CO2 CONCENTRATION 4.2%.
Skyler’s mouth dropped open. He lunged for the monitor built into the wall and clicked up the atmospheric sensor readouts. “No, it isn’t.”
YOUR COMPUTER IS WRONG. I HAVE AIR QUALITY SENSOR, MANY SENSORS INTEGRATED INTO MY ROBE. Nene touched the garment Skyler thought of as a smock. THIS IS STANDARD GARB FOR CLERICS.
“Oh shit,” Skyler said. “Oh shit oh shit oh shit.” So that’s why he felt so out of breath. “There’s gotta be something wrong with the valves …”
*
On the bridge, a voice abruptly crackled from the intercom. “Hey Jack! It’s Linda.”
Jack startled violently. He sprang away from Keelraiser. He smoothed down his shorts, heart pounding with embarrassment.
Nothing had happened, he told himself. “Nothing happened,” he said to Keelraiser.
“Nothing happened,” Keelraiser agreed, floating in the air with his eyes closed.
“Why’ve you got the door shut?” Linda said over the intercom. “Ha, ha. Can I come in and hang out?”
Jack frowned at the solid plug of steel that blocked the keel tube. “Should I let her in?”
“It’s up to you,” Keelraiser said.
“Oh come on, Jack. I know you’re in there,” Linda said playfully.
“That just sounds really off somehow.” Jack flew to the intercom. “You OK, Linda?”
There was a pause. Then Linda seemed to break down. “Jack, they tried to kill us! When we tried to go back to our ship—just to, to get some stuff—they attacked us! They hit us!”
“Who did?”
“The squids! Can you let me in, please? I don’t feel safe out here!”
“They wouldn’t have hurt you,” Jack said unsympathetically. His instincts yelped at him that something was wrong here.
“They hit us!”
“It’s their way of showing affection.”
“They’re monsters!”
Jack yawned, oddly as he wasn’t sleepy at all. “All right, I’ll ping them and ask them to stop monstering at you for a while.” He moved to the comms console and set the radio to the EVA frequency. “Hello Brbb? Come in.”
He knew it had to have been Brbb and company, because he’d asked them to weld the Victory to the truss tower. Those bungee cables didn’t look very secure at all.
A furious stream of Rristigul erupted from the headset. Jack ripped it off and fell backwards, clutching his ears.
Keelraiser leapt for the console and muted the piercing harmonics. His hair stabbed the air as he spoke in Rristigul, piggybacking on the open channel.
“Bad news, I’m afraid,” he said to Jack, tossing the headphones in his direction. “You’d better talk to Giles.”
Jack held the headphones sideways to his face. “Giles?”
“I am on the Victory,” Giles said. “With the Krijistal. I estimate that we have now opened a representative sample of the Victory’s cargo. It is all stuff for them, Jack—those salauds. Sorry, I know they’re your friends. Life-support supplies, personal items, MREs. There is no Shit We Need. I exaggerate. There were two or three boxes containing our items, in the forward module, near the airlock. Those held a small amount of the micronutrients and medical supplies we requested. But there is no more. Those things were only there to—to pass a cursory inspection. Merde!” Even the even-keeled Giles could not relate these horrific facts with equanimity.
“Oh my fucking God,” Jack said. “Well, I suppose we can eat the MREs.” He drew a shuddering breath. “All right, Giles. Stay where you are for the moment. I’ll get back to you shortly.”
Anger boiling, he leant to the intercom. “Linda, I think we’d better talk. Stand by. I’m opening the door.”
Keelraiser said, “Are you sure that’s wise?”
“I want to know what’s going on here.” Jack flew to the aft wall, braced his feet on the bulkhead, and turned the crank.
The door opened a crack.
When the crack was the width of a human body, a hand shot through it.
The hand was not Linda’s. It was large and hairy.
It held a gun.
The gun fired into the bridge. In the confined space, the noise was worse than any rriksti harmonics.
Jack spun away from the pressure door, reflexively ducking for cover, although there wasn’t any.
Grigory forced his bulk through the gap and levelled his gun at Jack, keeping his aim steady even as he drifted across the bridge under his own momentum. That took training.
