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

by Felix R. Savage

  The other three thieves were still wrapped around the outside of the axis tunnel. Brbb’s mates had hung them from the ropes while Jack hurried up here to save the first one.

  Down below, rriksti crowded the walking track. Their upturned faces looked like daisies in the jungle, blurring around.

  “All right, fun’s over,” Jack said. “Get your lads up here. If you all work together, you should be able to save them.”

  “Make Nene do it,” Brbb grumbled.

  Nene had refused to help, on principle. Jack respected its ethical stand, while finding its refusal inconvenient, not to mention a bit heartless. However, Nene wasn’t the only rriksti with extroversion in its fingertips. “You’ll just have to do it yourselves,” he told Brbb. “Hurry up!”

  “All right,” Brbb muttered. Its hair swirled. “If this ever got back to the Temple,” it said darkly, “Nene would have her clerical certification suspended.”

  “Your Temple is four and a half light years away,” Jack said. “Thank God.” He drifted forward to check on the nearest thief hanging outside the tunnel. The child. Its eyes were half-open, unseeing. Was it already too late? “Your culture stinks,” he informed Brbb.

  “This was a serious crime,” Brbb said. It clearly thought Jack a moral retard. The feeling was mutual.

  However, Jack was in no mood for a punch-up, especially not if it turned into eight on one. That’s why he had thought of a different, cleverer way to spike their grisly agenda. He glanced out of the axis tunnel, and sighed in relief. The jungle was sliding past at a noticeably slower rate. Giles had done as he was told.

  “We’re spinning the hab down,” he told Brbb. ”So no more hangings today, I’m afraid.”

  Brbb startled. It spreadeagled itself on the lattice and stared down at the jungle.

  “Hope you tied down everything that won’t fly well,” Jack said, enjoying Brbb’s dismay. He’d ordered the civilians to tie everything down at the beginning of the crisis, knowing they would have to spin down the hab sooner or later. The hydroponic tanks and trays had already been covered with watertight lids, to deter theft, not that it had worked.

  As the RPMs ticked down, Jack reached through the lattice to free the child and the other two thieves. “Mostly dead, or all dead?” he muttered to himself. Brbb’s slipknots defeated his fingers. “I need some help here! Where are your mates?” he shouted in frustration.

  “There,” Brbb said, pointing.

  As the hab’s rotation slowed to a crawl, the jungle stayed on the floor, but all the people on the walking track and around its borders rose into the air. They rose in knots. Each knot had one of Brbb’s friends inside it. Rriksti fists rose and fell. The civilians were punching the shit out of the Krijistal.

  As spin gravity lost its hold, the mobs broke up in confusion. The civilians dived for handholds. Their victims floated unmoving in the air.

  Jack clutched his head, gut-punched by horror for the second time today. He saw too late what a terrible mistake he’d made. Two mistakes, in fact. He’d set the Krijistal to lord it over the civilians as rule enforcement officers … and then he’d forthrightly criticized Brbb’s methods, giving the civilians the impression that it was open season on them.

  Jesus. He couldn’t have fucked up worse if he’d tried.

  “Nene!” he shouted. “NENE! This is an order! Need your help, NOW!”

  Brbb spidered down Staircase 6 to help its friends. Smashing Jack’s face in could wait, presumably.

  Nene emerged from the keel tube with Alexei. Jack noticed that the man and the rriksti were holding hands, but assigned no importance to the fact. The shrilling of Rristigul in his headset was getting unbearable. The combination of an unannounced spin-down and mob violence had pushed the situation to the edge of chaos. “Sorry, Nene. You’ve got to help the Krijistal.” He pointed down.

  Nene ignored his pointing finger. It gazed at the mostly-dead water thieves. “Do you understand what they were planning to do to these poor people?”

  “Yes!” Jack said. “They were going to heal them, then punish them, then heal them again, and punish them some more! It was a standard feature of law enforcement on your utterly vile planet! As the ranking cleric, you were supposed to help with the healing bit. Well, the whole thing’s gone sideways I’m afraid. The civilians mobbed them—” he pointed at the Krijistal floating around the tops of the suizh plants. “I don’t know how badly they’re hurt, but I need them! I can’t keep order without their help, precisely because they are such bastards! So save their lives, if you don’t mind—NOW!”

