He rose up underneath her. His head and shoulders took the impact of the slow-motion collision.
Before she could bounce away, he got one arm around her legs.
The broomstick looped the loop while Skyler, panting and swearing, positioned Hannah on his back. She was limp and unresponsive. He’d brought pre-cut lengths of duct tape, wearing them like streamers on his arms. He taped her wrists together in front of his waist, so her arms formed a loop around him. He squeezed the diaphragm in short bursts, experimenting with the new distribution of mass, until he got the broomstick straightened out.
Then he opened the throttle and headed for home.
*
He didn’t make it.
A hundred meters above the SoD, the oxygen tank sputtered empty.
His wrist rockets had already run out of CO2.
In space, you keep falling forever. Skyler was still moving, but he no longer had the ability to control his trajectory, so he was going to miss the SoD. Eventually, he and Hannah would fall out of orbit. They would join Meili as frozen, broken corpses on the surface of Europa.
“Hey, guys!” he said into the radio, hoping against hope. “I’m out here! Can you come get me?”
The SoD continued to inch away along its orbital path, the main hab rotating sedately, rim lights winking.
“Guys …?”
No answer.
Well, he hadn’t been expecting one.
Jack blamed him for the Lightbringer’s escape. Alexei may have forgiven Skyler for trying to kill him, but when push came to shove, he would side with Jack. Neither of them was going to rescue him.
“Well, baby,” he said to the burden on his back. “I tried.” He cleared his throat. “How’s about a song?”
He wasn’t going to sing about his sexual fantasies. Not at a time like this. He sang instead, to the tune of ‘One More Cup of Coffee’:
“Your voice is soft, you make me think of Mom and apple pie. Bob Dylan won the Nobel prize, and I still wonder why.” He chuckled bleakly to himself and improvised another rhyme. “Why didn’t I say I love you, before the bitter end? I wanted to be your sweetie-pie, but you just wanted a friend …”
“Skyler!”
A shout cut him off.
“Skyler! Hot mic! Hot mic!”
Jack’s voice.
Two humans in black rriksti suits swooped up from the SoD, wrist rockets gushing contrails.
“I also wonder why Bob Dylan won Nobel prize,” Alexei said. “Your lyrics are better. Is she alive?”
“I don’t know,” Skyler said. “Probably not. But I had to bring her back, anyway.” He felt dizzy with gratitude. “I thought you guys hated me.”
“Of course we don’t hate you, you dumb spook,” Alexei said. “We need you. We all need each other now.”
Tethers trailed from Jack and Alexei’s belts. Two tethers each, joined together. They’d robbed the dead to extend their reach.
To save him.
They got their arms around Skyler, so they were three abreast, with Hannah riding limply on Skyler’s back.
“Aren’t you supposed to be sick, Jack?” Skyler croaked.
“Saved by miraculous alien antioxidants,” Jack said. “And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything. But I’m not complaining. Did you actually make this broomstick by yourself?”
“Yeah.”
“Flipping incredible.” Jack’s voice held no condescension, only frank approval. “Well done, you.”
Jack and Alexei retracted their tethers into the reels. The SoD loomed larger and closer. As Meili had said, it was the most beautiful thing ever built by humanity.
“I just figured it would work,” Skyler babbled. “And I also had another idea, actually. I know how we can save the SoD. We can replenish the tanks with water from the surface. I know how to do it.”
“Hold that thought,” Jack said. “Let’s get inside.”
*
They had to go two by two, since the airlock wasn’t big enough for four.
Skyler went first with Hannah.
Rriksti hands pulled them out of the chamber. Skyler controlled his instinctive flinch of fear. These guys were Krijistal! Or rather, they had been. They all needed each other now.
The rriksti cut the duct tape that held Hannah on Skyler’s back. He doffed his suit to his waist and inhaled the cold, stinky air of the SoD. The rriksti flipped Hannah over in the air and fiddled with the rear entry port of her suit.
Skyler shoved past them and unsealed the port, shaky with dread.
