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

by Felix R. Savage

  Burn minus 0:20.

  Fuck it. Worry about this shit later.

  Like they taught you in the Air Force, 90% of professionalism is successfully working with assholes.

  “OK, Jack,” she said. “Execute Burn Three.”

  “Roger,” Jack said. He keyed in the throttle command.

  *

  Skyler and Meili trailed onto the bridge as Kate gave the command to burn. He floated over to Hannah. “OK there, Hannah-banana?”

  She didn’t answer, but smiled tremulously and gave his hand a quick squeeze.

  “Dammit, no view,” he said quietly. All the camera feeds were dark. His inner romantic had hoped for a spectacular view of Europa.

  Instead, all they got was a view of Jack pushing buttons, his hands flickering from one console to another, and a soundtrack of Kate and Alexei calling out numbers. They both had their laptops open, strapped to their knees with, of course, duct tape. Even Jack had a laptop propped open in front of the useless radar plot.

  Meili tugged on Skyler’s shoulder and tapped Hannah’s arm. She whispered, “They’re literally flying blind! All the sensors are out. They have nothing, nothing. This is incredible.”

  Skyler whispered, “The laptops?”

  Hannah answered, “The computers are still down. They only had time to fix the essential flight controls. They must have figured out the whole burn on their goddamn laptops.” Her lips parted in awe. Skyler felt a stab of jealousy that poisoned the experience for him.

  At last the three in the hot seats fell quiet. The deep bass thrumming of the steam turbines undergirded the silence. Skyler welcomed the sound after the hideous quiet they’d endured for hours. Back on Earth, he’d always thought the noise of machinery was ugly, but out here, the sound of machinery was the sound of life. A vital bulwark against the hostile night.

  He whispered to Hannah, “Did you have any trouble with the reactor?”

  She put on a folksy voice. “Oh Lawd, nothin’ but trouble … Seriously, Sky, when I pulled out the first rod, I thought I was killing us all.” Her face wrinkled. Tears stood in her eyes. Skyler felt terrible for making her cry.

  “But it went OK?” he said, desperate to cheer her up.

  “Yup. My baby’s tougher than I ever dreamed.” Hannah backhanded the tears out of her eyes. “I only took the output up to thirty-five percent. I’m not risking any more than I have to.”

  Jack pushed another cluster of buttons in rapid succession. Then he seemed to freeze, poised over the consoles.

  Giles said, “Are we there yet?”

  Everyone laughed louder than the joke warranted. Jack swung around, smiling— “Don’t relax yet. HERF number four incoming any minute now, I wouldn’t wonder.”

  “Luckily there is nothing left to slag,” Alexei added.

  “That’s it, guys,” Kate said. “Welcome to Europa.”

  *

  Everyone wanted to see outside. Even Jack. Especially Jack, perhaps. He had been awake for some number of hours that made his brain feel like porridge when he even tried to add them up, yet he volunteered for an EVA immediately to restore crucial sensors and antennas. He really wanted to be the first person to see Europa with his naked eyes. With luck he might even get a glimpse of the MOAD.

  Kate nixed the proposal. “You’ll be going out plenty,” she said. “Get some sleep first.” And, accurately reading his sense of urgency: “The MOAD’s not going anywhere.”

  Jack trailed aft through the misery of spilled tanks and floating vegetation. It was just as well the lights weren’t on, so he couldn’t see the plants scraping over the floor like kids’ balloons a few days after the fair. He bumped into plenty of them, though.

  Alexei walked beside him, leaning way forward in the ultra-low-gravity gait that made a person seem to be walking into a gale. Kate had told him to get some sleep, too.

  Jack wound up at his coffin by following his nose, rather than because any of the vegetable landmarks were still there. He flung it open and collapsed into his hammock. Alexei sat on the edge of his coffin.

  Accepting that Alexei wanted to talk, Jack sat up again. Tiredness, until now kept at bay by adrenaline, literally dizzied him; he folded an arm on the floor and rested his head on it. “I’m knackered, mate,” he mumbled.

  “I can’t believe I did that,” Alexei said.

  “Did what?”

