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

by Felix R. Savage

  Keelraiser said, “Did I miss something?”

  “They want us to fly the SoD to the moon. Honestly, I think everyone on Earth’s gone barmy.”

  “Who are you talking to?” Linda said.

  “My partner in crime,” Jack said, nodding at Keelraiser. “We’re going to nuke the Lightbringer. So you see, there won’t be any need to hole up on the moon. That’s a complete non-starter anyway, for a hundred reasons I could name if you want to talk life-support technicalities. Take my word for it, it’ll be simpler to just save Earth instead.”

  Grigory laughed. He sounded genuinely tickled. “How? We won’t even reach Earth until the Lightbringer has been there for months, raining death and destruction on the planet!”

  Jack grinned, his eyes narrowing to lazy slits. “I suppose your orders are to go back the same way you came?”

  “Yes. We will perform a powered flyby of Venus, utilizing the Oberth effect. I think you are familiar with that type of maneuver?” Grigory nudged Jack, reminding him of the way he’d bragged about his Jupiter flyby last year.

  But that was nothing to what he had in mind now. “I’m actually considering a different Oberth maneuver. It would be highly doable to swing around the sun.”

  He had not told Keelraiser about this idea he’d been chewing over in his spare moments. Now he wished he had warned it. He dared not glance at Keelraiser to see its reaction. Keeping his gaze on Grigory, he explained, “Faster, simpler, shorter. Get it just right, and we’ll reach Earth at the same time the Lightbringer does.”

  “Jeepers creepers, Jack!” Linda exclaimed. “Inside Mercury’s orbit?”

  “Nope, between Mercury and Venus.”

  Linda shook her head. “You’d need SPF 5 billion.”

  “Ever heard of sunglasses? Seriously, though, we can rig a sunshade. That’s not a big deal.”

  Koichi said, “Neutrons.”

  “Neutrons, yeah,” Jack conceded. “Nasty little buggers.”

  “The closer to the sun you go, the higher the neutron flux.” The Japanese astronaut talked fast, as if determined to have his say before he was cut off. It reminded Jack of Hannah, who used to do that, too. And of course, Koichi and Hannah had worked together closely while they were building the SoD’s MPD engine. “Free-flying neutrons have a halflife of about 15 minutes, so a quarter of them have decayed by the time they get to Earth orbit. But down around Mercury, not only is the flux higher, but they are younger neutrons! And what does neutron flux do to ships and people?”

  “Oh, why don’t you tell me, Koichi,” Jack said. He was more disappointed than he wanted to admit that the Victory crew had not immediately seen the genius of his plan. “I can see you’re dying to.”

  “Neutron flux causes elements to change into other elements. Radioactive elements!”

  “Big fucking deal, to be honest with you.” Now Jack did look at Keelraiser. It was leaning back on its sharp elbows, gazing up at the upholstery-rip stars, listening—or pretending to listen—to the music. “We have a cure for that. I’ll save the details for tomorrow, as I wouldn’t want all of your heads to explode at once. But just take my word for it, radiation sickness is not a major issue.”

  “How can you say that?” Linda exclaimed.

  Jack stood up. “There’s a reason I don’t have two heads at this point.”

  He reached for Keelraiser’s hand and pulled it to its feet.

  “Come on.”

  “Where are you going?” Grigory demanded.

  “To relieve Alexei.”

  “Where is Alexei Dmitrovich?”

  “On the bridge, of course.”

  Jack stomped down the hill, pulling Keelraiser by the hand. The stickiness from the microwaved insects Keelraiser had been eating formed a seal between their palms. Jack let its hand drop as he veered aside to top up his squeeze bottle with krak. The alien booze, fermented from suizh, was a rare treat.

  “I suppose I fucked that up,” he said, returning to where Keelraiser was waiting for him beneath a birch-sized stand of yfrit. “But I don’t care. Jesus. Fly the SoD to the moon!? You might as well park a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in the garden.”

  “Perhaps it’s the Cloudeater they really want,” Keelraiser said.

  “Probably. But why would they give it to them? The Earth Party built that moon base. There’s no love lost between them and the space agencies.”