Behind him, Koichi burst onto the bridge, bringing his own weapon to bear on Jack.
Keelraiser dropped from the ceiling of the bridge like a spider. He pounced on Koichi and wrestled him.
Jack saw this blurrily past the gun barrel aimed between his eyes. It did concentrate the mind.
“Jack, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Grigory kept one eye on the melee as he faced Jack, holding his gun level in a two-handed grip. “I am relieving you of command.”
Jack took a deep breath. Ceramic fragments and dust were swirling around. Grigory’s gun was loaded with frangible bullets which would not damage the ship. But at this range, they’d damage him. Terminally. “Why?”
“It’s been decided that you’re no longer fit for command.”
“This is sort of coming out of the blue.”
“You’ve been asking for it for the last year and a half!” Linda screamed. She had a gun, too. She was pointing it at Keelraiser and Koichi, trying to get a clear shot as they wrestled.
“I don’t want to do this, Jack,” Grigory said. “I would like you to join us. I would like to have your skills, your experience. But we cannot trust you anymore. Call that squid off before it kills Koichi! He’s your friend, no? Are you going to let it kill him?”
Something crackled. Grigory glanced away for a second. Koichi fell away from Keelraiser, frozen in a rigid, unnatural crouch.
Linda fired her pistol.
Jack flung himself into a backwards somersault, straight through the curtain in the corner. He wrenched open his personal locker.
When Grigory came through the curtain he came face to face with a Super Soaker.
“I picked this up on Europa,” Jack panted. “It’ll vaporize your brain and leave your skull full of radioactive ion soup. Want a demonstration?”
He pushed Grigory back out through the curtain.
Keelraiser held a taser. He was bleeding from one arm, but seemed not to have noticed. “This is a torture weapon,” he said through the intercom. Jack’s headset was not working. “Banned on Imf.”
Linda fired at Keelraiser again. Ceramic shards rebounded from the comms console housing.
Jack swung the Super Soaker to cover her. “Drop your weapon, Linda!”
“Don’t shoot me. I have a kid,” Linda gasped. Then, strangely, she yawned.
From the intercom, Skyler’s voice crackled. “… CO2 is way up …”
CHAPTER 31
“We were ordered to stand off until the sterilization protocol was complete,” Grigory said.
“Sterilization protocol?” Jack said. He unscrewed the air compressor from the wall of the secondary life support module. It had to be the valves. What a coincidence that the valves should fail at the exact moment when the Victory’s crew came on board. Behind the air compressor was a cavity filled with plumbing. Jack held the compressor away from the wall while Alexei—groaning, still recovering from being tased and hit on the head—peered into the cavity and examined the valves. “Sterilization protocol,” he repeated in a voice heavy with disgust.
While they worked, a long line of rriksti edged through SLS. They were moving across to the Cloudeater as fast as possible. Still reeling from the effects of the taser, whose electromagnetic pulses had deafened and tortured them, the civilians were now also sliding into narcosis as the CO2 concentration in the air pushed 6%. The Krijistal, spacesuited, flew up and down the line, keeping everyone moving. There weren’t enoug
h suits for everyone, never had been. Spare oxygen tanks could only do so much good, especially as the weaker civilians were too confused to breathe into face masks. At 8% they would start dying. Gotta get this fixed, now.
“It was meant to be quick and painless,” Grigory said. “They would have gone peacefully to sleep.”
Skyler was on the bridge, but because they were all in their EVA suits, he could listen in on the radio. “Oh yeah, carbon dioxide toxicity, that’s a real painless way to die. And what about us? What was supposed to happen to us?”
“We were also supposed to die, of course,” Alexei said. “Jack, there is nothing wrong with these valves.”
“I tried, damn it!” Grigory said. “I tried to save you, Alexei Dmitrovich! But you chose the squids.”
“Are you sure?” Jack said to Alexei, ignoring Grigory.
“Yes. See here, the purified, oxygenated air comes out of the algae tanks. It is fed into the air circulation system. This pipe feeds old air into the tanks. It’s working fine.”
