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

by Felix R. Savage

  But—

  “The algae tanks!” Jack shouted. “That’s it!”

  At the same time, Alexei said, “We could build something that works the same way. It doesn’t have to be the size of a house.”

  “It only has to be the size of an algae tank!”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” Alexei said, cool as a cucumber, as if he’d never even thought about freaking out. Jack could have hugged him.

  “God, this is a great team,” he said five minutes later, when they had roughed out the specs. The SoD’s crew might be down to half strength but their problen-solving ability had climbed exponentially. Take that, Lightbringer. We’ll survive this yet.

  Giles nodded. “I believe it will work. But how fast will it work? Normal requirements are fifty liters per person per day. The rriksti require more drinking water than we do. It takes almost one month to process sewage. And with no flush water, we cannot process the sewage, anyway. What will they drink until the apparatus produces drinkable water?”

  Giles had a point. “Damn. Alexei, how soon d’you think we could get it up and running?”

  “A few days?” Alexei shrugged.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

  “Such precision,” Giles said.

  “I have a degree in physics, you know,” Jack retorted, thinking: How many people will die in a few days? Fuck it, fuck it. “Right.” Before morale could deflate again, he turned to Alexei. “Water rationing. And when I say rationing I mean zero. Tell them we’re going to fix this. But until then, they’ll simply have to suck it up.”

  Alexei grimaced. “Got it. No sugar-coating. I give it to them good and hard.”

  He drifted to the door and turned the crank. The pressure door retracted into the wall. Rriksti arms and hands reached through the gap, and Alexei vanished down the keel tube, his demeanor shifting to match the rrikstis’ jerky, quick movements, mirroring their agitated state. Jack wondered if he’d just made a mistake.

  For Alexei was no longer quite the same man Jack had considered his Russian brother from another mother. Six months among the rriksti (not forgetting Alexei’s additional months among the rriksti on Europa) had changed him, more than any of the other men.

  Most notably, Alexei had mastered the rriksti communication style. So whatever he promised, he was going to leave that promise on the bridge. He was not going to give it to them good and hard. He’d pour his energies into calming their fears, and it might be ages before he got around to explaining about the water.

  On the other hand, was that necessarily a bad thing? It would give Jack time to take actions that might be unpopular.

  Jack pulled Giles close. He held him by the spindly wrists that sprouted from his elbow joints. “Good thing we never hooked up the plumbing to the Cloudeater.”

  “Yes,” Giles said. “If we had, they’d have lost all their water, too.”

  “They’ve got about two hundred thousand gallons in their potable water tanks. I want you to go over there and ask for it.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  ”Jesus, Giles. I’d be breaking the rules. I don’t know why but I do know I’m not supposed to go over there. Brbb would go after me in its self-appointed role as rule enforcement officer in chief. I do not need another punch-up today, on top of everything.” He touched his shoulder. The fresh bruise from Brbb’s fist still stung.

  Giles pursed his lips. “It is possible that we do not fully understand the particular rules that have been applied here,” he said carefully.

  “Possible? I just told you I do not understand the rules. But … Look, just do it, Giles. Please.”

  “All right,” Giles said. “I’ll arrange it with Cleanmay. We’ll run hoses from the Cloudeater’s potable water tanks to our irrigation lines.”

  Giles forced his way down the keel tube, and Jack flew to the curtained-off end of the bridge. Ducking under the lines of floating laundry, he dug out his blaster and fastened the holster belt diagonally across his shoulder. The blaster was too big to wear on your hip, even in zero-gee.

  “Skyler, you have the bridge until I get back.”

  Skyler nodded, absently biting the straw of his squeeze bottle. Jack gestured at it. “What’s in there?”

  “Water.” Skyler held it out. “Want some?”

  “Water,” Jack echoed. He shook his head. “I meant how much?”

  “Oh. Maybe twelve ounces.”

  “You and your imperial measurements. Make it last. That’s your ration for today.”

  He flew down the keel tube, his mind already jumping ahead. First step: remove some of the electromagnets from the drive turbine …

  CHAPTER 17

  “Right, we’re going to have to make examples. Might as well start now,” Jack croaked. The crisis had dragged on for four days. The men had cut their own water rations to 1.5 liters a day, while the rriksti were getting a quarter of that. “If you’d like to do the honors, Brbb?”

