Escape Velocity

by Jason M. Hough

  He levered the door closed and stepped back. His leg smacked against a low table or something and, delirious and exhausted, he fell backward.

  Skyler landed across it and squirmed to get up, only to fall again, a bit farther. Cushioning enveloped his head. Automatically deployed restraints grabbed hold of his torso, arms, legs, feet. The lid of the coffin closed over him at the same instant he recognized it for what it was.

  One of those hovering stretchers, like he’d seen in the tunnel.

  He heard it seal, and then the nightmare began.

  Above Carthage

  “I’M GOING.”

  “No.”

  “He needs us.”

  “Fuck that. We’ve got to go—”

  “I don’t want to go without him. Can’t you fucking understand that?”

  Vaughn stared at Sam. She stared back.

  Tania Sharma floated a few meters away, ready to leave no matter what the standoff resulted in.

  “We’re going to find a ship,” Vaughn said slowly, “and make it fly. If you two aren’t back by the time that’s done…”

  Sam leaned in and slipped her arm around his neck, pulling his helmet until the glass touched her own. “Then you’ll keep waiting for me, because we’re going to make it back.”

  “God damn your stubborn ass,” the man swore.

  The woman put her hand on the man’s visor as gently as if it were his cheek. A rare tender moment from Samantha Rinn, broken a second later when she slapped the same spot and forced a grin onto her face. “You and Prumble better be ready when we get there.”

  Vaughn could only shake his head, and let go.

  Sam moved back, and turned to Tania. “Let’s move.”

  Tania needed no more prompting than that. She turned, too, pulsed out a few meters from the outer hull of the space station, and fired her thrusters, not really caring now that they were so low on fuel.

  They’d tucked themselves into the shadowed area between two massive external tanks of unknown content.

  Everything inside the station had become filled with a new variant of the virus, one that did not react to the presence of the aura shards, meaning their suits were now their only line of defense. So Tania, Prumble, and Vaughn had ditched their burdens and, if the two men were anything like her, were much better for it. The freedom was exhilarating. She’d gotten used to the awkward bulk, and free of it now she felt as lithe and strong as a tigress on the hunt. Once again she found a tiny corner of her brain musing as to the nature of this moment. Whether or not Eve had foreseen it, indeed planned for it.

  Perhaps that was the point, Tania thought. Test us for vague things related to even vaguer distant unknown obstacles, and let the confidence we gain knowing we passed said tests propel us through adversity at the other end. Incredibly brilliant if so, and also utterly ruthless. Somehow that sounded very much like Eve.

  She and Sam became like two missiles, arcing and curling along the length of the elevator cord, bowing outward as space stations grew in their visors and then, in a flash, began to recede behind them. The tug of Carthage soon provided all the acceleration they needed, and their flight became a true fall.

  Near the top of the atmosphere Tania saw what had prompted their change of plan. Well, aside from Skyler’s gut-wrenching cry and subsequent departure from the comm.

  An armada of mirror-surfaced swarmers was descending the Elevator, gliding down the ribbon with one or two of their tentacle arms curled around the thin device, using it as a guide. With them were at least ten climbers, virtually in free fall, their contents unknown.

  Below, a massive beige cloud spread outward from the elevator base, as if the whole area had been suddenly enveloped in a cataclysmic hurricane. Though Tania knew that was not what it was. No storm moved like this. Straight out, in a nearly perfect circle.

  It was the virus, the new one, dropped like an atomic bomb on the city where Skyler lurked. She hoped he’d been underground—deep underground—when that onslaught arrived. From his last transmission, though, she knew that was unlikely.

  “We’ve got to ride one of those climbers,” Sam said. She had to shout now, to be heard over the strange thin-yet-loud hiss their bodies generated by friction with the very topmost portion of the atmosphere. “Otherwise the heat from reentry will cook us.”

  “We don’t know that,” Tania shouted back.

  “Is this the time to find out?”

  Tania couldn’t argue with that.

