Yes. But he had to do this the right way. “No.”
He exited the airlock and walked up the ramp. His chest-light raked the confusion of tire-marks and bootprints. He picked out the tracks of Skyler’s rover, pointing north.
He loped along the tracks, deeper into the shadow of Shoemaker Crater, hurrying to catch up.
*
The moon is dangerous as hell, even if all you’re doing is going for a walk. Skyler knew that better than most people. He manhandled the water sack off the back of the rover. It held 100 gallons of potable H2O, steamed out of the rubble of old comets, distilled in an energy-gobbling multi-step process that also extracted CO2 and ammonia. Skyler staggered under the unwieldy sack, which weighed about as much as he himself would on Earth. “Could use some help out here,” he shouted over the radio.
He set the sack down. The parked rover’s headlights sparkled on lunar rock, and reflected off a steel wall, suspended two meters above the ground, blurring past so fast that he couldn’t even see the four handcrafted rim thrusters that had replaced the old ones.
Jack had salvaged the SoD’s main hab. He had coerced four CELLie pilots into toting it all the way to the south pole, balanced on their lifters like a wheel of cheese on four toothpicks. When he got it here, he’d set it on a stand, shovelled all the salvage and rubbish out through the erstwhile keel tube, and embarked on a months-long project of patching the breaches in the side walls and building new rim thrusters. On June 20th—a date Skyler remembered because it was the same day the North African Alliance had invaded Italy and Greece—he’d spun it up.
Now, while Libyan and Moroccan irregulars sought comfort in the abandoned towns of the Italian Alps, the repaired hab whizzed around and around, horizontal to the lunar surface, faster than it ever had in deep space.
Jack emerged from below the hab into the rover’s headlights. His rriksti EVA suit outlined bulging muscles. He and Skyler carried the water sack and the LOX cylinder into the dark under the spinning kilotons of death. The hab stood on a 2m-diameter pipe, amid a forest of chocks and braces. Skyler ducked into a hole in the pipe. He climbed a ladder and came out in the axis tunnel, which now led straight up to the wrecked bridge. He sidestepped onto the former aft wall of the hab.
The vast interior of the hab was airless, but not entirely dark. A streak of light, like a long-exposure photograph of traffic, glowed on the outer wall. Skyler could not help remembering the luxuriant greenery and mellow scents that had filled the hab when it was attached to the SoD. Those were the good old days.
He hauled the supplies up, while Jack pushed from below.
“Did you bring any food?” Jack said.
“Oh sure,” Skyler said. “Let me just pull another rabbit out of my hat. No, I did not bring any food.”
“That’s OK,” Jack said. “Garden’s doing nicely.”
They walked along Stairway 4, which was now parallel to the ground. Centrifugal force tugged them forward, as if they were walking towards the outer edge of a merry-go-round. Presently the pull got so strong that Skyler had to cling to the guard rail. Jack tossed a rope into his hands. Skyler let the centrifugal force sweep him off his feet, simultaneously changing his orientation so that ‘forwards’ was now ‘down.’ He paid the rope through his gloves in careful jerks until he landed on the outer wall of the hab.
He now stood sideways to the ground, but the weak sideways pull of lunar gravity was barely perceptible in comparison to the powerful spin gravity generated by the hab’s rotation. A short distance away, an airtight polyurethane tent glowed white from within.
“How many RPMs have you got on this thing now?” he said, following Jack to the tent. Jack walked easily, carrying the LOX cylinder and dragging the water sack. Skyler hobbled behind him, wishing for the crutch he had discarded months ago.
“Five,” Jack said. “It’s about time to burn the thrusters again.”
Translation: Steal some more hydrazine for me, Skyler.
Skyler gritted his jaw. He was sick of raiding the old Moon Express fuel depot. Sick of helping Jack for no reward and less thanks.
Jack undogged a hatch set into the side of the tent at ground level. Skyler collapsed into the chamber of the airlock. It was the old airlock from the SoD’s bridge. Jack had sealed the plastic of the tent between the metal and the gasket. The plastic was the same stuff they had once used to transport ice from Europa. Using only the hardware and resources that survived the crash, Jack had built a pressurized dwelling in the location of the former kitchen tent.
