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

by Felix R. Savage

  “No, he was just a dirty Fed,” Jack said emptily. “You and him were a nice pair. As bad as each other.”

  “I know.” Skyler wiped his eyes. He was completely losing it. A blubbering mess. “I’m as bad as he was. He affected me. Infected me. I used to be a nice guy, too. Before I joined the NXC … I was normal. As normal as a Harvard astrophysicist can be. But I’ve gone over to the dark side of the Force.” Their eyes met. “I can’t go back. I can’t change back to who I was. But maybe you can.”

  “I’m going to fucking kill you,” Jack said. He heard the mindless, reflexive threat, and despised himself for it.

  “Fine,” Skyler said. “I don’t want to live, anyway. I told Director Flaherty to go fuck himself. My life won’t be worth living after he gets that.”

  “You told the NXC to get fucked?” Jack laughed out loud. Flecks of blood spattered the targeting screen.

  “Yeah, so you might as well kill me. But have mercy on the rriksti. Please.”

  Jack looked at his targeting board. A reticule had sprung into being over the screen. It nearly obscured the Lightbringer. According to the radar return, the alien spaceship was now more than a hundred kilometers away.

  Shit, shit, shit!

  He targeted the gray spot he could see on the Lightbringer’s hull. That had to be the hole amidships. He fired a two-round burst.

  With rapid Zzzzoik! noises, two burning red spots of light raced away.

  And impacted short of the hole.

  "Damn," Jack muttered. "Adjusting."

  The background whine, which had dipped during the railgun firing, began climbing again.

  Skyler wept, “You’re killing them.”

  “Those were just tracer rounds.” Jack fiddled with the controls. "Here we go again."

  Two more burning spots of light raced away from the SoD, this time impacting just beyond the gray hull spot.

  Have mercy.

  Please.

  Ignoring Skyler’s entreaties, Jack continued to fire and adjust the railgun. Suddenly, the Lightbringer tried to take evasive action.

  "Look at that whale, trying to dart around." Jack laughed so hard that tears came to his eyes. He had fired ten tracer rounds. Now he boosted the power to the rails.

  With a perceptible jerk, the SoD launched its eleventh shot.

  But the Krijistal had not been idle. From compartments open to space, debris of all kinds began sailing out of the ship. From scrap steel to an entire warped blast door, the Lightbringer was throwing a screen of radar-reflecting trash behind it.

  Jack gritted his teeth. He did not pray. It wouldn’t be appropriate. He just watched bleakly as the plutonium round sped towards the Lightbringer.

  The round impacted some of the lighter debris, shouldering it aside with barely a wobble. But that wobble was important, for it shifted the aim point just enough for the plutonium round to impact the warped blast door that had been tossed overboard seconds ago.

  A fireball erupted alongside the Lightbringer. It expanded at light speed into a baby star so bright that Jupiter dimmed in comparison. Yet the fireball should have been spherical, and it wasn’t. The bomb’s collision with the debris had distorted the blast, sparing the Lightbringer.

  The alien spaceship continued to recede into the dark, its engines glowing cherry-red.

  “Damn it,” Jack howled. “Oh, damn it all to hell.”

  Seconds later the port camera cut out. So did the radar, blinded by the nuclear blast.

  That’s it then. It’s over.

  Although Jack had only fired one of the railguns, and the other one was still fully loaded, he could neither aim it nor range it.

  He had missed his chance to take the Lightbringer out, because of Skyler Taft.

  It was one of those laugh or cry things.

  He put his face in his hands and cried.

  CHAPTER 46

  On the bridge of the Lightbringer, Hannah curled in a lumpy armchair, watching Jupiter. The gas giant had grown perceptibly larger since the Lightbringer heaved itself out of Europa orbit.

  Two sections of the bridge’s forward wall, on either side of the drive chancel, had turned transparent. Smart materials. The aliens were a long way ahead of humanity in terms of applied nanotechnology. Eskitul had promised to teach her how it all worked, not that she had any chance of understanding it, she thought.

  For now, they were relaxing.

