Colin and Pete walked back to the bunker, stumbling with tiredness. Jack turned off to the smaller roofed crater that housed the thorium reactor.
“Powdered phosphorus,” he said to Skyler, “aluminum powder. Water. We’ll need a LOX cylinder out of a suit for a pressure source.”
“I’m not walking across freaking Shackleton Crater,” Skyler said, propped against the side of the thorium reactor. This was his realm. Wearing his rriksti spacesuit, he looked at home amid the tangle of pipes and heat exchangers. A haze of silver-black dust hung in the vacuum, twinkling to the vibrations of the machinery. “We’ll have to take my rover; go the long way round.”
“All right,” Jack said. “I told the lads tomorrow night.”
“Tomorrow night?”
“What’s the point of waiting?”
Skyler hesitated. “What are we going to tell Alexei and Giles?”
“Nothing!” The question surprised Jack. His own response surprised him more. But after a moment’s reflection, he knew it was the right one. “Alexei’s had the bone tranfusions. Right? Giles is getting them soon.”
Skyler nodded.
“I don’t like it either, but we can’t expect them to come with us. And it’ll be safer for them if they don’t know anything.” Jack got up to leave. “See if you can raise your brother on the radio tonight. Ask him if that shuttle’s still there. It doesn’t matter particularly if it’s not. We’ll just wait for the next one to come along.”
He’d warned Skyler not to say anything to Alexei and Giles, but he himself planned to share their plans with someone else: Linda. He told himself that it wasn’t the same thing. Alexei and Giles had reconciled themselves to the Imfi conquest. Linda remained implacably opposed to it. And she, too, could pilot a spaceship. She would be a useful addition to the team.
Really, though, it was those pictures of her son that haunted him. He would be doing something good if he could reunite that boy with his mother. A check mark on the right side of his ledger.
The grimness of the sewage plant barely registered as he arrived for what would be his last shift. His mind seethed with plans for the engine ignition hack. He nodded to Siftik, the gloomy rriksti who shared the first half of his shift this week.
Checking the interior atmospheric sensor readouts, he discovered a methane buildup in Digester One, which served the rriksti side of the wall. “Better flame that off,” he murmured. Siftik could have done it, but it was no mystery why he hadn’t. Who wants to wade inside a tank of decomposing sewage, breathing oxygen through a mask because the O2 is so low you’d asphyxiate without it, with filth slopping over the tops of your boots, to adjust the outflow valve on the pipe leading to the flame arrestor?
Not a rriksti, obviously.
When he was done, Jack sat down to work his shit-caked waders off. He put his headset on. “What did you do on Imf, Siftik?”
“I was a crop geneticist,” Siftik said, and proceeded to give the longest speech Jack had ever heard from him. “Our traditional farming methods were not adequate to support the population of the Darkside. By genetically engineering crops from the twilight zone, we doubled and tripled yields, year after year. Our arcologies became entirely self-sufficient. One arcology typically had a population of a million or so; some were as large as five hundred million. Their inhabitants never saw the sky, let alone the sun.”
Jack thought this over. “Sounds like a shit life.”
“It was.”
And now the rriksti were planning to replicate their shitty, crop-engineering, arcology-building civilization on Earth. Jack silently nursed the thought of those nuclear submarines at Clyde.
He was running lunar gravel through the grinder, ensuring the particles got rounded down small enough to pass through the bodies of the worms, preparing to mix a new batch of soil he would never spread on the fields, when Koichi Masuoka strode into the sewage plant.
Koichi had lately taken to wearing a paramilitary uniform of his own design. Baggy orange trousers and high boots gave the impression that he was roleplaying some private fantasy—the Imfi conquest meets the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Jack always smiled when he saw it, although he suspected Koichi was having psychological issues.
Koichi did not smile. “There he is,” he said to Linda, who had entered after him.
