Alien Velocity (14 page)

Alien craft glided down, skimmed low over the desert. He watched a staggering migration of the bioluminescent creatures from their arboreal home to the area surrounding the smashed dome.

“And that’s that,” he said, finishing his tale. “How I drew a nine on planet Baccarat. If you want to know any more, you’ll have to buy my memoirs.”

He stood once again and, glimpsing a convoy of brilliant fliers in the corner of his eye, spun to face them. When he did, the spectators, airborne or clamped in the dirt, parted to let Charlie’s prize pass through.

He whispered, “Sweetheart, you made it.”

Bluebird
.

The fliers appeared to be able to levitate her twenty feet off the ground, without touching her. An invisible harness? Telekinesis? A dozen flanked her on either side, their luminosity reflecting over the pristine blue surface. Whatever the fliers had done, she looked a million credits. They set her down behind the charred wreckage, and one of them pointed Charlie to the open hatchway at the rear.

“Very good of you.” He gave an appreciative nod, then turned to Marley. “So they’ll guide me back home? With the wormhole technology?”

“Yes. You won’t need to do a thing. Let them work their magic.” She stepped forward. “I wish we had more time, Charlie, but it is time for you to go home. You have been stranded here long enough.”

“No arguments here.” He did want to leave Baccarat as soon as possible—the interstellar upheaval to come would be like endless press conferences after winning the Tonne—insomnia, chores, and deeper and deeper alienation. And he was dying to see Sorcha. Fleeing from Marley and the others, though, sounded bitter and even a little cowardly. After all, they were now more homeless than he was.

“What about you guys? What will you do?”

Silence.

He said, “Is there no way you can…I mean, there’s room in the
Bluebird
for a few…if you wouldn’t mind, you know, facing a whole planet full of Thorpe-Campbells. All right, forget I said that. I can assure you there’s only one of me.”

“Of that we are certain.”

“It was just an idea, but you know you’re welcome to tag along. It would be an honour and all that. You guys have been like family this past…however long it’s been. How long has it been? Never mind. Well? What do you say?”

Without ceremony or permission, Christina scurried away from her parents, past all her siblings, and climbed into the
Bluebird.
Marley stepped after her. Turning to Charlie, she said, “The feeling is mutual. When we get there, Christina would like an ice-cream. I would like to try scuba diving.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.” She motioned toward her siblings. “Goodbyes are irrelevant if you intend to meet again.”

Charlie smiled, rolled his eyes and waited for her to join her sister on board. He then shook everyone’s hand in turn—all one hundred and thirteen—and said a heartfelt goodbye to a few. A little piece of Baccarat faded with every face he passed. The bioluminescent creatures looked on silently, mysteriously. Charlie saluted them. “It’s all yours, fellas. If you wouldn’t mind giving us a lift?”

Inside, the confined acoustics seemed from another world. The tinny
clap, clap
of Marley’s metal feet on the silicone cyclic conveyer shot him through with nostalgia for Earth’s clunky technology. Metallurgy in the great dome had been sublimely smooth and serene. Here everything seemed like tank treads and tractor guts. He closed the hatch behind him. Kneeling against the window in his respite area at the rear, he clasped his hands together and rested his head, cheek down, facing the bow. The
Bluebird
took off vertically. He had to smile. Marley and Christina were busy inspecting the cyclic conveyer at the jog spot while the vessel was hurtling up toward space.

“You girls okay up there?”

“Yes. We are getting up to speed, so to speak, on the cyclic conveyer.”

“Are you excited about seeing Earth?”

“Aye, Captain.”

Charlie realised he was, too. He could barely make out the crash site and the remaining fliers swarming about. White mist and the jazz hymn of an aurora borealis obscured the ruins of the great dome. Across the desert, the blue forest was lit like a giant Christmas tree, its entire civilisation mobilising inside. Whatever force rocketed the
Bluebird
upward, Charlie felt sure it signalled the final rebalance of supremacy on Baccarat. The indigenous race had reclaimed their full control of the wormhole technology.

