It was an open question how he’d got here, as the last thing he remembered was hitting the floor of the Homemaker’s bridge. But the answer could wait.
Happy just to be alive, feeling lazy and refreshed at the same time, he stretched. One hand encountered warm flesh. He was sharing the sleeping cocoon with someone.
He brushed his fingers over floating bio-antennas, the jut of a shoulderblade, the spare curve of a flank.
Keelraiser, of course.
Without thinking much about it, Jack snuggled up to Keelraiser’s back, inhaling his salty, beachy smell. Keelraiser seemed to be sleeping soundly. Jack could not remember ever actually seeing him sleep before. Not that he could see him now. Couldn’t see a thing. The darkness heightened the pleasures of touch and scent.
He pressed his face against the flat place between Keelraiser’s shoulderblades, intending to just lie there and enjoy this innocent, harmless cuddle.
Keelraiser’s ribs rose and fell in a placid rhythm. Jack idly stroked the underside of a thin arm, thinking about how a wing-like flap would once have been anchored there. He wondered if Keelraiser could remember being a little kid and flying, or if you forgot that, the way human children forgot being breastfed.
He pulled Keelraiser closer, settling the rriksti’s buttocks against his groin. He drifted a hand over Keelraiser’s chest. No nipples. Skin like rough silk. There was barely a trace of sticky residue on Keelraiser’s skin, thanks to long hours in a spacesuit. Jack used to fantasize about how their bodies would stick together in a tight, comforting seal, like the life-protecting seals of a spacesuit, if they ever got naked together. But this drier, silky texture had its own appeal …
Nestled in the cleft between the lean buttocks, his semi-hard cock stiffened.
So, things are back to the way they used to be, huh, Kildare?
In reality, it was too late for that.
Insistent desire dispelled his drowsiness. He rubbed himself against Keelraiser’s buttocks.
He might wake up.
I’ll wake him up. Nicely.
Jack reached around. His fingers encountered the loose, wrinkly skin between Keelraiser’s legs. The rriksti equivalent of pubic hair. Inside these hot, hairless folds he would find a little surprise, or a big one, depending on whether or not it was the weekend. He couldn’t remember for the life of him. But he knew from hearsay that just because it was a weekday didn’t mean nothing could happen …
Keelraiser caught his hand and moved it firmly away.
He was awake.
“Don’t touch me,” he whispered.
He rolled over, facing Jack in the dark. Jack’s cock rubbed against Keelraiser’s lower stomach. He was as hard as a heat-seeking missile. He could not imagine that Keelraiser wasn’t into it. “Why don’t you want to be touched?”
“Not everything has to be reciprocal.”
“Oh, rriksti words of wisdom. No … thanks.”
They floated face to face, mouth to mouth. Jack licked Keelraiser’s lower lip. He pushed his tongue inside the small, hot mouth.
They wrestled for a moment, straining together, the friction driving Jack wild, until Keelraiser forced his way out of the sleeping cocoon and kicked away into freefall. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Not now.”
“You mean it isn’t the bloody weekend.”
“That, too.”
Giddy with frustration, Jack wriggled out of the cocoon. The Dealbreaker’s sensors automatically lit the crew area to rriksti level. He snatched a pair of shorts out of the air and pulled them over his sagging erection. “I just don’t understand you.”
“We destroyed the Homemaker. We are orbiting at 56,000 kilometers with limited reaction mass.”
“I’m aware of that. There’s nothing that needs to be done in the next ten minutes. Actually, to be honest with you, it wouldn’t even have taken that long.”
“You have no idea,” Keelraiser said dryly.
“Oh for fuck’s sake. I just wanted to …”
“Did you really want to? Arousal is a common side effect of extroversion.”
“Who gave me extroversion?”
“Do you know what happened after you destroyed the bridge of the Homemaker?” Keelraiser floated, gazing up. Jack followed his gaze. The ceiling of the crew area was transparent. It doubled as the floor of the cockpit. The lighting had come on up there, too.
A dark form floated behind the couches.
Splayed arms and legs.
Limp bio-antennas.
