Escape Velocity E-Book

Jason M. Hough

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 478

Beschreibung

Skyler Luiken and Gloria Tsandi have smashed through the Swarm Blockade, but now they and their crews are scattered around the Carthage system. They must regroup and find a way back to Earth. If they can find a way back at all. Standing in the way are a race of horrifying, technologically advanced aliens armed with incredible weapons. Faced with the threat of an invasion of Earth, Skyler and Gloria must bring them down and set Carthage free. The crews must rely on each other to survive. But not everyone can be trusted...

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Praise for the Works of Jason M. Hough

Also Available from Jason M. Hough and Titan Books

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

PRAISE FOR THE WORKS OF JASON M. HOUGH

ZERO WORLD

“A science fiction [novel that] smashes The Bourne Identity together with The End of Eternity to create a thrilling action rampage that confirms [Jason] Hough as an important new voice in genre fiction.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“An enjoyable read . . . expect minor whiplash from the frenetic pace.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Hough has combined all the ingredients of a first-rate sci-fi thriller.” —Kirkus Reviews

“One hell of an entertaining read. Hough continues to deliver white-knuckle books anchored by unusual and fascinating characters. Zero World is a giant cup of pure badassery that secures his place among the finest sci-fi action writers today.”

—Kevin Hearne, New York Times bestselling author of The Iron Druid Chronicles

“A high-octane blend of science fiction and mystery, Zero World is a thrill ride that shoots you out of a cannon and doesn’t let up until the very last page.”

—Wesley Chu, author of the Tao series

“Warning: Do not pick up this book if there is anything else you need to do. There is no safe place to rest inside these pages, no lag in the full-throttle action, no moment when you will think, ‘Okay, this is a good spot to take a break.’ Once you realize how much you don’t know—about this world, these characters, this inexplicable mission—the only way out is forward.”

—Brian Staveley, author of The Emperor’s Blades

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM JASON M. HOUGH AND TITAN BOOKS

ZERO WORLD

THE DIRE EARTH CYCLE

The Darwin Elevator

The Exodus Towers

The Plague Forge

Injection Burn

A DIRE EARTH NOVEL

JASON M. HOUGH

TITAN BOOKS

Escape VelocityPrint edition ISBN: 9781783295302E-book edition ISBN: 9781783295319

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition June 2017

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Jason M. Hough asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Copyright © 2017 by Jason M. Hough.All rights reserved.

This edition published by arrangement with Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For Nathan and Ian

In a far-off place, under the most extreme of circumstances, he did what he thought best.For all of us.

—a gravestone in Nightcliff, Australia, A.D. 3911

You seem to forget how utterly alone we were out there. There was no time to plan, no way to even communicate. Can we do this later? I need some time. I need a chance to mourn our dead.

—Dr. Tania Sharma, interrogation transcript, 26.AUG.3911

1

LOCATION UNKNOWN

He lay at the bottom of a deep hole, in a puddle of filthy water that sizzled as bits of molten metal dripped down from the destruction above.

Skyler Luiken remained motionless for a time, just staring up at the column his arrival had carved. He remembered nothing of the actual crash. Couldn’t even remember when exactly he’d lost consciousness, or why. Medically induced, probably. Another gift from Eve. Her last? He called out for her. “Eve?”

No response came. But then she’d said he’d be on his own, hadn’t she?

He took a long, shuddering breath and allowed all the sources of his frayed nerves to worm through his mind. He was a thousand light-years from Earth. Alone. His friends were scattered across the gigantic, planet-spanning apparatus of the Scipios, their exact locations and conditions unknown. All of them had been thrown toward the massive collection of alien space stations in the final explosion of Eve, their host. Eve, the only ally they had, the only one who knew what the hell was really going on here. Now gone. Holy fuck, she’s really gone. The AI had sacrificed herself. Expelled him and the others on precisely calculated trajectories an instant before her destruction in a last-ditch effort to give each of them a chance to accomplish the task at hand.

He found little comfort in that.

Skyler let his breath out, and with it banished the enormity of his task to the edges of his mind. Too much to grapple with, and he wasn’t about to lie here and wallow in overwhelmed shock. He’d deal with his immediate predicament now, and damn the rest of it. He had to survive, take stock, find safety. Find his friends.

“Hello?” he called. “Can anyone read me?”

A terrible silence stretched. He fiddled with the comm menu rendered on the inside of his visor. All channels were already on, but it showed no links to anyone else. He bumped the system to maximum broadcast strength.

“This is Skyler. I’m . . . I’ve no idea where I am. I’m alive. Obviously. I can’t hear any of you, but if you can read me . . .”

What? What to tell them?

“Just stay put,” he settled on, no better option coming to mind. “I’ll report my location once I know where the hell I am, and wait for you all to join me. Keep trying to communicate. We might just be out of range.”

Now what? he wondered.

The answer seemed obvious. He had to scavenge.

Now that, that, Skyler could wrap his mind around. He glanced around the pool of fluid and debris in the basin of the pit his arrival had created. The pod had burrowed through some kind of multilevel structure. A space station, no doubt. How deep had he gone? Skyler glanced up. The air above, thick with steam and smoke and a fine particulate like snow or ash, obscured the entry wound, but he figured the hole must have been patched by some automated process or else all that crap in the air would have been sucked out into space. Still, what he could see was at least a hundred meters of the shredded remains of a multilevel structure, as if his little craft had dug its way down through a twenty-story building. There were floors every five meters or so, each sprouting mangled pipes and conduits of unknown purpose, though given that most either leaked fluid or rained sparks, it didn’t take much imagination to guess. The cavities in between these, though, were truly unknown. In truth it didn’t look much different from a cross section of any Earth-based structure.

