Crystal Escape

by Doug J. Cooper

  “Can’t you stop her?”

  “Not with her dome shield in place. I can display simple things like arrows, but to overpower her, I need to be inside.”

  Cheryl took off for the lift, her mind racing. When the lift came into view, she asked the question, even though she feared the answer. “How long could someone survive breathing the gas down below?”

  “Minutes.”

  Cheryl hugged herself on the ride up to the guest deck, struggling for optimistic thoughts. She’d clung to the notion that somehow, somewhere, Juice and MacMac had found sanctuary from the cold vacuum of space. But pumped gas would find those hideaways and fill them with deadly fumes.

  “I believe Sid and I can enter the dome through a maintenance gate along the perimeter path,” said Criss. “To do that, you’ll need to configure the doors so they’re staged like an airlock. Can you help with that?”

  “Sure.”

  Floating arrows appeared, leading Cheryl across the deck, and she took off in a lope. “Please get here soon,” she pleaded, knowing they were doing everything they could.

  Pop, pop, pop, pop. The percussive thump of explosions caused Cheryl to drop to a crouch. She swiveled her head back and forth, seeking the cause of the blasts. Then the deck lurched, throwing her to the ground.

  The shaking howl of twisting metal dominated everything, filling the air with sickening shrieks as if Vivo itself were tearing open. Prone on the ground, she looked between her feet at the office tower.

  It swayed. Then it began to drop.

  Chapter 25

  Sitting in the lounge of Aurora’s executive berth, Sid wrapped his legs and arms into a ball in anticipation of a collision with Vivo.

  “Nice work,” he told Criss as he unfolded in his chair moments later, pleased to be alive.

  “I’m bringing the scout around,” said Criss. “It’ll be here in twenty minutes.”

  “Twenty minutes?” Sid’s whine revealed his impatience.

  “This berth uses a dock instead of a bay. It takes longer.” After a moment of silence, Criss added, “We left the scout’s truss line hanging on an external maintenance cleat.”

  “I’ll buy you a new one.”

  “We need to retrieve it before we start pursuit.”

  “No.”

  “The only way to slow Vivo is with its own drive pods or another ship’s engines. The scout’s engines aren’t in play without the truss line. We either retrieve it now or risk having to come back for it.”

  Angry at the universe and rebelling against any more delays, Sid lashed out. “I order you to find a way to slow Vivo using the scout’s engines.”

  Criss connected with Cheryl after that, and while those two worked together, Sid listened but kept quiet, willing his intuition to guide him. He was still awaiting inspiration when Criss rose.

  “The scout is finishing its docking cycle. We can board in a few moments.”

  “Did you invent a way to use the scout’s engines to slow Vivo?”

  “Yes. It’s called a truss line. There’s a custom model hanging on an exterior maintenance cleat. Let’s swing by and pick it up.”

  When they finally took up the chase, Criss multitasked, working with Cheryl in her search for Juice while at the same time helping Sid refine their strategy for boarding Vivo.

  “Lazura needs five hours to start the drive pods,” said Sid. “We used an hour waiting for the scout and retrieving the truss line. We’ll use two more catching Vivo. So, by my math, we have two hours to board Vivo and take control.”

  Criss nodded. “In round numbers.”

  “And once you’re under the dome, you overpower Lazura and it’s done.” He snapped his fingers to illustrate the speed of her demise. “What I’m getting at is that since the actual confrontation is over so fast, we really have two hours just to board Vivo. That cushion sounds almost comfortable.”

  “There are so many ways things could go wrong. If she restarts the drives, the chase resumes, and since her starhub is still broken and she doesn’t have the additional fuel she wanted, she’ll take big risks to overcome that disadvantage. However we approach this, we don’t want there to be a moment where she feels cornered.”

  “What would she do?”

  “She’s rational, but one of her options is to harm or kill the hostages. She keeps that decision on a knife’s edge because if we don’t believe it could happen at any moment, she has no negotiating position. In the end, she wants to find a way to return home with her archive.”

