Skyler leaned out to get a better look. Far below, at street level, several Scipios had emerged from the building, pushing the two medical pods. Even from here he knew they were the same ones because of their softly glowing status lights. Their movement became a procession, with Scipios lining up on either side to watch the two capsules float through the long, narrow plaza. At the far end the parade ended. Both pods were guided into the open doors of another building. Skyler studied the façade, but it was too far away to see clearly. Until his gaze focused on the middle. There, above the doors, tacked-on signage covered the original. He could not make out the details, but his visor could. It translated the words into perfect English.
TRANSFER FACILITY.
Above Carthage
THE SMALL SHUTTLE drifted on a preprogrammed path, first climbing to the midpoint of the space elevator where gravity would be effectively nullified at this speed, then beginning its trek to the selected location. The cramped space quickly became uncomfortable, with each member of the group gravitating to their own place and settling in for the ride. Tania remained in what she considered the pilot’s seat, though with everything automated the true purpose of the position seemed more like that of a conductor.
Still, it allowed her to monitor the various displays aligned around her. Something of a chore considering the translation system her helmet provided. Anything she wanted to read she had to hold in the center of her vision long enough for a suitable English version to display. For simple signs inside the space station, that had been trivial, but a status screen for a spacecraft was a whole different thing. Not only was the information dense, but it changed rapidly. Because the numbers no doubt had to also be converted into something a human would appreciate, often her visor’s readout could not even finish displaying something before it had to wipe the whole mess and start again.
Trying to follow it only made the headache she already had that much worse. The vitals at least seemed in order. They had fuel, they had air, and they had a destination. Tania decided the only thing she really needed to know was if their course had been altered by an external force, or if another craft was approaching them with an intent to dock, ram, or otherwise impede their course.
So she stared out the window instead. The ship was on autopilot, but she could roll it on its axis without affecting their course, so she manipulated the angle until her window looked down at Carthage. Nobody complained, or even seemed to notice.
Sam and Vaughn had taken positions on either side of the small airlock, ready to exit the craft at a moment’s notice if a battle was imminent. Prumble similarly clung to the wall directly opposite the same door, ready to face anyone who might try to board them. That left Tania at the “nose” of the ship, and Tim all the way aft, in a small chamber that appeared to be used for storing the personal belongings of the passengers. He had his eyes closed, and drifted lazily, held in place only by one foot, which he’d looped through one of the luggage webbings. He’d lived most of his life in space, as had she, which made the materials and design of the vessel the only thing about this that felt truly alien.
Tania let out a long sigh. It fogged her visor, temporarily obscuring the view. She let it fade, slowly revealing the details of the planet below as the moisture was removed from her air by the suit. She studied the landmasses, the oceans with their odd milky coloration. A topography she’d all but memorized while aboard the Chameleon, but seeing it in person was always so different. It’s so close, she thought. To come all this way and not make it to the surface. This outcome made her feel profoundly empty inside. All that had happened, here and on Earth and in between, for nothing. To end in retreat, with the knowledge that the Builders would simply continue their galactic sorting algorithm in order to find another possible candidate to achieve this rescue.
And worse, so much worse it made her heart feel as if gripped in a vise, was the knowledge that they would leave people behind. Skyler, Vanessa, even the crew of the Wildflower. Missing, presumed dead, the report would conclude. She could see it now, and it made her want to scream. Tania did not expect the Universe to be fair, never had. She knew it for what it was; a mostly empty container of atoms that sometimes came together in interesting ways. Such a thing had no sense of fairness. It had no sense at all. But it was supposed to make sense. That, at least, she always had believed. That if you looked hard enough you could find a reason for something being the way it was.
An overwhelming sense of confinement took hold of her. She wanted, more so even than seeing Skyler alive again, to be outside. To feel the air on her face. To not be in a tiny box with nothing more than someone else’s technology to keep her from the cold vacuum of space.
