Giles slapped Skyler on the back. “Dr. Boisselot diagnoses a caffeine deficit. Coffee!” he shouted, apparently to no one. He pushed the plate of energy bars at Skyler. “These have seven to nine hundred calories each.”
Jack remembered the energy bar he was holding, and unwrapped it. He tossed the wrapper at the rubbish bin at the end of the table. It went wide. “Shit. I forgot there’s no Coriolis force!”
They’d lived for four years in the spin gravity of the SoD’s rotating hab, where things fell anti-spinwards. Jack would have to break the habit of automatically compensating for the Coriolis force.
“Ah, here is your coffee,” Giles said to Skyler. A young woman emerged from the kitchen, carrying a tray. Jack’s mouth dropped open … and not only because the woman was a strikingly pretty blonde.
“I hope this is OK,” she murmured. She knelt on the floor and set the coffee tray at the end of the table, not getting too near the men. Then she crawled—crawled—along the floor behind Alexei. Jack craned over the table and saw her make an obeisance to Nene, bumping her forehead on the floor. Nene sat immobile.
“Excuse me,” Jack blurted. “Aren’t you …”
He trailed off as the woman rose, curtseyed, and returned to the kitchen, like a Victorian servant.
“Wasn’t that the actress from thingummy? That flick about …”
“About an alien invasion,” Giles said. “Yes, and many others. She earned millions of dollars per picture. Now she is a hostage! To be clear, she volunteered.”
“What the hell is wrong with these people?” Skyler said.
Nene said, “They think we come from the Lightbringer.” She did a rriksti shrug, jerking her head and shoulders sideways.
“But the brainwashing goes both ways,” Giles said. “For every person who sees us as the invading alien horde, there is another who just wants to kiss Nene’s feet.”
Us. Jack would have said that the same way, even though he did not have regenerated rriksti limbs.
“It’s sickening, is it not, Nene?” Giles pushed.
“Leave her alone,” Alexei said.
“Actually, Giles, I suspect you enjoy being waited on more than I do,” Nene said.
Alexei laughed. “She got you.”
“Bah,” Giles said. “It’s better than being shot at!”
Pensively, Jack bit into his energy bar—and nearly spat it out. “What is this? Strawberry-flavored cardboard?”
“No, it’s Earth food,” Alexei said. “You’ll adjust.”
“Christ. It’s worse than those MREs we got off the Victory.”
“Scientifically engineered to deliver maximum calories and nutrients per gram. Eat it. You look like a before picture on a bodybuilding website.”
Jack remembered the shockingly gaunt face he’d seen in the mirror. Alexei had a point. He chewed the strawberry-flavored cardboard bar without enthusiasm. Nene pointed at him. “Count yourself lucky,” she said, hair dancing, mouth open, sending conflicting signals of mirth and distress. “We have nothing to eat!”
“Oh, lapochka,” Alexei said. “There’s the rice …”
“Yes. There’s the rice.” Nene brought her other hand out of the pocket of her outermost thermal shirt. She opened her palm. A small pile of cooked white rice grains lay on it. She raised her palm, tipped the rice into her mouth, and chewed fiercely
“White rice has no fat-soluble vitamins, no vitamin K,” Alexei said. “It’s calories, at least …”
Jack confronted the possibility that the rriksti were about to die of starvation, amidst plenty. It was unthinkable. “Maybe Keelraiser can salvage some of your food from the SoD?”
“I hope so,” Nene said.
The left-hand pressure door, the one leading to the unused CELL 6, whooshed open. A mighty boom slapped the air. Skyler’s coffee mug flew up in the air, its contents spilling in a low-gravity arc.
CHAPTER 4
Jack rolled under the table. Alexei was already there, grabbing a crossbow that had lain under his chair.
Five men charged through the pressure door, diametrically across the common room. Their legs pedaled in the air. They were trying to run faster than the low gravity allowed.
Jack hauled Skyler under the table, tipping over the bench he had been sitting on. Giles scuttled towards the kitchen. Alexei frantically cocked his crossbow and loaded a bolt into the barrel.
