Boombox reached over her shoulder. She cringed. A slender forefinger tapped the dollar meter. “This indicates the region of critical controllable reactivity?”
“Yes.” She turned. The alien was right there. “You—you know this stuff?”
“Our ship is also nuclear-propelled. However, we use a different process.”
“What process?”
“Proton-lithium-6 fusion.”
“Oh. My. God. You’re kidding me, right? Say you’re kidding me. How do you bootstrap the reaction? What’s the containment vessel made of? Protons. Wait a minute. Protons …”
“From hydrogen.”
“Aha,” Hannah said. She narrowed her eyes and pointed at the alien. “That’s why you’re taking our electrolysis equipment. To make liquid hydrogen.”
“Yes,” Boombox said. Its bio-antennas shimmied briefly.
“Don’t you have any? A ship five freaking kilometers long, all the way from Proxima Centauri, and you don’t have any liquid hydrogen?”
“There is a hole one kilometer long in our ship,” Boombox said. “Everything was fried, shattered, slagged, or sucked into space. Would I be doing this if I had a large-scale power source? If I had working electrolysis equipment? If I had one single tank of LH2?”
Hannah gulped. “I don’t know.” She remembered Kate saying, They steal things. It’s their culture or something. “Would you?”
“Of course not,” Boombox said. It swept a bleak, dismissive gaze around her little kingdom.
She wrung her hands. What she wouldn’t give for a drink right now. She mustered a skeptical tone. “And this amazing fusion reactor of yours? That’s not working, either?”
“We have no fucking hydrogen! That means no proton source! Are you really a propulsion technician, or just a schleerp?”
Whatever a schleerp was, Hannah felt pretty sure she didn’t want to be one. “I am an engineer,” she said. “I’m one of the best damn engineers on Planet Earth. I helped build this system.” She slapped the reactor control board, noting the dollar meter inching up past 50%. “I have babied this reactor all the way from Earth, and I’m proud to say we haven’t had a single accident to this day. Whether that makes me a propulsion technician by your standards, I don’t know. But I do know something about nuclear reactions. And I know there is no damn way you have overcome the Coulomb barrier to the atomic nucleus.”
The Coulomb barrier was the stumbling block to fusion power. To overcome it and fuse two nuclei together, you needed the Large Hadron Collider, or a handy sun.
Hannah folded her arms and glowered at the alien, waiting for it to refute her.
The silver bio-antennas danced. “You would be amazed to know what we can do.”
“Bet I wouldn’t,” Hannah said. “Bet you haven’t really got a fusion reactor at all. Hell, you haven’t even got any good weapons. All the way here, I was waiting for you to throw, like, a miniature black hole at us or something.” She flung out her arms and looked around the module theatrically. “You haven’t even got ray-guns! What kind of aliens are you? Pfft.”
Boombox’s hair—she was starting to think of it as hair, because it looked like her own did when it came out of its twist-tie in zero-gee, except silver—danced so much that Hannah cocked her head on one side, smiling.
“We have got ray-guns,” Boombox said at last in a suspiciously choked-sounding voice. “I didn’t bring mine. I did not expect to be challenged.”
“Why didn’t you board us before?” Hannah said. “We’ve been here almost a week.”
Boombox’s dark eyes opened wider. “Would you board an alien ship, risking the lives of your companions against unknown forces?”
Hannah muttered, “That’s what Kate and Giles did.”
“And from them we learned that there was nothing to be afraid of,” Boombox said. It sounded almost sad. “They did not even carry personal weapons. What were you thinking?”
Hannah’s eyes prickled with tears. “I guess we thought, if you need a gun, you’re already fucked,” she said.
“On your TV, humans often meet aliens. They always fight them. This is what we were expecting.”
Hannah laughed wretchedly. “Guess we should’ve listened to the sci-fi writers, huh? Life imitates art.”
“Courage, Hannah Ginsburg,” the alien said. It pronounced her name like a trill of birdsong.
“We should’ve known you weren’t going to be friendly.”
