Crystal Escape

by Doug J. Cooper

  Then he spoke to the air. “What are you offering?”

  “A mining ship from Aurora is on approach to pick you up,” said Criss, his disembodied voice coming from the air around them.

  “Hey, Tommy, this is Natalya.” Her voice also came without image. “I have you in sight. Should be about five minutes.”

  “What ship?” Tommy asked her.

  “The Delilah.”

  “Is the smelt oven on?”

  Natalya paused, the confusion evident in her response. “You know it is, boss. What’s up?”

  “Nothing. See you soon.” Then Tommy spoke to Criss. “I take it the poker game is off?”

  “I’m sorry, but there isn’t time for your prolonged negotiating style. We’re moving forward with alternate plans.”

  “No problem,” said Tommy. “But I think we’ll be keeping this ship. Consider it a down payment on your total account due.”

  No sooner had Tommy expressed his defiance when the deep, powerful blare of a horn filled the air, blasting so loud that he thought his eardrums would explode. His chest, his head, his whole body shook from the forceful energy. All three governors pressed their hands to their ears in a desperate attempt to stop the pain.

  Anxious to distance themselves from the source of their agony, they lurched down the hallway, staggering like drunks at the end of a long night. Doors closed behind them as they moved, each closure corralling them into an ever smaller space.

  The oppressive noise stopped when the last door closed. Surfacing from the pain, Tommy surveyed their tiny prison—the scout’s airlock—and fumed. He wasn’t accustomed to being bested and didn’t like it at all.

  Then he heard Natalya say through the ringing in his ears, “I’m here, boss. Should only be a minute.”

  A sharp clunk signaled that docking had begun. By the time the maneuver was completed, Tommy’s anger had fermented into a perfect fury.

  The hatch opened and he scrambled forward onto the mining ship. Leaving his fellow governors to fend for themselves, he squeezed into the cockpit.

  “Welcome back, boss,” said Natalya from the pilot’s seat.

  “Where is he?” asked Tommy. Reaching over her, he moved short-range tracking onto the main display and studied the scout. “Is he shadowing us?”

  “He undocked and backed off,” said Natalya. “But we haven’t moved, so I can’t say if he’ll follow.”

  Tommy tapped and swiped to access the cargo hold, then flipped the smelt oven to manual operation and ramped its heat source to maximum input.

  “Geez, boss. That’s dangerous as hell.”

  “I hope so,” he said. A quiet thrum resonated through the ship for several seconds as the rear cargo bay doors opened. Using the smelt oven controls, he tapped the exhaust ports shut, causing lights and beeps to fill the alarm panel.

  “What are you doing?” said Natalya, her voice rising.

  Tommy didn’t want to debate, not now, so he shooed Natalya out of the pilot’s seat and took her place. He figured he had thirty seconds before the oven went critical, which was just enough time for him to act on one of his maxims of negotiation—if I can’t have it, you can’t either.

  Putting the ship’s external claws into mimic mode, he swung his own arm beside him. Outside the ship, one of the huge arms swung in a similar fashion. Moving with deliberate speed, he bent the external arm so it reached back inside the rear cargo hold, then guided the massive mechanical claw so it hovered over the smelt oven.

  “Natalya, there are going to be a few more alarms going off in a second. Would you mind handling them?”

  Not waiting for an answer, he spread the claw grip wide, grasped the glowing oven, and with a jerk of his arm, ripped the hissing unit from its foundation.

  In the cockpit, panels flashed and emergency buzzers beeped. He heard Natalya swearing as she tried to gain control of the situation. Tommy ignored her, instead focusing on his aim.

  With the mechanical arm outstretched above the mining ship, Tommy shifted forward in the pilot’s seat and mimed throwing a ball. Outside, the huge hand hurtled the fiery caldron at the scout.

  On the main screen, he watched his makeshift warhead approach the enemy. He didn’t have any control over the timing of the explosion, nor did he expect to hit the ship. But the explosion would be nasty. If he could just get it near the scout, he would exact his revenge.