The smell of diarrhea arose, mingled with the reek of blood.
Nestled tightly in the Z-2, Hannah’s shoulders looked too broad and bony.
Her neck too wide.
Her hair too short.
Hardly believing his eyes, Skyler reached into the suit and got his hands under her arms.
Hannah definitely did not have hairy armpits.
The rriksti pulled on the Z-2’s legs. Skyler pulled on the suit’s occupant.
Jack and Alexei tumbled into the storage module just as Skyler went sailing backwards with an unconscious Giles Boisselot in his arms.
Most of Giles, anyway.
EPILOGUE
Jack sat in the center seat on the bridge of the SoD, feet up, munching a roasted sweet potato. His hair was starting to grow back. He scratched under his headset as he listened to Mission Control in Houston reading him chapter and verse.
“Half the crew gone. It looks pretty bad, especially to the Chinese.”
The speaker was Richard Burke, the veteran director of the Spirit of Humanity project. He’d come on the radio after the boffins finished their spiel, to deliver some personal words of encouragement.
Jack grimaced. “I didn’t plan it this way,” he said, knowing Burke would never hear him. Earth was 48 minutes away, and Jack wasn’t transmitting, anyway. “Nothing’s gone according to plan.” From the intercom drifted faint alien warbles—the rriksti using the ship’s comms to chat as they worked.
“I’m just riding your ass, Killer,” Burke said. He had adopted Kate’s nickname for Jack, as if in homage to her.
“I miss her every day,” Jack said. Especially because he was now sitting in her seat. They’d named him acting mission commander.
“There is a lot of anger and grief here, as you’d expect. But we’re all pulling for you to bring the SoD safely home. In the next few hours, we’ll have a quick and dirty task list for you to get started on. You’ve assured us that the reactor is running at housekeeping level, but we will need you to carry out visual and computer checks and send us the numbers for analysis, since … since Hannah’s not available.”
Jack heard the sorrow in Burke’s voice. He knew that Burke had been close to Hannah. Their working relationship went back all the way to the days of the Juno probe. “She’s not dead,” he said to the empty bridge. He stuffed the sugary, partially carbonized end of his sweet potato into his mouth. “Why are you acting like she’s dead?”
Maybe Burke was just being rational.
But the survivors on the SoD refused to accept that Hannah was lost to them forever. And Jack refused to accept that the Lightbringer had escaped for good.
He and Skyler could agree on at least one thing: they were going to catch that ship.
What they’d do when they caught it … well, they hadn’t agreed on that.
But for the moment, they had other things to worry about.
Burke played recorded messages of hope and congratulations from the president of the United States, from the Prime Minister, from Russian President-Emeritus Putin. Jack grew bored. Half-listening, he rose in the air and focused the telescope on the surface of Europa.
“ ‘As painful as this is for all of us,’” he heard, “‘we must consider the Spirit of Destiny’s mission to have succeeded. The crew achieved first contact, and sacrificed their own resources so that the Lightbringer could start on the last leg of its journey to Earth …’”
�
�Jesus!” Jack howled. “What is this shit? They’re not coming to say hello! They’re coming to fucking conquer us!”
He knew there was a reason he hadn’t bothered to contact Mission Control for a week after the Lightbringer’s escape from Europa. It would have made him puke blood all over again to listen to the self-delusions of Earth’s elite.
“That was from the president of the EU,” Burke said, his skeptical tone confirming that even he thought it was a bit much.
“I should have guessed,” Jack said.
“The EU is infested with Earth Party shills,” said Giles, drifting out of the keel tube.
“Apparently they’re expecting to welcome the Lightbringer with open arms.”
“I am not surprised. I used to be one of them. I know how they think.” Giles gripped the back of the left seat and bent his face to the skewer of roasted onions—the other half of Jack’s lunch—that Jack had left stuck in the seat’s padding. Giles had to go at the food like this because he had no hands. He was gripping the seatback with a hook Jack had made in the machine shop. The Krijistal had amputated Giles’s arms at the elbows and his legs below the knees, so he’d fit into Hannah’s spacesuit.
