Escape Velocity

by Jason M. Hough

Reality didn’t care what he expected, of course. What he felt was a curious, calming warmth that spread out from a pinpoint spot between his eyes, up and over his scalp to the base of his neck, and then inward. It tickled. It delighted him. He felt like he had the first time he’d sipped a truly good whiskey, only this sensation went right to the core of his skull, not to his belly. It was even more pleasant, more comforting, than the drink. Exponentially better.

  He was conscious of the influx of…something…into his head. Memories, thoughts, an intellect. Yet it was all out of his grasp. Like knowing someone had entered the room but, just now, he couldn’t turn around to say hello. He knew it was there, and that was the limit of his senses.

  “Traveler,” the being said, “your brain…is different.”

  “Okay?” He felt dizzy. Giddy. At peace.

  “We understand you think of this as an immunity,” it said. “It is more than that.”

  “What is it, then?”

  A pause. Perhaps it did not understand yet, itself. Perhaps it wanted to keep the knowledge from him for some reason. But then it spoke. “My species has two separate brains. You are aware of this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Humans have one, a trait shared with all others save us. But you, Traveler, you have something in between.”

  “In between?”

  “Not one brain, not two, but a single physical organ capable of holding two states in each tiny quanta of the mind. In effect, the best of both, though from what I gather you’ve yet to adopt a true use for this beyond a simple hardening of your mental facilities.”

  Skyler considered this. He’d never really felt particularly hardened, mentally, but he had taken rather a lot of blows to the head in his recent life. “I think I understand,” he said carefully. “Will I be able to, I don’t know, recall your memories? When this is done?”

  “You won’t,” it said. “But I will. If it works.”

  “You lost me.”

  “I will be in there with you, Skyler. A companion, living in this secondary state of your brain’s structure.”

  He hesitated. This didn’t sound good, all of a sudden. He felt like a monkey in a lab, if only for a moment. Too late now, he supposed. He’d taken its hand, given permission.

  “We must hurry, Traveler,” the voice said.

  “Why?” Stupid question. He knew why. Still, it answered.

  “They are coming.”

  —

  Samantha didn’t need a computer to know the truth of it.

  They were going to be late.

  After everything, all the vast distances covered, the alien world visited, the failed ruse at the edge of the solar system, the destruction of the Chameleon, and their strange calculated expulsion in-system to make one last effort at salvaging this fiasco. After all that, she was going to be thirty seconds late.

  “Vaughn, Prumble,” she said.

  The two were nearby, behind her, in free fall toward the ground. Both acknowledged simultaneously.

  “Give these bastards something to think about.”

  “Understood,” Vaughn said.

  “A pleasure,” Prumble added.

  Sam glanced to her right. “Tania? With me.”

  And Sam streamlined herself, roaring like a meteor toward the blip on her visor that was Skyler Luiken.

  All at once the grounds around the complex in which he was located began to bubble with dazzling flashes of white and yellow. A few mortars each, the final supply now held in desperate reserve. The men started in with their beam weapons next, firing for effect. There was little point in attacking the big chrome monsters, but the rest of the alien rabble was fair game. Maybe it would trigger some protective instinct, make them back the fuck off. Maybe they’d get a lucky shot and rupture some fuel tank or another sensitive storage vessel. That would get the party started.

  Sam was eight hundred meters off the ground now. Soon she’d be below the roofline of the larger city that surrounded this place. It all rushed toward her. The elegant outer structures and the ugly inner ones. The lumbering shiny bruisers and the flood of tiny scrambling foot soldiers that had heeded the battle call. All of it obscured by the dueling particles of ash and the freshly delivered and updated virus. Explosions tossed their flimsy bodies in all directions, reflected eerily off their larger counterparts. The big ones were of single-minded purpose now. One picked up ridiculous speed and practically galloped.

  “Skyler, are you there? Answer! Skyler!” Tania had been repeating the request since finding his signal, so much so that her voice sounded raw and, Sam realized, she’d tuned the woman out.

