Escape Velocity

by Jason M. Hough

  “They’re all bunched up,” Alex Warthen said, more to himself than to anyone. A simple, quiet observation. A rather obvious one, too.

  “Alex?” Gloria prompted.

  “They’re all bunched up. Tactically that’s a gigantic mistake. One nuke in there and you’d take out a lot of them. Maybe all of them. Unless…”

  “Unless?”

  He glanced at her. “Maybe they’re not preparing to move outward at all. Maybe,” he said, “their focus is on whatever is at the center.”

  “One nuke, huh?” Xavi said, thoughtful now.

  Gloria glanced at him, then sent a private message to his visor. I WANT TO KNOW WHAT KIND OF WEAPONS THIS SHIP HAS, AND I WANT TO KNOW NOW.

  He cast her a sidelong glance, gave a small nod.

  The Lonesome’s current orbit had it circling the world at forty degrees of inclination. She wouldn’t pass close to the cluster of Swarm ships for another two orbits. Gloria plotted a small course correction, dragging their path so that, when that moment came, the Lonesome would pass right through the center of that mass.

  “Is that wise?” Beth asked, watching the adjustments.

  “Dear,” Gloria said, “I don’t think anything can be considered wise at this point. There’re only degrees of insane now.”

  Xavi’s reply came. NOT MUCH, I’M AFRAID. LOOKS LIKE DAW BLEW THE ENTIRE WAD BEFORE THEY WERE CAPTURED.

  Gloria drew in a long breath. This ship, military, state of the art, designed to survive encounters with the Swarm, had still been captured after unleashing untold devastation on the enemy.

  “Are we going to nuke them?” Beth asked. “A suicide run?”

  Gloria turned to face her.

  Beth Lee held up her hands. “I’m not saying it’s a bad idea. I mean, we could eliminate the Swarm, in one fell swoop. Even if this mission is a failure, the next…But, please, Captain, we have a right to know. We deserve that. I want the chance to make my peace.”

  Captain Gloria Tsandi studied her borrowed engineer, the last-minute addition to this voyage, the first crew member she’d not handpicked herself after lengthy consideration and a sizable gut feeling. And she found she wanted to pull her into a mother’s embrace and thank her, thank all of them, for being here. For staying by her side through everything. “The truth is I haven’t decided yet, but if it comes to that, I will give you your time.”

  “I don’t know about you guys,” Xavi said, “but in the last few days I’ve made my peace more times than I’ve had a shit.” He tilted his head toward Beth. “No offense, mate.”

  The woman ignored this. She’d grown somber, and stared at her captain.

  “Suppose,” Vanessa said, “we hit them with an EMP.”

  Everyone turned to her.

  Vanessa shrugged. “Eve tested us for that, back in…a place called Colorado.”

  “The cave, yes!” Beth replied. “Behind the Flatirons!” Before her zeal for the history of that era could get the better of her, Beth visibly shifted to an expression of dubious concern. “That was testing us, though, not the Scipios.”

  “Exactly my point,” Vanessa said. “We survived it. Maybe they won’t.”

  “Hmm. You might be onto something there.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Xavi said. “We don’t have an EMP. A couple of rail guns and several low-yield missiles, but no EMP.”

  No one spoke.

  “We could generate one,” Beth Lee said, after a moment.

  Gloria looked at her. “How?”

  The engineer’s eyes were darting back and forth, surveying some invisible catalog of the ship’s components and how they might be reconfigured to achieve the desired result. “Take the sinks and regulators off the ultracaps, dump them against the reactor’s thermal catalyst.”

  “All that would do is start the reactor,” Xavi said. “We could make better use of it than as a bomb, surely.”

  Beth shook her head. “No. I mean yes, it would start, but we couldn’t use it. Dawson shut it off for a reason. The Scipios hit the bleed lines and distribution cluster. If the reactor turned on right now…well, it would unleash all the electricity at once, and at maximum output.”

  “That would fry everything,” Gloria said, “including us, no matter what happened in Colorado. How is that better than a nuclear explosion?”