  His hopes rising as the oven flew on a flawless trajectory, he thought it might actually hit his target. Then the scout vanished.

  He hadn’t seen it move and blinked in his confusion. Switching the nav to a longer range, he frowned as he scanned for his quarry.

  “There,” said Natalya, pointing.

  Tommy zoomed where she indicated and his eyes widened. The smelt oven continued through space, now heading in the general direction of a dome-shaped ship on approach to Aurora. The size and construction pointed to a vessel that could hold many people on lengthy stays. “How big is it?”

  “It’s big.” She checked a display. “About a third the size of Aurora.”

  He sat back and pondered the news. “Something that big and housing so many has to be a mining platform. What else could it be?”

  “Are they jumping our claim?” asked Natalya.

  “I knew that kidnapping story was bullshit. If they think they can park here and work our mines, they’re in for a rude awakening.”

  By serendipity, he delivered on his threat moments later when the smelt oven exploded near the intruder.

  Chapter 22

  As Criss led Sid into the forgery shop, an opportunity to seize control of Aurora revealed itself and he took it. He didn’t have time to warn Sid, but that was the least of his worries.

  He’d been monitoring the ebb and flow of people—both on the platform and those mining the asteroids—and using that information to play rapid-fire what-if games. How would they react if a fire broke out in the galley? How would they move if there were a compressor failure in the air purification center?

  His goal was to discover a sequence of events that would cause all the residents to move to a single section of Aurora. Once there, he could block them in and try to contain them long enough to complete the business with Lazura.

  There were so many moving parts to such a ploy that he wasn’t optimistic it would ever work out. He’d come close to triggering an action a few times, but there were always key people out of place, and he’d chosen to wait for a better opportunity.

  So, when a promising scenario emerged this time, he moderated his expectations. And then the director of ore processing called an all-staff meeting.

  The handwritten sign on the wall near the hangar bay that he and Sid had passed on their way in had said that if you were not mining, processing, or shipping, then go home. As the sign implied, processing workers comprised a big portion of the population. More than a third of the residents would be at the meeting, and groups of people were easier to move.

  As those workers assembled, others around Aurora—key players Criss needed to control—drifted into ever better positions for a gambit. Like a picture coming into focus, stragglers walked away from isolated locales and toward common areas where he could influence them in groups, first one, then the next, then the next.

  The stars aligned and Criss executed with a push-pull strategy. His pull event was an alarm for a fictitious fire in the hangar bay. It drew a huge response, moving waves of people in the direction Criss wanted, because he made the alarm warn of an uncontrolled blaze.

  The push event was a containment breach. Sirens for two fictitious ruptures of the containment shell sent residents scurrying. Trained to move away from a leak, they ran in the same direction as the responders for the fire.

  “What should we do?” asked Sid, standing in the forgery shop and referring to Lazura’s desire for fuel.

  “Hope for the best,” said Criss, speaking of the luck they would need for success in corralling the residents.

  Still hid
den by his cloak, he stepped back to avoid the forgery shop workers as they hustled to address the emergencies. Then he and Sid followed them into the hall.

  He’d given up hope of ever persuading Tommy and his cohorts to be good Samaritans, much less reliable business partners. So he no longer cared about the details of their counterfeiting, the outcome of a poker game, or anything else that Tommy Two-Tone dreamed up in his never-ending manipulations to separate people from their possessions.

  “How are you doing?” Sid asked as they strode down the hall.

  “Busy,” Criss answered.

  “Care to share?”

  “I saw an opportunity to trap everyone on the mid-deck in sector three. That part went as well as I’d hoped. There are a few stragglers, but I have them controlled. My concern is the fierce determination of these people.”

  As he spoke, Natalya Alekseev led a crew onto the Delilah, one of the mining ships on the deck of the hangar bay prepped for departure. Criss considered disabling it and the other craft but chose to let Natalya take off, believing she’d serve as a useful distraction. Many on the platform would be watching her, and people watching were easier to control.

