Lifeboat: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 2)

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Lifeboat: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 2) Page 7

by Felix R. Savage


  As he read the text, his mouth dropped open in astonishment. His heart beat faster.

  *

  Hannah paced in the engineering module. It was a beguiling novelty to be able to pace down here, instead of floating. A tenth of a gee wasn’t much. She bounced off the floor at every step, and came down slowly. But it was better than sitting still. She was tense about this burn, mentally scrolling through all the things that might go wrong.

  She wished she hadn’t made up her mind to do this sober. She had a headache right behind her eyes. It disrupted the sense of oneness with the ship that she needed to feel.

  She paced towards the reactor controls on the port wall. Then back towards the steam turbine controls on the other wall. Every round-trip, she saw the same thing:

  100%.

  The reactor, turbines, and MPD engine were all running flat out.

  Running like honey.

  Tension ratcheting down a notch, she glanced up at the personal decorations she’d hung in the module. Her sister Bethany, Bethany’s husband David, and their kids Isabel and Nathan smiled from the photograph above the dollar meter. Imagine what they’d say if they could see her now! Above the hexagonal array hung an origami Star of David—a present from a class of first-graders in Israel, who were now third-graders.

  Gravity couldn’t flatten the grin that curved Hannah’s lips upwards.

  Star light, star bright, alien spacecraft in the night.

  Coming to getcha.

  *

  “Holy crap,” Skyler breathed. Astonishment shaded into anger. “You tell me this now?”

  Director Flaherty wrote:

  OK, Taft, here we go. Read this, and then install the attached program on your laptop.

  Remember the power distribution units?

  Sure Skyler did. Those units had been the proximate cause of the sabotage incident in low Earth orbit. During construction of the SoD, the ullage motors had unexpectedly fired. The SoD would have drifted away into space and been lost forever, if not for the quick actions of Jack Kildare. The NXC had zeroed in on the power distribution units in the ullage motors. No way those things had misfired on their own. It was sabotage, no doubt about it. But their investigation had run aground on the shoals of the SoD’s globally dispersed supply chain. They couldn’t trace the sabotage back to any one country, let alone any one individual. And they’d been further hampered by the fact that the actual, faulty PDUs from the SoD had vanished.

  We’ve found them, Director Flaherty wrote. The fucking Russians had them all along.

  Skyler closed his eyes and shook his head from side to side. Another classic entry in the annals of international cooperation.

  He opened his eyes and read on.

  The ISS station chief at the time was a Russian. Grigor Nikolin, remember him? He made the PDUs disappear. Sent them back home for analysis. Roscosmos determined that the PDUs, surprise surprise, were not manufactured to NASA’s specs. The Chinese company that made them, which conveniently no longer exists, added a couple extra components. Some specialized control circuits … and an antenna.

  There was no reason whatsoever for those components to have an antenna—unless it was to receive radio signals.

  There’s our smoking gun, Flaherty went on. Proof of sabotage. So what do the Russkis do? Motherfuckers SIT ON THE EVIDENCE for TWO FUCKING YEARS.

  Their excuse is they needed the time to analyze the software loaded into the control circuits. That’s bullshit. We could have done it in a week. They were stringing the Chinese along, blackmailing them, and you can take that to the bank. Anyway, they finally came across with the goods, I’m assuming because time is getting critical.

  Here’s what we now know. The PDUs contained malware that could be triggered with a Wi-Fi signal, causing the ullage motors to fire. The signal would have been sent from a device that was in physical proximity to the SoD. That narrows it down to someone in the orbital construction yard or on the ISS. Unfortunately, that includes all the present crew members except Hannah Ginsburg and you.

  Now for the guesswork.

  Skyler knew what was coming next. He raised his gaze from his laptop and glanced around the storage module in horror. The air-handling system … the algae tanks that provided the crew’s oxygen … the sensors that monitored air quality … the nitrogen tank under the floor of the storage module … any of it might be ripe for sabotage.

  Assume there’s malware all over that ship like flies on shit, Director Flaherty wrote. That’s what we get for outsourcing critical parts of the supply chain to China. But don’t panic.

