Escape Velocity

by Jason M. Hough

  Against the heat of that afternoon, and the downpour that followed, a great tent had been erected in the park. This had done its job during the wedding ceremony, but despite its vastness could not contain the party that followed.

  “Sam’s okay with this crowd?” Tania asked, one arm looped through Skyler’s as they strolled along the shore, far enough from the revelers to have some quiet, but not so far as to be accused of ditching the event.

  Skyler grinned. “Sam wanted a small affair. Vaughn wanted to invite the whole planet. This was the compromise.”

  “Uh-huh,” Tania said, unconvinced, enjoying the distant sounds of laughter rolling across the park where the Platz mansion had once stood. In the middle distance the gleaming new elevator tower seemed to leap into the darkening sky. New to her, at any rate. A historical site already to those of Gloria Tsandi’s Earth. “So strange,” she whispered, the words all but lost on the breeze.

  Skyler pulled her a little closer. “What is?”

  “The contrast. Visiting this place twice in as many years, from our perspective. Seeing how it’s changed.”

  “Some awful things happened here,” he said.

  “It’s lovely now.”

  A climber, sparkling in the setting Sun, slid down the now-ancient elevator cord and disappeared into the top of the tower. Beyond, huge skyscrapers both old and new stretched from horizon to horizon.

  “They’re building a defense fleet,” Skyler said, after a time.

  “I heard. Not sure how I feel about it, but I can’t blame them.”

  “I suppose not.” Skyler took a seat on a bench on the edge of the path and she settled in next to him. A row of trees behind them rustled in the breeze, stirred by a natural rise in the wind.

  It reminded her of another bench, a long time ago, on one of the farm platforms, where Neil had first told her that he’d hired a scavenger to find the data she’d needed. Some pilot named Skyler, but she wouldn’t know that for some time.

  “Do you think they’ll come here? The Scipios?” she asked.

  “I don’t really want to think about it,” he answered, his fatigue seeping into the words whether he’d intended it or not. “I feel like we’ve done our share.”

  “I won’t argue with that.”

  Skyler took her hand and held it tight. “I’m more interested to know if the Builders will come. If they’ll take this…whatever…out of my head, or at least tell me what the hell I’m supposed to do with it.”

  Tania kept her questions unvoiced. She had so many, but he wasn’t ready. The Passenger mind within him had yet to manifest itself in any meaningful way, save for the occasional guttural snippets of speech voiced through Skyler’s mouth as he slept beside her, late at night. In the cool evening air, as the summer rains fell outside the flat they’d been gifted, Tania would do her best to soothe the dreams he never remembered, and hopefully soothe the other as well. At least they knew it yet lived.

  At some point, when he was ready, Skyler would ask for her help, and she had a plan prepared. She would teach the Passenger, via Skyler, as if it were a toddler. If her theory was true, that would help it mesh with the pathways inside the human brain that were still wholly alien to it.

  A bright light caught her eye, off near the wedding tent. Several hovering camera drones buzzed around a lavishly dressed figure, who made sweeping gestures as he spoke to their lenses.

  “Prumble’s on the ’nets again,” she said.

  Skyler laughed and shook his head, amazed and amused in equal proportion. “The man, the myth, the legend.”

  The former smuggler lord of Darwin’s post-apocalypse underworld had become a major celebrity in this post-post-apocalyptic version of their home. He’d even hinted at running for the OEA council. “Literally two thousand years of perspective,” he joked his campaign slogan would be, saying the statement was perfectly honest by political standards. For now, at least, he was content to give almost daily interviews, broadcast all over the resettled world. In doing so he’d taken the spotlight, and the pressure, off the rest of the crew, and Tania suspected Prumble’s love of the lens was, in truth, more of a sacrifice made for the benefit of his friends.

  She loved him for that, and so much more. She loved all of them.

  Except one. She held back a sigh at the thought of Tim.

  “It’s weird,” Skyler said, after a silence.

  “What is?” she asked.