It wasn’t time for Linda’s shift yet. Jack stood up, confused and alarmed. Had they discovered his theft of aluminum powder? Or the LOX canister? Surely one of the other guys hadn’t squealed? Why was Linda here? He had not said a word to her yet—
“You thought you could get away with it, didn’t you?” Linda raged at him. “You think you’re invulnerable or something, don’t you, Jack Kildare? Wro-ong!”
“What’s happened?” Jack said.
Koichi gestured to the enforcers who had come in behind him. Two aimed their shotguns at Jack. The other two grabbed his arms. Handcuffs snapped onto his wrists.
“Jack Kildare, CELL citizen number 936,” Koichi said, “you are under arrest for assault and rape.”
CHAPTER 24
“I didn’t rape her,” Jack said. “Isn’t that obvious?”
He realized that he sounded just like every sleazebag ever accused of rape. This transcended any nightmare scenario he’d imagined. In some ways, it would have been less awful to be accused of murder.
He stood in James Coetzee’s office in the operations section, still in handcuffs. Coetzee sat behind his desk. He had bags under his eyes. But the eyes themselves glowed with malicious pleasure. He had finally achieved his goal of humiliating Jack.
“Do you also deny assaulting her?”
“Of course I deny it!”
“That’s interesting,” Coetzee said. “This office keeps full comms records. We have evidence of the assault on file.”
Jack hadn’t known that CELL had access to the comms chip audio logs. He had thought only Keelraiser did. Regardless, there couldn’t be any evidence of an assault, because there hadn’t been an assault, unless they were talking about that time he pushed Linda against a wall three months ago, in which case why wait until now …
Linda’s voice issued from one of the computers on Coetzee’s desk. “No. Stop. Please,” she sobbed. “Ow. That hurts!”
Jack had heard those very words in real life a few days ago, in the darkness of the junk room, while Linda pretended to push his fingers away from her swollen, aroused clitoris.
“Well?” Coetzee said.
“It was a game,” Jack said weakly.
“Some game.” Coetzee spun a monitor around. It displayed a close-up of Linda’s wrists, with the purple imprints of Jack’s thumbs on them. There were other pictures, too. Jack had not been aware of leaving bruises on Linda’s buttocks and thighs, but there they were in technicolor. He felt like the lowest piece of filth that ever pretended to be a man.
“That’s enough to convict you of assault,” Coetzee said. “As for the rape charge, Ms. Moskowitz consented to an examination when she reported the rape, so we’ve got DNA proof there. Do you still want to deny the charges?”
“Yes, I do deny them,” Jack muttered. He could not bring himself to admit to something he hadn’t done … but he had done it … but it hadn’t been assault and rape. She’d wanted it as much as he did, and afterwards they’d looked at pictures of her son together.
“Are you stupid as well?” Coetzee said. “We’ll destroy you with the evidence at trial.”
Jack raised his head. “Is there actually a functioning justice system in this place?”
“Of course there is. You’ll have the chance to defend yourself in front of a jury of your peers.”
Jack had thought everything got settled by reference to the ever-growing tome of rules and guidelines, or else by the enforcers, Krijistal style. But evidently the Steering Group considered it important to make a show of Earth-style justice when it came to serious offenses.
The Steering Group …
“If I’m going
to have a trial, I’d like an advocate. You do allow for that? I’d like to talk to Alexei.”
Koichi hit Jack in the mouth. “You mean Sir Ivanov,” he said.
*
Alexei swept into the office in his new robe, a sort of toga over a split skirt, patterned in vivid reds and blues that brought Russia to mind. Unlike the rest of the Steering Group, who would never look like anything other than nerds who’d strayed onto the path of neo-feudalism, Alexei actually did look like a sir. Jack could not meet his gaze.
After a brief, snarling exchange with Coetzee, Alexei signed something and beckoned Jack to follow him. Two of Koichi’s enforcers brought up the rear. The enforcers stopped at the sandwich wall. Alexei strode on, through the autorip that led into X-ray country.
“You’re in my custody,” he said over his shoulder to Jack. “I’m taking you to my house. If you screw me over, I’ll kill you.”