“But I am friendly,” said the eight-foot alien with the sea-creature hair, taking up half of her kingdom with its limbs.
Hannah laughed, really laughed. “I guess aliens do sarcasm,” she said.
“We will pay for everything we take.”
“With what, Proxima Centauri dollars?”
“We will take you home to Earth in the Lightbringer.”
CHAPTER 37
Kate delved in Alexei’s coffin with her one good hand. She’d already searched Alexei’s desk in the Potter space under the aft stairs. The aliens hadn’t noticed what she was doing, or else they just didn’t care. They were completely preoccupied with the garden, wrapping up trays of plants in vacuum-proof sheeting of some kind, so they could steal those, too. Some of them had half-doffed their spacesuits and were tasting things. She hoped the terrestrial vegetation poisoned them.
Alexei’s laptop had to be here.
Hannah had taken Kate’s iPod, but that couldn’t be the only place the malware trigger existed.. Alexei had to have kept a copy. Right? Kate just had to find his laptop.
She lifted out handfuls of DIY e-cigarette parts from the storage webbings on the coffin’s sides. She rummaged in the drift of dirty clothes in the hammock. Alexei had been the opposite of a neat freak. Despite herself, Kate raised the dirty clothes to her nose and inhaled his smell.
They used to make love in his coffin, on the down low. Two could fit in one of these things, although it was a squeeze. Best sex she ever had—it was a wonder everyone didn’t hear her muffled screams. His clutter would dig into her back and ass when they really got going. She used to give him shit for it. Clean out your coffin, Alexei …
She didn’t want to keep going without him. This was not a surrender to weakness. Her grief mirrored her understanding of the aliens. What they had done to Alexei, they’d do to everyone on Earth, if she did not stop them.
The nearest aliens stiffened, their bio-antennas standing on end. Kate had seen that before. That was how they reacted when their captain, that heinous sadist Boombox, was near. She looked up.
Boombox floated out of the aft keel tube into the axis tunnel, clad in its spacesuit. The patterns on that thing were less Parliament Funkadelic than Lovecraft. They hurt Kate’s eyes.
OK.
Hannah’s alone in the engineering module now.
Kate started to her feet, remembering how easily Hannah had fended her off before. She was in no shape to perform zero-gee tae kwon do feats. Maybe she could just talk Hannah into handing the iPod over …
Before she could move a step, Hannah floated out of the keel tube, wearing her Z-2.
Kate knew it was her because of the unique piping on her suit. Green lines ran around her chest and down her legs and arms.
Hannah must have seen Kate through her faceplate. She waved energetically.
“Where are you taking her?” Kate shouted.
She knew that Hannah herself couldn’t hear her. In a spacesuit, you existed in your own little bubble of silence. If the other person didn’t have a radio you were SOL, and Kate had nothing except a handful of Alexei’s dirty underwear.
Boombox shouted through the boombox in its hand, “We’re just going for drinks!”
All the aliens wiggled their bio-antennas. Kate understood their body language well enough by now to interpret this as subservient laughter.
Going for drinks? Bullshit. Boombox was kidnapping Hannah. She’d end up in the same place as Giles.
“Have fun,” Kate muttered under her breath.
<
br /> As soon as they were gone, Kate climbed the stairs and went aft to the engineering module.
A blue-haired alien floated in the middle of the module, taking apart Kate’s iPod.
“Hello, Gurlp,” Kate said. She had met this one on the Lightbringer. It was Boombox’s chief bully-boy sidekick. “Can I have that?” The alien had removed the back of the plastic housing. The Wi-Fi might still work.
Gurlp hijacked the intercom to reply. Its English was inadequate, compared to Boombox’s. “Wish understand mechanism,” it complained.
“It’s a music player,” Kate said. “Music is something we humans like. It makes us feel good.” She bit her lip, remembering one time when Mission Control had played ‘Stayin’ Alive’ for their shift-change selection. She and Alexei had danced around the bridge together, performing clumsy zero-gee disco moves. Oh, Alexei. Stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive … She didn’t want to stay alive any longer. “Can I have that?” she repeated, reaching for the iPod.
