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

by Felix R. Savage

  Yet now he had no better ideas.

  Boombox stood, flanked by its fellows, gravely watching his struggles.

  Giles faced the alien on his knees. The height of the table put their faces on a level. Any attempt to raise his right arm tortured his ribs, so he swung his left fist at the alien’s chest, and made glancing contact.

  All the aliens startled. The tips of their tentacles rose and wriggled.

  Giles collapsed back on his heels, waiting for them to beat him to death.

  Boombox came even closer, so that the edge of the table dug into its stomach. Giles smelled a strong salty odor. The alien shrugged off its coat and tossed it to a companion, exposing its upper body. It was so thin that its skeletal structure could be seen beneath the skin. The clavicle was longer than a human’s, giving its torso an exaggerated triangular form that echoed the shape of its face.

  It spread its arms obligingly.

  Giles closed his eyes and punched the alien in the chest. It felt like punching a hot steel wall covered with skin.

  Boombox tapped its own face.

  “All right, that’s what you want?” Giles swung at the pale cheek. Now he felt the dark joy of hitting the one who had hurt him. He slapped the alien’s face again and again, which probably hurt him more than it hurt Boombox. But he had a torn thumbnail, and it opened a shallow gash in the alien’s cheek. Blood welled.

  Giles noted that the blood was as red as any human’s. Then he passed out.

  *

  He regained consciousness, still lying on the dining table. The pain in his ribs had abated to a dull throb. He felt instinctively that only moments had passed since his orgy of violence against Boombox, but the improvement in his physical condition suggested it must have been longer.

  He pushed himself up on his elbows. Pain spiked through his right cheek. That didn’t seem to have abated any.

  Boombox was pacing amidst overturned chairs and tables. It had its arms folded behind its back. Its shoulders must be double-jointed. The posture made its chest puff out in a manner that would have been comical, if it were not eight feet tall with a stalking predatorial gait.

  Seeing Giles awake, it abruptly began to speak.

  “We fought,” it said, through the pathetic improvised communications device sitting next to Giles. “It was a fight that could not be settled. The situation deteriorated until we were entrenched at opposite ends of the ship. They held the bridge. We held the drive and the primary water reservoirs. But they also held a pocket of territory amidships, which they resupplied via the hangar deck. As we approached this gas giant, they made a sortie and captured the ship’s arsenal. They targeted our front lines with … a weapon your species hasn’t invented yet.”

  Giles struggled to process this sudden flood of information. He understood that Boombox was telling him how the MOAD had ended up here.

  “You know, perhaps, that a stream of muons catalyzes fusion in water?”

  Giles had not known this interesting fact.

  “Those cretins fired a siege-class muon cannon at our fucking water reservoirs.”

  Boombox unfolded its arms and flung them out. The gesture conveyed the force of an uncontrolled explosion.

  “The water tanks turned into fusion bombs.”

  “You blew up your own ship!” Giles said in amazement.

  “No! They blew it up.” Boombox stalked back towards him. “They murdered one hundred and eighty-four of my people. The explosion disabled the primary field generator, blew a hole in the hull. The in-system drive remains operable. But we cannot operate it.”

  Giles said, “I—I’m sorry.”

  He was sorry. He had hoped that the MOAD and its passengers would be the salvation of humankind.

  “Then,” Boombox went on, “they fled to the surface of this ugly ice ball. In the only working shuttle. They disabled all sixty-nine other shuttles, while my people fought the fires raging on board.”

  Giles shook his head at this iniquity. The motion sent needles of pain through his face. He rested his elbows on his knees and cradled his face in his hands. That hurt even worse.

  Boombox closed a hot, hard hand on his arm, Giles jerked his head up to see the alien’s face hanging over him, its huge eyes staring at him.

  “They left us to die.”

  “The ship, it is completely inoperable?” Giles said, tiredly. “You said something about an in-system drive …”

  “Undamaged. But inoperable.”

