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

by Felix R. Savage

  Jack had mentally reached the bottom of the barrel. All there was down there was his own dirty, selfish little desires. He remembered swapping racy videos with Meeks when they were in university. Sometimes they’d watch them together, sat on Jack’s grotty futon, making terse comments about the action on screen.

  He knew it was the wrong thing to say. Mental fog disabled his inner safeguards. He blurted, “How about watching some porn?”

  Keelraiser seemed to fold himself even tighter. His hair formed tense zigzags. “No.”

  “Oh, come on.” Jack dug the hole deeper. “It’s the weekend, isn’t it?” Solfiya had alluded to it.

  “Yes, it is the weekend. No, I don’t want to watch porn, or hear you talking about—about that stuff.”

  “Why not?”

  Keelraiser shouted, “Because I can’t get it up!”

  Jack stared. He fought laughter—stupid, cruel, thoughtless laughter, the reflex response to the most embarrassing admission a man, or a male, could make. After some moments, he said, “What?”

  “You heard me. I’m incapable of it. Aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “… No?”

  “No.” The proof was in a dirty rag he’d left in the rubbish at White Sands. He had vividly pictured himself meeting Keelraiser on board the Liberator. Keelraiser would be all sticky again, the way he should be, and they’d fuse together, and it would be filthy and sticky and absolutely right. Those fantasies now seemed remote. “Why would I be … impotent?”

  “Because of the side effects.”

  “What side effects?”

  “The pilot’s implant. I warned you that it has side effects. The worst of them is the loss of the ability to—to do it.”

  Jack stared, speechless.

  “Clearly,” Keelraiser mumbled, “it doesn’t apply to humans. Different biology. Different neurochemistry. Oh, the irony.”

  “But …” In retrospect, certain things made sense now. Keelraiser’s diffidence. Don’t touch me. “But the Cloudeater’s gone.” Keelraiser winced as if the words were a punch. “Sorry, but do the side effects last?”

  “One’s brain has been rewired. Oh, maybe it would have worn off in time. But now I’ve got a new implant.” Keelraiser touched the cut on his forehead. “The Shiplord chip is just a version of the pilot’s implant with additional functionality,” he said, incidentally confirming Jack’s guess that the Liberator was just a bigger, better version of the Cloudeater. “Some people say the implants are designed that way, so you can’t get distracted from the job. Of course, if that was the intention of the designers, it doesn’t work as planned.”

  “So it takes away the—the ability … but not the desire?”

  Keelraiser glared at him with those bottomless, sludgy eyes. “That’s right.”

  “So how did you ... have children?”

  “A minor surgical operation. It was not pleasant.”

  Jack blew into his cupped hands. He tried to straighten out his thoughts. He wished he hadn’t drunk so much krak so fast. He didn’t want to make this even worse. But his mental circuit-breakers failed again. “Can’t you reprogram the implant?”

  “No,” Keelraiser said indignantly.

  “Well, you should try. You’re good at computer stuff.”

  “Not that good.”

  “You’ll have seventy years to crack it on your way back to Imf.”

  “This ship can do it in fifty, if I fuse more hydrogen from the interstellar medium in the reaction chamber. That’ll increase the exhaust volume.”

  “And you’ll get shredded by the cosmic radiation crashing through the front of the ship.”

  “Yes, that’s the trade-off. But the cryosleep tanks are rad-proof. I was planning to sleep all the way home. I don’t need to watch any more television.”

  Something about the finality of that got to Jack. He stood up, jarring the table so that their glasses spilled. He leaned against the transparent wall, his forehead pressed to the cool alloy. Far below, Earth had set. He was looking at the nightside of the planet, with its sparse clusters of lights, nothing like as many as there used to be.

  He mentally said goodbye to Earth and all it meant to him. Spinning around, drunk and witless with desperation, he said, “Take me with you.”

  Keelraiser’s legs and arms unfolded. His mouth opened. “I can’t!” he said.

  “Why not?” Jack shouted.

  Keelraiser sat with his limbs splayed limply. He seemed to be lost for words. Jack stood over him and grabbed hold of the rosary around his neck, pulling him to his feet.

  “Why not?”

