“I love you,” Hannah sobbed. “We’re gonna get help, OK? Don’t move, don’t try to talk—”
“So far from home,” Ripstiggr whispered. The words came out of his mouth. He was talking.
Hannah wept uncontrollably, like a little girl. She scooped his head into her lap and kissed him all over his face. She tasted blood.
“Never saw myself dying … on an alien planet.”
“You’re not dying. You’re not.”
“Don’t mind. You are my life.”
“You’re talking. I can hear you.”
“Learned. For you.”
Hannah did not know exactly when he died. She was crying too hard. They had to prise her away from his body. Even then, she screamed and fought to reach him, until they tipped him off the roof of the parking lot, into the flood that was ebbing now, but still seemed endless, unfathomable, enough to drown the whole world along with her love.
CHAPTER 50
Jack went in hot and fast.
He had to get down to the ground before the Liberator came back around the limb of the planet.
The steep dive towards Earth awoke ghostly memories of piloting the space shuttle. He’d never actually landed the shuttle, as his first mission as pilot had ended with the loss of the Atlantis, but he’d trained exhaustively for it. And at the end of the day the Dealbreaker was just another space shuttle. Better technology. Same thing.
He flipped, decelerated, flipped again. The wings caught the atmosphere. The thermal shields took the brunt. He flew S-shaped banking turns, bleeding off velocity, high above North America.
He was so deep in the old NASA mindset that he thought nothing of it when a familiar voice said, “Dealbreaker, this is Mission Control.”
“Reading you loud and clear, Mission … what?”
A chuckle. “Good to hear your voice, Jack.”
Jack stared at the comms console. The transmission was coming in over the maser channel. Now disbelieving his ears, he said, “Sir?”
“Richard Burke here. NASA—well, what’s left of it—has relocated to central Africa. I am speaking to you from the Lightbringer.”
“Burke,” Jack marvelled. He smiled, alone in the cockpit, pinned to his seat by re-entry gees.
“I sent eight astronauts to Europa. It’s damn good to see one of them coming back, even if you are flying a fusion-powered toaster.”
“At least this toaster doesn’t play the greatest hits of Queen at me.”
“In all seriousness, you’re looking good so far. But what is your landing plan?”
“Don’t really have one,” Jack said, hurtling towards the Mojave desert. “I was just going to put her down on an interstate somewhere.”
“An interstate? I can tell how long you’ve been away, Jack. The whole southwest is crawling with bad hombres who would very much like to get their hands on your flying toaster. That’s if you don’t hit a bomb crater and flame out. No, I’ve got a better plan for you. My lovely wife Candy is on the radio right now with White Sands. They will activate the radio beacon and ensure the landing strip is clear. I’ll talk you in.”
“Roger that, sir.”
So the last of the SoD astronauts landed on the dry gypsum lakebed at White Sands Space Harbor, in New Mexico.
As the Dealbreaker’s landing gear bit into the ground, Jack briefly glanced at the empty seat next to him. He was flying with ghosts. Their faces changed with the light, but at different times he had felt the haunting presences of Qiu Meili, Xiang Peixun, Eskitul, and Oliver Meeks. Now, while the hydrazine thrusters roared, braking the shuttle and crushing him into his seat, Kate Menelaou came to sit next to him. She looked up in wonder at the bright sun of Earth. Son of a bitch, she said. You made it, Killer.
Jack stumbled down the steps, shivering in his cast-off rriksti clothes. His ghosts came with him. The sun was a fuzzy blaze behind thin clouds. He smelled dust, scorched insulation, and the faint sage-like tang of creosote bushes from the hills around the facility. The scent momentarily transported him back to Bunkerville, Nevada, where he’d been crashing at Meeks’s house when the Mother of All Discoveries was confirmed.
Pick-ups roared across the lakebed, ringed the shuttle. People in tattered haz-mat suits pointed guns at him.
“Kildare?”
“Yeah.”
“Anyone else on that thing?”
“No,” Jack said, coughing in the dust. “No one.”
