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

by Felix R. Savage

  “Going forward,” Jack continued, “we will coast for fourteen months.”

  The timescales involved in spaceflight could make you cry. Jack’s only comfort was that the Lightbringer had to obey the laws of physics, too.

  “At the end of that time, we will perform a powered fly-by of Mars.”

  Because that was what the Lightbringer would be doing, based on its current trajectory and speed. There was nothing else it could do and still reach Earth.

  The SoD might have another option. But Jack was keeping that in his back pocket for now. He’d wait to see how Mission Control reacted to this first.

  “Our estimated time of arrival at Earth is April 27th, 2023.”

  Making a total journey time five months shorter than the outbound leg, thanks to the very high coasting speed the SoD had achieved. But still too long. Too goddamn long.

  The Lightbringer would still reach Earth first, by a margin of two or three months.

  Jack started to feel a familiar sense of helplessness. No matter what he did, it wasn’t going to be enough. He couldn’t save Earth. They’d have to save themselves. The SoD still picked up terrestrial television broadcasts. Every talking head had become an expert on orbital defense platforms, space-to-space weapons, and next-generation kinetic kill vehicles. Jack was iffy on the concept of orbital defenses. Planets are sitting ducks, absent hardcore science-fictional kit that would be far beyond anything Earth could develop in the next fifteen months. The Lightbringer wouldn’t even need to repair its muon cannons and railguns and all the rest of it. Little had the Darksiders guessed, 70 years ago, that humanity’s space capabilities would advance so little during the 20th and 21st centuries, all they’d need to do was drop rocks on us …

  Jack just had to pray the TV pundits knew more than he did. But he couldn’t muster much optimism, especially when he thought about his parents. John and Helen Kildare lived on their own in southern England. They were in their seventies and completely defenceless.

  He took his helplessness and frustration out on Pavel. “Look, scratch everything I said. The SoD may arrive at Earth in April 2023, but there won’t be anyone left alive on board. We are running out of everything. We cannot survive for another twenty months without that resupply ship! Where is it?”

  CHAPTER 10

  Jack immediately regretted his outburst. It wasn’t Pavel Berezin’s fault their resupply ship had not been built, much less launched. The problem was money, beyond a doubt. Who do you blame for that? Everyone on Earth?

  He floated out of the left seat so Alexei could take his place. Pavel, who of course hadn’t heard Jack’s rant yet, was now talking in Russian.

  “What’s he saying?”

  “Russia has qualified for the 2022 World Cup,” Alexei translated.

  “England?”

  “Lost to Brazil in the qualifiers.”

  “Balls.”

  “Also, the Cup is moving from Qatar to Belgium.”

  “A likely story!” Jack yawned. He’d been awake for twenty hours straight. “I’m going aft.” He flew into the keel tube and sank feet first towards the blaze of light from the main hab.

  He emerged into the axis tunnel that ran the length of the main hab. LED growlights and fans festooned the outside of the lattice. The axis tunnel was in zero-gee; everything else whirled around it. Jack hung weightless, watching his little world blur past, ten storeys below.

  Growing crops on board a spaceship was a piece of cake, contrary to the scientists’ pessimistic predictions. Plants loved the controlled environment. On their way to Europa, the crew had feasted on fresh fruit, potatoes, legumes, and leafy veggies, supplemented with fish.

  Successive unplanned power-downs had taken their toll on the hydroponics. The Lightbringer had also stolen a lot of seeds and nutrients, adding insult to injury. But during their long stay at Europa, Jack, Giles, and the Krijistal deserters had restored the garden to close to its former glory.

  Then they’d harvested a final crop and cleaned out 90% of the trays and tanks, to make room for crops from Imf.

  In their bunker on the surface of Europa, the rriksti had grown suizh (looks like pampas grass), jgzeriyat (Jurassic-looking fleshy ferns), and yfrit (think Little Shop of Horrors, shortly before things got interesting), as well as several kinds of edible fungi. They’d also raised apé, Imfi fish that looked like coelacanths. They had a composting system based on water tanks populated by genetically engineered bugs. The bugs ate poop and all kinds of rubbish, the fish ate the bugs, the people ate the fish, and round we go again. They’d transported as much of this stuff up to the SoD as the Cloudeater could carry.

