She knew her un-lordly behavior annoyed them. That’s why she did it.
She sat on a kitchen counter that was neck-high on her, watching the cook, Figgrit, and his assistants clean and dry the corpse of Soldier 9,402 and put it into the dehydrator.
Ah, the dehydrator. No well-appointed rriksti kitchen would be without one. A van-sized box painted with a red sun in an orange and pink sky, its front hinged down like an oven door. It made Hannah, a Jew, think icky thoughts about Auschwitz. But this was how the dead were always treated on Imf, apparently. They slid Soldier 9,402 inside the dehydrator on a giant tray, and Ripstiggr showed up to do the funeral.
“This brave soldier gave his life for the Darkside,” Ripstiggr orated. “His sacrifice shall be recorded in the annals of Imfi victory, which span four thousand eight hundred and twenty-seven years, and shall continue until the sun stops flaring.”
It was amazing how much platitudinous rriksti eulogies sounded like platitudinous human eulogies. All Soldier 9,402 needed was a flag draped over the top of the dehydrator.
“In death, he shall sustain the living.”
Well, until you got to the cannibalism part.
“He looks pretty soggy, actually,” Ripstiggr said, veering off-script. “Make sure you run the dehydrator on the highest setting, Figgrit.”
The cook backed out of the circle of rriksti and went to change the setting.
Hannah, standing outside the circle, said, “Is that an approved part of the liturgy? What would the Temple say?”
“It’s perfectly allowable to personalize the service,” Ripstiggr said, hair dancing.
“Oh, sorry, the Temple doesn’t even know you exist. You got your clerical certification over the Imfi version of the internet. It probably has spelling mistakes in it.”
Joker’s hair quivered, a sign of amusement inadequately concealed. Ripstiggr stalked across the circle and backhanded Joker in the face. The black-haired rriksti staggered back and crashed into the refrigerator. Unfortunately, Hannah knew Joker would not hold a grudge over being disciplined so violently. Ripstiggr hit his people all the time, and they loved him for it.
“Where was I?” Ripstiggr said. “Ah, yes. In the name of Ystyggr, Lord of the Visible and the Invisible …” He raised his arms, spreading the stiff blue-gray sleeves of his priestly robe like wings, so that he seemed to become a snake-haired vulture-man, nine feet tall, his silver bio-antennas glittering in the low light—beautiful, terrible. “Let’s eat!”
When Ripstiggr made a joke, it was OK to laugh. Everyone’s hair danced, and they piled out of the kitchen to go up the curving staircase to the bridge. Hannah brought up the rear, bracing her hands on her thighs as she climbed. The staircase went around the mass attractor installation, approaching closer to it in the middle, so that the gravity felt stronger. By the time you got to the top, your orientation had changed 180 degrees. The floor of the kitchen was also the floor of the bridge, with a king’s ransom in super-compact iridium and other very dense elements sandwiched in between.
A wave of weakness overtook Hannah on the last few stairs. She dragged herself to the top, feeling nauseous. She hoped it was just the shifting gravitational field doing it, but when she coughed, she saw flecks of blood on the dark gray palm of her glove.
Aw, crap.
Coming down with another bout of radiation sickness.
Just another day on the Lightbringer.
CHAPTER 7
Burn minus 5 minutes.
Carefully, Jack bled some of the housekeeping turbine's steam into the drive tubes. This should have been Hannah’s job, but Hannah was gone, and Jack had severe doubts about Skyler’s ability to fill in for her. The poor guy had been thrown in at the deep end. No one could be asked to ullage a spaceship on his second day on the job.
Anyway, Jack had his own set of engine controls on the bridge. He goosed the ship into a plod. The maneuver gently jostled liquid water from the bioshield tank into the pipes.
“Oh man, Sparky is kicking out the jams!” Skyler said on the intercom. “The fuel cells are full! The primary heat exchanger is maxed out! Jack, do something with this load before the back of the ship falls off!”
“Sit tight. We’re going to burn it.”
The big steam turbine growled like a Formula One race car. The whole ship vibrated. A tang of ozone from the generator blew through the fans on the bridge. Back in the main hab, everything was tied down, or someone was holding onto it. Best we can do.
