Escape Velocity

by Jason M. Hough

  Skyler realized with a start that his fear had subsided, replaced with fascination. He tried to hold on to that. This was, after all, a Creator that sat before him. Diseased, outside whatever aura this place offered, but nevertheless one of the beings he’d come here to help. And here it was, cowering beside him in the dark. Sick and evidently alone. Skyler recalled the words of his sniper, Jake, the time they’d come across a feral hog in the jungles of Thailand. “It’s as scared of you as you are it, mate,” the Aussie had said, walking calmly past the animal without another glance.

  So he raised his hand in a gesture he hoped signaled “Hello, I am unarmed,” and splayed his fingers in a sort of wave.

  The Creator blinked. Skyler’s heart lurched as there was a sudden scraping sound against the floor. The being shifted, moving its feet to better face Skyler. It was in a squatting position, Skyler saw, his eyes now adjusted to the nearly absolute dark. Perhaps it had to run in here when the aircraft had flown over. He wondered if the firecracker barrage of virus spreaders had scared it as much as it had scared him, and what effect that sudden influx of viral dust had on it. His head swam, each new revelation about this world seemed to only unleash a hundred new questions.

  That third little eye blinked again. Skyler focused on it, recalling finally some of what Eve had told them of her Creators. Their unique dual-sentience. The low mind, and the high mind, she called it. One to control the body and deal with the day-to-day tasks of survival, the other free to ponder the mysteries of the universe. A Traveler, nothing more, reliant utterly on its host for information and senses. Or something like that. He hadn’t really been paying attention, the kind of mistake Sam would give him endless shit for, were she here. In truth he hadn’t imagined a scenario where they’d arrive without Eve, and figured the details could wait.

  Skyler’s breaths were coming a little easier. Each exhalation stirred the powder in the air. “Hello,” he said.

  A split second later his helmet made an odd, guttural noise.

  Skyler’s first thought was that his suit was failing, but then he noticed the creature had tilted its head to one side at the sound. Its eyes blinked—the big pair, then the small one. A tremble went through its body. Then it made a short burst of similar vocalizations, its triple-jawed mouth barely moving as if from lack of strength. After that it slumped, as if that tiny little amount of activity had drained the last of its life.

  Skyler started to shake his head and wave his hands in front of him, when the faded, broken display in the corner of his vision registered.

  IT WISHES TO SAY GREETINGS, TRAVELER, the translation said.

  Skyler looked up, mouth hanging open. Of course it made sense. More than anything else here, really. Eve may have poor data to translate the Scipio language, but her own Creators? Of course she could do that. And his suit was vocalizing for him.

  Another small wave of hope spread through him. Maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t alone here, after all.

  With no warning the Creator lunged at him, arms outstretched, strange digits splayed. Skyler scrambled back, almost falling over on his back. He aimed and, at the last instant, held fire. The Creator had stopped. Frozen in place. Its body began to tremble slightly, and then, very slowly, it eased back into its original position.

  It spoke again. The translation came an instant later. THE DISEASE. WE FIGHT IT, BUT SOMETIMES…

  “I understand,” Skyler replied. He righted himself and did his best to hide how unsettled he now felt.

  The alien went on. It spoke in short bursts. IT WANTS…TO KNOW…WHY YOU ARE HERE.

  “It,” Skyler repeated. “Do you mean the disease, or your…Passenger? High mind. I do not know your terms, I am sorry.”

  HIGH MIND.

  Skyler started to reply, stopped himself. How much to say? What if the billions of little machine-made cells floating around him could listen, record, and transmit?

  YOU FIGHT THE DISEASE, TOO, it said. HARD TO SPEAK, IS…The rest was cut off by the jagged glass of the damaged visor.

  “I,” Skyler replied, then paused again. He’d been about to admit his immunity, but thought better of it. If the Scipios weren’t aware of that ability, best not to clue them in should they be listening. “I…I only want to find my friends,” he said. “I need to get to the space elevator. Can you tell me how to reach it?”

