He had constructed a fantastical case against Alexei to avoid thinking about those moments.
To avoid the accusation Jack had just made.
It was YOU, Skyler.
He covered his face with his hands, as if he could blot out the memory, but it was too late. He couldn’t hide from the truth.
“You’re right,” he babbled. “I screwed up. That stupid touchscreen technology—no, it was my fault—everything written in Chinese—but no. It was my fault. I screwed up, and Meili’s dead. I’m gonna be dealing with this for the rest of my life.”
“Not to worry,” Jack said. “The rest of your life is likely to be quite short.”
Alexei said, “Jesus, Jack. He admits he screwed up. It can happen to anyone. He didn’t mean to do it. He almost died, too!”
Skyler wanted to hug the Russian, he was so grateful to him for defending him. But it didn’t seem to make much of an impact on Jack.
“Screwing up is not an excuse.” Jack’s face was a mask of fury. Skyler remembered—he’d never forgotten, actually—that Jack and Meili had been an item for ages. Jack was never going to forgive him.
And if Jack ever found out about the other thing …
… oh, fuck. My life won’t be worth a bucket of warm spit …
… as Lance might have said.
Skyler fiddled with his peace symbol in distress. “I loved Meili, too,” he muttered.
This, it immediately became clear, was the wrong thing to say. Jack huffed out breath through his nostrils like a bull. He plunged into the seat on the other side of the aisle and braced his feet against the back of the one in front of it, pushing so hard that the seats creaked.
Alexei hit Jack’s leg. “Jack! Jack. Remember to look on the bright side of life.” He started to sing in his creaky baritone. “Don’t grumble, give a whistle! And this’ll help things turn out for the best …”
“Hey, Monty Python!” Skyler said, recognizing the tune. He’d often seen Jack and Alexei guffawing over a laptop screen as they indulged in a Python viewing fest. “I freaking love Python.”
“If life seems jolly rotten, there’s something you’ve forgotten,” Alexei sang.
Jack smiled reluctantly. They belted out a couple of choruses of ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,’ while the rriksti slept, deaf to the tuneless racket. At last Jack said, “It’s fine, Skyler. It’s never too late to get it right.”
“I’m not gonna screw up again,” Skyler promised.
“Did they give you one of these?” Jack went to his blankets and came back with an alien gun. It looked like the kind of assault rifle Congress was always trying to ban. Skyler could hear Lance now: Fudgin’ Congress-critters don’t even know what a so-called assault rifle IS. Oh Lance—had you ever got your hands on one of these babies, you’d have been in heaven, before you went to hell. Skyler handled the wicked-looking gun with revulsion.
“Energy weapon,” Jack said. “I’ll make sure you get one. We can’t bring Meili back, but we can barbecue every fucking Krijistal on the Lightbringer in her memory.”
Skyler knew what he was supposed to say now—right on, fuckin’ A—but he couldn’t do it. The long conversation he’d had with himself after he shot Alexei led to precisely this choice.
This paralysis.
He thrust the alien gun back at Jack—wrong way round, earning himself a glower. “I’ll leave the guts and glory stuff to you.” It came out wrong, like an accusation. “I just can’t do it,” he tried to explain, making it worse.
Because who was to say who deserved to die? Meili had not deserved to die. Nor had Lance. Nor had Oliver Meeks. And yet all of them had ended up dead, because of Skyler.
Jack and Alexei thought these rriksti were good and the ones on the Lightbringer were bad, but what if it was the other way around? Skyler refrained from opening that can of worms, but he could not overcome his own uncertainty. His NXC training emphasized looking at things from all angles. No statements or perceptions were to be accepted at face value, without supporting evidence. Who was right, who was wrong? Who was good, who was evil? It was all so damn contingent. And Skyler no longer trusted his own judgement. He shook his head helplessly, rubbing his thumb over his peace symbol, which had taken on a new symbolic importance for him. It wasn’t ironic anymore.
“What if we get it wrong? What if I screw up again?” he said, hearing a tremor of pleading in his voice.
Jack frowned. “What you mean is, just leave it to other people.”
“You don’t have to do it, either.”
