“How many rriksti are down there? How many human beings?”
298 rriksti, counting all the babies, and 910 human beings, was the answer, but Alexei said, “There are 1208 people down there. And if you want to harm them, you’ll have to go through me.”
He had thought he was alone, but as he spoke, shadows fell past him up the ramp. Everyone who had a functioning spacesuit had come out of the airlock to stand with him. It moved him profoundly.
The rriksti confronting him said, “No, no!” It sounded puzzled. “We only want to know how much stuff you need. We have brought food from the Liberator’s gardens, some tanks of liquid ammonia, feedstocks for the 3D printers, and things like that, but we want to get a better idea of your requirements for our next trip. The Shiplord was really very vague. He just said, ‘Take everything.’”
Alexei held up a hand. “Wait. Wait. You’ve come to help us?”
“Yes, of course! This time, we’ve just brought emergency supplies, as I said. But next time we will start bringing the tools and materials you need to build arcologies. It can’t be much fun living underground.”
Nene pushed through the crowd to stand by Alexei’s side. “So it will be just like home?” she said—a challenge.
“A new home, for humans and rriksti to share. We were going to put the arcologies on Earth. But honestly, after so long in space, we like it better up here, anyway.”
Alexei drew a deep, shuddering breath and looked up at the lunar mountains. With his new eye implants, they no longer looked monochrome. The subtle tints of green olivine, silver mica, and pinkish diorites sparkled in the sun. “Yes,” he said. “It’s nice up here, isn’t it?”
CHAPTER 53
Jack took the Dealbreaker back into orbit and rendezvoused with the Liberator, 160 kilometers above Earth. A drumbeat of tension sped up as he slid the shuttle into the giant ship’s vacuum dock. He remembered what had followed his decision to dock with the Homemaker. Had that really only been ten days ago?
But this time, everything was different. The vacuum dock of the Liberator was half-empty. Most of the shuttles were away on missions to aid people in Earth’s disaster-struck regions. Others were shuttling supplies to CELL. And Jack’s welcome committee consisted of just two rriksti.
One was Hriklif.
“You finally made it,” the atomic engineer greeted him.
Jack had spent the last week in the desert. He’d done some climbing. Some hiking. Got the worst sunburn of his life. Tried to figure out what had happened. Eventually he’d given up.
“Thought I’d come and have a look around,” he told Hriklif.
“This ship is freaking amazing. It makes the Lightbringer look like the SoD. Sorry. You’ve got to see the reactor. One terawatt, baby!” Jack smiled; it was funny how Skyler had influenced the way Hriklif talked.
“We’ve even got a swimming pool,” said Hriklif’s companion, as they reached the corridor behind the vacuum dock. The Liberator’s version was not sapphire-colored, but amethyst, as if they floated inside a giant geode. They doffed their suits to the shoulders. Hriklif’s companion turned out to be a slender rriksti with gold bio-antennas and a pointed nose. “Nice to meet you,” it said to Jack. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“Nothing too scary, I hope.”
“I like scary stories. Which is just as well, because Hriklif has lots. You’re in most of them.”
Hriklif wrapped an arm around the gold-haired rriksti. “This is Solfiya,” he said. “We knew each other on Imf. I thought I’d never see her again. Turns out she volunteered to crew on the Liberator.”
“It was boring without you around,” Solfiya said softly.
“We want to get married,” Hriklif said. “Do you know how? It isn’t an Imfi thing. Well, it used to be, but the Temple banned it. So we don’t know how to do it.”
Jack stifled a smile. Here, then, was an example of rriksti culture the Temple had suppressed. Plain old marriage.
“Normally people just go to the register office,” he said. “But I don’t think there are any of those left. Alternatively, you could find a priest.”
“Do you know any priests?”
Jack remembered Father Cullen, the parish priest at Our Lady of the Angels in Nuneaton. The thought triggered a pang of worry. He’d been trying to find out how things stood in the UK. Were his parents alive or dead? The tsunami had left an information void in its wake. He’d have gone to investigate in person, but his contacts at the Lightbringer told him their satellite images revealed total devastation extending into the Midlands. There was nowhere to put the Dealbreaker down safely. Aid was being delivered to survivors by sea. After this, Jack planned to make his way to the staging area in France and get on one of those boats, by hook or by crook.
