Escape Velocity

by Jason M. Hough

  “Let’s go around,” Sam suggested. “Save fuel.” Not to mention I’m still a bit dizzy.

  The others agreed. Sam began to jog, wishing for all the world she’d asked Eve to make her a shotgun instead of this precision beam bullshit. She ran past several more doors, ignoring their markings and the translations that winked across her visor. Fifty meters before the door Tania had indicated, Sam pushed up against a wall and waited for the others to catch up. When they were all in a line, looking at her, she spoke. “Wait here. Just in case our suicidal friend down there has led us to a trap.”

  “We don’t know it was suicide,” Tania said.

  “The fact remains.”

  Tania seemed to consider several replies. She settled on, “Fair enough.”

  Sam made eye contact with Vaughn, who gave his customary nod. She turned and moved to the door, running at a low crouch, one arm held before her, the other aimed at the open circular passage they’d come up through. Five long strides. Ten. She reached the door and activated the opening mechanism.

  The panels irised aside. Before her, a hallway of staggering beauty awaited. The walls, angled slightly inward, were little more than a series of connected, expansive windows, the tops of which curved over to become a portion of the narrow ceiling.

  Along that ceiling, a series of dim lights offered the only illumination beyond what spilled in through those windows. Sam stepped inside, only distantly aware of her state of awe. Outside those windows, two views seemed in perfect harmony. To her left, the sweeping star-kissed crescent edge of the planet Carthage. To her right, farther away, one of its moons hung luminously against the dark of space. Purple, cratered, mountainous. Damn beautiful, Sam thought.

  Straight ahead, at the end of the twenty-meter corridor, another door awaited. Sam could see, just, that a long and narrow vessel was docked just beyond, exactly as their captive had advertised.

  Sam turned back, stepped into the space station proper, and motioned for the others to join her.

  Tania started to move, and in that same moment a sound rolled through the whole place. The lights all shifted hue in unison.

  Every door along the wall, and on each of the numerous levels below them, clicked and began to open.

  “Run!” Sam shouted. Pointlessly. She was beyond the range their broken comms could handle. It didn’t matter, the others understood what was happening. Vaughn reacted first. His boots lit up the floor as he flew forward under full thrust, sweeping his arms around Tania and Tim as he flew. The trio roared along the curve of the hall. Vaughn tilted as he went, thrusters pushing against floor and wall alike. The wash and heat of their power swept across the opening doors. Sam saw several Scipios fall back in surprise. Prumble followed suit, taking Vaughn’s example, a second later. The Scipios, students or low-level workers, Sam still wasn’t quite sure, threw arms in front of faces and fell back into their companions as these two sudden blasts of heat poured through the doors opening before them. Sam ducked inside her own as Vaughn barreled around the corner. He took it a bit too fast, turning his shoulder to protect Tania from impacting the transparent wall of the access way. He grunted with the impact, let Tania and Tim go, and tumbled end over end a few times before coming to a stop.

  Prumble flew in a second behind him. Sam stifled a delighted laugh as the big man somehow managed to run several steps along the glass wall rather than smear himself across it like Vaughn had. He even managed to hop over his fallen companion before finally reaching a more graceful end to his brief flight.

  “Ouch,” Vaughn said, pushing himself to a shaky stand. Tania and Tim did the same.

  Sam closed the door behind them all. “That was close.”

  “Did any of them see us?” Prumble asked.

  She shrugged. “They saw a couple of fireballs race down the hallway.”

  “Something worth reporting, surely, but we might have bought ourselves a few minutes.” He finally seemed to see the breathtaking corridor they’d hidden in. “Crikey.”

  “You said it,” Vaughn agreed.

  Tim seemed to ignore the view. He pointed at the far end of the short hall. “Is that the transport our prisoner spoke of?”

  “Time to find out,” Sam said, brushing past him. She marched to the sealed bulkhead. Vaughn joined her as she manipulated the latching mechanism. Shoulder to shoulder, they swept inside the craft, by silent agreement each taking a different direction.

  “Clear,” Vaughn said.

