Coetzee produced a rictus smile. “I’m going with them.”
Jack said, “Seriously? This just gets better and better.”
“You’re going with them?”
“That’s what I said.”
Alexei felt as if he were freefalling. Much as he loathed Coetzee, he’d looked forward to settling old scores with him once they were left alone in charge of CELL. Now, he wasn’t even going to have that.
CELLies and rriksti crowded the end of the locker room. Zhenya wriggled inside Alexei’s smock, disturbed by the radio-frequency noise. Alexei laid a calming hand over the infant and murmured a Russian endearment.
Jack gripped Alexei’s hand. Then pulled him into a hug, careful not to squash the baby. This was Jack, who was famously allergic to hugging. The embrace said more clearly than words that they’d probably never see each other again. “No more good little soldier boys, brother,” Jack said with a crooked smile.
“No more good little soldier boys.”
As the airlock closed, Alexei again experienced an overwhelming urge to go after them. Then Nene’s hand slid into his.
All right.
Staying.
He drew a deep breath, let it out. Turned to confront the crowd. One face after another told the same story: we’ve been abandoned. Dragged into the firing line and left to die. Even the rriksti faces, as blank as they were, hinted at the same panic.
“OK,” Alexei said. “We’re going to carry on. That’s what we do. We carry on, we stick to our procedures.”
No, he realized. That’s not going to help.
“But we’re also going to make some changes around here.” He spotted Koichi Masuoka. “To start with, you can recycle that stupid uniform. I don’t want to see it again.”
To his surprise, Koichi smiled. “Fine with me. I’m tired of playing the bad guy.”
“So that’s one thing. No more enforcement. No more punishments, unless you do something really unforgivable, like sneaking your Bee Gees MP3s into the PA system. I am looking at you, Carla.”
A ripple of laughter.
“That’s right. That is the change I want to see. Everyone, cheer the fuck up!” Alexei started to sing. “Always look on the bright side of life!”
He felt like the dumbest schleerp in the universe, until a few rriksti and then some humans joined in.
“If life seems jolly rotten, there's something you've forgotten! And that's to laugh and smile and dance and sing …”
The song echoed through the corridors of CELL, into X-ray country, and lifted spirits throughout the bunker, at least for a while.
CHAPTER 35
Jack stayed drunk most of the way to Sky Station. He was trying to reconcile himself to death, but serenity eluded him. All he felt was corrosive, futile rage at forces beyond his control, decisions taken on Imf before he was even born.
Keelraiser stayed in the cockpit throughout the 60-hour journey. Skyler and Hriklif organized Monopoly games. When they weren’t doing that, they jammed with Giles and Stepstone. Linda stunned everyone by turning out to have a great singing voice. Jack took refuge in the crew area and waged a cold war with Coetzee over the screen on the forward wall. He wanted to watch the invasion of the UK. Coetzee wanted to watch the red polygons that represented the Liberator and Homemaker coming closer and closer. Hard to tell which of them was the bigger masochist.
Jack finally sobered up as the Cloudeater approached Sky Station. CELL’s space station represented a generational advance over the old ISS. Large docking platforms glided above and below the central structure, anchored by 10-kilometer cables. Coetzee explained proudly that this docking mechanism offered a two-fer: when craft docked with the platforms, they transferred angular momentum to the station, boosting it in its orbit. No need for station-keeping burns. Otherwise, the station’s power came from a tiny nuclear reactor. Thorium again, shipped down from the moon in the days before the Lightbringer came. No need for solar panels!
This ruthless economizing spirit extended to the elevators that carried the Cloudeater party down from the top docking pad. They were merely platforms with places to clip onto. Jack looked up as they descended along the cable at 50 kph. The Cloudeater hung upside-down underneath the docking pad, anchored by the same weak tidal force that kept the cables taut. Invisible from here, strapped to the top of the pad—but he’d seen it as they transferred from the Cloudeater to the elevator—was a nuclear cruise missile.
The rriksti from the Lightbringer had parked it there, poised to take out CELL if and when the time came.
