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

by Felix R. Savage

  *

  Nene and Eskitul willingly agreed to show the men the fusion reactor. Alexei hadn’t seen it yet, either. The two rriksti led them across the hydroponic garden. The walkways creaked under the weight of the two humans. Jack put his feet where Nene indicated, his mind filled with excitement to the exclusion of all else.

  A fusion reactor! Is it possible, after all?

  Physicists on Earth had been struggling to achieve scalable fusion reactions for decades. Economically viable fusion reactors were always, always ten years off.

  And these buggers have done it?!? Or was it an inaccurate translation? Fission, fusion—they sound similar but there’s a world of difference. Fission is splitting atoms. It’s what the SoD’s reactor does. Fission razed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, blew the roof off Chernobyl. Fusion is joining atoms. It’s what happens in the heart of the sun.

  The garden ended on a ledge stacked with supplies. They walked along a tunnel leading away and up from the garden. The sweltering heat got worse. Alexei knuckled the dirty-white wall of the tunnel. “On the other side of this is ice, yes?” he said doubtfully. “Minus 170 degrees?”

  “You would call this material structural aerogel,” Eskitul said in its hollow booming voice. “It’s 99.99% air, 0.01% organic polymer.”

  “It feels like styrofoam.”

  “Yes, but it does not melt. We also use it to insulate the reactor.”

  “And it doesn’t exist,” Alexei said. “But I guess it does, after all!” His high-pitched cackle gave away that he was just as excited as Jack was. Aquaculture and genetically engineered bugs were all right. But Jack and Alexei were astronauts, not chemists. It was the science-fictional shit that got their blood pumping.

  The tunnel dead-ended in a wall. Nene stood on tiptoe and took an armful of filmy material from a shelf. “These are protective garments. Please put them on. See, we also wear them.”

  Both rriksti, without any signs of hesitation or embarrassment, stripped off their clothes.

  Jack and Alexei surrendered utterly to curiosity. They stared at the aliens’ naked bodies.

  Disappointingly, they were none the wiser. Both rriksti had wrinkly bulges at their crotches, like a single large, hairless testicle.

  Jack met Alexei’s eyes—his gaze said clearly, Oh fuck.

  With great reluctance, they removed their underpants.

  Nene and Eskitul fell about. They clung to each other and pointed at the men’s groins. Their hair danced. Although their facial expressions did not change, Jack felt no doubt whatsoever that they were laughing their heads off.

  “I wonder if they know how much it matters to us not to have our cocks laughed at?” Jack said dryly. Yet he welcomed the aliens’ hilarity, in a way. Making people laugh was the key to getting on with them, even if you had to disrobe to accomplish it.

  Alexei grabbed his penis and waggled it at the rriksti, reducing them to further paroxysms. “It’s a cock, deal with it! Jesus, they must have seen some porn in all their hours of watching TV.”

  “They probably thought it was comedy.”

  They put on the filmy garments. These were full-body bunny suits, with hoods that covered the face. It felt like wearing nothing at all. The garments turned out to be white on the outside, but transparent from the inside, and permeable to air. Eskitul walked towards the wall. It opened automatically, and they walked into hell.

  Alexei flinched and covered his ears. Jack fell back a step, before driving the heels of his hands against his ears and moving forward into what felt like a solid storm of noise.

  They followed the rriksti between cramped partitions, up twisting steel ladders, in the near-dark. Other rriksti stepped out of walls, and regarded the humans with silent attention, their hair twitching.

  The humid heat was thick enough to cut with a knife. Water dripped from overhead. The noise redoubled whenever a wall opened. Jack glimpsed corroded-looking turbine cabinets. That was where the noise was coming from. Steam turbines. No shortage of water on Europa. Convert heat energy to electricity …

  He’d almost concluded that there was nothing new here, after all, when they walked through another wall into a chamber filled with brilliant white light. Jack’s hood darkened, reducing the light to bearable level. The air felt brittle, charged.

  A star hung in the middle of the chamber.

