Of course, regular bouts of radiation sickness also helped in the weight-loss department.
Feeling more nauseated by the minute, she choked her food down. Eating was not just a nutrition thing, but also a power play. The Krijistal’s plates held sad little piles of pressed suizh cubes, which were basically alien tofurkey, and boiled mirip leaves. They had had—were still having—serious trouble ramping up their hydroponics production. After ten years, there’d been little enough left to eat on the Lightbringer, and the crew had doubled since then, as Eskitul had brought thirty deserters back with her and they were still around, although she was not. They were toughing it out on half rations. So Hannah got to gloat over them. Look at my delicious meal! Don’t you wish you could chow down on these yummy Russet Burbanks? What a shame they’d make you sick …
The rriksti required a diet heavy in metals, but many of the fat-soluble vitamins in terrestrial vegetables poisoned them. Instant vitamin toxicity—puking, diarrhea, dehydration—it wasn’t pretty. Their big eyes sadly tracked her fork’s progress from her plate to her mouth.
The tables turned, however, when Figgrit brought out the meat course. Sliced into strips, cooked medium rare, the roast filled the bridge with a tantalizing odor. Hannah’s mouth watered. She folded her hands in her lap, knowing where that roast came from. Last week’s dead soldier. Or maybe day before yesterday’s.
The bridge of the Lightbringer had a domed ceiling. Variable polarization built into the structure of the dome, and the hull sections above it, made it optionally transparent. Now, with the bridge oriented away from the sun, stars filled the dome. There was no other light on the bridge apart from some dim candle-like lamps on the dining tables, and the LED displays in the drive chancel. The constellations shone as bright as the glow-in-the-dark stars Hannah had once given Isabel for the ceiling of her bedroom. She gazed up, trying to see if she could pick out Alpha Centauri, so as to wish Biblical plagues on its cool red cousin.
The smart hull also allowed X-rays through. She estimated she was taking about 0.5 Grays a day. That’s one reason she got sick all the time.
The other reason …
Figgrit’s assistant approached her, having served Ripstiggr and the other higher-ranked Krijistal. He tonged up a small slice of meat and laid it on her plate.
You need protein, Hannah-banana.
You don’t have a decent B12 source. Lentils won’t cut it in the long term.
So she shredded the slice of human flesh—no, rriksti flesh, they are not human, but it still feels like cannibalism, dammit—into tiny pieces, and mixed them into her mashed potatoes. She swallowed the mixture without chewing.
Ripstiggr laughed at her with his hair, while he tore apart his own slab of metal-loaded, radioactive meat with his sharp teeth.
Hannah sighed loudly. “Y’know what goes with red meat?” She raised her cup of water. “This isn’t it.”
The rrikstis spoke in a frequency range of 800-2,600 KHz. Their bio-antennas converted signals from the language-processing regions of their brains into radio-frequency signals. Hannah, of course, vibrated the air with her vocal cords to produce sounds at a nice low 800 to 2100 Hz, which the rriksti could not hear. The Shiplord chip gave her a single, weak bio-antenna. It only carried over short distances without a boost, but it worked for casual dinner conversation.
“I’ve always liked to pair steak with pinot noir,” she went on. “I’d settle for a good merlot, but not cabernet sauvignon. It’s way too hit and miss.”
That’s what she said, but she’d have sold her soul for a $5 cab sauv from Walmart.
“Can’t wait to try this wine stuff,” said Joker, on her right. “You’ll have to point us to the best vintages when we get there.”
OK, she’d walked into that one.
When the meal was over, Ripstiggr rose. They had some customs that paralleled human ones, e.g. the boss gets the best seat, and dinner’s not over until he says it is. Ripstiggr stalked down the table to her and demonstrated another human-analog custom: he took her hand and raised her to her feet. It was almost courtly. He then tucked her arm through his own, so that no one else would see her swaying and almost falling down as they walked.
“I feel like crap,” Hannah muttered as they left the bridge.
“Lie down.”