  “Your wish is my command,” Brbb said, taking the piss, Jack thought, but also enjoying this. Definitely enjoying it.

  Maybe I should do it myself.

  Too late for second thoughts. Brbb headed forward, delivering a flurry of kicks along the way to the four rriksti who’d been caught siphoning water from the algae tanks.

  Brbb’s mates held them in a full-Nelson grip, so that their arms floated above their heads. When kicked, they jerked. The Krijistal deserters cranked their joined hands back, applying pressure to the thieves’ throats.

  Jack gestured for the Krijistal to escort the prisoners out of the turbine room. Before following them, he grabbed his blaster and slipped the holster belt over his shoulder.

  “I’ll stay here and monitor the tank,” Alexei said, without meeting Jack’s eyes. Alexei had argued against making examples. But the water thievery was getting outrageous. Jack couldn’t let it go on. It wasn’t fair to those who were not stealing.

  They floated out of the turbine room and through the engineering module. Skyler manned the turbine and reactor controls. As the unhappy procession passed through, he said quietly, “Gonna kill them?”

  Jack gritted his teeth. What did Skyler think he was? “The whole point here is not to kill anyone. We have to punish some of them so that we won’t have to kill anyone.”

  The water thieves shrieked as the guards stuffed them into the keel tube, their hair swirling wildly.

  Through the storage module. Through SLS. The two Krijistal guarding the algae tanks shot Jack a rriksti salute, which was like a Vulcan salute turned backwards, so it resembled the charming British gesture for “up yours.” It often made Jack smile but not now. He reflected that it had been quite the feat for four half-dead rriksti to steal water from under these guys’ noses, and wondered if Brbb and company had accidentally-on-purpose let them steal it, so that they’d have someone to make an example of. They’d entrapped a whole family: three adults and a child of maybe twelve.

  Jack slapped the lean rump of Difystra, speeding it through the keel tube into the main hab. They all trooped down Staircase 6. From high on the stairs, Jack scanned the jungle, counting the empty patches, brown patches, and yellow patches. Giles was dripping the water from the Cloudeater into the hydroponics, but people had got thirsty enough in the last couple of days to start drinking nutrient solution. They were killing their own crops.

  The hab seemed deathly quiet, devoid of life. But as they paraded through the jungle, rriksti peered between the fronds of suizh. A crowd of silent spectators had coalesced by the time they reached the walking track that ran around the hab’s circumference.

  This was the one place they’d kept free of vegetation. It was a lane through the jungle, about four feet wide.

  Brbb addressed the prisoners in English. “You have committed a crime worse than murder, and you will pay for it!”

  As Brbb spoke, a rope-end whipped past, bouncing along the track. Brbb stepped nimbly aside.

  Jack glanced up.

  A
nother rope swung towards them, rotating with the hab. Its top end was tied to the axis tunnel.

  Jack swallowed a gasp of bittersweet recognition. On the way to Europa, he and Alexei used to play a rope game like this. Jump on, rise up, jump off, win imaginary money.

  Surely Brbb wasn’t going to play games with the water thieves?

  Jack counted one rope swinging past every six seconds, making four in total. Brbb delivered a lengthy lecture in Rristigul. Flakes of dry skin drifted from its scalp as its hair shot this way and that, making its points. It then seized the nearest prisoner, waited for a rope to approach, and seized that. Brbb and prisoner rose swiftly off the path.

  When you attach a weight to the end of a rope and swing it around, it becomes a bola.

  There was a loop in the end of the rope.

  Brbb stuffed the prisoner’s head through the loop and jumped off the rope, sticking the landing.

  The loop was a noose.

  The prisoner rose higher and higher, a twiggy silhouette, spinning by its neck. Shrieks pierced Jack’s ears. He snatched his headset off. Paralyzed with horror, he watched the rope, with the prisoner on the end, wrap around the axis tunnel. He hadn’t expected anything like this and didn’t know what to do. The prisoner collided with the lattice with a meaty crunch. The screaming continued. It was coming from the crowd.