  “We go in through the roof,” Sam said to her. “I’ll take the side facing away from the Elevator, you go opposite.”

  “And then what?”

  “I have no fucking idea,” Sam answered as she blasted a hole in the roof from two hundred meters above. “I’m making this up as I go along.”

  —

  “We must hurry,” the alien had said.

  The problem was Skyler didn’t really know how to hurry. He was not, as far as he could tell, an active participant in this process. He just had to hold the alien’s hand, and not fall off the bridge, which, though slick with rain and the spray of the frothy, icy river below, did have a low wall along each side, and, anyway, he lay in the middle of it, on his back, looking up at his new…friend. Companion. Whatever.

  So he did his best to relax and let it happen. Vaguely he wondered what it would mean if the process were interrupted. Was there a fail-safe? Or would he find himself the proud new owner of a half-mind with incomplete memories, insane from the lack of mental completeness and prone to late-night murderous rampages as a result?

  Lightning began to flicker across the sky, and with it the sound of thunder. At first far away, but growing nearer quite rapidly. Part of the dreamscape, he wondered, or the real world bleeding through?

  Skyler sat up a bit and looked over the wall. The river had swelled, its churned, whitecapped surface now licking the underside of the bridge. It grew higher as he watched, its surface drawn in dark grays save for the occasional—actually damn frequent now—flashes of lightning that inverted the dream-world’s colorscape to blinding whites and pastel yellows that lingered inside his retinas.

  A pain began to grow from the center of his skull. The opposite of that warm, easy beginning. The warmth became a fire, pushing outward. He wanted to let go of the hand and plunge his head into that water, which now licked at the top of the barrier wall. He felt as if he were cooking from the inside.

  “Augh!” he shouted, lying back on the hard stones. He moved to let go, to pull his hand away. But the three-eyed alien clamped down with its long, slender hand. An iron grip that squeezed, squeezed, squeezed, not just his flesh but his mind from the pressure of the transfer. It flooded Skyler’s cells, those unused bits he’d evidently had since birth, with all it had. A lifetime. A full consciousness that had lived many lifetimes, and all that entailed.

  It all flowed in and he could comprehend none of it. Only the heat registered. The agony as his brain cooked, overloaded like a computer plugged into a HocNet a million units strong, all bursting with information and not a concern in the world for whether or not the deluge could be handled.

  That water came over the wall.

  It rushed to Skyler and smashed into his face, flooding into his nostrils and mouth, at once cool, which he welcomed, yet choking him. Instinctively he jumped to his feet, his perpetual handshake transformed into a stabilizing grasp. The bridge began to collapse from both ends. In mere seconds they were on an island again, an island of cobblestones already submerged. It was up to his ankles. His shins.

  Skyler felt the stone beneath his feet begin to give way. He cried out in alarm, started to fall. The alien held him. It looked at him now, its three eyes suddenly wide open.

  Then the middle one, the window to that higher mind, snapped closed.

  “Finished,” it said, and let go.


  Skyler fell back and the torrent took him. And in the dark depths, glimpsed in the now-dim and terrible flash of lightning from above, he saw the silver tentacle come to take him down, down, down…

  —

  The snakelike chrome limb coiled around his midsection and ripped him from the medical pod. Skyler flopped out, arms and legs flailing, as the Scipio swarmer heaved him out of the machine and threw him against the wall.

  He just had time to get his elbow up as the impact came. Coherent thought only returned with the sharp spike of pain that shot from his elbow straight into his thick, overworked brain.

  Skyler felt like he’d just recovered from a great illness, the medication far from wearing off. His head, now full of who knows what, had a physical weight he’d never felt before, like someone had stuffed ten kilos of cotton between his ears. An illusion, surely. Memories had no mass. Did they?

  The swarmer barely fit in the tiny chamber where the mind transfers occurred. It had only two of its six limbs in front of itself, and it used them now to tear the trio of medical pods from their connective apparatus, crumpling them like tin cans. On the other side of the room Skyler saw the being that had shared itself with him. It had been pulled free first, and now lay against the opposite wall, utterly still, no life in its three dark eyes.

