Killshot: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 4)

by Felix R. Savage

  It leapt into her hair and hid.

  Jack turned a wide-eyed grin of amazement on Nene. “Are they … yours?”

  “No, I’m just borrowing them.” Her hair danced. “This is Zhenya and this is Ithrilip. They are six months old.”

  Jack trailed after her into the kitchenette. He could not take his eyes off the infants. Baby rriksti! There had been none on Europa, none on the SoD. “Congratulations. I had no idea.”

  “Yes, we are starting to have children again. Zhenya and Ithrilip—Zhenya is a Russian name, Ithrilip means Moonlight—and there are eight more babies on the way.”

  “Why … I mean, why now?”

  “Keelraiser thinks we’re safe now.” Nene opened her mouth in that rriksti expression of wry amusement. She opened the fridge and took out a slab of pressed suizh. She plopped on the living-room settee, spread one of those stained white cloths on her lap, and sat one of the babies on it. “Will you hold Zhenya while I feed Ithrilip?”

  “I’m not awfully good—”

  Laughing, Nene threw the other baby at him.

  Threw. A baby.

  Jack lunged to catch it, but he was too far away.

  Tiny limbs spread in an X. Semi-opaque webs of skin stretched from wrists to ankles.

  The baby flew across the room, gliding in the low gravity. All Jack had to do was catch his balance and hold out his hands. Zhenya landed on his palms with a surprisingly solid impact.

  “—not very good with babies,” he finished, stunned.

  The minute fingers and toes scrabbled at his skin. It felt like holding a rat. Jack pushed the unworthy comparison away. This was a rriksti. A six-month-old rriksti. And it flew.

  “You’re the cutest thing I’ve ever seen,” he told it solemnly. It gazed into his eyes and trilled in his headset. Rriksti baby-talk.

  Nene said, “Alexei told me you are in trouble. I’m letting you hold my baby, anyway. You brought us safely back from Europa. Some of us have not forgotten that.”

  She was alluding to Keelraiser’s treachery. It gave Jack a much-needed lift to know that Nene was on his side, at least in principle. “Nene, did Alexei warn you about a potential problem with the air?”

  “Yes. He says it’s under control.” She caught his frown. “I’m sorry, Jack, but I have lived through too many life-support scares. I cannot run around like a chicken with my head cut off anymore. Is this correct?”

  Jack laughed. “Yes, it’s correct. In fact, I think it’s a healthy way of looking at it.”

  “I think so, too. Excuse me.” Nene bit off a chunk of the suizh slab. She chewed and swallowed, then lifted Ithrilip to her lips. The baby opened its mouth. Nene’s throat heaved. Beige mush trickled from her pursed lips, into the baby’s mouth.

  Jack stared.

  “Oh, you messy eater,” Nene cooed, wiping the baby’s face. Being a rriksti, she could talk while simultaneously trickling mush into Ithrilif’s mouth. Some of it went into the baby’s mouth, anyway. It soon became clear why the splash cloth’was necessary.

  She’s regurgitating, Jack thought.

  These babies fly.

  I saw her six months ago. She wasn’t pregnant.

  He cleared his throat. “Nene, please don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ve got to ask—”

  Zhenya interrupted him by scrambling up his arm to his shoulder. Swinging from his left ear like a mini-Tarzan, it patted his lips and trilled hopefully.

  “He doesn’t know I’m not a rriksti,” Jack marvelled.

  Nene laughed. “They do that to Alexei, too. He sometimes feeds them, although I have to pre-masticate the food. And before you ask, yes, we evolved from the Imfi equivalent of birds.”

  Jack shook his head in disbelief. He was trying to prise Zhenya out of his hair. Human hair was easier to get tangled in than bio-antennas.

  “Imfi birds—it isn’t really correct to call them birds—our flying creatures do not have wings that flap. They glide, as you saw Zhenya gliding just now. At home, there is always a wind to fly on. Here, there is lunar gravity.” She spat the last of the mush into Ithrilip’s mouth and pointed at the shelf Jack had noticed. “Those are the babies’ shells. We hold onto them as keepsakes.”

