Lifeboat: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 2)

by Felix R. Savage

  CHAPTER 44

  Left alone on the bridge of the SoD, Skyler fired up the video comms system. He had a few things to say to Tom Flaherty at the NXC.

  He started off by manipulating the camera with his hands, panning it around the bridge, to show them Kate’s corpse, and the two Krijistal who had died with her. He provided commentary so they’d know what they were seeing, and how it had gotten this way.

  While he was doing that, the SoD whanged into something with an almighty jolt. Skyler anxiously checked the status of the directional antenna. Whew. Undamaged.

  He really wanted them to hear this, especially as he didn’t figure Jack was ever coming back.

  “Our mission plan was a turd sandwich, hold the bread,” he said. “I know, I know, hindsight is 20/20. But come on, boss. You set us up for a confrontation. I’m not exempting anyone here—NASA, Roscosmos, CNSA, ESA, JAXA, there’s plenty of blame to go around. Blame the weather. Blame the politicians, like you always do. But we convinced them to fund the mission, with that vision of a big old alien technology pie in the sky. You told them what you told me. Now’s our chance. We’ll grab all the alien shit and keep it for ourselves.

  “With that kind of mindset, is anyone surprised that the aliens did exactly the same thing to us?”

  He laughed mirthlessly.

  The SoD leapt sideways.

  Skyler’s toes stayed in the foot tethers, but his body peeled out of his seat. He faceplanted on Kate’s corpse. He recoiled from her cooling flesh, tacky with blood.

  “Oh God,” he said. “Oh God.”

  He stopped recording after that. Well, not quite. He spoke a few more words, staring into the camera, so close that he could see his own haggard reflection in its lens.

  “That’s about it, Tom. You don’t mind if I call you Tom, do you? One last thing: FUCK OFF. Sir.”

  He smiled.

  Transmit.

  A second after he pressed the button, the airlock hatch clunked open.

  Skyler flew out of his seat. The SoD was spinning. The bridge rotated around him, so that the ceiling turned into the floor.

  Jack shot up out of the airlock chamber, entangled with an alien in a dead black Krijistal suit.

  *

  Jack kicked his alien assailant off of him. They cannoned in opposite directions. The rriksti bumped into Skyler. Jack grabbed the back of the right-hand seat to break his fall. He dived over it and frantically strapped in.

  “It’s me!” the alien said, from the headphones of the comms console, which made its voice small and tinny. “Keelraiser!”

  “Yeah, I thought it was probably you,” Jack said, working the axis precession controls. The SoD was tumbling. He had to null out this spin. Slight surges rocked the ship as Jack clutched the reaction wheels. The lights dimmed. This maneuver gobbled electricity. Mercifully, the Krijistal had not drained the fuel cells. Wait wait wait CLUTCH. Wait wait wait.

  “I am sorry,” Keelraiser said.

  It flew over and squatted above the main screen, at right angles to Jack. It had doffed its spacesuit to its waist. Jack reached up and struck out at it. “Be a good alien and fuck off,” he said. “Skyler! Open the pressure door. Keelraiser is going to join its friends in the main hab.” He was thinking he might vent the atmosphere from the main hab to kill all the rriksti on board. Wouldn’t have to jettison all of it. Atmospheric pressure of 4.0 psi or so should sort them.

  Skyler, doing as he was told for once, flew to the pressure door and turned the crank. No rriksti sprang in. A glance at the internal camera feed showed that they were still holed up in the axis tunnel. Maybe they were already dead, which would save venting the atmosphere. Deal with Keelraiser later.

  “I’ve broken with Eskitul,” Keelraiser said, floating higher, out of Jack’s reach.

  “They got wiped out, I suppose? I hope you don’t think you’re going to be safe here. I’ve had it with you, all of you.”

  “No.”

  Jack finished nulling out the SoD’s spin. He punched up the external camera feed. The Lightbringer filled the screen. Faint coronas of red glowed around its thrusters, like the dull glow of red-hot iron. That was black-body radiation from the water plasma spewed out of the Lightbringer’s mammoth MPD engine. The Krijistal were burning hard. But with that much mass to move, it would take the Lightbringer ages to spiral out of Europa orbit.

