Escape Velocity

by Jason M. Hough

  A wreck wasn’t good enough, though. Her charter, her oath, was to leave no trace. The Scipios must not find anything that could give them a clue about how to build their own field cavitation imploders, nor could they learn the location of Earth. A wreck was too much to leave behind.

  She remembered giving the order to Xavi. Burn all the fuel. Get us going fast enough to slam into something. Even better, overload the engines.

  He’d said something. She couldn’t grasp the meaning of the words now. Nor could she then. She’d hit her head, saw stars, slept.

  Then came the impact. A jarring thud that woke her briefly. The sound of something scraping against the hull that seemed to go on for days. Finally, quiet, though she couldn’t be sure if that was due to the end of the scraping or her own return to the abyss of her mind.

  Gloria focused on her body. Listened to her own heartbeat thanks to the anguished pulse in her ears. She twitched a finger, then another. All of them. Next came the toes, which took a bit of cajoling. So she’d kept all her limbs. Small victory.

  She opened her eyes again and watched the candle. Over time the flame became more real, more focused. She saw the trail of smoke that seemed to flee as if alive, right toward the hull puncture. Gloria shifted her gaze to the wall beside the fire and saw a familiar bulkhead, which put her near the Wildflower’s midsection. The flame was no candle at all. A ruptured pipe behind one of the wall panels, and no suppression system online to extinguish it. As if in control of a puppet, Gloria raised her heavy leg and, panting from the effort, pressed her boot on the little oval of fire. The space plunged into darkness. She pulled her foot away, and the flame did not return.

  There, she thought. I saved us all. She wanted to laugh, but knew her body was not ready for that kind of exertion yet. Besides, the humor drained as quickly as it had come. The fact that she was alive was a very, very bad thing. The ship had not been destroyed. The ship was a tidy bundle of intelligence waiting to be consumed.

  With great effort Gloria turned her head to one side. To her surprise, the blackness was not absolute. A shaft of blue-white light filtered in from the airlock porthole, illuminating the wall opposite. Dust swirled lazily in the beam. But, she noted, no debris drifted. She herself was planted against the hull, too.

  So, gravity. Must be.

  She heard no roar of engine, felt no vibration through her suit, so it must be actual gravity, and not the cargo hold of some Scipio hauler.

  “Where the hell are we?” she whispered to her dead ship, and the ship did not reply. Maybe it never would again. Amber glow at the edge of her vision swirled and phased, until collapsing into recognizable icons and characters.

  AIR LEVEL CRITICAL, the display read, with an almost comical skull and crossbones blinking away above it. She swallowed hard. Her mouth tasted like desert sand. Her stomach grumbled, empty. One calf throbbed with pain, something deep. Not broken, she hoped, but certainly badly bruised. She needed the med bay, and then water and a packet of nutrition paste. Also, air. The alert was coming from her own suit, not the ship. She’d almost used up her own supply.

  But first, the others.

  Propping herself up on one elbow left her shaking, cold sweat slimy against the fabric of her space suit. Gloria spent a minute catching her breath, then rolled the rest of the way onto her knees. Standing seemed too great a challenge just yet, so she crawled toward the tail of the ship, where Beth Lee had been.

  The engineer lay at her workstation. She’d somehow had the presence of mind to strap herself into her acceleration couch, and appeared to be sleeping peacefully. Though the ship lay on its side, the gimbaled chair had rotated with the angle. Gloria crawled to it and hauled herself up. She took Beth by the shoulder and shook.

  The woman spasmed, bucking against her restraints, an abbreviated scream escaping her lips as consciousness flowed back in.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” Gloria whispered.

  Beth turned to her, eyes wide with shock. She opened her mouth to say something, but all that came out was a single, sharp cough that flecked blood on the inside of her visor. For a moment Beth just stared at the tiny droplets, studying them.

  “Let’s get you to the med bay,” Gloria said, trying her best to sound upbeat. A bitten tongue would be one thing, internal bleeding something else altogether.