  As soon as the mining ship departed, Criss tripped an alarm across the hangar that warned of the imminent collapse of the airlock walls. He wanted the deck clear of anyone else interested in heroics, and he achieved that by driving the whole group back inside the containment.

  “And that fierce determination goes for Tommy as well,” Criss continued. “I was leading him through a projected image of a workshop when he closed his eyes, which meant he was getting suspicious.”

  “I’m tired of him,” Sid said. “Let’s space all three of them. Open up the hatch and let them blow away.”

  “How about if I confine them to the scout’s common room for now?” replied Criss, assuming Sid spoke in hyperbole. He turned left at a hallway intersection. “Oh, and you have to pretend to be Tommy in an upcoming discussion with Lazura.”

  “I do? When?”

  “Twenty minutes,” said Criss, turning right.

  It took ten of those minutes to get to the executive berth, a small dock for parking passenger spacecraft. Used by the governors and their top supervisors, its quiet simplicity stood in contrast to the hectic bustle of the hangar bay.

  “We can use this for passenger transfer. It doesn’t have the capabilities of the full hangar, but it has enough. And its size and location make it easier for us to defend while the exchange plays out.”

  As they toured the modest facility, Sid asked, “How do we get the fuel pods up here?”

  “What fuel pods?”

  “I had assumed we’d buy time by dummying up something to show Lazura.”

  “If we get to that point, there’s a service lift down the hall.”

  Criss gestured to a chair in the lounge area and Sid sat. As Criss pulled a second chair next to it, Sid asked, “How are you going to convince Lazura that I’m Tommy?”

  “I’ll have to break away from a fair portion of my activities and use the resources to do the manipulation. I can’t change her archives, so I’ll be changing the signals she receives to make them conform to everything she has on Tommy. If you could focus on duplicitous haggling, that would help with the personality mold.”

  “I can do that.”

  “And tell her you have the skill and experience to repair a starhub.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It coordinates multiple drive pods so they can work together as one. MacMac sabotaged hers, and she thinks you can fix it.” Criss squared up in his seat. “You worked for MacMac ten years ago when you moved Aurora out to the asteroid belt. Here we go.”

  As the scene from Aurora projected in front of them—Cheryl, Juice, and MacMac seated, Lazura standing behind them—Sid sought out Cheryl and locked eyes. Though he looked at her, he didn’t miss a beat.

  “MacMac, you old dog. I haven’t seen you in a decade.”

  In the end, the exchange went better than Criss had hoped. Their fraud went undetected, and Sid managed to get an invitation to board Vivo to repair the starhub, putting him in excellent position for a rescue attempt should that become necessary.

  The missing fuel-stacks remained a challenge, and while they still had time to find a solution, that window was shrinking.

  With the meeting over, Criss redeployed the resources he’d been using to hide the fact that Sid was not Tommy. When he did, he found the real Tommy tearing up the scout. Angry over the damage, Criss cursed, something that happened perhaps once per year.

  “Damn him!”

  In a moment of exasperation, he revisited Sid’s “space them” idea. Then he determined that he could dump them off with Natalya and the mining ship in just a few minutes.

  Good riddance, he thought when he saw Tommy scurrying off the scout like the rat he was.

  “Lazura knows you won’t let her go,” said Sid. “So how do we get her to give up the hostages?”

  For the first time, Criss gave voice to an idea he’d been considering—a compromise to his hard-line stance. “If she continues her journey outfitted with a broken starhub and half-stacks of fuel, it will be more than a hundred years before she reaches her Kardish masters.”

  Then Criss did something he’d never done before. He cursed a second time just minutes after the first. “Damn him to hell.”

  Criss projected an image of the Delilah, its huge external arm rearing back, so Sid could see the cause of his frustration. Before Criss could explain what they were looking at, the arm swung forward, pitching a glowing white mass into space, flashes and flickers trailing behind in sparks of red and white.

