Escape Velocity

by Jason M. Hough

  They’d gone to ground. They knew this danger was coming. Not him, but the sky. And they feared it.

  “Tania,” he said. “Might have a serious problem here.”

  The cloud fell, like the powdery wave of an alpine avalanche, only everywhere, all at once. It swallowed the top of the elevator tower and kept falling. A hundred meters above him now. In places the faster-falling tendrils, spearheaded by heavier clumps, began to crash into the city. Skyler watched one as he ran. It hit the roof of a building about half a klick away. The powder exploded outward, flowing over the roof and down the sides of the ten-story structure. The building itself seemed undamaged, as if the impact had been nothing more than a wad of loosely packed confetti.

  Five meters to the door.

  Skyler looked away from that rooftop and focused. He could hear the early impacts now, all around him, as a strange erratic drumbeat. A shape in the corner of his vision drew his attention back to that first impact. Where the powder ball had struck and disintegrated, something now stood. A large mirrored sphere, studded with blistered sections. In a flash those blisters punched outward and tentacle legs took shape. They slammed down into the roof and the sphere stood up.

  A swarmer. A large one, and newly coated in some reflective skin.

  “Tania?” he repeated, suddenly realizing she’d not replied the first time.

  She made no response now, either.

  “Tania?!”

  A garbled, incoherent burst of noise assaulted his ears.

  “Shit,” Skyler grunted, and reached for the door.

  All around him, the sky crashed down.

  Mago

  OTHER THAN A thick coat of powdery dust, the Lonesome seemed untouched. Gloria Tsandi counted this as the best luck since arriving in this godforsaken system, and hauled herself up toward the cockpit.

  Though still a compact ship by fold-spec standards, the Lonesome was more than twice the size of the Wildflower, and military in purpose. It had been custom retrofitted to use the new imploder, she recalled from her briefing. A process that had taken more than six months, replacing nearly every part with a more expensive prototype version made with the latest lightweight graphene-ceramic composites.

  Even the weapons systems. Gloria tapped her comm. “Xavi, get in here. They left everything in place. There will be weapons, somewhere.”

  “A bit busy,” he grunted.

  She ignored him. “Beth, you too. I need the ultracaps, reactor, engines. The works.”

  No reply came.

  “Beth?”

  “That’s what I’m busy with,” Xavi said. “She’s down.”

  “Dead?”

  “Unknown.”

  His tone told her two things. He didn’t know, and she should shut up or she’d get him killed. Gloria heaved on a rung and powered herself upward five meters, grabbing the next and heaving again. The bulkheads were all open, and the storage containers along the walls unlocked. On purpose? Gloria would have secured everything, changed the codes and thrown away the details. Why Dawson had left everything accessible to the enemy was a mystery, as was why Dawson hadn’t gone through with the self-destruct.

  Gloria, having had that chance several times since arriving in-system and deciding not to do it, could not blame her counterpart. Dawson probably thought they still had a chance, right to the very end, and merely waited a moment too long. Perhaps she’d opened everything to give her crew a chance when she no longer had one herself.

  Gloria powered through the sleeping cabin, into the mess. She made an opportunistic grab at a water pouch left lying out, attaching it to the receptacle on her belt where her suit greedily replenished its supply. She was through navigation a second later, and then at the captain’s chair.

  Outside a deep boom rattled the ship. Then something hit it, and the whole thing swayed on its landing legs. “Xavi?”

  “Not now, boss,” he shot back.

  She trusted him. She left him to do what needed to be done, and turned her focus to the command console. Dawson had also left this totally unsecured, allowing anyone who might reach it to access the entirety of the ship’s controls. Thank you, Gloria whispered silently, as her fingers flew across the interface.

  Another rattle below her. Gloria turned and saw Xavi clawing his way into the ship through the airlock, one arm around the limp form of Beth Lee.

