KILLSHOT
EARTH’S LAST GAMBIT
VOLUME 4
FELIX R. SAVAGE

CHAPTER 1
Jack Kildare glanced down at the moon. He leaned sideways to steer to the east. “Hold on!” he barked at Skyler Taft, who was behind him, clinging to his waist.
The two men straddled an algae tank from the wreck of the Spirit of Destiny. They’d ripped nichrome wire out of the old ship’s walls, hooked it up to a battery, heated the water inside the tank to boiling point. Steam gushed out of the pipe in the back.
Hey presto, a rocket.
Actually, more like an electric kettle.
But in the moon’s low gravity, it flew. It had carried them 2000 kilometers due south from the wreck of the SoD.
Flying in the dark, Jack steered by the stars and the zodiacal light. Hazy, glowing fans spread from the invisible eastern and western horizons: sunlight scattered by space dust. Keep your shoulders square to those glows, and Polaris at your back. Lucky we crashed in April. You can only see the zodiacal light around the spring and autumn equinoxes.
Jack glanced down again, trying to judge their altitude. A kilometer? His eyes had adjusted to the darkness. Below, starlit mountains reared from inky pools of shadow.
The SoD had clipped a mountain like one of those, but bigger. Broke in half. Crashed in a crater full of dust. By a miracle Jack and Skyler, the only people on board, had survived.
It had been Jack’s fault. No excuses. He’d taken one risk too many in pursuit of the Lightbringer, the alien planet-killer bearing down on Earth. Then the fucking thing got away, anyhow.
“We might be the last human beings in the universe,” Skyler said, breaking the silence.
“Earth’s still there.”
“I wish I shared your confidence,” Skyler said, hollowly. A moment later: “I wish we could see Earth.”
“Moon’s in the way.”
“I know,” Skyler snapped. He had a Ph.D in astrophysics.
“Then shut up about it.” Jack understood Skyler’s gnawing anxiety. But he couldn’t afford to think about Earth, and the damage the Lightbringer might have wreaked on it. He needed to concentrate on saving their lives. He kept a close eye on the pressure gauge he’d wired up to the tank, whose digital counter was ticking lower and lower.
“Get ready to bail,” he said abruptly.
“Oh shit. Oh shit, oh shit,” Skyler chanted, as he unfastened the broomstick lashed to the tank. He moved it parallel to the tank and swung his left leg over it. Holding onto the improvised tether he’d attached to the front of the tank, Jack did the same.
Couldn’t feel the weak lunar gravity at all. They’d topped out and were falling. At least they’d got this far before the rocket literally ran out of steam.
The pressure gauge reached zero.
“OK, go!”
In unison, like they’d practised in the airless hell of the SoD’s wreck, they transferred their weight to the broomstick and kicked the tank away. It tumbled downwards, while Jack twisted the throttle of the broomstick.
Oxygen spurted from the tank underneath Skyler’s arse. The broomstick was an angle iron with a spare EVA tank attached. Skyler had built it from parts in Europa orbit. They’d found it while they explored the wreckage of the SoD, around the time Jack was coming to terms with the fact that no one knew where they were, and no one was coming to rescue them.
He leaned back, trying to keep the sorry little craft’s nose up. Skyler gripped his waist. The ribs Jack had fractured in the crash begged for mercy.
“CELL, this is Jack Kildare, with Skyler Taft, of the Spirit of Destiny,” he said calmly into the radio. “Currently heading your way. Be advised we expect to land near your location. Would appreciate hot tea and sandwiches upon arrival.”
“Coffee,” Skyler said.
“Tea and coffee. Oh, and oxygen would also be nice, as we’re nearly out of that. Thanks, CELL. Appreciate your help.”
The silence returned. Every passing second diminished Jack’s hopes of a response.
Of course, there was no reason anyone at CELL would expect to hear from two men who should’ve been dead. Camp Eternal Light Limited had been founded by farsighted aerospace entrepreneurs a few years ago, on the rim of Shackleton Crater at the lunar south pole. It was the only colony on the moon. It meant survival, if Jack and Skyler could get there.
But if everyone at CELL was already dead …
Don’t think about that.
A glittering haze rimmed the horizon ahead. For a moment Jack thought he’d gotten turned around.
“That’s the sun,” Skyler said, just before light struck into Jack’s eyes, blinding him.
He wrenched his gaze away from the bright ball on the horizon.
The moonscape below was still drenched in darkness, but sunlight silvered the peaks ahead.
His inner ear told him the broomstick was losing altitude fast. It wasn’t built to be used in gravity, not even 0.16 gees.
“I’ll try to get us over the top of that mountain,” he said.
“Hey, hey.” Skyler’s voice rang with fear. “It’s déjà vu all over again.”
Once again, they’d be going down hard. Except now they weren’t cocooned inside a $300 billion spaceship. They had nothing but the limited impact protection of their five-year-old, much-abused spacesuits.
Squinting into the sun’s glare, Jack opened the throttle all the way. It didn’t make a lot of difference. Down, down the broomstick glided, wobbling every time Skyler nervously shifted his weight, until Jack yelled at him to sit still, goddammit. The dark ground swept up to a gigantic hump of rock. Jack could have brushed the summit with his boot as they skimmed over. That was the terminator. They’d made it across. The far side of the mountain fell away, bright gray. But another hill loomed ahead. They flew blind into its shadow, still losing altitude. Jack’s nerves screamed in anticipation of an impact he wouldn’t see coming. “Hold onto me!” he cried. “Don’t let go!”
The broomstick’s nose smashed into rock. Jack threw his weight back so his boots took the brunt. The impact jolted up his legs like an electric shock. He fell backwards with Skyler clinging to him.
He never saw the rocks they hit, but he felt every last one of them. They rolled over and over down the unseen slope, bouncing, until they rolled out of the shadow and fetched up against a large boulder.
Dust rose in a glittering cloud towards the black sky.
An avalanche of pebbles pattered down around them, falling lazily in the moon’s 0.16 gees.
“I’m alive,” Jack decided. The telemetry display in his helmet indicated that his suit wasn’t breached. He visually checked the parts of his suit he could see, discovering a couple of new rips in the outer garment, but no damage to the inner pressure garment. Every part of his body throbbed, stung, or ached. His ribs were killing him. No change there, then.
“I think I’ve got whiplash,” Skyler said, sitting up a few feet away.
“Sorry, I don’t have broomstick insurance.” However messy it had been, getting down to the ground in one piece was more than Jack had hoped for. It buoyed his spirits. He stood up and looked around.
A shallow grey valley pocked with old craters. Long polar shadows. A colorless, motionless world.
Skyler tried a few steps. A prismatic corona outlined his shadow. “Where are we?”
“Here,” Jack said, spreading his arms: fucked if I know.
“OK. Where’s Camp Eternal Light?”
Jack looked up at the ridge they’d crashed into. “This can’t be Shackleton Crater, so I think we’re a bit too far to the north.”
“Guess we’d better walk south, then,” Skyler said. He stepped into a patch of shadow. He pitched onto his face. He screamed.
Jack bounded over to him. That patch of shadow had been a micro-crater. Skyler had stepped in it. His left boot wobbled at a terrible angle when Jack lifted his leg up. “You’ve sprained your ankle,” Jack said, thinking it was probably broken.
“Great,” Skyler rasped. “Survive a spaceship crash, survive a broomstick crash, and bust my ankle going for a walk on the moon. It would be funny if it were happening to somebody else. Well, it doesn’t hurt that much. I bet I can walk on it—”
“Don’t—”
Skyler didn’t even manage to stand up before he fell over again. This time, Jack could hear him sobbing with pain, a frighteningly intimate sound. “Leave me here,” he choked.
“Don’t be stupid.” Jack bent to pick him up in a fireman’s carry.
“I’ll slow you down—”
“We got this far together. We’ll make it the rest of the way together, or we won’t.”
Carrying Skyler, Jack walked—very carefully—a pace or two into the shadow of the ridge. He squatted to rest and wait for his night vision to return. After a few minutes he could see the stars again.
There.
The Southern Cross.
And its two pointer stars.
Alpha Centauri and Beta Centauri.
Somewhere between them lurked their cool red sister, Proxima Centauri.
A tidally locked planet orbited Proxima Centauri, and that was where the Lightbringer came from. The rriksti called it Imf.
They had come to Earth to invade and conquer it, but some of them had changed their minds along the way. And Jack had ended up making friends with them.
Funny how that worked.
Were Keelraiser and the others even alive?
The dead stillness of the moonscape weighed on Jack’s hopes. His focus threatened to crumble.
Don’t fucking think about it.
He drew imaginary lines from the Cross and the pointers, and extended another line down to the horizon. “South’s that way.” He sucked a mouthful of water from his suit’s hydration nipple and turned around, offering his back to Skyler. “Hop on.”
He got Skyler settled on his back, and then he started walking.
He’d walked on Europa, which had slightly less gravity than the moon. But he’d never walked in micro-gravity while carrying someone piggyback. The problem wasn’t that Skyler weighed a lot. He was a skinny bloke to begin with, and in lunar gravity he weighed less than a toddler. The difficulty, Jack found, was keeping his balance. You tended to overbalance backwards in low gravity anyway, and Skyler’s weight altered Jack’s center of gravity, making it worse. He ended up bent low like a speed skater. Push off, glide through the air, land on the other foot and push off again.
“Hello CELL,” Skyler said in between gasps of pain. “CELL—ah—do you read me? Come in.”
The valley ended in a lumpy south-facing skirt of rock. Jack walked along the shore of a lake of shadow. An even higher ridge towered on the far shore, stretching out of sight to the east. That might be the rim of Shackleton Crater. Or it might not.
“Come in, CELL, come in.”
It was dangerous to stay too long in the sunlight. The surface temperature of over 100° C would overwhelm their suits’ ability to dump heat. Although it meant heading east instead of south, Jack veered into the shadow. He toggled his headlamp on. Skyler’s headlamp shone over his shoulder, joggling.
“We could use some help—ah—out here, CELL. Guess you’re too busy polishing your solar panels. Thanks for nothing, you—ah—bastards.”
The world shrank to the puddle of yellow light ahead of him. Every shadow was a potential ankle-breaker. Jack skated left and right, avoiding them. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back … His mother and father were in Warwickshire. Did Warwickshire even exist anymore? Dust puffed up at every step, obscuring the terrain.
A shriek tore into his helmet.
Jack never would have thought he’d be happy to hear a rriksti harmonic.
The shrill noise dug into his brain like a dentist’s drill, the result of rriksti radio-speech setting up a harmonic with his suit radio. It swiftly resolved into words. “There they are! Jack! Skyler!”
Jack straightened up, keeping Skyler on his back. Exhaustion fuzzed his vision. A twinned dazzle of headlights ate the darkness.
A fat-wheeled golf cart pulled up in a cloud of dust. Humanoid figures leapt out. Humanoid, but not human. The rriksti averaged 7 feet tall. Their living manes of bio-antennas added to their height. Skintight EVA suits outlined their spindly-legged, broad-chested physiques. The goggles they wore under their suits made them bug-eyed.
One of them carried a crossbow.
The other one had a shotgun.
Strong seven-fingered hands lifted Skyler off Jack’s back.
Jack managed to make it to the rover on his own two feet before collapsing.
“Earth?” he said.
“There,” said a rriksti, pointing.
Hiding in the sun’s glare, Earth floated above the horizon, a blue half-sphere.
Still there.
Still far away.
CHAPTER 2
The rover drove around the sunwards side of Shackleton Crater and veered uphill, heading for the summit. The rriksti talked tensely in their own language, to each other and over the radio. Jack floated in a brain-dead daze of thankfulness until one of them—an electrician named Tiggresit—turned around to talk to him and Skyler.
“The Lightbringer is on Earth,” Tiggresit said.
Jack woke up. “Fuck.”
“Yes.”
“Hang on a minute. On Earth?” Not all the rriksti spoke English, and not all of those spoke it well. Fair enough—Jack couldn’t speak a word of Rristigul. His lack of competency frustrated him now. “Don’t you mean in orbit around Earth?”
“No. It is on Earth. It fell out of orbit and crash-landed three days ago in the Congo.”
This was both the best and the worst news Jack had ever had. He had tried to nuke the Lightbringer before it could reach Earth. He’d failed—the SoD’s last nuclear round had been a dud. Ever since then, he’d been picturing a deadly rain of missiles falling from orbit on Earth. At least that had not happened. On the other hand … “Any survivors?”
“As far as we can tell, the entire crew of ten thousand survived.”
“Ten thousand?” Jack had understood that there were only a few dozen Krijistal—rriksti special forces—alive on the Lightbringer.
“There were sixteen thousand, to begin with. Many of them died in the war on board. There are probably only about ten thousand now.”
“I see. Only about ten thousand.”
“Yes.”
“That’s … not good.”
“What about Hannah?” Skyler said. Jack clamped a glove on his arm to calm him, but Skyler persisted, agitated, “Did she survive the crash?”
Hannah Ginsburg had been the SoD’s propulsion technician. Kidnapped by the Lightbringer, she’d become the alien behemoth’s Shiplord. Skyler had always had a thing for her, and refused to stop believing in her, even after Jack, and everyone else, reluctantly decided she was not on their side anymore.
Tiggresit hesitated, and then said, “Keep this to yourself. We are not supposed to tell anyone. But we think the crash was not an accident. It looks like Hannah seized the controls.”
Skyler turned his helmet to Jack. “See!” he said. “I told you so! She risked her own life to save Earth, after we failed!”
“Rub it in, why don’t you,” Jack sighed.
“Oh, damn. Oh, Hannah. Damn. My fucking foot. Damn, damn …”
“We are almost there,” the other rriksti interrupted.
Jack sat forward, keeping Skyler’s ankle cradled on his lap. Ahead, the crater rim looked like a razor-sharp horizon coming closer and closer. But the rim wasn’t razor-sharp at all; it only looked that way against the black sky, with zero atmospheric fuzzing. Like all the rock features on the moon, Shackleton Crater was ancient and heavily weathered. Weathered, on a moon without an atmosphere, let alone a climate? Yep. The solar wind is weather. Those fast-moving particles had spallated the rocks for hundreds of millions of years, while micrometeoroids pounded them. There was no water here to dig seams, cracks, and gullies. But there was plenty of dust, rounding the edges of all the rock features.
Dust in the craters, dust on the ground, dust on Jack and Skyler’s spacesuits, dust hurled up from the rover’s wheels as it barrelled silently along the inward face of the crater rim. Only the two rriksti were clean. Their colorfully patterned suits repelled the moon dust, leaving them looking as if they came from a different planet. Which, of course, they did.
The inner, sun-facing rim sloped gently down to the lake of shadow inside the crater. It was not steep at all. The rriksti in the passenger seat pointed. “That is CELL.”
Barrel-like silos poked above the horizon. They stood on stilts, shiny aluminum sides reflecting the sunlight. The design recalled Antarctic research stations. Each domed roof was a greenhouse, as Jack knew from the media reports which had breathlessly tracked the growth of James Coetzee’s pioneering lunar colony. Giant solar panels rode on masts above each silo, angled to the sun.
“There are six habs,” Tiggresit said. “They’re all connected by enclosed bridges. Beyond here, there is a water mining operation that brings ice up from the crater floor and distils it. There is also an oxygen refinery on the rim of the crater, back the way we came.”
“I didn’t see it,” Jack said.
“There is not much to see. It’s just a scrape in the ground. They bake oxygen out of the regolith with reflected sunlight.”
“What about their shuttle?” Jack knew CELL had had a ship that shuttled cargo and passengers between here and low Earth orbit. “The Moon Express, they called it. Where’s that?”
“Around the other side of the crater. They didn’t park it too close to the habs, obviously. Primitive chemical-fueled rockets are very dangerous.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jack said, used to the rrikstis’ dismissive attitude towards human technology. But these rriksti were driving a human lunar rover. They were carrying human weapons. “Speaking of danger, what’s the situation? Welcome us with open arms, did they?”
“No” Tiggresit said, and clammed up. He drove under the first hab, and parked in the shadow. The habs stood in a straight line, with a few meters of separation, except for one that was just uphill from this one.
Two more rriksti came running from underneath the next hab. They, too, carried crossbows. They gabbled at their friends, voices squeaking and hissing in the men’s suit radios.
Jack helped Skyler up the steps to the hab’s airlock.
CELL FIVE, proclaimed a stencil on the airlock hatch.
Someone had written above this with a grease pencil, Scrubbing saves lives!!!
Jack smiled ruefully to himself. He knew CELL was filled with rich noobs, who had bought their way in ahead of the Lightbringer’s dreaded arrival at Earth. By now they outnumbered the first wave of adventurers.
Inside the airlock, more emphatic signs directed them into an electrostatic scrubber, where most of the dust was sucked off their suits. These then went into a closet-sized compartment for intensive cleaning. Jack approved of the precautions. Moon dust indoors could really fuck up your day.
Getting Skyler’s suit off was a production. He ended up on the rubberized floor of the scrubbing area, white-faced and trembling with agony.
A rriksti, dressed in multiple layers of human clothes that were too small for him, poked his blue bio-antennas and big face into the scrubbing area. Jack and Skyler quickly put on the headsets they’d brought from the SoD in the pockets of their spacesuits. Now that they were out of their suits, they needed the devices to hear rriksti radio-speech.
“Alive; I don’t believe it!”
Skyler’s pain-twisted face broke into a smile. “Hriklif!” He’d been buddies with the rriksti atomic engineer aboard the SoD. “What’s up, dude? What’s going on?”
“It’s all so confusing,” Hriklif said. “We only just got here ourselves.”
Jack was about to start questioning Hriklif when another rriksti swept in. This was Cleanmay, the burly, silver-haired rriksti doctor. He, too, wore layers of human garments that stretched and bagged oddly over his spindly limbs and broad torso. “Where are you hurt, Skyler?”
“Ankle.”
Cleanmay lowered his face towards Skyler’s swollen ankle, as if to sniff it. Several of his bio-antennas, swaying, curved around the ankle. Below his huge dark eyes, two more eyes opened—tiny ones, like black glass teardrops on the flat pale cheeks. “Nasty,” he murmured. “Three separate breaks.”
The extra eyes were X-ray detector cells. Rriksti literally had X-ray vision. Their bio-antennas could emit a wide range, from radio up to much shorter wavelengths. Some could go higher than others, like human singers, and as part of his medical training, Cleanmay had learned to optimize the x-ray region on several of his bio-antennas to help him diagnose his patients. He was the biological equivalent of an opera singer crossed with a mini C-Arm fluoroscope. Jack had always thought that was cool. What was not cool was X-rays. Oh, X-rays were good for the rriksti; they basked in them the same way humans basked in sunlight. Didn’t give them radiation sickness.
“Your bones are weaker than ours,” Cleanmay said. “Lack of stress on the weight-bearing bones causes loss of bone mass in all species, but you excrete calcium at higher rates than we do. After four years in space, this was an accident waiting to happen.”
“We ran out of our biophosphonate supplements,” Skyler grunted.
“We’ll bring the swelling down. Then I will set it and apply a cast.”
Two more rriksti crowded into the scrubbing area. With Hriklif and Cleanmay, they crouched down and laid their palms on Skyler’s sunken belly, his chest, and his ankle. Skyler shot Jack a nervous glance—he’d never been comfortable with this. Nor had Jack, but he knew it was the best way to get Skyler back on his feet. He hovered, wishing he could help.
Cleanmay looked around at him. “We will heal him,” he said, not unkindly. “You might take a shower. Humans enjoy showers. Is this correct?”
Enjoy? How about crave.
Jack’s first shower in four years felt like a taste of heaven. The locker-room style showers opened straight off the scrubbing area. The water fell in large, shivering balls, which stuck to his body in a slow-sliding coat of water. He scrubbed himself with a bar of gritty soap stamped CELL, scraped the now-filthy water off his body with his hands, and trod on it to help it down the drain. He was in the habit of obsessing about every drop of H2O, but maybe he didn’t have to worry anymore.
He towelled off in the steam. While he was showering, someone had placed a pile of folded clothes near the door. Lightweight, silky thermals, seamed and colored to resemble a normal pair of jeans and a hoodie. He put them on, together with the foldable sneakers that sat atop the pile. He wiped the mirror clean and regarded his gaunt, bearded face ruefully before leaving the room.
Sponsor logos decorated a chilly corridor. Exploring, he found storage rooms and a suiting room stocked with high-visibility orange EVA suits, like prison jumpsuits. The heartbeat of life-support systems filled the silence: air pumps, water pumps, hisses of equalizing pressure.
A ramp led up to a large common room. Here was everybody. The passengers from the SoD milled around, stalking up and down the ramp that led to higher levels, experimentally biting the furniture. Jack grinned, overjoyed. He had rescued these people from Europa and brought them back on the SoD. It was a huge relief to see them alive and well. They surrounded him, twittering in Rristigul in his headset, patting his new clothes, their hair dancing.
“So everyone made it?” Jack said. “We didn’t lose anyone?” Trill, squeal, chirrup. None of this lot had any English to speak of. “Brilliant. This is great. This place is great.”
After years in the dingy, barely-functional environment of the SoD, overrun with Imfi vegetation and bugs, Jack couldn’t help being impressed by the high-tech common room. Mess tables to seat a hundred had embedded blood pressure, heart rate, and stress monitors. A big screen dominated one wall, presently showing a Google 404 error page. The open-plan kitchen on one side of the circular room, ringed in by a seating counter, could have done duty as a NASA test kitchen. Rriksti thronged the kitchen, pulling food out of fridges and cabinets. They were clearly very hungry and searching for anything their bodies might tolerate. Jack joined in on a quest of his own, and soon found what—or rather, who—he was looking for.
Actually, Alexei Ivanov found him.
“Jack!”
Jack spun around, mug in one hand, teabags in the other. “I’m not dead yet,” he croaked, Monty Python style.
“What’s it going to take to get you on the cart, English dog?” Alexei’s head was freshly shaved, and he’d procured a black turtleneck and fake jeans. He looked more like a boffin than a cosmonaut. “A Russian would have gone out in a blaze of glory!”
Laughter escaped Jack. “You don’t seem to have managed it, either.”
“Worse yet, I lost my e-cigarette.”
They hugged briefly, Alexei guffawing, Jack trying not to drop his mug and teabags. It was fantastic to see his co-pilot and closest friend unscathed. “I knew you’d make it,” he claimed, disowning his dark forebodings earlier. “Where’s Keelraiser?”
He brought Keelraiser’s name out as casually as possible, although he had not really stopped thinking about him since they got here.
Actually, for the last week.
Actually, for the last two years or so.
Alexei chortled. “He went to look for you! We were down on the ground only long enough to refuel the Cloudeater. Then he took off again. He is probably on the far side of the moon right now, searching the wreck and wondering why your bodies mysteriously vanished!”
Jack groaned and slapped his forehead, forgetting that he had a handful of teabags. One of them burst and released a precious eddy of tealeaves into the air. “Are you telling me we could have stayed where we were and got rescued?!?”
Both of them dissolved into laughter. Jack’s ribs shot daggers of pain into his sides. He’d need to get Cleanmay to tape them up before it was safe for him to have a laughing fit. Felt good all the same, though. During their hellish days in the wreck, he had felt like he’d never laugh again.
“So Keelraiser landed the Cloudeater OK? Hriklif said you only just got here.”
The alien shuttle known as the Cloudeater had ridden home from Europa with the SoD. A few hours before the SoD’s crash, Jack had forced the Cloudeater to fly off on its own, in hopes of reaching CELL. But a week had elapsed since then.
Alexei grimaced. “We had to fly around the moon twenty times to change the plane of our orbit. It took five days.”
Jack could imagine what a nightmare that flight had been. “And when you got here? The guys in the rover said the CELL people didn’t exactly welcome you … but here you are.”
Alexei’s gray eyes darkened. “Jack, they don’t want us here. They will kill us all if they can.”
CHAPTER 3
“ Hence the crossbows,” Jack guessed. His joy and relief evaporated. There was always a goddamn catch.
“Yeah,” Alexei said. “Those were Keelraiser’s idea. He fabbed them on the Cloudeater’s printer before we got here.”
“They look like the ones we made on Europa.”
“Same design. Faster cocking mechanism, but still, they’re only crossbows. We would have been slaughtered if these people had proper weapons. Fortunately, they don’t. Only a few shotguns, and they have no real ammo. Just beanbag rounds.”
“So what happened?”
“They attacked us. We returned fire, killed a few of them, took some hostages. After that it was easy. We used the hostages to gain entrance to this hab, and chased the CELLies out.” Alexei spread his hands. “The situation’s volatile. This only happened a few hours ago. Right now, it’s a stand-off.”
Jack nodded slowly, listening to the Rristigul in his headset. Now that he knew the score, he could tell from the timbre of their voices that the civilians were frightened and on edge. “Out of the frying-pan into the fire.”
“Yeah.”
Nene, Alexei’s rriksti girlfriend, glided into the kitchen. “Let me do that,” she said, taking the forgotten mug and teabags from Jack’s hands. She found more mugs and operated a hot water dispenser. Jack watched Alexei watching her. Short for a rriksti, at only 6’2”, Nene had slightly rounded cheeks and ruby-red bio-antennas. Like all the rriksti, she was bundled up in human clothing against the ‘cold.’ Her wrists and shins stuck out, giving her an extra dollop of gamine charm. In actual fact, Nene was no waif. She was a fifth-level lay cleric—a Very Important Person, in the rriksti scheme of things—which made her, Jack assumed, the leader of the rriksti while Keelraiser was away. But Jack was fond of her for a different, simpler reason: because Alexei loved her. She made him happier than Jack had ever known him to be in the past.
They sat at one of the mess tables with their mugs of tea. Nene had found powdered creamer and sugar. It was a moment of bliss in the midst of chaos. The air had a faint ionized tang, like sucking a metal spoon. Fans whirred, and a generator rumbled—but for all that, it was quiet. Imfi quiet, the peaceful silence of the rriksti which Jack had come to know and love. Even stranded on a barren moon in a star system far from home, the rriksti didn’t run around like chickens with their heads cut off. They were holding it together. They might be civilians but their trials had toughened them up.
As for Jack, now that he’d sat down, he felt like never getting up again. He fought back a massive yawn.
“You must be very tired,” Alexei said.
Jack shook his head. “I’m very glad you’re not dead, that’s all.”
“Me too,” Alexei said. He reached across the table and punched Jack lightly on the arm. “It’s an answered prayer. I mean it! I prayed for you to survive.”
Jack cleared his throat. Although he was technically a Catholic, the notion of being prayed for made him uncomfortable, especially as Alexei had never been much of a pray-er, either. “So what’s that about?” he said, nodding at the far wall. Two pressure doors punctuated the apricot-colored insulation. The one on the left was closed, but the right-hand one stood open. A lighted tunnel stretched beyond. The screen of the biometric reader beside the door flashed, emitting a pip-pip-pip sound that could be clearly heard in the silence.
“That’s where the cold is coming from,” Nene said, speaking for the first time since they’d sat down. “That tunnel leads to the other habs. It is very cold in the tunnels. But we have to leave it open, so that they can’t open the door on the other end.”
“You could just pull the compressor lines,” Jack said.
Nene shook her head. “I will not break anything, and I will not hurt anyone.” Her voice was adamant.
Jack and Alexei exchanged a glance. They had already paid in blood for going too easy on people who were trying to kill them.
Speaking of which— “Where are Linda and Koichi?”
Linda Moskowitz and Koichi Masuoka, career astronauts like Jack and Alexei, had betrayed them on the SoD. They had tried to hijack the ship, and had even tried to murder Jack, believing that he’d gone over to the rriksti. That still festered. Jack had thought of them as friends. He wasn’t going to make that mistake again.
“Over in CELL 4,” Alexei said, nodding at the open interhab tunnel. “They wanted to come here, after all. So—your wishes come true! Have fun.” He flashed a wicked grin.
“That works.” Jack pointed at the closed pressure door. “What about that one?”
“Goes to CELL 6. It’s unused. These morons put it anti-sunwards of the others, so it never gets any sun. They just use it for storing cryo gases.”
“So there’s no one in there?”
“No. We checked. Anyway, it’s too cold for anyone to survive in there.”
Jack drank his tea. There was also a selection of energy bars, arranged like tea cakes on a plastic plate. He picked one up, but didn’t unwrap it. “Is there any other way into the habs?”
“The airlocks, of course. Each hab has its own airlock. But we have sentries outside, to make sure no one gets in or out. Those are the guys who went to pick you up, actually.”
Jack could no longer keep it bottled up. “Alexei, I fucked up. I crashed the SoD. It was one hundred percent my fault. I went too low, chasing the Lightbringer—clipped a mountain.”
“Then I blame the mountain,” Alexei said. “It had no business being there.”
“No, listen. I actually got the Lightbringer. Hit it bang on the nose. Ask Skyler. But the round was a dud.”
“A dud?”
“Yup.”
“Blin,” Alexei said. He steepled his fingers in front of his nose. “OK, it’s not funny,” he said, breathing hard.
“No, it isn’t,” Jack said shortly. There was no making light of his failure. As a direct result, Earth was still in jeopardy.
Another familiar voice came from behind him. “Look who’s here!”
Jack rose. Giles Boisselot, the fourth surviving member of the SoD’s original crew, rolled up to him with his funny hybrid gait. Giles was a rriksti from the elbows and knees down. The Krijistal on the Lightbringer had amputated his limbs and replaced them with skin grafts that grew into seven-fingered hands and seven-toed feet. His lower legs had now grown to full rriksti length, making him as tall as Jack, although he used to be a head shorter. With Gallic disregard for Jack’s British reserve, he hugged him and planted a pungent kiss on each cheek.
Jack’s ribs screamed. He disengaged himself and sat down. “Good to see you, Giles,” he said warmly. The scruffy Frenchman completed the crew that had flown back from Europa. They were all here. Jack’s optimism returned. The Spirit of Destiny show was back on the road again, even though the Spirit of Destiny itself lay shattered in a crater on the far side of the moon. They could turn this thing around yet.
“I’ve inventoried the greenhouse,” Giles said. He unwrapped an energy bar and bit off a chunk. “Plenty of vegetables. That does our friends no good. There are also rabbits and chickens. I wonder if they could eat those?”
Jack realized the food situation must be truly perilous. The rriksti could not eat human food. They required a diet rich in heavy metals. Ordinary vegetables made them vomit and shit their guts out. There had been little enough food on the Cloudeater, and now they had nothing.
While Giles and Nene discussed the vitamin content of chicken, Skyler hobbled into the common room, balancing on a crutch. A printed cast of honeycomb plastic enclosed his left foot. He greeted Giles and Alexei and sank down, wan and withdrawn. The other three looked at each other. Jack didn’t need to say anything out loud. It wasn’t his broken ankle that had got Skyler down. He was worrying about Hannah.
Giles slapped Skyler on the back. “Dr. Boisselot diagnoses a caffeine deficit. Coffee!” he shouted, apparently to no one. He pushed the plate of energy bars at Skyler. “These have seven to nine hundred calories each.”
Jack remembered the energy bar he was holding, and unwrapped it. He tossed the wrapper at the rubbish bin at the end of the table. It went wide. “Shit. I forgot there’s no Coriolis force!”
They’d lived for four years in the spin gravity of the SoD’s rotating hab, where things fell anti-spinwards. Jack would have to break the habit of automatically compensating for the Coriolis force.
“Ah, here is your coffee,” Giles said to Skyler. A young woman emerged from the kitchen, carrying a tray. Jack’s mouth dropped open … and not only because the woman was a strikingly pretty blonde.
“I hope this is OK,” she murmured. She knelt on the floor and set the coffee tray at the end of the table, not getting too near the men. Then she crawled—crawled—along the floor behind Alexei. Jack craned over the table and saw her make an obeisance to Nene, bumping her forehead on the floor. Nene sat immobile.
“Excuse me,” Jack blurted. “Aren’t you …”
He trailed off as the woman rose, curtseyed, and returned to the kitchen, like a Victorian servant.
“Wasn’t that the actress from thingummy? That flick about …”
“About an alien invasion,” Giles said. “Yes, and many others. She earned millions of dollars per picture. Now she is a hostage! To be clear, she volunteered.”
“What the hell is wrong with these people?” Skyler said.
Nene said, “They think we come from the Lightbringer.” She did a rriksti shrug, jerking her head and shoulders sideways.
“But the brainwashing goes both ways,” Giles said. “For every person who sees us as the invading alien horde, there is another who just wants to kiss Nene’s feet.”
Us. Jack would have said that the same way, even though he did not have regenerated rriksti limbs.
“It’s sickening, is it not, Nene?” Giles pushed.
“Leave her alone,” Alexei said.
“Actually, Giles, I suspect you enjoy being waited on more than I do,” Nene said.
Alexei laughed. “She got you.”
“Bah,” Giles said. “It’s better than being shot at!”
Pensively, Jack bit into his energy bar—and nearly spat it out. “What is this? Strawberry-flavored cardboard?”
“No, it’s Earth food,” Alexei said. “You’ll adjust.”
“Christ. It’s worse than those MREs we got off the Victory.”
“Scientifically engineered to deliver maximum calories and nutrients per gram. Eat it. You look like a before picture on a bodybuilding website.”
Jack remembered the shockingly gaunt face he’d seen in the mirror. Alexei had a point. He chewed the strawberry-flavored cardboard bar without enthusiasm. Nene pointed at him. “Count yourself lucky,” she said, hair dancing, mouth open, sending conflicting signals of mirth and distress. “We have nothing to eat!”
“Oh, lapochka,” Alexei said. “There’s the rice …”
“Yes. There’s the rice.” Nene brought her other hand out of the pocket of her outermost thermal shirt. She opened her palm. A small pile of cooked white rice grains lay on it. She raised her palm, tipped the rice into her mouth, and chewed fiercely
“White rice has no fat-soluble vitamins, no vitamin K,” Alexei said. “It’s calories, at least …”
Jack confronted the possibility that the rriksti were about to die of starvation, amidst plenty. It was unthinkable. “Maybe Keelraiser can salvage some of your food from the SoD?”
“I hope so,” Nene said.
The left-hand pressure door, the one leading to the unused CELL 6, whooshed open. A mighty boom slapped the air. Skyler’s coffee mug flew up in the air, its contents spilling in a low-gravity arc.
CHAPTER 4
Jack rolled under the table. Alexei was already there, grabbing a crossbow that had lain under his chair.
Five men charged through the pressure door, diametrically across the common room. Their legs pedaled in the air. They were trying to run faster than the low gravity allowed.
Jack hauled Skyler under the table, tipping over the bench he had been sitting on. Giles scuttled towards the kitchen. Alexei frantically cocked his crossbow and loaded a bolt into the barrel.
The invaders spread out. Blue Lego men in Starliner spacesuits. Professional. Not wasting a second, not getting in each other’s way. Two went for the ramp. Jack fixated on one of the others, who carried a shoulder-mounted … what? Five-foot steel pipe with a stock mounted. Looked like a rocket launcher. The guy hit the ground, steadied his stance. Another of the invaders did some kind of sleight-of-hand at the back of the pipe.
Boom!
Muzzle flash threw shadows of toppled furniture on the walls.
The smell of kerosene filled the room.
Something shattered in the kitchen.
Rriksti shrieks drilled into Jack’s ringing head.
Alexei scrambled out from under the table. Screaming in Russian, he fired at the rocket launcher crew. His bolt took the loader square in the throat.
It went through the ultra-flexible, state-of-the-art spacesuit like paper.
Blood pumped from a shredded carotid, blackening the Boeing-blue material, pattering to the floor.
Rocket launcher guy still had a round up the spout.
Boom.
Alexei cartwheeled backwards, his crossbow flying from his hands, away from Jack.
Jack lunged out from under the table. He picked up the fallen bench. It was ten feet long but weighed nothing. Holding it under his arm like a lance, he charged at the nearest invader.
As he ran, time slowed down. He noticed—
Rriksti pouring out of the kitchen, brandishing spatulas, pans, a knife, whatever they could grab.
Nene jumping on the table, shrieking, “Muzl! MUZL!” Rristigul: Stop!
And the fifth invader sneaking towards the open pressure door, unzipping his sleeve so he could use the biometric reader.
Jack sucked in a breath.
“Get that guy!” he howled.
If that pressure door closed, the CELLies could open the door at the other end of the tunnel. Hundreds of them would come pouring through.
And Jack couldn’t do anything to prevent it. He was on a collision course with rocket launcher guy.
Growling, he rammed the bench at the guy’s midsection.
The guy swung his rocket launcher like a sword, knocked the bench aside.
Low gravity and the unwieldy length of the bench hampered Jack’s reaction time. They danced around each other in an absurd mime of swordplay, like knights doing battle with furniture and a length of pipe. But the bench was longer. Jack swung it overhand and clouted rocket launcher guy on the helmet. Over he went. Jack pounced before he could get up. He rolled him onto his face, pinned his arms behind his back, and switched his attention back to the real threat, the guy at the pressure door …
… who was now down on the floor, one leg sticking out of a pile of rriksti, spasming. Six-knuckled fists rose and fell.
That made three down, and here came the last two invaders stumbling down the ramp, prodded by Hriklif and another rriksti—Stepstone, was it? The musician. Both of the rriksti held shotguns, presumably captured from the CELLies themselves.
“We’re all Krijistal now,” Skyler said, leaning one-legged on the table, holding his crutch like a sword, although the fight was over.
Alexei sat up, clutching his shoulder. “You OK?” Jack yelled.
“Fine,” Alexei yelled back. But his left arm hung down limply and it looked bad, maybe dislocated.
