Escape Velocity

by Jason M. Hough

  Phone, wallet, passport. This last he thumbed through quickly, looking for new stamps. There were hundreds of stamps inside, but none were new. No surprise there. Wherever Archon had sent him, they would have provided the required documents. This passport was his, and he had a few more pages yet to fill.

  Now came the moment of truth. Clear conscience or not, there was one thing he simply had to know. He went to the kitchenette and gripped the handle of the fridge. Steeling himself against what lay within, he pulled the door open. White light bathed him from inside, along with a rush of frigid air that brought goose bumps to his skin.

  The space was completely empty save for the one thing he always made sure they stocked for him: exactly twelve bottles of Sapporo beer. They were in a neat row across the top shelf, from one side to the other. Each had its famous label facing him, save for the last three on the end. Those three were turned to face away.

  Peter Caswell felt his stomach tighten. Over the last few days, under the Integrity-Assured status his implant provided, he’d killed three people. All memory of this had been deleted. Since he’d come up with this way to keep track a decade ago, he’d now assassinated a total of 206 human beings, and the only thing he knew about any of it was the number. That’s all he wanted to know.

  He could have tried to learn more: taken clandestine pictures, scrawled a secret coded diary, left himself a voice mail on some personal unlisted number. There were a thousand ways to drop such hints that fell outside the safeguards already built into the implant. But part of the reason for his top-ranked status in this career was that he’d never attempted to tell himself these things. The beer bottles were his one allowance. If Monique or anyone else at Archon knew about this, they’d never mentioned it.

  Caswell removed the three backward bottles, set them on the counter, opened them, and poured each into the sink. A silent memorial to the three lives he’d taken and the widows or orphans he’d left behind. Then he took a fourth bottle out and opened it with that satisfying tsuk. The cap rattled in the sink.

  “May someone remember you,” he said for his victims, and drank.

  On the elevator down he summoned an autonomous limousine on his phone. The sleek black vehicle waited for him outside the doors of the corporate-owned building. No one said a word to him as he exited. No one ever did. Friends, even acquaintances, did not suit him. Relationships were…difficult. Memories, the goddamn past, were not for him. He had only Monique Pendleton, the one person in the world who could understand his life, who knew what it was like to have bits of your memories stolen away for security’s sake. And though he’d never met her in person, she was enough. Besides, she had the power to remove from his mind the horrors of what he’d done out there. She was the reason he could live with himself.

  Peter entered the car and immediately barked, “Turn that off.” The BBC news anchor on the seat-back screen vanished. “Radio as well,” he added. Silence enveloped him as the car slid into traffic. He stopped on the way and bought a scone and coffee, diligently avoiding the magazines and newspapers on display just outside the café door. News was poisonous. To glimpse some headline like THREE TOP MALAY DIPLOMATS ASSASSINATED IN BALI, or something along those lines, would fill his mind with questions. Had it been me? Was I really capable of that? What if they were the good guys?

  He didn’t want to know. He wanted to stay one step ahead of his past, his own version of Mr. Hyde.

  But he also wanted to give himself every chance at success. He may have killed 206 people, but he gained no benefit of experience from that. To him, they’d all been the first. And the next one to fall would be no different. The perpetual rookie, that’s what he was.

  “Heathrow, terminal one,” he said to the car. His mouthful of scone mangled the words, but the vehicle obeyed without hesitation.

  —

  Caswell parked himself on a stool at Wetherspoons, the only pre-security pub in the terminal. He’d chosen the spot, and his mark, after several careful minutes of observation. Someone roughly his size, age, and build. A weary-looking Asian businessman fit the bill this time. Caswell ordered a brandy and ginger ale, plus a burger with crisps. He made small talk with the man next to him.

  To be good at his job he had to keep certain skills honed. This was the only gift he could give his professional self: training. Practice. He had no memory of past missions to guide his actions in the field, so he lived his personal life in such a way as to best prepare himself for his next first assassination.

