Shiplord: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 3)

by Felix R. Savage

  “Yeah, I know.”

  The rriksti required a diet rich in heavy metals, which had been in short supply on the surface of Europa. After ten years, the refugees were chronically malnourished. Cancer also stalked them, owing to cumulative radiation exposure, although that wasn’t always the death sentence you might think.

  “I’ve discussed it with Cleanmay, and we’ve decided to turn the Cloudeater into a sickbay,” Keelraiser said. Cleanmay was a rriksti doctor. A doctor without a hospital or any medical equipment to speak of. “We haven’t got many treatment options. Still, the sick would be better off in a proper rriksti environment.”

  They reached the passenger cabin, which was the length of economy class in a 747, but twice as wide and high. A proper rriksti environment. Hot, steamy, and gloomy. Imf must be a proper tropical paradise. Jack reminded himself that the environment also included X-rays sleeting invisibly through the Cloudeater. The rriksti basked in X-rays like humans basked in sunlight. It wouldn’t be healthy for Jack to hang out in here too long.

  “Well, that sounds like a plan,” he said. “Rip out some of the seats …”

  “The whole middle row.” Keelraiser slapped the back of a seat upholstered in the same shade of orange—Jack now noticed—as its uniform. The movement sent Keelraiser rebounding to the ceiling. “We’ll break them down for raw materials. Plastics, aluminum alloys—you can find a use for those, can’t you?”

  “Well, sure.”

  “Will you help?”

  “Now?” Jack suppressed a sigh. He had a thousand things to do in preparation for their burn out of Europa orbit. With more icebergs potentially coming their way, he was even keener to get moving.

  But none of his tasks would take as long as getting the passengers settled, and the sick required extra care. This was your idea, Kildare, he told himself. Don’t half-arse it.

  “OK. Shall I go fetch our laser saw?” He wasn’t joking. The SoD had run out of many things they really needed—but hey, they had a laser saw! The eggheads at NASA had got the mission requirements about 80% wrong. Jack could write a book on Shit You Really Need In Space. In fact, he had.

  “No need for that,” Keelraiser said. It raised both hands to the back of its neck. The snaky black bio-antennas whipped out of the way, the seven-fingered hands flashed down, and two short swords stopped dead in an en-garde position. Skeleton-leaf blades trapped oily puddles of light from the LEDs. Keelraiser floated away, laughing with its hair.

  “Now I’m very jealous,” Jack said. “They never issued us anything like that.”

  “The cutting edges are just a few tungsten atoms wide.”

  “Bet you keep those locked up.”

  “Yes. They’re not the sharpest things in the universe. Carbon nanocables would be … cuttier? Is this correct?”

  “‘Cutty’ ought to be a word.”

  “But it’s more elegant to carry a sword than a piece of string. At least that is what our commanders thought.”

  “I’d have to agree.”

  “I used these to chop up the Cloudeater’s mobility pods,” Keelraiser said, referring to the small orbital transfer vehicles they had sacrificed for parts. “Now for the seats.” It held out one of the swords to Jack, who took it carefully. The off-white hilt felt smooth, yet sticky, like rriksti skin. “Let’s race,” Keelraiser suggested. “You start from that end. I’ll start from this end.”

  Jack grinned. “You’re on.”

  *

  On the bridge, Giles Boisselot frowned at his laptop. The Excel spreadsheet on the screen had three columns: a list of Rristigul words for heavy metals, the rrikstis’ own translations of these words, and Giles’s glosses, including alternative translations where he thought the rriksti might have made a mistake. Arsine? Or did they mean arsenic?

  For a xenolinguist, Giles made a good gardener. So he had concluded after months of struggling with Rristigul, the language used by the Darksider rriksti on the SoD. There were two rriksti nations, broadly speaking—the Lightside and the Darkside, who lived, obviously, on the light side and the dark side of Imf. Perhaps the Lightsiders spoke a less fiendish language. Giles would never know, because the Darksiders had obliterated them in an all-out planetary war. Then for an encore they had come to invade Earth.

