She blamed the chocolate, but she knew she was reacting to the deaths she had seen tonight. Her wimpy reaction disgusted her. She had to be tougher than this. Better. Stronger.
When she finished vomiting, Ripstiggr offered her a bottle of water.
“Thanks.” She tucked her hair behind her ears, rinsed her mouth, and spat on the ground. “Asshole.”
She could see him. Dawn must be not far off.
In the gray ghostly light, they climbed a ladder nailed to the trunk of a mahogany tree. Hannah didn’t so much climb as drag herself from rung to rung, exhausted by her ongoing struggle with Earth’s gravity. At the top, the branches spread out like a dome above the lower trees. A wooden observation platform ringed the trunk. A sentry monitored the sensors installed in the top of the tree. Ripstiggr told him to bug off.
As the sentry vanished down the ladder, Hannah collapsed onto her butt. From here, they could see the whole valley spread out. She felt a rush of gladness to see the Lightbringer unscathed. In the early light it looked like something natural, a mountain, not a ship that had flown 4.5 light years to conquer Earth.
Ripstiggr sat down beside her. “Now that we’re on Earth, we don’t really need a Shiplord anymore.”
She faced him, heart thudding in reaction to the open threat. “Yes, you do. You can’t get into the computer without me. You can’t restart the Lightbringer’s reactor.”
“It’s fucked, anyway.”
“You need a Shiplord. Who’d take my place? You? After what you did?”
She was referring to the general belief that Ripstiggr had fucked up their orbital insertion.
His lips tightened. “It needn’t be me. But if you don’t want to do it anymore, I owe it to the troops to pick someone who does.”
“All right. Go on. Kill me.” That would be the only way for him to retrieve the Shiplord chip and give it to someone else. It had extruded nanofilaments through her skull into her brain, where they interfaced with her cerebral cortex. Removing it at this point would give her brain damage, if not kill her outright. She stared into Ripstiggr’s triangular, alien face. Her muscles locked up with fear. The air was cool and sweet, birds were singing, and she didn’t want to die.
He broke eye contact and swigged water, throat jumping. “Why did you run away?”
He wasn’t going to kill her. Relief spilled out in tart honesty. “Maybe I was running away from you.”
Maybe? Their relationship was so bad, hitching a ride with the BBC crew had seemed like a smart option. After the crash-landing, she’d had to defend Ripstiggr against those who believed his mistakes had caused the crash. She’d saved his job and maybe his life, and of course that drove him bonkers. He’d been cold-shouldering her ever since, and since Hannah wasn’t blind, she could see he was carving out his own little organizational silo, buddying up with the shuttle crews.
She could think of one way to break the stalemate, but she refused to lower herself.
So she’d sneaked away in the middle of the night, just like she used to sneak out of guys’ apartments when she lived in California.
Real mature, Hannah-banana.
Her childish behavior had gotten three men killed.
Ripstiggr said, “Where do you think they’d have taken you?” There was an odd, careful note in his voice.
“They were just helping me,” she muttered, swamped by guilt.
“They’d have taken you to the authorities.” By coincidence, Ripstiggr used the same word the reporter had. “They would have tortured you for everything you know about us, about the Lightbringer, about—”
“We’re human beings, not Krijistal!”
“Oh, human beings don’t do torture? Really? I guess you haven’t been talking to the locals. Some of them have terrible stories.”
Hannah glared at the bank of cloud over the eastern hills. Gold tinged the horizon.
“Did you ask them for a ride?” Ripstiggr went on, relentlessly. “Or did they offer?”
They had offered. “They were good people.”
“Maybe they were. And maybe they worked for bad people. People who would have cut the Shiplord chip out of your head to see how it—”
“Stop it!”
“You trusted them because they were humans. Didn’t you?”
He was right about that. And it was actually worse than he knew. She had trusted them because they were white, English-speaking humans, the first ones she’d seen in years.
For a world-class engineer, she could be pretty dumb sometimes.
“I need a drink,” she muttered.