  Boombox yanked on his arm, dragging him off the table. Giles staggered in the unaccustomed gravity. The alien hauled him over to one of the star-point chancels. The wedge-shaped space seemed to grow as they entered, the side walls becoming screens filled with overlapping 3D readouts.

  “This is the bridge.”

  Boombox’s voice now came from behind them, but Giles did not take his eyes off the alien towering over him. His gaze was drawn to the bloody scratch on its cheek. Their exchange of blows had been traumatic, but it had had a purgative effect on him. He no longer felt any dislike for the alien. In fact, he wanted to apologize for hurting it.

  “For ten years I have thought about little else apart from life support. We cannibalized systems throughout the ship to survive. Even so, we’ve been dying. You see three sevens of people here, there are two more patrolling the ship—that’s all of us.”

  Boombox turned away and braced its hands on the edge of the console. Its leonine head drooped. Its shoulderblades poked up against the fabric of its coat, sharp, emaciated. Giles had every reason to sympathize with what he understood to be its weariness and despair. Venturesomely, he placed one hand over the large, seven-fingered one. “You’ve been through hell.”

  “For many years this was our life. Then you arrived.” Boombox swung around to face Giles, pulling its hand out from under his. “And we had hope.”

  Giles smiled sadly. “There is a fantastic irony in this. Do you understand irony, by the way?”

  “Yes.”

  “I believed that you were our hope. You see, humanity has virtually destroyed Earth. The climate is changing. The seas are rising. Our carbon dioxide emissions have trigged runaway deglaciation and biodiversity loss. We’re standing on the brink of a historical wave of extinctions, and even that’s not the worst of it. The Arctic sea ice is melting. When that goes, we all go.”

  Giles’s hobby was heavy metal, but that did not absorb all his intellectual energies. Pre-MOAD, his other hobby had been arguing online with climate deniers.

  “At this crucial inflection point in our history, you arrived. From this fateful conjunction of looming ecological catastrophe and first contact, the Earth Party emerged. Our mission is to welcome you, to establish a framework for dialogue, to achieve harmonious relations with your species. We hoped that you might save us from self-destruction.” Giles spread his hands ruefully. “Now, I see that we were naïve. You cannot even save yourselves!”

  Boombox’s hair danced as if an invisible wind were blowing it around. Giles did not know what this meant.

  Suddenly the alien reached under the consoles and yanked open a locker. An avalanche of fabric cascaded out. Giles wrinkled his nose at the musty smell that came with it.

  Boombox snatched up a bundle of orange cloth spotted with mold. “This will be too large for you, but you can roll up the legs,” it said.

  “What is it?”

  “A uniform.”

  CHAPTER 27

  “Alas, my Hannah, you do me wrong, to choose that retard Jack to screw,” Skyler sang. “For I have loved you so long, and dream about your coochie-coo …”

  He laughed, a gasp of breath, and searched for another rhyme.

  It distracted him from how shitty he felt.

  He walk had become a battle with nausea.

  Maybe it was the smell of vomit, which he’d never got out of his spacesuit, sickening him. That’s what he tried to tell himself. But the stomach is not to be reasoned with. Our second brain is in our gut. Isn’t that
what they say? The microbiome does a lot of thinking for us. And Skyler’s microbiome, or his paranoia, or both, was telling him that he felt like throwing up because he was taking rems.

  His stupid umbrella-hat wasn’t protecting him, or wasn’t protecting him enough, from the lethal blizzard of charged particles bathing Europa’s surface.

  “Oh, Hannah, why can’t you see, I want to make sweet love to you …”

  Knives of pain twisted in his stomach. He stopped to wait it out, and looked back the way he’d come.

  Under the edge of his umbrella-hat, the ice field stretched to the horizon. His footsteps crossed it in a wobbly, meandering line.

  He swallowed bile. His heart thudded in his ears.

  He’d been walking for four hours. The Shenzhou Plus had long since vanished over the horizon.

  At last the pain receded. He faced forward again, ready to keep walking, because there was nothing else to do. Panic moved sluggishly in his brain, kept at bay, ironically, only by nausea. The white spike of the Dragon had grown taller, but its base hadn’t come over the horizon yet. He should have been there by now. Either his calculations were way off, or he had overestimated how fast he could walk.

