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

by Felix R. Savage

  Hannah’s knees crumpled. She pitched forward.

  Boombox caught her. It carried her to the nearest chair and set her down. Then it sank to its knees before her. “Hail,” it said. “Shiplord.”

  CHAPTER 47

  Alexei cranked open the forward pressure door of the storage module. He took with him his rriksti blaster, and also a 1-meter length of angle iron, the stuff they’d used to make the crossbows. He’d sanded it to a point, welded a crosspiece onto it as a handguard, and wrapped duct tape around the grip.

  These tasks had occupied the long minutes while he considered Kate’s death. It had been therapeutic.

  He floated through the secondary life-support module, clad in shipboard sweats, with a bandage wrapped around his left calf. He’d been wounded during the fight earlier. A near-miss had left an oozing, bloody abrasion on his shin, as if a patch of his skin had been vaporized. Those alien weapons were evil. It stung like fuck. But it was just a graze. He’d told Jack the truth about that.

  On the other hand, he suspected the alien weapons emitted hefty doses of radioactivity. He might be in for a world of hurt later. But he didn’t seriously expect there to be a ‘later,’ so he didn’t need to think about that.

  SLS was Krijistal-free.

  Alexei opened the pressure door to the main hab.

  A few minutes later, he returned in a hurry to the storage module. He flew to the first-aid locker, prepared the supplies he would need, and darted back to the main hab.

  In the axis tunnel, he took the comatose aliens one by one. He pried them out of their frozen fetal postures and zip-tied them to the hexagonal lattice by a convenient arm or leg. Vomit leaked from their mouths when he moved them. Their eyes rolled, showing white. That was the first he knew rriksti eyes even had whites. In the slicks of vomit on their chins and chests, partially chewed pieces of carrot and sweet potato offered a clue to their condition. Brown globules floated in the zero-gee periphery of the axis tunnel. Another giveaway. Diarrhea. Their thin legs and buttocks were greasy with it, and the smell turned Alexei’s stomach.

  “Vitamin toxicity,” he muttered to himself. “Perhaps vitamin A, or one of the other fat-soluble vitamins? Who knows?”

  The treatment for vomiting and diarrhea was the same in any case. He had brought eight IV bags from the storage module, one for each hapless rriksti. He shook them to mix the solute pills into the water, forming a rehydration solution. Maybe the cure would be worse than the disease. But the rriksti were in hypovolemic shock. They needed to be rehydrated as a first step.

  Prodding with his thumb in search of a vein, he got a comment out of the first alien. “Why help?” it wheezed in his headset.

  “Oh, so you know what an IV is,” Alexei said. “Maybe you can show me where you keep your veins.”

  It turned out that the aliens’ median cubital veins were all the way on the insides of their forearms. Once he had that figured out, the next five went quickly.

  Number six shrieked at him in the rriksti language and then said, “But we tried to kill you.”

  Alexei got its IV hooked up and sat back, bracing himself against the hexagonal lattice. He looked down to the distant floor of the hab. He saw his handmade sword standing point up in a fish tank. He had dropped it when he saw the condition the aliens were in. “It’s what Kate would have wanted,” he said, and moved on to number seven.

  In fact, he was pretty sure Kate, were she alive, would not have given the aliens IVs. She would have served them each with an angle iron to the brain, and spaced their bodies.

  But maybe, wherever she was now, she was smiling.

  You have to believe things look different from heaven.

  “Your friends left you behind,” he told number eight.

  “That fucker Ripstiggr. I’m not surprised,” number eight said. It threw up again.

  “I think you poisoned yourselves with our vegetables. Why’d you stuff your faces like that?”

  “We were fucking hungry.”

  Alexei smiled. “Have an IV. I hope you aren’t allergic to isotonic chloride solution.”

  Strangers helping strangers—that’s how you throw a spanner in the miserable deterministic gears of the universe. Every act of kindness is a fuck-you to the siloviki.

  Even if they’re not human at all.

  *

  As he finished his medical duties, Alexei heard someone calling his name. He looked down.

  Thirty meters below and aft, Skyler rotated past, standing at the foot of Stairway 5. He had a laptop under his arm. He squinted up at the blaze of the growlights.