  “I hit her. She hit me, too. And …” Alexei pulled down the collar of his t-shirt. “These are the marks of our commander’s teeth.”

  “You definitely took one for the team,” Jack yawned.

  “She likes it,” Alexei declared. Then he sagged. “I don’t want to hit a woman. I’ve never really hit her before. It’s one thing, a spicy little spank or two, but this time I was angry. I hurt her. Jesus!” The exclamation sounded less like profanity, more like an invocation. “We can’t go on like this!”

  Jack sat upright. Alexei’s heartfelt confession ripped away the woolly blanket of exhaustion. It exposed his own rationalizations. Guilt pricked him anew. “I didn’t actually hit Hannah, but …” He shook his head. That sounded like he was pretending he hadn’t sunk that low, when actually he had sunk lower. In thought, if not in deed.

  Jack Kildare was not a man who thought very deeply about his own desires. Given sufficient distractions, he didn’t think about them at all. It horrified him to peer into the darkness of those moments back in Engineering. That isn’t me! And it didn’t help to realize that it wasn’t really anything to do with Hannah, either. It had been the situation, his frustration, his pressing need.

  What that said about him, he hated to think. He bowed his head and struck his forehead with his fist. “Must. Do. Better.”

  “She said you were the saboteur.”

  “Huh?”

  “Kate said you were the saboteur. I asked her who said that. Skyler, of course.”

  “Of course,” Jack said, grateful for the change of subject. “He’s trying to screw me any way he can.”

  “We’ll sort him out,” Alexei said. “First, we sort out the MOAD. Then we take lunch break. Then we sort out Skyler.” He yawned hugely.

  “No more good little soldier boys,” Jack said.

  “No more good little soldier boys.” Alexei clasped Jack’s hand briefly and stumbled off to his own coffin.

  The word was apt. Jack slept like the dead.

  CHAPTER 14

  Hannah found Kate asleep in her seat on the bridge. The words came to her mind—Tied to the mast. She wished she had a blanket to tuck over the commander, but all she had was a report on the status of the reactor. She had trimmed back the output to housekeeping level. She’d been going to tell Kate that it was OK to spin the main hab and power up the rest of the ship’s systems.

  She surprised herself by bending over and kissing the commander on the cheek.

  Kate woke up. “Ah! Oh. Hannah.”

  “Sorry,” Hannah said, backing away in the air. “You need to sleep.”

  “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” Kate said grimly. “We have repairs to carry out. Are those two still down for the count?”

  She meant Jack and Alexei, obviously. Hannah nodded—she’d seen that both their coffins were shut, the red ‘occupied’ flags showing.

  “Good.”

  Kate had a black eye. Hannah couldn’t look away from it. Noticing her gaze, Kate said crisply, “Alexei punched me.”

  “Oh God! I’m so sorry.”

  “Not as sorry as he’s going to be.”

  Hannah’s heart overflowed with sympathy and indignation. “I wasn’t going to tell you,” she said. “But something happened…”

  She started crying.

  “So much for my tough-girl image,” she gasped, scrubbing at the tears which could not fall in the zero-gee environment of the bridge.

  “What happened?” Kate said.

  “Jack tried to rape me.”

  Kate floated out of her seat. Her face reddened with anger. “I knew something
happened back there.”

  Hannah shook her head. Her scrupulous commitment to accuracy forced her to retract what she’d just said. “I don’t want to exaggerate. He kind of grabbed me and squeezed my ass. That’s all it was. But oh my God, I was so frightened.”

  “I’m not surprised. That is frightening. It’s completely unacceptable.” But Kate’s color was returning to normal. Maybe she didn’t think ass-grabbing was that bad, in the grand scheme of things. And maybe it wasn’t. The truth was, it wasn’t really having her ass grabbed that had scared Hannah. It had been the way Jack held her wrists, holding her powerless. But in the end, nothing had happened. So maybe she was making a mountain out of a molehill.

  “Sorry,” she said, sniffling. “I don’t want to distract you from the mission.”

  “No. If you don’t feel safe, that affects the mission. So it is important.”

  But something definitely seemed off about Kate’s reaction.

