Fuck you, too, Homemaker.
He tossed the blaster back into the locker. “Right, let’s go. Looks like the welcome committee is getting impatient.”
*
Rriksti seized them roughly as soon as they exited the airlock. Blows fell on Jack’s head and shoulders. He crooked his arms over his head, too late to block a punch that landed on the still-tender gash on his scalp. He mashed his lips together on a scream. Even as tears of pain blurred his eyes, he realized the rriksti weren’t really hitting to injure. This was their way of saying hello. Clout ‘em and see if they yell.
When everyone in the welcome committee had got in their punches, they kicked and flung Jack and Coetzee across the dock. While spinning through the air, Jack glimpsed rriksti swarming around the Dealbreaker’s airlock. He would soon find out if his deception with the corpse held up.
He hurtled through an autorip and bounced off the steel wall of an airlock chamber. Powerful jets of air blasted from the ceiling. The chamber pressurized, captives and captors spilled out into a corridor that seemed to be carved out of a sapphire the size of a subway tunnel. Jack wouldn’t be surprised if it was. His captors snagged him out of the air and spun him right way up for the local orientation.
A crowd of soldiers jammed the corridor. They all wore the familiar orange uniforms. This ship, at any rate, was still under Darkside management. The soldiers stared at the two humans with the red-rimmed, unblinking eyes of vultures. They’d been in cryosleep for almost 70 years. This would be their first sight of the species they had come to exterminate. They looked as if they would like to get started right now.
A rriksti dragged Jack’s hands behind his back and pressed the doffing patch on his backpack. His suit flowed away, leaving him feeling as if he were wearing a wet towel. He was actually naked, but heat and moisture saturated the air. The musky seaside reek of Imf cloyed his nostrils. Never had it smelled less sexy.
Coetzee, also naked, hung in the grip of an enormous rriksti nearby. Jack picked Keelraiser’s voice out of the clamor of Rristigul, turned his head to look for him—and caught himself. Idiot. It would be fatal to let them see that he could hear the bio-radio frequencies.
Keelraiser had showed them how to disable automatic radio-frequency transmission of their voices—a function built into the CELL comms implants, which the rriksti had not previously shared with the humans. Jack’s implant came with the same function. The drawback was that turning it off also disconnected him from the Dealbreaker. Already, he had got so used to the shuttle’s presence in his head that its absence bothered him.
Heart going like a kettle-drum, he glared at the crowd of gawpers.
Go on, yuk it up, guys.
However, none of the rriksti laughed or pointed. That was probably a bad sign. You don’t laugh at animals, when they haven’t done anything funny.
A slender, pewter-haired rriksti drifted out of the crowd. It tossed Jack and Coetzee orange uniform shorts. “Put these on. We do not wish to look at your repulsive bodies,” it said in a flat mechanical voice.
Jack heard the words three times at once: the mechanical voice in his ears, the same voice inside his head, and a normal, deep rriksti voice speaking Rristigul.
Released to put the shorts on, he spotted a scarab-like device stuck to the rriksti’s temple. The device had a little speaker. Instead of going to the trouble of learning English, the rriksti on the Homemaker had just built themselves the Imfi equivalent of Google Translate.
The rriksti, and the device on its temple, said, “I am on the Shiplord’s staff. My rank corresponds to colonel. I am tasked with dealing with you.”
Jack cleared his throat. “Good for you.”
“You are specimens of Homo sapiens. Is this correct?”
“Yes.”
“The pilot of your shuttle is dead. How did he get that way?”
Jack breathed a inwards sigh of relief. If it was unthinkable that humans should possess radio-speech implants, it was clearly even more unthinkable that a human could have flown the Dealbreaker here. A rriksti had been found in the cockpit, so he must have been the pilot. It was just happenstance that he had been shot straight through the top of the spinal column, obliterating any proof that he had or had not had a pilot’s implant.
“I shot him,” Jack said. “Any more questions? Because if not, I’ve got some for you.”
The colonel’s hair twitched irritably. “Why did you shoot him?”
“Why are you invading our planet?”
“Shut up,” the colonel said, and hit Jack in the mouth.