  Gloria said nothing. She turned to the display and found the command she wanted—rapid emergency power-up, and triggered it. Then she yanked her harness off and dropped the twenty meters to where Xavi worked to get Beth into an infirmary bed. “A tentacle arm slapped her across the room. She hit the wall pretty hard, lots of g’s. Concussion, minimum.”

  “Let me,” she said.

  “No,” Xavi said, almost angry but not quite. “Get this bird started.”

  She nodded, gave his upper arm a reassuring squeeze, and powered back up toward the captain’s chair.

  At the airlock she flinched. Something punched into her gut and sent her across the narrow space to smack into the far bulkhead, pinning her there. A silvery tentacle arm, barely able to fit in the outer door, held her to the wall, tip squirming around, probing. Lenses and little grated openings covered its surface. The flailing seemed random until, all at once, the whole length of it turned with new purpose and licked out toward Gloria’s helmet. She winced, turned away. A useless, automatic reaction.

  Nothing happened. She opened one eye and saw the tentacle looming before her. It stared at her with lifeless mechanical eyes and then drifted to one side. A glowing ring came into view, six meters down its length, just outside the airlock.

  The whole thing suddenly lurched outward and went tumbling off into the hangar. Vanessa hovered just beyond where the creature had been, the beam weapon on her arm still alive with bristling intensity that stung the eye just to look at. She swept it at unseen foes.

  Gloria shook her head, continued her climb. Her stomach hurt like hell, but her suit still had atmospheric integrity so she knew the tentacle had not pierced the material, or her skin. So she bit back the pain and heaved toward the captain’s chair.

  Alex Warthen waited for her there. She hadn’t even seen him come in. For a terrible instant she thought he might kick her away and take the helm, or that he was only there to tell her where he wanted his ship to go. But the man merely moved aside, gestured for her to take her place, and moved behind her. He faced not toward the console but aft, and settled into a defensive posture as best he could in this gravity and orientation.

  “Whatever I can do to help,” he said, “just name it.”

  “Well don’t defend me,” Gloria replied. “Make sure Vanessa gets in here safely, and seal the damn airlock the moment she’s aboard.”

  “Copy that,” the man replied, and was off.

  Whatever he’d been through, or his intentions the very first time he came aboard a ship Gloria captained, those two words settled any lingering concerns she had about him and his loyalties. Warthen was a soldier, a military man as the saying went, and when it came down to business he was the type who would set everything else aside. She whispered another silent Thanks and refocused on her displays.

  “Talk to me, Xavi,” she said, tapping through icons and scrolling past the obvious warnings.

  The ship rocked to one side, and another echoing boom billowed through the narrow spaces of her hull. Gloria gripped the chair controls and fired the attitude thrusters, forcing the ship upright again. She quickly enabled a launch stability program that would handle that task automatically now. One less thing to worry about, and—Hey, good news! she thought—the thrusters worked.

  “Reactor is not complying, boss,” her navigator said. “Without Beth to—”

  “What about the caps? Do we at least have those?”

  “Checking.” Seconds ticked away. The sounds of incredible violence continued to spill in through the airlock, occasionally singing a chorus with the deep hissing sounds of the attitude thrusters. “Caps
are at sixty-five percent.”

  “Good enough to get us off the ground; we can worry about the reactor when we’re out of this hellhole.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Beth?”

  “She’s still out, boss. Might be a coma.”

  Gloria drummed her fingers on her leg. The ship’s state-of-the-art medical pod could tell them more, but it drained power like a minor black hole and she didn’t know if they could afford it. “Get her in the auto-med,” she said a second later.

  “The draw—”

  “We can’t afford not to have her, Xavi. We need to know if we can fold.”

  He hesitated, if only for an instant. “I’ll take care of it.”

  Gloria twisted in her chair and shouted down to Alex, who stood gripping the edges of the airlock, watching the battle outside. “Get her in here! We’re leaving!”

  He glanced up and gave her a nod.

  Good enough. Gloria turned back to her console and powered on the engines.