  Alexei headed for the stairs. He, having served in the Russian air force, saw Jack’s point. Nene stayed put. “What about them?” Its bio-antennas indicated the thieves.

  “Oh Jesus,” Jack said. “I don’t fucking know!”

  Keelraiser should’ve been here. Jack shouldn’t have had to be fumbling through this crisis alone.

  “Here, here’s what we’ll do about them.” He pulled his blaster off its strap.

  He had to take the Krijistal’s side to stop the situation from spiraling into chaos. But he was damned if he’d go along with the sadistic rriksti concept of justice. On sailing ships in the old days, captains used to shoot thieves and mutineers outright. One of Jack’s own ancestors on his mother’s side had captained a privateer in the American Civil War.

  Holding onto the lattice with his left hand, he aimed and shot at the first thief. Then the other two adults. The child last of all. Born in space. Born to die in space. The invisible beam drilled a hole in each bloodied forehead. It’s easy to shoot well when your targets aren’t moving. Pink steam—body fluids superheated by the laser—jetted out of the holes. Each corpse moved away, like tiny rockets spitting bloody exhaust. The ones still hanging by their necks floated away from the axis tunnel, ropes gradually unspooling. Jack felt like crying.

  “There,” he said. “Problem solved.”

  Nene had left the axis tunnel while he was shooting. The rriksti did that. They either hit you or they walked away. Nene was already halfway down the stairs.

  “Jack?” Skyler spoke in his headset. “Hriklif’s been monitoring the mass spec, and it just told me—”

  “What’s gone wrong now?”

  “Nothing!” Skyler said. “The fuel cells are full. We can start giving people water!”

  CHAPTER 19

  One of the outside water tanks was fine.

  The other one had a spray of holes in it so small that Jack and Alexei only found them after forty-five minutes’ fingertip inspection.

  Jack poked a gloved finger into the largest hole. “Pebbles,” he said over the radio. “Several pebbles. The water leaked away bit by bit, and the stupid bloody computer kept pushing more water through the cross-connect.”

  He pushed off the hull with his fingertips and gazed into space. The SoD seemed to hang immobile in the darkness. But they were actually rushing towards the sun at 103,000 kph. And somewhere ahead of them … far ahead of them … was the Lightbringer.

  You nearly got us this time. But we’re still alive. His breath sighed in his helmet. Still alive.

  Alexei opened the damaged tank’s external valve port, which had not been touched since the SoD was built in Earth orbit three years ago. “Blin!” he swore as a cloud of dust rose into his face.

  “Holy shit,” Jack said. “The bladder.”

  Alexei explained to the rriksti, “The tanks were self-sealing. They had elastomer bladders. But all that time we spent around Europa must have wrecked the molecular bonds of the elastomer. So when it had to seal … it just crumbled.”

  “What is elastomer?” said Brbb.

  “A non-smart material,” Jack said bleakly.

  “Every day,” Brbb said, “I am more amazed that you ever reached Europa.”

  Jack swung a mock punch at Brbb. It darted away, its hair dancing in the psychedelic coating of its spacesuit. “With your permission, shall we patch the tank now?”

  �
��Yes,” Jack said. “Alexei and I will be down there, making sure this doesn’t happen again.”

  The two men flew ‘down’ from the rim of the main hab to the bridge module. Both of them, like the rriksti, wore tethers. Alexei had abandoned his Orlan EVA suit for a rriksti spacesuit. Jack still hadn’t given up his Z-2, but he was regretting his stubbornness. Dried blood stiffened the sleeves of his suit liner. Scratchy. And the lingering smell of his own blood cast a shadow on his mood.

  He hooked one boot through a grab handle on the outside of the bridge module, and shook out a 3-meter sheet of insulation backed with reflective silver Mylar.

  “Why do you think they gave us this stuff?” Alexei said.

  “Fuck knows. I used a bit of it to insulate my camera when I took pictures of Jupiter. Remember?”

