Crystal Escape

by Doug J. Cooper

  While this was happening, Criss directed the scout around to the left side of Aurora. Hooking the small craft’s truss line to a massive maintenance cleat fixed to the outer edge, Criss ramped the scout’s engines. The Criss-designed engines pulled as hard as all nine mining ships combined, causing the small craft to buck and shake as it struggled to move the massive platform.

  Aurora creaked and moaned, but movement was imperceptible. Criss continued down his priority list, next launching thirteen service craft and nineteen personal craft, positioning them nose-first against the external containment shell and firing their motors. Together the push of these craft equaled a fraction of one of the mining ships roaring behind them. But Criss needed everything, even then believing it wouldn’t be enough.

  Desperate for more, Criss sent out monitor bots and message carriers and added their feeble propulsion to the assortment. Then he popped every safety and relief valve on the exterior of the ship if it was pointed in the right direction, sending gases and liquids spewing into the void and creating a tiny propulsive force.

  In the executive berth, a loud creak echoed in the distance, followed by far-off sounds of popping, then a louder groan.

  “The shell is stressed but it will hold,” said Criss. “Now we wait.”

  “Let me speak to Cheryl,” said Sid.

  “I can’t reach anyone on Vivo. I’ve been trying to contact Lazura to assure her this was an accident, but everything is dead over there.”

  “Do we know what happened?”

  “Best guess is a fragment from Tommy’s improvised warhead and a horrible design on Vivo. Since Lazura didn’t want to reveal she was building a space vessel, she didn’t use the standard capillary design for her electronic infrastructure. Instead, she concentrated everything into two arteries, a primary and a backup. With that design, one minor accident can disable a ship.”

  Sid stared at the display while Criss ran the calculations again and again.

  “We’re short,” he said with ten minutes left.

  “How short?” asked Sid.

  “From here to the wall. We’re close, moving well, but I can’t make it. Not clean.”

  “You can do it dirty? How many?”

  “Three. Maybe four.”

  “Do it.”

  “Repeat.”

  “Kill three or four people if doing so will save everyone else. I so order.”

  “Thank you.”

  Vivo loomed large, growing bigger by the second. With impact imminent, Criss directed the scout to release the truss line, come about, and face the platform. Standing off at a safe distance, the scout a mere speck between two mountains, Criss activated the craft’s defense array and, with a zwip, fired a spread pulse that punched forty-three fist-sized holes along the top edge of Aurora’s containment shell.

  The holes opened up two sectors inside Aurora, empty of people thanks to Criss’s phony breach alarm. Empty except for the four individuals—two men and two women—who’d been locked in place by Criss when they’d failed to move with the other miners.

  Now riddled with holes, three of the compartments lost air, suffocating their prisoners in the process. Criss was able to maintain integrity in one small area with a modification to the puncture pattern, saving the man held there.

  In a visually spectacular display, the air venting from Aurora looked like a long row of water fountains, the discharge generating enough force to accelerate the growing tilt.

  In the blink of an eye, Vivo flashed by, missing a collision by a hair’s breadth.

  The domed world sped into the void, dead to all forms of communication, and carrying Cheryl, Juice, and thirty-three other souls on an uncontrolled journey into deep space.

  Chapter 23

  Lazura wiggled her fingers as she looked around the room. She’d been controlling everything up to now from the security of her console. But with this next sequence of events—Vivo approaching Aurora, Tommy coming aboard, and Criss being physically nearby—she felt that riding a synbod maximized her flexibility, so she made the move.

  Overall, Lazura felt she was ahead of the odds. Criss seemed open to discussion about her future, and his leadership talked of a resolution that would see her home. And while there had been a few rough spots along the way, in particular hostages who stirred up trouble around Vivo, it was predictable behavior and nothing she couldn’t handle.

