“Jack,” Jack said, into the little mic which seemed to be made of plastic, with no visible wiring or power source.
“That is a good name. It’s a nickname for John, who was an apostle of Jesus. Have I got that right?”
“Yes,” Jack said. “I suppose you learned all that off the TV?”
“Yes,” Keelraiser’s voice said in his ears. “We are very grateful for TV. Without TV, we would have died of boredom by now. When we started our journey, the shows were in black and white, and often seemed stylized or staged. Now they are in color. Is it correct to assume that the modern shows are a better approximation of life on Earth?”
“I suppose,” Jack said.
“Good. It’s hard to know when we are guessing right, and when we guess wrong. I expect we’ve made some terrible mistakes in our assumptions, and you will laugh at us. Is this a laugh?”
Keelraiser, via the headset, made a noise that sounded like a scratchy mechanical chuckle. Jack winced. “It’ll do,” he said. “Why don’t your lips move when you talk? Why have I got to talk to you using this headset?”
“Ah,” Keelraiser said. “Do you know, I made that myself. I am glad it works! I copied it from the comms device in your spacesuit. Is it correct? The fit, the functionality?”
Jack hopped off the bunk where he was sitting. The movement made his head ring. He felt momentarily nauseated, but pushed the feeling aside. He got the distinct impression that Keelraiser was pumping him for information, while volunteering nothing itself. He moved forward. Keelraiser took a skittery step backwards.
“I’ve had about enough of this,” Jack said levelly. He stood six feet four—he had gained an inch and a half in height since they left Earth, thanks to low gravity and freefall. The alien overtopped him by a head, but it was skeletal. Its biceps were no thicker than Jack’s wrists, its legs sticks. Evolution had favored humanity over these thieving cunts, Jack felt. Unless Keelraiser had titanium bones or something, Jack could snap its spine with one hand, and the biggest proof of this was the way Keelraiser had moved back, out of grabbing range. Jack doubled down on his momentary psychological advantage. “No more messing around!” he said. “Where’s Alexei?”
Keelraiser’s hair moved as if it had a life of its own. The shiny locks pointed in several different directions. “He is in our hydroponics garden. Do you want to go there?”
“Hell, yes I do.”
Keelraiser led him towards the end wall of the room. The dirt on the floor moved. It came apart into beetles, which scurried aside from their feet, like patches of oil on a frying-pan. The wall melted. A door-shaped slot appeared, where there had been no door. Jack blinked.
“Smart materials,” Keelraiser said, shortly. “We are significantly ahead of you in materials science.”
Jack hid a smile. Who’s got the biggest dick, eh? His amusement faded as he reflected that it might be suicidal to start a pissing contest with Keelraiser’s people, as long as he and Alexei remained in their power. He then wondered if Keelraiser actually had a dick. The alien came off as indefinably female. But did the concepts of male and female even apply? Keelraiser wore a loose grey string tank and grey culottes that disguised its lower body. It was flat-chested. It had no nipples.
They walked along a corridor that felt, to Jack, too high and narrow. The light was very dim: nightlight-level. The air was sweltering hot and sticky. The smell of the sea got stronger. They passed other aliens who exhibited a wide variance in terms of height, build, and coloring. Some were shorter than Jack. Some had silvery or bronze-colored hair, if those locks really were hair, which Jack began to doubt. Their reactions to him also varied, from studied indifference to freeze-and-run.
Keelraiser said, “That was a bad-mannered child—” pointing after the one who’d run.
“You have children?”
Jack regretted the words as soon as they were out. Keelraiser fixed him with a gaze that seemed to communicate world-weary disappointment. Its pupils had swelled in the low light to take up half its bruise-brown irises. “Yes, we have children,” it said. “This seems an appropriate time to misquote the Bard: Hath not a rriksti eyes? Hath not a rriksti hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a human is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? Well, I am not sure we are subject to the same diseases. But you haven’t died yet, which seems to prove something.”