He described his plan to Hriklif and Solfiya. “I’ll let you know if I find a priest who’d be willingly disposed.”
They took him on a short tour of the Liberator. Although the ship was a carbon copy of the Homemaker, cosmetic differences stood out, no doubt attributable to the brief reign of Tshaveg as Shiplord. The lighting everywhere was brighter, albeit still red-tinted. The rotating gardens boasted more diverse vegetation, including olive-green thorned vines that climbed almost to the train tracks. Creatures like furry manta rays sailed around in freefall. The air was oven-hot, but less steamy than Jack was used to. Aft of the bridge, an extra set of mass attractors anchored a seven-sided Olympic-size swimming pool where rriksti splashed rapturously. Jack smiled at the sight, while wiping spray off his face. In fact, this was the difference that most struck him: the crew of the Liberator seemed happy. He commented on it to Hriklif and Solfiya.
“Oh, it wasn’t always like this,” Solfiya said. “Tshaveg was a slavedriver. People are just happy to get the weekend off.”
“And to not have to go to war, after all,” Hriklif said.
“That’s right,” Solfiya said. “We Lightsiders are not a warlike people, and unlike the Darksiders, we mean it. The crew of the Liberator is about half and half. That’s thanks to the Great Unifier.”
“Hang on,” Jack said. “Didn’t the Great Unifier do his thing sixty years after you left Imf?”
“Yes,” Solfiya said. “Lots of people switched sides when we heard about that.”
“Switched from Darksider to Lightsider?”
“Of course.”
“Er …” Jack had been under the impression the Darksiders and Lightsiders were two different races.
“Pretty much everyone is mixed,” Hriklif explained. “After all, we all come from the twilight zone originally. So if you’ve got enough of the other side’s genetic characteristics, you can just decide to be that.”
“And change your implant’s settings so everyone knows,” Solfiya said.
“OK.” Jack realized he was never, ever going to get to the bottom of the mystery that was Imf, short of going there.
“Well, here we are,” Hriklif said. They stood in front of a series of hexagonal airlocks, familiar from the Homemaker. “This is the bridge. Are you going to go in?”
“I feel like I’ve been here, done this,” Jack said.
“You’ve got to go in! You can’t leave without seeing Keelraiser,” Hriklif said anxiously.
“Sorry. I was just joking. Of course I’ll go in and say hello.” In reality, of course, he had come for no other purpose.
As his eyes adjusted to the gloom on the bridge, he spotted Keelraiser sitting on the floor, facing the altar-cum-throne.
His heart went into a spasm of hard beats.
Earthlight spilled down from the bright crescent on the ceiling. It fleetingly reminded him of the cupola on the ISS.
He crossed the floor, his secondhand Nikes squeaking in the silence, and stood between Keelraiser and the throne.
“So how’d you do it?”
“How did I do what?”
“How, for fuck’s sake, did you become the Liberator’s Shiplord? I left you on a asteroid chunk with a f
ew days of air and water. Next thing I know you’re broadcasting to the whole world, telling everyone there’s been a change of management.”
“I screwed up,” Keelraiser said.
“What do you mean?”
“It took longer than I thought it would to reprogram the onboard computers.”
“So when I gave you the signal to launch the asteroid chunks …”
“I wasn’t ready. I continued to work desperately. I thought I was good at that kind of thing. I was dooming humanity to extinction … After the worst half-hour of my life, the mobility pod sent me a message from the Liberator. ‘Hello,’ it said. ‘Shiplord.’ When I realized what had happened, I requested a lift to the Liberator, and came aboard.”
“What had happened?”
Keelraiser touched his hairline. In the twilight, Jack made out a gash, sealed with a transparent plaster. “I got the idea from you.”
“You took Gale’s chip.”