  A long silence. Then it said: THERE ARE MANY.

  “The one across the bay. Closest to us.”

  It considered this for several minutes. Twice its body erupted into violent spasms. The war for control left it with a different expression on its face. Skyler did not know for sure—the face was alien, after all—but he thought this must be what anguish looks like. He wondered how long the high mind had been alive, transferred from diseased host to diseased host. Had it taught this host how to talk? Fought through their version of the SUBS virus in order to not be trapped with an animal?

  Outside the aircraft circled. Their sounds grew more distant.

  TRAVEL BY THE OCEAN.

  “A boat? Where?”

  The alien spoke, but this time the translation took several seconds to come through. Skyler guessed the system had taken considerable liberties when the text finally appeared. [100 METERS] TOWARD OCEAN, ALIGN LEFT, [50 METERS] STRAIGHT.

  I can work with that, he thought. “Come with me,” he urged, surprising himself.

  The being raised one of its semi-serpentine arms a bit. The serpentine portion undulated slightly. Another expression?

  “I don’t understand,” Skyler said.

  Another series of lurching, staggered alien sounds. The text came through. SUCH ACTIVITY NOT POSSIBLE IN THIS…

  Again the visor blurred, then lost, the final words where the display met the edge of the broken glass. But Skyler thought he understood well enough.

  THEY COME FOR ME SOON, it added. YOUR SAFETY…

  Skyler said, “It’s all right. I thank you for the information, and wish you well.”

  With that the Creator curled back into its sullen form. A posture so pitiful and defeated Skyler lost the will to leave it there. He’d seen many horrible things in his life, and this one broke his heart as much as anything. After a moment he forced himself to stand and move to the door.

  BE WELL, TRAVELER, the Creator said.

  “And you,” he replied, and left.

  —

  A set of stairs, barely visible under the centuries of uncontrolled plant growth, led down to a crumbling seawall. He looked back then at the city behind him, lit only by murky light filtering through the contaminated air from its cousin across the bay. A breathtaking place even in its semi-abandoned state. Much as in the old cities of Earth, a variety of architectural styles had been employed. Some with long sweeping curves. Others quite angular and stark. Still more, smaller, with great rows of pillars. Despite the differences, they somehow managed to come together in a skyline that pleased the eye. At least, his eye. Maybe the locals thought it was ugly and had protested against it. He almost chuckled at that. Almost. Part of him still reeled from the sorrow he’d glimpsed in that small dark room. Another part feared the patrolling Scipios, no doubt investigating their dead right now just a few hundred meters back up the hill. He had to get moving. A boat, though, on this empty bay? He’d be visible to anyone who glanced in the general direction, much less to searching aircraft that streaked and circled overhead.

  More than all of that, though, was the solitude. He was, as far as he knew, the sole human being on a hostile alien planet. How could he possibly hope to leave with his life, much less free the native species from the tyranny of the Scipios? This was ridiculous.

  Press on.

  Skyler trudged down the path, numb to it all. Find the others, he told himself. That was all he could do. Whatever happened after that he’d accept if he could just face it at Tania’s side. Preferably with Sam at his back, unleashing hell, and Prumble somewhere close, bellowing in his dramatic Kiwi voice. That would be bearable. Flipping
some ancient raft and tumbling into waves of unknown and likely poisonous waters? Not so much.

  The craft lay before him. Calling it a boat had been generous. At least, he thought, it seemed to float, until he realized it was up on some kind of scaffold. The boathouse itself had not fared as well. Centuries of neglect were not often kind, no matter how advanced the building materials might be. Part of the roof had fallen inward, spilling a vast quantity of dead or dormant virus cells, dust, and dirt into the back half of the building. He could see containers and a table poking out of the mountain of spilled scum. Every surface sported black splotches of mold or fungus. His nose, at least, was used to the stench of decay by now. Skyler sighed. He’d spent years scavenging for useful things in the wilds beyond Darwin’s safe zone, and liked to think he’d gotten pretty good at identifying what to salvage and what to ignore. If he’d come across this place in the harbor of Hong Kong, for example, he’d have grunted in disgust and kept moving. Of course, back then he’d always had a list of valuable items from Prumble to seek out. He never truly appreciated, until this moment, how useful that had been. Kept his team focused, working toward a goal.

