Escape Velocity

Ideally, I would have tried to sneak my way through the long hallways of whatever this alien space complex was. If for no other reason than to save my energy.

But when there’s an alien chasing you hurling space-magic fire at you, there’s no room to pace yourself.

The dusty blue alien in question was between me and the door I’d entered through, so I was forced to gamble with the other pair of exits on the far end of the room. The otters liked their doors heavy and vertical. I lost precious seconds hauling the metal shutter up far enough to duck under.

I kept running even on the other side. I couldn’t imagine the alien bothering with the door. It had simply destroyed the first one.

“Do we have a plan?” Daniel asked.

“I’m open to suggestions.” I panted.

“Well, we’re definitely in space, so I think our options are pretty limited.” Daniel’s observation coincided with running past an exterior window. I couldn’t stop to admire the view, but I got a glimpse of a rocky surface with some metal structures poking up through the barren ground. A black night’s sky was visible above.

“We should find a ship. Can you look ahead and try and give me some heads up what’s past the next corner?” I said.

“No we shouldn’t, and no I can’t. I can’t see anything you don’t get your eyes on. And you can’t fly a spaceship, we won’t get anywhere with one.”

“Not to fly it ourselves, to stowaway. We can’t be the only ones eager to get out of here.”

As if to punctuate the thought, another rumble went through the structure, this one stronger than the ones before. I didn’t have the cell around me to muffle the intensity. The sounds of fighting were getting closer too. Otters shouting and barking at each other was actually louder than the gunshots.

I turned a corner, picking the direction opposite the fighting.

“Come on, think out loud. If there’s aliens evacuating, how can we figure out where the ships are?”

“Depends on why they’re evacuating. It has to be because of the spaceship the warrior-otter showed us, right?... Actually, hold that thought.”

Daniel stopped his movement and appeared to listen for a moment. I kept running.

“Stop for a second,” he said, “I can’t tell while you’re moving.”

We were running from something that would kill me with a thought if I gave it more than a second or two to look at me. That teal-fire it wielded had melted through solid steel, or some comparable alien metal, with utterly no resistance. The back of my neck felt red and singed just from being nearby.

I didn’t want to stop running from that alien for even a moment.

But when I slowed to look at Daniel even a little, I couldn’t feel the alien pursuing. The three aliens that had demonstrated the ability to create things from thin air had all exhibited that ‘charge’. Daniel had felt it the first time when we’d been hit with the flashbang, but I’d gotten a taste of it too with the halberd warrior, and now the teal-fire alien.

So why couldn’t we sense it pursuing us?

“Where’d it go?”

“No way it just lets us go right?”

“Nope. Maybe we can’t sense it without line of sight? I didn’t clock it before it melted through the door.”

We needed to figure out the rules governing this phenomenon quickly. It would be the difference between life and death. Daniel was right that we hadn’t been able to tell it was coming before it melted through the door.

But that room had not been small. Could it have just been out of range? What even was the range on the sense?

Trying to interpret the sensation was like waking up a third arm that had been asleep my whole life. Only there wasn’t a hand on the end of it. There weren’t any joints. And it just seemed to disappear at random.

“We sensed the halberd warrior though. You got that same feeling from it before it entered, before I saw it.”

“One thing at a time. Either we’re being chased by our pyromaniac, or it’s got other priorities. If it’s still after us, we need to lose it immediately. That thing’s lethal and—”

His train of thought was interrupted by a glowing orange spot on the ceiling a few dozen feet down the hall from us.

Teal-fire shrieked through the melting ceiling and the dusty blue alien dropped into the corridor ahead of us.

“Holy shit.” Daniel said.

But I was more than just surprised. The alien had just fallen into the corridor and my awareness. The moment it had pierced the ceiling, this new sense had picked up on it. I hadn’t been looking at it. But experiencing the alien enter, exit, and now enter my new sense’s range illuminated what we’d missed.

We hadn’t sensed it moving above us. Whatever this sense was, it had a shape. I hadn’t been able to tell before, but it had stretched out horizontally from me, but not up. Recognizing the shape was jarring, because as soon as I realized it was there, I realized it didn’t have to be there.

“Caleb?” Daniel asked. He traded concerned glances between me and the alien blocking our way.

“I… think I just got something.”

The sensory area could go where I wanted it… or at least, I could shape it to something more intuitive than just a horizontal disc centered on me. Without even trying, the idea of the sense going in all directions snapped into place, and the shape of the sense changed into a sphere with me at the center.

New revelations aside, it didn’t change the fact that the blue blazing alien had, in fact, not let us go.