  Carthage

  A WHITE HELL enveloped him just a step away from the door. It was as if a thousand tornadoes of bleached sand had converged all at once, then suddenly released and hurled their swirling contents back to the ground in abject fury.

  Skyler curled into a ball and let the storm take him. There was nothing else to do. The grit whipped at him, sent him spinning and tumbling across the slimy landscape. It tore through the shreds of his armor and scraped his skin raw. A million tiny cuts.

  He screamed and choked, gritted his teeth, tasted acid and the dryness of the freshly delivered viral powder as it swept down his throat and into his stomach, his lungs. He felt it blast his eyes and power up through his nostrils like cold ash.

  The force of the wind sent him rolling across the ground until his body flopped against a wall and came to a sudden, teeth-rattling stop. He kept his arms around his face, though it was no use. The powder had found its way through the pathetic defense already.

  All the while Tania cried out for him. “What’s happening, what’s wrong? Skyler, answer!”

  He could only cough and gag. The skin on his face bled from countless needle-prick holes where the particulate had struck home. Any more of this and it would scrape his flesh away, leaving only a skeleton in tattered armor.

  The rush of sandpaper wind began to abate, and not because the ferocity of the virus-fall had dwindled, no. That would have been welcome, ideal. No, Skyler realized as he tried to open his eyes and felt only the sudden pressure of powder on his corneas. No, the storm had not passed. He’d been buried.

  And the pileup only went on. It became a weight on him, a dismal pressure growing to something oppressive. Nasty. Unbearable. Insurmountable, if he didn’t move.

  Skyler coughed through his pressed elbows, felt a searing burn all along his throat. He strained and strained, willed his legs to move under the growing weight. Somehow he got a foot up under himself and that would have to do. He willed the thruster to power on. Full strength, and then roared in pain as his back became the tip of a very poorly calibrated missile.

  The viral sand all around him shifted, rushed in to fill new gaps, but he was moving. He thought he was. Was he? Skyler groaned, strained, tried not to breathe as he pulled, pulled, pulled his other leg forward and up, second thruster activated. The press against his back, that goddamn equal and opposite reaction, felt like a two-ton lead weight. He smashed his eyelids together, ground grit between his teeth, held his breath, and willed more from the tiny motors. They howled, slamming his own knees up into his torso, forcing the wind from him.

  And then he broke through.

  All at once his body erupted from the viral avalanche and arced outward on an erratic curve. He let the boots power off and knew he was falling, but could do nothing about it. He had to hope, could only hope, that he’d land—

  A whoomp as his body flopped into the loosely piled powder, the softest cushion imaginable. He rolled on it, fought to keep from sinking in again as he heaved in a breath and felt new pain along this throat.

  Water! Water! his body screamed.

  He searched with his dry, scoured lips for the tube and inhaled all the goddamn powder that had wormed its way into it. He gagged, spit the crud out in a small eruption around his mouth and nose, then sipped again. This time the water flowed. He flushed his mouth, spit, then drank. The first gulp made him retch a pale muddy pile of gunk onto the powder beneath him. He drank again, and this time the water stayed where it belonged. Skyler gulped again, spit the water onto his gloved hands to clean them. The liquid stung the hundreds of tiny cuts, invisible through the pockmarked armor but no less real. He cleared the powder from his palms, spit water on them again, and rubbed his eyes clear.

  The liquid burned, but that only made tears, which helped even more. Seconds later he came to a shaky stand, blinking water from his eyes.

  The city had gone virtually silent around him as the dust literally settled. Except for the sounds of the chrome-surfaced swarmers. They’d landed all around. He saw one clutching the side of a building, twisting as it scanned its surroundings for its prey. Others lurched as they clawed their way through the freshly accumulated virus-fall.

  Then, all at once, the entire area seemed to vibrate.

  An earthquake, Skyler thought, but he quickly saw, or rather felt, that this was not the case. The ground, the buildings, they did not shake. Only the powder shifted and danced.

