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

by Felix R. Savage

  “Yeah.” Jack sighed. He had hoped for the best but planned for the worst, and as usual, the latter turned out to have been the right move. “Where is she now?”

  “In the main hab. Giles is giving her coffee.”

  “Coffee! God, that sounds terribly civilized.”

  “Well, it is their coffee.”

  “I just don’t know what to do with her. We can’t tie her up again.”

  “No. Like a dog. No.”

  “I suppose we’ll have to have someone follow her around all the time. Get the civilians to take shifts.”

  “With the taser,” Alexei suggested.

  “Christ no. Imagine if she got it off them. No, we’ll just have to trust in the squid intimidation factor.” Jack looked around at Keelraiser, hoping to draw him into the conversation. “Or maybe keep her on the Cloudeater? Squid intimidation factor times a thousand.”

  “No,” Keelraiser said. “You are aware that Brbb’s lot wanted to kill her. You’ve already broken the rules by keeping her alive. I’m in no position to criticize you for that, but don’t compound the error.” He moved between Jack and Alexei to the keel tube and left without a word.

  Everyone does that, Jack thought hopefully—but as soon as Keelraiser was gone. Alexei leered and gave Jack a punch on the arm. “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Well, what’s going on?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You were kissing him. That’s not nothing.” Alexei pretended to duck. “I can’t help having eyes.”

  Despite all his grueling experiences in space, Jack was still English. This came close to taking the crown as the most embarrassing moment of his life. “I’m not gay,” he said weakly.

  “No one says you are.”

  “You just did say it.”

  “No, I did not.”

  “You did.”

  “He’s an alien. It’s completely different.”

  Jack remembered Alexei using this very phrase—it’s completely different—to describe his relationship with Nene. “You’re right,” he said. “It’s completely different. We’re human and they’re aliens. They don’t think the same way we do.”

  “It’s possible to understand how they think. You just have to get them to open up.”

  Jack was bursting to tell Alexei about Keelraiser’s betrayal. But if he said anything negative about Keelraiser now, Alexei would take it as criticism of Nene and the rriksti in general.

  “I have to organize the Victory,” he said, shutting the conversation down, shutting Alexei out. He regretted it immediately. But fuck it. This was a distraction. He needed to stay focused on the mission. “We’ll need volunteers to move it …”

  Alexei’s gray eyes darkened. “Right.”

  “See if you can round up some of the Krijistal. I’ve got to stay here and see what the Lightbringer does. They’re freefalling towards Earth, no brakes … this is not going to end well.”

  CHAPTER 44

  It hadn’t worked.

  Hannah had clung to the ceiling of the reactor room, waiting to die, for what felt like a lifetime. But nothing had happened. No big boom. No miracle. The reactor’s rate of fusion had leveled off. The rriksti button-pushers had frantically tried to recalibrate the gauge field. They couldn’t, because the Shiplord’s commands superseded their permissions.

  Oh well, she had thought at last. Might as well help them out.

  “Chip,” she’d said in a flat, dead voice, “switch the gauge field off.”

  Then something had happened.

  The star in the reaction chamber had flared, and gone out.

  *

  Now, fleeing back towards the bridge, she emailed Iristigut.

  “You lied to me! You complete asshole, you LIED TO ME! You said the superatoms of flerovium-298 would be unstable and go fissile! THEY DIDN’T! When I switched the gauge field off, they just decayed into alpha particles.”

  She wasn’t an atomic physicist. If she were, she might have seen this coming. But even with her patchy, second-hand knowledge, it was pretty clear with hindsight what had gone wrong. The goddamn lousy gauge field exhibited hysteresis, meaning that it took a while to go away after you switched it off. So the superatoms hadn’t gone boom. Held in the decaying embrace of the gauge field, they’d just fallen apart like dandelion clocks.

  What time is it, Hannah-banana?

  Time to panic.

  If flerovium was supercompacted ‘smoke’ from the reactor’s fire, when it came apart, it reverted to ordinary ‘smoke’—clouds and clouds of helium particles. All that helium stole muons, ‘putting out’ the muon beam.

  No muons, no fusion.

