Lifeboat: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 2)

by Felix R. Savage

  The light from dozens of displays and readouts filled the bridge like an electronic sunset. The clouds of vapor from Alexei’s e-cigarette, which he had ceased to hide from Kate, glowed like nebulae. Jupiter rose like a pink Death Star on the aft-facing camera feed.

  “Burn plus three,” Kate said, transmitting to Mission Control. Excitement sharpened her voice. “We can see Europa!”

  “What?” Alexei said. “I can’t see it!”

  “It’s one of those pixels there,” Kate said. “You can see it better on the long-range radar.”

  Europa. The word punctured Jack’s concentration. He glanced up from the axis precession controls. The burn was just about over, anyway. He instructed the computer to throttle down the engine …

  A sharp crack! split the air, like thunder rolling very loud and very near. Sparks spat from the consoles. Alexei leapt for the fire extinguisher. The ozone tang of electrical discharges tainted the air.

  The SoD reverberated like a barrel struck by a hammer as the reactor’s control rods slammed into the core.

  The controls blinked off, leaving the bridge in darkness pierced only by Jupiter-light from the portholes. Then the consoles lit up again. Reboot screens flashed.

  Alexei floated, uncertainly holding the fire extinguisher..

  The intercom crackled. Hannah said dejectedly, “Wasn’t me this time. At a guess, the thermal fuse melted, and triggered the auto-scram. You guys OK up there?”

  Jack leant into the intercom. “HERFed again,” he said.

  “I figured,” Hannah said. “This is getting kind of boring, you know what I mean? Why don’t they vary their method of attack? I mean, haven’t they got nukes? Death rays? They haven’t got miniature black holes that they can fire from relativistic cannon? They haven’t got anti-matter scatterguns? What the fuck, you know? You come all this way, you’ve got a gee-whiz alien spacecraft five kilometers long that looks like something out of Battlestar Galactica, and you haven’t even got missiles?”

  Alexei cackled helplessly. Tears were running out of Jack’s eyes. He managed, “Maybe it really is an AI after all.”

  “I had a smarter AI in my fucking Subaru,” Hannah said.

  “I like you, Hannah. I really like you,” Jack said. “If you tell me you can restart the reactor within …” He consulted the burn parameters in his head. “Eight hours. I’ll love you until the day I die.”

  The wise-assery went out of Hannah’s voice. “No can do, Jack, sorry.”

  “Come on. Please.”

  “I wish I could say yes, but It’s a different story from before. Given our previous power history, the xenon pit is now fully poisoned. It’s going to take forty-eight hours, minimum.”

  “In that case,” Jack said, “we’re going to overshoot Europa. We might have time to wave at the MOAD as we flash by.”

  “Maybe shoot it as we go by,” Alexei suggested.

  “Nah, unfortunately,” Jack said. “We won’t pass close enough to its orbit. We’ll just slingshot and continue to circle around Jupiter until we run out of air.”

  Kate thumbed the intercom. “All hands, as you’ve probably guessed, our trip to beautiful Europa is gonna have to be postponed.” She gazed at the ceiling.

  “Why don’t you tell them they’re going to die?” Jack said.

  Kate glared at him. “They are not going to die.”

  “If we overshoot Europa, that’s it. We don’t have enough reaction mass for two more burns. The extra burn at perijove already wiped out our safety margin.” Jack plucked his squeeze bottle out of the webbing at the side of his seat and gulped cold tea. His bottle was different from the ones everyone else had. His parents had bought it at some online shop capitalizing on the craze for all things SoD-related. There was a cartoon of the ship on one side with the caption, I can’t believe the government is paying for this.

  Kate said, “Out of our original 8.2 million liter capacity, we still have one million liters left. I think we can squeeze two more burns out of that.”

  “You’re just saying that,” Jack said.

  “What do you want me to say?” Kate exclaimed.

  “It mightn’t be utterly impossible to squeeze out two more burns,” Jack conceded, trying hard to see the thing from all angles. “But you’re skipping the part where we all die of radiation sickness. Every time we dive in close to Jupiter, we’re taking more rems.” The next words got out before he could stop them. “I told you we should have raised our perijove.”

