He stared long and hard at Keelraiser. “All right. I trust you.”
Jesus, that was hard to say, after everything that had happened.
“You’ll crash the Dealbreaker,” Keelraiser predicted.
“I keep telling you, I’ve been doing this for twenty years.”
Keelraiser gave him a searching stare. He did not remind Jack in as many words that Jack had crashed his last ship.
Jack flushed. “It’s all fly by wire, anyway,” he said.
*
2,000 kilometers above China, Jack shut down the Dealbreaker’s main drive. The throttle was so responsive that the MPD engine cut out faster than he expected. The shuttle jolted sharply, bouncing him and Coetzee forward in their straps.
Keelraiser, several hundred klicks away in the Cloudeater, shouted, “Careful!”
“Just trying things out,” Jack said. “Let’s see, what does this button do? Whoops. Aaaarghh …”
He smiled cheerfully, floating in the 360° illusion of space in the Dealbreaker’s cockpit. The stars looked close enough to touch. Earth shrank under him like a blurred Willow Pattern plate.
“I’ve already got it to convert the displays to base 10,” he informed Keelraiser. “Piece of cake.”
In fact, his ‘steep learning curve’ had been more of a death-defying leap into the unknown. Coetzee, in the co-pilot’s seat, looked as if he’d just staggered off the world’s biggest rollercoaster.
But overall, the Dealbreaker was a joy to handle. Virtual displays and physical consoles functioned in harmony, as fast as Jack’s reaction times. The quantum computer directed his attention wherever it was needed, flaring the virtual displays in the colors of deep-space nebulae, or speaking in bursts of mellifluous, computer-generated Rristigul. Jack felt periodic pangs of disloyalty to the SoD. But the Spirit of Destiny’s thousands of clunky electromechanical systems and baggy, buggy software simply could not compare with this symphony of information and power. Better technology was just better. That was the the beauty and the tragedy of it.
The Cloudeater and the Dealbreaker had burnt away from Sky Station at 10 a.m. GMT on February 23rd, 2024. Both shuttles had refilled their tanks from Sky Station’s reserves, maximizing their thrust capacity. They needed every ounce of it. They were heading for 56,000 kilometers, twice the height of Earth’s old geosynchronous satellites, where the Homemaker had just settled into orbit.
It would take them about seven hours to get there. Coasting, conserving reaction mass, Jack watched the Homemaker on radar. He’d replaced the traditional rriksti red call-out polygon with a human-style crosshairs. He gave Keelraiser’s plan about a 1% chance of working, but at least he could make himself feel better about it.
He killed the next few hours teaching the Dealbreaker English, and getting it to use its new vocabulary to give him a virtual tour of its systems. He intuitively grasped what everything was, with a few exceptions. One of these was a seemingly unused electrical cable that ran from the reactor to a port in the shuttle’s nose. The Dealbreaker gave him an explanation heavy on the jargon associated with nuclear reactions. The only bit he understood was gauge field.
At the bottom of Hour 5, Coetzee pulled him out of his trance to eat rehydrated macaroni and cheese, salvaged from old stores at Sky Station. They munched silently, concentrating on not losing the glutinous orange globs off their forks. With the illusion of space around them, it seemed as if a stray piece of macaroni might float all the way back to Earth.
“There’s the Liberator,” Coetzee said, pointing down.
“Yup.” They’d seen the Lightsider-controlled ship pass across the face of Earth twice already. Jack held his fork at arm’s length and sighted along it. “No one expects the Flying Monkeys! Our chief weapon is cheese … macaroni and cheese …”
Coetzee gave a puzzled smile. Jack sighed to himself. How he wished it were Alexei in the co-pilot’s seat.
“How do you get to run a billion-dollar consortium without watching any Monty Python?” he said idly.
“The cause and effect arrow runs the other way,” Coetzee said. “I live in a world of facts, not slapstick comedy.”
“But so often they’re the same thing. I mean, just look at where we are. Humanity is about to be obliterated by ultraviolent, highly evolved birds.”
“I heard that,” Keelraiser said.
Jack chuckled. “Hey Keelraiser, what happened there, anyway? How did a Lightsider end up in charge of the Liberator?”