  “Follow the money,” Keelraiser said. “Is that correct?”

  Jack snorted. “Well, it’s out of the question, anyway. Hopefully I can persuade them to see sense.”

  “It might be easier if you spoke to them without me,” Keelraiser said, delicately.

  “Because they can’t handle talking to aliens?”

  “Well …”

  “You’re quite right, they can’t. That’s the other thing. How flipping rude can you be? They didn’t even have the decency to say ‘you’re welcome’ when people thanked them!”

  “They don’t have headsets.”

  “No, that’s not it. I passed my headset around so they could hear. The issue is that they don’t see you as human.”

  Keelraiser laughed.

  “You know what I mean,” Jack grumbled. Linda’s word, ‘squids,’ kept echoing in his head. The crew of the SoD had encountered the rriksti with open minds. But maybe that was no longer possible. Humanity had divided into two camps—for the Lightbringer’s false promises of interstellar friendship, and against the ‘squids.’

  They walked forward. Keelraiser said, “I had thought of doing a parabolic swing around the sun. But I didn’t think you would want to risk it.”

  “You know me.”

  They passed the band. It was not the rriksti custom for bands to perform facing their audience, as long as they were in bio-antenna range. The twenty-one musicians stood in a circle among the suizh plants, their hair swaying in complex patterns. They had no musical instruments. The entire range of signals that comprised their music, from spine-chilling sobs like a bagpipe to the droning low notes of an organ, came from their bio-antennas. The complexity of rriksti radio-speech allowed for a range of tonal colorations equal to a full orchestra. Skyler sat on a stool with his suitcase-sized amp at his feet, picking his guitar and singing. His strong tenor melded with the wall of sound in Jack’s headset, evoking ordinary human emotions of yearning and hope against a galactic panorama of loneliness.

  “Sky’s gotten to be really good,” Jack said. “I think this’s one of his songs.” It awed him to reflect that this musical fusion wouldn’t be possible without the same high-tech accomplishments that brought the Lightbringer to Earth. But Grigory, Linda, and Koichi were blind and deaf to the wow factor. All they cared about was the bloody moon.

  They climbed Staircase 3. On the way up, Jack pinged Alexei. As they reached the axis tunnel, Alexei emerged from the keel tube, followed, to Jack’s great surprise, by Nene.

  Jack peered up the keel tube. “Anyone else up there? Were you having your own private party?”

  “Kind of!” Alexei said, grinning. “Is there any food left?”

  Jack quickly filled him in on his conversation with Grigory and the others. “The whole moon business is dodgy as hell. See what you can find out.”

  “Leave it to me.”

  Jack flew onto the bridge, followed by Keelraiser.

  After the twilight in the hab, the lights on the bridge seemed shockingly bright. Jack closed the pressure door. Better safe than sorry, as Linda had said in a different context. With the door closed, the bridge also became radio-proof: the thickness of the steel plate at the top of the main hab, and two layers of hull, blocked bio-radio speech. So they had privacy in both the human and the rriksti senses.

  Jack turned a slow somersault in the air. He was drunk enough that the bridge seemed to revolve around him like a fairy carousel.

  “Do you want another fight?” Keelraiser said.

  “No. Do you?”

  “No.”

  CHA
PTER 28

  “Have some more krak,” Alexei said, topping up Grigory Nikolov’s cup. His plan was to get Grigory drunk and see what came out.

  “I should report you for drinking on the job,” Grigory teased with a gleam in his eye.

  “To who?” Alexei said. He sipped the sweetish, potent liquid in his own cup and glanced around the hill. The party was winding down. Full-bellied rriksti lay in groups, listening to the music, chatting and cuddling. Linda Moskowitz and Koichi Masuoka had also lain down, although not together. They looked to be asleep. Alexei judged it safe to say, “Pobeda?”

  The Pobeda would have been the Russian spaceship that met the SoD near Earth on its return, hijacking it and confiscating its expected cargo of alien goodies. Alexei had had orders to help with that. The malware installed on the SoD had also been a part of the scheme. He wasn’t sure what ditch the Pobeda project had died in, but it couldn’t be a coincidence that Pobeda meant Victory in English.