“People with testicles.”
“I just can’t.”
Jack floated out of the seat, taking the gun with him. “No, I see that.”
Alexei watched Jack with a worried scowl. “We all need to get some sleep,” he said.
In a last desperate attempt to communicate as opposed to just talking, Skyler said, “Don’t you see, guys? We’re neck-deep in alligators here, OK? But randomly shooting people is not going to help. It never helps! We have to stop and think and—and analyze the evidence …”
… and away we go down the NXC rabbit-hole, where every conclusion might just be another screw-up in the making, another fatally flawed decision from a Harvard astrophysicist who’d thought he was smarter than everyone else.
Jack floated away. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said over his shoulder.
*
Fucking Skyler! Jack concluded that he was simply a coward. He liked guns fine when he was the only person holding one. But at the prospect of a battle, he suddenly developed a conscience.
Jack’s own guilty conscience nagged him. I have no idea what you’re talking about, he’d said, but he did. Skyler had been talking about Lance. He’d been talking about the way Jack murdered him, by underhandedly messing with his spacesuit. He’d been rubbing Jack’s face in it. Jack gritted his teeth so hard that his jaw hurt.
Alexei had forgiven the little twat, apparently. Alexei always had had an amazing ability to move on from things.
Jack cooled down by floating around the crew area, making windows and taking pictures. The rriksti had returned his Nikon. It had been on the Dragon, but they had apparently removed it to have a look at the state of the art of human image capture technology. It still worked, anyway. He snapped photos of Europa, waxing as the Cloudeater flew over the icy moon’s terminator, and Jupiter. He photographed the Great Red Spot, the polar auroras, and a dun-colored storm the shape of a fried egg, losing himself for a while in the gas giant’s beauty.
The camera’s clock, calibrated to the now completely meaningless GMT time-zone, told him that fourteen hours had passed since they launched. Not much longer to go.
The ceiling of the crew area, formerly transparent, was now opaque. Jack floated up through the hatch into the cockpit.
Keelraiser and Eskitul were not asleep. They sat strapped into their respective seats, their hair flattened over their shoulders. Perhaps that was their way of giving each other the silent treatment.
“Tell me more about the Lightbringer’s offensive capabilities,” Jack said. Just making small talk.
“At this point, zero,” Keelraiser said without looking around at him.
“You said they threatened you—”
“Yes,” Keelraiser said. “They threatened to drop chunks of debris on our shelter.”
Jack nodded. “That would be like dropping a brick out of a Cessna flying at 300 meters and trying to hit your friend on the head. Not much of a threat.”
On the other hand, if you dropped a thousand bricks, you’d have a good chance of nailing him.
“Oh, perhaps,” Keelraiser said, staring straight ahead at the forward wall. “But if they get their reactor running, they can repair everything else. The muon cannons, the railguns, the … elsprit … it’s a method of increasing the range over which the strong nuclear force operates. It can be weaponized. Everything can be weaponized. It’s enough to say that when it’s fully o
perational, the Lightbringer is a planet-killer. So the question becomes: how fast can they bring the reactor online?”
“And the answer is?” Jack said.
“We don’t know,” Keelraiser said. “It depends on many things.”
Jack floated across the cockpit and grasped the raised, scrolled back of Keelraiser’s seat. From this perspective, the wall became a dizzying panorama of space. It was not just a window. It felt as if they were literally floating in space. Europa filled half the sky, Jupiter blazed overhead, and above Europa’s limb, an ember-red polyhedron identified—Jack guessed—the location of the Lightbringer, and the SoD. For almost the first time in Jack’s life, vertigo gripped him.
“Tell us more about the Spirit of Destiny’s offensive capabilities,” Keelraiser said, bouncing his question back to him.
Jack didn’t recall telling the rriksti that the SoD even had offensive capabilities. Maybe they took it for granted. “Two railguns mounted on the truss. Controls on the bridge, auto-loading from an external ammo store. Solid metal slugs.” He remembered Kate’s claim that there were plutonium rounds hidden somewhere on board, and decided not to mention that.
“Field of fire?”
