“Get up,” Jack said. “On your feet, like a human being.” He eased her out and shut the door behind her.
A single chair stood in the narrow space between the work counter and the sink. Keelraiser folded onto it. Jack lifted the lids of pans and appliances until he hit the jackpot: a vat of steamed white rice, now cold. He couldn’t see any bowls or implements, so he scooped some out with his hand.
“Here. Nene was eating this. She says it’s all right. Empty calories, I suppose.”
“Thank you,” Keelraiser said without moving. His head hung back and his arms lolled straight down from his double-jointed shoulders. He was wearing his Krijistal uniform, a boxy jacket with long tuxedo-like tails over knee-length shorts, the whole ensemble a violent shade of orange. The last time Jack saw him wear that, he’d been about to make a play to displace Jack as the commander of the SoD. It did not seem like a good sign. But now Keelraiser didn’t look imposing. Just exhausted and vulnerable.
Jack straddled the chair. He cupped the back of Keelraiser’s head with his free hand, sliding his fingers between the velvety bio-antennas. “Eat.”
Keelraiser focused on the pile of rice in Jack’s hand. He picked up a small clump of grains with his thumb and two middle fingers. Put it in his mouth. “Ugh.”
“Better than nothing.”
Keelraiser was already taking more rice. He swallowed without chewing. The last few grains stuck to Jack’s skin. Keelraiser lowered his face and ate them straight off Jack’s palm. Then he licked the skin, getting the last traces of rice. His breath chilled the wetness of his saliva.
Jack stood stock still. “More?” he said.
“You should eat something, too.”
“I had a 900-calorie piece of strawberry-flavored cardboard.”
“That sounds nice,” Keelraiser said wanly.
“It was revolting. I’ve lost my taste for Earth stuff.”
Keelraiser sat limply, bunching the material of his shorts in white-knuckled fists. “I searched the wreck of the SoD for hours. I’d still be there, looking for you, if they hadn’t radioed us to say you were here.”
“I should have left a note,” Jack said.
Keelraiser lifted his big, triangular face. “What would it have said?”
Jack hesitated. It had been ridiculously hard for him to accept that he’d fallen in love with an alien. An alien who was sometimes male, at that. God really must have a sense of humor.
“It would have said, ‘Meet you at the south pole. Love, Jack.’”
Keelraiser tentatively grasped his shoulders. They kissed. The taste of rice mixed with the maddening salty savor of Keelraiser’s mouth. Jack felt like he’d died out there without even knowing it, had been walking around like a zombie, and now he was coming back to life.
“You are my life,” Keelraiser whispered. He broke the kiss, jerked the zip of Jack’s hoodie down, and burrowed his tongue into the notch at the bottom of Jack’s throat. He moved his face lower. Sharp rriksti teeth nibbled.
“Ah! Oh …”
“Does that feel good?”
“Ah … yes.” Jack could hardly remember how to form words. “Good.”
“What are these, anyway?”
“Nipples.”
“But you’re male.”
“So are you, but I’m not holding that against you, am I?”
Keelraiser let out a torn-off laugh. He reached for Jack’s cock and squeezed it through the soft fake jeans. Didn’t bother asking if it was OK, just did it. Jack groaned. He assumed Keelraiser must be hard, too. He wanted to see what it looked like. His curiosity overlapped with his sex drive, each thing reinforcing the other. Keelraiser’s body was as different as a woman’s, despite being male, two days a week or when the wind was in the east or whatever. Jack relished every difference. He yanked at the drawstring of Keelraiser’s shorts.
“Don’t,” Keelraiser said, instantly drawing back. The chair scraped over the floor.
“Huh? Why not?”
“It’s not the weekend.”
“What’s that got to do with it?” Jack knew the rriksti on Imf had organized their lives into 11-day weeks capped by two-day weekends, but he only had a vague grasp of what the cycle meant. It seemed to differ depending on how honest the rriksti felt like being. Impatiently, he said, “Does your religion forbid sex on weekdays, or something?”
