“A snowball?” Skyler said, at the same time watching the red-hot instruments fade, and realizing how radically dumb a suggestion that was.
“Not very likely,” Hriklif said diplomatically. “We are on the far side of the sun from the Lightbringer, anyway.”
“Yeah, Jack was saying we won’t have to worry about them intercepting our comms for a while.”
“But not quite yet. Communications won’t become impossible until we cross Mercury’s orbit.”
Hriklif grabbed Skyler’s arm and towed him around the Victory, using his wrist rockets to vector them around the SoD’s much broader truss tower. Untethered spacewalking made Skyler sick with fear to this day, but he had learned to deal with it. They landed underneath the Cloudeater’s belly. The ramp was down, letting people in and out of the unpressurized cargo hold. Hriklif grabbed the edge of the cargo ramp and swung them both up and over it. Whoops-a-daisy!
“I don’t think Keelraiser’s on board at the moment,” Skyler said, when his pulse steadied enough for him to speak.
“Exactly,” Hriklif said. “He’s not. This is our chance.”
CHAPTER 35
Hannah floated in foot tethers too big for her feet, operating a lathe with a bed as deep as she was tall. She was in the Lightbringer’s vacuum dock, the on-board shipyard and parking lot. Preparations for the invasion of Earth were well underway. All up and down the length of the kilometer-long cavern, suited rriksti labored over shuttles floating above Hannah’s head. Every one of the shuttles was a blackened hulk, and many were missing their tails, as if they had been torn in half by immense hands.
Unfortunately, the vacuum dock, being well forward of the water tanks, had not blown up in the historic explosion eleven years ago. But Eskitul’s gang had disabled all the shuttles. There used to be seventy shuttles. Now there were sixty-nine wrecks. Eskitul and her followers had escaped in the last shuttle to Europa, where it and they presumably remained.
So the Lightbringer now effectively had no shuttles. But Ripstiggr never wrote anything off, so they were cannibalizing parts from the damaged ones. Sparks flew and smoke drifted through the dock. A vacuum forge melted down scrap metal. Enormous printers spat out replacement parts. Had there been any air, the din would have been overwhelming.
The activity centered around a handful of shuttles designated for refurbishment. These would transport the infantry to Earth’s surface after the first wave of bombardment.
Orbital bombardment used to be a science-fictional concept.
Now it was as real as the steel alloy rod in Hannah’s lathe.
Cast of slagged metal, the rod measured about three meters long. She mechanically wheeled the cutting tool up and down its length, honing it to cylindrical perfection.
Of course, orbital bombardment never had really been a science-fictional concept. That’s how most people thought of it, but aerospace professionals like Hannah knew it was all too easy.
Step one: Make a cylindrical projectile.
Step two: Line up your crosshairs.
Step three: Rods from God, baby.
She could have deliberately botched her work, so the projectile would tumble off-course in flight, but what would be the point? The guys working the other lathes would not botch their work, and final inspections would uncover any irregularities, which would definitely be blamed on Hannah. Besides, she clung to her professional work ethic. She would not make a mess of any task she was given … even if it was crafting a weapon of mass destruction.
Fortunately, she had a distraction from the job at hand.
“If people would disperse out of the cities, these things would have less impact,” she visualized in biophotons printed on the black, greasy chucks of the lathe.
Iristigut emailed back about one minute later. He was taking longer to respond to her emails these days. She assumed he was being kept busy, too. She glanced up at the suited rriksti levering a turbine out of a damaged shuttle overhead, wondering which one of them he was … or maybe he was one of the repair crew working on the Lightbringer’s HERF mast, since he knew a lot about weapons.
“The impact will depend on the accuracy of our targeting,” he emailed. “The rods’ll be mounted on guided missiles and fired from the Lightbringer’s main railgun.”
Ripstiggr had shown her the railgun after they finally got the rails fixed. A keel-mounted monster two kilometers long, it could theoretically accelerate projectiles so fast they melted. But that level of gee-whiz firepower wouldn’t be needed to devastate Earth’s cities. Just point and shoot.
