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

by Felix R. Savage

  “Oh,” Keelraiser said. “He’s with me.”

  “Really? Brilliant!” Jack punched the steamy air in joy. “Send him over, I suppose … hang on.” Logistics cascaded through his mind, falling into logical, inevitable sequences. “Actually, no. Tell him to stay there for the moment. I’m sending everyone else over to you.”

  *

  So they evacuated the SoD, again.

  Two by two, rotating the limited number of spacesuits available, the civilians filed out of the airlock. With Engineering sealed off, the atmosphere in the storage module was painfully hot, but survivable … for rriksti. Alexei made the mistake of doffing his suit to the neck. The air scalded his face, stung his eyes. Holding his breath, he donned the suit again as fast as he could.

  The civilians laughed at him. “On the Lightside it is hotter than this!”

  Alexei shook his head. Koichi and Linda had had no idea what they were dealing with, did they?

  But the heat wasn’t the only danger. The steam had also carried a perilous dose of radioactivity throughout the ship. They had to limit the civilians’ exposure to that. The rrikstis’ famous indifference to ionizing radiation was mostly based on their ability to heal the damage it caused. And with the eight Krijistal gone, there just weren’t enough strong extroverts on board to heal everyone who might fall prey to radiation sickness.

  Nene whispered, “And even that isn’t the worst of it.”

  “Are you reading my mind again?” He slipped his arm around her waist. Despite everything, he couldn’t sink into despair while she was alive and unhurt.

  “It’s the plants and the fish.”

  “Yes.”

  “Everything’s dead or dying.”

  “Yes.”

  “Everything.”

  “I know.” For once, Alexei couldn’t think of anything to say to cheer her up.

  She gazed grimly at the bodies stacked in a corner of the storage module. “We will take those,” she said. “Just as they are. Flash-freeze them in the vacuum. Who needs a dehydrator?”

  CHAPTER 49

  The moon was not worth getting out of bed for, Jack decided, with due apologies to the Apollo astronauts. When you had been to Jupiter and Mars, this titchy gray ball of rock underwhelmed.

  ‘Titchy,’ of course, was the scientific term for ‘actually quite big.’ At 50,000 kilometers out, the disk brushed against the edges of the main screen. He could see all the famous seas and mountains. But he spent next to no time gazing at the view. He had other things to do.

  As soon as everyone had evacuated to the Cloudeater, he vented the atmosphere in the main hab. Not all of it, of course. Just enough to dump the heat. Watching the pressure indicators unblinkingly, he closed the spill valves when the air pressure reached 5 psi. That was the equivalent of Himalayan air pressure, but it wasn’t actually so hard on the body, as the oxygen / nitrogen mix stayed at 50/50. Thankfully, the algae had survived the steam explosion.

  He equalized the bridge air pressure with the main hab, and opened the pressure door for the first time in twelve hours. He drifted out into still-warm gloom and silence.

  This was not the living, humming silence he’d grown to love. It was dead quiet. A pungent smell of rot crisped his nostrils.

  He worked his way along the outside of the axis tunnel, ripping the repurposed upholstery filters off the growlights.

  Little by little, the full-spectrum UV light exposed the devastation on the floor of the hab. The jungle had turned brown, and putrid yellow, and moldy white.

  Jack left the job half-done and went down to floor level. He wandered in a trance of disgust through sagging stalks of suizh and wilting yfrit. Mushy leaves squelched under his bare feet. The smell nauseated him. If the Imfi vegetation had smelled like overripe cheese and bubblegum when it was alive, dead it smelled like a compost heap.

  However, not everything was dead. Recycling bugs carpeted the floor, gnawing at the decaying leaves. He knew they were edible, and thought about gathering some up for the hungry rriksti in the Cloudeater, but they scurried between his fingers.

  “Jack?”

  “Just a minute,” Jack grunted. He’d found a sack and some spare aerogel panels in the deserted village, and set up a trap for the bugs. Clapping his hands and stomping, he was trying to funnel them between the panels and into the sack.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What does it look like?”

  “I think they usually catch them with sticky stuff,” Keelraiser said.

