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

by Felix R. Savage

  But as of last week, Skyler had stopped calling home.

  What in the hell was going on up there?

  Kuldeep wandered back inside. He watched the Q&A portion of the president’s talk with half his mind on the moon. The screen grabbed his attention when he noticed the engagement counter trending up.

  “Look at that, Rich. Two hundred thousand people online. Two ten … They’re gonna crash the server.”

  “Maybe it’s the Brussels thing,” Burke said, at the same time as Flaherty took a question from an online participant in France.

  “Mr. President, is it true that you will be attending the global peace summit in Brussels?”

  The Lightbringer’s pet talking heads had been hyping this summit for weeks. It was supposed to be an opportunity for ‘unaligned’ leaders to come to the table and discuss the future. In other words, surrender.

  Flaherty responded, “They say security is guaranteed. But I’m telling you, if anyone trusts a rriksti guarantee of security, they must have been hiding under a rock for the last year and some.”

  Applause. But Kuldeep frowned. “He didn’t say he’s not going.”

  “He called them rriksti,” Burke said. “That’s a first. It’s always ‘squids’.”

  “Yeah. Huh.” A worm of unease twisted in Kuldeep’s stomach.

  He forgot it—and the president—as Savannah turned over, groaned, and sat up, pushing tousled hair off her face.

  Kuldeep helped her to her feet. She smelled of the fruity Mexican detergent they had to use in place of shampoo. On her, it was a good smell. “How are you feeling?”

  “Like I wanna puke my guts up, as usual,” she said, but she gave him a soft, sleepy kiss. He stroked the tiny bulge of her tummy. “I want pretzels, Kul. Potato chips. Greasy french fries. Salty junk food. Please. Noooow.”

  Kuldeep would’ve flown to the moon to get her what she wanted, but junk food had vanished from the shops of Puerto Rico. In fact, most of the shops had vanished. The Arecibo team lived on prepper fare: rice, beans, plantains.

  “My mom says that means it’s a boy,” he said. “Salty cravings.”

  “I agree,” Candy Burke said, coming out on the balcony. “Look at her skin. Milk and honey. A boy for sure.”

  The things that had vanished. Gynecology clinics. Ultrasounds. Kuldeep felt panic when he thought about the baby being born up here, with only its grandmother attending.

  “Oh yeah, Dad,” Savannah said. “I forgot to tell you. The computer picked up something weird last night.”

  Burke’s team was so short-handed that his wife and daughter, and Kuldeep, and the security guys, took turns monitoring the telescope.

  “What kind of weird, honey?” Burke said.

  “Like a whole bunch of data downloaded itself.”

  Burke and Kuldeep rushed up the hill to the telescope in about fifteen seconds flat. They hurried to the monitoring room, where the NASA woman on shift pulled up last night’s data.

  Savannah, slower getting up the hill, came in. “So, is it anything interesting?”

  Burke turned from the screens with a tired smile. “It’s just the James Webb Telescope, honey.”

  “The what?”

  “Our biggest and baddest deep-space telescope. It was originally designed to look at galaxy and star formation, but we retasked it in 2019 to track the journey of the Lightbringer. It’s a long way away: it orbits the Sun at the L2 Lagrange point. So the Lightbringer never had a chance to trash it, like they did everything in Earth orbit.”

  “So it’s still working.”

  “Yes. Still repeating its last set of commands to infrared-scan the outer solar system.” Burke gestured at the window of the ops room, and the pewter bowl of the telescope below. “We happened to pick up one of its weekly data downloads.”

  “Oh.”

  “It used to transmit to the Deep Space Network. Three big radio telescope arrays in California, Australia, and Spain. We haven’t got those anymore, but smaller telescopes can also detect the signals.”

  The NASA woman interrupted. “I’m processing this data, Rich,” she said. “It does look kind of interesting. But we didn’t get all of it.” Frustration tinged her voice.

  After examining the data, Burke said, “Damn. Way to leave us hanging.”

  “Why didn’t we get all of it?” Savannah said.

  “Fixed dish, honey. We can’t track the JWST across the sky. We can only see what’s in our perception cone.”

