,” Gloria said. “That may work, but it doesn’t exactly put us on a path to escape.”

  Skyler studied her. “You said yourse
lf that you’ve been trying to get in-system for decades. Maybe this is your chance. Throw in with us, rather than the other way around.”

  “Hmm,” she repeated, brow furrowed in concentration. “If you achieve your goals, what then? How do you plan to return home?”

  “You’re not actually considering abandoning ship, are you, boss?” Xavi asked.

  “An hour ago we were thinking of ways to blow it up.”

  “Yeah, still…just leaving her out there, that doesn’t seem right.”

  “So we rig a remote detonation. On a timer, if need be.” Her gaze swung back to Skyler. “How do you plan on leaving the system once you’ve accomplished—”

  Skyler scratched his head. “The plan is…er…evolving.”

  Abruptly she held up one hand, eyes suddenly downcast and distant. “Repeat that, Beth?” she asked. “Calm down, I can’t—” Her expression turned dark, equal parts worry and anger. Then, “Who am I speaking with?”

  A pause.

  “If you hurt her I swear—”

  A terrible pause.

  “I want to know that my engineer is safe,” Gloria said through gritted teeth into her comm.

  And then she went quiet, listening. The air of confidence about her drained like water from a bath. After several seconds she rasped, “Just tell me what you want.”

  A prickling sensation crawled up Skyler’s spine. “What’s happened?”

  Slowly, very slowly, Gloria met Skyler’s eyes. “He wants to talk to you,” she said.

  “Who does? What are you talking about?”

  Gloria slipped a small device from behind her ear and held it out to Skyler. “He says his name is Alex Warthen. He wants my ship, or he’ll kill the woman named Vanessa.”

  Place Unknown

  Date Unknown

  ON THE WALL, surrounded by hardened foam, was an umbilical tube. Hastily added and wholly out of place, yet unmistakable. After all the stylized, fashionable corridors and the gray grime before that, the sight of that brilliant white disk flooded him with hope.

  That feeling vanished when his eyes settled on the far end. It was an airlock door, of that he had no doubt, but it looked nothing like the one they’d attached when first boarding the Builders’ ship. That one would look utterly antiquated next to this, though Alex couldn’t quite put his finger on why. The airlock door he remembered was utilitarian, and messy, like everything in post-plague Darwin. A metal slab with a round porthole window and a lever beside a simple control panel. Signage warning of various calamities should one open it without proper conditions. But here, before him, was an elegant thing. Almost translucent, with three windows arranged rather stylishly. The control panel, if it was one, was just an off-white square with a faintly glowing edge. The lever was an ergonomic double-grip attached to a half-circle groove. It had been designed and built, rather than cobbled together out of necessity and available materials.

  Still, it was an umbilical tube, and that meant a way out. He pulled the lever, slipped inside, and squirmed down the flexible corridor on the other side until he found himself inside a similarly designed airlock chamber, its outer door already open. The inner door had no security mechanism, and rotated open with a simple tug.

  No alarm sounded. No one cried out in surprise. The interior of the connected ship or station was utterly silent, in fact.

  Using hand gestures, Alex ordered Jared to move up and join him, hauling the unconscious immune behind him, then went in. He found what appeared to be a multilevel spacecraft, small but well equipped. Too well equipped, perhaps. Virtually everything inside looked like the sort of thing Neil Platz would have spent extravagantly on to outfit some useless corner of his headquarters above Darwin. Clean lines, gleaming metals. Some debris here and there, but on the whole it was an impressively engineered interior.

  The craft—it seemed obviously a spaceship or modified climber—was arranged like a vertical stack. It smelled faintly of ozone and charred electronics, but it had power. The screens on the bridge were of a total foreign arrangement, but the text he could see was English. He floated back down, toward the other end of the ship, passing Jared and their unconscious prisoner along the way. He raised a finger to his lips as he passed.

  The middle section had small cabins arranged in a circle, pointing outward, each barely larger than the beds they contained. On one wall he found an open cabinet with a pair of porcelain keys poking out, chains dangling from each. He looked inside and found two pistols. Another gift. He took one and floated the other back up to Jared, who caught it easily. The weapons seemed tailor-made to work in a thickly gloved hand and, like the entire ship, were at once familiar and yet utterly different. It was as if this whole place had been designed and built far away, or in a different era. Perhaps it was the Builders’ attempt to re-create a human-designed ship. Or maybe the Builders weren’t so alien after all.