  Suddenly. Hannah remembered her own drunken lie that she was sleeping with Jack.

  Oh, no. Of course, Kate thought Hannah had been screwing Jack for months! In that alternate universe, rape would have been a big deal, sure, but a bit of ass-grabbing was hardly worth mentioning.

  Kate said diffidently, “Hannah, just checking, but are you sure you were, y’know, totally sober at that time?”

  “Yes, of course I was!” The question panicked Hannah. It suggested that Kate had realized her relationship with alcohol was not an entirely voluntary one.

  She saw a way to divert Kate from the topic and tie up the loose ends of her previous lie at the same time. “I’m through with Jack, anyway,” she said. “Finito, no maz. It’s not even because of this. I honestly believe he knew that rebooting the reactor could have killed us all, and he was willing to take that risk, anyway.”

  *

  So it was that Giles Boisselot became the first human being to set eyes on the MOAD.

  Kate, officious and peremptory as usual, had ordered him outside to fix the comms antennas. Giles had protested that he was not an EVA specialist, but he did not wish to become a target of Kate’s wrath, so he suited up and endured a pre-breathe, sharing the bridge airlock with a satchel full of replacement parts.

  Ruefully, he reflected that Giles Boisselot, Ph.D, of ESA, formerly Professeur des Xenolinguistics at the University of Nantes, frequent ornament of interdisciplinary SETI conferences, respected to the point of fan worship by everyone in his tiny and obscure field, drinking buddy of even more obscure heavy metal bands, had come a long way. He used to create symbol sets incorporating sub-sonic frequencies to analyze and compare raw stellar data captured by telescopes throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Now he was a glorified plumber / electrician!

  But Giles did not complain. He’d signed up for this, after all. Moreover, he’d given much thought to the likely future of the human race after the MOAD revealed its secrets. It would be a better future, he had no doubt, in ways that no one at present could imagine. He relished the honor of ushering in that future, in whatever small way he could be helpful. Even if it was just mending antennas.

  He spun the wheel to open the external hatch, and egressed.

  A world of illimitable blackness opened around him. There was a roof to this world: a cracked white dinner plate, with a bite out of its upper edge.

  Europa.

  The ‘cracks’ he knew to be cyclopean trenches, evidence of Europa’s geological activity, which sometimes produced outgassings of water vapor. The first observations of the MOAD had been mistaken for such plumes.

  Europa seemed to hang alone in space, illuminated by the distant sun, which was behind the SoD at present, so that Giles floated in shadow. He was perplexed not to see Jupiter, and turned all around—keeping a nervous grip on the grab handle outside the airlock—in search of it, before realizing that Europa must be hiding it from view.

  This, then, was a sign that the SoD had entered precisely the orbit desired by Mission Control! They were meant to be in an orbit as near as possible to Europa-stationary, above the side of the moon tidally locked away from Jupiter. And it looked like that’s exactly where they were.

  He radioed, “Kate, I think we did it. The burn parameters were exactly correct!”

  “Good,” Kate said. “Hurry up and fix those antennas. You’re taking rems.”

  “But isn’t it true that Europa shields us from the worst of Jupiter’s radiation?”

  “Yes and no,” Kate said. “The safest place on Europa is the leading hemisphere. We are orbiting towards the terminator, the line that divides the leading and trailing hemispheres. Same place Thing One and Thing Two landed. In fact we should be able to see them, when we get the optic sensors fixed. But right now our priority is restoring comms with Earth. I also need you to fix the dipole antenna so we can receive telemetry from Thing One and Thing Two,” she added, in case he might have forgotten.

  “I would have liked to see Jupiter,” Giles sighed, working his way along the ‘ladder’ of grab handles that led over the top of the bridge. The module was a gray steel cylinder, with a rounded nose cone to deflect micro-impacts. Like the rest of the ridiculously named Spirit of Destiny, it was aesthetically null. 21st-century humanity seemed incapable of creating beautiful objects. It was just as well so much beauty remained in space, where Homo sapiens couldn’t defile it. Giles had no very high opinion of his species, yet he wished to preserve it—a curious paradox!

