Or perhaps the beings inside there weren’t remotely humanoid.
“Hello,” said a clear, fluting voice. “This is so thrilling. I’m afraid we don’t know your names?”
Jack shouted, “Fuck!”
Alexei shouted, “O Gospodi!”
Kate shouted, “Who was THAT?!?”
Jack let out a breathless laugh. “I think it was them,” he said. His radio squealed. “Alexei?”
“I’m here,” Alexei said, and he reached for Jack’s hand. The two men gripped each other’s gloves, still holding their crossbows in their free hands. The pressure of Alexei’s hand anchored Jack in the moment, a bulwark against conflicting impulses to run, to shoot, to go up to the aliens and touch them to make sure they were real. Strangely the one thing that did not occur to him was to reply. It was as if rocks or sea creatures had spoken—a marvel, not a conversational gambit.
The alien in the middle approached them with its stilted gait and tapped on Jack’s helmet, drawing back swiftly as Jack reflexively swung his crossbow at it. “Hello, hello?” it said. “Is this thing on?”
Jack cleared his throat. “Um, yeah. Are you—” he pointed at it— “talking to me?”
“Well, I’m trying to,” it said. It spoke English with a cut-glass BBC accent, and that was the weirdest thing of all. “If you aren’t going to attack us,” it went on, “perhaps you’d like to come indoors? It really isn’t a good idea to stand around out here. The radiation, you know—it’s extremely damaging. We’re always getting cancer, and your physiology may make you more prone to cellular damage than we are, although I admit we aren’t sure how your bodies work.”
Jack and Alexei looked at each other. Alexei shrugged. “What the hell?” he said.
Jack felt a little delirious. He said, “Good point about the radiation. But sorry, you HERFed us three times. I mean, you attacked us with a high energy radio frequency weapon. I assume that’s it over there. You almost destroyed our ship. So I hope you’ll appreciate that we’re not in a very trusting mood.” He lifted his crossbow to his shoulder.
The aliens turned to each other, for all the world like humans conferring. Suddenly Jack’s helmet filled with an intolerable high-pitched sound.
It made him remember running down the street in Nuneaton after dark, a daily ordeal when he was in primary school. Every house he passed would assault him with a high-pitched tone that felt like a screwdriver going into his young ears—so run, run past the houses, as if they were the lairs of wolves. Later he had found out that those noises were flyback squeal from old cathode-ray televisions. Only children with sharp ears could hear them. He must have lost the ability to hear 15,000 Hz and up by now, but this sounded just as high, and hurt just as badly. It was a cat playing the violin, it was fingernails on a blackboard. The wolves had got him.
He screamed.
Distantly, through the God-awful squealing noise, Alexei also screamed. Then Alexei raised his crossbow and loosed into the nearest alien.
The squeal raced up and down the spectrum, from one agonizing high frequency to another.
Jack wanted to rip his helmet off. He felt nauseated, crucified by the noise. Alexei had the right idea. The aliens were aiming this noise at them. Therefore, stop the aliens.
He shot at the middle one. The ‘string’ of the crossbow, a length of cable, twanged. The sheet aluminum bow flexed. The sanded-sharp welding rod thudded into the alien’s center of mass.
The noise did not stop. If anything it got worse. Jack loaded another quarrel into his crossbow.
Alexei shot at the last uninjured alien.
“Make a run for the Dragon,” Jack howled, but it was already too late. Shadows flickered on the ice all around them. More aliens had come out of the igloo while they were distracted by the first three. Because of their dead-white coloration, which camouflaged them against Europa’s icy terrain, their shadows were easier to see than they were. They moved like insects rather than people at the run, popping up in sand-flea jumps with their legs tucked under them. Now it was easy to see where those widely spaced footprints had come from. They must have carried the Things’ engines in pairs.
Thieving cunts, and I believed for one second that they might be friendly?
With grim methodical care, Jack loaded and shot, loaded and shot. It pleased him how well the crossbow was performing. The unbearable noise redoubled, but he used to stay focused in the cockpit of a Tornado GR-4, and he stayed focused now. Some of his quarrels found their targets; others skittered astray on the ice.