Gurlp backhanded her across the module. “No,” it said through the intercom, as she bounced off the side wall. “Need ask you about ship weapons system.”
“We’ve already been over this.” Fresh blood filled Kate’s mouth. “I am not telling you how to fire the railguns. Why do you want to know, anyway?”
“Us enemies come. We wish blow to shit.”
Hope blossomed. Kate had no idea who the enemies of these aliens might be. But the enemy of my enemy is my friend, right? “No way, Jose,” she said. “My ship, my guns. Go to hell.”
Gurlp casually broke the iPod in half and dropped the pieces. That’s how strong they were. It drifted towards her. “Hell, what? Human place?”
“It’s just a figure of speech,” Kate said.
“Rriksti also this figure of speech. Us say show hell. Let me teach you what means this.”
CHAPTER 38
The Cloudeater rose off the ice, hovering. Exhaust ducted from its engine provided lift.
The main engine engaged.
Felt like getting kicked by a horse, all over Jack’s body.
Keelraiser hadn’t been kidding. This thing pulled some vicious gees.
Jack wondered how Alexei was holding up, but he couldn’t turn his head. It was all he could do to drag air in and out of his lungs. His rosary dug into his chest like a branding iron. He’d been stupid to wear it around his neck. At this level of thrust, even a wrinkle of fabric under your back would hurt. The rriksti spacesuits didn’t wrinkle. But they didn’t have pockets, either.
The direction of the thrust gravity gradually changed. Jack pictured Keelraiser on the bridge overhead, fighting the gees, curving the shuttle’s vector to the vertical. Now they seemed to be lying on their backs. Jack stared at the ceiling, which had been the forward wall. Graphics skidded across it. He glimpsed a planet, divided into three stripes: desert-pale, mottled green and blue, and black. That must be Imf. Before the rriksti ruined it.
What did it mean for Earth’s future that the rriksti had devastated their home planet? Was that just something intelligent life did? Meeks had theorized that first contact was the Big Filter: the moment when an intelligent species was most likely to go extinct. But the rriksti had not needed any outside help to drive themselves to the brink of extinction.
No telling how much worse things had got in the Alpha Centauri system since the Lightbringer set out. As Keelraiser had said, this group of rriksti might be the only survivors of their species.
And if that was the case, Jack had a heavy responsibility to preserve their lives.
We are not so different.
His eyes watered. Tears slid towards his ears.
The gravity went away.
They were back in freefall.
The rriksti immediately slipped out of their harnesses, and Jack forgot his disturbing thoughts as he floated up from his seat.
“We have achieved an orbital height of 450 kilometers and orbital velocity of 13,700 kilometers per hour,” Keelraiser said in their headsets. “I’m now going to dive down and rise back up to converge our orbit with the Lightbringer’s orbit. This will take approximately seventeen hours.”
Seventeen hours!
Jack was frustrated, but not surprised. After all, the space shuttle used to take two days to overhaul the ISS. The Cloudeater was a shuttle, too. Pound for pound, it probably had even worse delta-V than the Atlantis. You can have a star in your belly, but you still need stuff to throw out the back, and all that passenger seating didn’t leave much room for tankage.
“Relax,” Keelraiser added, with a hollow laugh.
The rriksti relaxed. They floated back into the passenger cabin, talked in their silent way, ate, and drank. They’d brought food on board: greasy slabs of suizh that looked like tofu. Around the eighth hour of their wait, the men, tormented by their growling stomachs, caved in and asked the rriksti to share their food. The aliens delightedly watched them choke the stuff down. There was a kind that tasted like old inner tubes, and another kind that set the inside of your mouth on fire. The inner-tube variety was just about palatable, when washed down with enough krak. It was calories. And (Jack thought to himself) what did a little metal poisoning matter, when their bodies were breaking down anyway?
Skyler ate little. He floated on the fringe of the group, staring at Alexei. Maybe he knew what was coming to him.
*
Now or never, Skyler thought, several hours later.