  So the fire in the reactor’s core had gone out

  And that left the Lightbringer without thrust, without any power source apart from what was in the batteries, and sure, rriksti batteries held a heck of a lot of juice, but not nearly enough to drive the ship’s gargantuan MPD thrusters. So the Lightbringer was dead in space, hurtling towards Earth way too fast.

  She flung her fear and rage at Iristigut. “You TRICKED ME! You deliberately misled me about the behavior of superatoms!” And on and on, long after she gave up any hope of getting an answer out of him. At last, the funny side of it struck her. She was yelling at Iristigut for not helping her to commit a suicide bombing. She drifted to a halt and laughed weakly at herself.

  Checking the map, she was on Sleeper Deck 2, in one of the broad transverse corridors dotted with groups of furniture. She pulled herself down onto a sofa, feeling like Alice in Wonderland—the sofa was too big for her little human body. No vibrations came up from the deck. Without power, the turbines were just hunks of metal.

  What was Ripstiggr going to do to her? Oh God. He’d know it had been her. Only the Shiplord could have overridden the reactor’s operating restrictions. He’d probably kill her.

  Well, they were all dead, anyway. The Lightbringer would scream straight past Earth, go into orbit around the sun, and come back in 2070 or so.

  So she’d saved humanity, even if it wasn’t going to be as dramatic as she’d planned.

  I did it, Izzy.

  See you in fifty years.

  A green light glowed at the end of the corridor.

  It raced towards her, illuminating the tanks on both sides with a sickly, spectral light.

  As the tanks lit up, their occupants twitched, flexed their limbs, and opened their eyes.

  Hannah bounced off her sofa. She floated in mid-air, heart pounding.

  Fixated on the tanks in front of her, she did not at first notice the figures crowding towards her from the end of the corridor where the glow had started.

  Too late, she whipped around in the air and confronted a horde of soldiers.

  They still seemed to be half-asleep. They zig-zagged and bumped into each other in the air. Yet their long-ago training had saved their lives. Each of them, before leaving its tank, had donned the suit stored in an inner compartment of the tank. Cryosleep gel dripped off their black-sheathed limbs, forming a gelatinous rainfall in the vacuum.

  Hannah retreated.

  “Um, hi, guys,” she tried. “I’m your Shiplord. What are you doing up?”

  The corridor filled up as more and more soldiers burst out of their tanks. They flooded in from the narrower dormitory corridors that crossed this one. They had no intention, clearly, of sitting down on the sofas for a drink of juice and a nice gentle re-entry into the world of the living. They had awoken in an emergency situation—the ship in vacuum, the drive dead—and now the first thing they encountered was a bubble-headed alien.

  “Stay away from me,” Hannah warned, putting out her hands to ward them off. “I’m your Shiplord!”

  They had been asleep since the Lightbringer blasted out of Imf orbit eighty years ago. Why on earth should she think they understood English?

  She frantically sorted through her Rristigul vocabulary. She could describe the process of proton-lithium 6 fusion, but she was short o
n everyday words. “Muzl!” Stop! “I said muzl!”

  That worked about as well as a red flag to a herd of bulls. They closed in on her, grasping her limbs in steel-hard fingers—their suits seemed to be armored, more rigid than her own—prodding and pulling and scratching at her suit to see if it came off, or if it was her skin. They rapped on her fishbowl helmet, knocking her head sideways. One of them seized the helmet from behind, fingers closing over her field of vision like bars, and tried to twist it off.

  In a blind panic, Hannah screamed, “Ripstiggr! Ripstiggr! Help! Stop them! They’re trying to kill me!”

  No response came for long enough that she wondered if this was Ripstiggr’s doing, if he’d intentionally woken the soldiers so they would tear her limb from limb. Then his voice slashed across the drowsy muttering of the soldiers. As he bellowed at them in Rristigul, they let go of her arms and legs. She curled into a ball in the air. A nauseating flash of pain stabbed her right elbow.

  The beams of chest-lamps cut through the green-tinted gloom. Ripstiggr and a couple of the other Krijistal forced a path through the soldiers.

  Still yelling at them, Ripstiggr caught Hannah in his arms. She heard the word Eskitul. Of course, that was not actually the name of her predecessor. It was the Rristigul word for Shiplord.

