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

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Killshot: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 4) Page 22

by Felix R. Savage


  Giles snarled, “Va te faire foutre, putain d'espèce! … Do you know who that is?”

  “The Grand Marshal of Europe,” Alexei said, rolling his eyes at the pompous title.

  “Before he pledged fealty to Imf, he was the director of the European Space Agency.”

  “What’s he saying now?” The simultaneous translation had quit.

  “I can’t hear.”

  Alexei went closer to the screen. The left speaker wasn’t working. Another thing to repair. He felt like he was running ahead of an avalanche, barely getting one thing fixed before the next thing broke.

  Coetzee approached Giles and spoke to him. Over the noise in the mess, Alexei caught: “… help?”

  “No,” Giles said. “I cannot.”

  “Can’t, or won’t?” Coetzee said. He had his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, exposing one seven-fingered hand and one stump. He was having the other hand done, too.

  “Just fuck off,” Giles said. “See that son-of-a-bitch up there? The Grand Marshal of Europe? You are like him. You think you can amputate your own humanity.”

  Coetzee backed off without a word. He took shit from Giles that he wouldn’t take from anyone else, perhaps because Giles’s hands and feet gave him an air of rriksti authority.

  “That used to be a church,” Giles said morosely, staring at the screen.

  On the tables, the silicosis victims joked weakly with their friends. Coetzee went to the nearest one, a slender Asian woman. He laid his hand on her breastbone and closed his eyes.

  “He’s trying to do extroversion,” Alexei said in astonishment.

  “He wanted me to try,” Giles said.

  Alexei looked at Giles’s seven-fingered hands. It had never occurred to him that it might be possible.

  “Of course I can’t do it! I’m human!”

  Alexei almost suggested that Giles give it a go, anyway. What was there to lose? Then he realized that would come off as questioning Giles’s humanity.

  Skyler strolled over to them with a plate of soy porridge, peanuts sprinkled on top. “What’s the haps, gentlemen?” he said, as if unaware of the hostile glances that followed him. Keelraiser may have pardoned him for his role in the Moon Express fiasco, but no one else had. Even Alexei and Giles found it difficult. They agreed it was not fucking legit for Jack and Skyler to have kept the whole thing from them. Skyler sat down and scooped porridge into his mouth. “What’s wrong with those guys?”

  “They went looking for a meteorite and came back with their lungs full of moon dust,” Alexei said.

  Skyler started to sing: “Moon dust in your lungs, stars in your eyes … you’re a child of the cosmos, a ruler of the skies …”

  “Shut up! I am trying to watch the news,” Giles said.

  Skyler crunched peanuts. They were eating a lot of peanuts these days, as the plants were so useful for nitrogen fixing. “We should get the band started again.”

  “I’ve lost my enthusiasm,” Giles said.

  The Asian woman sat up and drank a cup of corn soup. Had it worked, after all? The power of suggestion was an amazing thing. On the screen, children greeted a rriksti delegation in Pyongyang. Skyler said, “For your information, I wanted to tell you guys. Jack ruled it out.”

  “So now you’re blaming it all on Jack,” Alexei said, regretting the words as soon as they were out. He knew Skyler was trying to make amends.

  “I’m sorry, sir!” Skyler squeaked. “I’m doing my best! They were just in too much of a hurry. They didn’t wait for us.”

  Alexei smiled sadly at the Spaceballs quote. “They went to ludicrous speed, huh?”

  “They went to plaid,” Skyler said. His eyes glistened. He fixed them on the screen.

  Alexei clasped his shoulder, saying nothing.

  Giles sighed, and pinched a peanut from Skyler’s plate.

  “Left shark,” Skyler said.

  “What?”

  “Left shark.” He pointed at the screen.

  “The Yankee has lost his damn mind,” Giles said.

  “The left speaker’s not working.”

  “No, I’ll have to get someone to fix it,” Alexei said.

  “Wait.” Skyler chewed slowly. “It was working yesterday, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So it’s just today’s broadcast?”

  “You think it’s a problem with the broadcast, not the speaker?”

  “Yes.” Skyler dropped his spoon and jumped up. “TV broadcasts have two audio channels, left and right. We’ve got the digital file of this broadcast, right? I’d like to have a look at it.”