  Oh Jesus, Jack thought. How could I forget they are Krijistal? They’re the exact bloody same as the guys who murdered Kate and kidnapped Hannah and cut off Giles’s hands and feet. It’s just sheer chance that these ones got left behind.

  “I thought you were just going to beat them up,” he shouted.

  Brbb regarded him in disappointment. “This was a serious crime,” it said.

  Jack took off running towards the aft stairs. Maybe the hanged rriksti was still alive. “Don’t touch the others,” he shouted over his shoulder.

  *

  At the same time, Giles was reclining on the bridge, working on his dictionary. It was something to do when one was dying of thirst. After his initial struggles with Rristigul, he’d adopted a mechanistic approach to the language. Noun by noun, verb by verb, he was building up a lexicon of rriksti concepts, which in turn adumbrated a shadowy picture of the strange culture of the Darkside.

  Word of the day for February 7th, 2022: Krijistal.

  A real bitch, this one. He listened to his collection of recorded snippets featuring the word, his fourteen fingers folded over his belly, trying to ignore the ache of thirst in his throat. He reminded himself that the rriksti in the main hab did not even have 1500 milliliters of luke-warm H2O to get them through the day.

  The intercom snarled to life. “Giles!”

  “What is it, Jack?” Giles said calmly.

  “Need you to spin down the hab.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Spin. Down. The. Hab!!”

  Jack was in a rage. Hoping to calm him down, Giles said, “Why?”

  “Because I fucking said so,” Jack shouted. “Look, we were going to spin it down anyway, to mend the tanks. We’ll just do it ahead of schedule.”

  Giles could hear rriksti voices on the channel. He could hear screaming.

  “Bien,” he said. “Consider it done.” He added, “I am not sure I actually know how to spin down the hab.”

  “It’s self, fucking, explanatory. Do it now.” Click.

  Giles flew to the right seat. He found the controls of the hydrazine-fuelled rim thrusters and stabbed the button marked ANTI-SPINWARDS. The thrusters began to fire against the direction of the hab’s rotation, slowing it down.

  CHAPTER 18

  Alone in the turbine room, Alexei checked the levels of O2 and H in the fuel cells. Getting there … but not fast enough.

  They’d emptied out one of the algae tanks. Hauled it back to the turbine room. Six feet by four, it barely fit through the keel tubes. Then they’d sealed the tank, turning it into a vacuum chamber. Inside: magnets from the drive turbine, cold cathodes, a radio-frequency generator.

  Ionizer at one end of the tank. A copper pipe with a grid inside. High voltage running through it.

  The jury-rigged apparatus filled the center of the turbine room, above the rusty turbine cabinets. They’d had to re-route all the plumbing back here to feed LH2 and LOX from the reactant tanks into the apparatus, instead of into the fuel cells where it would normally go. That meant they couldn’t use the fuel cells, and that meant brown-outs, because the mass spectrometer was gobbling most of the electricity from the housekeeping turbine. And that meant everyone was cold.

  As well as thirsty.

  And their skin was falling off from the low humidity. They were literally shedding. Full-body dandruff.

  Alexei coughed, his throat scratchy. Flakes of rriksti skin swirled like snow in the air, left over from Brbb’s brief invasion of the turbine room. He hated to think what was happening in the main hab right now. He just hoped Jack could restrain Brbb’s violent tendencies, without resorting to violence himself. The rriksti could be incomprehensibly brutal, but there was also a sweetness in them. A gentleness. Alexei saw that. He wasn’t sure Jack did.

  Wearily, he stared at the arc of green gas shooting through the algae tank. Oxygen, minus one electron, glowed like the Northern Lights. Hydrogen was invisible. So was the evil stuff, the tritium from Europa. That stayed in the tank. The oxygen and the good, clean hydrogen spurted out the other end, into the fuel cells, but it was so slow, so goddamn slow. They were still waiting for the fuel cells to overflow into the algae tanks, so they could start giving water to people.

  The turbines made a lot of noise, so Alexei didn’t notice that Nene had entered the room until she floated down into his field of vision. He smiled, happy to see her.

  She hugged a shawl around her shoulders against the cold. Her normally porcelain skin looked ashy. Alexei reached for his headset. He’d taken it off because he didn’t want to hear how the business with the prisoners turned out. Shame on you, Alexei Dmitrovich.