  Criss zoomed out to show Sid the molten mass heading for the scout. Sighing, he cloaked the craft and moved it out of the line of fire.

  “He sure is resourceful,” said Sid.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” cried Criss when his computations projected that the makeshift warhead was headed toward Vivo. He couldn’t predict when it would detonate, but the farther from Vivo, the better. To that end, he launched an energy bolt from the scout, hitting the smelt oven and causing it to explode on the spot.

  Shrapnel flew in a thousand directions at once. With the vastness of space, the fragments flashed harmlessly into the cosmos, starting million-year journeys that would end someday with an impact into a planet or them flaming into the sun.

  Except for the smelt oven door. A flat, heavy plate with edges newly jagged from the explosion, it spun like a saw blade as it winged its way across space. And in odds so long they were difficult to compute, the fragment hit Vivo.

  It entered at the subdeck level, creating a modest hole in the life support containment. An instant later, it tore through an electronic artery, severing the core links and feeds running throughout the domed world. From there, it grazed a heavy beam that deflected the fragment back out into space, creating a second hole in the subdeck containment as it passed.

  Criss didn’t notice that two small holes in Vivo’s subdeck were bleeding air into space. But when the drive pods shut down, he reacted with alarm.

  “Uh-oh.”

  While Lazura piloted Vivo with limited navigational tools, she had more than enough capability to pilot a precise approach path. In fact, she’d had Vivo on an intercept approach for several hours.

  What Lazura had chosen to ignore with her navigational decisions was that every licensing body in the solar system prohibits intercept approaches for safety reasons. This was because if the inbound vessel were to lose its engines for any reason, the result would be a collision.

  “Vivo’s drive pods just shut down,” Criss said to Sid. “It takes five hours for the restart cycle. They collide with Aurora in just over an hour.”

  “This just keeps getting better. And of course we can’t move Aurora, because we have no fuel.”

  Forecasting survival scenarios at a furious pace, Criss nodded. “We couldn’t start Aurora’s drives that fast anyway.”

/>   “Show me,” said Sid.

  Criss projected an image and positioned it between them. Sid leaned in to study it.

  Like a bullet flying backward, Vivo zipped toward Aurora traveling tail-first. This orientation was common for approaching spaceships because it let the engine thrusters be used to slow the vessel.

  Criss’s projection showed that Vivo’s underside would collide with Aurora out on the edge of its saucer shape.

  Sid put his hands in front of him, flat and side by side, and studied them. He leaned his hands to one side, then shouted his solution at the same time Criss arrived at it. “Tilt Aurora.”

  “Yes,” said Criss. The tilt scenario had a better than 15 percent chance of success, those dismal odds being the best available for any solution so far. He continued digging for a better answer, but at the same time acted on the tilt scenario.

  “Can you do it?”

  “I’ll let you know,” Criss replied.

  He seized control of the platform’s minimal web infrastructure, incorporated disused portions from the original design, then added every stand-alone system he could locate. Taking inventory, he then developed a priority list of everything he could use to exert even the tiniest force on the external structure of Aurora.

  To keep Sid involved and his ideas flowing, Criss continued to show him the activity through the projected image display. And that projection showed Criss starting with his biggest tools: the mining ships in the hangar bay.

  Three ships were already prepped for launch, and five more were in various stages of service but could fly. Criss jumped from ship to ship, commandeering their ops benches and launching them, one after the other.

  As soon as they cleared the hangar, he had the eight mining ships turn, extend their open claws, and clutch on to the lower lip of the reinforced deck of the hangar bay. As they secured their position side by side, the Delilah joined the lineup, Tommy cursing and waving his fists as his craft ignored his commands.

  Criss kicked the mining ships’ powerful industrial engines to maximum thrust. With a roar that shook Aurora, the nine sturdy vessels pushed upward in unison on the right side of platform.