“Yes, actually, it does. I’m a Krijistal officer.” Keelraiser sat up straight, eyes glinting. “We’re supposed to be empty uniforms, governed by technology, not biology. Glory to Ystyggr, Lord of the Visible and the Invisible, who happens not to exist, but never mind! Conquest is the best antidote to existential despair. We’ve already fucked up our own planet, so now we’ll go and fuck up someone else’s. That’ll justify our existence!”
He threw up a sloppy Krijistal salute. This resembled the British gesture for ‘up yours,’ with more fingers on each side. Jack laughed. He caught the salute and set his teeth gently into the web of skin between the two longer middle fingers. He had guessed from the way Keelraiser treated his hands that this was an erogenous zone. “Does this feel good?” A faintly sticky residue coated rriksti skin, salty, metallic, a bit musky. Jack couldn’t get enough of it.
“Yes …”
“What about this?” He sucked one of Keelraiser’s fingers, remembering that Keelraiser had put this finger into his mouth the very first day they met. Had he, even back then, been trying to hint at what he wanted? Could it possibly be as filthy as what Jack was picturing?
“That is so nice, it actually counts as torture,” Keelraiser said. Jack laughed. But Keelraiser was shuddering, pressing his hand against Jack’s mouth. “Give me a minute.”
Keelraiser doubled over, resting his elbows on his knees. Jack loosely encircled the black-maned head with his arms and pressed his cheek to Keelraiser’s smooth, slightly sticky forehead. He wondered if the problem really was the stupid 11-day cycle, or if Keelraiser had deeper-seated difficulties with what Jack was, who he was. Jack would understand that. It wasn’t easy for him, either.
After a moment he realized Keelraiser was trembling. The skin of his forehead felt smoother, drier. With the rriksti, dry meant the same thing as wet meant for humans.
“Tell me what it is,” Jack said, forgetting all about his own existential angst.
“They came to meet us, offering help. I thought it was likely to be a trap—that’s why I made the crossbows. But I wasn’t sure. You humans are as good at lying as we are, sometimes. You’re the only one who never lies.”
Jack blushed when he tried to lie. It was a defect going all the way back to childhood. His fair coloring, not any kind of moral superiority, doomed him to honesty. “Alexei said you killed a few of them, and after that it was easy.”
“It was not easy. I’d never killed humans before. I left the hostages with Alexei and went up the hill. They had laid mines. Blocks of explosive buried in the regolith. The wires were visible if one looked carefully. I scraped the pebbles away with my feet and cut the wires. It took a long time.”
“Claymores,” Jack muttered. He suspected Harry Windsor would have been the one to think of that.
“They were watching me on camera the whole time. I suppose they didn’t know what to do. I carried some of the explosives up the hill and put them in the airlock of this hab. I said to them: ‘Do you want to die, or do you want to let us in?’ They let us in.”
“Well done,” Jack said. “You saved everyone.” He wrapped his hand around Keelraiser’s head, pushing it down on his shoulder. “Come here. No, just come here, you crazy alien. It’s over now. It’s all right.” He rubbed Keelraiser’s back through the stiff material of his jacket.
“It is not over now,” Keelraiser said.
“No, of course it isn’t.”
“It’s so stupid it makes me want to shed.” Keelraiser broke away. A few flakes of sloughed-off skin—rriksti tears—drifted from his cheeks. His eyes were wide and fierce.
&nbs
p; “What is?”
“This place. These habs. Stuck up here on stilts, where a missile could take them all out at once! They’ve organized everything around solar power, of all the primitive, inefficient energy sources. They’ve got a thorium reactor. They just haven’t taken it out of the box yet, owing to bootstrapping issues that they somehow failed to anticipate. Mind you, I hate fission reactors. They’re dirty, dangerous. But a thorium reactor is better than nothing …”
Jack moved back and looked quizzically at Keelraiser’s tightly shut lips and huge eyes as Keelraiser continued to pour ideas into his headset.
“They may not like nuclear power, and I expect they won’t like living underground, but they’ll just have to get used to it. It’s safer. As for the water mining operation, it needs to be massively expanded. There’s a conveyor belt running up out of the crater. It carries buckets full of ice ore. We’ll extend it down to our new location, and we’ll also expand the mining works in the crater itself. The Cloudeater’s scans prove there isn’t only water ice down there. There are also ammonia deposits sealed in porous rocks, and that means nitrogen. We’ll need that to ramp up the hydroponics.”