*
The current occupants of the White Sands Test Facility welcomed Jack, conditionally. Led by US Army personnel from the nearby test missile range, they included a few NASA leftovers and multifarious prepper types from the New Mexico area. They’d turned the facility into an armed camp. Suntanned children played outside the buildings. Jack couldn’t help staring at them. Human children! He hadn’t seen any in half a decade. They seemed like aliens to him, with their thin limbs and high voices.
Their parents knew about the tsunamis and volcanic eruptions ravaging the planet, but they maintained a pose of stoic indifference. They had survived the alien invasion, and they planned on surviving whatever else the future threw at them.
Some things, though, you couldn’t see to fight. Charged particle beams. X-rays. Ghosts. Filoviruses.
Jack had not forgotten what Hannah screamed at him over the radio. He asked to talk to Burke, and was connected with the Lightbringer via the ham radio network. “Sir, do you know anything about a—an airborne virus?”
“No,” Burke said. “Where’d you hear about that?”
“From Hannah.”
“Haven’t heard from her at all.”
“She was in Belgium.”
“Yup. So was my daughter’s boyfriend. She’s pregnant. Going out of her mind. We had to give her sleeping pills.” Burke paused. “Europe is gone, Killer. Just gone. We have to take pride in the fact that Kuldeep and the others accomplished their mission. They took out the Liberator’s Shiplord.”
Jack got off the radio. He could not bring himself to tell Burke that this was actually a catastrophe. The Shiplord had rejected their ultimatum. If she had died—swept away by the tsunami, her chip with her—there would have been no one to rescind her orders to seed Earth with a deadly virus. He breathed in the sweet, tangy scent of the desert and wondered if he was already breathing in poison.
Regardless, he had work to do. He cajoled sufficient water out of the White Sands gang to refill the Dealbreaker’s tanks. They wanted him out of their hair and were willing to pay in H2O for it.
When it came to supplies for CELL, they were less understanding. Vitamins? Cotton clothes? Chickens? Rabbits? They had most of those things, but they weren’t giving them away to anyone. As for liquid ammonia and dry ice to keep it cold—he might as well’ve asked for a million bucks in gold bars. Go piss in the wind, flyboy.
Burke was right. Jack had been away for a long time. Neither he, nor Keelraiser, had grasped how much things had changed on Earth … how much was just gone. Technology supply chains. The milk of human kindness. Europe.
The plan to resupply CELL was dead on contact.
Eight hours after he landed, he sat with his head in his hands on the flatbed trailer that displayed the rusting Lunar Module Ascent Stage from the Apollo program. Some madman had trucked it over here from the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamogordo, perhaps seeing it as an important piece of human heritage to be preserved. Now it looked not just historical, but prehistoric.
Out on the lakebed, the Dealbreaker’s tail stuck up like the fin of a futuristic shark.
Clouds scudded across the sun.
The voices of children came to his ears like the cries of birds.
What the fuck am I going to do?
He asked me to do one thing. One thing. And here I am sitting in the desert, about as much use as balls on a skeleton.
Jack.
The Dealbreaker wrote a notification on his optic nerve. He pulled his t-shirt over his face and closed his eyes so as to read it against the day.
/>
Transmission received from the Liberator.
CHAPTER 51
Transmission received from the Liberator.
At least, that was what Hannah thought the Lightsiders’ comms set was saying. She only understood Liberator and the little squiggle that stood for an incoming call. The blue-haired rriksti, Hriklif, had retrieved Tshaveg’s comms set from the roof of the parking lot and plonked it in the cabin of the Belgian police boat. Hriklif was a Lightsider but he did not come from the Liberator. He was a good guy, according to Skyler. He piloted the boat through the debris with glum competence.
Transmission received from the Liberator.
Hannah blinked the notification away. The rriksti aboard the Liberator probably wanted to know what had happened to their Shiplord. An hour ago, she’d have taken the opportunity to gloat over Tshaveg’s death. That’s what Ripstiggr would have done. But Ripstiggr was dead, and nothing seemed to matter anymore. Not even the obliteration of the human species by tailored filovirus.