I turned and sprinted back the way I came. I didn’t have to look back to feel the alien chase after me. The change in shape to this new sense didn’t reach quite as far, but it would tell me if the alien went above or below me again.

“What’s going on Caleb?”

“I’m getting a handle on what’s going on in my brain.”

“Really?”

“No, but it’s a step.”

“You know, I think you might be faster than this alien too.”

I threw a frantic glance over my shoulder and found that he was right. That was a welcome surprise. Just like the otters, I was faster over even ground. Even through the adrenaline rush of running for my life, the observation struck me as odd.

I understood why I was faster than the otters. Their limbs were shorter, they didn’t provide the same leverage to propel yourself forward. But this alien was an inch or two taller than I was, and its limbs were similarly longer by just a bit.

Watching it run after me was a terrifying sight, especially considering that it would probably try to incinerate me if I let it get close enough. But it was hard to look away. It didn’t run the same way I did. The joints in its legs had a different orientation. Not completely unrecognizable, but different enough that it was mesmerizing to watch.

Even looking backward, I could still outrun it. Barely. I pointed the gun at it again and tried to shoot. But like before, it was still jammed up.

“Daniel, can you tell if the granule you created still in here?”

“It’s not. I can barely keep them around for more than a few seconds. But it still could have broken or jammed another piece to break the gun.”

I debated throwing it at our pursuer. I could throw pretty hard. But it wasn’t worth it. Better to hold onto the weapon. Even if I knew it was broken, but I could still threaten anyone else who didn’t.

We passed the intersection we’d reached before and I kept running straight, keeping an eye out for any shutter handles overhead that I could pull down behind me. I hadn’t seen any regular doors so far.

“I’m confident I can outrun it in a straight line. You don’t out pace things by sprinting. I’m trying to pay attention to the layout so that thing can’t cut any more corners on us.”

“That’s how it caught up the first time.” Daniel realized.

An image of the hypotenuse of a triangle popped into my head from Daniel. That was the general idea. Why follow the same path your prey did when you could just melt through the walls?

Wait. What the hell was I doing? Why would I be the one to keep track of where I was going? I had a freeloader in my head. One that could write things down and even draw pictures in a notebook.

“Daniel, notebook. Start drawing a map!”

“On it.”

That would simplify things. The question now was how much I was willing to risk. I couldn’t run forever, but then neither could my alien pursuer. The more ground I covered, the more likely I was to get found by more than just this one alien. But with Daniel charting our progress, I might just be able to see enough of this place to find a ship to hide on.

Different architecture emerged the further I went. The first halls I’d emerged out into had felt less like those of an actual building and more like that of an access tunnel. Every piece of the structure was identical as we’d progressed through it. Basically a tube supported by metal rings large enough to walk through spaced at regular intervals. It felt a bit like running through a subway tube with a floor instead of tracks.

But after running for a minute, the floor changed to tile of some kind and the walls changed from the tube shape to normal vertical ones. The tube had delivered me to another actual building it seemed. I was pretty sure that beyond the tube was empty space, and since there hadn’t been any off shoots, there was no way the alien could cut ahead of us.

The next part would be tricky. It came down to whether or not the alien could sense me like I could it.

“Daniel, quick, did that alien know how to cut us off the first time because it could sense me or because it could tell which way we would have to run?”

“…the former. That intersection had three possibilities and it picked… wait...” Daniel looked at the oddly neat map he’d been sketching out. The directions were all arbitrary, but we turned right when we fled the cell hangars, moving in what Daniel had labeled it north, so we’d gone east at the first intersection, the alien had stopped us, so we’d turned around running west.

“Shit. I don’t know now.”

I saw what he meant. Going west, the few porthole windows in the tube had shown the empty vacuum of space outside. So the alien wouldn’t have been able to cut that corner. And it couldn’t have kept up if we’d just kept going north. So it had tried to cut us off the one place it had a chance of getting to before us.

“No time for more deliberation. Either it got lucky, or it could tell where we were headed.”

“Let’s try to hide. Take some random turns and see if any of the doors are open.”

I could get behind that plan. The new building, and the facility as a whole, reminded me of a hospital complex; the connecting tunnels never actually went outside so it could be argued that it was all one building, but it definitely felt separate.

Daniel diligently plotted the series of turns I made, and we confirmed the building was laid out in a simple grid.

It was also crawling with otters. We didn’t get to take many random turns before the sounds of fighting grew closer. Stressfully aware of the alien chasing us, I forced myself to slow down and stop at one corner when I heard the barks of otters nearby. I peeked low to see a squad of four otters. They were more or less indistinguishable from the ones that had guarded the cell. I held my breath as I tried to sense if any of these otters set off my alien-sense.