  Beth barely managed a nod. She lay placid as Gloria undid the restraints and helped ease the diminutive woman from the chair. Together they staggered, each with one arm over the other’s shoulder, over several bulkheads to the medical station.

  “What a nightmare,” Beth managed, sinking to her knees among the spilled contents of three wall cabinets that had sprung open in the explosion. She swept the items aside with one arm and lay down on her back with a grunt.

  “Don’t sleep,” Gloria said. “Not yet, okay?”

  “Will…try.”

  “Goddamn fate,” Gloria swore silently as she rummaged through the detritus on the floor. Hundreds of sealed plastic bags, each containing some kind of pill or injector or bandage. The Wildflower had been stripped to the bone for this mission. Supplies were the bare minimum, and worse, her medical officer had been left behind. Basic triage had been part of Gloria’s training, at least, but right now she could remember precious little of it. She’d have to guess. Each bag had been marked with a bar code, which her visor scanned and displayed the contents as she held them up before her face. She tossed them aside as quickly as she picked them up. Behind her Beth groaned, rolling onto her side. Gloria worked faster, picking up bags with both hands now, not even looking at them, but instead just reading the summary displayed on her visor, scanning for keywords. There. SYMPTOM: INTERNAL BLEEDING. She turned, ripping the bag open in the same motion. Gloria opened a flap on the shoulder of Beth’s suit and twisted the injector into the port there. Then she thumbed the base of it and heard the click-click as the tiny needle within extended and retracted.

  Gloria didn’t wait to see if it worked. She whirled and continued her search. Several minutes later she’d stimmed Beth and herself with painkillers, hydration boosts, and shock suppressants. She found emergency air and water containers as well and replenished both of their suits.

  “Stay here,” she said to Beth. “Going to check on the others.”

  Beth said nothing. Her eyes were closed, but Gloria could see the bloom and fade of fog on the inside of the woman’s mask. Good, rest. Use less air.

  Xavi and Vanessa had sealed themselves into the bridge with the intruder, Alex Warthen, just before the explosion that expelled them from the alien ship. The bulkhead was still closed, but its locking panel had power. It was an isolated system, relying on nothing but its own internal programming, and backed up by an ultracap that would last for decades. Gloria pressed her palm against it, allowing her suit’s glove to sample and pass through a skin cell for DNA verification. It took only two seconds before the light turned green and the emergency closure was rescinded. A clunk echoed through the ship and then the door panels retracted into the surrounding bulkhead.

  Darkness greeted her. Biting back her fear and worry, Gloria switched her headlamp on and winced as brilliant white light flooded into the cramped space beyond.

  Xavi sat, knees to his chest, one arm around the sleeping form of Vanessa. His other arm was propped on one knee, aiming his pistol at Alex Warthen, who lay opposite them, utterly prone.

  “Boss,” Xavi muttered.

  “Hey there,” she said, unable to keep the emotion from her voice.

  “What happened?” he asked. “Where are we?”

  She fixed him with the best glare she could manage. “I was hoping you’d know.”

  “Huh?”

  “Why are we still alive, Xavi? I gave you an order. Smear us on some rock. Leave no trace. You know the directive.”

  “I…” His voice trailed off. He swallowed, eyes shifting away from her. “I screwed up.”

  “Meaning?”

  A long sigh escaped his
lips. “Burned the last of our fuel when we were pointed the wrong way. Slowed us down.”

  “So instead of crashing, we’ve landed.”

  “Seems that way.”

  Gloria bit back the urge to throttle him. For a moment she just stood there, eyes closed, allowing the past to become just that. “We’ll have to find another way, then.”

  “Seems that way,” he repeated. “Seriously, though. Where are we?”

  She shrugged, realizing after the fact that she hadn’t even bothered to look out the porthole window when she’d walked by to get here. “I’ll worry about that next. Status?”

  His turn to shrug. “Think I broke my wrist. Vanessa’s in shock, asleep now. Warthen…hasn’t moved in a while. Might be dead.”

  “I’m not dead,” Alex Warthen said, in a surprisingly strong and calm voice. “I’m conserving air. A concept the rest of you might want to familiarize yourselves with.”

