The silver-tentacled alien approached her. This time, she let it come. It moved behind her and released the catches on the back entry port of her suit. She wriggled out.
“Something stinks in here,” she said, sitting on her heels. The air was warm on her face but felt cool against her limbs, as the sweat soaking her thin nylon t-shirt and panties began to evaporate.
Giles limped up to her, walking with a cane. He was clearly having trouble with the gravity, too. And the aliens had given him a cane to walk with? It was too long for him. The head looked to be made of gold.
“You did very well!” He looked a bit woozy. But his eyes were bright in the dim light. “I think they are pleased with you!”
“What? All I did was kick that fucker in the nuts.”
“Yes, yes!” Giles babbled about how he’d worked out that these aliens had a custom of ritually trading blows with strangers. He described how the silver-tentacled one, which he named Boombox, had knocked him around and then invited him to hit back. Kate reflected that Giles was not a military man. He must also have avoided the playground as a child. What he described didn’t sound particularly exotic to her. More like a bully acting out to amuse his fan club. Hit me, go on. Hit me if you dare, you little faggot. If that was a ritual, it was one humans performed, too. Yes, there were probably some alien nuances going on, but she doubted Giles had grasped them, any more than she could.
She turned her head—her neck twinged painfully, after those blows to her helmet—and located the silver-tentacled alien behind her. Its feet, covered with the muck from the floor, had seven black-clawed toes. She raised her gaze to its freaky triangular face. “You’re bored, aren’t you?” she said. “Stuck in this wreck for ten years. You must be climbing the walls. So when a fly comes along … you pull its wings off. It’s good to know we’ve encountered another intelligent species.”
Boombox extended a seven-fingered hand. She deliberated for a moment, but the way she felt, she wasn’t getting off the floor by herself anytime soon. She allowed the alien to haul her to her feet.
It led her to a long table with plates and cups stacked messily at one end. Chairs were pulled up to the other end. Kate collapsed into one of them, with Giles on her left. Boombox and its sidekicks sat across from them. For the humans, the chairs were like high stools. Rather than sit with her feet dangling like a child, Kate crossed her legs in lotus position.
All the furniture was ornately carved, and seemed luxurious. This gang of survivors had taken over the best part of the ship, like paratroopers squatting in Saddam’s palace. Kate exhaustedly plopped her elbows on the table.
“How do you make the gravity in here?” she demanded. “And can you turn it off?”
“Mass attractors,” Boombox said, from a radio-like device on the table. “They can be moved, but not turned off. When the Lightbringer was coasting, only the officers and VIPs enjoyed gravity. Now we enjoy it.”
“The Lightbringer?”
“The MOAD,” Giles said. “That’s the real name of the ship! Translated, of course.”
“And these guys are?”
“The last survivors of the ship’s guard,” Giles again jumped in to answer her question. Of course, as a xenolinguist, he had to act like the big expert, even though his expertise was apparently superfluous, since the aliens spoke English.
He related a tale of war breaking out on board the Lightbringer, pitting the ship’s civilian leadership against their own guards. Kate shook her head. It sounded crazy … and 100% believable, given recent events on board the SoD. Just two years had been long enough to set a handful of humans at each other’s throats. If they’d had these—what? Muon cannon?—Jack Kildare might well have blown a hole in the SoD, just like the opposing alien faction had apparently blown a hole in the Lightbringer.
“How long was their journey?” she said.
“Oh, I had trouble working that out!” Giles said. “At first they spoke in terms of years. Thousands of years!”
“Oh my God.”
“Yes, but you see, they explained that their home planet has an orbital period of eleven days! So one year for them is just eleven days long. Calculating it, we get a journey time of sixty-one years and five months.”
“Whew. That’s still pretty long. Were these guys born on the ship? Or are they long-lived?”
She suddenly remembered the alien woman in the locker. A leggy Sleeping Beauty with a fright-mask face, floating in green light.
She now doubted that it had been a woman. Long hair seemed to be a unisex thing for these guys, if that stuff even was hair. In fact, as humanoid as they superficially looked, their sex or lack thereof was a big question mark.
