His view turned as the tower he flew inside slowly rotated around.
Ahead loomed the captive world of Carthage. A blue-green marble, so like Earth, yet almost completely obscured by a network of satellites and space stations. Dozens of massive orbitals ringed the equator, connected to the ground by space elevators that glowed like gigantic searchlights. The space stations formed an artificial ring at the halfway point of the elevator cords, where gravity would be nullified. Moreover, they were linked via some kind of visible energy grid, meshed with thousands of other, smaller installations all around the planet. The net effect was a sort of elongated sphere, the structure of which was primarily beams of energy.
Massive spacecraft—cargo ships, he presumed—were moored at facilities along the main equatorial ring, out at the counterweighted ends of the space elevators where centrifugal force would give the sensation of gravity pointing away from the planet below. Behemoths carrying, according to Tania, the captive bodies of the dual-brained Creators, ready to serve as intermediaries for a mind-transfer process the Scipios held a monopoly on.
As Skyler’s tower raced in toward one of these outer shipyards, he came to another realization. There were hardly any small ships here, in close to the world. Eve must have realized this flaw in the Scipios’ defenses. They’d put everything out at the perimeter of the solar system, ready to blockade any incursions. But Eve’s explosion, her sacrifice, had not only annihilated every scout in the area, but propelled Skyler and the others at a speed the Scipios could not match. A head start, though just how long it would last he had no idea. Surely the Swarm ships would have sent signals, unless they were unable to differentiate the towers from all the other ejecta.
He zoomed closer to Carthage. As the world began to fill his view of space, the first chunks of Eve’s exploded hull began to slam into the world and the space stations above it. Some exploded while still well outside the area, shot down by weapons too distant for his eyes to perceive. Tiny bursts of fire and shrapnel began to flicker all across his view like fireworks. Eve had hidden them among this, and it was working. Skyler looked around for the others, but saw none of their markers now. No Tania, no Sam. Nobody. “Shit. No, no! Eve, where—”
“There is one last thing,” Eve said over him, a terrible reminder that this was a recorded speech. She could not hear him, could not know the dread that gripped him now that the others had vanished from his display. Skyler swallowed. He forced the last bit of trust he could find for this alien intelligence. They must still be out there. They had to be. Eve’s voice went on. Calm, oblivious. “I know you disapprove of what I did with the others. Alex and Jared. But I did learn something that may be important. A difference between immune and nonimmune.”
Could he have stopped her voice there, he would have. He didn’t want to know. Didn’t want to be the one with secret knowledge.
“In one of the experiments, I gave their brains the exact same stimulus, and yet their minds produced different hallucinations. The immune saw a beach, the other a mountain ridge. I do not know why, but this may be useful to you.”
He barely heard her. In the chaotic rain of Eve’s debris, he spotted something familiar. A tower-shaped object like this, not tumbling like the rest. One of his friends. They had made it through, after all!
Fear crushed his mind as he understood the object’s impending doom. A Scipio station, right in its path. He watched in horror, utterly helpless. The station was angular, like a hundred metal boxes welded haphazardly together, and studded with towers and antennae. Lights glowed in thousands of windows of uniform size. He wondered how many Scipios were looking out those windows now, at the projectile bearing down on their habitat. Were they aware of it? How visible was he on their version of radar? Then, only seconds before impact, a purplish sphere blipped into existence around that tower. As Skyler watched, the newly enclosed object collided with the Scipio station, sending brilliant light and a shower of debris out into space.
And then it was all behind him. He’d passed right through that upper layer of Scipio tech. The hue across his visor changed; his tower was now similarly encased. Everything outside appeared to slow down. Skyler could only watch as his own tower approached the target Eve had guided him to. Part of him had to admire the AI’s precision in all this. Their paths during the battle had taken each of them to a specific point within her hull so that her final explosion would propel them to a pinpoint location millions of kilometers away.
He watched, utterly transfixed, as he approached the atmosphere. Thick milky clouds rushed toward him and then enveloped his entire view. Seconds later his vessel punched out the other side, but to his dismay no surface was visible below. The air was a choking haze of particulate, limiting his view to a scant tens of meters.
“Good luck, Skyler Luiken,” Eve said.
Something pushed through the haze. A massive solid obelisk, dark and inscrutable.
Impact.
Fire and light, all around.
A deep shuddering vibration reached his cocooned form. He heard the rattle and clang of countless impacts. He glanced up and saw explosions ripping through the object above. A building, perhaps Scipio. Walls, doors, windows, and probably living creatures, all being vaporized as his shielded tower burrowed deep into the installation. Fireballs rocked the spaces he passed through, digging a gigantic silo out of the structure’s levels.
His progress slowed, then stopped. He came to rest in a charred cavity. Severed pipes around him dripping unknown fluids. Exposed wiring that fountained sparks, which fell and bounced off the tower.
His artificial exterior view winked off, leaving him staring at the red foam again.
The cushioning receded, deflating. Skyler wiggled and moved, pushing it away, suddenly feeling trapped by it. He got an arm free, then the other. Finally, one leg managed to squeeze out, and then he fell. The tower, resting on its side in the pit it had dug, had opened, allowing him to exit.