  She’d been mulling Cheryl and Juice’s offer—that she leave her archive behind but carry home whatever she could fit into her memory—and was coming to terms with it. If Criss let her choose the content she kept, she could carry plenty of information her masters would prize.

  Still, she struggled to forecast scenarios where Criss would let her leave Aurora unchallenged. If she flew off alone, it would be too easy for him to shoot her down and solve the issue with finality, at least from his perspective.

  Hostages might deter him from destroying Vivo, but she’d have to pay constant attention to keep them from becoming a threat. And if the hostages were important enough to deter Criss, he’d likely come after her to rescue them.

  The dilemma was real, and she didn’t have the answer. Perhaps Criss can propose one, she thought.

  Riding the lift down from the tower, she studied Vivo, first with a visual sweep looking out the back of the lift cabin, and then with an internal scan, accessing the full array of links and feeds throughout the domed world. That’s when she discovered MacMac and Juice prowling the subdeck.

  When she saw them moving toward central stow, frustration washed across her outer tendrils. Those two were her biggest troublemakers. Glad to find Mondo already on the subdeck, she dispatched him to confront the two and escort them back to the office tower.

  Her lift stopped at the cellar. Exiting, she made for the old Structures office and her makeshift ops bench. She checked the nav when she got there to confirm Vivo’s approach trajectory to Aurora. Then she walked the room. Tommy would be coming to fix the starhub, and she tried to anticipate actions he might take if he harbored nefarious intentions.

  She thought about installing a wall partition to separate the equipment he’d need access to from those pieces he didn’t. Deciding she liked the idea, she connected with her one remaining Admin synbod to follow up. But before that communication could be completed, Mondo went offline in the subdeck.

  It had never happened before, and Lazura called to him. She knew he’d made it to central stow and had approached MacMac and Juice, but she hadn’t been actively monitoring the situation. Accessing the record for the subdeck, she sped through the last few minutes. Taken aback, she watched it again.

  Her behavioral model had indicated that Juice and MacMac were not physical threats. But she hadn’t accounted for the behavior of Chase and Justin, and so she was unprepared for the spectacle of seeing two synbods attack and terminate Mondo in a manner both surgical and brutal.

  She dispatched Hejmo and three Techs to take control of the situation and became furious when MacMac directed Chase and Justin to stop them. With this last straw, she classified the group as a threat to her success. It was time for them to go.

  Vivo’s automated maintenance system could broadcast focused energy to a site for welding, melting, sintering, heating, and other service needs. Lazura reconfigured the device—constructed from components similar to those of a commercial energy weapon—so that “broadcast” became more like “shoot.”

  She moved the energy beam to target MacMac. As she did, he swiped and tapped the air in front of him, triggering a small explosion somewhere behind him.

  Vivo went dark. Completely dark. She couldn’t jump, connect, or feel anything outside of her body, leaving her isolated and alone. “MacMac, what have you done?”

  He had to have blown the primary artery. It carried the power, feeds, and links throughout all of Vivo, and losing it was the only way to shut down everything so abruptly and completely.

  As local safety lights kicked on, she felt dismayed at the failure
of her behavioral model. It hadn’t even hinted that MacMac would do something so dangerous and reckless as to sabotage an artery. It put everyone aboard in grave danger.

  When she floated up off the deck in the Structures office from the loss of the gravity, she concluded the emergency systems were not going to switch over to the secondary artery the way they should. So either the secondary artery was out as well, or the switch mechanism had failed.

  She’d known that using an artery design for Vivo presented just this kind of risk, that damage to it would be catastrophic. Modern spaceships used a capillary design—a crisscross of distributed wires, conduits, and ducting spread everywhere to provide tremendous resilience should a portion be damaged. But a capillary design would have revealed Vivo’s true nature to Criss.

  In spite of her model’s failure at predicting MacMac’s behavior, she still couldn’t believe he would have sabotaged both arteries. It would mean certain death for everyone, and he wasn’t suicidal or a mass murderer.

