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

by Felix R. Savage

  “Oh! … That feels good.” Jack involuntarily arched his back. “Do that … some more …”

  “Like this?”

  “Yeah, a bit more … sort of harder, if you know what I mean …”

  Keelraiser didn’t seem to understand quite how this worked. His seven long fingers enclosed Jack’s cock and stayed there without moving. “What will happen if I do this?”

  Jack closed his eyes. His arousal was still building. The point of no return loomed. He was suddenly afraid of losing control. “Nothing,” he said, making a promise to himself. “Nothing will happen.”

  “Do you want me to stop?”

  “No, don’t! I mean …” Jack caught Keelraiser’s wrist. “This is fine. This is nice. Don’t move! If—if you could just sort of hold me …”

  CHAPTER 29

  “No, no,” Grigory said. “We’re not trying to put one over on the Americans. Things are too serious now to play political games.”

  “Then why do you want to fly the SoD to the moon? Do you mean we’re not going to point the SoD’s railguns at CELL, land the Victory near the base, and force all the Americans to leave so that we can take over?”

  This was the scenario that had sprung fully-formed into Alexei’s mind the moment Jack told him about the Victory crew’s ‘idiotic’ plan. Jack was English. He did not always see these things coming.

  Grigory tugged his moustache. “You haven’t been on Earth since 2019, Alexei Dmitrovich. You don’t understand how bad things are now.”

  Alexei shrugged. “Am I right?”

  “Let’s not divide the pelt of a bear we haven’t killed yet. First things first.” Grigory paused. “Have you still got the trigger for Zmeyka?”

  Alexei raised his eyebrows at the change of subject. Zmeyka. The ‘Little Snake.’ That had been the GRU’s codename for the malware.

  “No,” he said, greatly enjoying the look on Grigory’s face. “I destroyed it.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “With a homemade sword. And a hammer, just to make sure.”

  Grigory shook Linda. Koichi uncurled, too, and sat up. “He says he’s destroyed it,” Grigory said in English.

  “How unpatriotic of you, Alexei,” said Linda. Her teeth caught the dim light as she smiled.

  Alexei’s mind reeled. It looked like Grigory was the unpatriotic one here. No one was meant to know about the malware! When Alexei shared the trigger with Kate, he had been conscious of committing high treason. It had troubled him deeply, though not as much as he was troubled by resentment of the siloviki who manipulated people’s lives for the sole purpose of getting rich.

  But Grigory was one of that gang, or rather, he licked their boots. He’d never disobey an order from the GRU. That, Alexei felt certain, hadn’t changed.

  Yet here was Linda Moskowitz, a sassy American woman, murmuring, “Guess we got nothing to worry about, then,” and Koichi Masuoka, a son of Nippon, saying, “Except the squids,” and lo and behold, Grigory Nikolov, that old cuss, the terror of the ISS, was pointing a gun at Alexei’s stomach.

  Alexei recognized the squared-off barrel of a PYa Grach, the same weapon he himself had carried when he was in the air force. Small enough to fit in that satchel Grigory had brought with him.

  Damn it! We should’ve searched their bags!

  But if Grigory, growling in Russian about Alexei’s duty, thought Alexei would do as he was told like a good little soldier boy, he was wrong. Alexei grabbed Grigory’s wrist and forced the barrel of the gun away. Alexei had been living in 0.3 gees, working like a farmhand; Grigory had had a year in freefall for his muscles to deteriorate. Using the low gravity to his advantage, Alexei spun Grigory around by the arm and flipped him head down on the hill. Rriksti scattered. Alexei didn’t see where Nene went. He was trying to decide whether to break Grigory’s trigger finger.

  Cold steel ground into the back of his neck. “Get the fuck away from him. Now.”

  Linda.

  Alexei slackened his grip. He sat back on his heels, every movement a parody of exaggerated caution. Linda moved with him, keeping her gun pressed into his neck.

  Grigory jerked his clothes straight and faced Alexei. “What are you, some kind of animal? Or have you turned alien like Hannah Ginsburg? Human on the outside, squid on the inside?”