  As the hab spun at 3 RPMs, Jack gazed down at rows of tanks that blurred together into snaking, forking patterns. The rriksti must have been working straight through the burn to get things in order. Jack’s fears of spills and chaos had been unfounded.

  But what really wowed him was the radiant jewel tones of the Imfi vegetation. He’d never before seen it under proper lighting. The perpetual twilight in the bunker hadn’t done the plants justice. Leaves, flowerheads, and fronds painted the floor of the hab with hues of aquamarine, peridot, amethyst, and opal …

  Alexei shook his shoulder.

  “What?!”

  “You fell asleep.”

  “Jesus. Sorry about that.” Jack uncurled, stiff muscles cramping. His mouth tasted like dirty socks. You had to be really tired to fall asleep in the air. “How long?” It was dark.

  “Only a couple of hours. Come on downstairs.”

  Jack yawned hugely. It didn’t seem to be as dark as it usually was during lights-out. They had the growlights set to go off for six hours out of every 24: a ‘night’ for the plants, rather than for the men, who staggered their sleep shifts. “Who’s on the bridge?”

  “Skyler.”

  They slid through the lattice onto Staircase 1. The tops of the staircases rotated slowly around the axis tunnel. It was like stepping onto the top of a ten-storey escalator. Jack trailed after Alexei, still half-asleep. “What was the story about the flight plan in the end?”

  “Star City never saw it. There was some mix-up with the crypto.”

  “That’s what I thought.” Jack was done with Mission Control. They couldn’t even coordinate their own internal communications. Zero chance they could pull off a resupply flight. The SoD was on its own.

  As they neared the bottom of the twenty-storey staircase, Jack and Alexei grew heavier. A pleasant salty scent reminded Jack of the rriksti bunker. It already felt warmer down here than it used to. He breathed deeply, and rubbed his eyes. “Why does it look like the plants are glowing in the dark?”

  “Because they are,” Alexei said gleefully. “I wondered how long it would take you to notice!”

  Amazed, Jack descended the rest of the steps, into a fairy forest.

  Even the tanks glowed.

  Nene, one of the rriksti from the surface, came out of the Potter space under the staircase, carrying a pail full of fireflies.

  Alexei gave Jack his headset. Jack put it on in time to hear Nene say: “—amazing! We have never seen this before, either!”

  Electric blue water slopped from the pail as Nene gestured excitedly. Jack took the pail before it could spill. The rriksti had turned this Potter space into a rough and ready biotech lab for breeding their smart bugs. Krill-like shoals of bugs floated in the pail, illuminating the water inside.

  “You’ve never seen this before, either?” Jack asked.

  Nene’s hair danced. “No! Sharzh has no UV in its spectrum.”

  Sharzh was what the rriksti called Proxima Centauri, their sun.

  “It flares constantly in the X-ray portion of the spectrum, but only at very short wavelengths. Our bunker on Europa, of course, blocked out UV, but allowed X-rays in. So this is a real-life experiment! This is the very first time plants from Imf have ever been exposed to UV light.”

  “Chlorophyll ought to work the same everywhere …?” Jack said. In
fact, the rrikstis’ lives depended on the assumption that it did.

  “Oh yes, yes. The plants absorb in the red end of the spectrum. UV, no UV, this is irrelevant. But even though a thing is irrelevant, it can be beautiful.” Nene clasped its hands in front of its flat chest. Its eyes shone like huge black gems in its triangular face. “To me this is very beautiful. To you, too?”

  “Yes,” Alexei said. “To me, too.”

  “Maybe that’s the definition of beauty,” Jack said. “Superfluous loveliness.”

  Other rriksti wandered along the avenue. Their heads were above the level of the suizh-tops. Jack heard them twittering and chirruping in their own language on his headset. They were all equally awed by the glow-in-the-dark veggies. Rristigul usually struck him as an unlovely mashup of babbling brook sounds and German, but right now it sounded like birdsong. Well, human voices sounded nicer, too, when their owners were not upset or afraid ....

  “It’s fading,” Nene said in disappointment, though no dimming was yet visible to human eyes.

  “Bio-fluorescence,” Alexei speculated. “That only lasts for a short time after dark.”