He shifted his focus to the remains of his escape pod. It lay around him like a cracked egg, with bits of the foamy orange cushion that had surrounded him during the brief flight now melting away into the soup of knee-deep viscous fluids rapidly filling the space around him. He jumped off his toes, just enough to test the gravity without rocketing himself up into the haze above, and judged it to be about three-quarters of Earth normal. What had Eve said about the gravity on Carthage? Pretty damn close to that, if his memory served. So he must be at a pretty low altitude.

As the last of the cushioning melted away, Skyler saw some gray containers floating amid the wreckage. He picked one up and examined it, puzzled at first. It was Builder gear, definitely, but its purpose eluded him. He was about to toss it aside when he realized his suit was telling him the answer. In the bottom corner of his field of view, a display on his visor indicated that this was repair paste for his armored suit. He grinned despite himself and picked another. Ammunition, in the form of six pellets that could be inserted into the right or left shoulder of his suit, powering the beam weapons embedded just above his wrists. Skyler’s grin widened. Eve may have sacrificed herself, abandoning him and the others to take on an entire sieged planet by themselves, but at least she’d not left them completely naked and defenseless.

Another case held “nutrients.” He almost gagged. This would be the rather nasty food Eve had manufactured for them and never quite gotten around to improving. Skyler decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth, as his stomach growled its desire to be filled with the gritty, overly sweet fare. Last, a self-replenishing container for water, filled by pulling moisture out of the very air around him. This he attached immediately to the receptacle on his lower back and then willed the suit to extend the small tube toward his mouth. He heard the thin whir as the little straw extended, and he drank greedily, ignoring the slightly metallic taste. It was cool and wet and somehow grounded him, putting an almost whiskeylike glow of confidence in his gut. He repeated the process with the food, choking a few gulps down.

Skyler tried the comm again. “Anyone out there? This is Skyler. I’m alive, but I’ve no idea where the hell I am or what to do. Reply if you can hear me.”

No response came. The suit’s status indicators still showed no connection to anyone else, nor any Builder equivalent of a network at all. He ground his teeth at that, but decided not to spend any more time worrying about it for now. Maybe it was broken, or maybe the others were simply out of range. He left the comm switched on, and set a recurring timer to remind him every ten minutes to try it again.

Finally, he checked himself for injuries. Bruised and battered, but otherwise he felt good. His suit still had integrity, too.

Fed and hydrated, Skyler turned his focus toward his overall goal.

The enormity of which still boggled his mind, but considered in the simplest terms—that he was here to free the world of Carthage from the Scipios—he figured his first task should be to gather intelligence. How did the Scipios hold this world? What were their society and security structure like? Was his crew truly alone here, or could he perhaps rouse some kind of rebellion from within the metaphorical prison walls? The mental image of a worldwide prison riot was almost enough to make him laugh.

A burst of fire erupted into the cavity just a few meters above him, then quickly receded into a small gas-fueled flame like a welder’s torch left on. The sound of it somehow woke Skyler’s sense of hearing, and he began to listen as much as see. The dripping water, the slosh of his legs in the now-thigh-deep pool, and something else, too. A new sound, rhythmic, that stuttered even as it rose and fell through sweeps of extreme pitch changes. The noise came from all around him. Instinctively, Skyler sloshed over to one side of the pit, pressing himself against a wall made of charred debris, as the volume grew.

Multicolored light tore through the mists above. Beams of violet and yellow. Skyler knew next to nothing about life beyond Earth, but every fiber of his being came to the simple conclusion instantly: security response. He was an intruder here, an infection, and the cavalry had arrived to deal with him.

He raised his weaponized arm and waited, forcing even breaths through his clenched teeth. The one thing he could not afford was a shoot-out. Whatever the population of Scipios here was, it was bound to be far higher than he had ammunition for. No, a subtler approach was the only real option if he was to have any hope of reaching the surface, much less accomplishing what he’d come here to do.

The flashing lights above were joined by others, and then a shadow appeared in the rising steam. The curling white murk spread and swirled around the edges of a teardrop-shaped object maybe two meters tall, with four metallic and heavily segmented tentacles moving in a carefully controlled dance as it lowered itself deeper into the pit.

The sight of it barely registered, for it was what Skyler saw beyond this alien that almost overwhelmed his mind. A brief glimpse through the thick haze, but that was enough.

A night sky, half-obscured by clouds.

He didn’t need to get to the surface. He was already there. The realization left him reeling as his assumptions shattered like glass.

Skyler did his best to keep still, tucked in shadow under a curled bit of torn fibrous metal his arrival had peeled from the floor just above. The creature above him bore an obvious resemblance to the Scipio Swarm that had destroyed the Chameleon, though it had fewer tentacles and a more streamlined body of much thinner profile. Made for atmospheric use, perhaps, its existence closer to a support apparatus, rather than the swarmers who lived out their lives in that lonely vigil at the edges of this solar system. Those had been dirty things, rugged and scarred. This was sleek in comparison, with a gleaming white skin or hull that looked almost like porcelain on its top half, covering the lower black and gray areas like a tortoise shell.

With a slight bob the Scipio came to a stop. Its four limbs stretched straight outward to where they grasped whatever support they could find with four-fingered mechanical hands. Much more elegant than the spike-tipped monstrosities their space-faring brethren favored, perhaps because to impale every surface they traversed here would be to damage their own home.

For a time it simply hung there, suspended, crying its odd lilting alarm. Skyler remained motionless, too, ready to unleash hell if noticed, happy to remain hidden if possible.

