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

by Felix R. Savage

  Jack recalled that rriksti voices went through walls, unless they were specially coated with radio-frequency shielding paint. They had a very different concept of privacy. So even Keelraiser, locked up in here like a prisoner, would have heard the scuttlebutt.

  “Those were the only deaths throughout the whole crisis,” Jack said. “So yeah, I think I could have handled it a little better.”

  Keelraiser’s hair danced. “Brbb was apparently very impressed. That lot all think you’ve really got the right stuff now.”

  “I thought that might be why they’re finally playing nice. Well, that’s brilliant. That makes me feel a lot better.”

  The crisis had left Jack charged up like a battery with strong emotions. Fear was only one of the masks emotion could wear. He rubbed one hand over his face, struggling to cope.

  “Are you all right?” Keelraiser said.

  “What would you have done?”

  “Me?”

  “You’re Krijistal. It just means military, right? You’ve had the training. You know the rules.”

  “I broke the rules. No one cares what I think,” Keelraiser said crisply.

  “I just feel like utter shit about this.”

  “Come back and talk to me when you’ve murdered thousands.”

  Stung and embarrassed by the repulse, Jack glanced away. He tried to make out what was on the screens. It all looked like smudgy brown and pink shadows to him. Rriksti eyes detected contrast at far lower lighting levels than human ones could.

  Pulling himself together, he said, “Did you get any camera footage of the projectiles? I know they’d have been too small for your telescope to detect.”

  “Yes. I’ve gone through my external camera footage frame by frame. Three projectiles hit the main hab, and another seventeen passed by at distances from one to seven meters. None were larger than one centimeter in diameter. Based on their sphericality, they were ball bearings.”

  “Ball bearings!”

  “Yes.”

  Jack laughed hollowly. “Have they run out of icebergs, or what?”

  “They’ve changed tactics. The icebergs didn’t work. This almost did. It would have worked, if not for you.”

  “Well, it won’t work twice. I’ve turned our radar dish into a paraboloid jammer.” Jack’s voice gathered energy as he described the hack he and Alexei had implemented with the Mylar-backed insulation sheets. It was based on the DIY radar jammers that speeders on Earth used to thwart the cops. “It’ll swamp their radar with a more powerful signal, like shining a spotlight into their eyes. I only wish I’d done it before. I thought of it before, but the trouble is, if I’m using the SoD’s radar set as a jammer, I can’t use it for anything else.”

  He would be blind. Completely dependent on the Cloudeater’s instruments. That’s why he had resisted doing this so long.

  “But I think we’ve no choice now. We can’t survive another hit like that.”

  “There’s not much targeting involved. These projectiles were just dumped in our path.”

  “But what’ll come next? It might be worse than ball bearings. All in all it seems a good idea not to let them paint us with a targeting laser.”

  “Agreed.”

  “So that’s what we’ve done, but now we’ve got no radar. So I’ll need to use your radar …”

  “It is strange talking to you. I haven’t talked to anyone since we left Europa.”

  “…to track the Lightbringer, as well as for telemetry when the Victory comes within range.”

  “Yes, the Victory. It’s on course to make a tight swing around the planet you call Mars.”

  “So you have been listening to our comms. I suppose you can hear everything we say to Mission Control through the radio hook-up.”

  “I hope you don’t consider that eavesdropping.”

  Jack shrugged. “You must have been bored, stuck in here.”

  “There’s always television.”

  “The news is crap. It’s all the Lightbringer, all the time.”

  “The internet is worse.”

  “You’ve actually been browsing the internet? It still takes fifty minutes per click.”

  “I’ve got nothing but time.”

  There was a short silence.

  “We can’t go on like this,” Jack said, and at the same time Keelraiser said, “I’ve even been emailing … what? What did you say?”

  “I can’t go on like this,” Jack repeated, “not knowing what the hell happened. You broke the rules. All right, but which rules? What rules?”

  “The rules,” Keelraiser said. “It’s a religious thing, for God’s sake. Do you know what the Krijistal are?”