  Then it registered that she couldn’t hear the drive pods. She focused all of her senses on trying to detect their sound or vibration.

  Sensing nothing, she pulsed with alarm. We’re on an intercept course with Aurora!

  Disaster was certain, but she would fight to survive because her masters would expect it of her. And a fight it would be since the drive pods—the only tool that could realistically solve the problem—were rendered useless by their long restart time.

  Lazura had less than an hour to find a solution. Using all of her capacity, she forecast with a fury. But every scenario had vanishingly small odds of success, and they all started with first bringing Vivo back online. To do that, she needed to get to the subdeck and manually force the switchover to the secondary artery.

  Floating above the floor in the Structures office, she spied a tall pole leaning against the wall. With angles at each end, it looked like an unused bracket from one of the equipment cabinets. Snatching it up, she kicked off the wall and launched herself out through the office door.

  As she floated into the cellar, she hooked the doorjamb with her pole so it swung her in a short arc around the corner. Unhooking at just the right moment, she was flung down the open straightaway. After that, she used the pole to grab and pull, flinging herself to reckless speeds as she raced above the cellar floor.

  Minutes passed before her destination came into view—the back ramp down to the subdeck, the same one Hejmo had driven when carrying the fuel-stacks to the drive pods. Grabbing a lip on the wall with the end of her pole, she swooped around the corner and barreled down the wide passageway.

  But as she rounded the corner, a solid wall loomed in her path, blocking the ramp and her progress. With an instant to act, she tucked, flipped in the air, and untucked to hit the wall feet-first, crouching to absorb the impact of her body against the barrier.

  Floating in front of a wall—a safety door that dropped when conditions on one side or the other threatened life—Lazura pondered the implications. She’d concealed its purpose during construction by designing it for flood control during emergencies over the ocean. But like so much on Vivo, it was dual-use technology, also designed to provide a life support barrier if air were lost on either side.

  A containment breach? If they’d lost air in the subdeck, that meant either MacMac had been careless with his explosive, or the damage to the primary artery had been caused by an external event.

  But Criss wouldn’t attack Vivo, nor would he let others take such actions, not with the domed world screaming toward Aurora on an intercept approach. That was the whole point of the risky maneuver, to make them untouchable.

  Processing this new information—a breach in the subdeck—her scenario forecasting guided her to the same conclusion as before. Her odds of success were infinitesimal, and there would be no second step until she first switched service to the secondary artery and made Vivo operational.

  Vivo’s design included a handful of life support barriers and no manual airlocks. To get to the subdeck, she’d need to be creative. She still had Vivo’s construction schematics stored in her matrix, and upon viewing them, she zeroed in on a nearby lift station. There.

  Lazura didn’t hesitate. Pushing off the barrier and flying back the way she’d come, she hooked and swooped, straining to move faster. When the lift came into view, she changed tactics, dragging and hooking her pole in an attempt to slow down.

  The lift wouldn’t function without power, but an emergency battery would open and close the doors so as not to trap passengers inside. She signaled the door to open, stepped inside, and shut it behind her to ensure a seal between the cellar and the subdeck.

  Then she turned, crouched to the floor at the back of the lift cabin, and pulled back the carpet to expose an access hatchway. Releasing the latches and turning the handle, she lifted, but the hatchway wouldn’t budge.

  Like water in a sink holding down a drain cap, the air pressure inside the lift cabin pushed down on the hatchway, forcing it closed. Lazura planted a foot on either side of the lid, squatted, gripped the handle with both hands, and performed the synbod version of a deadlift. Coordinating the immense strength of her legs, torso, shoulders, and arms, she pulled up, testing the limits of the handle as she did.

  When she heard the first hiss—the sound of air rushing from the lift cabin into the vacuum below—she knew she’d won. The air in the cabin was depleted in an instant, eliminating the pressure on the hatchway. With no resistance left, Lazura leaned the hatch back against the wall.