  Probably the latter. It was hard to walk on an ice rink covered with grainy snow.

  “I want to se-ee your ecstasy … and …”

  A violent wave of nausea hit him. He barfed.

  His vomit hit his faceplate—liquid, just liquid, he hadn’t had anything to eat in hours. He did a couple of deep knee bends, fast, to make the vomit slide down so he wasn’t staring at it.

  He couldn’t help seeing it.

  There was stuff in it.

  Looked like coffee grounds.

  He retched again.

  *

  Hannah floated inside an algae tank, scrubbing it out. She’d made some headway on the to-do list Kate had left her. She’d repaired the industrial-size centrifuge and used it to separate the dead algae from the water in the tanks that had been worst hit by the power outage. She’d put the dead algae in the combustion unit and reduced them to phosphate-rich ash. That would provide extra nourishment for the living ones when she restocked the tanks.

  Now she was inside one of the thick, transparent Lexan cylinders, drying it with a special polishing cloth. When she climbed in here, there’d been globules of dirty water floating around. Now they were stuck all over her clothes and hair. She had a portable fan clipped to the rim of the tank, blowing air down on her, so she wouldn’t smother in her own CO2.

  It was hot, dirty, slimy work, and in combination with Ginsburg brand moonshine, it just about sufficed to stop her from thinking about the fact that she was alone on the SoD.

  That Skyler was dead.

  That Meili and Jack and Alexei were also dead.

  That Kate and Giles had been gone for more than four hours and they only had six hours of air supply in their suits.

  She might be the last surviving human being within 600 million kilometers.

  But she had a buzz on, so life wasn’t all bad.

  She climbed out of the tank at last, taking her portable fan with her, and fitted the end-cap back on. “Alas, my love, you do me wrong,” she sang. She’d heard Skyler singing this old chestnut around the hab in recent weeks. “To cast me out so discourteously …”

  She sniffled, and hooked up the pump. Water gushed into the tank. Soon she’d have a perfect line of full tanks spinning in their axial housing, filled with billions of algae, producing oxygen for …

  … me. Only me.

  She grabbed her bottle off her utility belt and squeezed it, hard. Moonshine mix gushed into her mouth.

  The SoD’s noises helped her to stay calm. Everything sounded louder now that she was alone. BRRRRRR went the fans. RMMMMM went the housekeeping turbine, aft. Clink clink went …

  … what?

  What was that?

  Clink.

  Still holding her squeeze bottle, Hannah drifted across the module. She ducked under the algae tanks.

  Clink.

  Wasn’t coming from the tanks.

  Sounded like something hitting the outside of the module.

  Clink clink.

  Micro-impact, she thought, but that was nonsense. Micro-meteoroids did not tap on the steel skin of your home like …

  … like something seeking a weak point …

  … looking for the way in.

  Clink.

  The sound was moving slowly over the hull of the module. Hannah floated on the inside, holding her breath. Only ten centimeters of steel separated her from whatever was out there.

  The sound came again, right in her ear. CLINK!

  Hannah flinched. She kicked off from the wall of the module and flew to the keel tube. In a blind panic, she scrambled through the axis tunnel in the main hab. Flies buzzed around her. The stench of rotting vegetation made her eyes water. She flew into the bridge and manually closed the pressure door behind her, using the hand crank they’d installed after Xiang Peixun’s death.

  It couldn’t get at her in here.

  Yes, it could.

  She flew to the radio and crammed the headphones over her hair. “Kate. Kate, this is Hannah. Come in. Giles. Come in.”

  Silence.

  “Kate, come in. Please.”

  Nothing.

  Numb denial moved her hand to the channel selector. She switched the comms over to the dipole antenna they used to receive telemetry from the maimed Things, and also to talk to the Shenzhou Plus and the Dragon. She keyed in the Dragon’s frequency.

  “Jack? Alexei? This is Hannah on the SoD. Do you copy?”