  A jet of luminous gas gouted from the star, crossed the chamber, and vanished into the far wall. The gas jet wavered to and fro in a sinuous unpredictable pattern, yet it never died, nor did the star dim at all.

  Jack stared, hypnotized. He knew that he was looking—through God knows how many layers of shielding—at a fusion reaction. This was the closest any human being had ever come to gazing into the heart of a star.

  When he recovered himself, he shouted, “Are we being shot full of neutrons right now?”

  Neutrons, the least appealing side products of fusion, could kill you even faster than Europa’s surface radiation.

  “No!” Eskitul said. “The reaction is aneutronic.”

  “What’s the fuel?” Alexei demanded.

  “Lithium,” Eskitul said. “The byproduct is helium 3, which is also useful.”

  A shadow flickered on the ceiling of the chamber. Someone was scrambling around on top of the star. The light melted the person to a skeletal silhouette. Yet Jack recognized Keelraiser.

  Jack backed up for a running start and jumped towards the star. His fingertips found the side of the housing. The light beat on the insides of his eyelids. He got his elbows over something lumpy. Up close, the thickness of shielding enclosing the reactor core could be seen—shadowy curves and corners.

  He clambered on top of the housing and stood next to Keelraiser. The fusion core burnt below them, as hot as the core of the sun, yet the half-seen metal under Jack’s soles felt barely warm.

  “How do you catalyze the reaction?” he yelled.

  “Muons,” Keelraiser said. It uttered its creaky chuckle at Jack’s expression. “Are you an expert?”

  “Not in the least.” Jack thought of Hannah. “I know an expert.” Hannah would go absolutely nuts for this. He couldn’t wait to share this marvel with her and the rest of the crew.

  In fact, he guiltily realized that everyone on the SoD must be worrying about him and Alexei. They’d have to return to the Dragon soon to send a sitrep. It was going to feel so great to deliver good news for a change!

  “The reactor is operating at five percent of maximum output,” Keelraiser said. “It’s not even producing thrust, you see. Maximum shielding, minimum output. I am not even sure what would happen if we cranked it up anymore.”

  Keelraiser suddenly turned and leapt away. Jack followed, stumbling over half-seen knobbles and hoops. He glanced back at the other three. Alexei’s face, bleached by the light, looked like he’d seen God.

  Keelraiser closed a hand on his wrist and pulled him through the wall.

  They stood in reddish shade, balanced back-to-back on a seven-sided nozzle …

  … inside the engine bell of a spaceship.

  “That reactor is a drive,” Jack said in delight. He touched the metal overhead. It was so smooth it didn’t seem to be there. Probably niobium. That’s what NASA had used for the engine bells of Thing One and Thing Two. “Jesus! You’re running this whole hab off a spaceship drive!”

  They stood at the small end of the engine bell. The large end measured about 10 meters across. It was mostly buried in a slumped wall of ice, with just a crack of reddish light showing at the top.

  “Variable shielding,” Keelraiser said. “At minimum output, nothing escapes into the combustion chamber.”

  “We were in the combustion chamber!” That room full of heat and light was actually the heart of the engine.

  “Yes. When we thrust, we pump propellant into the combustion chamber, and reduce the shielding. The reactor vaporizes the propellant, and it squirts out of this nozzle. Hey presto, thrust.”

  Keelraiser dropped
onto the smooth slope of the engine bell and coasted down to the bottom, like a child on a slide. Jack followed. He slid so swiftly that he had to brake at the bottom by shoving his feet against the wall. Cold styrofoam. It squidged between his toes, like sand, and sprang back.

  A rope ladder hung down from the top edge of the engine bell. Keelraiser swarmed up it.

  Jack copied the rriksti, and squeezed up through the crack between the engine bell and the wall.

  He now understood that they’d climbed through the engineering deck of the spacecraft on their way to the combustion chamber. Now they stood on a makeshift platform on top of the engine bell. The aerogel-coated ice wall lapped like a frozen wave around the whole ass-end of the ship; the door they’d come through must be buried somewhere under there.

  Overhead, Jack made out a distant roof in the dim light. This cavern must be the original cryovolcanic crater. Up there was the ice roof the rriksti had added.