  “The—the cryosleep tanks might not work on humans. It’s clear some of our other biotechnologies don’t—”

  “But some do. Giles’s hands and feet. Alexei’s bones and eyes. I don’t want that shit. I like being human. But I’m coming with you.” The idea gained power as he spoke. A new, glittering, history-making space adventure, to make up for everything that had ended. “I want to see Imf. I want to find out everything, see everything. I want to be the first human to travel to another star system.”

  “No,” Keelraiser exclaimed, jerking away.

  “Then you can’t leave!” Jack shouted. “I won’t let you!”

  “I have to! I can’t stand the way you make me feel!”

  Jack heard a sudden clunk. He whipped around, on a hair-trigger. It had just been the rubble of the throne settling. The bridge machinery hummed and whirred in the silence.

  “How do I make you feel?” he said eventually.

  “Like nothing.”

  Jack had not expected that.

  “I am nothing. This ship is nothing. I murdered thousands of people—that’s nothing!” Keelraiser’s voice dropped to a radio-frequency hiss, like a faint signal heard from deep space. “The universe is a punishment cycle. Action and reaction, cause and effect. The more we win, the more we lose. I’m like the vacuum. I kill, and kill, and then just sit here, like nothing happened. And then you come along and remind me … that I’m nothing.”

  Jack said, “Well, I’m nothing, too.”

  “You’re a human.”

  “We’re all nothing.” Keelraiser’s terrible confession dredged up dimly remembered concepts. “We’re less than nothing. We’re sinners. That goes for everyone.”

  For a second the rosary around Keelraiser’s neck caught his eye. It trapped the light of dawning Earth. The teethmarks on the crucifix glowed like wounds.

  “What did you say to your sister?” Jack asked suddenly.

  “When?”

  “When she threatened to kill you. You said, ‘I was just joking. I love you, Gale.”

  “Oh, that.”

  “You told me there was no word for love in Rristigul.”

  “There isn’t. That device mistranslated it. What I said was, ‘You are my life.’”

  “You are my life.”

  “Yes. You are my life.”

  “Well, maybe it’s the same thing.” Jack gathered his breath and sang softly: “Always look on the bright side of life!”

  “I am going to break something,” Keelraiser said.

  “Do you know who sang that first?” Jack nodded at the crucifix. “Oh, sure, it’s just a stupid film. But I don’t think it’s entirely inaccurate.”

  “You’re shedding,” Keelraiser said in amazement. He stretched out one of his middle fingers and touched Jack’s forehead. The finger came away with a shred of skin stuck to it.

  “It’s sunburn,” Jack said. “I went climbing in the desert. Trying to sort myself out.”

  “It’s all over you.”

  “I forgot I hadn’t seen the sun in five years. It’s sore as fuck, actually.”

  Keelraiser sucked the shred of skin off his finger. “We are so much alike. I’ve been climbing around in this gigantic, ugly ship, trying to sort myself out. But I just keep going round in circles.”

  Jack pulled him into his arms, pulled his head down onto his shoulder.
“So stay with me a while,” he said.

  They hugged, rocking back and forth, while Earth dawned.

  EPILOGUE

  A Russian armored personnel carrier drove up the M6 and turned off for Nuneaton. Two flatbeds followed it, laden with bulky objects covered by tarps.

  At the roundabout on the A444, the convoy slowed. A semi-trailer was parked in the middle of the roundabout, under the railway bridge. It had gun ports cut in its sides.

  A hoarse voice shouted, “Halt!”

  The convoy ground to a stop. The forward hatch of the APC opened. Jack looked out. “Hello,” he shouted.

  There was a moment’s silence. In Warwickshire the silence was medieval. No traffic noise. No airplanes. When the engines of the APC and the lorries cut out, all Jack could hear was the spring breeze rustling the trees.

  “What do you cunts want?” a different voice shouted. Jack craned around. Heads lined the railway bridge. Hunting rifles pointed at the APC, which had ceramic armor and a 30mm autocannon. Both had been tested on their way up from London. Nothing remained of the capital but a reeking wasteland. No great loss, in Jack’s opinion. But people had already begun to converge on the wreckage, as the aid ships churned up the Thames. Some people were desperate enough to attack an armored convoy. It could be hard to tell the difference between needy survivors and predators in human form.