  They hadn’t answered before, when Kate tried to reach them. They sure as shit weren’t going to answer now. They were dead, dead, dead. But she couldn’t help trying.

  “Jack. Alexei,” she said into the dead radio. “I’m alone. I’m the only person left on the ship. And something’s trying to get in.”

  The radio squealed. She stiffened.

  “Guys! Is that you?”

  Distantly, faintly, she heard something.

  It might have been the static hiss of Jovian space.

  But it sounded like laughter.

  Hannah snatched the headphones off. She floated in the foot tethers, rigid with terror.

  Her gaze fell on the telescope.

  She swam across to it and pressed her eye to the improvised anti-shock pad, a donut of cloth that Alexei had duct-taped to the eyepiece a lifetime ago. The telescope was already trained on the location where Kate had found the alien radio mast. Hannah blinked the distant ice plain into focus.

  She expected to see the Dragon standing next to the radio mast.

  Maybe she’d even see aliens moving around it.

  The same aliens that were using the Dragon’s radio, screwing with her mind.

  What she actually saw did not compute.

  A blank field of ice, with a little blur in the middle where the Dragon had melted the ice when it landed.

  The Dragon was gone.

  CHAPTER 28

  Kate regained consciousness lying on her back.

  Aliens were trying to pull her helmet off.

  Dumb freaks didn’t grok that the Z-2 was a one-piece suit. The helmet didn’t come off.

  She drew her left knee up and pistoned her foot into the stomach of the nearest alien, knocking it backwards. Another one jerked her upright by the helmet. She shifted her weight forward, grabbed the arm reaching around her neck, and threw the alien over her shoulder. Kate had a black belt in tae kwon do. The alien went tumbling in a ball of spidery limbs.

  “Come and get it, motherfuckers,” she panted, wheeling to see what was behind her. Looked like she was in some kind of control room. Stars in the ceiling. Maybe this was the MOAD’s bridge. Twenty, thirty aliens surrounded her. They’d retreated when she started to fight back.

  They didn’t look as scary now. In fact, they looked like people. Tall, skinny people with freak masks on, and manes of dreads th
at would be the envy of any Rasta.

  Convergent evolution? Some people talked about a progenitor race that could have spawned humans and aliens alike. If that were true, humanity turned out to have some extremely freaky cousins. Their large eyes, and the eyestrain-level lighting in here, suggested that their home planet imposed a requirement for low-light / no-light sensoria. Fuckers could probably see in the dark.

  One of them, even taller than the others, with silvery dreads or tentacles or whatever, advanced towards her.

  OK. Bring it, freak-face.

  Kate had the advantage of being in her spacesuit—a mixed blessing, actually. It gave her protection, but weighed 50 kilograms, hampered her range of movement, and limited her peripheral vision.

  Breathing hard, she waited.

  The creature drove a punch at her helmet.

  She swayed back. In her suit, she didn’t have the hip flexion for a roundhouse kick, so she drove a low kick at the creature’s groin. Fight dirty? Why yes, E.T. Her boot connected with a satisfying thunk, but the alien did not collapse in agony. Maybe it didn’t have balls. It reached to grab her foot, missed, shifted its weight, and when she regained her balance its fist was waiting for her helmet.

  Holy fuck. Her head bounced off the inner padding. Felt like her brain bounced off the inside of her skull.

  She jabbed at the alien’s solar plexus, but it was a weak-sauce blow. The alien dodged easily. It punched her in the helmet again.

  She hoped that hurt its hand one half as much as it hurt her head.

  Stars exploding in her vision, she slid bonelessly to her knees. She’d been concentrating so hard on the fight, she had not allowed herself to notice the gravity, or her own flagging energy. Now everything just kind of gave way all at once.

  She thought about what would happen after she died. She wished she could warn Hannah.

  Then she spotted Giles, fucking Giles, standing in the circle of aliens.

  Wearing the same damn clothes as them and everything.

  No helmet.

  All other thoughts went out of her head. Her perspective on the situation turned inside-out.