  There’d been a bit of excitement after they launched. Eskitul had given a string of orders, and the ship had surged gently this way and that. Hannah surmised that those had been evasive maneuvers. Kate must have fired on the Lightbringer. Hannah felt a little bit hurt by that. But she understood how Kate and Giles must feel, left behind.

  Almost as bad as Hannah felt, being here.

  The aliens had arranged chairs and a low table—well, low for them—in a conversation group in front of one of the viewing walls. They sat and chatted. Hannah imagined that travelling on the Lightbringer must once have felt a lot like a stay in a luxury hotel, with the best views in the universe.

  Must’ve been a nice—if long—journey from Proxima b.

  They called it Imf.

  “We are Darksiders,” Boombox told her.

  Imf was a tidally locked planet.

  “The Lightsiders pushed us out of the twilight zone, forced us to live in the dark, labor in the dark, raise our children in the dark. So we rose up and smashed them.” This had all happened seventy years ago, according to them, but Boombox was still gloating about it. Somehow Hannah wasn’t surprised.

  “You do not come from the Darkside, Ripstiggr,” Eskitul said.

  “No,” Boombox admitted. “I grew up in the twilight zone. But I grew up poor. I used to gather jgzeriyat from the ditches to help put food on the table.”

  “Cry me a freaking river,” Hannah muttered.

  Boombox’s hair danced. “In the twilight zone, the wind is so strong that children fly on it.”

  “My nurse used to tie me to the railings,” Eskitul said.

  “A formative experience?” Boombox said.

  Hannah hunched into herself. The aliens’ reminiscences cued memories of her own childhood. The taste of Coco Puffs and milk on a Saturday morning, watching cartoons, Bethany whimpering when Scooby Doo got too scary for her … Hannah used to cover her sister’s eyes until it was ‘safe’ for her to look. Now it turned out there really were monsters out there, after all. Joke’s on you, Hannah-banana.

  Rriksti. That’s what the monsters called themselves.

  Their language was Rritigul. Transposed into the audible range, it sounded like German with extra-long vowels, but meaning also depended on frequency, Eskitul had told her. They shifted frequency to add nuance, or alter the meaning of their words altogether, the way the Chinese language used tones. Thus, their bio-radio signals conveyed information in three dimensions: sound, pitch, and frequency. With such a fiendishly complex language under their belts, it was no wonder they’d found it easy to learn English. Going the other way would be next to impossible. She felt stupid just thinking about it.

  Stupid, and sick. Her head throbbed, and the half-strength gravity made her feel as weak as if she had a fever. Maybe she did. This place must be teeming with alien bacteria and viruses. Maybe she was dying.

  Or maybe she was just hungry.

  One of Boombox’s people laid a tray on the table. Transparent plates held various lumps, chunks, and wafers. Boombox and Eskitul used short sharp knives to chop and spear the food. Hannah’s mouth watered, even though it didn’t smell very pleasant. She stretched out her hand—

  —and Boombox slapped it.

  “Our food is not safe for you to eat.”

  “If you don’t feed me, you’re not going to have me around long,” Hannah said.

  “Some of your food has been brought on board. You shall have a garden of your own.”

  “You were planning to kidnap me all along,” Hannah said with loathing.

  Boomb
ox shrugged.

  The uniformed servant brought another plate. On it was a single, rather grubby Yukon Gold.

  “Oh hell,” Hannah said. She picked the potato up and bit into it. She knew that it was safe and even healthy to eat raw potatoes. Skyler used to snack on raw potato slices. He’d offer them to her, saying that with a bit of salt, they were as good as Kettle Chips …

  Crying, chewing, she ate the whole potato.

  Boombox was pouring clear liquid into ship’s mugs for itself and Eskitul.

  “Is that water? Can I have some?”

  Eskitul said, “Oh, give her some! It is only krak. It doesn’t poison them.”

  “Crack?” Hannah repeated.

  “We brew it in a distillation apparatus,” Boombox said. “Without krak, our ten-year ordeal would have been unbearable.”

  “A distillation apparatus?” Hannah started to laugh.

  “I agree! It’s funny! Reality is more bearable when it is filtered through a distillation apparatus,” Eskitul said. It poured some of the clear liquid for her. “Drink! It makes everything easier. Drink!” It tipped a whole cupful down its own throat.