The invaders spread out. Blue Lego men in Starliner spacesuits. Professional. Not wasting a second, not getting in each other’s way. Two went for the ramp. Jack fixated on one of the others, who carried a shoulder-mounted … what? Five-foot steel pipe with a stock mounted. Looked like a rocket launcher. The guy hit the ground, steadied his stance. Another of the invaders did some kind of sleight-of-hand at the back of the pipe.
Boom!
Muzzle flash threw shadows of toppled furniture on the walls.
The smell of kerosene filled the room.
Something shattered in the kitchen.
Rriksti shrieks drilled into Jack’s ringing head.
Alexei scrambled out from under the table. Screaming in Russian, he fired at the rocket launcher crew. His bolt took the loader square in the throat.
It went through the ultra-flexible, state-of-the-art spacesuit like paper.
Blood pumped from a shredded carotid, blackening the Boeing-blue material, pattering to the floor.
Rocket launcher guy still had a round up the spout.
Boom.
Alexei cartwheeled backwards, his crossbow flying from his hands, away from Jack.
Jack lunged out from under the table. He picked up the fallen bench. It was ten feet long but weighed nothing. Holding it under his arm like a lance, he charged at the nearest invader.
As he ran, time slowed down. He noticed—
Rriksti pouring out of the kitchen, brandishing spatulas, pans, a knife, whatever they could grab.
Nene jumping on the table, shrieking, “Muzl! MUZL!” Rristigul: Stop!
And the fifth invader sneaking towards the open pressure door, unzipping his sleeve so he could use the biometric reader.
Jack sucked in a breath.
“Get that guy!” he howled.
If that pressure door closed, the CELLies could open the door at the other end of the tunnel. Hundreds of them would come pouring through.
And Jack couldn’t do anything to prevent it. He was on a collision course with rocket launcher guy.
Growling, he rammed the bench at the guy’s midsection.
The guy swung his rocket launcher like a sword, knocked the bench aside.
Low gravity and the unwieldy length of the bench hampered Jack’s reaction time. They danced around each other in an absurd mime of swordplay, like knights doing battle with furniture and a length of pipe. But the bench was longer. Jack swung it overhand and clouted rocket launcher guy on the helmet. Over he went. Jack pounced before he could get up. He rolled him onto his face, pinned his arms behind his back, and switched his attention back to the real threat, the guy at the pressure door …
… who was now down on the floor, one leg sticking out of a pile of rriksti, spasming. Six-knuckled fists rose and fell.
That made three down, and here came the last two invaders stumbling down the ramp, prodded by Hriklif and another rriksti—Stepstone, was it? The musician. Both of the rriksti held shotguns, presumably captured from the CELLies themselves.
“We’re all Krijistal now,” Skyler said, leaning one-legged on the table, holding his crutch like a sword, although the fight was over.
Alexei sat up, clutching his shoulder. “You OK?” Jack yelled.
“Fine,” Alexei yelled back. But his left arm hung down limply and it looked bad, maybe dislocated.
Jack channeled his anger at the guy he was sitting on. “What’s your fucking problem?” he shouted, knowing the guy could not hear him with his helmet on. He decided to change that. The Starliner had more zips than a punk rocker’s trousers. It was meant to be bett
er than the old Z-2. Jack yanked the collar zip open and pulled the helmet roughly back. “You could have killed someone,” he snarled at the cropped, reddish-brown back of the guy’s head.
“Fuck you,” said a posh British voice, muffled against the floor.
“Do you want to get hurt?” Jack wrenched the guy’s arms up and back. He’d learned this trick from Brbb, legendary Krijistal brawler. With a gentle push, he controlled the guy’s struggles. “That’s better.”
“Where’re the lads?” said the guy, his voice thick with pain.
Jack looked around. “Well, you’re down one lad.” The loader had bled out on the floor. “Actually, two.” Nene and Giles were pulling the rriksti off the would-be door-opener. A few patches of blue still showed here and there. The rest was black with blood. Helmet smashed like a broken lightbulb, red filaments spilling out. “You’d better talk fast if you want to save the others.” Hriklif and Stepstone had them against the wall with their hands up. “How’d you get into that unused hab? There wasn’t meant to be anyone in here.”
