Shiplord: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 3)

by Felix R. Savage

  Well, that’s what the internet was for, wasn’t it?

  This far from Earth, every click took 66 minutes, round trip.

  Skyler didn’t care.

  He typed in the search box: “Hannah Ginsburg.” Return.

  Then he studied Reactors for Dummies for an hour and six minutes.

  At last his results came back.

  Every result on the first page was a video.

  He clicked on the first one.

  Another hour and a half passed.

  While he was watching the video, Jack’s voice came from the intercom, pulling him out of a vortex of shock and horror. “Alexei?” Jack said.

  “Yeah?” Alexei said, from somewhere else on the ship.

  “Can you meet me at the storage module airlock?”

  “Oh Jesus,” Alexei said. “I have to find somewhere dark for the mushrooms. There aren’t enough nets. And I still haven’t secured our own hydroponics.”

  Jack laughed huskily. “OK, sounds like you’re busy. Carry on.”

  Skyler blurted, “I’ll be right there.”

  He flew forward into the storage module, just as Jack dropped out of the airlock. Jack hadn’t succumbed to the convenience of rriksti spacesuits. He still wore his Z-2. It was the one with the red piping.

  “Clear out,” Jack said, waving his arms at the rriksti that were exploring the storage lockers, lab, and machine shop.

  Skyler flew over to him and unlatched the back entry port of the Z-2. He assumed this was why Jack had wanted someone to meet him, although a rriksti could have done this simple task.

  “I need a bit of help,” Jack said.

  As Skyler helped him to doff the suit, he tried to decide how to broach the subject of the videos. Jack had to have seen them. He’d lied to Skyler—by omission, but still. What the hell was going on?

  Jack emerged from the suit, and Skyler forgot about the videos. It was that bad.

  “You’re bleeding!”

  Blood swelled in zero-gee worms from cuts on Jack’s face, arms, and chest. Globules broke off like icebergs calving from red glaciers, and set off on wobbly journeys towards the intake ducts of the ventilation system.

  “Get the betadine wipes,” Jack said calmly, backhanding blood out of his eyes. “Gauze. Mupiricin ointment. And don’t let the blood get into the fans.”

  Skyler flew across the storage module to the first aid locker. This gave him an opportunity to see the rrikstis’ reaction. It was strange. They did not freak out. They did not ask Jack if he was OK. They did not even rubberneck. They hastened in good order towards the forward keel tube, as if Jack’s order to ‘clear out’ had belatedly sunk in.

  “Ixnay on the gauze,” Skyler said, rummaging in the first aid locker. “Here’s the mupiricin.” He also took out the suture kit.

  Jack had got his t-shirt off. It was already so saturated, it wasn’t much use as a rag. Skyler gave him a towel and used another one to mop the blood out of the air. All the towels were so filthy that they crunched as if starched. “Is there anything to drink?” Jack said. “Such as neat whiskey?”

  “Ha ha. Gatorade?”

  “Is there any left? Brilliant.”

  There were fewer than a dozen capsules left. These capsules were clever gimmicks, developed especially for the SoD. Place one into a bottle of water and shake. Skyler presented the bottle to Jack with a bartender’s flourish. “That’s a lot of blood, man.”

  “I know. I’m never going to get it out of my suit.”

  Skyler opened a new betadine wipe and swabbed Jack’s arms, trying to be gentle. Trying very, very hard not to think about what the Krijistal had done to Kate. And Giles. Was it starting again? Had they misjudged these rriksti, too?

  Jack drank half the Gatorade at once. He pulled Skyler closer and spoke into the mic of Skyler’s headset. “Giles! Is Gatorade on the Shit We Need list? If not, add it …”

  “You need stitches on some of these cuts,” Skyler said.

  “OK, do it,” Jack said curtly.

  Skyler tore open a suture pack and got to work with the attached needle. For some time the only words exchanged were “Ow!” and “Sorry.”

  Most of the cuts on Jack’s chest and face were shallow, like long paper-cuts. The bad ones were on his forearms.

  Defensive wounds.

  What the hell happened?

  “I’ll do this one on my face myself,” Jack said. “It’s not as if I can get much uglier. But I’m the one with advanced medical training …”

  Skyler clamped the mirror into the vise on the lab bench. Jack stitched the deepest cut on his face, which ran down his left cheek to his jaw.