  “Just a joke,” Grigory said. “The Pobeda is dead, long live the Victory! If we lose our sense of humor, we’re doomed.”

  “Yes. So are you hijacking us?”

  Grigory snorted. Peering with bleary eyes into the jungle, he said, “Is there anything here worth having? All I see is plants.”

  “And aliens,” Alexei said, squeezing Nene’s hand, a gesture hidden from Grigory, as she was sitting on Alexei’s other side.

  “You must be crazy to bring all these squids.”

  “It’s a crazy universe.”

  “Exactly! Look at me. I should have been retiring next year. Me and the wife had plans to buy a little place on the Black Sea. I’d have spent my days fishing. Instead I’m trying to save the human race.” Grigory shook his head. “Everything’s changed, Alexei Dmitrovich.”

  Alexei nodded. He wondered if Grigory had changed. They’d had problems with each other on the ISS. Grigory was an old-school cosmonaut who made no secret of his belief that Alexei’s generation was Westernized and sissified. He was also in with the GRU clique who’d drafted Alexei into the Pobeda project.

  Still, it felt great to have someone to speak Russian with again. Feeling guilty about leaving Nene out of the conversation, Alexei snuggled an arm around her back and drew her against his side. They’d been together for almost a year now and were getting sloppy about keeping their relationship private. After all, they had nothing to be ashamed of, did they?

  “The government is relocating to Arkhangelsk,” Grigory said. “We survived Napoleon and Hitler, we’ll survive the squids! That’s what they say, anyway.”

  The fatalistic way Grigory was talking resonated with Alexei’s own thoughts. The SoD now had no hope of overtaking the Lightbringer. Arriving at Earth two months after the Lightbringer would begin its deadly work, they might—might—have a chance to disable the alien behemoth in orbit. If successful, they could save the portion of humanity that had hidden in bunkers above the Arctic Circle. It killed him that that was all they could hope to do. But you can’t fight the laws of physics.

  Grigory leaned forward. “You’ve got to help us, Alexei Dmitrovich. We need to work together.”

  Alexei tilted his head on one side. “Are we still trying to one-up the Americans?”

  *

  Jack floated on the bridge, parallel to the ceiling. He’d let himself get quite drunk. It took his mind off his disagreement with the Victory crew, and allowed him to enjoy a rare glow of contentment.

  “So what’s the absolute best film in history?” he said.

  It was always safe to talk about movies. Keelraiser had viewed vastly more films and TV shows than Jack had, starting from well before Jack was born, but they had some shared favorites. The original Dr. Who. The Life of Brian! Jack couldn’t believe he’d never mentioned Monty Python to Keelraiser before. He even used to have a Flying Circus sticker on his laptop, the one Alexei had smashed because it had the malware trigger on it.

  They’d got a lot of conversational mileage out of that, but now the joking mood had departed from Jack. Tipsy, not sleepy, but relaxed, he floated in flat circles, noting the corrosion damage on the ceiling wiring.

  “I would have to say The Passion of the Christ,” Keelraiser said.

  Jack opened his eyes wide. Keelraiser drifted nearby, at an angle to him. “You’re kidding! That gorefest? My all-time favorite is Independence Day.”

  “That gorefest?”

  “Er. Well.”

  “It’s different when it’s aliens taking a beating?”

  “Yeah, exactly. That’s it.” Jack rolled over in the air. He reached out and prodded Keelraiser in the chest. “I was extremely disappointed that you didn’t swoop down into the sky over Manhattan with guns blazing. I mean, that’s what I was training all my life for …”

  “Really?”

  “Not really. I wasted my youth chasing girls and generally having a good time.” Jack remembered when he’d turned the corner and left time-wasting fun and games behind. He could pinpoint it. The turning point had come on a beach in Wales, the night he got into a fistfight with Meeks about the merits of, yes, Independence Day.

  He remembered that eerie moment after their Mars flyby when he’d mistaken Keelraiser for Meeks. He gazed at Keelraiser’s profile. In the brighter light of the bridge, it was impossible, of course, to mistake it for a human. But there was no denying that the dead man and the living rriksti had certain traits in common. Obstinacy, quirkiness, and what Jack most admired, the self-belief it took to go your way when the chips were down and the whole universe seemed to be against you.

