Escape Velocity

by Jason M. Hough

  The second row activated, then the third. With each passing second another row came alive until the whole room was lit by the glowing bases of the machines. Each now hummed with some electric purpose, the lights along their midsection undulating for reasons she could not fathom. Indicators maybe, but of what was anyone’s guess. Now the resemblance to the computer grids inside Anchor Station was unmistakable.

  In the darkness Tania could just make out the circular arrangement of barricades, wheeled into place evidently to cordon off the damaged area where she’d arrived. An entirely automated process, it seemed, and she was just fine with that. It did beg the question, though: Where were the Scipios themselves? From what information Eve had shared, Tania had imagined this place highly populated. A sprawling city above their captured world. Yet so far, only machines, and very few at that.

  There lay the problem with Eve’s data. It was old. Very old. Virtually anything could have happened here since the Builders fled, or even since their last attempt to retake their planet. How ironic it would be to come all this way only to find the Scipios, experts in virus design and manufacturing, had succumbed to some disease.

  A new sound reached her amplified hearing. A high whir and then, beneath that, a low sustained rumble. She spun where she stood and froze. The giant door behind her had separated in a jigsaw pattern down the middle, and were rolling apart.

  So much for the extinction event theory.

  Four Scipios moved into the room. Once again Tania concealed herself in the grid of now-humming machinery, her suit illuminated by the twinkling indigo and ruby status displays. She chanced a glance at the approaching aliens, and her breath caught in her throat.

  They were upright, but did not walk, instead moving in a sort of fluid hop-and-glide gait unlike anything Tania had ever seen. Perfectly normal, no doubt, for their limb structure and diminutive size, especially in this gravity. To her eye they resembled a chimpanzee crossed with a bat, complete with flappy winglike structures that connected their arms to their torsos. They would hop a meter into the air and then glide several forward, all effortlessly, as natural as humans walking along a promenade. They were dressed, after a fashion, in outfits of varying color, though all four had a large white band around the midsection. Some kind of utility belt, maybe, for there were pockets and other containers all around.

  As the Scipios moved across the gigantic room toward the improvised barricade, they chattered to each other. Alien sounds, but unmistakable as language. Like a mixture of birdsong and the clicks and whistles a dolphin made. An instant later, to Tania’s surprise and delight, a transcription began to flow across the bottom portion of her visor. Automatic translation was nothing special—humans had been able to do it for centuries. What surprised her was that Eve knew the Scipio language well enough to program it into this suit.

  An imperfect knowledge, in truth. Tania understood now the bracketed word error translated from the bar coding on the repair machine. It was a substitute for an unknown word. No great surprise, Eve’s knowledge of the Scipio tongue would be woefully out of date. Still, she felt grateful. The words told her much.

  One was saying, “Examination. Reconfiguration. [error] to be of returned [error] status.”

  “Copious agreement,” the other three said in unison.

  Then the group fell silent, continuing their hop-glide march to the site of the incident.

  She heard the whir and grating rumble of the door, now sliding closed. Tania slipped back to the main aisle and propelled herself toward it. No time to look through first. Caution lost out to her desire to leave, so she powered through the gap seconds before the door closed. Her momentum took her to a wall on the opposite side of a wide corridor. Bending her legs to absorb the impact of landing, Tania let herself fall back to the floor, dropping to a crouch and twisting left and right. With one arm curled protectively around her aura shard, she raised the other, ready to fire, sure she’d find the area cordoned off by Scipio police, curious Scipio onlookers lining up behind.

  What Tania Sharma saw instead brought tears to her eyes.

  Standing beside the door she’d just come through, backs against the wall, were two men. They both stared at her, mouths agape.