Jack stopped and reached out, slowly, as you’d reach out to a stray dog. Keelraiser blinked—the first time he’d seen it blink at all—but did not flinch away. Jack stroked the alien’s flat, white cheek with his fingers. He’d been wanting to do this ever since he first clapped eyes on the creature. Are you really real? Yes, you’re real. The skin was feverishly hot. Figure a core temperature a few degrees higher than human average. A fast metabolism to go with that gracile physique. The texture of the skin—sticky. Jack rubbed his fingers together. A residue clung to them.
He was very frightened. He cast about for a way to show the alien that he was not frightened. He put his sticky fingers in his mouth, and tasted salt. “Let’s see if I die now,” he said.
“May I touch you?” Keelraiser said.
Jack wanted to say no, but told himself that reciprocity was the first step towards establishing a rapport with these creatures, and getting out of here alive. He shrugged.
Keelraiser stroked his cheek with a seven-fingered hand. It ran one finger over Jack’s lips, and pushed the tip inside. The salt of its skin filled his mouth. The tentative touch felt less like an intrusion than an erotic overture. Jack’s nerve broke, and he pulled back.
“We are fascinated by your mouths,” Keelraiser said. “You use them for everything!”
“What did you say the name of your home planet is? Rriksti?”
“No more than the name of your planet is Human. Rriksti is what we call ourselves.”
“And you’re like us, more or less? Two arms, two legs, two eyes … two sexes? Families, schools, armies, nations? Technology, pop culture, religion, war?”
“Yes to the last,” Keelraiser said. “Very much yes.” It started to walk again,.
Jack persisted, “How did you end up here?”
Keelraiser swung its face to him. Its eyes were all pupil. “There was a war. Well, there was the eleven thousand seven hundred and ninth war, counting from the beginning of recorded history … give or take. No one agrees on just how warlike we are. And oddly, those who insist we are not warlike are the ones who won. The Darksiders. They defeated us Lightsiders, without once admitting that we were at war again. Can you imagine? There is no war, they said, while the missiles were flying.”
“Yes, I can imagine actually,” Jack said. “We do the same sort of thing ourselves.”
“Their denial of truth gave us time to save ourselves. A few ships of the Lightsider fleet escaped the first bombardment. We filled them with evacuees. Stuffed them in like insects in a trap. A thousand people applied for each crew slot. I was one of those chosen. There were nine ships. Five of them escaped our system. One escaped the pursuit.”
Keelraiser pointed up.
“That is the ship now orbiting this rotten little moon, which you call Europa.”
CHAPTER 21
“I’m very sorry we shot at you,” Jack said. “With, you know, crossbows. It seems silly, doesn’t it? But we didn’t bring any guns.”
“No one was badly hurt,” Keelraiser said. “No hard feelings. Is this correct?”
“Yes—well, that’s very good of you …”
“Now we are in the hydroponics garden. Your friend is over there.” Keelraiser stalked away.
The hydroponics garden was a tropical swamp in a cave. Rickety walkways zigzagged over pools clogged with pale, fleshy vegetation. Fish—or aquatic life of some kind, anyway—stirred carpets of algae. Oxygen pumps burbled. That, plus the ubiquitous generato
r rumble, were the only sounds. The rriksti working in the garden went about their tasks in utter silence. Jack wiped sweat off his face. The room where he woke must have been air-conditioned purposely to make him comfortable. Wherever the rriksti came from, equatorial temperatures must be the norm.
“They come from Proxima b,” Alexei said, when Jack found him squatting on one of the walkways, trailing a stick in the water.
Jack raised his eyebrows.
Proxima Centauri was the nearest known star to Earth. It was only four and a bit lightyears away. As interstellar distances went, that was a hop, skip, and a jump. Loosely associated with the Alpha Centauri binary star system, Proxima was a red dwarf. It had a couple of confirmed exoplanets. One in the habitable zone. Proxima b.
“That Proxima b?”
“So they say. They showed me a projection of the stars. I’ve taken the star sights often enough. It’s Proxima b. ‘This is our home,’ they said. They described a tidally locked planet. Hot and dry on one side, frozen on the other, a narrow twilight zone where all the rich fucks live. They call it Imf. They’re an interplanetary species. Imf’s got a large moon, they’ve colonized it. Bases also on the other planet in the system, a rocky Mars type with a 60-day orbital period. They’ve sent expeditions to Alpha Centauri A and even Alpha Centauri B. Bb exists, it’s a water world. Primitive life.”