“Shit,” Jack said, at a loss. He rounded on Grigory, Linda, and Koichi, who floated in a huddle, with Keelraiser pointing two blasters at them, one in each hand. “It’s not the valves. What is it? What is it?”
“Dunno,” Koichi said. He sounded exhausted, his voice as colorless as recycled paper. “We just clicked where it said to click.”
“The malware,” Skyler said.
“Yeah,” Jack said.
“I see,” Alexei said. “The Americans found out about the Pobeda project, so we had to cut them in.”
Grigory bristled. “They wanted to send drones. We convinced them that Zmeyka was a more elegant solution.”
Alexei suddenly slapped his palm with his socket wrench. “He asked me if I still had the malware trigger. I said I destroyed it.”
“I’ve got a copy!” Skyler broke in.
“You have?” Alexei said. “I thought we destroyed them all.”
“Um, it was like, I really need this laptop. So yeah. I know it was dumb—”
“Not that dumb!” Alexei said. “The trigger is also the off switch. It’s got to be!” He broke into Russian.
While Alexei and Grigory snarled at each other in Russian, Jack replaced the air compressor. A comatose rriksti floated out of the queue and caught on the algae tanks like a flag, barely living.
“Try the output,” Keelraiser said.
“It can’t be the output,” Jack said.
But it was.
At the other end of the string of algae tanks, the exhaust air from the tanks entered a feedback loop. This was supposed to return air to the tanks if it still had too much CO2 in it. But the feedback loop had turned into a dead end. All the air was going back into the front of the loop, blocking any stale air from being processed by the algae.
Jack disconnected the exhaust pipe and pointed it at the rriksti caught on the tanks. “It was the CO2 sensor.” He was so angry his vision tunneled. “It wasn’t you lot this time,” he said to Keelraiser. “It was them.”
“What’s wrong with the sensor?” Alexei said.
“Stuck on eleven.” Jack dug a gloved hand into the wiring and ripped out the electrical leads. Then he prised the CO2 sensor out with his screwdriver, and approached the rriksti on the tanks. It was blinking and starting to recover as sweet, oxygenated air blew into its face. “Here,” he whispered. “Have this.”
The rriksti took the sensor delicately from his fingertips. It shrugged, and crunched it between its teeth.
“Copper,” Jack whispered. “Silver, germanium.” His own mouth watered sympathetically as the rriksti savored the metals in the chip.
“They are saying we didn’t get the Shit We Need,” it said.
“Right. We only got a tiny bit of it. Effectively nothing. But if it’s any consolation, we’ll start yanking the semiconductors out of everything when we’re finished here. You can eat those.”
“Um,” Koichi said. Just the tiniest grunt of disagreement, but it set Jack off.
“What else am I going to do? I can’t trust the computer anymore. There was probably something else coming after this. Wasn’t there?” the Victory crew didn’t know, of course. They hadn’t designed the malware. They’d just clicked where it said to click. “So the computer’s got to stay off. We’ll have to do everything manually. Shit, shit!”
Alexei grabbed his arm. “Not necessarily.”
“We can’t take the risk of something like this happening again.”
“Grigory confirms it. There is an off switch. It’s in the trigger. And Skyler has a copy.”
“Skyler,” Jack said, “can you fix this?” No matter what he said, he needed the damn computer. The SoD was dead in space without it.
“Theoretically, yeah,” Skyler said. “Actually? I’m gonna have to call the NXC.”
CHAPTER 32
Flaherty got goosebumps as he listened to Skyler Taft’s voice, transmitted across the immense distance between the SoD and Earth. The spooky thing was Skyler sounded the same as always. Flaherty could close his eyes and imagine they were standing on a stoop in Arlington, Massachusetts, chatting about aliens.
Flaherty knew he’d screwed up, back in 2019, when he subbed Skyler in for Lance at the last minute. He had had no alternative. But a sensitive Harvard Ph.D couldn’t fill the shoes of a balls-to-the-wall redneck. The mission had suffered for it, the NXC had suffered for it, and Skyler himself had probably suffered most of all. When Skyler screamed at him from Europa to get fucked, Flaherty had shrugged—he’d known that was coming.
Now Skyler was relating a bitter tale of betrayal and failure.
Skyler’s betrayal.
