Alexei had been aggressively questioning the aliens about everything he could think of since he woke up on a shelf with two of them staring at him. Their readiness to answer his every question only made him more suspicious. He was dismayed that Jack seemed to take them at face value. But Jack came from green and gentle England. It was a mystery how they ever raised soldiers in that place. Alexei hailed from the mean streets of Volgograd—well, not all that mean; he’d had a private education, as you more or less had to to get into the officer corps—but life had beaten into him the lesson that everyone was an antagonist until proven otherwise. And everyone lied. Everyone.
Why should aliens be any different?
He had therefore pumped them for information, hoping to catch them out in a lie. And he believed he’d done it.
“Listen. They said that the magnetic field generator failed, and this blew a hole in the MOAD, right? Then they had to take refuge on Europa.”
“Yeah.”
“Why did the magfield generator fail, when it wasn’t in operation? Ramscoops don’t work within our solar system. Not enough hydrogen.”
“Hmm.”
“If it did fail, it failed for a different reason. Not simply wear and tear. If it was wear and tear, it would fail in deep space, not conveniently on the doorstep of Jupiter.”
“Hmm.”
Alexei thought he was getting through to Jack. He said, “And where are all the rest of the refugees? That ship is five kilometers long. They said there were thousands of rriksti on board. Where are all the rest of them?”
“I was assuming they all died in the explosion.” Jack frowned. “Let’s ask Keelraiser.”
“No, you idiot!”
But it was too late. Jack had gone bounding back across the floor.
Keelraiser slid down the rope from the shuttle’s wing.
Alexei caught up. He bunched his fist, ready to punch Jack, or Keelraiser, he wasn’t sure which yet. If the rriksti knew that the men knew they were lying—about what? Something. Something big—this could get unpredictable, fast. Their only hope of survival might lie in acting unpredictably, first.
Jack slapped his headset on top of his dirty blond curls. “I’m hungry,” he told the rriksti. He smiled, lips closed. “Alexei said you offered him some food, but it was …”
“Inedible,” Alexei said. He let his fist uncurl. This might turn out to be a cunning move.
“We do need food every so often,” Jack said. “We tend to get short-tempered and cranky without it. I’m sure you understand. So either feed us, please, or allow us to fetch our own food from our landing craft.”
Alexei suppressed a smile. They couldn’t eat the aliens’ food—he’d already tried—so if the rriksti wanted to keep them alive, they would have to let them return to the Dragon. Then they’d be getting out of here, even if Alexei had to tie Jack into his couch.
Keelraiser’s response disconcerted him. “Then we will eat together,” it said. “I apologize for our poor hospitality.”
Shit, Alexei thought. They aren’t going to let us go, are they? We’re trapped.
CHAPTER 25
Kate gathered in the loose end of the tether that should have been attached to Giles’s belt. It had been cleanly severed. She wrapped it around her right glove and untied the other end from the stanchion. The tether reel at the end was made of solid steel. It would weigh several pounds on Earth. Not a bad weapon. It was the only one she had, anyway.
She kicked off from the wall and floated into the darkness.
“Giles,” she called over the radio. “Giles.”
She drifted along the corridor they had explored before. Her headlamp shone on blackened, bubbled paint. Further on, swirls of acid color glowed undamaged on the walls. So this was the MOAD’s interior décor. Pretty gross.
She reached an intersection. The corridor crossing this one was as broad as a subway tunnel. Weirdly, tables and sofas stood in groups in the middle of the corridor, like some kind of extraterrestrial café. Kate’s heart hammered. She peeked left and right.
The walls of the corridor were lined with lockers eight feet high. Kate suddenly remembered an incident from her own high school days. Some kids had shut a girl into her own locker. She was too ashamed to shout and kick the door, apparently, so no one found her until after school, when the janitor heard her crying. Kate had been friends with the kids who did the shutting-in. They had laughed for weeks about it. She felt bad about that to this day.
