Escape Velocity

by Jason M. Hough

  “Suppose they get a climber working, reach the lowest station.”

  That would take far too long, but she couldn’t bring herself to voice it. “And what, we somehow dock and welcome them aboard? The Scipios just stand aside and let us match velocities and pick them up?”

  “They’re suited. We don’t have to dock.”

  “But we’re going too fast, Xavi. Even if we could slow down in time, which I doubt, we don’t have the fuel to get back up to fold speeds again. We’d be too deep in the gravity well. Stuck here, don’t you see?”

  “I have an idea.”

  It was Beth, at the ladder, her head just peeking above the hole in the floor that led down to the lower levels of the ship. She remained there, as if fearful of coming closer, of how Gloria might react. It had been her idea, after all, that had caused the Scipio fleet to shatter and fall to the surface. As much as she tried, though, Gloria couldn’t find it in herself to cast blame on the engineer. And besides, it had worked, just too well.

  “I’m listening,” she said to her.

  Beth came up a bit farther, her hands white-knuckled on the ladder rungs. “Suppose,” she said, and then voiced the craziest goddamn idea Gloria Tsandi had ever heard.

  Insane.

  Brilliantly insane.

  —

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Skyler shouted.

  Vanessa indicated she was most certainly not fucking kidding him.

  He stood on the roof of a climber, next to Vaughn. Below, on the ground inside the port structure at the base of the Elevator, Tania and the others argued as they tried to figure out how to get the damn thing to move.

  Only Vanessa, by way of Gloria, by way of Beth, had just told him how to get the damn climber to move. How to get it to move rather damn fast, in fact.

  “Insanity,” Skyler whispered.

  The walls of the building around them shook. Chunks of loose equipment fell from the high conical ceiling, crashing to the floor soundlessly because the riot of impacts outside drowned all else.

  “They’re working out the math right now, but it looks like it will work. Skyler, please, it’s the only option.”

  “Okay. Okay. It beats sitting here while the whole planet is blown to shit around us, I guess. We’ll do it, we’ll do it now.”

  “No,” Vanessa said.

  “What do you mean, ‘no’? This place is an epic inferno!”

  “The timing is critical. You have to do it in…Hold on, Beth’s running the…Yes, okay, I’ll tell him. Skyler.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Start a timer on your visor. Set it for one minute and twenty-two seconds, point five.”

  He dialed it in, wanting to laugh and cry at the fractional value, as if he’d be able to accomplish that kind of precision, because his shattered display had room only for the first part.

  Vanessa went on. “Start it on my mark. In three…two…one…mark.”

  Skyler started the timer. Then he told the others what needed to be done. They all stared at him as if he’d suggested they stand around a campfire and sing songs. Except for Tania. Her expression was dangerously thoughtful.

  “Huh,” was all she said. Then she added, for good measure, “That might actually work.”

  He’d just opened his mouth to reply when the building shook again. A close one, this time. Skyler staggered and blinked as a rain of dust fell all around him. “Much more of this and the whole place will come down on us.”

  “Then what are we waiting for?” Prumble asked. “If Tania’s on board with this, then…well, who am I to argue.”

  Another blast, even closer than the last one.

  “That was no crash,” Sam said, moving behind some fresh debris for cover. “That was a landing.”

  Vaughn matched her positioning, the two of them ready before Skyler, Tania, and Prumble had even realized the truth of their observation.

  A horde came through the wall as it exploded inward. Chunks of stone and metal skittered across the wide loading bay at the heart of the climber port. Skyler dove, felt something smash into his leg. Even Eve’s armor could not deaden the pain this time. He took a nasty blow that sent him wheeling into a support pillar. He cried out as white-hot pain pulsated in his left calf. Tania was there with him, one hand on his chest to keep him down, the other aimed outward at the Scipios piling into the room. Her wrist-weapon chattered, so fast it almost ran together in a high-pitched yowl.