  “Well, it’s going to download its stuff again next week, right? So find a dish that moves.”

  Burke laughed hollowly.

  Kuldeep said, “I might actually be able to do that.”

  Savannah’s coffee-colored eyes spurred him to make big promises he didn’t know if he could back up.

  “We haven’t got the Deep Space Network anymore, but we’ve got the Trekker Taft network. Let me email him.”

  “The no-contact protocol,” Burke protested.

  “Screw the protocol.” Nothing ventured, nothing gained. He was going to be a father. “If there’s anyone on Earth with access to a radio telescope, Trek will know how to find them.”

  CHAPTER 30

  “Thanks for this, Mike,” John Kildare said.

  “I’m not altogether keen on leaving you here on your own,” Mike Vaughn said, as they got John’s kit out of the car boot. Mike no longer drove his Prius. The cops had confiscated it a couple of months back. He had replaced it with a beat-up Corolla that had one inestimable advantage: it attracted little attention.

  Leaving the Corolla parked on the side of the road, they carried John’s tent and duffel bag across a frost-whitened field. A fence, more symbol than deterrent, was easily stepped over. They trudged into the grounds of the Bayfordbury Observatory.

  “I’ll be fine here,” John said. He put down the duffel in a leafless copse. He wished his tent was not so very red. Like a fishing lure. But there didn’t seem to be anyone around to notice it. This was rural Hertfordshire. Nothing here to loot. The nearest potential target was the University of Hertfordshire, a couple of miles away.

  Beyond the trees, domes stood in shaggy parkland, like the relics of Byzantine churches.

  “I’ll help you put up the tent,” Mike said.

  “I’ll be fine,” John assured him. “Go on, get back. And don’t go through Rugby.”

  “Not likely.”

  On their way here from Nuneaton, they’d driven into the outskirts of Rugby to visit a friend of John’s. That had gone all right, but on their way back to the M1 they had run into some cops. Their Battenburg-checkered cars had been decked with flaming skull-and-crossbones flags, like the covers of the heavy metal records that Jack had been into for a mercifully brief period in his teens. It was enough to make you miss the days when Earth Party walkers were the worst threat roving the Home Counties. Loudspeakers had ordered Mike to pull over. Instead, Mike had stepped on the accelerator and shot across their noses, muttering words that were quite inappropriate for a general practitioner and father of four.

  “I’ll stick to the back roads,” he assured John. “And I’ll be back to recover your frozen corpse on Wednesday.”

  John smiled. “Tell Helen she’s not to worry.”

  “Will do.”

  Mike strode away between the bare-branched trees. John erected his tent, reflecting on the pointlessness of telling Helen not to worry. He’d left her in a state of worry so exalted it approached a religious trance. But she was not worrying about him. She was worrying about Jack, their only child, who was alive—alive, ALIVE!—on the moon.

  John, this is Avigdor. I hope this email finds you. I’ve been writing to your usual address but have not had any response.

  John had not received any of those emails, because his phone had gone out when everyone else’s did. He had been in regular contact with Avigdor Taft before that, but knowing how bad things were in America now, he’d sadly assumed he would not be hearing from his fellow ‘NASA
Dad’ again. He had continued to pray, however. And last week his prayers had been answered in the form of a crumpled printout, passed from hand to hand before it reached him. Somehow Avigdor had got the email address of the Catholic school where John had taught before he retired.

  My younger son, Trekker, is something of an internet whiz-kid.

  Well, that explained it.

  In November, Trek made contact with Skyler. He is alive and well at that goddamn sci-fi colony on the moon. He says that your Jack is also alive.

  Alive. ALIVE! That was as far as John had read before shouting for Helen. She’d come running, afraid he was having a heart attack. He almost had.

  Everyone at Our Lady of the Angels had celebrated with the Kildares when they heard the good news. But in fact, John and Helen’s feelings oscillated between joy and acute anxiety. Why was it easier to believe your only child was dead than to know he was alive, but to know nothing of what was happening up there?