  Good.

  “Skyler, take the star sights,” he ordered. “Hopefully you know how.”

  “Jack!” Keelraiser said. “Jack! Eskitul is not dead!”

  That got Jack’s attention. “Huh?”

  “The Shiplord has reclaimed command of the Lightbringer.”

  “What?”

  “Eskitul has made peace with the Krijistal.” Keelraiser’s mouth opened in that strange rriksti expression that seemed to combine distress and hilarity. “She has betrayed us. She’s betrayed you, she’s betrayed me, she’s betrayed us all.”

  ”Eskitul is a she?”

  Keelraiser threw up its hands. “Not at the moment. But English has only two pronouns.”

  “Three. He, she, and it,” Jack said. “It is the one I favor for you lot. Go on. Tell me what happened.”

  “We boarded the Lightbringer. The Krijistal were waiting for us. They put up a fight, but it was … only for show. I knew what was coming when Eskitul allowed Ripstiggr to live. Ripstiggr is the acting commander of the Krijistal. He is very Chuck Norris. Eskitul should have killed him, but did not. This was a reward for not killing us. Oh, it is complicated. But what you must know is that Eskitul has taken command, and they’re leaving.”

  “They’ve abandoned everyone in the shelter on the surface?” Skyler broke in. “Holy crap, that’s cold.”

  “You have no idea,” Keelraiser said.

  “They’re going home, aren’t they?” Jack said. Without warning, tears heated his eyes. “Shit. I would have wanted to go. Why didn’t they just take us with them?”

  Keelraiser reached down and tried to pat his hair. Jack slapped its hand away.

  “Fuck off.” He remembered something. “The Cloudeater?”

  “I sent it back to the surface,” Keelraiser whispered. “Hriklif isn’t a pilot, but the computer can do the heavy lifting, and it’s not that hard to land on an ice plain. Anyway, Hriklif is on my side.”

  “You saw this coming, in other words.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, fuck you,” Jack said. “Fuck you and all your Proxima b string-bean people.”

  “I didn’t know what to do.”

  “I’ll tell you what to do! Get out of my fucking face!”

  Keelraiser started to float away. At the entrance to the keel tube, it paused. “I haven’t told you the worst of it yet.”

  “Spit it the fuck out, then!”

  “It is so hard to tell the truth,” Keelraiser said fretfully.

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “I promised myself I would not lie to you anymore,” Keelraiser hissed, and then it gabbled, all at once: “I lied to you before we all did we didn’t come to seek refuge we are not refugees we are not Lightsiders we are Darksiders we won the war and conquered Imf and now we are going to conquer Earth too and there are two more ships coming behind this one.”

  The two men stared at it in dumbfounded horror.

  “Now you know,” Keelraiser said, and dived into the keel tube, like a pale fish going down a drain.

  “Shut the door,” Jack said to Skyler.

  He sat back in his seat.

  “Well, that simplifies things,” he said to no one in particular. He adjusted his headset. “Alexei? Did you hear that?”

  “Yes,” Alexei said.

  “Do you believe it?”

  “Yes. I predicted this, if you remember. This isn’t Star Trek. It’s a Russian science fiction movie. Everybody dies.”

  “No, they won’t,” Jack said, pulling himself together. “But the bad guys will. Are you mobile?”

  “Depends wha
t you need.”

  Again, Jack wondered how badly Alexei was wounded. “Stand by,” he said, and floated out of his seat.

  He caught Skyler by one shoulder. Skyler screamed and cowered in the air.

  “I hardly touched you,” Jack said in disgust. “But I’ll hurt you if you don’t tell me the truth, right now. Where are the plutonium rounds?”

  CHAPTER 45

  “The plutonium rounds are in the storage module,” Skyler babbled. If Jack had known it was this easy to get him to talk, he would have physically threatened him before. “In Lance’s luggage.”

  “Do you know that, or are you guessing?”

  “Guessing,” Skyler said, with a sickly smile. Blood rimmed his teeth. “But I know I’m right. That’s the only place we haven’t been in and out of a hundred times.”

