Crystal Escape

by Doug J. Cooper

  In his current circumstances, this was his fastest option, at least to Aurora. “Someone needs to catch me. A ship with a standard grab rig will work.”

  “You get me enough money to spread around, and I’ll have a goddamn marching band waiting for you.” She caught his eye. “Give me deep pockets, though. I can’t be bargain hunting while you’re flying through space.”

  She pulled a dirt-brown box off one of the shelves and handed it to him.

  “What’s this?” he asked, flipping it over.

  “Power shunt. You’ll need it for lights.” She lowered herself to one knee and tugged at an old nav unit on the lower shelf. “You do want to see, don’t you?”

  Sid carried an armload of gear to the breach door, calling to Criss as he walked. On his way back, he swung past his displays to check the status of help from Earth, confirming that the troublesome timing had not improved.

  “Okay,” he announced. “Let’s work this like it’s going to happen or until a better option comes along.”

  Forty minutes later, he and Pete surveyed the result. A fair portion of the junk that had been piled on shelves in the workshop was now strapped to the inside walls of the canister. Still, it was far from crowded.

  “This is a mess,” said Pete as she climbed inside and bent over a collection of electronics. “Let me try to secure it better.”

  While Pete fussed with the instruments inside the canister, Sid returned to his displays. As he sat, he exhaled with a heavy sigh.

  Go or no-go was always the tough decision. Once committed it was easy; do your best with what you had. But that first step—the one that committed you to craziness—was the step to take with care.

  Things can go wrong with anything.

  This was the thought process he devolved to when he was going to decide something no rational person would. He pretended that every decision had a fifty-fifty outcome—either it worked or it didn’t. With that broken logic, he could rationalize anything.

  “I just got a message from Tommy,” said Pete as she stepped out from inside the canister. “He’s asked for more information. My guess is his cageyness is a strategy for hiking the price. If we offer enough, he’ll be there.”

  “What about a ship to chase down Vivo?”

  “I haven’t broached that topic yet. One step at a time. But I do know that to make it out to the asteroid belt at all, a ship has to be a long-haul craft. So everything out there is a candidate for a chase. It’s the bid price that limits your choices.” She caught his eye. “It’s your call at this point.”

  Sid nodded. “Let’s do it.”

  “Holy shit! Cheryl always said you were the craziest guy she knew.”

  “Well, I’m not crazy yet.” He pointed to an ops panel on the wall next to the breach door. “If the launch tools don’t run right, I won’t know how to fix them.” He awakened the panel and enabled the launch sequence. The image showed the tube come to life, ready lights glowing yellow as steering motors fired to swing Sisyphus toward Aurora.

  “Sisyphus needs to shift its nose eight degrees to align the tube,” he told Pete, who’d joined him at the panel.

  She pointed to a clock ticking down to zero. “Does this say it’s going to take ten hours to complete the alignment sequence?”

  Sid’s brow furrowed as he studied the display. He remembered Cheryl saying the engines were undersized for the task of rotating a massive object like Sisyphus on demand, but he hadn’t anticipated this.

  “Ten hours! That’s half of the time the cannon was buying me.” He tapped the panel. “There has to be a way to turn faster.”

  “Mercy me,” said Pete.

  “I know,” said Sid, his frustration showing.

  She looked at him the way Cheryl sometimes did, that look that made him feel like a dope. “No. Mercy Me. It’s the name of my tug.” She held up her hand, holding it flat ahead of her like she has signaling someone to halt. She then pushed against it near the tip with her other hand. “If I push here at the front, I can swing the nose around in thirty minutes. Forty-five tops.”

  She started for the door, then stopped. “Do you need me to close you in?”

  “No, I can do it from inside.”

  “Are you really going to do it?”

  “I guess we’ll find out.”

  “It’ll take me twenty minutes to launch and swing around.” She pointed to the workshop. “We didn’t give you blankets. There are safety sheets on the shelf under the fire extinguisher. Maybe grab the extinguisher when you grab the sheets.”