  “The Darkside military …”

  “A religious order. The cult of Ystyggr is the Darkside military is the Krijistal, and I should frankly never have gotten in, but having got in, I was bound to abide by the Krijistal code of conduct. Which says, among other things, that one shouldn’t attack an opponent who is unarmed.”

  “Hey, we’ve got that rule, too,” Jack grunted.

  “There you go, then.” Keelraiser’s mouth was shut in a tight smile—not actually a smile, of course, but a sign of tension in the rriksti. “It wasn’t reciprocal, was it?”

  It most certainly had not been. Why don’t you hit me back? Why don’t you hit me back? Jack loosened his arms from the bundled-up Z-2 he held in front of him. Nerve-endings thrummed as his adrenal system responded to the vibes of tension and hostility he was getting from Keelraiser. He caught himself gauging how much room he’d have in this confined space to swing his fists, and realized in horror that part of his own motivation for coming here, hidden even from himself, which was why he’d subconsciously dreaded it so much, had been to hit Keelraiser back. It deserved to pay for locking itself up in here and leaving Jack to handle the crisis alone.

  This realization absolutely gutted him, not least because it revealed how habit-forming his ritual exchanges of blows with Brbb and company had become. He had come close to accepting that violence was the only way to deal with the rriksti. Considering this idea consciously for the first time, he repudiated it. He opened his arms, letting the Z-2 float free. “I just want to know why you did it!” he said desperately.

  Keelraiser caught the spacesuit before it bumped into the screens. “Though I am native here and to the manner born, it is a custom more honour'd in the breach than the observance.”

  Jack laughed. “Shakespeare! Benefits of sixty-five years of watching television.”

  “Only about eight. I slept most of the way.”

  “How old are you, anyway? Do you count the years you spent asleep?” Jack knew that the Lightbringer had been equipped with cryosleep facilities. That’s how the infantry had got here. They had ended their journey without ever waking up, when the Lightbringer’s midsection exploded. More senior crew, like Keelraiser, had slept and woken off and on, according to their preference. Eskitul, apparently, had spent a full third of the journey awake, watching TV.

  “We decided not to count the years of hibernation,” Keelraiser said. “That makes me one thousand, three hundred and twenty-seven years old.”

  “Rriksti years are like one of those currencies where you need to be a millionaire just to go shopping.” Jack knew the conversion, though. Eleven Earth days to an Imf year. So Keelraiser was forty. It jolted him to realize Keelraiser was younger than he was, if only by a couple of Earth years.

  Handling the Z-2, Keelraiser said, “Why did you bring this in here?” Its long fingers delved into the suit’s thigh pockets. Before Jack could respond, Keelraiser plucked out the only item in either pocket: a scrap of blackened metal. “What’s this?”

  Jack’s jaw tightened. “Right, I was going to show you that.”

  “Is it a silicon device?” That was how the rriksti referred to human chips, to distinguish them from their own semiconductors, which were made of diamond, thank you very much.

  “Yup.”

  Keelraiser set the
device between its teeth. “It tastes good. A bit burned.”

  “It’s a tank sensor.”

  “Oh.” Keelraiser removed the ruined sensor from its mouth. The device floated above its palm, a tiny lump of carbon that had nearly cost 310 lives.

  “I recovered it when we repaired the tanks. It’s completely slagged.” Jack flushed as he relived that bleak discovery. “We’ll have to investigate why it failed high, but it must have been fried in the first or second HERF you hit us with. Or maybe the third.”

  “We were trying to stop you from reaching Europa,” Keelraiser said. “It makes me shed to remember it.”

  “At least you’re not still trying to pretend the HERFs were just your way of saying hello,” Jack snapped.

  Keelraiser’s hair washed around its face. “I’m sorry!” it shouted. “Yes, we tried to kill you! No, we did not succeed! I’m fucking sorry, and I don’t know if I’m sorry for trying, or sorry that we failed! There you go! I’m being honest with you!”

  The last words scaled up to a high, squealing note that went straight through Jack’s head. This sometimes happened when the rriksti were not careful how they tuned their voices. It was nails on a blackboard, a jackhammer digging into your brain.

  Jack lost it.

