“As to what they’re doing on our ship,” Kate added, “they’re stealing our electrolysis equipment.”
On the screen displaying the interior of the storage module, the hatch to the electrolysis unit’s compartment was closed. It looked undamaged. But a red light flashed, indicating loss of pressure inside the compartment.
“They came in through the storage module airlock, got into the compartment, and removed the hull plates from the inside,” Kate said. “Remember how the hull plates on that part of the module were designed to explode outwards, in case we had a liquid hydrogen leak? Yeah. Which makes them easy to dismantle. That would’ve been the big boom we heard. Let’s see …”
Kate brought up the feed from the storage module’s external camera.
A rectangular hole gaped in the module’s hull.
Aliens swarmed in and out of it. They were removing the electrolysis equipment, pipes and all, maneuvering it through the gaps in the truss tower.
“Could you not dig your nails into me like that?” Kate said gently.
“Sorry,” Hannah said. She let go of Kate’s arm. “This is just … I mean, holy cow.”
How would the SoD survive without its electrolysis unit? It wouldn’t, was the answer. They would never get home.
“Why are they taking it?” she said helplessly.
“Because that’s what they do, Hannah-banana. They steal shit. It’s their culture or something.”
Hannah-banana. The nickname took her off-guard. It was her old Twitter handle. She suddenly remembered her old Twitter BFF, @firebirdmeeks. A mai tai sounds good right about now …
The NXC killed him.
No, we killed him.
We killed him for his technology.
And now the aliens are about to do the same thing to us.
Poetic justice, much?
Recoiling from the implication that they were doomed, she tried to think of hacks. Thing One and Thing Two had electrolysis units. But they were down on the surface. No way to get hold of those without the Dragon or the Shenzhou …
Unexpectedly, Kate smiled at her. “Guess what, though? I have a secret weapon.”
She held up her iPod.
Crazy.
She is batshit crazy, Hannah thought, staring into the mission commander’s swollen eyes, looking at the iPod, looking back at Kate, waiting for this to make sense.
“Uh, are we going to play Pharrell at them?”
“Were you listening to my music? Lucky you didn’t click on this track.” Kate thumbed the iPod. She showed Hannah a playlist containing a single song, entitled Friends and Lovers.
“What’s that?”
“Come here. Closer. They might have ways of listening that we don’t know about.”
Hannah let Kate draw her close, although her skin crawled at the touch of the other woman’s cold fingers. Kate whispered into her ear, “It’s the trigger for a Russian malware program.”
Hannah pulled away. “You said it was Jack!”
“What?”
“You said Jack was the saboteur. He put malware in the control systems. Didn’t he?”
Kate grimaced. “No. That’s what Skyler said. But he was wrong. The malware is Russian. The Russkis tried to sabotage the SoD during construction—”
“OK, now I’m totally lost.”
“Remember, before the SoD got the greenlight, Putin announced a Russian mission to Europa? Yeah. In the end they joined the SoD project, but they kept right on planning their own mission. And tricked us into paying half their development costs. So their idea was to take the SoD out, then it would’ve been, oh, what a shame, but never mind, you can send one American on our beautiful spaceship … But the sabotage incident didn’t destroy the SoD, so they came up with something different.”
“Malware.”
“Yup. This program overrides the lockouts that prevent the control rods from being completely withdrawn from the nuclear reactor. That’s your wheelhouse … I’m not sure exactly what happens when the rods are pulled out. But I’m reliably assured it will be bad.”
Hannah pulled away from Kate in shock. “Um, yeah. The reactor would vigorously disassemble. That’s what would happen.”
“Good. That’s pretty much what I thought.”
“Kate, you can’t—you won’t … how do you even know it was the Russians?”
“Because Alexei told me.” Kate’s eyes glittered with tears that couldn’t fall in zero-gee. “I told him what Skyler said about Jack. And he confessed. The GRU gave it to him. Like—like a suicide vest. He was supposed to hijack the SoD on our way back to Earth, presumably after we scored some alien goodies. You know, they’re crazy like foxes, those Russian bastards. Our guys never stood a chance against them. The NXC? Give me a fucking break! The Russians have been playing us all along.”