  “Because,” Beth replied, “the reactor can be ejected. So can the caps.”

  Xavi made a tsk sound. “You realize this would leave us without power, right? The caps are all we’ve got right now.”

  “Not true,” Beth said, warming to her idea with every word. “We’ve got the engines. As long as we keep them warm, we can last as long as the fuel reserves last.”

  Beth glanced at the supply level instinctively and frowned. It was low, very low, and they were going to need a lot of it if they wanted to make an escape velocity of their own.

  “You actually considering this, boss?” Xavi asked.

  Gloria turned to him. “Degrees of insanity, remember?” She looked at all of them then. “We’ve got about one and a half orbits before we plow right through the center of that crowd, which means we’ve got half an orbit before we pass close enough to fling our reactor onto their doorstep. I think,” she said, “instead of making our peace, let’s make a nice little package for our Scipio friends.”

  —

  The clock became the enemy.

  Beth and Xavi hunched over their terminals, she running calculations of minimum safe distance and when to trigger the various components in order to achieve the result, while he pored through documentation to figure out what fail-safe would have to be disabled or bypassed for any of this to work.

  There must be a lot of those, Gloria thought, judging by the amount of swearing coming from his corner of the engineering hub.

  She could only leave them to the work. Hovering at their shoulders, questioning or second-guessing, would only distract them. She’d learned, over the years, that being a good captain meant knowing when to let people get about it. Well, that and being an unconscionable hard-ass. She’d lost that last part, somewhere along the path from the Key Ship’s destruction to that moon.

  Or maybe she’d just learned to trust her new crew. Even Alex Warthen, who now stood quietly by the airlock, watching their target station come into view over Carthage’s star-dazzled horizon.

  “You okay?” she asked him.

  For the first time since she’d known him, the man laughed. A dry, sardonic thing, but still a laugh. It faded, and he glanced at her, then laughed again when he saw she was serious. Gloria couldn’t help but smile. He was right. It was a ridiculous question, one of those automatic things one learned to say because it’s what they always said in the sensories. A question that always brought about a moment of reflection or deep philosophical understanding.

  Alex Warthen sighed, and said, “When I made it out of that AI’s nightmare, all I wanted to do was get back to Earth.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I’m starting to think maybe I’ve lived enough for one man.”

  Gloria gave him a hard stare. “Don’t you get all suicidal on me. I was just starting to like you.”

  “It’s not that,” he said. “What I mean is…I’m saying thanks. I tried to take your ship, with violence, and here I am part of your crew, and I realize this is where I should be. Fighting the good fight, for once.”

  She studied him, smiling both outwardly at his words and inwardly that her leading question had actually worked.

  A chime sounded. One minute to the point of decision.

  “Xavi, Beth, status?”

  There was a pause, as if the two of them were waiting for the other to deliver bad news. Xavi spoke first. “I think it’ll work.”

  Gloria digested that. Xavi wasn’t the sort for “I think” and “maybe.” Still, it wasn’t an outright no.

  “Beth?”

  This reply took longer. As she waited, Gloria tapped in a preprogrammed attempt to fold space,
should the crew not be around to try it themselves, in order to get them and their ship out of this predicament forever. Inspired by a very old song, one all ship captains were forced to listen to by their brethren as a rite of passage, Gloria Tsandi set the controls for the heart of the Sun, a program she would have to cancel, not enact.

  “Beth?” she asked again, her task done.

  “We’re a go,” the woman said.

  Finally, some confidence. Gloria acknowledged it gladly, and reviewed the specifics as they appeared on her screen. The burn would alter their path by just a few degrees, but by the time they reached the “collapsed swarm,” as Vanessa had coined it, the Lonesome would be a thousand kilometers from the current center of the massed ships. Not the distance Gloria would have wanted, but it would have to do. She added the thrust sequence to the command queue. “Everyone strap in for high lateral burn, and remain so.” She followed her own advice, checked her displays, and settled on one in particular. The countdown ticked away the last eight seconds.