  “Ditto.” Fist held out before her, Sam took four even steps to the end of the narrow space. The walls were lined with what she presumed were harnesses, though not made for humans, of course. She had to bend at the waist to keep from hitting her head on the low ceiling. Her headlamp lit the fine particulate in the air as she pushed to the end of the aisle. A small compartment there, a dead end. The walls were lined with shelves and cabinets, all with insignia on them. Sam didn’t bother to look at each and try to puzzle out the translation. Tania or Tim could handle that. Nothing dangerous, that was all she needed to know.

  “Up here,” Vaughn said.

  She turned and joined him. On his side, an endcap compartment identical to the one she’d found, only there were no shelves or cabinets. Instead a series of bizarre controls, handles, and displays graced every surface.

  “Cockpit?” Vaughn asked.

  “Seems so. Tania?! Tim?! See if you can make sense of this.”

  She marched back to the center of the ship as the pair came inside and swiftly moved to the controls. Prumble ducked in and sighed. He barely fit in the tiny, Scipio-sized space. “Cozy,” he muttered, and moved aft to give Sam room to shut the door behind him.

  Sam hesitated for a few seconds, staring down the glass-walled corridor and through the door at the far end. She’d closed that door, after the others had all made their mad dash from the station proper. It was open now. Three Scipios stood there. Innocent bystanders, like the one they’d captured and interrogated. The one who’d committed suicide at the first opportunity, or, as Sam suspected, been murdered by some new order transmitted to the virus. She marveled at how these three, staring back at her now, their mouths agape, could be simply going about their business already. How was it that this entire station was not on police lockdown?

  She held her fire. Sam heaved the door closed, only breaking eye contact with the trio of stupefied Scipios when the airlock blocked her view. It sealed with a faint inverse hiss.

  Almost immediately the little transport craft lurched and began to move. Sam swayed, grabbed one of the alien harnesses on the wall to keep her upright. From the cockpit, Tania and Tim let out a little victorious whoop in unison. Tim poked his head into the main cabin. “We’re away!”

  “Good. The question is where—”

  Tim’s wide, knowing grin stopped her short. Sam arched an eyebrow at him.

  “For once something wasn’t cryptic even in translation. There’s a station, a whole complex of them, marked ‘Interstellar Departure.’ ”

  “Fucking A,” Vaughn said. “Practically gift wrapped.”

  Tim beamed. He looked like a kid on Christmas. Tania, Sam noted, remained in the cockpit, her gaze still cast outside, blank expression reflected in the glass.

  Mago

  GLORIA TSANDI HAD worried about many things in her life, but never footprints. Each step on the moon’s blue-gray surface left a perfect impression of her boot. The soft sand—really a mixture of pumicelike rock and grit—compressed in perfect, airless clarity.

  “Our boots are telling quite the story here,” she said to Xavi.

  “We should spread out. Stick to shadows.”

  They’d been traveling in a line, Vanessa at the lead and Gloria in back, in a path that snaked away from the wreck of the Wildflower. Gloria had yet to look back at her ship. She couldn’t quite bring herself to do that. Not yet. Not until the moment came when she would have to issue one final, fateful command to her.

  Vanessa guided the team on a curved pa
th that kept them roughly at the edge of a wide circle around the distant Scipio facility. The plan was to get away from the Wildflower first, then move in, but these footprints…Gloria shook her head. They couldn’t hop from rock to rock. The gravity may allow it, but not the unseen search parties that lurked all around them. Vanessa said as much when Gloria called a break to raise her concerns. They had to speak by putting their helmets together. “We just have to hope that by the time they find the wreckage it’s just a blackened crater, and all these prints have been wiped away.”

  Gloria decided the choice of words was not-so-careful diplomacy. What Vanessa had really meant was “by the time you blow up your ship.” A small but appreciated bit of thoughtfulness, really.

  “But Xavi’s right,” Vanessa added. “Let’s spread out a bit. Use shadows where we can. If I remember right there’s a large crater up ahead. Once we’re below the rim we can trace the lip in darkness all the way around to the other side. That’ll put us well away from the crash.”