  Oddly, it was not knowledge of weapons or martial arts that he prioritized. It was travel. The ability to go anywhere, under a hastily assumed identity, and survive. Not just survive, but thrive. Play the role via total improvisation. Adapt to the surroundings. Live in the moment with only his wits to guide him.

  Reversion meant he had five days, give or take, of cool-down time. It was physically impossible for Monique to trigger his implant again before then. Doing so would drive him insane, or worse. So after each mission came the mini-holiday, and with his rather obscene bank account balance, Caswell could literally go anywhere and do anything. That’s precisely what he did.

  At the bar he ate and drank and made conversation with the mark he’d chosen. One Wei-Lin from Shanghai, a factory manager on his way to a conference in Brighton. Nice enough chap with a strong accent that Peter listened to carefully.

  I am Wei-Lin, a Shanghai factory manager. That would do nicely. Caswell paid his bill and said his goodbyes. “I wish you all success in Brighton,” he said to Wei-Lin, with a slight bow. The man blinked in surprise, for the voice he heard nearly matched his own.

  Caswell walked across the hall, past a crowded simkit parlor, and into the nearly empty bookshop. He meandered to the travel section. In the center of the bottom shelf was a book titled 300 Thrills in 300 Pages: The Adventure Traveler’s Guide to the World’s Most Exciting Destinations. Peter Caswell thumbed to page 206, one for each kill he didn’t have weighing on his blissfully empty mind.

  Page 206. Inland Patagonia, Chile.

  “Right,” he said to himself. Then he pulled his phone from his pocket and purchased a first-class ticket on the next flight to Santiago, plus a room at a five-star hotel. Wei-Lin had worn a Rolex and fine shoes, so it seemed appropriate for this borrowed persona. Clothes and luggage Peter would get on-site. Adapt and improvise. He’d introduce himself to everyone as Wei-Lin, just in from Shanghai, and strike up dinner conversation about his life as a factory manager. Make up lies on the spot about why he was in Chile, and anything else that came up. Perhaps even have an affair. Should he ever be sent there to remove someone from this world, he’d have a little firsthand knowledge of the place.

  He’d practice, and hope it helped. After all, 206 bottles of Sapporo facing away from him might tell him his body count, but they implied something else, too: He was brilliant at his job. Whatever he was doing, it was working.

  —

  Peter Caswell was sitting in the concourse waiting for his flight when a little chime in his ear broke the monotony.

  “Status, Mr. Caswell?”

  “Hello, Ms. Pendleton,” he said. “I’m fine, though the shoulder and ribs are sore. But other than that, all good. I’m at Heathrow, just off for holiday, you know?”

  She knew of his post-mission activities: trips taken at random to dangerous, thrilling places. She approved with open jealousy, her office being in orbit at Archon headquarters. “Well, cancel your plans. Something urgent has come up.”

  “Urgent?” He sat up a little. Urgent had promise, but the timing made him skeptical. “What is it?”

  “Are you familiar with the Venturi?”

  For a second he thought he’d misheard. “You mean the Venturi?”

  “I’ll take that as an emphatic yes.”

  Dusty memories swam through Caswell’s mind. Everyone knew at least something about the Venturi. A spacecraft where, allegedly, banned weapons research had been conducted. The whole thing had vanished about t
welve years ago, leaving behind no shortage of conspiracy theories as to what had happened. Caswell figured the ESA had been up to something truly terrifying and, given UN rulings on how international laws apply to off-Earth activities, they’d scuttled the whole operation before any penalty might arise. “Okay, you’ve got my attention. What’s happened? Details about their research finally leak?” he asked.

  “Not exactly. Not yet, anyway. Someone found the damn ship.”

  Caswell closed his eyes and waited for the other shoe to drop. It was the nature of the job. Archon had obviously learned of this discovery early. Maybe Monique had been asked to eliminate whoever had spotted the thing. Perhaps she had a drone rifle for him to place, pointed at the front door of some astronomer’s flat in Cambridge. It couldn’t be much more than that. Caswell wasn’t used for trivial tasks. He was a hammer, and a hammer drove nails. In his entire career she’d sent him on only a few missions that didn’t rate the Integrity-Assured status his implant provided, and they’d almost always been gimmes. Right place, right time sort of stuff, never anything sensitive. And if the rumors were true, you couldn’t get much more sensitive than the Venturi. “Fuck,” he managed to say.