  *

  At the bottom of Shackleton Crater, Jack removed the drive unit from a robot bulldozer. Fifteen minutes in, his fingers were already starting to get numb. His suit felt cold, like wearing a full-body icepack. Not even rriksti smart material could withstand 90 Kelvin for long. But the greatest risk was that the battery in his life-support backpack would freeze, depriving him of oxygen. He tossed the old drive unit on the ground and installed the new one, working as fast as humanly possible. You didn’t really do maintenance down here. Just pull the parts that weren’t working, take them back to the shop, clean the grit out, repeat.

  He gathered up his tools and backed away. The bulldozer ground off across the vast, shallow depression they had dug in the crater floor. Its weak headlight caught the armored carapaces of its two sisters and a robot dumptruck. Dig the white, leave the gray. Over the years, the mining robots had gotten a long way from the bottom of the conveyor belt. They’d have to relocate the belt itself soon, to a different ice-rich area. The further the machines had to travel to the ice, the more they broke down.

  Jack picked up the faulty drive unit and walked carefully back to the conveyor belt, suppressing the urge to run. He avoided anything that glistened in his chest-lamp—it could be a slick of LOX exposed by the mining machinery. At the belt head, the other robot dumptruck tipped ice ore into a bucket the size of a rubbish skip. Jack waited for the next bucket, threw the drive unit in, and scrambled in after it.

  All the way up the inner slope of the crater, he did chin-ups on the side of the bucket to keep his blood flowing, and thought about taking his suit off and drinking hot soup. He didn’t think about Earth anymore. Shackleton Crater compressed your horizons.

  A rover waited in the sunshine at the top of the belt, where CELLies unloaded the ice ore into the distillery. Jack jumped in with the drive unit before he noticed who the driver was.

  “Koichi?”

  “Hey, Jack.”

  “You been demoted, too?”

  “Keelraiser wanted me to go and pull you out of the crater,” Koichi said. “No fucking way am I going down there.” The rover started.

  Showered, mostly defrosted, wet hair dripping on his CELL hoodie, Jack followed Koichi to Keelraiser’s office. There was hardly room for them to squeeze in. Humans and rriksti crammed the small room. Everyone who was anyone was here. Jack went to stand with Alexei and Giles. “What’s going on?” he whispered.

  “Not sure yet,” Alexei muttered.

  Jack’s thoughts flew to the shortages Keelraiser had described. But he noticed that Skyler was standing beside Keelraiser, in front of Keelraiser’s desk, which had been pushed against the wall with the whiteboard on it. And now it was Skyler who spoke.

  “Everyone’s here, so let’s get to it.” Skyler toyed nervously with the peace symbol he wore around his neck. “I noticed earlier that on the news, in the mess, the left speaker wasn’t working. However this was only for one news segment, specifically CNN Newsroom. I speculated that something might be wrong with the digital file, so I asked Keelraiser if I could examine it.

  “As most of you probably know, I used to work for the NXC. I was also the comms officer on the SoD. On the way back from Europa, we used a type of encryption called steganography, in which one file is hidden inside another one, typically a video.”

  Jack suppressed a laugh at the memory of those videos. Cli
ps from nature shows. The mating habits of hedgehogs. The wonderful world of moss. The NXC had gone out of its way to select the most boring carrier files possible.

  “So,” Skyler said, “it was natural for me to wonder if this might be someone attempting to communicate with us in the same way. And it was. The left audio channel had been used as a carrier file for a large data package, which …” Skyler suddenly looked frightened. “Well. Um. Keelraiser?”

  Jack digested the implications of this. The NXC, or at any rate some of its personnel, were alive and kicking. They had access to CNN. Someone at the Krijistal’s pet news organization had agreed to hide a data package in their most-watched show. The American government was not quite so thoroughly defeated as everyone assumed.

  Keelraiser moved forward, his arms folded behind his back. The whiteboard flashed up long strings of numbers and astronomical notations. It was a smart screen, not a whiteboard at all.

  “We owe a great debt to Skyler,” Keelraiser said. “This file was sent to me by the Lightbringer as part of our daily ration of news. No one on Earth noticed anything wrong with it. Nor did I. We do not typically pay attention to audio.”