  Kate tensed.

  Alexei, still floating behind them, said, “Here is another possibility. We reboot the reactor and burn into Europa orbit, as planned.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Jack said.

  “It’s inconceivable,” Kate said.

  “You keep using that word,” Alexei said.

  “I do not think that word means what you think it means,” Jack said, grinning.

  “It’s a fucking nuclear reactor. You do not fuck around with a nuclear reactor,” Kate said. She reached for the intercom. “Hannah—”

  Alexei transferred the fire extinguisher he was holding to his left hand. He slid his right hand over Kate’s, jerking it away from the intercom. “Go,” he said to Jack.

  Jack licked his lips. He released his harness and flew out of the bridge.

  Straight through the keel tube.

  Darkness in the main hab was thick enough to stand a spoon up in.

  Meili and Skyler shouted at each other, voices clearly audible. Hold it down, hold it down. I can’t.

  The noise of fans—the noise of life—had stopped. The total silence, broken only by frightened human voices, ranked up there with the worst things Jack had ever heard in space.

  In the blackness, as he flew blind through the keel tunnel, things bumped against the lattice. Water splashed into his face.

  He kept moving, blundered through the SLS module and the storage module, and dropped into Engineering. He collided with Hannah. Her sensual curves registered in his brain, a small jolt of delight immediately submerged by urgency. They spun apart, grabbing for supports.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Me.”

  “I’m looking for my head-lamp,” she said. A minute later she found it. “What’s up?”

  “We need to reboot the reactor,” Jack said. The light was shining in his face. He shaded his eyes, saw her mouth and nose beneath the head-lamp.

  “I know,” Hannah said. “Unfortunately there’s nothing I can do right now besides wait. The xenon pit has to decay before I pull the control rods, or we get core poisoning.”

  “The trouble is if we wait, we die,” Jack said. “I worked at a company that developed nuclear propulsion systems. We developed this one, in fact. I’m not completely ignorant of how reactors work. You could reboot it to criticality. Skip everything we don’t need. Just give me enough delta-V to make Europa orbit.”

  “If you’re familiar with this type of system, you must be aware of what happened at a little town called Chernobyl,” Hannah said. “They tried to overcome xenon poisoning by pulling the rods prematurely. It blew the lid off the reactor.”

  Jack tried to tame his impatience with the engineer’s mindset that missed the forest for the trees. “This is a gas-cooled reactor. There’s no risk of a zirconium-hydrogen reaction.”

  “There is a substantial risk of damaging the core.”

  “If we don’t try it, we’re stuffed, anyway.”

  “If I do try it, and end up poisoning the core, there are several fun things that could happen.” Hannah spoke rapidly, brooking no interruption. “The core itself gets damaged, or the turbines do, or the radiators, or the steam generator. Or all four. If the core goes bye-bye, we end up with no propulsion whatsoever. If we damage the turbine, we lose power output. If we damage the radiators, ditto. Damaging the steam generator would result in hot coolant gas mixing with water, and that would cause a steam explosion that would blow off the end of the ship,” she finished breathl
essly.

  “I’d rather die that way than stick around for a slow death from radiation poisoning,” Jack said, shrugging.

  “I can’t.” Then Hannah Ginsburg’s essential honesty opened the door to their survival. “I won’t.”

  Jack pounced. “You have to.”

  “Has Kate greenlighted it? Is she OK?” The visible portion of Hannah’s face creased into a frown. “What are you doing back here, anyway? Shouldn’t you be on the bridge?”

  *

  On the bridge, Kate moved at last. Turning towards Alexei, she said, “Are you going to hit me with that thing?”

  Alexei looked down at the fire extinguisher in his hands. He’d grabbed it in a Pavlovian reaction to the sight of sparks. Fire was the single worst thing that could happen on a spaceship, they always told you. But now he was starting to wonder about that. Worse things could happen on a spaceship than the eggheads of Roscosmos ever encompassed in their bloodless, gelded imaginations. Look at him, holding this fire extinguisher by its base, as if it were a broken vodka bottle. “No,” he said.

