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

by Felix R. Savage

“Yet in your heart you know that you’re not destined for this death.” C, Cmaj9, Am. “And you pray for salvation with every breath.” There was no such word as salvation in Rristigul. They had kmanif, which translated as ‘self-perfection,’ according to Giles’s dictionary, which was now up to 20,000 words.

  As he sang, Skyler heard a low-pitched grinding noise. He stopped. Listened. Nothing except the noise of the fans.

  With a mental shrug, he went back to trying out different chord progressions.

  After a while, he noticed a yellow light flashing on the mechanical systems console. He flew over to have a look. By now, of course, he knew what all the consoles controlled, and what the various alerts they generated meant. This one didn’t seem very important. But he didn’t know how to shut it off.

  Call Jack?

  Maybe just to be on the safe side.

  CHAPTER 15

  “Jack? Jack, can you come up here for a minute?”

  Jack heard Skyler’s voice in his headset. “Iceberg?” he said sharply.

  “Nope. It’s just …”

  “All right. Hang on a sec and I’ll be there,” Jack said, frowning up at Brbb.

  A froth of ripe blue suizh framed Brbb’s head. Now on its third planting, the rriksti staple had grown to twice Jack’s height. Pale blue feathery fronds and seedheads of turquoise berries drooped above them like a forest canopy. Every plant represented calories in the bank and CO2 sucked out of the air, nature’s great two-fer. Apé rubbed their nacreous bellies against the sides of the tanks. Jack sometimes liked to just sit here and watch the fish, revelling in the calories they represented, like a king in his counting-house counting out his money.

  That is, when the Krijistal deserters weren’t getting on his case about this and that and the other rule he supposedly wasn’t enforcing properly.

  “What’s the problem, Brbb?” He already guessed, but he believed it was good for them to be made to say what they bloody meant.

  Brbb’s pupils were pinpoints, nearly invisible. Rriksti did not have enough facial mobility to squint. “We need to make the days shorter.”

  Jack sighed. He looked up, through the suizh, up, past the blaze of light around the axis tunnel, to the other side of the hab, where more jungle, and a village of tenement-style shelters built from structural aerogel and curtains, hung upside down. A cat’s-cradle of irrigation hoses and power lines stretched over the whole mess. Six months into its voyage, the SoD had become a flying slum. But so what? Everyone was still alive, alive. Jack felt prouder of that than of anything else he’d achieved in his life. They’d only had two deaths since leaving Europa, and both of those had been cancer patients, so it was sad but expected. Extroversion wasn’t magic.

  Near the rriksti village, a patch of green vegetation sprawled along the aft wall. The terrestrial crops were flourishing, too. Make the days any shorter, however, and the all-important potatoes would begin to suffer.

  “Ever heard of sunglasses?” Jack said.

  A couple of months ago he’d unearthed his own Ray-Bans. He couldn’t even remember why he’d brought them from Earth. Probably just for the coolness factor. Anyway, they added a touch of distinction to his outfit, which otherwise consisted of ragged shorts. He lowered his sunglasses, like Tom Cruise in Top Gun, and smirked at Brbb. “My ship, my rules.”

  Brbb drew back its fist and swung at him. Jack had known this was probably coming and he dodged under the blow, aiming a punch of his own at Brbb’s midriff. His sunglasses fell off. His fist connected, as if with a suede-covered brick wall. Brbb pistoned its other fist at the side of his head. Six knuckles. A rriksti fist was the size of a cricket glove. The blow landed on Jack’s shoulder. Shaking off the pain, he went in for the clinch. You had to get these buggers down on the ground, where superior human mass could tell. Rriksti had wiry muscles, belying their frail appearance, and they were fast. But Brbb, despite being taller than Jack, with a longer reach, weighed less, and could not muster as much raw stopping power. Jack ended up kneeling astride its chest, working its face over with his fists. He waited for Brbb’s hair to move, or its fingers to flutter away from its eyes, before letting fly, forcing it to protect its face again.