Overhead, the scaffolding that once enclosed the SoD’s terrestrial garden held up the plastic roof. A bank of growlights, assembled from the few LEDs un-shattered in the crash, blazed down on a split-level field that took up most of the tent’s floorspace. The hydroponic tanks had all broken, so Jack had made soil out of ground-up regolith and his own waste. Root vegetables and salad grew in the vile mixture. Skyler doffed his suit to the shoulders. The pungent smell of shit threatened to make him gag. It was chilly in the tent.
Jack hooked the new water sack up to his irrigation system, and swapped out the LOX cylinder attached to his CO2 scrubber / air replenishment setup. Skyler sat in one of the old SoD chairs, catching his breath.
Jack moved to the old kitchen table and wiped out mugs with a rag. “Tea? Coffee?”
This was a joke. All he actually had was water, hot or cold. Maybe a microwaved yam, or a protein bar, if Skyler had managed to grab some from the pantry. But Skyler could get yams in the bunker, and if he wanted a protein bar, he didn’t have to steal them.
“I’m fine, thanks.”
Jack looked around, plainly surprised. Skyler usually sat awhile and filled him in on the news from Earth—whatever the Lightbringer saw fit to send, anyway, and Keelraiser saw fit to show everyone. They’d gripe about the war in Europe and dream up better resistance strategies, a pair of armchair generals.
Not today.
“Actually, I’d better get going.” Skyler leaned down and picked up one of the dumbbells that lay on the floor beside his chair. 10 KG. He could barely lift it off the floor. Jack had moved all the old gym equipment in here – the weights, the resistance machines. Stripped to the waist, his upper body rippled with awesome definition. He looked almost freakish in comparison to the atrophied CELLies back at the bunker. Skyler had kept meaning to spend more time out here, do some training himself. But now that option was gone. “Well, see you later,” he said, getting up.
Jack frowned. “Is everything OK?”
“Oh, sure,” Skyler said. “The Libyans are crossing the Alps, Islamic State just occupied Barcelona, and rriksti ‘observers,’ quote unquote, have been sighted in New Mexico. Apart from that, everything’s fine.”
He donned his suit again and let himself out. He waved ‘up’ at the darkness. “You there?”
“Here.” A chest-lamp flashed in the axis tunnel overhead.
“When you get about halfway out, grab the rope. Don’t slide down too fast. It’s a hard landing.”
He did not want to be around when Alexei reached the tent. He walked across the bare floor of the hab, stumbling, the ground continually coming up faster than he expected. Another rope hung down alongside what used to be Stairway 1. Skyler wrapped it around his gloves and fly-walked up the forward wall of the hab, towards the bridge. He’d hang out up there until it was over.
*
Jack put the mugs away. Skyler’s abrupt departure gave him forebodings. Skyler had seemed to be in a skittish mood overall. Maybe he was fed up with the supply runs. It had to be a thankless job, and Jack would not have asked it of him if he could see any other way to stay alive without going back to the bunker … back to Keelraiser’s domain.
He whipped around at the clunk of the airlock’s inner hatch.
Alexei pitched headfirst onto the floor of the tent.
“Alexei!” Jack hadn’t seen him in six months. “Jesus, are you OK?”
Alexei pushed himself up onto hi
s hands and knees. “I’m fine,” he grunted. “Feel like I am back in the TsF-18.”
The TsF-16, the training centrifuge in Star City, subjected you to six gees. This was only 0.8. “Lie on your back, you’ll feel better.”
Alexei flopped onto his back. He’d grown his hair out, a striking change from his usual chrome-dome style. With his rriksti suit doffed to the waist, he looked as stringy as the CELLies had looked to Jack when they first got here. Lunar gravity was a wasting disease.
“You don’t get lonely out here?” he said, looking up at the plants swaying under the salvaged growlights.
The truth was, no. Alexei knew Jack as an astronaut. He didn’t know that Jack Kildare, ex-commander of the SoD, had once been a little boy who walked to school on his own and came back on his own, who spent entire weekends in his room, by choice, not because he had no friends but because he was happier alone. Quietly absorbed in drawing G.I. Joe and Judge Dredd characters, or building spaceships out of cardboard and modelling clay, he’d not even notice time passing until his mother called him. A typical only child. Small, too—he hadn’t shot up until his mid-teens. His parents and teachers in those days would have said he was the least likely boy to end up joining the RAF.
