Escape Velocity

by Jason M. Hough

  In truth, though, Skyler needed to understand. How these beings went about their business, how the machinery of their society worked. Did they get breaks? Did they go somewhere to sleep? Anything he could learn that might help him feel a bit less out of place, he’d take. But then, of course, one could learn only so much skulking about in the shadows above a city. This was no comic book, and he did not have superhuman senses. If his visor hadn’t cracked, maybe, but not now.

  Moving from roof to roof, he slowly worked his way toward the building dubbed the Transfer Facility. Little made sense here, but a place to transfer cargo on and off climbers? That he knew. That Eve’s delivery of space elevators to Earth had prepared them for. So he climbed, scaled, and walked, avoiding the use of his thruster boots in case their heat or noise would give his position away.

  Nagging at his mind was another odd fact. They still did not seem to be looking for him. Granted, there may be a whole team of forensic investigators in the tunnels below even now, picking through the wreckage and studying burn marks to determine what had happened at the guarded barricade. Same went for the ruins across the bay, where more Scipios had surely died. Part of him wanted them to declare a state of emergency. To fill their streets with foot patrols and broadcast announcements about a possible saboteur. Something. And it wasn’t because Skyler craved recognition, oh no. He wanted something he could understand. An enemy who reacted was an enemy who could be predicted. But this…this total obliviousness, it made no sense.

  He thought back to his first encounters with subhumans on Earth. Years of campy zombie sensories and films had prepared humanity for a similar event. But in all those, at least the few Skyler had seen (not really his cup of tea), the monsters had been predictable if nothing else. They’d shamble, they’d want to consume the brain, they were relentless about it. That was simple. Subhumans, though, had not quite meshed with this ingrained cultural expectation. He wondered, back then and again now, how many people had died because they’d expected something else. He’d come close, that much he knew. He hadn’t been prepared for the ones that weren’t full of murderous intent, but instead wanted to flee and hide, or laugh for all eternity, or play, as one had so terribly asked of him in Nightcliff.

  So he fought the urge to map the behavior of Scipios onto what his expectations were. The need to anthropomorphize was deeply seated in the human psyche. It took a force of will to overcome. A constant vigilance. Not so hard when sneaking about, alone and in no immediate danger. Much harder when in the heat of combat.

  In those hours he learned a few things, the most important being that all of the climbers he’d seen were coming down. Not a single one had returned back to space. Granted, it hadn’t been long enough to get a complete picture, but as much as he tried to view things through this lens of no expectations, he couldn’t get over the fact that they weren’t alternating between directions. A space elevator was in many ways identical to a single-track rail line, with the space stations along the length serving as sidings where the climbers could be moved to let others by. But here, at the terminus, it didn’t make any sense to only receive, to never send out. Traffic would back up, surely. And he’d seen a lot of it. At least twenty climbers had lowered themselves into the city since he’d arrived. Busy times, evidently. Or maybe they just ran them no matter what the passenger count was.

  Yet nothing went up.

  The only explanation he could come up with was that they were worried he’d be aboard. Hard to escape the planet if there was no way off. Yet this did not mesh with the near-total lack of pursuit they’d sent after him so far. That fact, viewed on its own, implied they were waiting for him to make his escape attempt. Indeed, counting on it, with ample forces waiting to grab him when he reached the departure facility. So why not run the climbers up and let him think there was a reason to head there?

  He kept watching, hoping to spot some clue that would unravel this. Or, barring that, at least spot a way to get a climber to head off-world. If he was successful in that it would lead to its own problems, most notably that they’d then just be waiting for him above, but one thing at a time. Get off the planet, get far away from the planet. That was the plan.

  Another thing bothered him. Transfer Facility was directly adjacent to the structure that received climber cars descending the cord. In his mind, he dubbed the place Centraal Station, after the bustling rail hub in Amsterdam, a place he’d spent way too much time in his youth doing what poor kids do: loitering.