  “I can feel this thing sometimes, inside me. It’s like it’s…I don’t know, groping around. Sizing things up. It’s like…revisiting a place you once lived.”

  “I did that just recently,” Tania said. “Anchor Station.” She’d barely recognized any of it, so much had been replaced in the centuries gone by, but a few of the original rings remained, preserved as a kind of monument, and it had been one of the strangest experiences of her life. “I guess that’s not really what you mean,” she admitted.

  Skyler waved her off, not unkindly. “It is, though. It’s like visiting a place like that and getting that flood of memory that comes back. That nostalgia. And yet at the same time I have this sense that there’s someone else with me, there for the first time and trying to make sense of it all, but I can’t explain any of it.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m fascinated by this. By you.”

  He grunted, amused and perhaps a little frustrated, too, for which she could hardly blame him. Skyler let go of her hand and stood, ready to walk again. After a few hundred meters they reached a part of the path that ran along the route of the original wall erected around Nightcliff to protect the Elevator’s base. They followed it for a long time in silence, well away from the party now. The marvelous, impossibly modern city vaulted upward all around them. People ate in brightly colored restaurants along Wall’s Path, as it was known. There was even a pub called Woon’s Tavern, though Skyler had scoffed at that the first time they’d seen it, days ago.

  Eventually they reached Ryland Square, where food riots had triggered so much of the strife that surrounded the days of the Builders’ tests.

  Skyler stood for a time and just looked at it all, and Tania said nothing, allowing him to remember, and perhaps also to forget. And maybe also to let the mind inside him see what he was seeing, so it might understand what befell this world just to save it.

  He started to walk again. He said, “I suppose we’re both trying to figure each other out. It needs me to experience the world, and I must find a way to…put up barriers, as bad as that sounds.”

  “No,” she said. “It doesn’t. I understand.”

  He smiled a bit sadly, and squeezed her shoulder. “I have to find a way to still be me, when I want to. I have to find a way to not let it talk through my mouth when I don’t want it to.”

  She took his hand this time, and he let her. The sounds of the wedding celebration drifted to them again on the wind, growing a little louder with each step. It sounded quite raucous now. She’d expected nothing less, considering the bride and groom.

  “I just wish I knew what I was supposed to do with it,” Skyler said, still embroiled in his thoughts.

  She had no real answer for him. Theories, but nothing more.

  He sensed her hesitation, shifted a little, put an arm around her. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “We’ll figure it out, or we won’t. I don’t see what we can do in the meantime, one way or the other, except live our lives.”

  “Perhaps,” she said hesitantly, “the being inside you has the answers.”

  Now he did look at her, one eyebrow raised.

  Encouraged, Tania went on. “I imagine it has a lot it could teach us, perhaps even help us find a way to move it from you to someone else, should that be…”

  “If I’m on my deathbed or whatever.”

  “Well, yes. I mean you’re not getting any younger.” She pinched him.

  Skyler let out a little gasp of artificial pain, then pulled her closer. “You’re saying I should stay out of harm’s way
? Take care of myself? Perhaps even step into one of those time-slowed bubbles until the Builders return?”

  “I do like the idea of you remaining safe and healthy, I admit,” Tania replied. “But what I meant was, perhaps we can speed up the process of making it—that mind, I mean—a full-fledged citizen of the nation of Skyler.”

  “Meaning what, exactly?”

  “Suppose you were to go sit in on a few language lessons with some six-year-old children for a few weeks.”

  “You can’t be serious,” he said, laughing.

  “I am serious!”

  He laughed harder, shaking his head, but she could tell he saw the wisdom in it. “I don’t know…,” he said after the silence had returned. A sliver of the Sun was just visible now in the west, under a sky of glorious purples.

  “Do you have a better idea?” she asked him, trying to put just the right amount of invitation in her words without pushing him too hard.

  Skyler Luiken shrugged. “Play it safe…educate this mind…keep it healthy. All very wise ideas, Tania Sharma.”

  “Or?” she prompted.

  Then he turned to her. “Or,” he said, “I had this thought that maybe you and I could jump out of an airplane over Hawaii.”