Ripstiggr produced another plastic bottle from his coat. A down coat, in the Congo, in April. She’d asked their local fixers about getting more cold-weather gear—it killed her to see the infantry shivering and huddling around their fires at night.
The bottle was half-full of the Congolese moonshine known as pétrole. They shared it in small, cautious sips as the eastern sky brightened. Ripstiggr brought out a tinfoil packet of ugali. The Congolese staple, a tasteless maize porridge so stiff that you could roll it into a ball, was one of the few Earth foods rriksti could eat without throwing up. Ironically, it was also one of the few local foods that Hannah’s digestion could handle at the moment. They ate and drank, and Hannah felt better with every mouthful. Alcohol always helped, even if it was home-brewed liquor named after gasoline.
“I hate the sunrise,” Ripstiggr said, staring balefully at the golden rays now shooting out of the cloudbank. “I hate sunset, too. And noon. And the whole damn business. Why can’t the sun just stay in one place?”
Hannah almost laughed. So many things she took for granted were completely new to the rriksti. They came from a tidally locked planet, where the sun stayed in one place, and there were no days and nights. “Sunrise is beautiful,” she said. “I missed this so much when we were out there.”
As a matter of fact, the only times she’d ever seen the sunrise in her old life were after pulling all-nighters at JPL, or more often, waking up in her car after a night of binge drinking. Here in the DRC, she truly appreciated its beauty for the first time. She gazed out at the valley, savoring the interlude of peace after the night’s chaos. Inevitably, her thoughts circled back to California. It was still last night there. She pictured Bethany, David, Nathan, and Isabel in some squalid refugee center, and dug her fingernails into her shins, tormented by her own helplessness.
The first rays of sunlight fell through the branches. “To be honest with you, I could kill those fuckers,” Ripstiggr said, shading his face with his hands.
“Who?”
“Our mission planners.” The admission startled her. “How could they not have anticipated the UV problem? Our sun has no UV in its spectrum! Couldn’t they at least have issued us hats?”
“They expected you to be flattening our civilization from orbit, not camping out in the Congo.”
“Yeah, but then we would still have had to occupy the planet. I suppose the other ships were bringing the UV gear.”
Ripstiggr rarely referred to the two other ships that had been meant to follow the Lightbringer to our solar system. Contact with them had been lost shortly after the on-board war that stranded the Lightbringer at Europa. Hannah privately believed similar conflicts must have broken out on board the other ships, resulting in the loss of both. That was good news for Earth, of course. But now she considered afresh what it must be like for Ripstiggr and the rest of the crew, stuck here on a planet where people kept bombing them, and they couldn’t eat the food, and the sunlight burnt their skin like tissue paper. They must feel so alone and far from home. Just like she’d felt when she was first brought aboard the Lightbringer.
. She stood up and went to the edge of the platform. She felt no vertigo, despite the gentle motion of the tree. Space had cured her of the fear of heights. She unrolled the screen that protected sentries from the sunlight during the long hot days. She hooked its top edge to the branches. It blocked out the dawn, leaving them in rri
ksti-friendly shade once more.
“Why did you do that?” Ripstiggr said.
“Lobster-red really isn’t your color.”
“I’ve got my bio-hazard suit on the bike.”
“You shouldn’t have to walk around in a fucking bio-hazard suit.”
“The geneticists are working on it.”
No actual geneticists had survived. They had a few soldiers with field experience, and a couple of the Krijstal knew how to operate the machines in the medical clinic. But everything was lying on its side, and everyone was thinking about food, not blue-sky solutions to the lack of melanin in rriksti skin, so the claim struck Hannah as mere bravado.
She sat down again. “Will you call off the bombing missions?”
“This is diplomacy—”
“Yeah, yeah. Ripstiggr, I can’t be part of this. I can’t help you to bomb my own people.”
“They’re trying to kill us,” Ripstiggr said with righteous indignation. “Are we just supposed to sit here and die?”