  Yet Keelraiser had served in the Darkside military. That didn’t seem to fit with its extreme independence of mind. Jack well remembered how military camaraderie and routine had fogged his own mind during his Iraq deployments, to the point that he’d had to get home before he was really able to think about what it meant to kill people.

  “How did you end up joining the military?” he said.

  Keelraiser arched its back. “Oh God, talk about wasting one’s youth. I was determined to get into the Krijistal. The last war but three had just broken out. My father was in the service. He actually held rather a high rank, which I suppose would correspond to admiral.”

  “Your dad was an admiral?!”

  “The ranks do not translate exactly. But yes, we were a prominent military family. I had three half-brothers and two half-sisters in the service—”

  “Gosh, it’s very good of you to slum it with the likes of us.” Jack pretended to tug his forelock.

  “Stop it,” Keelraiser said, laughing with its hair. It aimed a mock punch at him. “What I am trying to tell you is I was completely unqualified. I failed the entrance trials three times.”

  “And then your dad pulled strings?”

  “No. I did get in in the end, by other means.”

  “Why did you fail the first three times?” Jack couldn’t stop himself. Curiosity gripped him like a fever.

  “Because I’m not extroverted.”

  “I know, but …”

  “Extroversion is a key qualification for the Krijistal. It’s meant to be non-negotiable, although obviously, introverts like me do slip through the cracks.”

  Jack sighed. He turned in the air to face Keelraiser. Their bodies were aligned in the same plane. “Aren’t you extroverted at all? Really? Not even the tiniest bit?”

  Keelraiser reached out. Jack held still in the air. Keelraiser laid the tip of one finger in the hollow of his throat.

  “Do you feel anything?”

  The heavy, claw-like fingernail pressed gently into the notch at the top of Jack’s collarbone. His pulse beat against Keelraiser’s finger. A shuddery thrill ran through his body.

  “Well, I can’t really tell,” he said.

  Keelraiser reached out and pushed its other hand into Jack’s hair, taking care not to dislodge his headset. It grasped a handful of the blond—and now more than a few gray—strands. “Now?”

  Jack had grabbed Keelraise
r’s hair when they fought. Now Keelraiser was doing the same thing to him. It was a test of courage, and a challenge. He reached out and slid his fingers in among the gleaming black bioantennas. They ranged from the diameter of an electric cord, around the face, to the fat ones at the top of the skull that were thick enough to wrap your hand around. They felt velvety, hot and stiff, yet supple. He’d remembered that strange, enticing texture, and yes, it really was like that. He let the bio-antennas comb through his fingers like seaweed underwater.

  Keelraiser opened his mouth in a nervous rriksti grin. He let go of Jack’s hair. “Do you know how you look to me? I—I mean humans, in general.”

  “How?”

  “You’re so cute. Small and compact and… simply irresistible.”

  “I’m going to try not to take that personally.” Jack chuckled. “If you think us smelly, hairy men are cute, what about Linda? She’s very cute, isn’t she?”

  “Is Linda female?”

  “Er. Didn’t you notice?”

  “I couldn’t really tell the difference,” Keelraiser admitted.

  “We’re actually very different.” Jack yawned. “Up here …” He pointed to his head. “And down here.” He pointed to his groin. Then he took Keelraiser’s hand and placed it on the outside of his shorts.

  The long fingers pressed lightly. “It’s hard to tell …”

  “Try squeezing a bit.”

  The gentle pressure felt like erotic lightning shooting through Jack’s body. It ripped the scab off a need so deep it was like a wound.

  “It’s the weekend, you know,” Keelraiser said. He sounded nervous. His eyes were wide and expectant. Jack noticed that he was thinking of him as a he again, but so what, honestly? No one would ever know …

  His mind belatedly caught up to the conversation. “What? It’s not the weekend. It’s Tuesday. I think it is anyway.”

  “Never mind,” Keelraiser said. He cupped Jack’s shoulder with his other hand, bringing him closer. His fingers slipped inside the elastic waistband of Jack’s shorts, which were now far too loose for his waist.