  Sid stared at the projected image of Vivo hovering above the scout’s ops bench. “I want Cheryl back with us. I know we care about all the people on Vivo. But let’s get Juice if she’s alive, and Cheryl while she still is. Then we worry about everyone else.”

  “Juice is alive,” Criss said forcefully. “I won’t accept the alternative.”

  Sid thought Criss looked tired around the eyes, even knowing neither synbods nor crystals showed stress in that way. “She is, Criss. I’m so worried about Cheryl that I let my mouth speak garbage.”

  After a period of quiet, they resumed planning. By the time Vivo loomed, they’d narrowed their entry choice to a maintenance gate on the dome perimeter.

  “I assume we’re going in wearing our personal cloaks, or can Lazura see through them?”

  “What is this?” For a moment, Sid thought Criss was reacting to his question. Then he saw the ring of pyrotechnics flash around Vivo. Like sequenced explosions from the olden days of building demolition, a ring of silent explosions, tiny in comparison to the huge vessel, looped around the outside of the platform about halfway down the structure beneath the dome.

  Sid stood, enlarged the image, and replayed the scene while he leaned in to look. “What is that?”

  “She’s separating. Good one, Lazura.”

  Sid heard the admiration in Criss’s voice but didn’t understand the reference. Then, hundreds of flares, spaced around where the ring of explosions had occurred, ignited with a shower of sparks and began spewing intense cones of flame. Moments after that, a gap appeared between two sections of the platform.

  “What am I looking at?” demanded Sid, his frustration feeding his anger.

  “Those are beacon rockets that she’s repurposed as retrorockets. She’s using them to pull the subdeck away from the cellar and dome.”

  “How is that possible?” asked Sid as the gap in the middle of Vivo grew to a chasm.

  “That ring of flashes we saw earlier was a series of sequenced explosions that sheared thousands of bolts holding the two structures together. Now she’s using beacon rockets, distress signals powerful enough to be seen great distances, to separate them.”

  “Where did she get so many of them?”

  “Aubrey has had quirks her whole life, one of which is the need to over prepare for everything. I had believed it was this trait that drove her to purchase so many.”

  Sid grumbled, then called to the air, “Cher, are you okay?”

  “What’s happening?” she replied, her voice shaking from the tumult.

  Confusion dominated the next minutes. The rocket beacons didn’t have an off mechanism Criss could control. Each burned a charge of fuel that, once ignited, continued burning until the charge was depleted.

  “Shoot her,” Sid demanded, ready to kill Lazura and stop the madness.

  “I still don’t know where Juice is, so I don’t know how to avoid hitting her.”

  Ideas swirled between them in rapid fire with no consensus on what actions to take. As they brainstormed, the separation between the subdeck and cellar grew, removing all doubt about the end state; Vivo was dividing in two.

  And as the separation progressed, the domed portion started to turn in a lazy spin. Sid didn’t notice until Cheryl called to them. “The dome is rotating on its axis. Everything is getting pushed out toward the dome wall.”

  “Lazura mounted the beacon rockets at an angle,” said Criss after a moment of investigation. “The spin is
deliberate.”

  At one level, Vivo seemed toy-like to Sid, floating in space with nothing around it to hint at its size. But the shriek of tearing metal he’d heard through his com link with Cheryl hammered home that it wasn’t a toy and this wasn’t a game.

  As the distance between subdeck and cellar increased, so did the spin, making life increasingly difficult for everyone on Vivo. “The rotation has us pressed against the dome wall,” called Cheryl. “We’re above two g’s already and it’s getting worse. Some of the older folks are really suffering.”

  That urgency shifted their focus to stabilizing the dome. “The scout can help slow the spin,” said Criss, “but we have to wait for the separation to complete or we risk tilting one structure into the other.”

  The distance between the subdeck and cellar had grown large enough for Sid to see stars in between. He also saw that a rod connected the subdeck to the cellar at the center. “What’s that bar connecting the two pieces?”

  “That’s the central office tower,” said Criss. “It’s going with the subdeck, which means Lazura is too.” As he spoke, the subdeck pulled the office tower away from the cellar and dome, reminding Sid of a sword being drawn from its sheath.