  “Fucking tricky doing this backwards … Want to have a go, actually?”

  Skyler was starting to feel like he might throw up. He kept seeing Hannah in Jack’s place. If the supposed good guys had done this to Jack, what had the bad guys done to her? True, she had looked uninjured in the videos. But she’d been wearing jeans, long sleeves … He clamped his teeth shut and forced himself to push the needle through the skin of Jack’s cheek.

  “This would be easier in Medical,” he said, meaning: in the official sickbay, in the main hab, in gravity. Everything’s harder in zero-gee, and that includes stitching up someone’s face.

  “I know, but I’d rather everyone didn’t see.” Jack was shaking. Skyler could feel it. “Those fuckers who were in here will probably tell all their friends, anyway.”

  “Jack, what happened?”

  *

  Jack stared at the blood spots on the towel he was holding. He couldn’t look at Skyler. Much less look in the mirror. Basically, he wanted to die of embarrassment.

  “I fucked up,” he said.

  “Um …”

  “I just fucked up.”

  “OK.”

  Skyler got ready to make another stitch, his face strained with concentration. Jack held onto the lab bench to keep himself from drifting away. He knew he would have to come up with a better explanation, but every stab of the needle further fractured his understanding of what had, actually, happened.

  Ow. Ow.

  Keelraiser cut me up.

  Ow.

  Those blades are so sharp, I didn’t even feel it at first.

  Then it was just—blood everywhere. I’m blocking with my arms, trying to defend myself, but he keeps coming. Screaming, Why don’t you hit me back? Why don’t you hit me back? Well, I’m trying, Keelraiser, but I’m not the one with a tungsten-bladed sword, am I?

  Fortunately, he wasn’t out to kill me.

  Just messed me up.

  Then kicked me out.

  Ow. Ow.

  Jack had the shakes, something he hadn’t experienced since he was in Iraq. Struggling to hide the shameful reaction, he made a consequential decision without even thinking about it. “We were doing a bit of redecorating,” he said, “and I wasn’t careful enough. Moral of the story, don’t play with pointy objects.”

  “Redecorating … with scalpels?”

  “More or less.”

  Skyler snipped off the thread. He put the suture kit back in its box. The strained look around his eyes tipped Jack off to what must be going through his mind.

  Skyler thought Keelraiser had gone ape.

  (Had Keelraiser gone ape?)

  Skyler was afraid they were going to have a repeat of the battle for the SoD. Only this time, it would be 306 against four.

  (Were they going to have another battle?)

  No. Of course not. Don’t be daft. I‘m rescuing them from Europa, aren’t I?

  “It’s OK,” he said as forcefully as he could manage. “I fucked up, but it’s going to be OK. You see, what happened …”

  (Oh, this is what happened!)

  “… I offered Keelraiser the job of weapons officer. Tail-gunner kind of thing. And I think it was a bit insulted by that, so …”

  Skyler shared Jack’s preference for ‘it’ as the generic rriksti pronoun. “Did it try to heal you?”
<
br />   Hope and relief glimmered in Skyler’s eyes. Jack realized that Skyler had hit on an explanation that made sense to him, which did not imply mass slaughter round the corner. So even though that wasn't what had happened at all, Jack said, “Yeah. Yeah, and as you know, I’m really not into that.”

  “But I thought Keelraiser wasn’t extroverted,” Skyler muttered, spotting the hole in his own explanation.

  “Well actually it is,” Jack said. Lying his arse off. Just like a rriksti. “And you know they think they’re doing us a tremendous favor when they offer to heal us. They get quite huffy if you say no, don’t they? So we’ll just give old Keelraiser time to cool off.” Two years would be about right, Jack thought. He was also reconsidering the plan to hook up the two ships’ plumbing, although he knew that would be pure spite. “I suspect I’m persona non grata on the Cloudeater at the moment, but that’s OK. There’s no reason I need to go over there.”

  “Better to stay out of those X-rays, anyway,” Skyler muttered. He put away the first aid kit. Then he met Jack’s eyes. “I need to show you something.”

  Jack gestured wearily: go on. Skyler went aft. While he was gone, Jack checked the first aid locker for painkillers. As he had already known, they were out. Rot in hell, Mission Control.