  Don’t panic, boss? DON’T PANIC?

  Our belief is the saboteur has orders to wait until certain conditions are met before he or she takes action. Those conditions will be related to recovery of the MOAD. So you still have time to save the day.

  The attached program is a present from the NSA. It’s an extremely sophisticated malware scanner.

  Incidentally, this is why the Russians finally decided to share. They couldn’t write anything like this. They may have the world’s best hackers, but the world’s best programmers work for the NSA.

  The attached .exe file was named simply: BUGSWATTER.

  Install the program on your laptop and run it. It’ll remotely scan all laptops, iPods, Android devices, anything with Wi-Fi or Bluetooth capability. When it finds the malware trigger, it will identify the suspect device.

  Your job is to deal with the device, and the person who owns it.

  Skyler bit his knuckles. He’d believed for a long time that the saboteur was Xiang Peixun. So maybe the threat was already gone—chopped in half!

  But Flaherty knew, of course, that Xiang was dead, and that didn’t seem to reassure him any.

  Because Xiang, obviously, hadn’t taken his laptop or any other device he may have owned with him.

  Skyler’s gaze tracked to the bank of lockers on the opposite side of the storage module. Xiang’s laptop was in there. He had also had an MP3 player. Skyler had snuck that up his sleeve when they cleaned out Xiang’s coffin, thinking he might want it if his own iPod broke at some point. It was now in Skyler’s own coffin. It appeared to be loaded with hundreds of Chinese pop songs and nothing else. But what if one of those songs was the trigger? Skyler could’ve inadvertently blown up the ship, scrolling through Xiang’s playlists!

  Teeth chattering, he installed BUGSWATTER on his laptop.

  Run.

  The SoD fell towards Jupiter, struggling like an bird in a gale. Skyler gave not a thought to the interplay of mighty forces hurling him through space. He only had eyes for the progress bar on his screen.

  *

  Burn plus one.

  Jack flexed his shoulders, rolling out the stiffness that had set in with one full hour of ferocious concentration on his instruments. He smiled with pure pleasure at the inertial navigation display that proved they were where he wanted them to be. “We’re on track for orbit insertion,” he announced. “Alexei, check the star sights.”

  “Roger,” Alexei said, swiveling the telescope’s viewfinder to his eye.

  Kate touched the intercom. “Reactor status, Hannah?”

  Hannah’s voice came from Engineering. “Steady,” she said. “Need more power? I could crank this baby up to eleven.”

  Jack laughed, not specifically at the Spinal Tap reference, but because he recognized the note of elation in her voice. He felt the same way. The Spirit of Destiny was really strutting her stuff now. This huge, magnificent burn would justify the mission all on its own. Screw the taxpayers.

  An alarm shrilled.

  CHAPTER 10

  In Engineering, several alarms shrilled at once.

  Red lights strobed on the steam turbine control display.

  Shaft overspeed.

  It was happening again, it was goddamn happening again, and this time it was the little housekeeping turbine and the big-ass drive turbine, which fed the MPD engine’s voracious appetite for electricity.

&nb
sp; The fucking circuit-breakers had failed again! Both turbines were about to burst their hearts like racehorses spurred across the finish line. In Hannah’s mind, the steam drums ruptured in a catastrophic explosion.

  She cannoned across the module and threw her weight on the manual shutdown lever, forcing it down to the OFF position before her terrifying vision could become reality.

  The shaft speed ticked lower.

  And the reactor was still pumping out 100% of output.

  She had mere seconds before it would overload the primary heat exchanger. A steam drum explosion would be a wet fart compared to that shit-show.

  Voices bawled from the intercom speaker. “Hannah! HANNAH! We have lost all electronic controls! Confirm whether you still have reactor and turbine controls!”

  She already knew the controls were gone, because it was happening again, like faceplanting on a curb in a drunken haze, and this time she didn’t need anyone to tell her what to do. There was only one thing to do and she had to do it now, now, now—

  Teeth bared, hair whipping around her face, she toppled towards the reactor controls and stabbed the manual scram button.

  A deafening WHANNGGG! reverberated through the ship as the springs drove the control rods home.

