Alexei gave her a long, slow blink that Skyler—trained in reading body language—interpreted as insubordination. This might be about to get fun. If cracks appeared in the ‘Professional’ camp, it would be one positive outcome of this disaster. But then the Russian followed that up with a bland “OK.”
Jack just nodded, staring at the floor.
Xiang Peixun had been their third EVA specialist, but Jack was now wearing Xiang’s blood.
Jack hadn’t yet had time to clean up. Nor, apparently, had Hannah. Her face was dirty and she had a scratch on her left cheek. She wore a bandage around her left hand, which might conceal another injury. Skyler wanted to ask her if she was really, truly OK. Yet he dared not importune her with his concern. She was busy saving their lives—so busy that she didn’t even want to be here, and sat on the edge of her chair, poised to dart back to Engineering as soon as Kate released them.
“Next,” Kate said, “we need to send a full report on the incident to Mission Control. That’s going to be fun when we’re limited to text-only comms. The Ka antenna is down, too. I’ve notified them that the emergency is over, but they want to know what caused it. So do I.”
Alexei said, “It was the MOAD, obviously.”
“Yeah? How do you figure, Alexei?”
“It attacked us,” Alexei said. “Same thing it did to the Juno probe. We think it was a high energy radio frequency pulse. Right, Jack?”
“Right,” Jack said, without looking up. “Electronic systems on the outside of the ship were affected. The interior wiring was not. Ergo, the attack came from an external source.”
He may not have intended it that way, but speaking to the floor instead of meeting Kate’s eyes made him look disrespectful. His British accent didn’t help. He sounded arrogant, and arrogance was a red flag to USAF Major (Retired) K. Menelaou. Skyler saw her tense up. The back of her neck, exposed beneath the blunt edge of her short haircut, flushed pink. “Well, guys, you seem to have given this a lot of thought. I’ll include that in my report. Anyone else have an insight, theory, or wild speculation they want to share?”
Skyler actually did have a theory of his own: this had been the sabotage attempt he’d tried to warn Kate about. He’d been right about the timing, wrong about the saboteur’s target.
He really, really wanted to believe that Xiang Peixun had attempted to sabotage the steam turbine … and ended up dead himself, in a horrible accident no one could have foreseen. But the universe rarely deigned to deal out that much poetic justice in one serving. More likely, the saboteur had been Meili herself.
It had to hurt like hell, knowing she had inadvertently murdered her friend. She sat with her arms around her knees, red-eyed, looking about twelve. Skyler could not help feeling sorry for her. He decided that he would wait to receive the translation of that last conversation between her and Xiang before he broached the subject with Kate again.
“No one?” Kate said. “Well, the important thing to remember is we’re still here. If this attack came from the MOAD’s autonomous defense systems—” she threw a bone to Alexei and Jack— “it failed. Think about that! The MOAD hit us with everything it’s got, and we’re still here.” She smiled broadly. “This ship is as tough as they come.”
Hannah stood up. “With all due respect, Kate, no it isn’t. This ship was designed and built so fast that they didn’t think of all the failure modes. Every single system was rushed through development, rushed into production, and when they hit a snag, they didn’t go back and fix the design, because they didn’t have time. I know. I was there. The whole ship is a creative workaround. OK, credit where it’s due, Sonic is a thing of beauty.” She glanced at Skyler. He froze. The topic of the MPD engine was … sensitive. Hannah went on, “But then I would say that, wouldn’t I? I built it.”
“Ha, ha,” Skyler said, dizzy with relief that she wasn’t going to mention Oliver Meeks, the dead man who had invented the drive.
“OK, and the reactor. I love our reactor. It takes whatever you throw at it and asks for more. But the electrical systems! Jesus! Heads need to fucking roll! Who designs a door without a fuse in the motor, that you can’t open, even if there’s someone stuck in it?” Hannah’s voice broke. She turned and walked away.
Skyler realized for the first time that Hannah blamed herself for Xiang’s death, because she could have cut the power to the doors. That wouldn’t have saved Xiang. He had literally been chopped in half. But facts never stopped Hannah Ginsburg from blaming herself for circumstances beyond her control.