  “It sings,” she said.

  “What sings?”

  “The mass spectrometer. I can hear the radio-frequency resonance from the tank.”

  “Of course you can,” Alexei realized. “For you, machinery sings.” It must be so cool to be a rriksti. He felt fifteen years old around them sometimes. Especially, it had to be said, around Nene.

  “They wanted me to heal those prisoners,” Nene said. She drifted down and sat on the algae tank, hooking one foot around the intake piping. The spectral green glow from the tank lit her face from below. She was a doctor. A different kind of doctor from Cleanmay, the rriksti who ran sickbay on the Cloudeater. Cleanmay was the kind of doctor we all understand, an expert typist, not much use to the sick without shedloads of fancy machinery. Nene was a fifth-level cleric (her words), certified by the Temple of Ystyggr on Imf. OK, maybe doctor was not quite the right translation. But it was the best Alexei could come up with.. “I refused to help them,” she said. “They are sadists. They wanted me to heal the prisoners so they could punish them again. I refuse to play along with that anymore.”

  Alexei smiled, proud of her. That must have been a difficult decision. “Good for you.” He hesitated. “Did Jack back you up?”

  “Yes, yes. He doesn’t like it, either.”

  That relieved Alexei more than he wanted to admit. To hide any hint that he had doubted his friend, he hunted for his squeeze bottle. It still held 400 milliliters of his daily ration.

  “They will probably die,” Nene said. “But probably we will all die, anyway. They’ll just die faster.”

  Alexei whirled, bottle in hand. “No,” he said forcefully. “We will not die.” He slapped the tank full of ionized gases. “This is working! It just takes a little more time, then there’ll be water for everyone.”

  She hunched her shoulders. No, I don’t want to be cheered up, her long, sad face said.

  Alexei considered himself an expert cheerer-upper. He held out the bottle. “Have some wate
r. Straight from the dehumidifier, everyone’s breathed it; it is really disgusting.”

  “No. That’s your water.” But her eyes followed the bottle.

  Alexei clamped the straw in his teeth and sucked, filling his mouth with stale water. He badly wanted to swallow it, but he didn’t. Holding it in his mouth, he floated over to Nene and took her by the shoulders. He pulled her closer, felt no resistance. He pressed his lips to hers and opened his mouth, parting her lips so that the water trickled into her mouth.

  Her hot, sharp tongue chased the last drops past his teeth. Alexei convulsively clutched her. Their bodies, though fully clothed, seemed to fuse together. Rational thought left the building.

  “I’ve wanted to do this for so long,” he muttered into her cheek.

  Her hair—her bio-antennas, those amazing whip-like tendrils, the color of rubies—caressed his skull and shoulders. “I remember when we first met,” she said through his headset. “You and Jack tried to shoot us. That was your way of saying hello. We thought: oh, they are just like rriksti, after all! Then, gradually, I found out that you are not like rriksti.” Alexei moved his right hand up and down, stroking the bony nape of her neck. Her skin felt like the most expensive and delicate leather, supple as silk, although it was so dry. He almost hated to touch it with his rough, damaged, astronaut’s fingers. “But strangely, now that I know how different you are, I like you even more.”

  “I could teach you Russian,” Alexei suggested. “I’ll teach you how to say ‘leave me alone; you stink.’”

  “But I don’t want you to leave me alone!” Her hands fastened on his back. Fourteen points of heat digging into his skin.

  “This is crazy,” Alexei muttered. He was talking to himself, rather than her—trying, one more time, to talk himself out of his obsession with this beautiful, strong-minded … alien. “We’re not even from the same planet.”

  “So what? I want you. Is that correct?”

  Alexei laughed breathlessly. “Oh yes, that’s correct, honey.”

  *

  Jack floated in the axis tunnel, glaring at Brbb. One of the water thieves also floated in the tunnel. Jack had untied it. It had been hanged by the neck and slammed into the lattice at car-crash speed, but it still wasn’t dead. Rriksti are tough. Blood trickled from its ears and foamed on its lips. Same color as human blood. Blue on the inside, red when it got outside of the body.