But the locker had been real.
Thousands of lockers, stretching away into the darkness …
As she tried to phrase a question about that, Giles dropped his voice. “I don’t know about their lifespans. Clearly they are superior to us in many ways, however their biology is a mystery. We don’t even know if they are male or female, or perhaps hermaphroditic!”
“No, I was wondering about that.”
“Perhaps they’ve transcended gender identity through genetic engineering.”
Kate wrinkled her nose. Giles’s excitement grated on her. She could cut him a bit of slack—after a lifetime of theorizing about aliens, he finally got to meet them! He must feel like a kid in a candy shop. But they weren’t here to do cultural anthropology on these guys. They were here to evaluate any risk that the MOAD might present to humanity. Giles seemed to have clean forgotten about that part of their mission.
She herself felt easier in her mind, knowing that the MOAD—sorry, Lightbringer—really was disabled. It posed no threat to Earth. She was not impressed with Boombox and its cronies, either. Reading between the lines, they had been at the bottom of the food chain when the Lightbringer was fully manned. She smiled to herself, picturing them in rent-a-cop uniforms, hiding out until the shooting was over.
Wait a minute. Uniforms?
She frowned at Boombox, across the table from her. It wore the same gear as the others. A coat cut boxy in the front, with wide lapels, and longer in the back. Kinda Napoleonic. The loose Bermuda shorts suggested a more modern era—or just comfort. The whole ensemble was so dirty, you could scarcely tell it had once been orange.
Giles wore the exact same thing, but less dirty.
“Hey, Giles. Why are you wearing their uniform?”
She expected him to make some excuse, like they’d taken his spacesuit away.
She looked around the room to see, actually, what had happened to her suit, and what she saw was a couple of aliens taking it apart with knives. They had it laid out on a table like a corpse and they were hacking into the made-in-America soft goods, slicing out the mylar silicone joints.
“Hey!” She was on her feet. “That’s my fucking suit!” Her knees gave way. She caught herself on her chair. Boombox was there, hauling her upright. It came around the table so damn fast, she knew it had just been playing with her before.
“They dismantled my suit, too,” Giles said. “They need the raw materials! Kate, they have nothing. Everything is broken. The fabrication units, the electrolysis machinery, everything! They are barely surviving!”
“So what? Honestly, Giles, so the fuck what?”
He had to think about that for a minute. She hung in Boombox’s grip. It held her upper arms, gently. Her back was pressed against its torso. The heat of its skin came through her t-shirt.
“They are living creatures, like us,” Giles said finally.
”So what?” Anyway, she thought, they’re not like us at all.
“Oh, you’re a true American,” Giles said, bitterly. “As Iron Maiden said: ‘White man came across the sea, he brought us pain and misery …’”
“Huh?”
“You propose to do to the rriksti what your people did to the Native Americans. They weren’t seen as fully human, either.”
“Giles, the
se guys aren’t Native Americans. They aren’t human.”
A tirade burst out of Giles. Kate couldn’t follow the intricacies of his argument, but he seemed to be saying that first contact was a heavy metal thing. Metal was the music of the oppressed, of the excluded, of outsiders who did not belong. This was true on the semiotic level as well, he said. The dissonances of metal trained the brain for the weirdness of alien language. Kate remembered that these had been themes of Giles’s work pre-MOAD. But now he added a tinfoil-hat twist. The Spirit of Destiny, he asserted, had been designed by the tottering US hegemon and its allies precisely to suppress, with violence, these natural sympathies between aliens and terrestrial heavy metal fans (and, he generously allowed, other ‘outsiders’ of various flavors).
Kate reflected on how inadequate her briefings on her crew had been. Even the NXC had not known Giles held these radical opinions. But maybe he hadn’t held them before they left Earth. In the two years since the SoD’s departure, a lot of tinfoil-hat attitudes had moved into the mainstream, courtesy of the Earth Party. It had been a mistake, she thought, to allow the crew access to the internet.
And here came the Earth Party, right on cue. It was, Giles said, the voice of the oppressed and excluded. A new alternative to Earth’s corrupt politics. Direct democracy via the internet.
