Crystal Escape

by Doug J. Cooper

  Willow shrieked in panic, then started calling for help. “Mom! Mom!”

  MacMac yelled, but the roar in his ears drowned out his own words.

  “What have you done to the drives?” asked Mondo. This time he waved his torture device just above the girl’s heaving stomach.

  MacMac stared at the prongs circling above Willow’s belly button and tasted bile.

  When Mondo edged the device closer to her skin, MacMac relented. “You want Tom Touton. He’s chief engineer on Aurora. I didn’t do this to your drives, but I’ve seen it happen before. Something goes haywire when the drives reach forty percent. He’s the only one I know who can fix it.”

  Mondo touched the device to the young girl’s flesh. Her body went rigid, her eyes bulged as her face contorted, and a hideous gurgle escaped her throat.

  “Stop it, damn you!” yelled MacMac, tugging at his bonds. “I’m telling the truth. Hurting her won’t change that.”

  Mondo pulled the device away, and Willow collapsed in a heap at MacMac’s feet. He studied her diaphragm, relieved to see it rise and fall as she breathed on her own. He had no doubt Mondo would continue to torture this innocent, something he couldn’t bear to watch.

  “I think it’s related to the starhub,” MacMac said, speaking quickly to delay another shock for either of them. “Check the record from when it was being installed. I knew then that it might be a problem and told the same story. The engineer goes by Tommy Two-Tone. Check and you’ll see.”

  MacMac held his breath, hoping Lazura would confirm his story with a review of the record, and praying she didn’t notice him removing the insulating tab from the starhub with his thumbnail.

  Aubrey moved around Mondo and bent forward so her eyes were level with MacMac’s. As she spoke, he had no doubt the words came from the rogue Kardish AI. “If I’d brought a man up here, you’d have let me zap him all day. If I’d brought a mature woman, you’d have let me zap her once before you cooperated, maybe twice.”

  She looked down at the young girl. “I brought her because I knew you’d cooperate immediately. Your behavior is predictable. I zapped her just to show you I would, and of course to make sure you told the truth.”

  Nudging Willow with her toe, she called down to her, “I know you’re awake. Stop faking it.” Then addressing MacMac, she said, “I understand macho protectiveness. Men are big and strong and see women as weak and vulnerable. Maybe your protectiveness is primal because women birth new life. Maybe it’s Oedipal.” She shrugged. “Whatever your motivation, it all comes down to the same thing. You feel it’s your duty to shield her and save her from harm.”

  Her gaze flitted from his right eye to his left and back again. “One question you and the other guests can help me understand, though, is why some of these same protective men then go home and smack their wives, daughters, and girlfriends. My behavioral model can’t explain that.”

  She turned and addressed the other synbods. “His story checks out on first review. Go test the equipment to see if you can confirm it, then find a work-around. If anything even hints at deception or subterfuge, notify me immediately.”

  As Hejmo, Mondo, and the four Techs left the room, she returned to MacMac. “Do you think my behavioral model needs to give more weight to ego in those situations? Or is it as simple as you believing that if you save her, she’ll agree to mate with you?”

  She turned and made for the exit, calling over her shoulder, “Can I count on your help in answering those questions, MacMac? I have hundreds more that are just as vexing.”

  “I don’t think so,” MacMac replied, feeling his bravery increase as their physical separation grew.

  She stopped at the door and pointed to Willow, still on the floor, struggling to cover herself with MacMac’s shirt. “As long as you help, she lives. Think of it like saving her life every single day.”

  Goose bumps raced up MacMac’s arms and tingled across his exposed chest. Willow curled into a ball and sobbed.

  Chapter 13

  Criss threaded the end of the line through the eye of his makeshift hook and tied a knot. He’d crafted the line by cutting a long, thin strip of material from his pant leg. The hook was a piece of heavy wire he’d wrenched from beneath his seat.

  With half an hour invested in this plan, now was the time for the payoff.

