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

by Felix R. Savage

  The light of the sun coldly drenched the corridor.

  Above her, empty space gaped.

  She floated at the bottom of the crater ripped in the Lightbringer’s side by the explosion of the primary water tanks.

  High overhead, jagged teeth of hull plating curled back from the crater’s rim, dotted with work lights placed here and there by the repair crew.

  They’d been working to fix the damage ever since the Lightbringer left Europa, but it sure didn’t look like they’d accomplished much.

  Knowing how dangerous this was, knowing that the Lightbringer was charging through space at dozens of kilometers per second, and that one mis-vectored leap could carry her out into the void, where her life would depend on the CO2 reserves in her wrist rockets, she flew up the side of the crater, grabbing onto sheared-off structural members and warped deck plating. Tangles of wiring she avoided, although she was pretty sure none of that stuff was live.

  What region of the ship are you in?

  Iristigut was answering her emails so fast, he couldn’t be far away.

  If you are amidships, you might try the gunnery deck. It escaped major structural damage, and its door would stand up to anything. Search for ‘Libzig Afraf’ on the map.

  Libzig Afraf, Libzig Afraf …

  “Hannah! Where aaare you?”

  Glancing down, she saw them at the bottom of the crater, like black fish darting at the bottom of a sunlit pool.

  Libzig Afraf. There it was!

  On the far side of the crater, natch.

  Hannah took a deep breath and kicked off. She flew diagonally across the crater, just a few meters this side of where the hull would have been.

  “There she is!”

  “Hannah, hey, Hannah, don’t be a party pooper!”

  She flew into the shadow of the overhanging hull plates, and plunged into the black mouth of a burrow in the hull’s thickness. The arrows pointed her at a door, not an autorip, a solid steel door, which stood ajar, which had actually been propped ajar with a portable generator, because the repair crew had been working in here, but no one was here now, because it was the weekend. Hannah kicked the generator off its magnetic feet. It floated into the hall. She floated through the door, and swung it shut.

  Ahhh. Peace at last.

  She was in a tiny antechamber, so low, by rriksti standards, she could touch the ceiling with her fingers and the floor with her toes at the same time. Offcuts of thin steel pipe floated around her.

  As she turned to float into the next room, the door started to open.

  It wasn’t locked!

  “Halb! Iristigut, how do you say ‘Lock this fucking door’? Sgrat!”

  A rriksti arm reached through the opening door. Hannah whacked it with a length of pipe. This had been a game before, but now she was genuinely scared. She couldn’t tell one rriksti from another when they wore their spacesuits. They were back to being the octopus-headed monsters that had boarded the SoD and stolen everything that wasn’t nailed down. Well, they looked a little bit different right now. Fun fact: rriksti spacesuits do not hide massive hard-ons.

  She slammed the door. Rebounding, she jammed the length of pipe she held against the door, and braced its other end against the opposite wall. The door shook and shuddered. Hannah hung on. The pipe prevented it from opening more than a crack.

  “Oh, Hannah,” Ripstiggr said in her head. “When I catch you, I’m going to give you such a spanking.”

  Her stomach liquefied.

  The command is ‘If thelele.’ I’m sorry! I should have told you that straight away.

  “If thelele,” she said, staring at the door. Yes, this door, right here. Come on, chip. “If thelele!”

  A thunk travelled up the pipe to her hands. Doubtfully, she let the pipe float free. The door vibrated. They must be kicking it, banging on it. They wouldn’t get anywhere. It was well and truly locked.

  Grinning broadly, Hannah transmitted: “I am Shiplord, boys. Woot.”

  “You can’t stay in there forever,” Ripstiggr growled. “If you come out and say sorry, we’ll let it go. If you don’t …

  Hannah made a face as Ripstiggr enumerated the graphic acts he would perform on her. Tuning him out, she floated into the next room. She was trembling with shock. Her bravery had carried her further than she expected. She read the rest of Iristigut’s email. He / she had given her a whole list of useful phrases, including how to unlock the door. She would need that at some point, as she couldn’t stay in here forever. It was just a pocket of vacuum inside the Lightbringer’s hull.