  “Like coral!” Jack said. He looked up. Twenty storeys overhead, the plants on the other side of the hab hung upside down, a night sky full of jewel-hued stars. Jack imagined he was gazing at constellations never seen by human eyes; perhaps the constellations you could see from Imf …

  “That is the jgzeriyat! Oh, I want to see it up close!” Nene said. “Quick, before it fades—”

  They ran around the circumference of the hab. The luminous forest seemed to slope uphill, an illusion of spin gravity. Nene bounded ahead. Alexei chased it, laughing. Jack slowed down. He swung the pail of bugs, watching the glowing water bulge as the low gravity warred with surface tension.

  Keelraiser has to see this.

  On an impulse, he decided to show Keelraiser the bio-fluorescence. It seemed like it would heal the rift between them. He handed the pail off to a passing rriksti, climbed back to the axis tunnel, and flew through SLS to the storage module, in a tearing hurry.

  The storage module teemed with rriksti working at the machine shop and the lab. They evidently weren’t interested in glowing veggies. Philistines. Jack took his Z-2 down from the wall. Then he saw Brbb and its best mate, Difystra, floating in front of the airlock.

  Barring his way.

  “Excuse me?” Jack said, raising his eyebrows.

  “You want to visit the Cloudeater,” Brbb said.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Not a good idea.”

  “Sorry, Brbb; this is my ship.”

  “But the Cloudeater is not your ship.”

  Brbb could be a bit of a prick sometimes. That was why Jack had defaulted to prickishness himself. But now Brbb’s posture suggested a cringe. Quite a feat when you were an eight-foot skeleton with a mane of blue snakes on your head. Brbb explained reluctantly, “Keelraiser is there.”

  “So are thirty-odd sick people,” Jack said, pretending not to get it. “Everyone’s been going back and forth. Why shouldn’t I?”

  Difystra opened its mouth, showing its sharp little rriksti teeth. “You have to leave Keelraiser alone.”

  “Why?”

  Brbb traced one of its middle fingers down its own left cheek, mirroring the line of stitches on Jack’s cheek.

  “Look, if you think he’ll get the jump on me again …” Jack’s urge to reconcile with Keelraiser was waning. But he still wanted to assert his right to visit the Cloudeater. “I can assure you I won’t make the same mistake twice.”

  “No! That is not correct!” Brbb exclaimed, its hair thrashing. “Everyone must leave Keelraiser alone. We are shunning him!”

  *

  “Skyler!” Giles said. “Have you seen the plants? They are biofluorescing!”

  “Saw it,” Skyler said distractedly.

  Giles floated onto the bridge. Some of his rriksti friends, the Krijistal deserters who’d been helping him in the garden, trailed after him. “What are you doing?” Giles said.

  “Mmm,” Skyler said. He was sitting in the left seat with his laptop strapped across his knees. “Gimme a minute.”

  He heard Giles going into the corner of the bridge they’d curtained off to use as a nap room. Lockers opened and shut. “Where are the cards?” Giles said.

  “Somewhere, I guess.”

  “Want to play gin rummy?”

  “Not right now.” Skyler clicked Run.

  Technically, he shouldn’t even have had this laptop anymore. Back in April, he and Alexei had discovered malware triggers on half the electronic devices on board. The GRU—Russia’s dreaded military intelligence agency—had installed malware on the SoD during construction. What did the malware do? Don’t know, don’t want to know. Alexei had tried to delete the trigger, which had resulted in its automatically copying itself to every other device in wireless range. So they’d smashed them. With hammers.

  Skyler’s laptop was also infected. But a laptop was not something to lightly destroy when you were millions of miles from the nearest Best Buy. So he’d just moved the trigger to its own directory, to get it out of the way of accidental clicks.

  Now he was very glad he’d hung onto the laptop.

  Because it also contained the decryption program that the NXC had given him, lo these many moons ago, before he told Director Flaherty to get fucked.

  A mix-up with the crypto.

  Something about that explanation bugged Skyler.

  He was no longer a spy. But it wasn’t so easy to unlearn the habit of suspecting everyone and everything.

  Why would Pavel Berezin waste fifteen minutes of comms time rambling about soccer, excuse me, football? Mission Control might be in a shambles, but they sure didn’t have money to burn.

  So Skyler had downloaded the transmission to his laptop, to see if there was anything else in there. And it looked like there was.

