Escape Velocity

by Jason M. Hough

  “C-and-C is that way,” Caswell offered, pointing.

  “He’s useful, after all!” Angelina cried. She turned to face the team. “Okay, the geek is with me. Klaus, you, too. Douglas, check the landers. Harai, see if any of the reactor vessels are intact.”

  “I thought you were just here for the black box?” Caswell asked.

  “You don’t know shit about salvage, so just keep quiet unless we ask you something, okay? Okay.” She turned and drifted toward the command room. Klaus followed her. The other two turned and went in the opposite direction. Caswell soon found himself alone.

  Exercise equipment adorned the surfaces of the room straight ahead. A treadmill. Some handles attached to pulleys embedded in the wall. A used water bulb floated lazily across his view. At the far end a hatch led to the medical bay. It appeared to be fully sealed. Looking at it triggered something in him: a sudden irrational unease, like a child staring down a basement stairwell into blackness. He shook the feeling away.

  Satisfied the others were gone, Caswell floated to a blackened panel on the wall. From a pack on his midsection he removed an orange torque wrench, then used one finger to wipe away soot on the locking nuts. The magnetized wrench connected easily, and despite sitting out here for a dozen years, each bolt turned easily. He nudged the panel away from the wall and let it float next to his head.

  “Captain?” one of the crew said. Douglas, it sounded like.

  “Go ahead,” came Angelina’s reply.

  “Lander zero-one is missing.”

  Silence. Caswell listened. He marked his audio recording minus ten seconds, just in case.

  “Missing as in ripped away in the explosion?”

  “Uh. Not sure. Zero-two is still here, looks intact.”

  “Copy that. Keep me posted.”

  The radio went silent. Caswell marked the exchange as interesting and sent it off to Monique, then returned his focus to the section of wall he’d just exposed. Within, neatly bundled cables in a variety of colors ran in every direction. In the center, a grid of gold indentations gleamed under the light from his headlamp. From another pocket on his torso he produced a small dark green plastic box with ridged edges. He powered the box on and waited a few seconds for the tiny LED on it to wink from red to a flashing green. Caswell flipped the device around and pressed it against the gold grid within the wall, then fetched the hovering panel.

  He activated his private Archon channel. “Mo, the keg is tapped. You should be receiving data now. IA6, out.”

  Around him, rows of white lights flickered on, so bright that his visor darkened to compensate. He switched back to the standard channel. “How’s it going in there, Captain?”

  “Thought you were with us,” Angelina replied, her voice curt in his ear.

  “Just, you know, soaking it in. Surreal to actually set foot in such a famous—”

  “Get the hell up here, Doctor. We’re on a schedule.”

  While she spoke he reinstalled the access panel. “Any…uh, any sign of the original crew?”

  “Negative.”

  “And the black box?”

  “I’m staring at it right now. Which means I need you here, right now.”

  “Sorry. On my way.”

  His gaze went to the exercise compartment again, however, and that round hatch beyond adorned with medical signage. The sight tickled something in his mind. Memories just beyond reach.

  A thought began to worm into his mind—the inevitable conclusion whenever something like this happened to him. Déjà vu, or an infuriatingly familiar face. His particular skill set, his augmentation, made all such phenomena candidates for something else entirely: the remnants of a reality forcibly removed.

  He willed the thought away. Down that path lay madness. Ignorance, he reminded himself, was bliss.

  Yet he couldn’t resist the pull. There was…something. Despite his better judgment he found himself floating in front of the round hatch marked MED BAY. He wheeled the lever to the open position and pulled. Something pushed against his suit. Air, rushing out. His visor fogged before sensors could compensate. Dry air hissed through fans in his helmet and then condensation retreated.

  A monster rushed toward him, arms flung wide as if to grapple. Caswell’s heart lurched before his brain fully understood: A male corpse was moving on the current of air that had just been sucked from the room. Caswell shoved the hatch back just in time to feel the limp body flop against it and repel away.

  With a deep breath he opened the door again, a few centimeters at a time.

  Six bodies floated about within. They were remarkably well preserved, considering the room had still held air. Air, he realized, that would have been stagnant for twelve years.