  “What are you doing?” Alexei shouted.

  “Alexei! Could you come down here for a second?”

  The rriksti Alexei was attending to said, “By the way, could you turn the lights off?”

  “Why?”

  “They’re too bright.”

  “Deal with it,” Alexei said. The laptop under Skyler’s arm sent his thoughts skittering. He hurried down the ten-storey length of Stairway 5. Skyler met him at the bottom. He’d pulled everything out of Meili’s desk, in the Potter space under this staircase. He showed Alexei a pile of electronics on top of the desk.

  “The malware trigger is on all of these.”

  Alexei stared in wonder at Jack’s laptop, with the Monty Python’s Flying Circus sticker on the case.

  A Chinese MP3 player.

  Giles’s iPod.

  Skyler’s own iPod.

  And Meili’s laptop.

  Skyler opened the laptop he was carrying—his own. “This is a program the NXC gave me. I’m not supposed to show it to you, obviously, but whatever. Fuck the NXC.”

  Alexei found his voice. “I deleted it.” He shook his head. “I gave one copy to Kate. Then I deleted my own copy. How did it get onto all these devices?”

  “When you tried to delete it, that probably triggered some kind of self-preservation routine. It copied itself over the Wi-Fi to every device that was switched on. Anyway, this is all of them … except your laptop. I couldn’t find that.” He met Alexei’s eyes. “What do you want to do?”

  “What do I want to do?” Alexei laughed hollowly. “I want to take a shower, eat a steak, get drunk, go to sleep, and wake up at home.”

  “Me, too,” Skyler said. “But apart from that.”

  “Delete every instance of the damn thing. But wait. If we try to delete it … it will just copy itself to any other devices around. The rriksti might get hold of it.” He glanced up at the axis tunnel.

  “I thought those guys were dead,” Skyler said in alarm.

  “No. No, they’re cool … I think. But we should be careful, anyway.” The GRU had taught him to trust no one. Stalling, he said, “I’ll go get my laptop.” It was in the storage module, where he’d been using it to calculate tolerances for the crossbows he and Jack had made.

  While he was back there, he took a quick peek into Engineering. The reactor was fine. Kate’s iPod floated in pieces in the air. Fighting a surge of grief, Alexei wondered how that had happened, and why.

  “These are the last devices,” he said, tossing his laptop and Kate’s broken iPod on the desk.

  While Alexei was gone, Skyler had retrieved his homemade sword from the fishtank where he’d dropped it. Skyler took a practice swing at the pile of devices, not really hitting them, just being theatrical. “I checked on the fish,” he explained.

  “Are they alive?” Alexei was surprised.

  “Yep. Tougher than we are.”

  “Huh.” So there might be a ‘later’ after all. Alexei drew a deep breath. “Listen, I’m going to the bridge. I want to see what Jack is up to.” He knew Kate was up there, too. He’d been stalling.

  “And these devices?”

  “You can dispose of them.”

  He imagined GRU heads, far away in Moscow, exploding at these words, and smiled bleakly to himself as he climbed the stairs.

  He flew along the axis tunnel, dispensing reassurance to his rriksti patien
ts en route. They were already feeling better, to judge from their renewed complaints about the lighting.

  He shouldered through the keel tube and flew onto the bridge. “Hey, Jack—”

  Kate sat in the center seat. For a heartstopping instant Alexei thought she was alive. Then he saw that she was naked, her lap covered with a blanket tucked inside her harness for decency. Flies crawled on her parted lips.

  He stroked her blood-clotted hair, and kissed the dead face that he used to kiss so ardently when she was alive. He heard someone moving around above him. “Jack?” He glanced up, unashamed of the tears in his eyes.

  Keelraiser floated near the ceiling.

  Jack was up there, too.

  Floating.

  Not moving.

  Alexei stared in numb shock. Globes of dark vomit floated around the pair. Clumps of Jack’s hair adhered to the ceiling like dead spiders.

  Alexei had taken for granted that Jack would be OK. Jack was as tough as a Russian.

  On the other hand, he wasn’t rad-proof.

  The hair coming out, the reddish peeling appearance of Jack’s skin, and above all the fact that he’d puked blood—all the symptoms indicated an absorbed dose in the fatal range.