  “Nene—”

  “Did you think we were apes, like you? Keelraiser didn’t want to tell you the truth. He thought it would make you think of us as … too alien. But we are not birds, any more than you are chimpanzees.” She cleaned Ithrilip up with the splash cloth. “They will lose their wings when they are about four. It may happen sooner. In our Darkside arcologies, children often used to ground at two or three; the artificial wind wasn’t strong enough to keep them in the air.”

  “Nene—”

  “Are you disgusted? Repelled? Do you think of us as lesser now? Beings you have nothing in common with, although we feel as you feel, bleed as you bleed, speak your language?”

  “Nene, I think Zhenya has peed in my hair.”

  She laughed an accordion-squeal of happiness. “They pee on everything.”

  They were halfway through feeding Zhenya—well, Nene was feeding it, while Jack played with Ithrilip, tossing it into the air and batting it around like a living shuttlecock, a game Nene assured him the babies loved—when a string of radio-frequency beeps sounded. Nene went to a screen mounted on the wall, balancing Zhenya on one hand. Because the apartment was radio-proof, Jack reckoned this screen was the equivalent of a landline. She read the message on the low-contrast display, and turned to him. “Go.”

  “What’s happened?” He tensed for bad news.

  “That was Alexei. Go.”

  “What’s the status of the air issues?”

  “They’re still pushing the atmosphere through the decontamination loop, but we’re out of danger. That means you are in trouble again. Alexei says Coetzee is trying to blame the methane contamination on you, as well. So you are completely screwed, but you have one chance. Go to Keelraiser.”

  Jack caught Ithrilip as it glided towards him. “Nene …”

  She took Ithrilip, plopped it on her shoulder, pushed Jack to the door. She pointed along the corridor. “His office is that way. If you get lost, ask someone. Just go!”

  Jack stumbled into the corridor, head spinning with the suddenness of his ejection. The autorip closed behind him.

  He walked in the direction Nene had indicated, but only until he reached the nearest artery corridor. Then he turned and half-walked, half-ran towards the other exit from the bunker.

  The one at the end of X-ray country.

  The rriksti kept their suits in a changing room near their airlock, the mirror image of the human one.

  Five klicks around the outside of the bunker to the thorium reactor. That was nothing.

  Go.

  CHAPTER 25

  Skyler said, “I’m gonna go back and see if I can find him. Are you coming?”

  “No,” Harry said. “We’ll start the pre-flight checks.”

  Skyler hesitated. He didn’t feel good about leaving Harry, Colin, and Pete on their own in the Moon Express. None of them were astronauts. It was like leaving a bunch of interns in charge of the lab.

  On the other hand, they didn’t completely lack technical savvy. They’d unloaded the stuff for the engine ignition hack and set it up the way Jack had told Skyler to. They wouldn’t break anything.

  Mainly, however, he found himself unable to say no to a prince.

  “OK. I’ll be back soon, either way.” He got into the rover and started the engine.

  The rover bumped through the darkness. He ran no risk of getting lost, as years of journeys back and forth had marked the route with a river of overlapping tire tracks. It was like driving a bumpy, dusty interstate. His thoughts drifted back to his last talk with Trek.

  That shuttle’s left Sky Station.

  But it hasn’t de-orbited.

  That had been six hours ago.

  Maybe Trek’s network of eyes on the sky had simply missed the shuttle’s de
-orbit burn. They were just amateurs with binoculars.

  But if they were right, what did that mean?

  He had to talk to Jack about it. And that brought him back to the chief concern preying on his mind.

  Jack, where the fuck are you?

  He drove on, keeping one eye on the battery level indicator. The rovers only did fifty klicks per charge, and he’d already used up more than half of that. He would have to grab a spare battery while he was in the bunker.

  *

  “Taft’s been gone three hours,” Pete said. “It doesn’t take that long to drive there and back.”

  Colin said, “Give them one more hour. Then we start back on foot.”

  Harry said, “No. We’re not going back.”

  They were crammed into the pilot’s cabin of the Moon Express. The light from the consoles filled Harry’s faceplate with reflected numbers. But Colin knew that tone of voice. Even a rogue prince who ran away to the moon could do royal when he wanted to.

