Escape Velocity

by Jason M. Hough

  “Just what I said. What if they’re using him to get the rest of us to come to them.”

  “I don’t think so,” Sam replied. “I mean, so far their encounters with us haven’t gone so well for them.”

  “True,” Tania said, “but they’re adapting. Those mirrored giants…”

  Prumble grunted. “Tough bastards, no question. Still, we managed.”

  “And with the next thing they throw at us?”

  “We’ll figure that one out, too. C’mon, Tania, we were brought here for this reason. We improvise. It’s obviously why they picked us.”

  Tania frowned. “I highly doubt creativity is a trait unique to humanity.”

  The constant tug of acceleration faded as the climber reached its cruising speed. Sam led the team around to the other end of the climber, reorienting them for the presumed shift to deceleration.

  Tania had only just looped her arm around an antenna when it came, that sudden force of what the body thought was gravity. The press was hard, three or four g’s, she guessed. So hard, in fact, that she feared this was an unscheduled stop.

  Sam and Vaughn evidently had the same concern. In unison, they scrambled to either side of the climber’s endcap and peered over the side.

  “Station approaching,” Sam reported.

  “How close?” Tania asked.

  “About a klick,” the woman said. “I think we should go.”

  “Agreed,” Vaughn said.

  “All hands abandon ship!” Prumble said, voice raised but not so loud that anyone might mistake it for an actual alarm.

  Sam got on her hands and knees. “Follow me, everyone. Let’s go get Tim.”

  And she leapt.

  Tania went after her, powering up the thrusters in her boots and matching Sam’s speed and trajectory. Their path took them clear of the approaching complex of space stations, which the Scipios had arranged in a snowflake-like pattern connected by glowing beams. Sam let their momentum carry them past the complex, diving through a gap between two segments of the bleak and complicated structures.

  “Is it bad that I just want to shoot everything?” Sam asked the group.

  Tania couldn’t help but smile. She’d thought the same thing, but never would have voiced it.

  “Save your ammo,” Vaughn replied.

  “I am. I know. Just…thinking aloud.” Sam started to curve her path as they flew under the cluster of stations. Carthage loomed below, a patchwork of grays, greens, and milky whites.

  The globe’s presence, and the coming sunrise, made it easier to spot the adjacent space elevators. Not the cords, they were much too thin to see from here, but the clustered space stations that marked their path. Somewhere over there, Tim was being held by the Scipios. Tania stared at those stations, wondering if she’d been too hard on the young man.

  His actions since their crash landing had seemed so selfish, driven by jealousy. Yet she knew his heart was in the right place. She had no doubt that all he really wanted was to see her safely home, no matter the outcome of this endeavor. Viewed so, Tania could see herself as the irrational one now. Clinging to a baseless hope that Skyler and Vanessa were still out there, somewhere. She had been the one who had resisted the efforts to flee this place, and in doing so she might have doomed them all. She was the reason they were still here, which had led to Tim’s capture. Some friend she was.

  No wonder he’d become so sullen and bitter. She’d built a wall, steadfastly refused to see things from his perspective and analyze the situation objectively. She’d forgotten herself. Her scientist’s mindset, the very thing Tim had known and no doubt loved about her for years now. A terrible thing to see someone you thought you knew become someone else.

  “There,” Sam said, pointing.

  Tania steeled herself for what was to come, silently vowing to give Tim not only the benefit of the doubt, but also the respect he’d earned as her peer and friend these last few years.

  Ahead and below, another cluster of space stations grew nearer by the second. They were attached at the midpoint of the elevator cord, and not spinning. Null gravity inside, then. Tania took a hard look at the stations themselves, attempting to apply what she’d learned on the few she’d visited already in hopes of discerning their purpose. That effort was hopeless, though. The Scipios’ architectural style was functional in the extreme, but without their cultural context it all just looked haphazard and messy to her. Occasionally she glimpsed one of the stations the Creators must have built. Sleek, elegant things, though their windows were mostly dark now, and their surfaces largely hidden under the additions of their oppressors.