They might have been less surprised to see him living as a hermit in the wreck of his spaceship.
He couldn’t explain all that to Alexei, so he just said, “Not really, no.”
He rolled up his sleeping-bag and wedged it under Alexei’s head and shoulders, propping him up. While he did this, he casually ascertained that Alexei didn’t have a weapon. You couldn’t hide so much as a nail-clipper in a rriksti EVA suit, but Jack had to make sure. He hated himself for suspecting Alexei, whilst reminding himself that Alexei wasn’t his friend anymore.
He sat backwards on the same chair Skyler had occupied. “So you found me.”
“It’s not like this place is a secret. It is the most visible thing on the surface. You might as well paint a bull’s-eye on it.”
Jack shrugged. In six months, his own prediction that the Lightbringer would bombard CELL had not come true. He reckoned it never would. Keelraiser had neutralized that threat by changing sides.
“Nice garden.” The plants nodded in the breeze from the single rotating fan. Leaf shadows dappled Alexei’s face. “How do you live with the smell?”
“You get used to it.”
“It’s interesting, because we are also switching over to dirt farming in the bunker. It’s a more efficient way to fix and circulate nitrogen.”
“Yeah, Skyler mentioned that.”
If Skyler cropped up often in Jack’s conversation, it was because Skyler was the only living soul Jack had seen or spoken to in months. He was out of practice at talking to other people. “What do you want?” he said bluntly.
Alexei struggled into a sitting position. He looked Jack in the eye. “You can’t make Skyler keep stealing shit for you.”
As Jack had thought. Skyler was fed up with the supply runs, but he was too much of a coward to tell Jack to his face, so he’d enlisted Alexei to do it for him.
“Fine,” Jack said. “Tell him I don’t expect to see him again.”
He could fetch his own supplies. It might result in violence, which he had wanted to avoid, but he’d do his best to minimize confrontation.
“He’s risking his life for you, Jack. It’s not fair.”
“I said he doesn’t have to—”
“You saved his life after the crash. He is very aware of that, and he feels indebted to you.”
It shocked Jack to hear Alexei describing their years of mutual support and companionship as a debt. Not one of them would have got back from Europa without the other three. He realized in that moment that Alexei had left the crew of the SoD for good.
Alexei’s next words cast doubt on that hasty conclusion. “So Skyler’s trying to protect you. And I am trying to protect both of you. But it’s gone on too long! I can’t protect you anymore.”
“According to Skyler, you’re Keelraiser’s number two. Basically, you manage the bunker for him. Is he getting pissy about the oxygen and water? Mining operations not scaling as expected?”
“No, no, that’s going fine. We are refining almost 100 cubic meters of ice ore every day. There’s enough water for everyone. We’ve even built a swimming pool!”
“So what’s the problem?”
Alexei did a big, impatient Russian shrug. ”Are you stupid, or just acting stupid? Well, maybe Skyler hasn’t told you everything. I suppose we can say I’m Keelraiser’s number two, but I have to work with James. He’s an epic pain in my ass. He won’t give up control; keeps tightening the screws, saying we have to do this or that, or we’ll all die. And he still has the loyalty of most people.”
“Is there some reason Keelraiser hasn’t killed him?”
“It would break the pact.”
Jack shook his head blankly.
“Nothing’s written down, but there is a pact. If you work for us, we won’t kill you.”
Us. It was less clear than ever which side Alexei considered himself to be on.
“And that’s the problem, do you get it?” Alexei said. “James goes around mentioning to people, hey, look at Kildare, sitting out there, taking our resources, he’s not working. He’s breaking the pact. And yet he’s alive. What makes him so special?”
“All right, I’ll work,” Jack said.
“This ends in one of two ways. Either they come out here, one day soon, with rocks and offcuts of pipe. You end up dead. Or Keelraiser executes you for breaking the pact. You end up dead.”
