Escape Velocity

by Jason M. Hough

  All the pipes and machinery in the vast chamber seemed to converge at one point, about twenty meters away. There, a semicircular array of six small pillars faced inward on a pristine white platform.

  “Tania,” Sam said, without looking. “Tania?”

  “What is it?”

  “What do you make of this?”

  “Take my place here,” Tania replied, “and I’ll check.”

  Fair enough, Sam thought. She turned back and swapped spots with Tania at the improvised door. The space behind was too hazy to see much of anything now, and both Vaughn and Prumble were holding fire as Sam took up her spot with them. The trio kept their arms raised, aimed into the swirling smoke lit orange with dying fires from smoldering corpses. “What a mess,” Sam observed. Her back still rang with jolts of pain, and her whole body felt like one giant bruise. Still, could be worse, she thought. That tentacle strike to her chest would have punched right through her under normal circumstances, or crushed her rib cage if she’d had on lesser armor, like a Kevlar vest.

  “It’s quiet,” Prumble said.

  Sam winced. “Vaughn, don’t—”

  “Too quiet,” Vaughn said with all the swagger in the universe.

  “Dammit, Vaughn. And damn you, too, Prumble.” Sam shook her head. Vaughn chuckled, and soon Prumble took up the laughter.

  Samantha glanced back at Tania.

  The woman was standing before the little array of pedestals or broken pillars, whatever they were. A screen had come to life beside one of them, and Tania seemed to be reading it as if it were the daily gossip. “What is it?” Sam asked her.

  Tania said nothing. Instead, incredibly, she began to strip out of her armor.

  “What the hell?” Sam rushed toward her. She shot a glance back at the two men. “Guard the door.”

  They both nodded, as confused as she was.

  She crossed the space as quickly as she could without burning more thruster fuel, watching as Tania slowly extracted one arm from her suit.

  “What are you doing?” Sam asked her.

  But disrobing was not the woman’s goal. It was only her hand she’d meant to free. And once done, Tania reached out and placed her palm and fingers on top of one of the little half-pillars. “It’s just like in Africa,” the woman said, so distant she might as well have been there instead of here.

  “What is?” Sam asked.

  Red light flickered around Tania’s hand as her skin met the dull gray surface. There was a rumble from below their feet as machinery in the room came to life.

  Tania winced in sudden agonizing pain. Sam went to grab her and heave her away, but Tania’s cry stayed her hands. “Leave me!” the scientist shouted.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “An imprint.”

  “Meaning what?”

  Tania, eyes nearly shut in her throes of agony, nodded toward the small screen she’d been reading. “This machine determines what species are granted immunities to the virus. Quick, get Prumble and Vaughn over here.”

  “Why?”

  “Sample size,” Tania replied. “We’re going to level the playing field.”

  Sam met the two men at the door and needed to say nothing. They’d heard the conversation, and as soon as she was in position they both rushed off to join Tania. Sam had to force herself to keep watch on the smoky room outside as the trio each placed hands on the sampling devices.

  Shadows in the murk. Sam squinted, then raised both fists. “Whatever you guys are doing, time’s about up, I think.”

  “Fifteen seconds,” Tania replied.

  “That’s a wild-ass guess,” Prumble added.

  Sam clenched her teeth and squared herself as six large swarmers emerged through the smoke. They were twice the size of the others, easily. Standing one beside the other they formed a wall of armor plating and coiled tentacles, sensor pods and stubby—sensor pods.

  She’d forgotten all about the little cluster of lenses and antennae poking out from between two tentacle joints, roughly where a face would be on a living thing. Somewhere inside, no doubt, the little batlike bastards were watching her, calculating, planning their approach.

  Mentally Sam fumbled through her suit’s interface. She left her beam weapons on shotgun mode. It was the mortar she was interested in. Working as fast as she could, Sam modified the parameters of the launcher weapon and then fired up the targeting interface. She’d used this once, on the planet where they’d found the skin for the yet-to-be-named Chameleon.

  Sam stepped through the hole in the door.