By the time he got through thinking that, Hannah had vanished between the plants.
Kate looked after her for a moment, mouth thin. Then she said, “Let’s give her some alone time. We were just about finished here, anyway. Who’s for another cup of coffee?”
CHAPTER 6
Jupiter floated ahead of the SoD like a rotting peach, ten times bigger than the moon. Jack wouldn’t be able to wrap his arms around it, if it were hovering right in front of him, as it seemed to be. No depth perception in space. The gas giant was still more than 30 million klicks away. But it was 1,300 times the size of Earth.
Jack held his Nikon up, stabilizing himself with his other glove on the SoD’s hull, until he got Jupiter centered on the screen.
Click.
Oh, you beauty.
Click click click.
He’d photographed Jupiter for the first time from the ISS. At that distance, the gas giant was barely fifty pixels across. But something else had shown up in those photos … a smear that turned out to be a drive plume. Those pictures had set him and Oliver Meeks on the trail of the MOAD. Now that trail was leading them to Europa. His heart beat faster at the thought of finally reaching the alien spaceship, and prying out its secrets … even if the truth confirmed the dark fears he and Meeks had shared.
Of course it wasn’t going to be a stroll in the park all the way. They’d been lucky to get this far without interference.
Click. Click.
“Hey, Alexei!”
Jack velcroed his Nikon to his shoulder patch. He’d swaddled it in insulation to keep the batteries from getting too cold. He pulled himself hand over hand along the row of grab handles that led over the top of the bridge module. His satchel of tools and parts floated behind him.
What he was officially doing out here: repairing the electronics. The coaxial cables of the antennas had shorted out, which could only have been caused by a power surge so big that energy splooshed out of the cables into places it didn’t belong. Some of the connectors were completely slagged. Anyone want to bet it wasn’t a high energy radio frequency pulse? Anyone? Even Mission Control accepted their theory now.
“Alexei!”
“What?” Alexei was working on the Ka antenna, chipping at melted plastic and blackened metal. When he raised his head, a reflection of Jupiter swam into his faceplate.
“Say cheese.”
Click.
Best. Photo op. Ever.
“Stay there …” Jack hooked one boot through a grab handle and extended his body backwards, aiming to get Alexei and Jupiter in the frame together.
Alexei gave a thumbs-up, still holding his multitool. Then he turned to face Jupiter and gave the gas giant the middle finger.
Clickclickclickclick.
Their laughter alerted Kate, who was monitoring their EVA from inside the bridge. “How are you doing out there, guys?”
“Almost finished,” Jack said, blinking his eyes. When wearing a spacesuit, it was a mistake to laugh until you cried. “Just got to replace the cables on the Ka antenna and we’ll be coming back in.” This was their eighth marathon spacewalk in as many days. Every action took three times as long as it would in gravity. The lining of their spacesuits had started to rot from being sweated in and never drying out. You had to break the tension.
“Quit dicking around,” Kate said. “You’re taking rems out there.”
“These new gloves are really great, Kate. So flexible,” Alexe
i said. He contorted his right fist into the fig sign, giving the MOAD a special Russian fuck-you. Jack photographed that, as well, snorting through his nose in an attempt not to laugh.
“Remember you still have to check the landing craft,” Kate said. “Their sensors probably got fried, too.”
The landing craft: the Dragon and the Shenzhou Plus, two-person rockets that would take them down to the surface of Europa. If they got that far.
The landing craft were strapped to the truss tower, outside the storage module, behind the rotating hab that blocked Jack’s view aft.
Why did the SoD need landing craft at all? Because it couldn’t haul enough water for the round trip to Jupiter. By the time they reached Europa, the tanks would be close to empty. Not enough propellant for the trip home. But Hannah’s gang at Johnson Space Center had solved the problem. They’d launched two advance landers ahead of the SoD. Flying water tanks fitted with engines and electrolysis units, the advance landers would scoop up ice from Europa’s surface and process it into reaction mass for the SoD’s return journey to Earth.