  “It is cold here,” Keelraiser said. “That’s why we wear protective garments. The air is dry, also. You might like it! But please do not remove your hood. The water reclamation apparatus is quite noisy. It might hurt your ears.”

  Pipes snaked out of the ice around the ship’s business end, converging on a metal box the size of Jack’s childhood home. It had a Victorian aspect, because it appeared to be made of cast iron. Jack assumed this was the ‘water reclamation apparatus.’ Other machines, looking more authentically alien, like complicated versions of the radio mast outside, winked and blinked at the far end of the cavern. Rriksti in protective garments stared up quizzically.

  Jack’s attention zeroed in on the ship he was standing on top of. It was as big as a Hercules transport, not including all the propulsion-related business at the back. From the platform where he and Keelraiser stood, an arrangement of ropes led over the top of the engine bell, through the chasm between two drum-shaped propellant tanks, through a forest of metal spikes—perhaps a heat-rejection system. The fuselage of the ship projected forward, propped up on makeshift gantries, like the body of a tropical fish. Its coloration—oxidized swirls of blue, purple, and yellow—also made him think of tropical life. It had blended wings raked back from its nose.

  Walk on the wing, hold the rope. Jack’s protective garment caught on the rough fibers sticking out from the rope. The combination of ultra-low and ultra-high tech amused and maddened him. The ship’s aging paint job flaked off at a touch.

  “On Earth, there was a reusable orbiter called the space shuttle,” Keelraiser said through Jack’s headset. “Is this correct?”

  “Yes. I flew one,” Jack said.

  “Then we have something else in common. I was the pilot of this shuttle.” Keelraiser reached the leading edge of the wing, released the rope, and sat down with its legs dangling over the edge.

  Jack sat down beside it. He felt like a gambler holding a soft hand of maybe fourteen, tempted to stand, scared to hit. He laid his hands palm down on his thighs.

  Keelraiser tweaked the two extra fingers of Jack’s protective right glove, which hung empty, since Jack didn’t have enough fingers to fill them. Rolling the material between its own fingers, it said, “Ten years ago, after our ship’s primary drive failed, I landed this shuttle on Europa. There were five hundred and thirty-nine people aboard. Now, we are three hundred and eight.”

  “How did you lose so many people?” A second later Jack realized the question should have been—how did so many of you SURVIVE?

  “Radiation,” Keelraiser said. “We didn’t have the right machinery to build a shelter. We used the shuttle’s drive to melt a hole in the ice. But the rest of the work had to be done by hand.”

  Jack shook his head, awed by what these people had been through. Two hundred of them had literally worked themselves to death to save the others. Yet his gambler’s instinct prevailed. “If you’ve been watching TV, you’ll know how much you’ve frightened our leaders,” he said. “Outright destruction of your ship was considered. And that’s before they knew about you.”

  “Then why don’t they bomb us?” the rriksti said. It made a curious facial expression, opening its little mouth wide. “What are they waiting for?”

  “They’re waiting for us to tell them what to do,” Jack said, and in uttering the words he became fully aware of the power he possessed. The future not only of Earth but of the rriksti lay in his hands.

  It was a no-brainer, of course. But advantage remained to be extracted. Stand, he thought. Stand … and wait.

  Keelraiser pleated the extra glove fingers until it ran out of material. It pulled Jack’s last two fingers into its palm and held them in its big, bony, seven-fingered fist. The layers of filmy material were nothing. Just a slipperiness. The alien delicately flicked the web of skin between Jack’s pinky finger and his ring finger.

  It felt downright erotic. But Jack reminded himself that he had no idea what was erotic to a rriksti. He chose to interpret it as a challenge. He uncurled Keelraiser’s hand, slipped his thumb in between its last two fingers, and pressed his thumbnail into the web, through the slippery layers of fabric. He worked his thumbnail gently back and forth.

  Keelraiser gazed at their joined hands. Without raising its eyes, it said, “We will give you the design blueprints for the fusion reactor. This will include complete manufacturing specifications for the advanced materials used in the magnetic bottle and shielding, and specifications for the manufacturing equipment, and the machine tools you will need to build the equipment. We’ll even throw in a set of user’s manuals.” It uttered its creaky chuckle.