  Across from her, behind the debris pile, Sam and Vaughn moved in unison, firing as Tania was and then, abruptly, unleashing a synchronized barrage from their mortars. The whole room thrummed with violent energies too numerous to do anything but blur. Skyler ground his teeth. The pain in his leg was as bad as any he’d ever known, but it was fading.

  Tania shouted something to him.

  He glanced at her. “What?”

  “The timer!”

  “Shit!” he had to blink tears away to see the numbers, and coughed bile when his vision cleared enough to reveal the truth. “Fifteen seconds!”

  Tania heaved him to his feet in one remarkably smooth motion, and then thrust him toward the parked climber, wounded leg or not. He limped across the narrow gap, hopping like an idiot. Tania was shouting to the others, giving cover fire as Sam and Vaughn exhausted the last of their mortar rounds.

  Prumble had taken refuge behind the climber, and as the group approached he stepped out and let loose with both beam weapons, sweeping them across the throng of enemies and then across the pillars that held the roof up.

  “Eight seconds!” Skyler shouted. Could they hear him in this mess? No time to confirm.

  The base of the climber was a flat disk, the main body of the vehicle perched atop it giving it the general shape of a drinking glass perched on a saucer, the flat space around the bottom perhaps a meter thick. A ramp extended out to the loading bay at one side, but the rest of the climber was merely suspended over a deep pit stretching down into darkness. Somewhere, far below, the elevator cord plunged into the rock of Carthage and anchored this end to the world.

  Skyler landed and took a position on one side of the climber’s platform base. He lay facedown and leaned out until he was looking at the underside of the climber, where the mechanism that physically clamped on to the cord and crawled its length ended and the silvery-gray ribbon of the space elevator emerged and ran down into the abyss.

  Tania Sharma took up a spot next to him on the left. Sam was on the right. Above, Prumble and Vaughn did their absolute best to keep the enemies at bay. Skyler could feel the presence of that writhing horde. Hundreds of Scipios and several of the large, reflective swarmer vehicles. He did not know if they were here to stop them, or if they’d simply come in desperate search of a way off-world.

  Well, he thought, prepare to be disappointed.

  He watched the timer. Three, two, one, point-fucking-five.

  “Fire!”

  Here came the question mark. The bit that, in his mind, seemed a dangerously gigantic assumption. The three of them unleashed their beam weapons at maximum strength, full burn, and they focused.

  Six beams, erratic at first, gradually converged on the ribbon cable that extended perhaps a kilometer below this point and nearly fifty thousand klicks above.

  He wondered, when Vanessa explained this, if it would be like sawing through a heavy rope with a butter knife, or trying to sever a tendon by chewing on it with weak teeth.

  It was neither. The ribbon, miraculously, snapped like a wire cut with shears.

  The planet anchored this end of the cable. At the other end, way up in space, a counterweight anchored the other. As Carthage spun it threw that counterweight ever outward, and the elevator cable held them together, pulled taut by the two opposing forces.

  A phenomenal thwong marked the end of this relationship. Skyler, Sam, and Tania all heaved themselves backward onto the platform as the entire climber vehicle, clamped as it was on to that now-severed cord, shot upward
like a missile.

  Vanessa had warned of this. It didn’t matter. All five of them immediately lost consciousness as the climber was yanked like a yo-yo away from the grip of Carthage.

  —

  Gloria pitched the Lonesome into a steep dive, aiming for the Elevator. She could not kill the engines—they were providing all the power now—so she pushed them into a reverse thrust. A light touch. This had to be perfect, and this was her ship to pilot. Xavi had laid the course, but Gloria insisted she take it from there.

  She’d never been one to shy away from letting the computers handle flight duties. They could make a trillion decisions in a few microseconds, after all, based on thousands of data-points and readings.

  But this was different. She had no idea what to expect here, nor did anyone else, so Gloria knew the moment they’d put this rescue in motion that it would be her gut making the calls this time.