Originally, Thing One and Thing Two—as the media dubbed them, because of their Seussian appearance—had been designed to shoot their product into orbit for the SoD to pick up. But that turned out to be unworkable, hence the landing craft. The crew would go down to the surface of Europa to retrieve Thing One and Thing Two’s output.
Jack didn’t really give a damn about walking on Europa. It was the MOAD that lured him. But he had to admit that a Dragon might be a handy thing to have along.
“We’ll get to it, Kate,” he promised, handing Alexei a replacement connector.
The whole refueling scheme would have been bollixed if Thing One and Thing Two hadn’t made it to Europa. But they had successfully landed a couple of months ago, deorbiting straight past the MOAD, snapping pictures en route. Those pictures had caused a stir on Earth as they revealed the alien spacecraft in detail for the first time.
“Hey, Alexei,” Jack said aloud. “Why didn’t the MOAD mess with Thing One and Thing Two?”
“Hmm,” Alexei said.
Kate took the bait. “NASA assumes the MOAD is under the control of an AI tasked with area clearance. It determined that Thing One and Thing Two were not coming in at an angle that might impact the MOAD, so it didn’t HERF them.”
Even Kate had started using HERF—High Energy Radio Frequency—as a verb. Jack was quite proud of coining the term.
“But what about the Juno probe?” he pushed. “The MOAD HERFed the shit out of that. It was clearly not on a collision course, either.”
He crossed his eyes inside his helmet.
“The AI determined that Juno carried instruments which might have revealed sensitive information about the MOAD.” Kate stuck to Mission Control’s party line.
“So now we’re saying the MOAD could tell what instruments Juno carried? It’s making decisions based on long-range observations? Just how smart is this alleged alien AI?”
“Killer, just fix the goddamn electronics,” Kate said tiredly.
Killer, her nickname for him. A play on Kildare. Recently, though, it sounded less like a term of endearment, and more like an accusation.
When they were back inside, Alexei said, “What was that about? You want her head to explode? We already lost one astronaut.”
“Mission Control doesn’t have a bloody clue about the MOAD,” Jack said. “I just want her to admit it.”
“She can’t admit it until they do.”
“Which will be when hell freezes over.” Jack sighed, peeled off his underwear, and stowed it in his laundry bag. He reached into his coffin and pulled clean Y-fronts out of the storage webbing. He remembered Xiang Peixun’s blood splashing into his face, like hot spray from a water-gun. Bad scene, yeah. Bad, bad scene. But it was over now. The hab had warmed up again, the growlights were back on at full strength, and Jack had to give the potatoes some TLC before he relieved Kate on the bridge. Stay focused on the mission. It’s the only way forward.
Alexei sat on the folded-back cover of Jack’s coffin, fiddling with his e-cigarette. They were all supposed to be paragons of healthy living, but Alexei had never had any intention of giving up smoking. He’d brought tobacco seeds on board as part of his personal weight allowance. He used his own water allowance to grow the plants, to Kate’s despair. The funny part was, by the time his first crop matured, he’d admitted that he no longer got nicotine cravings… but a good DIY scheme should never go to waste, so Alexei had plunged into vaping. A year later, he could bore for Russia about the finer points of mixing nicotine juice and crafting atomizers. Space makes people weird in all the ways they were already weird, but more so.
“About Thing One and Thing Two?” he said, exhaling a monster cloud of vapor. “The aliens could see they’re not a threat, so they didn’t waste power on them. That’s all.”
Jack deadpanned, “Oh no, man. You’re shitting me. Aliens?!? The MOAD is a hulk! All the scientists say so.”
Of course there were aliens. Meeks had believed there were aliens, and holding to that belief was a way of honoring him. Anyway, aliens was the logical conclusion to draw from the media’s unanimous insistence that there weren’t any. When someone hands you a pacifier, look for the monster under the bed.
“Next EVA,” Alexei said, “we fix the radar dish and the display electronics for the railguns.”
Exhibit A. Of course there were aliens. If there weren’t, the SoD would not have been fitted with two railguns that could fire three 40-kilogram steel slugs per minute. Fancy a barrage of Mach 5 projectiles, E.T.?