  Now that Skyler mentioned it, Jack remembered Lance bringing a couple of large cases on board. He’d blocked it out, like everything else to do with Lance.

  “Blin!” said Alexei, listening in. “Why didn’t I think of that? All right, I’m checking now.”

  Jack said to Skyler, “Did you take that star sighting? Silly me, of course you didn’t, because you’re a useless little cunt.”

  He did it himself, lining up the telescope on a bright star. Wouldn’t it be something if that ‘star’ was the Alpha Centauri system? He chuckled to himself and returned to his seat. Waiting for Alexei to find the plutonium rounds, he programmed the targeting computer. He was pleased how closely the figures from the inertial navigation units matched his star sighting.

  “Got them,” Alexei said. “Fuck, these things are heavy.”

  “They’re nuclear bombs, man.”

  “There are two per case, two cases. They have steel plating. They’re less than half a meter long, but each one must mass fifty, sixty kilograms.”

  Jack hesitated. He knew he was probably asking Alexei to go beyond the limits of his strength. “You’ll have to go outside to load them, I’m afraid.”

  “I’m already in the airlock.”

  “Fantastic.”

  Jack pored over the external camera feed. It would be lovely if the microtamped nuclear bombs would zap into that hole in the Lightbringer’s hull, instead of blasting through from the surface. That would serve the dual purpose of destroying more of the Lightbringer’s interior, as well as containing the blast and radiation for a few milliseconds. Not that that really mattered. He, Alexei, Skyler, and Keelraiser were dead, anyway. He frowned at the realization that he’d mentally included Keelraiser in the tally of ‘people.’ Oh, well. Dead was dead.

  On the bright side, Eskitul and the Krijistal would die first. The Lightbringer would never bring its planet-killing armaments to bear on Earth.

  Jack trained the communications laser on the hull of the Lightbringer. He punched the ranging function on the comms panel and triggered a squirt. 5.7 kilometers. He fed the figures into the targeting computer.

  Come on, Alexei.

  “Don’t kill them,” Skyler said.

  Jack glanced to his left. Skyler slumped in the left seat. Dead Kate separated them.

  All Jack could do right now was wait for Alexei to load the rounds, so to take his mind off how bad he was feeling, he said, “Why?”

  “They’re weak and defenseless. They’re billions of miles from home.”

  “Did you actually hear what Keelraiser said? They came to conquer Earth.”

  “Yeah, well maybe that was the plan. But their ship is messed up. Even if they make it to Earth, how’re they going to conquer anything with that?”

  “They’ll have plenty of time to fix things along the way.” Jack remembered something Eskitul had said. “Water and power. Everything else is chemistry.” He added, “And DIY skills. They’ve got those.”

  Restlessly, he watched the Lightbringer recede on the screen. His initial targeting solution was already out of date. Hurry up, Alexei.

  “Well, actually, I’m mainly thinking about Hannah,” Skyler said.

  “I knew it.”

  “She’s on that ship.”

  “Regardless, it’s a threat to Earth, which needs to be eliminated. I’m not discussing this anymore.” He had been trying like hell not to think about the fact that he’d be nuking Hannah and Giles, as well as the Krijistal. In an attempt to salve his conscience, he added, “She’s probably dead already.”

  “But what if she’s not?”

  Jack leaned back in his seat and laced his hands over his eyes. When he did this, his head swam with exhaustion, and all the other things that were wrong with his body, like the grinding nausea in his gut, and the hot achy feeling in his joints, clamored for his attention. He opened his eyes and blocked it all out again by working the board, swinging the radar antenna to bear on the shrinking Lightbringer.

  “What if Hannah’s not dead?” Skyler said. “What if she’s waiting for us to rescue her?”

  “Then that’s too fucking bad, isn’t it?”

  “Jesus,” Skyler said. “I’ve never even slept with her.”

  “Nor have I.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “True; and it wouldn’t make any difference, anyway.”

  “You really are an asshole, aren’t you?”

  “One of the many differences between me and you is that I don’t resort to name-calling when I’m out of arguments.”

  “I made an argument. You just didn’t listen.”

  “Oh, they might not succeed in invading Earth, so we should let them have a go, because Hannah. That’s persuasive.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be a Christian?”