  The six Scipios surged forward at the sight of her out in the open.

  She took a knee and gave the instruction to fire.

  Her back erupted in fresh pain as the launcher pressed downward in six hard, rapid-succession punches. The projectiles flicked out through the air on jets of superheated exhaust, their flights lasting only a second. The first three struck home. Direct hits, straight into the sensor pods of their victims where they exploded with only minimal force. The fourth projectile was knocked aside by a lucky swing of a tentacle arm. Five and six hit home, their sensors cracking in a cloud of fire and mechanical chunks.

  Sam had known the full destructive power of the missiles would have taken out the entire station. This less ruinous option, though, was enough to leave gaping wounds on the hulls of the enemies she’d hit. Blinded, they flailed about recklessly. The one she’d missed was knocked aside by its own companion, struck full across the center of its mass by a tentacle. The limb broke in half at the point of impact and the smaller chunk came cartwheeling away. It flew right at Sam like a boomerang.

  She twisted and ducked, too late. The spinning tentacle struck her across her turned shoulder and upper right arm. Her armor tensed a spilt second before impact, suddenly hard as cement and then relaxing just as quickly, but the force of the hit sent her spinning herself, flipping around and slamming into a wall. The air rushed from her lungs. Her shoulder buzzed as her nerves there overloaded, all shouting their concern at once. And then the pain came like a tsunami.

  Sam grasped at her arm as she staggered to her feet, unable to tell which way was which. She gulped in air and gagged on it, and wanted nothing more in that moment than to rip the helmet from her head and breathe the real thing. To be away from this wretched place.

  “Three seconds!” Tania shouted. “Twoooooo…” Her voice took on an odd elongated tone, trailing into silence.

  “Now would be good!” Sam barked at her companions. She chanced a quick look back. The three of them were still standing exactly where they’d been, only now a semiopaque dome of purple enveloped them. “Oh shit.”

  Sam hobbled back from the door, firing off a few more shotgun blasts from her wrists just to keep the enemy from getting any ideas. The pain in her shoulder and arm still flared, but thankfully now at a level she could mostly ignore. She turned and raced toward her friends, mind reeling. They’d been trapped, one of those freakish time-desync bubbles or whatever Eve had called them. From here they seemed frozen in place, which meant for those inside the sphere time had been slowed. They probably hadn’t even realized anything was wrong yet, and it could be minutes or hours—hell, years—before they turned and managed to move outside the sphere of influence. The perfect trap.

  Sam’s thoughts caught up with her actions a split second before she barreled right into the pearlescent dome. She skidded to a stop just centimeters from entering it herself. She’d be trapped right along with them.

  Instead she pivoted and turned to face the door. Smoke curled in through the ragged frame they’d carved. Beyond, there were hints of movement in the choking haze. Scipios, gathering, scheming. Sam took a quick glance around, looking for anything that might help. That dome, she thought. There must be a way to turn it off. But she could see nothing. No power cables snaking toward it. No obvious beam projecting it or anything of that sort. It was just there, covering the platform.

  The platform.

  Sam
circled to one side of it. As she moved she switched her wrist-cannon back to beam mode, and let off a scintillating blast through the hole in the door. On a whim she fired another mortar in there, this one set to medium-yield with no target. It zipped through the door, pushing a column of smoke out of its way as it crossed the threshold into the space beyond. There was a crushing whomp that almost lifted Sam off her feet. The explosion ripped the rest of the original door away, leaving a massive opening now.

  “Oops,” she said, but there was nothing to be done about it. Sam circled the platform. There, behind it, a groove in the floor. She blasted it away with her beam weapon, opening a hole to some kind of crawl space below. Bundles of cables and pipes of unknown purpose all converged on the center of the platform where her friends were trapped. Samantha paused, staring at the mess. Slice one? Slice all? What if that caused the whole place to explode?

  She had to assume a civilization capable of building a facility as advanced as this would factor into their design the possibility of some cables getting severed, but then the Scipios seemed oddly inept in some areas. “Ah, fuck it.” Sam raised her arm and gave the thought command to fire her beam.