  “Good,” Kate said. She leant forward to the intercom. “Hannah, whatever Jack says, I have not ordered a reactor reboot. Don’t—”

  Alexei let the fire extinguisher go into the air. He fell, slowly, on top of Kate. She flinched back from the intercom, her sentence unfinished. Alexei punched the release on her harness. Pushing off with one foot, he hauled her bodily out of her seat.

  They tumbled against the aft bulkheads, wrestling. Alexei already knew how she fought, as their lovemaking had been spicy at times. It surprised him a bit that she didn’t have any new tricks.

  *

  Hannah let the intercom go. Wildly, she demanded, “What did she mean? What’s happening?”

  “I don’t have time to bloody explain it to you,” Jack shouted. He, too, had been taken aback by Kate’s abrupt—abruptly terminated—intervention. Best not to picture what was going on up there. “All you need to know is that we’re going to die if you don’t restart the reactor!”

  Hannah folded her arms under her breasts. “No, don’t explain,” she said, voice shaking. “Kate’s already told me about you. There’s a high probability that you’re the saboteur. You put malware in the ship’s control systems. This HERF theory is complete bullshit. It was you all along. And now you want me to finish the job by poisoning the core, so they can blame it all on design flaws? No, sorry. I won’t.”

  Jack’s mouth dropped open. What he was hearing was so utterly insane he didn’t know how to respond to it. “That’s simply absurd,” he said weakly.

  “I don’t know, it sounds plausible to me.”

  “It’s nonsense on stilts. You can’t possibly believe it.”

  “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

  “Believe me!”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m trying to save this ship!”

  Hannah just snorted.

  The contemptuous little sound made Jack see red. He kicked off from the wall and flew towards Hannah. She thrust out her arms to fend him off. He caught her wrists. She brought up a knee. Jack twisted from the waist, so her knee landed harmlessly on his hip instead of in his groin. His momentum carried them both on a diagonal trajectory to the floor. They bounced off gently. Hannah’s head-lamp came off and drifted away, spinning its beam over the reactor and turbine control panels.

  “Let me go,” Hannah said thinly.

  “I don’t think you mean that,” Jack said. He pinned her wrists with his left hand and slid his other arm around her waist. His right hand took on a life of its own and dipped lower for a quick squeeze. Hannah let out a squeak. She went rigid. Oh God, what did I just do?

  The head-lamp drifted up to the ceiling and bounced off again with a clunk in the unnatural silence. Hannah’s breath blew in hot pants against Jack’s neck. Every time she breathed, her breasts pressed into his chest. He was getting hard, which appalled him. He’d had it in the back of his mind all along that he might have to physically overpower her, but you couldn’t hit a woman—at least, Jack Kildare couldn’t. So how could he make her do what he wanted? What was left?

  “Do it,” he said, lips brushing her temple.

  “Or what?” she said.

  Or what? He couldn’t let go of her until she did what he wanted. But what did he want? It was all on a continuum, was the trouble. To overpower was to dominate was to do what men and women did in bed.

  Hoping that she didn’t know what was going through his mind, he let their bodies drift apart. He kept hold of her wrists, though. “Just start the bloody reactor!” he grated.

  Hannah writhed violently, jerking her wrists out of his grip, and thrashed away. “Get your hands off me!” she yelled. “Just because I said I was sleeping with you, it doesn’t mean you have a right to … oh my God. OK, I accept I shouldn’t have lied about something like that. But you shouldn’t have jumped me! I thought you were a gentleman!”

  The only part of that that made any sense to Jack was you shouldn’t have jumped me. Which he fully admitted was true. “I was late on the day they handed out gentleman cards,” he muttered.

  “Obviously!”

  She’d kicked him in the nose. He tasted blood. The pain effectively killed his arousal. “I’m very sorry, all the same. That was out of bounds, wasn’t it?”

  “‘Out of bounds’?! It was sexual assault!”

  “I’m a nice guy,” Jack said, holding his face in his hands. “I really am.”

  “That’s what they all say,” Hannah said bleakly.