Each locker had a plaque above it, etched with the chicken-scratch writing Giles had found so intriguing.
Kate chuckled bleakly. She rapped her tether reel on the nearest locker. “It’s safe to come out now, Giles. Time to go home…”
The locker lit up with a soft green light.
Kate pushed off from it in fright, and because she was in freefall she kept going until she bumped into one of the sofas in the middle of the corridor.
The light grew brighter. The door of the locker was translucent. The light was coming from inside, and it silhouetted a humanoid shape.
A woman, Kate thought.
Floating suspended.
Thick locks haloed her head like a mermaid’s hair.
But this mermaid had legs. Runway-model legs. Skinny arms, and a face …
A face like a huge Halloween mask, with outsize eyes, closed.
It’s an alien. A motherfucking alien.
Kate gripped her tether reel. She felt absolutely terrified lest those eyes should open, and fix on her.
She glanced up and down the tunnel. The green glow from the locker with the alien woman in it illuminated more and more lockers stretching away in both directions. Hundreds of them. Thousands.
She pushed off from the sofa, and caught movement at the edge of her faceplate.
An alien clambered over the sofa, reaching for her.
Just like the one in the locker, but dead black all over. The thick locks on its head wriggled like an octopus’s tentacles.
Kate let out a shocked little grunt, and hurled the tether reel into those repulsive tentacles.
An unbearable high tone stabbed into her ears.
Kate wanted to rip her helmet off to escape the noise. But she guessed that it was a scream. She’d hurt the thing. Good.
The tether reel bounced back to her. She swung it round and round like a nunchuck and let it fly again. The tether unreeled. The tether reel made solid contact.
High-pitched tones filled her ears, warbling from one intolerable frequency to the next. Kate brought her chin down on the toggle, switching her radio off.
Now she knew what had happened to Jack and Alexei.
More tentacle-headed aliens sprang at her from either side. Her quick, frightened pants filled her helmet. She swung the tether reel at their arms, at their tentacles—that was their vulnerable point, she figured.
But every time she moved, she herself moved in the opposite direction..
The aliens encircled her.
She swung at the nearest one with furious energy, and Newtonian physics propelled her backwards again.
A blow rammed into her kidneys. Agony whited out her vision. She lost consciousness.
CHAPTER 26
Slung upside-down over a bony shoulder, helmet bumping on a fleshless rump, Giles wondered if the aliens were going to kill him. The prospect did not perturb him overmuch. He had done what he wished to do before he died—he’d seen the future.
The future jolted past him, upside-down. Skinny legs stretched out like the legs of swimmers. Bright lights on the aliens’ chests lit their route. Clusters of alien furniture, bolted down, suggested an orientation that the aliens ignored as they flew onward. Giles had occasionally gone scuba diving. The aliens reminded him of fish darting through a shipwreck—agile, coordinated. Tropical colors patterned their hides.
They came to a great emptiness, and flew over a glacier that slumped away through shattered decks. The glacier curved like a difficult ski slope. The MOAD must
have been rotating when the disaster happened, Giles thought. Water had burst from some reservoir, and had flowed anti-spinwards. Then—the loss of atmosphere. Everything had frozen.
At the glacier’s foot, the aliens braked their flight by slamming into an elastic cable. They deftly clipped onto the cable and slid along it, towards a wall scrawled with alien writing.
The wall vanished.
They all tumbled on top of each other into the dark. Giles was spun around, dropped, seized again, and dragged by one boot.
Into twilight.
Alien hands jerked at his helmet. He slapped at them, panicking. They found the locking mechanism and pulled his helmet off.
He gasped in a lungful of hot, fetid air. But—it was air. He wasn’t asphyxiating. He lay on a filthy floor. Sludge coated his ESA-blue suit.
He rolled over.
Above him hung a cavern of stars with Jupiter in the middle, radiant.