“I apologized for shooting them,” Jack said. “‘Sorry we tried to kill you with homemade crossbows,’ sort of thing.”
“What did they say?”
“‘It’s all right. No one was badly hurt. …’ Maybe their EVA suits are really, really good.”
Alexei swished his stick in the water. “This is shit,” he said. He laid the dripping stick on the walkway and took a drink from a plastic mug beside him. Jack realized how thirsty he was.
“What’s that?”
“Water. They offered me food but it tasted like ass. These sick-looking plants? Supposed to be that color. Suizh. It’s their staple carbohydrate. Fish in the pools. These higher shelves around the pools are mushroom beds. Well, I still think it’s impossible to raise fungi hydroponically, but here we are. Here they are.”
Jack sat down beside Alexei and drank some of the water from the mug, grimacing at the tang of brine. He said, “They’re refugees. They fled from what sounds as if it must have been an extinction-level nuclear exchange. World War Three. Well, according to them, World War Eleven Thousand and Something. But this one was really something. They packed their people into ships and ran like hell.”
“That explains it.”
“Explains what?”
“Why they’re barely hanging on,” Alexei said. “Why they stole the engines out of our advance landers.”
“The MOAD was supposed to be a colony ship,” Jack said, relaying what Keelraiser had told him. “They were in the midst of a large-scale project to colonize one of the uninhabited planets orbiting Alpha Centauri B. When war broke out, they sent all these ships in different directions, hoping that at least one of them would survive. This was that one. But it was never intended to travel this far. They barely made it. Scraped in by the skin of their teeth.”
Ten years ago, Jack had photographed the moment when the MOAD skidded into the Jovian system on its last gasp. If only he’d known what he was seeing through his viewfinder!
“They’ve been here for ten years,” Alexei said, nodding glumly at the pools that shimmered in the half-light. Rriksti knelt on the walkways, tending their fish and plants. “Everything is starting to break down. They’re running out of replacement parts. They have advanced fabbers, but the problem is raw materials.”
“And then we sent them Thing One and Thing Two. It must have felt like Christmas.”
“The ones I spoke to … oh, there they are.” Two rriksti stalked towards them, hair swirling around their heads. “Their names are Nene and Eskitul, or some damn thing like that. They laughed about it. If only you could have landed the Things a little closer to here, they said. Three out of the four rriksti who retrieved the engines died of radiation exposure.”
That angered Jack—the waste of it, and the suggestion that the rriksti would mindlessly sacrifice themselves for their collective, conforming to the Hollywood image of a Borg-like alien menace, despite the evidence of individualism he’d already seen. Then again, humans did the same thing, didn’t they? Soldiers did it. Not mindlessly, but for the sake of their nation, their tribe, their platoon.
Nene and Eskitul dropped to their haunches on the walkway. They gestured for Jack and Alexei to put on their headsets. The one called Nene gushed about how pleased it was to meet Jack. It gave a very different impression from Keelraiser’s grave, somewhat awkward affect. Yes, these were individuals. Nene had reddish hair, wore a purple smock over its culottes, and gestured effusively with its seven-fingered hands.
Alexei took off his headset while Nene was in mid-flow. He smiled deprecatingly at the aliens. “By the way, I found out why they HERFed the SoD,” he said to Jack.
“They were afraid of us,” Jack said. He was still wearing his headset. Nene and Eskitul stiffened. Their hair stood on end.
Nene exclaimed, “It’s terrible. We are so very sorry. We were just trying to say hello.”
*
“They don’t talk with their mouths,” Alexei sighed. “They communicate by bio-radio.”
“Bio-radio?”
“That stuff on their heads isn’t hair. It’s keratin mixed with iron particles. They have antennas.” With every piece that fell into place, Alexei seemed to be getting gloomier. Typical Russian, Jack thought. When it rains he thinks God’s pissing in his eye. “They evolved with six senses, not just five. And they thought we did, too.”
