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

by Felix R. Savage

  While he was doing this, Meili, exploring around the back of Thing Two’s electrolysis and RTG heater unit, sang out numbers that filled Skyler with relief. 1.8 million liters. The telemetry had not lied. Thing Two was full to the brim with life-giving water.

  He went back for the LH2 hose, and hooked that one up.

  Then the water hose. The Shenzhou Plus carried its payload above the reactants for its own engine, in a tank that took up most of its 11-meter height.

  “OK, I’m turning on the pumps,” Meili said.

  “Roger.”

  Meili reappeared around the side of Thing Two. Skyler watched her descend to the ground.

  “That’s weird,” she said.

  “What’s weird?”

  There was a pause. Meili ducked under the engine bell. He could only see her legs. She spoke in an entirely different tone. “The engine’s gone.”

  *

  Skyler sprinted back to Thing Two. He joined Meili under the engine bell. They shouldn’t’ve even been able to get under there. The engine should’ve taken up all the space. They stood in a metal cave. Their helmet lamps flashed around the roof.

  No. Fucking. Engine.

  “Holy shit,” Skyler said. Waves of disbelief crashed over him. For some reason he remembered his eleventh birthday, when he woke up with a weight on his feet, and sat up, expecting to see the foot of his bed heaped with presents, because that’s how they rolled in the Taft household back then, but it was his father sitting on his feet, stroking his leg through the quilt and crying, yes, crying, and then he told Skyler that Mom was gone. She’d moved to Bali with her goddamn hippie yoga instructor. You can’t make this stuff up.

  Ends of fuel and coolant pipes glittered, cleanly sheared off. Wiring appeared to have been excavated out of the engine housing. Shards of low-temperature plastic littered the ice underfoot.

  Skyler ducked out from under the engine bell and stared around the frozen landscape. His heart pounded so hard, he felt like he might pass out.

  Nothing moved.

  He transmitted to Meili, “They took it.”

  “Who? Who took it?”

  “The aliens.” The NXC had not yet acknowledged that there might be living aliens aboard the MOAD. Belatedly, Skyler reverted to the party line— “Or their robots took it. Maybe the AI in charge of the MOAD has drones. It sent them down to the surface to … to scavenge for parts …”

  “Because you could totally fix an interstellar spaceship with the components of Thing Two’s drive?”

  “What’s your theory, then?” Skyler said, panicking.

  “I don’t know. I don’t have a theory.” Meili came out from under the engine bell. “We need to inform Kate.” She started running back towards the Shenzhou.

  Skyler ran after her. They climbed the ladder. Meili was talking to herself in Chinese. She might have forgotten she was transmitting. Skyler’s Mandarin comprehension sucked, despite Meili’s own attempts to teach him, but he caught a few words: they were correct … impossible … and again, they were correct.

  Meili plopped into the Shenzhou Plus’s airlock. Skyler paused, halfway in and halfway out, to take another look at the landscape.

  If the MOAD had sent down a lander, wouldn’t it have left some visible traces?

  A thin layer of snow—actually, frozen oxygen—covered the ice, and what’s more, the ice wasn’t flat like a skating rink. Every tiny variation in topology sprouted ice-moss. You crushed the feathery peaks when you walked on them. He could clearly see their own tracks, leading between the Shenzhou and Thing Two. Every bootprint held a puddle of black shadow.

  The other tracks were less obvious.

  He wouldn’t have seen them at all if he wasn’t specifically looking for something of the kind.

  “Meili!”

  She popped her head up— “Oh God, what?”

  “Look.”

  Another trail of shadow-puddles led away from Thing Two, to the east. The giveaway was they were equally spaced.

  A couple of meters apart.

  “Whatever made those footprints,” Skyler rasped, “was at least twenty feet tall.”

  He shuddered and clutched Meili’s arm. She gripped him just as tightly. When the monster under the bed comes out and leaves footprints on the floor, you feel like a child. They dropped into the airlock. Skyler slammed the hatch. Meili cycled the airlock, her gloves slipping on the fiddly little high-tech buttons. They fell back into the service module. By common consent they unlocked the rear entry hatches of each other’s spacesuits and writhed out into the oxygen-rich, sour-smelling air of the lander. The fans roared, a welcome noise after the quiet of outside.