  “‘Sticky stuff’? Easy to tell you’re not a gardener.” As he spoke, Jack lost his balance. He knocked over one of the aerogel panels, and all the bugs scurried away. “Now look what you’ve made me do.”

  “I’ll tell some of the civilians to come over and have a bug-catching competition,” Keelraiser said. “Can I use your radio?”

  “Time for me to get back to the bridge, anyway.” Jack wiped sweat off his face. “I assume Linda and Koichi haven’t come with you?”

  “They are on the Cloudeater. Strangely enough, they refuse to talk to us. They won’t drink our water, either.”

  “They will when they get thirsty enough. I wouldn’t expect any breakthroughs in the conversation department, though. I’ve never seen brainwashing like it. Koichi … I trusted him! But he was faking it all along.” Jack brooded as they climbed Staircase 2. “I blame sci-fi films. Independence Day, and so forth.”

  “Your favorite film of all time?”

  “Yes, but I know it’s a film. Some people can’t tell the difference … but just in general, we’ve been conditioned to see aliens as inhuman and implacably hostile. I suppose that says something about us.”

  “We were conditioned to see aliens as hapless pushovers,” Keelraiser said, opening his mouth. “What does that say about us?”

  They flew up the keel tube to the bridge. Thrust gravity turned the flight into a scrabble. The SoD was still thrusting at 66% of max. The housekeeping turbine was down, but the drive turbine was undamaged, so the MPD engine had power, although the life-support systems were running off the fuel cells.

  The moon had grown larger. Its edges were now off the screen. “We ought to be able to see the Lightbringer on the optical telescope soon,” Jack said, hunkering over the radar console. “I just want to get a little closer. One round left and I’m going to make sure it counts.”

  Keelraiser made his call to the Cloudeater for bug-catchers. Then he sprawled in the left seat, head hanging back. “Do you know why I attacked you on the day we left Europa?”

  The never-mentioned topic brought Jack upright in his seat. He narrowed his eyes. “So it wasn’t just your way of showing affection?”

  “I was afraid.”

  “Afraid?”

  “This low-tech nightmare of a ship. Oh, I no longer see it that way ... The Spirit of Destiny is a tough little beauty. She’s stronger than any of us.”

  “She is,” Jack agreed, filled with love for his ship, no matter how damaged.

  “But it looked very different to me two years ago. Tin cans attached to a fission reactor … and I was about to put my people aboard this thing? I was about to put them in your tiny little five-fingered hands? I panicked, Jack. I thought: There can only be one commander on this ship. Is it to be a human? No! Unthinkable! It should be me.”

  Keelraiser spread his hands and then clenched them into fists, as Jack stared, slack-jawed at what he was hearing.

  “I was going to kill you.”

  “Shit. I mean … glad you changed your mind. I suppose you remembered the rules at the last minute?”

  “No. I just couldn’t kill you.”

  Jack sat back in his seat. “Well, I’d no idea what a close call that was. Thanks for telling me. I suppose.”

  “You’re always saying I am dishonest. I’m trying to change.”

  Jack shook his head. “Mate, you are what you are. You’ve just got to accept it.” The cliché embarrassed him as soon as it came out of his m
outh. “By the way, what happened to those swords?”

  “Oh, my service swords? We ate them some time ago.”

  “Shame. They were cool.”

  “They were nutritious.”

  Jack nodded. Nothing mattered more to Keelraiser than keeping his people alive. He understood that and respected it, although he couldn’t go along with it as far as Keelraiser wanted him to. “Well, we’ve managed pretty well,” he said after a moment, half to himself.

  “You’ve managed pretty well.”

  “These tiny little five-fingered hands aren’t so useless after all, eh?” Jack grinned, and flipped Keelraiser a rriksti salute.

  Keelraiser reached across and grasped his hand. “I love these tiny little five-fingered hands.”

  Jack felt exasperated and sad. He freed his hand and pointed at the radar plot. “There’s the Lightbringer. I am going to nuke it. Got it? Nothing you say or do will change my mind.”

  To his surprise and relief, Keelraiser didn’t argue. “And then what?”