Beside him, Alexei shot his last quarrel and changed his grip on the crossbow to swing it like a sword.
Jack shifted position so they were standing back to back. Here am I, Jack Kildare, aged forty-three, about to die in hand-to-hand combat on Europa.
If he had had the breath to spare he’d have laughed.
The aliens closed in.
CHAPTER 19
Hannah mashed her knuckles against her mouth, watching Kate try to raise Jack and Alexei on the radio. At last the mission commander gave up and flung herself back in her seat.
“They’re not responding. The last thing Jack said was, ‘I think it was them.’ Then both of their radios went dead.”
“What do we do now?” Hannah muttered. She glanced at Giles. He looked as sickened as she felt.
“I think,” Kate said, “we have to assume that we are the only survivors.”
Hannah hugged herself. The three of them had gathered on the bridge as the terrifying drama of, first, the Shenzhou’s crash, and secondly, Jack and Alexei’s encounter with the aliens had played out on the surface. Now they had to face the possibility that they were … the only survivors. Her mind crumpled, and she ordered herself to think logically.
“We have to warn Earth,” Giles said, as the same words rose to Hannah’s lips.
“On it,” Kate said. “But hear this. We are not giving up.” Her words were forceful, but her face looked raw, as if a layer of skin had been peeled from her with the loss of four crew members.
Hannah felt a wave of grief. Skyler! She bit her knuckles again, willing the emotion away. But she knew the only thing that would cushion this blow was a drink.
A large drink.
Fortunately, she’d brought her squeeze bottle to the bridge with her, full of moonshine and cold tea. She cradled it. It would look crass to start chugging hooch right this second, especially in front of Giles, who didn’t know about her still ...
As if that mattered when Skyler, Meili, Jack, and Alexei were dead!
Hannah could see each of them in her mind’s eye so clearly that it was difficult to accept they were no more. Meili, stoic and cheerful— “Maybe just one more tiny drink …” Jack. Hannah thought she wouldn’t miss him, but then she remembered him and Alexei organizing games of tag or Simon Says, silly stuff to keep everyone smiling. Dragging her out of her lair— “Come on, Hannah, I bet you’re really good at hopscotch …” Grief lanced her. And then she couldn’t stop herself from picturing Skyler. “OK there, Hannah-banana?” No one else ever asked if she was OK. And she’d never told Skyler the truth. No, I’m not OK. I need you. I want you. I love you.
What a monumental idiot she’d been.
Now it was too late. Nothing left to do but drink to his memory.
And yet she cradled the squeeze bottle without taking a sip. Even now, her self-respect mattered.
Flies wavered around her, and she batted automatically at them. The insect population of the SoD had soared. All the dying vegetation in the main hab was a feast for bugs. They kept getting sucked into the air circulation intake, as a result of which the circulation efficiency had dropped. The bridge smelled sour, like a frat-house basement.
“We are not giving up,” Kate repeated. “However, with the loss of the Dragon and the Shenzhou …” She rubbed her forehead. “Son of a bitch. I’ve got one idea. It’s squarely in desperate-gamble territory, but look where we are.”
“Go on,” Han
nah said, still ready to trust that Kate could fix this.
“We’ll have to board the MOAD.”
“Yes,” Giles said immediately. “That’s what I was thinking.” He assumed a professorial tone of voice and gestured with one forefinger. “We know that the MOAD possesses a water plasma engine similar to ours. Therefore, it’s not unreasonable to assume that it contains stocks of water, or LOX and LH2. We only have to procure these stocks, and we will be on our way home.”
“Only,” Kate echoed. “But, yes, Giles. That’s my idea in a nutshell. Glad to know I’m not the only crazy one around here.”
Giles giggled and batted at the flies. It spoiled his donnish affect.
Hannah said, “Hang on, guys. How do we get to the MOAD without the Dragon or the Shenzhou?” Another wave of grief crashed over her. This time she capitulated to it. She raised her squeeze bottle and swallowed a mouthful of fiery moonshine. The alcohol drowned the lump of unexpressed emotion in her stomach.