  Minutes passed. She felt utterly exposed, adrift in the vacuum, nothing connecting her to any solid object. And yet at the same time, Tania found a sense of power in it. The feeling that she could go anywhere, do anything. Literally an entire world lay beneath her.

  The stations grew slowly larger, the distances involved making it hard to judge speed. Arrival came almost out of nowhere, confusing Sam as much as everyone else. The woman overshot their target and had to make a wide loop around. This proved useful, even if it hadn’t been the plan, for it afforded the whole team a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of the stations clustered here at the center of this cord.

  “Bingo,” Prumble said. Everyone looked to what had caught his attention.

  It took Tania a moment to spot it, but when she did she knew instantly they’d found the right place. There, tucked up against a protruding hallway, was the transport craft. It had the same designation emblazoned on the side that she recalled seeing on the displays glimpsed within. Tania activated her comm. “Tim,” she said, “make a sound if you can hear me. We’re close. We found the transport.”

  A silence stretched. No reply came, not even static. She wondered if they’d already extricated him from his suit, or found a way to power it off. What would they do to him? Her mind conjured terrible images. Horrible punishments, dissection, and all because he’d wanted to leave instead of quenching some petty thirst to leave a scar on the Scipios’ apparatus.

  “I’ll keep this channel open,” Tania added, aware of the bleak tone in her voice, unable to mask it. “We’re coming for you. Stay strong, we’re coming.”

  “Behind us,” Vaughn said.

  They all whirled.

  From the direction they’d come, a dozen flares had lit up against the background of dimly twinkling stars. Engines, firing to slow the approach of what could only be a pursuit. “What do we do?” Tania asked.

  “I’d rather fight them inside,” Prumble said before anyone else could talk. “They have to worry about collateral damage. We don’t.”

  “Unless Tim’s in there.”

  “Fair enough, but their risk is still greater.”

  “Agreed,” Vaughn said.

  Sam was nodding as well. Without prompting she took the lead again. Her boots flared and she took a direct path toward the docked shuttle. At the last second she pulsed to one side and flew past it, on a path parallel to the airlock tube extending out from the main station to the little craft. “Remarkably like how they approached the Chameleon,” she said, and then let off a mortar round. The projectile traced a line toward the tube, slamming into it right at the middle. There was a bright flash instantly followed by debris radiating out in all directions. Sam did not slow, did not waver. She flew right into the hole she’d made. Prumble followed her in, and Tania, without even really realizing she’d started moving, found herself flying in only seconds behind him.

  “I’ll check the transport,” Vaughn said. “In case they haven’t moved him out yet.”

  The tiny shuttle craft was still connected to a length of the severed hallway, drifting away from the station proper at a slow speed and tumbling slightly. Tania glanced back in time to see Vaughn fly into the ragged end of the tube and disappear inside.

  Sam and Prumble moved directly to the airlock door at the end of this part of the now-bisected hall. By the time Tania caught up to the
m, Sam had started cutting through. “Latch doesn’t work,” she said by way of explanation. “Bastards locked us outside.”

  “Can you blame them?” Prumble asked.

  Tania wasn’t so sure, but decided to keep the theory to herself. Sam had just destroyed what served as the airlock, so it made sense that the inner door would automatically lock if vacuum was detected outside.

  Sam was almost through.

  “Move aside,” Tania said. “That door is going to shoot outward from the pressure difference.” She flattened herself against one wall. Prumble moved to a spot opposite her and Sam took up her own place above. A few seconds later the cut was almost finished. The door began to bow, held on by only a slim bit of metal now.

  “Transport’s empty,” Vaughn said. “Coming to you.”

  “Watch out for the door,” Sam said. “It’s coming loose any sec—”

  The circular slab tore free and shot outward, straight down the hall, missing Tania and Prumble by mere centimeters. Vaughn needn’t have worried, the tumble imparted on the transport had taken it away at a slight angle, well out of the door’s path. Tania watched him emerge from the still-attached section of tube and push free. He powered up his boots and started toward them. “Our pursuers are close,” he reported, “and coming in hot.”