The otters were moving parallel to me one hallway over, and they were taking their time. Probably searching for me.

The only piece of good news was none of the otters were giving me the ‘kill you with magic space fire’ vibe. I could sense that alien still closing in with every second.

I lowered my voice as quietly as I could, but I’d been running long enough that my breath was heaving. I hadn’t moved like this in a while.

“How well can you sense it? How far would you say this radar reaches?”

“A few dozen meters, maybe? It’s not far behind.”

Now that we weren’t just running away in essentially a straight line, it was harder to tell where the teal-fire alien was. Whatever had been triggered in my brain, it only seemed to react to a select few aliens. In a way, that made the ordinary otter soldiers the more dangerous foe right now. I could tell at least the general direction of the teal-fire alien. As long as I was careful about recognizing it, I could feel the electric radiation it gave off, even through walls.

There was also only one of it. This squad of four could split up and unlike the first alien, these ones didn’t give off any exotic sensations.

The otters in question slowed their progress down the adjacent hall and one of them held what had to be a radio. I couldn’t make out any sounds, so there was nothing to add to Daniel’s fledgling language notes.

The otters split into pairs, one of which looked to be coming over to this hallway toward me.

I was sandwiched between the two different flavors of alien. The worst-case scenario.

I would have to hide and hope the other alien couldn’t sense me like I could sense it. I tried three doors before I found one that was unlatched. I ducked inside a darkened room and slid the door shut behind me, grateful for how quietly the door moved.

It did not escape my notice that these doors were not the vertical shutters like before. Instead they were panels that slid aside into the walls.

“The doors on the spaceship were the same way.” Daniel observed.

I pressed my ear to the door and listened for the otters. I could sense the dusty blue alien; it was about one hall over. What would happen if it ran into the squad of otters? Very little worse came to mind than my escape becoming priority number one. The number of aliens that knew about it had to still be single digits. And my chances would suffer with every additional enemy hunting for me.

“Stowing away might have been pretty optimistic.”

He was right. It had been hilariously bold to imagine I could escape the otters on our first attempt, after only a few days, and without help. The fact that I’d gotten out of the cell in the first place was downright impossible. Mentally preparing for the eventuality of getting caught again was… disquieting. But it was necessary.

I waited with bated breath as I heard the otters footsteps draw closer to this door. I had to fight off the temptation to open the door a crack to see where the otters were, but I didn’t want to take even that tiny risk.

The sound of the otter’s boots couldn’t be more than ten feet away from the door. My torso shivered from forcing my breath to stay steady and quiet. Stay calm. Stay still. Calm and still…

Breaking out. Seeing Daniel. The fire alien. Every minute since I’d been abducted, there’d been a pervasive stress wearing on me. But after day after day of all… this, I just wasn’t reacting to the unknown so sharply. I wasn’t really used to the fear—I was still plenty terrified—it just… wasn’t unexpected anymore.

So, for the first time in weeks, I felt like I had at least some idea of what would happen next.

The otters and ‘burning blue’ would reach this door, throw it open, and find me. They’d either kill me on the spot or throw me back in the cell and clamp a ball and chain to my ankle. Death or capture.

I hated the very idea of recapture. I was far more willing to die fighting than go back in any kind of cell. But Daniel had literally clung to my mind after death and was insisting I stay alive, no matter the cost. He was like an anti-ghost haunting me for my own good.

The part of me that had held out hope that this escape attempt would work broke in two when I realized the certainty of where I was. They would find me.

But, of course, something entirely different happened.

Three somethings, actually.

The first, was the otters let out some barks, and started shooting.

The second, was the already familiar and dreaded roar of teal cosmic fire.

The third was a voice behind me.

“Nai?”

My brain did a double take, because it had to have been Daniel that talked. But I whirled on reflex when I realized the sound came from just a bit too far away. Daniel always sounded like he was right next to me.

I turned to find a gun, inches from my face.

The room was dark, and I hadn’t paid enough attention to what was in it. Because four triangular pale heads peeked back at me from various shadows in the room, each one of them pointing a gun at me.

My brain instantly started reaching for the door. If I moved quickly, maybe I wouldn’t get shot.

“Don’t.” Daniel said. He was looking intently at the new aliens. “Look at them.”

They were all crouched behind various pieces of furniture around the room; cabinets and other odd features I couldn’t make out in the dark. After a second of my eyes adjusting to the dark, I saw that each one of them sported a solid black poncho that covered everything beneath the neck.