That said, a fat lot of good the railgun would do them without a functioning radar set-up, not to mention the electronics that extracted and processed the data.
Electronics.
Despite all her rad-hardened systems, the SoD was a 21st-century spaceship, crammed with semiconductors.
One more HERF like that, and they wouldn’t get close enough to use the railguns.
But there was nothing Jack could do about that, so he put on his filthy gardening shorts, took a hit off Alexei’s e-cig, and went to do his duty by the Yukon Golds.
As it happened, Skyler was working in an adjacent patch, adjusting the pH of the fish tanks. Tilapia swam in cool dark water under roofs of kale. They met the crew’s protein requirements. Chickens had been considered, but fish were easier to handle. They didn’t shit everywhere.
“Hey, Taft,” Jack said. “How are our finny friends coping?”
Skyler’s expression gave nothing away. He’d come aboard the SoD in a puking, trembling mess, but he had smartened up a lot since then. Even when Xiang died he hadn’t lost it.
He withdrew the pH meter from a tank. “The fish are OK. They’re surprisingly tough. The vegetables, less so. Just look at those leaves.” The kale plants were noticeably yellow. “When the oxygen pumps temporarily stopped, the pH went out of kilter. Hydroponics is inherently unstable. Take away the soil, and you take away any margin for error.”
Jack moved towards him with a handful of seed potato chunks in one hand, the knife he’d been using to chop them in the other. “So what do you think? Was it the aliens?”
Skyler’s mouth twitched. “If the hydroponics fail, we won’t have to worry about the aliens.”
“Oh, so you admit it. The NXC has lied to everyone.”
“We have no idea if there are aliens on the MOAD or not. But if you’re talking about the scientific consensus …”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a necessary corrective. The Earth Party keeps telling everyone there are aliens, based on no evidence whatsoever. They just want them to be there.”
It annoyed Jack to think that he had anything in common with the Earth Party. “Who gives a fuck about those hippies?” he said. Skyler smiled slightly and touched the peace sign he wore around his neck. It might as well have been a neon IRONY!! sign. Skyler was a bit of a hippie himself. Hilarious, right? What really irritated Jack was the way h
e played it up to convince everyone that a Fed could be human. That wasn’t in question. The issue was that there was, in fact, such a thing as a bad human.
And Jack sometimes feared he was one.
“You better give a fuck about those hippies,” Skyler said, still smiling. “They occupied London, didn’t they? Tore up the cobblestones and planted dandelions. Shat all over Hyde Park, indulged in a bit of undocumented shopping. Then moved on, the way they do. You come from Warwickshire, right? I heard it’s a nice place. Unspoiled. Might make a good party venue.”
“You really are a cunt, aren’t you?” Jack said. He wiped the potato knife on his shorts. It was an oblique threat, half-arsed, and he despised himself for it. Go big or go home. But no one was going home until they’d dealt with the MOAD. One way or another.
Skyler looked at the knife. “At least I’m not a killer,” he said, and walked away to the far side of the lentil patch.
Whistling Scarborough Fair.
Mic drop.
Cunt.
*
The problem was Jack had killed someone.
He’d killed the guy who was Skyler before Skyler came along.
*
He went and found Alexei, who’d gone to bed in his coffin. The coffins were cavities set into the floor, evenly spaced around the aft end of the hab. They had hammocks inside that swiveled on gimbals, so ‘down’ would always be down even when the SoD was under thrust. In your coffin you were meant to have the expectation of privacy.
Jack threw back the cover of Alexei’s coffin unceremoniously.
“Hey!” Alexei said. “What if I was wanking, eh?”
Jack sat down on the dirty floor at the edge of the coffin. “He knows.” It burst out of him. “He fucking knows.”
“Chto?”
“Skyler knows I did Lance in,” Jack said. He briefly related their conversation.
Alexei scratched his close-shaven head. “Let’s review,” he yawned. “Lance was an NXC agent.” Jack nodded. “He murdered your friend Ollie to steal the MPD drive technology.” Nod. “He tried to sabotage the SoD during construction.”
Lifeboat: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 2) Page 4