“The calibration would only have to be out by a couple of decimals to divert the rods from heavily populated areas,” Iristigut suggested.
The scope of their conversations had expanded over the months from Rristigul tutorials, which were frustrating for Hannah as her progress remained painfully slow, to brainstorming ways to sabotage the Lightbringer’s assault on Earth. With the Shiplord chip, and Iristigut’s step-by-step instructions, Hannah should be able to do something. But it was a lot harder than it looked to come up with a plan that would amount to more than a futile gesture.
She screwed up her nose. “They’d notice something was wrong the minute the first rod landed in a field somewhere,” she transmitted. “No, it’s got to be something bigger. Something they can’t fix in a few minutes, or a few days, or a few years. Something like Eskitul did.”
She gazed up at the shuttles. Rriksti industrial-strength light bathed the vacuum dock, still dim by human standards, but bright enough for each ship to cast a shadow on the ‘floor’ of the dock where the manufacturing equipment stood. The shuttles reminded Hannah of the styrofoam models of space shuttles she had hung from her bedroom ceiling as a child … blackened, ravaged, as if her past had exploded, along with her future. The reality of the Lightbringer retrospectively tainted all her childhood dreams of spaceflight, and in some ways, that loss hurt the most. The magic was gone.
She turned off the lathe to clean up the fan-shaped field of scurf that had floated up from the cutting tool. She had a large magnet for this purpose. She waved it around to grab the shiny curls of metal out of the vacuum, stretching and twisting, and her muscles felt just fine, no aches anywhere. Even her crotch felt fine, when it should have been sore as hell, because there was no magic in the stars, but there was magic in Ripstiggr’s hands … and what do you know, there he was, drifting up from behind her machine. He just couldn’t leave her in peace. He floated up behind her and tried to wrap his arms around her. She pushed off from the lathe bed, writhed away, and her magnet came too near the work piece. It jerked in her hands and glommed onto the projectile with a clang that vibrated up her wrists.
“Damn.”
She braced her feet on the lathe bed and jerked in vain at the magnet. Ripstiggr circled her in his arms, closed his hands over hers, planted his feet either side of hers, and pulled. The magnet popped free.
“Thanks,” Hannah snapped. “Now go away. I’m busy.”
“We need to talk.”
“I am Shiplord, buddy. Scram.”
“Is it something I did?”
“You figure it might be? You figure maybe you went a bit too far?”
Weekend had followed weekend and every weekend Ripstiggr pushed her boundaries a bit further. She still went through the motions of hiding from him, but they both knew that was just the game they played. And why shouldn’t she play? Why shouldn’t she gorge herself on alien booze and alien cock? Her life was joyless enough the rest of the time. She had every right to grab the pleasures on offer. That’s what she told herself. But if biology must have its due, flesh also had its limits, and Ripstiggr had definitely gone too far last weekend. She turned her back on him and went back to work. In the corner of her eye she saw him float away.
She had a new email from Iristigut waiting. “Hannah, I won’t be able to email you for a couple of weeks. It’s unavoidable. I’m very sorry. But please keep emailing me your questions, and I’ll answer them w
hen I’m able. I’ll also try to come up with a solution to the problem we’ve been discussing.”
Hannah responded immediately. “Two weeks?!?” The prospect of not hearing from Iristigut for that long pushed her to the edge of panic. He was her lifeline. “You can’t just abandon me like that! Things are pretty bad with Ripstiggr right now, and I really need …” There was no delete key in the neural interface. You can’t unthink a thought, if you’re only human. “I really need your input,” she finished lamely. Send.
Whine, whine went the lathe, perfecting the missile with NYC’s name on it, or London’s, or Shanghai’s. A couple of minutes later, Iristigut’s reply popped up. “What’s going on with Ripstiggr? Please tell me.”
They had never discussed her bizarre, fucked-up relationship with Ripstiggr. She figured if Iristigut was on board, which he had to be, he knew all about it, and anyway, it was beside the point, had nothing to do with saving Earth. But now the need for a friendly ear overwhelmed her modesty. “He just keeps pushing it. OK, I don’t think I’ve got anything to be ashamed of. I’m Shiplord. I can have all the men I like. I’ve got a harem. Is there anything wrong with that? No! I deserve some fun to make up for having this chip in my head! But last weekend he really went too far. And now he’s acting like I did something wrong.”