“There was a reorganization along the way,” Keelraiser said.
“Is ‘reorganization’ Rristigul for ‘revolution’?”
“No. The Liberator hasn’t got a hole in it. This seems to have been a much better-organized affair. Their original Shiplord died, or was killed, and his place was taken by the Lightsider we met. Her name is Tshaveg, by the way. She is a Khashaz—that translates to something like Grand Duchess. Her family owned a piece of the Lightside the size of Australia. They were sunfish ranchers.”
Jack said, “What are sunfish?”
Coetzee said, “Why were there so many Lightsiders on the Liberator in the first place?”
Jack raised an eyebrow, acknowledging that that had been the better question.
“I don’t know,” Keelraiser said. “There were only a handful on the Lightbringer. Eskitul carefully selected only good Lightsiders, such as Hriklif. I do not know how the Liberator ended up with that pack of … scientists … on board.”
A silence followed. While Jack was ill, they had received no word of what might’ve happened to Ripstiggr, Skyler, Giles, Hriklif, and Linda, whom the Liberator’s Shiplord had taken with her as guides and hostages. They might all be dead at this point. It was no use thinking about it. Yet Jack was starting to think about it, regardless, when Keelraiser spoke again.
“A sunfish is a Lightside animal, a living solar cell of sorts, that resembles a large jellyfish with legs.”
Jack laughed. “Taste like chicken, do they?”
“Only if you cook them for a week.”
Coetzee frowned at the levity, but it did Jack the world of good. He and Keelraiser were back to the way they used to be. “Suppose it’s better than eating birdseed,” he teased.
Keelraiser said, “Remember that most forms of life on Imf are less evolved than on Earth, owing to the lack of UV light, which is a major mutagen. So perhaps you should not think of us as birds. Try dinosaurs. Rrrrawwrr.”
“Seen Jurassic Park?” Jack was about to explain how the movie related to their present plight when the Dealbreaker interrupted him with a notification.
A blue line snapped into his field of vision, extending from the Homemaker to Earth’s surface.
“Something just fell out of orbit and impacted Earth near the equator,” he exclaimed.
“Something did not fall,” Keelraiser said, his voice suddenly somber. “Something was thrown, at high velocity. We’ve just witnessed the beginning of Earth’s orbital bombardment.”
*
Isabel Ziegler ran.
She had hoped she was done with running. In the months since Aunt Hannah had brought them to the DRC, as much as Isabel had resented being kidnapped, she had got used to being safe. Here, they did not have to hunt their food. No one was shooting at them. Dad had important work to do. Mom had begun fixing up Hannah’s house. Nathan was going to school and making friends with Congolese boys as nutty as he was. Isabel could go swimming. And so, imperceptibly, day by day, she had relaxed.
Stupid.
Now it was all starting again.
A mushroom cloud reared over the hills to the north, stark against the sky, its ugly brown head bulging into the upper atmosphere.
The impact had sounded and felt like an earthquake.
The pressure wave from the explosion had blown leaves off the bushes in Aunt Hannah’s garden.
Now, dirty rain splashed on the streets of Lightbringer City, while Isabel ran, dragging her mother by one hand and Nathan by the other, tow
ards the Lightbringer itself.
Dad brought up the rear, fruitlessly dialing on his new internet phone. He would not be able to reach Aunt Hannah. She was in Europe. And anyway, the hideous cloud over the Rwandan border proved that her mission of reconciliation had failed.
The Zieglers reached the Lightbringer amidst a mob of equally terrified Africans. The rriksti directed the refugees into the cargo holds. When the Zieglers got to the top of the recently built concrete stairs, the sentries recognized them and pulled them aside.
Gurlp came and whisked them the length of the ship to the bridge. A powered zipline had been put up in an artery corridor to facilitate this journey. Normally, Isabel enjoyed the heck out of the ride. Now, she glided along in silence, struggling with shock and fear.
The bridge of the ship was still sideways. The machinery couldn’t exactly be pulled out of the walls and repositioned. To enable access, the rriksti had built a scaffolding up the wall that used to be the floor. Uniformed Krijistal swarmed over it, talking urgently with their hair. It was like watching people talk in sign language. Beautiful, and inexplicably sad-making.
