“How’d he get in, then?”
“He failed the trials twice. Then he got in by developing a related specialty.”
“What?”
“Computers.” Hobo opened his mouth in amusement.
“OK,” Hannah said. “What’s the punchline? You had a computer geek in your academy class; so what?”
“Three weeks ago,” Hobo said, “I woke up on board the Lightbringer. As you may recall, they distributed a briefing packet to everyone who’d been asleep: here’s what happened in the last eighty years.”
“Yeah.”
“And that’s when I find out this very same Iristigut, this computer geek and world-class asshole, started a mutiny, blew a hole in the Lightbringer, got away, and is now skulking on Earth’s moon.”
CHAPTER 11
Hannah tried to hide her astonishment. Hobo had just told her Iristigut was safe on the moon. What he didn’t know—and nor did anyone else—was that she and Iristigut had been pen-pals. That had lasted until he tricked her into shutting down the Lightbringer’s reactor, in the belief that she was saving Earth.
“Of course,” she said. “Our old lividdr.” The Rristigul word could mean ally or enemy, depending on frequency and pitch nuances that Hannah couldn’t control with the chip. Hobo dipped his chin in agreement, and she wondered which meaning she had inadvertently given the word. “So he made it safely to CELL, huh?”
“Safely? He probably thinks he’s safe, hunkered down in the middle of a thousand human shields.”
“What about the Cloudeater’s other passengers?”
“What other passengers? The mutineers?”
“I … don’t know …” She had one specific passenger in mind. Her old crewmate, Skyler Taft. As far as she knew he was the only other survivor of the SoD. “The humans?”
“Why don’t you ask Iristigut yourself? I think Ripstiggr’s talking to him now.”
Galvanized, Hannah bounded through the autorip. There seemed to be no doors in the claustrophobic, dimly lit corridor behind the cockpit. Hobo pointed to a blank place in the wall: another autorip. It opened, and there stood Ripstiggr, hunched over a screen. The small room was entirely lined with screens and computer consoles.
“—estimate that no functional Minuteman missiles remain within the continental United States,” said an unfamiliar voice, in Rristigul. “That’s if your targeting has been as accurate as you say. I wouldn’t take it for granted with that bunch of mediocrities.”
“Mediocrities. Wait until I get my hands on that cocksucker,” Hobo murmured.
Ripstiggr flapped a hand for them to go away. Hannah ignored him, squeezing into the computer room. She was hearing Iristigut’s voice for the first time, and now she saw him.
He sat at a three-monitor computer, typing as he talked. The low contrast of the rriksti screen turned him into a dark ghost, but he looked ordinary, for a rriksti. The room also looked ordinary, a spacious office with a whiteboard on one wall. But it was an office on the moon, and that much space, on the moon, wasn’t ordinary. Not only had Iristigut arrived safely at CELL, he’d commandeered one of their best offices.
“According to my data, there are no ICBMs in Europe, with the exception of a few submarine-based cruise missiles deployed by France and the UK. Earth Party control of both governments makes a first strike by either country unlikely. I’ll turn next to China and the subcontinent. While the USA accounted for eighty percent of Earth’s total nuclear warhead count, China formerly deployed a number of Dong Feng mobile IBCMs, the whereabouts of which are unclear following the country’s fragmentation. There isn’t really much you can do about those. India and Pakistan present lesser threats. The Russian Federation, of course, is the greatest threat following the USA. The last known locations of their approximately 400 land-based ICBMs are as follows …”
So this was where Ripstiggr had been getting his battlefield intelligence! That’s why his strikes were so goddamn accurate.
Hannah turned to Hobo. “Where did Iristigut get all this data?” she whispered, as he reeled off latitude and longitude coordinates for Russia’s missile silos.
“I told you. He’s a computer guy.”
“He hacked into ultra-secure military databases?”
“Quantum computer, Shiplord. This is one, too. But I can’t be bothered with computer stuff.”
Hannah could not help admiring Iristigut’s achievement. While the Krijistal on the Lightbringer had been tinkering with their hardware and enjoying sex-sodden 48-hour benders, Iristigut, on the Cloudeater, had been assembling a comprehensive picture of Earth’s defenses, in the teeth of lightspeed delays up to an hour long. It must have taken him years … It had taken him years.
