“Got it,” Skyler said. “Anything else?”
Jack pulled a face. “We’ll be throttling back to two-thirds of max thrust after we bounce off Earth’s atmosphere. You don’t need to do anything until that time.”
“Got it. Out.”
“Someone’s got his knickers in a twist,” Jack muttered after he shut the intercom off.
“What do you expect?” Alexei said. He took another star sighting. They were going to reprise the ‘skidding’ tactic they’d used for their Mars flyby, with bonus enemy rounds flying at them. They couldn’t do anything about that but they could ensure rock-solid positioning. The SoD had to bounce off the top of Earth’s atmosphere at exactly the right angle to reach the Moon. They’d meet the stratosphere in another eight hours or so.
Jack felt Alexei moving away from him like an iceberg moving away from the shore. He had to do something to bring him back. He said, “Keelraiser’s been in touch with Hannah. He told her to shut down the Lightbringer’s reactor.”
Alexei sat back. “You’re not serious.”
“As a heart attack.”
“So that’s why we missed.”
“Yup. Keelraiser made sure we would miss.”
Alexei reddened and seemed to struggle for words. He said at last, “Well … it won’t make any difference in the end, will it? We’re going to nail them with the last plutonium round.”
“Right, on the far side of the moon, where it won’t matter if we EMP everything within a thousand-mile radius.”
On the camera feed, the shapes of the Americas emerged from Earth’s swirling veils of cloud. Jack breathed deeply, fending off homesickness. “We’re doing this for Earth,” he said, tacitly begging Alexei to understand. “For the people down there. For our families.”
“My parents moved to Siberia. By choice. They’re crazy, but they will be safe there.”
“You don’t bloody know that, and anyway, there are eight billion other—”
“I know, but we cannot just forget about Hannah! I never stop thinking about her. And for Skyler it’s worse.”
Jack squeezed his eyes closed. He wanted to say he thought about her all the time, too, but it would be a lie. He deliberately did not think about her at all, because if he did, he might not be able to do this. “She’s not on our side anymore.”
Without warning, the SoD leapt sideways.
Jack and Alexei, jolted out of their seats, scrambled back to the consoles, yelling obscenities.
A Rristigul shriek issued from the intercom, and cut off.
Keelraiser’s voice crackled from the Cloudeater. “That was Brbb.”
“The Victory,” Jack shouted, already guessing what had happened.
In anticipation of attacks from the Lightbringer, they’d converted the Victory into mobile armor. They had broken the welds holding the smaller ship to the SoD’s truss, and used the Victory’s RCS bundles to edge it backwards, past the bioshield, until it lay alongside the aft portion of the SoD’s truss tower. This positioned it between the Lightbringer and the SoD’s external tanks, which held their dwindling supply of reaction mass… and the SoD’s most crucial, vulnerable component of all—the reactor.
Once the Victory was in position, no one needed to stay on board. In fact, they couldn’t, because the whole ship was now behind the SoD’s bioshield, bathed in gamma rays from the SoD’s reactor. Just getting it back there had risked the lives of the Krijistal who’d volunteered to operate the RCS thrusters.
“It’s hit,” Keelraiser continued, imperturbably. “That jolt was the Victory colliding with the SoD’s truss. Check your cameras.”
Jack didn’t need telling. “It must have stopped the slug, or we’d all be dead.” The tactic had worked as planned, but it had been a desperate hack in the first place. “Shit …” The aft-facing cameras that looked behind the bioshield revealed a terrifying sight. The impact had forced the Victory flush against the SoD’s truss, so it nuzzled the larger ship, grinding dangerously on the SoD’s external tanks.
Jack could actually see the Lightbringer’s slug sticking out of the Victory’s forward module. It looked like a telephone pole. By the mercy of God, it had not hit the Victory’s reactor.
Black-suited rriksti flew past the cameras, heading for the Victory.
“Oi!” Jack yelled. “You can’t go back there!”
Keelraiser said, “You can’t see it from your angle, but atmosphere is venting from the hole in the Victory.”
