“Gimme the damn guns, Skyler.”
“No,” Skyler said, holding the Super Soakers out of Jack’s reach. He hated guns. He used to have one of his own but he’d left it on Europa, accidentally on purpose, after he almost murdered Alexei with it. He couldn’t believe this was happening. “Why do you need them? Who’re you going to shoot?”
“No one! I’ve just got to show them who’s boss.”
Brbb’s voice boomed from the intercom. The rriksti could hijack the PA when they really needed the humans to hear them. “You were breaking the rules!” it said.
“Huh?” Skyler said.
“I don’t know what fucking rules it’s talking about,” Jack said. “I wanted to visit the Cloudeater. Why not? Perfectly innocent. Why shouldn’t I? This lot tried to stop me from reaching the airlock.”
Giles pushed past Jack, getting between him and Skyler. With his regrown hands and feet, he looked like a grotesque dwarf. But he stared Jack down. “I thought you would end up going for the guns. I wasn’t wrong, eh? I wish I had been.”
Jack flushed red at the contempt in Giles’s voice. “I wasn’t actually going to shoot anyone.”
Skyler wished he believed that. He suspected that Jack himself believed it, which still didn’t necessarily make it true. He stuffed the Super Soakers back into Jack’s locker.
“I just can’t have them behaving like this,” Jack muttered.
“Who started it?”
“They did, obviously!”
Difystra took the intercom. “No. The commander started it. He was breaking the rules.”
“My ship, my rules,” Jack snapped. But Skyler could see he appreciated being called commander. He drifted up to Difystra, who flinched. Jack wiped a thumb across the Krijistal’s lips. “Sorry about that.”
Skyler couldn’t see what he meant, until Difystra opened its mouth to reveal a gap where one of its needle-sharp front teeth should have been. “Do not worry. It will grow back.”
“Your teeth grow back? That’s convenient,” Skyler said. Like sharks, he thought.
“Hurt me more than it did you,” Jack grumbled, cradling his right hand. His knuckles were gashed and bloody.
Giles said with forced lightness, “You’ve got to stop pissing around with pointy objects, Jack; we are too short on medical supplies!”
Jack snarled at him, which Skyler thought unfair. Giles had had the foresight to see this coming and head it off. A casual game of cards on the bridge? Now it made sense.
Skyler’s laptop chimed. He lunged for it with Pavlovian alacrity.
“Something up?” Jack said.
“Just a second …”
“It’s something from the NXC,” Giles said.
Jack made shooing gestures at the Krijistal. “Out.” They filed off the bridge. Jack and Giles gathered behind Skyler’s seat.
Decryption complete (2 of 2).
“I found encrypted files in that video of Pavel talking about soccer,” Skyler said. “It’s called steganography. Hiding files inside other files.”
The second file was an .exe file. Skyler installed it and clicked around. “It’s a new decrypt tool. OK. They said they’ve developed a new crypto solution, called AES-512. This must be to decrypt messages encoded with that.”
“Don’t you need a key, too?” Jack said.
“That was in the first file.”
“So now we’ve got the software, but nothing to decrypt with it,” Jack summed up. “Well, maybe they’ll send something soon. Now if you’re OK here, I’d better go catch up with Brbb.”
“And do what?”
“And apologize, of course,” Jack snapped. “We’ve got to get along, no matter what. We’re all in this together.”
CHAPTER 11
Gurlp set the stage. In civilian life, back on Imf, Gurlp had worked in the movies. Well, not really movies. Portals, or ‘ports.’ As far as Hannah could discover, ‘ports’ were radio plays with immersive virtual sets, fed directly into your brain via stick-on chips. They didn’t work with her brain, but the rriksti were crazy about them. Not surprising, in Hannah’s opinion. Life on Imf must have been a crapfest even before war broke out. No wonder they craved escapist entertainment.
It was hard to believe the bad-tempered Gurlp had ever been a civilian, much less a set designer. But she knew her stuff. She slapped some of Eskitul’s watercolors onto the walls of the primary life-support chancel, dragged in a priceless 500-year-old couch, tossed some bits of electronic junk on the coffee table in front of it, and left. The effect was exquisite. It looked as if Hannah and Ripstiggr had just happened to sit down for coffee in a room lined with mouthwatering high-tech machinery.