  Alexei didn’t dare to move anything except his eyes. His headset lay out of reach on the fungus. He spotted Nene, standing on the top of the hill, wringing her hands. He mouthed, “Run,” and wondered if she understood. There were still a lot of other rriksti around, staring curiously. They clearly did not understand. They thought this was the human version of a Krijistal punch-up.

  Alexei knew better. He knew this was the siloviki exacting their long-awaited revenge. Except the usual suspects had changed—that was where his assumptions had led him astray. “You’re not with the GRU anymore, are you, Grigory Abramovich?”

  “Oh, I am!” Grigory said. “And she’s with NASA, and he’s with JAXA, and all of us have the same goal: saving humanity. My question is, are you with us?”

  “Of course I am,” Alexei said.

  “I wonder. Looked like you were getting very friendly with that squid. That’s disgusting, Alexei Dmitrovich. You should be ashamed of yourself. Better to fuck your hand than one of those things.”

  Alexei bit back a foul-mouthed response. Defending Nene’s dignity would get him nowhere right now. He had to find out what the Victory crew wanted from him. “This is stupid, pointless. We’re all on the same side. Why do you think we’re not?”

  Linda said, “Oh, because you loaded up your ship with squids?”

  She dug the gun into the base of his neck, toppling him face-first onto the fungus. He poked up his head and saw that Nene was gone from the crest of the hill.

  “It’s your call, Grigory,” Linda said. “Wanna take him back to the ship? Or leave him here, or what?”

  “Kill him,” Koichi said.

  Grigory swore in Russian. He sounded distressed at the thought of killing Alexei. But not that distressed, evidently, because his legs entered Alexei’s field of vision, spread apart in a shooting stance, and then the world went away.

  *

  Aboard the Victory, Giles and the Krijistal were enjoying a party of their own.

  Giles had come aboard to help them unload the Shit We Need. Heh, not really. Brbb had tipped him off earlier—bring some krak … By the time he got there, the party was well underway. The Krijistal floated through the five linked modules of the Victory, already sloshed, to judge by the way they were bumping into the walls of boxes that lined the modules.

  “Giles!” Brbb greeted him with a flash of teeth. The teeth looked black. They must have been snacking on metals from the single box of Shit We Need they had got around to unpacking.

  “You could have waited for me,” Giles said, doffing his spacesuit.

  “We did wait!” Brbb trapped Giles against the wall of the cockpit and kissed him deeply. “See? No one has disrobed yet!”

  The bitter taste of metal made Giles cough. He broke the kiss to gulp from his bottle of krak. That made him cough again, and all the Krijistal laughed, but they weren’t laughing at him. They were laughing with him. They accepted him the way he was, and welcomed his participation in their weekend games. Maybe, Giles thought, there was a God after all.

  He was looking forward to tonight.

  They’d never had real privacy before.

  Snatched moments in the shacks of the rriksti village, with their paper-thin walls, could not compare to having a whole spaceship to themselves.

  Giles also intended to take advantage of the privacy for another purpose.

  He winked at Brbb, and hooked his MP3 player up to the Victory’s PA system.

  Slayer thundered through the spaceship.

  “It is a shame you can’t hear it,” Giles said, nodding to the beat.

  “No, I think it is probably a good thing,” Brbb said. “The other humans say your tas
te in music is shit.”

  Giles pounced on him. “Is my taste in aliens shit, also? Mmm?”

  As they spun in a freefall embrace, Brbb’s spacesuit flowed down to the top of his pelvis, exposing his hot, slightly sticky skin. His erection pressed against Giles’s thigh. “What luck the Victory arrived on the weekend,” he said.

  “Why is there sometimes a weekend, and sometimes not?” Giles said.

  Brbb cringed away. “That sounds like philosophy. Ask someone else.”

  “No, no,” Giles said, laughing. “I’m just being a xenolinguist. Language and culture are two sides of a coin. You speak of the weekend as the end of an eleven-day cycle, but in fact, sometimes a month goes by without any weekends.”

  “Sometimes work comes first,” Brbb said.

  “And some people—in fact, everyone else on board, no?—never seem to have a weekend at all! How can that be, if it’s a biological cycle?”

  “They just don’t know how to have fun,” Brbb said.

