Maybe someday, Jack would understand what it was like to love someone that much.
CHAPTER 17
The sewage plant needed a minimum of three people to tend the machines. For a while there’d only been two. Jack’s arrival brought the crew back to strength. The guy before him had had an accident. Suffocated in the grinder. Bad luck.
Turned out bad luck of that kind was an endemic problem at CELL. Funnily enough it only affected Coetzee’s enemies. Bad luck could get you kicked off your regular team, reassigned to dirty, dangerous duties. The sewage plant was the lowest rung of the ladder. Once you got here, you might be able to work your way back up … or you might wind up face down in the grinder.
So Jack never lowered his guard. He commuted from the rotating hab to the bunker. This privilege had not been taken away from him—he detected Alexei’s hand there, although he couldn’t risk talking to him to find out. The walk gave him a chance to prepare mentally for his shift. He was ostracized by everyone at CELL. He ate alone, off-hours, in the dunce’s corner of the mess. Occasionally Skyler or Giles joined him. Otherwise? Invisible. Living as a hermit had actually been easier than this.
The work itself was nothing. Run the grinder. Feed the precipitated solids to the digester. Add cell cultures. Extract compost. Mix it with powdered regolith to make soil. Repeat. Sometimes he had to go spelunking in the grinder—people dropped things in the loo, or just pretended to, so they could shrug, whoopsies, when he came up empty-handed. The smell never came off his hands, no matter how much he washed with those joke bars of recycled soap. All his food tasted of shit. He dreamed about pushing down floaters, like some nightmare game of Tetris.
Twice a day he rolled a handcart full of ripe soil to the farm, and that was how he ran into Harry Windsor, who was planting out potato seedlings, mounding up the soil and pushing the green sprigs into them, one by one, by hand.
Jack put the brake on the handcart and used a shovel to spread the soil over the virgin rock at the end of the potato patch. He could’ve just picked the handcart up and tipped it all in at once, but he didn’t want to draw attention to his strength.
A shadow fell across him. “That’s a shit job,” Harry said. “Pun very much intended.”
“So’s yours,” Jack said. He noticed that Harry’s little mounds of soil were all immaculately rounded off, like military bed corners. It was a bit heartbreaking.
“I beg to differ. I feel like that chap in The Martian.”
“That movie was all right. Not very realistic.”
“I thought it was too realistic. Mere survival is boring. I wanted derring-do.” Harry pulled a face, making fun of himself.
“Well, an alien invasion qualifies, I think.”
A pair of rriksti crossed the cavern, lugging armfuls of suizh stems. Enough of the salvaged alien seeds had sprouted to fill several caverns with Imfi vegetation. While the humans had switched over to dirt farming to stretch their precious stocks of nitrogen, the rriksti stuck to their own robust hydroponics system, based on tanks inhabited by genetically engineered bugs. Autorips were meant to keep the bugs in their place. They kept getting out, regardless. A swarm of them followed the rriksti like a moving smear of tar on the floor.
Jack knew these two rriksti from the SoD. Well, he knew all of them, of course. He even knew the name of the young female: Bliggrene. She and her friend came over and gestured awkwardly. Jack took his headset out of the pocket of his coverall and put it on to hear Bliggrene asking if they could borrow the handcart. They wanted it to take their suizh stems to the manufacturing plant, where the tough fibers would be broken down for printer feedstock.
“Of course,” Jack said. “Go ahead.”
Harry watched them go. “They’re so terribly nice.”
Jack stood, stretching his back. Harry clearly still couldn’t get his head around the idea that the rriksti were nice people and murderous brutes, all in the same skin. “Have you forgotten—”
He veered away in mid-sentence and brought his boot down on the swarm of bugs. They would devour the organic constituents of the soil, leaving only lunar gravel, if given a chance. He ground his boot into the moon-rock floor, crushing them.
“How they mobbed Gavin and literally beat him to death?” Harry said. “No, I haven’t forgotten that.”
“Good.”
“Still glad you stopped us from bashing them?”
“I’ve thought about it often,” Jack said truthfully, “and I still think it’s impossible to stop an alien invasion with a potato gun.”
