Escape Velocity

by Jason M. Hough

  “Look there,” Prumble said, and pointed.

  She followed his gesture and saw nothing out of the ordinary, at first. Certainly nothing to warrant the surprise in his voice.

  Then that all changed. On a station a few kilometers away, there was a large indented section, like an artificial canyon. A rectangular depression. It held things, and some part of her mind recognized them, bubbling up the word at the same moment the explosions began.

  Ships, her mind said, as the whole place began to erupt.

  Above Carthage

  SAM DRIFTED IN null gravity, gazing numbly at the strange world around her.

  An outside observer might think her dead, and until a few seconds ago she’d probably have conceded the point.

  Everything ached.

  Thoughts came to her like bubbles on a pool of lava, only to burst and sear her mind every time she tried to grasp them. Iconography on her visor occasionally registered. Warnings about injury, and air. Proximity something-or-other. Blah, blah, fucking blah.

  A single word nudged her closer to coherent thought. It meant something. Something important. Not a word, actually. No, it was a name. Vaughn.

  Her random endless drift brought him into view. Another inanimate object like her, one of thousands that made a lazy path through the impossibly vast chamber. He was curled, fetal, hands over his head. A crash position, wasn’t it? She wished she’d thought of it. Not that he seemed any better off.

  “Hey,” she tried. Came out more like a half-choked gasp. “Hey,” she said again, a bit more clearly.

  Vaughn stirred. His legs unfolded and stretched out flat. His arms came out as if he were feeling for a wall that wasn’t there. Then they went to his stomach, pressing. The kind of movement someone made when they’d been stabbed in the gut.

  “Hey yourself,” he said. More clear than she. “About time you woke.”

  She laughed, though it turned into a racking cough. Somehow the action brought feeling back to her limbs. “What the hell happened?”

  “My guess? Eve fired us out like a cannonball before she went nuclear. Launched us all the way to our destination.”

  “Well, goddamn. How thoughtful of her. We’re actually here?”

  “A guess, I said. But yeah…seems so.”

  Sam searched her mind, piecing the memories together. That desperate battle against the Scipio Swarm. Eve, guiding them so carefully and yet urgently to a specific place within her battered hull. Tricking her and Vaughn into entering some kind of room and then trapping them within.

  The question was, had it been Eve’s plan all along? Bring her human cargo up to the edge of the Swarm, forcing the enemy ships to get all nice and snuggly close, then detonate her massive bulk and hide her agents in the debris? Sam had little love for the Builder AI, but she could respect a well-played scheme when she saw one. “Effing brilliant, really.”

  “Except for the part where our ride home exploded,” Vaughn observed.

  Laughter really did erupt from her then. Sam couldn’t help herself.

  “The hell’s so funny?”

  She gestured, wide and slowly, toward the space around them. “Have you not looked at where we are, jackass?”

  In truth it had only registered for her an instant before, but the timing only made it more funny. She giggled as if half-drunk.

  The room…No. Not a room. A room had comprehensible dimensions. This place was something Sam had no word for. She judged the rectangular space to be five hundred meters wide and at least ten kilometers long. One of the long sides was open to vacuum, making the place appear as a trench from one perspective. The other sides were an incomprehensible mess of ductwork, small buildings or containers, and many thousands of gantries that extended out, up, or over to the things the vast space contained.

  Spacecraft. She had no doubt about this whatsoever. Inside this…dockyard, she supposed…were thousands of moored craft of every imaginable size and shape. Some sleek and shiny, others barely more than cobbled together junk with no recognizable front or back. Most were of Scipio design, the cargo ships Eve had shown them, only somehow more refined. Sam supposed that made sense, given how ancient the AI’s data had been. But the others! The variety staggered her. The scope of it left her breathless. Eve may have destroyed herself, but she’d sent them right into the heart of a shipyard so big it boggled her mind.

  “Looks to me like we can pick any ride home we like.”

  “I’ll give you a minute to figure things out,” Vaughn replied, “then you can take the jackass comment back for yourself.”

