“What?” Hannah said. Gexlidda was the sergeant in charge of the three hands of infantry who’d accompanied them. “Where’d he go?”
“Not sure, Shiplord. Reconnaissance?”
Whoomp. Fire and smoke blossomed from the crowd behind them. A pressure wave rocked the Hummer on its wheels.
Tralp spreadeagled himself on top of Hannah, protecting her with his body. Flifya accelerated into the crowd. “Hold on, Shiplord.” The Hummer rolled over things on the ground with soft, sickening jolts.
“You’re running over people!” Hannah screamed, as the collisions jolted her against her seatbelt.
“We’ll get you clear.”
“Go back!”
“Shiplord, a bomb just went off.”
“Go BACK!”
Flifya U-turned. A bloated mushroom of smoke obscured the Knucklebiter. People fled, blood streaming down their faces.
Hannah pushed Tralp off her. Bodies littered the street. Those were the ones they’d run over. Closer to the Knucklebiter, body parts lay here and there. Blood pooled over scorch marks where the explosion had gone off.
“That was big,” Sivine said. “They’re usually not so effective.”
“A suicide bomber?” Hannah said, swallowing nausea.
The Americans holding out in the Rockies had lately been sending suicide bombers against the allies of Imf. That brought home how lopsided the fight was. The carnage in the street gave Hannah a frisson of horrified awe. How could you ever defeat a people willing to commit suicide for their cause? We used to have the same problem with Islamic terrorists, before they graduated to commanding tactical squads of Nigerian mercenaries from the comfort of their rriksti-provided rear headquarters. Now it was Americans using the only weapons that remained to them. Their own bodies. Walking IEDs.
“Suicide is disgusting,” Flifya said, parking under the tail of the shuttle. They all jumped out and started pulling the medical packs out of the Hummer’s way-back. “We do not even have a word for it.”
“Seriously?”
“Even animals don’t murder themselves. It’s a crime against your own species.” Flifya’s mouth sealed tight in disapproval. “No rriksti would ever dream of suicide.”
She had thought she knew the rriksti, but she hadn’t known that. Of course, Flifya wouldn’t have spoken so freely if he knew about Hannah’s own failed suicidal attempt to crash the Lightbringer. That remained a secret between her and Ripstiggr.
“Let’s go.” She filled her arms with bivinzh, the clingfilm-like material that the rriksti used as bandages. “We don’t have enough medipacks, so: triage.”
She lost herself in the urgent work of stabilizing the wounded. The medical packs contained supplies of artificial blood, manufactured by the Lightbringer’s technicians to human specs, and selective clotting agents to prevent hemorrhage. Stop the bleeding, wrap the wound in bivinzh, and shoot the affected area with tissue growth accelerator. This was the closest thing to a silver bullet in the medical universe. It stimulated the growth of pluripotent stem cells, and told them when to stop. Human medical research had been on the trail of this mechanism, but never got near it before the Lightbringer ended medical research on Earth forever.
Pick up body parts, clean them off, attach them to their owners. If you reattach them quickly enough, the tissue growth accelerator will do the rest. Hannah gloried in cheating the suicide bomber of the results he/she would have wanted. The bomber himself or herself, of course, was now just a red smear on the asphalt, on other people, on Hannah’s clothes.
Ripstiggr came running down the street. Joker and the others, behind him, shot superfluous pulses of energy at human stragglers. It was when the rriksti ran flat out that they looked most alien. Like galloping horses, they transitioned into a completely different gait. They pushed off with both feet at the same time, in grasshopper-like bounds.
Ripstiggr skidded through the blood and snatched Hannah into his arms. She sagged against him, suddenly speechless with delayed shock. He half-carried her up the steps into the shuttle.
“Where is that schleerp Gexlidda?” he yelled at the infantry.
“On his way back, Commander.”
“Tell him to hurry up. We’re leaving as soon as he gets back. Start the engine checks, and make sure none of these animals get near the shuttle.”
Hannah flopped into her seat in the passenger cabin. Her thoughts circled around the wounded humans. Only then did she remember where she’d been going before the bomb went off. Her eyes filled with tears. Oh dammit, dammit. Her only chance, gone.