  Leaning close to the capsule door, he fed the hook out the hatch from the highest point in the crack opening and let the line hang down from there. Monitoring his progress outside with the finger-held camera, he adjusted the line length so the hook was level with the toolbox.

  With a gentle movement of his fingers, he swung the hook. The oblique angle of the camera and unfortunate placement of a pipe brace left him with a partially obstructed view, but when the hook appeared to hit near the toolbox handle, he tugged the line upward.

  It didn’t catch, so he tried again. And again.

  When he’d first conceived of the idea, he’d forecast that he could hook the toolbox in ten minutes, fifteen tops. So when he finally snagged it at the four-hour mark, he took great care in drawing the box to the side.

  Opening the hatch with his shoulder, he leaped out and scrambled from the mechanical room. As he climbed up to the main deck, he connected his awareness to the scout’s nav and mapped an intercept course with Vivo.

  Twenty-one hours. More than he wanted but about what he’d expected.

  He reached the bridge at the same time he engaged the scout’s drive. The engines awoke with a growl, climbed to a whine, and continued into a scream. With every onboard system maxed to its limit, the nimble craft shot forward, racing faster and faster in a mad dash to catch Vivo.

  Criss lowered himself into the pilot’s seat and reviewed the status of the scout’s various systems, then he called to Cheryl and Juice to let them know he was on his way. He couldn’t connect, though. From this distance, Lazura’s dome proved an effective shield.

  When he reached out to Sid, he heard, “Space coveralls!” and then silence.

  What are you up to? He linked out to Sisyphus, only to find a space tug, its oversized engines flaring with brilliant rooster tails of energy, pushing against the front of the floating mountain.

  Alarmed, he jumped to the scene and went several directions at once, visiting the bridge of the tug, and searching for Sid in the various nooks and hollows of the barge.

  On the tug’s bridge, he found Pete standing at the ops bench, staring at an ocean of volcanic rock through the front viewport. Feet shoulder-width apart, she leaned forward, putting her weight on her thumb as she mashed the “Full Thrust” select on the bench surface in front of her.

  Criss suspected this was an emotional display on her part, because a simple tap gesture near the select would achieve the same result. His suspicions were confirmed when he scanned the record from moments before.

  “Push, you piece of shit,” Pete yelled at the tug.

  On Sisyphus, his search came up empty—Sid wasn’t on the barge. Turning to the record, he located Sid in the workshop from earlier and raced forward, tracking his last recorded movements.

  When he saw Sid and Pete loading the canister with air, food, and water, an icy chill washed down his core. And when Sid locked himself within the container, Criss freaked, or the four-gen crystal version of that, anyway.

  Since he moved through the links and feeds of the connected world at the speed of light, a tiny slice of time had elapsed since Sid had yelled, “Space coveralls.” That same amount of time was how long it took the canister carrying Sid to travel the length of the cannon tube and burst into space.

  When Criss detected the launch, he dove his awareness back to the scout wondering how the worst day of his life could possibly keep getting worse. At the ops bench, he analyzed the launch data and deduced that Sid was trying to reach Aurora. But he wouldn’t make it, not on his current trajectory.

  It wasn’t Sid’s fault, nor was it Pete’s. The problem was that Criss hadn’t finished aligning t
he cannon’s field generator. He’d planned to do it while Sid played poker.

  Firing the cannon with a misaligned field generator was like firing a weapon with a skewed gunsight—whatever you thought you were shooting at, you weren’t. And so Sid now zipped at an impressive clip on an interstellar journey to nowhere.

  Criss struggled with his next decision—Vivo, then Sid; or Sid, then Vivo. Every scenario he forecast had him balancing the lives of his leadership, the highest stakes possible. Even his best options were distressing.

  Reviewing the supplies he had seen Sid and Pete load into the canister, he established that water was Sid’s limiting resource—he had enough for almost two weeks. Without rescue, he’d die of dehydration sometime late in week three.

  If Criss started now, he could reach Sid in nine hours. But after traveling that long on a new course, it would take him twice as long—about two days—to reach Vivo. Cheryl and Juice would be in peril for that extended period.

