Crystal Escape

by Doug J. Cooper

  Hejmo waited three more minutes before signaling the overhead door to open. The Power House safety inspections always took fourteen minutes, and today it would as well. When the time came, he directed the truck out of the building and onto the next stop in his regular inspection tour.

  While Hejmo followed his usual route through the cellar, stopping to walk through certain installations and inspecting others from the cab, the Tech in the back of the truck operated the chem processor. Used to regenerate catalyst material from the air purification units, this was one of twelve such units in Vivo’s inventory.

  Lazura had purchased this particular model of chem processor because its flawed design caused frequent malfunctions. When a failure occurred, longstanding procedure was to truck the faulty unit to the workshop for repair.

  A unit had malfunctioned a week ago, and while in the shop, a Tech had swapped out the internals and added instrumentation ports, effectively converting the chem processor into a working fuel processor. Hejmo now drove the truck with that modified equipment, and it had just been loaded with hot fuel blocks.

  The Tech started the conversion process by introducing an acid mixture to etch the surface of the fuel slabs. Working with care, he adjusted the ratio of chemicals and timed the pressure ramp by eye from a small display.

  After twenty minutes, he switched regimes, flushing the etching fluid and starting the thermal excitation cycle, something that took ninety minutes to complete. After a fifteen-minute stabilization period, the half-stacks, though dangerously hot, were ready for loading into drive pod fuel casings.

  Hejmo’s inspection tour lasted long enough for the stabilization period to complete. At that point, he approached the recycling facility, the last stop on his standard route. This facility, a collection of a dozen mini-factories housed inside three big warehouses, ensured that everything disposed of as waste anywhere on Vivo found its way back into the supply stream.

  The three buildings of the recycling facility were joined end to end to enclose a significant amount of deck space. Hejmo drove through the vehicle entrance in the center building, and that fed onto an indoor vehicle roundabout.

  A couple of small transports rode ahead of Hejmo, and a service van with a Tech in the cab pulled in behind him. Hejmo called to the Tech in the van using the common channel. “I have junction links for the drive pods here in the cab with me. You are to install them next. Pull over and receive them.”

  Both vehicles took the next turnoff to a covered alcove, unusual because it had no cameras or other sensors Criss might use to eavesdrop. Lazura had fretted about allowing the existence of such a dead space on the island because if Criss couldn’t see, neither could she. She loathed the loss of control, but given its strategic importance to her plans, she allowed the unmonitored alcove to exist as the seeming result of a construction mistake.

  Hejmo directed his big truck into the alcove, leaving just enough room for the service van to squeeze in next to it. The back doors of both vehicles opened and four Attendants hopped down from the van. Working in teams of two, they unloaded four empty fuel casings, carried them inside Hejmo’s service truck, and set them in a row in front of the chem processor tub with lids open.

  The Attendants then joined Hejmo a safe distance away while the Tech winched the chem processor tub up and tilted it forward so the slabs of brilliant energy slid into the casings. After, he latched the lids, sealing the raw energy inside. In his last act, he climbed down and stood against the near wall, waiting to die.

  Working again in teams of two, the Attendants carried the loaded fuel casings to the rear of the van. Three climbed in with the cargo and one drove, guiding the van out of the recycling facility and down the back ramp to the subdeck.

  When it arrived at the base of the first Corsia SuperDrive, Lazura prepared to make a move that Criss would see. She could not conceive of a way to load the fuel casings into the drive pods in secret, so her plan was to make sure Criss was looking somewhere else.

  She did that by triggering a small bomb on the Montrose, the one hidden inside one of the shielded crystal carry cases. The detonation caused modest damage to the platform but succeeded in creating tremendous confusion and disarray.

  Her expectation was that Criss would rush to help and spend time investigating. While she couldn’t know what actions he actually took, she did know he did not intervene as two Attendants unloaded a fuel casing from the van and placed it on the pod’s small service elevator. While one synbod climbed back into the van, the other stepped next to the fuel and rode with it up the side of the pod.