  Carthage

  A VAST UNLIT room stretched off in every direction, its ceiling supported by elegant pillars that resembled milky hourglasses. Pale spheres, one on the floor and the other above, which had somehow melted until they met in the middle. The floor was some kind of pitted metal, nearly black in color. It gleamed when it caught the wan light spilling in from the hole Skyler’s pod had made when it punched through from top to bottom. Above, the ceiling was similarly dark and also strangely elegant despite being more utilitarian, its span crisscrossed with tidy bundles of gently curved cabling and pipes whose purposes he could only guess. A temptation to start cutting those lines just to see what kind of damage it might cause to the Scipios faded as quickly as it had come to him. He had to remember now where he was. This world really belonged to the Creators; he had come to return it to them.

  So Skyler pushed into the room, away from his crashed pod. The chamber seemed to have no end, no sides, no beginning. It stretched farther than the light, and its air was filled with the same swirling dusty particulate his entry pit had been. Other than the curvaceous ghostly pillars, the floor was entirely devoted to row after row of nondescript containers, vaguely and unsettlingly reminding him of sarcophagi standing upright. They were all identical, about four meters long, one wide, one tall, with hair-thin filaments connecting them to the conduits and pipes that lined the ceiling above. It resembled some of the data processing facilities he’d scavenged in back on Earth. And much like those abandoned places, this one seemed to be without power. There were no banks of blinking lights indicating electronic traffic, or even the oppressive hum of cooling gear. If this place was indeed a computer center, it was either abandoned or switched off. Of course, it was possible the place was working fine until he’d punched a hundred-meter-deep hole right through its heart.

  “Or,” he whispered to himself, “it is a bloody crypt.”

  He forced himself to look at all of it through the lens of what Eve had told them about this world. A once flourishing civilization, now held captive by the Scipios, who mostly lived on the space stations above. This world was like Earth had been just after the Builders came, most of it a wasteland where engineered viruses kept the population subdued. Only, their postapocalyptic state had lasted millennia. Earth had gotten off easy, in comparison.

  Millennia.

  The word echoed in Skyler’s mind. As he walked he looked—really looked—at the pristine surfaces around him. The metal floor, the pearlescent double-teardrop pillars, the containers—all practically gleamed under the wan light spilling in. This in stark contrast to the particulate in the air where he’d landed, which fell heavily enough to coat any floor in a matter of hours, much less years or centuries.

  Which meant either this room had been sealed until his arrival, or it had been very, very well maintained. The latter implied a world far from the hellscape Skyler assumed they’d find.

  The room seemed to have no end, and Skyler forced himself into a run. The desire to be out under the open sky and out of this tomb suddenly eclipsed all other concerns. He jogged for a long time, a sense of wondrous dread at the sheer size of the place growing with each step, until finally a wall came into view. The surface was smooth, entirely uniform, offering no hint of which way to go. He reached it and turned, at random, to the left, following the edge of the space until finally something doorlike appeared in the darkness.

  A massive, almost zipperlike seam running five meters vertically up the wall.

  He glanced around for a lever or switch. Nothing obvious presented itself. Skyler sighed. Perhaps this was some kind of vault, the only access being from the outside. He debated retracing his steps to the hole he’d made to get in, but a quick glance over his shoulder made him realize that the breach was
either too far away now to be detectable, or the Scipio drones had sealed it off. Without that little patch of light spilling in, he had no way to find it.

  “Fine,” he said to himself. “I made one hole, I can make another.”

  He lifted one arm and fired at the zigzagging seam on the wall. He’d expected it to wither and melt under the intensity of the weapon, but what happened was decidedly more final. The energy lanced right through the barrier as if it were made of balsa wood. Fragments exploded into the space beyond, and on this side as well, pelting him and the ground around him. Skyler killed the beam and fumbled through the menus, dialing back the intensity to its lowest setting. This time he got what he’d wanted. A thin, almost surgical line of white-hot energy that required a few seconds in one spot before it could punch through the door or wall or whatever it was. In less than a minute he’d drawn an oval shape on the surface. Skyler stepped forward, kicked, and watched with satisfaction as the chunk fell away and landed with a dull thud on the floor beyond.

  The area outside defied explanation. Part hallway, part stairs, the wide passage was tilted at a shallow angle, its floor resembling a wave pattern more than what Skyler would consider steps. The hall was curved as well. Part of a very wide, very large spiral, with doors just like those he’d come through spaced in even intervals on both the inside and outside walls.

