Click to enlarge.

The Escape

By

Richard Lee Byers

            Like every member of her boisterous race Ruan had ever met, the Damarian had blue skin, towered over the average human being, and carried several weapons about her person. Waving her mug of greenish vegetable brew, she said, “I bet it’s all mating rituals.”

            The comment drew a general laugh from the off-worlders gathered in the bar. The establishment had a holo-system, but it only drew from a dozen of the thousands of channels extant on the Fuerst home world. Possibly because the Ancients considered the rest of the programming too sophisticated for younger races to appreciate.

            “Echo could find out for us,” Ruan said, whereupon his shipmate turned in her EVA suit and regarded him with her button eyes.

            The Starthane people consisted of three allied species: Humans, Canites, and Cetaceans. Echo was one of the latter and needed the suit with its six spindly legs to move around on dry land. Wearing it, she looked something like a big silver locust.

            “You mean hack in?” the Damarian said. “I doubt it.” Other races made fun of the Fuerst for their lofty, patronizing ways, but they still respected Ancient technology.

            Ruan keyed his data bracelet and held up the display for everyone to see. “I’ve got 18,000 UVU’s that say she can. Who wants in?”

            When everyone had placed their bet, and the barman had been assured the gamblers would pay for any damage to his equipment, Echo went to work via the cyber gear inside her suit. The several holo displays floating in the air flickered on and off as she sought to open up the system.

            His short fur a foxy red, Maxie approached for a closer look at Echo, not that there was any overt activity to see, and sniffed the air in her vicinity. “Are you sure about this?” the Canite whispered. “18 grand is our whole stake.”

            Ruan smiled. “It’s Echo. She’s got this.”

            The holo views stabilized, and when they did, they showed something other than the usual years-old slapstick comedy or sporting event imported for the entertainment of off-worlders. Looking like a steel turtle shell bristling with spikes, a warship hung in space. One of its plasma cannons pivoted on its mount toward the camera that was evidently surveying it, and the image exploded into static.

            After a moment, a chart of a solar system took its place, with circles around the star representing planetary orbits and dots in the circles indicating the current positions of the planets. Little triangles, presumably the ships in an armada, were converging on the fourth world out.

            Wagers forgotten, everyone stared at the displays. “That’s this system,” said a Kylon with purple leaves and ridged bark framing her humanoid features.

            “And that was a Corlis warship,” Ruan said. “Is this real?”

            “I think so,” Echo said, her translator conveying a hint of the staccato chitter that was her natural way of speaking. “I tapped into some sort of emergency alert broadcast.”

            “And the Fuerst didn’t bother to alert us,” Maxie growled. Usually, he was affable to a fault, but any threat to his shipmates brought out anger.

            “I have to get to my ship!” the Kylon wailed, and that triggered a general stampede for the exit.

            The Corlis were the relentless foes of the Fuerst. It was an enmity that stretched back millennia and had only grown more bitter after the Ancients triggered a weapon that turned their enemies into bodiless phantoms. The measure was supposed to neutralize the Corlis once and for all, but they’d found ways to continue fighting.

            In fact, if their fleet was already this close to the Fuerst home world, it could only mean they’d won a decisive battle and smashed the defenses intended to keep them away. Now, they’d rain down genocidal destruction from the sky, and woe to anyone who hadn’t managed to escape the planet beforehand, non-Fuerst traders and travelers included.

            Once the three Starthanes shoved clear of the press in the doorway, the spires of the city rose around them. Most were slender ivory structures adorned with golden filigree and stained glass. The nearest had been built in accordance with the same elegant aesthetic, but off-worlders had defaced the sector set aside for them with signs, murals, and graffiti.

            Almost everyone in sight was either already standing on the octagonal floor of the transit station or rushing in that direction. Ruan, however, balked.

            Fuerst transportation relied on teleportation, or “Spacefolding”, as they called it. An Academy-educated Fleet officer before he left the service to haul cargo, Ruan understood the hypothesis that every such occurrence damaged the fabric of spacetime itself, a notion the Ancients pooh-poohed as they did most every idea proposed by another species when it differed from one of their own.

            “I know you don’t approve of Spacefolding,” Echo clicked, stumbling as someone jostled her, “but this is an emergency.”

            She was right. To reach the spaceport in the least amount of time, they needed the transport system. The Starthanes pushed forward, Maxie baring his fangs at an Android who tried to shove in front of them, and then Ruan said, “Wait.”

            The station was out of service. The people standing on the octagon were telling it where they wanted to go, but nobody was vanishing.

            “Is it sabotage?” Maxie asked. His wet black nose sniffed repeatedly as if he hoped by that means to detect a saboteur. “Are the Corlis here already?”

            Ruan dismissed the question with a shake of his head. “All that matters is how do we get to the ship now?”

            The Fuerst had been Spacefolding for so many centuries that it verged on being their entire transportation system. The city did have streets, mostly boulevards and promenades lined with shade trees and flowerbeds, but few major thoroughfares that would facilitate travel from sector to sector at speed and few swift motorized vehicles to traverse them.

            Reversing course, the Starthanes fought the tide of frightened off-worlders struggling toward the already over-crowded platform even though the teleporter manifestly wasn’t working. Taking the lead, Maxie snarled, lunged, and snapped, and people flinched out of his way. Ruan wracked his brain in an effort to think of another way to reach his destination.

            After a moment, something came to him. “This way!” he said.

