“Thanks, Avigdor,” John Kildare said. “Thanks very much.” He hung up, having carefully copied down the Spirit of Destiny’s coordinates.
In the UK, dawn was breaking. John had been awake for a hour already. Helen was still asleep. She had a marvellous ability to remain serene in the teeth of the approaching apocalypse. He almost hated to disturb the sweet, lined face resting on the pillow. “Rise and shine, love. Avigdor says we ought to be able to see them.”
John had become close to Avigdor Taft, despite never having met him in person. They’d struck up an email relationship on the basis of their unique tragedy. Both of them had sons aboard the Spirit of Destiny. Superficially, not much else linked the dissolute American portrait artist and the British retired science teacher, but John believed he’d been able to help Avigdor in some small way by speaking to him of God’s love for man: not a sparrow falls to the ground without your Father knowing it …
Now Avigdor had returned the favor. John and Helen put on their coats over their pyjamas and went out into the garden. John got his telescope out of the garage.
The dawn chorus of birds was tuning up. The half-light softened the village street of near-identical brick houses. Less identical were the gardens. A year ago, in her unfussy way, Helen had started replacing her artistic wilderness of flowers with vegetables. John set up the telescope between the cabbages and the potato patch. The smell of dew-wet grass rose up as he settled the tripod into the ground.
“Is that it?” Helen said, pointing up at a luminous star.
“No, love, that’s Mercury,” John said. “It just so happens that both Mercury and Venus are near maximum elongation at the moment. Yesterday when I went down to the shopping centre, there were more than a few numpties standing around with binoculars. It emerged that they thought Venus was the Lightbringer.”
“Did you get the candles?”
“They’d run out.”
“I should have thought of candles before,” Helen said. “And extra batteries. And pepper spray. And a baseball bat. Some American I am.” She hadn’t lived in the States since they were married.
“If the aliens try to steal our cabbages, I’ll hit them with this,” John said. The telescope was quite heavy. Fiddling with the focus, he sighed in frustration, and then— “There it is.”
The viewfinder cupped a bright, elongated blur, still invisible to the naked eye.
“Coming in at two o’clock high.”
John stepped back to let Helen see. His heart thudded with longing and helplessness. Out of habit, he framed a silent prayer. Jesus Jesus Jesus. Recently, he had no words for their plight. He could only call on the name of the Lord in inarticulate desperation. Jesus Jesus.
Helen said in a choked voice, “Are you sure that’s it? It really is the Spirit of Destiny?”
“Yes.”
She stepped back from the telescope, shoulders shaking. Unflappable Helen was crying. “Oh, Jack,” she whispered. “Oh, my little boy.”
“He’s coming home,” John said as he patted her hand. “He promised he would come home and he’s bloody well doing it!”
The actual sight of the Spirit of Destiny’s drive plume hit them like a crowbar, knocking loose a four-year accumulation of hope and fear.
Despite the early hour, not everyone in Nuneaton was asleep. John wasn’t the only one who found it near-impossible to stay in bed with the end of everything just four days away. A Prius cruised along the street. John ambled down to the curb. The Prius halted and an acquaintance from church put his head out the window. “You’re out early, John. Morning, Helen.”
“And yourself, Mike. Everything OK?”
“All quiet on the western front. Just having a check around.”
The Kildares made understanding noises. Earth Partiers had been trickling out from London, making nuisances of themselves. They dossed in gardens, and sometimes broke into houses that they took to be empty. Hence Helen’s wish list of pepper spray and a baseball bat. The small Catholic community of Nuneaton had formed a village patrol, as had the Anglicans and the born-again crowd at the Temple of the Living Word. The borough council had gone altogether to pieces.
“That your telescope, John?”
“Yes. Want a look?”
A few moments later, Mike (a general practitioner and father of four) stepped back from the telescope, visibly shaken. He turned to the Kildares and stretched out his hands in an impulsive gesture. “Do you know, the future of humanity probably depends on your son?”
“Terrifying, isn’t it?” John said dryly.