Another shadow appeared as a second Scipio lowered itself into the deep pit. It came to rest a few meters above the first. This one was slightly larger, and had markings along its side, like a bar code made of skewed and curved lines. Abruptly the shrill alarm stopped as the pair of robotic machines or vehicles—Skyler couldn’t be quite sure which—settled into position. He stared at those lines, the markings on the side of the recent arrival. They seemed to shimmer, then warp under his gaze. A trick of the light, perhaps, or just his rattled senses, but before he could puzzle it out the situation changed.

A section of the larger one’s belly suddenly extended downward, revealing an array of tubes and connective gear. A turret, his brain warned, and he shifted his aim toward it. Before he could shoot, though, the swivel-mounted cannon revealed its purpose. It swung with precision to one side and burped out a white cloud of foam. The material slapped wetly against one of the small fires licking out from a severed pipe on the wall of destruction. The blaze vanished under the thick goop, smothered instantly. Another quick swivel, another blast from the fire extinguisher. Skyler watched, mildly fascinated, as the machine or vehicle systematically doused each open flame. An alien firefighter, he thought. When those closest to Skyler, in the basin of his crash-pit, were out, the thing began to climb smoothly back up toward the top. Every meter or so its cannon would cough out more white mucus. Another flame would vanish.

He shifted focus back to the first Scipio to have arrived, the smaller one. It hadn’t moved since its big brother had shown up, and as of yet had not revealed its purpose here.

Skyler cursed himself. With everything else going on he hadn’t bothered to check his air levels, and if the air here was breathable. He scanned the information splayed across the corners of his visor, the system tracking his eye movements and thought patterns as a means of navigating the interface. He fumbled his way through the menus until he found what he needed: atmospheric analysis. A quick review told him the only thing he really needed to know: breathable to a human. There were indicators for the various gases present and in what quantity, but that meant little to him. Oxygen was the only one listed in orange, the rest green. Nothing red, so he’d count his blessings and worry about the side effects later.

Besides, the suit acted like a giant gill, from what Eve had said. It could pull the ingredients he would need. Already it had replenished his supply to nearly full—enough to last him twenty hours or so, assuming he left the atmosphere and it couldn’t pull in anything more. Still, it gave him some small reassurance to know that even in the event his suit tore, he could still breathe. The air, at least, wouldn’t be trying to kill him. Probably.

A brilliant light bored into his eyes, forcing his attention back to the visitors. Skyler raised one arm to shield against the sudden flare before his visor recognized the problem and tinted itself to compensate.

The Scipio, the one that had remained near him, had extended a belly pod of its own. Unlike its larger companion, this one screamed “sensor array.” Flickering lasers that swept across the ruined crash site in all directions, along with pulsing spotlights that shifted from one area to another. Several converged on him due to the movement of his arm.

“Shit,” he said, and fired without really thinking about it. His beam cannon annihilated the small vehicle in a shower of sparks and shrapnel, as if it had no armor at all. Definitely not built like the Swarm that had attacked the Chameleon, then.

For a moment Skyler just stood there, surprised at how easily the enemy had been destroyed, and shocked at how quickly he’d fired on it. Some part of him had assessed, in that instant, that his presence had been noticed. And more important, decided that the little Scipio vehicle was likely transmitting everything its flickering scanners saw in real-time back to some control room. He processed this himself only now, but his suit had reacted to the conclusion and his reflexive decision to fire well before he’d even consciously understood the choice himself. That, Skyler Luiken thought, is going to be a problem. The last thing he needed was this exotic alien armor going all trigger-happy in a moment when his battle-sense needed to be carefully dampened by more strategic needs.

A problem to resolve later when he had a moment to breathe. Right now, he had to get the hell out of here, before this place absolutely crawled with more of these emergency responders or, worse, the Scipio equivalent of a police force.

Back up the way he’d come? Skyler considered that. The air above had closed back in, unnervingly opaque after ten meters, utterly choked now by the smoky outpouring of the fire suppression efforts and the explosion he’d just caused.

No, he thought. Not up. As much as he wanted to be outside, to survey his surroundings, he could too easily imagine a whole horde of Scipios up there. This hole he’d made was, at the very least, probably seen as some kind of freak natural disaster. A meteor strike or whatever. They’d be all over it, swarming in to plug the hole and repair the damage.

Sideways, then. Flee the scene, get his bearings, find the others if he could.

Skyler pushed off from the wall and climbed up to the first open cavity above him. The ragged pit his arrival had dug looked like a fist that had punched down through a skyscraper, revealing the interior structure—a very Earth-like stack of floors. Their contents were hidden in darkness, unknowable, but that didn’t matter. It was a way to go, nothing more. So he jumped and flung himself into the first cavity, aware of several shadows descending into the pit from above and wanting nothing to do with them. Let the Scipios puzzle out the cause of the calamity if they didn’t already know.

With any luck, he’d get a few precious minutes’ head start before they realized they had a rat on the loose.

2

LOCATION UNKNOWN

She lay facedown in a puddle of oily fluid, head turned to one side, the black slop leaving weird rainbow patterns as it rose and fell against her helmet’s visor.

For a long time Tania Sharma did not move. She just watched the strange pool of oil that obscured half her visor, right up the middle. Gradually the space around her came into focus. It hurt to focus. She blinked a few times, and tears fell away. She could see now. A bit. Grimy walls encircled her. A silo, or tank, perhaps?

Her head pounded. Her legs felt as if a lead blanket had been draped over them. Submerged in the thick goop, she guessed. Slowly Tania brought her arms up and pushed herself onto all fours. The slick fluid rolled off her armor. The drops did not so much splash as merge with the pool below.