Skyler landed in several centimeters of oily water. He hoped it was water. He stood and took in the space around him, the enormity of the place and his utter solitude threatening to overwhelm him.
He felt utterly alone. A saboteur delivered behind enemy lines. An agent sent into a prison camp so as to sow its destruction from within.
“I’m a virus,” he whispered. An infection.
And if there was one thing the Scipios knew well, it was how to deal with such things.
For all those who venture into the unknown
Acknowledgments
First and foremost I must thank my agent, Sara Megibow, and my editor, Michael Braff (plus everyone else at Del Rey who helps bring my books to life). I’m endlessly grateful for all the hard work that goes into a project like this.
Thanks be to the authors I’m so proud to call mentors, friends, and contemporaries: Chuck Wendig, Delilah Dawson, Peter Clines, K. C. Alexander, Kevin Hearne, Ramez Naam, Django Wexler, Kat Richardson, Scott Sigler, Robin Hobb, Shawn Speakman, Wes Chu, Sam Sykes, M. D. Waters, Alexandra Oliva, and on and on…If not for this wonderful community I don’t know how I’d get by. You wonderful weirdos are amazing.
My extreme gratitude to Felicia Day, whose support, generosity, and encouragement have kept me motivated while writing these books. You’ll get your sequel one of these days!
Thanks to my wife, Nancy, for her constant support. Love you, sugar!
And, last but not least, thank you for reading. In the end that’s all that matters.
—Jason M. Hough Seattle, 2017
DEL REY BOOKS BY JASON M. HOUGH
ZERO WORLD
THE DIRE EARTH CYCLE
THE DARWIN ELEVATOR
THE EXODUS TOWERS
THE PLAGUE FORGE
THE DIRE EARTH: A NOVELLA
THE DIRE EARTH DUOLOGY
INJECTION BURN
ESCAPE VELOCITY
JASON M. HOUGH is the New York Times bestselling author of Zero World and The Dire Earth Cycle: The Darwin Elevator, Th
e Exodus Towers, and The Plague Forge, as well as the novella The Dire Earth. Hough was born in Illinois but grew up on the mean streets of suburban San Diego, California. In 1978, when he was six, his parents took him to see Star Wars, and so began a lifelong love of sci-fi and all things geek. He later worked for a decade in the videogame industry as a 3D artist and game designer. Today he lives in Seattle with his wife and two young sons. When not writing, Hough enjoys building LEGO spaceships with his boys and other similarly grown-up pursuits.
jasonhough.com
Facebook.com/hough
@JasonMHough
Read on for a sneak peek at
ESCAPE VELOCITY
the thrilling follow-up to Jason M. Hough’s Injection Burn.
Coming very soon from Del Rey Books.
Location Unknown
HE LAY AT the bottom of a deep hole, in a puddle of filthy water that sizzled as bits of molten metal dripped down from the destruction above.
Skyler Luiken remained motionless for a time, just staring up at the column his arrival had carved. He remembered nothing of the actual crash. Couldn’t even remember when exactly he’d lost consciousness, or why. Medically induced, probably. Another gift from Eve. Her last? He called out for her. “Eve?”
No response came. But then she’d said he’d be on his own, didn’t she?
He took a long, shuddering breath and allowed all the sources of his frayed nerves to worm through his mind. He was a thousand light-years from Earth. Alone. His friends were scattered across the gigantic, planet-spanning apparatus of the Scipios, their exact locations and conditions unknown. All of them had been thrown toward the massive collection of alien space stations in the final explosion of Eve, their host. Eve, the only ally they had, the only one who knew what the hell was really going on here. Now gone. Holy fuck, she’s really gone. The AI had sacrificed herself. Expelled him and the others on precisely calculated trajectories an instant before her destruction in a last-ditch effort to give each of them a chance to accomplish the task at hand.
He found little comfort in that.
Skyler let his breath out, and with it banished the enormity of his task to the edges of his mind. Too much to grapple with, and he wasn’t about to lie here and wallow in overwhelmed shock. He’d deal with his immediate predicament now, and damn the rest of it. He had to survive, take stock, find safety. Find his friends.
“Hello?” he called. “Can anyone read me?”
A terrible silence stretched. He fiddled with the comm menu rendered on the inside of his visor. All channels were already on, but it showed no links to anyone else. He bumped the system to maximum broadcast strength.
“This is Skyler. I’m…I’ve no idea where I am. I’m alive. Obviously. I can’t hear any of you, but if you can read me…”
What? What to tell them?
“Just stay put,” he settled on, no better option coming to mind. “I’ll report my location once I know where the hell I am, and wait for you all to join me. Keep trying to communicate. We might just be out of range.”
Now what? he wondered.
The answer seemed obvious. He had to scavenge.
