“Linda,” Skyler said, cocking his head towards the keel tube.
Jack had kept Linda confined in the Victory since perihelion, guarded round the clock by the Krijistal. Now, however, he apparently wanted the Victory for something else.
“You know, Keelraiser’s been asking me some weird questions,” Hriklif said.
“What else is new?”
“He’s not an atomic engineer, obviously. And he never showed any signs of caring about gauge field calibration or muon generation before.” Hriklif opened his mouth wide. “But now he wants to know all about it. Like, even stuff I’m not sure about.”
“Is there anything you don’t know about fusion reactors?”
“Sure. I’ve never blown one up before.”
“Jeez,” Skyler said.
A tired Japanese face poked through the keel tube.
“Hey guys,” Koichi said. “Whew. She’s in a bad mood.”
Koichi had had the unenviable job of telling Linda she would have to vacate the Victory.
“Is she ever not in a bad mood?” Skyler said. “Wanna play Monopoly?”
He felt at ease with Koichi now. Everyone did. The Japanese astronaut had a way of making himself useful without asking for praise, like Giles. Skyler appreciated people like that, especially compared to the big egos around here—Jack and Keelraiser, and to some extent Alexei. And Brbb.
“Where is Brbb, actually?”
“They’re cutting through the welds attaching the Victory to the truss tower,” Koichi said. He dropped into the engineering module, managing to flip in the air. He landed in a heap beside the Monopoly board, and smiled weakly at Skyler. He wore a thermal hoodie. It must have gotten cold in the Victory. “How is this going to end?” he said.
Skyler swallowed. Thanks a lot, dude. We were trying not to think about that. “Well, either we survive …”
“Or we die,” Hriklif said, hair dancing.
But Hannah would die either way. Skyler glanced at the clock on the reactor controls display. Only twenty minutes until the plutonium rounds would impact the Lightbringer.
Suddenly he hated Jack. He’d hated him before, and tried to get over it, but it turned out the hatred was still hanging out in his heart, ready to be put on again, like an old coat, smelly but all too comfortable.
Hriklif’s hair stirred uneasily. “Do you know how to play Monopoly?” he said to Koichi.
“This, um, isn’t the version I know,” Koichi said. “Wormholes?”
“It is a vision of the future when Imf and Earth unite to peacefully colonize the galaxy,” Hriklif said.
“Or we could watch Spaceballs,” Skyler said.
*
“Hannah! Are you DOING it? We’re almost out of time!”
“Yes! Stop distracting me.” Hannah stared intently down at the gauge field generator. “Chip,” she whispered, “recalibrate the gauge field. Turn it up to maximum strength.”
Graphs and figures poured into her vision, but in the real world, nothing happened … until the rriksti monitoring the gauge field generator noticed something was wrong. Its hair stood on end. She heard it shrieking to its colleagues.
When the gauge field was properly calibrated, the fusion reaction inside the core generated a little bit of flerovium-298. This wasn’t a good thing, just an unavoidable side effect. But it didn’t impede the fusion reaction, because flerovium has a magic atomic number: both proton and neutron shells are filled, and thus it has a very low cross-section to muon radiation. So the Fl just got circulated out of the way, and decayed into alpha particles of helium. Brownian movement nudged them out of the way of the muon beam.
But now the star in the core was burning hotter and hotter as the fusion rate climbed. Helium steals muons like xenon steals neutrons in a fission reactor. By cranking up the gauge field, Hannah had forced the muon beam to catalyze the fusion reaction more efficiently. All the helium—the ‘smoke’ from the reaction’s ‘fire’—was being swept out of the reaction chamber, where it couldn’t steal any muons. Sounds good, right? Except the hotter the ‘fire’ got, the more ‘smoke’ it made … and an increasing percentage of that smoke was now being compacted into highly radioactive flerovium-298.
Hannah’s mouth squared. She was crying. So scared of dying. But now it was too late to take it back.
Hotter and hotter.
More and more flerovium.
Big, fat atoms bursting with protons and neutrons.
