“Skyl’. ‘Ear me?”
“You can talk?” Skyler gasped.
“‘Een ‘acticin’.” The rriksti lips clumsily formed the words, each short phrase pushed out on a gust of smelly breath. “‘Or ‘Annah. Wanted sur’rise ‘er.”
I fuck her until she screams …
“You need to work on those plosive consonants.”
“Louder. My ears no ‘ood. ‘On’ worry. ‘Ese ‘astards can’t ‘ear.”
“OK,” Skyler shouted. “That’s interesting. So what?”
“Oo NXC. America. Oo know any of ‘ese freedom fighters?”
*
Jack slipped away while the Lightsider soldiers were interrogating Keelraiser. They had been instructed to treat the prisoners as animals, and that’s exactly what they were doing. What did they care where a small, hairy animal like Jack went? After all, he couldn’t go far.
He climbed in a mental fog of rage and hopelessness through the hab module formerly used as a dorm for Sky Station’s crew. Swinging from handhold to handhold, he felt like a monkey. He was a monkey. A mere evolved ape. Fitted for survival in Earth’s biosphere. Not for anyhing else.
What had possessed humanity to imagine we could reach the stars?
Apes can’t fly.
Birds can fly.
No wonder the rriksti are winning.
In a corner of the dorm, Jack found what he was looking for: a locker with a fat red cross on it. He ransacked it, tossing some items to the distant floor, pocketing others. Monkey make mess. Oop, oop, oop.
He hoisted himself into the factory module adjoining the hab. The only light came, dimly, from the open pressure door behind him. Inoperable fab equipment gleamed in the dusk.
A putrid reek tainted the air. Fermented urine, feces, rotten meat, and blood all mixed up together. That was how it smelled when someone got gut-shot. Jack gagged, covering his mouth.
Hobo, the pilot of the Dealbreaker, had bled out in vacuum.
Jack had retrieved his body and stashed it in here, moments before the Krijistal invaded the station.
He’d stuffed the body underneath an electrophoresis distillation unit on the Earthwards side of the module, where it would be hidden from a casual inspection. He pulled it out, smearing bile and blood across the floor. Crouching, he rolled Hobo onto his front. He found the doffing patch on the life-support backpack and held it down until the suit flowed away from the dead flesh. The backpack burped, squeezing out vile fluids.
Jack pushed Hobo’s bio-antennas away from his shoulders. Limp and cool, they felt like kelp washed up on a beach.
So you went to school with Keelraiser, huh?
Face down, in the gloom, Hobo could have been Keelraiser. Same jet-black bio-antennas. Same smallish build.
A decent sort. Very conventional.
How conventional?
This conventional: Hobo had worn his service swords into combat, under his suit, where he couldn’t even get at them. Just for the principle of the thing. Because he was a Krijistal officer.
The stiletto-style blades nestled along his spine in sheaths attached to a featherweight harness, identical to the one Keelraiser had.
Jack drew one of them.
The edge, just a few tungsten atoms wide, caught a bio-antenna and sheared it off. Jack had exerted no pressure at all.
Goddamn, these things are sharp.
Jack touched the scar on his cheek. It had been left by a sword just like this. Well, not so much by the sword as by Skyler’s hamfisted stitching job.
One hard pull and it’s over.
Banishing second thoughts, he grabbed a handful of bio-antennas, planted a knee on Hobo’s back, and set the sword against the base of the rriksti’s neck.
Blood flowed sluggishly as Jack dragged the blade through skin, muscle, and cartilage. The sword bounced off bone. He sawed at the spinal column, retching. The act of butchery nauseated him. But now he’d started he had to finish it.
The vertebrae parted with a wet pop. Jack wrenched the head sideways at right angles to the neck. The exposed spinal column gleamed black in the dim light. Rriksti bones were not white. They were charcoal-colored.
He couldn’t see shit in here. Didn’t even know what he was looking for.
It turned out to be obvious.
A thin white wafer, adhering to the topmost vertebra.
He dug it out with the point of Hobo’s sword, careful not to damage it.