“Limited. Can’t fire past the bridge or the reactor. Think of the guns as broadsides.”
“Targeting accuracy?”
“Not great,” Jack said. He was underplaying the SoD’s capabilities, worried that the rriksti might change their minds about the operation altogether. They were not soldiers. Every passing moment made that clearer. And they were afraid, as the carousing of the rriksti in the passenger cabin proved beyond a doubt. “Look, the reason railguns freak us out is because they can throw projectiles so fast. Targeting is a whole different story. Over thousands of kilometers, we’re not hitting anything. And that’s if the Krijistal have even worked out how to use our guns.” Fear pinched him. The Krijistal could have tortured the information out of Hannah, Kate, and Giles …
“They say they are on the SoD, and they have us in their sights,” Keelraiser said.
“You’re talking to them?!”
“They’re threatening to fire on us.”
Eskitul said in its deep melancholy voice, “They’re like children. They can’t help it.”
“They may believe you aren’t on board,” Keelraiser snapped. “They may think you stayed behind on the surface, as you should have!”
Jack stared at the crimson polyhedron. The SoD had to be hundreds of kilometers away. Over that distance, he would rate the chances of a hit at 50%. “Are my friends still alive?” His throat constricted with dread.
“We don’t know,” Keelraiser said.
“Let me talk to these bloody Krijistal!”
“No,” Keelraiser said immediately. “They would only lie to you.”
And that makes them different from you, how? The thought flew across Jack’s mind, leaving a sulfurous contrail of mistrust..
Eskitul writhed out of its straps and rose from its seat. “They will not fire on us,” it said.
“I suppose we’ll find out one way or the other,” Keelraiser said.
“They will allow us to approach. They wish to end this stand-off, too.”
“I refuse to dock the Cloudeater with that ship,” Keelraiser said.
“There is no need to dock. I will lead the boarding party.”
Keelraiser flung its arms in the air and tilted its head back. It made a high-pitched grunting noise in Jack’s headset. Jack interpreted this as the rriksti equivalent of I bloody well give up! He didn’t care. If Eskitul said there was to be a boarding party, there would be. And they could either take Jack along, or throw him out of the airlock, because he wasn’t getting left behind. “Shall we suit up now?” he said. Keen as mustard. Me, me, sir. I’ll do that dodgy-looking bombing run.
Eskitul’s hair waved. “Yes. You could use some target practice before we blow those fuckers all the way back to Imf.” It added a laughing noise, which sounded like a fifty-decibel fart. Jack clutched his ears and smiled. He was starting to like the eccentric Shiplord.
CHAPTER 39
Boombox wrapped its fingers around Hannah’s glove and leapt off the SoD’s truss tower, into space.
The steel plain overhead seemed to fall towards them, but they were flying towards it. Boombox had tubes the size of salamis strapped to its wrists. They were thrusters, spewing invisible streams of cold gas. In freefall, you needed only a pinch of thrust to change your orientation. They flipped 180 degrees. Hannah’s legs went over her head, and they landed with a jolt on the hull. Nearby, a group of aliens nursed a steam hose over a ragged cliff.
Kate had soft-docked the SoD with the MOAD, right on the edge of the vast hole in the alien ship’s side. The SoD floated a few meters above a steel plain that stretched to the horizon, patterned like a giant silicon wafer with heat-rejection pipes and fins. The MOAD wore its circulatory system on the outside. Aft, a magnetoplasmadynamic thruster reared from the plain like a mountain. The sheer scale of the ship boggled Hannah’s mind. How advanced did a civilization have to be to build something like this?
She snatched one last look at the SoD, silhouetted against the waxing blob of Jupiter. Every antenna and rim thruster stood out. Her heart filled with love for their battered old design disaster of a ship, which seemed so small and helpless in comparison to this monster.
Boombox pulled her over the cliff, its wrist rockets puffing.
They descended past the steam hose and the electrical cables which were vampiring the life out of the SoD. Jupiter’s light bathed the devastation at the bottom of the hole. They flew over that, and into darkness. An empty cargo hold, Hannah thought, although she couldn’t see anything beyond the circles of weak light from Boombox’s chest-lamp and her own head-lamp.