  Jack gave up trying to make a joke out of it. “Look, I’m sorry. I fucked up. You can report me to Mission Control later, if we’re still alive …”

  “What are they gonna do, fire you?” Hannah’s mirthless laugh underlined the problem. They were way beyond the reach of any sanctions. Even the shackles of good manners and civility were starting to weaken. Jack felt a wave of self-disgust. What he had just done wasn’t him, but he’d never be able to convince her of that.

  “Sorry,” he said briskly. “There isn’t time for this. Four and a half hours to criticality, if we skip the full power-up and reboot. We’d better get started.”

  “We?”

  “You.”

  “Fine. I’ll do it,” Hannah said. She sounded close to tears. “But I want it noted that I’m doing this under protest, and the only reason I’m doing it at all is because you assaulted me.”

  “Noted,” Jack sighed. He decided not to mention that there would be no one left alive to note her protests if this didn’t work out.

  Hannah retrieved her headlamp. She floated down to the reactor control panel. The dollar meter stood at 0.07. The hexagonal array had cooled way down. “Here goes nothing,” she said, and yanked the lever to begin the creepingly slow withdrawal of the control rods.

  CHAPTER 13

  Ten hours later, Kate thumbed the PA. “All hands to the bridge, please.” She was so exhausted, it took her a second to remember that the PA wasn’t working. She turned to Alexei. “Go get the others. If we’re going to die, let’s all die together.”

  He left the bridge without giving her any backtalk. That made her feel a little more secure. But it didn’t soothe the pain of her blacked eye, or the humiliation Alexei had inflicted on her. He and Jack had overridden her authority. And, worse: she’d set herself up for this by sleeping with him. Without their existing intimacy, he’d never have dared to physically assault her like that.

  Well, their insane gamble had succeeded. Gambles sometimes did. But the most dangerous part of the operation started now.

  *

  Alexei’s voice floated down from the axis tunnel, loud in the unnatural silence. “Meili? Skyler?”

  “Yeah, what?” Skyler shouted, soaked to the bone and shivering as the hab cooled down. He and Meili had been working flat out to save the garden for the last ten hours. They hadn’t finished covering all the tanks before the HERF hit, so they had to stumble through pud
dles of water, in pitch darkness, and to top it all off, gravity was rapidly failing in the main hab, so the puddles were taking to the air, along with the plants. The tilapia flopped in dumb fear against the insides of their tanks, making quiet thuds. Soon they’d be flying fish, Skyler thought. He was so tired it struck him as funny.

  “Burning into Europa orbit in five minutes,” Alexei shouted. “Commander wants everyone on the bridge.”

  “No,” Meili shouted, without pausing in her work. “We’re not finished yet!”

  Skyler floundered over and took her by the hand. “Fuck this. We’re about to make history. Let’s go see it.”

  He’d developed a new admiration for Meili as they worked side by side. If she was the saboteur, she was doing a damn good job of acting like she cared. As a matter of fact, Skyler had ceased to worry about the malware for the time being. It paled into insignificance compared to the threat of a core meltdown, or an even tastier fate, overshooting Europa and spinning around Jupiter until they died—

  —both of which threats had been averted, apparently, by a successful partial reboot of the reactor. Hannah had saved them all …

  … for now.

  “OK,” Meili said. “I want to see, too. Let’s go.”

  *

  Alexei returned to the bridge with Giles in tow. “The others are coming,” he said, strapping into his seat.

  “Good. Thanks,” Kate said coldly.

  He’d let her down. Let himself down. This deeply emotional, idealistic, funny man, whom she’d trusted with her body, had resorted to superior male strength to get his way. Kate’s outrage went deeper than the pain of bruises. Alexei might as well have spat on the entire edifice of human civilization that got them here in the first place.

  She was never going to forgive him for that.

  And as for Jack …!

  Butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, would it, Killer?

  But as Hannah entered the bridge, and Kate turned to confirm that everyone was there, she noted Hannah’s terrified glance at Jack, and saw how she took a place in the far left corner, as far from Jack as she could get. So, something had happened in Engineering, too.