  A man trudged out from behind the semi-trailer. His face was hard, his coat ragged. “We don’t want aid,” he called. “Not from the likes of you.”

  Jack boosted himself up, squeezed through the hatch, and jumped down to the crumbling asphalt. “Mike Vaughn, isn’t it? I don’t know if you’ll remember me. Kildare. I came back.”

  *

  “We moved in here after the tsunami,” Jack’s father said, ushering them into Our Lady of Angels. “Our house is still there, of course, but it seemed wise. Safety in numbers.”

  A hundred people must have been camping out in the church. Belongings lay everywhere. The pews had been pushed together and turned into beds. Jack smelled boiled potatoes.

  “There’ve been plenty of people coming through, offering aid,” John Kildare said. “It’s always got strings attached, though.”

  “We’ve brought medical supplies, food, generators, fuel, solar panels. No strings attached.”

  “That’ll draw thieves like flies,” John sighed. “There’s a gang in Coventry that’s turned the whole city into their fief. They’re taking slaves. Little warlords all over the place—they’ve got to be dealt with.”

  “We’ll deal with them, Dad.”

  “Sorry, did I say we needed help?” His father grinned and unslung the shotgun he carried across his shoulders. “We’ve been looking after ourselves nicely, thank you.” He placed the shotgun on a rack inside the door, out of the reach of the children scampering around the church. “You can teach an old dog new tricks, as it turns out. Downloading data from radio telescopes. Scavenging from supermarkets. Building barricades.” His voice dropped confidentially. “Your mother’s been coping like an absolute star. This place wouldn’t function without her.”

  “Where is she?” Jack said. The rriksti were wandering around the inside of the church. Keelraiser studied the stained glass windows. Hriklif and Solfiya had trapped Father Cullen, who was talking to the aliens with the enthusiasm of a much younger man, shaking their seven-fingered hands. In fact the crisis seemed to have taken years off Jack’s father, too.

  “There she is,” John Kildare said, pointing.

  Helen Kildare came in at the door of the church and hesitated, peering into the gloom. Silhouetted against the sunlight, her gray hair standing out in a halo, she looked like an angel.

  “Mum!” Jack said. He went to her.

  She hugged him fiercely. “I was afraid you’d never come back.”

  “I knew he would,” John said. “After all, he promised.”

  *

  Jack took Keelraiser to find out what had happened to their old house. Wentworth Drive was only a mile and a bit from the church, and there was no sense wasting petrol, so they walked. Keelraiser wore UV gear from the Liberator’s stores, a stretchy poncho with an onepiece mask and hood, which was also insulated against the ‘cold’ of Earth. After a while he put the hood back and gazed around at everything, protected only by his extra-dark sunglasses.

  “You’ll burn,” Jack warned.

  “Maybe I’ll bio-fluoresce,” Keelraiser said. “Like our plants on the SoD.”

  “I’m astonished all these plants are doing so well. Maybe the volcanic ash was actually good for them, like fertilizer.”

  Every garden teemed with weeds and flowers. It was March, so the daffodils were blooming in battalions. Jack’s mother’s garden used to be the most colorful on the street. Now it was a jungle of overgrown leeks and broken tomato stakes. Helen had explained that she’d deliberately let it get messy so that scavengers would bypass the precious potatoes and carrots in the ground. Dock and nettles grew through cracks in the concrete outside the garage. Jack turned the key and went into the kitchen.

  “Hasn’t been looted,” he said in relief.

  Keelraiser’s head brushed the bulb-less ceiling light. “It’s so small.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And dark.” Keelraiser took his sunglasses off. “Nice and dark.”

  They went up the stairs to Jack’s childhood room. The familiar scent of Ocean Breeze air freshener overlaid a slight odor of mould. His mother had kept the room neat and dusted. Old physics textbooks stood next to vintage Beano annuals. NASA mementoes crowded a shelf. Jack’s model spaceships hung from the ceiling, batteries long dead. His RAF collar badges were pinned to the curtain. He drew the curtains and used the badges to pin them closed.