The interior of the Knucklebiter had been refitted so it resembled Air Force One or something. Puffy leather sofas faced each other across low tables. There was also a wet bar. Ripstiggr got two glasses.
“Wine glasses?” Hannah could have used something stronger right now. A dry martini. Krak.
Ripstiggr placed a bottle of 2011 Beringer Private Reserve on the table and uncorked it.
“Oh my God.” Hannah almost smiled. “That used to be, like, my favorite chardonnay ever.”
“I told the president to find some for us.”
Ripstiggr poured the wine. He looked out the window. Hannah followed his gaze. El Presidente was being made to inspect the remains of the suicide bomber and his/her victims. He shook his head violently: no, no, I had nothing to do with this.
“I’m going to have him replaced,” Ripstiggr said.
“Awww, don’t kill him,” Hannah said. “Poor little guy. He looks so pathetic in that uniform. And he did find this wine for us.” She clinked her glass against Ripstiggr’s. As she swallowed the first mouthful, the horror of the suicide bombing receded. Just add alcohol and any situation becomes normal.
“Someone has to pay for this,” Ripstiggr said. “They almost got you.”
“But they didn’t.” Flushed with the wine and the joy of being alive, she pulled him down on the sofa. They kissed, mouths cold and wet. She snuggled into the safety of his enfolding arms.
It used to be that they’d just fuck. Now they kissed and cuddled, as well. Hannah knew this was a step in the wrong direction. But how could she deny herself the one nice thing in her life?
Vehicles came and went outside. The engines of the Knucklebiter spun up. Clunks and thunks reverberated through the shuttle. The rriksti were loading their loot into the cargo hold. Hannah broke away from Ripstiggr’s embrace, glanced out the window.
“Rocket boosters?” Five infantry struggled each eight-foot cylinder off the back of a JPL grounds maintenance truck. Those things were heavy. They were used for boosting satellites into orbit. But the Lightbringer launched its satellites from the shuttles. You didn’t need that much power to reach LEO when the payload started out in the stratosphere. “What do we need those for?”
“Not sure yet. They might come in handy,” Ripstiggr said, kissing her neck.
She wriggled around and prodded his chest with a finger tipped with Congolese nail art. “I can tell when you’re holding out on me.”
Instead of answering, he sat up straight, took her hands. “Hannah.”
“Uh oh.”
“We didn’t really come here for satellite parts.”
Fear constricted her throat. A terrible foreboding oppressed her.
“I got you something nice.”
Hannah banged the back of her head against the sofa. He couldn’t do this to her. Couldn’t steal her last hope.
“What did I do?” Ripstiggr said.
She shook her head, hoping she was wrong about what he’d done.
Maybe he’d got her a whole case of Moët & Chandon.
Or, God knows, a puppy.
But he hadn’t.
CHAPTER 21
The aft ladder rattled. David Ziegler’s head poked into the passenger cabin, followed by the rest of him.
At the sight of her brother-in-law, Hannah forgot to be upset about how he’d got here. She shrieked in joy, ran to him and hugged him. He winced, but hugged her r
ight back. She let him go as Bethany climbed up the ladder. The sisters embraced long and tight. Bethany had changed. Her plump figure had deflated into bony angles. The expensively highlighted and straightened waves had grown out into graying frizz. But when Hannah held her close, she still felt and smelled like Bee-Bee, despite the overtones of smoke and gasoline.
Hot tears squeezed from Hannah’s shut eyes. “Bee-Bee, oh God, I’m so sorry. Everything. So sorry.”
“I missed you so much,” Bethany sobbed, as if she had never told Hannah to get out of her house, get help, you’re a shitty human being.
“Mom, have some freaking self-respect,” said a girl’s voice. Hannah opened her eyes and saw Isabel standing at the top of the ladder.
“Oh my God, Izzy, you’re so tall!”
“What do you expect? You’ve been away for five years,” Isabel said.
Hannah heard the flat, hostile tone, but moved towards her niece anyway. She dropped her arms when Isabel backed away, rejecting the offered hug.