Soon the racer breached the atmosphere and floated in orbit alongside the last few shy spacecraft. One by one, they would all be guided home. No more would be drawn by the lighthouse, snatched into captivity, herded out to unspeakable deaths in the arena.

Rome had fallen.

He had brought down Rome.

He couldn’t quite reconcile that in his mind, not while the constellations he stared at were uncharted to the last star, and the only planet for eons around consisted of yellow desert and a big blue cauliflower.

Then he felt a
whoosh
in his ears and his stomach drew long like a slinky. The word
LATIGO
on the blue panel opposite distorted and stretched into infinity. This time, the sensation of travelling through a wormhole was not pleasant. It was ecstatic, all the way into dreaming.

Before he knew it, Earthlight flooded in through the port window. The coastlines of Australia and New Zealand scrawled into view under rashes of cloud. The space dock appeared as small as a match head over Fiji. It would take some fancy piloting to reach it. What of the Tonne Run? The dock was still lit. What did they think had happened to him?

He took it all in for a moment: the emptiness, the nebulousness, being forgotten. The engine was silent, the race lanes empty, and Marley and Christina were fast asleep. In some sort of orbit, the
Bluebird
seemed off the radar altogether. Charlie swallowed, then let his mouth gape with tired fascination. It was the sublime loneliness of limbo—between the end of one adventure and the start of another.

And nothing was certain except…

He was one naked RAM-runner.

Thirteen months later…

Crunch, crunch
went their boots on the surface of Europa’s deep crust, over the long-since-abandoned ice flat at Camp Shackleton. There was no hint of the moon’s warm centre, nor of the liquid ocean swilling about miles beneath their feet. Glove-in-glove, Sorcha led Charlie out across the faint grooves cut into the ice by the skis of old record-breakers.

It had the empty feel of a playground through the eyes of a grownup. There had been excitement here once. Joy. Celebration. Now there were straight, indelible tracks over hallowed ground, leading no place. He set his father’s pendant down in the straightest, deepest groove he could find. Nodding to Sorcha, he didn’t say a word. It had been a long journey to this moment, aimless yet circuitous, for whether by design or the random card turns of fate, it had always seemed to Charlie an inevitability of his life that he should return one day to Camp Shackleton. He was adamant that the harder, the farther away he’d run, the more his steps had been guided.

The belly of Sorcha’s spacesuit bulged. Now seven-and-a-half months pregnant, she had to take slow, careful steps wherever she went. Charlie smiled to himself. His days of high-octane sports, of reckless Martian safaris, were long gone, and that was okay. He had run his rings around the earth and found home again but the ghostly grooves in the ice suddenly sat up, challenging him, like the loose ends of unfinished business. He kicked the ice with the spikes of his boot. It splintered. Then he remembered how many people had broken his dad’s record over the years, and how they’d both always hated to lose.

Maybe that had been the real Charlie all along.

The Campbell in him.

He glanced back to the observation cabin, to the green eyes peering after him, patiently. Marley and Christina were Earth’s new celebrities. Recently released from quarantine, they had co-written his bestselling autobiography with him,
Charlie Runs Rings Around the Earth,
but they were capable of so much more.

His fingertips suddenly tingled with excitement. He had extraordinary friends, and with engineers like those on his team, how fast could the
Bluebird
really fly?

Don’t want your strange voyage to end? Check out The Steam Clock Legacy series, also by Robert Appleton. Available now.

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Airship officer Verity Champlain is having second thoughts about her career after a mission nearly goes wrong. Lord Garrett Embrey is on the run, wanted dead by the organization that executed his father and uncle. Professor Cecil Reardon is obsessed with his work since the death of his wife and son. Now he is on the verge of a breakthrough: his machine is about to breach time, to undo the taking of his loved ones. When the jump doesn’t go according to plan, part of London winds up millions of years in the past. Verity, Lord Embrey and Professor Reardon must pull together to survive in a world ruled by dinosaurs…and to somehow get home.

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