  Skyler tried to push himself to his feet, but his brain seemed slow to figure out how to work his limbs. He toppled against a stack of gear that crashed out from under him and found himself on the floor once again. He rolled in time to see the Scipio had shifted its focus back to him. It stared at him with its little array of sensors and lens-studded mechanical eyes, as if in disbelief that he could have survived what had gone on in here. The mind transfer, and the subsequent way in which he was thrown at the wall like a spaghetti noodle being tested for doneness.

  Skyler lifted one heavy arm and aimed right at that bundle of lenses. He fired.

  Well, he tried to. Nothing happened. He opened his mouth, the foulest of swears on his lips….

  And then a miracle.

  The ceiling exploded above the thing. Debris rained down, and then something larger. A figure. A human.

  A Samantha.

  She landed hard right on top of the swarmer’s curved hull and planted her wrist against the joint where one of its tentacles was connected to the body. One of the few places the mirror-shine was interrupted. Sam gave it the full force of her weapon. The tentacle sheared and fell away. The body began to writhe, but she did not let go. She moved her arm slightly and aimed into the hole left by the severed limb and fired again.

  The beam came out the other side, scorching the floor.

  The Scipio fell and rolled backward into the hall, lifeless, as Sam hopped neatly off and landed in front of Skyler. She extended a hand.

  The gesture was so like what the alien had done in that shared hallucination that for a second he could only stare at it and shake his head in wonder.

  Sam’s mouth twisted up at one corner, her annoyed look. “Well,” she said, “aren’t you a sorry sight.”

  “Sam, I…”

  Another figure came in through the door, climbing over the swarmer’s carcass. Skyler leaned and saw Tania there. His heart clenched. She looked so tired, yet there was a wild ferocity in her eyes. The face of a soldier who hadn’t slept in days because of the bombs falling all around. He reached out for her and she took his hand. She pulled him to his feet and folded her arms around him.

  “There you are,” she whispered.

  Skyler tried to return the hug, he wanted nothing more in the world than to do so, but his arms weren’t ready to listen. Tania sensed this, and shifted from hug to supportive hold, lifting one arm over her shoulder.

  Sam took the other and together they helped him up.

  “Hold on. What the hell, mate,” Sam said, “were you taking a fucking nap down here?”

  Skyler lifted his head. He grinned at her and let himself be lifted back to his feet. “Not exactly. I’ll explain later.”

  “Are you okay?” Tania asked. She was staring into his eyes, really staring, as if she could not find the person she knew in them.

  This worried him, because he wasn’t that person anymore. Not exclusively. He could feel it, inside his head. Another. “I’ll explain later,” he repeated. It was all he could do.

  A sharp punch of static in his ears. Skyler winced. Sam and Tania did the same at exactly the same moment. The signal coalesced and then Vanessa’s voice filled his ears. “—anyone reading me? Please reply.”

  They all spoke at once, gushing, overjoyed. Prumble’s voice there, too. Skyler wondered where he was, but Sam and Tania didn’t seem worried so he filed it for later. Sam’s voice won out. “Where are you, Vanessa? Are you safe?”

  “I’m better than that,” she replied. “We have a way home. A ship. But, uh, the Scipios aren’t too happy about it. If we’re going to get to you we have to do it now. Please tell me you’re aboard that station, the one the Swarm is crowded around?”

  “Uh.” Sam looked at Skyler and Tania. “We’re planetside just now.”

  “When you say planetside…you mean?”

  “The base of that Elevator.”

  “Oh no,” she said. “Get out now. Get away.”

  “Why? What’s happened?”

  “We’re swinging around behind the planet again. Losing connec—et to orbit, all of you!”

  “What’s going on up there? Vanessa? Vanessa?!”

  Prumble’s voice interrupted Sam. “She’s not kidding. You’d better come and see this.”