  The smug attitude made her want to smack him, but his confidence gave her serious pause. Sam’s drift had turned her away from the expanse of the chamber—apparently Eve had crash-landed them at one end of the massive trench-room—forcing her to endure the sight of a wall forty meters away until she’d made a full circle. She studied the moored fleet again.

  And saw what Vaughn meant instantly.

  Decay. Dismantlement. Scaffolds that absolutely writhed with robotic machines. As Sam watched those closest to her, she saw that the little automatons were not bringing supplies or materials to the ships, but carrying them away. Scrap metal and bits of exotic filament wires, looking very much like they’d been shorn with an old, rusty pair of hair clippers. This was no dock or refueling depot. This was a salvage yard on the grandest possible scale. Rose-colored glasses gone, Sam noted the true state of the ships around her. Some were mere skeletons, like great butchered whales. Many more, those that appeared to be fully intact, were in truth only shells. She could tell because most had at least one gaping hole looking in on empty, ravaged interiors.

  “Why the hell are they taking apart so many ships?” she wondered aloud.

  “A damn good question,” Vaughn replied. “But what I really want to know is why they’re ignoring us.”

  The thought hadn’t even occurred to Sam, as if the tactical part of her brain had yet to recover from their turbulent arrival. She twisted about, looking for the actual impact site. Eve had ejected them in a small pod, all inflated orange cushioning on the inside, but until this moment Sam hadn’t seen the outside. If not for the cracked-open state of it, she’d have assumed it a random chunk of rock. “Is that what we came here in?”

  “Yeah. What’s left of it.”

  It looked like a shard of an asteroid, utterly natural. The kind of thing that drifted in abundance out in a star’s Kuiper belt. Which explained why the Scipios hadn’t shot them out of the sky. Well, partially explained. It may appear natural, but why let it actually impact? She pulsed the thrusters on her suit to right herself, then flew to the wreckage. Vaughn joined her.

  “Supplies,” he said, gesturing. “Food, water, something my suit tells me is ammunition for the wrist weapons, and these…”

  She looked at the objects his finger pointed at. Little blobs, like coals for a barbecue. A bit of text appeared in the lower right of her vision, projected on the inside of her visor. HIGH-EXPLOSIVE MORTAR ROUNDS.

  “I feel better already,” Samantha said.

  Vaughn grunted, amused. “Twenty? Against an entire world?”

  “It’s a start. What about the others? Heard from them?” She was already deep into the comm menu on her visor when he replied.

  “Nope. It seems we’re limited to short range only, don’t ask me why. It’s deliberate, as far as I can tell.”

  Sam bit back a reply to that. Eve had been like a god and gods had a nasty habit of working in strange ways, didn’t they? Maybe she thought they wouldn’t fight on if they knew their companions hadn’t made it. She turned her focus to Eve’s other unexplained gift: the small black pedestal that had been between them inside the capsule. It floated, silent and cold, like some impartial observer. “What about that thing?”

  “Beats me,” he replied. “Maybe we were supposed to use it to fly away.”

  “No,” Sam said. “First off, Eve wouldn’t have let us go that easily. Second, I recognize it. Sort
of.”

  Vaughn waited.

  “It’s an aura shard,” she said. “A small one, granted, but otherwise just like those Skyler found in Brazil. The black material, tapering down to a point. I bet if we were in gravity it would still float.” She turned to the man. Her friend, her lover. “You’re not immune, Vaughn. She sent this for you. We have to keep it close.”

  He wrinkled his nose. “It’s a boat anchor. I can’t fight if I’m lugging that thing around.”

  “It floats, moron.”

  “It’s bulky.”

  “Well, it’s that or the disease.”

  “My suit will keep their shit out,” he countered.

  “Until they get a hit on you,” Sam replied, thinking of the tentacle that had punctured her own suit at the calf. That Scipio had fled an instant later, as if it had accomplished its goal. Had it tasted her? Discovered her immunity? No way to know. “Might be that we both need it,” she said carefully.