Having just said that he would comply with this retarded pact, Jack now felt less inclined to toe the line. “I may end up dead, but I won’t be the only one. That’s a promise.”
“Why are you sitting out here? Why not just come in? Some people think it’s pride. But I know you better than that. You are an idiot but you’re not that kind of idiot.”
“It’s very simple, actually,” Jack said. He stood up and tossed his chair away. He seized Alexei’s ponytail and used it as a handle to heave him to his feet. Alexei yelled in pain. Jack dragged Alexei’s right arm across his shoulders, supporting his weight. Alexei no longer smelled human. He smelled like a rriksti, salty and musky. “You can’t even stand up unassisted in point eight gees,” Jack said. “How will you cope when you get back to Earth? You’ll be in a wheelchair for months.”
“No one is going back to Earth,” Alexei said quietly.
“Wrong,” Jack said. “I am. I don’t know how, I don’t know when, but I’m going back. And when I get there, I’ll able to stand on my own two feet, and fight.”
He dropped Alexei in front of the airlock.
“Now get off my fucking ship.”
He cursed himself when that slipped out. This wasn’t a ship anymore. It was just an exercise wheel. The SoD would never fly again. He didn’t want Alexei to think he was hanging onto pathetic delusions that he could somehow repair the damage.
But Alexei said, “Fuck you. This was my ship, too.”
“Was,” Jack agreed. He reached for the hatch lever.
It didn’t move.
The pressurization indicator no longer worked, but if the hatch wouldn’t open, it meant only one thing: someone was in the chamber.
Shit.
Jack swiftly crossed to the kitchen and reached up to the shelf above the microwave. He took down his blaster. A rriksti energy weapon, the only one still working. He checked the power level and swung around to face Alexei and the airlock.
A laser pulse would hole the tent, if his aim were even a little bit off.
Fuck it. Like he’d said, he wouldn’t be the only one who died.
CHAPTER 15
While Alexei was in the tent, Skyler clambered around the bridge, pushing buttons that no longer did anything, reliving the nightmare days they’d spent in here after the crash. He could still hear Jack snarling at him. Find that broomstick, it’s got to be he
re somewhere, if you break that wire I’ll fucking kill you, stop breathing so fucking much …
… stay alive, stay alive, stay alive …
Without Jack, Skyler would’ve died in the wreck.
That said, if not for Jack’s obsession with destroying the Lightbringer, the SoD wouldn’t have crashed in the first place.
Skyler shed a hot tear or two for their spaceship, once so graceful and sturdy, now reduced to a spinning-top on the surface of the moon, because Jack still wouldn’t let go.
He pulled himself up into the left seat, the very one in which he had come to after the crash. Good old NASA. They certainly had known how to build crash couches. So shed another tear for NASA, wiped from the face of the earth, along with the rest of the US government.
If only he knew what was really happening down there.
Their daily dose of news, looped on the big screens in the bunker, gave them the illusion of staying in touch with events on Earth. But Skyler knew they were getting a flawed and partial picture. The media remained as adept as ever at pursuing sensational stories at the expense of information. So they covered the war for Europe, for example, in gory detail, while ignoring the fact that the whole mess was happening in the context of an alien invasion. The only time you ever saw a rriksti on screen was when they were helping the wounded. Skyler actually suspected the BBC, ECN, Al-Jazeera, and all the rest of them of being in Ripstiggr’s pocket.
Ripstiggr. The Krijistal asshole who dared to put his arm around Hannah. Those images were seared into Skyler’s brain.
Balancing on the back of the left seat, he could just reach the edge of the hole in the hull where Jack had removed the bridge airlock. He wrapped his fingers around the sheared-off metal, jumped, swung his legs up. Ow shit my fingers … But the smart material of his suit did not tear. One breathless scramble later, he stood on top of the bridge, gazing down at the swiftly spinning hab.
He turned his attention to the remaining instruments and antennas. Jack had removed the comms laser and the radar dish, both of them requisitioned by Keelraiser. But the radio antenna was still here. Skyler fingered the dish. The bridge had not taken any direct impacts in the crash, as the rotating hab had suffered the brunt. The dish wasn’t even dented.
Killshot: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 4) Page 11