“House?”
“Apartment. Whatever.”
Jack had not been aware that Alexei lived in X-ray country. “How are you handling the rads?” he said, as they walked through the steamy dimness. Rriksti brushed past, their bare feet quietly scuffing on the metal floor. It was so silent here. No sound but the gurgling of pipes, the whirr of fans, and the background hum of machinery … including an industrial-scale X-ray generator.
“My wife is a fifth-level lay cleric, idiot,” Alexei said. Jack bit back another question: wife? When had that happened? “She’s at work at the moment, thank fuck. Here we are.”
Jack had never ventured into the residential areas of X-ray country before. The corridor had gutters on either side, musical with running water. Vines grew up the walls, supported by brackets in the shape of Imfi animals. Little bridges led to front doors, many of which stood open. Rriksti peeped out, wide-eyed. Jack smelt microwaved bugs and suizh toast. He remembered the village in the SoD’s main hab. This was what it had been trying to be.
He followed Alexei into a large, messy room. Alexei closed the door and turned up the lighting to the level of the weak incandescent bulbs that had been common thirty years ago in both England and Russia, an ambiance comfortable for both men.
“Radio-proof,” he said, indicating the sea-green walls. He flopped on a settee littered with stained white cloths. “So?”
“It would be easier to explain if I wasn’t handcuffed.” Although this made no logical sense, it was true.
“Christ, Jack. I don’t know what I should do,” Alexei said, but he dug a master key out of a drawer and opened the handcuffs. “You’re lucky I have this. I try to stay one step behind them. Staying ahead of them is impossible. They always think of something worse. So what happened?”
Jack rubbed his wrists with fingers that had turned into numb logs of flesh. “It was consensual. That’s all I can say. It was not assault, it was not rape. She’s trying to fuck me over.”
“What about the evidence? Is that fake?”
“No, it’s not fake!” Jack shouted.
Alexei grimaced in disgust. It was fleeting, but Jack caught it.
“You of all people should understand! You and Kate used to go at it like wild animals—”
“No, I haven’t forgotten that! Don’t you understand? I’m disgusted with myself when I remember that! I’m trying to get it right this time.”
“Was it that bad with Kate?” Jack said, momentarily forgetting his own troubles.
“Obviously it was. She died.”
“Rest in peace.”
“And I never treated her the way she deserved. I have a theory how these things happen, but it’s no excuse.”
“Go on. What’s your theory?”
“Space is boring.”
Jack waited. “That’s it?”
“Yes, that’s it. Space is boring. So we make our own entertainment. For better or for worse.”
Jack thought that in that case, his entire adult life had been boring. Then he thought of Keelraiser. Then he pushed Keelraiser out of his mind. “Right,” he said. “That makes sense. Sort of.”
“So is that what happened?”
“What happened is I slept with her—”
“Jack.”
“What?”
“You are a complete, fucking, idiot.” Alexei emphasized each word by punching his fist into his palm. “Linda? You slept with Linda Moskowitz?”
Jack sat down, as heavily as you could on the moon, on a wrong-shaped rriksti chair. “What can I say? Working at the sewage plant is boring.”
Alexei shook his head despairingly. “It could be worse.”
“Oh, I know.”
“You could be stabbed.”
Jack froze. Then he ventured, “Stabbed? Over in a second. Crucifixion takes hours! It’s a slow, horrible death!”
“But at least it gets you out in the open air,” Alexei said. He laughed his huge honking laugh. “I always liked Monty Python better than Spaceballs.”
“Same here.”
“I am watching all the movies with Nene.”
“Does she get it?”
“She thinks the Holy Grail is very funny. It reminds her of the Temple on Imf.” Alexei’s smile faded. He leaned forward. “Listen, Jack. If we’re going to get you out of this, there is one question that needs to be answered. Why did Linda Moskowitz sleep with you?”
“Are you blind? Check out my delts.”
“I’m serious. Why?”