  “You should take pictures now.” Alexei pointed at the rriksti swarming above the rim of the main hab. The colors of their suits vibrated against the blackness. Sparks sputtered. Jack felt a pang of worry—was he really letting Brbb use his precious welding kit?

  Yes, he was, and it was all right. Something had changed between him and the Krijistal. Perhaps they were gratified that he’d upheld their judgement on the water thieves. Or perhaps their experience of being set upon by the civilians had humbled them. All of them had recovered from the brutal beatings they received, thanks to Nene, but it had been touch and go for Difystra and a couple of the others. Anyway, their attitude towards Jack had changed, as if they accepted his authority at last.

  Jack was not happy with the high price they’d all paid for this relative peace and harmony. But he might as well enjoy it while it lasted.

  “If Mission Control could see this, they’d kill us,” he said lightly. “They’re very unhappy that we even brought the rriksti along in the first place.”

  “We had no choice,” Alexei said.

  “No, of course we didn’t. It’s easy for them to say from millions of miles away that we ought to have left them to die.”

  Alexei was silent for a moment. Jack thought he might be about to hear something from his friend, some kind of confession or … he didn’t know what. Something that would bridge the awkwardness between them.

  Instead, Alexei began to sing. “It’s a hard knock life for us …”

  Jack joined in before he remembered where the song came from. “It’s a hard knock life for us!”

  “Instead of kissing, we get kicked!” Alexei took the other end of the insulation sheet. Floating into space, he used his wrist rockets to maneuver around the outside of the bridge module to the SoD’s radar dish. The wrist rockets—rriksti tech, although there was no reason NASA couldn’t have developed something similar, if they didn’t have their heads up their arses—puffed out compressed CO2, allowing Alexei to change direction in freefall. He landed on the far side of the radar dish. Grasping its mounting, he said, “Glue gun.”

  “Catch.”

  “Fuck!” But Alexei made the catch. Jack had known he would. He glued the Mylar to the edge of the radar dish, pleating its inner edge as he went, so that it formed a skirt around the dish’s edge, doubling its size. “It’s a hard knock life for us …”

  “Instead of treating, we play tricks!” Jack improvised, as he unfolded another Mylar sheet from his satchel.

  They needed two sheets to go all the way around the outside edge of the first piece. This turned the radar dish into a huge cone, reflective inside. It wobbled above the bridge module like an upside-down umbrella.

  “Now we’ve just got to shove a large current into it,” Jack said happily.

  The Krijistal had finished patching the tank. Jack double-checked their work. “Well done. We can start refilling the tanks.”

  Two by two, they waited out the airlock cycle and doffed their spacesuits on the bridge.

  “Were you really singing a Broadway song?” grinned Giles, who’d been monitoring their EVA. “I thought I was the gay one.”

  “No, you’re the one who thinks Slayer is the greatest band in history.” Jack flipped him a rriksti salute. “Spin the hab up again. Slowly, we don’t want to waste the hydrazine. Once that’s gone, it’s gone.”

  Naked rriksti filled the bridge, bouncing around in the air. “Hydrate!” Brbb cried, shooting a stream of water into the air from a squeeze bottle.

  “Christ!” Jack shouted, fearing for the electronics. One of the other rriksti caught the whole stream in its mouth. Their laughter crackled from the intercom.

  “Gimme some!” Alexei said, joining in the horseplay. Jack smiled wistfully. It was good to see everyone cheerful. But the contrast with his own mood reminded him of the task still hanging over his head. This wasn’t over yet, for him.

  He pulled on shorts and gathered his Z-2 under his arm. “Right. I’m going aft …”

  He thought no one heard him, but Giles caught him up at the keel tube. “Where are you going?”

  “To the Cloudeater.”

  “That’s what I thought. I wonder if I should tell you …”

  “Oh come on Giles, now you’ve got to.”

  “OK. The newest word in my dictionary is Krijistal. We thought it’s a word for special forces. Chuck Norris, right?” They both smiled at the old joke. “But the meaning of Rristigul words varies depending on the amplitude and frequency, as you know. They sometimes talk on more than one distinct frequency at the same time, and this locates the word on a spectrum of meaning. So in one sense Krijistal does mean Chuck Norris. In another sense, it means something close to ‘rule enforcer,’ as you’ve been calling them. But the basic, single-frequency meaning of the word is just military. So there are not eight Krijistal on the SoD. There are nine. The ninth is Keelraiser.”