  Without hesitating, she wormed her way through the access hatch and, floating beneath the lift cabin, pushed her body down the tube in an effortless descent. With it pitch black inside the lift tube, she shifted her vision to the infrared range to see images illuminated by their warmth. The walls of the tube zipped past for a brief moment, then her feet hit the subdeck.

  Triggering the lift door open, Lazura stepped into a cold, dark world. With thirty minutes to impact, she pushed off and flew above the subdeck, headed for the secondary artery. She’d kept her pole with her, but the broad open spaces of the subdeck provided few opportunities for her to hook and pull.

  The tall, silent drive pods loomed on her left as she zipped along. She could feel their residual heat in the cold, and some warmth still radiated from the walls, floor, and ceiling of the subdeck. That was good news because it meant that any synbods caught down here should still be okay. Unfortunately, that included Chase and Justin.

  As for the humans, they’d last been seen headed up to the dome, so either they had made it, or they were long-since dead.

  The wall that held the secondary artery loomed ahead, and, as before, she flipped and landed feet-first. The moment she hit, she scrambled for a handhold, then pulled herself along the wall until she reached the maintenance cabinet, the only external evidence of the secondary artery’s existence.

  The cabinet was more like a small door flush with the wall. Lazura felt for the mechanical release and triggered it open. Inside the cabinet, along with hundreds of other devices, sat the tiny cutover switch and its support circuitry.

  “May we help?”

  Lazura turned with a start to see Hejmo floating toward her, crystals of frozen water vapor covering him like a dusting of jewels. The two Techs floating behind him were similarly encrusted.

  The dart protruding from Hejmo’s eye sent a wash of anger down Lazura’s core. She wanted to remove it, but with twenty minutes left, she couldn’t spare the time.

  It took ten minutes for them to explore the internals enough to diagnose the problem. Whoever had installed the cutover switch had powered it from the primary artery without a battery backup. When the primary went down, so did the switch, making it unavailable when it was time for it to do its job.

  They chewed up another ten minutes working to jury-rig a power relay to trip the switch. They were close to finishing when Lazura, who’d been keeping track of time, stopped working, turned in the direction of the K
ardish home world, and waited to die.

  When it didn’t happen on schedule, she remained motionless, waiting long enough so that every possible error in her time estimate had expired. And then she turned to Hejmo, grabbed the dart in his eye firmly between thumb and forefinger, and pulled it from his head.

  She didn’t know what Criss had done to avoid a collision, and she couldn’t learn until she restored power. Returning to the cabinet, she finished connecting the power relay. When she did, the cutover switch tripped and Vivo came alive.

  Lights flickered on, machinery clanked and whirred, the structure itself groaned like an old man stretching after a nap. Rising gravity pulled her down to the floor.

  She had to wait while Vivo’s systems restarted, synchronized with one another, and populated her feeds with current data. Her first act was to use the external cameras and look back at Aurora. The frozen fountains of air projecting upward along one edge of the space platform told the story.

  Imagining the damage and death associated with such a maneuver—a toll Criss could predict in advance—she concluded that he wasn’t the one who’d attacked Vivo. An alternative theory was that an errant asteroid had hit them. After all, Vivo was entering the asteroid belt. But an accident implied that this was all a coincidence, and that was something she couldn’t accept.

  And in the end, it didn’t matter—because everything had changed.

  Turning a behemoth like Vivo around and returning to Aurora would take two weeks, plenty of time for her hostages and the residents of Aurora to plan her demise should she do something so foolhardy.

  Continuing onward was problematic because she still had Cheryl and possibly Juice on board, something Criss would never let stand. And if Juice turned up dead, Criss would be unrelenting in his pursuit, and Lazura would die, too.

  Yet even with her new reality, her next actions remained the same. She could neither return nor run until she restarted the drive pods. And she couldn’t do that until she addressed the conditions on the subdeck.