  Samantha streamlined herself and fired her boots one last time, darting off toward the massed enemy force below. Her mortar tube burped—two, three, four times—the projectiles streaking out on erratic, curling paths as they found the right trajectory to connect with their targets. Her shots avoided the climber cars. Tania didn’t need to warn her off that tactic; they both knew that a way back up was somewhat important to the plan.

  Four flashes saw four swarmers erupt in nasty tumbling fireballs, tentacle limbs flopping free and cartwheeling as they fell. Sam had smartly targeted the four leaders, the farthest below them. The explosions tore outward, spraying flaming chunks of machinery and Scipio flesh into the paths of those trailing just behind. A sudden frenzy of movement followed. Some angled outward. Others twisted in, then via some survival instinct or a programmed avoidance of the elevator ribbon, they made urgent course corrections back into the maelstrom, or slowed drastically as a last hope of avoiding the mess.

  Tania fired. She felt the satisfying punch on her shoulders as the mortars took flight. Four shots, just as Sam had done. They’d both had eight left, now cut in half. Her shots ripped outward, then curled back in as they gained speed. Quadruple pulses of blinding light plumed from the edges of the armada, as those that had fled upward from Sam’s attack now ran headlong into Tania’s. The massive firestorm would, with any luck, mask Sam and Tania’s approach.

  She streamlined herself, too, and followed her companion as the other woman punched through that fresh obscuring murk.

  Air pounded at her now. A rippling series of kicks and punches all along her body, absorbed by the suit but communicated to her for the sake of her knowing about it. Tania fought to maintain her aim, the ribbon-shaped space elevator making a handy path to follow down. She passed a climber that resembled the transport craft they’d stolen. At the nose she saw a Scipio looking out at her through the window, deep-socketed eyes inscrutable but following her, as if to say “You won’t get away with this.”

  “Remains to be seen,” Tania whispered.

  She focused ahead, aiming her fall at the climbers closer to the ground. Sam darted in and out of sight several hundred meters below, her beam weapons carving the air. Tania could not see her target, but knew the plan well enough to guess. Time to do her own part.

  A climber loomed just below. Tania twisted her body to glide inward, scraping dangerously close to the Elevator now. The sleek narrow vehicle was fifty meters beneath her and approaching fast. Tania held both arms forward and switched her beams on. The twin lines of roiling energy punched into the top of the transport and bored inside. The whole thing cracked apart like an egg, molten fire spewing out through the gaps before the hull came apart and shards flew outward. There was no time to turn. Tania flew right through the center of the chaos, following the path her weapon had carved. She saw the ragged edges of torn-away hull panels and the horrible flailing bodies of Scipios thrust from the wreckage, cartwheeling out into their own awful descent. Wing flaps would not help them at this altitude, surrounded by frigid air too thin to breathe. Some tried, anyway, only to succumb seconds later and begin their final plummet to Carthage.

  Tania Sharma forced back a sudden wave of compassion and repeated her attack on the next climber, and the next. She and Sam had agreed to work the plan from both ends, leaving only the topmost climber intact.

  A battle instinct she still only felt passing awareness of triggered a sudden departure from her path. She flung herself sideways as the one of the remaining mirrore
d swarmers tracked her down and hurtled itself in to stop her attack. Tania rolled and swooped a path around its grasping limbs, ignored the sudden blast of viral powder that pelted the back of her armored suit. The display showed no punctures. She wondered if they still hadn’t figured the defense out, or if she’d just been lucky in her positioning. As Sam had said, Is this the time to find out?

  Tania stuck to the plan; destroy the climbers—which seemed to contain some kind of elite ground force from their camolike uniforms and the weapons they held—while avoiding the seemingly impervious swarmers. Mortars were required to destroy the swarmers, and mortars were in preciously limited supply.

