Boombox set her on her feet. She caught her breath, grimacing at the awful smell.
“Now are you impressed?” said the fake Sony stereo, and Hannah’s Z-2, faintly, from the floor.
“Yes, I am impressed.”
The room, a good thirty meters across, had seven pointed chancels—six on one side, separated into two groups, with a gap of wall in between. One larger chancel opposed them. Same design as an alien’s hand. Machinery and furniture crowded the chancels, as if this ‘hand’ had grabbed up all the useful stuff it could find from all over the ship. Knee-high troughs of soil haphazardly filled the circular center of the room, basking in the sunlight. Things grew in them—fungi, pale-leaved vegetables—or were spilling out of them; many of the troughs had shattered sides. Ten years in orbit. There comes a point when you can’t fix things anymore. Tables covered with clutter straddled the troughs. Hoses snaked around the room, dripping water into the vegetables. Soil gritted under Hannah’s bare feet.
Yes, under her feet.
That was the impressive part.
Her feet rested squarely on the floor, and she could feel her vertebrae compressing, shooting out twinges of pain.
“There’s artificial gravity in here.” It felt like about 0.5 gees. More than they had on the SoD. But the MOAD wasn’t rotating. “Have you found the tree that anti-grav effectors grow on?”
Boombox’s hair shook. “Just big lumps of iridium.” It stalked between the vegetable troughs to a table covered with dirty clothes, which looked like Hannah’s sofa back in League City, before she had figured out how to work her washing-machine. Presumably there was no such thing on the Lightbringer as a washing-machine. Boombox picked an orange tank top out of the mess and tossed it at her. The garment stank. Hannah put it on; it was better than being in her thin t-shirt and panties. It hung like a dress on her.
“Mass attractors? What a waste,” she said. “Lumps of iridium that big would make you millionaires on Earth.”
Boombox half-doffed its spacesuit to its waist. It set its hands to one of the troughs and pushed it to the side of the room. Pale, gladioli-like plants shivered. Soil trailed from a crack. Half-full, the trough must weigh a ton, even in half-strength gravity, but Boombox didn’t sound out of breath when it next spoke. Of course, it didn’t use its lungs to talk.
“What did you think of the reactor? When we passed through the reactor room, they were chilling it down. You may have felt the electromagnets contracting.”
It was not easy for Hannah to think clearly, weary and frightened as she was. But she knew she had to convince the aliens that human beings were their intellectual equals. The fate of humanity might depend on Hannah Ginsburg’s expertise.
She was an engineer. Not a nuclear physicist. But she’d spent enough time around the Rosatom boys. When they got drunk, they loved to talk about nuclear fusion: the what-ifs, the might-works. That was where she’d learned about the Coulomb barrier. And after seeing the size of the aliens’ fusion reactor—seeing that the containment torus was not the size of the CERN accelerator complex, but much, much smaller—she had an idea how it probably operated.
"You must have developed a gauge field that you impose on the lithium target,” she hazarded. “Inside that field, the strong force becomes strongly attractive at greater distances than normal. That’s how you break the Coulomb barrier. Am I warm?"
Boombox stared at her, the bio-antennas around its face straightening out like rays. “Go on,” said the voice from the boombox balancing on the dirty clothes.
“I’m reasoning backwards from the assumption that fusion occurs at temperatures well below the threshold where the entire target would fuse into a superatom, then detonate as soon as the field is turned off.”
“That is a sound assumption.”
“So, this field must enhance the strong force to draw protons into the nucleus at temperatures of … oh, maybe a couple hundred thousand degrees? As opposed to ten million?”
“It’s a very finely balanced thing. You cannot give the field too little power, or too much.”
“Or it’s hello, Mr. Superatom. And goodbye. Is that what blew a big-ass hole in your ship?”
“No. Our interstellar propulsion system malfunctioned.”
“That was one heck of a malfunction,” Hannah mumbled. “What about your in-system drive?”