“Yes. After you berated me about consuming the dead …”
“I didn’t—”
“I decided this would be a better way to honor her. Anyway, her ship was gone, as my ship was gone. The chip would just be like a piece of jewellery.” Keelraiser brushed the rosary hanging on his chest.
“You’ve still got that.”
“I kept it to remember you by. I took Gale’s chip for the same reason. But I didn’t know that when Tshaveg died, command of the Liberator would default to the only other person of equal rank … the Shiplord of the Homemaker.”
Jack drew in a breath. “We got lucky.”
“I suppose,” Keelraiser said with zero enthusiasm.
Earthlight glinted off something in his lap. A blade.
Jack lurched forward.
Keelraiser held out a service sword, identical to his old ones, and to the one Jack had used to saw off Hobo’s head. “I was trying to decide whether to start from the top or the bottom.”
“Of what?”
Keelraiser pointed a bio-antenna at the throne. “I can’t stand the sight of that thing.”
Jack snatched the sword by the hilt. Keelraiser drew its twin. “Always start from the top,” Jack said, and they set about demolishing the throne with the tungsten-edged blades, like they had demolished the seats in the passenger cabin of the Cloudeater, three long years ago.
The work went slower this time, as the throne was made of tougher stuff. It did not bring the same sense of catharsis. In the half-gravity of the bridge, chunks and splinters fell to the floor, instead of floating around. Jack hacked away with grim determination. When the throne at last lay in a pile of debris, he felt relief that a grueling task was finished, but no satisfaction.
Keelraiser kicked a piece of the emergency refuge into the air, sheathed his blade with a flick of his wrist, and said, “That will have to be tidied up.”
“Fuck it. You’re the VIP around here; you don’t have to keep everything tidy if you don’t want to. Is there anything to drink?”
Keelraiser poked around in the life-support chancel, clearly not sure where everything was yet. “Tshaveg must have raided all the remaining liquor stores on Earth. Vodka, champagne, schnapps, whiskey, gin, rum …”
“Is there any krak?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s have a jar of that for old times’ sake.”
They sat at opposite ends of a high-backed sofa, facing a section of transparent wall that joined up with the ceiling. It was like looking out a tall window. Earth hung at the top of the view like a blue sickle. Jack drank off his first glass of water in a gulp. He’d sweated gallons in the heat. He could smell Keelraiser’s sweat, pungent and beachy. He poured himself another glass, spiking it with krak this time.
“So what now?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
Jack raised an eyebrow.
“I didn’t have a plan for this. I didn’t want to be Shiplord of this monster. I was going to blow it up.”
“On the bright side, we didn’t have to kill another—what? Twenty thousand people?”
Keelraiser shrugged. “I’m losing count.”
Jack wasn’t. At least five thousand on the Lightbringer, another 20,000 on the Homemaker. The numbers boggled his mind, although they didn’t compare to the death toll the Lightbringer and Homemaker had wreaked on Earth. From a certain perspective, Keelraiser was the Hitler or Genghis Khan of his people. But he had saved Earth, as well as everyone on the moon. Jack wondered why he seemed so depressed.
“My father would be proud of me,” Keelraiser said, taking a long drink.
Well, that might be part of the reason why.
“My father was always proud of me,” Jack remembered. “Not in any complicated way. He was just enormously chuffed that I became an astronaut.” He stared at the shrinking rim of Earth. “I don’t know if they’re alive or dead. After this I’m going to go look for them.”
“Yes, you should. I’ll give you whatever resources you need for the journey.”
Jack shifted his weight miserably. “What’s wrong?”
Keelraiser hunched in his corner of the sofa, knees folded sideways in one of those painful-looking double-jointed poses. The cut on his forehead was livid in the Earthlight. “Nothing,” he said, and reached for the krak bottle. He poured and drank without having added any water to his glass. Jack had never seen him drink like this. Something was definitely wrong, and it wasn’t just his new job. The Liberator couldn’t be more than a larger version of the Cloudeater, with more moving parts.
Keelraiser put down his glass. “Jack? I am going home.”