“No. But there has to be a better way to do this.” If only she could think of it. If only she were Eskitul, the Lightbringer’s original Shiplord, instead of just a propulsion engineer. But because she was here in Eskitul’s place, she had a chance to save Earth and the rriksti. If only she could figure out how.
“Of course there’s a better way,” Ripstiggr said. “Boots on the ground. I’m working on that right now.”
Hannah inhaled sharply. The glimmerings of a plan came to her, and ironically, it was inspired by her own deceitful message about interstellar friendship. “That’s it! Once people meet you, they’ll understand you’re OK. I mean, the soldiers get along great with the locals! They use the field radios to communicate with them, they’re even picking up French. No reason they wouldn’t get along with other nationalities, too. But we need to get out there and show people how much better life could be … if we all just … get along, I guess ....”
She shook her head. This was the same kind of promise she’d been making for two years on the Hannah Ginsburg Show. She was just recycling the lies Ripstiggr had scripted for her.
But couldn’t the lies become truth? Couldn’t the BS about ‘we’re only here to help’ actually become sincere?
As an engineer, she’d spent her career turning ‘fanciful’ ideas into reality. A spaceship drive that ran on water? Impossible, they’d said. She’d built it, with help from a team of brilliant technicians. Couldn’t she also build bridges between humanity and the rriksti? Couldn’t she engineer a peaceful alien invasion that made life better for everyone?
She tilted the bottle of pétrole, watching Earth’s gravity slant the cloudy liquid this way and that. No more running away. She hadn’t signed up for this, but now she had no choice.
The beauty of it was that Ripstiggr didn’t have any choice, either, as far as she could see.
“Either you do this my way,” she said. “Or we all die, right here in this valley. Don’t kid yourself, Ripstiggr. A few bombers? You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
“We’ve already eliminated seventy-two percent of the ICBM silos in North America.”
“Are you sure about that? Those things are buried underground. They’re blast-proof, nuke-proof—”
“Nothing’s proof against titanium-alloy missiles dropped from sub-orbital altitudes at Mach 5.”
“Oh yeah? What about Tridents?”
“What are Tridents?”
“Nuclear submarines.”
A moment’s silence. “What are submarines?”
Hannah’s jaw dropped. Then it sank in. Imf had no oceans. Ripstiggr didn’t really grok the concept of sea. The shuttles flew over the Atlantic regularly; the pilots might be under the impression it was shallow, like the lake near here. “Jesus wept, Ripstiggr. This is why you need me.”
“Yes. We need you.” A long pause. Monkeys hooted in the branches of the lower trees. “I need you.”
She looked up. He was gazing straight ahead. As she studied his knife-like profile, it all came back: how good they used to be together. Shiplord and commander, human and alien, female and male, they had fitted together like puzzle pieces. They used to please and tease each other and even make each other laugh. Sure, it had been one fucked-up relationship. But Hannah freely admitted that she was one fucked-up chick—rocket scientist, reluctant astronaut, high-functioning alcoholic. With Ripstiggr, she’d got the relationship she deserved, and on some level, the relationship she needed.
She couldn’t pretend it had never happened.
And maybe he couldn’t, either.
“Your knees are bleeding,” he said.
She’d scraped them when she was crawling through the mud. It was no big deal. She had mosquito bites that hurt worse. But she knew that wasn’t the point.
He was tacitly offering her extroversion, the rriksti gift of healing. And they both knew where that led.
Longing tightened the pit of her stomach. She could practically feel the cool waves of bliss washing through her body. Feel the warmth of his skin. She imagined curling up in the cage of his arms, cozy and sheltered, like she used to when they were safe in space.
Sick as it was, a part of her wished they were back on the Lightbringer. She wanted a roof over her head again, not a filigree of boughs and the endless African sky.
She uncapped the pétrole and took a pull so big that it burned. Then she stood up. Calmly, she removed her t-shirt and cutoffs. Ripstiggr sat up to watch her undress.
“I am Shiplord,” she said, standing with one thumb hooked into the elastic of her panties. She hoped he couldn’t tell how her heart was pounding.
