Alien Velocity (4 page)

“What was he saying? Nex…next…nexus? I’ve never seen anything like it.” Charlie opened his eyes but kept them focused on the floor.

The orange light had enveloped the
Bluebird.

“Jesus, nothing can be that bright, can it? Think, damn it. A comet? No way—they’d have seen it coming. An explosion…one of those super-freighters? The space dock itself? Nah, there’s no oxygen in space for a fire—the explosion wouldn’t burn for so long, and definitely not at this intensity. What then?”

He spun to face the tail. A loud crackling spat out from the RAM propulsion unit. As well as blinding orange outside, he saw brilliant purple light in the little grid. The track began to cycle on its own. Charlie kept pace with it for a few seconds, shouting, “Stop! Computer, I said stop! What the hell’s the matter with you?” He pressed the emergency shutdown button on his wristwatch but nothing happened. “Can anyone hear me?” he yelled into the com-link. “I need you to shut the
Bluebird
down now!”

No response.

Purple light flooded the vessel. Deafening thunder rolled behind him, from the RAM unit. His teeth almost rattled out of his mouth as the shockwave hurled him, like a cricket ball, into a heavy midair spin. He couldn’t even wrap his lips round the word
wow,
not while time and space distorted into a twisting tunnel, stretching him lengthways inside it. Whizzing through the wormhole, he felt barely connected, elastic, as though he were a slinky suspended from a great height.

It was kind of liberating.

He blinked his eyes open. He felt as though he should still be running, but he was flat on his back. Apoplexy. No aches or pains save a little heartburn and the slightly giddy, sickening chime of his inner ear wheeling to one side when he tried to get up. Cockeyed equilibrium? What could that mean? How long had the bizarre sensation—his out-of-body experience—lasted?

A plethora of stars filled both windows. Not a single recognisable constellation remained. So clustered together were the points of light, Charlie quickly found he could discern any shape he wanted. He could make the night sky feel like home, even though he knew this was not remotely the same part of the galaxy. A celestial Rorschach? How far had he travelled? The longer he stared and imagined, the farther from Earth it appeared, the closer to home he felt.

Weird. He wasn’t frightened at all. At first he hypothesised that the wormhole had damaged that part of his perception, or his brain was subtly releasing endorphins to pre-empt despair. After an hour of sitting cross-legged, staring at the alien heavens and, slightly north of west, a pale orange planetoid that appeared to be the hub of much interstellar commotion, he concluded he was going to die out here. He swallowed the notion far too easily for his liking—just a slight twinge of the glands, an ache of regret on a par with the onset of the mumps.

“So this is how I go out?” He bowed his head and sighed. “The fastest runner in the world…going nowhere…slowly.” There wouldn’t be a single camera to capture his final moments, nor a microphone to hear his farewell. “That shouldn’t matter.” Then he scoffed. Everything electronic was still switched on. “But when the farewell is all that is, it matters.”

A few litres of Lucozade and blackcurrant juice wouldn’t last long but it would have to. Hmm, no food of any kind whatsoever. Oxygen? Fourteen hours’ worth, according to the computer. He shivered. Fourteen hours to hate himself for how he’d left his beautiful Sorcha—alone, bitter, wondering how he really felt about her. Oh God, if only he’d told her. If only he’d stopped “chasing ghosts,” as she’d put it, long enough to enjoy their life together in Cusco. A life any man would kill to have.

Why do I have to feel this
now,
when it’s too late to change it?

The urge to run out of the rear hatch almost got the better of him. He knelt instead, his forearms flat on the windowsill, his chin resting on his interlocked fingers while he stared out at the planetoid.

So far away.

A shadow shaped like a cauliflower covered a large portion of the northern hemisphere, while the rest was pale amber and yellow, here and there cotton-budded with cloud. There seemed to be a lot of space debris floating in orbit—tiny, dark shapes silhouetted over the coloured sphere, or brighter objects reflecting light from the system’s four faraway suns, from much higher orbits. He reckoned the objects could be tiny moons and the planet bigger than he’d supposed. Or they could just be random chunks of space garbage trapped in the gravitational pull.

The more he studied them, the less sure he was. For one thing, not all of them reappeared after each orbit, and of those that did, few seemed to be locked in a precise orbital pattern. For instance, one would disappear to the dark side of the planet at the equator, having followed that latitude steadily, only to reappear over the equivalent of the Tropic of Cancer. Another shot around much faster than any of the others before slowing for one orbit then disappearing completely. Charlie thought they might be colliding with something, or encountering a magnetic anomaly, on the far side. Things were not sequential. There was no clear chain of evidence. Not unless…

“They’re being piloted?” He attached the idea to his own predicament. “I was brought here? And I’m not the only one?”