She didn’t have to be told twice. She collapsed on the bed, hitting the wrist-button to doff her suit as she did so. She wore the suit as clothes most days, taking advantage of its radiation-shielding, but again, it didn’t block stupid X-rays. It flowed away, leaving her naked. She shrugged the backpack straps off her shoulders, and sprawled facedown on the quilt. It smelt salty, and felt like a furry hug. It was made from the wool of an Imfi animal called a zlok, which looked like a dog-sized yak. She’d put a bit about it in one of her videos.
This was the Shiplord’s cabin. The décor was schizophrenic: Eskitul’s watercolors adorned the walls, and Ripstiggr’s piles of electronic junk cluttered the floor. Hannah had not added any personal touches of her own. That would feel like admitting she lived here.
But she did live here, and she wanted to keep on living, so she lay still while Ripstiggr knelt over her and laid his hands on her sweaty, radiation-reddened skin.
A cool, refreshing sensation spread from the alien’s seven-fingered hands, taking away the pain and nausea. She tasted garlic, and drifted away on the waves of relief. When Ripstiggr rolled her over to do her front, she flopped willingly on her back, eyes closed, imagining that she was lolling in gentle surf.
Hannah had a fairly comprehensive knowledge of the laws of physics, but she had no idea how the fuck this worked.
Ripstiggr, the seventh-level priest of Ystyggr, insisted it was faith healing. He used the word extroversion, extroversion apparently being a Very Good Thing in the cult of Ystyggr, akin to love in Christianity and Judaism.
Yeah, nope. Hannah wasn’t about to accept that the rituals of an alien cult, centered on a god whom even Ripstiggr admitted was imaginary, could cure radiation sickness and cancer.
Maybe if she were a doctor or a biologist, instead of a rocket scientist, she’d be able to work it out in a jiffy. She just had to hope that all would become clear when she understood Rristigul better. For the time being, she reluctantly contented herself with:
It works.
Minutes, which felt like languorous hours, passed. Ripstiggr worked over her body methodically, restoring her to health from the inside out. As the process weaved towards completion, the cool sensation segued into a pleasant tingling in her extremities.
All over, actually.
The trouble with this faith healing business?
It made Hannah ridiculously horny.
She writhed on the bed, enjoying the sensual feeling of the fur sliding against her skin. Then she opened her eyes.
Ripstiggr stood over the bed. His arms were folded behind his back, so that his chest puffed out. The posture looked domineering, but she knew that it actually signified awkwardness.
Hannah smiled lazily up at him. “Come on,” she said. “Don’t be shy.”
Ripstiggr knelt by the bed and parted her legs. His long fingers danced into her crotch.
He never touched her sexually unless she asked him to. He was a gentleman in his own way, wasn’t he? Kind of.
Somewhere in the back of her head, she thought about a man she’d never see again. Skyler. Sweet, funny, handsome Skyler. But he was dead now, like all the others, so she stopped thinking about him, because this was happening and it felt … so … good.
She scooted away before she could climax. Sat upright. “Take that shit off.”
“Your wish is my command, Shiplord.”
“Oh, stop it.”
Opening his mouth in a rriksti smile, Ripstiggr shed his loose shorts and smock. (The priestly robes had already vanished somewhere, which showed how casual he was about the whole ‘faith healing is a gift of Ystyggr’ shtick.) Naked, he looked even more human … and less.
The rriksti had a loose pouch of skin between their legs. Both sexes looked superficially identical, unless they were in musth, when a male’s pouch got, ahem, bulgier. But arousal changed things down there. Touching Hannah had turned Ripstiggr on. So his pouch had retracted into a wrinkled nest of hairless skin, from which protruded a penis the approximate shape and size of a HB pencil.
The jokes wrote themselves.
Hannah didn’t crack wise out loud, because she guessed that rriksti males were probably as sensitive about the size of their equipment as human ones, and anyway, she’d seen what happened in musth—alien sex was no laughing matter then.
But even on the nine days out of eleven when they weren’t male or female, in their own understanding, rriksti could get aroused. They could want. They could need, maybe even as badly as Hannah did.
So she pulled Ripstiggr down on the bed and gave him a blow job.
“Now me,” she said, and flopped on her back again, so she could eke out the afterglow of the healing with multiple orgasms, courtesy of Ripstiggr’s long fingers, and yes, his tongue.