“Doesn’t matter. There’s no one in there—”
“It’s not air, per se. It is smoke.”
“Oh Christ,” Jack said. “Impact must’ve started an electrical fire. If it reaches the oxygen and nitrogen tanks …”
Just like the SoD, the Victory carried big tanks of compressed oxygen and nitrogen in its bioshield. If those exploded, the Victory’s aft modules would blow apart. Debris could damage the SoD beyond repair.
“Oh yes, Kildare, use a flying bomb as armor,” Jack groaned. “Sheer genius.”
“Better than if the slug would have hit us,” Alexei pointed out. But that was no comfort, as the men watched the Krijistal swarm around the stricken Victory. All eight of them were out there. Two headed straight for the airlock. The others flew up and down the truss as if looking for something. They carried a piece of equipment. Jack couldn’t make out exactly what it was, but it looked familiar—
“That’s our laser saw,” Alexei said.
Brbb came on the radio. His voice was a thin thread frayed by interference. “We will use the saw to punch a hole in the Victory. Escaping air will push it away. Just looking for the right place to put the hole.”
Jack knuckled his forehead. Yes. Gotta do it before it explodes. “Center of gravity. But you’ll have to offset it to compensate for the air escaping from the other hole.”
He could see the air venting from around the Lightbringer’s missile now. Linear jets of gray. Smoke.
“Difystra and Fewl are inside,” Brbb said. “They cannot put out the fire. They are coming out. Now we drill.”
The laser saw sparked up. It seemed to Jack that they were taking their time. He thought about the fire raging through the Victory’s modules, and also about the gamma rays soaking into the Krijistal’s bodies. Rriksti suits—good but not that good. The rriksti themselves—tough but not invulnerable.
“Get a move on,” he begged. “You needn't drill straight through. Drill a circle and keep going over it—“
“Until the air pressure punches the middle out,” Brbb said. “Jack, we have been in space for longer than you’ve been alive.”
The drilling process went on and on. The Victory smoked. More people crowded onto the bridge to stare helplessly at the screen.
Suddenly the Krijistal flew up from the Victory’s truss. They were through!
The Victory began to edge away from the SoD, torquing as smoke now gouted from two holes.
“It's going!” Jack yelled. “Come back in! Now!”
Brbb didn't reply. Instead, all the Krijistal leapt across the gap and clung to the Victory’s truss. They scattered towards the back of the small ship, deploying their own body mass to correct its torque. The Victory scraped the SoD’s external tanks. They pushed off with their feet.
“No!” Jack bellowed into the radio.
Alexei jogged his elbow, showed him his laptop. He’d done a quick and dirty calculation of how much radiation the Krijistal had absorbed in the sixteen minutes—only sixteen minutes?—they’d been out there. “They're dead,” he said flatly.
Keelraiser said over the radio, “Their nervous systems are shutting down. Already they are having trouble moving.”
Jack croaked, “Brbb, Difystra, Fewl, Creiggr, Rockshanks, Silkane …” He went through them all, these rriksti he’d once considered thugs and the bane of his life. “You don't have to do this…”
Brbb whispered, “Godspeed.”
The Victory drifted away. At first its motion appeared stately. The
n it got very fast.
It shrank to a dot before it exploded.
Jack burned with humiliation and grief. “Chuck Norris, eat your heart out,” he muttered.
There were a dozen rriksti on the bridge by this time. They were crying: tiny pale flecks of skin floated from their faces and upper bodies. They were literally shedding tears.
Linda had come to watch, too. “Well, there goes our ship,” she said. “Guess we really are stuck with you now.” She was dry-eyed.
*
Jack waited until everyone else was off the bridge. There was no need for the entire ship to know about Keelraiser’s treachery. When he was alone he radioed the Cloudeater. “Do you think you could possibly ask Hannah to stop shooting at us now?” he snarled.
Keelraiser said, distantly, “She’s not answering my emails anymore. I don’t think she is even reading them.”