He closed his eyes to backtrack the freak occurrences in his mind, arriving at the only planet anywhere in sight, at the other end of a wormhole, which had suddenly appeared from nowhere to whisk him away from Earth orbit—him—the fastest RAM-runner in the world.

It all made perfect sense and yet no sense. Why the hell would anyone go to all that trouble? To make contact perhaps? But what for? If they could control wormholes, why would they give a stuff about Earth?
We’re still taking nursery steps in space. Why me?
Why couldn’t it just be a freak, shit-happens cosmological phenomenon?
Yeah, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s more like it. Christ, talk about delusions of grandeur! I was brought here, that’s got to be the dumbest thing I’ve ever—

His hairline tingled when a quick-moving shadow passed over the
Bluebird
. He glanced up. A silent, V-shaped convoy of spacecraft glided toward the planet. They couldn’t have been more than a few kilometres away. He rose to his feet and gawped. The alien ships were long, narrow, each one a series of light-grey pyramids from bow to stern. Charlie thought they resembled giant Toblerone bars, yet they moved with such grace that he couldn’t help but stare after them until the convoy was no bigger than a flock of seabirds.

He swallowed and had to measure his breaths. Suddenly the
Bluebird
seemed alive again—his gorgeous, elegant
Bluebird
—as though she were somehow related to this extraordinary species of fliers.

“Sweetheart, did you see that? I don’t even know if there’s a name… They passed right by!”

Tiptoeing forward, he let the ramifications run rousing laps of his mind. The weight of his predicament seeped back to his heels and he found himself in the jog spot again, firmly in the grip of gravity. There was more to this planetoid than met the eye. The dark, orbiting objects really were other vessels? He might very well have been brought here for a reason. Whatever had happened with the wormhole was irrelevant, the extraordinariness of it all, unimportant. He knew what he had to do. It was as single-minded as his orbital racing had been, and certainly more difficult.

The
Bluebird
had to follow the alien convoy to the planet. Nothing else mattered, if he wanted to stay alive.

Breathless, he powered up the RAM propulsion at the tail, then plotted and keyed in an emergency course. He’d never done it before. In simulation, yes, but never for real. In his eight years of RAM-running, he’d never encountered even a slight mishap in orbit trajectory or otherwise.

“Well I think this qualifies.”

After praying he hadn’t screwed up the calculations, Charlie cleared his throat and fixed his glare on the tiny light-grey convoy inching over the amber planet. He had some catching up to do.

Maybe the farewell isn’t all that is, not yet.

His jaw clenched while he warmed up on the jog spot. In less than a minute, he was running at his most rhythmic and relaxed in years. He didn’t know why. Surely this was the last position from which one would expect to find grace. Survival? Then he realised why, and the whole debacle unravelled, shining at him from all sides.

He was running from death.

For the first time in his life, Charlie Thorpe-Campbell was the underdog.

* * *

The rest of the planetoid appeared so barren, so inhospitable. He course-corrected directly for the shadowy cauliflower covering the northern pole and a large area of the northern hemisphere. He didn’t want to enter the planet’s atmosphere too quickly. He might need to make subtle adjustments to pilot the
Bluebird
into a safe landing, so he stopped running at around 220 rpm. It was an all-out gamble, of course. Air, gravity, the density of the atmosphere, sustainable supplies of food and water, friendly natives or visitors—all were under chance’s jurisdiction. Yet there was no alternative. Charlie couldn’t shake the idea of his arrival at this deep-space terminus being designated. Of all the infinite possible destinations at the other end of a random wormhole, it was incredibly unlikely one would spit him out so near to so many other vessels in such proximity to this isolated planet.

Where was this? If he had been brought here deliberately—why?

The shapes of spacecraft ranged from cylinders and cubes to mimetic, swan-necked stingrays morphing dazzlingly over the orange surface. The traffic was busy in orbit. What did the occupants look like? What strange technologies were behind the propulsion of their vessels? What methods of communication did they use? How pissed would they be at being yanked away from their business? Were they armed? What would they make of him face to face, and what could they do to get him back home? It occurred to him that, to them, he was an alien here. They’d likely be thinking,
Who or what the hell is driving this crude metal heap that runs on leg power and can’t even steer worth a damn?

Charlie cringed when he pictured a hamster on an exercise wheel. That was him in the
Bluebird
. When the aliens found out, would they keep him in a cage to perform tricks for millions of intergalactic visitors paying three star credits a pop? He snorted a fake laugh and tried to blank out the traffic.