  Xavi grunted, eyes shifting back to Gloria in a “The hits just keep coming” look. “Beth?” he asked.

  “Sleeping it off. Same as Vanessa.”

  The man nodded, let his eyes close for a moment. He must have been watching Alex Warthen like a hawk since waking, unable to do anything about the door without the ship’s systems online to let his override open them.

  “Are you just going to stand there, or will you find out where we are?”

  It was Alex who asked. Gloria studied him for a moment, unsure how to treat him. He’d tried to take the ship, yes, but under the circumstances she couldn’t really blame him. “My crew comes first,” she said. Not only true, but also allowing her to avoid the decision for a bit longer. She met Xavi’s gaze and darted her eyes to the prone newcomer. Watch him.

  Xavi understood. He always understood.

  At the airlock Gloria pulled herself to one of the three windows and took in the view.

  It was magnificent.

  Blue-gray sand dotted by rocky outcroppings and patches of thin ice, all kissed by pinkish light from the setting star, and the crescent form of a world above. Carthage. She’d studied images of it enough to know it at a glance, and that meant the Wildflower had somehow managed to come to rest on one of her moons. Judging by what she knew of the terrain it was likely Mago, the largest and nearest moon of Carthage. How they’d made it so far without being caught by the Swarm she had no idea, but it didn’t take much imagination to guess Eve had done something. Shielded them, or masked their fall in-system.

  What truly baffled her, though, was how the Wildflower had managed to land, but she wasn’t quite ready to look that gift horse in the mouth. They were here, they were alive. The real question was—

  “What now?” Xavi asked, right on cue.

  She hadn’t heard him approach. “Alex?” she asked.

  “Vanessa’s covering him. She’s awake enough now.”

  “Good to hear.”

  Xavi joined her at the window and let out a long, low whistle. “How the hell did we get here?”

  “No idea and not going to worry about it.”

  “Looks like Mago.”

  “I thought the same thing.”

  Xavi shook his head. “Airless rock. We’re screwed, boss.”

  Gloria said nothing. She couldn’t. To agree meant resigning herself to the hard truth that her ship was truly dead. That she’d failed in the worst possible way for a captain to fail. Doubly so, since any ship left behind here was supposed to be vaporized.

  And Xavi, in his unassuming way, read her perfectly. “You did everything you could.”

  “And you did even more than me. Do you really expect me to believe you fired our engines while pointed the wrong way?”

  His grin infuriated her. “Strong survival instinct,” he said, tapping the side of his helmet. “Throw me in the brig if you like.”

  “If we had one I would.”

  Xavi laughed. “Look, we’re here. Let’s plug these leaks and figure out a plan.”

  “You don’t give the orders here. I’m the captain,” she replied, and hated herself for it. For the rebuke, for not thanking him for saving all their lives, and for hiding behind her rank.

  He placed a hand on her shoulder, calm and strong. “Relax, boss. Not an order, just advice.” With that he moved toward the med bay, and knelt beside Beth.

  —

  Ten minutes later, after sealing the hull breaches with spray foam, Gloria Tsandi sat cross-legged on the floor of the mess, surrounded by Beth, Xavi, and Vanessa. Alex Warthen was in the med bay one deck below—or rather, one deck over now that the ship lay on its side—sedated and snoring.

  They’d eaten and drank, removing their helmets once it was determined that the hull punctures had been plugged successfully. The air tasted like melted plastic, but it felt so good to have the helmets off that no one complained.

  “That foam,” Gloria said, nodding toward one of the beige, mushroom-shaped bulbs poking down from the ceiling, “is temporary at best.”

  The others nodded thoughtfully.

  “I don’t know about the rest of you,” Gloria said, “but I don’t want to asphyxiate or starve or die of dehydration on this lifeless moon. I don’t want to wait for the Swarm to track us down, either. Even if it wasn’t my sworn duty to vaporize this ship before letting it fall into Scipio hands, it’s still preferable to the alternatives.”

