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

by Felix R. Savage

  Down in the service corridor, she met more rriksti who gave her a wide berth, but turned to watch her after she passed. Their eyes seemed to glint redly. She told herself it was just the lighting down here, an indirect red glare from behind the walls that made moiré patterns on the ceiling, like red reflections on water, emulating the sky of Imf before a storm.

  She was relieved to reach the garden. The gravity eased off to about 0.2 gees as she entered the hall full of hydroponic tanks stacked up to the ceiling. No sense wasting mass attractors on plants, when they grew just as well in minimal gravity—or did not grow just as well, if you lacked sufficient nutrients, which was the problem here.

  But it wasn’t Hannah’s problem. She climbed a ladder past several layers of starveling suizh plants, wrinkling her nose against their rotten-cheese smell. At the top, she trotted along the catwalks into a maze of yfrit. These sugarbush-like plants had large, spiky leaves that looked ashen in the perpetual gloom.

  She would’ve liked to retreat to her own garden, an area in the corner of the hall, enclosed in blackout tarps, where jury-rigged UV lights shone on a little patch of Earth. But that would be the first place they’d look for her.

  She parted the leaves, bounced on her toes, and jumped inside a large yfrit plant.

  These ugly vegetables usually cradled gigantic flowers with edible seeds, but this one did not, because Hannah had wedged a table inside it, upside-down.

  She sat on the overturned table, hugging her knees, with her weekend supplies piled up around her in a rampart. She remembered playing boats like this with Bethany when they were little. An overturned coffee table their boat, the carpet their sea. Pretzel crumbs scattered on shag-pile waves …

  “Man, I would donate a kidney for pretzels and orange juice right now,” she whispered, although it was really Bethany she missed. That plump, giggly girl had grown up into a plump, neurotic woman, who still counted on big sister Hannah to protect her from the pirates …

  Yfrit smelled of bubblegum, which was not so terrible. Nibbling on a raw carrot (leucine! Vitamin K!), Hannah glanced through her fan mail.

  Far away, the distant hoots crescendoed.

  *

  They found her much sooner than she had expected.

  Admittedly, she rarely escaped discovery for the whole weekend. For the Krijistal it was a game, with Ripstiggr as ringleader. He could find her with minimal effort. There just weren’t that many places to hide in the Land of the Living. But Ripstiggr understood that Hannah had reservations about the whole business, and went easy on her. So she usually got left alone until Sunday afternoon-ish.

  This weekend, maybe Ripstiggr figured enough was enough. She’d been on the Lightbringer for a whole year. (A whole year? Oh my God. But it was true.) Time for her to stop playing coy.

  Or maybe he was just really feeling it this week.

  Or maybe it was the other guys, the low-ranking squirts, setting the pace.

  Anyway, she heard them skirmish into the garden only a few hours after she nestled into her hiding-place.

  Hooonhh. Hooonh.

  Those terrible hoots. The throaty noises tightened her chest. She sat up straight, tense.

  Shrieking and carolling in their own language, they spread out. They were searching the ground-floor level of the garden. “Hannah! Haaaaannah!”

  Hannah bit her lips. Just when she’d been reading a really interesting email! Well, it sounded like they were pretty drunk. Maybe they’d give up and go away …

  The rriksti weekend, of course, hinged on booze. They spent two days getting absolutely hammered, and that’s why Hannah was tempted to participate properly, of course she was. Had the ship been maneuvering, had there been any conceivable possibility that the crew would be called on to do their jobs, Ripstiggr would never have allowed these Dionysian revels—so he took pains to assure her. But they were just zooming through deep space, same as yesterday, same as tomorrow, so it was OK to give their biology its due. In fact it helped to keep them psychologically healthy by recreating the cycle that governed life on Imf. Sure you don’t want to play, Hannah?

  Nope. Me: human. You: rriksti. You go on and have your fun. (Although, saying that, she felt bad for Gurlp and the handful of other abstainers.)

  Krak, Hannah. All the krak you can drink …

  No. No. No.

  Breathing shallowly, she squatted on her table. Scuffling noises filtered up through the vegetation. They were right below her.