  Score, fucking SCORE, Jack thought. Careful to hide his elation—on the principle that the rriksti probably had a decent grasp of human facial expressions—he hmm’d, and said aloud, “What would you expect in return?”

  “To be allowed to live,” Keelraiser said.

  “Oh come on. Dare to dream,” Jack said.

  The rriksti’s hair danced. “A few things. Mostly raw materials.”

  “Name them,” Jack said. “Mind you, there are significant constraints on our interplanetary shipping capacity. Chiefly that we’ve not got an interplanetary shipping capacity.”

  Although that would change once they got their hands on fusion reactors. Jack’s imagination jumped ahead ten or twenty years to the day when fusion-powered spaceships entered service. He saw himself aged sixty or so, with a belly clad in Savile Row shirting and a cigar clamped in his teeth, courting Branson-esque publicity to celebrate their first launch. Jack Kildare, aerospace tycoon! Of course, he didn’t imagine or wish that it would be possible to keep the rrikstis’ gifts for himself. Something that big couldn’t be patented. But he figured he could wangle a competitive edge of some kind. Keep some of the booty at home in the UK. He pictured a resurrection of British manufacturing for the new space age about to dawn, led by his own company—Firebird Systems, v. 2.0. A fitting memorial to Oliver Meeks.

  Jesus Christ, I might get to pilot a torchship before I die!

  That vision put all the others in the shade. It was the future he’d dreamed about as a little boy, before he actually became an astronaut and found out that it was all about manual labor and clogged-up sinuses.

  He beamed radiantly at Keelraiser and said, “Let’s shake on it.”

  “Jack!”

  Alexei’s cry cut through the noise of the manufacturing floor. Jack looked down and saw his friend running across the cavern, under the nose of the alien shuttle. “Up here,” Jack shouted, freeing his hand from Keelraiser’s. He stood up on the wing.

  “There you are,” Alexei shouted. He beckoned urgently.

  Jack grabbed the rope and descended to the floor, sliding most of the way. They walked away from the shuttle together.

  “These guys are lying to us,” Alexei said. He spoke under his breath, although the aliens could not hear, and it was noisy in here, anyway. “Everything they’ve told us is bullshit.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Skyler couldn’t open his eyes
. His eyelids were stuck shut. He strained. Eyelid muscles: they aren’t good for much. At last his eyelashes peeled apart.

  All that effort for nothing. He still couldn’t see.

  His nose throbbed. He breathed through his mouth. His panting filled the universe.

  Everything hurts.

  Back. Head. Legs. Nose.

  Terror overtook him, the herald of returning memory. He recalled the Shenzhou’s engine failure. The horrible pogoing back and forth. The long fall.

  He couldn’t remember the crash itself, which was probably a good thing.

  He struggled against his straps for a long minute before he remembered they were there. Fumbling, he released them—

  —and fell sideways, because the whole crew module was tilted at a steep angle.

  His helmet lamp came on as he fell. The beam was very weak.

  He landed on top of Meili’s crash couch, which had torn loose from its mounting. It seemed to be welded to the dead consoles. Skyler dragged at it. He braced himself on the side wall of the module and pushed at it with his boots. It came away like the top slice of bread in a sandwich, and the sandwich filling was Meili. The lower edge of her console matched the dent in her chest like Africa matching South America. Her face was a red smear on the inside of her helmet.

  Skyler hauled himself up into the service module. Do not vomit. His suit’s heads-up display came on. The external pressure sensor told him the air pressure was down to 40% of normal. The crew module had lost hull integrity. Frost coated everything. His gloves left marks in the glittering white veil. Do not vomit. He spun the wheel and opened the airlock. Nothing had power. No alarms went off, no lights flashed. He pushed with all his strength on the wheel that opened the hatch at the other end of the airlock.

  It didn’t budge.

  “Help,” he said. “Someone help me.” All the answer he got was his own breath sighing in his ears.