  “Ah,” Jack said. “Good to know. Thanks, Giles.”

  He flew aft through the axis tunnel. In SLS, water gushed out of the overflow spigot for the algae tanks. Rriksti jostled joyfully, collecting the precious liquid in plastic sacks. As Jack passed, they seemed to cringe. A babble of Rristigul washed through his headset and then fell silent. He’d saved their lives, but at what cost? Were they grateful to him, or did they resent him for handling the crisis so badly?

  In the storage module he donned his scratchy, smelly Z-2 once more.

  “Where’s Keelraiser?”

  They’d done a nice job with the passenger cabin of the Cloudeater. Two long rows of cots occupied the center of the cabin, where Jack and Keelraiser had ripped out the seats. Thirty-odd patients lay strapped to the cots, hooked up to IVs. Their dark eyes followed Jack yearningly.

  “Somewhere in the crew area, I assume,” said Cleanmay, the rriksti doctor. Its phrasing conveyed that it did not give a flying rat’s posterior about Keelraiser’s whereabouts.

  “Thanks.”

  “Do you want help?”

  Jack hesitated. Was Cleanmay offering to help him deal with Keelraiser? Was it trying to tell him he was putting himself in danger?

  The doctor motioned towards the back of his Z-2, and Jack realized it had only been asking if he wanted help doffing it.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  Cleanmay unlatched the rear entry port. Hot, damp, salty air flooded in. Jack had actually been going to keep the Z-2 on, but he realized it was better this way.

  He pulled on the shorts he’d brought with him and jammed his headset on. Carrying the Z-2, he flew forward over the left block of passenger seats. The door to the crew area was a wall. He had to wave his hands all over the place to trigger the autorip sensor, and when it opened, he was staring at another wall that shouldn’t have been there.

  He pushed on it.

  It hinged forward, and a dirty white blade sliced down like a guillotine.

  CHAPTER 20

  Jack sprang back, heart racing.

  A guillotine? No, just a shelf.

  Furniture blocked the corridor on the other side of the door. Ropes and glistening wodges of clingfilm suspended disassembled panels of feather-light plastic, like a rriksti-sized spiderweb w
ith dirty dishes and cups caught in it. Jack’s feet dislodged the rubbish as he shoved through the barricade.

  The autorip sealed behind him with a squelch.

  He breathed shallowly in the briny humidity. The indirect red lighting made the ceiling of the corridor glow, as if a red sun had just slipped beneath the horizon. Dislodged furniture panels drifted around the corridor, bumping gently into the walls. Apart from that, a stale, crypt-like silence reigned.

  Jack had a sick, electrified feeling in his gut that reminded him of long-ago combat missions in Iraq. He also remembered something that had never happened: his planned quest into the bowels of the Lightbringer, in search of an unknown alien menace. Before he and Alexei could put that plan into action, the alien menace had made itself known by stealing the SoD’s water and killing Kate.

  Ahead of him, a slit yawned in the wall. Keelraiser floated out of the computer room. It wore shorts and a frayed tank top. It was not holding a gun or a tungsten-bladed sword or anything. “Come in,” it said without any sign of surprise.

  It floated back into the computer room. Jack squeezed in after it, gritting his teeth. He had to tug on his Z-2 to get it through the door.

  This ‘room,’ scarcely bigger than a wardrobe, was actually the operator’s chamber of the Cloudeater’s quantum computer. Noisy fans sucked away the humidity. There was hardly enough room in here for one person, let alone two. Jack held his Z-2 in front of him like a shield.

  “Well, it’s over,” he said cheerfully. Who was he kidding? It wasn’t over. Nothing was over. And his hearty tone was a complete pose.

  “You handled it well,” Keelraiser said.

  “I fucked it up. I killed four people.”

  “Yes, I heard about that.”

  “How?”

  “Everyone was talking about it.”