  Foam the color of mucus started to push out from small nozzles around the airlock doorframe. Emergency sealant.

  “Inside,” Sam said. “Now.” She led by example.

  Tania pushed in behind Prumble, the view of the interior obscured by his hulking form. As humans went, you couldn’t get much more intimidating than Samantha and Prumble, Tania mused. As soon as she passed the bulkhead she drifted to one side, one arm raised as if she were truly adept at such an incursion. She aimed where she looked, and only after a second, hearing both Sam and Prumble exclaim “Clear!” did she do the same.

  This station was much different from the others. The layout registered first. This room was really just a large hollow sphere, broken only by a single thick column that rose up from the floor and exited at the ceiling, those directions fresh in Tania’s mind because she’d seen the planet below them upon entering, and considered that “down.” The shaft cutting through the center of the spherical room no doubt housed the space elevator cord.

  The second thing she noticed was the style. This place clearly was not of Scipio design. There was an elegance to the curves, a thoughtfulness to how it flowed. Even the fact that connecting tunnels entered the sphere at seemingly random locations from all around, somehow their presence worked. It had an artful quality.

  “Now what?” Prumble asked.

  “Well don’t just sit there,” Vaughn said, coming in behind them. “The swarmers are right behind us.”

  “Yeah, but where do we go? This place is gigantic.”

  “They would have taken Tim somewhere they could study him,” Tania suggested.

  “That does not help at all,” Prumble noted dryly.

  “Just pick something!” Vaughn yelled, coming in through the hole carved in the airlock door.

  Behind him, only seconds later, the temporary seal around the ragged hole they’d made in the airlock became a solid mass, hard as concrete. Tania heard the hiss of air being recirculated into this part of the station.

  “Down,” Sam said, and was off again. She pulsed toward the spot where the column that housed the space elevator connected to the bottom of the sphere. All around it were circular openings—passages leading downward, parallel to the sheath that protected the cord.

  Sam aimed toward one of them, then once adrift she spun herself around to face the airlock they’d entered through. Tania pulsed her own thrusters to move slightly to one side, giving Sam a clearer view behind them, more than happy to let her handle whatever might follow them in. She moved into the lead, nodding to Sam as she passed her, seeing agreement in those eyes. This was Tania’s mission now.

  All right, Tim, she thought, where did they take you?

  She glided into the tube, just meters from the shaft where the space elevator’s cord drew a path all the way to the planet’s surface. The temptation to carve a hole in the wall and dip in there, to ride that insanely long zip line all the way to the ground, nearly consumed her. Instead she focused on the chambers opposite her. Door after door, marked with symbols that her visor refused to translate. What could that mean? Words new to the Scipio lexicon? Or maybe just proper names?

  Tania realized each door had a small panel beside it, with softly glowing symbols in rhythmically changing patterns flashing across the screen.

  She slowed and moved toward one, aware that Sam and the others were right behind her. Most of the words here, too, were unknown to the translator Eve had provided. But some were recognized. Tania scanned symbols and found words like mixture, and pressure, and nominal.

  And another thing. What she presumed was a date, though with no concept of their timekeeping methods the numbers meant little. The word beside the date, though, that she understood well. “ ‘Departure,’ ” she read aloud.

  The last thing, which the screen flashed every few seconds, was TRANSFER STATUS: PENDING.

  “Pardon?” Vaughn asked.

  Tania wasn’t listening. She moved to the next. And the next, and then one more. All of them had different configurations of mixture and pressure, all of them had nominal status, and all of them had different departure dates. TRANSFER STATUS: PENDING. TRANSFER STATUS: PENDING. TRANSFER STATUS…

  COMPLETE.

  She opened this last.

  “Is he in there?” Sam asked.