Nanofilaments, too thin to see, retracted into the package as he pulled it free, brushing his fingers like invisible fur.
Jack held the chip up to the light. It reminded him of a Communion wafer from childhood Masses. Father Cullen used to break them into slivers like this when there weren’t enough to go around.
If he put it down he’d lose it.
He held it in his teeth, tasting Hobo’s blood.
Raised the knife and cut a shallow gash in his own scalp, near the top of his head.
Holy fuck that hurts.
Oh God.
Oh Jesus.
His own blood sheeted into his eyes. Swearing, gasping, he jerked up the skin flap on his scalp and shoved the chip in, as deep as it would go.
Then the betadine wipes.
Antibiotic ointment.
Butterfly bandages.
The only thing missing from Sky Station’s first aid kit had been painkillers. Of course.
Jesus that fucking hurts.
His hands shook so much he couldn’t apply the bandages properly. They didn’t stick, anyway, on account of his hair. If he were doing this correctly, he’d have shaved the area, but he needed the hair to hide the wound.
Hurts.
Head feels … funny …
Wrong ...
Jack puked.
Vomit drooling from his mouth, he crawled back to the door of the factory module. He pitched over the lip of the pressure door and fell to the Earthwards end of the hab module, like a bird that couldn’t fly.
Lying on the end wall, he heard thumps and crashes from the command module. An indistinct, panicky shout—Coetzee.
Then nothing.
*
Vivid dreams.
Eight years old, alone in his room. Overhead, his model spaceships hung on strings beneath constellations of glow-in-the-dark stars. Dad had helped him glue wee LEDs to them, powered by watch batteries. Coruscant, his fleet of space shuttles and TIE fighters flew through the winter dusk on some ill-defined but glorious mission, and Jack was blissfully content.
Fifteen or sixteen. Alone in his room, again. Wanking. Of course. Solitude was no longer contentment; it was frustration. The little dark-haired girl from Form 2 smiled in his mind, but it was the spaceships, now dusty, that watched him come into a fistful of tissues.
Nineteen. Lying face down on a grotty futon. What’s wrong? Life. The door bursts open. There’s only one person who kicks doors open instead of knocking on them. Meeks. “You’re coming for a jar,” he announces. Jack rolls off the futon. Life is suddenly good again. There’s no problem that can’t be solved down the pub …
… but before he can stand up, he crumples. Dizzy. Heaving. The room goes dark.
“Hold still.”
Someone’s wiping his mouth.
“Drink this.”
Salty-sweet liquid trickles between his lips, takes away the taste of bile and blood.
That’s how it smells when someone gets gut-shot.
He wasn’t supposed to find that out for years and years yet.
“Sssh.”
What second-hand futon ever smelt like the seashore? Someone’s spooning him, curled around his back. Chest to spine, belly to kidneys, groin to arse, legs entwined, stuck together all the way to the toes. A fast heartbeat. A hand splayed on his stomach.
“If only I could help.”
You are helping. You’re nice and warm. Don’t go away. My head’s killing me.
“You’ve got a blood infection. Your temperature is very high. The Liberator’
s Shiplord is stalking wild animals in Tanzania. She left a hand of soldiers here to guard us. I killed them. I killed them, and now there is no one here who can help you.”
None of this really rings a bell.
“I can try.”
Who’s that? Don’t like that voice. Can’t remember why, though.
“Please. Let me try.”
“You are just a human.”
“Not anymore.”
“Oh … try, then.”
A hand on his forehead. This one’s smaller, cooler.
Lovely and cool.
Ahhh.
The filthy rotten pain ebbs. It doesn’t go away, but it gets bearable.
Sleep.
This time, there are no dreams.
*
Jack.
“Huh?”
Jack. Lividdr ag estambibul. Tzh? Sharn?
“What?”
Suddenly alert, Jack opened his eyes. The darkness coruscated, like the ceiling of his childhood bedroom. Golden squiggles and lagoon-colored graphs danced, staying in his field of vision when he turned his head. He sat up, catching his breath in wonder.
He scarcely noticed that his head no longer hurt.