  The Attendants unloaded the second fuel casing in the same fashion. When they moved the third casing onto its pod elevator, Lazura sent a passcode that caused an old energy weapon in the dense jungle of the Congo Basin half a world away—a big gun she’d identified months earlier—to fire a beam into the sky.

  Controlled by a hapless band of rebels unaware of her meddling, the big gun hadn’t been fired in a decade. The beam was weak and the aim awful, but Lazura didn’t care. Pointed in the vague direction of the Montrose and coming on the heels of an explosion, Criss would devote significant resources following up. And because the rebels lived in a remote place with few services, it would take valuable time for him to gather information.

  With the four Attendants up on raised elevators, each poised at a drive pod fuel access hatch, Lazura’s tendrils throbbed with a mix of tension, excitement, anticipation, and fear. Her next move would light up the nav. If Criss looked at Vivo, he would see it.

  But still she needed more time. To gain it, she launched the nineteen Elite Sevens under tow by Sisyphus.

  The moment the Elite Sevens started their sprint into space, Lazura directed the Attendants to load the fuel. With the speed and precision only a synbod could muster, they opened the drive pod’s fuel access door, manhandled the fuel casing into the receiver, opened the switch panel and disabled the link back to the ops panel, and slammed the access door shut.

  Believing she’d make it but fearing she wouldn’t, Lazura counted the seconds, each one lasting an eternity. When the nav lit up, her suffering did not diminish. She needed eight more seconds before the drives would fire.

  The go-signal flashed and Lazura triggered the launch sequence.

  When the SuperDrives thundered to life, the island shook and groaned, and the ocean bubbled and hissed. Pop, pop, pop. Small explosive charges sheared a thousand huge bolts holding the substructure in place. Massive quick-releases opened, disconnecting the island platform from the support legs running down to the ocean floor.

  And then the dome-covered island rose above the waves of the Pacific Ocean, hovered for a moment, and began accelerating in a climb toward the clouds.

  Knowing Criss couldn’t abort takeoff without killing Cheryl, Juice, and everyone else aboard, Lazura turned the dome shield to max, cut all external links, and reviewed her flight plan.

  Criss’s next chance to intervene would be when she escaped Earth’s atmosphere and reached outer space.

  Before then, she needed to decide how long she would let her hostages live.

  Chapter 9

  When the bomb exploded on the Montrose, Criss suspected that Lazura was making her break for freedom. He tempered the thought, though, because he’d been imagining her involvement in more and more situations and did not want that preoccupation to influence the facts.

  But he couldn’t deny that the disarray caused by the bomb was a great first step in any escape plan. While the platform move had already disrupted the normal flow of vessels in orbit, the cloud of debris from the explosion, combined with the swarm of emergency response craft floating nearby, pushed the scene into chaos.

  From his subterranean console, Criss jumped his awareness to the ops bench of the Montrose. After confirming that the damage to the platform was minor, he searched every corner of the orbiting installation looking for clues.

  As he traveled the vessel, he helped where he could, careful n
ever to reveal his presence. In one instance he overrode the electronics of a stuck door so rescuers could gain access to an injured cadet. In another, he modified a low-level routine to counteract the plummeting temperature in the aft service shop.

  At the parcel depot, his forensic scan identified the point of detonation—the cubby where the two cases of crystals had been stored. The likelihood of Lazura’s involvement spiked at the discovery, and he responded accordingly.

  He started by confirming the safety of his leadership. On Vivo, Chase and Justin carried new crystals that let Criss leap his awareness inside the dome. Flexing this capability, he scanned every deck and established there were no new threats since his last review. Outside the dome, he confirmed that nothing approached the island by air, boat, or sub.

  On Sisyphus, he reviewed the entire operation on the barge and visited every ship along the tether to verify that nothing posed a threat to Sid. Convinced that Lazura was making her play, Criss sought Sid’s permission to move the scout back to Earth and the center of the action.