“You’re beautiful when you climax,” he said when it was over.
“Spare me the flattery,” Hannah said. The comment reminded her of something a guy she picked up at a bar might say. No, Hannah wasn’t new to this business of screwing the wrong males. Back on Earth, she’d had a terrible habit of getting drunk and going home with strangers. An alien was new territory, even for her. But on the other hand, Ripstiggr was no longer a stranger …
He got up and stalked to the safe in the corner. Eskitul had decorated it with a painting of a gloomy purple forest on Imf. Only Ripstiggr now knew the combination. He unlocked it. China clinked. Hannah’s mouth watered.
He came back to the bed, bringing two cups full of krak, the booze they brewed in a still that was also locked up, unfortunately for Hannah. The small drink was his. The big one hers.
Hannah snatched the cup and inhaled the potent fumes. This was the miracle that kept her going: 190 proof ethyl alcohol brewed by aliens. It had exactly the same chemical composition as moonshine brewed by a naughty propulsion specialist in the turbine room of the SoD. No, it wasn’t a quality merlot. But it didn’t poison her, either. It did the job, for a high-functioning alcoholic.
Sipping, she relished the warmth burning into her stomach. It drove her anxiety away, although it couldn’t completely erase her self-disgust at what she’d just done. “A great dinner, a great screw, and a drink. What more could a girl ask for?” she said, wryly.
“You forgot the faith healing experience,” Ripstiggr said. He tickled her bare hip casually.
“So I did, and also, this definitely isn’t 250 milliliters.”
“Hell with milliliters. We use wergs,” Ripstiggr said. “But actually, you’re right. It is only eight wergs.”
“Huh? How come?”
“You haven’t earned the other two wergs yet.”
CHAPTER 9
Burn plus 1 hour 27 minutes.
Io flashed past, a malevolent speck in the distance. Jack opened the throttle again, chucking the exhaust down the throat of the MPD engine as fast as possible.
Io posed unique dangers to spacecraft. A flux tube curved from this volcanically active moon to Jupiter’s poles, carrying a monstrous electrical charge. The SoD fled beneath the flux tube, gaining speed all the time as it fell towards the gas giant.
“OK,” Jack said to Alexei, unable to hide his elation. “We just broke our own record for closest approach to Jupiter.”
“Closest human approach, but what about closest rriksti approach?” Alexei grinned like a skull. He had his e-cigarette clamped in his teeth. “The Lightbringer went lower than this.”
“I wasn’t forgetting about that.” In fact, Jack had modelled this burn on the Lightbringer’s escape burn. He was gambling that the SoD could stand up to anything the alien ship could take.
Lower and lower they plunged, into a storm of radiation. Highly energetic particles pelted the SoD and the Cloudeater like invisible machine-gun fire. This was too much for even rad-hardened circuits to bear. Fragile external sensors on both ships began to glitch out. From Engineering, Skyler and Hriklif warned that circuit-breakers were red-lining.
“Remember when you and Kate fought about whether to raise or lower our perijove?” Alexei said, no longer smiling.
“Yep,” Jack said.
On their initial approach to Europa, Jack and Kate had argued about whether they should swing closer to Jupiter or stay at a ‘safe’ distance. Their fierce disagreement now seemed comically trivial, like disagreeing about whether to have one sandwich for lunch or two. This time around, Jack planned to skim the tops of Jupiter’s clouds—an idea that would have made him flip out a few months ago.
That was before he knew just how tough the SoD was.
He calculated they would hit perijove—their point of closest approach to Jupiter—a mere 10,000 kilometers above the top of the gas giant’s atmosphere.
Closer and closer.
Faster and faster.
Jupiter filled the forward camera feed, like a divine fingerpainting experiment. God: Let’s see what I can do with just hydrogen and helium …
Jack roused himself from his trance of concentration. He leaned over, framed the screen with his old Nikon, and clicked.
“What the hell are you doing?” yelped Alexei.
“What does it look like? Taking pictures.”
*
42 minutes post-burn.
The comms console beeped. Alexei wearily downloaded and buffered the transmission.
