Escape Velocity

by Jason M. Hough

All her focus poured into the climber then. It was a blip on the screen, but growing fast. She dropped a marker on it, and had the computer calculate its path and figure out how to line up the Lonesome with it at the moment their velocities matched.

  No solution came. The Lonesome was already going too fast.

  She eased off the engines slightly. Then a bit more. A little more.

  “Boss, we’re slowing.”

  “No choice,” she said. “Got to match them. No talking now.”

  He made no reply. Good lad. Gloria dialed the engines back another tick and—yes!—their path would meet the climber. The ship turned and twisted onto the new course.

  Gloria Tsandi flipped on the PA. “This is your captain speaking,” she said formally. “Prepare to take on passengers.”

  A celebratory holler went up from Xavi’s bay, one floor below. Beth cheered into her mic, and Vanessa, a moment later, acknowledged on the comm.

  “Swarmers inbound!” Xavi shouted.

  Gloria glanced at the display. They’re on to us, she thought. They understand now.

  The blips were closing fast. She switched one screen to the rear view. Most of it was blotted out by the turbulent flare of the engines, but off to one side she could see the spherical body of a Scipio Swarm ship as it arced in toward the Lonesome, tentacles stretched forward to grab.

  No, she realized, not to grab.

  It was firing a weapon.

  The Lonesome lurched and, for one horrifying second, Gloria thought they’d been punched by some missile. But it was only the evasive actions of the autopilot. A hail of rail gun projectiles tore through space mere centimeters from the hull.

  And then the swarmer exploded. A dazzling fireball that whited out her screen and shook the Lonesome as expanding gases and debris slammed into her. Gloria saw a blurred streak lance through the remains of the enemy vessel only a heartbeat later. A Builder ship, at full acceleration, diving downward, had annihilated the enemy and kept going, straight down, to their home world. A place the Builders had not visited in centuries.

  A ping from her console whipped her attention back. “We’re okay! We’re okay! Ten seconds!”

  The ship began to wiggle as a thousand tiny course corrections occurred. Too fast, Gloria thought. We’re coming in way too fast.

  Then the climber snapped to one side, yanked by yet another perturbation of the ribbon to which it was attached as some station, hundreds of kilometers above, exploded and released its mass from the line.

  The ship had expected this. Counted on it, in fact. Its calculations were perfect. The change in direction brought the climber straight toward the Lonesome, and her ship rolled to meet it at just the right angle, all at the very moment that the two objects were moving at an identical velocity away from Carthage.

  A deep boom rocked the ship.

  —

  Skyler gulped and then covered his face with his arms. A pointless thing, but he couldn’t just do nothing.

  “Déjà vu,” Tania said, one arm around him as she prepared to open the door.

  “If you give me your air again this time I’ll never forgive you.” He made a little gap between his elbows to see through, and caught her smiling at him.

  “When you reach the vacuum, exhale every bit of air in your lungs. Otherwise your chest will explode,” she said, smile fading.

  “That’s…a visceral image. Thanks for the tip.”

  “Here they come!” Samantha shouted from outside.

  It happened so fast he barely followed the series of events. A rush as the door opened and the air was sucked out into space. Tania’s strong hands guiding him, her boots propelling them across the gap. He slammed into something. They’d missed. No, he felt arms, a squeezing embrace. Another slam, this time solid. A wall, maybe the outer hull of the other ship. They had missed!

  Skyler kept his eyes clenched shut against the vacuum and felt the bizarre sensation of naked skin against the vast emptiness. A thousand pinpricks of pain. No sound whatsoever. His ears stung as if spikes of ice had been jabbed in there.

  Then a hiss. High and strange, lilting and growing stronger, deeper. High-pitched voices, shouting. Cries that sounded inhuman, so thin and distant. It all crashed down into normality like a curtain falling. Not inhuman cries, he realized, but cheering. The arms around him tightened, and he felt a pounding hand against his back. “We made it! We made it!” Prumble roared.

  Skyler pulled his arms away from his face. Vanessa stared at him, her arms around him. He grinned and embraced her with all his strength.