Kate’s voice dissolved. Hannah, forgetting everything else, opened her arms to her. She pressed Kate against her bosom and stroked her hair, the way her sister Bethany used to hug her. Kate’s hair felt tacky. Bits of it were stuck together with what looked like dried blood.
“But here’s the thing,” Kate said, her voice muffled in Hannah’s shoulder. “Alexei hated being used like that. He was a real cosmonaut, Hannah. A real man. I loved him. I know I acted like it was just casual sex, but it was more than that. I just wish I had told him …”
“I understand,” Hannah said.
Kate pulled away, wiping her eyes. “So anyway, he gave me the trigger. It was his way of proving his loyalty to me, to the mission, I guess. It’s like, screw you, Alexei. I didn’t want that responsibility, either …”
Hannah’s gaze returned to the iPod. “How does it work?”
“You just press play,” Kate said.
“I don’t want to die,” Hannah said.
Now it was Kate’s turn to pull Hannah into a tender, sisterly hug. “Oh, I know. I know, Hannah-banana. But we’re going to die anyway, you understand that, right? Everyone else is dead already. It’s just you and me left. They’re going to kill us no matter what we do. We’re dead meat. But at least we can take a bunch of these motherfuckers with us. I’m just waiting for the big boss to get here. He, it, I don’t even know, he said he was going to come and look at our pathetic little spaceship.”
“The Spirit of Destiny is not a pathetic little spaceship,” Hannah said, hoping to spur Kate into defiance. She punched buttons on the optical screen, flicking through various cameras. When she got to the feed from the aft-facing cameras behind the bioshield, she stopped. “Holy shit!”
Fifteen, twenty tentacle-headed aliens were dicking around at the back of the ship, swimming in and out of the truss tower between the radiator vanes. A fat hose undulated in the vacuum.
“Oh, looky looky,” Kate said.
“They’re messing with my reactor!”
“We might get the whole gang of them.”
The airlock hatch suddenly clanked open.
“Here we go,” Kate said on a rising note, as if they were in a rollercoaster, at the top of a hill, about to plunge down. She pushed off from the center seat, floating away from Hannah.
An octopus-headed alien descended into the bridge. This one was covered with intricate patterns in headachy metallic colors.
“Hello, Boombox, you fucking asshole,” Kate said.
Her thumb moved to the iPod’s touchscreen.
Hannah pushed off and flew across the bridge, straight at her.
CHAPTER 36
Hannah cannoned into Kate with bruising force. She got her fingers around the iPod and jammed her thumb on the power button, switching it off.
The consoles stayed dark.
No klaxons sounded.
Kate had not had time to trigger the malware.
The mission commander fought like a wild animal, trying to reach the iPod.
Hannah fended her off. It wasn’t hard—Kate was at the end of her strength, not to mention that she was covered with bruises and had a recently dislocated shoulde
r. Hannah stuffed the iPod into the pocket of her sweats.
The alien grabbed Kate by the back of the t-shirt and pulled her away from Hannah. With the other hand, it lifted Hannah in the same way. Drops of blood detached from Kate’s cheek—Hannah had accidentally scratched her. The alien held the women apart like kittens. “Do you humans ever do anything except fight with each other?” it said. “You really are like us.”
The voice came not from the alien itself, but from an object it had brought onto the bridge, which was now floating in mid-air. This object resembled the portable stereo that had been Hannah’s most treasured possession in high school. It even had SONY written on it. But it was wrongly proportioned, crudely made.
Hannah looked from the fake Sony stereo, to the alien. “Oh, I see,” she said. “Boombox.”
Strangely, now that the alien was actually holding her by the scruff of her neck, she no longer felt afraid. This had gone beyond that.
Kate glowered at her, but didn’t try to grab the iPod again. Of course, she didn’t want the alien to suspect they had a secret weapon.
A secret weapon of mass destruction, Hannah thought. She resolved that no matter what, she was not going to let Kate blow the SoD up. She’d gone through her own valley of darkness while she waited for Kate to return. She had considered suicide, and rejected it. She wasn’t going to let Kate drag her back into that deadly slough.