  Tension-breaking chuckles mingled with rriksti squeals of laughter in Jack’s headset. Keelraiser did not laugh.

  “This is the data that was contained in the encrypted file.” He waved a bio-antenna at the whiteboard. The numbers meant nothing to Jack.

  Skyler said, “OK, now I’m going to put on my other hat. Before I was a spook, I was an astrophysicist. I know, hard to believe. But these numbers, to me, tell a clear story. This is data from the James Webb Space Telescope.” He scrolled down. “Station-keeping observations. The JWST orbits around the L2 Lagrange point in an orbit that’s actually larger than the moon’s orbit around the Earth. As such, it has to recalibrate its orbit from time to time, and for that purpose it takes star sightings to determine its exact position. These are some of those sightings.”

  Giles said, “Would you get to the fucking point?”

  Skyler suddenly went as pale as death. He stammered, “Th-this star, and this one, and this one, were occulted when the JWST observed them on January 18th. That’s very interesting.”

  “Interesting, how?” Alexei said.

  Skyler shook his head.

  Keelraiser said, “For the non-astronomers, something—or rather, two somethings—were blocking those stars. The telescope continued to take further sightings until it obtained usable ones. The pattern of occultations reveals the path of the objects. The timestamps allow us to calculate their velocity.”

  “Aha,” Alexei said. “Interesting as in: we’re all going to die.” The old wolfish grin was back on his face.

  The CELLies noisily demanded clarification.

  None of the rriksti in the room said a word.

  Neither did Jack.

  He guessed what had occulted those stars. And he knew why Alexei had said we’re all going to die.

  Keelraiser had warned him, after all. Two years ago, at Europa. Jack had been preoccupied at the time, and had thought no more about it, but now he heard Keelraiser’s voice ringing in his memory.

  We are not refugees we are not Lightsiders we are Darksiders we won the war and conquered Imf and now we are going to conquer Earth too, and there are two more ships coming behind this one.

  CHAPTER 32

  Hannah had blown off her schedule to show Isabel and Nathan around the Lightbringer. The sleeper decks of the vast ship had been converted into hydroponic gardens. Although the ship still lay on its side, and would forevermore, they’d turned walls into floors and installed new plumbing. In Earth’s gravity, Imfi vegetation grew in new, rotund shapes, spreading sideways instead of up. Apparently this was how it was supposed to look. The kids complained, of course, about the smell-scape of rotten cheese and bubblegum and acetone … and the dim reddish light … and the wind that blew the length of the ship, accelerated by fans. But their resistance melted when they saw the babies.

  The Imfi invaders had begun reproducing. This had not been meant to happen yet, according to Ripstiggr, but with the troops evenly divided between male and female, how was it not going to happen? Hannah certainly had no intention of telling the infantry they couldn’t have families. So the Lightbringer now doubled as a daycare center.

  Infants flew off the tops of the jgzeriyat stands, wearing cute little harnesses with strings attached, like living kites. Their nurses allowed Isabel and Nathan to hold some of the strings.

  “Cute factor: overload,” Isabel said. “If you and Ripstiggr had a baby, Aunt Hannah, would it look like this?”

  “I can’t lay eggs,” Hannah said wryly.

  “They come out of eggs?”

  “Yeah. They evolved from birds.”

  “Mondo coolio!” Nathan said.

  “So, what,” Isabel said. “You couldn’t have a baby with him at all?”

  “Nope. The DNA is just way too different.” Hannah felt a pang at stating the facts so bluntly. But she had never seen herself as a mother, anyway. She was the fun aunt.

  Aunt to hundreds, now.

  Gurlp pinged her. “Urgent, Shiplord. Can you meet us at the Dealbreaker?”

  Hannah bit her lip. “Guys, I have to run. You’ll be OK with Flifya. Do not let them stay in here too long, Flifya. X-rays.” With that, she took off. Letting them down again.

  She found Gurlp, Joker, a few infantry officers, and all four shuttle pilots crammed into the cockpit of the Dealbreaker. “What the hell is going on?”

  They hustled her down the hall into the computer room and crowded the doorway behind her. Ripstiggr was already in there, talking to Iristigut.