Aliens stooped over him. They roughly removed his spacesuit—first the upper torso, then the lower torso assembly—and peeled his spandex inner garment off, leaving him naked. Their hands had seven fingers. Their fingernails were dark brown, the color of dried blood, as heavy as dogs’ claws.
He was dragged by one foot again. At this stage he consciously noticed that there was gravity here. His upper body scraped over the floor. The sludge got into his mouth. It tasted like old coins. He grabbed at the leg of a table. Claw-footed. S-curved. Very Louis Quatorze.
The aliens picked him up and threw him onto another table. Plates and cups scattered onto the floor. His hand came down on a filigreed silver platter. Everything else was filthy but the plates were as clean as a bone—they might have been licked.
He scrabbled into a sitting position, and crumpled over his bare knees. The artificial gravity, however it was produced, felt like about half of a full gee.
The room was as large as Notre Dame. And that was just the central space in which he found himself. Triangular chancels jutted off this central space like the points of a star, cluttered with machinery. The transparent ceiling—if it were not merely a projection of some kind—enhanced the spaciousness. So too did the dim light and the silence. Orange lights on the various machines glowed like candles in a church.
A desecrated church, the floor covered with dirt that had spilled from numerous troughs of plants. Some of the plants resembled colorless lupins and gladioli. Others looked like fungi, pale excrescences the size of babies’ heads.
Machinery growled, and a fan whapped somewhere, yet silence was the overwhelming impression, and this was because the aliens themselves were silent.
In a pious hush, they were taking apart the broomstick Giles and Kate had ridden from the SoD.
Detachedly, Giles studied their weird physiology. They had been patterned all over in vivid colors when they captured him, but now they looked both more human, and less. Their patterned ‘hides’ must have been EVA suits. Now they wore short-sleeved coats that hung open over their chests, and trousers hacked off at the knees. The garments were so dirty that their original color could hardly be deduced. Perhaps orange. Their bare feet were encrusted with dirt. The tentacles on their heads writhed like snakes. They had skin as pale as any European’s, and sludge-dark eyes the size of nectarines.
In ones and twos, they drifted over to the table where he was sitting. Finding himself the center of attention, Giles lost his sense of detachment. He cringed and said, “I’m friendly.”
A taller alien pushed through the crowd. It stood at least two meters and a half, and its mane of silvery tentacles added another half-meter to its height. Its triangular face remained expressionless as it punched Giles in the cheek with a large, hard fist.
Giles sprawled sideways on the table, agony flaring through his cheek and jaw. He also pissed himself in terror.
“Don’t hurt me,” he babbled. “Please. I am a xenolinguist. I’ve been waiting for this all my life. I only want to communicate—”
An electronic squeal cut him off.
Two aliens moved up on either side of the table and hauled him into a sitting position.
The silver-tentacled one now held something that looked like a 1980s boombox. The proportions were slightly off, and the cassette player buttons had obviously been printed as mere ornamental touches.
“We come in peace,” the boombox blared in English. The silver-tentacled alien pointed to its own face, conveying that these were its words, although they issued from the boombox. “Is this correct?”
Giles blinked. He said, “I have the impression that my life’s work has been wasted.”
He smiled, despite the pain in his cheek, savoring the rich irony of this moment. He had spent years devising exotic symbol sets and holistic three-dimensional syntax structures, the likes of which human brains less able than his could not even conceive of. And now he had been captured by aliens who spoke English.
That said, their grasp of the language seemed shaky. If this were peace, Giles hated to think what hostility would look like.
He reminded himself that the aliens were stranded on a badly damaged ship. No doubt they feared the SoD had come to destroy them. He must lay their fears to rest.
“How did you learn English?”
“From television.” The silver-tentacled one holding the boombox opened and closed its mouth silently, as if to drive through Giles’s presumably thick skull that it was in fact talking.
“Ah, merde,” Giles murmured. A new and most unwelcome theory began to take shape. On TV—a medium saturated with Anglo-American cultural pathologies—people were always punching each other. The aliens must think that was the human way of saying hello. He was lucky they hadn’t shot him.