Jack boosted himself up through the hatch at approximately the speed of sound. He shot into the cockpit, bounced off the ceiling, and floated down to …
… the dead body of Gale, the Homemaker’s Shiplord.
It horrified him that he’d been drowsing peacefully while this floated up here.
“Gimme some proper light,” he bawled. Of course, the Dealbreaker did not understand a crude, slangy order like that. He cudgeled his thoughts into the required format, forced the luminosity of the cockpit lights as high as it would go.
Reflections of the overhead fixtures floated in the Shiplord’s eyes like rubies drowned in puddles of tar. She had been shot in the forehead. There was not much blood. Trembling, Jack turned her over. No exit wound. Blasters could kill without that kind of mess.
Keelraiser perched on the back of the co-pilot’s seat, holding on with both hands and feet, like a big ungainly bird.
“She rescued us both from the wreck of the Homemaker. I was in bad shape, but conscious. You were … dead, as far as I could see.”
“The radiation.”
“Yes. She was unaffected, as she’d taken shelter in her emergency refuge. She came out after you stopped the attack. Dragged us to the Dealbreaker. Got us on board. Then she gave us extroversion.”
“I should have been dead,” Jack realized, remembering what he’d seen with his own eyes. What he’d done. People literally disintegrating into clouds of hydrogen.
“Yes, probably. Gale saved you. Eighth-level clerics can practically bring people back from the dead. She is … I mean … she was …”
Jack was trying to close the Shiplord’s eyes. They wouldn’t stay closed. “Did you kill her?” he said bluntly.
Keelraiser laughed. It was not his usual laugh, but a high, frightening squeal. “I couldn’t even move without vomiting.”
“Ah.”
“I lay there and watched her save you. Then she saved me. And then, while I was still weak, you know what it’s like, one is not even sure where one is …”
“Yes.”
“She faced in the direction of Imf and shot herself in the head. And all I could do was watch, and beg her to stop, and the words wouldn’t even come out.”
Jack gave up his attempts to prettify the corpse. He floated upright. “Why? Why did she do it?”
“She’d lost her ship. She faced utter failure. And Tshaveg rubbing her nose in it for the rest of their lives.”
“But … suicide?”
“Some people,” Keelraiser said delicately, ”when they have failed in everything they set out to do, double down and keep going. It’s possible to understand the view that killing oneself is the more dignified option.”
Jack himself had pigheadedly doubled down on failure and kept going. So had Keelraiser, in his own way. It had brought them here, to this high and lonely orbit, with the body of Keelraiser’s dead sister between them. Their victory over the Homemaker suddenly seemed less satisfying.
“I thought rriksti didn’t commit suicide,” Jack said. Mechanically, he slapped open storage hatches, looking for a body bag or something to wrap the Shiplord in. “Doesn’t your Temple forbid it?”
“Yes.” Keelraiser rubbed his cheeks with his knuckles. Flakes of skin floated loose. “Gale, too, rebelled in the end.”
CHAPTER 46
Jack cranked up the long-range scanning equipment and acquired telescopic images of Earth. Combined with spectroscopic analysis, the
se confirmed his assumption that the Homemaker had not had a chance to launch its fatal Arctic-bound meteors. The methane content of the atmosphere had ticked up only a tiny bit, attributable to the multiple volcanic eruptions around the world.
“We did it.”
He was speaking to Keelraiser. They had put Gale’s body in the cargo hold.
“On the other hand, Spain looks a bit funny. In fact it looks like it isn’t there. No more holidays in Majorca, I suppose.”
He gnawed on a slab of soy jerky from Sky Station, poring over the images. Unease roiled his gut, and it wasn’t because the jerky tasted like shoe leather. He zoomed in on the coastline of Britain. The ‘toe’ of Cornwall didn’t look quite right, either.
“We destroyed one planet-killer,” Keelraiser said, slumped in the co-pilot’s seat, anchored by one bare foot through the tethers. It was strange to see him on that side of the cockpit. He looked out of place. His identity as a pilot had been lost with the Cloudeater. “But there is still one left.”