  CHAPTER 21

  That fucking noise just really set Jack off. He grabbed Keelraiser by the hair and dragged it out of the computer room.

  Nothing hurt the rriksti quite as much as grabbing their hair. It was completely out of bounds. Keelraiser screamed and screamed.

  Out in the corridor, Jack switched his grip to Keelraiser’s arm. Kicking off from the wall, he towed it down the corridor and over the ruined barricade in front of the door. The wall ripped. They shot out into the hospital.

  A mosaic of rriksti faces turned their way. Jack glimpsed Brbb at the far end of the passenger cabin. It must have come rushing over to make sure he wasn’t violating any rules. Until this moment, Jack hadn’t been absolutely sure what he was going to do, but now he understood that he had no choice. The Krijistal were watching. Jack braked by dragging a foot against the ceiling. He let go of Keelraiser, freeing his right hand, and grabbed its tank top in his left hand. He pushed it in the chest, open-handed, and then drove an upper-cut at its face. His fist thudded into Keelraiser’s cheek.

  It’s not easy to beat someone up in zero-gee. You can’t put your weight behind your punches when you weigh nothing, and you can’t get the bugger down on the ground when there is no ‘down.’

  However, Jack had mastered certain rriksti tactics. He wrapped his legs around Keelraiser’s slender waist, so that it couldn’t float away, and punched it hard in the face several more times.

  “If I have to walk around looking like Joseph’s fucking Technicolor Dreamcoat, you can, too, dickface.”

  Every time his fist connected with Keelraiser’s flesh he got a jolt of emotional and physical satisfaction. At the same time he hated himself for doing this. He hated himself even more for enjoying it.

  He waited for Keelraiser to fight back—he’d left its arms free on purpose, so that it could have a go if it wanted—but concluded after a couple of minutes that it wasn’t even going to try.

  Blood glistened on Keelraiser’s lips, black in the dim light. It must have cut the inside of its cheek on its own teeth.

  “Oh, look at that,” Jack said heavily. “You’re bleeding.”

  He kicked Keelraiser away.

  Even the goddamn patients sat up and applauded.

  Rriksti applause was a combination of high-frequency whistles, which Jack couldn’t hear, having lost his headset in the fight, and foot-stamping, which couldn’t be done in zero-gee. But he got the gist from all the heels of seven-fingered hands going up and down, thudding into pillows.

  He looked around for his headset. Brbb gave it to him. If rriksti had any amount of facial mobility, the blue-haired giant would’ve had a shit-eating grin on its long face. “—took you long enough,” it said.

  “I know,” Jack said. “What can I say? I’m human.”

  Difystra and Fewl, two of Brbb’s mates, laid Keelraiser out on a cot. They fastened the straps around its limbs with an efficiency that recalled cops restraining a suspect. Laying their hands on Keelraiser’s head and abdomen, they froze in stiff-backed postures. Other rriksti crowded around to join in. They were healing Keelraiser, whether it liked it or not. Within a few minutes its bruises and cuts would hurt less, if not vanish altogether, as the magical antioxidants secreted in their palms speeded up cellular-level tissue repair, or whatever the fuck really happened when they got extroverted. Jack had initially thought it was some kind of New Agey energy transfer thing, and liked it no better since he had come to understand that it was both less and more than that.

  He said to Cleanmay, “Sorry about that. Didn’t mean to disturb the patients.”

  “Not at all,” the rriksti doctor said. “This kind of thing is great for morale.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  Shaking his head, Jack went forward. He left a table jammed in the auto-rip so that it couldn’t close again, to show them all that the crew area would no longer be used as a moral leper colony with a population of one. He drifted into the cockpit, and settled into the commander’s seat.

  The illusion of variable polarization sealed around him. He seemed to be floating in space, unprotected against the vacuum. The sun rushed toward him like a car with one broken headlight, the illusion of toppling motion no lie at all, given how fast they were travelling, but inconsequential on the scale of the solar system, let alone the universe.

  Jack’s heart thudded, saliva collected in his mouth, and sweat started out all over his body. He felt trapped in himself, as if he were a tin can, with walls as impermeable as the hull of the SoD, hurtling, like the ship, through a hostile black void.