  “Boss,” Xavi said. “The Elevator.”

  “I see it,” she said. “I’m going to…Oh. Oh!”

  The sight before her defied belief, even though deep down she could not imagine what else would have happened when they severed the cord.

  The whole thing, the whole Scipio space station apparatus, relied on that cord. And now it was all coming apart. The orbital structures were bending and twisting along a path becoming more erratic by the second. It had all come undone, quite literally. And somewhere, down toward the bottom, a climber would be dangling from that insane unpredictable mess, and with any luck there would be five likely quite terrified human beings clinging to it for dear life.

  “Boss,” Xavi said.

  “Yeah, yeah, I got it.”

  “No, not that. Above.”

  Gloria looked, and her heart fell into her stomach.

  “So many,” she whispered.

  The electromagnetic bomb had done incredible damage. More than she could ever have hoped for. But that compacted ball of Swarm ships had been almost innumerably large. Beth’s weapon had disabled half a million, a reasonable guess, Gloria felt, and those had been flung out in all directions. Most out into space. A sizable group had fallen to the world below and many more would follow over time. Some had even slammed into the space stations along the cord, or into other Scipio ships in the area. But that left almost as many unaffected, and like hounds after the hare they had the scent of the Lonesome and were coming all at once.

  A cloud of death drawn against the moon Gloria had all too recently fled, they poured like a single sentient thing toward the Lonesome’s path.

  In her heart she wanted to shout at them. To stand and scream, “Bring it on!” In her head she knew the truth of it, though. They were far too many, and far too fast. She would not reach the cord. Not even close.

  “Oh hell,” she said.

  Something truly strange happened then. Gloria had to blink because her mind refused to acknowledge what was going on.

  It was her radar display. It made a strange sort of chittering sound she’d never heard before, and only after a long second did she recognize it for what it was. It was the sound of a new contact, but so many had been spotted it made about ten thousand of these sounds all at once.

  And the screen had erupted in a riot of icons. The uncountable red for the Scipio ships, gray for the space stations that writhed and danced along the recoiling space elevator, and also something new. An armada of “unknowns.”

  “What is that?!” she breathed.

  Xavi did not reply, and she knew him well enough to know he would even now be training their mil-spec sensors onto one of the newcomers. Gloria swallowed hard, wondering what new threat the Scipios had brewed up and dreading the answer. There was a part of her that, just for a second, hoped these were ships from Earth, flying to the rescue. What else, after all, could just blip into existence like that?

  But no, that was only a fantasy. Fold-ships made a violent entrance. If thousands of ships from Earth arrived this close they’d all be annihilated by the strange forces that flowed out of that maneuver, and anyway, Earth did not have even fifty ships that could fold space. Of those only one—now that the Wildflower was gone—could fold in close to a gravitational body. Gloria sat at the controls of that ship right now.

  “It’s…,” Xavi said, and even he had to pause to catch his breath. “It’s the Builders.”

  The scope image came into focus. A long, seed-shaped vessel identical to the remnant that had sat above Darwin, Australia, so long ago. Then the image shifted to another. And another. And another. Every second it cycled as the armada of Builder ships arrived.

  Instantly the swirling morass of the Scipio Swarm shifted. It broke like the unfolding arms of an octopus, one section remaining in pursuit of the Lonesome while many others branched and twisted away to address this newly arrived threat.

  And a threat the Builders were. The ships opened fire as they came into range. Everything Gloria could see became awash with brilliant flashes and the spray of molten projectiles.

  “It’s Eve,” Vanessa said abruptly. “She says…she says this is our moment.”

  Gloria felt a wide grin expand across her face. “Here we go, everyone. Hang on to something.”

  She twisted the Lonesome upward, parallel with the collapsing, wavy space elevator, and throttled the engines to maximum burn. An indicator in the corner of her screen began to tick upward toward escape velocity.

  —

  “Were you successful?” the familiar voice asked.