Jack channeled his anger at the guy he was sitting on. “What’s your fucking problem?” he shouted, knowing the guy could not hear him with his helmet on. He decided to change that. The Starliner had more zips than a punk rocker’s trousers. It was meant to be better than the old Z-2. Jack yanked the collar zip open and pulled the helmet roughly back. “You could have killed someone,” he snarled at the cropped, reddish-brown back of the guy’s head.
“Fuck you,” said a posh British voice, muffled against the floor.
“Do you want to get hurt?” Jack wrenched the guy’s arms up and back. He’d learned this trick from Brbb, legendary Krijistal brawler. With a gentle push, he controlled the guy’s struggles. “That’s better.”
“Where’re the lads?” said the guy, his voice thick with pain.
Jack looked around. “Well, you’re down one lad.” The loader had bled out on the floor. “Actually, two.” Nene and Giles were pulling the rriksti off the would-be door-opener. A few patches of blue still showed here and there. The rest was black with blood. Helmet smashed like a broken lightbulb, red filaments spilling out. “You’d better talk fast if you want to save the others.” Hriklif and Stepstone had them against the wall with their hands up. “How’d you get into that unused hab? There wasn’t meant to be anyone in here.”
“We waited until the squids drove away, and then strolled across to the airlock, of course.”
Jack sucked his teeth. These cunts had taken advantage of the span of time while two of the sentries had been away … collecting Jack and Skyler from the outer slope of the crater. We’ll need to step up our game, he thought. Everyone’s starving and tired, but we can’t afford to screw up like that. They almost got us.
“Tell me why we shouldn’t chuck you out of the airlock.” He put more pressure on the guy’s shoulders.
“Aaagh! … You’re a human. This is an alien invasion. Whose side are you on?”
Jack looked around. “Cover him,” he said to Stepstone. He rolled off the guy and backed away.
The guy stumbled to his feet. His face was instantly recognizable. Blue eyes met Jack’s. “We’ve been introduced,” he said.
“You!” Jack said to the Prince of Wales. Confusion came over him. He remembered the ceremony at Buckingham Palace in 2018, when he’d made the Queen’s Birthday Honours list without actually having done anything yet. It seemed to have been a million years ago. “Er … sir.”
“Harry will do,” the prince said. Then he said something that took Jack completely by surprise. Nothing about Europa. Nothing about the alien invasion of Earth. “Number 12 Squadron?”
Jack’s old RAF unit.
“Yeah,” Jack said. He knew the prince had flown Apaches in Afghanistan.
“You had a sticky old time of it, I heard.” Harry’s nose was bleeding. He blotted it absently on the back of his glove, staring at his lifeless friends.
Jack wanted to say he was sorry about all this, but he said nothing. Harry and his mates had tried to murder hundreds of innocent rriksti. He went to pick up the fallen ‘rocket launcher.’
“Is that what I think it is?” Alexei said. He sat on the table, shirtless. A massive bruise purpled his chest.
Jack peered at the little hole near the base of the pipe. He smelled a strong whiff of kerosene. He noticed a rash of white on the edge of the plum-red seating counter, where a projectile must have fragmented. He wiped his fingers through it and touched his tongue to them.
Raw potato.
“Yup. It’s a potato gun.”
Alexei gasped a laugh. “Waste of kerosene. And potatoes.”
“Was that all you had?” Jack said to Prince Harry, who was sitting on the floor, trying to revive his very dead friend who had been shot in the throat.
The prince said without looking up, “James thought it would be asking for trouble to have guns on the moon. There were six shotguns in the whole place. Now you’ve got them. So yes.”
Jack sat down on the table. The rush of victory was fading into weariness. His ribs hurt like hell again. He’d already flown a broomstick into a hill and done an epic moon walk today, for Christ’s sake. “What’re we going to do?” he said to Alexei. “There are nine hundred more like them in those other habs.”
“No, there aren’t,” Harry said. “The rest of them are sitting around in kumbaya circles, waiting for James to come back and tell them what to do. They’re completely bloody useless.”
Nene leant over the table, curling her bio-antennas around Alexei’s shoulder. Her X-ray detector ‘eyes’ opened and blinked. “Nothing’s broken,” she said.
Reminded of the X-ray issue, Jack looked around and noticed several of the rriksti sitting near the kitchen counter. There sat a medical X-ray machine, humming away like a coffee-maker with them basking in front of it. The rriksti wasted no time making themselves at home. Unfortunately, a home for rriksti could not be a home for humans, not for long. Jack rubbed his lower back. He could practically feel his spine cancer returning.
Skyler interrogated Harry’s two surviving friends, sitting on the table, jabbing his crutch menacingly at them. He had formerly worked for the NXC, the scariest intelligence agency in America. He could still do his Fed act, even with a broken ankle. “Why’d you try to get upstairs?”
Out of their Starliners, the men were weathered Brits in their forties. “Peter Hall,” one of them said. “Colin McFarlane,” said the other.
“Were you gonna fuck with the solar collectors? The CO2 scrubbers? What?”
The men reeled off ranks and strings of numbers.
“Answer the fucking question! What was your objective?”
Hall and McFarlane stared at the wall.
To Jack, Skyler said in frustration, “We have to know where our weak points are.”
“The whole bloody hab is a weak point. Anyway, they’re not going to say anything. Firstly, they’re SAS, and secondly, they’re fucking with you.” He watched the men’s faces for confirmation of his guess. Not a twitch.
“Ex-SAS,” Harry said. “It hacked me off to start with. Bodyguards on the moon! Wills was right, as usual.”
McFarlane spoke up in a gravelly voice. “I remember when you were selected as the pilot of that ship with the fucking stupid name.” His eyes bored into Jack. “You were a national hero. A global hero. My oldest boy had your poster on his bedroom wall. Look at you now.”
Jack’s face burned. “I tried to shoot the Lightbringer down. Didn’t succeed, obviously. That’s why we’re here.”
McFarlane shrugged disbelievingly.
“We’re the good guys, for God’s sake,” Jack said.
Nene was shouting at the civilians, ordering them to clean up their mess, by the looks of things. Rristigul bubbled in Jack’s headset, the timbre different from before, relieved and excited. Nothing like a little mob violence to improve morale, Jack thought bleakly.
Then he caught a familiar word, or rather a name.
Iristigut.
That was Keelraiser’s name in Rristigul.
“Keelraiser’s back,” Hriklif explained.
“Thank fuck.”
The rriksti mopped the bloodstains off the floor. They righted the furniture and hid the bodies. No trace of the fight remained by the time the door to the airlock foyer sighed open.
Keelraiser walked in with a tall, dark-haired human at his side.
CHAPTER 5
Jack did not loathe James Coetzee on sight. He’d loathed him long before setting eyes on him. Coetzee, an aerospace entrepreneur born in South Africa and raised in America, had got his start providing contract launch services to the SoD project. His company, Skyhooks Inc., had gone on to develop the reusable moon shuttle that made CELL possible. He had the career and the company that Jack’s late friend Oliver Meeks should have had, if Meeks hadn’t been murdered. And he was still only 45. The bastard had the looks of a professional tennis player to boot.
His smooth lunar stride and bolted-on smile reinforced Jack’s preexisting prejudices. Coetzee had even taken the time to comb his hair.
In contrast, Keelraiser looked like he hadn’t slept for a week. It was possible he had not. Living on a tidally locked planet, the rriksti had never evolved regular sleeping patterns, but took siestas whenever they felt tired. Flipside, they could stay awake for days at a time if they pushed themselves. Keelraiser crumpled onto the nearest bench, while Coetzee made a beeline for Harry Windsor.
It was a dead certainty that Harry would fill Coetzee’s ears with bullshit about the rriksti, and about Jack himself. And Coetzee, like him or not, was the one person they really needed to get on their side. But Jack suddenly couldn’t make himself care.
He elbowed through the crowd of rriksti surrounding Keelraiser. “Excuse me. Sorry.” The closer he got to Keelraiser, the tenser he got. Nervous energy wiped away his exhaustion.
Keelraiser looked up at him. “Let me know in advance next time you don’t want to be rescued.”
The rriksti around them turned in response to a bio-radio signal unheard by Jack—the headsets only picked up a portion of the radio-speech band. In from the foyer came several rriksti. Jack knew them by sight from the SoD, but with so many other rriksti in the hab, he hadn’t noticed their absence. They lugged bulky plastic sacks. The unmistakable odor of rotten cheese wafted through the room.
“Is that—”
“Seeds from the SoD,” Keelraiser said. “Everything looked dead. But the breach in the main hab may have saved some of the rootballs, ironically, by freezing them. We’ll find out soon enough.”
Keelraiser’s huge, dark brown eyes were glassy with exhaustion. His legs stuck out like broken camshafts.
Jack came to a decision. He took Keelraiser’s hand and pulled him to his feet. “You’ve brought food for your people—”
“Maybe; we don’t know if the seeds will germinate—”
“—but I bet you haven’t eaten anything yourself in days.”
He led Keelraiser into the kitchen. Nene had been eating rice; that must have come from somewhere. Jack discovered a door that led to a food-prep area. The actress was there, making sandwiches with some kind of paste squeezed from a tube. The bread looked to be full of vitamin-rich bran. That wouldn’t do. At the sight of Keelraiser, she dropped her bread knife and sank submissively to her knees.
“Get up,” Jack said. “On your feet, like a human being.” He eased her out and shut the door behind her.
A single chair stood in the narrow space between the work counter and the sink. Keelraiser folded onto it. Jack lifted the lids of pans and appliances until he hit the jackpot: a vat of steamed white rice, now cold. He couldn’t see any bowls or implements, so he scooped some out with his hand.
“Here. Nene was eating this. She says it’s all right. Empty calories, I suppose.”
“Thank you,” Keelraiser said without moving. His head hung back and his arms lolled straight down from his double-jointed shoulders. He was wearing his Krijistal uniform, a boxy jacket with long tuxedo-like tails over knee-length shorts, the whole ensemble a violent shade of orange. The last time Jack saw him wear that, he’d been about to make a play to displace Jack as the commander of the SoD. It did not seem like a good sign. But now Keelraiser didn’t look imposing. Just exhausted and vulnerable.
Jack straddled the chair. He cupped the back of Keelraiser’s head with his free hand, sliding his fingers between the velvety bio-antennas. “Eat.”
Keelraiser focused on the pile of rice in Jack’s hand. He picked up a small clump of grains with his thumb and two middle fingers. Put it in his mouth. “Ugh.”
“Better than nothing.”
Keelraiser was already taking more rice. He swallowed without chewing. The last few grains stuck to Jack’s skin. Keelraiser lowered his face and ate them straight off Jack’s palm. Then he licked the skin, getting the last traces of rice. His breath chilled the wetness of his saliva.
Jack stood stock still. “More?” he said.
“You should eat something, too.”
“I had a 900-calorie piece of strawberry-flavored cardboard.”
“That sounds nice,” Keelraiser said wanly.
“It was revolting. I’ve lost my taste for Earth stuff.”
Keelraiser sat limply, bunching the material of his shorts in white-knuckled fists. “I searched the wreck of the SoD for hours. I’d still be there, looking for you, if they hadn’t radioed us to say you were here.”
“I should have left a note,” Jack said.
Keelraiser lifted his big, triangular face. “What would it have said?”
Jack hesitated. It had been ridiculously hard for him to accept that he’d fallen in love with an alien. An alien who was sometimes male, at that. God really must have a sense of humor.
“It would have said, ‘Meet you at the south pole. Love, Jack.’”
Keelraiser tentatively grasped his shoulders. They kissed. The taste of rice mixed with the maddening salty savor of Keelraiser’s mouth. Jack felt like he’d died out there without even knowing it, had been walking around like a zombie, and now he was coming back to life.
“You are my life,” Keelraiser whispered. He broke the kiss, jerked the zip of Jack’s hoodie down, and burrowed his tongue into the notch at the bottom of Jack’s throat. He moved his face lower. Sharp rriksti teeth nibbled.
“Ah! Oh …”
“Does that feel good?”
“Ah … yes.” Jack could hardly remember how to form words. “Good.”
“What are these, anyway?”
“Nipples.”
“But you’re male.”
“So are you, but I’m not holding that against you, am I?”
Keelraiser let out a torn-off laugh. He reached for Jack’s cock and squeezed it through the soft fake jeans. Didn’t bother asking if it was OK, just did it. Jack groaned. He assumed Keelraiser must be hard, too. He wanted to see what it looked like. His curiosity overlapped with his sex drive, each thing reinforcing the other. Keelraiser’s body was as different as a woman’s, despite being male, two days a week or when the wind was in the east or whatever. Jack relished every difference. He yanked at the drawstring of Keelraiser’s shorts.
“Don’t,” Keelraiser said, instantly drawing back. The chair scraped over the floor.
“Huh? Why not?”
“It’s not the weekend.”
“What’s that got to do with it?” Jack knew the rriksti on Imf had organized their lives into 11-day weeks capped by two-day weekends, but he only had a vague grasp of what the cycle meant. It seemed to differ depending on how honest the rriksti felt like being. Impatiently, he said, “Does your religion forbid sex on weekdays, or something?”
“Yes, actually, it does. I’m a Krijistal officer.” Keelraiser sat up straight, eyes glinting. “We’re supposed to be empty uniforms, governed by technology, not biology. Glory to Ystyggr, Lord of the Visible and the Invisible, who happens not to exist, but never mind! Conquest is the best antidote to existential despair. We’ve already fucked up our own planet, so now we’ll go and fuck up someone else’s. That’ll justify our existence!”
He threw up a sloppy Krijistal salute. This resembled the British gesture for ‘up yours,’ with more fingers on each side. Jack laughed. He caught the salute and set his teeth gently into the web of skin between the two longer middle fingers. He had guessed from the way Keelraiser treated his hands that this was an erogenous zone. “Does this feel good?” A faintly sticky residue coated rriksti skin, salty, metallic, a bit musky. Jack couldn’t get enough of it.
“Yes …”
“What about this?” He sucked one of Keelraiser’s fingers, remembering that Keelraiser had put this finger into his mouth the very first day they met. Had he, even back then, been trying to hint at what he wanted? Could it possibly be as filthy as what Jack was picturing?
“That is so nice, it actually counts as torture,” Keelraiser said. Jack laughed. But Keelraiser was shuddering, pressing his hand against Jack’s mouth. “Give me a minute.”
Keelraiser doubled over, resting his elbows on his knees. Jack loosely encircled the black-maned head with his arms and pressed his cheek to Keelraiser’s smooth, slightly sticky forehead. He wondered if the problem really was the stupid 11-day cycle, or if Keelraiser had deeper-seated difficulties with what Jack was, who he was. Jack would understand that. It wasn’t easy for him, either.
After a moment he realized Keelraiser was trembling. The skin of his forehead felt smoother, drier. With the rriksti, dry meant the same thing as wet meant for humans.
“Tell me what it is,” Jack said, forgetting all about his own existential angst.
“They came to meet us, offering help. I thought it was likely to be a trap—that’s why I made the crossbows. But I wasn’t sure. You humans are as good at lying as we are, sometimes. You’re the only one who never lies.”
Jack blushed when he tried to lie. It was a defect going all the way back to childhood. His fair coloring, not any kind of moral superiority, doomed him to honesty. “Alexei said you killed a few of them, and after that it was easy.”
“It was not easy. I’d never killed humans before. I left the hostages with Alexei and went up the hill. They had laid mines. Blocks of explosive buried in the regolith. The wires were visible if one looked carefully. I scraped the pebbles away with my feet and cut the wires. It took a long time.”
“Claymores,” Jack muttered. He suspected Harry Windsor would have been the one to think of that.
“They were watching me on camera the whole time. I suppose they didn’t know what to do. I carried some of the explosives up the hill and put them in the airlock of this hab. I said to them: ‘Do you want to die, or do you want to let us in?’ They let us in.”
“Well done,” Jack said. “You saved everyone.” He wrapped his hand around Keelraiser’s head, pushing it down on his shoulder. “Come here. No, just come here, you crazy alien. It’s over now. It’s all right.” He rubbed Keelraiser’s back through the stiff material of his jacket.
“It is not over now,” Keelraiser said.
“No, of course it isn’t.”
“It’s so stupid it makes me want to shed.” Keelraiser broke away. A few flakes of sloughed-off skin—rriksti tears—drifted from his cheeks. His eyes were wide and fierce.
“What is?”
“This place. These habs. Stuck up here on stilts, where a missile could take them all out at once! They’ve organized everything around solar power, of all the primitive, inefficient energy sources. They’ve got a thorium reactor. They just haven’t taken it out of the box yet, owing to bootstrapping issues that they somehow failed to anticipate. Mind you, I hate fission reactors. They’re dirty, dangerous. But a thorium reactor is better than nothing …”
Jack moved back and looked quizzically at Keelraiser’s tightly shut lips and huge eyes as Keelraiser continued to pour ideas into his headset.
“They may not like nuclear power, and I expect they won’t like living underground, but they’ll just have to get used to it. It’s safer. As for the water mining operation, it needs to be massively expanded. There’s a conveyor belt running up out of the crater. It carries buckets full of ice ore. We’ll extend it down to our new location, and we’ll also expand the mining works in the crater itself. The Cloudeater’s scans prove there isn’t only water ice down there. There are also ammonia deposits sealed in porous rocks, and that means nitrogen. We’ll need that to ramp up the hydroponics.”
It dawned on Jack that Keelraiser was planning to tear CELL to pieces and rebuild it according to Imfi best practices. “Hold on, are you suggesting we’re going to stay here?”
“They’ve also been mining rare earth elements near the equator, in what they call the KREEP terranes. This moon isn’t quite as barren as it looks. James was telling me about his plans to supply their space station in low earth orbit with lunar oxygen. They’ve already built a linear accelerator to throw containers of REEs into LEO—”
“What were you doing with Coetzee, anyway?”
“James?”
“Did you take him with you to the wreck of the SoD?”
“Yes. Him and a few others.”
“Why?”
“I needed to keep the most important hostages with me.”
Jack leant against the counter, arms folded. What was this feeling? Jealousy? Get a grip, Kildare. He could not possibly feel jealous of a bogus little prick like James Coetzee. On the other hand, Coetzee’s ‘visionary’ shtick had a real hold over the humans at CELL. Harry Windsor had said that everyone was waiting for Coetzee to come back and tell them what to do. Maybe Keelraiser was onto something.
“Did you explain that we aren’t the Lightbringer’s moon conquest division? Did it get through to him?”
“I thought you were dead,” Keelraiser said.
Jack frowned, not seeing the connection.
Keelraiser rose and straightened his uniform. He picked up the bread knife the actress had left on the chopping board, examined the blade, wiped it on his shorts. “Not quite the same as a service sword.” With a limber double-jointed movement, he thrust it behind his neck. He was wearing his scabbard. Jack hadn’t even noticed the thin straps underneath the stiff, square-shouldered Krijistal jacket. “I wonder if there’s another one around somewhere?”
Jack pointed at the magnetic strip holding several knives to the wall above the sink.
Keelraiser selected the longest one—and pointed it at Jack. “Submit to the Imfi conquest.”
Jack tried a smile. Then he scowled. Then he raised his hands to shoulder height, deliberately making a mockery of the gesture. “Stop fucking around, Keelraiser.”
“Submit to the Imfi conquest!” Keelraiser barked the words this time, adding an edge of harmonic resonance. The knife flashed at Jack’s face, stopping just short of his throat.
Jack’s hands went the rest of the way up. The counter dug into his fractured ribs. “Don’t go all Krijistal on me.” He forced himself to speak levelly, staring into Keelraiser’s eyes.
Keelraiser switched his grip on the knife and thrust it into his scabbard, which had once held two short swords with blades only a few tungsten atoms wide. “If I can fool you, I can fool anyone.”
Jack had had a fright and now anger bled into his voice. “You think that’s what these people expect. You think you’ve got to jackboot around like some kind of alien in a Hollywood movie. You could be right. But what does it matter what they think? If they don’t cooperate, we’ll toss them out of the airlock. They don’t matter. What matters is Earth. We’ll refuel the Cloudeater, add some extra tankage. Load up on food and water. Then we’ll head for Earth. The space stations are still there: Sky Station and the old ISS.” The scheme built itself in his mind as he spoke. They weren’t out of this fight yet. “Dock with the ISS. Or Sky Station. But I know for a fact there are several external tanks in the construction dump near the ISS, left over from when we built the SoD. Take the stringers off the tanks, sharpen the ends. Hey presto, missiles. We could even tip them with uranium from this thorium reactor you mentioned. That’ll sort the fucking Lightbringer—”
“And what am I to do with my people? Take them as unwilling passengers on this suicide mission?”
“It’s not a suicide mission,” Jack said, while admitting to himself that it probably would be. Even if the Cloudeater could reach the ISS, it wouldn’t have enough reaction mass left to go anywhere else—neither down to Earth, or back to the moon. “Leave them here, then—”
“To die? Brbb and his platoon are gone. I’m the only Krijistal left. They can’t survive without me.”
“They did on the SoD,” Jack snapped. He knew he wasn’t being fair. During their journey, Keelraiser had backed off from his leadership role so as not to step on Jack’s toes. That’s why Jack knew first-hand how difficult the rriksti civilians could be. They had had to be told a dozen times not to flush the toilet paper. They’d done crazy shit like spacewalking during the SoD’s fly-by of Mars to take pictures. And on the SoD, there hadn’t been 900 human beings who wanted to kill them.
“And then there are the humans,” Keelraiser said relentlessly. “This wretched little collection of tin cans is not self-sufficient. It has relied on regular supply flights. Earth’s launch capacity has been destroyed. There’ll be no more supply flights for the foreseeable future. Without our help, they haven’t got a chance. Would you condemn them to death, just to take one more pot-shot at the Lightbringer?”
Jack covered his face with his hands and growled, “All right, all right! Shit.” Once he forced himself to think past the sexiness of immediate offensive action, he recognized that he wasn’t thinking rationally. He was trying to make up for crashing the SoD. Trying to pretend he hadn’t failed Earth, and his parents, and Kate Menelaou, and everyone who had thought Jack Kildare was the right man for the job, including himself.
Trying to pretend the lives of 932 humans didn’t matter.
But they did, they did. They mattered as much as the 267 surviving rriksti he’d rescued from Europa.
“Sorry,” he muttered. “You’re right. We’ve got to stabilize the life-support situation before we do anything else. Food. Water. Power. Etcetera etcetera etcetera.”
The very same things he’d spent the last two years worrying about. He felt like a hamster trapped in a cage, with a cat rattling the bars. But he’d crashed the SoD. He would have to pay for that.
“But there’s one slight problem, isn’t there?” He raised his head. Keelraiser was pacing between the counters. “If we don’t take out the Lightbringer, they’ll take us out.”
“No, they won’t.”
“You’ve just been saying how vulnerable this place is. One missile could finish us off. Right? So all they’ll need to do is get one of their shuttles into orbit and do exactly what I described, in reverse. In fact they’ve probably got missiles that would do it—”
“They haven’t. The tactical nuclear weapons were all destroyed in the explosion on board, and everything else is sized for the Lightbringer’s railgun. The shuttles are unarmed.”
“Look, these are the guys who aerobraked in Earth’s atmosphere after you thought they were doomed. These are the guys who pulled off an unpowered landing in a ship the size of a small city. You said it was impossible. They did it. Are you going to bet our lives that they can’t get hold of an ICBM and throw it at the moon?”
“They will not attack us,” Keelraiser said, still pacing.
“Oh yeah? What makes you so sure?”
Instead of answering, Keelraiser said again, “I thought you were dead.”
“And?”
“It was an unbelievable shock. It was like losing my life. I abandoned hope altogether for a little while.”
Keelraiser halted. Jack straightened up. He stood 6’4” after four spine-lengthening years in space. Keelraiser was medium height for a rriksti at 6’6”. Their faces were practically on a level.
“There seemed to be no point in going on without you,” Keelraiser said intensely. “Do you understand?”
Jack thought he did. The words left him shaken, emotionally unguarded. He met Keelraiser’s bottomless, dark brown eyes. “I’m sorry. I fucked up. I was taking it out on you. Sorry.”
“Your fuck-ups,” Keelraiser said, “are nothing compared to mine.”
He wrapped his arms around Jack and kissed him fiercely, heavy blunt fingernails digging into his back. The kiss felt like an attack. It was both dismaying and exciting. Jack responded instinctively to the shift in register. He remembered the times they’d laid into each other Krijistal style, even drawing blood. Had there been something of this in that? Yes, of course there had. Maybe, in fact, this was the way it had to be. They struggled against each other, striving to get closer.
It ended abruptly when Jack encountered something odd, tucked inside Keelraiser’s cheek.
“What’s this?”
“What? Nothing.”
“There’s something in your mouth.” Recklessly, Jack pried Keelraiser’s lips open with his fingers.
Keelraiser knocked Jack’s hand away. He stepped back and spat the object into his palm. Jack glimpsed a white plastic square. Something electronic.
“What’s that?”
“I had to put it in my mouth so I’d be sure not to lose it. Our uniforms don’t have pockets. A Krijistal officer isn’t meant to carry anything except his weapons.”
“Yes, but what is it?”
“The lives of one thousand two hundred and three people,” Keelraiser said. “Not quite a guarantee, but of course, we rriksti are known for dishonesty. It’s as good as we’re going to get. Whether it will have been worth the price …” He shrugged. “Up to you.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m apologizing, of course.”
“What for?”
“I was always a Krijistal officer.” Keelraiser turned and left the room.
CHAPTER 6
Jack chased Keelraiser, heart sinking. He caught the door on the backswing—and stopped short.
The common room was dark, and packed. The rustle and murmur of a human crowd replaced the Imfi silence. Rriksti sat on the benches. Humans filled the rest of the space, standing room only. The interconnect door to CELL 4 opened as Jack watched, and another dozen humans came in.
Harry Windsor had got his wish, except not. It looked like half of CELL had squeezed in here, and yet no one was attacking the rriksti, or even looked like they were thinking about it. They were just standing there like a crowd at a music festival, facing the big screen on the wall, which still displayed its error message.
The rriksti, meanwhile, were eating from communal bowls of white slop. Jack guessed pure sugar, mixed with water to make it stay on their spoons. Others used screwdrivers and their claw-like fingernails to dismantle tablets and sensors … sorry, food. Someone must have told the CELLies that rriksti could eat the rare metals used in electronic devices.
The rriksti kept their eyes on their meal, indifferent to the humans around them, or pretending to be, as Keelraiser strode to the front of the crowd.
Jack started to follow him. But the crowd, which had parted for Keelraiser, blocked his way. “Who are you?” said a man, looking around at him.
“Acting commander of the—”
“Of a wreck,” the man said triumphantly. He was much younger than Jack and clearly thought he was hot shit for living on the moon. “Your reactor polluted a whole goddamn mountain range.”
Jack had no comeback to that. He turned away. People were sitting on the kitchen counter. Someone leaned down and gave him a hand up. Skyler. “Thanks.” Jack squeezed onto the counter beside him. They sat with their legs dangling. “What’s going on?”
“Not sure. Hriklif said Keelraiser is going to make some kind of announcement.” Skyler was tense.
So whatever Keelraiser was about to do, he’d planned it all along. Then again, the scrap of plastic Jack had found in his mouth, whatever it was, proved that.
Keelraiser reached the screen. Arms folded behind his back, chest puffed out, he faced the crowd. There was a table in front of the screen, covered with a tarp that hid something lumpy. James Coetzee sat behind the table, playing with a pen. Skyler pointed out Hriklif, standing at one end of the screen, fiddling with a laptop.
The screen rebooted. Windows-blue light spilled over the crowd. Jack scanned the sea of faces. Their rapt expectancy chilled him to the core. He spotted Linda and Koichi, over by the ramp. He couldn’t see Harry Windsor.
Suddenly the screen flashed white. The humans jumped. A familiar animation played, together with a burst of music. The BBC news theme! Jack laughed out loud. He was the only one who did.
A long-distance video of the Lightbringer leapt onto the screen. It lay like a giant turd between misty hills covered with jungle so thick it looked like broccoli. Those who had never seen the Lightbringer before, which was almost everyone, gasped and yelped. Jack leant forward, intent on extracting every detail from the footage.
Scars glinted silver in the sunlight—the Lightbringer’s hull had taken a beating during its unpowered landing. A raw gash through the trees traced the path of its final skid. It cast a long morning shadow. Birds circled. A column of ants crawled along the scar in the jungle. No—the birds were airplanes, and the ants were lorries. They put the alien ship in perspective. The thing was one kilometer high and five kilometers long, the size of Ben Nevis. But what horrified Jack was the fact the lorries were there at all. They proved the Lightbringer had established contact with … well, people who had lorries, and stuff to put in them. Stuff to deliver.
He was about to point them out to Skyler when the scene changed. A gloomy industrial interior. Knobbly metal walls bulged in alien curves. At long last, Jack was seeing inside the Lightbringer. The room seemed to be too high and too narrow even for rriksti. The floor sloped. Of course—the ship had landed on its side. Rriksti moved around on undulations like hardened lava, unpacking boxes.
A leathery reporter walked into the picture. “Hello. I’m here on the Lightbringer, where we have the honor of being the first humans to be invited aboard. The first thing you notice is the distinctive scent of another planet. It’s hard to describe, but it’s rather like the sea. It’s … pleasant. The second thing is the courtesy and grace of the rriksti, as they call themselves. They’re not at all the monsters that some led us to expect. And that brings me to the one and only Hannah Ginsburg, who has granted us her first interview since returning to Earth.”
Skyler clutched Jack’s arm.
Hannah walked on screen.
She wore cutoffs and a t-shirt tied under her breasts. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail. She rolled a bottle of Primus beer over her forehead. “Damn, it’s hot. Before we start, can I get one thing clear? You can distribute this worldwide? Without satellite coverage?”
The reporter said something about a microwave truck and undersea cables.
“OK. It’s just really important for us to get our message out.” Hannah clicked on a camera-ready smile. “Hi, everyone! I cannot tell you how good it feels to be back on Earth.”
“And it’s an honor to meet you in person, Hannah.”
“Uh huh,” Hannah said.
“OK. The arrival of the Lightbringer has been devastating for some parts of the world,” the reporter said. “There’ve been claims of bombardment, in contradiction to your previous statements that the rriksti come in peace. In fact, the Lightbringer’s fighters are still operational, aren’t they? Can you tell me about the missions they are carrying out?”
“Fighters?” Jack said.
“Shuttles, not fighters,” Hannah said, as if answering him.
“Fuck,” Jack said. “They must have mended some of them along the way.” If the shuttles were the same make as the Cloudeater, they were unarmed, but that did not mean they couldn’t carry bombs. “Why doesn’t someone just fucking nuke them?”
“Quiet,” hissed the people around him.
Hannah was still speaking. “I can’t reveal the exact nature of those missions, but you should know that the United States and Russia targeted us without provocation. So it would be understandable if we acted in self-defense. But I can assure you that if there’s been any bombardment, it is limited to selected military targets. Look, is anyone really unhappy about eliminating weapons of mass destruction?”
“Ha ha; good point,” the reporter said.
“That’s what I’m saying. We come in peace.”
Hannah continued to explain how the rriksti really just wanted to be friends. Jack glanced at Skyler. After this, surely even he would have to accept that Hannah was not on their side anymore.
The reporter deftly interrupted Hannah’s spiel about interstellar friendship. “So picking up on what you’ve said, there has been a lot of speculation about the advanced technologies the Lightbringer possesses. Nuclear fusion, is that correct?”
“Yes. Proton-lithium 6. Muon-catalyzed.”
“Amazing. I’m sure you understand how transformative that could be for Earth. And can I ask about the other technologies we’ve heard about? Batteries with thousands of times the storage capacity of our own? Smart materials? Advanced medical treatments …”
“Oh God, yeah.” Hannah swigged from her bottle of beer.
A rriksti stalked into the picture. It had silver bio-antennas. It wore a uniform identical to Keelraiser’s. Jack had never before seen a rriksti built like a brick shithouse. He had now. Hannah’s head only came up to its sternum. It—all right, probably he—wrapped a possessive arm around her waist, six fingers resting on her bare midriff. Skyler moaned quietly.
“This is the ground commander of the rriksti crew,” the reporter said, looking like he wanted to run away. So he didn’t totally lack a self-preservation instinct.
“Greetings, Earthlings,” the rriksti said, his lips opening and shutting in a grotesque mimicry of human speech. “I am Ripstiggr. In English, my name would be Godsgift.” He opened his mouth wider in a facsimile of a smile. “I didn’t pick it.”
The reporter chuckled nervously.
“We’ve come to make your lives better than you ever imagined. We’re not a warlike people! If you attack us, we will defend ourselves. But our hand is outstretched in friendship. To put it in human terms, we seek an interstellar handshake between Imf and Earth.”
The video froze on a still of the hulking, silver-haired rriksti gripping the reporter’s hand in what looked more like the beginning of a judo throw.
The sheer hypocrisy of these claims of friendship made Jack want to puke.
Everyone watching in the hab chattered excitedly.
The babble stopped when Keelraiser stepped in front of the screen. He hitched one lean buttock on the edge of the table and spoke through the PA system.
“I apologize for insulting your intelligence.”
Dead silence.
“My colleagues on Earth are employing a time-honored strategy known as blatant lying. It’s understandable. They have a population of eight billion morons to pacify.”
Titters.
“You are exceptional, highly intelligent human beings. So I’ll tell you the truth. This is an invasion.”
The silence was unbearable.
“We didn’t travel four and a half light years to shake hands. We came to invade and conquer your planet. Needless to say, this moon also falls within our sphere of conquest. Thus—please understand, I’m being completely honest, because I believe you can handle the truth—you have two options. First, you can resist, and die.”
Hriklif tugged the tarp off the table. On it lay the corpses of the two men who had been killed earlier, one by the rriksti, one by Alexei. They still wore their spacesuits. Blood had leaked onto the pristine white surface of the table.
People gasped, cowered. A woman in the crowd started to scream like a tea kettle.
“Shut up and listen,” Keelraiser said. The people around the woman silenced her. “That’s one option. There is a second option. You can work for us. With us, I might say if I were as dishonest as my friends. I am not. With us, yes, but always for us.”
James Coetzee, seated at the end of the table with the corpses on it, nodded earnestly. Jack’s blood boiled. He felt dizzy, and realized it had been a while since he breathed.
“If you choose to work for us, you’ll have access to our technology.”
Coetzee stood up and touched his right earlobe. “I’ve already received a rriksti implant,” he said with smug nonchalance. “It’s a communications device. It enables me to talk to the rriksti and hear their voices without intermediation. No side effects—” He shrugged. “It’s great.”
“That’s a very small example of what we have to offer,” Keelraiser said. “But it’s a necessary first step. Think of it as an employee ID.”
Cleanmay, the rriksti doctor, stepped forward with one of the rriksti who had served as a nurse on the Cloudeater.
“Form two queues,” Keelraiser said. “For us.”
He gestured at Cleanmay.
“Against us.”
With a stop-motion flickering rriksti movement, he drew the longer of the two knives he’d taken from the scullery. Then he resumed his place, sitting on the edge of the table, in front of the corpses, holding the knife casually on his knee. It was crystal clear what against meant.
The crowd wobbled like a blob of jelly. Hriklif, Tiggresit, and some of the other rriksti shaped the group flinch into a queue.
A single queue.
No one lined up in front of Keelraiser.
As the humans queued, the seated rriksti carried on eating their sugar gruel and semiconductors. They were either embarrassed by the whole performance … or they had expected it.
Jack and Skyler joined the queue now snaking through the common room. Hriklif grabbed Skyler’s arm. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Oh?” Skyler said. “We special or something?”
“Yes, of course you’re special. You’re our friends.”
“Well, whoop-de-doo,” Skyler said. “How long has Keelraiser been planning to pull a fast one on us?”
“The plan was to rain death and destruction on Earth. That’s off the table, obviously, so, um, I think they’re making it up as he goes along.”
“They?” Jack said.
Hriklif looked miserable. “Keelraiser and Ripstiggr. They spent ages talking while we were on the Cloudeater.”
“Got it,” Jack said. “Good to know.”
Skyler fell out of line. Jack heard him firing questions about Hannah at Hriklilf. Jack shuffled along with the others. It seemed to take him a year to reach the front of the room.
As he got closer, he made out what Cleanmay was doing. The rriksti doctor had a large-gauge syringe. He was injecting each person’s earlobe. The nurse held a canister of refills for the syringe. Each operation took approximately 20 seconds. A human medic passed out Bandaids. People weaved away, smiling confusedly.
“Breathe deeply. You’ll just feel a little pinch …”
Cleanmay’s consoling murmurs came through Jack’s headset. There was no sound from Keelraiser, who brooded a few feet away, waiting for takers for Option One. Chin on his chest, he toyed with his knife like some sort of interstellar gangster.
Submit to the Imfi conquest … What are you saying? I’m apologizing, of course. I was always a Krijistal officer.
“I see you’ve got pierced ears.”
If I can fool you, I can fool anyone.
“It’s just like that …”
Well, exactly. You were fooling me all along, weren’t you, Keelraiser? You’ve been lying to me ever since we met.
“It won’t hurt much, I promise …”
Jack could still taste that last kiss. He rubbed his mouth on his sleeve, trying to get rid of it.
Then there were just a few people left ahead of him.
“Jack!”
The whisper came through his headset.
“Jack!”