  “Right on schedule,” Ripstiggr said, in a bitter, heavy voice she had never heard before. “Right on fucking schedule.”

  “A few months late, actually,” Iristigut said. “That can be explained by their decision to run cold once they entered this star system. They didn’t know what had happened to us. Didn’t know what to expect. They would know, however, that Earth has infrared telescope capacity.”

  “Had,” Ripstiggr said. “Had.”

  Iristigut was still speaking. “So they cut their drives and cruised in stealthily.” He paused. “Yes, well. Quite. If you hadn’t destroyed every satellite in orbit, we would have seen them coming months ago.”

  “If you hadn’t blown up the Lightbringer, it wouldn’t matter!”

  “As it is, we’re fortunate to have had any advance warning at all … Yes, yes, it’s all my fault,” Iristigut said wearily.

  “You’ve got that high-resolution telescope in orbit at the Earth-Moon L1 Lagrange point!”

  “I assume they carried out a deceleration burn around Mars. That would have been invisible from Earth, anyway … That telescope is pointing at Earth. I can’t reposition it to look at the outer system!”

  Hannah interrupted the developing shouting match. “Iristigut, Hannah here.” She wriggled in front of the screen. “I assume we’re talking about the Liberator and the what was it?”

  “The Homemaker,” Gurlp said leadenly, behind her.

  “That’s right. Gotta love Darkside naming conventions. The Liberator and the Homemaker, the other two ships of the Earth invasion fleet. They didn’t blow themselves up after all, huh? And now they’re here. Do you have an ETA? How long before they reach Earth?”

  “Hello, Hannah,” Iristigut said, his good manners a ghostly reminder of normality. “Approximately two weeks.”

  “Jeepers creepers.” That was no time at all. “Can we make contact with them? Have you made contact with them?”

  “No. I’ve tried, but they are either refusing contact, or unable to reply.”

  “Okayyy,” Hannah said. “I guess we should try, too.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Iristigut said. “That is, you can if you want. But I know the Shiplords of both ships. They’re unlikely to be impressed. You’re human, and Ripstiggr is a Krijistal platoon sergeant. They won’t talk to the infantr
y. We have no one left alive ranked higher than pilot first class … and they won’t talk to me. Of course, there may be other reasons for that.”

  “Yes, but,” Hannah started, and found that she didn’t know what to say next.

  Ripstiggr resumed speaking in Rristigul at machine-gun speed. Hannah couldn’t follow the conversation. The walls of the tiny room were closing in on her. She forced her way out and descended to the airlock in the crew area, which was just a door now. She stood at the top of the steps, breathing in the fresh air, gazing across the airport to the shanty town.

  Felt like a train had hit her life, just as things were finally starting to look up.

  Church bells rang in the shanty town. Children’s laughter came high and thin. Everything seemed unreal in the golden evening light.

  Ripstiggr came out. He handed her a beer.

  “So what’s the conclusion?” Hannah said, after draining half the bottle.

  Ripstiggr sat down on the top step, oblivious to the UV-rich sunset bathing him. “We’re fucked.”

  “Can you be more specific?” Hannah stood sunwards of him, so she shadowed his exposed arms and face.

  “We’re completely, utterly, terminally fucked.”

  “Why?”

  “It wasn’t supposed to go like this.”

  “I know, but we’ve done pretty well, considering.” For the first time, she really meant it. They had done pretty well, despite all the violence and destruction. Just look at this place. The universe’s first two-species city, where thousands of once-impoverished humans and stranded rriksti were building a shared home. Given time, they really could make a better world for everyone, starting right here in Katanga Province.

  “You don’t get it,” Ripstiggr said. “We were supposed to nuke your cities from orbit, and then mop up with ruthless tactical operations. There were not supposed to be any human military assets left at this point. There weren’t actually supposed to be any humans left.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well, a few here and there wouldn’t have mattered. But we were not supposed to get into a worldwide ground war, we weren’t meant to share our technology with you, we were absolutely not supposed to start building houses and schools and hospitals, much less providing aid and succor to the enemy, and no one at the Temple ever imagined in their worst nightmares that we might end up falling in love with you!”

 

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