  In the center of the climber group she held fire as the last of the vehicles came apart, its contents spilled into the now-howling wind. Sam flew past her at incredible speed, heading up. Three chrome swarmers were right behind her, closing fast. Tania saw, too late, that she would collide with one. No time to change course, she acted on instinct and fired her beams. A bad instinct, as the weapons were now ineffectual on these enemies. Tania watched in horror as the twin lasers bent away at strange shifting angles.

  The monster rushed toward her, its six arms flung wide as it did its best to avoid her. She tucked her legs and arms in tight and twisted, closing her eyes at the crucial moment, waiting for the impact that would kill her at worst, break her back at best. Instead she felt the wallop of a nearby explosion and her body convulsed as the shock wave ripped through. She opened her eyes, dazed for a moment, seeing only the planet below, clear as Darwin viewed from Gateway.

  “What happened?” she asked the world.

  It did not reply. Prumble, however, did. “Thought you two could use some company.”

  Tania twisted about and saw him, and Vaughn, rocketing in from complementary angles.

  “Do you two assholes ever follow orders?” Sam asked.

  Prumble laughed, full and hearty, as he slammed into one of the remaining swarmers and grappled with it. Tania did not understand this tactic until suddenly, one of the big man’s beam weapons ripped through the other side of the enemy’s casing and it began to fall away, limp as a doll.

  “How did you—” she started, bewildered.

  “Put your fist right up to their eye-thing,” he said, “and let ’em have it.”

  “What happened to the plan, Vaughn?” Sam was asking.

  “Too hot up there,” he said. “It looks like they brought the entire Swarm in to prevent us from leaving.”

  “What, all one million of them?”

  “Seems that way.”

  “He’s exaggerating,” Prumble put in. “There’s probably only five hundred thousand.”

  Tania swallowed hard. “Well,” she said, “at least we know we’ve got their attention now.”

  The four of them met on the top endcap of the one remaining climber, which still glided merrily along as if its entire escort had not just been annihilated in an orgy of violence all around it.

  “Surprised they haven’t just stopped,” Tania said. “Or turned around.”

  “Maybe they can’t,” Sam replied. “Anyway it doesn’t matter. We ride this as far as we can and then jump if we have to.”

  The climber continued its free-fall descent.

  Location Unfathomable

  HE STOOD ON a riverbank, churned water flowing swiftly past. A torrent, and growing, perhaps from a flood upstream. The banks crumbled away at his feet, soil and rock vanishing into the swollen river. He turned to run, only the river was behind him, too.

  No riverbank, then, but a sliver of an island being washed away on all sides. In seconds it would vanish under the waters, gone forever, and him with it.

  Skyler heard a voice, but did not understand the words. Icy cold swept over his feet as the flood swallowed the last of the land. He would drown. The voice again, above. He glanced up and saw a hand outstretched from a nondescript being floating above him in midair. Skyler grasped the hand and scrambled for purchase on the last little bits of island now beneath the frothy rapids. The hand clasped his forearm and he its, and it pulled.

  The person, not human but somehow not anything else, either, heaved Skyler up onto its shoulders and carried him like a child. It walked carefully through the air, one foot stepping right in front of the other as if it negotiated a balance beam.

  Another island came into view, this one artificial. Two stairway bridges arching up to meet at a stone gazebo straddling the roaring waters just below. The being jumped the last meter, over and down, spilling Skyler onto the damp stone surface in the process.

  He rolled, badly, surprised by the sudden awkward crash. When his body came to a stop, he found himself lying faceup, the spray of storm-driven rain like a perpetual slap across the cheek. Slick cobblestones bit into his back and legs.

  The figure stood over him. No, floated over him, as if gravity did not affect it.

  “Who are you?” Skyler asked. “Is this…What is this place?”

  He’d almost asked if this was the afterlife, a concept he’d never bought into if only because it seemed to empower, quite ironically, humanity’s worst people. Grillo, being the most recent example in a long and frightening line.

  But the being only looked at him quizzically.

  He recognized it then. And all at once everything came back to him. The Creator he’d sat with in that ruin of a building as the enemy scouts flew overhead. The same face he’d seen in that strange floating capsule, underneath the city, being brought into the Transfer Facility.