            Breaking free of the press, he led his companions to a park with yellow-leaved trees and amber grass, portions of the space filled with a climbing wall, swimming pool, and other outdoor amusements the Fuerst hoped off-worlder guests would enjoy. Some diversions Ruan didn’t even recognize. Others, like the seesaws, belonged in a children’s playground and were another indication of the Fuerst’s private estimation of younger races.

            The Starthanes made their way to several hoverbikes built to skim inches above the ground on a cushion of null-grav and air. Ruan turned to Echo. “Will these work?”

            She hesitated for a second as her suit’s tech interfaced with the vehicles. “They’re programmed to not go beyond the borders of the park. I’ll have to fix that.”

            “Do it, then.” Like hers, the new voice was electronic, the recourse of a being whose anatomy didn’t provide for anything approximating humanoid speech.

            Ruan pivoted. Six Gundarians were scuttling toward him, Echo, and Maxie. Built something like man-sized spiders, the Gundarians had bodies that bent mid-cephalothorax, allowing them to hold their faces high and use their front four limbs for manipulation instead of ambulation. Two were taking advantage of that latter capability to grip concussion pistols in their pincers.

            Maxie snarled. Ruan raised his hand to tell the Canite to stop and tried a smile instead, although there was no telling if the Gundarians were sufficiently familiar with Humans to understand what the expression was meant to convey. “Great minds think alike,” he said.

            “Move away from the bikes,” said the spidery alien in the lead. “The fish, too. From what we saw in the bar, she doesn’t need to touch them to reprogram them.”

            “We got here first,” Ruan said, “but we’re willing to share. Three for us, three for you.”

            “But there are six of us,” the spider creature said.

            “Who need me to do the reprogramming,” Echo said.

            “Which you will if you don’t want us to shoot you and your friends.”

            “All right,” Echo said. The Starthanes moved back, and the Gundarians mounted the bikes. The vehicles were made for humanoid frames, not arachnoid ones, but they managed to perch clumsily atop them. “It’s done, damn you. Now leave us alone.”

            “Sorry about this,” the Gundarian leader said, “but we want to survive, too.” He and his companions sped off toward the edge of the park.

            Ruan assumed the bikes had originally been programmed to come to a gentle stop as they neared the perimeter. But, thanks to Echo’s tampering, that wasn’t what happened. They slammed on the brakes at the last possible instant, and, caught by surprise, the Gundarians flew tumbling off the seats.

            “Did you hear how I said, ‘Damn you,’ all angry-like?” Echo chittered.

            “That really sold it,” Ruan said. “Now get them!”

            He and his friends rushed the Gundarians. A couple spiders lay motionless, but the others were scrambling to their feet.

            Ruan sprinted to scoop up one of the fallen concussion pistols before any of the arachnids could recover it. He didn’t quite make it. He and a Gundarian ended up facing one another over a weapon where it lay in the amber grass.

            Back in the Academy, Ruan had received high marks in unarmed combat. He hoped he wasn’t too rusty.

            The Gundarian’s arms stabbed and lashed at him. The pincers on the ends opened and closed as they sought to grab, crush, and cut. Ruan blocked, dodged, blocked again, then realized the alien was only attacking with three of its upper limbs. The fourth was reaching for the pistol.

            Ruan couldn’t just dive for the weapon with the non-stop attacks whipping and jabbing through the space above it. Instead, he sidestepped, grabbed one of the Gundarian’s arms, and applied pressure to one of the limb’s three joints, bending it backwards. The arm broke with a chitinous crunch, and creature faltered in pain.

            Ruan moved in and snap-kicked the creature in the flank at a point where it looked like its shell might be thin. The impact knocked it staggering back, and now, he judged, he had his opportunity to grab the pistol.

            As he reached, though, he sensed motion on the right. He looked around, and a second Gundarian was about to close its pincers around his neck. Bellowing, he knocked the attacking limb away and snatched up the gun. He fumbled for an instant trying to grip a weapon not fashioned for a humanoid hand, and thrust the business end at the creature’s circle of compound eyes. The Gundarian froze.

            “Get back!” Ruan panted, and when the spidery alien obeyed, he glanced around, making sure its comrade with the broken arm wasn’t moving to attack him anew. Since it wasn’t, he was able to survey the rest of the fight.

            Maxie wasn’t a trained martial artist like Ruan, but he was fast, agile, and, when obliged to fight, displayed a reckless ferocity that generally served him well. He was holding his own as he and an adversary struggled for possession of the other pistol.

            Echo was in trouble, though. She could be a terror in water, but brawling on land was difficult. Her Gundarian foe had her supine and was trying to pry open one of the seams in the EVA suit. The suit’s six legs and single tentacle kicked and whipped but without doing her assailant any perceptible harm.

            Ruan fired the concussion pistol. The invisible ray thudded into the ground beside Echo and her opponent and spattered them both with dirt. “Get away from her,” Ruan shouted, “or the next one won’t be a warning shot!”

            The Gundarian backed away, and when Ruan turned his attention on Maxie’s foe, that creature likewise abandoned the fight, letting Maxie grab the remaining pistol. Fangs still bared, he looked like he wanted to use it, too, but didn’t.

            “Alright,” Ruan told Echo, “now fix it so three bikes can really leave the park.”

            “You said we could have the other three,” a Gundarian said.

            “Yeah, that was before.”

            When she clambered atop a hoverbike, Echo looked as awkward as the spiders had, but she seemed to think she could ride it without crashing or falling off, and Ruan could only hope she was right. He gave his shipmates a nod and they set off.