  And then it began to rise.

  Skyler watched the grit begin to float upward, as if borne on some weak yet pervasive wind from below. Only there was no breeze. The particulate was moving on its own.

  Little robotic cells, he reminded himself. Cells had methods of locomotion, and now they were switching on.

  This had been a strategy, he realized, starting to run without really deciding to. The Scipios had killed off their old virus and replaced it with a new one, to what purpose he could only guess. Only, they could not afford to wait for it to billow through the atmosphere at its own leisurely pace. So they’d dumped it, like napalm, and activated it once on the ground.

  The particles flocked and schooled, took on shapes and flows as they took to the air and began to coordinate.

  Some seemed to circle around him, and did not leave. Movement in the distance made Skyler change focus, and he saw the swarmer on the side of the building suddenly twist its main eye toward him.

  “Oh fuck,” he whispered.

  He stood dead center in a cloud of molecular sensors. The cells. A trillion trillion tiny eyes and ears. The evolution of Earth’s suddenly primitive-seeming HocNets. And now they had his scent.

  He ran, full sprint, toward the building again. His flight had taken him away from the door, but it wasn’t far. This time he threw caution to the wind and carved himself a door in the middle of the one that already existed. At the last second he raised an arm and smashed his way through.

  Skyler found himself in a small foyer of sorts, with three halls leading off. Left, right, forward. He chose forward, if for no reason other than it was longer than the other two. He needed distance. The viral cloud could not be escaped, of course. It flowed in through the door like an unwelcome ghost, swirling around him.

  Scipios scurried like rats from the rooms along the hall, alerted perhaps by the virus that the building was no longer a safe haven. They wore uniforms that were yellow and black, or yellow and white, based on what criteria Skyler had no idea. He let them go. As he strode forward into the hall he saw the ethereal form of the virus cloud move with him, like an unpleasant odor made visible. Skyler swiped at the living smoke to no avail, it just moved out of the way on the air his arm displaced, nimble as tiny gnats.

  “Fuck,” he muttered, and soldiered on. He needed to get to the Elevator, and doing so unseen, no matter indoors or out in the open, seemed impossible now. The Scipios had recalibrated their tech. He wondered if his immunity no longer made any difference, and if not, how soon the symptoms would start to show.
r />   Something thudded into the ground outside. He turned and saw the mirror-finish spherical body of one of these new swarmers filling the hole he’d made. He fired his beam at it uselessly. The white line of pure energized whatever only reflected off, drawing a trail of fire across the little foyer room.

  Skyler took a knee and leaned, letting a mortar round loose.

  Only, none came.

  “Out of ammo,” he said to himself. “Perfect.”

  He shook his head in frustration and felt the powdered virus that had accumulated down in the depths of his collar grate against his neck. Angry and on the verge of collapse from exhaustion and pain and frustration, Skyler hefted a random chunk of debris from the ground and threw it at the enemy.

  It bounced off harmlessly.

  Ground forces began to swarm in around the swarmer’s limbs, dressed in what he could only assume was their military garb, a sort of shifting pattern of camouflage that automatically adjusted based on the surroundings.

  Skyler ran.

  Why not? he asked himself, feet pounding in that Carthage gait. He rounded a corner and surged ahead, while behind him came the sound of the chrome swarmer as it tore the rest of the doorway aside and moved into the building.

  The gunk in the air followed him, always swirling, moving, just out of reach and yet never far. On a whim Skyler shouldered through a door, and then another.

  He found himself in a blue room, low ceilinged and nearly totally dark save for the bit of light spilling in from where he’d come. He turned and waited, ready to fight with fists and feet, when he noticed something new.

  The virus hadn’t followed him in here.

  The air in this space was utterly clear, in fact. Unnaturally so.

  Curious. He wondered if the swarmer would be blind to his presence. Perhaps he could hide and surprise it. Fire his beam point-blank at one of its vents or eyeholes, there must be some.