In a dark room like this, they almost looked like floating white triangles with eyes. Big eyes. This was the third flavor of alien I’d come across, and funnily enough these ones had me the least unsettled, because they were the most alien.

They looked bizarre. There was no single thing from home that these creatures resembled. Their faces were shaped somewhere between hammerhead shark and sea turtle. Two giant eyes dominated their faces. Their foreheads were wide and swept back to make the top of their heads almost like a gently rounded slab.

Seeing them like this gave me a sense of relief despite the weapons they were pointing at me.

“They’re hiding too.” Daniel said. I nodded, several things fitting together in my head. These aliens were hostile.

Not to me. Well, maybe to me. But definitely hostile to the otters. As a matter of fact, they were probably the ones to break the lock on this room. All the other rooms had been sealed shut. It hadn’t been coincidence that this one hadn’t been.

They were hiding from the otters too.

I’d figured that some sort of battle was going on. Too much gunfire was audible in the distance for any other possibility. But I hadn’t fully thought that through. Because for there to be an attack, there needed to be attackers.

The enemy of my enemy.

Oh boy.

One of the turtlehead aliens, I realized, wasn’t actually looking directly at me. Its gaze was fixed on the door.

“Issti Nai geh heis senntiad!”

It wasn’t talking to me. Probably. I couldn’t tell which one responded in the dark, but the alien that had talked received a grunt in confirmation.

The one that spoke moved deliberately for the door and I jumped out of the way. It pulled open the door, seemingly intending to go out. A crack of light cast across its face for only a moment before it shouted and dove back away from the door.

I couldn’t move fast enough to avoid it grabbing me and dragging me away from the door and to the ground.

A blast of teal-fire and an otter smashed through the door and surrounding wall. Debris blasted through the room and I curled up trying to avoid getting hit. Both the otter and the alien that tackled me down immediately scrambled to their feet and chaos broke out.

Gunshots rang out from both inside and outside the room and I lost any coherent ability to hear. Boots, feet, maybe some claws bumped against me on the ground, and I tried to jump up and out of the way.

I felt an otter claw grab me by the hoodie I’d looted, and I was forcefully thrown out into the hallway. The otter, it must have been one of the soldiers I’d seen earlier, started to swipe a claw at me, but one of the turtlehead aliens shot it in the back.

I kicked the otter off me struggling to my feet. What were the turtlehead aliens doing? They were my best chance, for anything.

I got the impression that the turtleheads and I had similar attitudes about our ability to fight humanoid otters armed to the teeth. I had tried to hide; they’d hidden first.

Now it was time to run again, but again they’d reacted quicker than me. The four of them were already jogging away in pairs, taking turns to fire backward at the otters and the teal-fire alien.

“Nai!” One of them shouted.

The teal-fire alien shouted something back, but I couldn’t make out most of it. It swung a blocky metal rod like a baton, catching one otter under the chin. It followed the blow by jabbing the rod at the otter, pinning against the wall long enough for the teal alien to kick the otters wrist making it drop its gun.

Another one of the otters gave chase to the fleeing aliens, dropping into a run. But the dusty teal-fire alien grabbed the fallen gun from the floor and squeezed off several shots from the short rifle, even using the back of its mangled hand to support the gun’s weight.

I was lost. Too much was happening, and I couldn’t keep it straight.

The dusty blue alien had tried to kill me. But here it was fighting the otters. It was even protecting the turtleheads.

“Oh shit, Caleb.”

My ears were still ringing, but Daniel was still perfectly audible.

“Look at its neck.”

The teal-fire alien tossed a crackling ball of the same. The ball of plasma erupted into a wall of cosmic fire that licked the ceiling, cutting the remaining otters off.

It turned back toward me, and I saw it. I’d noticed the strip of ragged black cloth hanging around its neck earlier, but now I had the turtlehead’s ponchos to compare it to. It was burned, shredded, and reduced to little more than a scarf, but it was clearly the remains of one of those same ponchos. It wore their uniform.

It was their ally.

“It’s friendly.” Daniel admitted.

Except… It couldn’t be. It wasn’t.

My mind went back to only minutes ago to when it had stormed in and attacked me. Even now it radiated hostility, delivering it right into my brain with zero ambiguity. It might be the otter’s enemy, just like the turtleheads, but it would kill me given the chance.

I had to run.

My body was running out of energy and my joints were screaming at me to slow down. If I stopped though, I was dead. It was all I could manage to keep up with the turtleheads. I was only grateful they hadn’t decided to shoot me.

They carried much larger guns than the otters did—long rifles that poked out from under their ponchos.