  He thought it likely he could go to Vivo first, gain a quick victory over Lazura, and then chase down Sid. But if his victory wasn’t quick, if he had to break it off to go rescue Sid, the threat to Cheryl and Juice would skyrocket.

  “Ohh,” Sid moaned through his com. Criss had enabled it to assess Sid’s physical condition and kept it open as the only viable link out to the low-tech container.

  Sid’s voice tipped the scales on the decision. Changing course, Criss started after him. At the same time, he let his exasperation show. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m not sure. Where am I?”

  “You’re riding in a canister.”

  “That’s right.” Sid’s voice became less tentative as he recovered. “I’m headed to Aurora to see if I can save Cheryl and Juice.” After a pause. “I think I hurt my shoulder.”

  “You were fortunate. That junk damper worked at ninety-nine percent capability, so you took a blow about equal to falling from a second-story window. At ninety-eight percent effective, it would have been like falling five stories. It could easily have functioned at eighty percent, which is squished-like-a-bug territory.”

  “Where have you been?” Sid had recovered enough to show annoyance. “I waited for you. When you went dark, I did the best I could.”

  “I had difficulties.” Criss updated Sid on his time spent trapped in the escape capsule, and then explained why Sid’s canister was off course, finishing with, “Why didn’t you take a ship out to Aurora?”

  Sid walked him through his travails in trying to reach the mining platform in a timely fashion. Then he moved the discussion from the past to the future. “Aurora is the logical place for a hostage exchange, so I see it as a good sign that Lazura is headed there.”

  Criss could hear the hope in Sid’s voice. “I believe she’s going there for fuel.”

  After scuffling with Lazura during Vivo’s launch, Criss had combed the record to understand how she’d duped him. For years, he had searched for her by scanning the millions of suspicious activities occurring around the world at any moment, dissecting them for evidence of her involvement.

  An overwhelming task, he had kept at it, believing that if he didn’t detect her first, second, or tenth move, he’d find her by the hundredth or thousandth. It would take far more moves than that for her to evolve a plan that would get her home. But searching for her that way was a needle-in-a-haystack challenge, a fact she used to great advantage.

  Now that he understood Vivo was the center of her efforts, he could start there and work backward through the record. When he did, he found it easy to find and connect her actions.

  She’d been clever, dovetailing into Aubrey’s existing career and then manipulating her with synesthesia. She’d been bold, ordering thirty synbods from Juice’s company. And she’d been disarming, inviting Cheryl and Juice to Vivo’s inaugural escape and making it seem like it was about them.

  In the particulars of his review, he chastised himself when he deduced that she used the fuel blocks from Vivo’s generators to power the drive pods. He didn’t have all the details of her scheme, but her years of painstaking preparation combined with a willingness to sacrifice more than a dozen synbods allowed her to hide her fuel-swap gambit inside the everyday rhythms of island operation.

  “She’s running on half-stacks right now,” Criss said to Sid. “The fuel from Aurora’s two drive pods will give her full stacks. With that, she can cut more than a decade off her trip back to the Kardish home world.”

  “That gives us a bargaining chip,” said Sid, his excitement rising. “The way to get hostages back is to trade them for something the kidnapper wants. If she wants drive pod fuel, we need to get control of it so we can guide the exchange.”

  In his younger years, Sid had served as a covert warrior for the Union of Nations. During that time, the DSA—the Defense Specialists Agency—had encouraged his intuitive skills, training him to use his intuition to find pathways forward in impossible situations.

  An unlikely attribute, the skill was not one Sid ever claimed to possess or wield. But over the years, Criss had come to respect Sid’s abilities, especially when it came to life-and-death situations. Sid had beaten outrageous odds too many times, winning in circumstances where others had given up hope, for Criss to do otherwise.

  “If we focus on a hostage exchange, that means going to Aurora and waiting for them to get there.”