  Fitting that he loitered now. Skyler grinned to himself at the irony as he sat, back against a wall, and watched the climbers come down. They were oddly small compared to the ones humans had built, but then the Scipios were diminutive. Their climbers were a mix of very sleek, lozenge-shaped things that looked quite weathered, and others that were utterly functional in design. Ugly, angular, studded with vents and pipes and other machinery, all built atop a wide, flat circular platform. Instinct had him labeling these as passenger versus cargo, respectively, but he forced himself to set aside that assumption and really think about it. In the end he reached a different conclusion. The sleek ones had been built by the original inhabitants of this place, the Creators and their Builder AIs. The ugly ones were Scipio-made. What either carried probably had nothing to do with how they looked.

  Probably.

  Skyler sighed. The moment was quickly approaching when he’d need to go see for himself. And if they weren’t going to send anything up to orbit he’d have to figure out a way to turn them around himself.

  He tried to envision himself an alien in Darwin, crash-landed and ignorant of all things human, whose only goal was to leave. What would he have done? He’d seen the control room in Nightcliff where climbers were received and dispatched, where entire teams of very smart people planned and managed the traffic, manipulating computer programs for special cases, letting algorithms handle the day to day. Comprehending that system well enough to change it seemed ludicrous, even as an average human. It would have been impossible for an alien, no matter if they had a translation tool.

  No, in that scenario he would not have tried to decipher the climber control systems. He would have pointed a gun at someone who did, and forced them to help.

  And that, he thought, is the only way to do it here, too.

  He certainly couldn’t just ask, amusing though the idea might be.

  Skyler allowed himself a few swallows of water, and some of the bland nutrition paste Eve had provided. He tried not to think about how long it would last, or what stretching that time would do to his health and energy. His body ached in a dozen places, but no worse than a friendly spar against Sam might have left him.

  A strange whisper fell over the entire city. Skyler felt it as one feels the air change before a storm hits, and the Scipios sensed it, too. He leaned and looked down, expecting to see a gas leak or some kind of quiet electric vehicle powering through the wide plaza below. But the sound did not come from below, he realized.

  It came from above.

  Skyler glanced up, his gaze immediately drawn to the line the space elevator traced up into the dark sky. Nothing out of the ordinary there. A few climbers working their way down.

  Perhaps it was a storm. The sky had gone opaque, an even cloud covering made all the more ominous by the lack of ground lighting to give it texture and shape.

  A change did register then. The virus-fall, which had become like dust or powdery snowfall to him after being in it all these hours. It was coming down much faster now. Falling straight, as if weighted. He held his armor-gloved hand out and watched it accumulate there. Little white clumps, not quite dust and not quite snowflakes, but something in between.

  Before, they’d swirled and danced in the air almost as if alive. They may well be alive, of course. But lots of things on that scale were alive yet showed no outward movement other than the utterly random. The Scipio virus, though, had so far seemed to him to move like microscopic fish, the air their ocean. If he tried to focus on th
e falling powder before, he would see swarming patterns, schooling almost. Shifts that were not from a sudden gust of wind, but rather some signal that pulsed through the “crowd,” causing the little microscopic machines to alter their position.

  This behavior had now changed. They were falling as if they’d decided in their trillions to just stop.

  In seconds the rooftop around him had gone a dirty white. It was on his arms and legs, and starting to obscure his already broken visor.

  What did it mean? Skyler came to his feet and tried to shake the powder off. He felt as if he were a tiny creature under the sudden deluge of powdered sugar from a baker’s sifter. It just kept coming and coming. A centimeter deep now, and growing by the second. Maybe they intended to just bury him and sort it all out later.

  No, he thought, it couldn’t be that, but perhaps the point was to force him indoors. Usually the opposite would be the goal. You didn’t flush your prey into hiding, after all. Unless…Skyler licked his parched lips as he scanned the sky above. An impossible task, the air was positively full of falling virus cells now. He could barely see the end of his arm. Thick as a Rotterdam fog, only falling. The size of the clumps grew larger and larger. That made sense. The stuff higher up had had more time to gather on the way down. He wondered how big the chunks would be when the “storm” peaked.

