“That one had unforeseen consequences,” the Shiplord said. “The ground shock has widened an existing crack in this little outcropping down there.” She drew a polygon on one of the Canary Islands off the coast of Spain. “The crack continues to grow. We’re watching to see if a piece of the outcropping actually falls off. It will be interesting to see how this ‘sea’ stuff behaves if it does.”
Keelraiser’s hair jangled. “What were you referring to, Gale?” That must be the Shiplord’s name in English. Gale. “Retargeting? Why must the missiles be retargeted? Hadn’t you built up a database of targets before you got here?”
“It is important to stay flexible,” the Shiplord said. “Our targeting plan was based on prior assumptions about Earth’s CO2 output. The natives were pumping the stuff out like there was no tomorrow. However, your intervention reversed that trend. Industrial output fell to close to zero. We are climbing out of a hole, warming-wise. It will take thousands of years to warm the planet to acceptable levels like this; and besides, it’s messy. If I am to spend the rest of my life here, I don’t want volcanic ash all over everything.”
The Shiplord had finally said something Jack could agree with.
But what came next froze his brain with horror.
“Our first strike, on a lake in that large continent there, released large amounts of methane as well as CO2. Methane is a more effective warming gas. There just didn’t seem to be enough of it on the planet to go around. On a hunch, I ordered a detailed scan of these ‘sea’ regions. We found large deposits of methane clathrates underneath the seas near the north pole.” The Shiplord brought her fingers together and let them fly apart in a mime of an explosion. “Release those, and even the northern regions of the planet will be habitable in no time. The equatorial regions will become like the Lightside. That will be nice for Tshaveg and her sun-worshipping gang. Conveniently, the vapor will also block out a lot of ultraviolet light.”
Jack summed up to himself: Release those methane clathrates, and Earth will be fucked.
The ‘clathrate gun’ hypothesis had got comparatively little attention amidst the climate change furor. But Jack remembered the basic threat. If all the methane clathrates in the Arctic were to melt at once, there’d be a hell of a bang.
Runaway global warming.
Not just the end of humanity. The end of all life on Earth, leaving a clean slate for the rriksti to plonk down their arcologies.
Right. Time to pull the emergency cord.
Jack had one last long-shot hack in mind. It all depended on whether he could communicate with the Dealbreaker. The minute he used his implant, all the rriksti would notice. He’d suffer Coetzee’s fate. He had wanted to wait until he knew for sure he was in wireless range of the Dealbreaker, but he couldn’t wait any longer. As soon as the first volley of missiles streaked towards the Arctic, it would be goodbye, humanity.
He summoned the shuttle’s interface. Ready screens flashed in his HUD area. Svamblizant. Come in.
Heads snapped around, staring at him.
Leave the vacuum dock. Jack rapidly transmitted the series of commands he’d prepared in advance, instructing the Dealbreaker to start its main drive while still moored in the dock. That would snap those mooring grapples like paper chains. He didn’t give a fuck what or who it incinerated in the process. Report to my location.
Could the shuttle ‘hear’ him? Or was it too far away? How far had they travelled to reach the bridge?
“Hey,” Colonel Sparkshaft said. “Can you talk?”
Jack shut down the comms function. “No,” he said.
“Hey,” the colonel started, trying to get other people’s attention.
But no one was interested in the performing monkey anymore. They were all watching the view, waiting for the Earthbound missiles to fly.
All except Keelraiser.
Strangely, he did not look horrified.
In fact, to Jack, his tiny facial cues added up to a wide-eyed, sardonic look.
“I suppose I can’t talk you out of this,” he said to his sister.
“You suppose correctly,” the Shiplord said. “I have no interest in your opinions. I should have had you killed when I found you in my computing center. It was like finding a quintiper in my breakfast.”
Whatever a quintiper was, it must be a clever insult, judging by how the staff officers laughed. But Jack focused on the words before that—computing center—and their devastating implications.
Keelraiser had not gone anywhere near the muon cannons.
Yet again, he’d lied to Jack about his intentions.
