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

by Felix R. Savage

  The rriksti twittered their approval of this cliché, and Ripstiggr hugged Hannah tightly, as if apologizing for the bullshit he had to spout in his official role.

  If she stayed here any longer, her heart would fail her.

  What are you saying, Hannah-banana?

  Wasn’t it enough for her body to betray her? Was her heart now betraying her as well?

  Yes. It was. She wavered on the cusp of relinquishing her loyalty to Earth, because fuck it, you know what? If you’re Shiplord, you might as well do it properly. Call it Stockholm syndrome, call Hannah a traitor to her species, but she was compos mentis and perfectly capable of making her own decisions based on the facts, and the facts, the FACTS, Rich—in her mind she was talking to her old mentor, Richard Burke—are, I could live like this. I actually like this big silver-haired schmuck. He fucks like a god and he gives me all the booze I want. I am Shiplord of the most powerful interstellar spaceship ever built. That ain’t nothing.

  But. But but but. I know, Rich. If I live, everyone else dies.

  She freed herself from Ripstiggr’s embrace. “I’m going to make sure Figgrit’s not cooking my lentils too long. I don’t like them mushy.”

  She pattered downstairs. Heavier, lighter, heavier again. Don’t want to die. Don’t want to kill him. She passed Gurlp on the stairs. Don’t want to kill her. Or any of them. Oh goddamn it.

  In the kitchen, sheer bad luck waylaid her. Some dumbass had spilled a whole serving dish of steamed suizh, and they were all crawling around picking it up. Given the marginal food situation, not a single precious grain could be wasted. Hannah couldn’t reach the airlock without stepping on the stuff, which would have drawn howls. She decided with relief that escape was impossible at the moment. She’d wait until after lunch.

  She checked on her lentils and potatoes, and chopped greens for her salad, and the domestic tasks further depleted her will to die.

  Tonight. Tonight I will DO IT, she told herself, heading back upstairs, nibbling on an ear of young corn (her latest gardening success).

  She found the rriksti whistling and stomping their feet.

  “Got it,” Ripstiggr said, opening his mouth wide. He picked her up by the waist and swung her around. “Blew that cocksucker away!”

  High overhead, the red polygon enclosed a spreading shell of pixels.

  “Well done, Shiplord!” the rriksti cheered her.

  “I didn’t do anything,” Hannah demurred, although their congratulations reminded her that sooner or later, everything the ship accomplished got attributed to the Shiplord, for better or for worse.

  After lunch, examining the infrared and optical record of the ship kill, she reflected that the debris shell didn’t look quite right. If that was the pesky drone ship that had been chasing them since Mars, she’d have expected there to be more debris …

  She put it down to NASA cutting design corners and trying to do everything on the cheap.

  CHAPTER 41

  “Well, they got the umbrella,” Jack said.

  The SoD had cut their aluminum sunshade loose a week ago. It had promptly outdistanced the ship, hurtling towards Earth in a slightly higher orbit. Jack thought of it as a trial balloon. Would the Lightbringer fall for it?

  They had.

  The optical telescope captured the flash.

  “The Krijistal just can’t resist shooting at things,” Keelraiser said scornfully.

  “And now we know their range,” Jack said.

  He and Keelraiser sat side by side in the center and right seats, respectively, of the SoD’s bridge. The SoD was burning at full thrust. The low-pitched roar of the drive turbine had become a background noise like the fans. Jack wasn’t using the Cloudeater or Victory’s thrust this time. Their triple burn at perihelion had led to a near-disaster when the radiant exhaust from the smaller ships, flooding past the SoD’s reactor, overheated it, forcing the smaller ships to shut down their drives ahead of schedule, though fortunately not before they’d burnt off enough speed. There was also the live load issue to worry about. It would be massively embarrassing to fracture the truss at this point, so Jack was keeping the Cloudeater’s thrust in his back pocket as a last-ditch option, and he had another use for the Victory in mind.

  Thrust gravity held the man and the rriksti in their seats. Their hands were joined across the gap. Dampness formed a seal between their palms. Jack felt almost intoxicated with anticipation.