Now, as Alexei had correctly guessed, Jack had another use in mind for it.
He glanced down, past the edge of the elevator. The starfish silhouette of Sky Station loomed against a swirl of clouds on the mighty disk of Earth. Out of habit, he tried to work out what part of Earth they were looking at. Then looked away. Right now, Earth was just a beautiful distraction. A trophy in the war that they couldn’t win.
They spread out cautiously through Sky Station. Since the rriksti from the Lightbringer had been in and out of here for months, the interior was fully pressurized. Wodges of clingfilm, new welds, and exposed wiring told the tale of extensive repairs. The Krijistal had cleaned up the mess they made of the electronics, restored the reactor to operational status, and installed new LEDs in place of the old lighting. Instrument panels twinkled in the Imfi gloom.
They explored the factory modules that stuck out at angles from the central truss. In its heyday, CELL had hired out its manufacturing equipment to pure-play start-ups that wanted to try making things in zero-gee. Perfect ball bearings. New metal alloys. Refractory forgings of ultra-hot materials. Yttrium-aluminum-garnet laser crystals, grown from KREEP terrane ores, for inertial confinement fusion research on Earth. Now, the equipment languished unused.
They had the place to themselves.
“I expect Ripstiggr’s busy digging himself a bomb shelter in Siberia,” Keelraiser said, hair dancing in ironic amusement. “We’ll refuel the Cloudeater. Then everyone had better get some sleep.”
Jack ignored this advice. 11 hours and 37 minutes until the arrival of the Liberator. He drifted around the factory modules, depressing the hell out of himself by imagining an alternate universe in which Earth’s nascent space-based industry had had time to mature. When he judged that everyone else would be asleep, he returned to the main airlock, donned his suit, and tethered himself onto the elevator.
Up, up, up, riding the titanium cable. From the height of the docking pad, Sky Station was just an asterisk on Earth’s clouds. Jack unclipped his tether reel and climbed over the edge of the pad. He clipped on again on the top side and floated towards the ICBM, dribbling gas from his wrist rockets.
The missile’s khaki paint job made it look antique, but that was just in comparison to the colorful, playful rriksti aesthetic of weaponry that he’d gotten used to. This actually looked like one of Russia’s newer missiles. Anyway, rockets are rockets. Nuclear warheads are nuclear warheads. With a minimum of luck, they explode.
The Krijistal had fitted this one out with little solid rocket boosters.
Just the thing for a trip to the moon.
Or some nippy maneuvers right here in LEO.
Jack floated forward and checked that the Permissive Action Link was disabled. It would be a light green disk, like a hubcap, on the front of the weapons package. Not there. OK. Good to go.
He crawled under the strap holding the ICBM on the docking platform. Floating on his back, he looked up at the stars.
One of them shone brighter than the moon.
It was moving.
His heart skipped a beat.
There it is. There it fucking is.
Time wasn’t slipping away any faster than before, but urgency suddenly dispelled his pensive mood. Using a hand-held laser cutter he’d found in one of the factory modules—the Krijistal were messy bastards, leaving their tools lying around—he severed the strap.
The two ends whi
pped away in different directions, with Jack clinging to the shorter end.
The ICBM rose into space, pulled away by good old tidal forces. Already its inertial guidance system would be talking to Sky Station, acquiring positioning information.
Jack hauled himself down to the pad by his tether. Now he had to get back to the station and tell the ICBM where to go, what to look for, and what to do when it found it. Short version: find something the size of a small mountain, and hit it as hard as possible.
Back to the elevator. Down we go.
At the 5 km mark, Keelraiser came on the radio. “Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“Have you got the other laser cutter?”
Jack raised his eyebrows. He would have expected Keelraiser to say something about the ICBM. Perhaps Keelraiser hadn’t noticed it was gone. You wouldn’t, if you weren’t in the command module. “Yeah, I’ve got it. Where are you?”
“Outside. Where are you?”
“I’m outside, too.”
“Meet me at the lower airlock.”
“Trouble?”
“Look down.”
Jack looked.