  For Nathan and Ian

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost I must thank my agent, Sara Megibow, and my editor, Michael Braff (plus everyone else at Del Rey who helps bring my books to life). I’m endlessly grateful for all the hard work that goes into a project like this.

  Thanks be to the authors I’m so proud to call mentors, friends, and contemporaries: Chuck Wendig, Delilah Dawson, Peter Clines, K. C. Alexander, Kevin Hearne, Ramez Naam, Django Wexler, Kat Richardson, Scott Sigler, Robin Hobb, Shawn Speakman, Wes Chu, Sam Sykes, M. D. Waters, Alexandra Oliva, and on and on…If not for this wonderful community I don’t know how I’d get by. You wonderful weirdos are amazing.

  My extreme gratitude to Felicia Day, whose support, generosity, and encouragement have kept me motivated while writing these books. You’ll get your sequel one of these days!

  Thanks to my wife, Nancy, for her constant support. Love you, sugar!

  And, last but not least, thank you for reading. In the end that’s all that matters.

  —Jason M. Hough

  Seattle, 2017

  DEL REY BOOKS BY JASON M. HOUGH

  ZERO WORLD

  THE DIRE EARTH CYCLE

  THE DARWIN ELEVATOR

  THE EXODUS TOWERS

  THE PLAGUE FORGE

  THE DIRE EARTH: A NOVELLA

  THE DIRE EARTH DUOLOGY

  INJECTION BURN

  ESCAPE VELOCITY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JASON M. HOUGH is the New York Times bestselling author of Zero World and The Dire Earth Cycle: The Darwin Elevator, The Exodus Towers, and The Plague Forge, as well as the novella The Dire Earth. Hough was born in Illinois but grew up on the mean streets of suburban San Diego, California. In 1978, when he was six, his parents took him to see Star Wars, and so began a lifelong love of sci-fi and all things geek. He later worked for a decade in the videogame industry as a 3D artist and game designer. Today he lives in Seattle with his wife and two young sons. When not writing, Hough enjoys building LEGO spaceships with his boys and other similarly grown-up pursuits.

  jasonhough.com

  Facebook.com/hough

  Twitter: @JasonMHough

  Read on for more sci-fi action adventure with a preview of Jason M. Hough’s thrilling novel

  ZERO WORLD

  In bookstores everywhere from Del Rey Books!

  IN A LUXURIOUS flat overlooking Hyde Park the assassin’s mind reverted.

  He lay on a stiff mattress in a dark room, naked between silk sheets, cool conditioned air gentle against his face, when the rewind occurred.

  Time had just been taken from him. He knew this because he’d been exhaling, a slow, measured breath that suddenly and quite inhumanly changed to a sharp inhale. He’d prepared for this, but even with all his measures to reduce the effect, the moment of reversion always left him disoriented and more than a little nauseous.

  The routine he’d developed over the last dozen years involved a careful arrangement of his environment and physical state so that when his mind suddenly lurched backward to the trigger moment, the similarities would far outweigh the changes. He always used the company flat. The same bed, the same sheets, the same pillow. Set the thermostat to exactly 20 degrees Celsius. Kill the lights, draw the curtains, and send his handler, Monique Pendleton, the message: I’m ready.

  Then he’d lie down, faceup, hands at his sides. As agent Peter Caswell waited for her to trigger the implant, he would silently recite an old song lyric. Not aloud, just in his head. It was his secret anchor. His bridge across time.

  Speak the word

  The word is all of us

  Again and again he would recite the words until the reversion moment arrived. It never took long.

  This ritual was key. Days ago had been the trigger moment. Monique would activate the implant from her perch a few hundred miles above, and he’d get up and dress and go off on some clandestine job. He’d conduct his particular business, and then return here, to this same exact room, and put everything back just the way it had been. Once again he’d send I’m ready. He’d lie down in the same position, and he would wait for reversion.