  For a second she thought she meant Skyler, not Tim. In truth Tania had not expected to find either one. What she did find, for the first time since coming here, matched her prediction.

  “What the hell is it?” Sam asked. Her three companions had stopped in the hall, forming a line ready to fight enemies from either direction.

  “An alien,” Tania said. She moved a half-meter inside. The door led into a small viewing chamber, the inside of which was entirely transparent. Thick borosilicate glass, or something like it, from floor to ceiling. And beyond, in a thick haze of violet-tinged air, a lanky alien being lay on a long bed, straps keeping it from floating about. The three-meter-long creature resembled a stick insect, yet with a bulbous head. Its skin looked almost like polished stone.

  For a second Tania thought the creature was asleep, but then it moved one hand up to its face and scratched. The hand went back to its side. A very human gesture. Tania reached out and tapped on the glass. The creature’s head turned and strange eyes, great pools of black, looked into hers. Or perhaps not, hard to tell with no discernible pupils. It continued to swivel its head around, confused, she thought.

  A one-way mirror, perhaps. She turned and studied the wall just inside the door. There was another control screen there, and this had more words. One said OBSERVATION MODE, so she tapped at it. The words changed to CONVERSATION MODE. When she turned back the creature had sat up, looking directly at her now. It made a sound, guttural and raspy, something like “ghvast t’yolk.”

  To Tania’s surprise, her visor translated the words. WHO ARE YOU?

  “What is this place?” Tania asked. “Why are you in here?”

  She could see glowing symbols appear on the outside of her visor, a written translation for the alien to read. It stared at her, unblinking, eyestalks twitching.

  “Uh,” Prumble said from the door. “What the fuck?”

  Tania shooed him off without looking.

  “Do we have time for this?” Prumble said. “I don’t think we have time for this.”

  “If it’s not Tim let’s get the hell away from here,” Sam urged, farther out in the hall but no less loud for it.

  The alien undid its straps and rose from its bed. It came to the glass, tilted its head slightly, and pressed one stalky finger, or maybe that was its hand, against the surface. [ERROR] CARRYING TO GESTATION WORLD. HERE UNTIL IS TO RECOVER.

>   “Recover from what?” Tania asked.

  REJUVENATION.

  “I knew it,” Tania whispered. She pushed back out into the hall and closed the door. “We need to split up,” she said to the others.

  “Out of the question,” Sam replied.

  “Listen,” Tania urged. “This is the Elevator they use to bring mind-transfer patients back up from the surface. This is where they recuperate before departing back to their own system.”

  “You learned all that in thirty seconds?” Prumble asked.

  “I learned enough,” Tania said. “There will be ships here. At the far end. Big ones. Interstellar capable, like the Chameleon.”

  “What about Tim?” Vaughn asked.

  Tania looked at him. “We still need to find him, but if he manages to escape, he would head there. And if they’re trying to use him to find Earth, that’s where they’ll take him.”

  “You’re making a lot of guesses, mate,” Sam said.

  Tania had no reply that would satisfy that. Sometimes you just knew. Like the first time she would sit before a computer interface she’d never used. Like in the station they’d destroyed, with its imprint chamber. Baffling at first, then all the little glimpsed and confusing pieces suddenly made sense.

  “I still don’t see why we have to split up,” Prumble said.

  Tania looked at all three of them. “This is the Elevator where transfer patients are brought up from the surface. Which means down there”—she pointed toward Carthage—“is where they perform the procedure.”

  Prumble and Vaughn both glanced at Sam. Her face was pinched in concentration, a deep furrow across her forehead. “We should stick together,” she said after a moment.

  “But—” Tania began.

  Sam’s glance stopped her. “Remember when you dropped that farm platform on Russell? In Africa?”

  A chill went through her. “Of course.”

  “Maybe that’s the answer. Maybe Eve was testing us on that, too.”

  “No,” Tania said vehemently. “They could not have known anything about that situation, or our ability to move farm platforms. And anyway, we can’t do that; it’s possible they took Tim down there.”