  None of the bodies looked like Alice Vale, so he slipped the hatch closed and sealed it again. If Monique needed to know cause of death he’d explore further, but for the time being he felt no desire to mingle with the dead. He fired off another report to Archon. “Found the six crew you mentioned. They’re all in the medical bay—no comments on the irony there, all right? I only glanced, but given the room still held air, I’m going to guess sudden and very rapid acceleration did them in.” Then he added, “No sign of our missing seventh. Continuing my search.”

  Caswell drifted into the C&C to find Angelina in the pilot’s chair, tapping away at a foldout computer. Klaus knelt beside an open panel at the far end, fiddling with some gear he’d hauled in.

  The room had the basic size and shape of all mass-produced station compartments. Five meters on a side, fifteen long, studded with attach points to serve virtually any purpose.

  “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “Waiting for you,” Klaus replied.

  “Computers are up, huh?” he asked, more reproach in his voice than he’d intended.

  Angelina’s fingers paused for the briefest instant. “Nothing in the contract about not accessing them.”

  “If you say so. Find anything interesting?”

  “Just—”

  An urgent override from Monique clipped the captain’s response. “Agent IA6, this mission will continue under Integrity-Assured protocol. Sorry, Caswell, with the time delay there’s no chance to offer opt-in. This came from the very top.”

  His pulse swelled to a steady war drum on his temples. Integrity-Assured protocol, or IA, meant nasty business lay ahead.

  Monique went on. “Time critical, I’m afraid. I’m sending the remote command to enable your implant in exactly twenty seconds.”

  Peter Caswell swore. His ritual may be impossible here, but she could at least wait for consent. She’d always given him that much. Time to be relaxed. Opted in. Having fucking agreed. Caswell glanced about, feeling the clock tick away like a time bomb. He did the only thing he could think to do and slipped his free hand and both feet into the nearest stabilizer handles on the Venturi’s wall.

  Ten seconds.

  What was so damn important that they couldn’t allow twenty minutes for him to opt in? Of course, Monique had answered that: time critical. If he were to decline it would take weeks to get someone else out here. By then the crippled station would have fallen into the Sun. He told himself not to worry. Monique had opted in, obviously. For him to be activated meant she had been, too. They were paired. Agent and handler, experts in their respective roles, recruited and linked because their bodies happened to be the rare sort that wouldn’t reject the IA-class implant.

  Caswell shut his eyes. He took two deep breaths and started to chant the lyric. He could do that much, at least. She couldn’t take that away.

  This mental anchor had not been part of the training. He’d simply thought it wise to have something familiar on the tip of his tongue when he eventually made the mental leap back across the reversion gap. Sometime, in the next four days or so, he would forget everything that happened from here to that moment. He wondered where he’d be when the time came. Could he get close to this exact set of circumstances? Unlikely in the extreme. Bu
t he could do one thing.

  Microphone in his suit safely off, he used the seconds left to recite the old song lyric over and over, aloud in case that would help. “Speak the word, the word is all of us. Speak the word, the word is all of us. Speak the word, the—”

  At the base of his neck an artificial gland received the specially crafted trigger message sent by Monique from more than 160 million kilometers away. The gland flooded his brain with a biochemical marker.

  He lost track of the song lyric, wincing as engineered chemicals sought out every last neuron like a creeping poison. A hot tingling sensation unfolded from somewhere in the back of his head, thorny pressure that started from the bottom of his skull and pushed up and out until his very scalp felt as if it were being prodded by a million tiny needles from the inside.

  And then, quick as it had come on, the sensation subsided. Caswell fought to get his breathing under control and carefully opened his eyes. His vision swam, distorted by tears that would not fall away in the absence of gravity. He blinked rapidly to no avail and then gave up.

  “I’m sorry to do that to you in the field, Peter.”

  You’d better be. He desperately wanted to speak with her, to have a real conversation. He bit his lip instead and waited to hear what task he had to perform.

  “Your new mission is still being designed, I’m afraid. The reasons will become clear. For now, your new goal is as follows….”

  Caswell swallowed, waiting for the tears to dry and the pain in his head to abate. God, he missed the flat above Hyde Park. The ritual of it. “Never again, Mo.” He growled the words, made all the more bitter by the knowledge that he’d forget them. He’d forget all of this.

  “First,” Monique Pendleton said in a flat, all-business tone that told him things had gotten very grim indeed, “you are to eliminate the crew of the Pawn Takes Bishop. Immediately and with extreme prejudice.”

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