  A row of flexible tubes hung from one wall, where a heavy-duty housing had been removed. Looked like they were replacing the pipes …

  … oh. Of course. This was a gunnery deck. Those pipes must be the legendary muon cannons that had almost destroyed the Lightbringer, or some of them anyway.

  Hannah followed the flexible tubes across the deck to an enormous armor-plated cabinet. It reminded her of the Lightbringer’s fusion reactor, which she had seen once, when she was first brought on board.

  Proton-lithium-6 fusion, as developed by the rriksti, used muons to catalyze the reaction. It followed that they generated muons for the cannons using the same technique employed in the reactor. The nitty-gritty of that technique remained a mystery to Hannah, which frustrated her, because once, long ago, she’d been a nuclear propulsion specialist.

  When Ripstiggr first brought her on board, he had asked her to be their propulsion technician. But then he’d gone and killed Eskitul, and suddenly there had been a more urgent vacancy for Hannah to fill.

  She stroked a glove over the generator cabinet. A thin fur of ice crystals melted at her touch, becoming floating droplets of water. She licked her lips, realizing how thirsty she was. Sooner rather than later, she would have to head out and face the music. But first …

  “Halb. Hey Iristigut,” she visualized. “Any chance you could explain how this muon generator works?”

  *

  “You were very naughty, Hannah.”

  Spank.

  “You had everyone worried. You might have gone over the side. What would we do if we lost our Shiplord?”

  Spank. Ripstiggr’s palm came down again with a loud crack on her bare buttocks.

  “I said I was sorry,” Hannah gasped, face down across his lap. He was sitting on the beast-footed chair in the Shiplord’s cabin. She clawed at the carpet with her fingertips as he spanked her again. It hurt.

  “Yes. If you hadn’t said sorry, I would be using the kuvr. It is a sort of whip.”

  Muons decay in 270 milliseconds. She reread Iristigut’s last email, printed in bright biophotons on the carpet. Thus, muon cannons are short-range tactical weapons. They were installed on the Lightbringer as anti-boarding defenses …

  Spank. This time, after hitting her, Ripstiggr laid his other hand on her butt. Cool bliss flowed into her hot, stinging flesh. Just as she started to relax, thinking it was over, Ripstiggr withdrew his hand and spanked her again, harder than ever.

  She leapt like a fish, yelping.

  Her confused nerve endings had interpreted the slap as a pleasurable stimulus.

  “This is what we call a punishment cycle,” Ripstiggr said.

  Spank. Relief. Spank. Relief.

  After a few rounds of that, she was wriggling on his lap, dripping wet. In between spanks, she fumbled with the drawstring of his shorts.

  He stopped spanking her. “Wasn’t really a punishment cycle,” he whispered. “Real punishment would really hurt. I was just playing with you.”

  “I know.” She sat up and straddled his lap.

  “All the same, don’t do that again. OK? It’s bad for morale.”

  “OK.” She had lost interest in the conversation. She stood on her tiptoes and lowered herself down, inch by inch.

  “Hoooonh,” Ripstiggr grunted, from his throat.

  The key application of muon generation is in nuclear fusion. By applying a gauge field to increase
the range of the strong force, we extend the lifetime of muons …

  The golden skeins of text broke up as Hannah squeezed her eyes shut in ecstasy.

  CHAPTER 24

  On October 23rd, 2022, an observer on Mars might have seen a strange new star flash across the sky.

  A month later, they would have seen another one.

  From 36 million kilometers away, the second star did not look like a star at all. It was, in fact, the drive plume of a spaceship: the Victory.

  The SoD was in the middle of a test burn for their own Mars flyby. Given their absurdly high coasting speed, Jack would have no choice but to use the Cloudeater’s drive as well. They had to wring the maximum deceleration out of this maneuver. But since the two ships had never blasted together before, they had to get their thrust vectors aligned before cranking up the power.

  “Gimbal your engines out some more,” he said brusquely over the radio. The Cloudeater’s thrust was off-axis, so both ships had to gimbal their engine bells to compensate. The SoD, as the more massive component of the stack, determined their center of gravity. Right now, Jack was trying to line up their center of propulsion with that center of gravity. A little bit this way, a little bit that way, and if I get it wrong those bloody welds will break when we go around the curve.