She took some advice Skyler had given her, years ago. To act on instinct, rather than think everything through. Tania reached up and undid the seal on her helmet. She ignored the warnings and lifted the bulk away before anyone could stop her. Tania let it drift into a corner and shook her hair free from the ponytail she’d tied it in.
“What the hell are you doing?” Sam asked.
Tania inhaled deeply. The air tasted of metal and grease and the faint traces of chemical recirculation. Like home, to her, though it was far too cold and very thin. She turned to Sam, exhaled, and said, “I couldn’t stand the staleness anymore. Besides, we knew it was breathable.”
“Only just,” Prumble observed.
Tania gave an apologetic shrug. “I only want a few minutes. Besides, one of us was going to have to test it at some point.”
She drifted between the group clustered around the airlock. A tight fit, but she didn’t care. She just wanted to move, feel wind on her face. Nothing like what she’d experienced falling toward Hawaii, of course, but it made things a little more bearable.
The burst of conversation had not woken Tim. He’d twisted in his sleep, and settled in a corner as free-floating debris in zero gravity often did. Tania had no interest in waking him. She performed a swimmer’s turn, rolling in midair so she could push off with her feet, and launch back toward the nose of the ship.
A display caught her eye. She’d left her visor behind, and so had no translation, but the imagery required no such system to be understood. It was a map. A top-down schematic of all the space stations and space elevators around the planet, as well as some markers for various installations on the surface. Something about it was wrong. It didn’t match Eve’s depiction.
Curious, Tania pushed back to the cockpit, retrieved her helmet, and put it back on as she crossed aft once again. Prumble, Sam, and Vaughn watched all this silently, heads swiveling in unison like spectators at a tennis match. Once at the screen, with Tim’s sleeping form bobbing just centimeters away, Tania scanned the display again, this time with the English translation appearing just below the alien symbols.
There were so many that it took her a moment to realize it was the quantity that had caught her attention. Of course, that made perfect sense. Eve’s data had been woefully out of date. It was only natural to expect the Scipios to have expanded in the centuries since Eve had last visited. What wasn’t new had probably been moved or removed as well.
“What is it?” Prumble asked.
“A map,” Tania replied, almost unaware of her own voice. She’d already become lost in the schematic, studying its details wherever her eyes spotted something interesting. It took a moment, but she found their own craft, indicated by a small red shape that was evidently their iconic representation of a transport or shuttle. Their path, a softly glowing yellow curve, took them halfway around the planet to another space elevator, which ascended to the farthest point and terminated at a space station marked simply DEPART. Well that’s tidy, Tania thought. Now she knew why Tim had picked it. She just hoped it meant depart as in leave the system, and not the Scipios’ version of a morgue, for nowhere did it say who was departing or what it was they were departing from.
Still, she had to agree with Tim’s choice. It made sense to have a dockyard at that outermost point, if only for the gr
avitation assist such a position provided.
Chewing her lower lip in concentration, Tania scanned the other stations around the planet. Their purposes were often obvious—NUTRIENT PRODUCTION—and alternately, utterly baffling—EXCITING ALLOCATE being one example she could easily envision as the type of T-shirt tourists would buy in a foreign country purely for the novelty of the poor translation. She theorized that section of connected stations to be the Scipio version of a theme park or vacation spot. Probably used a slogan like “A place to get your yearly allocation of excitement!”
On a certain level she knew her giddiness came from the air she’d breathed, but that same air also made her not care. She continued to study the map. Doing so gave her an odd sense of joy, a feeling she’d known since childhood, that very first time she’d seen a physical globe map of Earth and spun it around. “The pleasure of finding things out,” a book she’d read many times had described it. A phrase that had defined her life.
Two details caught her eye, one after the other, each so alarming she felt momentarily trapped between them, unsure which to focus on. “Oh my God,” she whispered.
That drew Prumble over. He shouldered himself into the cabin, pushing the sleeping Tim against the wall. He still did not wake. The space was now utterly cramped, made worse by the fact that all three occupants had their aura shards strapped to their backs. “Found something?”