OK. Jack licked his teeth, making sure they were all still there. These guys plainly did not appreciate questions from the peanut gallery. His role was to answer. “When you hit us, we hit back,” he said, shrugging as best he could with his arms held behind his back.
The colonel opened his / her mouth in amusement. “You’ve been learning the way of the Temple.”
“Monkey see, monkey do,” Jack said
While this was going on, a hubbub had broken out around Coetzee. It was killing Jack to pretend he couldn’t hear it. But when Coetzee himself cried out, Jack’s head whipped around. The colonel slapped his face back to where it had been, but he’d seen a rriksti wrenching Coetzee’s left wrist over his head, displaying his seven-fingered hand for all to see.
Shit.
If technology-sharing was verboten, how much more so biology-sharing?
However, at the moment, it looked as if Coetzee’s augmented anatomy might have bought them an extended lease on life. The staff colonel, who had been thoughtfully fingering his or her sidearm, barked a command. The whole crowd jostled into motion along the sapphire corridor.
Jack tried to get a look behind them. Where was Keelraiser?
So far, as dicey as it looked, everything was going according to plan. Keelraiser would get credit for presenting specimens of Homo sapiens to the Homemaker. The Darksiders might lack the voracious scientific curiosity of the Lightsiders, but they were curious enough in their own way. While they poked at the humans, Keelraiser would try to track down some old friends on board he had vaguely alluded to.
At that point the ‘plan’ vanished into a mist of uncertainty. In Jack’s opinion, Keelraiser would have to get very lucky to successfully sabotage the Homemaker. Their brutal reception made the odds look even worse. There was no way Jack could see these suspicious bastards letting Keelraiser roam about the ship unsupervised, even if he had gone to the top Krijistal academy and once bought a car from the chief intelligence officer’s half-brother, or whatever.
But it was out of Jack’s hands now.
He and Coetzee just had to stay alive …
… until Keelraiser reached the Homemaker’s muon cannons.
Or not.
CHAPTER 40
A train ran the length of the Homemaker’s keel. It reminded Jack of those trains you see in big airports, complete with clusters of people impatiently peering down the tracks. Its latticework tunnel ran in zero-gee through the centers of progressively smaller rotating wheels, even the smallest a kilometer across, their inner surfaces furred with the ashy and dark colors of Imfi vegetation. Jack was impressed despite himself by the scale of this farming operation. He remembered how the plants on board the SoD had bio-fluoresced after they absorbed UV light. He imagined switching on the lights in here, and then switching them off. It would be a stunning spectacle.
Coetzee’s eyes shone. “It’s an O’Neill cylinder!” For him, this must feel like a visit to the future he’d spent his life wishing into existence. CELL had been just one small step towards the orbital habitats he envisioned, which would have looked a lot like this. Jesus, now he was fawning on the colonel, asking questions about the farms. His eagerness recalled his reaction to the Cloudeater’s arrival at CELL last year. Then, Jack had despised him for it. Now, it looked like a sort of courage. All the same, Jack suspected Coetzee had not yet appreciated the likelihood that neither of them would ever leave t
he Homemaker again.
The train terminated at a row of hexagonal airlocks ranging from tanker-size to rriksti-size. It was chaos on the platform, phalanxes of Krijistal charging around, shoving onto the train. Amidst the clamor of radio-frequency voices, Jack felt a strong urge to call the Dealbreaker. He wanted to know if he was still in wireless range.
No. Don’t risk it yet.
The colonel got hold of Jack and Coetzee’s arms and wrestled them into one of the smaller airlocks.
The darkness of a starlit night enfolded them. Without warning, Jack’s feet thumped onto the floor.
They stood on what had to be the Homemaker’s bridge. Keelraiser had mentioned that the Lightbringer had artificial gravity for the VIPs, generated by mass attractors. So did the Homemaker. After his months in the rotating hab, Jack was fine, but Coetzee swayed on his feet.
Dozens of rriksti stood in groups, or whisked to and fro, looking busy. Some wore Krijistal uniform, others had on VIP robes. Bursts of laughter and jovial shouts rose out of a hum of radio-frequency cross-talk. Jack used to appreciate the restful silence of rriksti crowds. Now, with the pilot’s implant in his head, he knew it had been an illusion. This place was just as hectic and noisy as any human forward operating base.