Fusing together into superatoms …
… which are inherently unstable, as everyone who ever took a graduate-level physics class knows.
Just a few more seconds now.
“Love you, Izzy,” Hannah whispered. “Hope you think about me sometimes.”
The rriksti swarmed around the gauge field generator, panicking.
If they had looked up—but they didn’t—they would have seen a black spidery shape clinging to the ceiling, like one of themselves, but smaller, with a spherical helmet.
And if they could have seen the face inside the helmet, they would have seen a tear-stained but radiant smile.
For the first time, Hannah was proud of being Shiplord.
CHAPTER 43
Six minutes to go.
“I can’t take this,” Skyler said abruptly. “I’m gonna … gonna … I dunno.”
He pushed off from the aft wall and jumped up. Grabbing the bulkhead, he struggled into the keel tube.
Hriklif bounded after him. “Skyler! Wait!”
Koichi was left alone in the engineering module with the half-finished Monopoly game.
He stared unseeingly at the magnetic pieces and the plastic fake money. He listened intently for any sounds from the storage module.
The fate of Earth hinged on his actions now, yet fear froze him.
As soon as they lost the fight to capture the SoD, Grigory had initiated Plan B. Grigory and Linda had fucked with the sewage just so that Koichi could blow the whistle on them and win the SoD crew’s trust. Why him? Why not Linda? Or Grigory himself? Because Koichi had the best poker face, supposedly. So Linda had suffered an atrocious beating, and Grigory had died.
And Koichi had won the other men’s trust.
What no one had anticipated was that he’d win the trust of the squids, too.
He could not forget the way they’d healed him when his brain was riddled with neutrons. They hadn’t had to do that. They’d done it because he was an intelligent being like themselves.
But Linda had kept him focused on their mission. She’d reminded him that these squids were the exact same as the ones poised to rain down death on Earth.
If the SoD could destroy the Lightbringer, that would be great … but Earth would not be safe as long as a single squid remained in our solar system.
The squids on the SoD also had to die.
Now, Linda had said when he went to fetch her from the Victory. We have to do it now.
And while the Krijistal were poking around for any electronics they might not have eaten yet, she’d slipped him the thing she had extracted from its secret compartment in the Victory’s hull.
Koichi jerked down the zipper of his hoodie.
“It’s so hot in here,” he said, in case anyone suddenly appeared in the keel tube—but no one did.
He lifted his t-shirt, feeling a mixture of relief and terror.
The thing that had lurked underneath it, flat against his stomach, came out.
*
In the kitchen, Alexei, Nene, and Giles sat around the table.
“Two minutes to go,” Giles said, breaking the silence.
“I don’t know why I am not happy,” Nene said. She tossed her head back and rolled her double-jointed shoulders the ‘wrong’ way, letting her arms hang down behind her. She looked like a broken puppet sitting in a too-small chair. Alexei knew this posture indicated a blend of exasperation and despair. He picked up one of her seven-fingered hands and squeezed it. He himself should have been wild with excitement at the p
rospect of slaying the Lightbringer. He should have been up there on the bridge with Jack, anxiously watching the radar. But Nene’s sadness tainted their impending triumph. He couldn’t leave her to go through this alone.
Because she had every right to feel upset. Love them or hate them, the Krijistal on the Lightbringer were her people.
Giles said, “It’s not necessary to be happy, Nene. This is war. It shouldn’t make us happy.”
Alexei said, “For a gay heavy-metal fan with fourteen fingers, you say some very profound things.”
The flaps of the tent rustled. Skyler trudged into the kitchen. Opening the refrigerator, he said with his back to them, “This fucking sucks.”
“One minute to go,” Giles said.
Skyler let out a howl like a forsaken dog. He slammed the refrigerator and leaned his forehead against it.
Forgiveness isn’t a once-off thing. You have to do it over and over. It never ends.
Alexei jumped up and pulled Skyler into a hug.
*
One minute to go, but on the bridge, Jack was already freaking out.
“This isn’t right. It can’t be right.”