  “Indeed. Now listen, I might have figured out a way to get you a seat on the salvage boat.”

  “What do you mean? What salvage boat?”

  “The one that’s going to try to reach her before the wreck falls into the Sun.” She let that settle in for a few seconds. She always knew when to do that. “There’s a flight leaving for Mysore in one hour. Be on it. I’ll have papers waiting at our drop there. Full ident kit, plus a few other goodies the team is working on. Use the travel time to get familiar with the Venturi, because your cover requires you to know all about it.”

  “You realize I’ve just reverted, right? This is a lot of detail you’re giving me, Mo.” He felt uncomfortable knowing anything at all. It defeated the purpose.

  “It can’t wait five days, Peter,” she said. “That salvage boat is our only shot. And anyway, it’s a long ride out there. I can activate your implant remotely before you reach the destination. This is, by the way, assuming they take you on as crew, which they had better, if you take my meaning.”

  So much for ritual, he thought bitterly. No posh flat above London, no comfortable bed, no silk sheets. No row of Sapporo in the fridge. He’d trigger somewhere off-planet on a damned spacecraft. And reversion? Who knew where the fuck he’d be. It was going to hurt.

  “Triple pay,” Monique added, as if reading his mind.

  He snorted. “Throw in four weeks off and you’ve got a deal.”

  “Done.”

  Caswell puffed his cheeks and let out the breath. He glanced at the gate where his flight to Santiago had started to board. “Hell. Okay, Mo. I’m on my way.”

  The money didn’t matter so much as the time to spend it. But it was the chance to remember, at least a little, that left his gut twisting with equal portions of excitement and trepidation.

  THE DEAD SHIP tumbled through space toward the fiery surface of the Sun.

  Peter Caswell studied the wreck that had been the Venturi. A spherical bulk constituted the largest piece, rolling end over end. Jutting from this was a severed portion of the truss that had once led out to the cargo bays and, behind those, the fuel and engines, all of which was now not much more than a cloud of debris trailing along like a comet’s tail. Mentally he reassembled the research craft from the schematics he’d reviewed on the flight out. Everything seemed to be here, just shattered.

  “Still holding air?” the mission commander, Angelina, asked, her deep, gritty voice thick with a Central African accent that left little doubt as to who was in charge.

  Her question was directed to the man she floated next to, who went by the name Iceberg. He pulled back from his scope and glanced at his superior. “There’s holes in it big enough to fly through.”

  Angelina smacked the back of his head. “Answer without being a jackass for once. What about power?”

  Iceberg shrugged and pressed his eyes against the black rubber hood. “No way to tell, Angel. But it’s not transmitting shit. Not even an SOS, and the lights are all off.”

  The captain hovered in silence. Caswell tried to imagine the mental deliberation going on behind her eyes.

  The stated goal was simple enough: recover the black box. Someone wanted the Venturi’s data and was willing to pay a fantastic sum for it. Angelina and her crappy little independent salvage boat, the Pawn Takes Bishop, had known—and possibly paid—the right person at the right time, and won the contract.

  Outside the Venturi grew larger.

  “How the fuck did they lose track of something that big?” Caswell had asked Monique, reviewing the mission dossier in his bunk on the first night out from Earth. The ship dwarfed most space stations.

  “My guess,” she’d replied, “is deliberate forgetfulness to hide a rather embarrassing cock-up.”

  He could appreciate that. “Deliberate Forgetfulness” could be the title of his life story.

  For the hundredth time he let his gaze casually flick across the other members of the salvage team. They were all older than his thirty-two years, rejects from the corporate asteroid mining operations that no doubt brought them off-planet in the first place. A tough and jaded bunch.

  Their ship, Pawn Takes Bishop, constituted a pretty typical salvage boat—a corporate discard deemed unfit for work in the Gefion asteroid fields.