I followed them to the end of the hallway where they started prying open a heavy metal door. One of them, the one that tackled me earlier I was pretty sure, kept an eye on me.

There was a moment of calm where the three of them were focused on getting through the door before more otters showed up, and the fourth one was watching me.

The moment didn’t last before the dusty blue alien caught up. It shouted at its allies and the turtlehead focused on me raised its weapon. The blue one conjured another teal fireball and threatened to toss it right into my chest.

Down the hall where we came from, I could see the wall of teal fire dying down and more otters were pursuing. I recognized the orange glint of the armor the otter from earlier had worn. It didn’t seem to have its halberd anymore, but that didn’t mean anything. It had pulled the first one out of thin air. A few moments later, I felt the warrior-otter reenter my detection range. To my horror, it wasn’t the only one. At least four more otters coming toward us emitted the same radiation.

The turtleheads would be through the door in seconds, and the otters were at least thirty seconds away.

I realized that these aliens were going to shut the door behind them once they got through. The blue alien could have just cut through it in a heartbeat otherwise. They were going to prevent anyone from following them. I needed to be on the other side of that door with them.

Calm. I needed to stay calm. They were soldiers just like the otters. If I tried to fight them, they’d kill me.

…Which is exactly what I’d done the first time. I was still terrified of the blue alien, and the unnatural feeling only intensified the closer it got. The first time, I’d pulled the gun I took from the otters in a panic.

You only get one chance to make a second impression.

Both of them tensed as my hand went into my hoodie’s pocket, but I raised the other high up and away.

As slowly as I could, I pulled the gun from my hoodie, pinching it with just two fingers. I tried to make every motion slow and nonthreatening, painfully aware of the otters barreling toward us. I set the gun on the floor, stood back up, and slid it toward the turtlehead with my foot.

It picked it up, returning an incomprehensible expression at me.

Give up my weapon—universal sign of surrender…hopefully. It was useless anyway. For good measure, I rolled up my sleeve and showed the long scratches the scientist otter’s claws had left on my arm.

The turtlehead and teal-fire aliens exchanged a glance. The pale fat one considered the gun I’d given up.

I gave a silent prayer that these aliens would get it. Please understand. I’m their prisoner. They stole my flesh and blood. They stole me from my home.

The moment crawled to a standstill. I had no idea what their names were. But the two aliens held my life in their hands. One had tried to kill me, and the other had saved my life within minutes of each other.

They let me through.

It was too soon to be relieved though. A dozen armed otters were seconds away.

Once we were all through, one of the turtleheads pulled some sort of mechanical release and the metal door slammed back shut behind us with a deafening clang. The room we were in now was long and narrow with a series of large hatches sunken into the wall at regular intervals.

Then I remembered where we were. On some sort of moon or asteroid. Were these some kind of escape pod?

The teal-fire alien looked at the door and once it closed, the familiar roar of its fire sounded on the other side. It would hopefully buy a few moments before the otters could get through the door.

Even if they accepted that I wasn’t out to fight them, they didn’t like me. At least two guns stayed trained on me at any given moment.

Sure enough, one of the aliens punched a few buttons on a wall panel and the closest hatch popped open with a hiss. The hatch led to a small round pod with eight seats and harnesses.

They made me go first. I had to guess how to fasten the harness around my legs and chest. Once I couldn’t move much though, the rest of them climbed in after me. Still pointing guns at me.

The four turtleheads and one dusty blue alien found their own seats. None of them chose the seats adjacent to mine.

The hatch was pulled closed behind us and through the small round window, I got to see the point of the otter’s halberd pierce through the door. But the otters were too slow.

The dusty blue alien punched a button on the wall of the pod within arm’s reach of their seat and machinery whirred to life outside the metal capsule. The whole thing lurched away from the wall and I lost sight of the otters entering the room.

Daniel was standing unsecured in the middle of the pod with a look of disbelief. I couldn’t believe it either. It seemed like we were actually going to get away from the otters.

One of the turtleheads spoke to the dusty blue alien and they started trading conversation. The blue alien glanced around the pod, checking with each of the turtleheads.

It held up fingers on its good hand. Four. Three. Two. One.

It hit a second button on the panel and another hellish roar drowned out all other sound. For a split second, I thought it had conjured up more cosmic fire and was about to kill us all. But the pod rocketed upward, and I felt my body flatten into the seat.

Through the scream of the booster rocket, I heard Daniel, still crystal clear.

“Uhh… you might be about to pass out.”

I tried to ask why, but all I could manage was a mumble as the blood rushed out of my head. I blacked out.