  Jack peered at Skyler, his gaze inevitably alighting on Kate along the way. The SoD’s resident flies, not all crisped in the earlier gunfight, had congregated on her dead face. He waved at them, and they rose up. Kate had died a hero. And what had she died for? Not to let the Lightbringer go on its merry way to invade Earth. It had to be destroyed. She’d been right about that. He had been wrong, and she’d been right.

  Skyler’s thin, ravaged face shone with intensity. “Mercy,” he said. “You’ve got to have mercy on them.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  Alexei’s voice crackled into their headsets. “Done,” he croaked. “Two rounds are loaded. I put ten tracer rounds ahead of each one. I’m taking a break now, guys.”

  “Spasibo ya u tebya v dolgu,” Jack said, drawing on his small stock of Russian to let Alexei know how grateful he was. He reached up to the railgun console and powered the rails on. Throughout the ship, system after system powered down, while a low growling sound started from far aft. The growling wound up the scale until it was an ultrasonic whine at the edge of hearing.

  “You don’t understand weakness,” Skyler said, his face contorting with emotion.

  “I do.” Jack fed the figures from the radar into the targeting computer. “It means I can target them without being fired on.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean! You’re unmerciful. You’re ruthless. You treated Hannah like shit. You treat everyone like shit. And before you say anything, it’s not just me. Even Meili said you were an asshole. You never held her when she cried. You just walked away.”

  This, actually, was true. Meili used to cry sometimes for reasons she couldn’t or wouldn’t explain. Reasoning that he couldn’t help her if she wouldn’t talk to him, Jack had usually just left her to it.

  “I’m a nice guy,” he said. “My mother says so.” His intended humor fell completely flat.

  “Bet your mother doesn’t know you murdered Lance.”

  Jack swung away from the board. “Oh, you fucking—you told me he was the one who killed Ollie! Was I supposed to let him get away with it?!”

  Skyler grimaced. “All right, let’s talk about Oliver Meeks.”

  “He was in a wheelchair. He was in a fucking wheelchair, and you cunts killed him.”

  “Maybe it wouldn’t have happened if you’d been there!”

  “What, was I supposed to
hover around him like a mother hen? Treat him like a cripple?”

  “He was a cripple.”

  “That doesn’t mean someone needs a round-the-clock nanny!” This was what Jack strongly believed, and his close friendship with Oliver Meeks had been predicated on Jack’s absolute refusal to treat Meeks like a cripple. But Skyler’s accusation cut deep. How many times had Jack himself regretted that he had not been home that night? Lance Garner would have thought twice before drawing a gun on an able-bodied man.

  “Oh, hell,” Skyler said. “Fuck it, fuck it. Listen, Jack, he was strong at the end. He was incredible. You should have seen him.” Skyler’s voice broke. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “He was in that wheelchair, pumping off rounds. He winged Lance. He was like this little battle tank, literally hell on wheels!”

  Jack smiled despite himself. He could see it clearly. Admiration for Meeks softened his bitter memories of that night.

  “Then he flipped out of his wheelchair and crawled under the table. I was right there. He didn’t shoot me, although he could have. He told me to run. Save yourself. Run.”

  “Oh, Ollie,” Jack muttered.

  “And then ….” Skyler was really crying now. “Then he ran out of ammo. And Lance was all like, standing over him, gloating. Meeks was cursing him out. He refused to beg for mercy. That pissed Lance off. So then he was like ..”

  “What?”

  “He—Lance—he wiped his gun off, and gave it to me. Because, you know, fingerprints. Although I didn’t think of that at the time. And he was like, you do it.”

  “And?”

  “I did it.” Skyler met his eyes with tear-filled ones. “I did it.”

  Jack lunged at him. He moved a few centimeters before his straps cut into his shoulders, stopping him. As if it had been yesterday, he could see Meeks lying on the kitchen floor in his house in Nevada, one side of his head missing, in a pool of blood and LCD fragments. “You did it.”

  “Yep.”

  “And you told me Lance did it. You made me think—you made me kill him!”

  “I thought Lance was a Chinese spy. I thought he was the saboteur. But he wasn’t.”