The metallic taste of fear numbed his mouth. He was concentrating so hard on the radar returns, he barely noticed that Alexei wasn’t on the bridge, as he would have expected him to be. This was the grand finale of their two-year chase, the pay-off for all their sacrifices … and it was going wrong.
Wrong. Wrong.
Lightbringer’s not supposed to be there, it’s supposed to be here, where my projectiles are going to be in 46 seconds.
“They’ve stopped decelerating.”
I based my targeting solution on a steady rate of deceleration. It was a reasonable assumption. If they don’t keep the brakes slammed on, they’re going to overshoot Earth.
But some Krijistal just took his seven-toed foot off the brake. They’re cruising at a steady speed again.
“Their drive plume has vanished,” Keelraiser observed.
“That, too. What the hell happened?”
Both of them fell silent, watching the final seconds tick down.
5 … 4 … 3 … 2 … 1 …
Three and a half million klicks away, the SoD’s plutonium rounds streaked through the place where the Lightbringer ought to have been, passing harmlessly astern of the place where it actually was.
Jack flung himself back in his seat. “Fuck,” he shouted. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK!”
All color and sensation seemed to drain out of the world. All meaning drained out of his life, exposing the underlying pattern of failure.
He heaved himself forward and thumbed the intercom. “All hands, be aware …” he said heavily. “We missed.”
Alexei came on the intercom, outraged, disbelieving—what happened?
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Jack said. “Might’ve been a targeting error, or I might’ve miscalculated the closing speed of the projectiles, or maybe the whole universe is actually a simulation run by cruel deities for their own amusement.” He switched off the intercom. He didn’t even feel up to discussing it with his closest friend right now. Especially as he knew the reason they’d missed was none of the above. The Lightbringer had stopped decelerating. In effect, it had executed the only evasive maneuver it could have, with suspiciously good timing. What he didn’t know was why. There was no way they could have seen those rounds coming.
Keelraiser said, “I told Hannah to shut down the Lightbringer’s reactor.”
Jack pushed himself up in his seat and turned to stare at the rriksti.
Keelraiser perched in the center seat, legs drawn up, hands knitted around his shins. His pupils were pinpricks in the bright lighting.
The inside of Jack’s head turned into a blizzard of snow like the radar plot when they had the jamming routine running. His fists bunched.
“There are a lot of rriksti on that ship,” Keelraiser said rapidly. “We haven’t heard from Imf. The planet may have been utterly destroyed. Our colonies, too. The rriksti species may be extinct, except for us.”
“I’m starting to think that if the rriksti species went extinct, it’d be rather a good thing,” Jack said. His glacially calm tone resulted from a superhuman effort not to punch the shit out of Keelraiser.
“It’s OK,” Keelraiser said. “It’s OK! The Lightbringer will enter an elongated orbit around Earth. They’ll swing out halfway to Mars, like a comet, and then swing back. We’ll make sure they can’t restart the reactor. By the time they come back, we can be ready to intercept and board them. Same result, minimal loss of life. It’s better this way, don’t you see, Jack, it’s better—”
“Screw that. I’m trying again.”
He had one more plutonium round. And now the Lightbringer, unpowered, was a complete sitting duck, unable to do anything except plunge forward inertially.
However, by the time his next salvo would reach the Lightbringer, the alien ship would be so close to Earth that a nuclear explosion would fry every electronic gizmo on the planet, including things like, oh, the computers that control electricity grids and power plants. So that was out.
He decided to save the last plutonium round for when the Lightbringer came back around, assuming Keelraiser was right that it would get captured into a comet-like orbit. He’d have to do the calculations. Keelraiser had presumably already done them, to make sure his deception would work. Jack reached for the intercom. “Alexei?”
“Yeah?”
“Reload.”
Kinetic rounds this time, he was about to add, when Keelraiser yanked him out of his seat. They fell gently back to the aft wall in a tangle of limbs. Jack was taken completely by surprise. Before he could fight free, Keelraiser pinned his arms behind him. One long-fingered hand encircled both of Jack’s wrists. The other hand went around Jack’s neck. Disregarding the pressure on his throat, Jack tried to headbutt Keelraiser in the face. He sank back, gagging.