  An eerie thought bored into his mind. The bigger, faster-falling chunks would catch up to those below. This might all end in one big sudden crescendo. Maybe the goal wasn’t to bury him but to crush him.

  Skyler made up his mind. He turned to the wall behind himself and carved a hole in it with his plasma beam. He stepped inside and flipped on his headlamp. He doubted anyone could see either light show with the air so choked, and any concern he had about the virus itself being some kind of surveillance tool was gone now, too.

  It was like it had all just died.

  This thought, too, gave him pause. He crept into the room he’d made a door into and swept his beam around. Empty. Some kind of living quarters, it seemed. Spacious, with elegant curved surfaces and simple, clean lines. He pushed as far in as he could go and turned, watching the powdered virus pile itself around the gap he’d carved in the wall. Within a minute it had piled high enough to start spilling into the room.

  Like it had all just died, he repeated in his mind, and his thoughts returned to the plague forge. That bizarre pyramid-like factory he and Tania had found in Africa, the source for the virus that had, invisibly in Earth’s case, permeated the world and left everywhere but Darwin unsafe for humans. Most humans, anyway.

  He and Tania had done something there. Deactivated the machinery that churned out the virus cells day and night, replenishing their numbers. Could this be the same thing? The others were out there, somewhere. Tim had proved that much. Perhaps they’d spotted this world’s plague forge. Bombed it from orbit, or just rammed into it. Found the proverbial kill switch.

  This train of thought reeked of wishful thinking, though. Skyler wanted to slap some sense into himself for allowing it.

  No, his friends were far off. This was something else. A tactic, one he just couldn’t yet see the purpose behind.

  And no matter. “I’m immune to your shit, or haven’t you figured that out yet?” he asked of the growing pile of off-white grit spilling into the room.

  With this came a new fear. One that he’d buried deep, refused to believe possible. Skyler swallowed as he watched the powdery stuff begin to push across the floor, a growing mountain like sand poured into a loose and circular pile. Perhaps they’d figured him out. Studied a scrap of DNA he’d left somewhere, or worse, captured Samantha or Alex and analyzed them. Maybe this was a deliberate extinction, making way for version two.

  Viruses were life-forms, after all.

  They evolved.

  Mago

  THEY MOVED SWIFTLY on the base. Vanessa again took point position at Gloria’s behest. She had alien armor, weapons, had spent years fighting subhumans, and—potentially the most important thing of all—she had the immunity. No one argued the choice.

  As before, Xavi followed close behind, then Alex Warthen in the middle, in front of Gloria. Alex insisted he would help them, fight if it came to that, but Gloria still had not decided if she could trust him. Besides, he was unarmed, just like Gloria and Beth, who brought up the rear. The three of them were a liability until they could arm themselves, and that seemed unlikely to happen anytime soon.

  Unless…

  Gloria tried to keep the thought from her head, but it was too tempting. If Dawson was here, alive, then her gear might be, too. Hell, the whole ship. The question was, what state were they in? She imagined dissection, both biological and mechanical, and shuddered. They needed to hurry. Every second may matter now.

  Vanessa took a serpentine path. Direct, but opportunistic in its use of shadows for cover. The outer wall of the facility came into view, just beyond a rock-strewn rise of blue-gray. Sunlight bleached the landscape at a forty-five-degree angle, blinding where it fell, making the sky a ceiling of total darkness. Gloria felt glad for that. The night sky always drew her gaze. Always. Her very first memory was of trying to capture the moon in her tiny hand, frustrated that she could not, her mother laughing and soothing at the same time. Now was not the time for such distractions.

  At the crest of the last rise Vanessa angled toward a small depression and waited there for everyone to catch up. Gloria pulled up next to her and scanned the view.