Jack felt a jolt of panic. “What? Back to Imf?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I’ve learned one thing from all this: I am good at killing people. I may go and kill some more people there.” Keelraiser’s lips parted in an expression of bitter amusement. “This ship was built to destroy a planet. Imf could do with destroying.”
CHAPTER 54
“I’ll go home in triumph, and turn my guns on them,” Keelraiser said. “It will be satisfying.”
Jack scrambled mentally for words. Keelraiser was going back to Imf. The inside of his head was a panicky blank. “What’s your father, the Great Unifier, going to say about that?”
“Oh, he’ll be dead by the time I get there. He doesn’t have the patience to spend decades in cryosleep when there are interesting things to do, such as torturing and humiliating his enemies in the name of enlightened government. As for the Great Unification, it will be a mere historical footnote by then. Imfi regimes never last long.”
“I thought you said this time was different. All over bar the shouting.”
“It will be when I get there.”
Jack sat forward, resting his elbows on his knees. He felt a terrifying tightness behind his eyes. He wondered if Keelraiser really meant it. There was no indication he did not. “I suppose I can’t talk you out of this,” he said, as Keelraiser had said to Gale, on the bridge of the Homemaker.
“No. I’ve made my mind up,” Keelraiser said.
“Well.” Jack blew out a breath. “When are you going?”
“Soon. As soon as we’ve done all we can for the disaster-stricken areas. I expect some of the crew will choose to stay on Earth, some on the moon. I’ll offer them the choice when I make the announcement.”
Jack sat in silence. He was battling the impulse to walk out in anger. He did not want to part on bad terms. Eventually he mastered his temper. “All right,” he said, forcing a smile. “Well, if this is the last time we see each other, let’s make it count.” He topped up his own glass, went to top up Keelraiser’s and found it empty. He poured a generous measure of krak and showed it the water. “Let’s …” He tried to think of something fun to do. It had been so long since he did anything just for fun that he drew a blank. “Let’s watch a movie. You’ve probably not got any popcorn, but some of those fried bugs would do.”
“A movie?” Keelraiser stared at h
im. “All I’ve got is Tshaveg’s archive of snuff films.”
Jack shuddered. “Nothing else, really?”
“Nothing.”
“All right.” Jack had another idea. This one was an inspiration. He plonked his Nikes on the low table in front of the sofa. Energy brightened his voice. “We’re going to watch my favorite film of all time, Independence Day.” He pointed to the window onto space. “Imagine that’s our screen. I’m going to tell you the whole thing.”
“All right …”
“Appropriately enough, our story starts in space. On the moon, in fact. We see the shadow of an enormous alien spaceship blotting out the American flag. Then some jobsworth in the US picks up a mysterious signal …”
Jack remembered the whole plot, and had large chunks of dialog off by heart. Forgetting his own troubles, he got quite involved in the story as he narrated Will Smith’s fearless mission to nuke the alien mothership. “He volunteered to pilot the refurbished alien fighter! Just like me …”
“Jack?”
“What?”
Keelraiser mouthed the rim of his krak glass. “This is boring.”
“I haven’t got to the big space battle yet.”
“I know how it ends. The alien ship gets blown up.”
“You’re missing the point.” Jack had picked this movie as something they could share, a trip down memory lane. After all, they both liked explosions. But now he suddenly saw the plot in relation to real life, and understood where Keelraiser was coming from. The pleasures of nostalgia staled on him, leaving emptiness.
“Can we watch something different?” Keelraiser said.
Jack ran through his mental top ten list. None of them appealed. In fact, he might have finally outgrown sci-fi action flicks.
His head swam; the krak was hitting him. He massaged a thumb he had jammed against something when they were demolishing the throne. “Spaceballs? Monty Python?”
Keelraiser had his knees tucked up to his chest, his arms wrapped around them, as if he were a beetle with its legs pulled in. His voice sounded a bit blurry. “I don’t know if I can stand to hear ‘Look on the Bright Side of Life’ without breaking something.”
Killshot: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 4) Page 36