  And so here he was. Mission over, brain chemically reverted to that same trigger instant despite the days that had passed. The first half of the lyric—Speak the word—front and center in his mind. A bridge over the memory gap. He crossed it, silently. The word is all of us.

  Three or four days deleted. That was the average duration, and so a safe assumption. All memory of his deeds wiped away. Conscience cleared.

  To jump ahead in time like this, as any drunk would know, can really fuck with the head. To trigger in a London office and revert in an alley in Cairo produced a sensation of disorientation and vertigo that bordered dangerously on the unbearable. Even to go from day to night, or one meal to something totally different, could leave one a vomiting wreck for hours.

  Caswell had learned all this the hard way, years ago. Gone from a beach cottage in Mexico, belly full of beer and fish tacos, to drifting in null gravity on an Archon Corporation ore processor with nothing in his gut but nutrition paste. That experience had nearly killed him. It had certainly made a mess of the Archon orbital. More important, the event had forced him to do the thing he detested most in this bizarre life: plan. So he invented the ritual.

  Yet preparation went only so far. In four lost days there were thousands of minute differences both to the body and his surroundings, no matter how carefully controlled. Each tiny variation was quite easy to overlook viewed individually, but added together all at once the effect could crush an unprepared mind.

  Here now, in this room, the differences began to fall inside his head like sudden rain on dry pavement. A relaxed heartbeat had shifted to a racing one, the rhythm slightly off. One instant he’d been exhaling, then abruptly breathing in. Such things made the mind want to react, and react he did. A sputtering cough racked his body. He let it pass and forced himself to focus, to continue the catalog of differences that allowed him to acclimate.

  Before the trigger he’d been relaxed and ready, and he was now out of breath. Okay, he could deal with that. He must have rushed to get here in time. Not so strange. What else?

  A new ache in his left shoulder. Another on his ribs, though less intense.

  Stubble on his chin that itched. That was odd; he’d shaved beforehand like always. Why hadn’t he had time to shave again before reversion? Because he’d been in a hurry. Right. Focus, Peter. He filed that and moved on.

  He opened his eyes. The room was pitch-black, but that was expected. A sudden shift from day to night could really disorient him, so he always pulled the thick drapes fully closed. Slowly he lifted the blackout curtain beside his left hand. Just a hair, enough to get a sense of t
hings. Gray daylight spilled in. Raindrops on the window. The Thames winding off into the distance between a forest of skyscrapers. London in the fall. That was good.

  He let the curtain go, sat up, then stood. Muscles across his body were sore. He felt tired and hungry, yet seconds ago he hadn’t been. There was something else, too: a faint antiseptic odor that reminded him of a hospital. Caswell felt his way to the bathroom and switched on the nightlight. He stared at himself in the mirror. A square patch of white gauze was taped to his left shoulder. There were sutures visible on the left side of his torso. Six stitches, recently administered. That explained the hospital smell. The stubble on his face was barely visible, representing perhaps four days’ growth, thanks to the curse of Korean genes. What could he infer from a four-day beard? He’d gone somewhere where shaving had not been an option. Somewhere remote. A battlefield, maybe? There was no shortage of those around the world. Or had his cover required a disheveled appearance? His unkempt black hair said yes, maybe so.

  Where’d you go this time? he asked the lithe form in the mirror. Not aloud; they’d be monitoring the room. Do the injuries mean you screwed up? That you’re losing your edge? Did you fail?

  For a minute he stared at himself, as if looking into his own eyes might reveal some hint as to what exactly he’d done in the last four days. This burning need swept through him every time, but he always battled it back. Not knowing was the whole point. And truthfully he didn’t want to know.

  A clear conscience was his greatest asset, the reason for his extraordinary success.

  Caswell showered. First scalding hot, then ice cold. He toweled off, shaved, and dressed. Dark slacks, a maroon polo, light gray casual coat. Comfortable Italian shoes. A tungsten biometric bracelet he slipped onto his right wrist. The band performed all the usual functions, but also interfaced with the implant, automatically regulating certain aspects of his brain chemistry according to his personal desire.