The viewers would never know it wasn’t coffee in their mugs. Hannah had krak, those last two wergs of her daily ration. Ripstiggr had water, as there was nothing else.
“Greetings, Earthlings!” Ripstiggr said to the camera. He had made this catchphrase into his trademark. Freaking Marvin the Martian. Hannah remembered watching that cartoon when she was a kid.
Now the children—and adults—of Earth were hooked on the Hannah Ginsburg Show. This broadcast would be sent Earthwards as an analog signal multiplexed into a carrier wave, targeted at the northern hemisphere, set to repeat every hour on the hour for 24 hours, so that everyone on Earth with a satellite dish could pick it up, not that they’d need to, as the Lightbringer’s transmissions always went viral on the internet, according to Ripstiggr.
Hannah had told them that frequency-hopping digital broadcasts were no good. She’d also told them how to encode the audio sideband in the human-audible range. Did it matter that they’d threatened to hurt her if she didn’t cooperate? Did it matter that they would’ve figured it out on their own in the end? It was still her fault. Her show.
Anyway, the krak tasted fine, and she listened with keen interest to Ripstiggr’s commentary on the biggest news stories from the week of August 20th-27th, 2021. This was the closest she ever got to finding out what was happening on Earth. Yet another “ancient kingdom” had been resurrected in what used to be China’s Hunan province. After the collapse of the Communist regime last year, the once-mighty PRC had shattered like a mirror, each fragment reflecting the true China, so it claimed. Ripstiggr offered some pseudo-deep thoughts on how the ancient history of the Middle Kingdom might be repeating. On the other side of the world, Montana threatened to become the next state to secede from the US. Hannah speculated miserably about what was happening to her country. It seemed to be fracturing like China. Ripstiggr, of course, urged a peaceful resolution to the crisis.
Hannah was drunk. She snuggled against Ripstiggr’s side and said, “C’mon. They want to hear about Imf.”
Ripstiggr patted her shoulder. This was all calculated to show that a human need not fear a rriksti’s touch. Hannah wondered what would shock the audience more, if they knew the truth: that she actually loathed and feared Ripstiggr … or that these long fingers had been inside her vagina half an hour ago?
“Hannah and I were chatting about Imfi funeral customs today,” Ripstiggr said to the camera. His hair stirred like snakes, but he was the snake-charmer, playing his flute. “We thought we’d show you this video to give you a taste of our culture. Raw video footage from Imf is quite rare, as we use more advanced data storage formats these days.” He meant the format used for ‘ports.’ Everything got encrypted into data-rich signals that mimicked rriksti brainwaves—the same as the I/O protocol of the Shiplord chip, actually. “This comes from the region known as the Lightside, which is comparatively less developed.”
The video played on a large screen set up behind the couch. Hannah turned sideways to watch it.
EXT—a desert on the Lightside of Imf—day
Redundancy alert! It’s always day on the Lightside. Imf is tidally locked to Proxima Centauri. So you have the Darkside, where it’s always night, the Lightside, where it’s always day, and the twilight zone, a region of howling winds and drenching rains, which the r
riksti talk about as if it were freaking California. Everyone wants to move there. I guess it must be nice in contrast to this.
Henna-red rocks stretch to the horizon, cracked like clay in a kiln. You can practically feel the heat rising off the screen. It gets up to 100° Celsius in the middle of the Lightside, directly below the glare of Prox b. Even here, at the edge of the Lightside, the temps are Sahara-hot. But people live in the Sahara, and they live here.
In the middle distance, a town spikes up from the desert like a high-tech hedgehog made of mirrors. Those spiky roofs are actually solar cells, permanently angled towards the sun’s red light. A water pipeline connects the town to a spaceport on the horizon. Technology has made life on the Lightside much more comfortable.
But here comes the past. A motorcade crawls towards us. Each ‘car’ has three large, fat wheels that squish and inflate as they pass over the jagged rocks. Their hexagonal solar-panel roofs double as parasols. The hexagon is to the rriksti as the square is to us: fingers -1, a good shape to build with. As the motorcade approaches, we see just how fast it’s going. Whiz! A spearhead-shaped chassis races over our viewpoint, smearing the camera lens with red dust.