The alien kicked off with a many-toed foot. Still holding the women, it drifted down to the consoles. “Where are the railgun controls?” said the boombox.
“Go to hell,” Kate spat.
“I don’t know!” Hannah said. It was half true. She hadn’t been trained to operate the railguns, unlike the other Americans. “Let’s talk about something different,” she gabbled. She had an idea, probably derived from Hollywood movies, that it was clever to keep the bad guys talking. “Why are your people messing around behind the bioshield? They’re gonna irradiate themselves! The reactor’s only running at 15%, but there are still gamma rays coming out of there!”
The alien said, “We are less vulnerable to radiation than you are.”
“Oh, because you’re just awesome-sauce in every way?” Her mouth was running away with her.
“Our EVA suits give us some protection,” the alien said.
“If that’s your suit, it doesn’t look very rad-proof. It looks more like something Bootsy Collins would’ve worn back in the ‘70s.”
“Oh, Hannah, Hannah,” Kate said.
The alien threw Kate away from itself. Kate went spinning through the air and crashed into the aft bulkheads.
“Go away,” the alien said to Kate. “My people are collecting resources from your life-support area. You can help them.”
Kate shot a frightened look at Hannah, and scrambled away through the keel tube.
Hannah floated in the alien’s grip. Her terror roared back. She could scarcely breathe.
Its voice fuzzed from the boombox. “You are the propulsion technician of this ship. Is this correct?”
“Y-yes.”
“Where are the reactor controls?”
“N-not here,” Hannah said. “Back in the, the engineering module.”
The alien shifted its grip to Hannah’s arm, seized its boombox in the other hand, and towed her into the keel tube. It was scarcely wide enough for the thing’s shoulders. They jostled, legs banging. The alien squeezed out into the axis tunnel, still gripping Hannah’s wrist. Kate was sitting on the forward stairs, near the top of Staircase 2. She looked up. Their eyes met, and then Kate rotated out of sight.
The alien flew through the axis tunnel, dragging Hannah at its side. Looking down, she saw its horror-movie companions exploring the garden.
Through SLS, past the spinning algae tanks. Through the storage module. Into the engineering module, which had been Hannah’s kingdom for the last two years. She had never expected to end up sharing it with an alien.
“This is it,” she gasped.
The alien let go of her. She bounced off the aft wall, catching herself with her hands.
The alien touched the inside of its left wrist, if those really were wrists, if the seven-fingered appendages really were hands … and its disco-era coloration melted away, starting at the tips of the fingers and tentacles. The tentacles turned silver. The hands, arms, and chest turned white-person color, with blue veins webbing the biceps, like an Irish person who had not exposed their skin to the sun in about … oh, ten years, maybe?
The triangular part below the tentacles turned into a face with a small mouth and huge coffee-colored eyes.
Hannah stared, open-mouthed.
It was otherworldly.
Grotesque.
Beautiful.
The metamorphosis stopped at the alien’s waist, leaving its pelvis and legs disco-colored. It had a bulge worthy of David Bowie in Labyrinth. Thin stripes over its shoulders also remained patterned. When it turned away to examine the reactor controls, Hannah saw that the stripes extended like braces to a rectangular patch on its back.
“This is a very primitive ship,” it said, with a hint of grumbling in its boombox-mediated voice.
“Well, excuse me,” Hannah said, flustered. “We’ve never had the opportunity of building one before, because this is the first time we’ve ever encountered aliens!”
Boombox regarded her with its huge, dark eyes. “They say there’s an explosion of intelligent life coming,” it said. “Everywhere, all at once. We’ll probably never meet them. Every other habitable star system is too far away.”
“Wh-where do you come from?”
“The name you give to our star is Proxima Centauri.”
“Oh, I was a big Transformers fan,” Hannah said. “Does your ship transform into a giant robot?” Boombox just stared at her. She swallowed. “Anyway. I guess that was Rigil Kentaurus.”
“Alpha Centauri,” Boombox corrected her.