  “Our range is better than theirs,” he mused aloud. “We can start shooting any time.”

  Alexei was loading the railguns as they spoke. Two plutonium rounds in the broadside facing the Lightbringer. They also had kinetic rounds, but there was no point firing those. If they couldn’t take the alien monster out with the nukes, they couldn’t take it out at all.

  Keelraiser said, “My life changed when I met you.”

  In contrast to Jack’s excitement, Keelraiser seemed unusually relaxed. Jack was treated to the rare sight of rriksti eyelids, descending in slow blinks over the big sludge-brown orbs. The parted lips suggested a lazy smile.

  “Mine, too,” Jack said. He rearranged his fingers around Keelraiser’s, so that his fingers interlaced with the rriksti’s first four fingers, joining their hands in a crushing grip. The skin-to-skin seal was what he enjoyed about this. It both comforted and tantalized him, and why shouldn’t he just go with it? What did it matter at this point? Even if they survived the coming battle, which Jack in his heart believed unlikely, the shipboard life they had eked out for two years was about to come to an end. He pictured himself and Keelraiser naked, every square inch of their skin somehow pressed together like a living Moebius strip, and squeezed tighter, although the extreme unlikelihood of this actually happening saved him from having to think about the explicit implications of the scenario. He preferred to think of it as pure somehow.

  He freed his hand from Keelraiser’s and moved over to the left seat. He picked up the headphones. “What are you doing out there, admiring the view?”

  “C’est ca,” Giles said. “We can see Earth, you know. What did Neil Armstrong say? ‘I’m coming back in … and it’s the saddest moment of my life.’”

  “That was one of the Gemini astronauts.”

  “Same thing.”

  A few moments later, the airlock opened, and a mile of Mylar-backed insulation lolled out of it like a silver tongue, followed by Giles and Brbb. The gunpowdery smell of space wafted into the bridge. “Try it now,” Giles said.

  Jack moved back to the center seat and activated the SoD’s radar. For the first time in a year and a half, the radar plot was not a blizzard of snow. He whooped, and aimed the dish at the region of the sky where the Lightbringer should be.

  Giles and Brbb had dismantled the DIY paraboloid jammer, as there was not much point jamming the Lightbringer’s radar when they’d soon be close enough for it to target them optically. Anyway, Jack planned to get off his rounds before they entered the range that the Lightbringer had obligingly demonstrated for them a few moments ago. For that, he needed the radar.

  “There it is,” he breathed. “Large and ugly as life.”

  The image on the radar plot was only a few pixels across, but it silenced everyone on the bridge. To Jack, it meant more than their first sight of Earth had. He hunched over the screen, and Giles, balancing his feet on the mounting of Jack’s seat, squeezed his shoulders.

  “They’re burning like hell,” Jack said, clearing his throat.

  “Are we going to blow them away now?” Giles said.

  “I’m going to start firing as soon as Alexei gets the rounds loaded. Maybe in twenty minutes.”

  “OK. I will go start dinner.”

  Giles gave Jack’s shoulders another squeeze and dropped back to the aft wall, where he changed out of his spacesuit. I’ll go start dinner … Jack replayed the remark to himself with amused appreciation. Giles’s blasé manner was hard-won, he knew. But it was appropriate. Many hours would pass before their rounds actually h
it the Lightbringer. In the meantime, they had to keep eating and sleeping. Jack just wished he could be equally laid-back about it.

  Giles and Brbb dropped into the keel tube and vanished.

  Alexei announced on the radio that he was coming back in. A few minutes later he scrambled out of the keel tube. Jack reached down to give him a hand, boosting him into the left seat.

  “Loaded,” Alexei said, palming sweat off his scalp. He’d started shaving his head again, using the late Grigory Nikolov’s razors.

  “I’d better go back to the Cloudeater.” Keelraiser swung his legs over the side of his seat, dropped lightly down to the aft wall, and left.

  Jack moved into the right seat. The shabby padding held Keelraiser’s body heat. He wedged his feet through the tethers.

  Locked and loaded.