“The people of Earth welcome the rriksti.” A drop of Giles’s spittle hit her cheek. “You will not stop us!”
“Giles, this is my fault,” she said. “I should have paid more attention. I took you for granted. I made fun of your music. Can you forgive me?” She made this desperate plea, hoping against hope, thinking of Peixun and Skyler and Meili and Jack and Alexei—five out of eight! She couldn’t lose anyone else, even if it were Giles. “I’ve been a shitty mission commander,” she blurted.
The fey light in Giles’s eyes brightened. “That’s OK,” he sneered. “You are not mission commander anymore.”
Boombox tightened its grip on her arms, lifting her up so her toes dangled off the floor. Too late, she realized that it was holding her so that Giles could hit her. Then he did.
He slapped her in the face, punched her in the stomach, punched her in the breasts. Christ that hurt. All the time Boombox was holding her with her feet off the floor in what was actually a torture position. Her arms seemed to be coming out of their sockets. She spat blood, felt a tooth wobble. Giles came at her again, his eyes wild, like he wanted to gnaw her throat out. Her eyes instinctively squeezed shut, and she thought about Alexei. They’d had that fight on the bridge, the night of the third HERF attack. He’d hit her, blacked her eye. Big fucking deal, in retrospect.
But at the time, she’d felt the humiliation, the loss of authority, like a knife in her heart, and so she’d made the worst decision of her life. Instead of being up-front with Alexei and Jack and walking them through her decision-making process, she’d lied about receiving orders to blow up the MOAD. She should’ve sat them down for a frank talk. She could have convinced them that the MOAD was a clear and present fucking danger to us, if not to all humanity. But after that near-mutiny, she had not felt like dialoguing with Alexei or Jack or anybody. So she’d made up those orders from Mission Control, and we all know how that went. She’d had to back down for fear of provoking total mutiny.
If only, if only she’d just talked to her crew, the Lightbringer and these psychotic aliens would now be a cloud of debris. Alexei would still be alive. And Kate wouldn’t be getting beaten to death by Giles fucking Boisselot.
The blows stopped coming.
She opened her eyes.
In a daze of pain, she saw Giles fiddling with a weird gun, resembling a water-pistol with a large reservoir. One of the aliens was showing him how to use it.
Giles stared at her and babbled, “This weapon lowers the Coulomb barrier! It will turn your heart into a fist-sized ball of radioactive ions! Tres cool, n’est ce pas?”
Oh yes, Kate thought. Shoot me, please. Anything to get away from this pain.
But wait.
There was some reason why she must not die.
What was it?
Hannah.
If she died, Hannah, left alone aboard the SoD, would die also.
But of course, that wouldn’t make a dime’s worth of difference to Giles. After all, Hannah was an American, too.
Kate twisted weakly in the alien’s grip. Something popped in her right shoulder. She screamed.
Boombox wrapped its big hands around her ribcage and lifted her up so her face was on a level with its own. The huge dark eyes regarded her, their expression unreadable.
She believed that the mind in there was the unknowable mind of a psychopath, if not something worse, something so bad that human language had no words for it. But she also had to believe that Boombox had pragmatic motivations, and wanted to ensure the survival of itself and its friends.
“You took our suits,” she gasped. “You took our broomstick. Your buddies on the surface took the engines out of our advance landers.”
“Not our buddies,” said the radio on the table.
“OK, whatever. Point being, your M.O. is taking our shit. So I’m guessing you plan to take the Spirit of Destiny, too. Am I right?”
Giles jumped in, “C’est ca! With the raw materials from the SoD, we will make the Lightbringer operable again!”
“I’m not fucking talking to you, Giles!” She stared into the alien’s eyes. “Boombox, you better believe me. If you kill me—if you let that faggot piece of shit kill me—you will never get the SoD. Do you understand? You will get nothing. You know why? Because I come from the United States of America. We Americans are many things but we are not stupid. The guy I work for? The president of the United States? Gave me a deadman’s switch,” she lied, praying that these fuckers were paranoid enough to believe it. Anyway, it was kind of true.