  The structure she was perched on began to shake.

  Someone was climbing up.

  Hooonhh!

  With trembling hands, Hannah stuffed her supplies into her backpack. She might be able to evade them. Sneak out of the garden and run to one of her other hiding-places. That would be unsporting, but maybe if she did that, Ripstiggr would get the message that, nope, she still wasn’t into alien parties.

  Yet, despite the impulse to flee, she stayed where she was, like a rabbit hiding in long grass, hoping the dogs would pass her by.

  The catwalks shook. Tall ripples glided across the water covering the yfrit plant’s roots.

  The wall of foliage around her ripped from top to bottom, and a rriksti face appeared. Oh, great. It was Hulk, as she nicknamed him. His mouth gaped. His eyes widened. He let out a bellow in Rristigul—presumably, “Found her!”—and at the same time, from his throat, not his bio-antennas, issued a wordless hoot.

  Hooonh.

  The rriksti were mute, but they didn’t have to be. Lacking vocal cords, they could not form words… yet they could make sounds by driving air through their larynxes. The first time Hannah had heard these hoots she had found them absolutely terrifying.

  Matter of fact, she still did.

  Because the rriksti only hooted when they were in musth.

  Hulk pushed the yfrit leaves further apart. He leaned into the central cavity of the plant, reaching for her. Hannah cringed away to the far corner of her table. Hulk made a grab for her ankle.

  “Leave me alone!” she cried. “I am Shiplord!”

  “Eskitul used to play,” Hulk said. “Not with us, admittedly.”

  “I’m not playing with you, either!” She threw a carrot at him, realizing that he would interpret this as playing.

  He caught it neatly and made lewd gestures at her with it. The carrot was quite a big one but it was dwarfed by the tent-pole in his shorts.

  More rriksti approached. The tower shook and swayed. Hoonh, hoonh. The hoots reminded her of the time she’d seen a Down Syndrome man lose his shit on the LA Metro. His primal howls had seemed to express some need so great he could not put it into words.

  All life on Imf was governed by 11-day cycles. The planet took 11 days to go around Proxima Centauri. Being tidally locked, with zero axial tilt, it had no seasons. But a slightly elliptical orbit caused variations in the weather. Twice a week (a “year” in Rristigul), when the planet was furthest from its cool red sun, the atmospheric pressure rose, causing the perpetual gales to die down to a breeze. Hannah was no meteorologist, but she figured it was kind of an ‘eye of the storm’ thing. The skies cleared, birds sang, flowers bloomed … and rriksti got horny.

  She had asked Rripstiggr why they had a two-day weekend, when Imf must logically reach apo-Sharzh twice per week, not once.

  “You cannot run an advanced industrial society with a four-day work week,” Ripstiggr had said with disarming honesty. “So we moved to the eleven-day week, with a two-day weekend. People adjusted.”

  OK.

  Hannah was never going to adjust to this. Nope. Never.

  As the other rriksti closed in, Hulk turned to fight them off. Maybe they’d end up scrapping and forget all about her. Happened, when you were several drinks over the limit.

  While Hulk wasn’t looking, she scooted backwards and scrambled out of the other side of the yfrit plant—

  —straight into Joker’s arms.

  “Oh boy,” he said. Hooonh. “My turn at last.”

  Hannah
struggled. “I like you, Joker, but not in that way!”

  It wasn’t getting through. Nothing got through when you were drunk and horny, as Hannah knew all too well. Joker clasped her to his chest, too excited to even try to get her out of her spacesuit. His boozy breath washed over her face. His penis pressed against her lower ribs.

  “NO fighting on the hydroponic towers!” Ripstiggr’s yell cut into their heads. Joker’s bio-antennas whipped around. “There are too many people up here! Get down to the ground before the whole thing collapses!”

  He stalked towards them along the catwalk, resplendently bare-chested. Joker let go of Hannah and fled.

  “Good,” Ripstiggr said. “Now it’s just you and me.”

  The game was over. This was how it always ended. Well, there had been that one time when another rriksti got to her first. She hadn’t stopped crying for days afterwards. Ripstiggr had torn that rriksti to pieces (literally), and since then it had been understood that although the others might play the game, they were to let Ripstiggr win.