  Skyler grabbed Meili in his arms and held her tight. The urge for human contact was simply overpowering. She wrapped her arms and legs around him. They swayed together, like children hugging, and then all of a sudden Skyler no longer felt like a child, but rather like an insanely horny man who hadn’t had sex in two years. More, actually. His sex life had been flatlined since long before he boarded the SoD.

  Meili kissed his neck.

  “Oh,” Skyler wept. “I’m about to come in my pants.” He ran his hands over the taut curves of her waist and ass. His fingertips brushed the skin of her upper thighs. “Please … don’t …” He tried to quench his arousal by telling himself he didn’t want Jack Kildare’s sloppy seconds; he told himself he was being disloyal to Hannah. Nothing availed. Meili worked her hand down and squeezed his hardness, tearing a groan from his lips.

  “I feel like I’m going crazy,” she said.

  “You’re telling me.”

  She abruptly pulled away and retreated to the other side of the service module, staring at him.

  “We have to radio up to the SoD,” Skyler said, recovering his sanity.

  “I was ordered to hijack the SoD,” Meili said.

  “Oh, that’s what that was about,” Skyler said. After they restored comms with Earth, he’d finally received the NXC’s translation of the last conversation between Meili and Xiang Peixun that he’d recorded on his iPod. “Peixun said you had to gain access to the bridge, and you said you couldn’t. That it was impossible.”

  “It was impossible. After Xiang died, I felt like I’d been set free. They couldn’t expect me to do it on my own!”

  “What did they expect you to do?”

  Meili’s expression turned inward, as if she wasn’t really talking to him, but the faraway CNSA officials who’d given her her marching orders. “Destroy the MOAD.”

  This, after Kate’s deceitful blow-up-the-MOAD gambit yesterday! It blew Skyler’s mind how many people were turning out to be short-sighted morons. Didn’t they realize that the MOAD could represent the next technological leap forward for humanity? If there were aliens on board, that complicated the picture, but the promise of levelling up for free still held. Of course, it would not be so enticing if it wasn’t your country in prime position to grab the technological goodies …

  “Do they think we won’t share?” he asked.

  “The Communist Party believes that the politicians in Washington are just like themselves,” Meili said.

  “Actually, they pretty much are,” Skyler admitted.

  “All they care about is staying in power. The MOAD threatens the status quo. We already had the Xian Incident.” She referred to the 2018 uprising by a unit of the PLA, which had declared a new republic at China’s old capital, before being bombed into oblivion. “If there is regime change, those pigs in Beijing will end up hanging by their necks. And they know it. The MOAD could trigger regime change in any number of ways. It’s an outside-context problem. The outcome is unpredictable. Even in the best-case scenario, the US gets an advantage. So they try to control it the old-fashioned way. Blow it up.”

  “Kate says we’ve got plutonium rounds, but no one knew about that until yesterday.”

  “No, we didn’t, either.”

  “So how were you supposed to pull it off?”

  “Ext
ract fuel from the core of the SoD’s reactor,” Meili sighed. “All you need is about two kilos of U-235. It becomes a fission bomb yielding several million tons of TNT equivalent.”

  “And, um, you die,” Skyler said. “Handling unshielded uranium tends to have that effect.”

  “Oh, sure. They don’t care. It’s not them dying.” Meili twitched her head to get her hair out of her face. “Peixun would have done it. He would have made me do it. When he died, I cried for joy! For joy! I was standing in front of a firing squad, and now I can live!” She flung up her arms, echoing her pirouette out on the ice.

  “You’re too beautiful to die,” Skyler said. He was not good at complimenting women, but he meant this compliment with all his heart.

  “Thank you,” Meili said. “Anyway, I want to defect to the United States. Maybe you can help me. I’m worried about my parents. Can your agency get them out of China?”

  “Whoa, whoa,” Skyler said.