  Alexei adjusted his headset and croaked, “All dead, or mostly dead?”

  “I don’t know.” Keelraiser lay parallel to Jack in the air, one hand flat on his belly, the other on his forehead. “Don’t distract me!”

  “You’re doing the same thing you did for Skyler,” Alexei realized with new hope.

  “I am trying! But it normally takes a full hand of people. And I’m not extroverted at all. I am a shitty manipulator.”

  Alexei ignored the last part of this, focusing on the first part. “As to that,” he said, “a full hand of people is seven, yes?”

  He flew off the bridge, shouting into his headset.

  *

  Jack floated in a hot black sea of pain. Now and then it pulled him under, and the agony drowned out thought and feeling.

  At other times he could hear someone talking to him.

  “SoD. SoD, do you read me? This is Houston, SoD, do you read me?”

  No, I do not fucking read you, Houston. I am dying. A 36-hour X-ray bath in the alien shelter, followed by those goddamn Super Soakers spitting out rems every time I pulled the trigger, on top of a fairly warm career as an astronaut since the year two thousand and fucking four, and a voyage to Europa.

  I’ve had my chips, Houston. You don’t fuck with megadoses of radiation and expect to come out the other side smelling of roses.

  I missed, anyway.

  I was in the right place at the right time to save Earth.

  And I fucking missed.

  “Spirit of Destiny! Commander Menelaou! Do you read me?”

  No, she doesn’t read you, because she’s dead, Mission Control. Same old story. I had a chance to save her and I stuffed it up. She’s dead. Those are pearls that were her eyes and all that. No, hang on, that was Lance.

  (Lumps of frozen crystals in his eye sockets. Not pearls, really. Diamonds. Murderers go to hell. Does it make any difference if you’re sorry?)

  “SoD! We have just picked up a drive plume stretching across Jupiter! Can you tell us anything about that?”

  Yes. Yes, I can tell you about that. It is the drive plume of the Lightbringer, better known as the MOAD, and it is on its way to destroy Earth, because I screwed up.

  “Don’t move, Jack. Don’t try to move.”

  Oh God, it hurts.

  He couldn’t move if he wanted to. His DNA was in ribbons, his cells were dividing out of control, he’d puked up his intestinal lining, and his head felt like it had been run over by a lorry.

  To make matters worse, people were pawing at him, dipping their meddling fingers into the full-body agony zone that was his skin.

  “It’s me,” the same voice whispered.

  I know it’s fucking you, Keelraiser. Get away from me, you deceitful, backstabbing alien piece of shit. Leave me alone to die.

  “Don’t be a bloody idiot,” said another voice, this one so clear, and so familiar, that Jack actually forgot his torment for a moment. “I told you this would happen, if you recall. The MOAD had extinction event written all over it from the minute it appeared in the sky. But all is not lost yet. There’s still time to save Earth. The SoD is still flyable, and you’re the only one who can fly it. So stop wallowing in guilt, and let them help you! Oh, I know you have to find everything out the hard way. I did. But it actually doesn’t make you a pathetic loser to let people help you sometimes.”

  “Ollie?”

  Jack tried to open his eyes, to see if Meeks was really there. This had the effect of reuniting his perceptions with his senses, and immersing him deeper into the sea of pain … at the very moment when it started to cool.

  Oh, that’s nice.

  Oh, that feels good.

  The taste of garlic filled his mouth.

  After some time, another voice drifted into his ears. “Houston, this is Ivanov. Stop shouting at us! I am alive, but Taft is missing. I don’t know where he went. And Kildare … is not in good shape.”

  “Just write my obituary and get it over with, why don’t you?” Jack said hoarsely, heaving his eyelids up.

  Alexei, at the comms console, spun around with a glad shout. He flew to Jack and hugged him. Rriksti scattered in the air.

  One of them was Keelraiser.

  Its eyes stared, its bio-antennas drifted limply.

  It extended one seven-fingered hand and curled it into a loose thumbs-up.

  Jack freed one arm and pulled Keelraiser into the hug, too.