Jack! The voice spoke in his mind, and new skeins of information sprawled across his vision.
“Who are you?”
Svamblizat. Ifl, LIVIDDR. Tzh? Sharn? Zyghret?
Things started to click. That graph over there could only be a radar plot. And next to it, that’d be the altimeter. The numbers were just squiggles, but there were the altitude acceleration and rate scales, and the radar altimeter …
An entire virtual cockpit.
All at once he got it. These were readouts from the Dealbreaker.
His new ship.
“Jesus Christ!” he shouted exultantly. “It worked!”
He was sitting on a carpet of unzipped sleeping bags. A Sky Station hab module stretched above him. A hot, stale miasma of human and rriksti funk filled the air. Next to him, Keelraiser sat up, hollow-eyed in the darkness. When Jack looked at him, the graphs and notifications collapsed into an unobtrusive HUD bar. The chip could tell when he was focusing his gaze on something else. It was slick as hell. This is the future, baby.
He’d woken up next to Keelraiser. A confusing pang of shame stabbed him. But the miracle of the Dealbreaker allowed him to ignore it. Keelraiser of all people should be able to understand how fantastic this was. “The Dealbreaker is talking to me! Unfortunately it only speaks Rristigul. I don’t have a clue what it’s saying, but the instrumentation looks fairly self-explanatory. I’ll just need to get a feel for the base 14 notation system, or maybe I can program it to count in base 10. Then I’ll able to fly it, no problem.”
“It took Hannah a year to figure out how to interface with the Lightbringer,” Keelraiser said.
“The Lightbringer’s a flying city, and Hannah is an engineer, not an astronaut. The Dealbreaker is just a shuttle, and I’m a pilot. This is the same shit I’ve been doing for twenty years.” Jack gloated over the readouts, mentally labelling each one based on what it looked like and where it was in relation to his visual memory of the Cloudeater’s cockpit. His labels appeared in block capitals where he wanted them. “I knew it would work.”
“You did not know it would work. You gambled with your life, hoping it would work.”
“You got me through it, anyway.”
Keelraiser shrugged. “You nearly died. If not for Coetzee, you probably wouldn’t have made it.”
“Coetzee?”
“He performed extroversion on you.”
“He did what?”
“Unforeseen consequences of messing around with programmable skin grafts. Cleanmay will be over the moon when he hears about it. Of course, this proves that extroversion is epigenetic, rather than a gift of Ystyggr. What a surprise.” Keelraiser stood up and kicked through the tangle of sleeping bags, looking for something.
Jack suddenly realized he wasn’t wearing his headset. He brushed his head with his fingers, found nothing but a sore place. “I can hear you. How?”
“The implant doubles as a comms chip. It has a very limited wireless range, but the Dealbreaker is sitting on the ceiling. If you want to communicate with it from further away, you’ll need to piggyback on a stronger transmitter.”
Jack pinched his lips shut and concentrated on speaking without making a sound. “Testing. Check one, check two.”
“I can hear you perfectly,” Keelraiser said.
“Is this what it’s like?”
“What what is like?”
“Being you.”
Keelraiser tossed a slimline backpack at him. His suit. “Yes, now you know what it’s like to have self-inflicted brain damage.” He slipped the loops of his own suit backpack over his shoulders.
“Self-inflicted brain damage,” Jack echoed. It seemed pretty wonderful to him.
“There are side effects,” Keelraiser said darkly.
“Like what?”
“You’ll find out.” When Jack pressed for more details, Keelraiser said. “Remember you no longer have any expectation of privacy. That’s one of them.”
In the command module they found Coetzee monitoring the radio. “She’s on her way to Brussels.”
“Right,” Jack said, compartmentalizing the friction with Keelraiser. “Can I have the short version?”
Keelraiser said, “The Shiplord of the Liberator has four hands of shuttles on the surface now. They have captured and killed more animals in the last week than your people manage in a decade. She’s announced her intention to build a comprehensive DNA database of Earth’s biome.”
“She’s been capturing and killing people, too,” Coetzee said. Stubbled, in underpants and a rriksti-size tank top, he looked more like a homeless man than the 21st century’s most successful entrepreneur.