“Two things,” Tania said, breathless.
“Be calm, be calm,” he said. “Show me.”
Sam and Vaughn came over as well, though they had to remain just outside the narrow bulkhead, unable to see the screen.
Tania pointed to an odd icon flashing erratically on the planet’s surface, near the base of one of the space elevators. The text below it translated to two phrases that it faded between rapidly: UNEXPLAINED FATALITIES, and DEORBITED OBJECT.
“That,” Prumble said, “is something indeed.”
Tania nodded. She didn’t want to voice her theory, as if putting his name out there might somehow dispel the chance. Besides, she could see in Prumble’s eyes that he thought the same thing she did. “There’s more,” she said, tracing her finger up the length of that elevator thread. This was no error or even a warning, but merely a stack of space stations along its path, perhaps a third of the way around the equator from the position of their little shuttle. On their path, in fact, a bit less than half the distance to their destination.
She pointed to one station after another along the line of the Elevator, lingering briefly on each so Prumble could digest their meaning. PRIMARY VIRAL PRODUCTION, VIRAL REALIGN, VIRAL ANALYSIS, and so on.
Sam must have seen a great change in Prumble’s expression. “What the hell is it?” she asked, loud.
Tim stirred.
“I’m not exactly sure,” Prumble replied, “but I think we might not want to leave just yet.”
Above Carthage
“THIS IS INSANE,” Tim said. “Suicidal.”
Samantha battled back a powerful urge to punch the young man in his stomach. If not for his armor, she might have. Words would have to suffice. “Your cowardice is really starting to piss me off.”
It felt good to say it. She’d been thinking it since the first time he suggested they look for a way to leave despite having agreed with that plan. The difference in their motivations being what allowed this little bit of hypocrisy.
From the sudden wrath in his eyes, though, Tim did not care for this assessment. “I fought those creatures as hard as any of you before the Chameleon exploded, taking our way home and our guide from us. All I want to do now is survive this…this mess.”
“Tim,” Tania said, with just the right amount of soothing and authority, “this place is on our way. We may not be able to accomplish our mission, but we might at least have a chance to do some real damage. To give whoever comes after us better odds.”
“She’s right,” Prumble said. “Our mission here is over, no one is saying it isn’t. But if we can knock out their plague factory, who knows how long that would set them back.”
“It might not set them back at all,” Tim rasped.
“True, true. Or, it may set them back years. Decades. They may be utterly vulnerable during that time, allowing the Builders’ next attempt to succeed.”
“Exactly,” Tania said. She was next to Tim now, her hand on his arm. “Come on, Tim. We’ve come so far, taken so many risks, surely this is worth the tiny bit more.”
He looked at her. Really looked, Sam noted. Probably trying to find evidence of what he no doubt assumed: that Tania wanted to stay longer only to give Skyler a chance to join up with them. Sam was a realist, though. She could feel it in her bones that Skyler and Vanessa were gone. Mourning would have to come later. Maybe she’d find that same hangar in Darwin where she and Skyler had drunk a toast—several, actually—to their lost friend, Jake. She’d sit up there again and drink for Skyler, and Vanessa, and the fact that everyone and everything she’d known on Earth was centuries dead and gone. Part of her saw this prospect as a fresh start, a new beginning on a once-again prosperous planet. And part of her saw it as a strange sort of cheating, leaving Earth at its lowest moment only to return centuries later when everything was back on track.
Tim’s gaze drifted down, stopping on Tania’s arm. He reached up and lifted it away. “It’s clear you’ve all made up your minds. So be it. But I’m staying with this craft. It’s too useful to abandon.” He glanced at Sam, then at Vaughn and Prumble, too. “Do what you can in there. I will wait as long as possible for you.”
This last he said to Tania.
