Alien Velocity Read online

  Seven or eight shimmies later, the voice on the com-link announced, “Bluebird, RAM booster to ignite in ten, nine, eight…” Charlie touched his toes then rose to take a deep breath. The butterflies roused at “four, three, two, one…commence.”

  His ears popped when the artificial gravity spiked, holding him in place in an invisible vise as the rear booster drove the Bluebird forward. He glimpsed the young lad’s orange runner ahead to his right but instantly turned away. The gravity’s grip loosened and, for a few moments, he felt as light and soft as an eiderdown pillow.

  “Right, here we go.” His first step almost lost him his balance. Crouching low to steady himself, he thumped the cyclic conveyer with an angry fist, but quickly apologised by kissing the ends of his fingers and touching the same spot. No need to test providence so early. Within two dozen strides he had his rhythm—that veteran metronomic timing newscasts often joked was more accurate than the British Admiralty clock in Greenwich. No more than a steady warm-up, his early pace would probably put him near the back of the field after his first orbit but no one ever won a race in the virgin lap.

  On the other hand, it might be best not to dawdle. How fast were some of these new guys? He hated letting anything invade his private keep, but the simple fact remained that Charlie was thirty-three. His physical peak was behind him, and whatever cute aphorism he might trot out for the public, being over the hill was never an advantage. Not in RAM-running.

  But thirty-three wasn’t that old. He was still the fastest in this field. He was Charlie Thorpe-Campbell, for chrissakes.

  The thud, thud of his trainers on the cyclic conveyer overpowered the whir and crackle of the RAM propeller at the rear. Like his running, the propulsion system was both simple and formidable. The track’s motion rotated the rear propeller, infusing each blade or shaft with psammeticum energy. Like the wheel of a tramp steamer through water, these in turn would churn the localised antimatter created by a Pei-McMillan field just behind the propeller. Psammeticum being rare, and also the only energy to remain constant across the matter-antimatter barrier, it was an incredibly expensive engine to operate. Fortunate then, that RAM-running, in terms of popularity, superseded every sport in human history. It wasn’t just the runners’ celebrity status or the extraterrestrial nature of the race, or even the mind-boggling speeds. The real excitement existed in seeing mankind and technology push the envelope further than ever before. RAM-running operated at the limits of man’s endurance. No question. These were the fastest humans who had ever lived. Some said if Hermes were to descend from Mount Olympus and challenge the world to a foot race, he would go by the name of Charlie Thorpe-Campbell. It was that thrill of watching gods race their chariots, and betting on the outcome, that had kept the sport in the heavens for decades. No matter what happened elsewhere, there would always be RAM-running.

  * * *

  Charlie scratched an itch on his forearm as the computer announced, “Lap one—fifteenth position.” He could check his lap time and the virtual map of his competitors’ positions on the monitor, but he preferred not to. Not at this early stage. Pacing was the key, the transference of energy…from him to the cyclic conveyer to the antimatter propeller. Racing in space was all about acceleration. The more steps he took, the higher his top speed would become. If he suddenly stopped for a rest, the Bluebird would not slow down. She would maintain a constant speed. The vacuum of space offered no resistance. It therefore became a question of velocity. Whoever could push it the highest, for the farthest, would win.

  He forgot all about the micro-cameras dotted about the interior, scrutinizing his every move. It was moot now anyway. The world knew his anatomy and his peccadilloes by heart. He had nothing new to show them, nothing to hide from them.

  The memory of the metal stud bouncing inside his dad’s Bluebird stung his rhythm. He pursed his lips and quickened his pace. The blue and white of Earth spun like a whirligig in the corner of his left eye.

  * * *

  “Lap four—ninth position.”

  Head down, up tempo. Existence no longer occurred in heartbeats but in the rubbery rhythm, the tit for tat of breathing out and in on the verge of asphyxiation. Christ! He’d pushed it sooner than he’d planned. Plenty of laps to go yet before the grand finale, but something had his heels. Slowing at all now seemed unconscionable. The others had smelled his blood and were closing in. In a panic, he glanced at the monitor display. Crap. Still ninth. Crap. Early days, but it sure didn’t feel like it. His throat tightened. His calves hardened like wet concrete.

  “To hell with this!”

  He drifted backward on the track. Smoothness filled his brain as he decelerated to a walk. By the time he grabbed his towel and sucked in a few mouthfuls of Lucozade from the flexi-straw, the panic had passed.

  “All right, idiot, time to regroup.” The cool air refreshed him while his breathing wound down. “It’s all in your mind. You can beat this. Just do what you always do—run the bitch into the ground, and focus on the track under your feet. She’s the Bluebird, but you’re the engine driving her. Forget everything else. This is what you were both built for. This is it. Dad’s watching.”

  For a few moments, all was blue—the side panels and the ceiling and the Pacific Ocean filling the left window. He reached the jog spot and immediately restarted his warm-up cycle.