CHAPTER 29
Jack dressed for dinner with mixed feelings. A formal sit-down meal! He’d have been fine with a sandwich, or whatever the rriksti equivalent was.
“We’re probably on the menu,” Alexei muttered.
Jack grinned at him. At least Alexei was joking again. For a while there he’d been spazzing out, insisting that the rriksti were holding them prisoner. Even if that was true—which Jack wasn’t ready to believe—throwing punches would clearly do them zero good. Jack had pleaded with Alexei to recognize that fact.
He pulled on the shorts the rriksti had lent him. “It’s better than being raped to death,” he said.
“Or having our skins sewn into their clothing.”
Jack held up the smock that went with the shorts. “Oh dear. Is that you, Skyler?”
Alexei sniggered, putting on his own borrowed garments.
The clothing had no seams; printed, not sewn. The material felt slubby, like a raw silk shirt Jack had once been given by a girlfriend. Smocks and shorts were the same dull gray as the clothing most of the rriksti wore.
But the room they were in—Eskitul’s private apartment—shouted with color. Hangings, cushions, and screens displayed the fiddly swirling patterns that the rriksti seemed to favor. This stuff must have been brought across four lightyears from Imf, but Eskitul was not interested in showing it off. Instead, it kept fetching out items related to its study of Homo sapiens: books, models of the Parthenon and the Pyramids, and most disturbingly, a model of a human brain, like you’d see in a science classroom, slightly wrong in its proportions. Eskitul explained that it had printed these things on the basis of images captured from television. The ‘books’ were particularly sad. The covers looked all right—the Bible, Das Kapital, Mein Kampf, all the biggies—but the plasticky pages were covered with impressionistic squiggles, not actual words.
There was a mirror. Jack combed his hair and beard with his fingers. Obviously the rriksti had no such thing as an actual comb. Eskitul had made a fuss over his blue eyes, but right now they looked more red than blue. Nervous apprehension coursed through his body, giving him a brittle kind of en
ergy. He didn’t even feel all that hungry, wished they could back out of this. His own fault for pushing it.
Alexei studied a picture on the wall. “Is this Imf?”
Jack put on his headset in time to hear Eskitul answer, “Yes, this is my home.” A castle perching on an impossibly steep crag. The castle’s walls burgeoned outwards—gravity on Imf was allegedly about three-quarters of Earth’s. A needle-nosed airplane painted a contrail across the purple sky. Airglow lit the horizon.
“Were you some kind of oligarch?” Alexei said. “Or maybe this is your ancestral pile?”
Eskitul’s hair danced. “It was my family home before the Darksiders captured it, two hundred years ago. Now it is dust.”
They had sorted out the difference between rriksti years and human years. The rriksti had switched to using the human definition in their involved tales of warfare. Alexei’s incessant questioning had prompted Eskitul to offer a complete history of the Long War between the Darkside and the Lightside, but it was less enlightening than mind-numbing—a dry-as-dust recitation of treaties, truces, attacks, counter-attacks, and filthy betrayals by the Darksiders.
They went into the next room, where a table had been set for what promised to be an excruciatingly formal meal. Ten rriksti rose to greet them. Keelraiser sat in the middle of one long side of the table. Eskitul took the empty place between Keelraiser and Nene. Jack and Alexei were seated across from them. A young rriksti served a starter course of what appeared to be fried floor-cleaner insects.
“What did I say?” Alexei muttered.
“They eat bugs in Asia,” Jack muttered back. He picked one up with the implement provided—a cross between a fork and a pair of sugar tongs—and crunched it.
Bubble-wrap. Greasy, tough bubble-wrap. Bitter as hell. Jack’s mouth threatened to turn inside-out. After a minute’s solid chewing, he managed to choke it down.
The rriksti munched their servings noisily. They came off as uncouth eaters, because they could not hear themselves. They’d told the men that they did possess a sense of hearing, but that their ears were nowhere near as sensitive as human ones. Jack now saw that they also possessed teeth—crowded rows of little white needles, which showed when they curled their lips back to eat. The sight of those teeth, and the noise of crunching, made for an off-putting ambiance.
Lifeboat: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 2) Page 20