Jack was about to give another jokey answer when the truth suddenly hit him like a dustbin lid to the head. “Christ! I know why she did it!” He groaned, feeling like a complete fucking idiot, just as Alexei had said. “She told me why. She said we needed to get Siftik out of the way. But he’s in a state of clinical bloody depression on account of not being able to do crop engineering or something. He wouldn’t notice if the place was burning down around his ears. It was me she needed to get out of the way. And now she’s done it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She’s going to pump methane into X-ray country. The same thing they did on the SoD, only with gas. One spark in the atmosphere and we all die.”
Alexei started to his feet.
“It only takes six percent and there was already a methane buildup when I came on shift. She’s already started …”
*
“Wait for me here.” Alexei vanished so fast he practically made a sonic boom.
Left alone, Jack sniffed the air coming from the vents. Pointless—methane had no odor. He paced the apartment.
He was supposed to be on his way to the Moon Express right now.
The shock of being arrested had pushed their plan onto the back burner of his mind, but now anxiety turned up the heat again.
To think he’d been going to ask Linda to go with them!
Thank God he hadn’t had a chance to say anything to her yet.
There was no reason to think they’d been found out. In fact, this panic could help to cover up their getaway.
If he could, in fact, get away …
He walked to the wall where the front door had been. It did not open. He slapped it lightly in frustration.
It opened.
He looked out at the garden corridor.
Two rriksti sat on the doorstep opposite, gazing at a hexagonal computer screen, their hair dancing. Further along the corridor, another rriksti deadheaded the fish-belly-pale flowering vines over its front door. Jack thought of his mother pruning her azaleas in Nuneaton, Warwickshire. This was suburbia, Darkside edition.
Alexei hadn’t locked him into the apartment.
Had just trusted in Jack’s honor to keep him from walking away.
Dammit, dammit, dammit.
Standing on the doorstep, he fished his headset out of his pocket. The twittering, gargling music of Rristigul came over the bio-radio frequencies. No one sounded alarmed. If there was methane in the atmosphere, it wasn’t bad enough for Alexei to have issued a general alert. Or maybe it was so bad that there was no point in issuing an ale
rt.
How would they deal with it? They’d have to run a pipe out of the hab, into the evening shadows, where the methane could get cold enough to liquefy out of the air.
Irresolute, Jack went back into the apartment. The bed, sofa, and table, padded with vividly patterned textiles, created a homey ambiance. Alexei and Nene had accumulated a lot of paraphernalia. A mobile of stars cut from sheet metal flashed and sparkled below the ceiling vent. There was a sort of cage in one corner, with blankets inside. A shelf high on one wall displayed two decorative glass cubes with bits of eggshell embedded in them. There was a kitchenette. Microwave, mini-refrigerator. The fridge held slabs of pressed suizh, brine-pickled mirip leaves, and cold rabbit cutlets. Jack helped himself to a couple of those and washed them down with carrot juice.
He’d been going to meet Harry at the end of his shift. They would walk over to the thorium reactor, where Jack had already stashed the stuff he would need to bypass the TEB engine ignition system. Skyler would be there waiting for them. They’d take the rover the long way around the crater, meet Colin and Pete at the Moon Express. Then up, up, and away.
His shift had ended an hour and a quarter ago.
Would they go without him?
They couldn’t. No one else could fly the damn Moon Express.
They’d wait.
And lose this God-given chance to get away without being missed, while everyone was busy controlling the methane contamination.
He strode back to the door.
It opened before he could touch it.
Nene startled, her hands flying to her shoulders.
On each shoulder sat an astonishing little creature. No bigger than Jack’s hand, they looked like the troll dolls that had briefly been a craze when he was a kid. But they had long spindly limbs.
Their upswept black hair was bio-antennas.
They gripped Nene’s shoulders with perfectly formed seven-fingered hands the size of Jack’s thumbnail.
“Oh, just look at you,” Jack whispered. Completely enthralled, he stretched out a forefinger to the one on Nene’s left shoulder.
Killshot: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 4) Page 17