But Hannah, Kate, and Giles could still be saved. At least, Jack needed to believe they could.
Impotently, he growled, “Couldn’t refueling the Dragon have waited? Our friends are in danger!”
Keelraiser shouted over the radio, “I fucked up! Is this correct? I fucked up! I’m sorry!”
“Sorry is not a strategy,” Alexei grunted. “Tell your friends in the Dragon to radio the SoD. Tell Kate …”
He trailed off. Jack realized to his shock that Alexei was overwhelmed by emotion.
He jumped in to cover for him. “Warn them! Tell them—tell them not to leave the SoD, not to let anyone in.”
“They’ve been trying, actually,” Keelraiser said after a grudging pause. “No one answers the radio.”
Jack and Alexei followed the rriksti back into the airlock. Air jetted into the chamber from hidden vents, white, like the breath of cows on a winter’s morning. Jack pushed between the rriksti. His helmet lamp shone on Skyler’s helmet. The inside of the faceplate was coated with black stuff that looked like coffee grounds. Jack’s medical training told him what that was. Blood. Skyler had been bleeding internally, puking it up. The poor guy had no chance.
The rriksti seemed to think differently.
As soon as the chamber was pressurized, they set off down the tunnel, carrying Skyler, at their grasshopper-like run.
CHAPTER 31
A cool, refreshing sensation spread through Skyler’s body. It originated from points on his forehead, his lower belly, the small of his back, his palms, and the soles of his feet. Where it spread, the pain receded. Semi-conscious, he absorbed it passively.
“Mom,” he whispered. She was back. She’d run off with her goddamn hippie yoga instructor but she must have come back. She was hugging him, stroking his forehead. “Don’t go away again,” he begged.
She’d even made her special garlic bread for him. He could taste it in his mouth.
*
“He said something,” Alexei whispered.
Jack nodded. “It sounded like ‘Mom.’”
The two men stood awkwardly, giving the rriksti room to … do what they were doing.
It didn’t involve an IV, morphine, or any recognizable medical technology at all.
They’d dumped Skyler on the manufacturing floor. Working at top speed, they’d peeled his spacesuit off, leaving him naked. The air was cool, the floor cold, but Skyler didn’t seem to mind. He lay in a fetal position, and damned if that wasn’t a smile on his vomit-smeared face.
The rriksti had daubed some kind of ointment on his forehead, belly, back, hands, and feet. The stuff shone on his peeling, reddened skin.
Keelraiser squatted on its thin haunches, resting one palm on Skyler’s forehead. Other rriksti touched him in the same way on his back, belly, hands, and feet. These were the five who’d gone outside. The other rriksti who’d been working on the floor had left their posts to stand or kneel behind the others, as if backing them up.
The five touching Skyler had doffed their spacesuits to the waist. Gooseflesh pebbled their exposed skin. The brisk temperature in the cavern was cold for them.
They were motionless.
Their thousand-yard stares creeped Jack out.
“What the hell are they doing?” Alexei muttered, shifting his weight from foot to foot.
“Some kind of energy transfer,” Jack guessed.
“Huh?”
“I’m just guessing. You know, that Chinese healing stuff? Something like that. Maybe?”
“Reiki?”
“Is that what it’s called?”
“I’m Orthodox, you know,” Alexei prefaced his next statement. “Our Patriarch said Reiki is occult, and it doesn’t work anyway.”
“I think you can get it on the NHS now.”
Skyler moved. He curled up in a ball, ducking his head against his knees.
Keelraiser sidled around him to reach his forehead again.
Something fell out of the pocket of Keelraiser’s shorts.
Jack frowned.
That looks like …
He darted forward and picked it up. As he did so he got a whiff of Skyler. Bloody diarrhea coated the man’s buttocks and legs. And yet he was smiling.
Jack showed Alexei the object Keelraiser had dropped. “My rosary.”
“So they did take it. I’m so surprised.”
Jack noticed tiny dents on the flat back of the crucifix. He held it up to the light. He didn’t want to say it out loud, but he’d bet money those were teeth marks. His rosary was made of copper, coated with tungsten … in other words, metal. And they already knew that the rriksti thought metal was tasty.