  “What do you mean, then what?”

  “After we nuke the Lightbringer, then what?”

  People expected him to keep coming up with new ideas, but he was out. What he had was all he had. “Have you never heard of dying in the line of duty?” he snapped in irritation.

  “In Darkside strategic thinking, that’s an honor reserved for the other side.”

  “Good one.”

  “We don’t believe in an afterlife.”

  “I’m not sure I do, either.”

  “But you wear this.” Keelraiser climbed across the seats and jerked on Jack’s rosary.

  Jack took the crucifix from the long fingers. “I know it’s sappy,” he said, “but …” Self-pity welled up. “I believe in love.” He reached up, wrapped his hand around the back of Keelraiser’s head, and pulled him down. His dry, chapped lips caught on Keelraiser’s lips. They stayed like that for a moment.

  “There is no word for love in our language,” Keelraiser said. He tried to pull Jack closer, as if they could melt into one another’s bodies.

  “As I’ve said before, your culture stinks.” Jack sniffled. Before he could get really mushy, he pushed Keelraiser away and worked his rosary off over his head. “Take this.”

  “What? Why?”

  “It’s coated with tungsten. Very nutritious.”

  “It’s a religious symbol.”

  “So were your swords, weren’t they? You ate those.”

  They discussed matters a little further. Then Keelraiser went back to the Cloudeater.

  A few hours later Jack increased thrust to maximum. Blasting with all its might, the SoD entered lunar orbit, only a few thousand kilometers behind the Lightbringer.

  *

  Ripstiggr said silkily, “Shiplord, I need you to reauthorize the weapons systems.”

  Each authorization expired after a set time, and had to be renewed. The Lightbringer’s designers had been really keen on keeping the ship’s awesome power out of dirty ditch-born hands.

  Hannah tossed a bleak glance at Ripstiggr. “No.” Curled in her armchair on the bridge, she drew up her knees like a wall between herself and the crowd. She made the chip bring up Skyler’s email again. Iristigut’s. Skyler’s.

  That email had knocked her head apart like a pinata. The next time the Shiplord chip pestered her with an enemy/ally warning, she’d understood what she was looking at. That blip on the radar was an alien shuttle! The alien shuttle that Eskitul had stolen twelve years ago! Talk about a blast from the past … It had followed them all the way here.

  And Skyler Taft was on board.

  Skyler Taft!

  Now there was someone she hadn’t thought about in ages.

  It had been weird and a bit creepy to read his declaration of love. He seemed to be writing to someone else. The details convinced her it really was Skyler, but she had to bear in mind that he might have been writing under compulsion. Iristigut was one hell of a manipulator, after all. The likeliest scenario, she concluded, was that Skyler was a captive on the Cloudeater, just like she was a captive on the Lightbringer.

  And yet …

  I have total faith in you, Hannah. I know you’ll do the right thing.

  Those words had lodged in her heart like bullets.

  She had tried to do the right thing.

  Failed.

  Skyler’s email had found her at a low point, when her only ambition was to not get killed by Ripstiggr.

  But couldn’t she do better than that?

  If at first you don’t succeed … try, try again, Hannah-banana.

  So she had a sort of a plan, a really shitty plan but the best she could think of. But if she were to have a chance of implementing it, she had to make Ripstiggr believe she’d repented of her disloyalty.

  But she still didn’t want to blow the Cloudeater away.

  But since Ripstiggr didn’t know she knew that it was the Cloudeater, much less who was on board, she had to provide another rationale for not authorizing the weapons systems.

  She shifted in her chair and moved her gaze to the moon. They were barely 5,000 kilometers up, freefalling towards the rocky disk for a retrograde flyby. With a thought, she spun and zoomed the image on the variable-polarization ceiling. It was an actual optical image, as if seen through glass, but at her command the ship’s computer took over and rotated it around two axes. (She was getting better at this.) At the south pole, a tiny pool of infrared glowed. “Do you want to hit Camp Eternal Light?”

  “Well …” Ripstiggr said cagily.