  She stopped at the door. “Cheryl always said you’d be there for her no matter what.” The door closed behind her.

  Sid stood outside the canister and tried to brainstorm things he might have forgotten, then he walked the workshop, looking on each shelf for ideas. In the end, he found himself back at the breach door with a ball of heavy string and a roll of adhesive tape. He had no specific use for either but had room in the canister and thought they might prove useful.

  “Okay,” Pete called. “I’m in position. Should I push?”

  Sid tapped and swiped the panel, setting the launch sequence to fire automatically when Sisyphus reached the proper orientation.

  “Let’s get it started, anyway,” he said as he climbed into the canister and shut the breach door.

  The nose of the rock mountain swung ever so slowly along its proscribed path. Pete read off the degrees of rotation remaining. “Five…four…three...”

  Sid didn’t have a launch chair because this canister had an inertial damper. It would kick on just before launch, shielding him and the canister contents from the extreme forces of acceleration. As the canister shot forward like an ultra-high-speed bullet, he would float in a bubble of serenity.

  If it works. He’d refused to contemplate the obvious—this canister had the faulty inertial damper that was causing Criss so much concern.

  “Two…Get ready.”

  He could feel every hair on his body stand on end, telling him the acceleration field was powering up.

  “Hey, Sid?” called Pete, her voice breaking as she spoke. “Cheryl always said she was the luckiest woman alive.”

  “Space coveralls!” Sid yelled, remembering something they’d forgotten to stow.

  Those were his last words, his last thoughts, before the bottom of the canister rose in a flash and slammed his body with a crushing blow.

  Chapter 12

  MacMac watched Cheryl and Juice whisper together under the basketball hoop in his office. Juice waved Chase and Justin over, and the whisperers became a foursome.

  Ignoring them, he sat back in the couch and, tapping and swiping, worked to restart Vivo’s image projection system. The weather, the décor, the entire ambiance was designed to be calming and pleasant. He hoped a restart would help mute the panic and outrage the guests must be feeling.

  It took a moment to complete the process, and his efforts were rewarded with the sound of a soothing, disembodied voice that filled the room. “We’re so sorry for the technical difficulties. We’ve corrected the error, and your vacation may resume. By way of apology, everyone please accept a fifty percent discount on your room and food for the remainder of your stay.”

  That got Cheryl’s attention, and she marched over. “What are you doing?”

  “Are you my boss now?”

  She looked at him.

  “Sorry. I meant to say that we can do more if we work together. You whispering in the corner doesn’t promote a sense of teamwork.”

  “There’s a trust issue, MacMac. You work for my kidnapper.”

  He shook his head. “I was quitting this job. The only reason I’m still here is because I hoped I could impress you with my drive pod knowledge and you’d give me a job.”

  “How impressed would you be if someone calling himself ‘chief engineer’ didn’t even know that his pods were fueled?”

  “They weren’t…” He started to gesture and then dropped his hands. “Okay, that pa
rt looks bad. But I swear I don’t know how she did it. I’m not working with her.”

  Juice, who’d joined Cheryl at that point, changed the subject. “Is running the projection system one of your regular responsibilities?”

  “There are crystals that handle the details, but I oversee the big picture from here.” He gestured, and when a display popped open, he pointed. “I control the weather, too. See how I’ve set the cycle to be sunny and warm during the day with a light scatter of clouds in the afternoon?” He nodded. “Nice days are good for morale.”

  “What’s with the half-off discount?” asked Juice. “Are you really thinking about profit at this point?”

  “That part wasn’t me. It was one of Aubrey’s AIs. It’s probably trained to leave room for further negotiation with guests. Complainers are legendary in the hospitality business.”

  “It’s Lazura,” Juice reminded him. “There is no Aubrey, not like you knew her, anyway.”

  “Restarting the illusion was a good idea, though,” said Cheryl. “Especially for the kids.”

  MacMac turned to his displays. “They are one of my big concerns. We have thirty-five people on board, including us and removing Aubrey from my count.” He shrugged when he said that. “Of those, seven are kids fifteen or younger. Two of those are under ten.”