Tania rocked back to a sitting position, her legs folded underneath her. She put all her effort into focusing on the display inside her visor.

SUIT INTEGRITY: GREEN. She breathed a sigh of relief.

WATER SUPPLY: 2.4 LITERS. Not great. In fact, very disconcerting. But she couldn’t worry about it just yet.

AIR SUPPLY: BEST BAND EVER. “Argh, Prumble, you wonderful imbecile,” she said, the corners of her mouth turning up into a grin despite herself. Why they had let him design the interface she couldn’t quite remember. What she did distinctly remember was his solemn promise to take the task seriously.

AIR LEVELS: 40%, but the number ticked up to 41 as she watched. That was good. The suit was pulling in what it needed from the atmosphere in the room. Better still, the outside air, in a worst-case scenario, would be breathable. Cold, thin, and a bit weak oxygen-wise, but breathable. A very good sign.

NUTRITION RESERVES: 4200 KCAL. Only a few days’ worth. It could be stretched, of course, but not nearly enough. Tania could not imagine succeeding here in a matter of days. But she’d die of dehydration before she starved, so there was that, at least.

COMMS: NO LINK. Of course not. Tania tried activating it, anyway. The system was already on, it turned out. She just couldn’t establish a connection with anyone. Either they were out of range, or something was jamming the signal. Could be a problem, could just be the walls of this . . . What was this place?

Debris lay in the opaque fluid around her. Chunks of orange cushioning from her spherical pod, the edges frothing as they melted away. She tried to recall what it had looked like before climbing into it. Like a . . . black egg, really. The cushioning inside had inflated to secure her from the violence going on all around. There’d been two, actually. Prumble had entered the other. Maybe, just maybe, the others had been similarly expelled.

Inside there’d been something else, too. A small pedestal. Like a miniature aura tower, or a shard cleaved from one of those giant versions she’d seen back on Earth. Tania glanced frantically around, looking for it. Overwhelmed with the need to find it. Water, food, air . . . none of that mattered here if she had no protection from the horrors that the Scipios could infect her with.

There, next to the wall, a lump of blackness concealed in shadow. Tania pushed through the slick goop around her to the device and knelt in front of it. Seemed intact. No obvious damage. But how to know for sure?

The visor, she realized. Had to be. She studied the remaining readouts and saw it, there, at the end.

AURA: ACTIVE.

Tania let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. She reached out and gave the little tower a nudge with her finger, watched it glide just above the surface of the oily muck, until it was pressed against the wall of the room. Someday she’d figure out how they did that. The tech still amazed her, after all this time. All that mattered right now, though, was that it worked. She stood, satisfied, and skimmed the rest of the data on her display. The remaining information all concerned her suit’s weaponry. A full supply of energy for the beam weapons on her arms. A few mortar rounds. She shook her head at that. At everything. To take on an entire world, with supplies that would last her a day, maybe two if she encountered only a few enemies out of the millions that must live here.

Tania began to pace, her thoughts turning to finding a way out. Her foot brushed against something solid, floating in the pool at her feet. It bobbed and rolled over. She picked it up and waited as the incredibly slick fluid dripped off. The thing was small, about the size of a bunch of bananas, and slightly curved, too. Matte gray in color, in the Builders’ style. As she turned it in her hands her visor’s display drew a line to it and words appeared. NUTRITION RESUPPLY: 10,800 KCAL.

She went to her knees then, and began to grope through the sludge. Four more of the packages were concealed in the fluid. Water, food, ammo, and fuel. Enough for a week or so now, she thought. “Thank you, Eve,” she whispered. Of course, the AI had neglected to provide her with a means to carry the stuff. No, wait. Tania reached behind herself and ran a hand along her back, even as Prumble’s description of the suit’s full capability set came back to her. There were sockets along the spine, she could feel them. These packages had matching connectors. Tania tried one and sure enough, it snapped into place on its own, as if the two were drawn together by magnets. Which may well be the case, she realized. Instantly her display updated to reflect the change.

Tania attached all four and reviewed her supply levels anew, enjoying the warm confidence the numbers now gave her. Aura shard under one arm, she turned her attention then to finding the others, battling the competing emotions of anticipation and dread.

* * *

Her pod had crashed through the ceiling of some kind of storage silo, she discovered. She’d had to burn a bit of fuel to get out, using the thrusters in her boots to power a jump up to the hole at the top that her headlamp had revealed. The gravity was low, about one-third Earth’s, making the ten-meter hop that much easier. Tania carefully hoisted herself over the jagged metal edge of the hole in the silo’s roof, and crawled out onto it.

The chamber she found herself in was narrow, just wide enough to fit the silo, but very long. Similar vessels were arranged in a long row that curved off to the left at a gentle rate. She turned around and saw a mirror of this sequence going off in the other direction, implying a circular arrangement of silos with, she guessed, a radius of several kilometers. Larger than Eve, in any case, which confirmed what she’d already strongly suspected. The ship had ejected her in that pod. The question was, to where, though Tania felt the conclusion to that was obvious. Still, she had to be sure. She looked up, through the hole in the ceiling of this room. And up, and up. Deck after deck had been tunneled through by her arrival. She saw only the ragged edges of floors, interspersed with bits of dangling, shorn wires and pipes. And beyond, several stars.

Tania had to know. She powered on her boots again and flew up through the tunnel her pod had made. The decks flew past, falling away below her as she rocketed toward the stars. At the last second she let up, willing the suit to slow her ascent. It complied, and as she reached the initial impact point Tania came to a rest, one hand on the fractured edge of some kind of exotic hull plating. Stars, out there. A bluish moon. More important, she saw glimpses of a vast network of space stations, and hints of the space elevator network to which they were attached to the unseen planet she now knew would be below. Carthage, Captain Gloria Tsandi had named it. Home world to the race known as the Creators, now held hostage by the Scipios.