  Everything here was coated in dust. Creeping vines snaked their way along the surfaces, all black and gnarled. The sight of such decay filled him with a strange nostalgia. Suddenly he was back on Earth, creeping through the ruins of Brisbane or Taipei, Auckland or Phuket. If not for the strange rippled floor this could be any one of a dozen hallways he’d slogged through in the dead cities of Earth.

  Go up, he told himself, and moved to his left, picking his way over the undulating surface and the root systems—roots of what, he could not imagine—that sought to reclaim the whole place back to nature. Particulate blew in lazy swirls down the passage, filling his field of view like ash. He glanced at the displays on the visor’s interior. The air mixture hadn’t changed, but there was a definite breeze here. Skyler amplified the exterior sounds, heard only his own cautious footfalls and the sigh of air pushing past. No more sirens, no hint of air processors or plumbing. None of the telltale signs of a technological civilization. A dead place, then. He felt sure of it. Which meant the breeze came from…?

  He saw the opening before he could finish the thought. At the edge of his view of the curved hall, the space expanded into a larger room, one side of which was open to the elements. Leaves, or something like them, swirled in a conical eddy in the center of the room, like a wandering ghost searching for a way out. The sight reminded him of the first time he’d ever seen Ana, dancing in an abandoned courtyard, unaware he was watching. The memory sent a tingle down his spine. He swallowed the pain and regret that thinking of her always brought.

  Skyler crept to the end of the hall and crouched in the shadows, watching. Other than the meandering cone of swirling dust and leaves, nothing moved. The far wall of the lobbylike chamber was made up of four massive slabs of filthy but clear material—glass, or something like it—which were attached to huge circular columns so that they could be rotated. They’d been open the last time anyone had actually been here, and left that way.

  Beyond lay the ruins of several more buildings. Just shadows, really. It was dusk outside, the system’s one star already below the horizon, painting shades of dark red and purple between the dark gaps. Above, through the hazy swirls of the ash-filled air, he saw wisps of clouds and the faint but imposing clusters of hundreds of space stations beyond. Fiery objects—chunks of Eve’s wreckage, he had no doubt—streaked across the magnificent view, burning up well before they reached the ground. He’d made it, though. Maybe the others had, too.

  With an effort he tore his gaze from the sight and focused on his immediate surroundings. He’d exited into something like a plaza. A long, flat space surrounded by structures of varying height, the tallest being perhaps fifty stories. The bottom floors of each were choked with climbing vines that made odd geometric patterns as they wormed along the existing grooves and panels of the manufactured walls, windows, and doors. But above, where the vines couldn’t reach, Skyler caught a glimpse of what had been. Even in this one tiny example of Creator society, their former greatness was evident. He felt like a caveman transported through time to Manhattan or Dubai. All around him were the towering examples of a highly advanced alien culture that prided itself on architecture. No two buildings were alike, and yet they all meshed together as if no one piece had been designed without consideration of the whole. Their profiles curved and intertwined. Soaring bridges connected their highest levels, writ in graceful arcs. Here there were pillars and what must be classical elements, while there stood a monolith of severe edges and cleaved sublevels. And yet it all worked. Rather, once worked, thought Skyler, it’s all dead now.

  No lights. No sound but the wind. Not a single face staring down at him from one of those soaring balconies.

  No roads, either, Skyler noted. None that he could see.

  He walked now, keeping to the shadows, deciding to first circumnavigate the building he’d exited, hoping to find somewhere that offered a better view of the surrounding landscape. If not, he’d go back to the spiral, and climb as far as it would take him, until he found a roof.

  A noise made him stop. He ducked behind a triangular pillar and went to one knee on instinct, eyes scanning the vine-choked entryways all around him.

  It had been a low grunt. And a crackling sound. He strained his ears, and realized he could let the suit do that for him. Skyler ramped the audio gain to maximum.

  “Gnngh,” a familiar voice grunted, hazy and yet very close. “Anyone there?”