He hid the rosary in his fist.
Skyler moved again. The rriksti closed in tighter around him, and resumed their frozen poses.
In Jack’s fist, the rosary felt queerly warm.
*
Skyler sat up.
He felt better.
His trek across the ice lingered vividly in his memory, like a nightmare. His muscles felt weak and achy. But if the pain and weariness had been 1,000 on a scale of 1 to 10 before, now it was more like a 3. Best of all, his nausea had gone, washed away by …
… coolness …
… his mother’s touch …
… the taste of garlic.
Or had his hike been merely a nightmare, after all?
The jumbled shapes and colors around him resolved into humanoid forms.
Jack Kildare crouched in front of him, holding his hands and saying, “Skyler! Skyler, Earth to Skyler!”
Not a nightmare, then. Although, to be honest, many of Skyler’s nightmares had Jack Kildare in them.
“You look like crap.” Jack’s blue eyes crinkled. He was wearing gray shorts and had his rosary around his neck, like some kind of half-dressed knight crusader. “How do you feel?”
It angered and embarrassed Skyler to be seen in a state of collapse by Jack, of all people. He pulled his hands away. “Where am I?”
“The Pit of Despair. Don’t even think about trying to escape,” Jack said, putting on a raspy voice. He laughed.
The lighting was low, like at a jazz club, but the only sound was a background rumble of machinery. Skyler looked past Jack.
“Aliens!!!!”
“Yeah, they’re aliens. They call themselves rriksti. That one’s Keelraiser. That one’s Nene. That’s Riverlock. Some of them translate their names, some don’t …”
Skyler shook Jack off and stood up. With renewed energy coursing through his body, he faced the silent, goblin-faced beings. Rriksti. Okayyyy.
“Greetings,” he said. He glanced down at himself. He was wearing nothing except shit and vomit. “Jeez, I’m making a great first impression, huh?”
“You should have seen yourself when we brought you in,” Jack said. “It made your arrival on board the SoD look like a masterpiece of diplomacy. Oh, and you were singing! That’s how they found you!”
“I don’t remember that,” Skyler said warily. He did.
“We couldn’t really catch the words,” Jack said, tactfully. “Anyway, you were in bad shape.” His smile faded. “They … did something for you …”
“Oh yeah, the refreshing thing,” Skyler said, as if he knew all about that. For some reason, he felt a desire to change the subject immediately. His spacesuit lay on the floor nearby. He picked it up and bundled it in his arms as a fig leaf for his nakedness. “Do these aliens have showers?” he said hopefully.
“Er, not that we’ve seen. But we’ve only been here a bit.”
That was good news. On the other hand, ‘we’ was bad news. Skyler scoped his surroundings. Aliens, alien machinery, an alien spacecraft … and Alexei goddamn Ivanov, still smirking at Jack’s Princess Bride quote. So the Russki had survived, too.
The mission of the SoD is to investigate the MOAD and determine whether it is, or is not, a threat to humanity.
Director Flaherty’s voice echoed in Skyler’s ears.
Your mi
ssion is to secure as much alien shit as you can get your hands on, and return it to the United States.
The echoes faded into irrelevance. Flaherty and the rest of the big brains who devised this mission, on faraway Earth, had no goddamn idea what it was like to be here.
They didn’t know what it was to fall out of the sky and see a brave, strong woman squashed like a sandwich filling. To make a death-defying solo trek across Europa. And then wake up with your worst enemy smirking at your disgrace.
“Congratulations,” Skyler said to Alexei, choking on his own sarcasm. “You killed Meili. You almost killed me, too. But you can’t win ‘em all, right, soldier?”
Alexei paced towards him. “What are you talking about?”
Jack interrupted. “Meili’s dead?”
“Of course she’s dead. Just like you wanted.”
Skyler did not really believe Jack had wanted Meili dead, but as he spoke, he realized it made sense for Jack to have been in it with Alexei. The British government had always been cozy with the Kremlin. Anyway, look at these two, always together, no daylight between them. No jury would doubt that they were conspiring together to … to grab alien shit, and kill everyone else. Yeah, probably.