Burn minus 50 seconds.
As Jack glanced from one set of instruments to another, the stitches in his face and arms pulled painfully. Everyone seemed to have bought his story about dicking around with alien pointy objects. Why? Did they assume he was lying? Or that he was telling the truth? Which was worse, from the point of view of confirming the inarguable defects in his character?
Burn minus 30 seconds.
What had happened, anyway? Why had Keelraiser attacked him? He must’ve pushed Keelraiser out of its comfort zone. Pushed it right over the edge into rriksti ultraviolence mode. That didn’t really explain anything … but he was reluctant to think about what, specifically, he might have said or done that set it off.
Fortunately, he had the best possible excuse to put the whole wretched business out of his mind.
309 people were counting on him to get them safely out of Europa orbit.
“Star sights valid,” said Alexei, in the left seat.
“Gyroscopes spun and locked. Thrust is stable.” Kate was gone, so Jack said her part for her. “Burn on my mark.”
The two of them could fly the SoD alone, since they didn’t have to mess with the comms at the same time. Earth was 67 minutes away by radio, round trip. Much too far to be any help. All the telemetry for this burn would have to come from the SoD’s own sensors. However, Jack had decided to leave the channel to Mission Control open for the time being. He had repurposed some rriksti clingfilm (not quite as good as duct tape) to tape the TRANSMIT switch down in the ‘on’ position.
Why? Because fuck ‘em, that’s why. If we die, I want them to at least notice.
Burn minus 0:05. He poised his sore hands above the flight controls. “Five seconds, mark. Four. Three …”
Alexei smirked. “Jack, do you feel a need …”
“… a need for speed?” Jack finished the quotation. “I sure do.”
Burn minus zero.
He punched in the throttle command. Way away at the back of the ship, the MPD engine opened its throat and let out a silent roar. Water flashed into steam. Tremendous pulses of radio energy ionized the steam into plasma. Secondary electrical coils hammered the plasma out of the engine bells. The back of the ship did not fall off.
“Full throttle,” Jack said with studied calm.
The SoD rose out of Europa’s gravity well on the wings of Oliver Meeks’s genius.
And Meeks had got his inspiration from an alien ship’s drive.
What goes around comes around.
The Cloudeater clung to the truss like a butterfly perched on a metal twig, inert.
What’s Keelraiser doing over there? Jack wondered, with a tiny fraction of his mind.
0.10 gees of thrust gravity.
0.12.
0.13.
The welds held.
*
Burn plus one hour 15 minutes. Jack undid his harness and rose into the air to stretch.
Technically, he should under no circumstances have left his seat while the ship was still burning. But he’d throttled back the drive to 25% after they escaped Europa’s gravity well, and this was his only chance to take a break before he’d have to precess the axis of the ship to bend their trajectory towards Jupiter. Anyway, his brain had fused with the flight controls to such an extent that he’d know in his gut, he felt, if a single indicator moved in the wrong direction.
He pissed into a bottle. This particular bottle had a funnel and a suction pump attached. He and Giles had made it a couple of months ago whe
n they were bored.
“You should patent that,” Alexei said.
“That’s how I’ll make my millions,” Jack deadpanned. The joke was that it didn’t work all that well. Splashback happened. Whatever. The bridge couldn’t get much dirtier than it already was.
“Future best-selling penis enlargement device. Use at own risk,” Alexei said, yawning away the tension.
Crumbs, dead insects, used wipes, slagged electronic components, connectors, syringe wrappers … thrust gravity had pulled a truly shocking amount of rubbish loose from the crannies where it accumulated. Since they were still burning, all of it stuck to the aft wall in a lumpy carpet. Weighing a couple of pounds, Jack fell slowly through the air and sank in up to the tops of his feet. He kicked rubbish into the air. Some of it actually was dead leaves.
“Anything from Mission Control?” he said.
“Nope.”
“Fuck them, anyway.” Jack bounded back up to the couches and stuffed the piss bottle into the nearest cupholder.
“Oh, no,” Alexei said quietly.