  The trouble with Rristigul was not the 15 different declensions of nouns, nor the three tense-sensitive cases used for pronouns, nor even the fact that the meanings of words changed depending on frequency as well as amplitude. No, it was the fact that the Darksiders were so infuriatingly dishonest, even in matters, such as the naming of heavy metals, which could make the difference between life and death for them.

  File name: SHIT WE NEED.

  Jack had started the list. By now it was book-length. They had all added to it as their margin for survival frayed thinner and thinner. Four months spent orbiting Europa had not been in the mission plan.

  Nor had 306 rriksti.

  Rescuing them from Europa had been Jack’s idea. He’d said it was the least they could do, after the rriksti helped to refill the SoD’s water tanks. Alexei backed him up, as usual. Skyler’s opinion did not matter. Giles flattered himself, half-seriously, that his own opinion did matter. He approved of the decision, as he recognized that Jack was acting, consciously or unconsiously, on the Golden Rule: do as you would be done by. This at least moved interstellar relations back in the right direction, after the disastrous start they’d got off to. Furthermore, Giles had begun to grasp the importance of reciprocity in rriksti culture. But the question remained:

  How the fuck are we going to get home?

  It’s nice to have plenty of reaction mass, but that will not keep us alive for two years, not if we don’t have—say it with me—all this Shit We Need.

  Sighing, Giles scrolled down to the end of the list. Someone had made a new entry. He smiled. Then he touched the intercom.

  “Jack?”

  Alexei answered. “He’s still on the Cloudeater. What’s up? Another iceberg?”

  “No, no. Is everyone safely aboard?”

  “Aboard, yes, safely, no comment. It is complete chaos back here.”

  “Are you going to hook up the plumbing now? Or later?”

  While he waited for Alexei’s response, Giles scanned the internal monitoring feed, flipping through grainy videos from all the different cameras mounted inside the SoD’s modules. Each and every camera showed rriksti. Rriksti, and more rriksti. Their luggage littered the floor of the main hab. Hydroponic tanks and trays had leaked in transport. Several rriksti knelt up to their elbows in a large tank, wrestling with Imfi fish. Giles spotted Alexei at last, in the Potter space under Staircase 5, standing on poor dead Qiu Meili’s desk, driving rivets into the hab wall. The plan was to rig nets to stop all this crap from shifting around when they burned.

  “I will do the plumbing later.” Alexei’s lips moved on the screen, and his voice came through the intercom. They’d patched their rriksti headsets into the ship’s internal comms.

  “Rivets?” Giles said.

  “We’re out of duct tape.”

  Giles sighed. He glanced back at his laptop screen. The DUCT TAPE!!! entry was highlighted in yellow, sandwiched between ‘nitrogen’ and ‘antibiotics.’ “We really need that resupply flight,” he said.

  “Send them some more pictures of your feet,” Alexei suggested.

  Giles looked down at his feet. His feet? He wiggled his toes.

  He was a quadruple amputee. He had not started out that way. His hands and feet had been severed, just for fun as far as he knew, by Ripstiggr, the commander of the Krijistal.

  Ripstiggr now held the distinction of being the individual Giles hated most in the universe, narrowly edging out the director-general of the European Space Agency (ESA).

  After the amputations, while Giles was unconscious, the Krijistal had sealed his stumps with skin caps. They had stuffed him into poor Hannah’s spacesuit and cast him out of the Lightbringer.

  At first, th
e skin caps had looked like rounded clubs, the pale color of rriksti skin. Jack had made him a pair of strap-on hooks so he could perform basic tasks. No one had been more surprised than Giles himself when his stumps started to grow. Day by day, those mushroom-colored clubs had sprouted nubs that turned into fingers and toes, on the ends of wrists and ankles which still continued to elongate.

  The rriksti had not been surprised. They had apparently known this would happen. On Earth, research into limb regeneration was in its infancy, but the rriksti were fifty to a hundred years ahead of humanity in most arenas. And that very much included medical technology.

  When Giles pressed for information, the rriksti doctor Cleanmay had speculated that the guys on the Lightbringer must have done a quick and dirty analysis of his DNA, and used cells from his fingernail and toenail matrices to ‘program’ the skin caps, in the hopes that their regeneration technology would work, probably, mostly, sort of.

  Mostly. Yeah. Sort of.