  “Tim?” Skyler asked, baffled.

  Only then did he realize it was the comm. It showed a link now, where none had been before. “Tim,” he said with more certainty. “Tim, it’s Skyler. Where are you?”

  “I don’t…It’s dark. I don’t know.”

  “Activate your headlamp.”

  Silence stretched. Then, “Some kind of machine room. I can’t really…I don’t know what it is.”

  “Are any of the others with you?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Is there gravity where you are?”

  “Huh?”

  “Gravity, Tim.”

  The scientist was likely in shock, and perhaps injured. Skyler took a breath and tried again. “I’m on the planet. Carthage. I’m trying to determine if you’re here or—”

  “There’s very little,” Tim said. “Gravity, I mean. I just jumped and went about two meters up.”

  Skyler jumped himself and barely managed one. “You must be on one of the orbitals.”

  “Where’s Eve?”

  “Gone,” Skyler said. “Destroyed, I think. We’re on our own now.”

  The other man went quiet. No doubt his mind churned through the same thoughts Skyler’s had. “Tim, we have to—”

  “Over here,” Tim said.

  “What?”

  No reply.

  “I’ll be okay,” Tim said, after several seconds.

  “Uh, good. That’s good. Now listen, we—”

  But Tim interrupted again. As if he were talking to himself. Or someone else.

  “I’ll follow you? Nothing. My long range is out, too. Haven’t heard from anyone.”

  Skyler stood there, dumbfounded, then angry. “Tim, are you still receiving me? What the hell are you talking about?”

  No reply. Not to Skyler, at least. Tim’s conversation went on. He was uninjured. He agreed the air appeared to be breathable, but felt they shouldn’t risk it. His pod was also stocked with some supplies—water, food, ammo—and also had a small version of an aura shard.

  “Tim,” Skyler tried again, asserting as much authority as he could. “Who the fuck are you talking to? Please respond!”

  The man went on. It wasn’t hard to
imagine that Skyler’s transmissions weren’t actually reaching him, but the fact remained that Tim had specifically said to whomever he spoke, Nothing. My long range is out, too. And, worse, Haven’t heard from anyone.

  “Tania?” Skyler tried. “Prumble? Sam? Anyone?”

  Tim kept talking, then the conversation went quiet as he and his companion embarked on a plan to “find the others.”

  Skyler glanced at his visor’s display. The comm still showed a link to the bastard. “God fucking dammit, Tim, if you can hear me you’d better explain yourself.”

  Still, he did not reply. He continued his other conversation, referring to his unseen companion as “Prumble” at one point.

  Well, at least there’s that, Skyler thought. The big man had made it, after all. If only he could talk to him. No amount of fiddling with the comm interface would allow him to do anything other than talk to Tim, however.

  Skyler continued his circuit of the building, but his attention was split between Tim’s chatter and his own frustrated navigation of the visor’s menu system. He must have accidentally locked himself into a private channel with Tim. Maybe during those hazy moments after the crash. And Tim evidently had taken a nasty knock on the head, because he clearly thought his conversation with Skyler hadn’t happened.

  Yet the comm seemed in order. Everything did. Just as he’d left it.

  No, wait. Eve warned me of this. In the fog of his arrival he’d forgotten, but the memory rushed back now. She’d said only one of the crew would be able to communicate with everyone else. “A necessary precaution,” she’d called it, her logic inscrutable, as always. Whatever the reason, she’d evidently given Tim the role of bridge between Skyler and the others, and Tim wasn’t playing along.

  He stopped dead. He’d almost walked right into them.

  Ahead, a veritable fleet of small drones was clustered around the entry wound his arrival had punched through the bottom four floors of the building. The Scipio machines—perhaps vehicles, he couldn’t be sure—were all turned in toward the gaping hole, like a rescue team after an earthquake. Or, perhaps, like a squad of police investigating a bombing. Skyler had the presence of mind to flatten himself against the wall and take two slow steps backward. Shielded from view by the curving wall, he leaned out and took in the scene.