Harry’s mouth twitched. “Colin and Pete told me you punched Keelraiser’s lights out at the chipping ceremony.”
“They were there?” Eight months had passed, but that night remained crystal clear in Jack’s memory. He revisited it often, deliberately keeping it fresh. On the other hand, he didn’t remember details such as faces in the crowd. The room might as well have been empty except for him and Keelraiser.
“Oh yes. They wanted to make sure the chips were OK before I got one.”
“And are they OK?”
“You haven’t got one?”
“I’m old-fashioned.” Jack returned his headset to his pocket. He’d put it back on if any rriksti needed to speak to him.
“You hear their voices in your head,” Harry said. “You can’t turn it off. Some people say it’s like music. Personally, it drives me barmy. But apparently this is how they live. No privacy.”
“Right.”
“Anyway, Colin and Pete were quite impressed by the way you went for him.”
Jack shrugged. “It was a stupid thing to do.” He squatted and swirled his palms over his new patch of soil.
“You can’t stop an alien invasion with your fists?”
“Touché.” Jack smiled. “Something like that.”
Harry squatted down on the other side of the soil patch. “But perhaps they can still be stopped,” he said quietly.
Jack raised his eyebrows. Harry was flirting with a demotion to the sewage plant. Jack decided to head him off for his own good. “Did you see the news yesterday?”
“About Paris? Yeah.”
The North African Alliance had occupied Paris in a triumph reminiscent of 1941, complete with French politicians fleeing across the Channel. Giles had sought Jack out in the sewage plant to rave about the fate of his country. The news had shown rriksti ‘peacekeepers’ protecting frightened Parisians from the NAA troops, who saw their invasion as long-delayed justice.
“More and more people are being trained to think of the rriksti as good guys who’re trying to prevent the carnage, not inciting it,” Jack said. “There’s only one thing that could stop them at this point. The same thing as before. Drop a nuke on the Lightbringer.”
This, he thought, would end the conversation. Harry knew as well as anyone that Jack had been there, tried that, failed.
Harry said quietly, “We’ve still got our nuclear deterrent.”
Jack opened his mouth to say—yes, four subs parked at Clyde; good luck getting to those—and then shut it again, remembering that this grubby young man was actually the heir to the throne. If anyone could get to those Vanguards and authorize the launch of their nuclear warheads, he could.
However, that still left the not-so-small problem of getting to Earth.
Harry drew with his finger in the soil between them. A cylinder with four little blobs at the back. And two capital letters. ME.
The Moon Express.
Yes, it was still there, sitting neglected on the far side of Shackleton Crater. And yes, it could reach LEO. But that wouldn’t do them very much good, to say nothing of the fact that it would be near-impossible to launch it in the first place without getting caught. Jack had already worn himself out gaming the angles. He could see how to pull off the launch—with a lot of luck. The problem he could not solve was how to get from LEO to Earth. He’d be stuck at Sky Station, at best, and then what? Then nothing. He wouldn’t mind dying; he would mind dying fo
r a gesture only marginally less futile than shooting at aliens with a potato gun.
Harry drew an arrow to his crude sketch of the ME and wrote: PILOT = J.K.
Well, of course, neither the prince nor his ex-SAS mates would be able to fly the ME. They needed Jack for that, so if he said no, they’d have to give up the whole daft idea.
“I’d stick to farming, Harry, if I were you. You’ll do more good that way.”
Jack loped back along the freezing-cold passage to the sewage plant. Since the rriksti had taken his handcart, he filled buckets with soil and carried them back to the farm.
In the potato patch, Harry was destroying his sketch of the ME, mounding the soil into tiny immaculate hills.
CHAPTER 18
After his shift, Jack went swimming. He did this only once or twice a week, as it meant a trip into X-ray country. He half-dreaded, half-anticipated bumping into Keelraiser one of these days, but apparently Keelraiser didn’t like swimming, because Jack had never seen him at the pool.