“Yes,” Keelraiser said. “Nothing is as dangerous as the quest for knowledge. That’s why we went to war with the Lightsiders in the first place. Anyway, James, see if you can get her HQ staff on the radio.”
“Will do.” Coetzee punched buttons. To Jack, he said, “Good to see you’re feeling better.”
Sensitive to any hint of condescension, Jack stiffly thanked him for his help.
Coetzee shrugged. “You can owe me. Or not. Who’s keeping track?” He seemed like a different version of himself: lower-key, the smug arrogance pared away. Jack realized he wasn’t going to be able to hate him anymore. That actually came as a relief. They were just two humans now, in the deepest of deep shit.
Coetzee raised someone on the radio, and Keelraiser spoke to them in Rristigul.
Apart from the background hum of systems, Sky Station was oppressively quiet. Jack glanced up and down the command module, wondering where their Lightsider guards had gone. He had a dreamlike memory of Keelraiser saying he had killed them. He was about to ask Coetzee what had happened when Coetzee said, “It’s interesting how self-mutilation is the first step to getting anywhere with these people.”
Jack did not equate what he had done with what Coetzee had had done to himself. Peaceably, he said, “Yeah, it’s desperate, isn’t it?”
“How’s it going with the Dealbreaker?”
“So far, so good. You know what they say: the computer flies the ship, and the pilot is just there to take the abuse.”
“Has it told you anything in particular?”
“It may well have done, but it doesn’t speak English.”
“Did it say anything about a lividdr?”
“I think it did, actually. Do you know what that means?”
Keelraiser got off the radio. He reached a doublejointed arm behind his back and donned his suit. “Lividdr means enemy or ally, depending. In this case it means the Homemaker.”
Coetzee asked tensely, “How long until it gets here?”
Jack did the sums. He had been out of it for a week. The Homemaker had been due to arrive in a week.
“Six hours and fourteen minutes.”
Keelraiser levelled a stare at Jack. “You’re going to have a very steep learning curve.”
CHAPTER 38
“Wait,” Jack said. As urgent as the situation was, he needed some answers. “What happened to the guards? The Lightsiders the Shiplord left here to make sure we didn’t get up to any mischief. Where’d they go?”
“I killed them,” Keelraiser said flatly.
“And then he called the Liberator’s Shiplord, and told her what he’d done!” Coetzee said. This display of rriksti nerve clearly impressed him. What impressed Jack was the fact that Keelraiser had managed to get the drop on seven armed Lightsiders. How had he done that?
Keelraiser said, “Both Lightsiders and Darksiders subscribe to a philosophy I can best describe as ‘testing to destruction.’ By leaving me here with those guards, the Shiplord offered me the opportunity to take an aptitude test. I passed.”
“Aptitude for what?” Jack said.
“Killing, obviously.” Keelraiser’s hair tossed. “The other thing you should know is that she’s not on the best of terms with the Homemaker’s Shiplord. It would suit her very well, in fact, if the Homemaker ceased to exist.”
Jack saw it. “And that’s our job.”
“My job.”
“Our job. We’re coming with you.”
Coetzee seconded this enthusiastically. “I want to see inside one of these ships.”
Jack frowned. “See inside it? No need for that. We’ll recover that ICBM, fly it close to the Homemaker, and take them out Star Wars style.”
“No,” Keelraiser said. “We’re doing it my way.”
Jack stared at him, appalled. He should have remembered the way Keelraiser hung onto supposedly good ideas, refusing to let go of them even as they fell apart under the weight of events.
“You don’t have to come, Jack,” Coetzee said. “One human would be enough, right, Keelraiser?”
Keelraiser nodded. “As a matter of fact, I’d prefer you to stay here, Jack. You need time to familiarize yourself with the Dealbreaker.”
Jack gritted his teeth. If he refused to go along with Keelraiser’s plan, Keelraiser and Coetzee would simply go without him.
The only thing worse than deliberately getting captured by the Homemaker would be sitting alone on Sky Station, waiting to die.
Killshot: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 4) Page 26