  THEY COME FOR ME SOON, the fractured translation on his visor had said. And so they had. And Skyler hadn’t figured out, or perhaps didn’t want to admit to himself, what this place was, this transfer center.

  The being had its hand out, and Skyler only stared at it now. He’d thought it was offering to help him up, as it had pulled him from the vanishing island in the river, but now he saw that was not the case. The Creator was floating away, unbound by the gravity Skyler felt.

  This allowed another rush of understanding. The test Eve had performed on Alex and Jared. Alex had mentioned a shared dreamscape, where despite being together they saw different things and different rules applied. It had been another test, so Eve had said, regarding the human mind’s ability to align with that of another.

  All of it came together in Skyler’s head. The coming together of two minds, a bridging, literally and figuratively. A conduit open between them whereby a consciousness could be transferred.

  He’d stumbled into it. Fallen into one of the connective pods and inserted himself into the process. As the host? As the mind to be transferred? Was he about to find himself in a new body, or find his own mind discarded so that some alien could plop itself into his head?

  If he let this being float away, is the whole business called off? The Creators served as the medium for this transfer, didn’t they? That was the whole reason the Scipios had imprisoned them.

  Skyler reached for the being’s hand. He hesitated. The Creator studied him for a moment with its unsettling third eye and then, bizarrely, nodded. A very human gesture, perhaps glimpsed when he’d sat with it in hiding.

  Lightning roiled across the stormy sky. A brisk slap of frigid water across his face.

  “Talk to it, Skyler,” a voice said, bright and clear.

  Eve’s voice.

  The Lonesome

  THE LONESOME SPIRALED in toward Carthage, engines growling as her velocity bled away and her altitude slowly declined.

  The improbable crew stood crowded around Gloria Tsandi, staring at the display in front of her.

  “Welp,” Xavi said, “no doubt where the bastards are.”

  The ship’s sensors had painted every object of unnatural composition within a few million klicks by now, at least those larger than a football.

  The ring of Elevator-anchored space stations around the planet were like a glowing belt. Structured, sensible.

  And then farther out, well beyond even where the Lonesome now sat, seve
ral blips with fine trajectory markers traced long arcs that followed the familiar paths every space captain knew all too well. Injection burns, as they came in to make orbit, or the ferocious push to get out of a planet’s gravity well, to achieve escape velocity.

  Not unlike what a representation of Earth’s space assets looked like these days, in truth. Elevators, stations, and the signs of commerce and exploration.

  Except for one glaring, gigantic difference, of course.

  The thing they all now stared at in stupefied silence.

  One Elevator in particular, around which there buzzed a hornet’s nest of icons and calculated vector cones. So many ships the Lonesome’s computer had trouble drawing them all, and had marked them with a light gray coloration that Gloria had to look up in the manual to learn the meaning of: The computer used this color when insufficient processing power was available to calculate paths for the number of objects the sensors detected. She had not known this was possible.

  “That is a lot of fucking ships,” Xavi said dryly.

  “It’s like they brought the entire Swarm in,” Beth Lee said shakily, but at least she was no longer unconscious. Not a coma, after all. Gloria patted the chair’s armrest, grateful to the universe for that small bit of good news.

  “Perhaps that’s exactly what they did,” Vanessa replied, thoughtful and somehow still defiant. A warrior, that one. “The question is, why? Last stand, or are they all here to celebrate their victory?”

  Xavi made a little grunt of resignation. “Maybe they’re massing for an invasion of Earth. Got what they needed, so why wait?”

  “We don’t know if they got anything,” Gloria said. “For now we assume—”

  “I know what you’re going to say, boss, but it’s wishful thinking. We need to warn the OEA about this.”

  Gloria studied him. “If you think a warning, even now, would help defend against that”—she pointed at the ball of enemy ships on the screen, all clustered around one space station—“you’re mad.”