  The others all began to separate, save Xavi and Alex Warthen. Her navigator kept close to him by an order Gloria had delivered with a simple glance, acknowledged by a slight dip of Xavi’s chin as they’d exited the ship. He hadn’t let Alex get more than five meters from him since. If Alex noticed this, or cared, he made no indication. He seemed to be in shock, and she couldn’t blame him. Right side or wrong, the man had been through a lot.

  Vanessa had been right about the crater. The hill they’d been slowly climbing turned out to be the outer rim. Near the crest, the immune slowed and began to carefully choose her path between exposed boulders and, at one point, a depression so low she had to crawl on her belly to maintain a low profile. No choice here but for all of them to follow her lead. Gloria held her breath when it came time for Alex to make the crawl. There was a moment’s hesitation, and for a second she thought he might have decided he owed nothing to her or any of them, that this entire endeavor was a suicide mission, anyway, and why drag it out? But he dropped to his knees as Beth had, lay down on his stomach, and pulled himself through the fine powder and loose rubble. Xavi didn’t wait for him to reach the top, he crawled right behind him. Gloria waited until they were both in the shadow of a cleft in the crater’s rim, twenty meters up the slope.

  There they waited for her, silhouettes against the stars. Carthage hung high above, filling a quarter of the visible sky, its myriad of equatorial space stations glinting like jewels.

  “Coming, boss?” Xavi asked.

  “In a second,” she replied. “There’s something I have to do first.”

  She turned and looked back toward the Wildflower. The ship was hidden from sight by all the boulders and dunes they’d just traversed, but their path, viewed from here, was blindingly obvious. She stared in the direction of her beloved vessel and executed the command they’d rigged way back when they’d first docked with the object that turned out to be Eve. The Chameleon, they’d called her ship form.

  A bright flash lit up the craggy landscape, followed by a rapidly expanding cloud of powdered rock, boulders, and the unrecognizable chunks of the place that had been her home for so many years. The Wildflower joined the Chameleon then, in that afterlife for starships that was the memory of their captains.

  “Hopefully they’ll consider that just another impact,” she said, aware of the emotion in her voice and not really caring.

  “No,” Xavi said, “hopefully they were already there, crawling all over it.”

  “Amen to that,” she replied.

  Gloria turned and started her crawl. Halfway there the ground began to vibrate as the broken remains of the Wildflower rained back to the surface. She lay there, head turned to one side so she could watch, and waited for the storm to pass. Then she reached up and heaved herself forward, one more length. Then another. Again and again until she felt Xavi’s hands under her arms. He helped her to her feet and stared into her eyes for several long seconds before clapping her on the shoulder. “Let’s move out,” he said.

  “Yes,” Gloria said, “let’s.”

  The crater was several hundred meters across, more than half of it hidden in shadow as the system’s star hung midway to the horizon. It was only partial shadow, the light reflecting off Carthage filling in some of the blackness. Vanessa set off, barely visible until Gloria’s eyes adjusted.

  “Think this will work?” Xavi asked.

  Beth replied before Gloria could. “We’re assuming their eyes work like ours, and that they have yet to invent the flashlight. I’d say that’s a big assumption.”

  Xavi grunted. “Better than nothing, mate.”

  Gloria repeated her call for radio silence. They’d been so sloppy already that it seemed unlikely to matter, but the truth was she craved silence just now. Time to reflect, to mourn, and find within herself what resolve might be left for what may lie ahead. At least, she thought, the Scipios won’t learn anything from the Wildflower. A small consolation if there ever was one, especially considering the Lonesome may even now be hidden away in some distant corner of this solar system, being picked apart molecule by molecule for every last scrap of intelligence. She wondered if the Scipios were, at this very moment, assembling a factory to reproduce their own imploder. Her gut churned at the idea they could be on the cusp of folding their way to Earth in force, destroying everything humanity had fought so hard to regain. And here Gloria was, sneaking through this unnamed, unimportant crater to what would probably turn out to be a helium-3 mining station, one of thousands the Scipios likely had strewn about. Even if she managed to damage it, much less destroy it, it would amount to a minor blip on some Scipio spreadsheet, and they’d dispatch an automated construction rig to build a replacement within the day, if they even bothered.