“Wow,” Jack said. “They called back.”
Light takes just as long to get anywhere as radio signals. Right now, Mission Control’s network of tracking and data relay satellites would be seeing the SoD skimming out of Jupiter’s orbit. 33 minutes ago, when this signal originated, they would have just seen the SoD reappear around the gas giant’s limb.
But in real time, the excitement was over. The thrust gravity fairy had flown away. Rubbish spun sluggishly in the air as the fans scattered it back to the corners. Back in the main hab, the rriksti were settling in for the long haul.
Jack had been putting off going back there to see how chaotic it was. He floated in his straps, staring at the velocity calculation which he had just redone by hand for the second time, to make sure the computer wasn’t messing with his head.
585 million kilometers away and 33 minutes ago, Mission Control said, “Ty che, guys?” What the hell? “You scared the shit out of everyone here.”
“Hi, Pavel!” Jack and Alexei said, waving at the screen.
The SoD consortium had started out as a grand multinational effort. Now it was down to a bare-bones US-Russian alliance. Houston and Star City were supposed to be working hand in hand, but they often did not seem to be on the same page.
Now, veteran mission controller Pavel Berezin slumped at his desk, elbows propped on his belly. A cigarette burnt in his fingers. People moved between messy desks in the background, stopping to wave at the camera, or make devil horns behind Pavel’s head. Discipline at Star City Mission Control was not what it used to be.
“Come on, guys,” Pavel said sorrowfully. “Don’t do this crazy shit. It would be a hell of a thing for you to survive first contact, and then kill yourselves on the way home …”
“This ship survived three HERFs,” Jack said, referring to the high energy radio frequency attacks the SoD had weathered on the way out. “I had a reasonable degree of confidence that we could survive a dash through Jupiter’s radiation belt. But do continue to yell at us.”
“At least we got their attention,” Alexei said.
“D’you think maybe Houston didn’t share our flight plan with them?”
“You sent it on the secure link, right?”
“Yeah, with the NXC’s encryption.” Jack hadn’t wanted to tell the Lightbringer exactly what they would be doing and when. He assumed the Lightbringer was reading
all their transmissions, encrypted or not. It had a freaking quantum computer, after all. But there was always a chance that it couldn’t break the NXC’s supposedly ultra-secure crypto.
Now that the burn was over, however, there was no harm explaining what they’d done.
In fact he wanted the Lightbringer to hear this.
Anything you can do, we can do better …
He put on the comms headset, muffling the voice of Pavel, who was now talking about football. The SoD, of course, could transmit and receive simultaneously, on different frequencies.
“Privyet, kak pazhivayesh?” Jack gave his basic Russian an airing, before dropping back into English. “It sounds as if you may not have had prior notification of our flight plan. So I’ll just quickly hit the highlights. The idea was a powered fly-by of Jupiter with the goal of achieving maximum acceleration. We performed a continuous burn at full throttle to escape from Europa’s gravity well. Quarter throttle down to Io’s orbit, then full throttle again. We stayed at full throttle whilst rounding perijove, and burned for a further hour and two minutes, for a total burn time of eight hours and twenty-one minutes. This maneuver had a threefold purpose. One. Limit exposure to Jupiter’s radiation belt. Two. Ensure that we would fly beneath the Io flux tube.”
Nyah nyah nyah nyah. I didn’t graze the Io flux tube.
“Three. This is sometimes called an Oberth maneuver. When you fall into a planet’s gravity well, and then accelerate, you end up going quite fast. So after completing this maneuver at burn plus four hours and 13 minutes, we left Jupiter’s orbit, travelling spinwards. Our present velocity is …” He gulped. “Thirty kilometers per second.” 108,000 kilometers per hour.
“Are you serious?” Alexei hissed.
“Yeah,” Jack whispered back. “We haven’t dropped as much speed as I thought we would.”
They’d whipped past Jupiter at an astounding 61 kps. Climbing out of Jupiter’s gravity well, they’d lost a lot of that speed. Still, they were travelling twice as fast as they had on the outward leg of their journey.
Shiplord: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 3) Page 6