“Aha,” Kate said bleakly. “Remember when Skyler came aboard?”
Hannah remembered that perfectly. Skyler had been the last of the crew to board, joining them at the last minute, after the NXC agent who’d originally been sent with them died. Lance Garner’s spacesuit had malfunctioned. She still wondered if it really had malfunctioned, or … Anyway. Skyler had been slung up to the Spirit of Destiny’s orbit in a Falcon Heavy, and he’d had to venture across to the SoD on a broomstick.
“The broomstick,” she said, understanding what Kate had in mind.
“That’s it,” Kate said. “We’ve still got it. It’s tethered outside the storage module.”
These ‘broomsticks’ had been used during the construction of the SoD. They were LOX tanks with nozzles and handlebars attached. Hannah had never ridden one, but she remembered the construction crew joking about popping wheelies in space.
“The MOAD is only two hundred meters away from us. The broomstick could carry two people that far,” Kate said. “As regards returning with the water, we’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it. I might be able to maneuver the SoD close enough to the MOAD to hook up the fueling hoses. But there’s no point getting ahead of ourselves. First, we have to find out if there’s any water there.”
Hannah shook her head. “Two people? Not all of us?”
“Of course I will go,” Giles said immediately.
“And me,” Kate said. “You’ll stay here, Hannah.” Her gaze travelled briefly to the squeeze bottle in Hannah’s hand, and returned to her face.
The old paranoia roared back.
She knows I’m a lush. A shitty human being.
Get help, Hannah, get help! Her sister Bethany’s voice came back to her. With those words, Bethany had cut Hannah off from her family, the only family Hannah had.
She’d come to see Kate as a substitute sister, a more fun sister than Bethany had ever been, a naughty elder sister who got drunk with her and gossiped about their crewmates.
And now Kate had revealed that she, too, thought Hannah was a liability. She was taking Giles instead, because she thought Hannah would scream if she saw an alien, or puke in her spacesuit, or both.
As she struggled to respond, Kate said kindly, “It isn’t just the water. We’re way behind on repairs. The last HERF knocked out the control machinery for the pumps and centrifuges in the SLS. If we don’t get that stuff fixed, we can have all the water we like and we’ll never get home. So Hannah, I’d like you to stay here and work on those repairs.”
Hannah understood that Kate was trying to make her feel better about getting left behind. She swallowed hard. “I’d probably just slow you down, anyway,” she muttered.
“Good. We go,” Giles said. Hannah caught a smug expression on his face, and suddenly hated him intensely, although she’d never had strong feelings about him one way or the other before.
“Life support is Giles’s job,” she said in a last spasm of resistance. “Shouldn’t he stay and do the repairs?”
“It’s only his job because Peixun is dead,” Kate said. “Anyway, he has to come. He’s the xenolinguist.”
CHAPTER 20
Light shining in my eyes.
Go away, I’m trying to sleep.
What’s that smell?
Half-conscious, Jack followed the salty smell down a memory lane that brought him out on a beach in Cornwall. A camping holiday with some friends from uni. Jack there for the laughs and a girl he wanted to get off with. But the atmosphere had rapidly soured. Jack had been a bad drinker in those days. The genes of his alcoholic Irish grandfather played havoc with his normally controlled temperament. He remembered storming out of the tent at two in the morning, walking along the beach with Meeks—this was in the days when Meeks could walk—the waves crashing on the pebbles, moonlight shattering on the bay.
Oblivious to the beauty around them, they’d continued their argument. It had started with Independence Day, of all things. Jack had claimed it was a perfectly plausible scenario—he loved that film! Meeks had insisted that the aliens would have obliterated humanity long before Will Smith ever climbed into his F-18. Somehow, they’d gone from there to tumbling around on the beach, trying to punch each other’s faces in.
Jack hadn’t even sobered up before he realized what a complete dick he’d been. He’d apologized so extravagantly that even Meeks ended up laughing. It had never been mentioned again. First fight, last fight. But something had changed forever on that beach.