Isabel had not only grown tall, she’d grown gorgeous. Dark curly hair, the same color as Hannah’s, cascaded over swimmer’s shoulders. She wore a ripped UCLA sweatshirt and jeans. With a scornful glance, she took in the deluxe passenger cabin, the rriksti, and Hannah herself, in the Chanel skirt suit she’d worn especially to show her family that she was no longer the schlubby old Hannah; she was Shiplord, and she was OK. If they came with her to the DRC, they could all be OK together.
That’s what she had wanted to offer them. An end to all their tsuris. But it had to be their choice. If they didn’t want to come, so be it. That’s why she hadn’t told Ripstiggr what she was planning, and that’s why Isabel’s next words wounded her deeply. “So, are you kidnapping us?”
“Izzy, shut the hell up,” David said. He stared fearfully at the rriksti like a kindergartener on his first day of school.
Hannah turned on Ripstiggr, taking her family’s side. “You had no right to just snatch them!”
“I thought you’d be pleased,” Ripstiggr said.
“Did you ask them if they wanted to come?” She knew he hadn’t. “What if they’d rather stay here?” She turned to Bethany. “If you’d rather stay, we’ll give you stuff. Just tell me what you need—”
“We want to come,” Bethany said instantly. “Please don’t leave us in this hellhole!”
She was not talking to Hannah. She was talking to Ripstiggr. Awkwardly, she dropped to her knees and crawled towards him. She kissed his dirty, bloodstained boots. She must have seen that on television.
Hannah felt her sister’s humiliation as if it were her own. She dragged Bethany to her feet. “You don’t have to do that.”
“Oh, we’re exceptions, huh?” Isabel said. She dropped onto one of the sofas and swung her long, ripped-denim legs onto the table. ”You look gross, by the way, Aunt Hannah.”
“Well, excuse me, but my personal shoppers are aliens,” Hannah snapped. “I told them to get me something nice, and they stole the entire contents of the Chanel store on the Champs des Elysees. Sorry it doesn’t meet with your approval.”
“I didn’t mean that,” Isabel said. “I mean you’re covered with blood. Yuck.”
Hannah looked down at herself. It was true, of course. She did not look like a celebrity. She looked like Lady freaking Macbeth.
“I was trying to help people,” she said.
The Knucklebiter started to taxi. “Nate?” David said. “Where’s Nate?”
“Got him right here,” Sergeant Gexlidda boomed. He came up the ladder with a small boy hanging limply on his back.
The first thing Hannah thought was: Uh oh, that kid’s sick.
The second thing was: Oh my God, that’s Nathan.
She had last seen her nephew as a toddler. Now he was a skinny seven-year-old, hair sticking to his flushed cheeks, completely out of it. Gexlidda laid him on one of the sofas. His feet hung off the end. Toes poked out of holes in too-small sneakers.
“He’s got a fever,” Bethany babbled. “He got shot a while back–”
“Shot!” Hannah said.
“It was the Feds,” Isabel said. “They tried to catch us, to use us as bargaining chips against you.”
“And he just never got completely better,” Bethany went on. “It might be tetanus from the wound or I don’t even know. One of these multiply antibiotic-resistant things. God alone knows. It’s not like we’ve got any antibiotics to give him. I’m so scared. Can you help him? We’ve heard a lot about rriksti medicine …”
“Not to worry,” Ripstiggr said. He knelt and laid one hand on Nathan’s head. Joker and Gexlidda knelt beside him, touching the boy’s stomach and back.
Bethany clutched Hannah’s arm. “What are they doing?” she begged over the noise of the engines.
None of them would have seen extroversion before. The rriksti did not allow that to be shown on TV. “They’re healing him,” Hannah said. “Don’t worry, it’s completely safe.” Lie of the century. Extroversion was the two-edged gift that had opened her up to the rriksti like a living technical manual. She helplessly watched them work their magic on her nephew, until the shuttle turned the corner onto Oak Grove Drive, and she had to direct the others to strap in for takeoff.
She’d been dreaming of this day for so long. The hope of reuniting with Bethany, David, Isabel, and Nathan had given her the strength to make it home from Europa.
Now Ripstiggr had taken that away from her.
Tribute for the Shiplord.
A set of gold-plated keys that opened nothing …
… and the living, breathing keys to her heart.
I got you something nice, he had said, presenting her family to her like a basket of puppies.