This pool was bigger and better than anything they’d had in the bunker on Europa. Briny water slopped over the sides of a pit dug out of the lunar rock and edged with floating mats of mushrooms. Scavenger bugs lived on the bottom, cleaning the water, which was needed, because the pool seemed to be in use 24 hours a day.
The twilight zone of Imf was a world of rivers, ditches, and streams. All the time the rriksti had been passengers on the SoD, and the Lightbringer before that, they’d been pining for a dip.
Now they crowded the pool around the clock, splashing, frolicking, and swimming underwater, avoiding each other in a balletic display of radio-location.
When Jack got there, it was the middle of the ‘night’ back in CELL. But the rriksti had no truck with 24-hour ‘days.’ Pearly limbs sliced the water, and bio-antennas swirled like anemones beneath the surface. Jack stripped naked and slid in, letting the cool water carry away the filth and grime that clung to his body. If the rriksti didn’t like him getting in dirty, they could say so. But he reckoned it didn’t matter. After all, the pool already had mushrooms in it.
He floated on his back, watching the water reflections ripple on the shiny smart material of the ceiling. The movements of the rriksti made tall waves that splashed over his face. He imagined he was floating in the sea off a Welsh beach. Any minute now, Meeks would swim out and grab his legs. He would go under, and when he came up, he would never have gone to Europa, he would not be in a swimming pool filled with aliens, and these self-same aliens would not be conquering Earth.
Someone did grab his legs. Spluttering, Jack came up face to face with one of his coworkers from the sewage plant.
The only other human who dared to swim in the rriksti pool.
Linda Moskowitz.
“Didn’t see you, Linda.”
“I’ve been waiting for you.” Her teeth flashed in the dim, opalescent light. “I’m all pruney. Let’s get out.”
They pulled t-shirts and undershorts onto wet bodies. As Linda wrung out her hair, more rriksti entered the cave. They wore gray underpants, standard rriksti swimming costume. One of them was Keelraiser.
Jack whipped his gaze away. With his back to Keelraiser, he gathered up his coverall and boots. “Come on.”
“Well, well,” Linda said as they slipped barefoot out of the cave. “That’s the first time I’ve ever seen Lord K there. I thought it would be beneath his dignity to splash around with the peons.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe he was looking for you.”
“Hope not.” Jack changed the subject. “I found out what was wrong with the screw in the grinder after you knocked off. There was a bridge stuck in it.”
“A bridge?”
“As in false teeth.”
“Oh my God.”
“I wonder how anyone drops a bridge into the bog.”
“The bog. You talk funny.”
“That’s why all the women throw themselves at me.”
“I know how you’d drop a bridge in the toilet. You’d be doing something very active in the toilet cubicle. You know, those are pretty much the only places without cameras.”
“I know another place,” Jack said.
They hurried along an artery corridor towards the ‘sandwich wall’ that separated X-ray country from CELL. Rriksti glanced curiously at them as Jack tugged Linda down a dead-end turning. Down this way, unused caves stored junk and parts from the dismantled habs. All this stuff was kept on the rriksti side of the wall, of course.
The briny smell and indirect reddish light faded into stale darkness. Jack switched on the headlamp he used inside the sewage grinder. Linda’s fingers curled hot and damp in his other hand.
He flashed the headlamp around their favorite cave, the one half-filled with spare fiberglass insulation blankets. “All clear.”
Linda darted ahead of him into the cave. She bellyflopped on the pile of plastic-coated blankets and dug her iPad out from among them. Christ knows how she had managed to hang onto it all this time. She kept it charged with a portable charger Jack had stolen for her. The screen filled the cave with TV-colored light. She clicked open the memo app and typed, All we need to do is get Siftik out of the way.
Siftik was the rriksti who worked with them at the sewage plant.
“No,” Jack said. “We still aren’t going to blow up the bunker.”
Her lips squirmed with the desire to answer him out loud, but she had a chip. She typed, It would be easy. The plumbing for the rriksti side is separate from ours. Just push methane through the pipes—
“The gas version of what you and Grigory did on the SoD. Don’t you ever have any new ideas?”
Don’t need new ideas when we got good ones. We raise the concentration of methane to 10%-ish. Set up a spark generator in this very cave. We could kill them all!