  The raft itself had no obvious means of propulsion. No engine mounted on the back, no oars, no controls of any kind. It was little more than a rectangular platform with a slightly raised edge barely visible under untold years of accumulated “dust.” He doubted it would even float, if pushed out into the soupy froth that served as an ocean here.

  “What a mess,” he muttered.

  What alternative was there? He glanced around. The bay was semicircular, perhaps formed by a crater rim from ages ago. The city he stood in ran along the curved shore for another kilometer or so, then tapered off, giving way to high dunes and then a forest of treelike things. After a few kilometers of that, over on the opposite side across the water, the trees transitioned to small buildings, growing gradually larger as they reached the ocean proper. A long way to walk, and through unknown territory.

  To sail straight across, though, he judged to be a bit less than a klick in distance. He could put in among the smooth boulders that lined the shore there, and climb up to the city itself. If they didn’t spot him first. If they didn’t have guards along the shore, waiting to repel unwanted sub-Creators who might wander too close. That, at least, seemed unlikely, given the state of the one he’d just talked to. But then the enemy would certainly be alert for something, given his dramatic crash here and the subsequent annihilation of the first responders.

  His eyes scanned farther along this coast, toward the sea, and he saw what he should have seen right away. This was, of course, the first boathouse among many. “Idiot,” he scolded himself, and kept on.

  A sound like thunder rolled through the streets and alleys around him. The searching aircraft, distant now. That was good. They seemed to be working on the assumption that he’d move away from their gleaming city across the bay and the precious space elevator within, not toward it.

  The road meandered, following the shore in a series of graceful curves lined with buildings almost entirely consumed by unchecked vegetation. More sunlight filtered through the buildings, casting pinkish-orange beams along the broken stone structures and the mottled vines and roots that snaked through them. Skyler heard things scurry about in the undergrowth, fleeing at his approach. Their version of rats, maybe. Everything reeked of decay. Or maybe that was just their ocean air, he decided. Perhaps it was pleasant to the senses the Creators had evolved.

  The next two buildings facing the bay were taller, and partially collapsed so that they leaned together ten meters above the sloping alley between them. A massive treelike plant grew straight up through the middle of one, its branches now almost reaching the neighbor. Skyler gave the pair a pass and went on to the next.

  Unlike the last two, this place was low and sleek. It was caked with mold and virus-dust, like everything else, but had no obvious damage otherwise. More important, it was long, with the side facing the bay extending out almost all the way to the water. Skyler made a circuit of the place on the three landward sides, looking for a way in. Nothing obvious presented itself, so he scaled a pile of rubble and then a series of interwoven vines until he reached the roof. He kept to the edge, not trusting the center, which had no doubt been rained on and sitting here accumulating shit for untold decades. He had to hand it to the Creators, their construction techniques and materials were pretty damn good to have lasted so long exposed to the elements. This place looked only slightly worse off than Belém had, and that city had been left abandoned only for a fraction of the time.

  He walked along the roof’s edge toward the water. The building jutted out slightly from the seawall. Milky waves with frothy caps lapped and churned at the coastline. Had it always looked so? he wondered. Or was this the result of centuries of viral snow accumulating across the world?