  “Meaning what?”

  “SUBS, back on Earth? That was Eve’s approximation of the Scipio virus, and based on her understanding of it from a few thousand years ago. Who knows what variants they have? Fuck, they’re probably manufacturing a new version as we speak.”

  He grimaced. And then his expression changed, his gaze off in the vague middle distance. “Trouble,” he said simply. All that needed to be said.

  Sam whirled. For the first time she realized another detail about the massive shipyard. Their little pod wasn’t the only one to crash here. She counted four other crash sites in their immediate area, hard to see in a room full of semi-dismantled vessels, but entirely obvious now. Deep blackened gouges along the “floor,” surrounded by the shredded remains of alien machinery. Sam squinted and, in response, her view zoomed in. A purely digital enhancement, but still quite impressive. Part of her wanted to see Skyler floating beside one of those impact sites. Hell, she’d be happy to see Tania right about now. But somehow she’d known these objects were not pods like hers. They were the remnants of the Chameleon. A slab of matte-black hull. There, a surprisingly large chunk of one of the biosphere walls, the segmented glass panels webbed with cracks, but still connected to one another. Sam wondered if Eve had meant to do this. Hide her and Vaughn’s arrival in this wreckage. Probably. But it hadn’t worked. Vaughn was right. A kilometer away at least, and closing, was a squadron of fast moving craft. Teardrop shaped and white in color, they sped along just a few meters from the floor in a V formation, heading straight toward Sam and Vaughn. As they neared they began to spread out, preparing to surround.

  Not today, Sam thought.

  Vaughn, as was his way, read her mind, and together they unleashed a salvo of mortars on the incoming Scipio craft. Sam assumed they were Scipio, at least. Seemed reasonable. Under the circumstances she felt entirely justified in a “Shoot first and ask questions later” policy.

  The mortars scythed through the air, their trajectories curling with the evasive maneuvers of their targets, and slammed home. Vaughn’s was a direct hit. A soundless explosion flashed, followed by a rapidly spreading sphere of debris. He’d be bragging about it at the first opportunity, she knew, because hers somehow missed. The Scipio did a neat little shimmy to the left at the last possible second. The mortar missed by a hair-width, plowing into an array of cylindrical containers secured to the floor by some kind of scaffold. Sam’s disappointment gave way to elation as a brilliant flash lit up the room. Fuel containers of some kind, she realized in hindsight, knowing she’d tell Vaughn it had been her plan the whole time. The queer vacuum-hindered fireball flashed out and vanished in little trails of prismatic sparks like a summer firework. The Scipio that had dodged was already twenty meters in front of the explosion when it came. Not far enough to escape damage entirely. It flipped forward, nose scraping the floor in a moment of friction that sent it cartwheeling off.

  “Lucky shot!” Vaughn shouted, already moving away to her left to put some distance between them.

  “You wish,” she replied.

  Vaughn fired again at another enemy, but stopped short of a third salvo when Sam urged him to hold fire. “What is it?” he asked.

  “Shoot the moorings,” she said.

  “The what?”

  Lead by example, she decided. Sam raised her arms and fired twin beams, spreading out from her position, sweeping slowly with the movement of her arms across two truly gigantic bundles of tubing and filament that held one of the ruined starships in place. Whatever fear she had that the beam would not be up to the challenge melted away as the plasma lance severed the cables like they were made of paper. Vaughn caught the drift and sliced away the two other visible supports holding the ship steady in the bay. Compared with others in the massive chamber, this one was small, but that didn’t bother Sam. She wanted a bowling ball, and when the next mortar she fired struck home, she got one.

  The explosion nudged the freed ship into movement. The next mortar pushed it even harder. When Vaughn added two more from his position, the derelict craft got up a head of momentum that served the purpose she’d intended. The rapidly approaching Scipios slowed, then stopped. Their focus divided, and then, seconds later, completely consumed by the huge mass of metal and ship’s innards that now tumbled through the dockyard with total, directionless abandon.