  Now he was here, she was safe.

  Safe?

  Safe from the other rriksti.

  But not from herself.

  CHAPTER 23

  Hannah had not really been hiding from Ripstiggr, of course. She’d been hiding from herself.

  Now she’d lost the game. She stood and waited for him to come to her. He stepped behind her and pressed the button which made her spacesuit flow away. Suddenly naked, she shivered, despite the heat.

  Ripstiggr embraced her from behind. She knew immediately he’d dropped his shorts. She turned around, pushing him away a little so she could look at his penis.

  No more Mr. Microdick. The biological phenomenon she called musth—a word borrowed from the periodic testosterone rises in bull elephants—was basically a 24-hour hard-on. That No. 2 pencil had swollen into a rod with a bulgy tripartite tip, so long and thick that you could hardly imagine it fitting inside a human woman.

  It did, though.

  She felt weak in the knees just looking at it.

  Now now, Hannah. Don’t drool.

  She’d always had a thing for, ahem, larger men. That was part of the reason she used to pick up guys at bars. Like a gambler heading back to the track again, she’d always hoped she might strike gold. Or rather, girth. And length.

  Love? Romance? Those were for people who didn’t have an important job to do, and a drinking habit to hide.

  With Ripstiggr, she didn’t have to hide anything. It was liberating. And if the price to pay was her self-respect? Right now, it seemed worth it.

  She reached out and wrapped her fingers around his amazing schlong. For a fleeting second she remembered Skyler… but he was dead. She was alive. And hurting, and empty. She needed to be filled.

  Ripstiggr shivered at her touch. Stooping, he grasped her butt and effortlessly picked her up. She wrapped her legs around his waist and clung to his shoulders for balance. The distant look in his eyes cued her to anticipate the magic. Within a few seconds, cool waves of bliss started to spread from his hands into her ass. Two birds with one stone. He was pepping her up, and getting her ready. With the best will in the world, she couldn’t handle that girth without a bit of prep work.

  As the refreshing magic worked on her, the very touch of the air on her crotch became a torment. She reached around and felt for him.

  “Naughty, naughty,” Ripstiggr crooned. Her un-ladylike ways were catnip to him in the sexual arena, apparently.

  “I hate you, you know,” she informed him, reminding herself of why she shouldn’t be doing this.

  “My Shiplord. Why are you so cruel?” He set her down on her feet and dropped into a kneeling position, which put his face at the level of hers. “Allow me to worship you.” His hair danced—he couldn’t help laughing at his own joke. His hands pumped more magic into her body. He stared into her little, brown, human eyes, and she knew he was exulting in his power over her. She felt dizzy. The black foliage in the reddish twilight, the catwalk, the disconsolate hoots of rriksti retreating from the garden, all faded, leaving only the feelings.

  But the feelings were her enemy.

  Ripstiggr was her enemy.

  Even if she had allowed herself to be degraded to the point that she enjoyed this, she still hadn’t asked to be here, and Ripstiggr was still the inhuman monster from another star system who’d kidnapped her and killed her friends!

  Gathering the shreds of her dignity, she pushed him away.

  “Wouldn’t you rather be with a rriksti female?” she said shakily, stalling.

  “There are only five other females on board, and Gurlp doesn’t play. Anyway, I like you best.”

  “What if I say no?”

  Ripstiggr seemed to think about it. “Krak?” he offered. “Might help you to get in the mood.”

  Hannah reached through the yfrit leaves, grabbed her backpack, and ran.

  *

  She stopped at the far end of the garden just long enough to don her spacesuit. The smart material flowed up to her neck and stopped, pushing insistently at the base of her skull. She reached back, uncrumpled the helmet built into the suit, and pulled it over her head. For a scary instant it was like wearing a plastic bag, and then her air supply inflated the fishbowl.