*
Four and a half thousand miles away, in the foothills of Montana’s Beartooth Mountains, it was still dark. As soon as Isabel Ziegler walked out of camp, she walked out of the 21st century. Trudging through the snow-trimmed pines, she could’ve been a Native American girl a thousand years ago. What, she wondered, would remain here a thousand years in the future, after the aliens landed?
She hadn’t brought a flashlight, because she wanted her eyes to adjust to the dark as quickly as possible. She held up her hands to keep branches from poking her in the eye, knowing that she wouldn’t see them coming. The scent of fir needles and pine resin prickled her nose. The trail was overgrown. The adults had let that happen on purpose, so it would be harder for outsiders to guess that they were here.
Isabel’s parents, Bethany and David, had moved the family out here after California seceded. They’d joined a community of ten families headed by an old friend of Dad’s. Yurts, an outdoor firepit, polytunnels where they grew stuff. No internet, no TV, no electric light. The adults had been lawyers, executives, doctors, stage mothers; now they chopped wood, hauled water, hunted deer, and quarrelled bitterly over the precise positioning of solar panels. Isabel’s brother Nathan and the other little kids looked after the chickens and goats. Isabel, at sixteen, occupied an in-between place. There was no one else within a couple of years of her age. They’d assigned her to record-keeping, because of her meticulous nature. Total drag. Yet she enjoyed the outdoor life, despite the bitter cold and snowfalls they had weathered during their first months here. The only thing she really missed about Pacific Heights was swimming.
Her coach had thought she might make it to the Olympics in 2024.
But there would be no Olympics in 2024, because the aliens were coming in four days.
The trail Isabel padded along—her eyes now adjusted to the darkness, her hiking boots crunching dead leaves crisp with frost—led to the lake, where she had swum during the winter, even when she had to crack the ice with her arms like a miniature icebreaker.
She came out of the trees on the bluff above the lake, and the stars exploded over her head.
This was one thing she liked about Montana. The stars. She had literally never known there were so many of them.
But tonight she was looking for one star in particular.
Out here, far away from any light pollution, it could already be seen with the naked eye.
Soon, it would be the brightest thing in the sky.
Last night and the night before, they’d all traipsed out of camp to gaze at it. The adults had joked dismally about the War of the Worlds. The ironic thing, Isabel thought, was that they’d hidden up here to escape the collapse of civilization. They were terrified of what they saw the Earth Partiers doing to the cities, and hoped the squids would restore the world to rights. But actually they were terrified of the squids, too. Isabel wasn’t fooled. She’d heard her parents talking about things they heard on the ham radio network connecting similar farflung prepper communities. The squids are going to nuke the whole planet back to the Stone Age. They’ve got chemical weapons. Genetic weapons. Nanobots. Plague.
If the Zieglers had more money they would have run away to the moon, like the Silicon Valley elite had. But they didn’t have that much money, so the best they could do was to run away to Montana, with thousands of dollars’ worth of survival equipment in their brand new 4WD.
Last night, the adults’ smiley-
happy façade had cracked a bit. Isabel’s mother had said, “Maybe they’ll make an exception for us.”
“Nukes don’t make exceptions for anyone,” Gloomy Greg, the former plastic surgeon, had said. The subject was dropped there—don’t scare the kids!—but it touched on the reason the Zieglers had been welcomed into the community in the first place, when other refugees from LA got turned away.
They were exceptions. Because Hannah Ginsburg was Isabel’s aunt.
Isabel hugged her knee-length parka around her, and stared at the stars on the horizon. The mountain peaks on the far side of the lake gave her two points of a triangle.
The third point was a silver pinprick. It looked more like a faint planet than a star.
Definitely brighter than it had been last night.
“Hey, Aunt Hannah,” Isabel said. “Are you coming to see us? It’s been a while.”
She snickered humorlessly. She’d admired and looked up to her aunt when she was little, but Hannah had rarely made the time to visit. Never came to any of Isabel’s swim meets. And then there was the time she’d dropped Nathan in the pool because she was drunk. Isabel knew that her parents would forgive Hannah for everything in a split second if she used her influence with the squids to save them. She was made of prouder stuff.