  Skyler floated back into the storage module. As soon as Jack saw the laptop in his hand, he guessed what Skyler wanted to show him. “You found the videos?”

  “The Lightbringer’s got its own damn YouTube channel,” Skyler said. He clicked. Hannah Ginsburg’s voice emerged from the laptop’s tinny speakers.

  Jack reached over and clicked the video off. The cuts on his arms throbbed with every movement. “I’ve already seen it.”

  “There are like twenty of them.”

  “I’ve seen them all.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Skyler was white as a sheet. He was clearly struggling with fierce emotions. Jack had felt the same way when he first saw the videos. But for Skyler, it must be far worse. He’d had an unrequited crush on Hannah for years. Jack felt a deep pang of sympathy for him. “We just didn’t know how to tell you. I sincerely apologize.”

  “Do you think they did the same thing to her that Keelraiser did to you? Or what they did to Giles?”

  “It doesn’t look like it, does it?”

  “You can’t really tell,” Skyler said, staring at the paused video.

  “You can’t, but listen. Keelraiser thinks they must have made her Shiplord after Eskitul bought it. There are clues in some of the other videos, and you can see a scar of some kind on her forehead. That’s where the implant would be.”

  Skyler bit his knuckles so hard Jack worried he would break the skin.

  “The point is they’re probably treating her like a princess. So it isn’t really as bad as it—”

  “It’s obscene,” Skyler said. “It’s grotesque, it’s disgusting.” He shut the laptop, hard.

  Jack wondered if he should just give him the rest of the videos, to save him the trouble of downloading them later. He and Giles had downloaded them all over the last four months. Mission Control must have seen them, too. After all, the flipping things were on Youtube.

  CHAPTER 6

  Hannah Ginsburg floated through the bowels of the Lightbringer, wearing her spacesuit. By the light of her chest-lamp, she saw rows of tanks stretching away along both sides of the corridor. The Lightbringer was only five kilometers long (ha! Only!) but it could seem as vast as the universe. It was her universe now, enclosed within a 1.5-meter steel hull.

  The hull, however, had a big-ass hole in it. So most of the ship was in vacuum. That’s why she wore her spacesuit. It was a rriksti suit, fitted to her body. They’d built a fishbowl helmet into it, just for her.

  She consulted the display projected on her left optic nerve. It came from the chip embedded in her forehead, which had semi-successfully set up an interface with her brain. Most of the stuff it offered her was useless, as she couldn’t speak Rristigul. The maps, however, came in handy.

  “Zghersh 23,” she read. The chip had figured out how to transliterate Rristigul into the Roman alphabet. It also rendered rriksti numbers as Roman numerals, although it did not convert base 14 into base 10. She had to do that in her head. So, she was looking for Zghersh, which meant Dormitory, 31. The dull green arrows superimposed on her vision told her that it was that way. She dimmed her chest lamp to get a bit more contrast behind the arrows. The rriksti saw colors differently with their dark-adapted eyes. They perceived imperceptible, to her, differences in dull, sludgy shades, while pastels all looked white to them.

  Not that there were any pastel hues on this ship. The Lightbringer was a warship, built for epic meanness, an interstellar killer cloaked in asteroid steel. Its interior proportions echoed the kinks and dents of fossils. A saurian bulkhead loomed out of the darkness. Hannah turned the corner into Dormitory 31.

  Tank 35d8.

  Base 14 to base 10 …

  9,402.

  Hannah peered at the tall, rectangular door of the tank. It looked just like a high school locker, except bigger. The occupant’s telemetry had flatlined yesterday. Happened. Even rriksti technology sometimes went on the blink after 70 years.

  She banged on the tank with her gloved fist.

  It lit up. Green light spilled down the corridor.

  Inside, a rriksti floated in a loose, relaxed posture, like a giant fetus. You couldn’t tell by looking at it whether it was dead or alive. Hannah cleared her throat and said: “Acquire Tank 35d8 telemetry.”

  The chip didn’t need her to talk out loud to it, because it was in her head, sealed behind the skin of her forehead, talking directly to her brain via nanoscale filaments that had grown through her skull like grass roots growing through pavement. But they were not made for each other. She came from Earth. The chip came from Imf. Vocalizing helped her to form a clear picture in her mind—tank, telemetry; the chip could understand that. One picture is worth a thousand words, after all. The fact she was standing right here in front of the tank in question also helped.