  “Eve,” Skyler whispered through a jaw clenched tight. The climber shifted like a large ship on a stormy sea, pulled one way and then on some great unseen curve lurched back in the other direction. Above, the cord had gone from a rail-straight line to an undulating ribbon, the curves becoming more and more pronounced as the whole thing was heaved upward. “Eve, not now.”

  They were dangling at one end. Skyler felt the icy air on his face growing colder and then painfully frigid. His nose had gone numb, and his breaths were now a mighty effort that made his lungs sting from the freezing temperatures.

  “Sam, my visor,” he managed to say.

  She looked at him from her spot on the platform. They were all lying on it, holding on for dear life. She seemed confused for a second, and then realized his problem. “Shit,” she said. “Tania, his visor is open. He’s going to freeze to death.”

  Tania began to crawl her way to him.

  “Skyler…,” Eve said.

  “Not now!”

  “Did you succeed?”

  Tania was grabbing his arm and pulling him. His whole face hurt, and he had to close his eyes lest they freeze over. He could feel his spit freezing.

  And then he was off the platform, and Skyler imagined himself tossed overboard, deadweight. This lasted half a second until his back slammed down onto the floor of the climber. The sounds of the rushing air vanished a second later with a dull click.

  He waited, felt the warmth returning, and when he had the courage he opened his eyes. He was in a small room, Tania collapsed against the wall across from him, studying him.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Where…,” he began, and then he knew. The climber compartment. “Why didn’t we get in here before?” he asked.

  “Because it was full of soldiers before. We thought they were still inside and Prumble decided not to bother facing them unless they came out on their own.” She narrowed her eyes. “Who were you talking to a second ago?”

  “Eve,” he said.

  Her eyebrows rose. “What?!”

  “Eve.”

  “She’s not gone? But I thought—”

  Skyler held up a hand. “Eve,” he said. “I’m listening now.” He bridged the comm channel so Tania could listen.

  “Did you succeed?” the Builder intelligence asked.

  “I…,” he started, and realized a strange truth. “I really don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  And then, quite bizarrely, his mouth moved of its own accord. Several incompre
hensible sounds tumbled out. Then something like language.

  Eve replied, in kind.

  “What the hell was that?” Tania asked breathlessly.

  Skyler waved her off. He felt for that moment like a passenger in his own body.

  “Skyler,” Eve said.

  “I’m here now. What was that? What just happened?” He asked the question, though in his heart he already knew. He was not a passenger in his body, but he carried one.

  “You hold our salvation within you,” she replied. “We have come to help you get away.”

  “Have you been here this whole time?” he demanded. “Did you just decide to let us fumble about here?”

  “No,” the AI replied. “When I realized the Chameleon was doomed I sent you off on the best paths I could, and then I transmitted myself out, toward another of my kind. We gathered, and as one we decided to return if we saw signs that it would benefit you for us to do so. When the Swarm began to fall inward, we advanced, staying just out of range, watching—”

  “Skyler!” Vanessa interrupted. “The Builders are here! In force!”

  He inhaled shakily, aware of the dangers of hope but unable to stop the feeling from coursing through him. “Are you ready for us?” he asked.

  “We’ll find out,” Vanessa replied.

  The Lonesome

  THE LONESOME DIPPED below the end of the elevator cable as Gloria pulled it from its free-fall dive into a vicious climb. The hull shook violently as the engines strained against the planet’s gravity.

  There was too much debris now for a human, no matter how skilled, to have control. Gloria ceded maneuvering thrust to the ship and turned her focus to the next task.

  “Vanessa, Alex, ready down there?”

  “As we’ll ever be,” the woman replied.

  “Seal it up, then.”

  Seconds later the center chamber of the Lonesome’s interior became an airlock reception room, segregated from the compartments above and below.

  “Xavi,” Gloria queried.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Don’t take your damn eyes off that velocity reading. When it’s right, we go, no matter what.”

  “Got it, boss,” he said.