The closer he got to the dark cauliflower, the more certain he was that some sort of a gigantic forest covered the northern hemisphere. Smart call number one. He grinned as the first conical tips of dark blue vegetation shot by outside the window. Then he realised where this was.

“Wait a minute.”

Still in the upper atmosphere! The
Bluebird
’s nose now had an indigo corona. It was clearly entering a light atmospheric shield over the planet. So, what were plants doing this high? He was miles from the ground, yet here they were, extraordinary trees reaching so tenaciously for sunlight they almost braved space itself. Charlie chewed his lip. If this was what the vegetables had achieved, what about the rest of the world?

The
Bluebird
sliced through the atmosphere with little more than a shimmy. It nosedived through the citrus sky. Charlie’s gaze grappled with the planet’s surface. Was it a mile away? Fifty miles? He couldn’t tell. There was nothing below for him to recognise, nothing against which to gauge the relative size and distance of the contours. Directly beneath, scrawled purple lines and a number of pale yellow splodges separated the smooth undulations—hills of deep orange bordering the sky-scraping tree. He braced himself at the keypad, ready to switch on the emergency brake thrusters. Just before setting her down, he would need to buck her to the horizontal to avoid a disastrous nose landing. He aimed just short of one of the yellow splodges. This was so he could pick the softest terrain—orange or yellow—and still have enough room to land on either.

Myopia. For all Charlie knew, that was the name of the planet, for that was all he could see, a breathless descent through limbo. Yellow or orange? Still too far to tell. His eyes ached and blurred through his determination to blink sparingly. He had to rub them. When he next looked ahead…glimmers lit the purple lines. Now!

He felt sure he had spotted moving liquid, which meant he was nearing ground level. The emergency brakes kicked in. The impact wrenched him forward. If the artificial gravity field hadn’t automatically spiked to hold him suspended in its grip—a safety protocol—Charlie would have smashed into the nose window at a fatal velocity. Instead, he felt the grind of the thrusters then an invisible, stomach-squeezing vise.

He could hardly breathe. The keypad was now out of his reach. Would the
Bluebird
slow down in time for the gravity to loosen him? Still too fast! Christ! The purple sliver was indeed a river of some kind, and the orange a range of rocky hills.

“Crap!”

It had to be the yellow. If nothing else, it appeared flat enough to land on. Failing that, the purple river would do. Anything except the piercing orange rocks he was headed for. Christ, the brakes were taking forever. They’d been designed for the vacuum of space, but even so. Moving even a limb in the gravity vise proved hellishly difficult. At least it had braced him for the crash. The orange rocks were now the size of work sheds. He knew he would not slow down in time. The impact would dash the
Bluebird
to bits. A chill shot through him.

At around five hundred feet, he remembered his wristwatch. Automatic shutdown!
Beep.
The moment he pressed it, everything died—the gravity revolver, the brakes, the propeller—everything but him. He tumbled toward the nose. After regaining his feet, he frantically pulled himself up the window ledge to the keypad. He pressed the button on his wristwatch to restart the system. Three, two, one…

System Ready
appeared on the screen. He planted his forefinger on the key for Hull Nose Thruster then pressed his eyes shut. A split second in freefall stretched into infinity. He prayed the
Bluebird
had righted herself in time.

The ship’s rear jolted upright. The whole vessel seemed to spin on its end before slapping down, inverted, into a cauldron of oily purple. He didn’t know which way was up. Frothy liquid hissed through a gash in the rear, above the RAM unit. He thought about trying to plug it then realised where he was.

Underwater. How deep?

He raced to the rear access panel, yanked the safety lever through one-eighty degrees then smashed his fist against the button to release the explosive bolt hinges.

Thud!
A violet cascade swept the door aside. Panicked, Charlie kept his grasp on the handles over the hatchway. The inrushing water tossed him to the ceiling. He held his breath. In seconds, the
Bluebird
had completely flooded. The water was warm. It stung his eyes. Probably not drinkable, so he needed to take the Lucozade and blackcurrant—without them, he’d be dead in a few days. He wrenched open the ceiling panel and removed one of the plastic drink containers. It was heavy, so he could only carry one, and this one had more liquid in. Clutching it to his chest, he exhaled a few bubbles and followed the air. He kicked up until he heard a muffled scrape above. At once he felt the weight lift then pour from his head and shoulders. It was cooler up here. He sucked in a massive breath—strange and heady air, but it didn’t strangle him, rather it spread crisply inside, revitalising him.
Thank you, God.
He inhaled it gluttonously, then rubbed his eyes, spitting the metallic taste of this purple water through flaky lips. It streamed with mucus from his nose. He coughed. His sinuses burned.