“Good enough,” Vaughn proclaimed. He moved to the airlock, forcing an end to the conversation. Sam joined him a moment later. Prumble followed as well, leaving Tania with Tim in the storage area at the back of the craft. They floated side by side for the remainder of the journey, speaking to each other only occasionally. Most of the time they both just watched the display. Tania with an expression of fateful confidence, and Tim with something more like that of a counselor who’s just given up on a troubled patient, and is now content to let them make a great mistake so that it can be learned from. She’d seen this before, in her own face reflected in a mirror, working at a summer camp helping troubled teens. A life that felt impossibly far away now.
She’d left those kids there, to die. Fled, in truth, for they’d become something not quite human. The fact remained. She wondered if Tim would do the same, and was surprised to find that she didn’t care. Something had changed inside her with this discovery of the Scipios’ own plague forge. There was a chance, after all, that Skyler’s death would not be in vain. And there was a chance she could meet an end as he had, fighting the good fight, not growing old on a world she no longer recognized.
“We’re here,” Tania said, gripping the bulkhead and propelling herself to the center of the cabin.
The four of them clustered around the door like a team of special forces soldiers about to raid a bomb lab. The sudden shift in mood and purpose flooded Sam with that most addictive of chemicals: adrenaline. Battle-sense. She coiled herself opposite the door, ready to power through into whatever waited beyond. “I’ll take point,” she said, though she sensed the others already understood that. They should, by now, but it was even more important here. She was the only immune in the group, and therefore the most nimble.
Prumble positioned himself to one side of the airlock, Vaughn across from him. Tania loomed at Prumble’s shoulder. Notably she’d not said goodbye or good luck to Tim, and he’d been silent, too.
The sensation of movement made her stomach flutter. The craft slowed, matching speed with the docking port of the approaching station. Sam grunted as the gravity piled on, all the way to Earth normal and beyond, then abruptly eased. A clang rolled through the ship. The hiss of air, equalizing.
“Docking complete,” Tim said. “Keep in contact, please. We don’t know the range of the comms.”
“Will do,” Prumble replied.
<
br /> “Here we go,” Sam said.
The airlock door irised open. Sam rushed in, both arms held in front of her.
She dove left.
Scipios were arrayed in the hallway before her, huddled behind improvised barricades. One of them wore a thing that looked like a backpack vacuum cleaner. A choking plume of white erupted from it as Sam hit the floor. The fine particulate, a much denser version of that which permeated everything here, seemed to freeze in midair, and then the particles formed strands. The crystalline structure she’d seen in Darwin, and again aboard Eve’s ship. Sam rolled backward and pushed herself to her knees. She raised her arms and let loose both beams, sweeping them inward until they converged on the place she thought the sprayer stood. The sizzling beams of energy ripped through the crystal growth, leaving two angular swaths of empty air in their wake.
Something strange happened. Around the airlock door, as if pulsating out, a bubble began to form. Or rather, a spherical cavity where the crystallized virus structure shattered into powder. This invisible ball of empty air pushed toward the enemy for a meter or so before she realized what was happening. Two more beams joined hers. Vaughn, coming in, and the aura shard on his back was negating their viral cannon blasts.
Together they unleashed hell on the welcoming party. Four beams that danced, sliced, and cut through a defensive position that seemed, to Sam at least, odd in its apparent hasty arrangement. Why were they still so unorganized in their response to this incursion? Sam swept her beam up the chest of one. A vertical line of gore as its neck, then face, split into gushing halves. It fell, lifeless, behind the barricade. Three more took its place.
“They know we can’t resupply,” Vaughn shouted over the battle. “We’re going to burn through all our ammo doing this. They’re cannon fodder, literally.”
Then Prumble stepped into the frame of the still-open airlock. “Let me show you how it’s done,” he said.
Arms raised, he let loose. Only, the protrusions above his wrists were not throwing forward their usual lines of sizzling energies. Or rather, Sam thought, they were, but they were turning on and off a hundred times per second.
Escape Velocity Page 15