Alexei stood at the corner of the screen, beckoning. Giles at his side. Giles the showpiece, stood up there for people to stare at. Behold the gifts of Imf. But worst of all, Nene stood there too, hand in hand with Alexei, staring straight ahead. Even she was in on this. Did that mean Alexei, too, had known what was coming? Jack decided he probably had.
“You don’t have to do this,” Alexei hissed.
But yes, yes he did.
And now he stood in front of Cleanmay.
The rriksti doctor opened his mouth in a pained grimace.
“What’s that really?” Jack said, gesturing at the syringe in Cleanmay’s hand.
“We found this injector in the clinic. The humans all have medical information chips implanted subdermally in their hands. It’s not a new technology, even for your people.”
“What’s in the injector now? What are you putting in them?”
“Communications devices. As Keelraiser said.”
“What was wrong with the headsets?”
“It’s a new iteration of the same technology. More convenient. Do you want one? If not, please step aside. There are seven hundred people waiting.”
“No thanks.” Jack stepped aside.
And stood in front of Keelraiser.
Keelraiser raised his head, a glassy look in his eyes.
“I hope you’re fucking well ashamed of yourself,” Jack said. Emotion choked his throat. He could hardly get the words out.
“Submit to the Imfi conquest,” Keelraiser said, mechanically.
“I’ll submit to fucking nothing!” Jack yelled. Fury and the pain of betrayal drove him forward, fists swinging.
Keelraiser slid wearily to his feet and stabbed at Jack overhand. Slow. Sloppy. Jack grabbed Keelraiser’s wrist, twisted the knife aside, and punched him in the face—a weak, glancing blow. They grappled, knocking the table back against the screen. People rushed towards them. James Coetzee picked up the chair he’d been sitting in and whirled it.
Pain thudded into the back of Jack’s head. An explosion of white static swallowed his vision. He crumpled.
His last thought was that Keelraiser wasn’t wearing the rosary Jack had given him on the SoD. He should have noticed that before.
After all, Keelraiser had already told him there was no word for love in Rristigul.
CHAPTER 7
The bombers came back a couple of hours after the BBC crew left.
Hannah heard their approach and decided this was her chance. She sat up and laced her new hiking boots, careful not to wake Gurlp, who’d crashed in Hannah’s bivouac on Sleeper Deck B. They had spread sleeping bags on the wall that was now the floor. Above them, a corridor stretched up for half a kilometer like a mine shaft. Everything was sideways. The crew had spent most of the week since they landed salvaging the hydroponics.
The rest of the time they’d spent ducking and covering.
Not a day went by without reconnaissance planes circling in the sky. And not a night went by without bombs falling around the Lightbringer, showering the ship with geysers of dirt.
The Lightbringer was still intact, but Hannah figured it was just a matter of time. After all, how often could the bombers miss?
She stepped over Gurlp. Then she bent and gently stroked the sleeping rriksti’s bio-antennas back from her face. Gurlp had been the first to stick up for Hannah when Ripstiggr accused her of deliberately crashing the Lightbringer. There was a cool chick inside the hardbitten Krijistal shell. Hannah had practically come to think of Gurlp as her rriksti sister.
But she had a real sister. In America. And she was going to get the hell out of this war zone and find her.
She turned away before she could change her mind, tiptoed along to Maintenance Hatch 16, and climbed down the ladder, through the 3-meter thickness of the asteroid-steel hull, to an airlock that would never be closed again. Two more ladders led down to the ground, a five-storey drop. The ‘up’ ladder bowed under the weight of rriksti infantry and Congolese porters carrying stuff into the Lightbringer. The rriksti risked their lives by taking one hand off the ladder to salute Hannah as she climbed past in the other direction. She was their Shiplord. They didn’t imagine she would ever desert them.
The headlights of trucks lit the darkness. The rriksti, of course, could see in the dark, and preferred to work at night, despite the bombing raids. Their initial contacts with the locals had blossomed at unbelievable speed into a portfolio of procurement agreements that spanned the country and were quickly extending across porous African borders. Drums of copper cable, fertilizers, rice, AK-47s, pigs and chickens, gasoline, lumber, generators, sewing machines, screws and nails, sunglasses, computer parts, rope, plastic explosive, ammunition, chainsaws, rubber boots, industrial chemicals, cement, and more arrived at the Lightbringer daily, transported on cattle trucks, flatbed Toyotas, and even donkeys.
Walking back along the length of the Lightbringer, Hannah got the impression that half the population of the Democratic Republic of the Congo had relocated to this remote corner of Katanga province, just south of Upemba National Park. People sat around cookfires, laughing and chatting in French and a dozen local languages. Rriksti infantry mingled with the locals, their flat pale faces a stark contrast with shiny-dark Congolese skin. TVs and stereos ran off car batteries. The smell of spicy stew and roasting chicken blended queasily with the smell of toilets … actually, the smell of no toilets, and all that that implied. It wouldn’t be long before people started getting sick. Hannah wished she could tell them all to go home. That’s where she was going.
She pulled a Snickers bar out of her raincoat pocket and ate it as she walked. The taste of chocolate brought back sweet memories, redoubling her homesickness.
The noise in the sky got louder. The Congolese glanced up, shrugged. They had lived through a brutal civil war. Some of them were long-term refugees from Rwanda, survivors of genocide. They’d seen worse than this. Hannah admired their insouciance, and at the same time it drove her nuts. Just because the bombs had fallen wide of the tent city last night, and the night before, did not mean this wouldn’t be the night they all died.
She walked faster, the soggy ground sucking at her boots. She felt about five times heavier than she really was. After so long in the half-gravity of the Lightbringer’s living quarters, she got tired quickly in Earth’s gravity. The rriksti were coping better. They literally had metal in their bones, and their cryosleep tanks had stimulated their muscles to keep them in shape.
At last she reached the tail of the Lightbringer. The lip of one magnetoplasmadynamic thruster lay buried in the waterlogged ground. The other five thrusters were angled skyward, each one wide enough to swallow a whole fleet of airliners. The convexity of the bottom thruster made a roof for the ship’s temporary power plant: the Hairsplitter, one of the four shuttles they had restored to working condition. The shuttle looked like a delta-winged Hercules with a gigantic sea urchin stuck to its ass. The puddles around it steamed, the fog lit red from within by the light streaming from the open cargo hold. Rriksti stood in the mist, warming their hands. The Hairsplitter’s reactor was now powering much of the tent city, as well as the ship’s computer and essential functions.
Speaking of which.
Notifications scrolled over Hannah’s left eye, projected on her optic nerve by the Shiplord chip implanted in her forehead. Hannah, Hannah. Although her Rristigul wasn’t fluent, she knew the chip was telling her about all the systems that needed repair, and begging her to fix them. Hannah, Hannah, your baby’s hurt. Help, Hannah, help! That wasn’t what the chip said in so many words, but that’s what it felt like. It agonized her, because what could she do that 10,620 infantry and 72 elite Krijstal could not? They were all working flat out, repairing the ship’s core systems as fast as possible. But the chip wouldn’t be happy until Hannah put her personal imprimatur on every hack and every fix. That’s what being Shiplord was about. Tending your ship, looking after your crew, who all trusted you to be their guide to this strange planet—
“I can’t,” she muttered aloud. “I’m sorry. I just can’t anymore.”
She kept walking, and no one stopped her, because she was Shiplord, and they all assumed she was busy, on her way to do something important, at 3:30 in the morning.
Well, she was.
She trudged along the edge of the scar in the jungle, past the second shuttle snuggled under the Lightbringer’s rear. The Knucklebiter sat dark and quiet, Water tankers nuzzled alongside it, refilling its reaction mass tanks. The other two shuttles, the Bridgeburner and the Dealbreaker, were nowhere to be seen. They were somewhere else in the world, carrying out covert bombing missions, and Hannah couldn’t do anything about that, either.
The kilometer-wide scar served as a runway for the shuttles, and also an access road, although road was stretching it. Hannah used her flashlight to avoid debris, stones, pulverized branches. The overhanging trees dripped on her head. It had rained earlier and would rain again later. April was the hottest and wettest time of year here, with temperatures rising into the 90s Fahrenheit in the middle of the day. But at night it got chilly. She hunched her shoulders as cold drops ran down the neck of her cheap vinyl raincoat.
A mechanical shriek cut through the night. Then came the explosions, whump whump whump. The whole forest seemed to shiver as the pressure wave raced through the trees. Hannah stood with her hands over her ears and her mouth open. The noise had been so huge, like a machine physically shredding the air, that she couldn’t even tell which direction it had come from. Had they hit the Lightbringer this time? She urgently queried the chip.
No response.
Either she’d walked out of wireless signal range … or the Lightbringer was gone.
She fought an urge to sprint back the way she’d come.
Headlights blinded her. The sound of an engine filtered into her ears. “Hannah! Hannah! Over here!”
She broke into a clumsy run. The BBC reporter met her halfway. “You made it. Good stuff. Hop in.”
They had a Toyota 4x4. The seat stuck to the backs of her legs. She sat limply as the reporter threw the truck into gear. One of the private security guys sat beside her in back, another in the passenger seat up front. They peeled out from under the trees. They had been waiting for her. She’d told them she needed to get out of here, and they’d offered to help her escape.
“Did you hear that?” she said. Her ears were still ringing.
“Sure did,” said the security guy in front. “Sounded like B-52s. They fly at 35,000 feet. You never see ‘em.”
“Do you know if they missed?”
“They missed us.” All three men laughed, too loudly.
The 4X4 jolted over the torn-up ground. Hannah twisted around to look out the rear windshield. “Where’s the microwave truck?”
“Sent it on ahead,” the reporter said. “As you said, it’s very important to get your message out.”
A laugh bounced out of Hannah. “Our message is two hundred proof bullshit,” she said. “All that stuff about coming in peace? Interstellar handshakes? It’s a good image, isn’t it? I pulled that out of my ass. The rriksti don’t do handshakes. They do foot-kissing, or else they hit you. That’s their way of saying hello.” She rubbed the L-shaped scar on her forehead. It had faded now. You could only see it in the brightest of light. This was the only real interstellar handshake that had ever happened, or ever would: the bond between the Imfi chip and Hannah’s human brain.
“Nuclear fusion? A cure for cancer? Limb regeneration? High-density batteries? Are those bullshit?” the reporter said.
“No.”
“There you go, then. Want a beer?”
She had been praying they’d offer. “Thanks.”
The private security guy in front popped the top off a Primus from the cooler at his feet. It wasn’t cold. It tasted like nectar. “They brew decent beer here, don’t they?”
She’d sworn to God that if they survived the crash-landing, she would give up drinking. Yeah, that hadn’t lasted.
The reporter chuckled. “I’ll buy you a proper drink when we get to Lubumbashi.”
“Is that where we’re going?”
“Closest airport.”
In a few hours she’d be on a plane. In less than a day she could be home. “I wonder where I can get a connecting flight. I need to get to L.A.” She knew Los Angeles had changed. California was an independent country now. She’d captured images of her sister Bethany’s Pacific Heights neighborhood during their descent. Many of the houses had looked un-lived in. But where else could she start searching for her family?
The security guy next to her gave her a look she couldn’t read. She was actually having trouble reading humans, period. It had been so long since she saw any. They even smelled wrong—meaty, musky, an unpleasant contrast to the clean salty smell of the rriksti. “Ma’am, there are no flights to L.A.”
“Why not?”
“There are no flights to America.”
“What?”
“Ma’am … it’s bad. The USA ain’t there anymore. It’s like China: fifty governments instead of one, half of them at war with the other half. And that was before y’all bombed the power plants, dams, interstates …”
And Ripstiggr had told her they were only targeting military facilities. The liar.
“So where are these bombers coming from?” B-52s could fly thousands of miles. Hannah had assumed they were coming from the continental US.
“Abu Suweir.” At her blank look, the security guy explained, “USAF base in Egypt. Jointly operated with the Egyptians and the Russians.”
“Oh. So America is basically … fucked?”
“I would say folks are hanging on. But they got no electricity, no water in a lot of places. It’s bad.”
“I know a guy flying food aid into Chicago from Montreal,” the other security guy said. They argued about various intricate routes into the country that Hannah used to call home, while she sat there, trying to come to terms with these shocking facts.
I need another beer, was the only conclusion she reached.
But she said, “Then how can I find my sister? She lives in Los Angeles. At least, she used to.”
The reporter said, “I’m sure the authorities will help you find her.”
“Authorities,” the back-seat security guy echoed. “What authorities?”
“Shut up. Both of you, just shut up. Ms. Ginsburg, you may not be aware of your reputation here on Earth. You’re the most famous person on the planet. Whatever you need, the authorities will be happy to help you.”
“I don’t have any money,” Hannah said with a broken laugh. It was years since she’d even thought about money.
“I’m sure that won’t be an issue.”
The truck drove on for another mile or so. Butterflies waltzed in Hannah’s stomach. She burst out, “We’ve got to be near the security perimeter. They’ll stop the car.” She had been going to hide in the microwave truck. “Should I get down on the floor or something?”
Tense laughter from the men. “The plan is actually not to stop,” the reporter said. “We’re just going to drive straight through.” The security guys fished guns out of the footwells. Tattooed hands checked magazines. “Perhaps you should get down on the floor, actually, Ms. Ginsburg.”
Hannah knelt in muddy water on the floor-mat, cradling her second beer. Suddenly she heard a shout in Rristigul. She did not hear it with her ears, but with her brain. The Shiplord chip picked up bio-radio signals, but its range was very limited. That meant the shout had come from somewhere close. She struggled back up onto the seat, just as the 4x4 braked, throwing her against the back of the driver’s seat. Her beer spilled. The security guy in the front seat jumped out, his gun pointed loosely at the ground.
The headlights shone on tumbled red soil. Beyond that, darkness.
A bomb crater, where the security checkpoint used to be.
“So this is where they hit,” the reporter said. “Fucking great. Thanks a lot, chaps.”
A soft thwut pierced the night. The security guy took half a step backwards and crumpled across the Toyota’s hood. His arms jerked. Blood trickled from the hole where his right eye used to be.
Hannah threw her door open and rolled out. She crawled away from the 4x4, staying low, splashing on hands and knees through the puddles. If she could make it to the treeline, she might be able to work her way around the crater, to freedom.
More Rristigul shouts.
A volley of gunfire.
Hannah kept crawling, until she crawled straight into a pair of bare, seven-toed feet. She looked up from the feet, to camouflage fatigues cinched over pale rriksti shins, and a down coat sewn out of two coats, and a mane of silver bio-anntennas.
She was caught.
CHAPTER 8
Ripstiggr picked Hannah up by the armpits and gave her a shake. “How far did you think you’d get?”
“I was going to look for my sister.”
Rriksti faces had limited mobility, but Hannah didn’t have to read Ripstiggr’s expression to know he was murderously mad at her. No wonder, really. He dragged her back to the 4x4. Rriksti sentries surrounded it. The door was still open, the interior roof light on. The reporter and the other security guy slumped dead in their seatbelts. The rriksti infantry were crack shots, especially in the dark, and their rifles shot finned projectiles that could bend around trees. She’d tried to warn them. The infantry yanked the corpses out of the vehicle, dragged them to the lip of the bomb crater, and threw them over.
“A good night’s work!” they said, in Rristigul, as far as Hannah could catch it. “More glory for our Shiplord!”
Ripstiggr said in English—which the infantry didn’t speak, apart from a few phrases— “Those schleerps were spotters for the American pilots. You personally undertook the risky task of guiding them into our ambush. Got it?”
“Got it.” Hannah wanted to weep as she watched the last corpse tumble into the crater. But no tears came. “You’re covering my ass.”
“No, I’m not. I’m protecting the troops.” Ripstiggr’s arms tightened around her. He was literally shaking with rage. “Did you even think about what it would do to them if you deserted the cause?”
She had. And she hadn’t. She sagged as the sentries saluted her and melted into the darkness—still believing in her. Believing that their Shiplord had put her own life on the line for the glory of Imf.
Ripstiggr pushed her into the 4x4 and folded himself into the driver’s seat. Even with the seat shoved all the way back, his knees poked up on either side of the steering wheel. He hunched his head like an adult driving a child’s toy car. He drove parallel to the crater. There was another crater beyond it. And another one beyond that. The row of craters stretched all the way across the scar.
“They’re trying a new tactic,” Ripstiggr said. “This is meant to cut us off from the N-1.” This was the only drivable road in the southern DRC. The scar intersected it about ten miles south of here. All their deliveries came that way.
“You mean they aren’t aiming at the ship?” Hannah’s numb, exhausted mind connected the dots as she spoke. Of course, the bombers never had been aiming at the Lightbringer. They didn’t want to destroy the fusion reactors, the high-density batteries, et-fucking-cetera.
“I keep telling you. This isn’t war. It’s diplomacy.”
Diplomacy that had killed three men tonight. Three good men whose only crime had been trying to help Hannah.
But her lying, deceitful message about interstellar friendship had got out. It would be flashing along the undersea cables right now.
Ripstiggr parked at the treeline. Somewhere in the dark, a forest giant crashed into the undergrowth. Chainsaws snarled.
“There’ll be a causeway in place by dawn,” Ripstiggr said. “We needed to improve this road, anyway.”
His bike waited under the trees. Hannah called it a bike, but it was fully enclosed. Its skirt of blast-deflection armor hid three fat wheels that could go over anything. She flopped in the pillion seat, taking a childish pleasure in getting mud all over the violently patterned Imfi upholstery. Ripstiggr gunned the bike into the forest. It smashed through the undergrowth in low gear. It could drive itself, more or less, but of course Ripstiggr was the kind of person who liked driving his own bike. The canopy was transparent from within. Branches whipped at Hannah’s face and rebounded from the invisible armor, streaking it with water. Soon they reached one of the narrow paths the locals used. Ripstiggr switched on the jury-rigged single headlight—a courtesy to any villagers who might be about at this hour. A key part of his strategy was getting and keeping the Congolese on their side.
At least that’s what Hannah thought until she glimpsed a pair of feet swaying in mid-air. She whipped around in her seat. A Congolese man hung by the neck from a tree branch above the path.
“Did we do that?”
“He was a spotter for the Americans,” Ripstiggr said.
“I bet he wasn’t.”
“His brother-in-law swore he saw him out at night with a laser pointer. Of course, there may have been some pre-existing quarrel over a cassava field. But we wouldn’t know anything about that.” Ripstiggr’s hair danced. “We’re just here to help.”
Hannah’s heart hurt. Her knees hurt. She felt nauseated. She was vaguely aware that the bike was climbing a steep, winding track. As soon as it stopped, she yanked the door open and vomited. The Snickers bar came back up, tasting the same as it did on the way down. She should have known better. After two years of an enforced spartan diet, her stomach couldn’t handle fatty, sugary foods.
She blamed the chocolate, but she knew she was reacting to the deaths she had seen tonight. Her wimpy reaction disgusted her. She had to be tougher than this. Better. Stronger.
When she finished vomiting, Ripstiggr offered her a bottle of water.
“Thanks.” She tucked her hair behind her ears, rinsed her mouth, and spat on the ground. “Asshole.”
She could see him. Dawn must be not far off.
In the gray ghostly light, they climbed a ladder nailed to the trunk of a mahogany tree. Hannah didn’t so much climb as drag herself from rung to rung, exhausted by her ongoing struggle with Earth’s gravity. At the top, the branches spread out like a dome above the lower trees. A wooden observation platform ringed the trunk. A sentry monitored the sensors installed in the top of the tree. Ripstiggr told him to bug off.
As the sentry vanished down the ladder, Hannah collapsed onto her butt. From here, they could see the whole valley spread out. She felt a rush of gladness to see the Lightbringer unscathed. In the early light it looked like something natural, a mountain, not a ship that had flown 4.5 light years to conquer Earth.
Ripstiggr sat down beside her. “Now that we’re on Earth, we don’t really need a Shiplord anymore.”
She faced him, heart thudding in reaction to the open threat. “Yes, you do. You can’t get into the computer without me. You can’t restart the Lightbringer’s reactor.”
“It’s fucked, anyway.”
“You need a Shiplord. Who’d take my place? You? After what you did?”
She was referring to the general belief that Ripstiggr had fucked up their orbital insertion.
His lips tightened. “It needn’t be me. But if you don’t want to do it anymore, I owe it to the troops to pick someone who does.”
“All right. Go on. Kill me.” That would be the only way for him to retrieve the Shiplord chip and give it to someone else. It had extruded nanofilaments through her skull into her brain, where they interfaced with her cerebral cortex. Removing it at this point would give her brain damage, if not kill her outright. She stared into Ripstiggr’s triangular, alien face. Her muscles locked up with fear. The air was cool and sweet, birds were singing, and she didn’t want to die.
He broke eye contact and swigged water, throat jumping. “Why did you run away?”
He wasn’t going to kill her. Relief spilled out in tart honesty. “Maybe I was running away from you.”
Maybe? Their relationship was so bad, hitching a ride with the BBC crew had seemed like a smart option. After the crash-landing, she’d had to defend Ripstiggr against those who believed his mistakes had caused the crash. She’d saved his job and maybe his life, and of course that drove him bonkers. He’d been cold-shouldering her ever since, and since Hannah wasn’t blind, she could see he was carving out his own little organizational silo, buddying up with the shuttle crews.
She could think of one way to break the stalemate, but she refused to lower herself.
So she’d sneaked away in the middle of the night, just like she used to sneak out of guys’ apartments when she lived in California.
Real mature, Hannah-banana.
Her childish behavior had gotten three men killed.
Ripstiggr said, “Where do you think they’d have taken you?” There was an odd, careful note in his voice.
“They were just helping me,” she muttered, swamped by guilt.
“They’d have taken you to the authorities.” By coincidence, Ripstiggr used the same word the reporter had. “They would have tortured you for everything you know about us, about the Lightbringer, about—”
“We’re human beings, not Krijistal!”
“Oh, human beings don’t do torture? Really? I guess you haven’t been talking to the locals. Some of them have terrible stories.”
Hannah glared at the bank of cloud over the eastern hills. Gold tinged the horizon.
“Did you ask them for a ride?” Ripstiggr went on, relentlessly. “Or did they offer?”
They had offered. “They were good people.”
“Maybe they were. And maybe they worked for bad people. People who would have cut the Shiplord chip out of your head to see how it—”
“Stop it!”
“You trusted them because they were humans. Didn’t you?”
He was right about that. And it was actually worse than he knew. She had trusted them because they were white, English-speaking humans, the first ones she’d seen in years.
For a world-class engineer, she could be pretty dumb sometimes.
“I need a drink,” she muttered.
Ripstiggr produced another plastic bottle from his coat. A down coat, in the Congo, in April. She’d asked their local fixers about getting more cold-weather gear—it killed her to see the infantry shivering and huddling around their fires at night.
The bottle was half-full of the Congolese moonshine known as pétrole. They shared it in small, cautious sips as the eastern sky brightened. Ripstiggr brought out a tinfoil packet of ugali. The Congolese staple, a tasteless maize porridge so stiff that you could roll it into a ball, was one of the few Earth foods rriksti could eat without throwing up. Ironically, it was also one of the few local foods that Hannah’s digestion could handle at the moment. They ate and drank, and Hannah felt better with every mouthful. Alcohol always helped, even if it was home-brewed liquor named after gasoline.
“I hate the sunrise,” Ripstiggr said, staring balefully at the golden rays now shooting out of the cloudbank. “I hate sunset, too. And noon. And the whole damn business. Why can’t the sun just stay in one place?”
Hannah almost laughed. So many things she took for granted were completely new to the rriksti. They came from a tidally locked planet, where the sun stayed in one place, and there were no days and nights. “Sunrise is beautiful,” she said. “I missed this so much when we were out there.”
As a matter of fact, the only times she’d ever seen the sunrise in her old life were after pulling all-nighters at JPL, or more often, waking up in her car after a night of binge drinking. Here in the DRC, she truly appreciated its beauty for the first time. She gazed out at the valley, savoring the interlude of peace after the night’s chaos. Inevitably, her thoughts circled back to California. It was still last night there. She pictured Bethany, David, Nathan, and Isabel in some squalid refugee center, and dug her fingernails into her shins, tormented by her own helplessness.
The first rays of sunlight fell through the branches. “To be honest with you, I could kill those fuckers,” Ripstiggr said, shading his face with his hands.
“Who?”
“Our mission planners.” The admission startled her. “How could they not have anticipated the UV problem? Our sun has no UV in its spectrum! Couldn’t they at least have issued us hats?”
“They expected you to be flattening our civilization from orbit, not camping out in the Congo.”
“Yeah, but then we would still have had to occupy the planet. I suppose the other ships were bringing the UV gear.”
Ripstiggr rarely referred to the two other ships that had been meant to follow the Lightbringer to our solar system. Contact with them had been lost shortly after the on-board war that stranded the Lightbringer at Europa. Hannah privately believed similar conflicts must have broken out on board the other ships, resulting in the loss of both. That was good news for Earth, of course. But now she considered afresh what it must be like for Ripstiggr and the rest of the crew, stuck here on a planet where people kept bombing them, and they couldn’t eat the food, and the sunlight burnt their skin like tissue paper. They must feel so alone and far from home. Just like she’d felt when she was first brought aboard the Lightbringer.
. She stood up and went to the edge of the platform. She felt no vertigo, despite the gentle motion of the tree. Space had cured her of the fear of heights. She unrolled the screen that protected sentries from the sunlight during the long hot days. She hooked its top edge to the branches. It blocked out the dawn, leaving them in rriksti-friendly shade once more.
“Why did you do that?” Ripstiggr said.
“Lobster-red really isn’t your color.”
“I’ve got my bio-hazard suit on the bike.”
“You shouldn’t have to walk around in a fucking bio-hazard suit.”
“The geneticists are working on it.”
No actual geneticists had survived. They had a few soldiers with field experience, and a couple of the Krijstal knew how to operate the machines in the medical clinic. But everything was lying on its side, and everyone was thinking about food, not blue-sky solutions to the lack of melanin in rriksti skin, so the claim struck Hannah as mere bravado.
She sat down again. “Will you call off the bombing missions?”
“This is diplomacy—”
“Yeah, yeah. Ripstiggr, I can’t be part of this. I can’t help you to bomb my own people.”
“They’re trying to kill us,” Ripstiggr said with righteous indignation. “Are we just supposed to sit here and die?”
“No. But there has to be a better way to do this.” If only she could think of it. If only she were Eskitul, the Lightbringer’s original Shiplord, instead of just a propulsion engineer. But because she was here in Eskitul’s place, she had a chance to save Earth and the rriksti. If only she could figure out how.
“Of course there’s a better way,” Ripstiggr said. “Boots on the ground. I’m working on that right now.”
Hannah inhaled sharply. The glimmerings of a plan came to her, and ironically, it was inspired by her own deceitful message about interstellar friendship. “That’s it! Once people meet you, they’ll understand you’re OK. I mean, the soldiers get along great with the locals! They use the field radios to communicate with them, they’re even picking up French. No reason they wouldn’t get along with other nationalities, too. But we need to get out there and show people how much better life could be … if we all just … get along, I guess ....”
She shook her head. This was the same kind of promise she’d been making for two years on the Hannah Ginsburg Show. She was just recycling the lies Ripstiggr had scripted for her.
But couldn’t the lies become truth? Couldn’t the BS about ‘we’re only here to help’ actually become sincere?
As an engineer, she’d spent her career turning ‘fanciful’ ideas into reality. A spaceship drive that ran on water? Impossible, they’d said. She’d built it, with help from a team of brilliant technicians. Couldn’t she also build bridges between humanity and the rriksti? Couldn’t she engineer a peaceful alien invasion that made life better for everyone?
She tilted the bottle of pétrole, watching Earth’s gravity slant the cloudy liquid this way and that. No more running away. She hadn’t signed up for this, but now she had no choice.
The beauty of it was that Ripstiggr didn’t have any choice, either, as far as she could see.
“Either you do this my way,” she said. “Or we all die, right here in this valley. Don’t kid yourself, Ripstiggr. A few bombers? You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
“We’ve already eliminated seventy-two percent of the ICBM silos in North America.”
“Are you sure about that? Those things are buried underground. They’re blast-proof, nuke-proof—”
“Nothing’s proof against titanium-alloy missiles dropped from sub-orbital altitudes at Mach 5.”
“Oh yeah? What about Tridents?”
“What are Tridents?”
“Nuclear submarines.”
A moment’s silence. “What are submarines?”
Hannah’s jaw dropped. Then it sank in. Imf had no oceans. Ripstiggr didn’t really grok the concept of sea. The shuttles flew over the Atlantic regularly; the pilots might be under the impression it was shallow, like the lake near here. “Jesus wept, Ripstiggr. This is why you need me.”
“Yes. We need you.” A long pause. Monkeys hooted in the branches of the lower trees. “I need you.”
She looked up. He was gazing straight ahead. As she studied his knife-like profile, it all came back: how good they used to be together. Shiplord and commander, human and alien, female and male, they had fitted together like puzzle pieces. They used to please and tease each other and even make each other laugh. Sure, it had been one fucked-up relationship. But Hannah freely admitted that she was one fucked-up chick—rocket scientist, reluctant astronaut, high-functioning alcoholic. With Ripstiggr, she’d got the relationship she deserved, and on some level, the relationship she needed.
She couldn’t pretend it had never happened.
And maybe he couldn’t, either.
“Your knees are bleeding,” he said.
She’d scraped them when she was crawling through the mud. It was no big deal. She had mosquito bites that hurt worse. But she knew that wasn’t the point.
He was tacitly offering her extroversion, the rriksti gift of healing. And they both knew where that led.
Longing tightened the pit of her stomach. She could practically feel the cool waves of bliss washing through her body. Feel the warmth of his skin. She imagined curling up in the cage of his arms, cozy and sheltered, like she used to when they were safe in space.
Sick as it was, a part of her wished they were back on the Lightbringer. She wanted a roof over her head again, not a filigree of boughs and the endless African sky.
She uncapped the pétrole and took a pull so big that it burned. Then she stood up. Calmly, she removed her t-shirt and cutoffs. Ripstiggr sat up to watch her undress.
“I am Shiplord,” she said, standing with one thumb hooked into the elastic of her panties. She hoped he couldn’t tell how her heart was pounding.
“You are Shiplord,” he agreed, eyes glued to her breasts. He had once confessed that her body fascinated him because it was so different from rriksti bodies.
“Take off your coat and shirt. That’s an order.”
“Your wish is my command, Shiplord.” He stripped off his coat, then the t-shirt underneath it. To her dismay, the t-shirt turned out to be an XXXL pirated edition of that shirt that was everywhere in the tent city. Her own face, red, white, and blue, heavily idealized, above the enigmatic word RAUS!
Oh well. She’d be like one of those celebrities who wore their own designs. The Paris Hilton of the Congo. Not.
She picked the t-shirt up and pulled it on. When her head popped out of the neck-hole, she nearly burst out laughing at the sight of Ripstiggr’s face—eyes wide, mouth open. This was not what he’d expected. She knew him so well she could tell he was startled.
But not completely unamused.
The t-shirt held his body heat. It came down to her knees. “That’s better,” she said. “I hate wet, muddy clothes.” She pulled the rope belt out of her cutoffs and tied it around her waist.
“Shiplord,” he growled.
“What?” She hooked a smile at him. “It isn’t the weekend, anyway.”
She tossed him her clothes. He caught them. Then, as she started towards the ladder, he caught her. Wrapping his arms around her from behind, he pumped his hips against her. “You just wait for the weekend, Shiplord …”
She tipped her head back against his chest, inhaling his scent. He murmured about the things he planned to do to her, some of them so imaginatively kinky he must have spent days dreaming them up.
“I’ll be looking forward to that,” she murmured. God help her, she was only flesh and blood.
Now he was promising her wine, a car, TV, hot and cold running water. Speaking of needs. Well, maybe Napa Valley chardonnay wasn’t a need per se, but she sure would prefer it to pétrole. Ripstiggr seemed to have kept a mental list of all the things she had ever mentioned missing …
“… and I’ll find your sister.”
All at once, Hannah’s rationalizations crumbled. Her protective big-sister instincts surged up.
No!
The very last thing she wanted was to drag Bethany into this.
After a moment of panic, her brain started working again. If the BBC guys had been telling anything like the truth, Ripstiggr had zero chance of finding her family. He was just saying what he thought she wanted to hear.
“Good luck with that,” she said dryly. “Find me a case of 2011 Beringer Private Reserve while you’re at it.”
She was about to start down the ladder when a sonic boom punched the air. A distant roar built to a roll of thunder. She clamped her hands over her ears. The noise was so loud, her teeth vibrated in her skull.
A spot of light appeared in the sky and grew brighter.
CHAPTER 9
Isabel Ziegler ran, dragging her little brother Nathan by the hand.
Behind them, one of the women screamed, on and on.
After a while their own footsteps, crashing through the pines, drowned out the screams.
“Hurry up, Nate,” Isabel gasped. He was only six. His face was white with terror, except for the smear of peanut butter on his cheek. They’d been eating breakfast when the bad guys came.
Bad guys? Isabel had recognized the one who broke into the chicken run. He came from Robert’s place, another hideaway in the foothills of the Bear Mountains. Most of the people at Robert’s place came from California, like the families in the Zieglers’ community. But they didn’t have as much stuff—no pedal generator, no solar oven, no cellar full of rice and beans.
After the man in the chicken run had pointed out the yurts to his companions, he had started chasing the chickens and grabbing them by the necks.
“Where are Mom and Dad?” Nathan sobbed.
“They’re going to meet us at the car,” she told him, praying it was true.
They took the long way around to the lake where Isabel swam. Glimpsed through the trees, the water sparkled in the morning sunlight. The wind smelled of spring. Isabel stopped to listen. Boughs soughing overhead. The trill of a meadowlark.
A burst of gunfire.
In her old life, when she was a high-schooler in Pacific Heights, Isabel had only ever heard gunfire in the movies. But now that the aliens had come, everything was real.
She pulled Nathan down the hill towards the lake, and there, thank you God, a flash of high-gloss red.
Mom, hauling the camouflage tarp off the Toyota 4Runner, dropped the tarp and ran to hug her children, babbling OMG my babies, until Isabel interrupted, “Where’s Dad?”
Bethany Ziegler’s mouth squared. “Honey, he went back to look for you.”
Cold horror gripped Isabel’s heart. She started back uphill. Nathan wailed in raw panic, “Izzy!” She turned around.
“Did he say to wait for him here?”
Her mother shook her head. Tears spilled from her eyes.”They shot Doug and Greg. Did you see?”
“You’re scaring Nate.” Isabel snatched the keys from her mother’s hand. She didn’t have her license. They had moved here a few months before she was due to retake her test. She’d messed up her three-point turns the first time around. But technically, she could drive.
She shoved her mother and brother into the back seat. Delaying, praying her father would appear at any minute, she checked the way-back. Their bags were there. Isabel and Dad had packed them after the bad guys came the first time. They’d rocked up at the yurts with some tall tale about how their truck broke down on the way to Canada, and when Doug went to have a look at their truck, they’d taken him hostage. Turned out they had like twenty little kids with them. All they wanted was food. No one had got hurt that time, but after that the adults had stepped up patrols, made sure there was always someone with a gun in the hide overlooking the access road, and Isabel and Dad had packed their bug-out bags again, because they knew they weren’t going to be safe here forever.
These bad guys, though. They were something else. Not refugees on their way to Canada. They’d hadn’t come up the road. They’d come through the forest. Isabel had recognized that one man from Robert’s place but she hadn’t recognized any of the others, because their faces were all camo-creamed, like soldiers or something.
Another burst of gunfire echoed through the forest.
Isabel jumped into the driver’s seat and twisted the keys in the ignition. She maneuvered the SUV out from under the trees, onto the dirt road that ran around the lake. Ease off on the brake, gently press the gas pedal, she reminded herself.
“We have to wait for Dad!” Nathan howled.
Isabel felt the same way. But she knew Dad would want her to save Nathan and Mom. She didn’t know what to do. She met her mother’s eyes in the rearview. No help there.
What would Aunt Hannah do?
Answer: she’d burn rubber. That’s what she actually had done, after all. She’d left Earth, left her favorite and only niece, to go chasing aliens in space, without even saying goodbye properly.
So, whatever Hannah would do, Isabel was going to do the opposite.
She took her foot off the gas, pulled up on the handbrake. “OK, Nate. We’ll wait for Dad.”
Silence in the car.
More gunfire. It sounded closer this time.
Mom cried quietly.
Two men sprinted along the road, running so fast they looked like cartoon characters. One of them was Dad and the one behind him was catching up.
“Dad!” Isabel shrieked. She rolled the SUV out onto the dirt road, swinging the nose in the other direction. Reached over and flung the door open.
A bullet smashed the window of the open door, turning it into a white spiderweb.
Dad toppled into the car.
Isabel floored the gas.
Purple in the face, wheezing, David Ziegler grabbed the door shut. “Fasten your seatbelt, Izzy,” were his first words when he got his breath back.
“Dad, are you OK?”
“Fine,” David gritted. He was clutching his side. He’d been shot. Isabel couldn’t take her eyes off the road for a better look. The SUV bounded over the unpaved road. Another bullet spiderwebbed the rear windshield.
“Which way?” she screamed. It was a pointless question. She was going the only way possible. Away. Deeper into the mountains.
“Up towards Granite Peak,” Dad wheezed. “We’ll head for the Adams compound.”
“Dad, one of those guys was from Robert’s place!” She meant: We can’t trust anyone anymore. The mountains of Montana were crawling with refugees from California. The adults used to make jokes about Little L.A. But everything was real now. Just because someone used to attend the same synagogue in Pacific Heights, it didn’t mean he would not try to murder you for your chickens and your solar oven and your sacks of rice.