  The soldiers fell back. One by one, they mumbled a response to whatever Ripstiggr had said. Hannah got the impression of formulaic, grudging assent.

  “What are they doing awake?” She trembled, shocked to the core by her narrow escape.

  “Tanks were programmed to wake them when we completed our final deceleration into Earth orbit,” Ripstiggr replied. “The system was synched with main engine cut-off.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yup.”

  As her fear of the soldiers ebbed, her fear of Ripstiggr returned. She licked her lips. “I did it.”

  “I know.” His voice had never sounded colder. “Come on.”

  The other Krijistal stayed behind to sort out the soldiers. Ripstiggr dragged Hannah back towards the bridge. Their progress was slow. Every corridor teemed with dazed soldiers looking for their weapons, looking for answers, looking for enemies. Ripstiggr yelled at them continuously. At last they reached the kitchen airlock. Soldiers had begun to invade the shattered space outside the airlock, floating over the glacier and investigating the three-storey hole it had torn in the support decks. Hannah did not envy whoever got to fill them in on the Lightbringer’s adventures in the last twelve years.

  A dozen of them crowded into the airlock with Hannah and Ripstiggr. Hannah shied from the black-clad giants. Nervously, she said to Ripstiggr, “Thanks for rescuing me.”

  Ripstiggr did a rriksti shrug, jerking his head sideways and rolling his shoulders.

  She wanted to ask: Why did you rescue me? Why not just leave me to die?

  But the question answered itself. He’d rescued her because she was Shiplord. He might kill her himself, but he couldn’t leave her to get torn to pieces. Not because he cared about her. Just because she was Shiplord.

  They stumbled into gravity. Hannah yelped as her weight came down on her right ankle—it was twisted or sprained. Dozens of Krijistal crowded the kitchen. The soldiers doffed their suits and headed straight for the water dispensers. Ripstiggr yelled orders. On the way upstairs, he said tersely to Hannah, “Air is the big problem. They’ve only got a day or so in those suits. I’ve told the guys to cycle them through here to top up. They’ll also have to eat and drink, obviously. We’re going to run out of food, but we’ll run out of oxygen first. We’ll operate the electrolysis equipment around the clock. Who knows if it’ll be able to keep up?”

  The Lightbringer’s electrolysis unit was actually the SoD’s electrolysis unit, stolen from it in Europa orbit.

  “Sorry,” Hannah said, hobbling after him, nearly in tears. She couldn’t stand the thought of her crew suffering like that. Her crew? Yes, they were her crew. She was Shiplord. And she’d condemned them all to a miserable, lingering death, very different from the miracle she had planned on. “I screwed up.”

  Ripstiggr shrugged again.

  On the bridge, the wall sections on either side of the drive chancel had been polarized to transparency. Earth floated ahead of the ship, a blue marble adorned with swirls of white. Hannah stared at it through a mist of tears.

  Joker reported to Ripstiggr, his bio-antennas inscribing loops of despondency in the air. “They tried to restart the reactor. It’s not happening. Got the muon injection going, but the gauge field is fucked.”

  I probably smoked the CPU by turning it up that high for that long, Hannah thought. Without the gauge field, the muons would just decay before they could catalyze fusion. No power. No thrust. No power.

  “How are you feeling?” Joker asked her.

  He’d asked. Ripstiggr had not.

  “Lots of bruises. Something’s wonky in my right ankle. And I think I’ve got radiation sickness again. I feel really nauseous.”

  Ripstiggr acted as though he hadn’t heard her. “Organize a work crew to inspect the chemical thrusters,” he told Joker. “They should be in order, but make sure.”

  The Lightbringer had small maneuvering thrusters that ran on rocket fuel. The Krijistal had used them occasionally to boost the Lightbringer’s orbit during its ten years circling Europa.

  Hannah felt a flare of hope, and then reality set in. “Those thrusters can’t slow us down enough to achieve orbital capture. We’re going to sail straight past Earth.”

  “No, we aren’t,” Ripstiggr said. He did not look at her. He stared intently at Earth. She saw that he was not going to give up as long as breath remained in his body. “We’re going in hot.”

  CHAPTER 45

  Jack frowned at the radar plot.

  He looked back at the computer.

  He said, “They’re going to aerobrake.”