  His hope for an open-ended structure, with a boat nestled within, was banished when he reached the edge of the roof, for it was no edge at all. The structure sloped downward into the waves like a slide. Skyler stood there for a time, confused. Perhaps the alien had actually meant that pitiful raft? Perhaps it had confused its memories. There were several millennia’s worth, after all. Sullen, he trudged back to the front of the building, scanning the adjacent structures for a vantage point that would allow him to study the entire row along the rocky shore. He felt terribly exposed up here. This roof offered no cover at all from whatever lurked overhead. Aircraft were one thing. But what, Skyler wondered with a fearful swallow, did the Scipios have in orbit? They must monitor the surface very closely, given their absolute need for the bodies—really the minds—of the native population.

  Which begs the question, Skyler thought as he slogged back to the front of the roof, where is everyone? Granted he’d explored only a few city blocks of a vast world, but from what Eve had said the Scipios relied on a large population of adolescent Creators to pull from when their designs required it. So where were they?

  These questions tumbled about in his head as he reached the city-facing edge of the structure. Skyler froze there, staring down at what should have been obvious to him minutes before when he’d walked the perimeter. He’d been too focused on the building to look at what surrounded it. In the middle distance, a wide avenue ran straight toward the edge he now stood on. About fifty meters away, this road—path, track, whatever—plunged down into a tunnel that ran, quite likely at least, right below the building where Skyler now stood.

  He clambered down the vine-laced wall and scaled the pile of rubble below that in three neat hops. Jogging, his breathing fully acclimated now, Skyler moved to the tunnel entrance. He had to round the corner to see for sure. When he came around he saw…darkness. Absolute darkness. Feeling like a child staring into the pitch-black maw of a train tunnel, he knew he’d found what the alien had meant for him to find.

  Skyler crept down the incline, stepping across wide cracks and over exposed, pale roots. A tree with corkscrewing branches grew right out from one of the sidewalls, its bluish spiny leaves reaching upward like thousands of little upheld arms.

  The darkness swallowed him. He didn’t want to risk his light just yet, though, so Skyler continued into the tunnel utterly blind. He held a hand out in front of him and swept his foot back and forth before each step. Ten paces, he could handle no more than that, the fear rising in him like bile. He switched on his headlamp.

  For a time he only stood there, trapped between two options. The tunnel led downward at a gentle slope as far as his light could penetrate. Its surfaces, both flat floor and semicircular ceiling, were cracked and seeping fluid in places. He weighed his choices. Travel through this dank and utterly black passage, or take the raft where he would be exposed to sky and land?

  “Trust your gut,” he said in a low voice, “it’s gotten you this far.” The words echoed down the passage for a long time, mingling with the sounds of dripping water.

  Skyler crept deeper into the tunnel.


  Above Carthage

  TANIA SHARMA FEARED many things just then. As their party crept in tactical fashion through the bowels of a hostile alien space station, she could imagine any number of horrible outcomes—far too many, in fact. She could picture a myriad of ways their plans might fail. What she did not expect, though, was a total lack of Scipios at a time when they actually wanted to find one.

  Sam had taken the lead, Vaughn just behind her, the two of them leapfrogging each other as they moved from one cover position to another. Prumble seemed content to bring up the rear, sometimes lagging well behind, tucked in a shadow or behind some bit of unfathomable tech, to make sure they were not being followed.

  And so Tania and Tim were in the center of the group, a situation Tim unrelentingly took advantage of.

  “Capture a Scipio. This is never going to work,” he’d said under his breath at one point, as if it were not meant for her to hear. And after being ignored, a minute later he added, “We should just get back outside. Much easier to find a ship when you can see for a few thousand kilometers.”

  “Much easier to be seen, too,” Tania noted. “Relax, will you? This is going to work.”

  He snorted. “This is problematic on many different levels, Tania. Language, for starters—”

  “Our suits can handle that. Well, from their language to ours, but I’ve been poking around in the menus and it looks as if the other direction works, too.” To demonstrate she enabled the automatic translation and counted to ten out loud. No sound emitted from her suit, instead a series of symbols appeared on her visor, reversed and enlarged so as to be readable from the outside. Centuries out of date, no doubt, but it stood to reason that the Scipios would have a similar technology and could adjust.