Earth had turned. The black expanse of North America lay below. But two bright dots burnt against the darkness.
Getting larger.
Brighter.
Jack cleared his throat. “Looks like we’ve got company.”
“Yes.”
“Not to worry, all the Krijistal are hiding in a bomb shelter in Siberia.”
“It will not surprise you,” Keelraiser snapped, “to learn that I am sometimes wrong.”
Within minutes, Jack could see two shuttles rising towards Sky Station on ballistic trajectories. Then the station blocked them out. He unclipped from the elevator and flew over the top of the station. Five barrel-shaped hab modules ringed the central command module, all tucked inside a 60-meter cylindrical truss, with the factory modules sticking out at angles. Quicker to go around than through. Opening the throttles of his wrist rockets, Jack dived over the edge of the station and flew towards Earth.
Underneath the station, two rriksti and two human figures clustered around one of the cables that anchored the lower docking pad. Keelraiser waved, pointed Jack to the other cable.
Jack saw immediately what Keelraiser was planning. They still lived inside each other’s heads, when it came to shit like this. “That’s going to shift the center of mass of the station.”
“We weren’t using the fab equipment, anyway.”
“Point.”
Titanium cables, though. Tall order, even for rriksti laser cutters.
A millimeter at a time, the beams vaporized the tough metal.
One of the shuttles landed on the docking pad below. The other one approached in a slightly higher orbit. It did Jack’s head in to see the Cloudeater gliding overhead … and to know that it was not the Cloudeater. Same make, as alike as two Ford Fiestas.
“That’s the Dealbreaker,” Keelraiser said. “The one on the bottom pad is the Hairsplitter.”
Skyler said, “What happens when they try to dock with the top pad, and the Cloudeater’s already there?”
“They get pissed as fuck,” Jack said. “Good thing these shuttles aren’t armed.”
“Hairsplitter crew is disembarking,” said Hriklif over the radio. He was in the command module, watching the cameras. “Getting onto the elevator. Hurry up!”
But you can’t cut through titanium any faster than it wants to give. Jack had the ‘up’ cable. It vibrated under his glove as the elevator started to rise. He kept cutting, concentrating on the path of the beam. Now the cable was hanging by a sliver …
Without warning, tidal forces took over.
Jack’s cable parted.
Sky Station lurched violently, tossing Jack and the others out on their tethers. Stepstone lost his laser cutter. It fell into the bottomless well of space.
Yells of shock came from Hriklif and the others inside the station. It would feel like they got rammed. No way to brace for that.
The other cable snapped.
Spinning on his tether, Jack saw the distant shape of the docking pad with the Hairsplitter on it tumble away. The severed cables whipped in mismatched 10-kilometer arcs. Little black dots flew off the ends of the cables. Those were the elevators. Smaller specks hurtled free. Bodies, pulverized by the car-crash forces generated when the cables snapped back.
Jack licked his lips nervously as he stabilized his spin. Easier than pulling a trigger. Just as dead.
Hriklif shouted, “Watch out! Twelve o’clock high!”
The Dealbreaker hovered over Sky Station, plasma drooling from its attitude thrusters.
Denied a landing spot on the top pad, it had come down to where the action was.
The cargo ramp gaped. Krijistal arrowed out, hard to see against the blackness of space in their stealthed suits. They swarmed down the side of the station.
If you see a laser beam in space, that’s because it’s pointing straight at you, and you’re about to be dead.
The exception is when the volume is filled with chaff.
Stepstone shook bits of foil out of a pouch, tossing handfuls of them at the Krijistal. Aluminium: one thing they had plenty of on the moon. The Krijistal’s blasters caught the reflective fragments. Blue sparks ignited. Beams refracted towards the shooters. Bright spots speckled the station’s truss.
Linda cocked her crossbow, fired, cocked, fired.
Jack had no weapon. But he had a laser cutter. He pointed it at the Krijistal, raking the guys in front. The chaff made it worse than pointless. He’d end up hitting himself at this rate.
Yells in Rristigul added to the confusion, filling his head with painful harmonics.