  They took off their clothes and stood face to face, locked together, kissing. The underside of Jack’s cock rubbed against the bulge of Keelraiser’s genital area. He reached inside the folds of skin and drew out a long, pale earthworm. It was all right. He was used to it. He actually liked it. So different from anything human and yet, somehow, similar to the way he felt about his own cock—a stupid little thing.

  Keelraiser wrapped his hand around both of them, squeezing them together. Jack arched his back, staring down in amazement. The earthworm started to stiffen against him. Its tip poked over the top of Keelraiser’s hand like a fat pink three-leafed clover. He came all over it.

  “I think it’s beginning to work,” he said, flopping on his bed, blissfully drained.

  Off and on, Keelraiser had been poking at the Shiplord chip, trying to unpick the bits that controlled his limbic system without breaking anything else.

  “When it works, you’ll be the first to know,” Keelraiser said. He lay beside Jack. “Am I bio-fluorescing? Because that’s how it feels.”

  “No, that feeling is what we humans colloquially call blue balls.”

  “I never want to stop touching you.” Keelraiser wrapped his arms and legs around Jack, nuzzling his neck and chest. “Look. I’m trembling.”

  “And that feeling,” Jack said, “is what we humans colloquially call being cold.” He spoke brusquely, still embarrassed by his own emotions. “Get under the covers, you crazy alien, before you freeze to death.”

  Although it was warm for spring, it was cold for rriksti. Jack pulled the old Star Wars duvet over them both, and piled Keelraiser’s discarded UV poncho on top of that. Under the covers, he reached down and cupped his hand over Keelraiser’s crotch. “I like this the way it is, to be honest with you.” Outside, a lark was singing.

  “I like your spaceships,” Keelraiser said.

  They walked back to the church. Jack had his blaster with him, but the only time he drew it was when something made a noise in the shrubbery. It turned out to be a fox. Nuneaton was safe from human predators, thanks to the community patrols.

  Outside the church, more vehicles had arrived, clogging the drive.

  “Hey! Hannah and Skyler are here.”

  *


  They’d brought Giles and an elderly French couple who turned out to be Monsieur and Madame Boisselot senior. They had also brought their own families: Hannah’s sister and her family, and the Taft clan of Boston, whom Skyler had found camping out in western Massachusetts after the tsunami ravaged the East Coast.

  “I thought your brother was supposed to be fatally ill?” Jack said to Skyler, nodding at the young guy who was talking to his own father about installing a Ku-band receiver on the church steeple. Skyler’s brother seemed to have the energy levels of a high-bouncing ball.

  “He had cystic fibrosis,” Skyler said. “He doesn’t have it anymore.”

  “How’d you persuade him to accept extroversion?”

  “Easy. I said it wouldn’t kill him to let them touch him, but it would if he didn’t.”

  “That’d work.”

  Hannah came over and said, “Oh my God. We flew in from the Congo, OK? Big mistake. First we tried to put down at Coventry airport. Some fucking assholes fired on the shuttle. So then I was like, hell with it, we’ll just land on what’s that big interstate?”

  “The M4.”

  “Yeah. So that’s what we did. And we came this close to hitting a cow.” She pushed a curl out of her face. “This is seriously the boonies, Jack.”

  “It’s good to see you, too, Hannah.”

  She wrinkled her nose, grinned, and hugged him. Jack held her off. “Looking great.” It was an understated apology for everything. But it was also the truth. Frumpy Hannah Ginsburg had turned into a fashion-plate in the mould of past female politicians. She was definitely the best-dressed woman in Nuneaton, and probably in the whole UK. That befitted her position as the de facto leader of Earth. “Our very own Shiplord,” Jack said.

  Hannah slipped her hand into Skyler’s. “I even made him dress up,” she said, referring to Skyler’s tailored suit, “and then it turns out everyone’s in jeans.”

  “Well, this is officially a disaster zone.”

  “If this is a disaster zone, I’ll take it,” Giles said, weaving up to them with a bottle of champagne. They were all standing outside the church, in the graveyard of all places, while the inside of the church was got into order. Giles gestured at the daisies and weeds growing among the gravestones. “Nature recovers fast.”