“I said forget it. Any plan that involves killing hundreds of people isn’t a plan I’m interested in.”
Hundreds of SQUIDS, not people.
“They are people,” Jack sighed. “Look, I hate them too, but you can’t say they’re not people. In fact that’s why it’s possible to hate them. You can’t hate a … an asteroid, can you? Or a solar flare, or moonquake, or a charging rhinoceros. Only people.”
Linda deleted what she’d typed, tossed the iPad down. “You’re still under their spell,” she said.
“Am not.”
“You don’t really know how to hate.” She crawled towards him across the pile of blankets. “That’s because you don’t really know how to love.”
Now she was performing for an audience, for any rriksti that might overhear, and might happen to mention their ‘secret’ meeting to Coetzee, who had daily meetings with Keelraiser in his office. Coetzee’s decision to put both Jack and Linda, two of the most notorious troublemakers at CELL, on the sewage plant crew, deserved to go down in the annals of classic social engineering screw-ups. Jack could guess what he’d been thinking: Jack and Linda were deadly enemies. Having to work side by side would be irritating and humiliating for both of them. It had been, at first.
But the trouble with manipulating people like variables in an equation is that they aren’t.
“Where are you going?” Jack said. She was crawling closer, breasts bouncing freely under her t-shirt. Lunar gravity did amazing things for the female form.
She shrugged, making her breasts wobble even more enticingly, and slid her legs off the pile of blankets. “You’re no fun. I’m out of here.”
Jack pressed his hands down on her shoulders. “Did I say you could go?”
“What are you gonna do? Stop me?”
“Yes, actually.” Jack got hold of her t-shirt and yanked it over her head. She didn’t try very hard—make that, at all—to prevent him. This was a game, after all.
Jack got his hands around the breasts he’d wanted to touch ever since they were in the same NASA intake in 2004. He was fondling them when she slid out from under his hands and made a break for the door, pa
le legs flashing in the iPad light. Jack lunged after her, caught her, tossed her onto the pile of blankets. She rebounded and sank into the squeaky plastic folds. He crawled on top of her and pinned her. He remembered Keelraiser staring at him across the swimming pool. Linda writhed as if trying to get away, which magically resulted in the disappearance of her undershorts. Jack thrust two fingers between her legs, and that was when she really started to fight. She bucked under him. Her fists landed on his chest and shoulders. Her nails, ragged from stirring soil in the sewage plant, drew blood. The iPad switched itself off, taking away the beautiful visuals of her body. The darkness heightened the sensations of warmth and pain and the smell of human juices.
Jack had slipped up with women in the past—that was how he thought of it. Getting a bit over-enthusiastic. He was a nice guy, so he tried to hold back, but space rubbed niceness away like sandpaper rubbing away paint. He could still hear Hannah Ginsburg saying in shock, “You assaulted me!” That lived among his most shameful memories. But then there’d come the time when he got a bit rough with Linda—the first day she followed him to the pool. He’d turned on her in genuine anger, pinned her against a wall and told her to leave him the fuck alone.
And she’d made a game of it.
It didn’t feel quite right. Sex shouldn’t be a game. But it certainly was an eye-opener.
Trying to trap her still-damp limbs, Jack forgot everything except the desire to overpower her and screw her brains out.
All at once she grabbed his hips and pulled him in. He pounded away as violently as he needed to, holding nothing back, and it was absolutely terrific until, as Linda climaxed, she cried out, “Stephen, oh God, Stephen …”
Spent, they lay side by side on their backs.
“That was amazing,” Jack said. “Well, apart from the bit where you called me by your husband’s name. Thank you, anyway.” He dropped a kiss on her shoulder. Now that it was over, he felt tender towards her.
But Linda did not want his tenderness. She curled up with her back to him and sobbed silently. Jack rose and put his clothes on.
What could he say to make her feel better about a husband and son left on Earth, who might be dead, who she was unlikely to ever see again? The most he could do was take her mind off it for a little while. And even then—Stephen, oh God, Stephen.
Killshot: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 4) Page 13