At this point, sad to say, Jack almost expected that. He zeroed in on the fact that Keelraiser had been able to penetrate into this computing center before getting caught.
What for?
What had he been planning to do there?
Jack’s speculations abruptly foundered as the Shiplord descended from her throne. “In fact, tell me why I shouldn’t kill you right now, Iristigut. My people would like to see that cycle ended, wouldn’t you, you rascally fuckers?”
As if to affirm it, the officers pressed closer, forcing Jack to stumble along with them.
“Well? Why shouldn’t I kill you, big brother?”
“Because I’m too beautiful,” Keelraiser said, half-naked, bruised and bloody.
Jack barely managed not to laugh. Others did. The Shiplord glared, and aimed her blaster at Keelraiser’s eyes.
“I’m just joking, Gale,” Keelraiser said rapidly. “You know I love you.”
Jack knew there was no word for love in Rristigul. He would have liked to know what word the device was translating that way. But the Shiplord froze. Then she fell on Keelraiser’s neck. Black bio-antennas tangled as the two rriksti embraced. “I love you, too, brother!” the translation devices cried in their flat mechanical tones.
The things could not possibly be working right. Glancing at the one on Colonel Sparkshaft’s temple, Jack accidentally caught the colonel’s eye. What a family, eh? the colonel’s gaze seemed to say.
Gale was sobbing and laughing at once, shaking her brother. Flakes of skin floated from her face. “I just do not understand how you could have done that to us!”
“It was something to do,” Keelraiser said, stroking his sister’s back.
“You had something to do! You were our family’s representative on the Lightbringer, the flagship of the invasion force!”
“Yes. I got bored of it.”
“Bored?”
“Bored of fighting. Bored of the endless tension between conquest and despair. Bored of the cynical bullshit about a god who does not exist, whose cult we kept on life-support because we couldn’t explain ourselves to ourselves any other way. Bored of testing and being tested to the edge of destruction and beyond. Bored—of—this.” With every word, Keelraiser squeezed his sister tighter. She tensed up. Her face, above Keelraiser’s shoulder, took on an astonished look; her mouth dropped open. And all her officers just stood there, watching, not doing anything, the same way the Krijistal used to stand and watch when Jack and Brbb got into it on the SoD.
“Now do you understand, Gale?” Keelraiser said, almost tenderly. “I set my sights on the biggest conquest of all: the conquest of Imfi history. Did I fail? Oh, of course. But failure is its own reward.”
The blaster in the Shiplord’s hand jerked. Her wrist bent. The muzzle of the blaster wobbled around towards Keelraiser’s back. A long finger wrapped around the trigger—
“Keelraiser, look out!” Jack shouted. He hurled himself forward.
The blaster went off, scorching the floor.
Keelraiser and Gale reeled apart.
Jack pounced on the Shiplord. He knocked her to the floor and landed on top of her, fists flying. Punch a girl? Why, yes. I’m a bad guy, after all. Accused rapist. Guilty of assault, the works. They only accused me of what I’d be if I didn’t hold back. And what’s the point of holding back now? You’re about to ruin my planet.
&
nbsp; He hammered punches into the Shiplord’s face. She fought weakly, still stunned by whatever Keelraiser had done to her. Jack bloodied her nose. Crushed the roots of her bio-antennas. Other people rained blows on his back and head, tried to drag him off.
Keelraiser was shouting: “The rules! Remember the rules!”
“The rules don’t apply to animals,” someone else shouted.
“He is not an animal! He’s one of us!”
Without warning, a radio-frequency alarm sounded. Jack involuntarily clutched his head—it felt like someone was jamming a screwdriver into his brain. The Shiplord writhed away. He caught her by one ankle.
“Incoming,” droned the translation devices, barely audible over the alarm.
“Weapons systems authorized,” the Shiplord shrieked, prone on the floor. “Fire on it.”
“Acknowledged.”
“Incoming.”
“Ranging in. Firing charged particle cannons.”
“Incoming.”