They’d made it, after all.

She pushed herself higher still, intent on going out and looking around, but an invisible barrier seemed to hold her in. Of course, she thought. A hull breach like this wouldn’t be left unaddressed. There was air around her, after all. Tania lifted one armored hand and pushed at the field. There was no ripple of energy or flickering light. Not even a repelling force, really. Just a subtle vibration that seemed to harden as she pushed against it.

What now? she wondered. Hit it with a mortar and try to push through before the field could reassert itself? Might work. Might not. No way to know, but what did seem certain was the Scipios would notice an explosion like that.

Or would they? She pondered the situation. Despite her arrival having torn a hole one hundred meters deep, she’d seen no sign of a reaction to it. The entry point had been sealed, yes, but from the look of things that was an entirely automated feature of the hull. A sensible one, in truth. Tech she’d wished they’d had on Anchor back home.

But, at least from the perspective of her own species, a severe wound like this to such a structure would have to be investigated, wouldn’t it? Repaired? Which meant a response, and soon. Tania wanted to be far away when that happened.

She pushed back down, past ten meters of mangled equipment, until she came to an open floor her arrival had exposed. Tania hauled herself in and flicked on her headlamp, taking in the surroundings.

The room was large, perhaps a hundred square meters and five high. Row upon row of rectangular structures. Silent gray masses that took up the entirety of the floor space. It reminded her of the computer farms on Anchor, only this place was dark, dead.

She turned in place. The hole her arrival had punched was roughly in the center, and while three of the distant walls were identical, one had a wide indented section with lines down the middle. A door. Had to be. She started toward it.

The silence unnerved her. Tania ramped up the audio amplification her suit offered. This only served to increase the distant hum of machinery, a noise she found soothing. It sounded like home. Her home. The hallways and shafts of Anchor Station.

And then a new sound. A distant, sharp clang, and a whirring of motors. In that same instant, she detected movement. Tania dove between two of the hulking silent boxes and waited, breath held, senses strained. Weak light spilled in from the direction of the door, and then more sounds. The whine of electric motors, and the friction of wheels on tiled floor. Not one, but a chorus. The sounds diverged, began to spread around her, as if surrounding her. She felt cornered, at the center of a closing perimeter, yet could not bring herself to move or even to look.

The room had only one exit. No, she thought, that wasn’t true. She’d come in through a hole that exposed multiple levels of the station. So go back, or fight her way out? Neither seemed wise, not knowing what approached. She risked a quick glance around the corner of the box, in the direction she’d been going. What she saw reminded her first of a police riot shield. Just a rectangular metal plate moving slowly down the aisle toward her, its surface pitted and scarred from use. There was a band of white near the bottom, with some odd curved bar code–like patterns splashed across one side. She stared at them, baffled as the pattern seemed to shift and twist as if reacting to her gaze. Some kind of strange paint that reacted to being observed?

No, she realized, this was no magical, auto-translating paint. It was just the suit’s visor, letting her know she was looking at something it could read. Recognizable English text flashed in the lower corner of the display. Eve must have programmed it to automatically translate Scipio writing into something understandable.

It read: [ERROR] BARRICADE.

Tania leaned back out of sight and considered this. Barricade made sense, it was a moving wall coming toward her, after all. Error, though? What did that mean? Was she the error? A foreign body detected within the Scipio apparatus that they’d come to purge? Or maybe the crash site was considered an error, the mobile wall part of some repair process.

She pushed herself deeper into the grid of machinery, holding her breath, ready to shoot at the first sign of danger and hoping desperately it wouldn’t come to that.

Twenty seconds passed before the error-barricade slowly pushed by, working its way down the aisle she herself had been walking along. As it passed she saw a small treaded machine attached to the back of it, electric motor whirring softly. The barricade itself was as thick as her arm, and almost as tall as the space between floor and ceiling. It did not turn to face her, but instead merrily trundled along toward the hole her arrival had made.

She watched in solemn silence for several minutes as a fleet of these mobile walls converged on the hole punched through ceiling and floor of the huge room. Their motions were like a dance, a bit of performance art, as each of the slabs they carried were maneuvered into place. Bands of light seeped between the sections, growing ever smaller. With a staggered series of clangs the segments came together and the light vanished. Tania’s world plunged into near total darkness for a moment, sending her heart racing. Then, a dozen brilliant stars erupted before her, sending showers of sparks in all directions, skittering across the tiled floor. Robotic arms with welding torches began to bond the movable barricades together.

“They’re sealing it off,” she said to herself. “An automated response. They don’t know I’m here.” It made sense: An orbital superstructure like this would be regularly bombarded by meteors, space junk, and who knows what else. The Scipios had made their prison self-repairing.

The knowledge flooded her with a sudden confidence, and an urge to remain hidden here until the situation changed, if only to gather her wits and think.

But her friends were out there, somewhere. Maybe in similar situations, maybe much worse off. She had to find them, and soon.

Tania slipped out from her hiding place between the towering objects and jogged into the darkness, the way only visible due to the augmented view through her visor. She ran until the door appeared in front of her, closed behind the mobile barricades.

The massive bulkhead, rectangular in shape, had an almost zipperlike joint where the two halves met in the middle. She saw no way to make it open. On a whim, she strode up to stand before it, positioning herself in the center in the hope a camera or another sensor would detect her and let her pass. Nothing happened.