“That still works. It is a larger version of yours.”
Hannah sat on the edge of the table covered with dirty clothes, taking the weight off her spine. She hugged herself as the truth sank in. “You’re only about a hundred years ahead of us. Maybe only fifty.” She was using the number of years as a rough metric for the number of technical breakthroughs that separated the SoD from the Lightbringer. For instance, she had no idea how to actually generate a gauge field to increase the efficacy of the strong nuclear force. But if they let her have a proper look at the hardware, she could probably figure it out.
She felt both elated and depressed. Her emotions mirrored her innate love of advanced technology, and her relief that the aliens’ technology wasn’t more advanced. There was nothing here beyond the grasp of the human intellect. The Lightbringer would not shatter the arc of human history.
And yet, a part of her had hoped to find something incomprehensibly strange, instead of more proof that the universe was the same all the way down.
“What are you doing?” she said, as Boombox continued to push the troughs against the walls, clearing the center of the room.
Boombox straightened up. Soil smeared its face. “A VIP is coming on board. I must get the place into a somewhat less disgraceful state.”
“A VIP?”
“Don’t you refer to your commander as a VIP?”
“No. Ma’am sometimes. But mostly we just call her Kate …”
“That seems disrespectful to me. She’s a formidable human being.”
“Yes,” Hannah agreed. “Yes, she is.” Her heart sank as the incongruities between Kate’s story and Boombox’s story jumped out at her afresh. Kate had said the aliens hurt her. Those bruises had been real, all right. Boombox, on the other hand, called Kate ‘formidable,’ and implied that she should get VIP treatment. Was this somehow the same story seen through two opposite sides of an imperfect human-alien linguistic interface? After all, whatever Boombox’s native language was, it certainly wasn’t English.
She needed Giles. He’d come with them for this very reason. “Where’s Giles?” she said.
“Oh, the other one?” Boombox said. “I will bring him to join us soon.”
Finished moving the troughs, it picked up a broom and began to sweep up the loose dirt. The humble broom: a piece of technology so perfectly suited for its purpose that it looked pretty much the same on Earth and Proxima b. Sitting on the table with her arms curled around her knees, Hannah wondered how many more such examples there were. Did the aliens have bicycles? Fishing rods? She already knew they had reactors and high-tech Saran Wrap.
Again wistfulness touched her. Never fully acknowledged, a childhood dream was dying. Once, a very long time ago, she’d gazed up at the stars and known that whatever was out there, it must be magic.
As Boombox swept, patterns came into view on the floor. The circular mosaics reminded Hannah of Roman frescoes. Pompeii meets the 1970s. Aliens were depicted in symmetrical poses like Rorschach blots, laying their hands on parts of each other’s anatomy, which unfortunately was too stylized to deliver any information about alien private parts.
“Don’t you have ESP or anything?” she said.
“ESP?”
“Oh, you know. Telepathic powers. Anything like that.”
Boombox stood its broom against the wall. It sat on the table beside her. Its feet reached the ground, although the table was as high as a kitchen counter. “Some of us are extroverted,” it said.
“Extroverted?”
“I am very extroverted.”
“Uh, I think we have a translation glitch here.”
&
nbsp; “I am certified as a seventh-level lay cleric.”
“That’s nice, I guess …”
“Others are not extroverted at all.”
“No?”
“That is probably why your friends died.”
The off-hand reference to Skyler, Jack, Alexei, and Meili caught Hannah like a sucker-punch in the gut. She tried to power through it, breathing deeply, willing her emotions to stay under control. It was no good. There were limits to what a person could take and keep smiling.
“They never had a chance, did they?” she said.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there. But the surface of Europa is a hostile environment, even for us. Your bodies are just not made for it.”
The brutal, truthful epigraph overcame her. Tears burst from her eyes. She hid her face in her knees, sobbing.
Boombox’s fingers fastened in her hair. It gently raised her face and stared, apparently puzzled. Hannah kept crying.