And all the time he had been making Hannah think he was her friend.
“That concludes my assessment of the land-based nuclear threat. And now, Ripstiggr, get your head out of your ass and pay attention to the seas. The USS John F. Kennedy is currently on its way across the Atlantic. It is the most advanced aircraft carrier on Earth, with a complement of F-35 joint strike fighters. These aircraft have EMP capabilities. Have you ever seen the weapon called a taser, Ripstiggr? It is similar to the kalk, which was of course used by the Temple for advanced questioning. These pulses will kill or cripple every rriksti of your crew, without damaging the Lightbringer.”
Hannah froze. She’d been scared, but it sounded like she hadn’t been scared enough.
“The F-35s will be within range of your position in an estimated …”
Fayhti to hours, base 14 to base 10 …
She elbowed Ripstiggr aside and spoke to the ghost on the screen. “They’ll be here in fourteen hours?”
Of course, there was an 1.3-second lightspeed delay to the moon. Iristigut continued to describe the USS JFK’s course and capabilities, every word another nail in the Lightbringer’s coffin.
“He’s got a high-resolution telescope orbiting the Earth-Moon L1 Lagrange point,” Ripstiggr said, pushing her away from the screen. “Well, CELL had it. Now he does. He can even see the Americans moving troops by road. So yeah, I expect that’s right.”
“Hello, Hannah,” Iristigut said. “How are you?”
She wanted to spit and scream at him. But saving her crew came first. “Are they really going to kill us all?”
“Of course not,” Ripstiggr said, before Iristigut could answer. “I don’t believe in this super-kalk weapon. What’s an aircraft carrier, anyway?”
“You had years to find this stuff out,” Iristigut said. “But you didn’t, because what’s the point of learning about a civilization you’re going to bomb from orbit? Go look it up on the internet, Ripstiggr.”
Ripstiggr knew what the internet was. “We’re still waiting for our hook-up.”
“I have no internet access,” Iristigut said, echoing him from the moon. “My data is two weeks old, at best. All I can give you is telescope observations and guesses.”
Which was more than the Lightbringer had. Sitting here at the bottom of Earth’s atmosphere, they were blind. The TDRS, gone … Hubble, gone … there was the James Webb telescope at the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point, but its downlink could only be picked up with a world-class radio telescope, and it wasn’t pointing at Earth, anyway. Hannah yanked herself out of a vortex of futile regrets. Iristigut was still talking—
“—evacuate the Lightbringer. Disperse the crew around the planet. That was my advice from the beginning—”
“He’s still trying to sabotage our cause,” Hobo said from the doorway.
“—ensure the survival of our species.”
“I understand these people better than you do,” Ripstiggr said to Iristigut. “The situation’s under control. Keep the telescope observations coming. I could also use some data on air bases in, what was it called? Germany. Whatever you’ve got.”
He reached out as if to end the call. Hannah squirmed past him. “Hey, Iristigut. Before you go, I just want to know …”This might be stupid, but if she was going to die in
fourteen hours, it didn’t matter. “Can I talk to Skyler?”
*
A CELLie skidded into the construction shed where Skyler was trying to boot up the controversial thorium reactor. He now knew why it was controversial. It required an initial load of uranium, but they hadn’t actually been allowed to bring any from Earth, ‘cause that shit is dangerous, yanno? So they had to opt for a neutron-producing cyclotron, plus thorium mined right here on the moon. Trouble was, the thorium wouldn’t turn into fissile uranium until it had been bombarded with neutrons for 27 days … and that was why the CELLies hadn’t even started the damn thing up yet. Somehow, they had to keep the salt molten for 27 days, until the reactor started melting it on its own. And there was nowhere to put the solar furnace where it would get sunlight for that long. ‘Eternal Light’ was just a PR gimmick.
Anyway, Skyler had moved the whole setup into an impact crater on the sunwards slope where it would get 14 days of sunlight, max. He scowled at the solar furnace’s temperature readout. This was like trying to cook hot dogs over a candle.