Tania almost gave up, when she heard a thin click. She waited, anxious. Another click. It came from behind, not the door. She whirled, ready to fire, but saw only darkness.

Another click, then another. Then the noises became so frequent they blended together. Suddenly the first row of the gray towers that filled the floor space of the room lit up with multicolored indicators about a meter from their bases. The entire row, stretching off to her left and right for fifty meters, came on in unison, bathing her in their glow.

The second row activated, then the third. With each passing second another row came alive until the whole room was lit by the glowing bases of the machines. Each now hummed with some electric purpose, the lights along their midsection undulating for reasons she could not fathom. Indicators maybe, but of what was anyone’s guess. Now the resemblance to the computer grids inside Anchor Station was unmistakable.

In the darkness Tania could just make out the circular arrangement of barricades, wheeled into place evidently to cordon off the damaged area where she’d arrived. An entirely automated process, it seemed, and she was just fine with that. It did beg the question, though: Where were the Scipios themselves? From what information Eve had shared, Tania had imagined this place highly populated. A sprawling city above their captured world. Yet so far, only machines, and very few at that.

There lay the problem with Eve’s data. It was old. Very old. Virtually anything could have happened here since the Builders fled, or even since their last attempt to retake their planet. How ironic it would be to come all this way only to find the Scipios, experts in virus design and manufacturing, had succumbed to some disease.

A new sound reached her amplified hearing. A high whir and then, beneath that, a low sustained rumble. She spun where she stood and froze. The giant door behind her had separated in a jigsaw pattern down the middle, and were rolling apart.

So much for the extinction event theory.

Four Scipios moved into the room. Once again Tania concealed herself in the grid of now-humming machinery, her suit illuminated by the twinkling indigo and ruby status displays. She chanced a glance at the approaching aliens, and her breath caught in her throat.

They were upright, but did not walk, instead moving in a sort of fluid hop-and-glide gait unlike anything Tania had ever seen. Perfectly normal, no doubt, for their limb structure and diminutive size, especially in this gravity. To her eye they resembled a chimpanzee crossed with a bat, complete with flappy winglike structures that connected their arms to their torsos. They would hop a meter into the air and then glide several forward, all effortlessly, as natural as humans walking along a promenade. They were dressed, after a fashion, in outfits of varying color, though all four had a large white band around the midsection. Some kind of utility belt, maybe, for there were pockets and other containers all around.

As the Scipios moved across the gigantic room toward the improvised barricade, they chattered to each other. Alien sounds, but unmistakable as language. Like a mixture of birdsong and the clicks and whistles a dolphin made. An instant later, to Tania’s surprise and delight, a transcription began to flow across the bottom portion of her visor. Automatic translation was nothing special—humans had been able to do it for centuries. What surprised her was that Eve knew the Scipio language well enough to program it into this suit.

An imperfect knowledge, in truth. Tania understood now the bracketed word error translated from the bar coding on the repair machine. It was a substitute for an unknown word. No great surprise, Eve’s knowledge of the Scipio tongue would be woefully out of date. Still, she felt grateful. The words told her much.

One was saying, “Examination. Reconfiguration. [error] to be of returned [error] status.”

“Copious agreement,” the other three said in unison.

Then the group fell silent, continuing their hop-glide march to the site of the incident.

She heard the whir and grating rumble of the door, now sliding closed. Tania slipped back to the main aisle and propelled herself toward it. No time to look through first. Caution lost out to her desire to leave, so she powered through the gap seconds before the door closed. Her momentum took her to a wall on the opposite side of a wide corridor. Bending her legs to absorb the impact of landing, Tania let herself fall back to the floor, dropping to a crouch and twisting left and right. With one arm curled protectively around her aura shard, she raised the other, ready to fire, sure she’d find the area cordoned off by Scipio police, curious Scipio onlookers lining up behind.

What Tania Sharma saw instead brought tears to her eyes.

Standing beside the door she’d just come through, backs against the wall, were two men. They both stared at her, mouths agape.

3

CARTHAGE

A vast unlit room stretched off in every direction, its ceiling supported by elegant pillars that resembled milky hourglasses. Pale spheres, one on the floor and the other above, which had somehow melted until they met in the middle. The floor was some kind of pitted metal, nearly black in color. It gleamed when it caught the wan light spilling in from the hole Skyler’s pod had made when it punched through from top to bottom. Above, the ceiling was similarly dark and also strangely elegant despite being more utilitarian, its span crisscrossed with tidy bundles of gently curved cabling and pipes whose purposes he could only guess. A temptation to start cutting those lines just to see what kind of damage it might cause to the Scipios faded as quickly as it had come to him. He had to remember now where he was. This world really belonged to the Creators; he had come to return it to them.

So Skyler pushed into the room, away from his crashed pod. The chamber seemed to have no end, no sides, no beginning. It stretched farther than the light, and its air was filled with the same swirling dusty particulate his entry pit had been. Other than the curvaceous ghostly pillars, the floor was entirely devoted to row after row of nondescript containers, vaguely and unsettlingly reminding him of sarcophagi standing upright. They were all identical, about four meters long, one wide, one tall, with hair-thin filaments connecting them to the conduits and pipes that lined the ceiling above. It resembled some of the data processing facilities he’d scavenged in back on Earth. And much like those abandoned places, this one seemed to be without power. There were no banks of blinking lights indicating electronic traffic, or even the oppressive hum of cooling gear. If this place was indeed a computer center, it was either abandoned or switched off. Of course, it was possible the place was working fine until he’d punched a hundred-meter-deep hole right through its heart.

“Or,” he whispered to himself, “it is a bloody crypt.”