  Two distinct vessels now hung in space. The part with the dome and cellar looked similar to the original Vivo, though shorter with the loss of its lowest tier. The part with the subdeck and office tower looked something like a thick, floating manhole cover with a short, fat broom handle poking up from its center.

  “Hang on!” shouted Criss.

  Sid fell back into his seat as the scout dipped, then he heard the engines spin into a whine and continue into a scream.

  “Tell me,” yelled Sid as the scout shook and the distance from Vivo and Cheryl began to grow.

  “She’s going for a cold start,” Criss yelled above the shriek of the engines. “With her greatly reduced mass, she has an eighty percent chance of success, so it’s not irrational. And if it works, she has us at a huge disadvantage.”

  Criss held up a hand and wiggled his fingers. “But that means there’s a one in five chance she fails. If that happens, the drive pods go, and the entire subdeck becomes shrapnel. In truth, I’m not sure we can get far enough away to save ourselves.”

  “What would happen to the dome?” asked Sid, his tone reflecting his fear.

  Before Criss could answer, the bottom of the subdeck glowed a brilliant white. And with the office tower pointing the way, the improbable vessel accelerated, gaining speed so quickly it disappeared in a blink. Lazura and her chopped spacecraft were gone.

  Sid felt a level of relief at seeing her go because it meant the alien AI no longer shared space with Cheryl. It also gave them the opportunity to locate Juice. To do that, they needed to return yet again to the domed world.

  Turning the craft, Criss used the engines to slow the scout. The maneuver took longer than Sid wanted, prompting him to grunt and groan every few minutes to show his unhappiness. The nimble craft finally moved forward again, and Criss pushed the engines as hard on the return trip as he had during their escape.

  “Now I see why you called it a good one,” said Sid. “She’s making her run, and we need to stay here and stabilize the dome.”

  “I hadn’t foreseen the separation, let alone the spin. I examined everything about Vivo, and yet I didn’t see that twenty unrelated features could be repurposed all at once to provide that capability. But the instant the separation started, I knew she had scored big.”

  “Can the scout stop the spin?”

  Criss nodded. “We have the truss line…” He left a tiny pause, just long enough for Sid to notice. “…and using it, the scout can slow the spin to a tolerable level in about four hours. Livable in eight. But it will take a week for our engines to stop that huge structure on its journey into deep space, and another week to get it moving on an inbound trajectory.”

  “And meanwhile, Lazura is putting distance between us.” After a pause, Sid continued. “If we find Juice in the domed section, then we can send weapons after Lazura.”

  “But if Juice is gone,” Criss finished, “we have to give chase. And with Lazura’s head start, it will be a long, grueling pursuit.” Criss folded his hands together, signaling a dramatic moment. “Given that scenario, it’s best if I give chase alone. You and Cheryl can stay and help the guests get back home.”

  Sid responded with an obscene gesture.

  “Then you should know that I’ve launched fourteen of our high-performance supply ships and am humping them out to different intercept points along Lazura’s likely exit routes. The scout’s been used hard over the past few days, with more to come. We’ll need to connect with any one of them and replenish before we leave the solar system.”

  This time Sid nodded and sought to comfort both Criss and himself. “We’ll confirm Juice’s status once we’re inside. Either way, we’ll get her back. I promise.”

  Slowing the spin of the huge platform started with hooking the scout’s truss line to a structural component on the outer rim. Criss impressed Sid by hooking the truss line to an exposed flange without either of them leaving their seats. After ramping the scout’s engines to pull against the spin, he leaned back in his chair. “It’ll be a couple of hours before it’s slowed enough that we can move about and be productive inside.”

  Like turning a massive ocean liner with a tugboat, slowing Vivo with the scout was a reasonable undertaking but a prolonged process. Sid didn’t last ten minutes. “I’m not sitting here waiting while Cheryl’s over there.”

  “Cheryl is in excellent physical condition, but she is suffering great discomfort. What can you accomplish under such conditions?”