“Skyler!”
“Watch out for the pipes,” Skyler shouted.
“Keelraiser’s on the radio for you,” the young CELLie gasped. “Quick!”
Skyler took his time limping out of the unpressurized shed, around the snarl of pipes that led from the reactor to the cold, unresponsive turbine and generator. He rappelled up the slope of the impact crater, one-legged, using the power cables to haul himself up. The sunlit slope of Shackleton Crater rose to the black sky. He climbed into the earth-mover parked at the edge of the crater. The comms screen was covered with dust, like everything else. He wiped it with the sleeve of his Starliner. “Yeah?”
The face that appeared on the screen was not Keelraiser’s.
Skyler nearly died of a heart attack then and there, in the cab of a RTG-powered bulldozer on the moon.
“Hannah? Is that really you?” he blurted.
Then he waited, feeling all kinds of stupid.
And happy.
And confused.
And—as he made out the shapes of rriksti on either side of her, one of them, if he was not mistaken, that big silver-haired fucker who had appeared in many episodes of the Hannah Ginsburg show—heartbroken.
“Nice EVA suit,” Hannah’s voice crackled over the comms link. “Is that one of the new ones?”
It was her. It was really her.
“Nice t-shirt,” Skyler said, stupidly.
This time, while he waited, he remembered the emails she’d sent to Keelraiser, which he should never have seen. I have a harem … I can have as many men as I like ... And there she was, sandwiched between two of them. Did rriksti count as men?
“Oh God, this thing,” she came back on the air. “It’s his. I just borrowed it.”
Skyler’s heart broke a little more.
“Listen, I just wanted to make sure you’re safe.” She hesitated. “Stay safe. Don’t, you know. Don’t do any Fed shit.”
Skyler almost laughed. As if he wanted anything to do with the government that had got him into this mess. Anyway, they had no comms with Earth apart from the Cloudeater’s maser. That must be how Hannah was talking to him now. “Hannah, are you OK?” He didn’t have any sense of the big picture. “What’s happening down there?”
“Oh, it’s crazy. It feels like half of sub-Saharan Africa is camping out here, and the other half is on their way. Honestly, I love these people.” Her mouth wobbled for a second. “They’re trying to help.”
“But what about you?”
Are you on their side? he wanted to say. Are you sleeping with the enemy?
340,000 kilometers away, Hannah leaned closer to the screen, blocking out the two rriksti. “Remember you once said you had faith in me to do the right thing? I tried, Skyler. I’m still trying. Don’t lose faith in me. I—I have faith in you, too. Do the right thing out there.” She straightened up. “OK, gotta go. I’ve got ten thousand things to do. What else is new, right?”
Skyler couldn’t bear to let her go. They had so much to say to each other. He blurted, “Wait. Wait, Hannah. I need to ask you a question. I’m trying to boot up this thorium reactor. Yeah, I know, who the heck am I to be messing with a reactor? Sad thing is, I’m more of an expert than anyone else here. But there’s a problem …” He quickly outlined the solar furnace issue. “So how do I keep everything molten after the sun goes down?”
After three seconds, Hannah’s face lit up. “Oh my God, Skyler, technology of the future! Then again, hell, we’re living in the future now. We eat computer parts and comb our hair with ray-guns.” She made her eyes cross a bit, and Skyler fell in love with her all over again. “OK, let me see. That’s tricky. Don't fill the reactor with molten salt. Keep the molten salt just barely moving. Don't run it through the primary heat exchanger. As it gets colder, let the salt remain inside the core as long as possible, but don't let the salt freeze in the pumps or piping. You’re gonna have to baby that thing around the clock until it starts ticking over on its own.”
“Would it help if I heated the pipes? I could take the RTG out of this bulldozer.” Unlike the rovers, the earth-mover ran on a radioisotope generator. Power equals heat.
“Oh my God! What’s the radioisotope in the RTG?”
“Uh … I have no idea.”