“That asshole was just their local guide,” Dad said. “The others .. honey, I don’t think they were from around—WATCH OUT!”
Another car surged around the bend in front of them. It was black and big and that was all Isabel saw before she pulled a three-point turn that would have made her driver’s ed instructor rub his eyes in disbelief. She didn’t think about it, just did it. Like swimming.
The other car bumped into them, actually hit the SUV’s rear bumper, jolting it forward.
Mom and Nathan slithered down onto the floor.
“Go!” Dad yelled. “Floor it!”
Isabel stamped on the gas.
Dad dived into the footwell. He came up with a gun that Isabel had never seen before. It was folded in half. He unfolded it and powered the window down, twisting in his seat to aim at the car behind them.
Blam! And crack! crack! as bullets destroyed the already-useless rear windshield.
A sudden chilling yelp came from the back seat.
“Oh my God, Nate!” Mom screamed.
Dad’s gun roared rage.
Isabel gripped the wheel with white knuckles, barely keeping control of the SUV. They rocketed back the way they’d come, past their parking place.
The guy who’d been chasing Dad stood in the middle of the road, talking on a cell phone.
Isabel screamed. There was no time to stop, no room to swerve. At the last minute the guy hurled himself out of the way, into the trees. His face stayed printed on her eyeballs: dark-skinned, bearded, pop-eyed with shock.
“Just keep going,” Dad shouted, reloading.
The friends and associates of David Ziegler, seven-figure corporate lawyer, would not have recognized the wild-eyed, red-faced man shooting backwards out of the SUV. At some point the other car stopped following them. Dad said he thought he’d shot out one of their front tires. That’s what he’d been trying to do, anyway.
The dirt road merged into Route 212. Isabel stopped. “Nate?!”
He lay on the back seat, face white, eyes huge. Mom was tying a t-shirt around his arm. Blood soaked it. “He’s gonna be OK,” Mom said, in a low voice that nevertheless sounded like a scream. “Aren’t you, baby? It was just a graze. Right?”
“Right,” Nate said weakly.
“That makes two of us, buddy,” David said. “They winged me, too. Through-fer.” When he opened his door to get out, Isabel saw a splotch of blood on his seat. “Move over, Izzy.”
She swallowed. “No, Dad. You’re hurt. I’ll drive.”
“OK,” he said after a moment. There was something new in the way he looked at her. Like she was an adult.
“But which way?” They now had a choice of two directions. Isabel started the engine..
Dad said, “Fasten your seatbelt,” and then he said, “I don’t know. We could head up to Billings …”
Mom argued that these bad guys might actually have come from Billings. Dad said Yeah but. Mom said No really. Isabel sat holding Dad’s gun. She met poor Nathan’s eyes. Despite the pain he must be in, he rolled his eyes and stuck out his tongue. Their parents were sitting here arguing over which way to go, while the bad guys might be catching up with them!
Isabel said, “We’re going this way.” She turned the car south. Away from Billings. She stepped on the gas.
Somewhat to her astonishment, Dad said, “OK, honey.”
Isabel glanced at the gas indicator. The tank was almost full. But the SUV only got 17 miles to the gallon. “We’ll have to get gas,” she said.
Mom said, “Where are we going?”
They were actually letting her make this decision. It felt unfair. “We’re going back to California.”
“That’s a long drive,” Dad said.
“That’s why I said we’ll have to get gas. Dad, Mom, those bad guys were Feds.”
Doug and Greg, back at the yurts, used to think everyone was a Fed. Then a bunch of actual Feds had killed them.
“That guy had a phone. A phone? No one has a phone anymore.”
“It might have been fake,” Nathan piped up.
“Oh, Nate. It wasn’t. They were Feds, and that means we have to get out of America.”
“We need to get help for Nate,” Dad said, not mentioning his own wound. “Might be easier to find meds and first aid in California.”
“Honey, California’s a disaster zone!” Mom said. “The aliens hit the Oroville Dam. They hit all the military facilities on the coast.”
This information came from the ham radio network, which was probably how the Feds had located them. Since the Lightbringer’s arrival, the radio had seethed with reports of carnage, floods, plagues, basically the whole megillah including locusts. Isabel didn’t believe any of it. In her mind, California was home. It was their big house with the pool in the backyard, where she used to swim a hundred lengths every morning, training for the 2024 Olympics, which would never be held now.
“It’s funny,” she said.
“What’s funny, Izzy?”
“Everyone’s scared of the aliens. But it wasn’t aliens that nearly murdered us back there. It was human beings.”
CHAPTER 10
The bright spot in the sky turned into a delta-winged silhouette.
“That’s the Dealbreaker,” Ripstiggr shouted. He had to shout because Hannah couldn’t even hear the inside of her own head. Every time one of the Lightbringer’s shuttles took off or landed, they could probably hear it in Zambia. Noise pollution was a non-issue to the designers of Imfi spacecraft.
The Dealbreaker screamed down at a steep angle. Lightning sparkled in its water-plasma contrail. It flattened out its dive, using its auxiliary thrusters as air-brakes, and sank behind the trees. The thunder of its engines abated.
Hannah unclamped her hands from her ears. Ripstiggr was talking on his field radio, a compact unit that amplified his bio-radio signals. She couldn’t follow the rapid-fire Rristigul.
“What’s going on?”
“I was just telling that schleerp of a day-shift sentry to hurry up.”
This was obviously not the truth, but a few moments later the day-shift sentry did indeed climb onto the platform. Ripstiggr gave him a clout and hurtled down the ladder. Hannah followed just in time to jump on the back of the bike. As Ripstiggr gunned it downhill, she clung to the pillion handle, keeping quiet. He wanted to defend his silo from her, she thought. Or tidy it up before she got a good look at it. So why had he let her come? Maybe he just didn’t want to leave her alone in the forest.
Hydrazine decomposition products surrounded the Dealbreaker in an invisible haze of poison. Hannah borrowed Ripstiggr’s bio-hazard suit before getting off the bike. He jogged to the shuttle ahead of her, coat over his head. The rriksti feared sunlight but they didn’t give a hoot about toxic chemicals. Just one more reason their standard m.o. wasn’t going to work here.
“Shiplord,” the Dealbreaker’s pilot greeted her, respectfully.
Hannah unsealed the hood of the bio-hazard suit and smelled burning. The cockpit was a cave with a low-slung roof, like the inside of a black eggshell, its forward end crammed with consoles. She’d never actually been on board one of the shuttles before. As Shiplord, she did not control them directly. The pilots did that. In theory, she controlled the pilots. In practice, Ripstiggr did.
“What’s your name?” she asked the pilot. He had pomegranate-red bio-antennas, and an indefinable aura of douchiness.
“Hobo, Shiplord.”
“Is that English or Rristigul?”
“Can be both.” The pilot laughed. The chip rendered it as a horror-movie wheeze.
“OK, Hobo. I want your mission report. Video footage, targets, results, munitions expended, all that stuff.”
Hobo’s hair twitched. “Might take a few minutes to put that together.”
“I’ll wait.”
She descended the ladder into the crew area. Total man-cave. This was the nerve center of Ripstiggr’s campaign to batter Earth into submission with sheer naked aggression. One of four—but all the shuttles were identical. Uniformed crew tossed her salutes as they hastily tidied up their mess. Empty munitions crates littered the floor.
Not all the crates were empty. Some held ring binders, laptops, and clear plastic folders stuffed with printouts.
Hannah frowned. This was human stuff. And it was singed, half-burnt. She picked up a ring binder and flipped it open …
Seconds later, she was back in the cockpit, binder in hand.
Ripstiggr was nowhere to be seen. Hobo, shutting down the shuttle’s systems, slewed a guilty glance at her.
“Just wondering where you got this?” Hannah held up the binder.
LH2 / LOX TANKAGE CAPACITY AND CHARACTERISTICS
SKY STATION MAINTENANCE GROUP
CELL
“Aha,” Hobo said. “Was going to put that in my report.”
“Bet you weren’t.”
“Got me,” Hobo said, hair dancing.
Hannah stalked over to him and slapped him in the face. It was not a hard blow. Nothing like the sledgehammer punches Ripstiggr doled out to anyone who pissed him off. It was a calculated risk. She was counting on Hobo to respond to this show of authority.
The pilot cringed, and glanced at the autorip at the back of the cockpit. It stayed closed.
“No, Ripstiggr isn’t here,” Hannah said. “While he’s off powdering his nose, why don’t you go ahead and tell me where this came from?”
Hobo touched his cheek thoughtfully. “Well, CELL refers to Camp Eternal Light, Limited. That’s what the humans call their colony on the moon. It was established by a group of companies headquartered in this place called Florida …”
“I know that.” Hannah put two and two together. “Jeepers creepers. You landed, didn’t you? You landed at freaking Cape Canaveral and salvaged this stuff from CELL’s offices.”
“Yep,” Hobo admitted.
“Was there anything left? We hit Cape Canaveral with the railgun on our way down.” Hannah shook her head. She held evidence in her hands that the destruction had not been total. “What’s so important about this stuff that you had to land in enemy territory?”
“Well,” Hobo said, “this Sky Station is the biggest asset in Earth orbit. We HERFed it, but it should be repairable.”
Hannah nodded, lips tight. She had unwittingly HERFed Earth’s space stations, along with all the satellites. She spared an agonized thought for the astronauts who had died on Sky Station and the ISS.
“So we wanted to find out what exactly’s up there. Sensing instruments, hab modules …” Hobo gestured at the binder Hannah held. “Tankage.”
“OK. So we’re going to fix Sky Station up?” It was humiliating that she had to get this information from some random pilot. “For what?”
Hobo glanced at the autorip again. Then he said, “Shiplord, let me tell you a story.” Hannah rolled her eyes. “No, it’s a good one, I promise. Once upon a time on Imf, there were nine hundred and forty Krijistal academies. Each of them had a different specialty. Everything from supply chain analysis to ceremonial cuisine, there was an academy for that. But the best, most prestigious of them all was the pilots’ academy.”
“Of course it was.”
“I’m not just saying that. Everyone and their half-brother’s step-cousin wanted to get in. Well, the month after the last war but two started, competition was especially stiff.” Imfi months were two hundred-some days long, in contrast to their years, which were only 11 days long. “A young candidate called Hobo was over the moon to get his acceptance letter. But it turned out that getting in was the hard part. Once you were in, all you had to do was learn to fly one of these babies. And most of us, coming from military families, already knew how to fly. So we had plenty of time to goof off.”
“I guess young people are the same everywhere.”
“Do young people on Earth go glacier-surfing?”
“Um. No. How do you surf a glacier?”
“Well, when the atmosphere circulates to the Darkside, water falls out of the sky and freezes. But ice expands, right? It pushes out of the ravines, back to the twilight zone, and turns into rivers. So the trick is to surf along to the melting point, and hang-glide off the end before it crumbles under you.”
“Oooo… kay.”
“If you leave it too late, your glider gets wet and you end up in the drink.”
“Do the glaciers, like, crumble into huge waterfalls?”
“Icefalls! I really miss Imf. Anyway, Ystyggr help you if you go into the river. People would usually wash up downstream on someone’s estate. We would have to retrieve them and fix them up so our instructors wouldn’t know what happened.”
“You’d heal them using extroversion.”
“Correct. Strong extroversion is a requirement for the Krijistal. I’m a fourth-level lay cleric. But you can’t do extroversion on yourself. So one day I go into the falls. I just manage to cut my straps before the glider drags me under. I wake up on this miserable little stony beach with a herd of zlok sniffing me. My leg is fucked up. I’m in agony. I shout for help, and eventually this guy comes strolling through the trees. I know him slightly. His dad is an admiral. He’s the oldest person in our class. I ask him to fix me up, but he doesn’t do it! He calls an ambulance, which is the last thing I want, and until it gets there, he sits beside me, just out of punching range, talking about how pain is a gift from Ystyggr. What the fuck ever.”
“Did you get in trouble?”
“I came this close to getting expelled. All this guy’s fault. So when I’m back on my feet, I ask around, and it turns out other people have problems with him, too. He shouldn’t even be at the academy. He’s not extroverted.”
“How’d he get in, then?”
“He failed the trials twice. Then he got in by developing a related specialty.”
“What?”
“Computers.” Hobo opened his mouth in amusement.
“OK,” Hannah said. “What’s the punchline? You had a computer geek in your academy class; so what?”
“Three weeks ago,” Hobo said, “I woke up on board the Lightbringer. As you may recall, they distributed a briefing packet to everyone who’d been asleep: here’s what happened in the last eighty years.”
“Yeah.”
“And that’s when I find out this very same Iristigut, this computer geek and world-class asshole, started a mutiny, blew a hole in the Lightbringer, got away, and is now skulking on Earth’s moon.”
CHAPTER 11
Hannah tried to hide her astonishment. Hobo had just told her Iristigut was safe on the moon. What he didn’t know—and nor did anyone else—was that she and Iristigut had been pen-pals. That had lasted until he tricked her into shutting down the Lightbringer’s reactor, in the belief that she was saving Earth.
“Of course,” she said. “Our old lividdr.” The Rristigul word could mean ally or enemy, depending on frequency and pitch nuances that Hannah couldn’t control with the chip. Hobo dipped his chin in agreement, and she wondered which meaning she had inadvertently given the word. “So he made it safely to CELL, huh?”
“Safely? He probably thinks he’s safe, hunkered down in the middle of a thousand human shields.”
“What about the Cloudeater’s other passengers?”
“What other passengers? The mutineers?”
“I … don’t know …” She had one specific passenger in mind. Her old crewmate, Skyler Taft. As far as she knew he was the only other survivor of the SoD. “The humans?”
“Why don’t you ask Iristigut yourself? I think Ripstiggr’s talking to him now.”
Galvanized, Hannah bounded through the autorip. There seemed to be no doors in the claustrophobic, dimly lit corridor behind the cockpit. Hobo pointed to a blank place in the wall: another autorip. It opened, and there stood Ripstiggr, hunched over a screen. The small room was entirely lined with screens and computer consoles.
“—estimate that no functional Minuteman missiles remain within the continental United States,” said an unfamiliar voice, in Rristigul. “That’s if your targeting has been as accurate as you say. I wouldn’t take it for granted with that bunch of mediocrities.”
“Mediocrities. Wait until I get my hands on that cocksucker,” Hobo murmured.
Ripstiggr flapped a hand for them to go away. Hannah ignored him, squeezing into the computer room. She was hearing Iristigut’s voice for the first time, and now she saw him.
He sat at a three-monitor computer, typing as he talked. The low contrast of the rriksti screen turned him into a dark ghost, but he looked ordinary, for a rriksti. The room also looked ordinary, a spacious office with a whiteboard on one wall. But it was an office on the moon, and that much space, on the moon, wasn’t ordinary. Not only had Iristigut arrived safely at CELL, he’d commandeered one of their best offices.
“According to my data, there are no ICBMs in Europe, with the exception of a few submarine-based cruise missiles deployed by France and the UK. Earth Party control of both governments makes a first strike by either country unlikely. I’ll turn next to China and the subcontinent. While the USA accounted for eighty percent of Earth’s total nuclear warhead count, China formerly deployed a number of Dong Feng mobile IBCMs, the whereabouts of which are unclear following the country’s fragmentation. There isn’t really much you can do about those. India and Pakistan present lesser threats. The Russian Federation, of course, is the greatest threat following the USA. The last known locations of their approximately 400 land-based ICBMs are as follows …”
So this was where Ripstiggr had been getting his battlefield intelligence! That’s why his strikes were so goddamn accurate.
Hannah turned to Hobo. “Where did Iristigut get all this data?” she whispered, as he reeled off latitude and longitude coordinates for Russia’s missile silos.
“I told you. He’s a computer guy.”
“He hacked into ultra-secure military databases?”
“Quantum computer, Shiplord. This is one, too. But I can’t be bothered with computer stuff.”
Hannah could not help admiring Iristigut’s achievement. While the Krijistal on the Lightbringer had been tinkering with their hardware and enjoying sex-sodden 48-hour benders, Iristigut, on the Cloudeater, had been assembling a comprehensive picture of Earth’s defenses, in the teeth of lightspeed delays up to an hour long. It must have taken him years … It had taken him years.
And all the time he had been making Hannah think he was her friend.
“That concludes my assessment of the land-based nuclear threat. And now, Ripstiggr, get your head out of your ass and pay attention to the seas. The USS John F. Kennedy is currently on its way across the Atlantic. It is the most advanced aircraft carrier on Earth, with a complement of F-35 joint strike fighters. These aircraft have EMP capabilities. Have you ever seen the weapon called a taser, Ripstiggr? It is similar to the kalk, which was of course used by the Temple for advanced questioning. These pulses will kill or cripple every rriksti of your crew, without damaging the Lightbringer.”
Hannah froze. She’d been scared, but it sounded like she hadn’t been scared enough.
“The F-35s will be within range of your position in an estimated …”
Fayhti to hours, base 14 to base 10 …
She elbowed Ripstiggr aside and spoke to the ghost on the screen. “They’ll be here in fourteen hours?”
Of course, there was an 1.3-second lightspeed delay to the moon. Iristigut continued to describe the USS JFK’s course and capabilities, every word another nail in the Lightbringer’s coffin.
“He’s got a high-resolution telescope orbiting the Earth-Moon L1 Lagrange point,” Ripstiggr said, pushing her away from the screen. “Well, CELL had it. Now he does. He can even see the Americans moving troops by road. So yeah, I expect that’s right.”
“Hello, Hannah,” Iristigut said. “How are you?”
She wanted to spit and scream at him. But saving her crew came first. “Are they really going to kill us all?”
“Of course not,” Ripstiggr said, before Iristigut could answer. “I don’t believe in this super-kalk weapon. What’s an aircraft carrier, anyway?”
“You had years to find this stuff out,” Iristigut said. “But you didn’t, because what’s the point of learning about a civilization you’re going to bomb from orbit? Go look it up on the internet, Ripstiggr.”
Ripstiggr knew what the internet was. “We’re still waiting for our hook-up.”
“I have no internet access,” Iristigut said, echoing him from the moon. “My data is two weeks old, at best. All I can give you is telescope observations and guesses.”
Which was more than the Lightbringer had. Sitting here at the bottom of Earth’s atmosphere, they were blind. The TDRS, gone … Hubble, gone … there was the James Webb telescope at the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point, but its downlink could only be picked up with a world-class radio telescope, and it wasn’t pointing at Earth, anyway. Hannah yanked herself out of a vortex of futile regrets. Iristigut was still talking—
“—evacuate the Lightbringer. Disperse the crew around the planet. That was my advice from the beginning—”
“He’s still trying to sabotage our cause,” Hobo said from the doorway.
“—ensure the survival of our species.”
“I understand these people better than you do,” Ripstiggr said to Iristigut. “The situation’s under control. Keep the telescope observations coming. I could also use some data on air bases in, what was it called? Germany. Whatever you’ve got.”
He reached out as if to end the call. Hannah squirmed past him. “Hey, Iristigut. Before you go, I just want to know …”This might be stupid, but if she was going to die in fourteen hours, it didn’t matter. “Can I talk to Skyler?”
*
A CELLie skidded into the construction shed where Skyler was trying to boot up the controversial thorium reactor. He now knew why it was controversial. It required an initial load of uranium, but they hadn’t actually been allowed to bring any from Earth, ‘cause that shit is dangerous, yanno? So they had to opt for a neutron-producing cyclotron, plus thorium mined right here on the moon. Trouble was, the thorium wouldn’t turn into fissile uranium until it had been bombarded with neutrons for 27 days … and that was why the CELLies hadn’t even started the damn thing up yet. Somehow, they had to keep the salt molten for 27 days, until the reactor started melting it on its own. And there was nowhere to put the solar furnace where it would get sunlight for that long. ‘Eternal Light’ was just a PR gimmick.
Anyway, Skyler had moved the whole setup into an impact crater on the sunwards slope where it would get 14 days of sunlight, max. He scowled at the solar furnace’s temperature readout. This was like trying to cook hot dogs over a candle.
“Skyler!”
“Watch out for the pipes,” Skyler shouted.
“Keelraiser’s on the radio for you,” the young CELLie gasped. “Quick!”
Skyler took his time limping out of the unpressurized shed, around the snarl of pipes that led from the reactor to the cold, unresponsive turbine and generator. He rappelled up the slope of the impact crater, one-legged, using the power cables to haul himself up. The sunlit slope of Shackleton Crater rose to the black sky. He climbed into the earth-mover parked at the edge of the crater. The comms screen was covered with dust, like everything else. He wiped it with the sleeve of his Starliner. “Yeah?”
The face that appeared on the screen was not Keelraiser’s.
Skyler nearly died of a heart attack then and there, in the cab of a RTG-powered bulldozer on the moon.
“Hannah? Is that really you?” he blurted.
Then he waited, feeling all kinds of stupid.
And happy.
And confused.
And—as he made out the shapes of rriksti on either side of her, one of them, if he was not mistaken, that big silver-haired fucker who had appeared in many episodes of the Hannah Ginsburg show—heartbroken.
“Nice EVA suit,” Hannah’s voice crackled over the comms link. “Is that one of the new ones?”
It was her. It was really her.
“Nice t-shirt,” Skyler said, stupidly.
This time, while he waited, he remembered the emails she’d sent to Keelraiser, which he should never have seen. I have a harem … I can have as many men as I like ... And there she was, sandwiched between two of them. Did rriksti count as men?
“Oh God, this thing,” she came back on the air. “It’s his. I just borrowed it.”
Skyler’s heart broke a little more.
“Listen, I just wanted to make sure you’re safe.” She hesitated. “Stay safe. Don’t, you know. Don’t do any Fed shit.”
Skyler almost laughed. As if he wanted anything to do with the government that had got him into this mess. Anyway, they had no comms with Earth apart from the Cloudeater’s maser. That must be how Hannah was talking to him now. “Hannah, are you OK?” He didn’t have any sense of the big picture. “What’s happening down there?”
“Oh, it’s crazy. It feels like half of sub-Saharan Africa is camping out here, and the other half is on their way. Honestly, I love these people.” Her mouth wobbled for a second. “They’re trying to help.”
“But what about you?”
Are you on their side? he wanted to say. Are you sleeping with the enemy?
340,000 kilometers away, Hannah leaned closer to the screen, blocking out the two rriksti. “Remember you once said you had faith in me to do the right thing? I tried, Skyler. I’m still trying. Don’t lose faith in me. I—I have faith in you, too. Do the right thing out there.” She straightened up. “OK, gotta go. I’ve got ten thousand things to do. What else is new, right?”
Skyler couldn’t bear to let her go. They had so much to say to each other. He blurted, “Wait. Wait, Hannah. I need to ask you a question. I’m trying to boot up this thorium reactor. Yeah, I know, who the heck am I to be messing with a reactor? Sad thing is, I’m more of an expert than anyone else here. But there’s a problem …” He quickly outlined the solar furnace issue. “So how do I keep everything molten after the sun goes down?”
After three seconds, Hannah’s face lit up. “Oh my God, Skyler, technology of the future! Then again, hell, we’re living in the future now. We eat computer parts and comb our hair with ray-guns.” She made her eyes cross a bit, and Skyler fell in love with her all over again. “OK, let me see. That’s tricky. Don't fill the reactor with molten salt. Keep the molten salt just barely moving. Don't run it through the primary heat exchanger. As it gets colder, let the salt remain inside the core as long as possible, but don't let the salt freeze in the pumps or piping. You’re gonna have to baby that thing around the clock until it starts ticking over on its own.”
“Would it help if I heated the pipes? I could take the RTG out of this bulldozer.” Unlike the rovers, the earth-mover ran on a radioisotope generator. Power equals heat.
“Oh my God! What’s the radioisotope in the RTG?”
“Uh … I have no idea.”
“In that case, it’s probably polonium-210. You could dismantle the RTG and remove that. Mix it with beryllium, and you’ll have a neutron generator that keeps irradiating the thorium after the sun goes down! No electricity required.” Hannah was animated, talking fast. “So if the activity in the fuel salt isn't high enough to keep everything molten, you have two options. Destroy the RTG to get at the polonium, which honestly, I’m not sure I would want to risk. Or else turn the RTG up to 11 and try to run the salt through it—”
The silver-haired rriksti interrupted. “Read the instruction manual, chump. That is what we did.”
The screen went black.
Keelraiser’s face appeared on the dusty rectangle. “I apologize,” he said. “I cut you off. I don’t want them to learn too much about what we’re doing.”
Skyler’s frustration boiled over. “I was talking to her!”
Keelraiser, that traitor, sat in the office that had formerly belonged to James Coetzee. Behind him, Hriklif touched a button on the whiteboard—actually a giant screen. Where it had been blank, it now displayed floorplans and elevations for the new habs they were going to build underground, in an impact crater a little way from here. The thorium reactor would provide baseload power for the new settlement. If Skyler could ever get it running.
But now his thoughts jumped onto a different track. Comms. When the new settlement was built, they’d still be dependent on the Cloudeater’s comms maser … on Keelraiser. There had to be some other way to get in touch with Earth. CELL had a Ku-band radio, but Keelraiser had dismantled it.
“Hannah gave you good advice,” Keelraiser said. “Take it.”
“Which part?”
“All of it.”
The screen blanked.
Skyler gritted his jaw. Getting mad at Keelraiser would get him nowhere. Unlike Jack, he wasn’t going to start pointlessly throwing punches. Do the right thing. For Hannah’s sake, he had to try, even if that just meant getting the reactor working, wringing electricity out of the raw lunar elements, keeping people alive.
He twisted in the earth-mover’s seat, examining the columnar RTG behind the cabin. It looked like it would be easy to remove. Of course, if he did that, they couldn’t use the earth-mover to dig holes for the new habs. But the heavy rock-breaking would be done by laser, anyway. Pump megawatts of power into a laser beam and it’ll vaporize anything, even lunar regolith.
Keelraiser had ordered Jack to salvage the SoD’s comms laser for that. He was supposed to be coming back with that today ...
A shadow fell across the earthmover. Skyler looked up. For a second he thought a UFO was about to land on him. Then he recognized the giant disk, borne on four CELL short-hop lifters.
Jack had not just salvaged the comms laser from the SoD.
He’d come back with the whole rotating hab.
CHAPTER 12
Late afternoon in the Congo. The noise of engines seeped out of the sky. Hannah stopped digging. She pushed her rain-wet hair out of her eyes and looked up. All she saw was the clouds currently dumping a downpour on Katanga province. Would F-35s attack in the rain? Why not?
“Sounds like they’re early,” she said to Joker, who was helping her dig latrines on the fringe of the tent city.
Hey. You have to do something while you’re waiting to die. It might as well be something useful.
She’d recruited a crew of rriksti—they didn’t mind working during daylight hours when it was raining—and Congolese, who were equally indifferent to the weather. If they lived through today, they’d have a nice row of pit latrines. If not, they’d have a handy row of graves.
Now everyone, human and rriksti, leaned on their shovels and looked up, or popped their heads out of pits that were already deep enough to stand in. The rriksti could not hear the approaching aircraft, but they reacted to the humans’ reaction.
Hannah said to Joker, “Carry on. It might be a false alarm.” To the Congolese, she yelled, “I’m going to get beer! Je vais, um, get de la beer!” She should have gotten Giles to teach her some French when she had a chance. But beer was understood by everyone. They raised a cheer. She gave them a rriksti salute and squelched downhill.
As she walked around the tent city, the noise resolved into a distinct clattering. That did not sound like F-35s.
Suddenly hopeful, she broke into a jog. She found Ripstiggr on the waterlogged proto-road behind the parked shuttles, staring into the sky.
“What were you doing?” he said, noticing that she was muddy from head to foot.
“Digging toilets.”
“Why?”
“Because these people,” she yelled, flinging out an arm in the direction of the tent city, “are going to start getting sick! And more people keep coming! We’re going to have a health crisis on our hands if we don’t provide some basic amenities!”
“I was thinking of houses,” Ripstiggr said.
“Um … proper houses?”
“Whatever humans like.” He glanced in the direction of her pointing arm. His bio-antennas thrashed, shaking water droplets onto her angry, upturned face. “It’s as if someone already destroyed all civilization on this planet.”
Hannah stared at him.
“I remember when we first got here, I thought we would be giving away high-density batteries and things. It turns out what these people need most is a roof over their heads.”
She could have kissed him. But it was too late. Her gaze flicked back to the clouds. Helicopters could be just as bad news as jet fighters.
Gurlp spoke in her head. “Shiplord. I am on bridge. Sensor blimp can see approaching aircraft.”
The sensor blimp was the last of the Lightbringer’s dirigibles. Filled with hydrogen gas, it floated high over the ship, a dot beneath the low-hanging clouds. Its sensors, impervious to bad weather, would supposedly detect incoming missiles in time for Gurlp to disable them with the HERF.
“They are three. Low-flying, rotary-wing type of craft called UH-60 Black Hawks.”
“Shit,” Hannah whispered.
“Want me to prep HERF pulse?”
That and the comms maser were the Lightbringer’s last lines of defence. The HERF mast had snapped off in the crash-landing. The setup they’d jury-rigged a few days ago consisted of several feed horns mounted on top of the Lightbringer, which could be aimed separately or in concert. Hannah liked the HERF concept. She liked the idea of a bloodless war that only killed electronics. On the other hand, killing the electronics of a modern helicopter in mid-air would also kill its crew, just like her anti-satellite HERF pulses had inadvertently killed the astronauts on the space stations. There was no such thing as a bloodless war.
“Prep the pulse,” she said to Gurlp, hating everything, and herself most of all.
The lights strung up throughout the tent city dimmed as Gurlp diverted power to the HERF generator.
“In range in five seconds,” Gurlp said. “Five … four …”
Hannah still couldn’t see the Black Hawks, on account of the clouds. But Gurlp’s countdown told her they were close. The new HERF setup had a very limited range, since it was running off the Hairsplitter’s comparatively puny reactor.
“Three … two …
The helicopters dropped out of the clouds, right on top of the Lightbringer.
“Ranging in,” Gurlp said.
“Don’t shoot, Gurlp,” Ripstiggr said calmly. “They would have fired on us by now if they were going to.”
Hannah glanced at him. “Hold your fire, Gurlp,” she confirmed, doubting him, doubting herself.
One by one, the Black Hawks settled out of the sky and landed on the scar, a couple of hundred meters behind the Dealbreaker. The process took long enough for Hannah’s fears to return at crippling strength. She was glad she’d gotten to talk to Skyler before she died. At least one survivor of the SoD would survive to tell their story after she was gone. Of course, the rriksti on the moon probably would not long outlive the rriksti here. As an American, Hannah knew that there was nothing more dangerous than a maddened US of A, even if it had been reduced to a floating patchwork nation of submarines and aircraft carriers.
And Black Hawks.
Rotor wash sent debris flurrying across the ground. Men disembarked from the helicopters, jogging beneath the still-spinning rotors.
“That looks right,” Ripstiggr said.
“What?”
Most of the newcomers walked with the rigid posture she associated with the military. But some were stumbling. They had their hands tied or cuffed in front of them.
“I talked to these guys earlier,” Ripstiggr said.
“You what?”
“But I’m not sure which of them is my contact. Do any of them look Russian to you?”
One man from each helicopter unfurled a flag. They walked ahead of the others, waving them in slow sweeping arcs.
Cold with shock, Hannah said, “Yes. That’s a Russian flag.” She pointed to the second one “That’s the Israeli flag. I don’t know what the other one is.” A red, white, and black tricolor.
“You people have too many countries,” Ripstiggr said.
“If you’d given us another fifty years or so, we, too, might have whittled it down to one victorious superpower and one defeated one,” Hannah said.
They waited side by side in the rain. As the men from the Black Hawks drew nearer, she placed the tricolor. That was the flag of Egypt. She remembered what the BBC guys had said: … a lousy little airfield in Egypt under joint American and Russian command.
The flag-bearers halted, their flags now bedraggled and sticking to the poles.
Three uniformed men strode forward, with four handcuffed prisoners shambling between them.
“Greetings.” The man who spoke had a face like an overcooked roast, and so many medals on his chest that it was a wonder he didn’t overbalance. He directed his words to the tall, imposing alien, not to the dishevelled woman wearing a t-shirt as a dress. “I am Yegor Ostrovsky, representing the Russian Federation.”
“I am Ayelet Levy.” The ‘man’ on the right was actually a woman, although she could probably have arm-wrestled Ostrovsky to a draw. She looked straight into Hannah’s eyes. “I am the deputy defense minister of Israel.”
“And I am Abdul Maksoud, spokesman for the President of Egypt,” the other man said.
Hannah couldn’t stop staring at Levy. Two women. Two Jews. Were they on the same side, or not?
“And who are these guys?” she said, gesturing to the handcuffed men. Their faces were bloody and bruised. Looked like they’d been beaten up, even though the oldest had to be near 70.
They all wore American uniform.
Ripstiggr was speaking with Ostrovsky. His contact. He used his field radio to project the deep, purring voice that she heard in her head. It was weird to hear it with her ears, too, in stereo. “Congratulations, General, on the destruction of the USS John F. Kennedy.”
“It was a very difficult operation,” Ostrovsky said gravely. “However, your positional observations were of help.”
The Russians had sunk the freaking USS JFK!
No wonder Ripstiggr had been so calm while they were talking to Iristigut. He’d probably been in touch with the Russians for a while already, setting this up. He might not know what a sea was, but he knew exactly how to manipulate tech-hungry human beings.
Torn between relief and guilt, Hannah said, “Are these guys survivors from the JFK?”
Ostrovsky finally deigned to look at her. “Sadly, there were no survivors. These are the commander, chief of staff, and senior deputy commanders of AFRICOM.”
The commander started to speak. The Egyptian diplomat hit him in the face, just like a rriksti would have done.
“Let him talk!” Hannah cried.
The commander spoke to the air somewhere beyond her head. “We have come in the hope that we can develop a friendship with the Darkside nation of Imf. Although you come from another planet, it is possible that we have many things in common.”
When Hannah formulated her new policy of let’s all get along, this was the kind of thing she would have hoped for.
But she’d never wanted it to be a memorized speech from the mouth of a prisoner.
CHAPTER 13
It took Kuldeep Srivastava a day and a half to get home after the failed snatch operation, even though the Cheyenne Mountain Complex was just two states over. The problem wasn’t the roads. It was the traffic. Kuldeep spoke to some of the refugees. They said the squids had hit the Hoover Dam. Kuldeep hadn’t heard anything about that. The Great American Bug-Out, Round II, had taken on a momentum of its own. Shots crackled through the crisp mountain air, as unremarkable these days as horns honking.
Outside of Denver, he checked in with HQ. They were back to using shortwave radios, like in the olden days. That’s when he learned the USS John F. Kennedy had gone down with all hands.
The emergency meetings were still going on when he reached the NORAD complex under Cheyenne Mountain. Not even an alien invasion could break the US government’s addiction to meetings. Unwashed and sleep-deprived, Kuldeep crept into the Situation Room. The Secretary of Defense and his coterie of generals cursed the squids in one breath and the Russians in the next. Nineteeth-century presidents stared disapprovingly down from the walls. The 46th President of the United States brooded over a vending-machine coffee. They still had plenty of essentials: cans and 100-year shelf-life freeze-dried shit.
Kuldeep pulled a folding chair up behind the president. He didn’t mention the Zieglers. He had already reported his failure to capture them, and after the JFK’s sinking, no one cared anymore. “Do we know what happened?”
“What happened is I took the advice of these gentlemen,” President Flaherty said, “and three thousand boys and girls of the US Navy paid with their lives.”
The generals stiffened momentarily, but kept on talking. The president was a middle-aged, balding black man with a paunch. He looked like a cuddly teddy-bear. Some people made the mistake of thinking his folksy manner was for real.
“The Russkies have taken Abu Suweir. Our troops in the ME are leaderless. Our conventional military response has failed.”
The generals disagreed with this assessment, loudly. Kuldeep bristled at their disrespect.
“I do not have a military background,” President Flaherty said. “I am aware of my limitations in that arena, and I value your expertise. But I do not see the value of throwing more troops and materiel into what is now a two­-front war. We can beat the squids. We can beat the Russkies. We cannot beat them both at once.”
Kuldeep nodded. In fact, he had previously argued for doing exactly what the Russians had done yesterday—stab their alliance partners in the back and hand them over to the squids. The SecDef, a hooknosed vet with a white quiff, like the American eagle in man’s form, had overruled him. We do not need to negotiate with the squids, he’d said. We will eliminate them with precision strikes. This had been music to the ears of a president who had already seen too much killing. So the ‘precision’ bombing campaign had begun, with the intent of scaring the locals away before the planned F-35 strike on the Lightbringer.
And now it had failed, although of course, the SecDef and his gang weren’t admitting it.
As they spitballed strategies, Kuldeep balanced his laptop on his knees and accessed the surveillance cameras in the residential areas of the complex. He checked on his parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins. President Flaherty had authorized a rescue operation just for the Srivastavas after the squids bombed the Salem, NJ power plant. He had Kuldeep’s undying loyalty for that alone.
Flaherty spoke into a lull in the discussion. “Forget it,” he said. “Y’all ain’t fucking listening. Y’all ain’t using your fucking eyes.” Flaherty occasionally deployed street locutions for shock value. It always worked on this gang. They faced him, mutinous but attentive. “Conventional tactics will only result in further losses of blood and treasure. So all that shit you are discussing is off the table. Now I know some of you are thinking about the Tridents. But I am telling you right now, I will not authorize a nuclear strike on the Congo.”