  Hannah picked up the mug it had filled for her. She inhaled the tantalizing fumes. The contents of the scratched, battered mug smelt like home—a home she had thought lost to her forever. Her body and brain yearned for it.

  Hannah’s Rule #1, from her years at JPL: Never drink at work.

  She had completely abandoned that rule on the SoD, but now was the time to revive it. If she was going to keep ahold of her mind, she had to think of this as work.

  A new engineering challenge.

  Look at all this alien shit. Transparent hull sections, gaze-controlled computers, smart walls, a freaking fusion reactor.

  Your mission, Hannah Ginsburg, is to get to grips with this stuff, to understand it, instead of diving headfirst into a keg of alien booze.

  It took every grain of her willpower, but she put the mug down—spinning justifications to mollify the screaming demon in her heart: it might not be ethanol, it might be methanol, it might kill you, don’t take the risk.

  The demon said that that was a risk worth taking. Hannah told it to shut the fuck up.

  “No, thank you,” she said to Eskitul. “Could I have some water?”

  In the viewing wall, Jupiter grew larger. Eskitul explained to Hannah that it had set a course that would cross in front of Jupiter’s orbital path. By skimming the top of the gas giant’s atmosphere, the Lightbringer would reduce its velocity. When the ship exited Jupiter orbit, it would be going slow enough to fall inwards towards the sun … and towards Earth.

  “Nice,” Hannah said, too mentally exhausted to think about it. She sipped the briny water they’d given her, still mourning the krak she had turned down. The view of Jupiter compensated somewhat for her sense of deprivation. Auroras crackled above the gas giant’s north pole, an eerie web of blue lightning. She was getting a better view than the Juno probe ever had.

  But wait.

  Something bothered her about this trajectory.

  Don’t just sit there, Hannah.

  Do your goddamn job.

  Think.

  Jupiter has four Galilean moons.

  From largest to smallest: Ganymede, Callisto, Io, Europa.

  Io orbits closest to Jupiter, at a distance of just 422,000 km.

  “How close are we cutting it?” she asked Eskitul, nervously. “I mean, you don’t want to get too close to Jupiter!”

  “In your units of distance, we will approach no closer than 300,000 kilometers,” Eskitul said reassuringly.

  So we’ll be cutting inside Io’s orbit.

  “Where is Io right now?”

  Boombox frowned.

  “Io. Jupiter’s innermost moon. Where is it?”

  “Right there,” Eskitul said. It hiccuped delicately, and gestured at the ceiling. Hannah glanced up. The dome that had held the sun at its apex now cradled a blob of sickly yellow and puke-green. That was Io, and it was close.

  Hannah jumped to her feet. “Change course! Now!”

  “Why?” Boombox demanded.

  “The Io flux tube!” Hannah’s skin crawled. Her mouth dried out with a premonition of horrible danger. As she spoke, a harmonic shrieked from the boombox. The rriksti in the drive chancel spilled out, their hair thrashing.

  Boombox spun the dials of the boombox, cutting off the screech. “The electrical field sensors just overloaded!” it shouted at Hannah. “What is this Io flux tube?”

  “We didn’t know about it, either, until we did close fly-bys of Jupiter,” Hannah gabbled. “It’s an electrical current generated by Jupiter’s magnetosphere. Those pretty aurorae on Jupiter’s poles? Those are Io’s footprints. Basically, it’s a gigantic flood of charged ions. And we’re about to fly straight into it!”

  “Think of it as the mother of all HERFs,” Eskitul explained helpfully. Its hair danced. It closed its eyes.

  “Alter course!” Hannah yelled. “Ninety degrees up, or ninety degrees down. Either one will work.”

  “The ship is heavily shielded,” Boombox said. But it took off running to the drive chancel.

  “There is nothing in our home system like this,” Eskitul said to Hannah, in a conversational tone. “Our sun is a red dwarf. We never saw a gas giant until we explored the Alpha Centauri system. So this was all new to us. During our exile on Europa, we extensively observed Jupiter and its other moons. We discovered the existence of this flux tube. Clearly, the Krijistal did not.”

  “You—you knew about the flux tube?!” Hannah said.