“We waited until the squids drove away, and then strolled across to the airlock, of course.”
Jack sucked his teeth. These cunts had taken advantage of the span of time while two of the sentries had been away … collecting Jack and Skyler from the outer slope of the crater. We’ll need to step up our game, he thought. Everyone’s starving and tired, but we can’t afford to screw up like that. They almost got us.
“Tell me why we shouldn’t chuck you out of the airlock.” He put more pressure on the guy’s shoulders.
“Aaagh! … You’re a human. This is an alien invasion. Whose side are you on?”
Jack looked around. “Cover him,” he said to Stepstone. He rolled off the guy and backed away.
The guy stumbled to his feet. His face was instantly recognizable. Blue eyes met Jack’s. “We’ve been introduced,” he said.
“You!” Jack said to the Prince of Wales. Confusion came over him. He remembered the ceremony at Buckingham Palace in 2018, when he’d made the Queen’s Birthday Honours list without actually having done anything yet. It seemed to have been a million years ago. “Er … sir.”
“Harry will do,” the prince said. Then he said something that took Jack completely by surprise. Nothing about Europa. Nothing about the alien invasion of Earth. “Number 12 Squadron?”
Jack’s old RAF unit.
“Yeah,” Jack said. He knew the prince had flown Apaches in Afghanistan.
“You had a sticky old time of it, I heard.” Harry’s nose was bleeding. He blotted it absently on the back of his glove, staring at his lifeless friends.
Jack wanted to say he was sorry about all this, but he said nothing. Harry and his mates had tried to murder hundreds of innocent rriksti. He went to pick up the fallen ‘rocket launcher.’
“Is that what I think it is?” Alexei said. He sat on the table, shirtless. A massive bruise purpled his chest.
Jack peered at the little hole near the base of the pipe. He smelled a strong whiff of kerosene. He noticed a rash of white on the edge of the plum-red seating counter, where a projectile must have fragmented. He wiped his fingers through it and touched his tongue to them.
Raw potato.
“Yup. It’s a potato gun.”
Alexei gasped a laugh. “Waste of kerosene. And potatoes.”
“Was that all you had?” Jack said to Prince Harry, who was sitting on the floor, trying to revive his very dead friend who had been shot in the throat.
The prince said without looking up, “James thought it would be asking for trouble to have guns on the moon. There were six shotguns in the whole place. Now you’ve got them. So yes.”
Jack sat down on the table. The rush of victory was fading into weariness. His ribs hurt like hell again. He’d already flown a broomstick into a hill and done an epic moon walk today, for Christ’s sake. “What’re we going to do?” he said to Alexei. “There are nine hundred more like them in those other habs.”
“No, there aren’t,” Harry said. “The rest of them are sitting around in kumbaya circles, waiting for James to come back and tell them what to do. They’re completely bloody useless.”
Nene leant over the table, curling her bio-antennas around Alexei’s shoulder. Her X-ray detector ‘eyes’ opened and blinked. “Nothing’s broken,” she said.
Reminded of the X-ray issue, Jack looked around and noticed several of the rriksti sitting near the kitchen counter. There sat a medical X-ray machine, humming away like a coffee-maker with them basking in front of it. The rriksti wasted no time making themselves at home. Unfortunately, a home for rriksti could not be a home for humans, not for long. Jack rubbed his lower back. He could practically feel his spine cancer returning.
Skyler interrogated Harry’s two surviving friends, sitting on the table, jabbing his crutch menacingly at them. He had formerly worked for the NXC, the scariest intelligence agency in America. He could still do his Fed act, even with a broken ankle. “Why’d you try to get upstairs?”
Out of their Starliners, the men were weathered Brits in their forties. “Peter Hall,” one of them said. “Colin McFarlane,” said the other.
“Were you gonna fuck with the solar collectors? The CO2 scrubbers? What?”
The men reeled off ranks and strings of numbers.
“Answer the fucking question! What was your objective?”
Hall and McFarlane stared at the wall.
To Jack, Skyler said in frustration, “We have to know where our weak points are.”
“The whole bloody hab is a weak point. Anyway, they’re not going to say anything. Firstly, they’re SAS, and secondly, they’re fucking with you.” He watched the men’s faces for confirmation of his guess. Not a twitch.