  “If Taft can’t find Kildare …” Harry started, and shook his head. “No. Whether he finds him or not, we’re going.”

  “Sir!” Pete’s sir was an enthusiastic acknowledgement. Colin’s a horrified remonstration.

  Harry’s helmet turned towards him. “Look, it’s not that complicated. The computer does everything.”

  “The engine ignition …”

  “Piece of cake. We inject the powders into the combustion chamber via the TEB route.” Harry parroted what Kildare had told them. “Then inject water under high pressure, forming a mist. The reaction will happen instantaneously. Follow up with LOX, then turn on the LH2 flow, and there you go. Right? We’ve already set up the water reservoir and the high-pressure source.”

  Colin nodded reluctantly. He himself had rigged the LOX tank, wrapped in a heating blanket, which would power the water injection.

  “So.” Harry brought his gloves together, shutting down what had passed for a discussion. “One more hour, then we go.”

  *

  Jack walked across the roof of the bunker. Every minute heightened his desperation. But he could only go so fast. Rriksti spacesuits had no built-in boots. It felt like walking barefoot. And to make matters worse, the footing was treacherous. The blanket of regolith over the roof had just been bulldozed into place. It shifted underfoot like scree on a beach.

  Ten thousand slabs of lunar iron, welded together, lay beneath this rubble. Below that lay a pressurized volume the size of Nuneaton, but you would never guess what you were walking on. Jack remembered the rriksti bunker on Europa. From outside, that, too, had looked just like a hillock. The rriksti excelled at deception even in their architecture. The moon’s hostile environment actually conspired with them. Here, as on Europa, the freezing ground was a ready-made heat sink. No need for surface heat rejection systems that would give the game away …

  He raised his head to see how much further he had to go.

  The illusion of lunar solitude shattered.

  Less than a hundred meters ahead, a work crew fussed around a pipe that rose from the rubble and extended across the roof, towards the evening shadow cast by the bunker’s convexity.

  Jack knew what that was. The emergency decontamination loop. Just like the SoD, the bunker needed some way to vent the atmosphere in case of fire … or methane contamination. So vents had been built into the roof here and there. And he’d almost walked into the one they were using to chill the dangerous methane out of the air.

  Great going, Kildare.

  Gritting his teeth, he hooked left. He’d have to circle around. The spacesuit he’d taken was Alexei’s; its life-support backpack had a respirator cup shaped for a human mouth. And the bloody thing was patterned in the high-visibility red and green of the Lokomotiv Moscow football club.

  Had they seen him?

  “Hey, you!” His rriksti headset, worn under the suit as a radio, picked up a voice. “Name and number!”

  They had.

  *

  Skyler braked, dust spraying from the rover’s wheels.

  His suit radio picked up confused voices.

  One of them sounded like Jack’s.

  Uh oh.

  Skyler jumped out of the rover. He turned in a circle. He couldn’t see anyone. In the pitiless evening sunlight, the curving roof of the bunker looked two-dimensional, like a paper cut-out. It cast a shadow anti-sunwards. Skyler had driven past that shadow, thinking: Bunker Hill. One of his ancestors had died in the Battle of Bunker Hill. His mother had taken them to see the monument when they were little, before she ran off with her yoga instructor.

  “Identify yourself or I will shoot!” This voice came through loud and clear. The mess was moving his way.

  “Don’t shoot!” yelled Skyler Taft, descendant of ambassadors and generals and one US president. He had learned the hard way that this was always the best advice. But no one ever took it. He started running in long lunar bounds.

  *

  “Right,” Harry said. “Here we go.”

  “Fingers crossed,” Colin said, strapped into the co-pilot’s couch. There were only two couches up top, so Pete had agreed to ride in the passenger cabin. Moving only his eyes, Colin watched Harry push that button, flip this switch. The instruments flashed like an unholy disco. No poisonous snake—of the human persuasion, or otherwise—had ever scared him as much as this inanimate machine did.

  Three. Two. One.

  LOX jetted into the combustion chamber, igniting the explosive blend of aluminum and phosphorus powders.

  Half a second later, a stream of LH2 joined the controlled explosion.