  He punched up the ranging function and squirted a burst from the comms laser at the Lightbringer. While he waited for the ranging data to come back, he powered up the rails. The lights dimmed. The familiar, long-unheard hum scaled up to an agitated whine.

  “Are you sure you want to use up two plutonium rounds straight away?” Alexei said.

  “Yeah. There’s no point just crippling it. We know it can survive that. Anyway, that still leaves us with one, just in case.”

  The computer spat out the ranging data. Jack fed it into the targeting equation he’d already worked out.

  Lightbringer’s 9,010,637 kilometers away.

  But the old whale’s decelerating at a steady rate. Constant deceleration is like gravity: one half deceleration x time squared. That squared gives you distance graphs that look like logarithmic curves. So, when we aim at where the Lightbringer’s going to be when our rounds get there … that gives us a path length of just 4,540,006 km.

  “Here we go,” Jack said. He sighed. He mashed his thumb on the firing button.

  Zzzzoik!

  Zzzzoik!

  The plutonium rounds sprang away, one after another, streaking towards the Lightbringer. No way the Lightbringer could see them—they were just little slugs, coated with an easily volatilized substance that applied even more speed once they were off the rails. When they impacted the Lightbringer, they’d be travelling at a hundred and ten thousand kilometers an hour, too fast to evade or intercept.

  The whine dipped and died.

  “Bombs away,” Alexei said. He pushed his joined hands over his head, stretching.

  “And now we wait for forty-one hours,” Jack said. He sighed again. “Wanna play cards?”

  CHAPTER 42

  “We’re running out of time! You have to do it SOON!”

  “OK, Iristigut,” Hannah said, and visualized, and sent, through a mist of tears. “Stop bugging me! I’m doing it, I’m doing it!”

  Two days had passed. They’d been busy days. The excuses practically manufactured themselves. But now she was all out of excuses. The Lightbringer would reach Earth in 31 hours. The Krijistal’s preparations were done as they’d ever be, and Hannah had got extremely drunk. That was the only way she could suppress her desperate yearning to survive. She focused with inebriated singlemindedness on picking her way across the bridge without stepping on anyone.

  The rriksti had been working so hard that many of them had fallen asleep as soon as their shifts were done. They literally fell on the floor of the bridge and dropped off where they fell. To see so many of them asleep at once was unusual, but the floor-sleeping thing was not. Coming from a world without a day and night cycle, they’d never evolved regular sleeping patterns—it was one reason why life among the rriksti could feel like an endless Super Bowl with no commercial breaks. A rriksti in Imf’s pre-industrial era would simply have taken a siesta whenever and wherever it felt sleepy. Nowadays, they structured their siestas around their work, but the haphazard drowsing-off thing continued to be their preferred pattern. And of course, they did not require darkness. The perpetual gloom was both their day and their night.

  The Shiplord was unique in actually having a cabin, which of course was more for privacy than for sleeping in. Hannah had left Ripstiggr curled on the fur-covered bed. She wanted to go back and snuggle up beside him. Instead, she went downstairs, pulled up her helmet, and went out into the darkness. Faint green arrows blinked, pointing aft.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m on my way, OK? You don’t have to keep bugging me!”

  It had started to feel downright creepy, the way Iristigut kept pressuring her to kill the Lightbringer and everyone on board, presumably including himself. But Hannah had a theory about that.

  “Where are you?” she asked him. Predictably, he gave her the same answer as usual:

  “Not very far from you.”

  Hannah smiled grimly to herself. She flew on, following the green arrows, until she reached a knobbly steel wall. It looked like part of the hull. She ordered the chip to unlock the door, and flew in. Lights blazed on automatically. She squinted. The lights were no brighter than you would find in a public area on Earth, but after so long in the twilight, she was dazzled. “Hello, Iristigut,” she sent.

  While waiting for him to reply, she searched for him. The lights bathed a corridor lined with plate glass windows, like a shopping mall without signage. She flew down the corridor. Each window was the wall of a cell about 1.5 meters square—cramped quarters for a human, wretched for a rriksti.

  But every cell was empty.