Jack looked at where he’d put it. In the cupholder for the center seat. Kate’s seat. Her empty seat. “Hmm,” he said. “Whoops.” He moved it.
Alexei and Kate had been in a relationship. What kind of relationship? Jack still wasn’t sure. But he knew it had involved sex, and he had a feeling it had also involved love. He hadn’t asked how Alexei was coping with her loss. Didn’t want to hurt him by reviving memories of Kate’s horrible death. The Krijistal had brutally beaten and then shot her, right here on the bridge of the SoD. She had died in Jack’s arms. The only way to deal with that would be to murder every single Krijistal on the Lightbringer.
If wishes were booster rockets …
Alexei went aft to see how the passengers were holding up. Jack settled into the foot tethers at the left seat. He switched on the camera. “Well, hey there, Houston,” he said. “Sorry. Forgetting my manners. Mission Control, this is the SoD, presently 550,000 kilometers from Jupiter.”
He smiled. The expression looked truly frightening—a lopsided Frankenstein grin, pulled askew by the line of stitches running through his beard and up to his cheekbone. And that was just the dim reflection in the camera lens. Richard Burke, the big cheese at Mission Control in Houston, should fall off his chair when he got this. Jack hoped he did.
“We’ve been feeling a bit forgotten recently, Mission Control. I sent you our flight plan. All we got back was a one-sentence acknowledgement. I suppose it’s understandable. Hannah’s the star. We’re the boring, depressing show with crappy ratings. But really, Mission Control? Is that how you treat a five hundred billion dollar investment? Is this thing even on?”
He reached forward and rapped his knuckles on the camera lens. He then glanced down at the antenna status display to make sure that he was, in fact, transmitting. Jupiter radiated a blizzard of electrical interference. The closer they got, the worse it got. In a little while, they’d lose comms with Earth altogether, but for now it looked good.
“I hardly even dare to ask how the Victory project is coming along. But I ask about it every time, so I may as well. Any chance of an update? It would be appreciated.” Jack scratched a scab on his chest. It came off. Ow. He flicked it at the camera.
The Victory was their resupply ship. At least it would be if it ever got built. They’d been shown plans for a smaller, faster version of the SoD. The Victory would be unmanned, of course. It would catch up with the SoD somewhere around Mars and deliver the stuff on the Shit We Need list.
Except Jack had a feeling it was never going to happen, because Mission Control had gone ominously quiet about the project.
Alexei came back. He tapped Jack on the shoulder, holding out a laptop.
“Right. While we’re on the topic, here are the latest items on our wish list.”
Alexei had scrolled down to row 1209 of the Shit We Need spreadsheet. Jack started reading from the cursor position.
“Welding rods. High-capacity rotary torque sensors, part number 1003XP. Pressure sensors, part number B234a, the ones that go up to 3000 psi. Ibuprofen. Mucipiricin. Gatorade.”
Alexei was hovering over him for some reason. Jack frowned up at him and read on.
“Rheostats for the LEDs, part number ZY1. Number 600 screws. Gay porn videos …”
Jack’s eyes bulged. He looked up at Alexei. His friend’s face was red with suppressed laughter.
Jack cleared his throat and returned his gaze to the camera. In the same authoritative voice as before, he continued to read: “Bukkake is OK, but no BDSM please. Beautiful butts a must.” There were a lot more specifics on the screen but he couldn’t go on. He improvised, “Additionally, straight porn. Sexy librarians, traffic cops, rock chicks, desperate housewives, we’re not fussy. Thanks, Mission Control, I know you’ll understand. It’s a matter of life and death to us. SoD out.”
Alexei sagged against the aft wall, weak with laughter.
Jack thumbed the intercom. “All right, guys. Who added porn to the Shit We Need list?”
Although he had been the victim of the joke, he was teetering on the edge of a laughing fit. Alexei’s honking laughter was more infectious than the flu.
“It was me,” Skyler admitted, from Engineering. “I just put it in as a joke …”
“Skyler, you horndog!” Jack howled. “I always thought you might be gay.”
“I’m not gay!” Skyler yelled.