“The Shenzhou crash was an accident,” Jack said. “Wasn’t it?”
“That’s what you’d like us to think,” Skyler sneered.
“You can’t possibly blame us.”
“Oh, you goddamn hypocrite.” God-DAY-um HUH-p’crit.
Skyler was channeling Lance, his dead colleague, and he welcomed the visitation. Putting on Lance’s ghost like a coat, he escaped the feeling of bogusness that had haunted him throughout his career with the NXC. A Taft from Boston, holder of a doctorate in astrophysics, a descendant of ambassadors and generals, couldn’t be a gen-u-wine American badass. Just didn’t have the bona fides. But a redneck from rural Georgia did. Lance had never held back, or maybe it was truer to say nothing held him back. Balls to the wall, finger on the trigger, take no prisoners. That was Lance.
“Do you guys speak English?” he said to the aliens.
“They can’t hear you,” Jack said. “They talk in the AM band. Here, use this.” He pulled a slimline headset off his head, threw it at Skyler, and turned away, pressing a fist to his lips.
Skyler picked up the headset and put it on. He heard a high, sweet voice saying, “—friends?”
“It’s complicated,” Alexei said, obviously talking to the aliens. “He’s a shithead, and also a government agent.”
“But I’m not the only government agent here,” Skyler said. “Wild guess, but has this guy—” thumb-jerk at Alexei— “been less than honest with you?”
“Are you different from him?” an alien said. He couldn’t tell which alien, because their mouths didn’t move when they talked.
“Different? Hell, yeah. I’m from America. He’s Russian.”
“The United States of America is a shining city on a hill. Is this correct?”
“Nice Reagan reference,” Skyler said, astonished.
Alexei said, “Keelraiser, this piece of shit is trying to trap you into making some commitment to his political masters. Don’t fall for it.”
Skyler shot back, “As long as we’re quoting Reagan, he called you guys the evil empire.”
Alexei gazed at Skyler as if he were a cockroach. Skyler’s face burned. A high-school debater could have come up with a better retort than that.
“I don’t really care about politics,” Alexei said, shrugging. “They told me to plant a Russian flag on the MOAD. I might try to do that later.”
That did it. Skyler threw circumspection to the winds. “Oh, you don’t really care about politics,” he drawled. “Haven’t you forgotten to mention something?”
“What?”
“Such as the fact that you’re a GRU agent?”
The GRU: Russia’s military intelligence agency. Coasted through the fall of the USSR. Institutional history stretching back to Trotsky. Oh, and the GRU commands the Spetsnaz, Russia’s dreaded special forces.
Jack barked, “Do you think it’s clever to smear an honest man?”
He glanced at Alexei, awaiting a denial, which didn’t come. Skyler grinned. That must feel like a two-by-four upside the head. Alexei hadn’t had a canned response ready, and now it was too late. His face told a tale of dawning fury and fear. He was a GRU agent, of course. The NXC had confirmed it way back when. And now Skyler saw how it all fit together.
“Your people packed the SoD full of malware,” Skyler said. “There was malware in the Shenzhou. Big surprise. The engine was built in Russia. I’d kind of like to know how you triggered the APU heater to shut down. But hey, it worked, right? You killed Meili. And you almost killed me.” He grinned, wildly. “That didn’t quite go according to plan, obviously.”
“That is a complete lie,” Alexei said, too late to be in the least convincing. Jack stared at him, so transparently shocked it was almost funny.
Alexei shot a glance at Jack. Perhaps he realized at last just how much trouble he was in now. His face changed. Skyler’s conscious brain was still reveling in his enemy’s humiliation, but a subconscious voice spoke up: Uh oh. He slid his right hand inside the folds of the spacesuit bundled in his arms.
Alexei responded to Skyler’s accusations in the best Russian tradition. He hurled himself at Skyler, reaching for his throat.
Skyler struggled to disentangle his arms from his Z-2. Alexei crashed into him. Both of them flew over backwards in the low gravity. Skyler just barely raised his arms—and the bundle of spacesuit wrapped around them—in time to block Alexei’s strangulation grip. The hands that would’ve gone around his throat latched onto the Z-2.