  Sam watched, a smile of childish satisfaction on her face, as the ship slammed into its nearest neighbor. From a distance the crash looked about as violent as two baby strollers bumping into each other. The scale simply defied comprehension. All she wanted was to distract the incoming enemy force.

  What she achieved was something altogether more.

  “Holy fucking shit,” Vaughn whispered.

  Later she’d theorize as to just what that second vessel contained that caused such an incredible release of energy. A reactor or, hell, several goddamn reactors. Some cache of missiles too exotic in their makeup to reasonably ponder. In that moment, though, all Sam could do was watch the calamity unfold, her mouth agape the entire time.

  Her projectile ship had plowed into its victim—a much larger ship, but much less substantial. Hardly more than a skeleton, really, to Sam’s eye. After the first few layers of scaffold were torn asunder, though, her projectile hit something that exploded with a force just short of nuclear. Even her Builder-made visor struggled to dampen the bright flare. Heat washed over her body, no worse than the Darwin sun on the inside, but a dark fear coursed through her at the sudden appearance of a glowing marbleized pattern all across her armor. There was a shuddering sensation as radiation was absorbed and reemitted. The floor, a few meters from her feet, melted, leaving a trail of warped metallic tiles as the energy of the blast pushed her backward.

  Seconds passed in a blur as her mind recoiled from the inferno. Sam righted herself with the pulse from the suit’s thrusters, grateful the engines still worked. Grateful she hadn’t been cooked alive.

  “You okay?” Vaughn asked, his voice an island of calm amid the violence.

  “I think so.”

  “Jesus, Sam, look what you started.”

  She blinked, willed enough concentration to take in the vastness and insanity spread out before her. Her plan had been to set a ship loose, hoping it would knock a few others around and force the Scipios to alter their priorities. Those Scipios were utterly gone. Vapor, or a smear of black on the gaping wound the accidental bomb had left on the shipyard. When it went, it annihilated the four other ships around it. But even that wasn’t what left Samantha Rinn utterly without words.

  It was the vessels farther away that her eyes now struggled to track. Dozens of them, propelled on the wave of high-energy particles that had slammed into them. Flickering secondary explosions boiled across their surfaces, adding even more chaos to their movement, and causing the support filaments that held them in place to snap. It all reminded her of a billiards table, the cue ball, hard struck, sending the rest into a riot of unpredictable movement. Only this was in three dimensions. And on a truly massive sc
ale, rife with catastrophic explosions. “Time to bail,” Sam said.

  “Amen,” Vaughn replied.

  “Get the…shard,” she said, gesturing toward the meter-tall object that had been at the core of their escape pod. However much it resembled an aura shard, shard seemed more appropriate. Vaughn knew exactly what she meant and propelled himself toward the object.

  She led the way, knowing he would fall obediently in behind her and for once his puppy-dog loyalty didn’t bother her. Sam decided to do the counterintuitive thing and get outside, rather than heading for the shelter of the space station’s interior. She aimed herself out toward the open edge of the dockyard and triggered her thrusters on full burn for a few seconds, gaining speed through space full of glowing-hot debris that streaked across her vision. Crossing the distance took only a few seconds, giving her just enough time to take one last glance at the drama she’d unleashed. The ships were falling like dominoes, either loosed from their moorings or simply being pelted by the truly astonishing amount of debris now flying about the room. A chunk of indefinable gear sailed past Sam’s own head and out into space. She followed it.

  Another, smaller piece smacked into her thigh. She felt the armor harden up and down her entire leg a fraction of a second before the blow arrived. The impact sent her spinning, and despite the suit she still felt a pain across her thigh as if she’d been kicked.

  Sam willed the suit to cancel her errant rotation. It complied, and then she was out, leaving the confines of the vast chamber before immediately turning and firing her thrusters again. She sailed along the outer hull of the space station, Vaughn just a few tens of meters behind, carrying the Builder shard under his arm like a rugby ball.