  “I can keep her company, suffering next to her until it’s over.”

  Criss nodded. “She will express disapproval but will be cheered by your presence.”

  They dressed in space coveralls and made their way out into open space through the scout’s airlock. Criss operated a hand drive—a handgrip with angled nozzles designed to pull people short distances in a weightless environment—and Sid held on to him as they glided toward the now exposed underside of the cellar containment.

  When they’d drifted below the lip of the structure, Criss restarted the scout’s engines. As the nimble craft pulled mightily to slow the platform’s rotation, the two made for the shaft beneath Vivo that, with the loss of the office tower, was now an open cylindrical tunnel.

  The tunnel ran up through Vivo’s central axis, placing it at the center of rotation for the platform. When they entered the opening, the spin was barely perceptible, the cylinder walls turning slower than the second hand on a sweep-hand clock. As long as they stayed close to this center of rotation, the spin wouldn’t affect them to any degree.

  But, just the way a longer rope on a tree swing makes for a wilder ride, the farther away they moved from the central axis, the greater the centrifugal forces pushing them out toward the dome wall.

  “Lazura designed the tower extraction mechanism so it protects the atmosphere inside the dome and cellar,” said Criss as they floated up the empty shaft. “That’s a peace offering from her view.”

  Sid, busy searching for a way in, didn’t respond. He didn’t care about Lazura’s motives.

  The mouth of the shaft had a smooth wall all the way around, offering little hope of providing access to the inside. But as they rose up the cylinder, they approached a spot where twisted metal and sheared cables protruded from the wall.

  “Can we get inside there?” asked Sid, pointing to the damage.

  “We can get to the guest deck over here.” Criss moved them to a rectangular plate on the opposite side of the shaft. “As we rose up the cylinder, we moved inside the dome shield. I’ve taken control of everything and have confirmed that Lazura went with the other vessel. I still can’t sense Juice anywhere here on Vivo. In fact, I can’t locate Juice, MacMac, Chase, or Justin. That’s not good news.”

  Criss triggered a release and the
plate fell away to reveal a shallow cavity. With his feet protruding into the open shaft, Criss leaned forward and started fiddling with a cover panel set in the cavity’s back wall. After several seconds, the cover released.

  Criss shifted to the side, and Sid, moving up next to him, peered into a dark cubby, much of it filled with a rectangular shaft passing across the back wall.

  “We’re going to take turns climbing that ventilation chase up to the guest deck.”

  “I’ll go first,” said Sid.

  “See that square cap?” Criss pointed to a cover on the side of the chase. “When you open that, air will escape and fill this cubby, so this hatch door has to be shut. Get in, close the cap, and climb up to the next one, just like that one. Open it, climb out, and cover it again. I’ll follow.”

  “No problem,” said Sid, moving inside the tight cubby.

  “Did you notice that when you crossed this threshold, the gravity module started affecting you?”

  The comment drew Sid’s attention to his knees, now rubbing against the cubby floor. It was a modest influence, but a tug nevertheless.

  “As you climb the chase, you will transition to full gravity, so be prepared to work harder as you move upward.”

  Given the hurdles he’d overcome to get this far, Sid wasn’t about to let a climb up a shaft be his undoing. It took several minutes of inelegant scrambling, but his determination won out, and he made it to the guest deck. By the time Criss joined him, Sid was out of his space coveralls and looking at the wonders inside Vivo’s dome.

  “Over here.” Criss motioned for Sid to follow. They walked along a garden path that ended at a square of lawn near where the office tower lobby had been. In the middle of the patch of grass sat a small table like you might find in an eat-in kitchen. An ornate box sat on top of the table.

  As they approached the table, Sid caught sight of the distinctive markings on the box’s exterior. “Those are Kardish symbols.” His scalp tingled as he said the words.

  Criss nodded, then raised the lid and removed a faceted glass ball the size of a pebble. “Lazura’s archive,” he said, closing his fist around the bit of crystal. He held his hand at chest level and stared into the distance. Sid waited, figuring he was exploring the contents.