Strangely enough, the bastards had taken pains to ensure Giles would not die. The fabulous medical technologies Jack had been anticipating had finally made an appearance, in the form of mushroom-white, rriksti-color skin caps that covered the stumps and blended seamlessly with Giles’s own skin. These finishing touches bugged Jack almost as much as the heinous cruelty of the amputations. It seemed so inconsistent.
Giles was bearing up astonishingly well. His trauma had left him with a bitter hatred for the Krijistal—understandable—and an equally strong hatred for the Earth Party—also understandable. But he didn’t seem to be dwelling on what he’d lost. Using his hooks, he did what he could to help Jack make repairs to the SoD and restore the hydroponic garden.
The job was too big for the two of them. Mercifully, the ex-Krijistal saw fit to lend a hand. They had learned to stay away from veggies with a high vitamin A content.
Jack leaned over, pulled the skewer of onions out of the seat padding, and held it in front of Giles’s mouth so the other man could eat.
On the radio, Burke was still talking. “So, now that your places in history are assured, let’s get back to the technical issues. Our discussions here and in Moscow have centered around water. You’ve got a few hundred thousand gallons in the housekeeping water cycle, but the ETs and the bioshield tank are bone dry. Fortunately, we think we’ve got a way for you to retrieve ice from Europa, and get it into the tanks.”
Jack smiled. “Do tell,” he murmured.
“The catch is that you’ll have to negotiate with the aliens remaining on Europa, and get them to help,” Burke said.
“That part was easy. They want to get away from this rotten little moon as much as we do.”
“You’ll start by locating a nice-sized nickel iron meteoroid buried—but not too deeply—in the ice.”
“There was one quite near their shelter.”
“They’ll have to dig it out, mix in carbon, and make crude steel.”
“They already had the equipment and processes in place. Carbon from their rubbish dump. They’ve been manufacturing steel on a limited scale for years.”
“The steel will need to be fashioned into hoops and wrapped with wire. Are you following so far? It’ll all be in a PDF you can download via the text comms link. Form the rest of the iron from the meteor into inverted umbrellas that can be inserted into plugs of ice. Then the aliens will have to use their fusion reactor to energize the hoops, flinging the plugs from hoop to hoop, so that they’re ultimately travelling fast enough to be flung into orbit.”
Burke’s voice grew livelier as he described the concept.
“It’s all from a Heinlein book, actually! It’s quite poetic how science fiction turns into reality, given enough time. Or maybe poetic isn’t the word I’m looking for,” Burke finished with a chuckle.
Giles chewed and swallowed, the lingering bruises on his temples moving like shadows. “He must have read the same book Skyler did.”
“Sounds like it.”
Jack leaned forward to the telescope. The SoD was approaching the longitude of the alien shelter. He adjusted the telescope until the mass driver came into focus.
The rings were still under construction. Rriksti, no longer invisibly camouflaged, their spacesuits keyed to the flamboyant patterns they liked best, moved around outside their shelter, positioning enormous steel hoops in a north-south line. Jack noted down the exact orientation of the telescope and pointed the SoD’s long-range camera at the same spot. He didn’t have his Nikon anymore—Alexei had taken it down to the surface to document work flows—but the SoD’s camera had good enough resolution to capture the work site. He would send the pictures to Mission Control. Burke would know what he was looking at.
He switched off the radio as Burke began to talk about the challenge of capturing the ice chunks flung into orbit, and melting them to get them into the SoD’s tanks. Skyler had come up with a solution for that, too. Catch the ice chunks in a big sack—the rriksti could make one of smart plastic. Run both of the fuel cells and the housekeeping turbine. Get the bioshield tank up to 80° C, and run all that water into the sealed sack with all the ice in it. Flow hot water in, melt the ice cubes, pump cold water back into the tank. Use the extra electricity to run the heaters.
“Are you going to respond to them?” Giles said.