“In that case, it’s probably polonium-210. You could dismantle the RTG and remove that. Mix it with beryllium, and you’ll have a neutron generator that keeps irradiating the thorium after the sun goes down! No electricity required.” Hannah was animated, talking fast. “So if the activity in the fuel salt isn't high enough to keep everything molten, you have two options. Destroy the RTG to get at the polonium, which honestly, I’m not sure I would want to risk. Or else turn the RTG up to 11 and try to run the salt through it—”
The silver-haired rriksti interrupted. “Read the instruction manual, chump. That is what we did.”
The screen went black.
Keelraiser’s face appeared on the dusty rectangle. “I apologize,” he said. “I cut you off. I don’t want them to learn too much about what we’re doing.”
Skyler’s frustration boiled over. “I was talking to her!”
Keelraiser, that traitor, sat in the office that had formerly belonged to James Coetzee. Behind him, Hriklif touched a button on the whiteboard—actually a giant screen. Where it had been blank, it now displayed floorplans and elevations for the new habs they were going to build underground, in an impact crater a little way from here. The thorium reactor would provide baseload power for the new settlement. If Skyler could ever get it running.
But now his thoughts jumped onto a different track. Comms. When the new settlement was built, they’d still be dependent on the Cloudeater’s comms maser … on Keelraiser. There had to be some other way to get in touch with Earth. CELL had a Ku-band radio, but Keelraiser had dismantled it.
“Hannah gave you good advice,” Keelraiser said. “Take it.”
“Which part?”
“All of it.”
The screen blanked.
Skyler gritted his jaw. Getting mad at Keelraiser would get him nowhere. Unlike Jack, he wasn’t going to start pointlessly throwing punches. Do the right thing. For Hannah’s sake, he had to try, even if that just meant getting the reactor working, wringing electricity out of the raw lunar elements, keeping people alive.
He twisted in the earth-mover’s seat, examining the columnar RTG behind the cabin. It looked like it would be easy to remove. Of course, if he did that, they couldn’t use the earth-mover to dig holes for the new habs. But the heavy rock-breaking would be done by laser, anyway. Pump megawatts of power into a laser beam and it’ll vaporize anything, even lunar regolith.
Keelraiser had ordered Jack to salvage the SoD’s comms laser for that. He was supposed to be coming back with that today ...
A shadow fell across the earthmover. Skyler looked up. For a second he thought a UFO was about to land on him. Then he recognized the gi
ant disk, borne on four CELL short-hop lifters.
Jack had not just salvaged the comms laser from the SoD.
He’d come back with the whole rotating hab.
CHAPTER 12
Late afternoon in the Congo. The noise of engines seeped out of the sky. Hannah stopped digging. She pushed her rain-wet hair out of her eyes and looked up. All she saw was the clouds currently dumping a downpour on Katanga province. Would F-35s attack in the rain? Why not?
“Sounds like they’re early,” she said to Joker, who was helping her dig latrines on the fringe of the tent city.
Hey. You have to do something while you’re waiting to die. It might as well be something useful.
She’d recruited a crew of rriksti—they didn’t mind working during daylight hours when it was raining—and Congolese, who were equally indifferent to the weather. If they lived through today, they’d have a nice row of pit latrines. If not, they’d have a handy row of graves.
Now everyone, human and rriksti, leaned on their shovels and looked up, or popped their heads out of pits that were already deep enough to stand in. The rriksti could not hear the approaching aircraft, but they reacted to the humans’ reaction.
Hannah said to Joker, “Carry on. It might be a false alarm.” To the Congolese, she yelled, “I’m going to get beer! Je vais, um, get de la beer!” She should have gotten Giles to teach her some French when she had a chance. But beer was understood by everyone. They raised a cheer. She gave them a rriksti salute and squelched downhill.
As she walked around the tent city, the noise resolved into a distinct clattering. That did not sound like F-35s.
Suddenly hopeful, she broke into a jog. She found Ripstiggr on the waterlogged proto-road behind the parked shuttles, staring into the sky.
“What were you doing?” he said, noticing that she was muddy from head to foot.
“Digging toilets.”
“Why?”
“Because these people,” she yelled, flinging out an arm in the direction of the tent city, “are going to start getting sick! And more people keep coming! We’re going to have a health crisis on our hands if we don’t provide some basic amenities!”
Killshot: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 4) Page 9