  It had impressed Hannah greatly to discover that humanity now had a moon base. “Tch, tch,” she said. “Leave them alone. A few pioneers in dugouts, huddling around their solar panels. What threat could they possibly be to the unstoppable interstellar victory machine that is Imf?”

  Whistles of approval.

  Some striking differences existed between the newly awakened soldiers and Hannah’s old friends who’d been awake all the way. One of them was that the soldiers, even if they had the ship’s new auto-translate program running on their implants, did not get sarcasm. She and Ripstiggr had had some good laughs at their expense.

  Emboldened, she added, “And as for that pesky little ship that’s following us? That would be one of CELL’s shuttles. Jeez, you should see their technology. Chemical rockets. No kidding. We’d be lowering ourselves to fire on it, and also the optics would be terrible.”

  “Oh, that ship?” Ripstiggr said. He gave an impression of speaking through gritted teeth, even though he wasn’t using his mouth to talk at all. Hannah felt a twinge of worry. Then Ripstiggr opened his mouth wide. “I’m not worried about that ship. It’s our backup.”

  CHAPTER 50

  Down we go.

  Lower and lower, deeper into the gravity field, bending closer and closer to the surface.

  The bright side of the moon blurs past, 500 kilometers below … 400 … 300.

  I could do this in my sleep.

  It is exciting, though. The thrill never entirely goes away.

  Remember Alexei saying we could drop a bomb down Olympus Mons?

  I could spit into these craters.

  Alexei’s not here now. Got him to stay on the Cloudeater.

  And this was a new experience for Jack. He was flying the SoD all by himself. It gave him a giddy sense of power and control.

  Lower, lower …

  The fly in his soup was that he couldn’t actually see the Lightbringer anymore.

  But he’d known this was going to happen. The orbital mechanics decreed it. As both ships dived towards the moon on close flyby trajectories, the Lightbringer had vanished around the curve of the rocky sphere. Catch-22! Jack could have fired from a distance of thousands of kilometers, sacrificing accuracy. But he was absolutely determined not to screw this up again. One nuke left. That meant getting closer, but that meant diving lower, and that meant he lost sight of the target. They say you can’t hide behind a moon; well, you can whe
n you’re low enough to see the tracks of the lunar rover in Schiaparelli Crater.

  (Yup. Wish I’d had time to take pictures.)

  Schiaparelli lay far behind now, as the SoD raced towards the moon’s terminator in an equatorial orbit.

  A solution to the Catch-22 existed, of course.

  Dive even lower.

  Cut the corner.

  Catch up.

  And that’s what Jack planned to do. The altimeter read 298 kilometers. He spoke into the radio. No hands—he was wearing his suit, as you should during risky maneuvers. Not his rriksti suit, but his smelly old Z-2. “What is the fucking delay?” he shouted, pent-up tension spilling out.

  *

  “Forget about it,” Alexei said, sprawling on a crash couch in the Cloudeater’s crew cabin. The cabin’s transparent ceiling doubled as the floor of the cockpit. Above him, Keelraiser and Hriklif sat in the pilot’s and co-pilot’s seats. Immobile. Waiting. Keelraiser wore Jack’s rosary around his neck. When Alexei saw that, he’d gotten a bad, bad feeling.

  “I miss the Krijistal,” Jack’s voice crackled over the radio. “They did as they were bloody told.”

  “Maybe you should have punched me in the face a few times, but I don’t care. I am not doing it.”

  “What about the civilians? What about Nene? Are you going to let her die because you were scared?”

  Jack’s voice jabbed at him, lacerating, on and on. Alexei understood perfectly well that his friend was trying to get him mad on purpose. He breathed in and out, feeling his old scars twinge, refusing to rise to the bait.

  And yet what Jack was saying made sense. In fact it was what Alexei had been thinking for days, if not weeks.

  “We can’t take the rriksti back to Earth. Apart from anything else they’ll die of starvation before we get there. We’ve got to cut the Cloudeater loose and it’s got to be done NOW! I’d have done it at 30 K if they had enough fuel. They don’t, so a thousand would have been ideal, but a hundred klicks is the absolute minimum, so get out there and break the fucking welds, Alexei!”