“We don’t need you,” she informed the Lightbringer. “We’re doing just fine on our own.”
Except everything was already ruined. No Olympics. No pool. No school, no friends, no future.
Isabel excelled at pretending everything was OK, but as she gazed at the Lightbringer, her defenses crumbled, and tears came to her eyes, making the alien ship twinkle.
“It’s all your fault, Aunt Hannah,” she muttered, echoing her mother’s words four years ago. “You may be a great scientist, but you’re a shitty human being, and you’re an alcoholic.”
CHAPTER 40
Hannah sipped krak on the rocks, glued to the view from the bridge. As the Lightbringer raced closer to Earth, the faint blue dot in the black sky gradually got brighter. She struggled to wrap her mind around the reality that after four years of hardship and misery, she was almost home.
The sight was all the more poignant because she knew now she would never get there.
She’d counted on getting Iristigut’s help to steal one of the refurbished shuttles. But he had dropped out of touch for two weeks, and when he reestablished contact, he’d told her no way Jose. You needed a special type of implant to fly a shuttle.
Well, wasn’t he a shuttle pilot? Didn’t he have the right kind of implant?
Yes and yes, but he wouldn’t or couldn’t do it, and it was too late by then to think of another escape route.
There was no other escape route.
So she’d just have to go down with the ship.
As a Shiplord should.
She raised her glass of krak to Earth. Tears blurred her vision.
The rriksti assumed she was toasting the success of their mission. They whistled and stomped their feet. They were in a festive mood, euphoric as the moment of victory approached. How she wished she could share their excitement.
“Shiplord! Shiplord! This is all thanks to you,” they said, clustering around to touch her feet, which was the rriksti equivalent of hand-kissing. Every crew member had something nice to say about her ‘achievement’ in bringing them all this way. Even Gurlp: “Best Shiplord I ever serve with.”
“I didn’t do anything.” Hannah rolled her eyes.
“Exactly,” Gurlp said, rolling her eyes right back.
But Hannah was going to do something. Soon. Iristigut emailed her again, reminding her that time was running out.
“I know,” she visualized and sent. “I know! I’m going to do it today!”
The Shiplord chip interrupted her. It had gotten smarter, figured out her notifications filter. Now, when it wanted her to see something, it put her name in the subject line. The messages were still in transliterated Rristigul, but she’d learned enough of the language from Iristigut that she could sometimes pick up the gist. It helped when there were pictures attached, like this one. “What’s this?” She looked around for Ripstiggr. “Radar’s acquired a potential enemy / ally?”
(Rristigul had one word that covered both meanings, which could be frequency-nuanced to mean either thing, but in alphabetic transliteration it was just the one word, lividdr.)
“Oh, that,” Ripstiggr said. “See? Up there.”
He pointed at the zenith of the transparent ceiling. Hannah shook her head. “All I see is stars.”
“Maybe you need to take a closer look.” Ripstiggr picked her up and set her on his shoulders.
“Put me down!” Hannah yelped.
“I will not put you down.” His seven-fingered hands wrapped securely around her calves. His bio-antennas swayed in front of her face like velvety silver snakes.
She was still holding her drink. “Watch out below,” she said, tipping the glass.
The rriksti stomped their feet as Ripstiggr tilted his head back and caught the stream of krak in his mouth. “Whew!” He shook himself. Hannah swayed. “Can you see it now?”
“Chip, give me some freaking help,” Hannah said. “This lividdr. Where is it?”
The chip painted a red polygon around a very faint star.
“What is it?”
“It’s that little drone ship Earth launched last year. Remember? It chased us around Mars,” Ripstiggr said. “It went the other way around the sun, but now it’s caught up. What do you want to do about it?”
Hannah shook her head. “It’s unmanned, right?”
That was what the traffic intercepts said, according to Ripstiggr. Of course, he could be lying. Or the intercepts could be lying. But Hannah could not imagine that Earth would have launched another manned spacecraft, after the loss of the SoD and seven-eighths of the SoD’s crew. That would be political suicide.