He forced himself to look at all of it through the lens of what Eve had told them about this world. A once flourishing civilization, now held captive by the Scipios, who mostly lived on the space stations above. This world was like Earth had been just after the Builders came, most of it a wasteland where engineered viruses kept the population subdued. Only, their postapocalyptic state had lasted millennia. Earth had gotten off easy, in comparison.

Millennia.

The word echoed in Skyler’s mind. As he walked he looked—really looked—at the pristine surfaces around him. The metal floor, the pearlescent double-teardrop pillars, the containers—all practically gleamed under the wan light spilling in. This in stark contrast to the particulate in the air where he’d landed, which fell heavily enough to coat any floor in a matter of hours, much less years or centuries.

Which meant either this room had been sealed until his arrival, or it had been very, very well maintained. The latter implied a world far from the hellscape Skyler assumed they’d find.

The room seemed to have no end, and Skyler forced himself into a run. The desire to be out under the open sky and out of this tomb suddenly eclipsed all other concerns. He jogged for a long time, a sense of wondrous dread at the sheer size of the place growing with each step, until finally a wall came into view. The surface was smooth, entirely uniform, offering no hint of which way to go. He reached it and turned, at random, to the left, following the edge of the space until finally something doorlike appeared in the darkness.

A massive, almost zipperlike seam running five meters vertically up the wall.

He glanced around for a lever or switch. Nothing obvious presented itself. Skyler sighed. Perhaps this was some kind of vault, the only access being from the outside. He debated retracing his steps to the hole he’d made to get in, but a quick glance over his shoulder made him realize that the breach was either too far away now to be detectable, or the Scipio drones had sealed it off. Without that little patch of light spilling in, he had no way to find it.

“Fine,” he said to himself. “I made one hole, I can make another.”

He lifted one arm and fired at the zigzagging seam on the wall. He’d expected it to wither and melt under the intensity of the weapon, but what happened was decidedly more final. The energy lanced right through the barrier as if it were made of balsa wood. Fragments exploded into the space beyond, and on this side as well, pelting him and the ground around him. Skyler killed the beam and fumbled through the menus, dialing back the intensity to its lowest setting. This time he got what he’d wanted. A thin, almost surgical line of white-hot energy that required a few seconds in one spot before it could punch through the door or wall or whatever it was. In less than a minute he’d drawn an oval shape on the surface. Skyler stepped forward, kicked, and watched with satisfaction as the chunk fell away and landed with a dull thud on the floor beyond.

The area outside defied explanation. Part hallway, part stairs, the wide passage was tilted at a shallow angle, its floor resembling a wave pattern more than what Skyler would consider steps. The hall was curved as well. Part of a very wide, very large spiral, with doors just like those he’d come through spaced in even intervals on both the inside and outside walls.

Everything here was coated in dust. Creeping vines snaked their way along the surfaces, all black and gnarled. The sight of such decay filled him with a strange nostalgia. Suddenly he was back on Earth, creeping through the ruins of Brisbane or Taipei, Auckland or Phuket. If not for the strange rippled floor this could be any one of a dozen hallways he’d slogged through in the dead cities of Earth.

Go up, he told himself, and moved to his left, picking his way over the undulating surface and the root systems—roots of what, he could not imagine—that sought to reclaim the whole place back to nature. Particulate blew in lazy swirls down the passage, filling his field of view like ash. He glanced at the displays on the visor’s interior. The air mixture hadn’t changed, but there was a definite breeze here. Skyler amplified the exterior sounds, heard only his own cautious footfalls and the sigh of air pushing past. No more sirens, no hint of air processors or plumbing. None of the telltale signs of a technological civilization. A dead place, then. He felt sure of it. Which meant the breeze came from . . .?

He saw the opening before he could finish the thought. At the edge of his view of the curved hall, the space expanded into a larger room, one side of which was open to the elements. Leaves, or something like them, swirled in a conical eddy in the center of the room, like a wandering ghost searching for a way out. The sight reminded him of the first time he’d ever seen Ana, dancing in an abandoned courtyard, unaware he was watching. The memory sent a tingle down his spine. He swallowed the pain and regret that thinking of her always brought.

Skyler crept to the end of the hall and crouched in the shadows, watching. Other than the meandering cone of swirling dust and leaves, nothing moved. The far wall of the lobbylike chamber was made up of four massive slabs of filthy but clear material—glass, or something like it—which were attached to huge circular columns so that they could be rotated. They’d been open the last time anyone had actually been here, and left that way.

Beyond lay the ruins of several more buildings. Just shadows, really. It was dusk outside, the system’s one star already below the horizon, painting shades of dark red and purple between the dark gaps. Above, through the hazy swirls of the ash-filled air, he saw wisps of clouds and the faint but imposing clusters of hundreds of space stations beyond. Fiery objects—chunks of Eve’s wreckage, he had no doubt—streaked across the magnificent view, burning up well before they reached the ground. He’d made it, though. Maybe the others had, too.

With an effort he tore his gaze from the sight and focused on his immediate surroundings. He’d exited into something like a plaza. A long, flat space surrounded by structures of varying height, the tallest being perhaps fifty stories. The bottom floors of each were choked with climbing vines that made odd geometric patterns as they wormed along the existing grooves and panels of the manufactured walls, windows, and doors. But above, where the vines couldn’t reach, Skyler caught a glimpse of what had been. Even in this one tiny example of Creator society, their former greatness was evident. He felt like a caveman transported through time to Manhattan or Dubai. All around him were the towering examples of a highly advanced alien culture that prided itself on architecture. No two buildings were alike, and yet they all meshed together as if no one piece had been designed without consideration of the whole. Their profiles curved and intertwined. Soaring bridges connected their highest levels, writ in graceful arcs. Here there were pillars and what must be classical elements, while there stood a monolith of severe edges and cleaved sublevels. And yet it all worked. Rather, once worked, thought Skyler, it’s all dead now.