Kuldeep let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. Thank God this man was leading the country on this day.
SecDef said, “I understand your reluctance, sir, given your background …”
“Now what exactly do you mean by that?”
SecDef could not say out loud what he was obviously thinking, that the Congo was only populated by black folks, and Flaherty was protecting them because he was black, too. He changed it to, “With your background in the intelligence community—”
“You ain’t making no sense. I will not drop a nuclear bomb on unknown thousands of human beings, human beings, who’ve done nothing wrong. And anyone in this room who thinks that would be acceptable should take a good hard look at their own humanity.” The president stared at SecDef, who flushed.
“If nuclear escalation was ever justified, that time is now,” SecDef grated. “After everything the squids have done to us—”
“I’ll tell you what they have not done. They have not dropped nukes on us. I am not gonna be the one who provokes them into an escalation that could end all life on Earth.”
“I don’t have to sit here and listen to this self-defeating bullshit.” SecDef stood and left the room. Kuldeep got busy tracking him on the surveillance cameras. He suspected the man only had a few more hours to live. That’s what happens when you cross the former director of the NXC.
With the tension in the room at breaking point, Flaherty segued into a fiery speech about fighting them on the beaches, on the landing grounds, in the fields and on the streets. The truth was that they had lost the battle for the Lightbringer, and their new war aim was simply to defend the United States. But Flaherty dressed it up so expertly in Churchillian glamor that he got even the generals applauding. Kuldeep breathed a sigh of relief. This gave them more time to pursue an acceptable outcome via covert means.
The meeting broke up at last, leaving Kuldeep alone with the president. He said, “Arecibo?”
“Yeah, you can go ahead and put that into motion. But our top priority going forward is Europe.”
“Europe?”
“Sure. If the squids want to conquer the planet, they’ve got to start somewhere. Europe’s closest. I want all our networks around the Mediterranean activated, funded, and reporting on anything that looks like alien influence or alien technology. I’m gonna send you over there to knock on doors, too.”
“Got it.” Kuldeep paused. “SecDef?”
“I’ll take care of him,” Flaherty said. “You go and pack for Europe. Pack light. It’s warm in Italy this time of year.”
Kuldeep headed for the door, laptop under his arm. He heard the president say, “‘After everything the squids have done to us …’”
Kuldeep turned back. “What’s that, sir?”
“Nothing. You go ahead, Kul.”
As Kuldeep threaded between the scattered chairs, the echoes carried another mutter to him: “Bullshit.” The president was slouched at the Vietnam-vintage table, talking to his paper cup of cold coffee. “Most of all of this we did to ourselves.”
And he started to laugh.
Kuldeep closed the door on the eerie sound of a man laughing to himself, on and on, alone in a room under a mountain.
CHAPTER 14
Six months after the rriksti came to the moon, much had changed. But the changes were hard to spot.
From outside, you’d never know the bunker was there.
Rubble camouflaged the slightly convex roof. Same blinding white as the sunlit lunar rock around it. There used to be an impact crater in this spot, two klicks sunwards from Shackleton Crater’s rim. Now it had vanished. All you could see was the Cloudeater, parked on the surface, seemingly abandoned.
A skein of power cables ran from the rriksti shuttle and disappeared into the ground.
A dark hole gaped at one side of the bunker. Two short-hop lifters stood near the entrance. These were ore transports, built to service CELL’s refinery in the Procellum KREEP terrane. They looked like the Apollo lunar lander after the return module went home. Platforms on four legs. Titchy pilot’s cabin on top, off-center. Honking great engine bell underneath. Now they also transported LOX and H2O to the bunker from the oxygen refinery and the waterworks on the crater rim.
CELLies in orange Starliners swarmed around the lifters, unloading heavy cylinders of LOX and plastic sacks of water.
Skyler drove his rover out of the midnight-black hole in the ground. He got out, wrestled one of the LOX cylinders into the rover, balanced a sack of water on top. The CELLies did not help with the awkward task. In fact they passive-aggressively jostled him.
He got back into the rover and drove away.
*
Alexei kissed his wife goodbye. It was a long, loving kiss, which lasted until one of the babies fluttered into Nene’s hair. She squealed, broke away, retrieved the infant rriksti in cupped hands. Its laughter tinkled in Alexei’s head like the notes of a music box he’d had as a child.
He caught the baby and bounced it on a spread palm. “Are you Ithrilip or Zhenya?”
“Ithrilip has black hair. Zhenya has black-brown hair,” Nene said severely. The distinction, obvious to rriksti eyes, was invisible to Alexei. None the wiser, he kissed the baby on its tiny snub-nose. It cooed at 1010 KHz.
“Look after your mother for me.”
He navigated the obstacle course of baby stuff on the floor of their apartment. It was about the size of his parents’ kitchen when they lived in Volgograd. One room for eating, sleeping, dreaming, working, love-making, and private discussions of private fears. Yes, private. The blue-green paint on the walls blocked radio-frequency signals. That alone made this one of the best apartments in the bunker. Nene had insisted on it.
“Be careful,” she said, at the door.
“There’s no danger at all,” Alexei said. “I’ll be back in time for supper.” He kissed her again and went out.
Yet despite his assurances, a pulse of nervousness started up in his gut as he walked through the bunker. He donned his EVA suit in the changing room behind the airlock, no longer thinking about his family, thinking only about what he had to do to protect them.
He hesitated in front of the gun safe. Built into the wall, it had a combination lock and a biometric lock. Alexei was one of only eight people who could open it. Of those eight, he was the only human. It was a heavy responsibility and had to be used wisely. He reached out to the palm reader … and drew back.
He’d do this the right way, or not at all.
Banks of lockers, ripped from the old CELL habs, filled the changing room. Giles came around the end of them. “Where are you going?”
“For a walk,” Alexei said.
“Do you want company?”
Yes. But he had to do this the right way. “No.”
He exited the airlock and walked up the ramp. His chest-light raked the confusion of tire-marks and bootprints. He picked out the tracks of Skyler’s rover, pointing north.
He loped along the tracks, deeper into the shadow of Shoemaker Crater, hurrying to catch up.
*
The moon is dangerous as hell, even if all you’re doing is going for a walk. Skyler knew that better than most people. He manhandled the water sack off the back of the rover. It held 100 gallons of potable H2O, steamed out of the rubble of old comets, distilled in an energy-gobbling multi-step process that also extracted CO2 and ammonia. Skyler staggered under the unwieldy sack, which weighed about as much as he himself would on Earth. “Could use some help out here,” he shouted over the radio.
He set the sack down. The parked rover’s headlights sparkled on lunar rock, and reflected off a steel wall, suspended two meters above the ground, blurring past so fast that he couldn’t even see the four handcrafted rim thrusters that had replaced the old ones.
Jack had salvaged the SoD’s main hab. He had coerced four CELLie pilots into toting it all the way to the south pole, balanced on their lifters like a wheel of cheese on four toothpicks. When he got it here, he’d set it on a stand, shovelled all the salvage and rubbish out through the erstwhile keel tube, and embarked on a months-long project of patching the breaches in the side walls and building new rim thrusters. On June 20th—a date Skyler remembered because it was the same day the North African Alliance had invaded Italy and Greece—he’d spun it up.
Now, while Libyan and Moroccan irregulars sought comfort in the abandoned towns of the Italian Alps, the repaired hab whizzed around and around, horizontal to the lunar surface, faster than it ever had in deep space.
Jack emerged from below the hab into the rover’s headlights. His rriksti EVA suit outlined bulging muscles. He and Skyler carried the water sack and the LOX cylinder into the dark under the spinning kilotons of death. The hab stood on a 2m-diameter pipe, amid a forest of chocks and braces. Skyler ducked into a hole in the pipe. He climbed a ladder and came out in the axis tunnel, which now led straight up to the wrecked bridge. He sidestepped onto the former aft wall of the hab.
The vast interior of the hab was airless, but not entirely dark. A streak of light, like a long-exposure photograph of traffic, glowed on the outer wall. Skyler could not help remembering the luxuriant greenery and mellow scents that had filled the hab when it was attached to the SoD. Those were the good old days.
He hauled the supplies up, while Jack pushed from below.
“Did you bring any food?” Jack said.
“Oh sure,” Skyler said. “Let me just pull another rabbit out of my hat. No, I did not bring any food.”
“That’s OK,” Jack said. “Garden’s doing nicely.”
They walked along Stairway 4, which was now parallel to the ground. Centrifugal force tugged them forward, as if they were walking towards the outer edge of a merry-go-round. Presently the pull got so strong that Skyler had to cling to the guard rail. Jack tossed a rope into his hands. Skyler let the centrifugal force sweep him off his feet, simultaneously changing his orientation so that ‘forwards’ was now ‘down.’ He paid the rope through his gloves in careful jerks until he landed on the outer wall of the hab.
He now stood sideways to the ground, but the weak sideways pull of lunar gravity was barely perceptible in comparison to the powerful spin gravity generated by the hab’s rotation. A short distance away, an airtight polyurethane tent glowed white from within.
“How many RPMs have you got on this thing now?” he said, following Jack to the tent. Jack walked easily, carrying the LOX cylinder and dragging the water sack. Skyler hobbled behind him, wishing for the crutch he had discarded months ago.
“Five,” Jack said. “It’s about time to burn the thrusters again.”
Translation: Steal some more hydrazine for me, Skyler.
Skyler gritted his jaw. He was sick of raiding the old Moon Express fuel depot. Sick of helping Jack for no reward and less thanks.
Jack undogged a hatch set into the side of the tent at ground level. Skyler collapsed into the chamber of the airlock. It was the old airlock from the SoD’s bridge. Jack had sealed the plastic of the tent between the metal and the gasket. The plastic was the same stuff they had once used to transport ice from Europa. Using only the hardware and resources that survived the crash, Jack had built a pressurized dwelling in the location of the former kitchen tent.
Overhead, the scaffolding that once enclosed the SoD’s terrestrial garden held up the plastic roof. A bank of growlights, assembled from the few LEDs un-shattered in the crash, blazed down on a split-level field that took up most of the tent’s floorspace. The hydroponic tanks had all broken, so Jack had made soil out of ground-up regolith and his own waste. Root vegetables and salad grew in the vile mixture. Skyler doffed his suit to the shoulders. The pungent smell of shit threatened to make him gag. It was chilly in the tent.
Jack hooked the new water sack up to his irrigation system, and swapped out the LOX cylinder attached to his CO2 scrubber / air replenishment setup. Skyler sat in one of the old SoD chairs, catching his breath.
Jack moved to the old kitchen table and wiped out mugs with a rag. “Tea? Coffee?”
This was a joke. All he actually had was water, hot or cold. Maybe a microwaved yam, or a protein bar, if Skyler had managed to grab some from the pantry. But Skyler could get yams in the bunker, and if he wanted a protein bar, he didn’t have to steal them.
“I’m fine, thanks.”
Jack looked around, plainly surprised. Skyler usually sat awhile and filled him in on the news from Earth—whatever the Lightbringer saw fit to send, anyway, and Keelraiser saw fit to show everyone. They’d gripe about the war in Europe and dream up better resistance strategies, a pair of armchair generals.
Not today.
“Actually, I’d better get going.” Skyler leaned down and picked up one of the dumbbells that lay on the floor beside his chair. 10 KG. He could barely lift it off the floor. Jack had moved all the old gym equipment in here – the weights, the resistance machines. Stripped to the waist, his upper body rippled with awesome definition. He looked almost freakish in comparison to the atrophied CELLies back at the bunker. Skyler had kept meaning to spend more time out here, do some training himself. But now that option was gone. “Well, see you later,” he said, getting up.
Jack frowned. “Is everything OK?”
“Oh, sure,” Skyler said. “The Libyans are crossing the Alps, Islamic State just occupied Barcelona, and rriksti ‘observers,’ quote unquote, have been sighted in New Mexico. Apart from that, everything’s fine.”
He donned his suit again and let himself out. He waved ‘up’ at the darkness. “You there?”
“Here.” A chest-lamp flashed in the axis tunnel overhead.
“When you get about halfway out, grab the rope. Don’t slide down too fast. It’s a hard landing.”
He did not want to be around when Alexei reached the tent. He walked across the bare floor of the hab, stumbling, the ground continually coming up faster than he expected. Another rope hung down alongside what used to be Stairway 1. Skyler wrapped it around his gloves and fly-walked up the forward wall of the hab, towards the bridge. He’d hang out up there until it was over.
*
Jack put the mugs away. Skyler’s abrupt departure gave him forebodings. Skyler had seemed to be in a skittish mood overall. Maybe he was fed up with the supply runs. It had to be a thankless job, and Jack would not have asked it of him if he could see any other way to stay alive without going back to the bunker … back to Keelraiser’s domain.
He whipped around at the clunk of the airlock’s inner hatch.
Alexei pitched headfirst onto the floor of the tent.
“Alexei!” Jack hadn’t seen him in six months. “Jesus, are you OK?”
Alexei pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. “I’m fine,” he grunted. “Feel like I am back in the TsF-18.”
The TsF-16, the training centrifuge in Star City, subjected you to six gees. This was only 0.8. “Lie on your back, you’ll feel better.”
Alexei flopped onto his back. He’d grown his hair out, a striking change from his usual chrome-dome style. With his rriksti suit doffed to the waist, he looked as stringy as the CELLies had looked to Jack when they first got here. Lunar gravity was a wasting disease.
“You don’t get lonely out here?” he said, looking up at the plants swaying under the salvaged growlights.
The truth was, no. Alexei knew Jack as an astronaut. He didn’t know that Jack Kildare, ex-commander of the SoD, had once been a little boy who walked to school on his own and came back on his own, who spent entire weekends in his room, by choice, not because he had no friends but because he was happier alone. Quietly absorbed in drawing G.I. Joe and Judge Dredd characters, or building spaceships out of cardboard and modelling clay, he’d not even notice time passing until his mother called him. A typical only child. Small, too—he hadn’t shot up until his mid-teens. His parents and teachers in those days would have said he was the least likely boy to end up joining the RAF.
They might have been less surprised to see him living as a hermit in the wreck of his spaceship.
He couldn’t explain all that to Alexei, so he just said, “Not really, no.”
He rolled up his sleeping-bag and wedged it under Alexei’s head and shoulders, propping him up. While he did this, he casually ascertained that Alexei didn’t have a weapon. You couldn’t hide so much as a nail-clipper in a rriksti EVA suit, but Jack had to make sure. He hated himself for suspecting Alexei, whilst reminding himself that Alexei wasn’t his friend anymore.
He sat backwards on the same chair Skyler had occupied. “So you found me.”
“It’s not like this place is a secret. It is the most visible thing on the surface. You might as well paint a bull’s-eye on it.”
Jack shrugged. In six months, his own prediction that the Lightbringer would bombard CELL had not come true. He reckoned it never would. Keelraiser had neutralized that threat by changing sides.
“Nice garden.” The plants nodded in the breeze from the single rotating fan. Leaf shadows dappled Alexei’s face. “How do you live with the smell?”
“You get used to it.”
“It’s interesting, because we are also switching over to dirt farming in the bunker. It’s a more efficient way to fix and circulate nitrogen.”
“Yeah, Skyler mentioned that.”
If Skyler cropped up often in Jack’s conversation, it was because Skyler was the only living soul Jack had seen or spoken to in months. He was out of practice at talking to other people. “What do you want?” he said bluntly.
Alexei struggled into a sitting position. He looked Jack in the eye. “You can’t make Skyler keep stealing shit for you.”
As Jack had thought. Skyler was fed up with the supply runs, but he was too much of a coward to tell Jack to his face, so he’d enlisted Alexei to do it for him.
“Fine,” Jack said. “Tell him I don’t expect to see him again.”
He could fetch his own supplies. It might result in violence, which he had wanted to avoid, but he’d do his best to minimize confrontation.
“He’s risking his life for you, Jack. It’s not fair.”
“I said he doesn’t have to—”
“You saved his life after the crash. He is very aware of that, and he feels indebted to you.”
It shocked Jack to hear Alexei describing their years of mutual support and companionship as a debt. Not one of them would have got back from Europa without the other three. He realized in that moment that Alexei had left the crew of the SoD for good.
Alexei’s next words cast doubt on that hasty conclusion. “So Skyler’s trying to protect you. And I am trying to protect both of you. But it’s gone on too long! I can’t protect you anymore.”
“According to Skyler, you’re Keelraiser’s number two. Basically, you manage the bunker for him. Is he getting pissy about the oxygen and water? Mining operations not scaling as expected?”
“No, no, that’s going fine. We are refining almost 100 cubic meters of ice ore every day. There’s enough water for everyone. We’ve even built a swimming pool!”
“So what’s the problem?”
Alexei did a big, impatient Russian shrug. ”Are you stupid, or just acting stupid? Well, maybe Skyler hasn’t told you everything. I suppose we can say I’m Keelraiser’s number two, but I have to work with James. He’s an epic pain in my ass. He won’t give up control; keeps tightening the screws, saying we have to do this or that, or we’ll all die. And he still has the loyalty of most people.”
“Is there some reason Keelraiser hasn’t killed him?”
“It would break the pact.”
Jack shook his head blankly.
“Nothing’s written down, but there is a pact. If you work for us, we won’t kill you.”
Us. It was less clear than ever which side Alexei considered himself to be on.
“And that’s the problem, do you get it?” Alexei said. “James goes around mentioning to people, hey, look at Kildare, sitting out there, taking our resources, he’s not working. He’s breaking the pact. And yet he’s alive. What makes him so special?”
“All right, I’ll work,” Jack said.
“This ends in one of two ways. Either they come out here, one day soon, with rocks and offcuts of pipe. You end up dead. Or Keelraiser executes you for breaking the pact. You end up dead.”
Having just said that he would comply with this retarded pact, Jack now felt less inclined to toe the line. “I may end up dead, but I won’t be the only one. That’s a promise.”
“Why are you sitting out here? Why not just come in? Some people think it’s pride. But I know you better than that. You are an idiot but you’re not that kind of idiot.”
“It’s very simple, actually,” Jack said. He stood up and tossed his chair away. He seized Alexei’s ponytail and used it as a handle to heave him to his feet. Alexei yelled in pain. Jack dragged Alexei’s right arm across his shoulders, supporting his weight. Alexei no longer smelled human. He smelled like a rriksti, salty and musky. “You can’t even stand up unassisted in point eight gees,” Jack said. “How will you cope when you get back to Earth? You’ll be in a wheelchair for months.”
“No one is going back to Earth,” Alexei said quietly.
“Wrong,” Jack said. “I am. I don’t know how, I don’t know when, but I’m going back. And when I get there, I’ll able to stand on my own two feet, and fight.”
He dropped Alexei in front of the airlock.
“Now get off my fucking ship.”
He cursed himself when that slipped out. This wasn’t a ship anymore. It was just an exercise wheel. The SoD would never fly again. He didn’t want Alexei to think he was hanging onto pathetic delusions that he could somehow repair the damage.
But Alexei said, “Fuck you. This was my ship, too.”
“Was,” Jack agreed. He reached for the hatch lever.
It didn’t move.
The pressurization indicator no longer worked, but if the hatch wouldn’t open, it meant only one thing: someone was in the chamber.
Shit.
Jack swiftly crossed to the kitchen and reached up to the shelf above the microwave. He took down his blaster. A rriksti energy weapon, the only one still working. He checked the power level and swung around to face Alexei and the airlock.
A laser pulse would hole the tent, if his aim were even a little bit off.
Fuck it. Like he’d said, he wouldn’t be the only one who died.
CHAPTER 15
While Alexei was in the tent, Skyler clambered around the bridge, pushing buttons that no longer did anything, reliving the nightmare days they’d spent in here after the crash. He could still hear Jack snarling at him. Find that broomstick, it’s got to be here somewhere, if you break that wire I’ll fucking kill you, stop breathing so fucking much …
… stay alive, stay alive, stay alive …
Without Jack, Skyler would’ve died in the wreck.
That said, if not for Jack’s obsession with destroying the Lightbringer, the SoD wouldn’t have crashed in the first place.
Skyler shed a hot tear or two for their spaceship, once so graceful and sturdy, now reduced to a spinning-top on the surface of the moon, because Jack still wouldn’t let go.
He pulled himself up into the left seat, the very one in which he had come to after the crash. Good old NASA. They certainly had known how to build crash couches. So shed another tear for NASA, wiped from the face of the earth, along with the rest of the US government.
If only he knew what was really happening down there.
Their daily dose of news, looped on the big screens in the bunker, gave them the illusion of staying in touch with events on Earth. But Skyler knew they were getting a flawed and partial picture. The media remained as adept as ever at pursuing sensational stories at the expense of information. So they covered the war for Europe, for example, in gory detail, while ignoring the fact that the whole mess was happening in the context of an alien invasion. The only time you ever saw a rriksti on screen was when they were helping the wounded. Skyler actually suspected the BBC, ECN, Al-Jazeera, and all the rest of them of being in Ripstiggr’s pocket.
Ripstiggr. The Krijistal asshole who dared to put his arm around Hannah. Those images were seared into Skyler’s brain.
Balancing on the back of the left seat, he could just reach the edge of the hole in the hull where Jack had removed the bridge airlock. He wrapped his fingers around the sheared-off metal, jumped, swung his legs up. Ow shit my fingers … But the smart material of his suit did not tear. One breathless scramble later, he stood on top of the bridge, gazing down at the swiftly spinning hab.
He turned his attention to the remaining instruments and antennas. Jack had removed the comms laser and the radar dish, both of them requisitioned by Keelraiser. But the radio antenna was still here. Skyler fingered the dish. The bridge had not taken any direct impacts in the crash, as the rotating hab had suffered the brunt. The dish wasn’t even dented.
He shone his chest-lamp on the receiver assembly in the middle. The SoD had used a Ka-band comms system. Higher frequency than the Ku-band system that CELL had used. Anyone trying to contact CELL right now would get the radio equivalent of a busy signal, as Keelraiser had dismantled the CELL receiver. The SoD’s Ka-band receiver would not pick up any such calls, even if it was working. But what if Skyler could convert this dish into a Ku-band receiver? Shouldn’t be that difficult …
A flash of light distracted him. He looked up. A single lamp bobbled through the darkness, far below.
Skyler spoke into the radio built into his air supply mouthpiece. “Hey! You down there. Name and number!” This was the way the CELLies spoke to each other. You had to do it too if you didn’t want them to think you were putting on airs because you were special.
“Go fuck yourself, Skyler,” a familiar voice said. “It’s just me.”
*
Jack held his aim on the airlock hatch as it opened.
Two people crawled out.
Skyler … and Giles.
“The gang’s all here,” Jack said, stonily. He did not lower his blaster.
Giles collapsed on his face, just as Alexei had done. He cursed in French. But unlike Alexei, he levered himself onto his feet without help. Those rriksti limbs were good for something.
Skyler picked Alexei up. The three of them stood in a huddle, supporting each other. It suddenly occurred to Jack that with their long hair, skinny physiques, and psychedelic tights, they looked like three-quarters of an ‘80s metal band. He squelched the urge to point this out.
“Gonna shoot us all?” Skyler said.
“I told you I don’t need company,” Alexei said to Giles.
“I heard you. I followed you anyway,” Giles said. “And I find him pointing a blaster at your face. Maybe you don’t need company, but you do need help.”
The words could equally have been meant for Jack.
“You are shit at diplomacy,” Giles went on, still speaking to Alexei. “You probably told him they’ll kill him if he doesn’t cooperate. Bah, that’s true, but that just gives him ideas about going out in a blaze of glory.”
Alexei let out an explosive snort of suppressed laughter.Jack struggled not to smile.
“No, no, Alexei. This is how you do it.” Seeing that his humor was working, Giles put on a campy, wheedling voice. “We all miss you, Jack. Without you there is no one to insult my cooking—actually, I don’t cook anymore, I am a xenolinguist again—or complain about the porn shortage. Actually, there is no porn shortage. These people are filthy perverts. The higher the IQ, the more spicy the shit on their hard drives. And that’s only the women! Even I am shocked.”
“Shocked, I tell you, shocked,” Skyler squeaked.
Giles grinned. “Anyway, Jack, we all miss the smell of your farts in the morning, so quit being a hermit, please. There is work waiting for you to do.” He waggled his eyebrows. “By the way, nice pecs. The weightlifting pays off! Too hot to handle, especially with the blaster.”
Alexei and Skyler were in stitches at this point. Jack could not stop himself from joining in their laughter. He threw his blaster up into the air and caught it by the stock, then pointed it at the floor. “Hard drives full of porn? I can feel my willpower crumbling as we speak.” He grinned. “So what sort of work wants doing, exactly?”
Giles glanced at Alexei. “That’s for him to decide.”
“Unfortunately, it’s not,” Alexei said. “I have to get the Steering Group’s approval for all new assignments. But I can probably get you something at the waterworks or the oxygen refinery.”
Jack accepted the inevitable as gracefully as he could. “That doesn’t sound too bad.” Working outside would allow him to avoid any contact with Keelraiser. “Just as long as it doesn’t involve welding.”
Throughout his career as a spaceship pilot he’d periodically doubled as a welder. In the same way, Alexei had doubled as a plumber. They used to joke about how much more money they would be making if they’d stuck to those humble trades.
Alexei’s face lit up. “Jack, do you know how much plumbing I had to do during the construction phase? After that, sitting at a desk feels like a vacation.”
“On second thoughts, maybe I’ll take the welding job,” Jack grinned.
“Good! Now can we get out of here?” Giles said. “I wasn’t going to say anything, but this place stinks like a toilet.” As they rode back to the bunker in Skyler’s rover, Giles kept talking. “Oh, I also have a nice surprise for you. We’ve reformed Interstellar Fusion. You remember, Skyler and Stepstone’s band.”
“Our folk band,” Skyler said mournfully.
“Ho ho! Now it is a Slayer cover band. I learn to play keyboards. It’s a shame you cannot play an instrument, Jack, or sing for shit.”
“Be very glad I have no intention of trying,” Jack said. The rover bounced over the lunar terrain. He’d left his tent, but he would be coming back to it. He’d set a couple of booby traps at the entrance to the hab, just in case the spin gravity wasn’t enough of a booby trap, so no one could fuck with his stuff in his absence. He could do this. Work for a living. Everyone ought. And who knows, it might lead to some way of getting back to Earth.
CHAPTER 16
When they arrived at the bunker, Jack stared curiously at the ramp, like the entrance to an underground carpark. At the bottom of the ramp there actually was a carpark. Skyler left his rover beside the others. They entered an airlock that Jack recognized from the mountaintop CELL habs, now welded into a wall of aluminum panels.
“Did you break down the old habs for parts?”
“We left two of them up there as decoys,” Alexei said. “Just in case the Lightbringer does throw something at us.”
Scrubber, showers. For the last six months, Jack’s ablutions had consisted of cold-water sponge baths. He was appalled to see how much dirt came off him. He put on the fake jeans and t-shirt they gave him without a word.
“Alexei, what the fuck are you wearing?” He laughed.
Alexei had changed into a sort of robe. Dark gray, with a red border. It looked like a rriksti formal garment. He tugged at the draped fabric in embarrassment. “It’s printed from recycled suizh fiber. Itchy like hell.”
They stood in a kind of changing room outside the showers. Banks of lockers rose to head height. Clangs, clonks, and gurgles echoed from behind the walls: the sounds of life in a tin can.
Footsteps rang on the aluminum floor. “You’re back! Good to see you, man.” James Coetzee strode around the lockers. He, too, wore one of the copycat rriksti robes. One hand was tucked in the crossover of the robe, the other outstretched.
Jack stiffly returned the handshake. “I thought I’d come and see if you needed any help.”
“Sure, sure, there’s always work for willing hands.” In light of what the guys had said about Coetzee’s whispering campaign against Jack, this sounded like gloating. Jack kept his expression bland, remembering how he used to deal with RAF officers and NASA bureaucrats. Don’t talk back. Let them think they’re winning.
Alexei said, “James, I want to put him on the refinery crew. It’ll be a good fit.”
Three other people advanced behind James. All wore robes. Two were CELLies, a man and a woman. The third was Koichi Masuoka. Coetzee introduced them as the balance of the Steering Group. They had not let Jack get even ten paces inside the bunker before intercepting him. They didn’t want him here, regardless of what Alexei had said. Alexei had not mentioned, either, that Koichi was on this Steering Group thing. The Japanese astronaut used to be a friend of Jack’s, but his sabotage attack on the SoD had moved him into the enemies column. Jack autopiloted through the small talk, trying to work out how Koichi had managed to float to the top again.
When he caught a glimpse of a handgun inside the crossover of Koichi’s robe, he knew the answer. Koichi Masuoka had found his way into a role he was well suited for: enforcer.
“So I think we have just the thing for you, Jack,” Coetzee said. “Come on!”
They walked through institutional, metal-walled corridors. The odors of the bunker made Jack nostalgic for the tent he had left less than an hour ago. No earthy smell of growing things. Instead, ozone and machine oil. The sharp tang of oxygen fresh from the ventilator, and the furry redolence of under-washed human bodies. CELLies were everywhere, creeping along like scared mice. They passed through a high-ceilinged mess shaped like a subway tunnel. People sat clumped at the end nearest the screens. Images of dark-skinned soldiers bivouacking in a field yanked Jack’s head around, but Coetzee was already moving on.
Operational control spaces. The smell of hot circuit boards. Acrid stink of overloaded insulation. Jack got the distinct sense that he was not so much getting the grand tour as being paraded around: a head on a pike. People zombied out at computers woke up as they passed, stared gleefully.
Storage rooms, dormitories, the gurgles of wastewater being drawn through rigid pipes.
Jack heard the whapping of mighty fans ahead, and detected a smell he knew all too well.
The smell of shit.
“Behold, the first farm on the moon!” Coetzee said, and pushed through a swing door into blazing light.
Lush green plants rose dozens of feet into the air, supported only by lunar gravity. Potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, every kind of bean—all the calorie-dense stuff that Jack himself grew. However, this garden put his to shame. It was, as Coetzee said, a farm. The plants grew in floor-level troughs of black, pungent soil.
“Oh yeah, you mentioned they were switching to dirt farming,” Jack said to Alexei, who was looking really miserable now, barely meeting his eyes.
They toured linked caverns that must have covered two square kilometers. The more distant caves were just echoing holes lined with aluminum, yet to be filled with earth and plants. Other caves held fish tanks roofed with leafy vegetables, and banks of wire rabbit hutches.
“My bunnies,” Giles said, trailing a seven-fingered hand over the wire. “I cannot bear to eat them. I’ve become a pescetarian!”
“Where are the rriksti?” Jack said, as they returned to the cavern full of fairytale-tall potato plants. It beggared belief that Keelraiser wasn’t hovering, umpiring Coetzee’s power games.
“Over there,” Skyler said, speaking for the first time since they began the tour. He waved at the far side of the farm. “X-ray country.”
“Ah.”
“Wall’s a sandwich of aluminum and stabilized rock dust. But you can go over there if you like. Anyone can. It’s not as if we live in a gulag crossed with a Scientology center, after all.” Skyler jammed his hands in his armpits and gazed up at the towering plants. “This wasn’t my idea,” he said so softly that Jack barely caught it over the echoes and the rustling of the farm.
Coetzee herded them past sunflower-sized spinach plants, out of the light. Dirt splattered the floor and walls of a dog-legged corridor. “This is unacceptable,” Coetzee fretted. “Look at this mess. You can make a big difference starting right here, Jack!”
They came out in another cavern. Tanks the size of rocket boosters lay on their sides, connected by pipes. A worker in shit-splattered mask, coverall, and boots clambered backwards out of the nearest one, lugging a bucket, which he (or maybe she) dumped into a large open vat filled with waste and grit. The smell was unspeakable. Grinding and sloshing noises shook the air. Coetzee raised his voice. “This is one of the most important facilities in the bunker.”
“It certainly is,” Jack said. He knew what he was looking at. An industrial-scale sewage plant. “You use the digested solids to make soil, I suppose? Pump the water to a distiller?”
“Hey, man, you know more about this than I do! That’s why I’d like you to join the waste treatment team here. Your expertise will be invaluable in adding efficiencies to the process.”
Jack laughed out loud. He didn’t have to force it. There were no efficiencies to be added to sewage processing. It was what it was. He understood very well that Coetzee planned to humiliate him by offering him this job—no, forcing him to take this job; there stood Koichi the enforcer, in case there was any doubt about that. But the joke was on Coetzee. Jack had helped to maintain the SoD’s sewage system for four years. He used to unclog the toilets with his bare hands and a gaffer hook. More recently, he’d mixed his own shit with lunar gravel to make soil, using a chair-leg to stir the disgusting paste. He was an old hand at this.
“Delighted to be of help,” he said, enjoying Coetzee’s sour expression. He frowned at Alexei, although he understood that Alexei had done what he had to do to keep them all breathing.
Alexei reddened. He said to Coetzee, “You piece of shit. If it’s so important, why don’t you do it yourself? Maybe you should take a turn in that tank. Head-first. No one would notice the fucking difference.”
“Back off,” Coetzee said calmly, as his people stepped forward to shield him.
Jack tensed, ready to hold Alexei back. The male CELLie was moving in, Koichi sidestepping to get a clear shot. It would be madness to start a fight.
But to Jack’s surprise, Alexei did back off. He contented himself with saying, “Be careful you don’t forget human things like decency, fairness, and respect for others!”
Jack studied his friend, puzzled. In the old days, once Alexei got going, nothing stopped him. He’d had a berserker streak. He had once bragged about killing a man in a bar fight. But now … He’d changed. Softened. Why?
Coetzee smirked, safe amidst his people. “Human things are nice, Alexei, but survival comes first.”
It was a blatant threat, and once again Jack wondered why Keelraiser wasn’t keeping this shit in check.
Well, maybe he didn’t want to. Maybe the whole point was to turn this human community into a copycat rriksti community, complete with violent, dictatorial leadership.
With that gloomy thought in mind, Jack watched the Steering Group leave, sweeping Alexei along with them.
Skyler and Giles stayed behind. “Did you see his hand?” Skyler whispered.
“Whose?”
“Coetzee’s. Look.”
Jack peered after them. His jaw dropped. Coetzee’s left hand, which he’d been hiding inside his robe, was … not there. The wrist ended in a skin cap, with seven little nubs of flesh sprouting out, just like Giles’s arms before his limbs regenerated.
“Just like mine,” Giles said, echoing Jack’s thoughts. “Except he begged for it.”
*
Alexei went home. He dropped onto the bed, after making sure it was clear of babies. “That went badly.”
Nene lay down beside him. She already knew how it had gone. The apartment might be radioproof, but she’d just returned from her shift in the clinic, where she would have heard the whole thing. Keelraiser did not need surveillance cameras (although there were plenty of those scattered around the bunker) when almost every human being had a comms implant, which transmitted everything they said and heard to X-ray country.
“You should have hit him,” she said.
“You think so?”
Alexei was not wearing the headset he used to depend on. Her voice came to him through the comms implant in his left earlobe. Yes, he’d gotten chipped, too. How was he going to turn down the opportunity to talk to his wife without relying on a clunky wearable?
Nene nuzzled her face into his neck. Her bio-antennas combed through his hair like gentle fingers. “If that schleerp wants to be a rriksti, he should start by learning to fight.”
The sadness in her voice came through clearly.
“If I hit him, I’d have broken my hand,” Alexei said wryly. “I almost broke my leg getting into Jack’s hab earlier.”
“Maybe you should get the bone transfusions.”
Cleanmay, the rriksti doctor, had come up with a regime of transfusions to improve what he saw as the inferior spaceworthiness of human skeletons. During their journey here, Cleanmay had not had any of the tech he needed to doctor properly, but now he did. CELL had all the medical devices you’d find at a state-of-the-art hospital on Earth, including the equipment for bone marrow transfusions. The rriksti had hacked, jury-rigged, and reprogrammed the equipment to perform a different type of transfusion, replacing the calcium in human bones with a crystalline structure of fluorine, magnesium and cobalt. The theory was that all that stuff wouldn’t get out into the bloodstream. The first takers, including Coetzee, had shown no signs of dying yet.
“Maybe I should,” Alexei sighed. “And the eye surgery, too. I’d love to see you as you really are.”
“You do see me as I really am,” Nene said. She rolled on top of him, feather-light in this gravity. The soft mound of her groin pressed against him through his stiff, itchy robe. “You’re the only one who ever has.”
“Are the babies asleep?” He assumed so, given the silence.
“Yes, so we’ll have to be quiet.”
He slid his hands inside her shorts, parted the irresistible cleft between her buttocks.
When he came, it felt like he was releasing all the anger and poison and worry into her. She neutralized it.
But afterwards, it all returned—the Earth-like gravity in the rotating hab, the blaster pointing at his face, the betrayal in Jack’s eyes, the reckless and pointless confrontation with Coetzee … “I wonder if you see me as I really am, lapochka.”
“I see my husband.” They were not actually married. Rriksti didn’t marry, and there was no such thing as a priest at CELL, but the idea entranced Nene. “I see the father I always wanted to give my babies. Am I wrong?”
She wasn’t wrong. Alexei reaffirmed the decision he’d made today. He’d do whatever it took to keep her and the babies from harm. They weren’t his children, in the biological sense ... but he had opened his heart to them, because they were Nene’s, and now counted them as his own. He would protect them, even if it meant sacrificing his dignity to Coetzee.
Maybe someday, Jack would understand what it was like to love someone that much.
CHAPTER 17
The sewage plant needed a minimum of three people to tend the machines. For a while there’d only been two. Jack’s arrival brought the crew back to strength. The guy before him had had an accident. Suffocated in the grinder. Bad luck.