  “Mark,” Gloria said.

  A hum as the maneuvering thrusters started their burn. These were not subtle things. On or off was all they knew. The force pressed Gloria into the side of her chair.

  “Chaff,” Gloria ordered.

  Xavi fired the two crude devices, using the last of their supply of inflatable decoys. Captain Dawson had used the technique at least ten times during her own flight from the Scipios, to obvious lack of complete success, but in this case Gloria needed the objects to work only once.

  A small flotilla of tightly folded ceramic-alloy objects began to spread in a cloud. Once clear of the ship their panels rotated and stretched, forming buckyball lattice supports that soon contained thick inflated balloons made of a carefully designed fabric meant to return just the right signatures to match the spectral lines an Earth ship’s hull would reflect back to any probing sensor out there.

  Oldest trick in the book, really, and one the Scipios were very familiar with after so many encounters with humans. Gloria didn’t mind. They only needed to present the enemy with multiple targets and, with any luck, not enough time to shoot them all out of the sky before the real payload came within range.

  “Launch,” she ordered.

  Gloria activated the ship’s engines at the same instant, the lowest thrust possible, just enough to provide power.

  A series of deep clangs and thuds rippled through the hull as single-use explosive bolts sheared the connective supports that held the reactor housing to the hull. Two smaller sequences came a split-second later. The ultracapacitors now. Several emergency alarms began to wail, but Gloria acknowledged and disabled them before her ears received any real damage.

  Outside, the three discarded items began to separate from the mother ship, floating away with growing speed. A hundred meters out the two ultracap chunks shifted position slightly, and electromagnets did the rest. The doomed portions of the Lonesome drifted together and then, abruptly, snapped into a single entity. They were a kilometer away now, a distance that would double and double ten times over before it was all said and done.

  “Settle in, everyone,” she said. “Nothing to do now but wait.”

  The time went by surprisingly fast. Gloria, and she presumed everyone else, passed the seconds by watching the sensor display, where their little gift for the Scipios continued to gain distance from the Lonesome. Her eyes darted from their position to the confusing ball of indicators that represented the Scipio Swarm. Like a massive school of fish, it was impossible to focus on any one of them, only to let their coordinated movements fool the eye into seeing patterns and infer a hive intelligence as a result. In truth they were probably all just acting on some individual avoidance programming, but the result was breathtaking. The entire cluster seemed to bulge and dent, bands of it swirling left while others turned back the other way, like a ballet performed by a half-million dancers in zero-g.

  “Here we go,” Xavi said.

  The modified reactor careened toward this mess, and amazingly the Scipios seemed to notice it only in the final portion of its trip. So inward was their focus, the bubble of enemy ships did not begin to realign until the incoming device—and each decoy—was at the edge of its effective range.

  Gloria watched as beam weapons licked out across the narrowing gap. The decoys were flimsy, just giant hollow things, really, and so exploded easily and quite undramatically. Little puffs of unsubstantial debris that seemed to scream “Only joking!” as they flew apart.

  The ruse had worked, though. Gloria could see it already. She braced herself. She almost didn’t notice the plume of Scipio ships that had begun to pull away from the main body, like a detachment of bees peeling off from the hive to confront a new threat. Or, more apt, the curving trail of a solar eruption. The tendril of spacecraft began to stretch outward, an arm reaching right toward the Lonesome’s future position.

  “Boss!”

  “I see it.” And I can’t do anything about it. If this doesn’t work—

  A thousand klicks away, two ultracaps, all of their safeguards carefully removed, shunted a terrific quantity of raw electric power into the gutted, similarly flawed reactor core. Deep inside that bundle of technical marvel, a minuscule gap at the center of a hundred million tiny amplifiers became filled with argon heated to a temperature of incomprehensible measure. Hotter than the moment of creation, a professor had once told Gloria, in explaining the kinds of physics going on around a starship captain, in the hope some care and respect would be afforded the vessels. If you could see me now, she thought.