“Jesus Christ!” Jack shouted, seemingly far away.
Skyler hit the ground on his back with Alexei on top of him, and bounced. The impact drove the air out of his lungs. Alexei grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled his head back. Skyler had never seen anything as terrifying as Alexei’s face right now. He knew for a certainty that he was looking at his own death. Warm piss dribbled down his leg. He shook his head frantically, leaving a hank of hair in Alexei’s fingers.
Jack grabbed Alexei by the shoulders and dragged him backwards, yelling, “Have you lost your fucking mind?”
Skyler seized his chance, writhed and kicked. He slithered away, leaving Alexei with an armful of Z-2 …
… and Skyler with his modified Glock in his hand.
He’d just managed to dig it out of the thigh pocket of his spacesuit before Alexei pulled the whole lot away.
He scrambled to his feet and backed out of grabbing range. He levelled the gun in a textbook two-handed shooting stance. He had always hated shooting. The NXC had made him spend hours on the range.
Alexei sat on the floor, looking up at him. “Oh, here we go,” he gasped. “Now, please, who’s the bad guy?”
Well, that was a good question, and Skyler would’ve liked for Lance to answer it. After all, it was Lance himself who’d first dragged the NXC into the wetworks business. But there was a limit to how much a dead redneck could do for you. Skyler would just have to finish this filthy job himself.
He sighted down the barrel at Alexei’s center of mass.
The aliens scattered, recognizing a firearm when they saw one.
Alexei started to get up. Jack started to move towards Skyler.
Skyler fired.
The report boomed through the cavern. Echoes piled on echoes.
Alexei slumped to the floor. Blood spattered from his chest, painting sloppy micro-gravity arcs in the air.
Skyler lined up the sights on Jack’s chest and fired again.
The frangible bullet shattered. Instead of penetrating Jack’s body like it was meant to, fragments sliced into Jack’s face and chest, drawing sheets of blood.
Skyler fired a third time. His arms shook. The bullet fragmented harmlessly on the floor.
Jack tackled him head-on, snatched the gun, and threw it over
hand as far as he could. Blood poured from a gash over his left eye, splatting on Skyler’s face in coppery globules. “I should kill you,” Jack grated. “I should,” but in the moment of speaking he seemed to lose interest in Skyler. He shoved him away and dropped to his knees beside Alexei.
CHAPTER 32
“Come on mate, come on, don’t you fucking dare die.” Jack applied pressure to the wound in Alexei’s upper chest, bearing down with the heels of both hands. He was distantly aware of the rriksti crowding him, and of stinging pains in his face and chest.
Alexei smiled weakly. "I'm not dead,” he coughed. “I think I'll go for a walk."
Jack laughed, but it sounded more like a retch. "You’re not fooling anyone, you know."
"I don't want to go on the cart ..."
“Oh, don't be such a baby," Jack said. It had only been a couple of months since their last Monty Python marathon on board the SoD. They’d had no idea what was waiting for them, none.
Alexei’s eyes rolled back.
Jack’s hands slipped. Blood welled out of the wound.
“He needs help! Isn’t anyone going to help?!”
He’d hardly got the words out before the rriksti bowled him out of the way. They picked Alexei up, dumped him on a stretcher—two feet too long, it made the six-foot cosmonaut look like a child—and hustled down the tunnel to the warm, salty-smelling depths of the shelter. Jack followed. They dived into one of the smaller caverns that opened off the garden.
“Where are you taking him?” Jack yelled. But he’d lost his headset in the fight. He was stranded in the rrikstis’ silence.
The rriksti bounded between the jigsaw partitions to a room full of alien bodies on bunks built into the wall.
“Oh, the morgue,” Jack said. “Ha, ha.” He was dripping blood on the floor. Felt about ready for the morgue himself. There was one thing he had to do before he died, though, and that was kill Skyler Taft.
All in good time. The little fucker was stuck here with them, couldn’t get away.
Morgue? The ‘bodies’ on the bunks were alive. Their heads turned and their hair stirred at the commotion.
Lifeboat: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 2) Page 22