  Another crewman, Klaus, cleared his throat. “Why’s it up here, anyway?” He was looking at Caswell.

  Angelina replied without turning her head. “What do you mean?”

  “Up here. Above the Sun. There’s nothing around, so what were they doing?”

  “Classified,” she replied with more than a little irony. She kept her gaze firmly on the display before her. “Ask the geek.”

  Caswell offered an apologetic smile, not really looking at any of them. “I was never privy to that—don’t have the clearance, I’m afraid. But feel free to speculate. I’m curious myself.”

  The crew shifted uncomfortably.

  Now the captain glared at him. “At some point it would be nice if you earned the air you’re breathing, Dr. Nells.”

  Caswell raised his hands in defense. “You wanted a subject matter expert, so here I am.”

  “Tell me this, then: What are we going to find in there?”

  “A black box,” Caswell said simply. Then he nodded toward the wreckage on the display. “If you’re lucky.”

  —

  Pawn Takes Bishop docked with Venturi three hours later.

  Everything had to be done manually given the lack of even backup power on the other side, but once the rings were secure a tap linked the two crafts’ grids and some emergency lighting came on. Faint red light spilled in from the porthole. Iceberg studied the readouts. “Vacuum. Told ya.”

  Expecting this, Angelina had made everyone suit up an hour ago, save for Iceberg and the mousy engineer, Bridgette, who would remain at the Pawn’s controls.

  To Caswell the suit felt like being wrapped in tape. The smart fabric allowed for a full range of movement, loosening just enough to let muscles flex, constricting again the instant they relaxed. It all added up to a sort of permanent state of evenly applied pressure, which his brain refused to translate as anything other than stiff-as-cardboard.

  The round hatch swung inward and Caswell fell in line just behind Angelina. The big son of a bitch, Klaus, drifted inside without preamble, headlamp sweeping across a chamber lined on all sides with labeled storage lockers. Two other Pawn crew members followed behind Caswell, carrying the tools of their trade.

  “IA6,” came a voice in his ear. Monique Pendleton, transmitting from Earth a good nine minutes away. “We’ve been studying the data from that scanner you’re carrying, and only six of the Venturi crew are accounted for. One is missing. It’s possible her transponder was damaged. Details inbound.” Seconds later a private message indicat
or blipped on the inside of his visor. “Once you’ve installed the tap, your next objective is accounting for this person.”

  Caswell turned off his local transmission option and sent a reply. “Understood. If she’s here, I’ll find her.”

  Monique’s message contained a brief dossier on a scientist named Alice Vale. He scanned it with practiced efficiency, absorbing the important details. The motion pic showed a thin woman with short, stylish brown hair. Her eyes, close together, were large and brimming with intelligence. She hadn’t smiled during the ID scan. Her gaze had a mixture of both intensity and distance that suggested someone who lived to multitask.

  Caswell’s eyes flicked across the details as the portrait spun around. A tall woman at nearly 180 centimeters, and rail thin. She’d been twenty-eight years old at the time of the Venturi’s disappearance. Parents, deceased. No husband. No children. Born in Chicago, educated at Dartmouth, tested out early straight into a graduate program at Cambridge. Studied biology and cognitive science. Accepted into the ESA at twenty-six, joined the crew of the Venturi just one year later. And then, a year into the mission, it had all ended.

  “Sad,” he muttered. A promising scientist, lost in her prime.

  The team continued forward to the inner airlock door, which hung ajar and showed signs of fire damage around the lip and on the surrounding wall. Debris floated about. Angelina swatted aside a clump of charred fabric and moved up to help Klaus pry the damaged door aside. Together they wrestled its bent shape until a gap wide enough to pass through had opened.

  A junction waited within, each wall scorched black by the same explosion or impact that had blown open the airlock door. Compartments led off in all directions.

  Angelina and Klaus stopped in the center, letting the rest of the salvage team catch up. Caswell moved aside and steadied himself in the junction, letting the last two in behind him.