EXT—a graveyard on the Lightside of Imf—day
The motorcade arrives at a flat plain covered with stone tables. A silvery geodesic dome sports a sign subtitled ‘Café (Vomitoriums for Customers Only).’ This subtitle may be Ripstiggr’s little joke.
Rriksti disembark from the cars, clad in reflective white burnouses. One is hoodless, its face seamed and reddened from professional exposure to the elements. It is a priest. Its robes are much fancier than Ripstiggr’s. It supervises the unloading, from the last car, of a coffin.
The mourners carry the coffin to a vacant stone table. They open the lid. We zoom in on the pale, dead face of an elderly rriksti. You can tell it’s old because of the frosted-glass translucency of its skin. Rriksti don’t get wrinkles. They get thin-skinned.
CUT to the mourners. As the priest orates, they tear off their hoods in grief. Their hair thrashes, and flakes of skin waft from their faces, to be blown away in snow-like eddies on the wind. “They are weeping,” Ripstiggr explains, in voice-over. “We do not cry with our eyes. We cry with our whole bodies.”
“In other words,” said Hannah, “you shed.”
While the video played, Gurlp wasn’t recording, so she could say what she really thought.
So could Ripstiggr. “Lightsiders are so emotional,” he commented with distaste, as the mourners fell into each other’s arms, shedding like crazy. Their body language clearly expressed devastation. Hannah did not find their grief excessive. It reminded her of her parents’ funeral. The Ginsburgs had died too young, in a car crash, leaving her and Bethany to be raised by their grandmother. And if this scene touched her emotions, she had to assume it would also touch other human beings. They would feel kinship with the rriksti. A cross-species emotional bond.
“Just to be clear,” Hannah said, “these Lightsiders are the ones you guys nuked to oblivion.”
“That’s exaggerating,” Ripstiggr said. “Lightsiders always exaggerate.”
“To be precise, you smashed them in a brutal war that dragged on for centuries, and escalated to tactical nuclear exchanges, and was ultimately ended by orbital bombardment of the largest Lightsider cities.”
“Yeah.”
“So that town we saw probably isn’t even there anymore.”
“It’s there,” Ripstiggr said. “It’s just ruined. On the other hand, who knows what’s going on nowadays? It’s been seventy-six years since we set out, and ten years since we had any news from home.”
Hannah knew better than to respond to this. The Lightbringer’s inability to establish contact with Imf worried Ripstiggr, maybe more than anything else he had to deal with at the moment.
On the screen, the mourners trailed away towards the café, leaving the coffin open. Close-up, once again, of the deceased’s face. Subtitles explained that the heat and the dry wind would mummify the corpse, a process explicitly likened to ancient Egyptian burial practices. Small white flags streamed around the perimeter of the graveyard, and small birds gathered out of nowhere to peck the mourners’ tears out of the air.
Hannah said, “Are you going to show the part where they come back 77 days later, slice bits off the corpse, and ceremonially eat them?”
Ripstiggr’s hair twitched. “Don’t be stupid,” he said.
Hannah sensed that Ripstiggr was getting tired of her snark. She withdrew into herself, eking out the last few swallows of her drink, rebuilding the flimsy wall between herself and reality.
After the video, Ripstiggr wrapped the broadcast up with some general comments about how the meeting of cultures was always fruitful and beneficial for everyone involved. He then gave an updated estimate of the Lightbringer’s ETA: “We’ll arrive in Earth orbit on the eighth of February, 2023. The whole crew is looking forward to this so much. But maybe Hannah is the most impatient of all! After all, for her, Earth is home.”
Cued, Hannah smiled at the camera. “That’s right. I absolutely cannot wait. If you’re watching, Rich, hi! And also my sister, Bethany … Hi, Bee-Bee!” She waved at the camera, and leaned forward. “The kids must be so big now. Hi, Isabel … hi, Nathan.”
Could they see the desperation in her eyes? Did they guess that far from being a happy passenger on the Lightbringer, she had an alien computer in her brain and a metaphorical gun to her head?