  A speck floated across the sun. Jack reflexively reached out and caught it. It was that slagged tank sensor. How had it got up here? Well, things floated.

  He put it between his teeth and bit down. The taste of metal filled his mouth. He imagined what it would be like to be a rriksti, to think this tasted good, to feel his sharp teeth crunch into the transistors.

  CHAPTER 22

  Hannah prepared for the weekend with care. She selected her hiding-place and began moving food and drink into it a couple of days in advance. Wander through the garden, pocket a few potatoes. Hang out with Figgrit in the kitchen, leave with a handful of jerky. She had a mismatched collection of bottles. She filled them all with water.

  Just water, sadly. She’d have to go without booze for the weekend. She accepted the trade-off. Every week, Ripstiggr promised her extra krak if she would stay put, but it wasn’t worth it. Two dry days out of eleven; she could do that, just about.

  On Saturday morning, although it wasn’t Saturday really, of course, she awoke to a pregnant silence. As she got dressed in her spacesuit she heard, now and again, an ominous hoot.

  She sauntered out of her room. There were not many people on the bridge. Those that were there pretended to ignore her—this in itself a deviation from their habitual ironic salutes—while grinning sneakily at her when they thought she wasn’t looking. The expression she thought of as a grin was a drop-jawed gape. ‘Sneaky’ was when you could see those sharp rows of needles they had for teeth.

  “Any new mail for me?” she said to Gurlp, in the comms chancel.

  Gurlp wasn’t a fan of the weekend either, so she was in an even worse mood than usual. “Check your notifications,” she snapped.

  Hannah sighed. Whenever she told the chip to show her notifications, a feed of subject lines scrolled over her left eye almost too fast to read. It didn’t help that the chip transliterated them, because Rristigul written in Latin script was still gibberish. “Gurlp, I get hundreds of notifications every day. Thousands. The ship sends me status updates on every little freaking system that I don’t care about, and if there are comms
notifications mixed in there, I have no way of filtering them out.” She remembered when she had started doing Twitter, on Richard Burke’s orders. “It’s worse than Twitter.”

  “What is Twitter?”

  “A old social media platform.” Hannah rode out a pang of longing for the world she had lost.

  “Oh,” Gurlp said. “Twitter is defunct. Now is Yell, Barf, Emojigram, Spark, and HiThere, among others.”

  Back in the early 2010s, technology platforms had exhibited centripetal tendencies; now they all seemed to be fracturing. Even mighty Google had split up into a dozen different browser/search engine combos.

  But people still sent email. They even sent email to the Lightbringer. The comms team filtered them out of data traffic intercepts by flagging terms like Lightbringer, Proxima b, and Hannah Ginsburg. Hannah was allowed to read the ones addressed to her, after suitable redactions had been made. It made her miserable but it was a better way to spend the weekend than staring at the walls and listening to those distant, throaty hoots.

  “Come on, Gurlp, just forward them to my inbox.”

  “Fine.”

  “Thank y—”

  “I teach you how to filter notifications.”

  Gurlp walked her through the gibberish that webbed her vision. Since Gurlp couldn’t see what Hannah saw, she had to spell the Rristigul words and get Hannah to find their matches, as if Hannah were a toddler matching triangles and squares. That’s about how intelligent Hannah felt right now. But at last they managed to set up a filter consisting of one word, ‘Hannah.’

  “Now you only see notifications with your name in subject line or body of email.”

  “This is awesome! You rock, Gurlp.”

  “Now you don’t bug me anymore.”

  “Love you too, girl,” Hannah said wryly to the blue-haired, seven-foot alien. “Stay safe.”

  “Is no danger.”

  Hannah left the bridge with a spring in her step, for a change. It felt great to have done something useful with the Shiplord chip, even if she had needed help to do it.

  Her mood dimmed as she descended the curving staircase. Two rriksti dashed past, knocking her into the wall. They grinned at her with glaring eyes. One stuck out his tongue and waggled it like Gene Simmons. Then they charged away.