Anyway, looking over the stern of the boat, it didn’t seem as if there was anything left to obliterate. The sea had done it already. The tops of drowned buildings stuck out of the tide like gravestones.
Skyler sat opposite her in the cramped cabin, staring at her. He still had that dumb peace symbol, and he still had the habit of fiddling with it.
At last she snapped, “You’re bugging me.” She meant that she didn’t want him observing her grief. She stumbled to her feet and went out of the cabin. There was a small aft deck, piled with weapons. She stood at the rail, gripping it with white knuckles.
Skyler came out after her. The others stayed in the cabin: the Indian guy, Kuldeep; Hriklif and the one surviving rriksti who had come with him and Ripstiggr—a veteran of the Lightbringer’s infantry; and the two SEALs. One of those men had killed Ripstiggr.
“If that guy comes near me—” she said, jerking her chin at the cabin.
“He apologized,” Skyler said. “He just thought he was an alien.”
“Oh, and aliens are things we shoot. Right. They’re not people or anything.” Her voice got hollow and wobbly. “I loved him.”
“I know.”
“I don’t care what you think. I loved him so much.”
“I figured you were sleeping with him. I was so jealous, I used to daydream about torturing him, like he tortured you on the Lightbringer.”
Hannah bristled at this misapprehension. “He never tortured me. When I first met him, he was a typical Krijistal. OK, he was kind of the recruitment poster ideal of a Krijistal. Brutal, violent, dictatorial … but also funny and sometimes shy. But we were together for years. Little by little, he changed. And I changed. We changed each other.” Tears rolled down her face.
“So you were sleeping with him,” Skyler said.
Men. So damn fixated on sex.
“Look at everything that’s happened, and you’re mad that I slept with a rriksti?” She laughed, wildly.
“Oh, no,” Skyler said. “Everyone’s doing it. Alexei married one of them. Giles was doing about five of them. Even Jack had this weird thing going on with Keelraiser—he pretended it was nothing to do with sex, but it was. Me and Hriklif used to complain that we were the only people on the SoD not getting any.”
“Oh. Wow.”
“So, no. It’s just like, whatever.”
“It is not like ‘whatever’! Sure, it started out as sex, but it turned into love.”
She bowed her head, shaking with dry sobs. She had cried so much she had no tears left. If she were a rriksti, she’d be turning transparent from shedding so much of her skin.
Skyler said, “That actually makes it easier for me. Not that it matters what I think, of course. I just want to make clear that I’m not mad about it. I mean, I would be jealous of you banging some guy. But even I am not enough of an asshole to be jealous of love.”
Jealous. That word snagged in her brain. It wasn’t the first time he’d used it. “You were jealous? Of me and Ripstiggr?”
“Yup. It’s shitty. But then again, I was a little shit.”
“Why? Why were you jealous?”
“I loved you so much it used to drive me crazy. I took over as the SoD’s propulsion technician, just to try and stay close to your memory. Yes, you may laugh now. I loved you so much …” He stopped. Amended, “Love. I love you so much, present tense.”
Hannah was silent. Something scraped the hull underwater. Hriklif was taking it slow, wary of fouling the turbine on submerged obstacles.
“You can tell me to go away, and I’ll go,” Skyler said.
“Where would you go to?” Hannah said, gesturing at the horizon. As she spoke, she saw a hill sticking out of the flood, a brown lump of mud that must recently have been underwater. The tide was going down.
“Point,” Skyler said. “I guess you’re stuck with me for the time being.”
The ghost of a smile cracked Hannah’s lips. She was thinking about Tshaveg’s killer virus. Wondering if ‘the time being’ would be measured in weeks, or days.
Hriklif called from the cabin, “I’m going to head for that hill over there. Need to reach dry ground before the engine dies.”
“Don’t go away,” Hannah said to Skyler. She went back into the cabin. The rriksti were poring over maps, looking for someplace to land.
Skyler stayed on the aft deck and lit a cigarette.
She remembered how he’d told her that he had faith in her to do the right thing. Had she justified his faith, or betrayed it?