CHAPTER 46
The Lightbringer tore into Earth’s atmosphere like a meteor.
NASA warned astronauts to expect intense g-forces on reentry, but that was only if you had working engines. The Lightbringer did not. It was freefalling towards the planet. Hannah stood with a much-needed glass of krak in her hand, gazing ‘up’ at the Pacific.
Using the maneuvering thrusters, Ripstiggr had rolled the ship to present its undamaged side to the atmosphere. This gave the crew and soldiers on the bridge a fine view. The blue-and-white expanse of the Pacific Ocean filled the ceiling. Earth no longer looked like a globe, but a wall.
Notifications wobbled over Hannah’s left eye. Hannah Hannah Hannah. Iristigut was emailing her again. She hadn’t read any of his messages since the reactor shut down. Apologies? Weaselly explanations? Not interested. Delete delete delete. And now the bruise-colored text was spoiling her view of Hawaii and the West Coast.
“Turn off notifications,” she muttered.
The text vanished.
Ahhhh.
Better.
But now the atmosphere was starting to drag on the hull. The Lightbringer juddered like a speedboat on a rough sea. People laughed, clutched each other for balance, sat down.
Hannah stayed on her feet, although she could feel herself getting heavier. Their deceleration would generate some gee-force. She drained her glass and watched the blue wall came closer. Hello, California. Wish I was there.
Ripstiggr stood in the drive chancel, monitoring their descent. Hannah walked over to him, stepping over soldiers who sat on the floor. With every step she seemed to grow heavier and heavier. She’d been living in half a gee so long that it felt like having breezeblocks tied to her arms and legs. Yet she refused to sit down. She was Shiplord.
Turbulence tossed the floor up at her. She dropped her glass, staggered, caught herself on the edge of a console that came up to her breastbone. Dizziness speckled her vision.
Ripstiggr nodded coolly at her. “See that?”
He wasn’t watching the view.
The targeting screen displayed a rendering of Earth with all its artificial satellites.
*
Richard Burke stood on the side of a mountain in Colorado. You weren’t supposed to go out, but he was far from the only person who’d defied the rules today. They waited in silent groups around the bunker exit.
Perfect weather.
Sunny, brisk.
A juniper-scented breeze blew over scrub accented with snow.
Burke’s daughter Savannah grabbed her father’s elbow, pointing.
On the western horizon, a new star flashed over the Rockies. As bright as Venus, if Venus shone during the day.
People cried out. Sobbed. Cowered. They were all waiting for the big boom that would end everything. Burke felt disgusted that this was how the remaining employees of the federal government greeted the apocalypse, and proud of Savannah, who stood erect by his side, shading her eyes with her hand.
“You can see it moving,” she said.
“It’s actually moving very fast,” Burke said.
“It looks like a star.”
“Yep. The hull is ablating off. It is literally burning.” The sight brought back memories of the worst thing that had happened during Burke’s early career at NASA: the day the Columbia broke up over Texas. It had looked like this. Like a day-star. Very bright and very quiet.
*
In his war room deep under the mountain, Flaherty gave the command to fire.
Nuclear submarine crews in the Pacific and the Caribbean executed the procedures they’d been drilling for months.
They fed up-to-the second satellite data on the Lightbringer’s trajectory into their targeting software.
And pressed the big red button.
Trident II missiles with heatseeking nose cones, their nuclear warheads replaced with conventional explosives, surged up from the surface of the ocean, curving towards the Lightbringer on ballistic intercept paths.
A few seconds later, Russian submarines in the North Atlantic launched Sarmat missiles. Their first stages tumbled back towards Scandinavia. Contrails etched the sky, terrifying the faithful who awaited the aliens in Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Oslo.
The Lightbringer flashed onwards, gaining altitude again as its velocity pulled it out of orbit.
*
Point and shoot.
They’re just satellites, after all. No need to feel guilty about them. Hunks of metal and electronics don’t have feelings.
Key word, electronics.
All 3,000 or so of Earth’s satellites were exquisitely vulnerable to HERFs.