  “How is this?” Keelraiser said over the radio.

  “Better …”

  Keelraiser was no longer in disgrace. It had resumed normal communication with the other rriksti, making life easier for everyone. But Jack could never forget that he’d liberated Keelraiser from social purgatory by literally beating it to a pulp. He felt that there were dangerous loose ends there, floating around like fallen power lines, and avoided them by avoiding Keelraiser itself.

  So he’d been nervous about how this would go. But soon they were working together as smoothly as in the old days, and Jack forgot to walk on eggshells.

  “Come and see this,” Keelraiser said abruptly.

  “What?”

  “Come and see this. It’s interesting.”

  “Define interesting,” Jack said, with a glance at Alexei.

  Alexei cleared his throat and let out a shout. “Oh my God! We’re all going to die!”

  Jack cracked up. That one never got old. But after the test burn, he left the bridge and crossed over to the Cloudeater. “What is it?”

  Keelraiser’s withdrawn, distant demeanor chilled Jack’s anticipation. Hriklif, who’d been collecting engine performance data during the test burn, sat beside Keelraiser in the cockpit. Keelraiser threw a meaningful look at the atomic engineer.

  Uneasily, Jack said, “OK, Hriklif, you can go.” He folded his arms, floating, waiting.

  Even when they were alone, Keelraiser did not meet Jack’s eyes. It gestured at the radar imaging screen. “That is the Victory. It’s lining up for its Mars flyby.”

  “Yeah. Time for NASA’s programmers to earn their pay.” Jack spoke with mordant humor. If the programmers faceplanted, and the remote-controlled Victory failed to execute its flyby properly, the SoD would pay the price. That distant blip contained the Shit We Need … at this point, the Shit We Really, REALLY Need.

  “Look at it,” Keelraiser said. “Quick, before it turns end-on to us again.”

  They’d only ever been able to observe the Victory head-on, as it had been travelling towards them since it launched. To be precise, at the extreme distances that separated the ships, they’d only ever been able to observe its drive plume. But as the Victory vectored towards Mars, they’d be able to see it in profile for a few short hours.

  Jack floated behind the pilot’s seat and into the illusory void. Mars queened it over the black velvet night. Near the planet’s limb floated a red speck.

  “Infrared imaging,” Keelraiser said.

  The speck seemed to hurtle towards them. It elongated into a blur. The familiar drive plume of its MPD engine, now seen sideways-on. As Keelraiser cranked up the magnification, the Victory’s heat signature grew bigger on the screen, but it also grew shorter.

  “It’s turning,” Keelraiser said in frustration. “Can you see it?”

  About to answer that he could see it fine, Jack finally understood what Keelraiser was driving at. The heat signature was shaped like an exclamation mark.

  “What’s that?”

  “The forward region of the ship is emitting heat,” Keelraiser said.

  “Yes, obviously. It’s using waste heat from the reactor to …”

  “To do what, Jack? To keep the computers warm?”

  Their eyes met for the first time in months, not in understanding, but in shock and doubt.

  *

  Two weeks later, the SoD hurtled into its own Mars flyby.

  Jack had once dreamt—hadn’t every astronaut?—of going to Mars. But right now he had so much on his mind that he didn’t see Mars at all. He didn’t see its austere beauty, even when it grew to fill the sky, as large as the Earth seen from the ISS. All he saw was a planet-sized brake.

  “Hey Jack.” Alexei was staying chill. “What did one Martian say to the other Martian?”

  “Wait …” Jack watched the thrust indicator climbing. “Wait … OK. I’ve got a good one. ‘Spaceships are like buses. You wait four billion years and then three of them come along at once.’”

  “Nooo,” Alexei said. “’I’m hungry.’”

  “What?”

  “’I’m hungry.’”

  “That’s it?” Jack started to laugh. “That’s not funny.”

  Alexei cackled. “No, it’s not funny! Hee hee hee!”

  After 14 months of this voyage they were both easily amused. But the truth was the joke cut a bit close to the bone. Imaginary Martians were not the only hungry ones.