The alien reached out and wiped one finger under her eyes. It sniffed the finger, and then put it in its mouth.
“What are you doing?” it said at last.
“I’m crying,” Hannah sobbed. “Don’t you cry?”
“Not with our eyes.”
“Oh.” She cried harder.
“Are you hurt?”
“In here,” Hannah said, placing one hand over her left breast to indicate her heart. “Yes. I’m hurt.”
“I can help you.”
“No, you can’t. Leave me alone.”
“I am extroverted.”
“Whatever. Sorry. It just hurts so much.”
Boombox slid one arm under her legs and deftly tilted her over backwards. She landed on her back on the dirty clothes. A musty, salty reek puffed up around her.
She struggled to sit up, panicking. Boombox’s hands came down on her shoulders and forced her back. It leaned over her, bringing its face close to hers.
She flashed back on the frightening moment in the engineering module when Jack had held her powerless. Let me go. I don’t think you mean that.
That had been bad. This was much, much worse. The thing leaning over her was not even human.
“I can help you,” it said.
She wanted to scream, but there was no one to hear her. What an idiot she’d been! To come aboard an alien spaceship, alone, unarmed—oh, damn it, I never was the adventurous type. I shouldn’t even have tried.
“Hold still.”
Boombox pulled her tank top aside. It ripped the neck of her t-shirt, exposing her breasts. Then it laid one large hand on her left breast, completely engulfing it.
Hannah waited in dread for something else to happen—alien rape? How much worse could this get? Don’t answer that.
What happened was that a cool, refreshing sensation spread from the alien’s hand into her breast. Little by little, it percolated through her body, like gradual submersion into a cool jacuzzi. Her hot, aching, weary body yearned to plunge all the way in right now. The slow spread of the feeling tantalized her. She arched her back, pushing up against the alien’s hand. Boombox bore down. It had a strange expression on its face, even more inscrutable than usual; it seemed to be looking through her, not at her.
At last it relaxed. Leaning over her, it met her eyes. By now the delicious coolness had reached Hannah’s fingers and toes and the roots of her hair. Her nipple was hard under the alien’s palm. She had a funny taste of garlic in her mouth.
“Do you feel better now?” Boombox said.
“I feel great. What did you do?”
“You had an early-stage cancer, here.” It withdrew its hand from her breast. “I am surprised you could feel it. It was very small.”
Hannah sat up. She gripped her torn t-shirt together over her breasts. “I have cancer?”
“It was only a small one.”
“But I’ve been tested! I had the test for the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. So did my sister. We were both fine.” Quivering in horror, Hannah thought of Bethany. Oh my God. If Hannah had breast cancer, maybe Bee-Bee did, too! These genetic tests didn’t guarantee anything …
The next instant, she remembered it probably wasn’t genetic. She’d been in freaking space for two years. That would do it.
I’m going to die. I’m going to die.
But wait. Boombox had said ... “It’s gone?”
“Yes. I took it away.”
“How’d you do that?”
Boombox stretched out one hand with all seven fingers stiffly splayed. The same gesture shown in the mosaics on the floor. “I’m extroverted.” it said. “I told you.”
Hannah didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Was this the magic she’d yearned for? Or some kind of elaborate alien joke?
Assuming Boombox wasn’t joking, an instantaneous cancer cure didn’t have to be a supernatural feat. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Clarke got that right back in the 1970s. Maybe Boombox was crawling with nanites, small enough to crawl through the pores of the skin, programmed to destroy cancer cells. Earth’s biotechnologists were already working on that line of research. Or maybe it was something else, something Hannah could not possibly imagine. Maybe she was wrong that the aliens were only 100 years ahead of humanity. Maybe they were thousands of years ahead. Or maybe their development had been asymmetrical, giving them godly powers in the arena that, after all, mattered most to biological beings: the control and maintenance of the body …
She looked up at the tall, Olympian being before her, and started to cry again.