Turned out bad luck of that kind was an endemic problem at CELL. Funnily enough it only affected Coetzee’s enemies. Bad luck could get you kicked off your regular team, reassigned to dirty, dangerous duties. The sewage plant was the lowest rung of the ladder. Once you got here, you might be able to work your way back up … or you might wind up face down in the grinder.
So Jack never lowered his guard. He commuted from the rotating hab to the bunker. This privilege had not been taken away from him—he detected Alexei’s hand there, although he couldn’t risk talking to him to find out. The walk gave him a chance to prepare mentally for his shift. He was ostracized by everyone at CELL. He ate alone, off-hours, in the dunce’s corner of the mess. Occasionally Skyler or Giles joined him. Otherwise? Invisible. Living as a hermit had actually been easier than this.
The work itself was nothing. Run the grinder. Feed the precipitated solids to the digester. Add cell cultures. Extract compost. Mix it with powdered regolith to make soil. Repeat. Sometimes he had to go spelunking in the grinder—people dropped things in the loo, or just pretended to, so they could shrug, whoopsies, when he came up empty-handed. The smell never came off his hands, no matter how much he washed with those joke bars of recycled soap. All his food tasted of shit. He dreamed about pushing down floaters, like some nightmare game of Tetris.
Twice a day he rolled a handcart full of ripe soil to the farm, and that was how he ran into Harry Windsor, who was planting out potato seedlings, mounding up the soil and pushing the green sprigs into them, one by one, by hand.
Jack put the brake on the handcart and used a shovel to spread the soil over the virgin rock at the end of the potato patch. He could’ve just picked the handcart up and tipped it all in at once, but he didn’t want to draw attention to his strength.
A shadow fell across him. “That’s a shit job,” Harry said. “Pun very much intended.”
“So’s yours,” Jack said. He noticed that Harry’s little mounds of soil were all immaculately rounded off, like military bed corners. It was a bit heartbreaking.
“I beg to differ. I feel like that chap in The Martian.”
“That movie was all right. Not very realistic.”
“I thought it was too realistic. Mere survival is boring. I wanted derring-do.” Harry pulled a face, making fun of himself.
“Well, an alien invasion qualifies, I think.”
A pair of rriksti crossed the cavern, lugging armfuls of suizh stems. Enough of the salvaged alien seeds had sprouted to fill several caverns with Imfi vegetation. While the humans had switched over to dirt farming to stretch their precious stocks of nitrogen, the rriksti stuck to their own robust hydroponics system, based on tanks inhabited by genetically engineered bugs. Autorips were meant to keep the bugs in their place. They kept getting out, regardless. A swarm of them followed the rriksti like a moving smear of tar on the floor.
Jack knew these two rriksti from the SoD. Well, he knew all of them, of course. He even knew the name of the young female: Bliggrene. She and her friend came over and gestured awkwardly. Jack took his headset out of the pocket of his coverall and put it on to hear Bliggrene asking if they could borrow the handcart. They wanted it to take their suizh stems to the manufacturing plant, where the tough fibers would be broken down for printer feedstock.
“Of course,” Jack said. “Go ahead.”
Harry watched them go. “They’re so terribly nice.”
Jack stood, stretching his back. Harry clearly still couldn’t get his head around the idea that the rriksti were nice people and murderous brutes, all in the same skin. “Have you forgotten—”
He veered away in mid-sentence and brought his boot down on the swarm of bugs. They would devour the organic constituents of the soil, leaving only lunar gravel, if given a chance. He ground his boot into the moon-rock floor, crushing them.
“How they mobbed Gavin and literally beat him to death?” Harry said. “No, I haven’t forgotten that.”
“Good.”
“Still glad you stopped us from bashing them?”
“I’ve thought about it often,” Jack said truthfully, “and I still think it’s impossible to stop an alien invasion with a potato gun.”
Harry’s mouth twitched. “Colin and Pete told me you punched Keelraiser’s lights out at the chipping ceremony.”
“They were there?” Eight months had passed, but that night remained crystal clear in Jack’s memory. He revisited it often, deliberately keeping it fresh. On the other hand, he didn’t remember details such as faces in the crowd. The room might as well have been empty except for him and Keelraiser.
“Oh yes. They wanted to make sure the chips were OK before I got one.”
“And are they OK?”
“You haven’t got one?”
“I’m old-fashioned.” Jack returned his headset to his pocket. He’d put it back on if any rriksti needed to speak to him.
“You hear their voices in your head,” Harry said. “You can’t turn it off. Some people say it’s like music. Personally, it drives me barmy. But apparently this is how they live. No privacy.”
“Right.”
“Anyway, Colin and Pete were quite impressed by the way you went for him.”
Jack shrugged. “It was a stupid thing to do.” He squatted and swirled his palms over his new patch of soil.
“You can’t stop an alien invasion with your fists?”
“Touché.” Jack smiled. “Something like that.”
Harry squatted down on the other side of the soil patch. “But perhaps they can still be stopped,” he said quietly.
Jack raised his eyebrows. Harry was flirting with a demotion to the sewage plant. Jack decided to head him off for his own good. “Did you see the news yesterday?”
“About Paris? Yeah.”
The North African Alliance had occupied Paris in a triumph reminiscent of 1941, complete with French politicians fleeing across the Channel. Giles had sought Jack out in the sewage plant to rave about the fate of his country. The news had shown rriksti ‘peacekeepers’ protecting frightened Parisians from the NAA troops, who saw their invasion as long-delayed justice.
“More and more people are being trained to think of the rriksti as good guys who’re trying to prevent the carnage, not inciting it,” Jack said. “There’s only one thing that could stop them at this point. The same thing as before. Drop a nuke on the Lightbringer.”
This, he thought, would end the conversation. Harry knew as well as anyone that Jack had been there, tried that, failed.
Harry said quietly, “We’ve still got our nuclear deterrent.”
Jack opened his mouth to say—yes, four subs parked at Clyde; good luck getting to those—and then shut it again, remembering that this grubby young man was actually the heir to the throne. If anyone could get to those Vanguards and authorize the launch of their nuclear warheads, he could.
However, that still left the not-so-small problem of getting to Earth.
Harry drew with his finger in the soil between them. A cylinder with four little blobs at the back. And two capital letters. ME.
The Moon Express.
Yes, it was still there, sitting neglected on the far side of Shackleton Crater. And yes, it could reach LEO. But that wouldn’t do them very much good, to say nothing of the fact that it would be near-impossible to launch it in the first place without getting caught. Jack had already worn himself out gaming the angles. He could see how to pull off the launch—with a lot of luck. The problem he could not solve was how to get from LEO to Earth. He’d be stuck at Sky Station, at best, and then what? Then nothing. He wouldn’t mind dying; he would mind dying for a gesture only marginally less futile than shooting at aliens with a potato gun.
Harry drew an arrow to his crude sketch of the ME and wrote: PILOT = J.K.
Well, of course, neither the prince nor his ex-SAS mates would be able to fly the ME. They needed Jack for that, so if he said no, they’d have to give up the whole daft idea.
“I’d stick to farming, Harry, if I were you. You’ll do more good that way.”
Jack loped back along the freezing-cold passage to the sewage plant. Since the rriksti had taken his handcart, he filled buckets with soil and carried them back to the farm.
In the potato patch, Harry was destroying his sketch of the ME, mounding the soil into tiny immaculate hills.
CHAPTER 18
After his shift, Jack went swimming. He did this only once or twice a week, as it meant a trip into X-ray country. He half-dreaded, half-anticipated bumping into Keelraiser one of these days, but apparently Keelraiser didn’t like swimming, because Jack had never seen him at the pool.
This pool was bigger and better than anything they’d had in the bunker on Europa. Briny water slopped over the sides of a pit dug out of the lunar rock and edged with floating mats of mushrooms. Scavenger bugs lived on the bottom, cleaning the water, which was needed, because the pool seemed to be in use 24 hours a day.
The twilight zone of Imf was a world of rivers, ditches, and streams. All the time the rriksti had been passengers on the SoD, and the Lightbringer before that, they’d been pining for a dip.
Now they crowded the pool around the clock, splashing, frolicking, and swimming underwater, avoiding each other in a balletic display of radio-location.
When Jack got there, it was the middle of the ‘night’ back in CELL. But the rriksti had no truck with 24-hour ‘days.’ Pearly limbs sliced the water, and bio-antennas swirled like anemones beneath the surface. Jack stripped naked and slid in, letting the cool water carry away the filth and grime that clung to his body. If the rriksti didn’t like him getting in dirty, they could say so. But he reckoned it didn’t matter. After all, the pool already had mushrooms in it.
He floated on his back, watching the water reflections ripple on the shiny smart material of the ceiling. The movements of the rriksti made tall waves that splashed over his face. He imagined he was floating in the sea off a Welsh beach. Any minute now, Meeks would swim out and grab his legs. He would go under, and when he came up, he would never have gone to Europa, he would not be in a swimming pool filled with aliens, and these self-same aliens would not be conquering Earth.
Someone did grab his legs. Spluttering, Jack came up face to face with one of his coworkers from the sewage plant.
The only other human who dared to swim in the rriksti pool.
Linda Moskowitz.
“Didn’t see you, Linda.”
“I’ve been waiting for you.” Her teeth flashed in the dim, opalescent light. “I’m all pruney. Let’s get out.”
They pulled t-shirts and undershorts onto wet bodies. As Linda wrung out her hair, more rriksti entered the cave. They wore gray underpants, standard rriksti swimming costume. One of them was Keelraiser.
Jack whipped his gaze away. With his back to Keelraiser, he gathered up his coverall and boots. “Come on.”
“Well, well,” Linda said as they slipped barefoot out of the cave. “That’s the first time I’ve ever seen Lord K there. I thought it would be beneath his dignity to splash around with the peons.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe he was looking for you.”
“Hope not.” Jack changed the subject. “I found out what was wrong with the screw in the grinder after you knocked off. There was a bridge stuck in it.”
“A bridge?”
“As in false teeth.”
“Oh my God.”
“I wonder how anyone drops a bridge into the bog.”
“The bog. You talk funny.”
“That’s why all the women throw themselves at me.”
“I know how you’d drop a bridge in the toilet. You’d be doing something very active in the toilet cubicle. You know, those are pretty much the only places without cameras.”
“I know another place,” Jack said.
They hurried along an artery corridor towards the ‘sandwich wall’ that separated X-ray country from CELL. Rriksti glanced curiously at them as Jack tugged Linda down a dead-end turning. Down this way, unused caves stored junk and parts from the dismantled habs. All this stuff was kept on the rriksti side of the wall, of course.
The briny smell and indirect reddish light faded into stale darkness. Jack switched on the headlamp he used inside the sewage grinder. Linda’s fingers curled hot and damp in his other hand.
He flashed the headlamp around their favorite cave, the one half-filled with spare fiberglass insulation blankets. “All clear.”
Linda darted ahead of him into the cave. She bellyflopped on the pile of plastic-coated blankets and dug her iPad out from among them. Christ knows how she had managed to hang onto it all this time. She kept it charged with a portable charger Jack had stolen for her. The screen filled the cave with TV-colored light. She clicked open the memo app and typed, All we need to do is get Siftik out of the way.
Siftik was the rriksti who worked with them at the sewage plant.
“No,” Jack said. “We still aren’t going to blow up the bunker.”
Her lips squirmed with the desire to answer him out loud, but she had a chip. She typed, It would be easy. The plumbing for the rriksti side is separate from ours. Just push methane through the pipes—
“The gas version of what you and Grigory did on the SoD. Don’t you ever have any new ideas?”
Don’t need new ideas when we got good ones. We raise the concentration of methane to 10%-ish. Set up a spark generator in this very cave. We could kill them all!
“I said forget it. Any plan that involves killing hundreds of people isn’t a plan I’m interested in.”
Hundreds of SQUIDS, not people.
“They are people,” Jack sighed. “Look, I hate them too, but you can’t say they’re not people. In fact that’s why it’s possible to hate them. You can’t hate a … an asteroid, can you? Or a solar flare, or moonquake, or a charging rhinoceros. Only people.”
Linda deleted what she’d typed, tossed the iPad down. “You’re still under their spell,” she said.
“Am not.”
“You don’t really know how to hate.” She crawled towards him across the pile of blankets. “That’s because you don’t really know how to love.”
Now she was performing for an audience, for any rriksti that might overhear, and might happen to mention their ‘secret’ meeting to Coetzee, who had daily meetings with Keelraiser in his office. Coetzee’s decision to put both Jack and Linda, two of the most notorious troublemakers at CELL, on the sewage plant crew, deserved to go down in the annals of classic social engineering screw-ups. Jack could guess what he’d been thinking: Jack and Linda were deadly enemies. Having to work side by side would be irritating and humiliating for both of them. It had been, at first.
But the trouble with manipulating people like variables in an equation is that they aren’t.
“Where are you going?” Jack said. She was crawling closer, breasts bouncing freely under her t-shirt. Lunar gravity did amazing things for the female form.
She shrugged, making her breasts wobble even more enticingly, and slid her legs off the pile of blankets. “You’re no fun. I’m out of here.”
Jack pressed his hands down on her shoulders. “Did I say you could go?”
“What are you gonna do? Stop me?”
“Yes, actually.” Jack got hold of her t-shirt and yanked it over her head. She didn’t try very hard—make that, at all—to prevent him. This was a game, after all.
Jack got his hands around the breasts he’d wanted to touch ever since they were in the same NASA intake in 2004. He was fondling them when she slid out from under his hands and made a break for the door, pale legs flashing in the iPad light. Jack lunged after her, caught her, tossed her onto the pile of blankets. She rebounded and sank into the squeaky plastic folds. He crawled on top of her and pinned her. He remembered Keelraiser staring at him across the swimming pool. Linda writhed as if trying to get away, which magically resulted in the disappearance of her undershorts. Jack thrust two fingers between her legs, and that was when she really started to fight. She bucked under him. Her fists landed on his chest and shoulders. Her nails, ragged from stirring soil in the sewage plant, drew blood. The iPad switched itself off, taking away the beautiful visuals of her body. The darkness heightened the sensations of warmth and pain and the smell of human juices.
Jack had slipped up with women in the past—that was how he thought of it. Getting a bit over-enthusiastic. He was a nice guy, so he tried to hold back, but space rubbed niceness away like sandpaper rubbing away paint. He could still hear Hannah Ginsburg saying in shock, “You assaulted me!” That lived among his most shameful memories. But then there’d come the time when he got a bit rough with Linda—the first day she followed him to the pool. He’d turned on her in genuine anger, pinned her against a wall and told her to leave him the fuck alone.
And she’d made a game of it.
It didn’t feel quite right. Sex shouldn’t be a game. But it certainly was an eye-opener.
Trying to trap her still-damp limbs, Jack forgot everything except the desire to overpower her and screw her brains out.
All at once she grabbed his hips and pulled him in. He pounded away as violently as he needed to, holding nothing back, and it was absolutely terrific until, as Linda climaxed, she cried out, “Stephen, oh God, Stephen …”
Spent, they lay side by side on their backs.
“That was amazing,” Jack said. “Well, apart from the bit where you called me by your husband’s name. Thank you, anyway.” He dropped a kiss on her shoulder. Now that it was over, he felt tender towards her.
But Linda did not want his tenderness. She curled up with her back to him and sobbed silently. Jack rose and put his clothes on.
What could he say to make her feel better about a husband and son left on Earth, who might be dead, who she was unlikely to ever see again? The most he could do was take her mind off it for a little while. And even then—Stephen, oh God, Stephen.
He wandered to the other end of the cave, giving her space. Loneliness settled on him like the unbearable lightness of lunar gravity. Strangely enough, these were the only times he ever felt lonely.
He flashed his headlamp over the junk at the end of the cave. Looked like things had been rearranged since he was last here. Someone else had been in here. Half of CELL probably used these caves for secret assignations.
Something’s missing, said his pattern memory. What?
That J-shaped boom. It was leaning against the wall, now it’s on the floor.
And what was attached to its end, that isn’t there now?
That’s right. The antenna for the Ku-band radio dish, which now lay on the rim of Shackleton Crater, unused. That 12-foot dish wasn’t getting through any airlock. But it was useless without the antenna … and the receiver assembly. Which used to be right over there, and bingo, that’s missing too. So’s the cable.
Does someone think they can fix the dish?
Good luck with that.
There were always people up on the crater rim, working at the refinery and the waterworks, making the risky trip into the crater to tend the automated mining machinery. They’d notice anyone messing with the dish, and report it to Coetzee, who’d report it to Keelraiser.
Anyway, how would you set up and track the dish without its mount? That was still right here.
“I’m covered with bruises,” Linda said.
“What? Oh Christ! I’m sorry.”
His headlamp found her pulling her shorts on. She squinted in the light, then winked. Shook her head. She was talking to their unseen audience of rriksti. “Just look at this!” she said, holding out her arms.
Jesus, she was right. Oval shadows painted her wrists. His thumbprints.
“God, Linda, I’m sorry.”
“You don’t know your own strength,” she said, stepping into her coverall. She pulled his ear close to her mouth and breathed, “That’s so fucking hot.”
Jack pulled on his own coverall. His arms and shoulders stung where her nails had dug in. “It takes two,” he offered.
Before they left the cave, she fired up the iPad one more time for a ritual look at old pictures of her kid. Jack watched her face as her finger strayed across the images of a chubby toddler, who became a boy, who played baseball and kept turtles in an aquarium, who won prizes for his science projects. Linda smiled down at the photographs, and it was the saddest smile Jack had ever seen.
He remembered the crazy idea Harry Windsor had sketched in the soil of the potato patch.
It was still a crazy idea, because there was still no way to get back to Earth from LEO. But if that obstacle could somehow be overcome, Jack knew one person who’d go for it.
Counting himself, two.
CHAPTER 19
The van smelled like a farmyard. Not that Piper Taft had ever been to a farm, but she knew these smells, feathers and leaf-litter and poop, because Boston Common had turned into a farmer’s market. Not the old kind of farmer’s market that abounded with artisanal cheeses, green smoothies, and handmade jewelry. The new kind of farmer’s market, where they sold live chickens and killed them in front of your eyes if you were too squeamish. Piper used to shoot smack into her own arm but she couldn’t watch a chicken’s head getting chopped off. That was how she’d met Derek. He drove in from Wellesley twice a week with his van full of chickens and crates of eggs and crusty sheaves of onions and dirt-caked turnips.
Now Piper perched on the passenger seat of the van, with her brother’s scribbled instructions in her hand.
“It’s too dangerous to take the Mass Pike,” Derek said. “We’ll go through Brookline.”
“OK.”
Cate and Geoff, in the back, offered further suggestions as to the best route. They all used to travel with the Earth Party. So had Piper, until she lost her nerve and came home to Boston, just in time for the rolling blackouts and the looting. Might’ve been the aliens started that, might not. There were no aliens in Boston now, anyway. And Piper had no time to obsess over the news from Europe. She was out and about every day, scavenging food, bartering for meds, keeping her father and brother fed and alive. She sewed simple, hard-wearing clothes and sold them at the foot of the Boston Massacre memorial statue. She was happier than she’d ever been in her life.
Together, she and her friends were building a better world in the rubble of the corrupt old United States.
They drove past the gates of the Charles River Country Club. Piper remembered going to dances there as a teenager, but she kept quiet about that. Now, African-American teens lounged in an SUV parked across the gate, weapons out of sight but definitely there.
“They’re planting the golf course,” Derek said. “We need another big farm in the metro area.”
He started to complain about the pesticides used on golf courses, and he was still complaining as they drove across the Charles, so he did not see the thing floating in the river. Piper rolled down the window and craned backwards.
Autumn foliage hid the water. But she was quite sure that had been a corpse.
“Well, this is it,” Derek said, slowing as they reached the old General Dynamics building. “Hope they got what you’re looking for.”
The low-slung red-brick building went on for blocks. General Dynamics was long gone. This was now the headquarters of NBC Boston. But NBC had gone off the air when the aliens came, and the building looked deserted, like everything else on Boylston Road. Holes gaped in its glassed-in prow.
“Go into the parking lot,” Piper said.
Not many cars. All the useful vehicles had already been stolen. Piper’s heart sank.
“Oh! There!” She pointed.
You’re looking for an uplink truck, said Trek’s instructions. Big dish on top. NOT a C-band dish, those are 3m across. Ku-band dishes are smaller.
Derek parked behind the uplink truck. Fallen leaves clogged the windshield. No one wanted this ungainly vehicle. With Earth’s satellites out of commission, it was useless. But not to Trek.
Piper was about to suggest simply driving it away when she saw that two tires were flat.
Cate and Geoff climbed out with the toolbox. Piper said, “I need the dish. Can we just, like, remove it?”
“Give it a try,” said Geoff. He climbed up on the roof of the truck. Cate scuffled away to the nearest of the dividers where trees stood in robotic lines. She leaned against a trunk and lit a cigarette, watching the building, watching the road.
Piper jimmied the back doors of the truck. She’d learned a few useful things during the years she’d lost to smack.
Unfortunately, she hadn’t learnt the difference between a mixer and an audio board and what Trek wanted, which was the receiver that went with the dish. She stared in dismay at walls crammed with electronics.
Fine, just take everything.
She yanked out connectors, loosened screws, carried heavy equipment out to the van. Called up to the guys, “Don’t forget the coax cable,” whatever that was—
—and Cate shouted, “Got company, go go go!”
Geoff and Derek jumped off the truck, leaving the dish tilting, almost free.
“No, we need that!” Piper cried. She ran at the truck, sneakers gripping the windshield, up to the roof, kicked the dish and shoved it. Clang! The dish stung her hands. A dent appeared in it. She was twenty-nine years old, she’d gone to RISD, she could make cool-looking clothes out of curtains and sheets, she was building a better world, and someone was shooting at her, in a parking lot in Needham. Ping! Another bullet skipped off the truck roof.
Piper stumbled forward, her weight on the dish. Metal shrieked. The dish came free and crashed down to the asphalt, Piper on top of it. She heaved at it until Geoff dashed back and helped her lift it into the van.
Cate sprinted towards them.
Bulky figures ran after her, t-shirts flapping. One stopped. Gun held sideways. Blam!
Cate fell into the van, weeping. Derek gunned the engine. Piper frantically tugged at Cate’s clothes, looking for the bullet wound. There wasn’t one. Cate was just crying in fright. She and Geoff and Derek were gentle people, farmer’s market people, walkers, origami-folders, what the Earth Party used to be.
All the way back to Boston, Derek ranted about the Nazis who’d taken over the Party. Piper nodded along mechanically. She guessed Derek hadn’t seen what she saw. Behind the people running across the parking lot, a tall figure standing and watching. As tall as Kobe Bryant, as thin as Edward Scissorhands. Holding a golf umbrella, of all things, over its head. And maybe that had been one of those made-in-Mexico silicone wigs blowing around in the shadow of the umbrella ... but there had been no wind.
They’re here.
Her hands throbbed, scraped bloody in her fall from the uplink truck.
They’re here.
Derek parked outside the Taft townhouse on Beacon Hill. Piper’s father opened the door. Piper launched herself at him like a little kid and hugged him like she’d never let go.
“Thanks for this, guys,” Avigdor Taft said as Geoff and Derek lugged the dish through the house. “How was the drive?” Piper cringed at her father’s awkwardness. It sounded as if he were talking to Derek, who was black, like a handyman.
Derek put the dish down in the junkyard that used to be the back garden. He turned to Avigdor, smiling tautly. They had agreed not to mention the shooting at the NBC building. “The drive was fine. But I have to pay for my gas. You know how much that costs these days?”
“Well, sure,” Avigdor said, glancing at Piper. “We can certainly compensate you—”
“No,” Derek said. “No, no.” He gazed at the French windows they’d just come out through. Piper became conscious again of how nice the house was, how full—still—of appliances and electronics that could be bartered, and furniture that could be burnt for heat. “We’ll just compensate ourselves,” Derek said, “if you don’t mind.”
Avigdor followed them through the house, nervously asking them not to take this or that. Piper stayed in the garden. Betrayal reverberated through her as if she were a struck gong. She had thought Derek, Cate, and Geoff were good people. She had let them into her house as friends.
Trek, indifferent to the pillage in progress, came out and frowned at the Ku dish. “It’s dented.”
“Sorry about that,” Piper said. “Want me to go back and get another one?” She was never, ever going back to Needham.
“No, this is fine. I can fix it. You got the receiver, too. That’s good. Now I just need to mount it and install the tracking motors, finetune the reception and polarization …”
“I saw one of them.”
“No kidding,” Trek coughed. “They’ve taken over Hanscom AFB. Apparently they’ve set up a hospital.”
He would have got this from the internet. Amazingly, there still was internet, even though there was no cell phone service, and the power kept going out. Modern data centers were tougher than the grid.
“What kind of hospital?” Piper said keenly. “Who for?”
Trek, as skeletal as an alien himself, spat phlegm onto the ground. “Who cares? I’d rather die.”
This was not a figure of speech. Trek had cystic fibrosis. And after today, Piper would not have a lot of stuff left to barter for his prednisone. Antibiotics already could not be had anywhere in Boston. They’d have no treatment options if he got a lung infection.
He grinned at her, dismissing his illness. “The moon is overhead for twelve hours a day.”
Piper looked up at the blue November sky. She found it hard to believe their elder brother, Skyler, was alive up there, no matter what the internet said. Much less that Trek could actually phone the moon with a satellite dish stolen off the back of an NBC truck.
“Figure tomorrow to get this set up. Day after tomorrow we could be talking to him.”
“What if you call him and the aliens pick up?”
“Then I tell them to gargle my balls.”
“Trekker,” Piper chided. But his confidence lifted her spirits.
To hell with Derek. She’d keep on keepin’ on. Tote her fabric samples down to the Common, take people’s measurements, make new friends. And try not to think about Nazis squatting in the NBC building, or the alien standing under an umbrella, like a football coach at the edge of the field.
CHAPTER 20
The Knucklebiter, the third of the Lightbringer’s shuttles, touched down with an unearthly roar on Oak Grove Drive. Same road Hannah used to take to work.
She flew down the steps even before the hydrazine byproducts had a chance to clear from the air. She gazed up with watering eyes at the buildings of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Everything looked the same for a minute. Then she saw broken windows. Banners hanging out. ONE GALAXY UNDER YSTYGGR. “God, someone’s done their research.” Smoke rose from behind the trees.
The cool, dry California air caressed her skin, delightful after the humidity of the Congo, where the second rainy season of the year was now drowning Lightbringer City in mud. Hannah was always getting requests to speak in various places around the world, but she usually turned them down. However, she was not about to turn down a trip to JPL.
The California government had laid on a parade and a fealty ceremony. Hannah limply took possession of the symbolic keys to California. The real keys to California were in a tequila bar a little way north of here, where she used to pound back cocktails to forget her stress … and end up forgetting her obligations. Forgetting her promises to visit her sister. Forgetting what really mattered.
It tormented her to know she was just a couple of hours’ drive from Pacific Heights. She told herself there was no way Bethany’s family was still there. I mean, look at this place. The buildings that once housed cutting-edge aerospace research had been looted and abandoned. The president of California, sweating through his dress uniform, asserted that research continued. When Ripstiggr asked to inspect it, they were taken to see a few people struggling to get the on-site generators working. The rriksti laughed with their hair. It always made them happy to see proof of human technical incompetence. Hannah wanted to tell them that right here, on this very campus, she’d calculated the burns that carried the Juno probe to Europa, but she kept quiet. She was doing a lot of keeping quiet these days.
“Hannah,” Ripstiggr said. She knew by the fact he called her Hannah, instead of Shiplord, he was going to offer her something to cheer her up. It would be as symbolic and meaningless as the electroplated keys that Joker was toting for her.
“We’d like to see where you used to work.”
That wasn’t a mood-lifter, it was lemon juice on an open cut. Yet she succumbed to the morbid temptation. “This was the mission control room.”
Computers gone. Faint smell of urine. On the wall, someone had spraypainted Imf, as it was commonly represented in graffiti: a banded sphere, white, green, black.
“I thought you built things,” Ripstiggr said, looking around the empty room.
“Not here.”
“Didn’t this facility build and pack satellites?”
“Oh. Yeah. That was over in the sat assembly building. Not my job.”
Ripstiggr turned to the president. “Hey,” he boomed. His new field radio covered one ear like a black crab, and projected his voice at earsplitting pitch. “We want to see the sat assembly building. Understand? Sat. Assembly. Building.”
That’s why they’d come to JPL. Satellite parts. The rriksti had been seeding low earth orbit with cubesats of their own design. They could build a lot of stuff in the new factories in Africa, but why build what you can steal? And, bonus, whatever the rriksti took, no one else could use.
Bored and depressed, Hannah begged off the tour of the sat assembly building. Ripstiggr and the other rriksti went with the president, ridiculous in their large conical sunhats, El Presidente equally ridiculous in his caudillo costume with the gold braid and the unearned medals. El Prez had been California’s most powerful drug trafficker. Still was, Hannah expected. He hardly spoke English. In the hands of such as these lay the fate of her country, of her world.
Can’t we all just get along?
Si, si. Se puede.
When Hannah conceived her policy of making friends, she had failed to foresee just who would take them up on it. Opportunistic Russian generals. Narcotraficantes with imperial delusions. The government of Pakistan. Neo-Nazis.
She pushed the if-onlys out of her mind. She was only one woman. She couldn’t save Earth. But maybe, just maybe, she could save her family.
She looked around at her personal bodyguards, Tralp, Sivine, and Flifya. It would be impossible to give them the slip. Screw it. She’d lean on them not to squeal to Ripstiggr. “I want ground transport. Get me a car.”
“Why, Shiplord?”
“Because I say so!” She had to get away before Ripstiggr finished pillaging the sat assembly building. He knew she had lived near here, but not that her sister had lived in the same city, close enough that she could have visited every weekend—if only, if only …
They commandeered a Hummer from the president’s entourage and loaded it up with leftover gifts: medical packs, mundane stuff such as water filters, and a few of the shoulder-mounted blasters that the rriksti passed out like candy to their friends. These nasty weapons, although manufactured to lower specifications than the rrikstis’ own blasters, could be recharged simply by plugging them into an outlet, if you could find an outlet that worked. Maybe Bethany and David could barter them for stuff they really needed.
She glanced nervously out of the Hummer’s rear windshield as they bumped away from the Knucklebiter. Adoring crowds of locals surged around the shuttle, held back by coolie-hatted rriksti sentries. The Hummer progressed at walking pace.
“Gexlidda’s team will have a hell of a time getting back,” Tralp said in Rristigul to the others.
“What?” Hannah said. Gexlidda was the sergeant in charge of the three hands of infantry who’d accompanied them. “Where’d he go?”
“Not sure, Shiplord. Reconnaissance?”
Whoomp. Fire and smoke blossomed from the crowd behind them. A pressure wave rocked the Hummer on its wheels.
Tralp spreadeagled himself on top of Hannah, protecting her with his body. Flifya accelerated into the crowd. “Hold on, Shiplord.” The Hummer rolled over things on the ground with soft, sickening jolts.
“You’re running over people!” Hannah screamed, as the collisions jolted her against her seatbelt.
“We’ll get you clear.”
“Go back!”
“Shiplord, a bomb just went off.”
“Go BACK!”
Flifya U-turned. A bloated mushroom of smoke obscured the Knucklebiter. People fled, blood streaming down their faces.
Hannah pushed Tralp off her. Bodies littered the street. Those were the ones they’d run over. Closer to the Knucklebiter, body parts lay here and there. Blood pooled over scorch marks where the explosion had gone off.
“That was big,” Sivine said. “They’re usually not so effective.”
“A suicide bomber?” Hannah said, swallowing nausea.
The Americans holding out in the Rockies had lately been sending suicide bombers against the allies of Imf. That brought home how lopsided the fight was. The carnage in the street gave Hannah a frisson of horrified awe. How could you ever defeat a people willing to commit suicide for their cause? We used to have the same problem with Islamic terrorists, before they graduated to commanding tactical squads of Nigerian mercenaries from the comfort of their rriksti-provided rear headquarters. Now it was Americans using the only weapons that remained to them. Their own bodies. Walking IEDs.
“Suicide is disgusting,” Flifya said, parking under the tail of the shuttle. They all jumped out and started pulling the medical packs out of the Hummer’s way-back. “We do not even have a word for it.”
“Seriously?”
“Even animals don’t murder themselves. It’s a crime against your own species.” Flifya’s mouth sealed tight in disapproval. “No rriksti would ever dream of suicide.”
She had thought she knew the rriksti, but she hadn’t known that. Of course, Flifya wouldn’t have spoken so freely if he knew about Hannah’s own failed suicidal attempt to crash the Lightbringer. That remained a secret between her and Ripstiggr.
“Let’s go.” She filled her arms with bivinzh, the clingfilm-like material that the rriksti used as bandages. “We don’t have enough medipacks, so: triage.”
She lost herself in the urgent work of stabilizing the wounded. The medical packs contained supplies of artificial blood, manufactured by the Lightbringer’s technicians to human specs, and selective clotting agents to prevent hemorrhage. Stop the bleeding, wrap the wound in bivinzh, and shoot the affected area with tissue growth accelerator. This was the closest thing to a silver bullet in the medical universe. It stimulated the growth of pluripotent stem cells, and told them when to stop. Human medical research had been on the trail of this mechanism, but never got near it before the Lightbringer ended medical research on Earth forever.
Pick up body parts, clean them off, attach them to their owners. If you reattach them quickly enough, the tissue growth accelerator will do the rest. Hannah gloried in cheating the suicide bomber of the results he/she would have wanted. The bomber himself or herself, of course, was now just a red smear on the asphalt, on other people, on Hannah’s clothes.
Ripstiggr came running down the street. Joker and the others, behind him, shot superfluous pulses of energy at human stragglers. It was when the rriksti ran flat out that they looked most alien. Like galloping horses, they transitioned into a completely different gait. They pushed off with both feet at the same time, in grasshopper-like bounds.
Ripstiggr skidded through the blood and snatched Hannah into his arms. She sagged against him, suddenly speechless with delayed shock. He half-carried her up the steps into the shuttle.
“Where is that schleerp Gexlidda?” he yelled at the infantry.
“On his way back, Commander.”
“Tell him to hurry up. We’re leaving as soon as he gets back. Start the engine checks, and make sure none of these animals get near the shuttle.”
Hannah flopped into her seat in the passenger cabin. Her thoughts circled around the wounded humans. Only then did she remember where she’d been going before the bomb went off. Her eyes filled with tears. Oh dammit, dammit. Her only chance, gone.
The interior of the Knucklebiter had been refitted so it resembled Air Force One or something. Puffy leather sofas faced each other across low tables. There was also a wet bar. Ripstiggr got two glasses.
“Wine glasses?” Hannah could have used something stronger right now. A dry martini. Krak.
Ripstiggr placed a bottle of 2011 Beringer Private Reserve on the table and uncorked it.
“Oh my God.” Hannah almost smiled. “That used to be, like, my favorite chardonnay ever.”
“I told the president to find some for us.”
Ripstiggr poured the wine. He looked out the window. Hannah followed his gaze. El Presidente was being made to inspect the remains of the suicide bomber and his/her victims. He shook his head violently: no, no, I had nothing to do with this.
“I’m going to have him replaced,” Ripstiggr said.
“Awww, don’t kill him,” Hannah said. “Poor little guy. He looks so pathetic in that uniform. And he did find this wine for us.” She clinked her glass against Ripstiggr’s. As she swallowed the first mouthful, the horror of the suicide bombing receded. Just add alcohol and any situation becomes normal.
“Someone has to pay for this,” Ripstiggr said. “They almost got you.”
“But they didn’t.” Flushed with the wine and the joy of being alive, she pulled him down on the sofa. They kissed, mouths cold and wet. She snuggled into the safety of his enfolding arms.
It used to be that they’d just fuck. Now they kissed and cuddled, as well. Hannah knew this was a step in the wrong direction. But how could she deny herself the one nice thing in her life?
Vehicles came and went outside. The engines of the Knucklebiter spun up. Clunks and thunks reverberated through the shuttle. The rriksti were loading their loot into the cargo hold. Hannah broke away from Ripstiggr’s embrace, glanced out the window.
“Rocket boosters?” Five infantry struggled each eight-foot cylinder off the back of a JPL grounds maintenance truck. Those things were heavy. They were used for boosting satellites into orbit. But the Lightbringer launched its satellites from the shuttles. You didn’t need that much power to reach LEO when the payload started out in the stratosphere. “What do we need those for?”
“Not sure yet. They might come in handy,” Ripstiggr said, kissing her neck.
She wriggled around and prodded his chest with a finger tipped with Congolese nail art. “I can tell when you’re holding out on me.”
Instead of answering, he sat up straight, took her hands. “Hannah.”
“Uh oh.”
“We didn’t really come here for satellite parts.”
Fear constricted her throat. A terrible foreboding oppressed her.
“I got you something nice.”
Hannah banged the back of her head against the sofa. He couldn’t do this to her. Couldn’t steal her last hope.
“What did I do?” Ripstiggr said.
She shook her head, hoping she was wrong about what he’d done.
Maybe he’d got her a whole case of Moët & Chandon.
Or, God knows, a puppy.
But he hadn’t.
CHAPTER 21
The aft ladder rattled. David Ziegler’s head poked into the passenger cabin, followed by the rest of him.