“Please don’t,” Keelraiser said. “Please. Please.”
Jack struggled mindlessly until he had to give it a rest. His breath came in ragged pants. Keelraiser used the arm around his back to hold him tighter. Both were wearing shorts and nothing else. Their upper bodies pressed together. The sticky residue on Keelraiser’s skin formed the skin-to-skin seal that Jack had fantasized about more often than he cared to remember. It was salt in the wound of Keelraiser’s betrayal to experience it this way.
At the same time, it dawned on Jack that Keelraiser hadn’t actually tried to hurt him. Jack had resisted the urge to punch Keelraiser’s lights out, and perhaps Keelraiser was making the same effort, in his own way. Well, it was progress. Maybe someday they could have a civil dialogue about why Keelraiser kept lying to Jack and pulling the carpet out from under him.
Keelraiser released Jack’s wrists. He wrapped his other arm around Jack’s back, and delicately laid his cheek on Jack’s. “I’ve wanted this for so long,” he said. “Now I’ve fucked it up. Story of my life.”
Jack slid his arms around Keelraiser’s back, settling them underneath the broad ribcage, where it seemed they were meant to go. He nodded in sad amazement—yup, you get what you want and then you fuck it up: story of my life, too.
“You’re just a complete bloody … alien, aren’t you?” he said, looking up / down into the black tangle of bio-antennas.
“It must be possible for two intelligent species to exist in the same star system,” Keelraiser said.
“We can’t even exist in the same room without attacking each other.”
“I keep getting it wrong,” Keelraiser said. “What about this?” He lifted his head. Their faces were inches apart. “Is this correct?” He pressed his mouth onto Jack’s in an open-mouthed kiss. Soft lips with sharp teeth behind them, metallic seaside breath, enticing wetness—the sensations startled Jack violently. He pushed Keelraiser away.
“Just hang on. Just wait a minute.”
“Was that wrong?”
Jack licke
d his lips. Salty, piquant, moreish. The taste stirred desires that were decidedly impure. “Yeah. Very wrong,” he said.
“You never say what you really mean,” Keelraiser said. “But I think I know what you mean. You don’t actually trust me, let alone like me. And I admit that I have not always behaved correctly. I’ve broken the rules. I’ve abused the reciprocity cycle. I’ve lied to you and deceived you, over and over. I’m a piece of shit, Jack. Is this correct?”
The self-accusation took the wind right out of Jack’s sails. “Well, now that you mention it,” he said, trying for a humorous note.
Behind Jack, someone cleared his throat. Jack knew without turning around that it was Alexei. A hot blush spread up his neck to his face. He groaned inwardly and mustered his nerve to face it out. He arched his body backwards until he could see Alexei’s head and shoulders poking out of the keel tube. Why didn’t I close the damn door? “Come all the way in or go all the way out,” he said. “It still gives me the willies to see anyone halfway through one of those things.”
“If it’s not a good time, I can come back,” Alexei said, with a broad wink.
“No, come in, we’re not busy.” Jack flipped right way up to Alexei. He collected his scattered thoughts, willing the humiliating blush to go away. “Well. We missed.”
“Do we know why?”
“The Lightbringer seems to have shut down its reactor. According to Keelraiser, it’s unlikely they can get it restarted.”
“You’re fucking joking.”
“Unfortunately not. So we’ll be firing further salvos.” Jack didn’t look around. He didn’t care what Keelraiser thought. Anyway, Keelraiser was sure to be aware that the SoD’s kinetic rounds would do no more damage to the Lightbringer than mosquitoes stinging an elephant, unless Jack could put one straight into the hole in the ship’s side, or score some other chance-in-a-million lucky hit. “I expect them to return fire as soon as they realize we’re shooting at them, if not before. We’re about to enter the effective range of their railgun. So I’m going to use the Victory as mobile armor.”
Alexei nodded in understanding. “That’s why you wanted Linda off the ship.”
Shiplord: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 3) Page 29