Gallic guffaws on the intercom resolved into Giles’s voice. “I found his entry and fixed it for him. Ho ho ho. Did you send it to Mission Control, Jack? I am very proud of you.”
Still laughing, Jack vacated Alexei’s seat and clambered back to his own. He used Kate’s empty seat as a stepping-stone. “What’s buk-whatsit? Is it Japanese?” Japanese made him think of perverted comics. Tentacle porn. Alien porn. “No actually, I’d rather not know.” He dropped back into his seat, feeling great. He gulped cold tea from his squeeze bottle. It was really just tea-flavored water at this point. Tea was item #2 on the Shit We Need list. Would’ve been #1 if not for coffee. Remembering the tea-vs-coffee argument, he chuckled. “You got one thing wrong, Skyler.”
“What?”
“You put porn at the end of the list. Should’ve put it at the top.”
“Um, no. I need my coffee.”
“Heads up.” Alexei had just taken the star sights. “We’re about to cross inside Io’s orbit.”
Jack sobered quickly. “OK everyone, strap in. This could get ticklish …”
*
Back in Engineering, Hriklif said to Skyler, “What is porn?”
Skyler made a sad face at the rriksti. Hriklif was an atomic engineer. It had come over to make sure Skyler didn’t break anything. Yes, it knew about fusion reactors, not fission reactors like the SoD’s, but that was still more than Skyler knew. He felt better having Hriklif here. But it did have a tendency to ask awkward questions.
They were standing on the aft wall, floating on their tiptoes, like you do in a swimming pool when you’re almost out of your depth. Hriklif was sturdy for its kind, six and a half feet to Skyler’s 5’8”. The hexagonal array’s yellow glare turned its dark blue bio-antennas green.
“Haven’t you ever seen porn on TV?” Skyler tried to dodge the question.
“Yes, yes, I know, it is human beings having sex on camera. Not good for language learning. We change channel.”
“Hmm, I see your point.”
“So what is it for?”
Skyler sighed. He always seemed to end up apologizing for the warped emanations of human culture that we put on TV. “Don’t you guys have porn?”
“Of course we do. But only on weekends.”
“Okayyyy.” Skyler had no clue about rriksti sex and reproduction, despite having lived among them for months. Alexei had taken more of an interest in that side of things when they were on the surface.
He schooled himself not to glance at Hriklif’s baggy shorts. He didn’t even know
what sex the atomic engineer (sometimes) was, much less what it kept down there. Then again, did it matter? Hriklif knew what all these frightening displays meant. That was what counted.
“So why do humans need porn?” Hriklif wasn’t letting him off the hook.
“Well, people watch it to get their rocks off … when they haven’t got anyone to have sex with.” Skyler shrugged.
“I have not had sex since we left Imf.”
“I haven’t had sex since we left Earth. Booyah.”
“But weren’t there females on this ship when it left Earth?”
A new pang of loss stabbed Skyler’s heart. “Yup. Our first commander was a woman, so was our hydroponics specialist … and of course, our propulsion specialist.”
Hriklif said, “Yes. Hannah.”
Just the sound of her name felt like lemon juice on a cut. Skyler had spent all night looking at those videos. “You guys would have had a lot in common,” he said, past the lump in his throat.
“Did you want to have sex with her?” Hriklif asked.
“I loved her.”
Skyler braced for Hriklif to ask some really awful question such as What is love? But the rriksti just parted its lips in that weird all-purpose expression of theirs, which could mean Oh shit, or Gotcha, or Ha ha; you just made a funny. It was maddening not to know which.
CHAPTER 8
Hannah’s dinner consisted of mashed potatoes without milk or butter, a kale and sprouted lentil salad dressed with salt, and a hunk of sourdough bread with ten drops of olive oil. The Krijistal had stolen her sourdough starter from the SoD, as well as tons of hydroponic equipment, seed potatoes, and seeds. So she had her own little garden. Figgrit could cook vegetables to toothsome perfection; she baked the bread herself. The one thing the Krijistal had forgotten was dietary fat. They had brought one jug of olive oil, thinking it was something for the plants. So Hannah Ginsburg was looking positively svelte these days.
Shiplord: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 3) Page 5