  The other Krijistal stood around, ready to drag the suizh tanks out of the way if necessary. They would not intervene, as this was an argument, not a fight. At least that’s how Jack understood it. The rriksti rules of engagement allowed for arguments to be settled by violence, regardless of the merits of the case. So instead of going round and round in rhetorical circles, they went round after round on the filthy floor of the hab. Brbb’s hair whipped, stirring leaf mould and suizh husks into the air.

  Jack heard an odd noise.

  There wasn’t usually much to hear in the main hab, apart from the roar of the fans and the more distant rumble of the housekeeping turbine. Hundreds of rriksti made remarkably little noise. Of course, in the mid-kilohertz range, it was a different story. Jack was accustomed to a certain level of background chatter in his headset, which picked up some of the rrikstis’ signals in Rristigul as well as their English-language signals to the humans. But his headset had come off in the fight. He froze, listening to the quiet.

  Brbb took advantage of his distraction to throw something at his face. His Ray-Bans. One earpiece had snapped off. After all these years!

  Jack saw red. He jumped off Brbb, scuffed back, and before it could rise, delivered a vicious kick to its groin. He knew now what they kept down there. It wasn’t quite like kicking a human in the balls, but close enough. Even though Jack was barefoot, his toes delivered enough pain to make Brbb curl up like a spider pulling its legs in. Gone, gone were the days when Jack Kildare had scorned fighting dirty. He picked up his broken sunglasses and put them in his pocket. He retrieved his headset and put it on. He panted, “Now we won’t have any more nonsense about the fucking lights for at least twenty-four hours, will we?”

  The first thing he heard was Alexei saying, “—get hold of Jack,” and then Nene saying, “Jack? I’m afraid the forward toilet is broken.”

  “Again?” Jack picked up a long-handled gaffer hook leaning against a stand of suizh. That would show Brbb he was seriously pissed off. Arming oneself meant one was ready for bloodshed. Jack wasn’t, but hopefully it would send a message. The gaffer hook would also come in handy to unclog the toilet. “I’ll be right there,” he told Nene, glad of the excuse to cut this short.

  He walked diagonally forward, brushing through the froth of suizh and jgzeriyat, still out of breath from the fight. His shoulder hurt. He told himself he would be all right. The nutrient solution dripping from the irrigation hoses gave off a briny smell. With all this water around, spills were inevitable. Wet leaf fragments and other rubbish squidged under his toes, the consistency of mud. He passed a rriksti child painstakingly scraping the stuff off the floor, for recycling. They couldn’t afford to lose a single molecule of the vegetation’s heavy metal content. Jack smiled at the child, and wiped sweat off his face with a bare forearm.

  “Hey, Jack, just wondering if you could come have a look at this?”

  “I said I’ll be right there, Skyler,” Jack snapped, as he reached the forward toilet, in the Potter space under Staircase 2.

  Nene stood in front of the open door, keeping out a crowd of rriksti who were desperate to go. Jack edged between them. Their hair undulated, red and bronze and gold and silver and black, transmitting apologies into his headset. “Sorry. Sorry.” It was the one English word every rriksti had learned to say. “Sorry.” The apologies blunted Jack’s exasperation, reminding him that they weren’t slovenly by choice. And they hated pissing into buckets. Much as Jack sympathized, he wished they would.

  “What seems to be the trouble?” he said, easing Nene aside. He peered into the reeking hole in the wall which had once been a $31 million commode equipped with the same suction system used on the ISS, plus a water-sparing flush mechanism similar to an airplane toilet. The commode was still there … shit-encrust
ed, the seat long gone. But it was walled in with bales of the rough toilet paper that the rriksti insisted on manufacturing for themselves, and a bag for used toilet paper—Giles’s wheeze to get them to stop flushing the stuff. Some of them perversely played dumb, as if it were beneath them to let on that they understood what the bag was for. “Let me guess,” Jack said. “Someone’s been flushing the loo roll again.”

  “I don’t think so,” Nene said, wringing its hands. Short for a rriksti at just 6’3”, Nene had dark red bio-antennas and a face more rounded than the rriksti norm. It almost had apple cheeks. Jack could see, in certain lights, that it was cute. Alexei swore it was female two days in eleven. All the same, Jack still thought of Nene—of all of them, in fact—as it. This was deliberate. He couldn’t allow himself to start imagining that they were just humans in alien suits, as he knew all too well they weren’t.