  For contact with the moon had been lost again, Avigdor Taft said, and now he had a favor to ask—a request passed along from what remained of NASA—which might or might not help their sons.

  Anything, Avigdor. Just name it.

  And that’s why John Kildare was breaking into the Bayfordbury Observatory on a freezing January day.

  Tent set up, he walked across the parkland to the telescopes. The sun, a red wintry ball, had risen high enough to melt the frost off grass that had not been mown in months. Beyond the domes, a large dish pointed skywards on a goosenecked support, looming over a one-storey building. This was the East Anglian Amateur Radio Observatory.

  Although located on the university observatory’s grounds, EAARO was actually run by a non-profit … and the science director of that non-profit lived in Rugby. John knew him from the days when they were both active in the local astronomy society. That was who he’d gone to see this morning at the crack of dawn. It had felt like a miracle to find Hubert still ensconced in his home, and determined to remain there, although broken windows and crime scene tape marred his street.

  The second part of that miracle was in John’s pocket.

  Glancing over his shoulder, feeling like a housebreaker, he stepped up to the EAARO building and took out Hubert’s master keys.

  Inside, the air was stale and dusty, but did not smell of people. No one had been in here recently. John wondered if he should move his bivouac in here. It might be safer, and would certainly be warmer … but that seemed like an offense too many. He was not a squatter.

  He fumbled through the darkness to find the circuit-breakers. The power’ll be off, Hubert had said, but there are on-site generators. After all, data keeps raining down from the sky whether or not the bloody power company’s on the job.

  John had taught science to teenagers. A balky electrical system had no hope of resisting his organizational powers. Half an hour later, he had everything humming. He fired up the computers. The databanks contained the ephemeris of all radio-emitting missions in the sky. John selected the James Webb Space Telescope.

  The giant antenna stirred into motion. Silently, it hunted through space for its target.

  That day, the JWST stayed mute for all of the twelve hours it was above the horizon. This was as expected. According to Avigdor, the telescope automatically downloaded its data once a week. Tomorrow would be the big day. John had just come early in case it took him longer to get set up than he expected.

  He wasn’t the only one waiting for the JWST’s data, he knew. Trekker Taft had found a chap with access to a telescope in Hungary, and someone in Spain, in NAA-held territory.

  The NAAs were probing through the Channel Tunnel now. One heard shocking, scarcely believable rumors from Kent. But that was the last thing on John’s mind as he went to sleep in his tent after a supper of hard-boiled eggs and soup from his thermos.

  In the small hours his eyes popped open. He couldn’t have slept another wink if you’d paid him. It was like the early days of First Contact Syndrome all over again. Nothing to do with the cold.

  He put on his layers and went out. The bare branches webbed the face of a nearly-full moon. John stood gazing up for he couldn’t have said how long, in a trance comparable to Helen’s distracted state of mind as she dropped dishes and pulled up carrots instead of weeds. A prayer repeated in his heart. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Nothing else could ease the intolerable burden of hope.

  He snapped out of it at the sound of a car. Headlights flashed across the field. Voices hallooed. John cowered beneath the trees like a criminal.

  When morning came, he moved his tent and belongings into the EAARO building.

  He was not feeling well. Stuffy head, a touch of fever. That’s what comes of camping out in January. His ridiculous reluctance to squat on someone else’s property had cost him.

  Achy, sore-throated, he once again fired up the computers and sent the antenna hunting. Even inside the building, it was so cold he could see his breath. He leaned back in the controller’s chair and spread his sleeping-bag over him like a blanket.

  “It’s open!”

  “Careful.”

  “Someone in here, bruv.”

  John sat up. He had fallen asleep. He stumbled to his feet.

  They surrounded him in a second. Black faces, hoodies. The light from the computers caught the gleam of a knife.

  “Who this?”

  “Who you?”

  John dredged up his classroom voice. “I’m in the middle of an extremely important project. Do you mind?”

  “What project?” The knife-wielder prowled to the computers. John saw that the JWST had been downloading data for almost four hours.

  “Don’t touch anything!” Heedless of the knife, he bent over the computers. “I have to send this data to NASA.”

  “What for?”