  “Hang on,” Kate said. “You can’t see Jupiter?”

  “No.”

  “That’s wrong. Jupiter should be visible above Europa’s limb.”

  “But doesn’t Europa block it out?”

  “No! The distances are completely—OK, just tell me what you can see.”

  Giles breathed heavily. “I can see Europa.”

  “And?”

  “She has the appearance of a crescent moon lying on her back.”

  “And that’s wrong,” said Kate. “At no time should Europa appear as a crescent. There’s nothing to cast a shadow on it.”

  “But—” Giles started, prepared to insist on the evidence of his own eyes.

  Then he understood what he was really looking at.

  The black convexity eating into the top of Europa was, in fact, an object floating between him and the distant moon.

  The dim, scattered lights which he had taken for stars were lights, located here and there on the object.

  He stood up to see better. The movement peeled him off the bridge module. He floated up on his tether—and now he could see Jupiter! It peeked from above the object.

  The lumpy, engorged silhouette of a thruster stood out sharply against the creamy bands of gas.

  Giles Boisselot screamed.

  CHAPTER 15

  Kate called an all-hands meeting.

  “We are close enough to the MOAD to spit on it,” she said. “We were supposed to wind up in the same orbit, with a comfortable separation. Our actual separation is a couple of hundred meters.”

  Jack, feeling fantastic after ten hours of sleep, grinned and shrugged. The implied criticism of his seat-of-the-pants burn calculations did not rankle. “A miss is as good as a mile,” he said.

  “Sorry, but are we sure we aren’t going to collide with it?” Hannah said.

  “Our orbit is tilted a fraction of a degree further to the north,” Kate said. “So no, we won’t collide with it. Unless it moves.”

  There was some nervous laughter. Of course the MOAD wasn’t going to move! It had sat here for ten years without ever doing anything.

  Except HERFing human probes and spaceships, Jack thought, but he reckoned the same thing was on everyone else’s mind, so he said nothing. His personal view was that the aliens had probably shot their bolt. That spacecraft was in bad condition. The pictures Giles had taken with his helmet camera, although low-rez, confirmed the massive hole halfway along the MOAD’s length, and added detail to the pictures previously obtained by Thing One and Thing Two. It look
ed like an explosion had almost ripped the MOAD in half. Jack pictured the aliens holed up in there, taking potshots at the indomitable SoD with the only working weapon they still possessed: a radio-frequency transmitter. The aliens themselves refused to come into focus, but the general picture in Jack’s imagination owed a lot to Alien—only in reverse. A few surviving crew members, marooned in their own ship … stalked by some implacable menace?

  He remembered Oliver Meeks’s prediction that the MOAD would deliver doom to Earth, and felt a goose walk across his grave.

  More realistically, the MOAD had probably suffered a steam explosion, or whatever the alien equivalent was.

  And now you’re in real trouble, E.T. Now the humans are here.

  Jack couldn’t wait to get in there, appropriately loaded for bear, of course.

  That last part was going to be the problem.

  He leaned over and whispered to Alexei, “Remind me again why we don’t have guns?”

  Alexei muttered, “I’m thinking about this. We might be able to make crossbows.”

  Jack nearly laughed out loud. Crossbows! “Wicked,” he purred under his breath. His mind immediately went walkabout, foraging in the storage module for likely materials. He listened with half an ear as Kate moved on from the MOAD to other findings.

  Giles, after recovering from the surprise of coming face-to-arse with the MOAD, had completed his task of repairing the antennas—both the directional antenna for comms with Earth, and the little dipole antenna for shortwave communications with Thing One and Thing Two. They’d acquired up-to-date telemetry from the two advance landers. No problems there, it seemed.

  “About time something went right for a change,” Skyler said. “When are we looking at recovering the reactions mass, ma’am?”

  “I’m glad you asked,” Kate said, smiling at him. “You will be recovering the reaction mass. You’ll go in the Shenzhou Plus lander with Meili. It should’ve been Peixun, but … rest in peace. Jack and Alexei will take the Dragon. We’ll need both landers shuttling up and down to fill the tanks. Probably four trips each. What’s a little radiation, right, Skyler?”