  The chip established a wireless connection with the tank and painted graphs on her field of vision. Hannah had done this enough times to know which one was the brain activity monitor.

  “We got a deader,” she said. The chip converted the electrical impulses in the speech center of her brain into radio-frequency transmissions. The comms unit in her helmet boosted the signals. “Come on down here, because I am not doing this by myself.”

  “Be right there,” said a rriksti voice on the other end of the radio.

  While she waited, Hannah gazed at the dead occupant of Tank 35d8. She wondered what its name was, whether it was male or female, and why it had signed up to invade Earth. Had it left a family on Imf, knowing it would never see them again? How did you do that?

  Pot, meet kettle. Hannah had done something similar herself. She’d volunteered to go on the Spirit of Destiny, knowing she might never see her family again. Some schlemiel by the name of Richard Burke, director of the SoD project—Hannah loved Burke dearly, and missed him—had persuaded her that she had, lurking somewhere in her engineer’s soul, a spirit of adventure.

  So she’d said goodbye to her sister Bethany, and David, her brother-in-law, and Isabel and Nathan, her niece and nephew, who were all the family she had. Bethany had been relentlessly negative about the whole thing, but Izzy, sweet Izzy, had been so proud of her …

  Hannah blinked—bad idea to cry in zero-gee. “Hurry up,” she yelled, just as Gurlp and Joker rounded the corner, flying on their wrist rockets.

  “See how swiftly we obey,” Joker said. His real name was something else, of course. Hannah had nicknamed him Joker because she actually did think he had a sense of humor, kind of dry and sarcastic, like Jack Kildare, the pilot of the SoD. Jeepers, at this point she would even be glad to see Jack. But he was dead, of course. They all were. The SoD had been abandoned in Europa orbit without water or power. Of the eight-p
erson crew, she was the only survivor.

  Which didn’t say much for Earth’s chances.

  “Authorize recovery,” Gurlp said.

  “What’s the magic word?” Hannah said.

  It was Joker who said, “Pleeeease.” Gurlp said nothing.

  “I authorize recovery of this organism,” Hannah said. The chip transmitted the authorization protocol to the tank. The cloudy green liquid drained away, leaving Soldier 9,402 floating in the vacuum. The door popped open, and the corpse floated into Gurlp and Joker’s arms, dripping.

  They took it back to the Land of the Living, a two-kilometer journey through the sleeper decks. In her roamings Hannah had discovered that the numbers on the tanks actually went up to 16,000 (in base 10). Sixteen, freaking, thousand soldiers of the Darkside had signed up for the voyage to Earth and gone willingly into the Long Sleep. Of course, a lot of the numbers in the middle were missing. They had been vaporized or blown into space when Eskitul turned the ship’s muon cannons on its own midsection.

  Hannah had conflicted feelings about Eskitul. She admired the late Shiplord’s noble resolve to prevent the Lightbringer from conquering Earth. But she also resented her for dying and sticking her, Hannah, with the job.

  Because what was the use of being Shiplord when you couldn’t speak the language, so someone had to hand-hold you through the most basic operations, and your neural patterns confused the heck out of the mini-computer implanted in your forehead, so that even if you could read Rristigul, it wouldn’t work properly anyway?

  They hauled the corpse through the service airlock, into the kitchen. Hannah doffed her suit to the tops of her shoulders. Heat and steam filled the cavernous room. It was hot and steamy everywhere in the Land of the Living, now that the Krijistal had enough spare water to keep the atmosphere tropical, the way they liked. The floor exerted a comfortable 0.5 G pull on her feet. They used mass attractors to create artificial gravity. It’s hard to cook in zero-gee.

  During the Lightbringer’s ten years in a parking orbit around Europa, the Krijistal had huddled on the bridge to save air. After they got the power back on, they’d reoccupied the kitchen, the laundry room, the industrial-scale hydroponic farm, and the other service areas below the bridge. Oh, call it what it is: the servants’ quarters. The rriksti made no bones about being basically a feudal society. There’s a reason Hannah’s title was Shiplord.