Hannah aimed the short-range HERF mast with gestures, and fired its pulses with grunted commands, while fighting the gees that tried to crumple her into the floor. The HERF beam was a cone. It only had an effective range of a thousand klicks or so, but that soaked broad tracts of orbital space.
Ripstiggr could have done this himself, anyone could have, but he’d offered her the honor, because she was Shiplord. She was smart enough to know that he was giving her a second chance to prove her loyalty to the Lightbringer. Like it or not, she had to take it. At least this way she had a chance of minimizing the damage.
The crowd sitting on the bridge applauded her kills with high whistles. In their eyes, she was finally acting like their Shiplord.
What it felt like, though, was playing a 1980s video game. Space Invaders or something. Shooting at blips on a screen. Not real.
The Lightbringer swung back towards space, while Hannah grunted her commands, and more satellites died.
*
As the Lightbringer pulled away from Earth, Flaherty got a phone call from his best friend. That’s how the other man described their relationship, anyway. He had a sense of humor.
Right now, however, he was in no laughing mood. “How is it possible that all of your ICBMs missed the fucking thing?”
“All yours missed, too, Vladimir,” Flaherty pointed out. “It was going very fast and very high and the damn things just plain missed. The tech ain’t perfect.”
“We will not miss next time,” said the dry voice from Arkhangelsk. “If they—”
Sudden silence.
Flaherty pulled the phone away from his ear, checked it was working.
“Line’s dead,” he yelled.
“Uh, sir, yes, sir. We are getting reports of satellite failure. Pretty much everything in low Earth orbit …”
“What about the ISS?”
*
“That was a blast,” Hannah said, smiling brightly at Ripstiggr.
Then she collapsed, coughing. Flecks of blood speckled the consoles. Those pesky rads again.
Ripstiggr picked her up. Cradling her in his arms like a baby, he walked through the crowd.
“Do you understand now, Shiplord?” he murmured. “No one has to die.”
*
Actually, however, people had already started to die.
The ISS and its overgrown sibling, CELL’s Sky Station, caught in Hannah’s indiscriminate HERF blasts, wallowed in low Earth orbit without power—without
comms—without light, or heat, or computer controls.
In defiance of orders, a few hardy astronauts had stayed up there to watch the Lightbringer’s arrival.
All of them would soon be dead, the first collateral damage in the war between Imf and Earth.
CHAPTER 47
“It took the Apollo astronauts three days to reach the moon,” Linda said. “We’re going a heck of a lot faster than they were. Jack says two days.”
Koichi just nodded. The loss of the Victory had plunged him into depression.
Linda smacked his knee. They were sitting in the gloom of the main hab, under a tree that smelled like cheesy socks. Nobody monitored Linda’s movements now that the squid enforcers were gone. Good fucking riddance to them. Now Koichi and Linda had to get rid of the rest of the squids … and then they could escape. This unplanned swing out to the moon was a heaven-sent opportunity. Every minute brought her closer to Rufus and Stephen.
“We can’t hold off much longer. It’s ready to go. Right?”
“Yeah. I just have to give it the final command.”
A squid stalked past them, staring with its inscrutable bug-eyes. Linda knew the monsters were deaf. All the same, she lowered her voice to a whisper. “Now,” she said. “Do it now.”
*
Skyler was sleeping on the aft wall of the engineering module. Thrust gravity didn’t have enough oomph to hold him down, and his startle reflex disturbed his sleep. Again and again, he dreamt that he woke up in the darkness, fans off, turbines down, in the hideous silence of a dead ship.
Then he really did wake up in the darkness.
The glowing reactor and turbine controls soothed his fears. Hriklif had just turned out the light to let him sleep. The SoD had not been HERFed, or blown to shit. Yet.
But he couldn’t go back to sleep. He shook Hriklif, who was napping, too, splay-limbed amidst the floating game pieces and crumbs and the mirip twigs that rriksti liked to gnaw on. “Hey, hey Hriklif.”
Shiplord: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 3) Page 31