  “What’s the problem? I told you everything! I’ve given you great intelligence!”

  “Well, sure, but …” Skyler shook his head. “No, actually, you haven’t told me everything. What about the malware?”

  “What malware?”

  Her eyebrows went up, her eyes widened, her mouth fell open. Only a trained professional like Skyler himself could fake surprise that well, and Meili wasn’t a professional. She was fairly readable most of the time. He’d accurately read the tension between her and Xiang, for example—he just hadn’t known what was causing it.

  Now, he knew for a certainty that she’d never been told about the malware.

  “It may have been your bosses’ Plan B,” he said. “I’m still waiting on an analysis of the trigger.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Meili said. “You have to believe me. I’ve told you everything I know.” She bounced over to him and wrapped her arms around his neck again.

  “Oh honey,” Skyler said, burying his face in her hair. “I don’t work for Immigration Services. But I’ll do what I can, I promise. I’ve got some connections.”

  “I always think you’re sexy,” Meili said. “But Xiang wanted me to sleep with you, so I didn’t. You understand? He wanted me to get information from you … But I haven’t asked you anything about the NXC, your work. I ask for nothing. Just help my family.”

  “How did he take it when you were sleeping with Jack?”

  Meili giggled. “It pissed him off! That’s why I did it! Oh, Xiang was so mad. I told him, if he wants to trade sex for information, he can do it himself.”

  “Uh …?”

  “You’re so stupid! Giles is gay. And Xiang is so patriotic, he would take a cock up his ass for China.” She uttered the vulgarity in a matter-of-fact tone. “But he never did it. His excuse was the Earth Party is not important.”

  “The Earth Party? I feel like I’m missing something.”

  “Giles supports the Earth Party. Actually, I support it, too.” Meili touched her cheeks.

  Those odd freckles.

  “OK, I am missing something.”

  “I want to come to Europa, not as a Chinese, but as a human being.”

  A memory stirred. The NXC had noted a fad for ‘micro-cupping,’ not just in China but throughout Southeast Asia. Using tiny suction pumps, Earth Party supporters gave themselves temporary tattoos in the form of blood blisters. It showed their support for the movement in nations where actual movements of the kind the Earth Party favored—meandering, cross-country, ideally cross-border walks—were not allowed.

  The micro-cupping thing had run its course in 2019 or so, but of course Meili hadn’t been back to Earth since then.

  “I like the freckles,” Skyler said, touched. Having rejected patriotism, Meili must have cast about for a substitute identity. It was natural for her to settle on the Earth Party. The movement had gained a reputation as the first truly global political movement, no matter how poorly defined its policy aims were. It had even gained some institutional credibility as Earth Party representatives won election to national parliaments in Europe and the U.S. House of Representatives. In the NXC’s view, it was a messianic movement in secular clothing: the MOAD, our 21st-century salvation. Fringe activists also borrowed the Earth Party brand to indulge in sit-ins and looting. Skyler frowned on the whole business. However he understood how the international brothers-in-arms shtick must appeal to Meili.

  He drew her into his arms, meaning to tenderly reassure her that he accepted her revelations. Unfortunately, his dick was as stupid as a dog with a bone. It swelled whether he would or not.

  A string of beeps from the crew module pierced the white noise of the fans.

  Meili broke away. “The tanks are full.”

  She dropped down through the hatch into the crew module. Skyler followed.

  Now they heard Kate’s voice coming thinly from the headset hanging on the center console. “… come in! Shenzhou! Come in! Meili! Skyler …”

  “She must have been trying to reach us for ages!” Meili dived for the headset. Suddenly, the urgency of what they had to impart to the SoD returned. “Skyler, close the valves! … Kate, I’m so sorry. This is Meili. I read you loud and clear.” Putting on the headset, she winked at Skyler. “We were busy.”

  Skyler toppled towards the consoles. Meili jerked a thumb at an LCD display over the left seat. Goddamn touch-screens. The Chinese had seemingly determined to make the upgraded Shenzhou’s control panels look like the inside of a luxury car. Everything was electronic, not mechanical, and half of the symbols on the screen were in Chinese, with no or very dubious English annotations. Skyler saw a window labeled PUMPS, and stabbed all the off buttons. The window went away.