  Reversing the course of a spacecraft hurtling through space is like turning around a car careening down a long, steep hill. While possible, slowing to a stop and then accelerating back in the other direction takes enormous energy and a capable vehicle. The scout, engines glowing as they fought a fierce battle against momentum, had the wherewithal to achieve the feat, which is why Criss wanted it in the mix.

  Criss had just started turning the scout around when an energy beam flashed up from the Congo as the Montrose passed overhead. The shot went wide, and the Montrose, already on high alert, obliterated the jungle site in an automated response, destroying any evidence Criss might have used to attribute the attack to Lazura.

  As the scout accelerated toward Earth, a major astronomical tracking installation in Socorro, New Mexico—one Criss piggybacked on to track orbital activity—blinked off. The outage lasted less than a second before backup systems restored function. Criss jumped to the facility in search of Lazura and wasted precious time before learning that the cause of the inopportune failure was a rodent infestation at a transfer station.

  The scout reached Earth, and as Criss dove the craft into orbit, nineteen Elite Sevens disengaged from Sisyphus and began a mystery sprint into deep space.

  And as the scout swung around behind the planet, the SuperDrives on Vivo came alive.

  Lazura!

  Frantic, Criss’s tendrils chilled as he confronted the reality of her success and the magnitude of his own failure. When his scenario forecasts predicted yet more failure ahead, he fought a rising panic, one that threatened to overwhelm him.

  Diving his awareness to the island paradise, he jumped for the ops panel, determined to shut down the drives. But the moment he landed, he felt a jolt, one so intense it reached all the way back to his underground bunker in the Adirondack Mountains.

  The existence of such a defensive system removed any doubt about who was responsible for this outrage. Having primed himself for just this moment, he dove again for the panel, prepared to tackle whatever Lazura had in store for him.

  At the interface, her defenses presented like a morphing thicket, snags and catches grabbing at him as he fought his way forward. And while he did, the clock advanced on the launch sequence.

  But he would not be denied. No one messes with my leadership. With a last push, his goal in sight, he stretched and slapped at the panel, shutting down the drive pods.

  But nothing happened. He repeated the action, this time chasing the signal as it raced through the links and feeds, watching for the failure of execution. He made it all the way out to the drive pods themselves, and there he learned that synbods had intentionally disabled the link.

  Fuming, Criss jumped and overpowered the Attendants standing on the platforms next to the drive pods, commanding them to cancel the launch. But as his consciousness landed in the three-gen crystals, in all four cases he found himself careening through the air for the briefest moment, followed by a devastating crash. Just before he’d landed in the synbods, Lazura had commanded them to dive headfirst from their elevated perches down to the deck below.

  Then the drive pods fired. Shaking and shuddering, the island lifted into the air. Criss dove back to the ops panel to override everything and guide Vivo back to Earth, only to learn that on takeoff, the assembly supporting the island from below had been left behind. Without it, Vivo would crumble if Lazura tried to re-land the enormous structure.

  And so to complete his humiliation, Criss helped Lazura kidnap Cheryl and Juice by clearing the path ahead of Vivo as it climbed the sky into space. He had no choice; their safety was paramount. At the same time, he jumped back to Vivo’s ops panel to confirm the health of the various systems critical to launch success.

  And then Lazura enabled the dome shield, cutting him off from everything inside. Unsure how it went wrong so fast, Criss pulled in resources from everywhere and jumped to Chase, then to Justin. In both cases, the link he established proved too weak for him to manipulate events.

  The scout had just completed its swing behind Earth, positioning it to use a weapon to disable Vivo’s engines as the behemoth rose into space. An energy beam aimed just right could thread the needle into Vivo’s substructure from below, severing a trunk line and disabling the SuperDrives.

  Up ahead, Criss sighted the brilliant cones of plasma lifting Vivo from Earth’s atmosphere. He closed on his quarry, approaching from a side angle to avoid the intense wash of energy directly behind the drive pods.