She stewed anxiously while waiting for Iristigut’s answer. “What did he do?”
Hannah sighed. She wished she’d never opened this can of worms. “Is group sex normal for rriksti? Is it, like, something you guys normally do?”
Minutes passed. No reply. That’s it, Hannah thought. I’ve grossed him out. He’ll never talk to me again.
A second later, an even worse thought came to her. What if Iristigut were actually one of the guys she’d screwed over the weekend?
It had been Ripstiggr’s idea. Regardless of her claim to have a harem, she had not had one before this weekend. She’d never slept with any of the rriksti apart from Ripstiggr. But this time, he’d encouraged her—nay, coerced her, by threatening to cut off her access to krak—to do several of the others, separately and simultaneously. Hulk, Joker, and she didn’t even know the names of the other … six? Seven? Eight guys? Just remembering it made her want to cry.
It wasn’t that they’d hurt her. In fact they’d been very respectful, insofar as they could be respectful while having energetic sex with her (and one another; when she said group sex she’d meant it). No, what hurt was the memory of Ripstiggr watching. Mouth open. She’d actually caught him playing with himself. Not only did he not care that these other guys were doing her, he’d gotten off on it.
And now fear twisted the screw further. What if one of those other guys had been Iristigut? What if she’d fucked him without even knowing it?
“You have to tell me who you really are!” she emailed, desperately.
No reply came. Hannah bit her lip, stricken with regret. As if it wasn’t bad enough to prospectively lose contact with Iristigut for two weeks, now she’d lost him forever.
CHAPTER 36
Minutes ticked away and still Iristigut didn’t reply. Hannah’s sense of loss shaded into anger as she glanced up and saw Ripstiggr harassing the rriksti at work on the shuttle directly overhead. It was all his fault. It had been his idea, and on account of him, she’d lost her only friend.
She switched off the lathe, kicked out of her foot tethers, and flew straight up through the vacuum dock. A shuttle loomed above her. She caught the wing and went hand over hand along its trailing edge to the fuselage. A jump took her into the forest of heat radiator fins. She kicked off again and used her wrist rockets to flip in the air. The aft hull plates had been removed. She dived down to the flayed spine of the shuttle, forward of the engine bell, where Ripstiggr was giving hell to the poor saps working on the reactor.
“It shouldn’t be unfixable,” Hannah said sweetly. She was so pissed off that she rashly revealed the depth of her knowledge about the disaster, gleaned in bits and pieces from Iristigut. “All they did was crank the reactors and disable the speed controls on the turbines. Result, the heat rejection systems melted, the turbines exploded, and in most cases, the back end of the ship blew off. This one’s in better shape than most. The radiator fins are still there, and the reactor housing’s undamaged, which probably means it’s OK. You just need to test it out. Inspect the cooling systems, hook up a generator to provide a load …”
“Which is exactly what I told these schleerps to do, several hours ago,” Ripstiggr said. “Have you finished your work?”
“Anyone can run a lathe. I’ll do this. It’s my specialty.”
“I gave you that task,” Ripstiggr said, pointing down.
“And I am Shiplord, and I’m giving myself this task.” She jerked her helmet at the cringing rriksti workers. “Buzz off.”
As soon as they were gone, Ripstiggr pinned her on the top of the reactor housing, where they couldn’t be seen from the floor. “Damn these suits. They get in the way.” He brushed his thumb over her right breast. Her nipple poked up against the material of her suit. “I want you right now.”
“It’s not the weekend.” Hannah struggled. He had no business getting all handsy after what he’d let those other guys do.
“The weekend is a social construct,” Ripstiggr said, in blithe contradiction of the biological facts as she knew them.
At that moment a long email from Iristigut plopped into her notifications. She read it hastily, superimposed on Ripstiggr’s black-shrouded face and floating hair.