  Meili was telling Kate about their discovery in a high-pitched gabble. “Aliens! … Aliens!”

  When she concluded the transmission, she was scowling. “She wants us to go out again and photograph the tracks.”

  “At least she’s not telling us to disbelieve our lyin’ eyes,” Skyler said. “Oh well, we would’ve had to go out to disconnect the hoses, anyway.”

  Meili shivered. “I don’t want to go out again,” she said, but she put on her spacesuit.

  They repeated the process of egressing from the airlock.

  The tracks etched into the fluffy ice carpet had not gone away, like a nightmare should.

  “I’ll disconnect the hoses,” Skyler said. “You take the pictures.”

  They had prepped their camera before coming out. Meili raised it to her fishbowl helmet and snapped.

  Skyler climbed halfway down the ladder, disconnected the water hose, climbed further down, disconnected the LOX hose, climbed even further down, disconnected the LH2. Dragging all three hoses, he trudged back to Thing Two. Now he knew it wasn’t the drill that had churned up the ice around the advance lander’s feet. It was the aliens. He pictured them bending their twenty-foot bodies to pry under the engine bell, and shuddered uncontrollably. He climbed up and replaced the hoses on their hooks.

  Standing on the platform behind the electrolysis / RTG unit, he followed the line of tracks with his eyes. They vanished over the horizon.

  On Europa, the horizon was only a couple of kilometers away. Small moon, tight curvature.

  He hurried back to the Shenzhou Plus. They returned to the crew module and transmitted Meili’s pictures to the SoD.

  CHAPTER 17

  Jack and Alexei sat in the crew module of the Dragon lander, still docked with the SoD, waiting.

  And waiting.

  And waiting.

  Periodically, Kate came on the radio and told them to hang on for a few more minutes.

  “Elephant,” Alexei said, throwing a homemade crossbow quarrel to Jack.

  “Edible,” Jack said, catching it.

  “You lose. Elephant is not edible.”

  “Bet you they are, ever tried?”

  Alexei had taught him a Russian game called Is It Edible? It was meant to be played with a ball. They were using a crossbow
quarrel. The tricky part was catching it without puncturing the gloves of your spacesuit. Alexei had put wicked points on the things. They had the crossbows in the storage area overhead.

  “My turn, anyway,” Jack said. “Wheelchair.” He tossed the quarrel. Alexei batted it back. “Kate.” Alexei caught it. Jack cracked up. Alexei threw it back, quite hard.

  At that moment Kate came on the radio again. “Guys?” Her voice crackled with tension. “Sorry to keep you waiting so long. Here it is. Meili and Skyler have found some weird shit. The engine of Thing Two is gone. Missing. And there are tracks, as in footprints, leading away from Thing Two.”

  “Oh God,” Jack said.

  “Yeah. Meili took photographs and sent me the data via the Shenzhou’s uplink. I’ve matched the photographs with our high-rez images of the surface, which appear to show … well, I’ve forwarded everything to you. Have a look for yourselves.”

  Alexei reached for his laptop. He’d brought his laptop and Jack had brought his Nikon on board the Dragon, in preparation for the side trip they had planned, which was an unauthorized flyby of the MOAD. They’d been planning to launch when Kate gave them the green light. Instead of de-orbiting immediately, they had planned to cruise past the MOAD first. Check it out at close range. Take some better pictures. And if a suitable place to dock the Dragon presented itself, well, you never knew …

  This new information underlined just how much they didn’t know, how volatile the whole situation was.

  Alexei used the end of the crossbow quarrel to tap around on his laptop, since the keyboard was not designed to be used with spacesuit gloves.

  The first of the pictures Kate had forwarded filled the screen.

  “Got it,” Alexei said.

  With enhanced contrast and magnification, Jack could see a trail of black dots leading east from Thing Two. The tracks continued in a straight line for a distance marked as 56 kilometers, and then vanished.

  Next picture.