That comparison seemed apt. Even though Jack didn’t speak Rristigul, the confident tones of the exchanges, and the outbursts of euphoric laughter, reminded him of the first days of his deployment to Iraq in 2003, when the allied forces were rolling Saddam’s army up like a carpet. That must be how the officers of the Homemaker felt now.
The colonel dragged them across a floor inlaid with mosaics. As everyone spotted the humans, the talk died down.
If this were a football field, they’d be standing at the kick-off line. But it felt less like a stadium than a cathedral. The ambiance of the high-arched ceiling filled with stars, and candle-like lights twinkling in chancels shooting off from the main bridge, culminated in the enormous piece of furniture that occupied the wall between the two biggest chancels. It looked like a combination of altar and juridical bench. Flunkeys sat at computers on a dais raised above the floor. Higher up, a single rriksti sprawled in a cavity lined with cushions, which Jack could only think of as a throne.
He suddenly flashed back on his disastrous testimony in front of Congress in 2012, when he had spoken out of turn and gotten himself fired from NASA.
The rriksti on the throne sat up. It spoke in Rristigul, and in English, on both the radio and acoustic frequencies.
“Ohhhh,” said the mechanical, translated voice, accompanied by a sweet alto line of Rristigul in Jack’s head. “Aren’t you cute. Here, boys! Here!”
Jack would have preferred another round of punches to this. That said, among the Krijistal, you could have violence and patronizing superiority in the space of five seconds. A kick from the colonel forced them to shamble towards the throne. Jack supported Coetzee, who was still having trouble with the gravity. They stood in front of the throne, Coetzee drooping, Jack defiantly staring up.
This Shiplord made a night and day contrast with the golden elegance of the Liberator’s Shiplord, and for that matter with the grave majesty of Eskitul, the Lightbringer’s late Shiplord. She—Jack assumed her sex, going on the general pattern—was small, black-haired, skinny even for a rriksti, swimming in the folds of her bright red costume. Her rather bulbous eyes sparkled with curiosity. She slipped off her throne and descended to the floor. She was scarcely taller than Jack.
“Aren’t you hairy,” she marvelled, and petted his head. Jack flinched. It was involuntary. He was afraid she might notice the cut on his scalp. Thank God anyway that his hair might be fast turning gray, but it showed no signs of thinning yet. The cut was not obvious unless you parted the hair and had a good look.
The Shiplord laughed. “Don’t you like that?” She ran a hand over his chest, down to his groin. Jack could happily have ripped the hand off. He stood at parade rest, glaring into the distance, modelling his posture on the stony demeanor of Colin McFarlane and Peter Hill, God rest them. The Shiplord snapped the elastic waistband of his shorts and peered inside, making salacious comments that provoked gales of laughter.
Just stay alive. Don’t react. Pretend this is happening to someone else. It did feel like it was happening to someone else. It went completely against the grain to stand there and let himself be poked and prodded like this. In fact, part of the reason Jack hated this plan was because it required him to play the passive victim. He had overcome his reservations, telling himself that was just selfish ego talking. But God, it was difficult.
The Shiplord tired of his lack of responsiveness and moved on to Coetzee. “Is this the one with the … ah. Ugh.”
She picked up Coetzee’s seven-fingered left hand as if it were a slug, and dropped it.
“That is an abomination. How did it happen? Strange choice of words. Who did this to you?”
Coetzee raised his head. “Shiplord—uh, is this the correct form of address?”
“It talks! I was starting to wonder if this device was working. Yes, I am Shiplord of the Homemaker. And you are a human. How did you end up with a rriksti hand on the end of your arm?”
“Shiplord,” Coetzee said. “I just want to say that the Imfi conquest is the best thing that’s ever happened to humanity. I see our future together as extending beyond this star system, beyond the Alpha Centauri system, perhaps to Sirius, and then onwards—”
The Shiplord slapped him. “Are you aware,” she said, “that both our star system and yours are presently moving through a higher-density cloud of interstellar hydrogen, compared to the local bubble? That our ramscoop techology, which depends on extracting hydrogen from the interstellar medium, is barely viable as it is, and will no longer work at all when we exit this cloud in another 10,000 Earth years?”