Gurlp settled the Zieglers at one of the tables on the new floor. She brought a Michelin road map and showed them what had happened. “This is Lake Kivu,” she said through her field radio. “A large meteor hit it.”
“That’s where we saw the gorillas!” Nathan said.
“That’s where Ripstiggr takes you swimming!” Bethany said.
“I have a group of investors heading up there today!” David said.
Isabel said, “Is everyone dead?”
“Yes. Everyone within a few miles of the lake is burned to death or asphyxiated,” Gurlp said. “We are not in immediate danger here. The air in the mushroom cloud is oxygen-depleted. But it takes days for the cloud to reach the stratosphere, cool, and sink. There is no real need to take refuge in the ship, at the moment.”
“At the moment?” Isabel said.
Gurlp’s blue hair twitched. “The waters of Lake Kivu are saturated with CO2 and methane. Now all of that has been released into the atmosphere.”
David said, “Uh oh. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas.”
“This is still not much GHG, in relation to the total volume of Earth’s atmosphere. But we think there will be more coming. More meteor strikes. More massive and rapid CO2 releases.”
“CO2 causes global warming,” Nathan chirped, showing off his knowledge.
“Yes,” Gurlp said. “This is Phase Two of the Imfi conquest. First phase kills humans. Second phase alters the environment, to make it nice and warm for rriksti.”
“Are you doing this?” Isabel cried.
Gurlp took the girl’s hands in her seven-fingered ones. “We did not want to frighten you, but our friends have arrived.”
“Make them stop it!”
“I am sorry. We cannot make them stop it. They are not our friends anymore.”
CHAPTER 39
The two shuttles coasted higher, converging with the orbital path of the Homemaker. Now Jack understood the vicious irony of that name. This behemoth had come to make Earth a home for rriksti. It wouldn’t be a home for humans when they were through.
During the long hours of their flight he’d seen two more meteors plummet down from 56,000 kilometers.
These had impacted on the active volcanoes of Mauna Loa and Ulawun in Papua New Guinea.
Tidal waves would now be sweeping across the Pacific, while magma flowed down on helpless communities, and volcanic smog darkened the sky. Muddy blooms of cloud spread above Hawaii and Micronesia. But the real killer would be the CO2 thrown into the upper atmosphere. That shit hangs around for centuries.
Oddly, after three strikes inside an hour, the meteors had stopped falling. But Jack drew no comfort from the pause. The gunners were probably just taking a tea break.
They certainly had not run out of ammo.
As the Dealbreaker neared the Homemaker, its radar and LiDAR picked out hundreds of blips flocking around the giant ship. Radar spectrography identified them as rocks.
Keelraiser said, “Earth, you know, has several natural satellites. The moon is only the largest. I’d speculate that now it has one less.”
“A small solar system body,” Jack realized. “They caught it on the way in. Carved chunks off, attached engines to them, and brought them along.”
“So that’s why they were late getting here,” Coetzee said. He looked totally overwhelmed. Jack sympathized.
They were close enough to the Homemaker now to see it on the optical telescope in stunning detail. Jack magnified the telescope images so the leviathan seemed to hang right in front of them. He and Coetzee stared at it in dismay.
If the Lightbringer had been a flying mountain, the Homemaker was a mountain-sized needle that could sew up the gaps between stars. The years following the launch of the Lightbringer had clearly seen vast advances in Imfi interstellar spaceship manufacturing. The Homemaker’s 8-kilometer length tapered from a cluster of bulbous thrusters to a blunt point. Instead of a pocked, pitted asteroid-iron hull, machined flanks reflected the sun. Antennas and HERF masts bristled here and there along the ship’s obsidian length. Infrared dapples gave away the location of gun ports. Jack privately acknowledged that his ICBM would not even have got near this monster.
Nor would the Cloudeater and Dealbreaker have gotten near it, unless the Homemaker wanted them there, much as a crocodile wants rodents to wander near its jaws.
Keelraiser came back on the radio. “They’re opening the shuttle bay. Follow me in,” he said curtly.
The next seconds tested Jack’s resolve to its limits. If he’d ever less wanted to do something, he couldn’t remember it. But he had made up his mind to trust Keelraiser. And on the practical level, he no longer had any real options apart from this blind leap of faith.