“Ten years is a long time to keep making a mistake like that.” Jack muttered. But he considered how much they didn’t understand about the rriksti. Vice versa, the same applied. The things you couldn’t learn from television were precisely the fundamentals of human existence.
“We’re very sorry,” Nene said, wringing its hands.
Jack said skeptically, “So when you nearly broke our eardrums yesterday, that was our suit radios picking up your crosstalk?”
“Yes. We didn’t mean to hurt you.”
Eskitul said, “We hypothesized that your mouth movements were a non-verbal signaling mechanism.” This large-framed, bronze-haired alien’s voice, as simulated by the headset, sounded deep and boomy, like whale song. “Microphones? We took them for transmitters. The hair of these poor creatures must be underpowered, we thought. Each antenna strand is so thin.“ Eskitul’s own thick, bronze bio-antennas shook gently. “And yet, how fast they can process information!”
Nene explained, “We thought you demodulated the sideband signals of your television broadcasts in your heads. We never guessed that you communicate by making sounds with your mouths!” Nene opened its own tiny, pink mouth wide.
“Oh, the research, the mentation, the competing theories!” Eskitul said. “I was a leading anthropologist. All these years. It was a complete waste, wasn’t it?” The big rriksti came closer on its hands and knees. Its luminous eyes seemed to smile at Jack and Alexei. “I’ve learnt more from you than I did from thousands of hours of broadcasts.”
Jack said, “You’ve got a powerful radio transmitter out there. Why didn’t you simply get in touch? Save everyone a lot of trouble.”
“We tried,” Nene said immediately.
“Using digital AM signals, with frequency hopping,” Alexei muttered. “Not a snowball’s chance of picking that up.”
Jack scuffled away from Eskitul. He didn’t like the large alien with its bronze mane wafting around its long, starved-looking face. He disliked the idea that the rriksti had overestimated humanity, and had suffered as a result. Our radio telescopes were too weak to pick up their SOSes, we took ten years to get out here, and when we arrived the first thing we did was to attack them with homemade crossbows. He felt ridiculously grateful that the aliens wer
e not holding that against them. They must have taken it about as seriously as an adult would take a toddler pounding on him with its little fists.
Frustrated and ashamed, Jack picked up the stick Alexei had been messing with and plunged it into the water. It crunched into the bottom of the pool. He bore down until his hand entered the water up to the wrist. “Careful!” Nene said. The water was blood-warm. Darting touches whispered against Jack’s skin, like small fish. He moved the stick around, felt it catch in something, and brought the thing up.
A half-decayed fish head.
Dripping, gleaming in the half-light, with the flesh eaten away from the cheeks and jaw, it looked like a Halloween prop.
“Protein,” Alexei said.
“Good one,” Jack said. He let the fish head splash back into the water. The algae knitted over the black hole it made.
“That’s not all I’ve found, poking around in here,” Alexei said. “These are all-purpose middens. I found one of their skulls.” He did not have his headset on. He gestured at his own jawbone. The two rriksti watched the men with patient perplexity. “They bury their dead in the compost heap. It’s one step up from cannibalism.”
Jack took off his headset and ruffled his hair with his fingers. It had set into stiff cowlicks, as if he’d been swimming. “I’d like to see us survive for ten years on Europa, with a busted spaceship and limited resources, after the destruction of our home planet. We wouldn’t be doing aquaculture, we’d be eating each other.”
“They’re willing to let us see everything, stick our fingers into everything. Maybe they think we’re mentally incapable of understanding how it all works. Those little scavenger bugs—you saw them?” Jack nodded. “They’re also protein sources. I saw this Nene person pick one up and pop it in her mouth. Crunch.”
The red-haired rriksti cocked its head on one side.
“Do you think she’s a she?” Jack said. “I get that impression, too. Keelraiser is a she, as well, but Eskitul’s a he.”
“It’s a very finely tuned ecosystem. No waste, maximum recycling of resources, probably some genetic engineering at the microbe and bug level.” Alexei suddenly grinned. “Did they tell you they have a fucking fusion reactor?”
Lifeboat: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 2) Page 15