At the sight of her brother-in-law, Hannah forgot to be upset about how he’d got here. She shrieked in joy, ran to him and hugged him. He winced, but hugged her right back. She let him go as Bethany climbed up the ladder. The sisters embraced long and tight. Bethany had changed. Her plump figure had deflated into bony angles. The expensively highlighted and straightened waves had grown out into graying frizz. But when Hannah held her close, she still felt and smelled like Bee-Bee, despite the overtones of smoke and gasoline.
Hot tears squeezed from Hannah’s shut eyes. “Bee-Bee, oh God, I’m so sorry. Everything. So sorry.”
“I missed you so much,” Bethany sobbed, as if she had never told Hannah to get out of her house, get help, you’re a shitty human being.
“Mom, have some freaking self-respect,” said a girl’s voice. Hannah opened her eyes and saw Isabel standing at the top of the ladder.
“Oh my God, Izzy, you’re so tall!”
“What do you expect? You’ve been away for five years,” Isabel said.
Hannah heard the flat, hostile tone, but moved towards her niece anyway. She dropped her arms when Isabel backed away, rejecting the offered hug.
Isabel had not only grown tall, she’d grown gorgeous. Dark curly hair, the same color as Hannah’s, cascaded over swimmer’s shoulders. She wore a ripped UCLA sweatshirt and jeans. With a scornful glance, she took in the deluxe passenger cabin, the rriksti, and Hannah herself, in the Chanel skirt suit she’d worn especially to show her family that she was no longer the schlubby old Hannah; she was Shiplord, and she was OK. If they came with her to the DRC, they could all be OK together.
That’s what she had wanted to offer them. An end to all their tsuris. But it had to be their choice. If they didn’t want to come, so be it. That’s why she hadn’t told Ripstiggr what she was planning, and that’s why Isabel’s next words wounded her deeply. “So, are you kidnapping us?”
“Izzy, shut the hell up,” David said. He stared fearfully at the rriksti like a kindergartener on his first day of school.
Hannah turned on Ripstiggr, taking her family’s side. “You had no right to just snatch them!”
“I thought you’d be pleased,” Ripstiggr said.
“Did you ask them if they wanted to come?” She knew he hadn’t. “What if they’d rather stay here?” She turned to Bethany. “If you’d rather stay, we’ll give you stuff. Just tell me what you need—”
“We want to come,” Bethany said instantly. “Please don’t leave us in this hellhole!”
She was not talking to Hannah. She was talking to Ripstiggr. Awkwardly, she dropped to her knees and crawled towards him. She kissed his dirty, bloodstained boots. She must have seen that on television.
Hannah felt her sister’s humiliation as if it were her own. She dragged Bethany to her feet. “You don’t have to do that.”
“Oh, we’re exceptions, huh?” Isabel said. She dropped onto one of the sofas and swung her long, ripped-denim legs onto the table. ”You look gross, by the way, Aunt Hannah.”
“Well, excuse me, but my personal shoppers are aliens,” Hannah snapped. “I told them to get me something nice, and they stole the entire contents of the Chanel store on the Champs des Elysees. Sorry it doesn’t meet with your approval.”
“I didn’t mean that,” Isabel said. “I mean you’re covered with blood. Yuck.”
Hannah looked down at herself. It was true, of course. She did not look like a celebrity. She looked like Lady freaking Macbeth.
“I was trying to help people,” she said.
The Knucklebiter started to taxi. “Nate?” David said. “Where’s Nate?”
“Got him right here,” Sergeant Gexlidda boomed. He came up the ladder with a small boy hanging limply on his back.
The first thing Hannah thought was: Uh oh, that kid’s sick.
The second thing was: Oh my God, that’s Nathan.
She had last seen her nephew as a toddler. Now he was a skinny seven-year-old, hair sticking to his flushed cheeks, completely out of it. Gexlidda laid him on one of the sofas. His feet hung off the end. Toes poked out of holes in too-small sneakers.
“He’s got a fever,” Bethany babbled. “He got shot a while back–”
“Shot!” Hannah said.
“It was the Feds,” Isabel said. “They tried to catch us, to use us as bargaining chips against you.”
“And he just never got completely better,” Bethany went on. “It might be tetanus from the wound or I don’t even know. One of these multiply antibiotic-resistant things. God alone knows. It’s not like we’ve got any antibiotics to give him. I’m so scared. Can you help him? We’ve heard a lot about rriksti medicine …”
“Not to worry,” Ripstiggr said. He knelt and laid one hand on Nathan’s head. Joker and Gexlidda knelt beside him, touching the boy’s stomach and back.
Bethany clutched Hannah’s arm. “What are they doing?” she begged over the noise of the engines.
None of them would have seen extroversion before. The rriksti did not allow that to be shown on TV. “They’re healing him,” Hannah said. “Don’t worry, it’s completely safe.” Lie of the century. Extroversion was the two-edged gift that had opened her up to the rriksti like a living technical manual. She helplessly watched them work their magic on her nephew, until the shuttle turned the corner onto Oak Grove Drive, and she had to direct the others to strap in for takeoff.
She’d been dreaming of this day for so long. The hope of reuniting with Bethany, David, Isabel, and Nathan had given her the strength to make it home from Europa.
Now Ripstiggr had taken that away from her.
Tribute for the Shiplord.
A set of gold-plated keys that opened nothing …
… and the living, breathing keys to her heart.
I got you something nice, he had said, presenting her family to her like a basket of puppies.
The shuttle accelerated, engines screaming. Hannah rescued the Beringer Private Reserve as it began to slide off the table. The glasses, too. Each one still held an inch of wine. She got rid of it by drinking it, and felt Isabel’s eyes on her.
“Still on the sauce, Aunt Hannah?”
“You’d need a drink, too, if you’d just rescued a dozen victims of a suicide bombing,” Hannah said.
Isabel laughed a very grown-up laugh. “When we got back to our house, there were Mexicans living in it. We chased them out. Dad and I used to take turns going hunting with the assault rifle. You know what hunting means these days? It means finding people who have food, and taking it away from them. I’ve killed people, Aunt Hannah. Not all of them were trying to kill me.”
Hannah tipped her head back and closed her eyes. “I am not going to have a pissing contest with you about who’s the most bad-ass. You didn’t want to come. I get that. Well, we’re stopping in Germany on the way home. You can get off there, if you want.”
They spent 24 hours parked on an autobahn behind the North African Alliance front lines.
Isabel did not get off.
Ripstiggr took Gexlidda and a hand of infantry, vanished along the autobahn, and returned driving a truck-mounted Soviet-era ICBM.
“Whoa boy, that’s a TOPOL!” David said. “Where’d you find that, Ripstiggr?” After one good meal he had reverted to being the bouncy, outgoing David that Hannah remembered. Now he was trying to bond with Ripstiggr, bro to bro.
“The Russians moved it to the old Soviet base at Chenmitz,” Ripstiggr boomed. “They intended to use it to attack the Lightbringer. But now the Russians are our friends.”
In the distance, unnaturally dark and low clouds hung over the flat landscape of Saxony. The air being drawn into the shuttle carried the stinging scent of gunpowder, and the chemical smell of explosives. Hannah spotted billows of flame, like yellow-red Jiffy-pop mushrooms of light, fading to black and rising in the shockwave-roiled air. Hard to tell how close the front was. Joker said the NAA were a couple of days from taking Leipzig.
The rriksti found a crane, detached the TOPOL from its truck, and maneuvered it into the cargo hold of the Skycutter. They ended up moving the rocket boosters from JPL into the passenger cabin to make room for it.
“This is so cool!” Nathan said, fully recovered and chomping on candy given him by a Libyan colonel. He sat astride one of the rocket boosters and pretended to drive it.
That night Hannah fucked Ripstiggr and Joker in the bedroom of her house in Lightbringer City. Bach on the stereo. Wet wind rattling the blinds. Bethany and her family safely asleep, out of earshot. A dose of extroversion, schnapps looted from the base at Chenmitz, and then it was game on. Long gone were the days when Hannah had recoiled from doing more than one guy at a time. Ironically, she’d come to appreciate the value of having someone else in bed as an emotional buffer against Ripstiggr. With Joker in the mix, there was no risk of getting kissy and cuddly. Ripstiggr may have wanted her to himself, but he couldn’t sulk about it, as he was the one who’d encouraged her to fuck the crew in the first place.
She took Joker first, while Ripstiggr fingered her ass. Two holes filled and that only left the one in her heart. Bouncing deliriously in time to Joker’s thrusts, she thought not of her family but of the TOPOL. Phallic, monstrously oversized. And the rocket boosters—smaller versions of the same thing. If only she could cram them inside herself and make them disappear.
Joker came and rolled away. He lay back on the enormous platform bed, playing with his detumescing penis. He didn’t give a damn that Hannah was using him. He was just a pussy hound. The devilish weekend gleam in his eyes said that soon he’d be ready to go again.
She reached out for Ripstiggr. She was so wet now that his cock slid all the way in on his first thrust. She climaxed explosively. And that was when she thought of Skyler.
It came out of the blue. She hadn’t thought of him in months. Why now?
The TOPOL. The rocket boosters.
Skyler.
What was the connection?
The moon.
A TOPOL.
Two rocket boosters.
Oh, no.
She forced herself to keep quiet until Ripstiggr finished and withdrew. She got up, put on the fluffy robe they’d brought her from Paris, and crossed wobbly-legged to the kitchen, where she fixed herself a cup of coffee, just for something to do with her hands.
Her house was a bigger, nicer version of the ones she’d been building by the hundred for their African friends. Aerogel walls that the rriksti, metaphorically rolling their eyes, had tinted on her orders to look like teak. Three open, airy rooms. Bedroom and kitchen in one. She peeked out into the living-room. Tralp stood guard in front of the door of her office, which was now the guest room. He saluted. Her family were safe inside.
She poured her coffee out of the French press into a Spode porcelain cup (more goodies from that Parisian spree) and sat cross-legged beside the drowsy Ripstiggr.
“Have we heard from Iristigut lately?”
Ripstiggr’s eyes sprang open. “I talked to him a couple of days ago. Why?”
“I was just thinking,” said the cunning Hannah. “Now we’ve got the cubesats in orbit, we don’t need his telescope observations anymore.”
“True,” Ripstiggr agreed. “But there’s a lot of good stuff coming out of the lunar mines. This planet is very short on useful minerals. We’ve got enough to eat but we need more for manufacturing. That Chinese delegation’s coming next week. Something might come of that. In the meantime, we still need Iristigut’s cargoes.”
The rriksti on the moon had been shipping REE minerals to Earth by firing containers to Sky Station, where the shuttles collected them.
“And Iristigut hasn’t done anything treacherous lately.” She sipped her coffee, unsure whether to be reassured.
“What can he do?” Ripstiggr laughed with his hair. “Africa—ours. Europe—we’re getting there. Asia—they’re falling over each other for our business. South America—who needs it? When we wipe out the diehards in the northern latitudes, the whole planet will be ours.”
“Until we crash the economy by flooding the gold market,” Hannah muttered.
“There’s always something rarer to use as currency,” Ripstiggr said comfortably. “And once again, that’s why we need Iristigut’s cargoes. In the long term, we’ll restore travel links with the moon and build arcologies on the equator. I don’t see him outliving his usefulness before then.”
Hannah felt slightly reassured. That, surely, was a long way off. She drank her strong, rich Ethiopian coffee, paid for with Congolese gold, which had been paid for with smart clingfilm and aerogel. Gusts of rain blew against the blinds. Frogs croaked outside. She was OK.
CHAPTER 22
Skyler sat on the bridge of the SoD while the rotating hab roared below him, gradually shaking itself to pieces. He figured it would last another few months.
“Hello?” he said. “Hello, hello?”
He had patched the Ku-band antenna and receiver from the junk room into the SoD’s dish. Pointed it at Earth. Fiddled with the tracking and polarization until—hallelujah! one day he heard a voice.
“Squids stay the fuck out of Denver. It is KNOWN that you are Zionist agents.”
Okayyyy.
At least the dish worked, so Skyler had kept scanning the bandwidth whenever he could get away from his duties, whenever North America was facing the moon. The good thing about working at the thorium reactor was that he was already outside the bunker. He didn’t have to log extra surface walks into the moronic new suit tracking system.
“Hello, Earth, hello …”
Maybe today he’d get the guy from Toronto, or the preppers in Oregon. Surprisingly, the number of random people in North America with handcrafted Ku dishes was not zero. And they all talked to each other on the internet. Before the coming of the Lightbringer, their raucous forums had specialized in conspiracy theories; now they had become clearing-houses for news about the alien invasion. Skyler awaited today’s war stories, real and fake, with eagerness and dread.
“Skyler?”
Stupidly, he looked around, his headlamp bouncing off the wreckage of the bridge. He was alone. In hard vacuum. The voice had come from Earth. But it was a voice he knew. The voice of a ghost …
“Skyler, you there?”
It couldn’t be.
“This is Trek.”
It was.
Skyler started to cry. “Here,” he gasped, embarrassed by his own reaction.
“Holy fuck, Skyler.” Cough, cough. “Dude, Earth is fucked. You can’t even get weed anymore.”
“Skyler, this is Piper. When are you coming home?”
“Skyler, this is Dad. Say something so we know you’re OK.”
“I’m OK,” Skyler said, grinning away his tears. “I’m OK, but what about you guys? How’s everything there?”
They told him.
*
After twenty minutes Skyler lost the signal. It happened. He turned off the radio, clambered down the keel tube, and descended to the floor of the spinning hab. He staggered back to Jack’s tent and plunged into the airlock. Jack raised his eyebrows. He was in the middle of doing deadlifts. He kept up his weightlifting, in addition to his shifts at the sewage plant, but he had let his garden die. The odor of decomposing leaves and rotten potatoes tainted the cold air in the tent.
Skyler crashed full-length on Jack’s sleeping-bag and doffed his suit to the neck. He rubbed at the slick of tears that had spread over his face beneath the smart material.
“Something the matter?” The barbell went up and down, up and down. 50 KG on each end.
“I was just talking to my brother.”
“What?”
“I have a younger brother. Trek. He has cystic fibrosis.”
“What’s that?”
“A genetic disease. Basically, one hundred percent of sufferers die by age 40. Trek’s twenty-eight.”
“You don’t have it, do you?”
“No, I’m just a carrier. That’s why I put salt on everything.”
“I did used to wonder about the salt thing. Who puts salt on carrots? Sorry to hear about your brother … but you can’t have been talking to him, Skyler. We’re on the moon.”
“I fixed the radio.”
Pause. “So it was you that took those parts.”
“Um. Yeah. I’ve been coming here off and on. Usually when you’re on shift. I talk to ham radio operators on Earth. Today I talked to my brother.”
Jack set the barbell down. “Did he say anything about the situation in the UK?”
Of course, Jack would be worried about his own family. Skyler felt like a heel. “Sorry, no. I’ll ask next time.”
“That would be great,” Jack said. He added sarcastically, “Thanks for telling me you’d got the radio working.”
“I wasn’t sure who else you’d tell,” Skyler said. He’d heard rumors about Jack and Linda Moskowitz.
“I’d have liked to … oh, never mind.” Jack towelled his face with a dirty t-shirt.
“You’ve been a total dick lately,” Skyler pursued.
“More than usual, you mean?” Jack smiled crookedly. “So what did your brother say? Let’s have it.” He pulled the t-shirt on and gazed at Skyler with tense expectancy.
“The Krijistal are in Boston. They waited until shortages, power cuts, and random violence had wrecked the infrastructure. Then they appeared like saviors. They’re using medical care to control the population. It’s stupidly brilliant. You know, there’s nothing people won’t do to save the lives of their loved ones.” Skyler felt tears coming on again. He stared up at the taut plastic ceiling.
“So they’re offering life-saving treatments to the sick … but your brother, who’s very sick, won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole?” Jack’s voice was gentler now.
“Yeah, how’d you know?”
“If he’s your brother, he’s got to be a bit like you.”
“Ha. I guess.” Skyler smiled distantly, thinking of Trek’s courage, hearing the wheezy breathing on the other end of the radio.
“So what else did he say?”
Skyler sighed. “Can I have that water, after all?”
Jack handed him his own mug. Skyler wet his throat. “It still disappoints me that you can’t tell the difference between billion-year-old water from comets, and other people’s recycled piss.”
Jack was waiting.
“OK. Trek has 20/20 eyesight. His lung function is for shit, but his eyes are really good. He said that while we were gone he used to drive up the coast and look for Europa. He would cover Jupiter with a piece of card, and then he could see all the Galilean moons with his—his naked eye ... Sorry.”
Jeepers creepers. Thirty-three years old and crying like a baby at the thought of Trek standing on Singing Beach, searching the blackness for Europa. He ducked his head, scared that Jack would think him a wimp. The fear came like a reflex… and suddenly vanished, a paper monster falling apart. Fuck it. Jack already knew his wimpish inner self. He had nothing to hide. He smiled effortfully, wiping the tears away with his fingers.
“It’s OK,” Jack said. “It’s either laugh or cry, and sometimes you can’t laugh to save your life, can you? It’s fine.”
“Right. So Trek’s got good eyes, and a good pair of field binoculars. He watches the ISS and Sky Station from our garden. The light pollution in Boston is way down from what it used to be … Well, he’s seen the Lightbringer’s shuttles docking with our space stations.”
“Huh,” Jack breathed.
“When he first saw that, he got his internet buddies on the case. They recruited other people, you know how it goes. At this point, they’ve got eyes on the space stations pretty much round the globe. They’ve been able to track the shuttle flights, launch frequency, how long they spend at each station, etcetera.”
“Go on.”
“The Krijistal seem to be focusing on Sky Station. Thirty-eight flights have docked with it since Trek started watching in June.”
“That’s a lot.”
“Yeah. What do you figure they’re doing?”
“Repairing shit. Fixing the HERFed systems. Plussing up the water and reactant tanks. The question is, for what?”
“That is indeed the question. Six days ago, a shuttle docked with the station … and it never left. Jack, it’s still up there.”
CHAPTER 23
Jack pushed his handcart through the farm, casually glancing from side to side. At last he spotted Harry Windsor.
He parked the handcart in a spot near Harry, where the tree-sized runner bean plants would shield him from the overhead cameras. He began to spread soil around their roots.
Harry wandered over, cupping something in his hands. “How’s the gulag treating you?”
“Been worse,” Jack said. “Got a minute?” Harry was moving behind him. Before Jack could turn around, Harry twitched his coverall away from his neck. Something repulsively cool and wriggly slithered down his back. “Fuck!” Jack yelled.
Harry backed away, laughing. Jack tore his coverall open, ripped his t-shirt off, and danced. Several large, fat worms fell to the floor. They had been raised from egg cell cultures brought from Earth years ago. “Very amusing, Your Highness,” Jack said sternly, and then started sniggering himself at the thought of how his frenzied strip-tease must have looked.
“Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I think I’ll go and eat worms,” Harry sang as he returned the worms to the runner bean patch. “Big fat juicy ones, long thin skinny ones, see how they wriggle and squirm.” The old playground rhyme had sickening overtones, as worms had recently been tabled as a possible protein source.
Jack squatted down beside him. “I’ll be brief. Don’t respond, don’t say a word. The rriksti are at Sky Station. If we can make it that far, our chances of hijacking one of their shuttles are decent, in my opinion. That’s how we get back to Earth. We’ll need to kill a few rriksti but I think we can manage that.”
Harry leaned closer to hear over the noise of fans and irrigation pumps.
“Your mates work outside, don’t they? Tell them I’ll meet them at the thorium reactor for a talk. Tonight, if possible. It’s got to happen soon. There is no time to spare.”
The Krijistal might abandon Sky Station as inexplicably as they’d occupied it. The whole thing would be a gamble. But success depended on moving fast, in the sense that the longer they messed around getting their ducks in line, the likelier Coetzee would find them out.
*
At fifty-one, Colin McFarlane was too old to be patrolling across a lunar mountainside. Darkness hid the parched swells of rock on the anti-sunwards side of Shackleton Crater. His headlamp illuminated a small yellow oval ahead of him. His breath whispered in the silence. He’d come to hate the moon more than he ever hated the South American jungle, or the sandy wadis of the ME, or any of the other places where he’d operated during his 20-year career with the SAS. The moon was even worse than Wales—as he often said to Harry, Prince of.
His oxygen regulator hissed. His suit fan whirred, sucking the stale air out of his helmet. Push off, glide, land, push off. No need to use those thigh muscles, you great wally. Don’t think about the sub-zero cold waiting outside your suit, don’t think about the vacuum that’ll turn your lungs inside-out if you get a suit breach. Don’t think about Mary and the boys, back in Aberdeen. Think about the objective.
Ahead, a hillock stood in sunlight. Solar panels, raised on stalks like gleaming black flowers, tracked the sun. The darkness had crept to the bases of their masts, but would not reach the panels themselves until late evening, several days from now.
A bright orange Starliner climbed the hillock into the sunlight. That was Pete. He examined the ground, hand-signaled, pointed. Colin changed course and caught up with him at the cable leading away from the solar installation.
They loped into the darkness, following the cable through the darkness. It led them to the Moon Express.
They flashed their helmet lamps along the length of the 47-meter cylinder. Micro-impacts had scarred its white paint and CELL logo. A coating of moon dust underlined the fact that the craft had been sitting here neglected for almost a year.
“If this thing still flies, I’m a donkey’s uncle,” Pete said, breaking their silence.
“Only one way to find out,” Colin said. He took the temperature gun from his belt. He had a reason to have it on him. Used it for servicing the mining robots, down in the crater. He scuffled to the rear of the Moon Express, located the external valve cap of the old LOX tank. It had been partitioned to hold fuel for the titchy little engines attached to the old SRB mounts.
Pete boosted him up. he aimed the temperature gun’s sensor at the fuel tank.
“Score!”
“Minus two hundred and ten.”
“Means there’s cryogenic propellant in there.” Colin chuckled, his spirits improving now that the first hurdle had been cleared. “They left the fuel in the tank.”
“That won’t do us much good if they took the keys out of the ignition.”
“It’s a fucking spaceship, it hasn’t got keys.”
Jack Kildare had given them a list of things to check. They climbed the steps to the door halfway along the Moon Express. It opened smoothly. They slid into the darkness of the intertank space between the fuel tank and the forward tank, which had once held liquid hydrogen. Now it held cargo restraints and room for thirty people to travel in ‘comfort’ approximating standard class on the Caledonian Sleeper. From that flying tomb Colin had emerged onto the moon, a year and a half ago—and wished, as soon as his boots touched the lunar rock, that he could turn around and go back. You’ve got to go, Dad! his boys had said. It’s the moon! In their eyes, he would’ve been mad to say no. But in reality, he’d been mad to come.
The only silver lining was that the heir to the throne remained alive. The moon, ironically, may have saved the House of Windsor.
And if those nuclear subs were still berthed at Clyde, the House of Windsor might yet save Earth.
But first they had to get the hell off the moon, so Colin and Pete climbed the ladder around the inside of the Moon Express to the pilot’s cabin, which sat on top of the craft like a howdah on an elephant’s back. The airlock opened without a delay. No pressurization. The dashboard consoles lit up at the swipe of touch-sensitive gloves. The trickle of power from the solar installation kept fragile machinery ticking over in the Goldilocks zone, not too hot, not too cold.
Pete read out the items from Kildare’s checklist, written in the margins of a page torn from a Spirit of Destiny technical manual. Colin searched for buttons, squinted at indicators. How did anyone ever fly this thing? It was like being inside one of his eldest son’s video games. “OK … OK.” Item after item checked out.
“Engine ignition system. Runs on TEB, that’s triethylborane. Check TEB level.”
TEB, TEB. Colin directed his headlamp onto the indicator. “Oh, no.”
“What?”
“They did take the fucking keys out of the fucking ignition. There’s no TE-bloody-B. Not a drop. And according to Kildare, the engines won’t start without it.” Colin felt like smashing the console with his fist. “It was a nice idea, but this bird’s not going anywhere.”
*
“Oh yes it is,” Jack said. “Leave it to me. I’ll just need some of that powdered phosphorus from the KREEP mine, the stuff we use for fertilizer.”
As he explained how he’d rig a replacement ignition system, brain cells stultified by the sewage plant sprang back into SoD problem-solving mode. Maybe this was what he was born to do. The essence of spaceflight, after all, is not flying into space, but staying alive once you’re out there.
Colin and Pete nodded, tentatively accepting that he could make it work. They had the single worst job at CELL: they were on the team that descended into Shackleton Crater when the lousy rotten robot tow truck couldn’t attach its tow cable to one of the lousy rotten mining robots. That was how they’d pulled off their trip to the Moon Express. Down into the crater, cross the crater floor to the other side. Dead reckoning in temperatures as low as -250°. Jack did not think he could have done it. “Took bloody hours to fix that damn robot,” was all Colin had said about their trek, winking.
They’d met on the tyre-tracked route back from the waterworks, a prearranged ‘chance’ encounter, out of the bunker’s wireless range. The comms chips had roughly the same range as rriksti bio-antennas—2 klicks at best. The rrikstis’ unwillingness to give the humans better bio-radio than they had themselves created several holes in the CELL surveillance system; this was one of them.
Colin and Pete walked back to the bunker, stumbling with tiredness. Jack turned off to the smaller roofed crater that housed the thorium reactor.
“Powdered phosphorus,” he said to Skyler, “aluminum powder. Water. We’ll need a LOX cylinder out of a suit for a pressure source.”
“I’m not walking across freaking Shackleton Crater,” Skyler said, propped against the side of the thorium reactor. This was his realm. Wearing his rriksti spacesuit, he looked at home amid the tangle of pipes and heat exchangers. A haze of silver-black dust hung in the vacuum, twinkling to the vibrations of the machinery. “We’ll have to take my rover; go the long way round.”
“All right,” Jack said. “I told the lads tomorrow night.”
“Tomorrow night?”
“What’s the point of waiting?”
Skyler hesitated. “What are we going to tell Alexei and Giles?”
“Nothing!” The question surprised Jack. His own response surprised him more. But after a moment’s reflection, he knew it was the right one. “Alexei’s had the bone tranfusions. Right? Giles is getting them soon.”
Skyler nodded.
“I don’t like it either, but we can’t expect them to come with us. And it’ll be safer for them if they don’t know anything.” Jack got up to leave. “See if you can raise your brother on the radio tonight. Ask him if that shuttle’s still there. It doesn’t matter particularly if it’s not. We’ll just wait for the next one to come along.”
He’d warned Skyler not to say anything to Alexei and Giles, but he himself planned to share their plans with someone else: Linda. He told himself that it wasn’t the same thing. Alexei and Giles had reconciled themselves to the Imfi conquest. Linda remained implacably opposed to it. And she, too, could pilot a spaceship. She would be a useful addition to the team.
Really, though, it was those pictures of her son that haunted him. He would be doing something good if he could reunite that boy with his mother. A check mark on the right side of his ledger.
The grimness of the sewage plant barely registered as he arrived for what would be his last shift. His mind seethed with plans for the engine ignition hack. He nodded to Siftik, the gloomy rriksti who shared the first half of his shift this week.
Checking the interior atmospheric sensor readouts, he discovered a methane buildup in Digester One, which served the rriksti side of the wall. “Better flame that off,” he murmured. Siftik could have done it, but it was no mystery why he hadn’t. Who wants to wade inside a tank of decomposing sewage, breathing oxygen through a mask because the O2 is so low you’d asphyxiate without it, with filth slopping over the tops of your boots, to adjust the outflow valve on the pipe leading to the flame arrestor?
Not a rriksti, obviously.
When he was done, Jack sat down to work his shit-caked waders off. He put his headset on. “What did you do on Imf, Siftik?”
“I was a crop geneticist,” Siftik said, and proceeded to give the longest speech Jack had ever heard from him. “Our traditional farming methods were not adequate to support the population of the Darkside. By genetically engineering crops from the twilight zone, we doubled and tripled yields, year after year. Our arcologies became entirely self-sufficient. One arcology typically had a population of a million or so; some were as large as five hundred million. Their inhabitants never saw the sky, let alone the sun.”
Jack thought this over. “Sounds like a shit life.”
“It was.”
And now the rriksti were planning to replicate their shitty, crop-engineering, arcology-building civilization on Earth. Jack silently nursed the thought of those nuclear submarines at Clyde.
He was running lunar gravel through the grinder, ensuring the particles got rounded down small enough to pass through the bodies of the worms, preparing to mix a new batch of soil he would never spread on the fields, when Koichi Masuoka strode into the sewage plant.
Koichi had lately taken to wearing a paramilitary uniform of his own design. Baggy orange trousers and high boots gave the impression that he was roleplaying some private fantasy—the Imfi conquest meets the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Jack always smiled when he saw it, although he suspected Koichi was having psychological issues.
Koichi did not smile. “There he is,” he said to Linda, who had entered after him.
It wasn’t time for Linda’s shift yet. Jack stood up, confused and alarmed. Had they discovered his theft of aluminum powder? Or the LOX canister? Surely one of the other guys hadn’t squealed? Why was Linda here? He had not said a word to her yet—
“You thought you could get away with it, didn’t you?” Linda raged at him. “You think you’re invulnerable or something, don’t you, Jack Kildare? Wro-ong!”
“What’s happened?” Jack said.
Koichi gestured to the enforcers who had come in behind him. Two aimed their shotguns at Jack. The other two grabbed his arms. Handcuffs snapped onto his wrists.
“Jack Kildare, CELL citizen number 936,” Koichi said, “you are under arrest for assault and rape.”
CHAPTER 24
“I didn’t rape her,” Jack said. “Isn’t that obvious?”
He realized that he sounded just like every sleazebag ever accused of rape. This transcended any nightmare scenario he’d imagined. In some ways, it would have been less awful to be accused of murder.
He stood in James Coetzee’s office in the operations section, still in handcuffs. Coetzee sat behind his desk. He had bags under his eyes. But the eyes themselves glowed with malicious pleasure. He had finally achieved his goal of humiliating Jack.
“Do you also deny assaulting her?”
“Of course I deny it!”
“That’s interesting,” Coetzee said. “This office keeps full comms records. We have evidence of the assault on file.”
Jack hadn’t known that CELL had access to the comms chip audio logs. He had thought only Keelraiser did. Regardless, there couldn’t be any evidence of an assault, because there hadn’t been an assault, unless they were talking about that time he pushed Linda against a wall three months ago, in which case why wait until now …
Linda’s voice issued from one of the computers on Coetzee’s desk. “No. Stop. Please,” she sobbed. “Ow. That hurts!”
Jack had heard those very words in real life a few days ago, in the darkness of the junk room, while Linda pretended to push his fingers away from her swollen, aroused clitoris.
“Well?” Coetzee said.
“It was a game,” Jack said weakly.
“Some game.” Coetzee spun a monitor around. It displayed a close-up of Linda’s wrists, with the purple imprints of Jack’s thumbs on them. There were other pictures, too. Jack had not been aware of leaving bruises on Linda’s buttocks and thighs, but there they were in technicolor. He felt like the lowest piece of filth that ever pretended to be a man.
“That’s enough to convict you of assault,” Coetzee said. “As for the rape charge, Ms. Moskowitz consented to an examination when she reported the rape, so we’ve got DNA proof there. Do you still want to deny the charges?”
“Yes, I do deny them,” Jack muttered. He could not bring himself to admit to something he hadn’t done … but he had done it … but it hadn’t been assault and rape. She’d wanted it as much as he did, and afterwards they’d looked at pictures of her son together.
“Are you stupid as well?” Coetzee said. “We’ll destroy you with the evidence at trial.”
Jack raised his head. “Is there actually a functioning justice system in this place?”
“Of course there is. You’ll have the chance to defend yourself in front of a jury of your peers.”
Jack had thought everything got settled by reference to the ever-growing tome of rules and guidelines, or else by the enforcers, Krijistal style. But evidently the Steering Group considered it important to make a show of Earth-style justice when it came to serious offenses.
The Steering Group …
“If I’m going to have a trial, I’d like an advocate. You do allow for that? I’d like to talk to Alexei.”
Koichi hit Jack in the mouth. “You mean Sir Ivanov,” he said.
*
Alexei swept into the office in his new robe, a sort of toga over a split skirt, patterned in vivid reds and blues that brought Russia to mind. Unlike the rest of the Steering Group, who would never look like anything other than nerds who’d strayed onto the path of neo-feudalism, Alexei actually did look like a sir. Jack could not meet his gaze.
After a brief, snarling exchange with Coetzee, Alexei signed something and beckoned Jack to follow him. Two of Koichi’s enforcers brought up the rear. The enforcers stopped at the sandwich wall. Alexei strode on, through the autorip that led into X-ray country.
“You’re in my custody,” he said over his shoulder to Jack. “I’m taking you to my house. If you screw me over, I’ll kill you.”
“House?”
“Apartment. Whatever.”
Jack had not been aware that Alexei lived in X-ray country. “How are you handling the rads?” he said, as they walked through the steamy dimness. Rriksti brushed past, their bare feet quietly scuffing on the metal floor. It was so silent here. No sound but the gurgling of pipes, the whirr of fans, and the background hum of machinery … including an industrial-scale X-ray generator.
“My wife is a fifth-level lay cleric, idiot,” Alexei said. Jack bit back another question: wife? When had that happened? “She’s at work at the moment, thank fuck. Here we are.”
Jack had never ventured into the residential areas of X-ray country before. The corridor had gutters on either side, musical with running water. Vines grew up the walls, supported by brackets in the shape of Imfi animals. Little bridges led to front doors, many of which stood open. Rriksti peeped out, wide-eyed. Jack smelt microwaved bugs and suizh toast. He remembered the village in the SoD’s main hab. This was what it had been trying to be.
He followed Alexei into a large, messy room. Alexei closed the door and turned up the lighting to the level of the weak incandescent bulbs that had been common thirty years ago in both England and Russia, an ambiance comfortable for both men.
“Radio-proof,” he said, indicating the sea-green walls. He flopped on a settee littered with stained white cloths. “So?”
“It would be easier to explain if I wasn’t handcuffed.” Although this made no logical sense, it was true.
“Christ, Jack. I don’t know what I should do,” Alexei said, but he dug a master key out of a drawer and opened the handcuffs. “You’re lucky I have this. I try to stay one step behind them. Staying ahead of them is impossible. They always think of something worse. So what happened?”
Jack rubbed his wrists with fingers that had turned into numb logs of flesh. “It was consensual. That’s all I can say. It was not assault, it was not rape. She’s trying to fuck me over.”
“What about the evidence? Is that fake?”
“No, it’s not fake!” Jack shouted.
Alexei grimaced in disgust. It was fleeting, but Jack caught it.
“You of all people should understand! You and Kate used to go at it like wild animals—”
“No, I haven’t forgotten that! Don’t you understand? I’m disgusted with myself when I remember that! I’m trying to get it right this time.”
“Was it that bad with Kate?” Jack said, momentarily forgetting his own troubles.
“Obviously it was. She died.”
“Rest in peace.”
“And I never treated her the way she deserved. I have a theory how these things happen, but it’s no excuse.”
“Go on. What’s your theory?”
“Space is boring.”
Jack waited. “That’s it?”
“Yes, that’s it. Space is boring. So we make our own entertainment. For better or for worse.”
Jack thought that in that case, his entire adult life had been boring. Then he thought of Keelraiser. Then he pushed Keelraiser out of his mind. “Right,” he said. “That makes sense. Sort of.”
“So is that what happened?”
“What happened is I slept with her—”
“Jack.”
“What?”
“You are a complete, fucking, idiot.” Alexei emphasized each word by punching his fist into his palm. “Linda? You slept with Linda Moskowitz?”
Jack sat down, as heavily as you could on the moon, on a wrong-shaped rriksti chair. “What can I say? Working at the sewage plant is boring.”
Alexei shook his head despairingly. “It could be worse.”
“Oh, I know.”
“You could be stabbed.”
Jack froze. Then he ventured, “Stabbed? Over in a second. Crucifixion takes hours! It’s a slow, horrible death!”
“But at least it gets you out in the open air,” Alexei said. He laughed his huge honking laugh. “I always liked Monty Python better than Spaceballs.”
“Same here.”
“I am watching all the movies with Nene.”
“Does she get it?”
“She thinks the Holy Grail is very funny. It reminds her of the Temple on Imf.” Alexei’s smile faded. He leaned forward. “Listen, Jack. If we’re going to get you out of this, there is one question that needs to be answered. Why did Linda Moskowitz sleep with you?”
“Are you blind? Check out my delts.”
“I’m serious. Why?”
Jack was about to give another jokey answer when the truth suddenly hit him like a dustbin lid to the head. “Christ! I know why she did it!” He groaned, feeling like a complete fucking idiot, just as Alexei had said. “She told me why. She said we needed to get Siftik out of the way. But he’s in a state of clinical bloody depression on account of not being able to do crop engineering or something. He wouldn’t notice if the place was burning down around his ears. It was me she needed to get out of the way. And now she’s done it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She’s going to pump methane into X-ray country. The same thing they did on the SoD, only with gas. One spark in the atmosphere and we all die.”
Alexei started to his feet.
“It only takes six percent and there was already a methane buildup when I came on shift. She’s already started …”
*
“Wait for me here.” Alexei vanished so fast he practically made a sonic boom.
Left alone, Jack sniffed the air coming from the vents. Pointless—methane had no odor. He paced the apartment.
He was supposed to be on his way to the Moon Express right now.
The shock of being arrested had pushed their plan onto the back burner of his mind, but now anxiety turned up the heat again.
To think he’d been going to ask Linda to go with them!
Thank God he hadn’t had a chance to say anything to her yet.