“Throw the missiles at it!”
“Shiplord, the missiles are being retargeted. They are not yet operational.”
“Incoming.”
“Keep up the charged particle fire! What is that thing?” The Shiplord’s eyes were wide, staring at virtual images Jack could not see.
“Shiplord, it is … one of ours.”
“That’s not possible!”
“Incoming.”
“Shiplord, it’s too big to destroy or deflect! It’s coming too fast—”
“Evasive maneuvers! Now!”
For another instant, the frozen tableau held.
Jack and the Shiplord on the floor.
Officers in tense communion with their computers.
And Keelraiser calmly donning his spacesuit.
As the smart material flowed over his face, something fell to the floor. It must have got trapped in the suit when Keelraiser last doffed it. He picked it up and fastened it around his neck. It was the rosary Jack had given him long ago.
Overhead, a splinter stuck in the face of Earth. It swelled to blot out half the globe.
The Homemaker leapt as if the entire space-time continuum had shifted sideways. Jack lost moments in that dislocation.
He was flying through the air.
Hanging onto the Shiplord’s foot.
The tacky stained glass decorations on the throne glowed like a constellation of stars as the bridge was plunged into absolute darkness.
The noise of crumpling metal went on and on.
CHAPTER 43
Jack struggled to orient himself. Voices and alarms filled his head. His ears picked up the acoustic groans of metal bending in ways it was never designed to. He smelled smoke.
Experimentally moving his fingers and toes, he winced at stabbing pains. Multicolored light bathed him, like light falling through a stained glass window. He lay in the middle of this profane puddle of light, in the Shiplord’s throne. It turned out to be lined with crash-proof aerogel. Good thing he had hit this and not the wall.
Someone wriggled feebly under him. The Shiplord herself.
An object flew out of the darkness. Jack automatically caught it. An EVA suit. Ace idea. He slid off the throne, kicked his shorts away and put it on.
The smart material blocked out the moaning of tortured metal, leaving only the radio-frequency racket. He breathed sterile suit air, a relief after the humid smoke-tinged atmosphere on the bridge.
“Jack! Down!”
Reflexes threw him into a dive. Energy pulses splintered the glowing gems around the throne behind him. Jack crawled headlong down the stepped levels of the altar-like structure. As he moved, a hand fastened around his left ankle. He couldn’t see whose weight he was dragging, but he had a feeling it was the Shiplord.
Bright blue spots and smouldering red holes peppered the dais. The moisture in the air, now mingled with smoke, revealed the spectral lines of energy beams crisscrossing the bridge, converging on Jack.
He rolled off the bottom level of the throne. A stealthed-black rriksti skidded out of the darkness and shoved his head down as he tried to stand. “It’s me. Crawl.”
The Shiplord unleashed a piercing stream of orders directed at the people who were, presumably, shooting.
“She is teling them to stop firing at us,” Keelraiser said, as they crawled around the side of the throne.
“They don’t seem to be listening.”
“No—” Keelraiser’s shadowy shape unfolded to full height. He grappled with an unseen assailant. Jack rolled past their feet, grabbed the unknown rriksti by the hair, and flung it, screaming, away from them.
The Shiplord shoved past him. Blaster beams speared after her, lighting the depths of one of the long, triangular forward chancels.
The floor vibrated. Energy pulses nibbled the edge of a pressure door sliding across the entrance to the chancel. Keelraiser hurled himself through the gap at the last moment. The door slammed shut behind him.
“That will buy us some time,” Keelraiser said. “Unfortunately, we’re now stuck. We need to get back to the vacuum dock.”
“The vacuum dock no longer exists,” the Shiplord snapped. Consoles sprang to life around her. The upper parts of the walls lit up with graphs and 3D images of dizzying complexity. “These instruments are running on emergency batteries. They won’t last long. Have a look for yourself.”
All the images winked out except one. A schematic view of the Homemaker.
“This was my ship five minutes ago.”
The base of the needle vanished, leaving a 1.5-kilometer obelisk, its aft end ragged.