Keelraiser’s voice cut through the noise. “Get inside. Skyler. Jack. Stepstone. Linda. Now.”
“Oh, there you are, Iristigut,” said a new voice. “Got you at last, cocksucker.”
Jack desperately scanned the chaos.
Skyler, Linda, and Stepstone scrambled into the airlock.
Keelraiser flew through the cloud of chaff, leading the Krijistal away from the airlock, dodging and weaving on his wrist rockets.
Jack flew after them.
Keelraiser vanished around the far side of the station.
Jack hooked upwards. He flew up the outside of the truss, towards the hovering Dealbreaker. Its tether cables clamped onto the upper edges of the truss, as if it were grasping the station in skinny claws. He flew under its belly. His wrist rockets sputtered, the small cylinders of compressed CO2 almost exhausted.
Keelraiser scrambled over the top of the truss. His wrist rockets had died, too. He threw himself towards the central airlock, hand over hand. No tether. One missed handhold and he’d drift away forever.
A Krijistal rose up from behind the station, silhouetted against the stars. A Rristigul yell split Jack’s head in half. Jack did not need to understand the language to guess that it meant something along the lines of “Eat shit and die, motherfucker.” The triumph in the stranger’s voice also transcended light-years of cultural separation.
Jack grabbed the edge of the Dealbreaker’s cargo ramp, braking.
The stranger levelled his weapon. One of those toxic Super Soaker efforts. Red-hot spots lit up the airlock hatch ahead of Keelraiser. When you’re moving and the target’s moving, it’s incredibly easy to miss.
Jack braced the laser cutter on his left forearm. He forced himself to wait until he was immobile. Then he depressed the switch.
The laser cutter’s beam lanced into the stranger’s chest. It had cut through a titanium cable. It had no trouble burning a hole in a rriksti spacesuit, and the rriksti inside it.
“Eat shit and die, motherfucker,” Jack drawled. Earlier he had felt a bit queasy about sending all those rriksti to their non-existent hereafter. Now he felt giddy with satisfaction at getting a good, solid kill. He kept the beam on the stranger until he or she stopped jerking.
“Jack?!” Kee
lraiser floated underneath the Dealbreaker’s nose. “Do you know who that was?”
“No fucking idea. Better get inside before the rest of them show up.” A fat lot of good that would do them, as these airlocks couldn’t be secured from the inside. Oh, trusting humanity.
“It was the pilot of the Dealbreaker,” Keelraiser said. “His name was Hobo. I went to school with him. He was a decent sort. Very conventional.”
The pilot of the Dealbreaker, huh?
An idea occurred to Jack. He clipped his tether to one of the Dealbreaker’s lifting lugs and kicked off from the fuselage. Sailing in an arc, he caught the pilot’s body as it drifted away. He twisted the throttle of a wrist rocket on a limp arm and floated back with his burden, leaving a trail of steam and ice in the vacuum as body fluids spurted out of the hole in Hobo’s suit.
Keelraiser was working the hatch of the airlock. “What are you doing with him?”
“Bringing him inside,” Jack said. “Seems respectful.”
Without warning, a voice blared into their helmets. Rristigul first, then English.
“What have you done with my fucking TOPOL, Iristigut?”
CHAPTER 36
The Hairsplitter, of course, had come back. It had simply untethered itself from the freefalling docking pad, burned into a higher orbit, and waited for Sky Station to catch up.
Cutting the docking pad loose had bought them some time, but not enough to make any difference.
Now the Hairsplitter clung to the underside of Sky Station, while the Dealbreaker remained parked on top. The two shuttles seemed to be playing tug-of-war with the defenceless station.
Twenty to thirty Krijistal commandos were dead.
The Dealbreaker’s pilot was also dead.
And all that Ripstiggr, the notorious commander of the Lightbringer, cared about was his precious TOPOL.
I’m never going to understand these people, Jack thought. As the combat high wore off, he felt increasingly sick and tired of the way that the rriksti accepted bloody mayhem as the cost of doing business.
Killshot: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 4) Page 24