  The decryption progress bar moved slowly across the screen.

  Behind him, Giles found the playing cards. He and the Krijistal started a game of gin rummy. Skyler frowned. Why did they have to do this on the bridge? Cards always wandered off in zero-gee, no matter how clever you got with rubber bands.

  Waiting for the decrypt to complete, he turned sideways in his seat and watched the game. The one with gold bio-antennas was Rockshanks. Their names were easier to remember when they translated them into English. Silver was Cruiggr or Creiggr, and bronze Skyler couldn’t recall. Solkine? Solkane? The distinctive salty smell of rriksti body odor pervaded the bridge. By some biological accident, this smell appealed strongly to the human nose. Skyler liked it, because he was human, but it also made him feel uneasy. He had not slept well the whole time he was on the surface. And then there was whatever happened between Keelraiser and Jack. The worst of it was that Jack was obviously lying about it. Redecorating with pointy objects? How dumb do you think we are, Kildare?

  To be sure, Giles’s Krijistal buddies looked fairly unthreatening right now, tossing the playing cards around and kicking their big flappy feet in amusement. When Skyler first met the rriksti he had thought they looked like goblins. Now that he was used to them, the proportions of their faces and bodies pleased the eye, like Modiglianis, and their snaky bio-antennas conjured thoughts of dryads and naiads. But these classical allusions, it had to be remembered, meant nothing. They were aliens.

  And they were way too good at cards.

  A chime pulled him back to his laptop.

  Decryption complete (1 of 2).

  A .txt file.

  To: SPIRIT OF DESTINY

  From: Thomas Flaherty, Director, National Xenoaffairs Council

  Skyler’s guts churned at the sight of his former boss’s name.

  But the text clearly hadn’t been written by Flaherty himself. Impersonal, it stated that the NXC assessed with high confidence that the squids had broken NASA’s 4096-bit encryption and the NXC’s own AES-256 encryption.

  “Squids?” Skyler
muttered. “Is that, like, a technical term?” The rriksti might not be the most charming creatures in the universe, but squids, come on. That was just derogatory. “Hey Giles. The NXC thinks the Lightbringer’s been reading our mail.”

  “Quelle horreur,” Giles said.

  “So it says they’ve developed a new crypto solution. Details forthcoming. So that’s where all the money went.”

  Skyler chuckled cynically, Giles laughed with him, the Krijistal who understood English opened their mouths wide in appreciation, and Jack burst onto the bridge. Wild-eyed, he shouted, “What are these cunts doing here? Get them off my bridge.”

  He dived towards the curtained-off corner.

  But Giles moved first. He tackled Jack with his little regrown arms. “Skyler!” he screamed. “Don’t let him—” A grunt cut off the rest of the sentence as Jack peeled Giles off, not very gently.

  Skyler froze.

  The three Krijistal did not.

  They pushed off and arrowed past Jack, flipping to block his way. Jack struggled with them. Punches were exchanged, which resulted in all four of them caroming away from each other like billiard balls.

  Giles had not wanted Jack to get into the nap room. Why not? What was in there?

  Skyler forced himself to move. He dodged the melee and flew through the curtain. There was a sleeping-bag tied to the side wall. He started opening lockers, scared of what he’d find. Dirty clothes spilled out like pigeons. Did Jack and Giles ever do their laundry?

  A gun floated out, wrapped in a grubby t-shirt.

  Skyler caught the gun reflexively. It was one of those blasters they’d used during the battle for the SoD. Looked like an AR-15, except bright red. The rriksti sure did love bright colors. They’d never got the memo that tools of slaughter are supposed to be gray or black.

  Skyler stuffed the blaster back into the locker it had come out of. While he was doing that, he found two more alien guns wedged into the back. These were the even nastier Super Soaker type. He had one in each hand when Jack ripped the curtain down. “Gimme those.”

  Giles, behind Jack, shouted, “No. Don’t!”

  The rest of the Krijistal deserters poured onto the bridge. Brbb’s blue bio-antennas whipped furiously. Skyler did not have his headset on but he could see Brbb was shouting at Jack, who spun in the air and shoved it hard in the sternum. Rebounding backwards, Jack collided with Skyler. He had a bruise rising on his cheek.