  The bottom level was some kind of monitoring station. A row of displays full of graphs and information. A woman sat there in a contoured seat, one hand on the armrest to keep her in place, huddled over a screen and talking quietly to herself. Her back was to him.

  Alex cleared his throat, gun raised.

  The woman came out of her chair so fast she floated all the way to the ceiling, her face a twisted mask of terror. He aimed at her and shook his head, compelling her to ditch whatever thoughts of escape or self-defense she might be considering. She wore no helmet or even an earpiece that he could see, but it seemed likely there were microphones in the compartment.

  He pulled his helmet off then, and took in a lungful of the warm, heavily recycled air. It tasted like the air on Gateway Station. It tasted like home.

  It was then her eyes had widened and a gasp escaped her lips. Not in fear, but recognition. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “You’re Alex Warthen, aren’t you?”

  “Keep your voice down. Who are you, and where’s the rest of your crew?”

  “I’m Beth. The others are inside,” she said, “talking with Skyler. I can’t believe we actually found you, after all this time.” The recognition on her face had gone, replaced with something else. Admiration? Could these people be allies? Odd that she showed almost no concern for the weapon pointed at her.

  Jared floated down. Their other prisoner had woken. He pushed her over to join the one called Beth. Alex shifted his aim to the one he knew to be dangerous. The warrior in the alien armor.

  “Name?” Alex asked her.

  “Piss off,” she replied, her voice full of venom.

  “Your name,” he repeated, and aimed his gun at the young Asian woman with the raised hands, “or her life.”

  Several seconds ticked by. “Vanessa,” she finally said.

  The name earned another glance of naked admiration from the one called Beth. Strange. Whose side was she on? Time to find out. “You,” Alex said to her. “Do you know how to fly this ship?”

  “No.”

  A simple statement of fact. He decided she was being truthful. Better yet, she’d just confirmed that it was indeed a ship. “Who does?”

  The woman said nothing. He could see the war going on behind her eyes, that age-old debate between bravery and self-preservation. He renewed his aim. “You really don’t want to test me.”

  Beth swallowed, hard. “Xavi is the navigator. And then there’s the captain, of course.”

  “And the name of this captain?”

  “Gloria Tsandi.”

  “And she’s inside? With Skyler?”

  A brief hesitation. Beth, deciding how much to say, or whether to lie. Wondering how much time she could buy, probably. “That’s correct.”

  “Can you contact her? Good. Do it, and then get this boat ready for departure.”

  “But…you can’t mean that,” Beth said, almost a whisper.

  “I most definitely mean that.”

  “But—”

  “Enough talking. I’ll speak with your captain now, and that’s the last time I’ll ask in a civilized
way.”

  While she fiddled with the comm, Alex instructed his officer to remove Vanessa’s helmet. Jared didn’t hear him at first. He had that blank, pained stare again, and worked his jaw.

  “Her helmet, Jared?”

  “Huh?” He blinked, twice, a simple action that seemed to hurt quite a lot.

  “Remove her helmet, please. Or convince her to do it.”

  “Oh. Right.” He did and tossed it upward to float off toward the bridge.

  “She wearing a comm? No? Okay. Find duct tape or something,” Alex said to him, and Jared drifted away. “And find yourself some meds while you’re at it.”

  Jared made no reply.

  Finally, Beth handed him a small circular device plucked from behind her own ear. He held it against the same spot on his own head, impressed with the quality of it. This was no cobbled together bit of gear, but something new. Purpose-built and highly advanced. After all this time, she had said. What had she meant?

  “Who am I speaking with?” a woman asked. “I want to know that my engineer is safe.”

  “You spoke with her, so you know she is. That will have to suffice.” Alex paused, let the hierarchy of this arrangement settle. He was in charge, and he had to make this woman believe that completely. “I have your ship. If you cooperate I will return your engineer to you unharmed.”

  She took a moment to reply, and when she did the fire had drained from her voice. “Just tell me what you want.”

  “Right now I want to speak with Skyler Luiken. Put him on, or I shoot his friend. Vanessa is her name. Tell him.”

  Silence stretched. He heard her speak, but not to him. “He wants to talk to you,” she said.

  A quieter voice. Male, familiar. “Who does? What are you talking about?”

  “He says his name is Alex Warthen. He wants my ship, or he’ll kill the woman named Vanessa.”

  Rustling sounds. The microscopic earpiece being transferred. And then came the voice. “Warthen?”

  “Well, isn’t this a surprise.”

  “Alex, listen, I don’t know what’s going on here but there’s no time. We’re in terrible danger—”

  “Good,” he said. “You deserve to be. And it’s not my problem.”