No lights. No sound but the wind. Not a single face staring down at him from one of those soaring balconies.

No roads, either, Skyler noted. None that he could see.

He walked now, keeping to the shadows, deciding to first circumnavigate the building he’d exited, hoping to find somewhere that offered a better view of the surrounding landscape. If not, he’d go back to the spiral, and climb as far as it would take him, until he found a roof.

A noise made him stop. He ducked behind a triangular pillar and went to one knee on instinct, eyes scanning the vine-choked entryways all around him.

It had been a low grunt. And a crackling sound. He strained his ears, and realized he could let the suit do that for him. Skyler ramped the audio gain to maximum.

“Gnngh,” a familiar voice grunted, hazy and yet very close. “Anyone there?”

“Tim?” Skyler asked, baffled.

Only then did he realize it was the comm. It showed a link now, where none had been before. “Tim,” he said with more certainty. “Tim, it’s Skyler. Where are you?”

“I don’t . . . It’s dark. I don’t know.”

“Activate your headlamp.”

Silence stretched. Then, “Some kind of machine room. I can’t really . . . I don’t know what it is.”

“Are any of the others with you?”

“No,” he said.

“Is there gravity where you are?”

“Huh?”

“Gravity, Tim.”

The scientist was likely in shock, and perhaps injured. Skyler took a breath and tried again. “I’m on the planet. Carthage. I’m trying to determine if you’re here or—”

“There’s very little,” Tim said. “Gravity, I mean. I just jumped and went about two meters up.”

Skyler jumped himself and barely managed one. “You must be on one of the orbitals.”

“Where’s Eve?”

“Gone,” Skyler said. “Destroyed, I think. We’re on our own now.”

The other man went quiet. No doubt his mind churned through the same thoughts Skyler’s had. “Tim, we have to—”

“Over here,” Tim said.

“What?”

No reply.

“I’ll be okay,” Tim said, after several seconds.

“Uh, good. That’s good. Now listen, we—”

But Tim interrupted again. As if he were talking to himself. Or someone else.

“I’ll follow you? Nothing. My long range is out, too. Haven’t heard from anyone.”

Skyler stood there, dumbfounded, then angry. “Tim, are you still receiving me? What the hell are you talking about?”

No reply. Not to Skyler, at least. Tim’s conversation went on. He was uninjured. He agreed the air appeared to be breathable, but felt they shouldn’t risk it. His pod was also stocked with some supplies—water, food, ammo—and also had a small version of an aura shard.

“Tim,” Skyler tried again, asserting as much authority as he could. “Who the fuck are you talking to? Please respond!”

The man went on. It wasn’t hard to imagine that Skyler’s transmissions weren’t actually reaching him, but the fact remained that Tim had specifically said to whomever he spoke, Nothing. My long range is out, too. And, worse, Haven’t heard from anyone.

“Tania?” Skyler tried. “Prumble? Sam? Anyone?”

Tim kept talking, then the conversation went quiet as he and his companion embarked on a plan to “find the others.”

Skyler glanced at his visor’s display. The comm still showed a link to the bastard. “God fucking dammit, Tim, if you can hear me you’d better explain yourself.”

Still, he did not reply. He continued his other conversation, referring to his unseen companion as “Prumble” at one point.

Well, at least there’s that, Skyler thought. The big man had made it, after all. If only he could talk to him. No amount of fiddling with the comm interface would allow him to do anything other than talk to Tim, however.

Skyler continued his circuit of the building, but his attention was split between Tim’s chatter and his own frustrated navigation of the visor’s menu system. He must have accidentally locked himself into a private channel with Tim. Maybe during those hazy moments after the crash. And Tim evidently had taken a nasty knock on the head, because he clearly thought his conversation with Skyler hadn’t happened.

Yet the comm seemed in order. Everything did. Just as he’d left it.

No, wait. Eve warned me of this. In the fog of his arrival he’d forgotten, but the memory rushed back now. She’d said only one of the crew would be able to communicate with everyone else. “A necessary precaution,” she’d called it, her logic inscrutable, as always. Whatever the reason, she’d evidently given Tim the role of bridge between Skyler and the others, and Tim wasn’t playing along.

He stopped dead. He’d almost walked right into them.

Ahead, a veritable fleet of small drones was clustered around the entry wound his arrival had punched through the bottom four floors of the building. The Scipio machines—perhaps vehicles, he couldn’t be sure—were all turned in toward the gaping hole, like a rescue team after an earthquake. Or, perhaps, like a squad of police investigating a bombing. Skyler had the presence of mind to flatten himself against the wall and take two slow steps backward. Shielded from view by the curving wall, he leaned out and took in the scene.

The Scipios had arrived in four large aircraft. Bulky things that resembled mechanical whales, their design likely guided by the atmosphere and gravity of Carthage. They were parked in a half-circle some distance off from the impact zone, their cavernous bellies exposed by large ramps that opened from the sides rather than the back, as the Melville had.

Smaller dronelike pods swarmed around the place where Skyler’s pod had met the building. As he watched, one ducked inside and extended those climbing tentacles he’d seen, suspending itself over the opening. The machine or vehicle trembled slightly, and then puffed a glowing cloud of shiny particulate into the space. The blue-white material coated what little he could see of the interior walls of the pit his escape pod had dug.