  Difystra put in, “He’s messing with you, Giles. Is this correct?”

  “I fear so,” Giles said.

  “We’ve got implants.” Difystra reached out and flicked the back of Brbb’s neck with a long finger. “Everyone has them.”

  “Everyone who crewed on the Lightbringer?”

  “Everyone, everyone,” Difystra said. “Fertility control. It’s better this way. We’re not slaves to our biology like they were in the Dark Ages. So if we want a weekend, we have a weekend. If not, we don’t! Isn’t technology great?”

  “So being drunk and insanely horny is a choice,” Brbb said. He gave Giles a soulful look. “Unless I can blame you. Can I? Yes. It’s all your fault.”

  Giles groaned. “Work calls,” he said. “We’d better start unpacking the boxes before the others start to wonder what we’re doing.”

  “Later.”

  Sometimes Giles deplored his own commitment to duty. But there it was. He couldn’t have fun as long as a task remained undone. “No, we’d better make a start, at least …”

  “Oh, all right.”

  Drunkenly, to the strains of Giles’s heavy metal playlist, they started to open the Shit We Need boxes.

  *

  Skyler swayed on his stool, lost in the music. He knew he was being antisocial, but fuck it. He was pissed as hell about being lied to, again, by the very people they counted on for support. It was on the newcomers to explain themselves. Wasn’t on him to make nice.

  Without warning, a harmonic shriek drilled into his ears. Skyler snatched his headset off. Ears ringing, he thought for a second that someone had hit a bum note. Interstellar fusion, as they grandly dubbed their new genre of folk music, had to be structured around the harmonics that hurt human ears—like composing without the E string, for example. Not that hard, but sometimes someone forgot, and hit it.

  But the musicians seemed agitated, staring aft in confusion, although Skyler could see nothing amiss. Their bio-antennas were doing something he’d never seen—flattened straight down their backs, giving them strange, snake-headed silhouettes.

  Skyler slid off his stool and put his guitar down on the amp.

  The musicians twitched. One or two fell to their knees.

  Static burped from the headset in Skyler’s hand.

  Hriklif, on the far side of the circle, took one tottering step towards him, and collapsed.

  Skyler took off running. As he dodged through the towering stands of suizh, he jammed his headset on. “Jack! Jack, come in!” No response. In fact he could not hear a single thing in the headset, not even the usual background chatter of Rristigul.

  He burst out of the jungle on the edge of the village.

  And tripped over a body.

  Catching himself on his hands, he flew over in an inadvertent handspring. He landed in front of the long table that had served as a buffet. Rriksti sat and lay on the floor, shaking, twitching, obviously in such pain that they couldn’t move. Every one of them had its hair flattened down in a single mega-dreadlock, like an antenna folded away.

  Skyler shook the nearest one. “What’s wrong with you? What happened?”

  Bio-antennas whipped, but Skyler heard nothing. That’s when he realized his headset wasn’t working.

  The goddamn thing had crapped out on him.

  Or burnt out.

  He blundered through the village.

  A single form lay on the hill in a contorted, frozen posture.

  “Alexei!”

  Skyler leapt up the hill. Shook Alexei. Checked his pulse. Prised up his eyelids to see the whites.

  And found twinned red blisters on the back of Alexei’s neck.

  The marks of a taser.

  *

  The three Victory crew members bounded aft through the choking heat. They forced their way through vegetation that Linda would describe to her son, if she ever got to talk to him again, as like the weeds in your aquarium after Mr. Turtle died. Grigory, in point position, swept his taser high and low, squeezing the trigger every time something moved. They hadn’t anticipated this stroke of luck. The taser worked like a magic wand on the aliens. Discharge voltage, Mister Squid he take dirt nap. Didn’t even have to hit them with it. The 50,000-volt arcs wriggling between the electrodes flashed eerily in the gloom.

  They hurtled up the aft stairs. Clambering into the axis tunnel, Linda gasped for breath. Was it starting? Duh. It had already started. But none of them knew how fast it would go.

  They got to the storage module. There were some squids swarming around. Grigory tased them. The three humans got into their suits. Linda checked the atmospheric readouts in her heads-up display. Whoa boy.