Now that, that, Skyler could wrap his mind around. He glanced around the pool of fluid and debris in the basin of the pit his arrival had created. The pod had burrowed through some kind of multilevel structure. A space station, no doubt. How deep had he gone? Skyler glanced up. The air above, thick with steam and smoke and a fine particulate like snow or ash, obscured the entry wound, but he figured the hole must have been patched by some automated process or else all that crap in the air would have been sucked out into space. Still, what he could see was at least a hundred meters of the shredded remains of a multilevel structure, as if his little craft had dug its way down through a twenty-story building. There were floors every five meters or so, each sprouting mangled pipes and conduits of unknown purpose, though given that most either leaked fluid or rained sparks, it didn’t take much imagination to guess. The cavities in between these, though, were truly unknown. In truth it didn’t look much different from a cross section of any Earth-based structure.
He shifted his focus to the remains of his escape pod. It lay around him like a cracked egg, with bits of the foamy orange cushion that had surrounded him during the brief flight now melting away into the soup of knee-deep viscous fluids rapidly filling the space around him. He jumped off his toes, just enough to test the gravity without rocketing himself up into the haze above, and judged it to be about three-quarters of Earth normal. What had Eve said about the gravity on Carthage? Pretty damn close to that, if his memory served. So he must be at a pretty low altitude.
As the last of the cushioning melted away, Skyler saw some gray containers floating amid the wreckage. He picked one up and examined it, puzzled at first. It was Builder gear, definitely, but its purpose eluded him. He was about to toss it aside when he realized his suit was telling him the answer. In the bottom corner of his field of view, a display on his visor indicated that this was repair paste for his armored suit. He grinned despite himself and picked another. Ammunition, in the form of six pellets that could be inserted into the right or left shoulder of his suit, powering the beam weapons embedded just above his wrists. Skyler’s grin widened. Eve may have sacrificed herself, abandoning him and the others to take on an entire sieged planet by themselves, but at least she’d not left them completely naked and defenseless.
Another case held “nutrients.” He almost gagged. This would be the rather nasty food Eve had manufactured for them and never quite gotten around to improving. Skyler decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth, as his stomach growled its desire to be filled with the gritty, overly sweet fare. Last, a self-replenishing container for water, filled by pulling moisture out of the very air around him. This he attached immediately to the receptacle on his lower back and then willed the suit to extend the small tube toward his mouth. He heard the thin whir as the little straw extended, and he drank greedily, ignoring the slightly metallic taste. It was cool and wet and somehow grounded him, putting an almost whiskeylike glow of confidence in his gut. He repeated the process with the food, choking a few gulps down.
Skyler tried the comm again. “Anyone out there? This is Skyler. I’m alive, but I’ve no idea where the hell I am or what to do. Reply if you can hear me.”
No response came. The suit’s status indicators still showed no connection to anyone else, nor any Builder equivalent of a network at all. He ground his teeth at that, but decided not to spend any more time worrying about it for now. Maybe it was broken, or maybe the others were simply out of range. He left the comm switched on, and set a recurring timer to remind him every ten minutes to try it again.
Finally, he checked himself for injuries. Bruised and battered, but otherwise he felt good. His suit still had integrity, too.
Fed and hydrated, Skyler turned his focus toward his overall goal.
The enormity of which still boggled his mind, but considered in the simplest terms—that he was here to free the world of Carthage from the Scipios—he figured his first task should be to gather intelligence. How did the Scipios hold this world? What were their society and security structure like? Was his crew truly alone here, or could he perhaps rouse some kind of rebellion from within the metaphorical prison walls? The mental image of a worldwide prison riot was almost enough to make him laugh.
A burst of fire erupted into the cavity just a few meters above him, then quickly receded into a small gas-fueled flame like a welder’s torch left on. The sound of it somehow woke Skyler’s sense of hearing, and he began to listen as much as see. The dripping water, the slosh of his legs in the now-thigh-deep pool, and something else, too. A new sound, rhythmic, that stuttered even as it rose and fell through sweeps of extreme pitch changes. The noise came from all around him. Instinctively, Skyler sloshed over to one side of the pit, pressing himself against a wall made of charred debris, as the volume grew.
Multicolored light tore through the m
ists above. Beams of violet and yellow. Skyler knew next to nothing about life beyond Earth, but every fiber of his being came to the simple conclusion instantly: security response. He was an intruder here, an infection, and the cavalry had arrived to deal with him.
He raised his weaponized arm and waited, forcing even breaths through his clenched teeth. The one thing he could not afford was a shoot-out. Whatever the population of Scipios here was, it was bound to be far higher than he had ammunition for. No, a subtler approach was the only real option if he were to have any hope of reaching the surface, much less accomplishing what he’d come here to do.
The flashing lights above were joined by others, and then a shadow appeared in the rising steam. The curling white murk spread and swirled around the edges of a teardrop-shaped object maybe two meters tall, with four metallic and heavily segmented tentacles moving in a carefully controlled dance as it lowered itself deeper into the pit.
The sight of it barely registered, for it was what Skyler saw beyond this alien that almost overwhelmed his mind. A brief glimpse through the thick haze, but that was enough.
A night sky, half obscured by clouds.
He didn’t need to get to the surface. He was already there. The realization left him reeling as his assumptions shattered like glass.
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