“Blow it away,” she said. The decision came from a well of stored-up bitterness. Earth’s politicians had sent Hannah and her crewmates to their deaths. They deserved to pay for that … and they also deserved to know that some lousy little drone ship was no match for the Lightbringer.
“Just what I was thinking,” Ripstippr said. He carried her to the drive chancel. She stretched up and touched the sloping ceiling. Swarms of icons and menus flocked to her fingertips. Soon she’d figure out what they all meant … no, she wouldn’t, because soon she was going to die.
“You have to authorize the weapons systems, Shiplord,” Ripstiggr said.
Hannah detected tension, not in his voice, but in the bunched shoulder muscles under her thighs. He wasn’t quite sure she would actually betray her species when it came down to it.
“Authorize all weapons systems,” she said to the chip. One drone ship was a small price to pay to keep Ripstiggr from suspecting her disloyalty.
Ripstiggr set her down, but wrapped one arm around her to keep her close. He worked what had to be the targeting board, using gestures and bio-radio signals that the chip translated to her brain as chirps and beeps. “It’s right at the limit of the railgun’s effective range. 50% probability of a hit. We’ll wait until we get a bit closer.”
“I thought the railgun was specced out to eleven million klicks,” said Hannah, who had been doing a lot of base 14 to base 10 conversions recently.
“That would be with the original ammo. Lumps of slag just don’t fly that well.” Ripstiggr’s hair stirred pensively. He stroked her upper arm through her suit as they watched the drone ship—just a clump of pixels on the radar plot—float in the Lightbringer’s crosshairs.
“I need something to eat,” Hannah said. Not that she was callous about the drone ship’s fate, but … y’know. If she was going to destroy the Lightbringer, she had to keep her strength up. “Hey, Figgrit!” she called. “Any chance of lunch in the next day or so?”
The cook was downstairs in the kitchen, beyond the reach of the chip’s weak broadcasting ability, but she knew the
crew would pass her request along, because she was Shiplord.
“It’ll be on the table soon,” the response came back.
Soon. Do it soon. Every passing minute shaved another increment off her remaining hours of life.
Seeking to shore up her resolve, she stared at the targeting reticule. “Are our projectiles going to fly OK in atmosphere? I mean, we’ve got to have rock-solid targeting precision, or we won’t hit the ICBM launch sites.”
Ripstiggr’s mouth shut in a tense line. “Might use the HERF mast for that.”
Hannah nodded, thinking about what HERF attacks could do to Earth’s cities, let alone the launch sites. There wasn’t much to choose between a targeted HERF and a nuclear airburst. Iristigut had jettisoned all the Lightbringer’s nukes, and blown up its long-range HERF mast, but the crew had jury-rigged a short-range HERF mast by cannibalizing the ship’s scientific instruments.
“The trouble with HERFs,” Ripstiggr went on, “and the muon cannons, is their power requirements. We can’t use them while thrusting. So that’ll have to come after main engine cut-off. But we’re going to pass 160 kilometers above Earth’s surface as we enter orbit.” He squeezed her shoulders. “We can drop our missiles right down their throats.”
Hannah nodded, faced with the terrifying reality that Ripstiggr was winging it.
Billions of lives hinged, not on some fiendishly detailed plan of conquest, but on the instincts of a platoon sergeant elevated by chance and disaster to interstellar warlord.
Oh, sure, there was a fiendishly detailed plan of conquest. Or rather, there had been. It had died with Eskitul.
And they still hadn’t been able to contact Imf, and there was no instruction manual for conquering an alien species, as this was the first time the rriksti had tried it. So Ripstiggr was just playing it by ear.
“It’s going to be OK,” Hannah said.
I’m going to kill you.
“You’ll make the right decisions when the time comes.”
You won’t have to make any decisions, because you’ll be dead.
“Of course it’ll be OK,” Ripstiggr said. “I’m a seventh-level lay cleric. Ystyggr will guide me in the path of victory.”
Shiplord: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 3) Page 27