“This is not the kind of question I expected to be answering,” Iristigut began. “I have been trying to think how to respond. Briefly, there is a rriksti concept which I can only translate as ‘test to destruction.’ As an engineer, you should be familiar with this concept in the context of materials testing. A substance is broken down to determine its strength. We do the same thing to people. It’s sometimes called ‘professional training,’ sometimes ‘intimacy,’ and sometimes, with unusual honesty, ‘punishment.’ Context is all.”
Hannah changed her mind about Iristigut being one of the guys she’d screwed over the weekend. Those dudes would be completely incapable of analysis like this, let alone such articulate and grammatical English sentences. She actually couldn’t think of anyone on the Lightbringer whose English was as good as Iristigut’s.
“You are Shiplord, but you were never tested. I think Ripstiggr is testing you now. He is trying to find out how much you can take—emotionally, physically—so that he’ll know how far he can rely on you. I strongly advise that you refuse to cooperate.”
Easier said than done. Ripstiggr was pawing at her. She could hardly keep the wobbling golden words in focus.
“I used to be part of that culture, too,” Iristigut wrote. “I participated in the cycles of destruction. Then I changed my mind. I decided that extroversion is not next to saintliness, testing to destruction is not love, conquest is not healing, and war is not peace. In short, I saw what was in front of my eyes. It is all complete bullshit. You belong to the Judaic religion, don’t you, Hannah? I found some Talmudic quotations that seem to apply …”
The Talmudic quotations followed, at length. Hannah stopped reading. “Screw you,” she responded. “I didn’t ask for a goddamn sermon! I just need a way to stay alive until I can figure out how to sabotage this ship!”
“Why are you staring at me like that?” Ripstiggr said.
“I wasn’t staring at you,” Hannah said. “I was interfacing with the chip.”
… how to sabotage this ship …
She’d said it herself. That was the answer! They’d been brainstorming ways to sabotage the weapons systems, but that was small potatoes.
Go big or go home, Ginsburg.
Sabotage the Lightbringer itself.
My baby, she thought. I can’t hurt my baby—but that was the Shiplord chip talking. She was not a rriksti and this ship was not her baby. It was the instrument of Earth’s destruction.
“What’
s it saying?” Ripstiggr said, floating above her, caging her with his arms and legs.
She quickly instructed the chip to acquire telemetry from the reactor beneath them. “Wow.” Her eyebrows rose in unfeigned surprise. “Good thing they didn’t start this sucker up yet. The gauge field settings are screwed. Jacked way up. Let me have a proper look.”
She slid free and floated down to the reactor control panels. The chip printed transliterated Rristigul on her optic nerve, augmenting the physical displays. She matched the words with the cheat sheet Iristigut had put together for her. “OK, gotta recalibrate the gauge field. Don’t want to make it too strong, or it’ll produce too much fleurovium-298 …”
Ripstiggr floated behind her. She knew for a fact that he knew less about the proton-lithium-6 fusion reaction than she did at this point, although he would never admit it. None of the Krijistal were nuclear scientists. Not one of them was even a propulsion specialist. And none of them had an Iristigut to teach them about the finer points of muon-catalyzed fusion. They had gotten this far by reading the user manuals and pushing the right buttons. It was a miracle they hadn’t blown themselves up yet …
… a miracle …
That’s it.
I’ll give them a miracle.
I’ll give them the biggest boom they’ve ever seen.
It unfolded in her head like the solution to a knotty engineering problem, as obvious as 2+2.
Blow up the Lightbringer.
Save Earth.
She saw herself escaping from the big boom … maybe in one of these very shuttles. Soaring away to safety. Leaving all her problems behind.
“Funny,” she mused aloud. “This one really is different from the others.” She waved at the other shuttles hanging in their mangled ranks. “Those ones blew up. This one didn’t.” And here, she thought, was the key to her miracle. She began to regret her irate email to Iristigut. “Sorry I yelled at you,” she emailed. “Does calibrating the gauge field to a higher setting increase the strength of the strong force, or just cause it to operate across a larger region in the core of the reactor?”
Shiplord: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 3) Page 24