  “Lap seven—fourteenth position.”

  His eyes widened against his furrowed brow until they ached—riveted and focused. Thump, thump. The cyclic conveyer adapted to his quickening steps in kind. Much easier, automatic breaths now kept his stamina-sucking adrenaline about his shoulders and away from his legs. Faster and faster and…

  Now! He pressed a small green button on his wristwatch. The track ahead quickly curled up and retracted toward him, segment by segment, with a series of metallic claps and clicks. This shortening of the conveyor precipitated a shift in the angle of the gravity revolver. The track folded itself up until it was a smooth curvature, from floor to ceiling, directly in front of him. When he stepped onto the curve, the gravity field shifted with him, rotating slowly until he could jog horizontally.

  His stomach felt a twist and a twinge, nothing more, as the poles flipped. Soon he found himself running upside down, his weight just the same as a minute ago. Only the speed of the track had changed. With the cyclic conveyer folded, it had now shortened by a third, which meant the same running pace would rotate it that much quicker. Conversely, it felt like running uphill, and required far more effort to keep said pace. RAM physics in action. While the track’s full cycle mitigated the resistance of the Pei-McMillan field, this shortened circuit, with its higher propulsion rate, bore the brunt of that resistance. Hence Charlie had to run harder. A distinct advantage could be gained, though, if he managed to keep a steady rpm on this shorter track. The energy buildup transferred through the psammeticum propellers and ratcheted the antimatter output up several notches. It was all about acceleration, and this was the steepest, toughest curve.

  Charlie gritted his teeth and focused on the RAM propulsion unit at the Bluebird’ s tail. Silver aluminium casing, four feet wide, five high. Through a small elliptical grid he watched the purple light created by psammeticum energy crossing through the Pei-McMillan field. Beautiful. Crucial. The more intense it grew, the more it crackled, the more energy he was creating. Cyclic conveyer coolant wafted through his hair. Upside down? It might be showy, but the fresh perspective always did wonders for his resolve. The crowd would be going nuts. Forget ’em. The only things that mattered were the whir of the track, the RAM crackle and the thump, thump of his trainers driving him on to infinity. No finishing line. Only speed mattered.

  Thump, thump.

  Lactic acid tore his left shoulder to shreds. He slackened for a minute, long enough to massage the pain, discover his second wind, and hated himself for letting the purple light wane even a single watt.

  “This time—to the death.”

  A one-way trip. He kicked into
a punishing rhythm. The roar of his gasps drowned out the computer’s lap update. His next was the gravest orbit of his life. Charlie knew that if he didn’t make this a superhuman effort, he would probably fail. The inversion was usually a runner’s last throw of the dice—digging in for a spectacular dash to the finish. Charlie had inverted very early, and he had spared no effort for the final laps.

  * * *

  Metallic shapes whooshed by on either side. One or two reflected the sun dazzlingly, like flares through a camera lens. He had to be lapping people, but whom? How many? Was he in pole? If so, how far ahead was he? He didn’t even know how many laps he’d spent inverted. The reserves of energy he’d summoned had been staggering.

  He was spent. His heart thrashed like a whale floundering on coral. The thuds pulsed through his arms and rang through his brain. He staggered sideways for a moment, almost blacked out, before he slowed to a walk and, finding the green button on his wristwatch, manoeuvred himself backward onto the curve of the track. Gravity lifted his stomach through the one-eighty, returning him to his upright position. Very pleasant. Being centred—just what he’d needed. Then, like clockwork, the cyclic conveyer unfolded into its original shape, as if nothing had happened.

  If only it were that easy for him.

  With his hands on his knees, while gathering breath, he let the conveyer carry him back to his respite at the rear. Upside down, he’d had no opportunity to refresh. Now he could make up for it. He’d just been through hell inverted. The blackcurrant juice went down sublimely, making him shudder with delight. He coughed. It went everywhere. He didn’t give a goddamn.

  Wiping his face, neck, legs and armpits with the towel, he felt dizzy but still determined. He muttered, “That was insane.” The purple psammeticum light barely flickered, let alone crackled. He made his way forward on rubber legs with crepe joints. A gigantic breath precipitated the biggest sigh of his life. He wiped his eyes and checked the computer monitor. Garbled. He rubbed his eyes. Still garbled.

  “Okay, what’s happening?”

  He tapped the screen and tried every function on the keypad.

  “What the hell?”

  A brilliant orange glow lit the windows, forcing him to shield his face. The tinted glass filtered out harmful sunlight, so it had to be something far brighter. Jesus, it had imprinted on his retinas—an iridescent splodge with tentacles.

  “Blue…there’s…nex…emerge…quick!” Someone tried to warn him over the com-link. But what of? It was a staggered, panicked message. The frightened voice and his temporary blindness clicked his brain into gear.

  “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.

  Chapter Two

  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.