  John set the data to copy itself to the thumb drive he’d brought. Facing them, he said, “When was the last time you had a hot meal?”

  They exchanged glances, laughed in the way young men laugh when they don’t know what to say.

  “I’ve a friend coming later to drive me home. You’re welcome to come to our church for supper. You’ll have to leave your weapons at the door, mind you.”

  “Nah, bruv. We staying at the uni. We just saw your tent last night, came to warn you. Cops always nosing round here, innit? They catch you, they’ll fuck you up.”

  John let out his breath. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for the warning.”

  That afternoon Mike came to pick him up. John Kildare returned to Nuneaton with a high fever, two university students in the back seat, and the James Webb Space Telescope’s entire observational data queue on a thumb drive in his pocket.

  Helen took the thumb drive to the Catholic school and sent its contents to Boston.

  Trek dug through it, failed to make head or tail of it, and forwarded it to Arecibo.

  CHAPTER 31

  The carbonaceous chondrite meteorite hunters returned to CELL empty-handed. They had been away for two weeks, camping in an inflatable shelter they took with them. They’d flown boxes in the short-hop lifters, scanning the south pole’s craters in search of a meteorite that satisfied Keelraiser’s highly specific criteria. They had not found one. Alexei suspected that mattered quite a lot. If it didn’t, why would Keelraiser have approved this expensive and risky mission in the first place?

  But their failure faded in importance compared to the state they were in.

  Blue lips and fingertips. Fever. Their breath rattled and wheezed in their lungs.

  “Acute silicosis,” Alexei said. “That goddamn inflatable shelter. You were tracking moon dust in every time you used it. You’ve been eating and drinking the stuff. Breathing it.”

  All ten meteorite hunters needed immediate treatment. Silicosis had no conventional cure. Extroversion might work. Alexei triaged them, and Nene took the five worst cases to the clinic in X-ray country. She hadn’t the resources to treat more than that at a time. There weren’t eno
ugh extroverted rriksti on the moon, never had been.

  “I miss Brbb more every day,” Giles said as they tried to make the other victims comfortable in the mess.

  Alexei glanced at his friend, knowing it wasn’t just a throwaway remark. Giles had been very close to the Krijistal platoon led by Brbb.

  “We all do,” Alexei said, not knowing what else to say.

  Giles sneered. He flung himself down to watch television. James Coetzee and Carla Giacometti, the CELL doctor, covered the silicosis sufferers with suizh-fiber blankets. Anguished CELLies gathered around.

  Things just keep going wrong, Alexei thought. On the big screen at the end of the mess, boats carved wakes across a choppy gray sea. A CNN reporter holding an umbrella jabbered about the symbolism of this historical moment. Jet engines throbbed on the audio channel. A plane swooped out of the drizzle. Water geysered up, with bodies and pieces of boat in it. “This has been going on all day,” said the CNN reporter, with the unstudied callousness Alexei remembered from his own war in Chechnya.

  The invasion of Britain was not proceedling smoothly, from the point of view of the invaders. But its outcome was a foregone conclusion. The Channel was a 50-kilometer open door. Alexei felt ashamed of his own country’s role in the invasion: Russia had provided a lot of the NAA’s hardware.

  More planes droned over the flotilla, dropping projectiles. Alexei thought they were civilian jets, not RAF planes, although he wasn’t sure. He’d have liked to ask Jack, but Jack was freezing his balls off in Shackleton Crater. Maybe it was just as well he wasn’t here to see this. Based on the experience of Germany, civilian resistance was a bad idea. The Krijistal and their allies won anyway, and more people died in the process.

  The picture changed to an exterior view of a cathedral. A banner proclaiming GLOBAL PEACE SUMMIT 2024 flapped wetly on its gothic façade. NAA soldiers faced a restive crowd, cradling their weapons. The European Parliament had taken over the cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula as its headquarters after the destruction of much of official Brussels. A small, plump man stood on the cathedral’s steps. He spoke in French. Simultaneous translation kicked in: “We hope and pray our friends in the UK will, ah, will get the situation under control so that they may attend the summit.”