He locked in his positioning data, opened the Dealbreaker’s throttle, and keyed his course to the white-hot beacon of the Cloudeater’s drive.
The zoomed-in telescope image left the screen. The Homemaker shrank back to a shrimp, then grew again in real time, slowly. Decelerating hard, Jack navigated through the throng of dismembered asteroid chunks that followed the Homemaker in its orbit. Even the smallest ones were as big as skyscrapers. He imagined what they would do to Earth. But the challenge of avoiding rocks in three dimensions demanded all his concentration. As he’d occasionally done on the SoD, he slipped into a flow state where his brain fused with the ship, the controls mere extensions of his fingers. A little this way, a little that way, trickling gas out of the attitude thrusters, working the throttle like a brake … He came out of it to see the Homemaker towering off his port wing like a cliff.
3D Death Tetris test: aced.
Something else had changed, too. The lingering friction of the rriksti interface had vanished. He no longer had to pause to think about how to do things. The Dealbreaker really was his ship now.
He reached for that odd sub-system he’d discovered while he was exploring the virtual cockpit. Svamblizant, he commanded, mouthing the words under his breath, the better to form them in his mind. Svamblizant was the Dealbreaker’s name in Rristigul. Power this down. Hide it inside this directory here. Make it look like an ordinary power bus.
He had developed a theory of what it did, and he didn’t want the Homemaker to notice it.
Ahead, the Cloudeater reversed through the Homemaker’s hull and disappeared.
“Autorip,” Jack said aloud. “Not magic. Just smart material.” He followed.
Space slid away like a curtain being drawn on the world. Dim reddish light flooded into the cockpit.
“MUZL!” a voice barked over the radio.
Jack knew that Rristigul word: STOP!
The Dealbreaker came to a halt beside the Cloudeater, floating in the middle of a cavernous vacuum dock. Tethered to the floor, an endless row of shuttles filled the dock. They resembled the Cloudeater and Dealbreaker in the same way Mustangs resembled Ford Fie
stas.
Grapples rose and mated with the Cloudeater and Dealbreaker’s landing gear. They winched the two shuttles down to rest in line with the other craft.
A different voice boomed in Jack’s head: “Welcome home.”
*
Rriksti humor. Just gotta take it the way it’s meant. They have a thousand different ways of saying ‘fuck you.’
Jack released his harness, kicked off, and arrowed out of the cockpit. A shock of heat greeted him in the passenger cabin. He had dialed the temperature up back here as high as it would go. After all, the cabin had no occupants.
Except one.
Jack ricocheted off the ceiling and landed in front of the first row of passenger seats. A rriksti sat there, strapped in. He wore a black Krijistal suit. He was dead. Jack had turned the heat up so he would defrost during their flight. Keelraiser had reluctantly agreed to this stratagem when Jack insisted on coming.
“Give me a hand,” he yelled to Coetzee, wrestling with the rriksti’s straps.
They didn’t know this guy’s name. He had been one of Hobo’s crew. Died in the fight outside Sky Station, because Hobo had cared more about getting even with Keelraiser than he did about his crew’s lives. Linda had got him in the neck with her crossbow. Thanks, Linda.
Jack and Coetzee carried him into the cockpit. They stuffed him into the pilot’s seat and strapped him in.
“Get your suit on,” Jack said to Coetzee, taking in the activity on the external camera feed. Suited rriksti surrounded the Dealbreaker and the Cloudeater. Keelraiser was coming out, arms held out in a T—the rriksti version of ‘hands up.’
Jack donned his own suit. Then he reached into a locker on the ceiling of the cockpit and took out the dead Krijistal’s blaster. He hooked his feet under the pilot’s seat, so he was floating in front of the rriksti corpse, practically sitting in his lap. He shot the corpse in the throat, exactly where Linda’s crossbow bolt had gone in. He held the trigger down until the beam ate all the way through the rriksti’s neck and out the back.
The air filled with wisps of steam from vaporized flesh and smoke from singed upholstery. The afterimage of the pulse scarred Jack’s eyeballs.
Killshot: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 4) Page 27