  “…Ooooooone!”

  Tania’s voice. Sam killed the weapon in the same instant it came on, dealing only minor damage to the edge of the first pipe. She looked to the platform and saw her three friends just as they’d been, evidently no worse for wear. The purple dome had gone.

  “Everyone okay?” she asked.

  Vaughn just about leapt from his boots.

  Prumble answered her question with his own. “How’d you get over there?”

  “No time to explain. Tania, did it work?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied, studying the lone screen again. “Their method of graphing results—”

  Sam annihilated the screen with a quick snap-fire of her beam weapon. “We’re done here,” she said. “Time to go. Now.”

  “Why?” Prumble asked.

  “Because of that thing.” Sam nodded toward the now wide-open door to the chamber. It was filled, corner to corner, ten meters across, by the hulking form of a single, giant swarmer. The largest Sam had yet seen. Its surfaces were all shiny, as if dipped in chrome.

  The behemoth’s tentacles curled in around the gaping hole in the wall where the door had once been.

  Behind it, three more loomed.

  Prumble’s shoulders dropped, more out of annoyance than any concern. He casually lifted one arm and unleashed a torrent of rapid energy bursts that flicked and blazed in Sam’s vision like the flare of a welding torch.

  The energy ricocheted off his target, as if it had struck a mirror. Little parcels of roiling heat spraying outward like a firework from hell. Sam just managed to duck as one streaked past her head, disappearing into the complex machinery behind her.

  “Mortars!” Vaughn shouted. He took a knee to incline his back and launched a round at the same enemy, which had advanced several meters into the room. Too close, Sam thought.

  Vaughn was a smart son of a bitch, though. He’d lowered the yield, just enough. The round hit the thing dead center and its entire bulk rocked backward. For a moment, smoke and shrapnel obscured the result. Sam waited, teeth clenched.

  The beast pushed through the haze, undamaged. Undaunted.

  “Uh,” Prumble said as the four humans backed up, “ideas, anyone?”

  For a second no one said anything, and in that brief silence Samantha felt the first pang of fear begin to crack her battle-lust. Then Tania spoke. “The legs,” she said. “These things are built for zero-g.”

  The swarmers had six tentacles, three mounted on the top hemisphere with one in front and the other two behind. The others were on the lower half, arranged in the opposite fashion. Optimized to give it stability no matter what surface it needed to cling to.

  These bastards, though, theirs were polished to a mirror finish, just like their bodies. Sam tried a mortar, the idea hitting her at the same instant Vaughn reached it. Without planning, they both fired half-yield rounds at two different legs, each striking their targets a split second apart.

  Two explosions shook the room. Debris sprayed against Sam’s visor, the smoke now so thick she could see only a few meters. Then came a great crash that shook the floor. Sam was knocked off her feet, but she’d been ready for it, turning the fall into a backward roll that left her pressed against the machinery that made up the bulk of the chamber. The pain in her shoulder flared, and she held it back with clenched teeth and a powerful will not to die here.

  Sam rocked back onto her feet and scanned the area before her. Vaughn and Tania had closed ranks with her. Prumble was somewhere near, but she could not see him.

  A vibration came up through the floor, like an earthquake. Sam ignored it.

  Ventilation finally cleared the view enough for them to see their attack had worked. The massive swarmer lay on the floor, rolling, trying to find a way to get up. That would be only a matter of time, Sam knew. It had a healthy set of tentacles on top to stand on, once it figured out how. But there were more enemies behind the fallen one, and they were as yet undamaged. With a meaty swing, one of them swept their wounded comrade aside as if it were trash.

  “Up here!” Prumble shouted.

  Sam scanned the area around them, but saw nothing. Of course, he’d said “up,” and she’d failed to process that. She looked up and saw him. He’d found some kind of Scipio-style handhold ladder leading up to a raised walkway that snaked off into the tangle of pipes and machinery. A crack ran across his visor, Sam realized, and she wondered when that had happened. She wondered if it would affect his displays. Something to figure out later.