The shuttle accelerated, engines screaming. Hannah rescued the Beringer Private Reserve as it began to slide off the table. The glasses, too. Each one still held an inch of wine. She got rid of it by drinking it, and felt Isabel’s eyes on her.
“Still on the sauce, Aunt Hannah?”
“You’d need a drink, too, if you’d just rescued a dozen victims of a suicide bombing,” Hannah said.
Isabel laughed a very grown-up laugh. “When we got back to our house, there were Mexicans living in it. We chased them out. Dad and I used to take turns going hunting with the assault rifle. You know what hunting means these days? It means finding people who have food, and taking it away from them. I’ve killed people, Aunt Hannah. Not all of them were trying to kill me.”
Hannah tipped her head back and closed her eyes. “I am not going to have a pissing contest with you about who’s the most bad-ass. You didn’t want to come. I get that. Well, we’re stopping in Germany on the way home. You can get off there, if you want.”
They spent 24 hours parked on an autobahn behind the North African Alliance front lines.
Isabel did not get off.
Ripstiggr took Gexlidda and a hand of infantry, vanished along the autobahn, and returned driving a truck-mounted Soviet-era ICBM.
“Whoa boy, that’s a TOPOL!” David said. “Where’d you find that, Ripstiggr?” After one good meal he had reverted to being the bouncy, outgoing David that Hannah remembered. Now he was trying to bond with Ripstiggr, bro to bro.
“The Russians moved it to the old Soviet base at Chenmitz,” Ripstiggr boomed. “They intended to use it to attack the Lightbringer. But now the Russians are our friends.”
In the distance, unnaturally dark and low clouds hung over the flat landscape of Saxony. The air being drawn into the shuttle carried the stinging scent of gunpowder, and the chemical smell of explosives. Hannah spotted billows of flame, like yellow-red Jiffy-pop mushrooms of light, fading to black and rising in the shockwave-roiled air. Hard to tell how close the front was. Joker said the NAA were a couple of days from taking Leipzig.
The rriksti found a crane, detached the TOPOL from its truck, and maneuvered it into the cargo hold of the Skycutter. They ended up moving the rocket boosters from JPL into the passenger cabin to
make room for it.
“This is so cool!” Nathan said, fully recovered and chomping on candy given him by a Libyan colonel. He sat astride one of the rocket boosters and pretended to drive it.
That night Hannah fucked Ripstiggr and Joker in the bedroom of her house in Lightbringer City. Bach on the stereo. Wet wind rattling the blinds. Bethany and her family safely asleep, out of earshot. A dose of extroversion, schnapps looted from the base at Chenmitz, and then it was game on. Long gone were the days when Hannah had recoiled from doing more than one guy at a time. Ironically, she’d come to appreciate the value of having someone else in bed as an emotional buffer against Ripstiggr. With Joker in the mix, there was no risk of getting kissy and cuddly. Ripstiggr may have wanted her to himself, but he couldn’t sulk about it, as he was the one who’d encouraged her to fuck the crew in the first place.
She took Joker first, while Ripstiggr fingered her ass. Two holes filled and that only left the one in her heart. Bouncing deliriously in time to Joker’s thrusts, she thought not of her family but of the TOPOL. Phallic, monstrously oversized. And the rocket boosters—smaller versions of the same thing. If only she could cram them inside herself and make them disappear.
Joker came and rolled away. He lay back on the enormous platform bed, playing with his detumescing penis. He didn’t give a damn that Hannah was using him. He was just a pussy hound. The devilish weekend gleam in his eyes said that soon he’d be ready to go again.
She reached out for Ripstiggr. She was so wet now that his cock slid all the way in on his first thrust. She climaxed explosively. And that was when she thought of Skyler.
It came out of the blue. She hadn’t thought of him in months. Why now?
The TOPOL. The rocket boosters.
Skyler.
What was the connection?
The moon.
A TOPOL.
Two rocket boosters.
Oh, no.
She forced herself to keep quiet until Ripstiggr finished and withdrew. She got up, put on the fluffy robe they’d brought her from Paris, and crossed wobbly-legged to the kitchen, where she fixed herself a cup of coffee, just for something to do with her hands.
Killshot: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 4) Page 15