“Oh, and I don’t want to forget David, the world’s best brother-in-law. Dave, you better start laying in microbrews, because maybe what I’m looking forward to most of all is a nice cold beer!”
“Perfect,” Ripstiggr said, sliding his hand down her arm in a distracted caress. She was wearing one of the camera-ready outfits they’d printed off for her: blue jeans and a long-sleeved blouse.
She stood up and went to change. These clothes did not offer any radiation protection at all.
CHAPTER 12
Tom Flaherty, director of the National Xenoaffairs Council, and in the view of some (not all of them his enemies) the most powerful man in America, paced the deck of a car ferry churning through the Gulf of Mexico, off the Louisiana coast.
The August sun baked the crust of salt on the deck. Hot wind whipped away the smell of aviation fuel.
Squinting through the glare, Flaherty tried to count the small boats chasing the ferry. They’d scattered when his helicopter arrived. It was almost like they thought a Coast Guard chopper might open fire on them. Flaherty grinned humorlessly at the thought. In the not-so-distant past, he had had to order some of the paramilitary units under his command (the SWAT teams formerly attached to a bunch of federal agencies now folded into the NXC; a beefed-up SAD and SOG, the special ops units attached to the CIA, ditto) to shoot at civilians. But the Coast Guard? Not yet. He prayed not ever.
That said, the Coast Guard was all he had out here today, versus a motley flotilla of shrimpers, yachts, and Jesus God what is that thing?
Flaherty stopped at the rail next to a Coast Guard officer. “What is that thing?”
“Too damn hot for Kevlar,” the man said. Flaherty uh-huh’ed. His own loose navy t-shirt concealed a bulletproof vest. Wore the thing every damn day, never got used to it—nor the Sig Sauer in his hip holster, either. He had started out as a field agent in the CIA, his weapons a keen intellect and a folksy aura that fooled the people who mattered. Pre-MOAD (that’s how Flaherty still thought of the Lightbringer: the MOAD, the Mother Of All Discoveries), you could get ahead with brainpower. Didn’t need firepower. He missed those days.
The Coast Guard officer went on, “That boat looks like a destroyer got shrunk in the wash?”
“Yeah.”
“Superyacht. Belongs to some tech guy.”
That was the trouble with the Earth Party. Too many tech guys.
“I’m told it’s got its own missile defense system.”
“Hope it ain’t got its own missiles.�
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Flaherty walked forward, stumbling as the ferry met the ocean swell. The Coast Guard men positioned here and there along the rail twitched when he passed them, like iron filings at the approach of a magnet.
Flaherty’s chopper stood on the foredeck, which was marked out as a helicopter pad. Kuldeep Srivastava, Flaherty’s personal assistant, sat in the side door with headphones on. Kuldeep had worked for the NXC before it was the NXC. Flaherty had hired him back last year because he needed someone who wouldn’t bullshit him or cringe in his presence.
He veered over to the chopper. “You should go inside. Don’t tell me you can hear a damn thing out here.” The ferry’s engine was noisy, the sea was noisier, and someone on one of the pursuing boats had a bullhorn. They were yelling their usual pacifistic war-cries.
“It’s OK,” Kuldeep said. “I’ve already watched it three times. Now I’m just listening for …” He rocked one thin, dark hand from side to side. “Nuance.”
“And also, you’re scared we might have to take off suddenly.”
“And also that.”
Beyond the prow, twin towers poked from the dazzling horizon.
*
By the time the car ferry reached the New Hope launch facility, the fastest of the pursuing boats had caught up. The tech guy’s superyacht tore defiantly across the ferry’s bows. Garishly dressed people lined its top deck. They threw paper airplanes at the ferry.
Now named the Gulf Commander, formerly the Caribbean Fantasia, this ferry used to run passengers and cargo between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Refurbished from stem to stern, it now served as a floating R&D facility and dormitory for refugees from Kennedy Space Center. Its roll-on, roll-off car deck had become a transport barge for rocket parts and tanks of fuel.
Leaving the crew to unload, Flaherty strode up the gangway with Kuldeep in tow. They were going to see Richard Burke.
Shiplord: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 3) Page 8