  CHAPTER 48

  One of Skyler’s tasks, because no one wanted an NXC agent on board, so he got all the shit jobs, had been EVA suit maintenance.

  So he knew where all the spares were.

  The oxygen tanks, the valves. The LOX heaters. The batteries.

  He’d attached an oxygen tank to Alexei’s homemade sword, two-thirds of the way up.

  His feet rested on the sword’s crosspiece.

  Another length of angle iron, grabbed from the bench where Alexei had been working, went under the tank, crosswise. It extended far enough to the sides to support his thighs.

  Batteries under the tank.

  Valve and LOX heater on top.

  Cobble the whole lot together with duct tape, the astronaut’s best friend.

  He’d converted Alexei’s sword into a crude broomstick. It worked on the same principle as the one he’d ridden two years ago, wobbling all over the sky and puking in his helmet.

  He wasn’t wobbling now.

  Felt like puking. When didn’t he? But that could wait. It would have to wait.

  He had a job to do.

  He held the diaphragm for the oxygen tank in one glove. He’d modified the regulator so that a squeeze of the diaphragm would open the tank’s valve. That had been the trickiest bit of the whole project.

  He was wearing the wrist rockets the rriksti had given him. He opened the CO2 valves, using them like ullage motors to give himself a bit of a head start, so the LOX would settle in the tank, and bad shit wouldn’t happen.

  Now he was moving. Now it was safe to … squeeze.

  The broomstick shot away from the SoD, with Skyler riding it like he was humping the thing, thighs clenched around the oxygen tank.

  Below him, a thin rind of light heralded dawn on Europa.

  With the icy little moon in darkness, Jupiter’s umber glare illuminated the debris left behind by the Lightbringer.

  Scrap metal, twisted and buckled.

  And …

  The drifting shape of a human spacesuit.

  Just where Keelraiser had said it would be.

  Skyler angled towards it, using his wrist rockets to finesse the broomstick’s trajectory.

  The Lightbringer had been thrusting away from Europa when the Krijistal tossed their makeshift blast screen out. So, although the Lightbringer had
been laterally separated from the SoD by a hundred klicks, it had also been separated vertically. As a result, the debris had wound up in a higher orbit—a slower orbit—and the SoD had been overhauling it ever since.

  Now the debris field was barely two kilometers away, directly above the SoD.

  This is your only chance, Keelraiser had said to him. There is a human body in the debris. If you want to recover it, you must go now.

  Skyler glanced down past his feet. The pinprick lights around the SoD’s main hab looked very far away. He was terrified of getting left behind. He knew no one would come to save him if he didn’t make it back.

  Squeeze.

  Cold gas streamed out of the exhaust pipe he’d taped to the oxygen tank, on the opposite side from where he rode, so he wouldn’t freeze his cock off.

  “Hannah? Hannah!”

  No response from the drifting spacesuit. Maybe his rriksti headset wasn’t compatible with the Z-2 radio. Maybe she was too sick to speak. Or, most likely: she was dead inside that thing.

  Even so, he had to do this.

  He hadn’t expressed his feelings for her while she lived, because of the regulations, because he was scared of getting shot down, because he was trying to be a gentleman. So he’d ended up losing her to Jack. But Jack wasn’t here now. It fell to Skyler to bring her home. He reveled bitterly in his own fidelity.

  Gliding closer to the drifting spacesuit, he visually confirmed that it was Hannah’s Z-2, the one with the green glow-in-the-dark piping. He hailed her again, but got no answer.

  She rotated lazily, an X of arms and legs silhouetted against Jupiter.

  They’d thrown her out with the trash.

  Just one more piece of debris to deflect incoming blast waves.

  It was enough to make Skyler wish Jack had hit the goddamn Lightbringer.

  He’d done his best to talk Jack out of it, and he still believed he’d been right … but goddamn, those Krijistal were assholes.

  “Hannah, it’s me. I’m here …”

  No response.

  Had the nuke killed her? He didn’t see any flame damage on her suit. She might have escaped the blast. The debris had already spread out by the time the plutonium round detonated, and explosions didn’t travel far in space. But gamma rays and neutrons did. That was probably what had killed her, he told himself, clamping down on irrational hope. Either that, or she’d simply run out of air.