Darkness shrouded the passenger cabin of the Cloudeater. The rriksti had strapped themselves into seats to sleep. The seats were the wrong size and shape for the humans. Jack had made himself a sort of sleeping-bag by securing a blanket to the floor in one of the aisles. He’d rigged another blanket-bag for Alexei, but the Russian wasn’t asleep. Maybe he was in too much pain to doze off. Skyler could see his eyes glinting in the dim red light from the monitoring screens scattered around the cabin.
Skyler floated over and landed on the seat next to Alexei. The cosmonaut turned his head. “Can’t sleep?”
Skyler gestured at Alexei’s splinted arm, which lay above the blanket. “How’s your arm?”
“Collarbone. Hurts. But it’s not the worst thing that ever happened.”
“Sorry,” Skyler said. “I’m really sorry.”
“You already said that.”
“I’m really, really fucking sorry.”
Their voices were quiet. The Cloudeater’s air circulation system kept up a background roar. Skyler hung over the armrest of the seat, which was shaped like an oblong padded bowl, to hear Alexei better. The aisle was floored in some kind of rubbery stuff with raised patterns like flowers, or explosions. Lots of petals.
“I talked with Hriklif,” Alexei said. “I asked why they let you on board. Hriklif didn’t understand the problem. For one person to inflict non-fatal wounds on another, it’s a normal thing for them. They don’t make a big deal unless one person ends up dead. It’s a sensible way of thinking, very pragmatic. We can learn a lot from them, I guess.”
Skyler said, “I was so fucking glad to see you alive. Thank God those were sub-lethal rounds.”
“You thought they were lethal, eh?”
Skyler was tempted to lie, but he had promised himself that he’d lay his heart bare. Let the chips fall where they may. “Yes.”
“Hmm,” Alexei grunted. He felt around under his blanket with his good hand. Skyler watched, petrified.
“I jumped to conclusions,” Skyler blurted. “I just assumed the malware had to’ve caused the crash. And I figured it was Russian, because I already knew you were working for the GRU, and the pieces seemed to fit together. But it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been wrong.” He shuddered to think how close he’d come to killing a man for the wrong reasons—again … “I’m sorry, dude. Really sorry.”
Alexei brought his hand out from under his blanket. He held up his mod. “I have a little bit of juice left.” Depressing the switch with his thumb, he inhaled. A cloud of vapor rolled along the
floor, revealing the direction of the imperceptible breeze blowing from the vents. “You want?” Alexei held out the e-cigarette.
Skyler grinned in profound relief. He understood that this was Alexei’s way of saying it was OK. The e-cig of peace. “Thanks.” He took a drag, coughed it out. “Wonder if the rriksti smoke? We could introduce them to a new vice.”
“I look forward to discovering their vices,” Alexei said. “Krak is a good start …We can put this behind us, hey, Skyler? We are both professionals.”
Skyler nodded. His heart soared. Being forgiven felt amazingly good. He should try it more often. “I’m a crap spy,” he said, beginning to unburden himself. “I just can’t take all the lying and deception anymore.”
“Nor me either,” Alexei said. He reached out to retrieve the e-cigarette, and gripped Skyler’s hand for a moment. “The malware was Russian.”
“Oh.”
“So you were right. But it did not cause the Shenzhou crash, this I’m sure of.”
Before Skyler could respond, the mound of blanket further along the aisle humped up. Jack’s head popped out. “So what did cause the crash?”
Jack hadn’t been asleep after all! He untangled himself from his blanket and drifted down the aisle towards them.
“Mechanical error, Jack,” Alexei said, sitting up. Skyler straightened up, too, so their heads were all facing the same way. “Go back to sleep.”
“Mechanical errors have causes.” Jack pointed at Skyler. “And if I had to guess, the cause of this one was you.”
Skyler froze. As if Jack’s words had opened a locker in his mind, those last terrible moments in the Shenzhou Plus tumbled into his memory. You turned the APU heater off, Meili had said. I told you to turn off the valves! But you turned off the heater for the APU pump! So the hydrazine froze!
Lifeboat: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 2) Page 26