“I am talking to you,” the boombox said.
“I know. Can you hear me?” The aliens had tiny, delicate-looking ears. But since they apparently could not talk without electronic intermediation, perhaps they couldn’t hear, either.
“This device picks up your voice. It transmits it to me. Now answer my question! Have you been in contact with those cocksuckers on the surface?”
Giles giggled. Pain starred his cheek. “You have mastered the use of obscenity; well done. Regarding your question, if there are other living beings on the surface, we did not—we don’t … Four of our crew went down to the surface, but two are dead, and the other two … I don’t know. We don’t know what happened.”
“They have contacted them.”
“Perhaps. I do not know …”
“Fuck,” the boombox said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Giles couldn’t help giggling again. “Do you also speak French, out of curiosity?”
“English is your lingua franca. Is this correct?”
“Yes, although it pains me to say so. But these personal feelings are mere nostalgia, and I disregard them on principle. Our species is rapidly progressing towards a future without linguistic barriers, without borders, without xenophobia. In other words, we have at last reached the stage where interspecies cooperation is a possibility. I represent the political grouping—the Earth Party—that is most favorably disposed towards you, and stands ready to welcome you to Earth, in a spirit of peace,” he emphasized.
The speech he had prepared for this moment was actually much longer. He had envisioned many variants of this moment. None of them had included himself sitting naked on an alien dining table with a possibly shattered cheekbone.
Boombox punched him again, this time in the stomach. Giles instinctively reached down to block the blow. This laid him open to a right jab that caught him squarely in the mouth.
He regained consciousness flat on his back, looking up at Jupiter through a haze of tears. He breathed, and sobbed.
The aliens sat him up once more. Blood drooled down his chin. His head felt like a swollen balloon of agony. He blotted his lips genteelly with the back of his hand.
“Aren’t you going to hit me back?” Boombox shifted its device into its left hand and spread its arms over its
head, as if inviting a punch. Its coat rode up to expose a pale midriff ridged with muscle. Giles noted that it had no belly button or nipples.
“What is to be gained by exchanging blows? Should we not exchange information?” Giles raised his gaze to meet the alien’s eyes. He was terrified of being hit again, but on a deeper level, his resolve remained undimmed. “I am devoured by curiosity. I am completely sincere. I want to know everything about you, even if it costs me my life!”
Boombox opened its small mouth wide. Giles could not imagine what this expression meant.
“You have the advantage of me,” Giles continued. “You speak English. You know a lot about us—”
This time, he didn’t even see the alien’s fist coming.
Pain exploded in his right side.
Knocked sprawling on the table, he fought to breathe. Every breath stabbed like a knife in his side. A broken rib, or maybe two.
Yet this time, the pain did not overwhelm his reason.
When something happens over and over again, it’s a pattern.
The alien’s violence must be a form of communication. It was talking to him with its fists, and if that weren’t enough, it had talked to him via its boombox.
Aren’t you going to hit me back? it had said, when he failed to comply with its expectations.
Reciprocity, Giles thought. I am meant to mirror its behavior, to prove myself a worthy interlocutor. It said so in plain English. I simply wasn’t listening, in too much of a hurry to communicate my own message. Would I walk up to a peer and launch into a political sales pitch without so much as shaking his hand? No, of course not! Mon Dieu, I deserve to get punched in the face. Some xenolinguist I am.
He pushed himself up on his knees. The gravity dizzied him. His broken ribs seemed to slice his lungs every time he breathed.
At the best of times, Giles despised physical violence. He hadn’t raised a hand to a fellow creature since breaking up with his first boyfriend, whom he had been compelled to slap in the face after the latter cheated on him once too often. That’s not to say he did not like the idea of violence—he had often envisioned lingering and painful deaths for the other members of the SoD’s crew—but recourse to his fists would be beneath a sophisticated man like him. That’s what he thought.
Lifeboat: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 2) Page 18