  “Where are you?” Iristigut emailed.

  “In the brig. Aren’t you here?”

  She’d only found out about the existence of the brig yesterday, poring over the ship schematics in search of some escape route she hadn’t thought of yet.

  Ripstiggr had never told her the Lightbringer even had a brig.

  And she had concluded that must be because Iristigut was there.

  That’s what you would do with the person who blew a kilometer-long hole in your ship and disabled all the landing shuttles, not to mention ditching the nukes and slagging the HERF mast. You’d put them in a maximum-security cell. Wouldn’t you?

  Except, obviously, not.

  The reason Ripstiggr had never mentioned the brig was simply because they weren’t using it.

  “I thought you must be here,” she sent. “I thought that was why you wanted to die.”

  She kicked the nearest cell window and rebounded into the one behind her. “Ow. Ow.”

  “I did spend time in the brig once,” Iristigut emailed. “But I’m not there now.”

  “I can see that!”

  He was not there. She could not force him to steal a shuttle for her. She was out of time. There would be no escape for Hannah Ginsburg. Not in this lifetime.

  She fled the deserted, silent cell block and flew on through the dark corridors, passing by the hole in the hull.

  “How did you get out of there?” she emailed. “How are you still alive?”

  Iristigut’s answer came quickly. “Someone I care about helped me to escape. Is there anyone you care about, Hannah?”

  What a cruel question! Her eyes filled with tears again, which was really annoying because they couldn’t fall in zero-gee. “Yes,” she said. “My sister Bethany and her family. I guess most of all my niece, Isabel. God, I love that kid so much.”

  She had answered her own question, not his question. The question was: Why do I have to die? And the answer was: For them.

  Her mind cleared. Her reluctance didn’t go away, but she simmered down from her overwrought emotional state. She opened the throttles of her wrist rockets and flew faster, past icefalls bursting from the sides of cargo holds, and other holds that had been sealed off so the water could be turned into steam and pumped out. At last she reached the reactor room.

  She braked, grasping the bulkhead at the entrance.

  The high-ceilinged cavern held an armored containment ring the size of seven RVs parked head to tail. In the center stood a sphere the size of a two-storey house. This was the reaction chamber. It had heavy armor as well, but y
ou couldn’t see it because the sphere was semi-translucent. So what did Hannah see from the doorway?

  A star.

  The fusion reactor was running flat out, roaring away inside its smart-material casket. Its light cast the shadow of the containment ring on the wall all around. Submerged in that shadow, four rriksti monitored the muon injection beam and gauge field generator.

  Hannah drifted to the top of the door and clung onto the handholds that covered the ceiling like nobbles on black dinosaur skin. The vibration from the ship’s enormous turbines gnawed into her palms.

  She eased across the ceiling. None of the reactor techs noticed her. Reactor techs? They were just screen-watchers and button-pushers. As such, they never took their eyes off their consoles, frightened that Ripstiggr would flay them if anything went wrong.

  Well, something was about to go wrong.

  Sorry, guys, Hannah thought as she positioned herself directly above the gauge field generator.

  *

  In the engineering module of the SoD, Skyler and Hriklif were playing Monopoly.

  Skyler had not even tried to stop Jack from launching the nukes that would pulverize the Lightbringer. He’d just hidden away back here and wallowed in self-hatred, too miserable even to play his guitar.

  Then Hriklif had turned up with a handmade Monopoly set.

  Although not a word about Hannah was said, Hriklif clearly didn’t intend to let Skyler suffer through his vigil alone.

  It was nice to have a friend, even if he made you play board games.

  The Monopoly set was well-designed. Hriklif had printed magnetic pieces that stuck to the sheet metal board. The properties were named Sirius, Vega, Betelgeuse, and so forth.

  “Conquering the galaxy is lucrative,” Skyler observed.

  “That’s why the Darksiders decided to do it,” Hriklif said, and landed on one of Skyler’s utilities.

  “That’ll be five million dollars in wormhole transit fees, please,” Skyler said.

  Above their heads in the storage module, irritated human voices broke through the background noise of the turbines.