  Cheryl moved to sit on one arm of the couch and waved Juice to the other. As Juice sat, Cheryl manipulated her com.

  “Okay, I’ve activated a privacy shield,” she said. “She’ll defeat it eventually, but we should be able to talk freely for now.”

  Juice spoke over MacMac’s head to Cheryl. “Criss’s highest-priority task is for us to get control of everyone, so it feels weird that Lazura wants that, too.”

  “Yeah, but he wants us to be able to move them as a group when the time comes. She wants us to help turn them into slaves.”

  “Sorry, but I’m lost again,” said MacMac. “So Aubrey is actually Lazura, and she’s an AI? And who is Criss?”

  “Lazura is a powerful Kardish AI who’s been spying on Earth and is now trying to get her information back to her home world,” said Cheryl. “Criss is an even more powerful AI built to hunt rogues like her. He reports to us, and his job is to take her down.”

  MacMac had been sequestered from society for decades working on big space vessels, but he had vivid memories of the Kardish ship looming in orbit above Earth those years ago. “If she makes it home, will they be back?”

  Cheryl nodded. “That’s why she needs to be stopped.”

  MacMac took a deep breath and exhaled, pondering the disorienting events that had changed his world. “Lazura seems to know your hunter and acts pretty unconcerned. In truth, it sounded like she was mocking him.”

  “She was using our emotions to manipulate us,” said Juice. “Don’t worry. She’ll change her tune when he gets here.”

  “That will be soon, I hope.”

  “It will be soon enough,” said Cheryl, though she didn’t sound convinced. “We could use your help on two of his other priorities in the meantime. He wants a good access point for entry into the dome, and he wants us to slow Vivo down to give him more time to act.”

  “Nothing crazy, though,” said Juice. “He says there’s no need for us to be taking big risks.”

  “I might be able to help with one of those as we speak.” MacMac opened new displays and sorted through them. “I’m locked out of the nav and ops panel, which is what I expected.” He swiped. “But like everything else, data from the nav eventually ends up in the record. I may be able to see it there as historical trends.”

  After a moment, he pointed to a screen dense with information. “This is the complete nav dump from two minutes ago. The drive pods were running at thirty-seven percent and climbing by a percent every couple of minutes.”

  As he spoke, the display advanced to 38 percent and Cheryl asked, “If this is two minutes ago, the drives are now really closer to thirty-nine percent?”

  MacMac nodded. “Let’s see if we get lucky when the drives reach forty percent.”

  “What happens then?” asked Juice.

  He didn’t answer, keeping his focus on the display. They watched with him.

  After an eternity, the two-minute-old data advanced to 39, indicating that the drives themselves had reached 40 percent of full power. MacMac straightened and waited, then slumped back into the couch in disappointment. “Damn. I thought I’d done something good.”

  And then the deep thrum rumbling in the background changed pitch.

  MacMac grinned and pumped his hands in the air. “Ask and you shall receive. That is the sweet sound of drive pods shutting down. She can’t restart them until the shutdown procedure completes, and that takes about four hours, maybe five.” He let his pride show in his voice. “I planted a bug that will cause this to happen anytime she pushes the drives above forty percent power.”

  “Look at you,” said Cheryl, her tone showing approval. “Keep it up and maybe I will find a job for you when this is over.” Standing, she tilted her head at the door. “We should go talk to the others. Criss will be here soon, and he’ll be counting on us to coordinate everyone when he makes his move.”

  “Agreed,” said Juice. “Given her modest capabilities, this shutdown surely has Lazura scrambling. She’ll be too busy to mess with us for a while.”

  “What are you going to say to them?” asked MacMac, shifting the speaking task to Cheryl before she could do it to him.

  “I’m not sure. I’m hoping the right words come when I start to speak.” She accessed her com. “I’m dropping the shield, so take care what you say.”