“Yeah.” Jack blobbed his little crosshairs icon on the Liberator, which he’d captured in his imaging data as it passed over Europe. “But didn’t what’s-her-name agree to lay off if we took out the Homemaker for her?”
“Yes.”
“But?”
“But she is a rriksti.”
“Meaning you can’t trust a word she says including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ Got it.” Jack bit off the words. It was stupid to feel such disappointment. He knew how the rriksti lied: habitually, strategically, and compulsively. He had just hoped against hope their fight could be over. “What’s the point of even making agreements in the first place?”
“Firstly, the lies people offer are clues to their true intentions. It’s like radio-location. We bounce signals off our environments all the time to determine where things are. That is how we survived the early stages of our civilization, when we were not yet the apex predator. On Imf, radio-location was a greater evolutionary advantage than sharp hearing. The same goes for truth-seeking, as opposed to simply believing everything one hears, like a gullible human.”
Jack aimed a mock-punch. Keelraiser ducked.
“And more fundamentally, rriksti often lie and tell the truth at the same time. I know, it’s paradoxical.”
“Gale accused me of speaking in paradoxes.”
Keelraiser toyed with the rosary floating around his neck. It had reappeared after they took Gale’s body below. Jack wondered if this were a non-verbal example of lying and telling the truth at the same time. “It was when I got a glimpse of the paradoxes at the heart of human culture,” Keelraiser said, “that I realized how much alike we are. Slaughtering you would be genocide. Something close to cannibalism. Yet I don’t understand these paradoxes. I can see they’re there, that’s all.”
“So what are we going to do about the Liberator?” Jack said after a suitable interval had passed.
Keelraiser tipped his head back. He was eating rriksti food he’d found in the Dealbreaker’s stores—high-calorie mirip pulp, packaged on Earth, by the Lightbringer’s manufacturing operations, into a economy-sized toothpaste tube. He squeezed out a glob and caught it in his mouth. “Stop them,” he said.
“And there I was hoping we could leave it to someone else,” Jack said.
“Who else is there? Ripstiggr’s people are trapped on Earth. Alexei, Nene, and—and the others are trapped on the moon.”
“I’d like to get in touch with them.”
“It’s your ship. But I think we should not use the comms until we’re ready to send our ultimatum. At the moment, we just look like another piece of hottish debris. The moment we start sending out signals, they’ll know someone is alive up here.”
“Hang on. What ultimatum?”
“The one you are going to send the Shiplord of the Liberator, warning her to disarm and evacuate her ship, or be destroyed.”
Jack scratched his stubble. He pondered the images on his screens. The shape of Cornwall had changed again. He double-checked the Dealbreaker’s reserves of water. They had just about enough for a single de-orbit burn. Eventually he said, “I know I was the one who brought up Star Wars, but I’ve sort of cooled off on that idea.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Calling in a reverse gauge field attack on my own position was enough suicidal insanity for one lifetime.”
“That isn’t what I had in mind, anyway,” Keelraiser said. “There are hundreds of unused asteroid chunks floating around up here. One would be enough to take out the Liberator.”
“Yes, but wouldn’t the Homemaker have to reprogram them with new targeting information? And the Homemaker’s gone.”
“I can do it.”
“Really?”
Keelraiser ate some more mirip-pulp toothpaste. “I’m good with computers.”
“Can you do it from here?”
“No.”
“All right.”
“When I diverted the missile intended for Mt. Aetna, I discovered that their onboard computers are short-lived, by design. The short-lived part is the power supply. Their capacitors were kept charged with beamed power from the Homemaker. By now, they’ll all have run out of charge.”
Jack queried the Dealbreaker. “No beamed power capability here.”
“No.”
Jack called up passive scanning data of the Dealbreaker’s own orbital path. He found a couple of dozen asteroid chunks drifting about three hundred klicks ahead of them, like huge ugly ducklings. “So we have to actually land on the goddamn things.”
“Yes.”
Jack closed his eyes. He did not want to do this. He was tired, tired of destruction, and Spain had vanished, and Cornwall was vanishing, and he desperately wanted to get on the comms and find out if there was anything left to save. But on whom did that depend now?