It dawned on Jack that Keelraiser was planning to tear CELL to pieces and rebuild it according to Imfi best practices. “Hold on, are you suggesting we’re going to stay here?”
“They’ve also been mining rare earth elements near the equator, in what they call the KREEP terranes. This moon isn’t quite as barren as it looks. James was telling me about his plans to supply their space station in low earth orbit with lunar oxygen. They’ve already built a linear accelerator to throw containers of REEs into LEO—”
“What were you doing with Coetzee, anyway?”
“James?”
“Did you take him with you to the wreck of the SoD?”
“Yes. Him and a few others.”
“Why?”
“I needed to keep the most important hostages with me.”
Jack leant against the counter, arms folded. What was this feeling? Jealousy? Get a grip, Kildare. He could not possibly feel jealous of a bogus little prick like James Coetzee. On the other hand, Coetzee’s ‘visionary’ shtick had a real hold over the humans at CELL. Harry Windsor had said that everyone was waiting for Coetzee to come back and tell them what to do. Maybe Keelraiser was onto something.
“Did you explain that we aren’t the Lightbringer’s moon conquest division? Did it get through to him?”
“I thought you were dead,” Keelraiser said.
Jack frowned, not seeing the connection.
Keelraiser rose and straightened his uniform. He picked up the bread knife the actress had left on the chopping board, examined the blade, wiped it on his shorts. “Not quite the same as a service sword.” With a limber double-jointed movement, he thrust it behind his neck. He was wearing his scabbard. Jack hadn’t even noticed the thin straps underneath the stiff, square-shouldered Krijistal jacket. “I wonder if there’s another one around somewhere?”
Jack pointed at the magnetic strip holding several knives to the wall above the sink.
Keelraiser selected the longest one—and pointed it at Jack. “Submit to the Imfi conquest.”
Jack tried a smile. Then he scowled. Then he raised his hands to shoulder height, deliberately making a mockery of the gesture. “Stop fucking around, Keelraiser.”
“Submit to the Imfi conquest!” Keelraiser barked the words this time, adding an edge of harmonic resonance. The knife flashed at Jack’s face, stopping just short of his throat.
Jack’s hands went the rest of the way up. The counter dug into his fractured ribs. “Don’t go all Krijistal on me.” He forced himself to speak levelly, staring into Keelraiser’s eyes.
Keelraiser switched his grip on the knife and thrust it into his scabbard, which had once held two short swords with blades only a few tungsten atoms wide. “If I can fool you, I can fool anyone.”
Jack had had a fright and now anger bled into his voice. “You think that’s what these people expect. You think you’ve got to jackboot around like some kind of alien in a Hollywood movie. You could be right. But what does it matter what they think? If they don’t cooperate, we’ll toss them out of the airlock. They don’t matter. What matters is Earth. We’ll refuel the Cloudeater, add some extra tankage. Load up on food and water. Then we’ll head for Earth. The space stations are still there: Sky Station and the old ISS.” The scheme built itself in his mind as he spoke. They weren’t out of this fight yet. “Dock with the ISS. Or Sky Station. But I know for a fact there are several external tanks in the construction dump near the ISS, left over from when we built the SoD. Take the stringers off the tanks, sharpen the ends. Hey presto, missiles. We could even tip them with uranium from this thorium reactor you mentioned. That’ll sort the fucking Lightbringer—”
“And what am I to do with my people? Take them as unwilling passengers on this suicide mission?”
“It’s not a suicide mission,” Jack said, while admitting to himself that it probably would be. Even if the Cloudeater could reach the ISS, it wouldn’t have enough reaction mass left to go anywhere else—neither down to Earth, or back to the moon. “Leave them here, then—”
“To die? Brbb and his platoon are gone. I’m the only Krijistal left. They can’t survive without me.”