  They had made it. They were aboard and the airlock had been sealed.

  Tania joined the hug, a smile so wide on her face he found himself matching it reflexively. Sam and Vaughn were pressed together behind her and to the left, arms around each other, their helmets already off to allow the deepest kiss Skyler thought he’d ever seen. He saw Prumble, smiling like a fool in one corner, clasping hands with Alex Warthen, of all people.

  A voice came over the PA. “Did we get them?”

  “Captain Tsandi,” Skyler replied. “Permission to come aboard?”

  “Granted, Mr. Luiken,” the voice replied.

  Another cheer went up.

  The captain shushed them. “No time for a welcoming party, I’m afraid. Get below and strap in. I fear that was the easy part.”

  A click at Skyler’s feet as the interior door unsealed. Tania went first, pulling her own helmet off as she went. Skyler followed right behind toward a common area where the crew likely relaxed under normal circumstances. This was not, he realized suddenly, Gloria’s ship. Too big by far. He’d ask later. Skyler found a harness chair that unfolded from the wall and heaved himself into it. The craft lurched suddenly and something boomed outside.

  Everyone froze, looking around. A strange moment of helplessness as they waited to see if the vessel would crack open or, more likely, it would all just end before their minds could comprehend it. Vaporization by a direct hit. But nothing happened. Just a boom that rattled their bones and then the desperate flight continued.

  Skyler buckled his harness and looked directly across the small chamber at Tania. She held his gaze, and he hers. The moment dredged up old memories of their flight to Hawaii, when he’d first met her, and they’d leapt out of the Melville together and into horrible danger. He smiled, and she returned it.

  Prumble settled in beside her. Sam and Vaughn to Skyler’s left.

  The five of them sat in silence as passengers, unable to do anything but wait, and trust the skill of their new captain.

  —

  Gloria ramped the engines back to maximum burn, though she had no idea what she was going to do next. Ahead, at a distance that rapidly approached zero, loomed a cloud of debris so large and thick she could not see the stars beyond it. She added the maneuvering thrusters, also at full bleed, to try to push the Lonesome clear, but no amount of course correction would take them out of harm’s way. Not unless she turned the ship and used the main engines to handle the task. She did not have the fuel for that. She could only go straight ahead, with minimal drift thanks to the tiny engines on the sides of the ship, and…and what?

  The craft would be pulverized in that field of shrapnel. The space station there had come apart, or been blown apart. Now a billion tiny pieces of destroyed Scipio tech stood in her way. Not enemies bristling with weapons, not those terrifying orbs with their probing segmented tentacles. No, the enemy now was just bits. Chunks of space station no bigger than her hand or as large as a building, it didn’t matter. She couldn’t avoid either if they were going to reach escape velocity, and she couldn’t reach escape velocity if the Lonesome was torn to shreds by all that flaming junk.

  “Boss?” Xavi asked, an utterly foreign note of panic in his voice. “Are we really going through that?”

  “No choice,” she said.

  “I know but—”

  “No choice,” Gloria repeated. “Sorry.”

  A silence stretched b
etween them at the word, and she thought she’d lost him. She’d finally made a decision that even his sense of loyalty could not accommodate.

  “You got us this far,” he said then. “I’m with you. Always will be.”

  Gloria Tsandi fought back a sudden rush of emotions—regret, sorrow, love, it was all there in full force, but this was not the time. She snarled at the image before her, the debris field, as if by a sheer outpouring of anger she could make it go away.

  Countless tiny explosions began to ripple through the field.

  “Boss!” Xavi shouted. Excitement there. Triumph.

  She glanced at her readouts and saw what he saw. A half-dozen Builder ships swooped in and pulled alongside the Lonesome, their guns roaring. The path before her did not clear, that would have been impossible, but the Builders reduced the obstacles in front of her to so much dust. Their numbers swelled as the forces converged around the one target that mattered. Builder ships tore in-system at monstrous speeds, becoming missiles themselves, slamming into space stations all around the belt of the world. Scipio ships and those of their clients began to flee, knowing the party had finally, after so many centuries, ended.

