Escape Velocity by Jason M. Hough

Author:Jason M. Hough
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-06-27T04:00:00+00:00

Carthage

HE WATCHED FROM the rooftops for several hours, telling himself he’d move as soon as the horizon showed any hint of an approaching dawn. His goal, at least the one he sold himself on, was to learn the schedule of their climbers, and perhaps catch a glimpse of how they were loaded. Security precautions, inspections, anything like that.

In truth, though, Skyler needed to understand. How these beings went about their business, how the machinery of their society worked. Did they get breaks? Did they go somewhere to sleep? Anything he could learn that might help him feel a bit less out of place, he’d take. But then, of course, one could learn only so much skulking about in the shadows above a city. This was no comic book, and he did not have superhuman senses. If his visor hadn’t cracked, maybe, but not now.

Moving from roof to roof, he slowly worked his way toward the building dubbed the Transfer Facility. Little made sense here, but a place to transfer cargo on and off climbers? That he knew. That Eve’s delivery of space elevators to Earth had prepared them for. So he climbed, scaled, and walked, avoiding the use of his thruster boots in case their heat or noise would give his position away.

Nagging at his mind was another odd fact. They still did not seem to be looking for him. Granted, there may be a whole team of forensic investigators in the tunnels below even now, picking through the wreckage and studying burn marks to determine what had happened at the guarded barricade. Same went for the ruins across the bay, where more Scipios had surely died. Part of him wanted them to declare a state of emergency. To fill their streets with foot patrols and broadcast announcements about a possible saboteur. Something. And it wasn’t because Skyler craved recognition, oh no. He wanted something he could understand. An enemy who reacted was an enemy who could be predicted. But this…this total obliviousness, it made no sense.

He thought back to his first encounters with subhumans on Earth. Years of campy zombie sensories and films had prepared humanity for a similar event. But in all those, at least the few Skyler had seen (not really his cup of tea), the monsters had been predictable if nothing else. They’d shamble, they’d want to consume the brain, they were relentless about it. That was simple. Subhumans, though, had not quite meshed with this ingrained cultural expectation. He wondered, back then and again now, how many people had died because they’d expected something else. He’d come close, that much he knew. He hadn’t been prepared for the ones that weren’t full of murderous intent, but instead wanted to flee and hide, or laugh for all eternity, or play, as one had so terribly asked of him in Nightcliff.

So he fought the urge to map the behavior of Scipios onto what his expectations were. The need to anthropomorphize was deeply seated in the human psyche. It took a force of will to overcome.

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