  Typhoons of chemical fire roared out of all four engine bells.

  The Moon Express hurtled into the sky like a cork out of a bottle … but this bottle was the moon’s gravity well, and it would take some getting out of.

  Gee-forces squashed Colin into his couch. It felt like death itself was sitting on his chest, sinking its claws into his lungs.

  He did not think about the nuclear submarines at Clyde. He thought about Mary and the boys. He pictured his kitchen in Aberdeen, in the house that remained home no matter how long he was away. He could practically smell the tea steeping in the pot that always sat on the corner of the Aga, and the mouldy football kit abandoned by the back door.

  He imagined Harry getting his feet under the table, safe from the world that had pursued him like a prey animal all his life.

  To hell with saving humanity.

  All Colin McFarlane wanted was to go home.

  *

  “Stop or I will shoot!”

  Jack didn’t stop. In fact, even if he had wanted to, he couldn’t. Start running downhill on the moon and good fucking luck to you.

  He soared into the shadow of the bunker. Impenetrable blackness swallowed the ground. He frantically keyed the wrist patch that switched on his chest-lamp. The rubble drifted up at him, a beach lapped by a sea of darkness. The decontamination pipe glinted dully.

  The darkness turned into day.

  A new star flashed up from behind the rim of Shackleton Crater, casting shadows in the wrong directions.

  Jack sobbed out curses.

  They went without me.

  Bastards—

  Who’s flying that thing?

  The star brightened. It expanded until its heart reddened and the shadows around Jack turned murky.

  Then fiery meteors started to fall from the sky.

  Jack missed his footing. He rolled over and over on the rubble.

  The CELLies floundered over the skyline.

  Lumps of flame thudded into the regolith. The heavy impacts flung dust and pebbles through the vacuum.

  One of the meteors struck a CELLie, pulverizing him.

  Another hit the decontamination pipe.

  The methane went up like a gas flare from an oil well. Flames silhouetted the CELLies in a stop-motion tableau.

  Shrapnel flew in a lethal rain.

  Jack struggled to his feet, started to run.<
br />
  God’s fist thumped him on the back and blotted out everything.

  CHAPTER 26

  Hannah stepped out of her house into a rare sunny morning. “Ahhhh.” She stretched her arms over her head. The old-growth trees around her house gave the illusion of Edenic solitude. She’d chosen a spot just downhill of the old look-out platform, which was now a HERF mast poking out of the trees. You could smell the city, but not see it, from here.

  Bethany waved from the hammock strung between the jacarandas. She raised her coffee cup. “This is like an upscale resort!”

  “Choose the Congo for the family vacation of a lifetime,” David intoned, from the lounger where he was idly scanning an iPad.

  Hannah forced a smile. “Where’re the kids?”

  “Nate’s gone on safari with Ripstiggr,” Bethany said. “Izzy’s around.”

  Bethany and David trusted the rriksti to keep the children safe. It seemed idiotic on the face of it. However, they were not wrong. Ripstiggr would not let harm come to a hair on the head of any one of the Zieglers, as he knew perfectly well that their survival guaranteed Hannah’s pliability.

  Speaking of which … “I have to go and meet some Chinese officials. David, wanna come?”

  “Guess the brave new world still needs lawyers!” David said pleasedly, accompanying her to her Toyota 4x4. Flifya drove. Sivine sat in front with a rifle across her lap. Although this was now the safest place in Africa, the locals had expectations about strength projection. The blacked-out windows and Darkside pennants on the hood broadcasted badass alien glamor.

  Lightbringer City sprawled below them, filling the valley. In one sense this was just like any fast-growing African metropolis—hastily erected buildings surrounded by a ring of slums. But Hannah had put the kibosh on the idea of skyscrapers, or anything over three storeys tall. She had laid out broad streets and made sure enough trees survived to shade them. She had built a mini-Los Angeles in this Congolese valley. And today, even the weather was cooperating. The sun glinted on rooftop solar panels. The UV-proof roofs of the giant rriksti greenhouses mirrored the cirrus clouds. The smells of smoke and—despite Hannah’s best efforts—sewage drifted from the shanty-town that sprawled on either side of the scar.