  The wall was no defensive barrier, of course. Nothing to defend against on this rock, at least not until this moment. But the facility was one large complex of interconnected buildings, and so presented a continuous exterior surface that jutted out in various places. From above she thought it probably resembled an overly complicated puzzle piece. Lights dotted the roof, reds and yellows mostly, indicating who knows what. They painted the areas currently lost in deep shadow due to a large mountain on the opposite side of the base.

  Gloria spotted several spherical structures in the middle distance, perhaps chemical tanks, perhaps reactors of some kind. She knew from history classes that humanity used to build them aboveground like that, too, something they’d grown out of ages ago. Maybe these Scipios weren’t quite so advanced as they seemed. She grinned at that thought, then quickly set the feeling aside. Vanessa was on the move again. She’d stopped only long enough to pick a point of entry and, now evidently having selected one, was off. Xavi followed, then Alex, then Gloria. She felt Beth’s presence behind her, pleased that the engineer was keeping pace.

  Nearer the wall Gloria eased off her pace, putting a hand on Alex’s shoulder to keep him with her. She wanted Vanessa and Xavi to gain some distance, and Alex Warthen, a career security officer, understood and made no complaint. They allowed a gap of twenty meters to open.

  Of Dawson’s errant radio communication, they’d heard nothing more. The distant anguished sobs had ended a minute after they’d started, and not returned.

  Vanessa reached the wall without incident. No alarms, no sudden appearance of defensive turrets. Now came the tricky part. Well, the first tricky part. Breaching the outer wall of a building on an airless moon meant exposing the inside to vacuum. Not something to be done lightly, especially when there may be people inside you wanted to remain breathing. Had there been an obvious airlock to enter through, that might have been better, but Vanessa and Xavi both discarded that option right from the beginning. Those, undoubtedly, would be watched. And they’d be too easy to become trapped inside.

  Gloria bounded across the last twenty meters, watching as Vanessa teased a hole in the wall with her wrist-mounted beam weapon. A gout of moist air plumed from the hole. It kept coming for several seconds, then diminished, then vanished altogether. This implied much. Rather than some field or self-repairing wall, the Scipios’ base used emergency bulkhead doors to seal a breach. Easier to enter, then, but also her team must now work on the assumption that a repair crew would be dispatched immediately. />
  Vanessa stepped back and carved a two-meter-high oval in the wall, stepping aside to let it fall away into the gritty “soil” of the moon’s surface. Then she was in, going right. Xavi followed, pistol raised, heading left.

  Pushing Alex ahead, Gloria and her group followed. They would remain close to the advance team, following Xavi if the lead pair decided to split up. That was what everyone had agreed to, back on the crater rim. That had been the extent of the plan. Anything more wouldn’t survive contact with the enemy, as Vanessa had put it.

  Gloria escorted Alex into the hallway. Beth came in a second later. They paused to let their eyes adjust.

  Dim red lights illuminated the space. The floor was a thick metal grating with pipes and other infrastructure visible below. The walls were simple and dark, adorned only with two stripes that ran the length at chest level. Gloria had to stoop slightly to fit. She’d never seen an actual Scipio, but from the dimensions of this place they probably stood a bit more than a meter tall.

  Sure enough, emergency bulkhead doors had closed and sealed the punctured hallway, each perhaps five meters away in both directions. Xavi stood near one, ready if anyone came through. Vanessa had moved toward the other bulkhead, but she stopped short. On the interior wall there was a door leading to a connecting room or hallway, and the immune now crouched before it, attempting to decipher the control mechanism. Gloria moved to her side and eased her away. She pointed at the emergency bulkhead and tried to mimic holding a rifle. The other woman understood and moved into a defensive position.

  Gloria studied the door. Beth joined her, and after a few seconds they managed to work out the control. A little lever embedded in a C-shaped groove in the frame, that slid around in the half-circle. Twelve o’clock for closed, six for open. So she guessed, at least. She moved it, had to use her pinky for the groove was small. Nothing happened. Perhaps refusing until atmospheric integrity returned. Perhaps it just didn’t recognize her, or she’d misinterpreted the function of the lever.