  Gloria knew in that moment that this was not the final battle, though. There was no ending here, but a beginning. The start of a great war, but it would be a war out of spite. This place had been the source of the Scipios’ power all this time, since their betrayal, and knowing that, she felt she understood that what she’d done, what they’d all done, was the only solution possible. This place needed to be razed to ever truly be wrenched from the Scipios’ foul grip.

  As the Lonesome reached the debris zone, speed climbing, engines thrumming, her hull was peppered by a million bits of microscopic flotsam and scoured down to the bare metal, but she made it through. A thousand warnings on the screen, Klaxons wailing, but they’d done it.

  “Beth!” Gloria shouted. “It’s all up to you now! Go for fold!”

  “I’m ready!” the engineer replied.

  “Someone kindly ask those Builder ships to get clear,” she added. “They’re not going to want to be anywhere near us when this thing goes off.” After a second she added, “And please, thank them. For me. For all of us.”

  Skyler acknowledged.

  “Now then,” Gloria said, “Miss Lee? If you’d be so kind? Get us the fuck out of here.”

  From a launch tube on the Lonesome’s belly, a field cavitation imploder rocketed outward, straight ahead, and Gloria pushed the ship beyond all safety restrictions to catch it.

  —

  “It is we who thank you,” Eve said to Skyler’s relayed message. “You have undone a great injustice here.”

  “The price, though.”

  “We all knew the price,” Eve replied. “We just couldn’t pay it until we had what you now carry.”

  “What is it, Eve? Inside me.”

  This reply took longer, but judging by the intensity of the battle outside he could hardly blame her. The ship began to shake, far worse than earlier, worse than anything Skyler had ever known, even when he’d ditched his own beloved Melville over Australia. The Lonesome was going to shake itself apart, had to, no way it could keep this up.

  He held on for all he was worth, Tania’s hand clasped in his right, Vanessa’s in his left. He screwed his eyes shut and waited for this implosion to occur, or for the ship to come to pieces by its own insane acceleration or simply because some swarmer out there happened to get a tentacle into its path.

  “A great mind,” Eve finally replied. “A Passenger now, a stranger. It does not know how to talk to you, how to make use of what you can offer it. But in time, it will.”

  “I…I think I understand.”

  “You must keep yourself safe, Skyler Luiken,” Eve said. “It is the last of our Creators within you, and all the memories it was able to collect. A substantial trove.”

  He marveled that it could all fit. He was lucky to remember which shoe went on which foot, some mornings. And to stay safe! He did laugh aloud at that. “Eve, I cannot imagine a scenario less safe than the one I’m presently in.”

  “Then perhaps you should have a look outside,” she replied.

  To hammer that point home the Lonesome was rocked to its core. The lights went out, briefly, and Skyler heard the engine stutter.

  “Hell!” he heard Gloria shout from several decks away. Her voice came on the PA a second later. “Close one, but we’re on target. Eighteen seconds.”

  —

  Just a little bit more, Gloria silently urged. Give me a little more.

  The ship seemed to have nothing to give, though. The rate of acceleration did not increase. Gloria regretted her lie. That blast had left them off target, in truth. Too slow, and the Lonesome would not be able to make it up.

  She could cancel the implosion. That was a terrible idea, though. She’d save all their lives, but give the Scipios the ultimate consolation prize as the fold device went inert and floated about the system, ready to be plucked by one of the fleeing ships.

  No shortage of those, either. Gloria’s radar looked more like an aquarium full of spooked fish. Ships were everywhere, going in every direction and at every speed. Shooting one another to pieces, slamming into things when their ammunition was spent or their courses could no longer be changed. It was a bloodbath, an orgy of wrath against desperation.

  “And here comes the big finale,” she whispered as the imploder neared its moment. She would not stop it. Could not. At least, she thought, we’ll all go together, and none the wiser.

  She felt a strange, small punch in her lower back. Familiar, except that she had not commanded it.