  “You kids go first,” Grigory told them on the suit-to-suit comms. Linda hated leaving him behind in the storage module, but only two of them could fit into the airlock at a time.

  Outside, the delta-winged alien shuttle blocked out the sun. Linda and Koichi crabbed around the outside of the SoD’s truss tower. They had to get back in the Victory. There, they’d be safe. Batten down the hatches and wait until it was over.

  The truss towers of the SoD and the Victory came together in a V. You could think of it as the bottom of a deep valley with the stars at the top. Linda scrambled across the gap, holding onto one of the cables that secured the two ships together.

  The airlock of the Victory’s foremost module opened.

  A beam of light shone out of the hatch and raked across Linda’s face, blinding her.

  A blow hammered into her helmet.

  Koichi dragged her away from the ship as blows rained down on them both. It wasn’t just one squid, it was hundreds of them … well, at least two … with their head-lamps in the middle of their chests and their tentacles swirling in the vacuum like industrial mops.

  Dizzied by the blow to her helmet, Linda reached into the thigh pocket of her Starliner. She dragged out her specially modified Glock and fired. The gun kicked, propelling her backwards against the truss tower. The squids scattered. “Die, motherfuckers, die!” Linda screamed with the passion of a woman dispossessed of home, planet, and now, it appeared, ship as well. Koichi was shooting, too, upside down, knees hooked through the lattice.

  But the squids had only been startled. They closed in again, and now there were more of them. Linda and Koichi battled their way back to the SoD’s airlock. More squids arrived from the Victory to join the attack. Out of ammo, Linda pistol-whipped the nearest ones with the butt of her Glock.

  Somehow the two humans crammed themselves back inside the airlock and closed it against the monsters.

  “Least they didn’t have ray-guns,” Koichi panted.

  “Same fucking difference.” If they couldn’t get back to the Victory, they were dead. Linda shook the dizziness off, tasted blood in her mouth. She’d bitten her tongue.

  “They’re in our ship,” Koichi told Gregory, back inside. “We saw four of them. There may be more. They attacked us.”

  Grigory swore in Russian. “We’re not s
afe here, either.”

  Tased squids drifted around the storage module like garbage. The taser didn’t kill them, it just put them down for the count. Who knew how long the effects would last? And in a few minutes, the other squids, the aggressive ones, would pile in through the airlock.

  “Get batteries for the taser,” Grigory said. “Extra oxygen tanks.”

  The same people who built the Victory had built the SoD. The Victory crew knew where everything was stored. Although the crew of the SoD had ignored orders and betrayed their own humanity, they’d not cut any corners when it came to inventory maintenance.

  Burdened, they flew back through the secondary life-support module. Linda felt a yearning to stay right here. It was so peaceful, with the huge algae tanks spinning their contents in the normal, bright, human light. But they weren’t safe here, either.

  They flew on through the axis tunnel, between the fans and the growlights swathed in handmade orange veils, towards the bridge.

  CHAPTER 30

  Skyler carried Alexei to Medical. It seemed to take weeks. He kept having to stop and pant for breath. Along the way, he shouted for help. No one heard him, unsurprisingly as his headset was dead. He was so out of breath that his shouts came out as croaks.

  He dumped Alexei on the stretcher tucked into the Potter space under Staircase 4, and switched on the high-powered LED light above it. He knew that tasers don’t knock you unconscious. Alexei had stopped shaving his head because they’d run out of anything to use as a razor. Parting the greasy dark hair, Skyler found a swollen gash. He began cleaning the wound with a wet rag. There was nothing else to use. He hoped the Victory had brought the medical supplies they needed, although he very much doubted it at this point.

  A rriksti stumbled into the pool of light. Nene. Its bio-antennas spasmed. Same thing was wrong with it as with all the others. It crumpled to its knees beside the stretcher. Its arms fell limply across Alexei’s body. It rested its face on his stomach.

  “Hey, Nene,” Skyler said. “Can you do anything for a knock on the head?” He laughed bitterly.

  Nene levered itself upright and stumbled to the whiteboard on the wall. Grabbing a marker, it scrawled in capital letters. At first Skyler was so taken with this unprecedented behavior—a rriksti writing!—that he neglected to read the words.