  Reuniting with Sam and Tania, then hearing Vanessa’s voice again, and now the sonorous tone of the dear Mr. Prumble, it was all too much. Skyler faltered, he wanted to lie down and give his brain a few years to cope with it all.

  If only he had the time.

  Sam and Tania carried Skyler to the hole Sam had made during her magnificent entrance. The three of them flew up and onto the roof in unison.

  Skyler, shell-shocked, could not take his eyes away from the sky.

  It rained fire.

  “Vanessa,” he muttered to himself, “what did you do?”

  The fireballs dripped through the choking haze of the new virus, causing the whole sky to flicker with brilliant oranges and yellows. They fell everywhere, the ones close to the horizon almost totally obscured by the powder-filled atmosphere, just tiny shimmering red orbs that vanished as they reached the ground. Closer, though, the flaming bits of debris made landfall with staggering velocity. Impacts rocked the entire city. Buildings exploded and began to collapse. The streets and plazas were being pulverized.

  “To the Elevator!” Sam shouted over the cataclysmic noise. She ran, Tania on her heels, helping Skyler until he shrugged her off.

  “I’m okay,” he said to her, a half-truth. “Go, go!”

  A falling chunk of something slammed into the adjacent building. The ground buckled, the shock wave like a hammer blow across Skyler’s entire body. He flew sideways and almost fell from the roof, managing to get his feet under himself at the last possible second.

  They ran. They soared. Skyler could not help but look to the sky at first, as if he might spot an incoming strike and avoid it. He knew this would be impossible. There were too many, coming far too fast, to avoid. All they could do was run.

  “Prumble and Vaughn are there, waiting,” Sam said. “They’ve got a climber.”

  The news focused Skyler’s mind. Or, the half that was still his. As he ran he felt that second awareness wriggle and squirm. A purely mental sensation, but nonetheless real. It was in there. The Creator. Settling, no doubt struck numb and confused by the alien architecture of Skyler’s brain. It could, of course, not be settling at all, but dying, forced into an incompatible structure. He could do nothing about that.

  He could only run.

  The Lonesome

  THE DARKNESS DID not last. Beth Lee had anticipated the power outage aboard the ship and taken measures to shield critical c
omponents against the electromagnetic blast by safely shutting them off a split second before the wave hit. Still, it had been a terrifying stretch of pitch-black before the lights flickered and the computers restarted.

  The Lonesome woke like a spooked animal, but there was no time to let her nerves settle.

  Gloria stared at her displays and wondered how the hell she was going to make this work.

  Her companions were on the floor. She glanced at the elevator site on her scope and frowned. The whole area around the base, and stretching now hundreds of kilometers to the east and west, was nothing but a constant shimmering eruption of tiny explosions. Landing there would be suicide, but even if the conditions were calm the Lonesome was not an atmosphere-rated craft. She could not land.

  They’d have to come to her. But even if they could get a Scipio climber moving and left immediately, at best they would only reach a few thousand meters of altitude before the Lonesome passed uselessly overhead. Odds were they wouldn’t be able to get the vehicle moving at all.

  She touched the screen, drowning in a sudden all-consuming grief. If only she’d known they were down there. If only she’d realized what would happen to the ships in that swarm if they were expelled and could not change course. And this was only the beginning. They would be falling to the surface for weeks. There were living beings down there. Diseased and wandering but no less precious. Wildlife, probably, too.

  She’d come here to save this place and instead initiated its destruction.

  “Snap out of it, boss,” Xavi said. He was at her shoulder. She hadn’t heard him come up from his station.

  “What do we do?”

  “About the planet? Sorry, but that ship has sailed. Damage is done.”

  “And our friends? How could they survive…that?”

  “They’ve made it through a lot. We have to assume they’ll get through this. Anyway, we’ll find out soon enough when we swing back around. The more important question is, how the bloody fucking hell are we going to get them aboard?”

  Gloria stared at the images, her mind utterly blank. “It’s impossible,” she whispered. “Xavi, it can’t be done.”