  Precision was key with this shot because to hit the trunk line, the beam had to brush past critical life support systems. He’d outfitted the scout with his own technology, though, so he could take the shot with confidence.

  The distance between the scout and Vivo closed, yet the scout’s weapon system failed to reach target lock. Criss confirmed the integrity of the scout’s systems, searched for external causes, and found it in a thin cloud growing behind Vivo.

  Chaff. Criss’s humiliation drifted to despair when he realized his plan was thwarted by a countermeasure technology so old it was a footnote in aviation history.

  Vivo had huge piles of EM sand, tiny grains manufactured with sophisticated electromagnetic properties. When loose, the grains made wonderful dunes and beaches for guests to enjoy. Yet with a small energy field, the same particles would hold together to form ridged structures, becoming anything from a rocky tunnel to stone steps down a cliff face. In between these extremes, the sand made excellent hiking trails through the wilderness, or perhaps garden soil for plants.

  Versatile for creating unique guest experiences, EM sand had practical uses as well. The technology had advanced to the point where, after an event, a portion of the sand could be formed into a flexible hose, and that could be used to vacuum the rest of the particles into storage. When done, the end of the hose crumbled and was sucked away, the length ever shortening until everything was stowed for future use.

  Criss knew about the EM sand and considered its use to be appropriate, even inspired, for a vacation resort like Vivo. He now understood that the grains were the perfect cover material to sprinkle behind Vivo as it accelerated into the void.

  A modern spin on the old countermeasure of military jets dropping foil strips to confuse radar, the scatter of electromagnetic sand behind Vivo made it impossible for Criss to target the trunk line with confidence. And to his consternation, the unique EM properties of the particles further interfered with his ability to jump inside the dome, already challenged because of Lazura’s dome shield.

  Moving the scout away from Vivo, he called to Cheryl and Juice, giving them a positive message of hope. “Hang in there. I’m working on it.”

  Spinning through scenarios for disabling the SuperDrives, his best options now relied on help from his team inside. Given their precarious situation and the demands they would make of him, though, he would need time, perhaps days, before he could execute.

  And this triggered a new dilem
ma, one so unsettling it caused him to wail.

  “What happened?” called Juice.

  “It may take some time for me to save you.”

  “You need to save all the guests,” Juice replied. “It’s everyone or no one.”

  Exactly, he thought, her response confirming what he’d anticipated. Saving everyone meant controlling Vivo, a much bigger challenge compared to spiriting away two souls.

  And while the scout could keep up with Vivo as it blazed into deep space, Criss the crystal remained in his underground bunker on Earth. As time passed and the distance from Earth grew, his ability to jump his awareness out to the action would fade.

  He forecast an 80 percent chance he could stop Lazura before distance became an issue. But that left a 20 percent chance he could not. Which meant a one in five chance of losing Cheryl and Juice, possibly forever.

  And that’s what caused him to wail. He had no choice but to break off pursuit, swing back to Earth, move his crystal self onto the scout, and resume the chase. The way Vivo was accelerating, it would take him more than a day to catch up again. He’d be out of contact with Cheryl and Juice for most of that time.

  But in the end, he’d have the scout, the best tool for solving a problem like this. And he’d have all the time he needed, days or weeks if that’s what it took to execute a low-risk rescue plan.

  Indeed, he’d have all the time he needed because he wouldn’t rest until he rescued his leadership, even if he had to follow Lazura all the way back to the Kardish home world to do so. His forecasts put his chances of success above 97 percent with this approach.

  “I’ve loaded some ideas into Chase and Justin that will speed things along when I return,” he told Cheryl and Juice after briefing them on his dilemma. “Do what you can, but it’s not necessary to take any risks. Put your safety first. Please.”

  As he turned the scout back to Earth for the second time that day, Criss updated Sid about his intent to move his crystal from his underground console and into a synthetic body. “I’m about to get dressed and then ride the capsule up to the scout. I’ll be in and out of contact for the next hour.”