“By then we’ll have invented FTL,” Coetzee muttered.
“You say that with remarkable assurance. Nothing is assured in life except death.” The Shiplord spoke with such bitterness that Jack shivered, despite the heat.
“But together,” Coetzee said stubbornly, “we could conquer challenges that have defeated both of our species. Humans and rriksti each have unique strengths to bring to the table, and—”
Another slap. “Why am I bothering?” the Shiplord said to the bridge in general.
“Do it the honor of dispatching it, Shiplord,” said the staff colonel.
“That would probably be the kindest thing,” the Shiplord said. “It is is a walking atrocity.”
Coetzee, though pale, said, “I consider myself a human-rriksti hybrid. A work in progress, yes. But it is an honor to have taken humanity’s first small step into the future, which we will share, regardless of what happens in the near term. Technology is borderless, contagious, impossible to contain. The genie is out of the bottle …”
The key to James Coetzee’s pioneering achievements was that he just didn’t know when to stop. Twice slapped down, standing defenceless on the bridge of an alien spaceship, he still continued to drone on about his vision. Jack saw that the Shiplord was getting crosser and crosser. “For Christ’s sake, put a sock in it,” he muttered.
Too late.
The Shiplord drew a small blaster from the folds of her robe and shot Coetzee in the head.
Coetzee’s monotonous voice stopped. Bubbles of blood burst from his lips. He pitched forward. The colonel caught him and slung him upside-down over his / her shoulder.
It all happened so fast that Jack didn’t have time to react. He started forward and then caught himself. The colonel backed away and handed Coetzee’s corpse off to a subordinate.
“Take it away and dissect it,” the Shiplord said. ”Do separate genetic analyses of the hands and the body, and a comparative analysis of human DNA. Then destroy it. Ugh.”
Jack watched Coetzee’s corpse travel away, bumping on the back of a broad-shouldered rriksti. Dead eyes stared up at the stars Coetzee had longed to conquer. Despite never ha
ving got along with the man, Jack felt a stab of grief, which immediately congealed into hatred of all the rriksti around him, especially the Shiplord.
She turned back to him. “Well, I still have you, anyway. I think I’ll keep you. Tshaveg says she’ll get me some specimens from the surface, but that bitch is completely unreliable. Not that it really matters. We aren’t here to collect exotic pets.” Her dark eyes held something that looked like—could it be?—sorrow. Despite her bling and her imperious manner, this young female gave off the vibe of a homeless veteran. She had seen horrors. Abruptly, she said, “What do you think?”
Careful, Jack told himself. Wrong answer gets you an energy pulse in the head. “What do I think about what?” he stalled.
“Us. Conquering you.”
Jack hesitated. It suddenly seemed paramount to be true to himself. “I can’t say how my life would have gone if you hadn’t invaded us,” he said. “But I’ve got no regrets.”
The Shiplord spun her blaster in her fingers. “What?”
Jack’s whole life flashed before his eyes. He thought of Xiang Peixun, Qiu Meili, and Kate Menelaou, who had died for Earth. He thought of his life-and-death struggle to save the rriksti refugees on board the SoD. He thought, guiltily, of Keelraiser. “I’d do it all again,” he said.
“I don’t even know what that means!” the Shiplord said.
“It means I don’t regret trying to stop you. And I don’t regret failing.” Come on, Keelraiser, he thought. Blow this ship the fuck up. I’d rather die in an explosion than be shot like a dog.
“I do not think this translation device is working, after all,” the Shiplord said. “I was told you were intelligent beings. Yet the other one was mad, and you’re speaking in paradoxes.”
Jack shrugged. “Paradoxes are a human specialty.”
The Shiplord opened her mouth. “No, they are a rriksti specialty. I wish to vivisect you, but I also wish to keep you around. Conveniently, I am an eighth-level lay cleric, so I can do both. Sparkshaft, remove it.”
Killshot: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 4) Page 28