“Nah,” Jack said. “I’ll just send them pictures as we go.”
He switched the radio over to the channel dedicated to SoD-surface communications. As long as the SoD was above the horizon relative to the shelter, they had line-of-sight comms, using the rrikstis’ radio mast as a relay. “Hey, Alexei! Come in.”
“Yeah?” Alexei said, seconds later, from the surface.
“Houston says we suck. We should form the rest of the nickel iron from the meteor into umbrellas. Stick them into plugs of ice and throw the whole thing into orbit.”
“That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all day,” Alexei said. “I’ll have to tell Skyler.”
Skyler came on the radio. “Tell Houston they suck,” he said. “First of all, there isn’t that much iron in the meteor. We’re going to make it into buckets that hold ice chunks, which can be reused after they fling the ice into orbit. So Europa’s going to end up with a petite version of Saturn’s F ring. So what? We’ll pick it all up on the way out. ”
“We’re staying with your plan,” Jack assured him.
“Anything from Flaherty?”
“Not as such,” Jack said, although he had rather had the feeling at certain points that although he was hearing Burke’s voice, it was Tom Flaherty talking.
He focused the telescope on the work site again, and cranked up the magnification. Now he could actually make out the radproof shells, like oversized Daleks, that the rriksti had made for Alexei and Skyler so they could hang out on the surface without getting sick. The shells were constructed from the aluminum hulls of Thing One and Thing Two, melted down and foamed up with hydrogen gas. The advance landers had finally played a lifesaving role, even if it wasn’t the one they were designed for. Alexei and Skyler slept in their ‘Daleks’ when they were inside the rriksti shelter, too, to avoid getting X-rayed.
Next to the two giant pepperpots stood a lone rriksti in a blue and green patterned suit, looking up, hands shading its face from the sunlight reflected off Europa’s ice.
“Hey there, Keelraiser,” Jack whispered.
THE STORY CONTINUES IN
SHIPLORD
EARTH’S LAST GAMBIT, VOLUME 3
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SELECTED CREW MEMBERS OF THE LIGHTBRINGER
Commander Eskitul (“Shiplord”)
; 5th-Level Cleric Nene (“Breeze”)
Shuttle Pilot 1st Class Iristigut (“Keelraiser”)
Atomic Engineer Hriklif (“Ditchlight”)
Weapons Specialist Gurlp (“Rocky”)
Sergeant 1st Class & 7th-Level Cleric Ripstiggr (“Godsgift”), also called Boombox
DISCOVER THE ADVENTUROUS WORLDS
OF FELIX R. SAVAGE
An exuberant storyteller with a demented imagination, Felix R. Savage specializes in creating worlds so exciting, you’ll never want to leave.
EARTH’S LAST GAMBIT
A Quartet of Present-Day Science Fiction Technothrillers
Ripped from the headlines: an alien spaceship is orbiting Europa. Relying only on existing technology, a handful of elite astronauts must confront the threat to Earth’s future, on their own, millions of miles from home.
Can the chosen few overcome technological limitations and their own weaknesses and flaws? Will Earth’s Last Gambit win survival for the human race?
Freefall
Lifeboat
Shiplord
Killshot (forthcoming)
THE RELUCTANT ADVENTURES
OF
FLETCHER CONNOLLY
ON THE
INTERSTELLAR RAILROAD
Near-Future Non-Hard Science Fiction
An Irishman in space. Untold hoards of alien technological relics waiting to be discovered. What could possibly go wrong?
Skint Idjit
Intergalactic Bogtrotter
Banjaxed Ceili
Supermassive Blackguard
THE SOL SYSTEM RENEGADES SERIES
Near-Future Hard Science Fiction
A genocidal AI is devouring our solar system. Can a few brave men and women save humanity?
In the year 2288, humanity stands at a crossroads between space colonization and extinction. Packed with excitement, heartbreak, and unforgettable characters, the Sol System Renegades series tells a sweeping tale of struggle and deliverance.
Lifeboat: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 2) Page 34