  “Yeah,” said Sid. “And the thing I don’t like about that is that it leaves everyone at Lazura’s mercy for two extra days. I don’t think she’ll harm anyone. She needs them as bargaining chips. But it will be stressful as hell for everyone, and more time means more chances for things to go wrong.”

  “To end it sooner, we need a way to board Vivo.”

  “How about crawling through those pipes they used to take on the air and water?” said Sid. “They’re easily big enough for us to fit through, and she won’t be using them again, not for a while anyway.”

  “Those pipes connect to big pumps, and we wouldn’t fit through their mechanicals. We’d need a way out before we reached them.” The tone of Criss’s voice changed. “Vivo just shut down its drive pods. I hadn’t forecast that in any scenario.”

  They spent the next hours brainstorming anew based on this unexpected development. Along the way, Criss reminded Sid, “An important priority after hostage rescue is to keep Lazura’s archive of secrets from reaching her Kardish masters. They’ll tear Earth apart looking for me. I’d have to leave.”

  Criss was well past the halfway point on his race to catch Sid when Vivo’s drive pods restarted, leading to yet more discussion. Then Criss changed subjects. “You don’t have space coveralls.”

  “No. Do you have any ideas?”

  To join Criss on the scout, Sid needed to leave the cargo canister. Space coveralls made it easy—open the canister door, float across the cold vacuum of space, and enter the scout’s airlock. Without such a suit, they needed to find a way to move Sid to the scout without ever exposing him to the extreme conditions outside.

  The problems were numerous. The canister was much too large to fit inside the scout’s tiny service bay, so Criss couldn’t bring the canister itself on board. The canister door—a big hatch that swung wide to ease the loading and unloading of cargo—couldn’t mate with the access hatch on the scout, nor with the hatch of any ship for that matter.

  In the end, Criss solved the problem using a tech bot. With the two vessels traveling synchronously side by side, he sent the bot floating over to the canister carrying a universal saw, coveralls for Sid, adhesive, and airtight sheet material.

  Latching to the outside of the cargo canister, the bot draped the material over itself like a tent. The tent became an airtight pouch when the bot glued the edges of the material to the canister exterior, working methodically all the way around until it had sealed every edge.

  Then, using the saw, the tech bot cut a hole straight into the canister. The rush of air out through the opening inflated the pouch, forc
ing it into a taut bubble. The bot took a moment to confirm that the seal remained airtight before widening the hole enough to pass through the suit.

  Sid donned the space coveralls, opened the canister door, and together with the bot, floated back to the scout. Minutes later he joined Criss on the bridge to plot their next steps.

  “I know nothing about Aurora,” said Sid, rubbing his shoulder. “I mean, I know it’s a mining settlement. But it’s hard for me to brainstorm a plan for a place I’ve never seen.”

  Criss projected an image of the platform so it floated between them—two shallow soup bowls joined face-to-face to create an oversized flying saucer shape.

  “You’ll find it crowded and somewhat chaotic,” said Criss. “There are three hundred fifty residents living in a habitat built for two hundred. It’s the jobs that attract so many. And there are jobs because the miners shun AI.”

  “Heathens,” said Sid.

  Criss ignored him. “Much to the consternation of Aurora’s corporate owners, the miners won’t cooperate with anything more capable than a two-gen crystal. And those are used to stabilize the structure, maintain life support systems, and do other critical tasks humans can’t do by hand.”

  “Why do they put up with it? Can’t they just replace the people in charge?”

  “NOAH—Northern Ore Astro Holdings—is trying to balance the wishes of a frontier society in deep space with the need to make a return on their investment. Aurora continues to meet its ore shipment schedule, so the NOAH group, though wary, is watching for now, weighing its options.”

  “Show me the drive pods, and let’s figure out where on the platform we can stash and protect the fuel. I want to keep an eye on it from now until Cheryl and Juice are safe.”

  The image shifted to a big industrial room crowded with crates, random pieces of equipment, and items that looked to Sid like junk. Criss pointed to the drive pods, the mighty engines that had moved the platform from Earth to the asteroid belt, to help Sid see them among the clutter.