Boombox had said it would show her their ship, and the compartment they had prepared for the humans to travel in. She could make sure everything was up to her standards. She would definitely be impressed, it had said, laughing with its hair.
So far, she was mainly impressed by the scale of the ship—and the scale of the disaster that had blown its guts out. Her focus kept splitting between her external surroundings and her immediate surroundings, namely the Z-2. She had worn her spacesuit exactly once before, when she boarded the SoD in Earth orbit. Second time out, it was even more nervewracking than she had remembered. All this telemetry flashing in her heads-up display! The noise of her own breath filled her helmet. The suit restricted her freedom of movement, it squeezed her legs like the world’s most brutal support hose, and it was so hot that sweat trickled out of her hair. EVA specialists accepted these limitations without much bitching—such is life. Hannah, however, nearly an EVA virgin, felt shocked and embarrassed that this was the state of the art of human suit technology.
Just look at Boombox, swimming easily through the vacuum in its funkadelic full-body wetsuit. Hannah wanted one of those.
Love or hate these aliens, you couldn’t deny their suit technology was superior.
In fact, all their technology seemed to be superior.
But by how much?
That was the burning question Hannah ached to answer. The future of Earth depended on it.
Boombox towed her through shattered decks. Ice clung to everything. They passed a glistening wall of what looked like Saran Wrap. That would be the cargo hold full of ice, or rather, steam and water, now. The steam hose from the SoD vanished into it through a DIY valve port.
They followed a secondary steam hose into a large, low-ceilinged room. Dim blue light gleamed on the frost-coated deck. Overlapping plates of steel, like the carapace of a giant woodlouse, defined a seven-sided polygon. Each side was as long as an RV. Seven RVs, parked nose to tail. On one side a heavily shielded box adjoined the polygon.
“This is our reactor,” Boombox transmitted into her helmet.
Hannah had visited CERN, walked around the dingy jogging track of the Proton Synchrotron.
This was to that
as an iPhone 12 was to a first-generation IBM mainframe.
Suited aliens worked at the injection port on the far side of the torus. “Is that where they’re generating protons from our liquid hydrogen?” Hannah demanded.
“Yes.”
She saw with a pang that the electrolysis equipment stolen from the SoD had been set up nearby. The steam hose whipped across the room. Wisps of vapor jetted into the vacuum.
Boombox landed on the floor and bent its knees to push off again. In that brief instant Hannah felt the violence of the processes concealed from sight. Vibrations from the hammering of the LH2 compressor/chiller travelled up through the soles of her feet. The floor itself seemed to contract and flex, tossing them towards the ceiling. The aliens around the injection port scattered to stations at the vertices of the torus.
“They’re almost ready to start the reactor,” Boombox said. “Come on. Hurry.”
“Why? What’s the rush?” Boombox did not answer. Hannah persisted, “You’ve been here ten years …”
But maybe that’s exactly it, she thought. I’d want to get out of here after ten years, too.
Boombox towed her through cavernous holds, down dark corridors lined with tall lockers. The journey lasted so long that Hannah almost ceased to be amazed at the scale of the ship. At last they tumbled into a truck-sized airlock, and then into an open space filled with—a lovely shock, this—sunlight. Yes, light from the actual sun. The whole ceiling was transparent. The sun hung near the middle of the black dome, blotting out all the other stars.
“Is this the human quarters? Pretty spacious …”
Boombox unlatched the rear entry port of her Z-2. With the rush of shipboard air into her suit, a fetid smell reached her nostrils.
“Can you get out of this thing without assistance?” Boombox said, staring at her.
The answer turned out to be no. She ended up on her hands and knees, like a butterfly struggling to emerge from its pupa, knowing she had to be missing a trick. Jack and Alexei had never needed help getting out of their suits. This was downright humiliating.
Boombox’s hands fastened under her armpits. It lifted her out of the suit, into the air. Her feet pedaled off the ground. The long alien fingers moved in her armpits, tickling. An abashed laugh burst from her. “Hee hee hee. Put me down …”
Lifeboat: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 2) Page 27