  The ruddy light of Mars shone through the portholes onto a bridge stripped down to the steel and aluminum bones. Naked dials and unhoused buttons glittered. The housings had been unscrewed to allow access to electronic components … and their copper and silver content. There’d been plenty of components that had failed in the HERF attacks, but had never been removed because they had no replacements. Jack had let the rriksti have them. He owed them more than that, and did not complain even when some of the housings vanished, as well. Even the paint was gone off his radar altimeter—it had turned out to have lead in it. Yummy, yummy.

  The missing paint made the numbers hard to read. He had not used this instrument once since they left Earth. “God, I hope this is accurate …”

  Altitude: 150 kilometers. He touched the rosary that he wore always, these days, around his neck.

  “Gimme a star sighting.”

  Alexei read out the numbers. Jack bit the inside of his cheek. They had to come out of this with rock-solid positioning. Every tenth of a degree mattered, and he didn’t trust NASA’s numbers. He didn’t trust NASA at all right now. Or anyone on Earth, really.

  He radioed up to the Cloudeater. “Let’s punch it harder.”

  There were only two things they could control: thrust and attitude. And thrust was a dangerous tool that might turn on them. The SoD’s truss had not been designed to take the strain of a welded-on shutle and its thrust. No choice, though; got to do this.

  “On my mark.” Jack poised to precess the axis to angle the SoD into a steeper dive towards Mars. The paint was also gone off the metal keyboard he used to control the reaction wheels. He went by touch.

  Hriklif, co-piloting for Keelraiser, radioed down. “By the way, we are in the thermosphere. That is not space out there anymore.”

  “I know,” Jack snapped.

  “If we go much lower, the bridge will melt off.”

  “Wouldn’t that be interesting,” Alexei said, rolling his eyes.

  Jack recognized that Alexei was telling him to chill, and he was right. With a deliberate effort, he freed up a fraction of his mind from the maneuver. After all, he’d done this before.

  He reached for the radio, winked at Alexei, and spoke.

  “Hey, Mission Cont
rol. You keep bugging us for information. How about this?”

  He fumbled for the camera feed. “Alexei, are those loons still out there?”

  “They are,” Alexei said grinning. He touched the intercom and spoke in broken Rristigul. To Jack, he said, “Bridge camera two.”

  “Got it.”

  Jack switched the feed to Bridge Camera 2. A moment later, the view of Mars on the main screen turned into a view of a psychedelically EVA-suited rriksti. Its tendrils whipped in the wind of the Martian thermosphere. It gave a double rriksti salute.

  Jack snorted in amusement. “Do that again,” he said. He patched the camera feed into the comms transmission. “Here you go, Mission Control. You’re going to love this. Pictures of Mars, taken by rriksti lunatics who decided to do the flyby outside the ship …”

  *

  In New York, in the back seat of an armored SUV screaming along the center lane of the Brooklyn Bridge, Tom Flaherty wondered whether to laugh or explode at the pictures Richard Burke had just forwarded to his phone. “What is this shit?”

  Far away in Houston, Burke said, “Beats me. Kildare says they are squid selfies with Mars in the background.”

  The SUV slewed to a stop in the middle of the bridge. “Tell Kildare to quit fucking around and do his job.” Flaherty was looking forward very much to the day when Jack Kildare would not be needed to do his job any longer.

  Pocketing his phone, he threw his legs out of the SUV’s door.

  A tsunami of voices crashed over him. Chanting, singing, shouting.

  The fierce urgency of now, as a smart politician had once put it, elbowed the SoD to the back of Flaherty’s mind.

  NYPD cars and Humvee ambulances barricaded the bridge, facing Brooklyn.

  The Manhattan side of the bridge was completely empty, as no one was trying to leave. Enormous banners draped the skyscrapers at the south tip of the island. Legible from the bridge, they said things like “JOIN THE PARTY,” “PARTY POOPERS OUT!” and of course “ONE GALAXY UNDER …” Fill in the blank. The deity of choice varied according to fad. The banner Flaherty could see now featured a picture of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which had mystically grown arms and legs. In other words, it had turned into a squid.