Jack stopped drinking, joined the University Air Squadron. Next stop, Iraq.
Meeks? Built a rocket car in his garage and smashed it into the side of a Welsh quarry.
Jack opened his eyes, projecting himself into a sitting position at the same time, as if the force of that crash had carried through the decades and across 600 million kilometers to …
Europa.
Right.
Um … really?
He sat on a bluey-green platform … bunk … shelf? His eyes identified familiar objects. Lockers. Ceiling lights. A hamper full of what appeared to be seaweed, except it was wriggling about like it might be alive. The floor was very dirty. At a card table in the middle of the room sat an alien.
“If this is hell,” Jack said, “it’s a bit underwhelming.” His voice sounded shaky in his own ears. But he could hear it, and also hear the familiar noises of fans, and a generator or something else that rumbled like a diesel engine nearby. He was not wearing his spacesuit. In fact he wasn’t wearing anything except his own, rather unclean, underpants. This detail convinced him he wasn’t dead. He swung his legs off the shelf—his feet dangled half a meter off the floor—without taking his eyes off the alien.
“Where’s Alexei?” he blurted, remembering how they’d fought back to back, swinging wildly at their attackers. That memory broke off inconclusively. He must have passed out … and woken up here. In a room that smelled like the sea. With an alien.
The alien, after all, looked much the way it had when wearing a spacesuit, except it had a face. The skin of the face was white, but not the dead white of its spacesuit. More like mushrooms. Mushroom-color too were its hands and its bare shins and feet. It did not have an octopus for a head. The snaky ‘tentacles’ were locks of hair, or something like hair, as fat as electric cords, which stood out in a shifting halo, Medusa-like, shiny black, with a coppery glint where they caught the light.
The face reminded Jack of those Japanese cartoons he’d never gotten into. An inverted isosceles triangle dominated by gigantic purplish-brown eyes. A nothing of a nose, a gash for a mouth. Ridiculously small ears like cowrie shells.
Convergent evolution, Jack thought. Start with oxygen-breathing organisms, add a requirement for opposable thumbs, and this is pretty much what you’re going to get.
Yet it blew his mind to see the alien slouching with one foot tucked up on its chair, fiddling with a metal device the size and shape of a sunflower, which was nonetheless identifiable as a computer, as it had a screen in the middle, c
overed with squiggly marks that must be alien text.
The alien had not so much as glanced at Jack since he woke up. While he stared, the alien put down its computer, reached around its own spindly knee, curled three of its seven fingers through the handle of a cup that stood on the table, and quaffed the black contents.
Then it flicked a glance at Jack, saw him awake, and sat up straight, dropping its foot to the floor and placing its cup on the table at the same time, with a jerky movement that looked uncoordinated, but ended in poised stillness, like a dancer only pretending to lose her balance.
“Mind telling me where I am?” Jack said, shakily. “Oh, and if you’re going to whack me into the cookpot, I’d like to know that, too. It’s not dying I’m afraid of. It’s not knowing what’s going to happen next.”
The alien foraged through the stuff on the table, which Jack mentally labeled as playing cards, a pair of pliers, metal marbles with one flat side, and a wad of clingfilm—although each of these things bore only a categorical resemblance to its earthly counterparts. The ‘playing cards,’ for example, were seven-sided, and could have been alien money, or leaves from an alien plant. The alien found an object that was completely recognizable: a wireless headset. It stood up, walked to Jack with its stiff hip-swaying gait, and offered it to him. Jack saw that the alien had pinpoint pupils, as if it had just done a line of coke.
He took the headset dubiously. Feather-light, it seemed to be made of white plastic.
The alien mimed putting it on.
“OK, OK, I see what it is,” Jack said. He remembered—nails on a blackboard, nails through his head. He had to find out what had happened to Alexei. If the alien wanted to communicate with him via headset, it was a risk he had to take. He fitted the disks over his ears.
“There! Hello.”
It was the same BBC voice as before. Jack stared at the alien. Its lips hadn’t moved.
“My name is Keelraiser. That’s a literal translation. Could I know your name?”
Lifeboat: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 2) Page 14