  “I am going to end this.” Eskitul poured itself some more krak. She could barely pick out its words amidst the yells from the other aliens, and the shrieks of alarms going off, all channelled through the boombox’s speakers. “I am sorry you had to be here.”

  Eskitul drained its mug and set it down just as Boombox stormed back to them. It grabbed Eskitul by one arm, hauled it out of its chair, and shook it. The speakers of the boombox sizzled with harmonics. Hannah reflexively covered her ears.

  “Why don’t you just alter course?!” she screamed.

  Boombox threw Eskitul to the floor. The bronze-haired alien crashed into the table, knocking it over, plates and mugs, boombox and all. “You’re going to kill us!” Boombox shouted.

  “You deserve it,” Eskitul said. “The human beings do not.” It grasped Hannah’s knees, as if to pull itself upright. But instead of rising, it stayed on its knees and looked up at her. “Sixty-five of your years ago, I was given the … the honor … of leading the conquest of Earth.”

  Hannah’s blood ran cold, “Come to think of it,” she managed, “you never did say what you were doing here in the first place.”

  “I lied. We all lied. We came here to conquer you.”

  “O—oh.”

  “But along the way, I changed my mind.”

  “You betrayed yourself,” Boombox said. “You betrayed all of us. That’s what comes of watching too much television.”

  “I found myself,” Eskitul said. “I found that after a lifetime of war, I still had a moral core.” It let go of Hannah’s knees and unfolded to its full height. “I will not destroy another innocent people.”

  Eskitul’s nobility moved Hannah to the point of tears. It terrified her to think that Earth’s fate hung on an alien’s refusal to do wrong. At the same time, it felt bizarrely right that a moral scruple should be the still point on which their survival hinged.

  “So instead, you’ll destroy the Lightbringer?” Boombox said, queerly calm. “Is that it, Shiplord?”

  Eskitul paced towards the viewing wall. Spreadeagled against the eternal night, it rested its forehead on the Great Red Spot. “It is the only way to end this,” its voice said from the boombox. “Consider: we will not die immediately. The magnetic flux will utterly wreck the ship’s electrical systems. We will gradually spiral in towards Jupiter. But we shall have enough air and water here on the bridge to enjoy the
ride. It may be interesting!”

  “Until Jupiter’s tidal forces rip us apart,” Hannah yelped. She now realized just how badly she wanted to stay alive. As much as she admired Eskitul’s noble gesture, she had no interest in exploring a gas giant from the inside. “Quick! Dodge above the flux tube, or below it!”

  “The problem,” Boombox said, “is that the drive controls are subject to the authority of the Shiplord.”

  “Correct,” Eskitul said. “You can do nothing without me.”

  “Wrong. I can do this.”

  Boombox bent and snatched up a knife from the debris of their meal. It pounced on Eskitul from behind and seized a handful of its bio-antennas.

  A hideous scream tore from the boombox. Every rriksti on the bridge rushed forward—and froze.

  Boombox sank to its heels, bending Eskitul backwards over its lap. It used the eating knife to cut the Shiplord’s throat.

  Blood sprayed the screen, filming Jupiter red.

  The lights went out.

  In a fanfare of electronic whines and mechanical rattles, all the systems on the bridge powered down.

  Boombox now moved even faster. It flipped Eskitul over and hacked at the back of its neck.

  Hannah backed away from the horrifying scene, hands over her mouth. She bumped into some of the other rriksti, who held her.

  Boombox stalked towards her. Now that the only light on the bridge came from red-stained Jupiter, Boombox was a massive, octopus-headed silhouette, reviving the terror she’d felt when she first saw the aliens. Blood dripped from its hands.

  Her captors thrust her forward.

  The knife flashed.

  Hannah screamed.

  Pain slashed across her forehead. In a flurry of emotionally shattering impacts, she felt Boombox prying at the wound with the point of the knife, shoving something under her skin, into her, oh God help me. One of the other aliens slapped something over the wound, which infused menthol coolness into the burning agony.

  They all stood like that for a few frozen seconds.

  Then the lights came back on.

  The air circulation and the other systems started up again.

  The other aliens sprinted to the forward chancel. Boombox yelled, “Engage thrusters! 90-degree course correction! NOW!”