“This is my ship now.”
Whatever hit the Homemaker, it had impacted squarely amidships, tearing the giant ship in half.
“Messy,” Keelraiser said. “But that’s what you get when you attach engines to chunks of asteroid.”
Jack was sitting on the floor, prodding his bruises through his suit. He looked up sharply.
The Shiplord said, “Did you do this?”
“I hoped it would hit aft of the vacuum dock,” Keelraiser said. “I could have aimed it better. But I was in a hurry.”
Jack said, “So that’s what you were doing in the computing center.”
Neither rriksti so much as glanced at him.
“When you decided to target the methane clathrates,” Keelraiser said to his sister, “you pulled the navigation team off the missiles that were already en route. There were two such missiles. Nobody was even watching when the first one crashed into Iceland. And nobody was watching when the second one veered off its course, following my instructions. It looped around Earth and climbed back towards the Homemaker.”
Jack shook his head and smiled to himself in the darkness. Hit them with one of their own fucking asteroid chunks. Too big to deflect, too fast to evade. By the time it reached the Homemaker’s orbit, it would have been travelling at several kilometers per second. Sliced through the goddamn ship like a tungsten-bladed sword.
“So,” the Shiplord said at length. “What now?”
“They’re trying to saw through that pressure door,” Keelraiser said. “They’ll succeed sooner or later. What do you think they will do when they get in?”
“They’ll kill you first, and then me.”
It was unreal to Jack how calm they both sounded. Rriksti. Can’t say they lack courage.
“The other way round, I think,” Keelraiser said. “You first. Then me.”
“No, me first.”
“Me first.”
“Well, maybe they’ll kill us both at once.”
“Or maybe they’ll chop off bits of each of us in turn, and leave the moment of death up to chance.”
“Maybe they’ll take bets on it.”
“It will be something for them to do while they wait to suffocate when the air runs out.”
To Jack’s disbelief, brother and sister were both laughing, hair dancing in the dim light from the consoles.
“Why would they kill their own Sh
iplord?” Jack said. Immediately he realized what a moronic question that was. Because they’re rriksti, that’s why.
“Because I spared this schleerp,” the Shiplord said. “I shouldn’t have done that. It is against the rules of the Temple to treat someone differently just because he’s your father’s son.”
“Actually, it’s just that everyone hates our family,” Keelraiser said.
“They do not! Daddy is the Great Unifier!”
“Precisely.”
A silence fell. Keelraiser wandered over to the pressure door. A spot near the edge had started to glow red-hot. Keelraiser stretched his bio-antennas towards the sleek metal, listening.
The Shiplord said, “You hurt me, Iristigut. It felt like I was being tortured.” Though the mechanical, translated voice stayed flat, the Rristigul voice in Jack’s head rang with injured outrage.
“Sorry,” Keelraiser said.
“What did you do to me?”
Keelraiser opened one gloved hand. He held a rechargeable 9-volt battery and what appeared to be the head of a fork.
“A taser!” Jack said.
“Yes. That’s how I killed the Lightsider guards at Sky Station. I used a larger battery that time.”
“You pulsed that shit into my hair,” the Shiplord said. “Only the Temple police are allowed to use EMP weapons!”
“I got the idea from the humans, actually,” Keelraiser said. “They have a different definition of torture.”
He came and sat on the floor by Jack. He put one hand tentatively on Jack’s knee.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m trying to save our lives,” Jack said. He mashed his face into his hands. “Give me a minute.”
Biophotons formed words on the darkness behind his eyelids.
Svamblizant. Where are you?
He had contacted the Dealbreaker before the asteroid chunk hit. He’d told it to burn plasma out of the vacuum dock. But had it even heard him?
“Shiplord? How far aft is, I mean was, the vacuum dock?”
“About thirteen zilk,” she said.
“Two kilometers,” Keelraiser said. “The Cloudeater is gone. I’ve had that ship half my life. It feels as if I’ve lost my right hand.”
Killshot: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 4) Page 30