Transmission received from the Liberator.
Oh … leave me alone, she thought.
Then she reconsidered.
Do the right thing.
Until she died, she was still Shiplord.
The right thing for a Shiplord to do was face up to reality, not hide from it … in a bottle … or in someone’s arms … or in a black hole of grief.
Accept transmission, she sent in Rristigul. She wondered if the comms set would even understand her. But it turned out that just like the Lightsiders themselves, it was only pretending to be different.
*
“Accept transmission,” Nathan Ziegler chirped, translating for his family what he had just said in Rristigul. He’d picked up the language as only a young child could. The radio headset he’d made at school was never far from his tousled head. Little show-off, Isabel thought. But love softened her frown.
Anyway, Nate’s proficiency came in handy at times like this, when all the rriksti were away from the bridge of the Lightbringer, dealing with the new deluge of refugees from the Lake Kivu area. Isabel’s parents were out helping, too. She and Nathan were alone with the Burkes and a few other families who’d been camping on the bridge.
Nathan looked down from the scaffolding that provided access to the comms chancel. “It worked!” he yelled. “Stand by for the transmission. I’ll try and translate it.”
He didn’t have to.
The voice in their headsets spoke in Rristigul, and then repeated what it had said in English.
“This is a message for all personnel on Earth. The Liberator has cancelled all pending and scheduled attacks. All shuttles deployed in an offensive capacity have been recalled. Forces currently on the surface are to consider themselves demobilized, and should cooperate on the individual and small-unit level with personnel from the Lightbringer, as well as with human units engaged in rescue and recovery efforts. To assist in those efforts, shuttles will be dispatched from the Liberator to deliver communications equipment and medical supplies to distribution centers.
“It is permissible to suppress violence, but not to offer it. Reciprocity will not be sought or enforced. Punishment for infringements of this policy will be harsh but commensurate. Do not be afraid.
“This is the new Shiplord of the Liberator, Iristigut, known in English as Keelraiser.”
CHAPTER 52
Alexei stood on the roof of the bunker, watching stars fall out of the sky.
Seve
n of them. The same as the number of fingers on a rriksti hand.
Deprived of comms, the community at CELL was completely cut off.
But they still had the telescope orbiting the Earth-Moon L1 Lagrange point.
They had watched in horror as the Homemaker meted out a drip-feed of agony to Earth, like—this was Nene’s analogy—Temple torturers meting out the pains of a punishment cycle.
They had watched meteors hit volcanoes, triggering massive eruptions.
They had seen a killer tsunami scour the Iberian peninsula and redraw the coastline of northern Europe.
It was the apocalypse. Down in the bunker, they huddled together for comfort, and spontaneously cut back on their food rations.
Koichi had said to Alexei yesterday, "Remember how they told us CELL might be an ark for the survival of the species?”
But this was a failing ark. Data from the farm already reflected declines in productivity, traceable to nitrogen shortages. Alexei had kept the truth to himself for now, telling only Nene where they stood, but soon people would notice for themselves.
Even when he was on the SoD, hundreds of millions of kilometers from Earth, he had not felt as alone and forgotten as he did now.
Yet an hour ago he’d been woken from a nightmare-ridden catnap by news. News!
The worst news possible.
They had not been forgotten, after all.
A fleet of shuttles had been sighted in orbit, and now here they came, dropping out of the black sky like fiery meteors.
They landed on the plateau between Shackleton and Shoemaker Craters, out of sight.
Alexei walked to the entrance of the bunker. He stood at the top of the ramp, breathing heavily into his respirator.
While he waited for them to come, he remembered his days in the Russian air force. What fierce, misbegotten pride he had taken, as a young man, in dropping bombs on other people. Now, that same pride served a better cause: the ideal of brotherhood he’d been fumbling after all his life. He had finally found it on the moon.
They came loping over the bare rock, twenty rriksti in extravagantly tinted suits, with guns to match.
“What do you want?” Alexei said in Rristigul.
Killshot: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 4) Page 35