  She took another step, though, and the one after that. Because no matter how inconsequential their actions, it was another breath, another heartbeat, another chance that rescue might come.

  The hike became a monotonous, quiet affair. She frequently glanced back, but the enemy had yet to show their faces beyond the initial sighting Vanessa made. They were out there, of that Gloria had no doubt, but as of yet they’d found no reason to investigate this particular crater.

  Hidden in the last of the shadow, on the lip of the far side, Vanessa stopped and chanced a look over the edge. Almost immediately the woman ducked back down, turned, and gave an urgent hand signal demanding radio silence. The others gathered beneath her, waiting until Gloria caught up. They put their heads together so all their visors were in contact, allowing the vibrations of speech to pass between them.

  “We’re right on top of it,” Vanessa said. “Less than a hundred meters.”

  “Any kind of security perimeter?” Xavi asked.

  “Not that I could see. Which is to say, nothing obvious.”

  Beth Lee spoke up. “It’s possible they never expected to need one, this far in from the Swarm Blockade. No one’s ever breached that barrier.”

  “That we know of,” Xavi corrected.

  Gloria shook her head. “Not exactly true. There’s Captain Dawson, and the Lonesome.”

  “Yeah, but who knows how far they got before the Scipios got them.”

  “I’m just saying,” Gloria amended, “we have to assume the Scipios will be on edge, if for no other reason than the massive impact zone our arrival created so close to this facility. Speaking of, Vanessa, did you see anything that might imply its purpose?”

  “No,” the immune replied. “Domed buildings, towers, a large warehouse or something near the center, connecting hallways. Plus all the various pipes and conduits and silos you’d expect.”

  Beth Lee said, “Alien or not, some things are evidently universal.”

  No one spoke for several seconds, and Gloria soon realized they were all waiting for her. Even Alex Warthen stared at her with the gaze of a soldier awaiting orders.

  “What’s the plan, boss?” Xavi prompted.

  She studied them all. Vanessa was by far the mo
st heavily armed. Alex Warthen had the same armor, but none of the weapons. Never mind that his loyalties were suspect at best. Xavi carried the small pistol all spacecraft were required to have on board in the event of a crew member becoming mentally unstable. It was designed to be able to penetrate a helmet visor, but not hull plating. Beth and Gloria herself carried no weapons at all. Their burden instead was the supplies, the meager quantities of food and water salvaged from the wreck.

  “Our goal is to figure out a way to destroy that facility. Given we’re somewhat lacking in the armaments department, my hope is we can find some kind of reactor or explosive supply of chemicals, and sabotage. With any luck the secondary explosion will be enough to do the job.”

  “And what happens to us?” Alex Warthen asked.

  Gloria met his gaze and held it. “One-way trip, I’m afraid. We don’t have the supplies to wait for rescue, or any way to call for one even if we did.”

  Warthen held any reaction he had to this in perfect check. He just stared back at her.

  Gloria Tsandi sighed. “Xavi?”

  “Yeah, boss?”

  “If anyone in this group tries to flee or otherwise survive this effort, I’m ordering you to shoot them dead. We cannot leave a survivor for the Scipios to interrogate.”

  A cold silence fell over the group. “Understood,” Xavi managed, and she realized he didn’t like this much better than Alex. But there was no other option, and the last thing she wanted to do right now was get into a debate.

  “Suppose we can’t do it?” Beth asked.

  Gloria looked at her, an eyebrow raised.

  “Suppose,” the engineer went on, “the base, or whatever, is solar powered. Or what if it’s a peaceful observatory. I mean, for all we know it’s a Scipio orphanage.”

  Nobody said anything. The words were like a plug pulled from the bathtub, and Gloria could only watch as her vengeance-fueled drive drained away.

  “She’s got a point,” Xavi said. “Okay, maybe not the orphanage thing, but we’ve really got no idea what we’re destroying. Hell, they could be part of some kind of resistance against the Scipios.”