On the Shiplord of the Lightbringer.
And on him.
He offered one last objection. “There must be thousands of rriksti on that ship.”
“Tens of thousands.”
“You went to the wall to stop me from destroying the Lightbringer.”
“I’ve changed.”
“It’s not going to work if you’re just bluffing. She’ll be able to tell.”
“I am rather good at the traditional rriksti art of bluffing. Aren’t I, Jack?”
Jack whipped his temper down. He knew why Keelraiser was bragging about his own flaws like this. It was because he’d lost his ship—his identity. “You can’t fool me anymore,” he said flatly.
“Then you know it won’t be a bluff. If she doesn’t disarm and evacuate, I will destroy them.”
“All right,” Jack said wearily. “Calculating our burn now.”
*
He flew to the swarm of asteroid chunks. It wasn’t real flying, just applied orbital mechanics. He pulsed the main drive, dropping the Dealbreaker into a lower, faster orbit. This carried the shuttle a bit ahead of the asteroid chunks. Then he returned to a higher, slower orbit and dropped back towards them. Less than two minutes of burn time in total. If anyone on Earth had noticed, they weren’t saying so.
He used the attitude thrusters to maneuver the Dealbreaker into synch with the leading asteroid chunk, so close that the shuttle’s belly almost kissed the rock. No way to actually dock with this thing, but its orbit was as stable as—well, as a rock.
The other chunks trailed behind it at distances of a klick or two.
Jack inspected the engine the Homemaker’s crew had attached to this one, a ten-meter titanium bell sticking out of the rock. He had tucked the Dealbreaker in near it. He spacewalked and recharged the dead capacitor with an electrical cable—in fact, the very same cable that the unknown inventor of the reverse gauge field had put into the Dealbreaker to carry that lethal beam. He would not be using that again. He’d stick his head into the fusion reactor first.
When he got back to the Dealbreaker, he found Keelraiser wrestling with a large hatch at the back of the cargo hold.
>
“What’s that?”
“Give me a hand. The hydraulics are stuck.”
They pried the hatch open. Dust drifted out of a secondary cargo bay.
Clearly Jack’s virtual tour of the Dealbreaker had not been exhaustive. He shook his head ruefully. “I thought there wasn’t as much room in here as there was on the Cloudeater.”
“I knocked down the partition in my cargo hold while we were on Europa. We needed the materials.”
An egg-shaped craft about the size of a Humvee occupied the extra cargo space. Jack floated around it on his wrist rockets. It had a thruster on the fat end of the egg, gimbaled for maneuvering.
“Hydrazine?”
“Yes. I’ll have to borrow some from your tanks.”
“What is this?”
“A mobility pod. Each shuttle originally had two. We dismantled the Cloudeater’s pods for materials and parts. It looks as if Hobo disposed of one of his, too. I’m glad he left us this one.”
“I suppose you’re going to use this to go and recharge the computers on the other asteroid chunks?”
“Yes. We should be prepared to launch several, in case one or more is destroyed.”
At that moment, Jack’s HUD flashed. He blinked up a new notification from the Dealbreaker.
Jack. Text transmission from Kralshamat. Text follows. The text was in Rristigul.
“Well, well. Someone noticed us hopping around up here. And I thought I was being sneaky.”
“Who is it?”
“Kralshamat. What’s that?”
“The Lightbringer.”
They piled back into the ship. Keelraiser walked Jack through the procedure to bring up the transmission on a screen in the computer room. “It’s from Ripstiggr.”
“Anything about Skyler and Giles?”
“No. Ripstiggr is stranded in Belgium. He telephoned this message to the Lightbringer, which sent it to us. He says that diplomacy has broken down … and the Shiplord of the Liberator has Hannah.”
CHAPTER 47
“I am going to obliterate your fucking species,” Tshaveg said calmly. They were in a Belgian police van driven by a rriksti, speeding away from the cathedral. The Shiplord of the Liberator had dropped her pretense of not speaking English or Rristigul. “We’ll keep the chimps and gorillas. There’s very little difference, except that the apes are more polite.”
Killshot: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 4) Page 32