  Silence filled the tiny space. Gloria waited, but when no one spoke, she went on. “Xavi may have accidentally extended our lives—”

  Xavi raised a protein shake in salute. “You’re welcome, mates. Cheers.”

  “—but the hard fact is that we must leave nothing for the Scipios to study.”

  “What about the Lonesome?” Beth asked.

  The ship they’d come for, the original goal of this escapade. Gloria had all but forgotten her. “What about it?”

  “Our mission was to find it, yes? If we destroy ourselves, we fail.”

  “We did what we could and found no trace of it. I have to assume that they at least completed the task we must now accomplish. Besides, we’re in no condition to be worrying about that now, so put it out of your mind.”

  Beth Lee’s gaze fell to the floor. She’d barely eaten or drank anything, while Xavi had a pile of used containers around his lap.

  “Can we even do it?” Vanessa asked. “Scuttle the ship, I mean? It’s pretty beat up, and I don’t think my suit has enough firepower.”

  Gloria spread her hands. “That’s what we need to find out. What I’m proposing here is that we spend our last few hours of air finding a way to do that. The easiest way is to force our reactor to melt down, but that means getting it operational again. Beth, can you look into it?”

  It took several seconds, but the slow bob of her head finally happened. An acceptance of fate as much as the task. It was the only answer Gloria would get, but it was enough.

  “Xavi, you’re the backup plan. Get creative. Figure out a bomb we can rig, or a rock outside we can get to fall on the ship. Anything.”

  “I can do that, I think.”

  “Vanessa, I’m hoping you’ll do an EVA. These foam seals won’t last much longer, and I think your Builder suit has the most air. Perhaps with that…cannon on your wrist, you can weld some scrap plating to the holes from the outside.”

  “I’ll handle it,” Vanessa said.

  “Okay, then. I’m here to help any of you with whatever you need, and in the meantime, I’ll keep an eye on our guest.”

  With that the morbid gathering dispersed. Xavi headed for his navigation bay, probably because it was familiar. Or to say goodbye. The idea brought tears to Gloria’s eyes, which she wiped away on her sleeve. Another small benefit to having helmets off.

  Gloria took one glance at Alex Warthen and decided the man wasn’t going to be up and about any time soon, so she followed Vanessa to the airlock. “I’ll handle the doors for you since it’s manual or nothing right now.”

  The woman nodded and stepped into the airlock proper.
“Wait, how will we communicate?”

  Gloria had forgotten. They’d been using external speakers, as the comms in their respective suits were incompatible. Once she was outside, though, that would no longer work. “I have an idea,” Gloria said.

  She went to the sleeping compartment and grabbed the one extra helmet they’d brought. Sealed for flight, it had a cap attached to the bottom of it to keep dust and other things from getting inside. Gloria twisted the cap off and stuffed a portable ultracap inside. She connected it and powered the helmet on. Configured it so the helmet would be in emergency mode, as no suit was linked, but that was okay. It had a self-contained comm, and that was all that mattered.

  “Here,” she said, handing it to Vanessa.

  “That’s not going to fit my neck ring.”

  “I know,” Gloria said, “but you can hold it against your visor and shout really loud. The vibration should carry through.”

  Vanessa stared at her dubiously.

  “Try it when you’re out there.”

  “I won’t be able to hear you.”

  Gloria nodded. “We’ll have to do that part the old-fashioned way. Yes or no questions, I’ll give you thumbs-up or -down from this side of the porthole.”

  Vanessa gave her the kind of look someone might give if handed a beer and a slice of pizza at a formal affair. She took the helmet all the same.

  With a small wave Gloria closed and sealed the inner door.

  “Okay. I’m going to purge the air and open the outer door. Uh.” Vanessa paused, staring at the controls on the wall. “You better walk me through the process.”

  “Remember,” Beth Lee said. She’d come to stand next to Gloria, a blanket wrapped about her shoulders. “She’s a lawyer by trade, and a scavenger by necessity. Not to mention more than a thousand years old by our perspective. She’s never seen an airlock like that.”

  Gloria studied her engineer, an apparent expert historian. “I thought you were checking on the reactor.”