  MacMac reached toward the displays and flexed his fingers, pulling them up into his peripheral vision so he could see them as he walked. As he did, the office door opened and Hejmo and Mondo stormed into the room. Four more synbods, Techs in gray jumpsuits, crowded in behind them.

  “Hejmo!” exclaimed MacMac, feeling momentary joy at seeing his Super.

  Hejmo responded by grabbing MacMac’s upper arm in a fierce grip. Mondo took the other arm and squeezed even harder. MacMac’s feet barely touched the floor as they escorted him from the room.

  The two Supers hustled MacMac across the lobby and onto the lift. Before the door shut, Mondo called to Cheryl and Juice, “You’ve been given an assignment. Cooperation is expected.”

  Pressed from all sides by the six synbods around him in the tiny lift cabin, MacMac’s trained nose detected a slight ketone odor, the result of the respiration process used to keep the skin and other biological portions of a synbod alive.

  The ride was short, the time it took to move up one floor to Aubrey’s penthouse suite. When the lift doors opened, Mondo and Hejmo walked MacMac across the small lobby and into her front office.

  MacMac didn’t resist when they positioned him in front of the same upholstered chair he’d sat in when he’d last met with Aubrey. But when they started removing his shirt, he struggled. That is, until a vice-like synbod grip on the back of his neck made resistance impossible.

  “I order you to stop,” he said when they pushed him down into the cushions. His anger turned to disbelief when Mondo strapped his hands to the armrests, cinching them tight enough that it slowed the flow of blood to his fingers.

  Then Mondo picked up a handheld device, a stubby wand with two prongs sticking out like antennae from a bug, and pressed a button on the side. A brilliant blue arc of electricity jumped from one prong to the other, hissing and snapping as it did.

  “What have you done to the drive pods?” asked Mondo.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said MacMac, trying to put bravado into his voice. He’d served a stint in Fleet as a young man and struggled to recall the methods they’d taught him for withstanding coercion.

  But Mondo didn’t wait for him to search his memory. Instead, the humanoid touched the device to MacMac’s bare chest.

  MacMac had received shocks over the years—it went with the territ
ory of being an engineer on complex space vehicles. So he knew what the bite of electricity felt like. This device took that painful sensation and refined it, focusing the invasive energy onto his nerve endings in a way that caused pain more excruciating than anything he’d ever imagined.

  The pure, raw agony became the sum total of his existence. He couldn’t hear, see, think, or breathe. The torture lasted forever, and he wanted to die. When he thought he might, it stopped.

  MacMac gulped air as he regained the function of his diaphragm. I must not cooperate. He steeled himself to resist.

  “What have you done to the drive pods?” Mondo asked again, his voice devoid of emotion.

  “I didn’t even know we had fuel!” MacMac shouted, anxious to convince them. “How could I do anything?”

  Mondo pressed the button on his device, and MacMac again dropped into the singular world of unbearable agony. It scrambled his brain and seared his soul as he gurgled and convulsed.

  After an eternity it ended, leaving him gasping for air, spittle drooling from his mouth. He didn’t think he could take a third jolt.

  He waited for Mondo to ask his question, but before he could, the door opened and Aubrey—MacMac now understood she was a Super like Mondo and Hejmo—entered.

  Aubrey’s hand gripped a clump of shoulder-length hair, which itself was attached to a teenage girl shuffling behind her. Bent at the waist, the girl struggled to keep her head near Aubrey’s hand.

  Aubrey pulled the girl over to MacMac, then pulled the teen upright so the two could see each other.

  “What are you doing?” the girl protested through her tears.

  “This is Willow,” Aubrey said to MacMac.

  Maybe fourteen years old, dressed in fashionable clothes, face contorted in fear, Willow looked at MacMac and became hysterical. MacMac had never seen her before but knew she had to be one of the guests.

  While Aubrey continued to hold her, Mondo moved in front of the crying teen, took the front of her blouse in both hands, and with a dramatic flair, tore the material apart. The act exposed a simple white bra, and beneath it, the taut pink skin of youth.