  Giles’s small, bony new hands had seven fingers each. His little flipper-like feet (still growing) had seven toes.

  But whether it has five or seven fingers, a hand is a hand. Right? Even if the word in Rristigul is shka, and we just call them hands to make it seem mostly, sort of, OK.

  They had, of course, sent pictures of his amazing new limbs back to Earth.

  Giles regretted that almost as much as he regretted losing his hands and feet in the first place.

  Because the director-general of ESA—the second-most-despicable person in the universe, let’s remember—had got hold of those pictures, and leaked them to the media, to make it look as if the rriksti were miracle-workers.

  An outrageous deception!

  Giles knew well how tempting it was to believe in salvation from beyond. That’s what had brought him out here. But as it turned out, the rriksti needed salvation at least as badly as humanity did.

  And since there is no God, Giles thought, we’ll just have to save ourselves.

  CHAPTER 4

  Keelraiser’s tungsten-bladed sword was a joy to use. It went through the aluminum frames of the seats as if they were made of butter.

  They started at opposite ends of the cabin and worked their way towards each other. Jack soon got into the rhythm of it. He swung and hacked, bracing his feet against each seat in turn while he demolished the one behind it. Air cushions embedded in the seats popped, unleashing a strange, wild odor. Air from Imf, trapped inside the upholstery all these years.

  Swing and hack. Swing and hack. Sweat shook loose from Jack’s body in airborne rivers. Some of the seats wore the face of the late Eskitul. Some of them became Krijistal. Some of them took on the faces of the fucking idiots on Earth who’d approved this mission in the first place. And some became the NASA project managers who’d half-arsed their design evaluation processes, leaving Jack to command a low-tech disaster …

  He backed over a seat and hit nothing with his legs. A single row of seats remained in the middle row. The rest drifted in pieces around the cabin like orange-and-blue asteroids.

  “I won,” Keelraiser said, sheathing its sword. Until now, Jack had thought that the rriksti didn’t sweat like humans. Turned out he’d just never seen one of them work this hard before. Keelraiser’s pale face dripped like a seashell just pulled out of the surf. Its cheeks glowed pink, and it had dark circles under its arms. It mopped its face with its sleeve.

  Jack ducked an airborne seat chunk, and laughed. “Think we might have got a bit carried away there.”

  “It was fun,” Keelraiser said. “But you chopped them up too much. That is why you lost.”

  “I did not lose.”

  “Lies, damned lies, and English.” Keelraiser had found a water bottle somewhere. It closed its small lips around the nozzle. Its throat worked as it drank.

  “Gimme some,” Jack said, realizing how thirsty he was.

  “No,” Keelraiser said, still drinking. When you talk with your hair, you can talk with your mouth full. “It would poison you.”

  Jack hated that rriksti food and drink was toxic to humans. It made him feel vulnerable. Irrationally, he refused to be beaten by some stupid Imfi beverage. “We’ve got to share everything now, you know,” he said, making a grab for the bottle.

  Keelraiser plunged away through the air. Jack gave chase. Keelraiser threw a chunk of seat at him. They pelted each other, dodging and diving. Keelraiser’s laughter pealed like the noise of a sat-upon concertina. Yeah, it was childish, but now that everyone was safely aboard, couldn’t Jack stop being the mission commander for five minutes and just be himself? Freefall was fun, something he forgot for long stretches at a time through focusing exclusively on the dangers of space.

  He caught Keelraiser by the legs and pinned it to the floor. There was no ‘down,’ as such. The floor was just one side of the battle theater they had made of the passenger cabin. Jack hooked his toes and fingers around severed seat supports, spreadeagling himself on top of Keelraiser. “Why orange?” he gasped, referring to the seats.

  Keelraiser panted under him, his torso rising and falling. Its coat had fallen open to reveal the ribby breadth of its chest. It had no nipples. Gusts of salty breath blew into Jack’s face. “Darkside Space Force colors. Orange, indigo, and white. This craft started its life as a commercial passenger shuttle.”

  “So it was a Concorde!”

  “Yes, something like that. A Concorde that flew to the moon and back. It was commandeered when the last war but two broke out. In those days, the military had enough money to employ people to design carpets and soft furnishings …”

  “We’ve got plenty of those.”