Hannah Ginsburg was a bit of a control freak. Surprise, surprise. Her unhealthy love of booze complemented her need to control her environment—and most definitely her own body. As much as she might have yearned for some revelation that would save her from herself, she now felt overwhelmed by the mysteries piling up all around her. First contact sucked. She was calling it quits. It was all just too fucking weird.
Boombox regarded her for another moment. Then it ducked under the table and picked it up, Hannah and all.
“Hey!” she yelled, laughing in fright. She clung to the edges of the table as the alien carried it across the now-uncluttered expanse of the bridge.
Boombox put the table, and Hannah, down by the entrance to one of the aft chancels. “I will take you home,” it said.
“Don’t get my hopes up,” she said wearily.
“You are an accomplished propulsion technician.”
“According to my sister, I’m a great engineer but a shitty human being,” Hannah said. Having thought about Bethany, she couldn’t un-think about her. She had to see her family. Nothing else would begin to heal the wounds of this nightmare.
“All our engineers died in the explosion.”
Hannah laughed. “So those guys bringing the reactor online right now are actually, what, they aren’t technicians at all? Holy shit. I hope this thing has ejection seats.”
“I want you to be our propulsion technician.”
You must be kidding. Hannah almost said it, and then she thought Kate and then she thought Giles. For their sakes, she could give it a try. After all, what was the alternative?
“All right,” she said, “just as long as you lay off the, uh, extroverted stuff. No more messing with me. OK?”
“You may decide you want me to mess with you,” Boombox said.
Hannah shook her head firmly. Once had been enough. “No.”
“You will change your mind,” Boombox said.
She saw the alien’s huge fist draw back, but she did not have time to move before it crashed into her forehead.
CHAPTER 40
Jack clung to a strap, floating in pitch darkness, jostled between rriksti bodies. It reminded him of jump training. The tight embrace of his rriksti spacesuit also reminded him of the wetsuit he’d worn for that unforgettable adventure. “Hey, Skyler?”
“What?” said Skyler, from somewhere else in the Cloudeater’s cargo hold. It was amazing how much fear the man could pack into one monosyl
lable.
“When I was in pilot training, we had to do a parachute jump into the North Sea. It was a joint effort with some troglodytes from the Parachute Brigade. Go! Go! Go!” Jack recalled, laughing under his breath. “It wasn’t so much ‘go’ as get pushed out of the door. Anyway, I was the last one out. The rescue boat had already headed for home, as it was time for tea. I had to swim to shore, fighting off sharks with my flare pistol …”
“This was his Chuck Norris training,” Alexei told the rriksti gravely. They had never got around to correcting the record with regard to Chuck Norris, whom the rriksti believed to be a special forces unit. “For my own Chuck Norris training, I had to kill one hundred men simultaneously with a machine-gun.”
“There are no sharks in the North Sea,” Skyler said. “Are there?”
Jack and Alexei cracked up.
The Cloudeater was creeping up on the Lightbringer from below, backthrusting, and Jack was remembering how keen he’d been when he first joined the RAF, and what it had felt like to go into battle, when he first got to Iraq, before anyone died. He’d never shared this with anyone, as it went against the general presumption that one was just doing one’s job—you were supposed to buy into all that maddening vague talk about reducing forces and degrading potential—but the fact was he had harbored a strong desire to kill Iraqis. He’d even fantasized about getting shot down and taking out ragheads bloodily, on his own, before they captured him. At root it was a primal curiosity about death. Of course that had gone away after the war, when the toll sank in, and worse yet, when the dossier revealing Blair’s deception emerged, he’d begun to feel ashamed of taking part in the war at all. But the happy warrior had not gone away—he’d only gone to ground in some deep corner of Jack’s psyche.
Now, Jack deliberately summoned that version of himself. He excised premonitions of shame and regret from his mind. Reminded himself that he most likely would not live long enough to regret this, anyway. He was psyching himself up to kill as many people as he could.
Lifeboat: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 2) Page 28