“You are Shiplord,” he agreed, eyes glued to her breasts. He had once confessed that her body fascinated him because it was so different from rriksti bodies.
“Take off your coat and shirt. That’s an order.”
“Your wish is my command, Shiplord.” He stripped off his coat, then the t-shirt underneath it. To her dismay, the t-shirt turned out to be an XXXL pirated edition of that shirt that was everywhere in the tent city. Her own face, red, white, and blue, heavily idealized, above the enigmatic word RAUS!
Oh well. She’d be like one of those celebrities who wore their own designs. The Paris Hilton of the Congo. Not.
She picked the t-shirt up and pulled it on. When her head popped out of the neck-hole, she nearly burst out laughing at the sight of Ripstiggr’s face—eyes wide, mouth open. This was not what he’d expected. She knew him so well she could tell he was startled.
But not completely unamused.
The t-shirt held his body heat. It came down to her knees. “That’s better,” she said. “I hate wet, muddy clothes.” She pulled the rope belt out of her cutoffs and tied it around her waist.
“Shiplord,” he growled.
“What?” She hooked a smile at him. “It isn’t the weekend, anyway.”
She tossed him her clothes. He caught them. Then, as she started towards the ladder, he caught her. Wrapping his arms around her from behind, he pumped his hips against her. “You just wait for the weekend, Shiplord …”
She tipped her head back against his chest, inhaling his scent. He murmured about the things he planned to do to her, some of them so imaginatively kinky he must have spent days dreaming them up.
“I’ll be looking forward to that,” she murmured. God help her, she was only flesh and blood.
Now he was promising her wine, a car, TV, hot and cold running water. Speaking of needs. Well, maybe Napa Valley chardonnay wasn’t a need per se, but she sure would prefer it to pétrole. Ripstiggr seemed to have kept a mental list of all the things she had ever mentioned missing …
“… and I’ll find your sister.”
All at once, Hannah’s rationalizations crumbled. Her protective big-sister instincts surged up.
No!
The very last thing she wanted was to drag Bethany into this.
After a moment of panic, her brain started working again. If the BBC
guys had been telling anything like the truth, Ripstiggr had zero chance of finding her family. He was just saying what he thought she wanted to hear.
“Good luck with that,” she said dryly. “Find me a case of 2011 Beringer Private Reserve while you’re at it.”
She was about to start down the ladder when a sonic boom punched the air. A distant roar built to a roll of thunder. She clamped her hands over her ears. The noise was so loud, her teeth vibrated in her skull.
A spot of light appeared in the sky and grew brighter.
CHAPTER 9
Isabel Ziegler ran, dragging her little brother Nathan by the hand.
Behind them, one of the women screamed, on and on.
After a while their own footsteps, crashing through the pines, drowned out the screams.
“Hurry up, Nate,” Isabel gasped. He was only six. His face was white with terror, except for the smear of peanut butter on his cheek. They’d been eating breakfast when the bad guys came.
Bad guys? Isabel had recognized the one who broke into the chicken run. He came from Robert’s place, another hideaway in the foothills of the Bear Mountains. Most of the people at Robert’s place came from California, like the families in the Zieglers’ community. But they didn’t have as much stuff—no pedal generator, no solar oven, no cellar full of rice and beans.
After the man in the chicken run had pointed out the yurts to his companions, he had started chasing the chickens and grabbing them by the necks.
“Where are Mom and Dad?” Nathan sobbed.
“They’re going to meet us at the car,” she told him, praying it was true.
They took the long way around to the lake where Isabel swam. Glimpsed through the trees, the water sparkled in the morning sunlight. The wind smelled of spring. Isabel stopped to listen. Boughs soughing overhead. The trill of a meadowlark.
A burst of gunfire.
In her old life, when she was a high-schooler in Pacific Heights, Isabel had only ever heard gunfire in the movies. But now that the aliens had come, everything was real.
Killshot: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 4) Page 7