  *

  Skyler screamed. The noise sounded like the hand of some vengeful space god had slapped the ship.

  Terror gripped him. He automatically slammed his laptop closed. And yet his first thought was of Hannah, and another detached part of his mind noted that fact, and felt proud that he was still capable of putting her first, even though she was screwing Jack. He floundered across the storage module. As he moved, he came off the floor. Floating again.

  “Hannah!”

  The lights went out. LEDs around the airlock and over the keel tubes came on. Skyler flew through a red-tinted twilight.

  “Talk to me, Hannah! Are you OK?”

  She shouted up from the engineering module. “Skyler?”

  The pressure doors hadn’t closed. Skyler interpreted that as a good sign for a split second, until he remembered that they’d disabled the auto-slam thing after Xiang’s death.

  “Are you OK, Hannah? What was that God-awful noise?”

  Hannah’s pale face floated in the keel tube. “I scrammed the reactor,” she said.

  *

  “We’ve been HERFed again,” Jack howled in fury.

  Alexei whipped off his t-shirt.

  Kate said to him with rising tension, “Think you could pick a better time and place for your Putin impersonation?”

  Alexei swivelled to his spacesuit, hanging on the wall behind them, and used the utility tool on its belt to poke a hole in the t-shirt. He placed the hole over the telescope’s viewfinder and wadded the material up to make a donut-shaped cushion. Jack got it. Alexei wasn’t going to take the risk of touching the naked metal, not when a megavolt HERF had just slammed into the ship. Horse, barn door, but it was a sensible precaution all the same. Eye to the viewfinder, Alexei said, “Roll, pitch, yaw?”

  Jack read out the numbers. Emergency power fed the bridge instruments. They’d lost the lights. The faces of the other two looked spooky and haggard in the light from the screens. The fans slowed to a halt, letting the silence of space in.

  Hannah said from Engineering, “We are running on battery power. I’m going to bring the fuel cells on line in a few minutes.”

  Something stirred in Jack’s mind. He wanted to tell her to wait, but he wasn’t sure what his instincts were telling him, so he held off. Didn’t want to panic her. That said, she sounded remarkably together. Skyler, Meili, and Giles had all checked in. They, too, were coping well.

  It made a huge difference to know—or be 99.9% sure—what was happening, even when what was happening was utterly shit.

  Alexei took the star sights and confirmed what Jack already knew. They hadn’t finished their burn before the HERF hit.

  The SoD was still travelling far too fast.

  “We’ve lost our groove.” Kate slammed one fist into the other palm. “Could they hit us at a worse time?”

  “I’m sure they intended to hit us precisely at the worst time possible,” Jack said. He noticed that even Kate had started referring to the MOAD as ‘they.’ The aliens. “We’re going to overshoot our optimal target in front of Jupiter. We’ll still enter orbit, but it’s going to be a very elongated orbit.”

  He mathed it out roughly on the flight control computer. Alexei and Kate did the same calculations. “Son of a three-legged bitch,” Kate said.

  “Yeah,” Jack said. He sat back and regarded the blank optic feed screen. They’d lost the external sensors, again. He caught himself rubbing his fingers together nervously, and wondered why he felt so edgy, as if there was something he should be doing. There was nothing he could do with the reactor off-line. He might as well be sitting in a broken-down Volvo on a conveyor belt.

  Which led straight into Jupiter’s junkyard.

  Kate huffed out a hard sigh, and leaned forward to her comms console. Just like last time, they were down to basic text-only comms. “Houston, this is the SoD,” she murmured out loud as she typed. “Got some good news for you, and some bad. Good news: we are on track for Jupiter orbit injection. Bad news: our projected orbit is going to sling us straight into Jupiter’s radiation belt.”

  *

  “But no,” Jack cried. “It doesn’t have to go like that!”

  An hour had passed since the HERF attack. The SoD had swung around the far side of Jupiter. That terminated their comms with Earth for the time being. They’d had everyone except Hannah crowding into the bridge, desperate for information and reassurance. The crew’s brittle self-command had fractured at the news that they were on course to pass through Jupiter’s radiation belt. Now they needed the kind of reassurance you couldn’t get over an intercom, but only through face-to-face contact with other shivering, jabbering human beings. It drove Jack up the wall, and he’d escaped to the main hab.