  The vibration in the floor had grown, and kept growing. Something coming? The station moving? She felt no change in gravity, though.

  Sam motioned for Vaughn and Tania to join Prumble. She turned to follow, ready to defend their backs if the Swarm monstrosities gave chase, when something truly bizarre happened.

  It took her some time to process it afterward.

  One second she was running, Tania right in front of her, the handholds looming just a meter away. Vaughn was there, reaching for the first.

  Then the floor shook like a struck drum before going utterly still. A purple sheen flashed around her vision. Tania and Vaughn looked normal, but everything beyond them became almost completely obscured and blurry, tinted pearlescent purple.

  She had time to think only two words: Oh fuck.

  And then it was gone. The purple bubble. The machinery. The walls.

  Sam was falling, her view only that of Tania and Vaughn against a backdrop of stars, their limbs suddenly flailing for purchase as hers were. Sam felt a pressure against her back. Air, smoke, fragments of machinery all flowing past her and outward.

  A flash of motion caught her eye. Prumble, in space, using the thrusters in his boots to keep from falling away. Arms held out, flashing with their mini-gun chatter of blazing energy at targets unknown. Somehow Sam managed to spin around and look behind them.

  Her mind caught up with reality.

  It was a brilliant tactic, of course. Trap your enemies inside a weird-ass time sphere and figure out how to deal with them at your leisure. A heartbeat for them, hours for you. Sam had no idea what was required to set up one of those purple domes, but they clearly were not easy to make.

  Only problem was, they hadn’t quite caught everybody.

  Prumble, you sneaky bastard.

  Behind her she saw the wreckage of the room they’d been in. While Sam and her team had been pinned down at the back of that platform, fighting for their lives, the Scipios had moved the device beneath them, under the floor. Only they’d been too late. Prumble had already moved away, outside the literal sphere of influence.

  And from the wreckage, he looked none too pleased at seeing his friends caught like statues in a museum. Even now he continued to fire. Not at the enemies, but at the machinery. A rapid continuous drumbeat of destruction.
Flickering explosions roiled through the exposed pipes and conduits. He had, evidently, carved a massive hole through the outer wall. Whether on purpose or not, he’d caused everything not bolted down to be sucked out into space. Then he’d gone to town on the device generating the time bubble, destroying it as he floated out with the rest of the ejecta. It had all happened in the blink of an eye for Sam.

  “Sorry it took me so long,” Prumble said, voice crackling in her ears.

  Sam remembered his damaged visor then. “Prumble, your helmet!”

  “I’m okay,” he said. “It’s holding. You guys all right?”

  “Yeah,” Sam replied. Vaughn and Tania echoed her response.

  “Then maybe you could start shooting?” He was falling with them now. Away from the planet along the length of the long, tall station. Somewhere below, docked at its outer edge, Tim would be waiting. Should be.

  As the four of them fell toward that point, they raked their weapons across the length of the Scipio space station. Prumble spraying it with his rhythmic, now-silent thrum. Sam and Tania still in beam mode, tracing molten lines across the metallic surfaces. Vaughn took a different approach. He used his mortars only, aiming them at windows. All above them the station cracked apart like an egg. Secondary explosions began to rock its very core. Sam suddenly feared the whole thing would go up in a giant nuclear inferno before they were clear.

  But that’s why we came here, isn’t it? Go out with a bang?

  “Tim,” Tania said. “Can you hear us?”

  “I read you,” he replied instantly, though he sounded like he was whispering, or talking through clenched teeth.

  “Undock and move clear if you can. Things are, um, heating up.”

  “Would if I could,” his response came. “But I’m afraid I’ve been captured.”

  Carthage

  HE WATCHED FROM the rooftops for several hours, telling himself he’d move as soon as the horizon showed any hint of an approaching dawn. His goal, at least the one he sold himself on, was to learn the schedule of their climbers, and perhaps catch a glimpse of how they were loaded. Security precautions, inspections, anything like that.