“Ex-SAS,” Harry said. “It hacked me off to start with. Bodyguards on the moon! Wills was right, as usual.”
McFarlane spoke up in a gravelly voice. “I remember when you were selected as the pilot of that ship with the fucking stupid name.” His eyes bored into Jack. “You were a national hero. A global hero. My oldest boy had your poster on his bedroom wall. Look at you now.”
Jack’s face burned. “I tried to shoot the Lightbringer down. Didn’t succeed, obviously. That’s why we’re here.”
McFarlane shrugged disbelievingly.
“We’re the good guys, for God’s sake,” Jack said.
Nene was shouting at the civilians, ordering them to clean up their mess, by the looks of things. Rristigul bubbled in Jack’s headset, the timbre different from before, relieved and excited. Nothing like a little mob violence to improve morale, Jack thought bleakly.
Then he caught a familiar word, or rather a name.
Iristigut.
That was Keelraiser’s name in Rristigul.
“Keelraiser’s back,” Hriklif explained.
“Thank fuck.”
The rriksti mopped the bloodstains off the floor. They righted the furniture and hid the bodies. No trace of the fight remained by the time the door to the airlock foyer sighed open.
Keelraiser walked in with a tall, dark-haired human at his side.
CHAPTER 5
Jack did not loathe James Coetzee on sight. He’d loathed him long before setting eyes on him. Coetzee, an aerospace entrepreneur born in South Africa and raised in America, had got his start providing contract launch services to the SoD project. His company, Skyhooks Inc., had gone on to develop the reusable moon shuttle that made CELL possible. He had the career and the company that Jack’s late friend Oliver Meeks should have had, if Meeks hadn’t been murdered. And he was still only 45. The bastard had the looks of a professional tennis player to boot.
His smooth lunar stride and bolted-on smile reinforced Jack’s preexisting prejudices. Coetzee had even taken the time to comb his hair.
In contrast, Keelraiser looked like he hadn’t slept for a week. It was possible he had not. Living on a tidally locked planet, the rriksti had never evolved regular sleeping patterns, but
took siestas whenever they felt tired. Flipside, they could stay awake for days at a time if they pushed themselves. Keelraiser crumpled onto the nearest bench, while Coetzee made a beeline for Harry Windsor.
It was a dead certainty that Harry would fill Coetzee’s ears with bullshit about the rriksti, and about Jack himself. And Coetzee, like him or not, was the one person they really needed to get on their side. But Jack suddenly couldn’t make himself care.
He elbowed through the crowd of rriksti surrounding Keelraiser. “Excuse me. Sorry.” The closer he got to Keelraiser, the tenser he got. Nervous energy wiped away his exhaustion.
Keelraiser looked up at him. “Let me know in advance next time you don’t want to be rescued.”
The rriksti around them turned in response to a bio-radio signal unheard by Jack—the headsets only picked up a portion of the radio-speech band. In from the foyer came several rriksti. Jack knew them by sight from the SoD, but with so many other rriksti in the hab, he hadn’t noticed their absence. They lugged bulky plastic sacks. The unmistakable odor of rotten cheese wafted through the room.
“Is that—”
“Seeds from the SoD,” Keelraiser said. “Everything looked dead. But the breach in the main hab may have saved some of the rootballs, ironically, by freezing them. We’ll find out soon enough.”
Keelraiser’s huge, dark brown eyes were glassy with exhaustion. His legs stuck out like broken camshafts.
Jack came to a decision. He took Keelraiser’s hand and pulled him to his feet. “You’ve brought food for your people—”
“Maybe; we don’t know if the seeds will germinate—”
“—but I bet you haven’t eaten anything yourself in days.”
He led Keelraiser into the kitchen. Nene had been eating rice; that must have come from somewhere. Jack discovered a door that led to a food-prep area. The actress was there, making sandwiches with some kind of paste squeezed from a tube. The bread looked to be full of vitamin-rich bran. That wouldn’t do. At the sight of Keelraiser, she dropped her bread knife and sank submissively to her knees.
Killshot: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 4) Page 3