  Hannah had brought the fuel cells on line, so the growlights were back on at half power. The garden wheeled, perceptibly slower now. Microfiber nets over the plants, securing them for the burn, gave a spiderweb sheen to the greenery, reminding Jack of his mother’s garden in Warwickshire when it was all covered with dew.

  He crouched in the axis tunnel, looking down at their little spinning world, like a monkey on a branch. He tossed the SoD’s orbital parameters around in his mind like dice.

  “We can do it,” he shouted aloud.

  He turned and flew back to the bridge.

  “Out,” he said to Meili. “Out,” to Giles. “Bugger off,” to Skyler.

  “Excuse me, Jack?” said Kate.

  “Alexei, can you give me our internal orbital parameters?” Jack wedged himself into his seat.

  “They haven’t changed,” Alexei said.

  “I know, but it just occurred to me. We can raise our perijove.” The point at which they’d be closest to Jupiter. “That way we won’t have to pass through the radiation belt!” He grinned exultantly.

  “Jack,” Kate said. “If that were possible, I’d have told you to do it.”

  “It is possible,” Jack insisted.

  “We are going to lower our perijove. That’ll decrease our orbital period by thirty hours. Right, Alexei?”

  “Yes,” the cosmonaut said.

  “Hannah says she can bring the reactor back on line in forty-eight hours,” Kate said. “We’ll burn once to lower our perijove, and again when we swing back to perijove—”

  “In the middle of the radiation belt,” Jack interrupted. “Do you realize how much radiation Jupiter blasts out? It’s a blizzard. It’s a maelstrom. Every moment we’re exposed to that, it’s as if the ship is taking mini-HERFs. We can’t—”

  Raising her voice, Kate interrupted him right back. “I am aware of the radiation levels! You’re overstating the risks.”

  “Yeah,” said Skyler, from the keel tube. He hadn’t gone away, after all
. “What’s a little radiation?”

  “Whose side are you on?” Jack said. He heard the insult coming out of his mouth and knew he was losing the fight. He focused on Alexei, who was working the instruments, avoiding everyone’s eyes. “My point is we don’t have to take that risk! We’ll raise the perijove instead of lowering it! Just flip the ship!”

  “Just flip the ship, huh, hotshot?” Kate said. “Alexei, how much would that increase our orbital period?”

  “Forty-four hours,” Alexei said.

  “I’m not putting my crew through that,” Kate said. “People are scared, they’re on the edge of panic—”

  “You’d know,” Jack said.

  Kate’s mouth thinned. Her chin jutted. “A one-eighty flip is a perilous maneuver which I will not approve if it’s not strictly necessary, no matter how good you think you are! Am I making myself clear?”

  Jack dropped his gaze—there was no sense fighting on. He’d lost.

  “Crystal.” He bit off the word. “I’ll calculate the parameters for a burn at our current orientation, then.”

  “Thank you,” Kate said. She had the decency not to look smug.

  Later, Jack said to Alexei, “Why the hell didn’t you back me up in there? Did she threaten a pussy strike?”

  “She’s sexy when she is mad,” Alexei said, smirking.

  “Traitor!” Jack snapped at him. He was really angry.

  “Jack!” Alexei said. “Are you a fucking moron? Think like a Russian! Lose in order to win. First you lose, and then you win, is this so hard to understand? If we win this battle, we have nowhere to go except throwing her out of the airlock.” He let that sink in.

  “High-energy electrons and protons, Alexei.” Jack’s eyes were dry. He rubbed them with the heels of his hands. “Those charged particles are like bullets whacking into the ship.”

  “We have to go to Europa anyway,” Alexei said. “We’ll be sitting in a blizzard of charged particles for how long, who knows?”

  “That’s why I would have liked to minimize our exposure before we get there.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Three days later, Skyler started to believe he might live through this, after all. The lights were back on at full strength, the fans hummed, and he was feeding the fish, in orbit around Jupiter.

 

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