  The Lonesome had found its nerve, and accelerated hard at the last possible moment. And then all at once everything went dark. Screens, displays, everything.

  A hundred meters below her, unbeknownst to Gloria Tsandi, her engineer, Beth Lee, had fiddled with something. She’d recognized the dilemma and instead of pondering her legacy she’d found a solution. Later, much later, Gloria would thank her for that bit of initiative and clearheaded thinking. She couldn’t just now because the ship had lost power. The ship had lost power because Beth Lee had taken it all and rammed it back into the engines for one…

  …final…

  Burst.

  The imploder’s core ignited.

  Space and time crashed inward in a blast powerful enough to ignite a star. Energies so titanic that the very fabric of the universe was turned violently inside out. Whatever Scipio infrastructure was left in that area all slammed inward, pinched together to an infinitely small point. It all collided in the center and rebounded outward like a supernova.

  All except the one thing that had been close enough to ride the fold.

  The Lonesome had vanished.

  The Lonesome

  THE LONESOME DID not reappear near Earth. Far from it, in fact.

  Gloria, even in that hurried and frantic escape, remembered enough of her training not to point the Scipios right where they could go to find a new home world to conquer.

  “No,” Gloria said, “I’m afraid we’re adrift in the middle of nothing, a billion miles from anything of note.”

  She noted the crestfallen expressions on their faces, save for that of Xavi and Beth, who knew the score. Gloria smiled, and let the other shoe drop. “Well, that’s not exactly true. This is a staging point, one well known to the fleet. There’s even a supply cache here, and a small space station where we can rest.”

  “Oh hell,” Prumble boomed. “I like you.” He turned to Vanessa, seated beside him. “I like her quite a lot.”

  “You like everyone,” Vanessa said, laughing.

  The big man laughed right along with her.

  In the days that followed they rested, ate, and partied. They spent many hours recounting all that had happened, and mourning the two they’d left behind despite the circumstances of their deaths. Some of them made love, were even quite…spirited, in those endeavors. Samantha was not th
e sort of person one asked to keep it down.

  Some merely lay in each other’s arms.

  Tania rested her palm over Skyler’s heart and felt the rhythm of his pulse. Her cheek rested on his shoulder, allowing her to gaze past his strong chin and out the expansive window of the magnificently appointed outpost. She and Skyler did not make love. He couldn’t, not yet. “I’m no longer just me, Tania. There’s someone…something else…in here, and I can sense it observing through me. It’s too strange. For now. I’m sorry.”

  She did not mind. It was enough for her simply to be in his company, and—though she felt rotten to admit it—without any competition or romantic politics to consider. They didn’t talk about Tim, save a toast with the group to mourn his death. Prumble said kind words, as kind as could be found, at least. In the end the poor young man had been blinded by affection for her, and so she felt partly to blame in a strange way. She knew she should not, that this was a false line of thought of the worst sort, but there it was.

  After sixteen days spent in recovery, conversation, and somber celebration, a blip appeared on the radar exactly one million kilometers away. Tania knew from Gloria’s smile that this was not a pursuing Scipio warship, nor even Eve come to give a more proper and proportional thanks.

  It was a ship from Earth. A beautiful, sleek thing. Tania sat beside Skyler and watched it approach, and it swelled her heart to know that humanity had made such a brilliant recovery since the plague had been eradicated.

  An hour later they went aboard, Tania with one arm around Vanessa, grinning like she hadn’t been able to do in a very long time. Another hour and space was folded over on itself once again, and this time they punched into a deep orbit out beyond Neptune and began the long, leisurely cruise toward Earth.

  Darwin, Australia

  10.DEC.3911

  A SUMMER SHOWER did nothing to dampen the mood of those gathered.

  They danced in a corner of Nightcliff normally serene and sparsely trafficked. A park of rolling green grass and meandering paths, where small plaques at regular intervals marked the locations of the many historic events that had taken place here. Along one edge ran the low “cliff” of the shoreline, and beyond waves flecked with the golden glitter of sunset bobbed and rolled.