“Have you seen The Transformers?”
“Yes.”
“Wow. Is that how you learned English?” No answer. “Anyway, you’re right, they came from Alpha Centauri, but a few years ago we renamed it Rigil Kentaurus.”
“Why?”
“Astronomers.” Hannah did the finger-twiddling thing for ‘crazy.’ “But, um, sure, we can call it Alpha Centauri if you want.”
“We call it Skrur. We have colonized its planetary system.”
“Okayyyy. Do you have FTL?”
“FTL means faster-than-light propulsion. Is this correct?”
“Yes. It’s supposed to be impossible, but I’m just like, anything’s possible now.”
“No, we do not have FTL,” Boombox said, grumpily. It peered at the hexagonal array. “How do you increase the power output from the reactor? I wish to generate maximum output.”
Hannah folded her arms. She couldn’t believe she was defying this awe-inspiring, beautiful creature. “Why?”
“I am asking the questions.”
“Well, if you’re so smart, you figure out how to do it.”
The alien floated over to her. It dragged its fingers along the ceiling to stop. Hannah held her ground, or rather her place in the air. The alien’s breath sighed out of its small, thin-lipped mouth, so close that she felt it, and smelt it. Like seaweed drying in the sun.
“My people are dying,” Boombox said. “We require water.”
“Okayyyy …”
“We’ve run a hose from your external radiator system to one of our cargo holds. The hold is full of ice.”
“Yeah, Kate mentioned that.”
“I wish to use your reactor to direct low-pressure steam against the ice.”
“To—to melt it, OK.”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re going to have a cargo hold full of a steam and water mixture.” Hannah recalled her own struggles with the MPD engine’s steam drum. She had not been able to figure out how to get the steam out, without the drum undergoing a rapid unplanned disassembly. In the end, the NXC h
ad killed Oliver Meeks to get the answer. “Everything's in freefall. There is no convection. Heat doesn’t circulate. How does your cargo hold not explode before you get all the ice melted?”
The silvery bio-antennas on the alien’s head danced. “We are using your electrical capacity to run fans that take the steam and water mixture from the hold and dump it into a tank. Eventually, the ice is melted and evaporated, or the tank is filled. Then we disconnect the hose.”
“You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” Boombox said, smugly.
“Except it’s kind of cheating. You’ll be using our water, in the form of steam, to melt your water.”
“Yes.”
Hannah swallowed. “OK. I’m just warning you, we don’t have very much water on board.”
“We will not require more than you have in your tanks.”
But I don’t want to give you everything we have in our tanks, Hannah thought. There’s little enough as it is. She floated over to the other wall. Before Boombox could come to see what she was doing—as if it could read English, anyway—she disabled the gauges on the reactant tanks. “All right,” she said, pretending to read the gauges. “You’re drawing electricity from our fuel cells.” As she spoke, she switched the fuel cells off. Now they wouldn’t be depleted. The SoD would hang onto some water, however much remained in the ET that held reactants for the fuel cells. She stared at the electrical output meter. The aliens were drawing a couple of megawatts via their cables, but now it was all coming from the housekeeping turbine. She turned back to Boombox, and smiled. “Now, what did you want to do with the reactor?”
It stared at her for such a long time that she started to lose her nerve. She was on the verge of confessing to her deception. At last the alien said, “Turn it up to eleven.”
Hannah let out a startled laugh.
“Is this correct?”
“Yes, yes, it’s correct …” She floated over to the dollar meter. “It’s gonna take a while to crank it up.”
“I understand. It is a primitive system.”
Hannah programmed the control rods to withdraw slowly, increasing the amount of reactivity in the core. She remembered Kate’s malware. She imagined the control rods withdrawing all at once. You had to figure the malware would also turn off the coolant pumps. Boom. A long-forgotten face flitted across her mind’s eye: the Rosatom physicist she’d slept with on her first trip to Russia, where the SoD’s reactor was built. Had he known they were fitting the ship out with a time bomb? Goddamn. He’d had melty dark eyes. The same color, actually, as the alien’s.
Lifeboat: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 2) Page 25