  Glancing over her shoulder—half hoping Ripstiggr would pursue her, half fearing it—she slapped the sensor next to where the water pipes ran into the wall. There was a hatch there so they could service the plumbing for the hydroponics. Backpack bouncing on her back, breath rasping, she scrambled along the top of the bundled conduits. Gravity oscillated as the tunnel curved around the mass attractors. She popped out of another hatch in the wall of the pantry, under the depleted shelves.

  Movement caught her eye. She froze, then relaxed. Figgrit was screwing one of the female Krijistal up against the pantry wall. Rriksti females went into estrus on the weekend, same as the males went into musth. It mystified Hannah why, after all these years, there were no rriksti babies on the Lightbringer.

  She tiptoed across the otherwise empty kitchen and slipped out of the airlock, into the wilderness of the sleeper decks.

  *

  Now where was that email again?

  Aha. Here.

  Subject: From A Friend

  Dear Hannah,

  You don’t know me, but my name is Iristigut. I may be able to help you. If you have any questions about the Lightbringer, or anything else, please reply to this email. (To reply, just give the verbal or neural command ‘Halb,’ meaning ‘Reply,’ followed by your text, and then ‘Sgrat,’ ‘send.’)

  Yours sincerely,

  Iristigut

  P.S. By the way, to search old emails, give the command ‘Ilvigt,’ search,’ followed by your search term.

  Floating through the damaged deck levels aft of the bridge, Hannah frowned at the biophotons induced by the chip’s electrical stimulation of her brain, which were currently arranged into words. These particular words puzzled and intrigued her.

  Iristigut sounded like a genuine rriksti name. It actually rang a bell, although she couldn’t place it.

  It might have come from some nutjob on Earth. But the nutjobs asked questions (invariably redacted by Ripstiggr’s censorbot). They never offered to answer them.

  However, the real revelation was that the Lightbringer’s messaging system worked a lot like Gmail.

  “Ilvigt ‘Iristigut,’” she vocalized—and gasped as the chip presented her with a long list of identical subject lines. She opened and read a few at random.

  This Iristigut character had been emailing her pretty much every day for a year.

  Hope blazed up, tempered by regret that she hadn’t seen any of these emails before.

  “Halb.” She mentally visualized the words, as if typing, and the chip formed them out of biophotons. “Hello, Iristigut. This is Hannah. Questions, I got them. Starting with, who are you? Sgrat.”

  Maybe she had a friend on board. Maybe one or more of the K
rijistal shared her reservations about the weekend bacchanals. Maybe …

  Drifting upwards, she twisted the dials of her wrist rockets to float over the glacier that had gushed from the forward potable water tank, and then frozen when the ship depressurized. All the water tanks had shattered on that terrible day eleven years ago. Muon cannons? If you say so. She couldn’t imagine what else could have caused such devastation.

  Calling up a map of this deck, she hurried aft.

  She assumed the rriksti would not pursue her. She’d made her wishes pretty clear, after all. She couldn’t stay out here forever—her suit only had a few hours of air tanked up in the life-support backpack, and she’d left all her supplies behind—but if she stayed away as long as she dared, that would give most of them time to score, taking the edge off their frustration. Only a few of them would get to score with the females, but the guys were not above screwing each other. Biology must have its due, after all.

  Grimacing, she flew on through the maze of dormitories, and along broader halls dotted with groups of tables and chairs for when the sleepers, one day, awoke. As she turned a corner she glimpsed a dim gleam of light far behind her.

  Oh hell!

  “Hannah,” she heard in her head. It was Ripstiggr’s voice. “Hannah …”

  She opened the nozzles of her wrist rockets and dived down a side corridor.

  A reply from Iristigut popped up at the top of her notifications.

  Hello, Hannah! I am so glad you answered my email! If you don’t mind, I would rather not tell you anything more about myself. But I promise that I am your friend, and I would be happy to answer any other questions you may have. I want to help you.

  Sincerely,

  Iristigut

  Reading, Hannah almost crashed into a wall. She caught herself with her feet and bounced off. “Halb,” she visualized. “Yeah, hey, Iristigut. Do you know anywhere on the Lightbringer I can hide where I can lock the fucking door? Thanks in advance. Bye. Sgrat.”

  She burst out of the darkness into light.