“They did on the SoD,” Jack snapped. He knew he wasn’t being fair. During their journey, Keelraiser had backed off from his leadership role so as not to step on Jack’s toes. That’s why Jack knew first-hand how difficult the rriksti civilians could be. They had had to be told a dozen times not to flush the toilet paper. They’d done crazy shit like spacewalking during the SoD’s fly-by of Mars to take pictures. And on the SoD, there hadn’t been 900 human beings who wanted to kill them.
“And then there are the humans,” Keelraiser said relentlessly. “This wretched little collection of tin cans is not self-sufficient. It has relied on regular supply flights. Earth’s launch capacity has been destroyed. There’ll be no more supply flights for the foreseeable future. Without our help, they haven’t got a chance. Would you condemn them to death, just to take one more pot-shot at the Lightbringer?”
Jack covered his face with his hands and growled, “All right, all right! Shit.” Once he forced himself to think past the sexiness of immediate offensive action, he recognized that he wasn’t thinking rationally. He was trying to make up for crashing the SoD. Trying to pretend he hadn’t failed Earth, and his parents, and Kate Menelaou, and everyone who had thought Jack Kildare was the right man for the job, including himself.
Trying to pretend the lives of 932 humans didn’t matter.
But they did, they did. They mattered as much as the 267 surviving rriksti he’d rescued from Europa.
“Sorry,” he muttered. “You’re right. We’ve got to stabilize the life-support situation before we do anything else. Food. Water. Power. Etcetera etcetera etcetera.”
The very same things he’d spent the last two years worrying about. He felt like a hamster trapped in a cage, with a cat rattling the bars. But he’d crashed the SoD. He would have to pay for that.
“But there’s one slight problem, isn’t there?” He raised his head. Keelraiser was pacing between the counters. “If we don’t take out the Lightbringer, they’ll take us out.”
“No, they won’t.”
“You’ve just been saying how vulnerable this place is. One missile could finish us off. Right? So all they’ll need to do is get one of their shuttles into orbit and do exactly what I described, in reverse. In fact they’ve probably got missiles that would do it—”
“They haven’t. The tactical nuclear weapons were all destroyed in the explosion on board, and everything else is sized for the Lightbringer’s railgun. The shuttles are unarmed.”
“Look, these are the guys who aerobraked in Earth’s atmosphere after you thought they were doomed. These are the guys who pulled off an unpowered landing in a ship the size of a small city. You said it was i
mpossible. They did it. Are you going to bet our lives that they can’t get hold of an ICBM and throw it at the moon?”
“They will not attack us,” Keelraiser said, still pacing.
“Oh yeah? What makes you so sure?”
Instead of answering, Keelraiser said again, “I thought you were dead.”
“And?”
“It was an unbelievable shock. It was like losing my life. I abandoned hope altogether for a little while.”
Keelraiser halted. Jack straightened up. He stood 6’4” after four spine-lengthening years in space. Keelraiser was medium height for a rriksti at 6’6”. Their faces were practically on a level.
“There seemed to be no point in going on without you,” Keelraiser said intensely. “Do you understand?”
Jack thought he did. The words left him shaken, emotionally unguarded. He met Keelraiser’s bottomless, dark brown eyes. “I’m sorry. I fucked up. I was taking it out on you. Sorry.”
“Your fuck-ups,” Keelraiser said, “are nothing compared to mine.”
He wrapped his arms around Jack and kissed him fiercely, heavy blunt fingernails digging into his back. The kiss felt like an attack. It was both dismaying and exciting. Jack responded instinctively to the shift in register. He remembered the times they’d laid into each other Krijistal style, even drawing blood. Had there been something of this in that? Yes, of course there had. Maybe, in fact, this was the way it had to be. They struggled against each other, striving to get closer.
It ended abruptly when Jack encountered something odd, tucked inside Keelraiser’s cheek.
“What’s this?”
“What? Nothing.”
“There’s something in your mouth.” Recklessly, Jack pried Keelraiser’s lips open with his fingers.
Keelraiser knocked Jack’s hand away. He stepped back and spat the object into his palm. Jack glimpsed a white plastic square. Something electronic.
“What’s that?”
“I had to put it in my mouth so I’d be sure not to lose it. Our uniforms don’t have pockets. A Krijistal officer isn’t meant to carry anything except his weapons.”
Killshot: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 4) Page 4