  Half-hearing Nene’s demurral, he moved past it, breathing through his mouth, to have a go with the gaffer hook. Giles had invented this gizmo and printed its pieces off on the 3D fabber. It had a glove at the bottom of the handle with spaces for seven fingers. Jack, naturally, only used the first five. Pressure pads allowed intuitive operation of the hook, which converted into a four-way grabber.

  He smiled in triumph as he drew a compacted lump of alien shit up through the U-bend. “Problem solved.”

  Nene helped him scrape the tarry mass into the toilet paper bag. “You see,” it said, “the trouble is that the flushing mechanism hasn’t been working. There isn’t any water.”

  Jack froze. “No water?” he said, and heard that weird noise again.

  *

  Jack flew onto the bridge. Skyler looked around. “Hey, sorry about that. The computer threw up a mass trim alert. But it’s OK now. Panic over.”

  Jack wasn’t so sure. He dived into the center seat and punched up the external camera feeds. The cameras on the outside of the rotating hab showed nothing except space. Light from the distant sun reflected off the hull. He switched to the feed from the aft-facing cameras mounted on the ‘bottom’ of the rotating hab, where a 46-foot steel disk crammed with bearings connected the hab to the truss tower.

  “Did you hear that funny noise?” Skyler said. “It was weird. Almost subsonic. It’s stopped now.”

  “Yeah, I heard it.” Jack pored over the camera feeds. He saw a bloom of white all around the edge of the bioshield. He cranked the magnification. It looked like a snowfall had dusted the bioshield.

  Snow.

  In space.

  Jack let out a howl. He rocked back in his seat—in zero-gee, this movement threatened to turn into a backwards somersault—and clamped his hands over his face, as if he could un-see the sight that spelled doom for everyone on board.

  CHAPTER 16

  Jack’s surrender to despair lasted for all of a microsecond. He rocked forward and checked the rotation rate of the hab. As he’d expected, it was rotating slightly faster than before—3 RPMs had turned into 3.12 RPMs. That’s what would happen, when the hab got lighter.

  “What is it?” Skyler shouted. Jack’s despairing howl had launched him out of his seat. He turned, gripping the EVA suits that hung against the aft wall. “What’s going on?”

  “Put down your suit,” Jack said tiredly. “There’s nowhere to go.” And that was exactly the trouble. Nowhere to go. They were so alone out here, the English language needed a new word for it.

  “Everything OK?” It was Alexei, on the intercom.

  “Come to the bridge,” Jack said. “Giles? You, too.” He switched off the intercom.

  “OK, hit me,” Skyler said, tense.

  “That noise was the hab’s bearings. I didn’t recognize it straightaway.” Jack could have kicked himself for that. And for fixing the toilet first. And for not being able to be in three places at once. On the other hand, nothing would be different even if he’d reacted immediately. By the time they heard that grinding noise, it had already been too late. “Remember how the mass trim control system works?”

  Skyler licked his lips. “It’s like ballast tanks in an oceangoing ship. There are two water tanks, one on either side of the hab. The computer feeds water from one tank to the other to balance the hab.”

  “So what do you think would happen if one tank was completely empty, and the other was full?”

  “First of all, you’d get friction in the bearings. Oh.”

  “Yup.”

  “If there’s an imbalance, the computer pushes water through the cross-connect until the tanks balance.”

  “Or until both tanks are empty.” Jack pointed at the external camera feed. The sinister bloom of snow on the bioshield. “Guess what that is.”

  “Oh, shit. Our water.”

  “Bingo.”

  “They got us.” Skyler actually went white. You’d think a man who had not seen the sun for three years couldn’t get much whiter, but fear turned him into a staring spectre. “The Lightbringer. They fucking got us.”

  “It wasn’t an iceberg,” Jack said. He desperately tried to think what it could have been. One thing was for sure. It had come from the Lightbringer. After six months of deflecting attacks, the SoD’s luck had finally run out.

  Skyler flew to the life support console. “This says both tanks are full!”

  “The sensors are probably fucked,” Jack said. “The water is not in the tanks. It’s on the bioshield.”