  “So they refitted it as a stylish and patriotic troop transport. Then it got reassigned to the Lightbringer. When we reached Earth, I would have flown support missions, taking the Darkside infantry to carry out their terror operations on Earth, and resupplying their bases.” Jack could feel Keelraiser’s heartbeat thudding, belying its calm voice. “I was looking forward to it.”

  Jack fell silent, thinking about that nightmare scenario. It could so easily have happened. But now the rriksti infantry were all dead. The war on board the Lightbringer had killed them in their sleep. And there were no more shuttles. Only the Cloudeater remained. The Lightbringer might still wreak havoc but not half as much as it had been designed to. Humanity owed Keelraiser an incalculable debt.

  He stared down (up) into Keelraiser’s eyes. “You were looking forward to it, but then you changed your mind.”

  “I changed my mind.”

  Jack took his right hand off the seat support he was holding, so that Keelraiser—like his shuttle—was now only secured by the minimum three points. He picked up one of Keelraiser’s seven-fingered hands. The six fingers were arranged in two groups of three, with a gap between them. The two middle fingers were the longest. He remembered something, a moment from their first meeting that had been eating at him ever since. He put one of Keelraiser’s fingers into his mouth.

  Still as stone, Keelraiser stared up (down) at him.

  Jack moved his tongue around the tip of Keelraiser’s finger. The fingernail was blunt, heavy, like the claw of a dog. The salty residue on Keelraiser’s skin tasted pungent. The delicate first joint contracted, hooking the fingertip behind Jack’s teeth.

  Jack pulled back.

  “Why did you do that?” he said. “The very first day we met. You put your finger in my mouth. Why?”

  “To see if you’d bite,” Keelraiser said quietly. He rolled his head to the side as if seeking an escape route. Jack caught himself thinking of him as a he. Of course, he was male, two days in eleven or whatever. Jack had been wrong about that at first, too.

  “I suppose neither of us thought the other was civilized,” Jack said ruefully.

  Keelraiser suddenly writhed, jerking one arm up and behind his neck.

  Jack saw the blade coming, like a gray leaf falling where there was no gravity to bring it down, but he had no time to dodge.

>   CHAPTER 5

  Skyler took off his spacesuit in front of a dozen rriksti who weren’t too traumatized by the killer iceberg drama to laugh at his genitals. Apparently this hilarious sight never got old for them.

  Shooting them a friendly middle finger, he went aft to the engineering module.

  This had formerly been the private kingdom of Hannah Ginsburg, the SoD’s propulsion specialist. Skyler gazed at the reactor and turbine controls on the curved side walls. Pumps, thermocouples, and SCRAM controls, oh my. The engine controls took up another section of wall. A laptop was duct-taped, open, above the tankage pressure display. Skyler touched the trackpad and saw one of the checklists sent by Mission Control. Jack and Giles had been following these step-by-step instructions to monitor the reactor and turbines. But to Skyler, the checklists were not reassuring. They made Hannah’s absence as real and tangible as a punch to the gut.

  She was dead. Had to be dead. The Krijistal on the Lightbringer had kidnapped her, and look what they did to Kate and Giles.

  Yet during his lonely nights in the rriksti bunker, Skyler had hoped against hope that she might be alive. That he might even see her again someday.

  He glanced at the faded origami Star of David floating above the hexagonal array, and the photo of Hannah’s family above the dollar meter. Her sister, brother-in-law, and two kids. They looked crunchy, wholesome. California nice. Had they been notified of Hannah’s death? Did they still cling to hopes as faded as an old photograph?

  Skyler sighed, letting his desolation roll over him. If he was going to be the SoD’s new reactor and propulsion specialist—such, incredibly, was the plan; they were so shorthanded now that Skyler Taft had to look after the freaking reactor—he’d better get to work.

  He drifted over to the laptop on the wall.

  But instead of starting on the checklists, he checked that the laptop was connected to the SoD’s Ka comms system, and opened Google Chrome.

  During his months on the surface of Europa, he’d been totally cut off. No idea what people on Earth were saying. Jack had been very stingy with news, claiming that Mission Control had clammed up on them.