  Those tiny amplifiers were supposed to be connected to a whole array of channeling baffles and containment shells that would control and sustain the reaction. None of these things were present, though. Only the converter pods that loved nothing more than to convert heat into electricity and send it onward for use.

  Onward, in this case, meaning everywhere, all at once.

  In a sphere that grew at the speed of light, an eyeblink really, the swirling ball of Scipio Swarm ships went dark. They went blind, deaf, and dumb all in one fell swoop. No motors to keep them on course, no eyes to keep them from avoiding their multitudes in that gigantic maelstrom. Their paths became fixed things, dictated by their vector at the moment the pulse hit them.

  The Swarm mushroomed, and then the collisions began. A hundred thousand high-velocity bodies that bumped, smacked, and head-on collided into one another. Some ricocheted off. Some bounced. Others exploded, and these each added another million objects to the growing orb of deadweight slugs.

  All this in the span of a heartbeat.

  A cry of triumph had just begun to form on Gloria’s lips when the electromagnetic shock wave hit the Lonesome, and absolutely everything went dark.

  The Shared Nightmare

  EVE.

  EVE!

  A furious anger boiled in him at her voice. “You’ve been there the whole time!?”

  “I have not. I…am very far—” and her voice became garbled digital noise. A transmission from a great distance, then, rather than some voice in his head?

  Skyler had the sick thought that this static sound and sudden disconnection was fake, a childish avoidance of guilt. He set this feeling aside. She was back, that was what mattered.

  Talk to it, she’d said. Well, okay. “Who are you?” he asked the being.

  A delay followed. Perhaps some initiation of translation, for after several seconds came comprehension and, unless Skyler was mistaken, sheer joy appeared on the being’s face. “I am many things. All things. An elevated mind, one of the last of our people, and I carry with me the memories of all my species. I need to give them to you.”

  Well, Skyler thought, fuck. Had so much ever been said in so few words? He found himself at a loss.

  “I require your permission, Traveler,” the being said, hand still outstretched.

  Skyler reached up, and took the hand.

  —

  The climber began a hard-braking action, p
rep for arrival. Sam glanced over the edge and watched the vast city rush ever closer, filling the visible landscape. “Get ready,” she said.

  They’d debated what to do upon landfall, settling on: Stay with the climber, secure the port, then venture out. But one look at the city changed their minds. Swarmers marched through the streets and plazas, like spheres of liquid mercury with spider legs, buoyed by the smaller antlike figures of Scipio ground forces. Or maybe just an angry mob of curious civvies, but whatever. Sam knew the trouble was not in the climber port, and that meant Skyler wasn’t, either. They all seemed to be converging on a building a few hundred meters from the Elevator’s anchor point. Smoke billowed from the entrance already. Skyler? Defending his position? Or had they already tried to bomb him out?

  “Contact,” Tania said. “I’ve got his transponder.”

  Everyone looked at her.

  “Spread out,” she said. “We need to triangulate.”

  They did as she asked, though there was only limited room on the roof of the rapidly slowing climber transport. Sam wondered if it would be enough, if they should fan out now. But Tania’s face lit up a moment later, and then, through some technical prowess Sam wished she possessed, Tania made a blip appear on everyone’s visor. Sam glanced over the edge and saw what she had already guessed, but the confirmation made all the difference. Alive or dead, Skyler was in that building.

  “Vitals look good!” Tania shouted.

  Alive and not dead, Skyler was in that building.

  Vaughn came to her side. “Time to—”

  “Don’t you dare—”

  “—rock and roll,” he finished.

  Sam punched him in the arm, hard. Then she laughed, a laugh that might be her last. “Yeah,” she said, “yeah. Let’s fucking dance.”

  She leapt from the platform toward the army of Scipios, and toward her friend.

  —

  He expected something dramatic. To throw his head back and howl as the link between minds occurred and memories began to flow into him. He expected his brain, indeed his whole nervous system, to buckle and thrash under the onslaught and sheer alienness of it all.