Flaherty’s failure.
The unelected president of the United States felt every one of his sixty-two years as he listened to Skyler’s ultimatum.
“Tell me how to disable the malware,” Skyler said, “or Linda, Koichi, and Grigory get it.” He laughed, faintly. “I have to tell you, Jack wouldn’t do it. He’s got a, what do you call it? It’s on the tip of my tongue … Oh yeah. A moral compass. I , obviously, haven’t.”
The self-accusation revealed just how badly the NXC had damaged Skyler Taft.
“I killed Oliver Meeks. Surprised? Did Lance tell you he did it? Nope, that was me.”
“I did not know that,” Flaherty said to Kuldeep, who was listening with him on speaker.
“So I’ve already crossed that line. Also, I don’t give shit one about these guys. Jack and Alexei know them from the old days. Jack is like, we’ll just make them clean the toilets until they say sorry. Are you kidding? These people tried to murder us all, and we’re gonna let them walk around like nothing happened? I would be very happy to feed them to the fish. I don’t give a fuck about their families. And I know where the guns are.” A staticky pause. “So. Ball’s in your court. Want to keep them alive? Tell me how to disable the malware. You have 24 hours. Out.”
The recorded transmission ended.
Kuldeep said, “This is the guy Lance picked to work with him after I got fired, right?”
“Right,” Flaherty said. “Lance had a real eye for potential.”
“I thought he was this wimpy scientist dude. He sounds badass.”
“He’s gone over to the squids, body and soul,” Flaherty said. He glared bleakly at the computer which had been playing the recorded transmission, remembering that dumb peace symbol Skyler used to wear.
“Yup,” Kuldeep said. “That came across loud and clear. He’s self-alienated. Just like Hannah.”
Flaherty roused himself to do what had to be done. “Call Moscow,” he said to his chief of staff, who was hovering obsequiously at the door. “Get hold of whoever it is in the GRU who knows this shit. ASAP, before they get put in front of a firing squad. Got it? Tell them to write it down, step by step, no mistakes, and send it by secure courier to Houston for transmission to the SoD.”
“You’re doing what they want?” Kuldeep yelped.
Flaherty gaz
ed at him bleakly. “Son, what happened to your moral compass?”
“On it, Mr. President,” said the chief of staff. “Will there be anything else at this time?”
“Yeah. Get the plane fueled up. We’re going to Florida.”
*
On the bridge of the SoD, Skyler, Jack, and Alexei watched Mission Control’s reply come in. It was packaged in a clip from a nature documentary, as usual. Skyler downloaded it to his laptop and decrypted it.
Jack let out a whoop. “That looks right! Is it?”
Skyler swiftly read through the payload file. “Yup,” he said huskily. “It’s instructions for switching off the malware.” Relief flooded him. He leaned back and pulled his hair out of its ponytail, trying to cool the sweat that clung to his scalp. “I guess they believed me.”
“It was a great performance,” Alexei said.
“Oscar-winning,” Jack said.
Skyler glanced at them. He wondered if his performance had been too good. Maybe he shouldn’t have referred to the murder of Oliver Meeks. He knew Jack was still sore about that, even after all these years, despite Skyler’s apologies.
And Alexei was rubbing his shoulder, where a starburst of faint scars commemorated the place Skyler’s frangible bullet had gone in. Skyler had apologized for that, too.
But apologizing was never enough, was it? No matter what he did to prove his loyalty, they still saw him as the Fed he used to be. He’d put his soul on the line to save the SoD, and even that wasn’t enough.
“So what are we going to do with them?” he said.
Jack shook his head tiredly. He had been up all night, Skyler knew, fixing the output of the algae tanks and monitoring the air quality until it returned to normal. The rriksti were moving back in as they spoke. “I don’t know. There’s no good solution.”
Yes, there is. Throw them out of the airlock, Skyler thought. Because that was the really sad thing. He hadn’t been lying on the radio. He’d seen the fury and defiance on the faces of Grigory, Linda, and Koichi, and he believed they would try again if they got the ghost of a chance. He’d feel better if they were sleeping with the fishes.
Shiplord: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 3) Page 21