  Alexei and Giles flew onto the bridge. Several rriksti, including Nene, jammed the keel tube behind them. Jack shot out of his seat. “Close the door,” he shouted. Alexei did not do it. Jack turned the crank himself, spraying insincere smiles through the gap until the heavy steel pressure door hid the rrikstis’ blank faces. There was then a lot of shouting, which gradually cohered into a shared understanding that they now had no drinking water except for what remained in the algae tanks, the irrigation hoses, and the sewage lines.

  The four men stared at each other in silence. They had not always been astronauts. But they were all astronauts now. And they all understood what water meant in space.

  Life.

  And what no water meant.

  Death.

  “We can reclaim a little bit of water from the hydroponics,” Giles broke the silence. “But not much. The nutrient solutions have precise molarity and isotonicity. We make a different solution for each tank, in a narrow range of concentrations for nitrates and other nutrients. If we extract water from the solutions, the increased concentration of salt and nitrates pulls the water out of the cells of the plants. They die. Then we die.”

  Alexei gave a death’s-head grin. “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking.”

  Jack laughed. “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit doing amphetamines.”

  Alexei, dressed in a rriksti outfit that looked like two shopping bags with the ‘handles’ over his shoulders, which, he swore, kept him cool in the heat and humidity, plucked his e-cigarette out of a pocket and blew vapor into the air. He had, of course, gone to extreme lengths not to quit smoking—or rather, vaping. He grew his own tobacco plants. The vapor swirled towards the vents on the ceiling, and Jack thought about all those particles of precious water vanishing into the air circulation system, contributing to the general humidity, ending up as a corrosion hazard.

  “The dehumidifiers,” he said, snapping his fingers. “If we crank them up, we can wring quite a lot of water out of this fucking sauna. Yes, the rriksti will scream bloody murder. They’ll just have to cope.”

  “That buys us maybe one more day’s water,” Giles said. “Then what? We start throwing them out of the airlock?”

  The words hung in the air like a turd in zero-gravity.

  Skyler broke the silence this time. He was back on his laptop, running calculations. “What I want to know is who designed this ship? I mean, I cannot believe this didn’t happen before. Why did they put the potable water tanks on the outside of the hab? Why, why?” He did a nasal, nerdy voice. “We need extra shielding fo
r the rotating hab. Hey, I know! Water makes great shielding! Wow, that’s genius! Let’s use the waterRRRRRR!” Skyler’s eyes popped; he mimed wringing the necks of the engineers whose flawed design decisions were now killing them.

  Everyone laughed. Jack smiled at Skyler, grateful for the moment of levity. “Right,” he said. “We’ve got to conjure up 1.8 million liters of water from thin air. Ideas?”

  “There is plenty of water in the external tanks,” Alexei said.

  “Tritium and oxygen 14!” Skyler said. “Tasty.”

  “We’re already glowing in the dark,” Jack said, shaking his head.

  It was true they had plenty of water in the propulsion tanks. Unfortunately, it wasn’t drinkable. Their big burn out of Jupiter orbit had left the SoD with 6.6 million gallons of H2O in the bioshield tank and the four external tanks, respectively, as well as another million or so in the plastic bags attached to the bioshield. But as Skyler had pointed out, that water was extremely radioactive. It had been sitting out on Europa for billions of years, getting bombarded by neutrons, which mutate good old hydrogen into stable nuclides of tritium. Little rocks of cancer in every drop.

  Yet now the others were all jabbering about the water in the ETs. Jack rubbed his fingers together nervously. He was afraid they were getting blasé about radiation. They weren’t rriksti. They couldn’t rely on extroversion. Even the rriksti couldn’t rely on it. Their healing gift was just too failure-prone. Too weird.

  “Jack, the rriksti drank Europan water for ten years!” Alexei said.

  “After processing it through a DIY mass spectrometer the size of a house,” Jack pointed out.

  “It was just a big box.”

  “Yes …” A really big box, made of cast iron, lined with magnets. Shoot water plasma in at the top. Leave the radioactive nuclides behind, run the rest through a fuel cell, and you get pure, neutral, non-radioactive water. But the flipping thing had weighed several tons. On top of that, it had been badly radioactive from all those years of shoving Europan ice down the chute. So that got left behind.