  Despite himself, he felt a shiver of respect for the Krijistal commander.

  “Blin,” Alexei swore. “That takes guts.”

  “Yup. No power, no brakes … so they’re going to brake in Earth’s atmosphere.”

  “Mad,” Keelraiser said crisply. “The Lightbringer was not built for aerobraking. It won’t work.”

  “It was built tough,” Jack said. “The hull is what? Three meters thick?”

  They all gazed at the main optical screen. It showed the feed from the SoD’s forward-facing camera. Earth, picture-perfect, the size of a watermelon. The SoD was just 200,000 klicks out now—half the distance from Earth to the moon. They could not see the Lightbringer on the screen but it was there. Not having slowed down at all in the last thirty hours, it had reached Earth first. In fact it was about to dive into the atmosphere, entering at an oblique angle over the Pacific.

  Jack almost wished Mission Control hadn’t gone off the air. He’d have liked to hear Star City and Houston’s best guesses about the Lightbringer’s course. As it was, all he had to go on was their own observations.

  “One dip into the atmosphere won’t slow them down enough.”

  “They’ll have to swing out to the moon,” Alexei said.

  “That’s what I said.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Well, I was thinking it.”

  “Once around the moon,” Alexei said. “Back to Earth. Then they will have to skip off the top of the atmosphere several times to slow down and regularize their orbit.”

  Jack shook his head, not disagreeing, just because it was such bad news. “That’ll give them plenty of time to fire on Earth at their leisure.”

  He deliberately didn’t look at Keelraiser. Keelraiser had been wrong. He’d underestimated the Krijistal by the same factor that he himself fell short of their standards.

  “So …” Jack rubbed his fingers together nervously. “We’ll have to chase them to the moon.”

  Silence.

  “Anyone disagree?” Jack shouted, turning from the screens.

  Alexei sat in the left seat; Giles was p
erched for some reason in the center seat; Keelraiser, Nene, Brbb, Koichi, and a bunch of odds and sods stood on the aft wall, looking up—even Linda was there … They merely looked back at him. Their silence said they weren’t taking responsibility for this. He was the commander.

  A timer on Jack’s console cheeped. “Oh, fuck it.” Time to launch another salvo. In silence, he laser-targeted the Lightbringer, powered up the railgun, and fired another four kinetic slugs.

  “Can you fill us in on the operational utility of these attacks?” Linda said sweetly, as the whine of electrification died down.

  “I’m just amusing myself, aren’t I?” Jack snapped.

  *

  Hannah, said the chip, followed by a schematic of the Lightbringer’s aft port quadrant, exterior view. The picture was worth the thousand Rristigul words that followed it. The hull sported a brand-new crater measuring 2 zlimik, or three-and-a-half meters, across.

  “Someone’s shooting at us!” Hannah yelped.

  “I know,” Ripstiggr said curtly. He stood in the drive chancel, working the consoles. Hannah stood close beside him, not by choice, but because the whole bridge was packed solid with people sitting and lying on the floor. They couldn’t split water fast enough to resupply the suits of 16,000 soldiers, so as a last-ditch measure, they were packing them into the pressurized bridge and support decks to hang out and wait for oxygen supplies. The air had already started to taste stale and smell foul. It was like living in a crowded subway carriage as big as a cathedral. It broke Hannah’s heart how quiet they were.

  “Who’s shooting at us?” she demanded. She didn’t know how to make the chip give her that information.

  “Humans, doubtless,” Ripstiggr said. A mild shockwave ran up through the soles of Hannah’s feet. The Lightbringer had returned fire. Unfortunately, the railgun ran off huge fuel cells that had been fully charged before the reactor went down, in anticipation of hammering Earth’s cities.

  Sickened, Hannah wondered who was about to get hammered now.

  *

  “Skyler,” Jack said into the intercom. “There’s been a slight change of plan. We’re going to the moon.” He paused, expecting pushback. Nothing. “I estimate that the Lightbringer’s going to catch up to the moon in its orbit and swing around it in a retrograde direction to slow down. So we’re going to do the same thing. We’re behind them now, but we ought to catch up, as they’ll drop more speed than we will on the way around Earth. Just letting you know …” He trailed off. Waited. “Skyler?”