There was no reason to think they’d been found out. In fact, this panic could help to cover up their getaway.
If he could, in fact, get away …
He walked to the wall where the front door had been. It did not open. He slapped it lightly in frustration.
It opened.
He looked out at the garden corridor.
Two rriksti sat on the doorstep opposite, gazing at a hexagonal computer screen, their hair dancing. Further along the corridor, another rriksti deadheaded the fish-belly-pale flowering vines over its front door. Jack thought of his mother pruning her azaleas in Nuneaton, Warwickshire. This was suburbia, Darkside edition.
Alexei hadn’t locked him into the apartment.
Had just trusted in Jack’s honor to keep him from walking away.
Dammit, dammit, dammit.
Standing on the doorstep, he fished his headset out of his pocket. The twittering, gargling music of Rristigul came over the bio-radio frequencies. No one sounded alarmed. If there was methane in the atmosphere, it wasn’t bad enough for Alexei to have issued a general alert. Or maybe it was so bad that there was no point in issuing an alert.
How would they deal with it? They’d have to run a pipe out of the hab, into the evening shadows, where the methane could get cold enough to liquefy out of the air.
Irresolute, Jack went back into the apartment. The bed, sofa, and table, padded with vividly patterned textiles, created a homey ambiance. Alexei and Nene had accumulated a lot of paraphernalia. A mobile of stars cut from sheet metal flashed and sparkled below the ceiling vent. There was a sort of cage in one corner, with blankets inside. A shelf high on one wall displayed two decorative glass cubes with bits of eggshell embedded in them. There was a kitchenette. Microwave, mini-refrigerator. The fridge held slabs of pressed suizh, brine-pickled mirip leaves, and cold rabbit cutlets. Jack helped himself to a couple of those and washed them down with carrot juice.
He’d been going to meet Harry at the end of his shift. They would walk over to the thorium reactor, where Jack had already stashed the stuff he would need to bypass the TEB engine ignition system. Skyler would be there waiting for them. They’d take the rover the long way around the crater, meet Colin and Pete at the Moon Express. Then up, up, and away.
His shift had ended an hour and a quarter ago.
Would they go without him?
They couldn’t. No one else could fly the damn Moon Express.
They’d wait.
And lose this God-given chance to get away without being missed, while everyone was busy controlling the methane contamination.
He strode back to the door.
It opened before he could touch it.
Nene startled, her hands flying to her shoulders.
On each shoulder sat an astonishing little creature. No bigger than Jack’s hand, they looked like the troll dolls that had briefly been a craze when he was a kid. But they had long spindly limbs.
Their upswept black hair was bio-antennas.
They gripped Nene’s shoulders with perfectly formed seven-fingered hands the size of Jack’s thumbnail.
“Oh, just look at you,” Jack whispered. Completely enthralled, he stretched out a forefinger to the one on Nene’s left shoulder.
It leapt into her hair and hid.
Jack turned a wide-eyed grin of amazement on Nene. “Are they … yours?”
“No, I’m just borrowing them.” Her hair danced. “This is Zhenya and this is Ithrilip. They are six months old.”
Jack trailed after her into the kitchenette. He could not take his eyes off the infants. Baby rriksti! There had been none on Europa, none on the SoD. “Congratulations. I had no idea.”
“Yes, we are starting to have children again. Zhenya and Ithrilip—Zhenya is a Russian name, Ithrilip means Moonlight—and there are eight more babies on the way.”
“Why … I mean, why now?”
“Keelraiser thinks we’re safe now.” Nene opened her mouth in that rriksti expression of wry amusement. She opened the fridge and took out a slab of pressed suizh. She plopped on the living-room settee, spread one of those stained white cloths on her lap, and sat one of the babies on it. “Will you hold Zhenya while I feed Ithrilip?”
“I’m not awfully good—”
Laughing, Nene threw the other baby at him.
Threw. A baby.
Jack lunged to catch it, but he was too far away.
Tiny limbs spread in an X. Semi-opaque webs of skin stretched from wrists to ankles.
The baby flew across the room, gliding in the low gravity. All Jack had to do was catch his balance and hold out his hands. Zhenya landed on his palms with a surprisingly solid impact.
“—not very good with babies,” he finished, stunned.
The minute fingers and toes scrabbled at his skin. It felt like holding a rat. Jack pushed the unworthy comparison away. This was a rriksti. A six-month-old rriksti. And it flew.
“You’re the cutest thing I’ve ever seen,” he told it solemnly. It gazed into his eyes and trilled in his headset. Rriksti baby-talk.
Nene said, “Alexei told me you are in trouble. I’m letting you hold my baby, anyway. You brought us safely back from Europa. Some of us have not forgotten that.”
She was alluding to Keelraiser’s treachery. It gave Jack a much-needed lift to know that Nene was on his side, at least in principle. “Nene, did Alexei warn you about a potential problem with the air?”
“Yes. He says it’s under control.” She caught his frown. “I’m sorry, Jack, but I have lived through too many life-support scares. I cannot run around like a chicken with my head cut off anymore. Is this correct?”
Jack laughed. “Yes, it’s correct. In fact, I think it’s a healthy way of looking at it.”
“I think so, too. Excuse me.” Nene bit off a chunk of the suizh slab. She chewed and swallowed, then lifted Ithrilip to her lips. The baby opened its mouth. Nene’s throat heaved. Beige mush trickled from her pursed lips, into the baby’s mouth.
Jack stared.
“Oh, you messy eater,” Nene cooed, wiping the baby’s face. Being a rriksti, she could talk while simultaneously trickling mush into Ithrilif’s mouth. Some of it went into the baby’s mouth, anyway. It soon became clear why the splash cloth’was necessary.
She’s regurgitating, Jack thought.
These babies fly.
I saw her six months ago. She wasn’t pregnant.
He cleared his throat. “Nene, please don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ve got to ask—”
Zhenya interrupted him by scrambling up his arm to his shoulder. Swinging from his left ear like a mini-Tarzan, it patted his lips and trilled hopefully.
“He doesn’t know I’m not a rriksti,” Jack marvelled.
Nene laughed. “They do that to Alexei, too. He sometimes feeds them, although I have to pre-masticate the food. And before you ask, yes, we evolved from the Imfi equivalent of birds.”
Jack shook his head in disbelief. He was trying to prise Zhenya out of his hair. Human hair was easier to get tangled in than bio-antennas.
“Imfi birds—it isn’t really correct to call them birds—our flying creatures do not have wings that flap. They glide, as you saw Zhenya gliding just now. At home, there is always a wind to fly on. Here, there is lunar gravity.” She spat the last of the mush into Ithrilip’s mouth and pointed at the shelf Jack had noticed. “Those are the babies’ shells. We hold onto them as keepsakes.”
“Nene—”
“Did you think we were apes, like you? Keelraiser didn’t want to tell you the truth. He thought it would make you think of us as … too alien. But we are not birds, any more than you are chimpanzees.” She cleaned Ithrilip up with the splash cloth. “They will lose their wings when they are about four. It may happen sooner. In our Darkside arcologies, children often used to ground at two or three; the artificial wind wasn’t strong enough to keep them in the air.”
“Nene—”
“Are you disgusted? Repelled? Do you think of us as lesser now? Beings you have nothing in common with, although we feel as you feel, bleed as you bleed, speak your language?”
“Nene, I think Zhenya has peed in my hair.”
She laughed an accordion-squeal of happiness. “They pee on everything.”
They were halfway through feeding Zhenya—well, Nene was feeding it, while Jack played with Ithrilip, tossing it into the air and batting it around like a living shuttlecock, a game Nene assured him the babies loved—when a string of radio-frequency beeps sounded. Nene went to a screen mounted on the wall, balancing Zhenya on one hand. Because the apartment was radio-proof, Jack reckoned this screen was the equivalent of a landline. She read the message on the low-contrast display, and turned to him. “Go.”
“What’s happened?” He tensed for bad news.
“That was Alexei. Go.”
“What’s the status of the air issues?”
“They’re still pushing the atmosphere through the decontamination loop, but we’re out of danger. That means you are in trouble again. Alexei says Coetzee is trying to blame the methane contamination on you, as well. So you are completely screwed, but you have one chance. Go to Keelraiser.”
Jack caught Ithrilip as it glided towards him. “Nene …”
She took Ithrilip, plopped it on her shoulder, pushed Jack to the door. She pointed along the corridor. “His office is that way. If you get lost, ask someone. Just go!”
Jack stumbled into the corridor, head spinning with the suddenness of his ejection. The autorip closed behind him.
He walked in the direction Nene had indicated, but only until he reached the nearest artery corridor. Then he turned and half-walked, half-ran towards the other exit from the bunker.
The one at the end of X-ray country.
The rriksti kept their suits in a changing room near their airlock, the mirror image of the human one.
Five klicks around the outside of the bunker to the thorium reactor. That was nothing.
Go.
CHAPTER 25
Skyler said, “I’m gonna go back and see if I can find him. Are you coming?”
“No,” Harry said. “We’ll start the pre-flight checks.”
Skyler hesitated. He didn’t feel good about leaving Harry, Colin, and Pete on their own in the Moon Express. None of them were astronauts. It was like leaving a bunch of interns in charge of the lab.
On the other hand, they didn’t completely lack technical savvy. They’d unloaded the stuff for the engine ignition hack and set it up the way Jack had told Skyler to. They wouldn’t break anything.
Mainly, however, he found himself unable to say no to a prince.
“OK. I’ll be back soon, either way.” He got into the rover and started the engine.
The rover bumped through the darkness. He ran no risk of getting lost, as years of journeys back and forth had marked the route with a river of overlapping tire tracks. It was like driving a bumpy, dusty interstate. His thoughts drifted back to his last talk with Trek.
That shuttle’s left Sky Station.
But it hasn’t de-orbited.
That had been six hours ago.
Maybe Trek’s network of eyes on the sky had simply missed the shuttle’s de-orbit burn. They were just amateurs with binoculars.
But if they were right, what did that mean?
He had to talk to Jack about it. And that brought him back to the chief concern preying on his mind.
Jack, where the fuck are you?
He drove on, keeping one eye on the battery level indicator. The rovers only did fifty klicks per charge, and he’d already used up more than half of that. He would have to grab a spare battery while he was in the bunker.
*
“Taft’s been gone three hours,” Pete said. “It doesn’t take that long to drive there and back.”
Colin said, “Give them one more hour. Then we start back on foot.”
Harry said, “No. We’re not going back.”
They were crammed into the pilot’s cabin of the Moon Express. The light from the consoles filled Harry’s faceplate with reflected numbers. But Colin knew that tone of voice. Even a rogue prince who ran away to the moon could do royal when he wanted to.
“If Taft can’t find Kildare …” Harry started, and shook his head. “No. Whether he finds him or not, we’re going.”
“Sir!” Pete’s sir was an enthusiastic acknowledgement. Colin’s a horrified remonstration.
Harry’s helmet turned towards him. “Look, it’s not that complicated. The computer does everything.”
“The engine ignition …”
“Piece of cake. We inject the powders into the combustion chamber via the TEB route.” Harry parroted what Kildare had told them. “Then inject water under high pressure, forming a mist. The reaction will happen instantaneously. Follow up with LOX, then turn on the LH2 flow, and there you go. Right? We’ve already set up the water reservoir and the high-pressure source.”
Colin nodded reluctantly. He himself had rigged the LOX tank, wrapped in a heating blanket, which would power the water injection.
“So.” Harry brought his gloves together, shutting down what had passed for a discussion. “One more hour, then we go.”
*
Jack walked across the roof of the bunker. Every minute heightened his desperation. But he could only go so fast. Rriksti spacesuits had no built-in boots. It felt like walking barefoot. And to make matters worse, the footing was treacherous. The blanket of regolith over the roof had just been bulldozed into place. It shifted underfoot like scree on a beach.
Ten thousand slabs of lunar iron, welded together, lay beneath this rubble. Below that lay a pressurized volume the size of Nuneaton, but you would never guess what you were walking on. Jack remembered the rriksti bunker on Europa. From outside, that, too, had looked just like a hillock. The rriksti excelled at deception even in their architecture. The moon’s hostile environment actually conspired with them. Here, as on Europa, the freezing ground was a ready-made heat sink. No need for surface heat rejection systems that would give the game away …
He raised his head to see how much further he had to go.
The illusion of lunar solitude shattered.
Less than a hundred meters ahead, a work crew fussed around a pipe that rose from the rubble and extended across the roof, towards the evening shadow cast by the bunker’s convexity.
Jack knew what that was. The emergency decontamination loop. Just like the SoD, the bunker needed some way to vent the atmosphere in case of fire … or methane contamination. So vents had been built into the roof here and there. And he’d almost walked into the one they were using to chill the dangerous methane out of the air.
Great going, Kildare.
Gritting his teeth, he hooked left. He’d have to circle around. The spacesuit he’d taken was Alexei’s; its life-support backpack had a respirator cup shaped for a human mouth. And the bloody thing was patterned in the high-visibility red and green of the Lokomotiv Moscow football club.
Had they seen him?
“Hey, you!” His rriksti headset, worn under the suit as a radio, picked up a voice. “Name and number!”
They had.
*
Skyler braked, dust spraying from the rover’s wheels.
His suit radio picked up confused voices.
One of them sounded like Jack’s.
Uh oh.
Skyler jumped out of the rover. He turned in a circle. He couldn’t see anyone. In the pitiless evening sunlight, the curving roof of the bunker looked two-dimensional, like a paper cut-out. It cast a shadow anti-sunwards. Skyler had driven past that shadow, thinking: Bunker Hill. One of his ancestors had died in the Battle of Bunker Hill. His mother had taken them to see the monument when they were little, before she ran off with her yoga instructor.
“Identify yourself or I will shoot!” This voice came through loud and clear. The mess was moving his way.
“Don’t shoot!” yelled Skyler Taft, descendant of ambassadors and generals and one US president. He had learned the hard way that this was always the best advice. But no one ever took it. He started running in long lunar bounds.
*
“Right,” Harry said. “Here we go.”
“Fingers crossed,” Colin said, strapped into the co-pilot’s couch. There were only two couches up top, so Pete had agreed to ride in the passenger cabin. Moving only his eyes, Colin watched Harry push that button, flip this switch. The instruments flashed like an unholy disco. No poisonous snake—of the human persuasion, or otherwise—had ever scared him as much as this inanimate machine did.
Three. Two. One.
LOX jetted into the combustion chamber, igniting the explosive blend of aluminum and phosphorus powders.
Half a second later, a stream of LH2 joined the controlled explosion.
Typhoons of chemical fire roared out of all four engine bells.
The Moon Express hurtled into the sky like a cork out of a bottle … but this bottle was the moon’s gravity well, and it would take some getting out of.
Gee-forces squashed Colin into his couch. It felt like death itself was sitting on his chest, sinking its claws into his lungs.
He did not think about the nuclear submarines at Clyde. He thought about Mary and the boys. He pictured his kitchen in Aberdeen, in the house that remained home no matter how long he was away. He could practically smell the tea steeping in the pot that always sat on the corner of the Aga, and the mouldy football kit abandoned by the back door.
He imagined Harry getting his feet under the table, safe from the world that had pursued him like a prey animal all his life.
To hell with saving humanity.
All Colin McFarlane wanted was to go home.
*
“Stop or I will shoot!”
Jack didn’t stop. In fact, even if he had wanted to, he couldn’t. Start running downhill on the moon and good fucking luck to you.
He soared into the shadow of the bunker. Impenetrable blackness swallowed the ground. He frantically keyed the wrist patch that switched on his chest-lamp. The rubble drifted up at him, a beach lapped by a sea of darkness. The decontamination pipe glinted dully.
The darkness turned into day.
A new star flashed up from behind the rim of Shackleton Crater, casting shadows in the wrong directions.
Jack sobbed out curses.
They went without me.
Bastards—
Who’s flying that thing?
The star brightened. It expanded until its heart reddened and the shadows around Jack turned murky.
Then fiery meteors started to fall from the sky.
Jack missed his footing. He rolled over and over on the rubble.
The CELLies floundered over the skyline.
Lumps of flame thudded into the regolith. The heavy impacts flung dust and pebbles through the vacuum.
One of the meteors struck a CELLie, pulverizing him.
Another hit the decontamination pipe.
The methane went up like a gas flare from an oil well. Flames silhouetted the CELLies in a stop-motion tableau.
Shrapnel flew in a lethal rain.
Jack struggled to his feet, started to run.
God’s fist thumped him on the back and blotted out everything.
CHAPTER 26
Hannah stepped out of her house into a rare sunny morning. “Ahhhh.” She stretched her arms over her head. The old-growth trees around her house gave the illusion of Edenic solitude. She’d chosen a spot just downhill of the old look-out platform, which was now a HERF mast poking out of the trees. You could smell the city, but not see it, from here.
Bethany waved from the hammock strung between the jacarandas. She raised her coffee cup. “This is like an upscale resort!”
“Choose the Congo for the family vacation of a lifetime,” David intoned, from the lounger where he was idly scanning an iPad.
Hannah forced a smile. “Where’re the kids?”
“Nate’s gone on safari with Ripstiggr,” Bethany said. “Izzy’s around.”
Bethany and David trusted the rriksti to keep the children safe. It seemed idiotic on the face of it. However, they were not wrong. Ripstiggr would not let harm come to a hair on the head of any one of the Zieglers, as he knew perfectly well that their survival guaranteed Hannah’s pliability.
Speaking of which … “I have to go and meet some Chinese officials. David, wanna come?”
“Guess the brave new world still needs lawyers!” David said pleasedly, accompanying her to her Toyota 4x4. Flifya drove. Sivine sat in front with a rifle across her lap. Although this was now the safest place in Africa, the locals had expectations about strength projection. The blacked-out windows and Darkside pennants on the hood broadcasted badass alien glamor.
Lightbringer City sprawled below them, filling the valley. In one sense this was just like any fast-growing African metropolis—hastily erected buildings surrounded by a ring of slums. But Hannah had put the kibosh on the idea of skyscrapers, or anything over three storeys tall. She had laid out broad streets and made sure enough trees survived to shade them. She had built a mini-Los Angeles in this Congolese valley. And today, even the weather was cooperating. The sun glinted on rooftop solar panels. The UV-proof roofs of the giant rriksti greenhouses mirrored the cirrus clouds. The smells of smoke and—despite Hannah’s best efforts—sewage drifted from the shanty-town that sprawled on either side of the scar.
The Lightbringer loomed over it all like a mountain, shadowing half the city at this early hour.
The car eased through floods of Congolese bicycling to work in the factories and greenhouses. The bicycles had batteries, like the battery that had replaced the gasoline engine in the 4x4. No traffic noise in Lightbringer City—just the music of African voices and bicycle bells. Despite everything, Hannah felt a twinge of pride as she saw the city through David’s wide eyes. The hellhole formerly known as California, and the war in Europe, seemed very far away.
Time to get to work. She checked her notifications.
Ten seconds later she was pinging Gurlp. “What the hell is this? An explosion on the moon?”
“That’s what it looks like, Shiplord. We obtained these images from Sky Station’s telescope.” Gurlp had finally taken the trouble to improve her English.
“At the south pole?”
“Yes.”
Dread clutched Hannah’s chest. “What’s Iristigut got to say about it?”
Pause. “He says everything is fine.”
“I want to talk to him.”
“Shiplord, the moon is below the horizon. We’ll have to wait ten hours before re-establishing the comms link.”
Hannah could not wait ten hours to find out what had happened. “OK, Gurlp. Meet me at the airport.”
David was staring at her. “Can I ask …?”
“A friend on the Lightbringer.”
“New … phone technology?”
Of course, he’d noticed that she was apparently talking into the air with no phone in sight.
“I have a chip in my head,” Hannah said, touching the scar on her forehead. “I guess I’m kind of like a cyborg.”
“Oh. Ha, ha.”
“David, I’m gonna leave you to handle the Chinese. They want to sell us REEs—rare earth elements—in exchange for weapons. We want the deal, but we need to drive a hard bargain, OK? We want them coming back for more. Also, they will probably ask for a factory tour, but that’s a no-no. Our IP does not leave this valley.”
David sat up straight and cracked his knuckles theatrically. “I used to negotiate with Hollywood studio heads. These guys won’t know what hit them.”
She bundled him and Sivine out of the car, telling Sivine to call the Lightbringer for another vehicle.
“Airport,” she said to Flifya. She was already calling ahead to the ground crew to make sure there was a plane fueled.
The rriksti had expanded their air force by buying up everything from Antonov transports to Cessnas. Half a hundred planes now stood in the Lightbringer’s morning shadow, dwarfed by the Hairsplitter and Bridgeburner. Hannah jumped out of the 4x4 and ran to the McDonnell Douglas 82. A whole short-hop jet, just for me? Why yes.
The plane flew across an imaginary line on the map into Rwandan airspace. Lake Kivu sparkled below, cradled amid green hills. The cone of Mt. Nyiragongo steamed. The rriksti pilot put the MD-82 down on a road leading into Goma, alongside the racket of pipeline construction.
Hannah, Gurlp, and Flifya commandeered a construction foreman’s jeep to drive into Goma and down to the waterfront. A speedboat took them out into the lake.
15 kilometers offshore, the KivuWatt drilling barge reared out of the haze.
Hannah found Ripstiggr below-decks, inspecting the maze of pipes and valves. His bio-antennas brushed the roof. Vulture-man, alien priest. Three hot, sweaty, tiring hours had passed since Hannah left Lightbringer City. She had almost begun to wish she hadn’t bothered coming. But here she was. Here, also, was the president of Rwanda. Hannah mechanically exchanged pleasantries with him, glad she’d put on another of her new Parisian designer outfits this morning, even if it was now wrinkled and less than fresh.
Then she dragged Ripstiggr up a ladder to the deck of the barge. Sun beat down on the water. Rwandan boys followed them, holding a parasol the size of a patio umbrella over their heads. Hannah snatched Ripstiggr’s field radio off his ear and flung it into the lake. Splash.
“What the fuck?” Ripstiggr said, reasonably.
“Did you blow up CELL?”
“Oh yeah, that. I did not.”
“So the Dealbreaker did not launch an ICBM from Sky Station, fitted with SRBs to help it reach the moon? And said ICBM did not just destroy CELL?”
“No. Yes, Hobo flew that TOPOL up to Sky Station. It’s still there. We’ll be adding more missiles to Sky Station’s arsenal as we acquire them.” Ripstiggr glanced up through his custom-made mirror shades at the African sky. “Orbital defences,” he said. “Every planet needs them. Wouldn’t you agree?” He laughed, Flifya laughed, even Gurlp laughed. Their easy defeat of humanity was such a great joke.
Hannah felt like screaming. “So what happened at CELL?”
“Here’s what Iristigut told me last night.” While I was sleeping off two bottles of wine, Hannah thought with self-loathing. “The humans tried to launch that crappy little shuttle they’ve got. It blew up a few seconds after take-off. The debris damaged the CELL surface facilities, but Iristigut thinks everything can be repaired.” Ripstiggr’s hair danced. He thought Iristigut’s travails were funny.
“Deaths?” Hannah said leadenly.
“Only the idiots on the shuttle.”
One of them might have been Skyler. She could see him making a desperate escape bid. Sacrificing his life for freedom.
The president of Rwanda emerged from the barge’s superstructure, beaming determinedly. Hannah couldn’t cope with him right now. She walked to the edge of the platform. Ripstiggr followed her, and the parasol boys followed them both.
In classic African style, the platform had no guard rail. The water lapped at the giant floats below. A few fishing boats sculled nearby, their crews standing up to get a look at the rriksti.
“I’m negotiating for the purchase of seventy percent of Lake Kivu’s methane,” Ripstiggr said. “When the pipeline’s completed …”
“We’ll turn on the spigot and light a match. Boom, hydrogen,” Hannah said wearily. “Stuff it into a fuel cell, and you have electicity. Divert some hydrogen over to the Lightbringer’s fusion core, and we’ll finally have enough volts to fire up the gauge field and kick off fusion. Then we can switch all the hydrogen over to fusion. It’s the perfect bootstrap. A few microwave relay stations later, we’re powering half of West Africa.”
“This will be the first of Earth’s continents to have fusion energy, thanks to us,” Ripstiggr said contentedly.
But this isn’t what I wanted, Hannah thought. It isn’t what I planned. Ripstiggr had bought the president of Rwanda and his inner circle with extroversion. Fusion energy for the masses … and for the kleptocrats, a magical cure for cancer. The same game was playing out across Africa. Even freaking Mugabe could now look forward to another decade or two in power. And it had all started with a carrot-and-stick act worked out by trial and error on one frightened propulsion engineer.
She pushed Ripstiggr off the platform. Flailing, he fell six meters into Lake Kivu. She jumped in after him.
Down, down to the water. A shock of cold. Then back up to the surface, kicking off her Parisian shoes, treading water.
Ripstiggr broke the surface, laughing wildly, his bio-antennas flinging rainbows into the air.
Above, Francophone cries of horror rent the day.
“Come on in, the water’s fine!” Ripstiggr called to Gurlp and Flifya, who were peering over the edge of the platform. “Not salty enough, but who cares?”
He swam over to Hannah, kissed her on the mouth, and began taking her dress off underwater. “You’ll sink,” he explained.
“You’ll burn.”
“I don’t care. I do not fucking care, Hannah.”
He was a fantastic swimmer. She’d had no idea.
Gurlp and Flifya arrowed into the water like Olympic divers. People jumped off the fishing boats and swam towards them, laughing and calling out. Hannah had dodged swimming lessons in school, but now she found that a bit of languorous kicking was enough to keep her afloat. And the water felt heavenly.
The absurdity of her situation began to cool her anger. Skinnydipping with aliens in Lake Kivu! She really was a long way from California. And maybe, just maybe, she should stop trying to get back there.
Gurlp popped up to the surface, spitting out water. She said to Hannah, “Billions of people die on Imf. Thousands die when Liberator and Homemaker were lost.” These had been the other two ships of the Imfi invasion force. “Thousands more die when Lightbringer explodes. For a long time I wished I die, too. It’s not fair.”
“Oh, Gurlp.”
“But today I am happy. I love Earth! Thank you for bringing us here.”
Not knowing what to say, Hannah swam over and stroked Gurlp’s cheek. “We need to get you some waterproof SPF 50.”
The people from the fishing boats swam nearer. One of them waved a thin, pale arm. “Aunt Hannah!”
“Nate! Oh my God!” Hannah doggy-paddled to meet her nephew. “They said you were going on safari!”
“We did go on safari! We saw gorillas! Then we took a boat ride!” Nathan waved at Ripstiggr.
“Where’s Isabel?”
“There!” Nathan pointed.
Hannah squinted across the dazzling water. Her niece’s arms sliced the water in a steady rhythm. It looked like she was planning to swim all the way around the KivuWatt barge.
“She couldn’t wait to jump in,” Nathan said. “She really loves swimming.”
“I know,” Hannah said, remembering all those missed swim meets. “Is she still pissed, Nate?”
“Well … she kinda smiled when we saw the gorillas.”
That was good enough for Hannah. She swam after her niece in a clumsy breaststroke.
Isabel waited in the shadow of the floats until Hannah caught up with her.
“Whew!” Hannah said, clutching the weed-bearded float. “How do you make it look so easy?”
“It is easy. You’re fighting the water, Aunt Hannah. You have to just be in the water, like a fish.”
“Blop, blop, blop.” Hannah put her mouth underwater and bubbled like a fish.
Isabel smiled faintly. “Are you sleeping with that alien?”
The blunt question left her no way out. “Yes.”
“That doesn’t bother me, just so you know.” Isabel shrugged. “He’s kinda cool.”
“Did you know he’s a priest? He got his certification from the internet. Imfi version. I am dating a priest of Ystyggr.” Hannah rolled her eyes. “I used to be a regular person.”
“Nope,” Isabel said. “No woman who makes it to the top is just a regular person. Lean in, Aunt Hannah.”
Hannah laughed at the idea that she’d ‘made it to the top.’ She hoped Isabel was smart enough not to see her as a role model.
“Anyway, I wanted to ask you. Ripstiggr was telling us about these orbital defenses they’re putting in space.”
“He told you about that?”
“Nate asked what that huge missile we got from Germany was for. So Ripstiggr was like, every planet needs orbital defenses.”
“Yeah.”
“But I was just wondering. The aliens are already here. So what are they worried about? There isn’t anything else out there … is there?”
CHAPTER 27
Jack lay on a beach. He could smell the sea. Hear seagulls crying. Feel the little waves rolling over his body …
… through his body.
No beach. No sea.
The ‘seagulls’ were rriksti talking. The smell was the smell of X-ray country. The cool waves were magical antioxidants, or good vibes, or the power of faith, healing him from the inside out.
Jack had always disliked extroversion, although he grudgingly appreciated its usefulness. He sat up. Brimming with wellbeing, more than a little horny. That’s what it did to you.
Seven rriksti stepped back, wearing the holier-than-thou expressions they always got when they worked their magic.
One of them was Nene. Looking around, he found that he was in in her clinic. Unlike Cleanmay’s gizmo-crammed domain, Nene’s clinic was just a room with several pallets on the floor. On every pallet lay a human being, naked in the steamy heat, apart from the bits wrapped in bandages. Rriksti squatted over them, hands pressed to their bodies.
Jack croaked, “What happened?”
“Harry Windsor, Colin McFarlane, and Peter Hill launched the Moon Express,” Nene said. “It exploded a few seconds after take-off. Do you know what happened?”
Jack got his legs under him. He braced his hands on his thighs, head drooping. “Fuck it. Why didn’t they wait for me?”
“Ask the dead, if they can talk! We have seven dead, counting those three schleerps, and fifteen injured. You were struck by a shard from the decontamination pipe. Thanks to your superior suit—that is, Alexei’s suit—you did not suffer suit decompression. Others were less fortunate.”
“Skyler?”
“He’s fine.”
Jack breathed a sigh of relief. “Thanks, Nene.” He stood up. “Where is he? I’ve got to talk to him.”
“No, you do not.” In a flash of violence, Nene grabbed his arm and swung him around to face the wall. “Keelraiser is waiting for you.”
“I’m in no state.”
“Give him what he wants, Jack. He’s given you so much. It is your damn turn.”
She walked away. Jack tried to remember if he’d ever seen her this angry before. He thought not.
Well, she had reason. Jesus, what a clusterfuck.
He wandered out of the clinic, through the steamy, twilit maze of the rriksti operations sector. He considered simply walking away, but he would probably be re-arrested the minute he set foot on the other side of the sandwich wall. Besides, it was an honor thing, wasn’t it? Alexei and Nene had put him on his honor before. He’d betrayed their trust. He couldn’t let them down a second time.
He asked directions, found his way to a wall marked, in English, Moonlord. Slammed a fist on it.
“Use the damn sensor,” Keelraiser’s voice said in his headset.
Jack pressed his palm to the biometric reader. The wall ripped. The reader had been keyed to accept his handprint. He could’ve walked in here at any time.
He expected to be greeted by a blow from Keelraiser’s fist, and prepared to dodge, but all that came at him was the tendrils of a pot plant hanging from the ceiling.
His adrenaline ebbed. “Well?”
“Hang on,” Keelraiser said, from behind a cluster of computer monitors.
The desk took up half the small office. Human and rriksti computing equipment loaded it down. Jack recognized some of this stuff from the Cloudeater. Keelraiser must have set up a remote workstation so he could use the Cloudeater’s quantum computer while remaining physically present in the bunker. Jack stared at the sharp-jawed triangular face, the tiny ears, the black bio-antennas twitching as Keelraiser manipulated the computer’s radio interface. He recognized that Keelraiser had shut himself away again, like he’d done on the SoD.
Computers galore and a single mirip plant hanging from the ceiling. This place made Jack’s tent look like a five-star hotel. Well, three stars, anyway.
“You wanted to see me,” he said impatiently.
Keelraiser swung his chair around. He stared at Jack across the computer equipment. The silence lasted longer than it should have.
“Congratulations,” Keelraiser said eventually. “You’ve cost us our only chance to win this thing.”
“Is there anywhere to sit down? … No? You don’t get a lot of visitors, do you? I suppose James has to stay standing when he makes his reports, like a kid called into the headmaster’s office. Well, I’ve just recovered from a nasty knock, so if you don’t mind …”
Jack lowered himself onto the floor, leaning against the wall. He noted that the walls were radio-proof, like the walls of Alexei and Nene’s apartment. Privacy for me but not for thee. That was the rriksti way.
“I could eat a horse. Extroversion always makes me hungry. I could do with something to drink, as well.”
Keelraiser stood up and came around his desk. He was barefoot, dressed in a dingy tank top and shorts—no Moonlord he, behind closed doors. He tossed a squeeze bottle at Jack, who caught it and drank. Water. Lukewarm.
Keelraiser said, “I’d planned to take the Cloudeater to Sky Station and then proceed, I suppose, as you were planning. Capture the ICBM they’ve just parked up there; drop it on the Lightbringer. I’ve spent the best part of a year convincing Ripstiggr I am on his side, all so that I’d have a chance of getting away with it. He still doesn’t trust me, of course. But I persuaded him that I wanted a piece of the action, which comes to the same thing. Now? His suspicions have been violently revived. We’ll never get a craft off the surface of the moon again. That ICBM will be aimed at us, and when we outlive our usefulness, they will launch it. You may have killed everyone on the moon—as well as your daring friends.”
Jack digested this for a few seconds. If true, it was a devastating revelation. “You should have told me earlier.”
“I did. I told you what I was planning before I’d even planned it.”
Maybe he had, at that.
If I can fool you, I can fool anyone.
Well, Keelraiser had fooled Jack. Completely.
So it ultimately made no difference. Even if the Imfi conquest of the moon had been one long deception, Keelraiser had played it to the hilt. And here they were.
CHAPTER 28
“I told you we should have done something before they got an ICBM up there,” Jack said, although he understood that recriminations were futile at this point. What Keelraiser had done, he’d done. What Jack had done, he’d done, likewise.
“It would have been pointless before they did. There’d have been nothing to capture.”
Jack didn’t feel like admitting that he had not actually known about any ICBM. His own plan had been far more of a long shot. “What’s the damage? I’ve been informed about the deaths.”
“Minor breakages at the waterworks. And in a nicely ironic twist, your hab was destroyed.”
“Destroyed!”
“When you drop a piece of spaceship onto a hollow disc rotating at seven RPMs, balanced on a ramshackle collection of props, the result is predictable.”
“Well, I suppose that’s that,” Jack mumbled. He thought about Skyler’s Ku-band radio. So much for that, too. Skyler would never get to talk to his brother again.
“You will have to move into the bunker.”
“Is that what you want? You want me gathered into your herd of—of subjects? Preferably with a chip in my ear, so I’ll never get a moment’s peace again?”
“For God’s sake, I could have forced you to abandon the hab at any time. I could have prevented you from retrieving it in the first place! I wanted you to do what you liked.”
Jack remembered Nene’s words: He’s given you so much … This must be what she’d meant. Keelraiser had given Jack plenty of rope. And he’d used it to hang Harry, Colin, and Pete.
“I have nine hundred human beings competing to do my will,” Keelraiser added, with touchy pride. “I don’t need one more.”
“That’s just as well, as I’m likely to be shoved in jail the minute I leave here.” Jack remembered the sword hanging over his head. Whatever Coetzee’s idea of punishment for rape and assault was, it wouldn’t be penance enough for what Jack had done to Harry and his lads, but it would be a start.
“Jail?” Keelraiser said. “There’s no jail here. Coetzee’s intention was to exile you. He’d have stuffed you in your hab to see how long you would last without anyone bringing you oxygen and water.”
That made the hair on the back of Jack’s neck stand up. Not because it was a death sentence, but because it was a slow death sentence—the ultimate nightmare of any astronaut who’s ever watched an oxygen gauge going down, down, down. “That’s not justice, it’s murder.” But he remembered the four water thieves he himself had executed on the SoD. They haunted him to this day. Their crimes hadn’t been proven, either.
“Coetzee’s trying very hard to prove himself worthy of the Krijistal. But now that your hab is spread across a square kilometer, that’s no longer an option.” Keelraiser gave a rriksti shrug, head and shoulders jerking sideways. “I’m sure he’ll think of something else.” He started to pace. “It doesn’t matter much. We’re facing critical shortages.”
“I know,” Jack said. “Severe lack of hookers and coke. I’ve been meaning to complain.”
“It’s not really a joking matter. The biggest shortages are nitrogen and carbon. The building blocks of life. There isn’t as much ammonia in Shackleton Crater as we had hoped. I’ve got people out searching for a carbonaceous chrondrite meteor. That’s really our only chance. Failing that, we have about another six months before the ecosystem collapses, on both sides of the wall.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“No, no one else does.”
“Are you sure?”
Keelraiser gestured at his desk. “I’ve spent several months modelling the failure modes. Looking for gaps in the nitrogen cycle we might be able to squeeze through. There aren’t any.”
“You survived for ten years on Europa.”
“Humans aren’t like rriksti. You’re metabolically inefficient. You need a ridiculously broad spectrum of nutrients. Your technology is a joke. Your habits are wasteful. Coetzee’s management system is about as good as it’s realistically going to get, and still …”
“He’s just running this place like he ran his company.” Jack pushed himself to his feet. “Can I see your numbers?”
Without waiting for permission, he went around behind Keelraiser’s desk. He was starting to feel very guilty. On the SoD, he’d spent two years obsessing over every little detail of the water and nitrogen cycles. Then after they got here, it had stopped being his responsibility, so he’d stopped thinking about it. If he considered life-support issues at all, he’d made the dumb assumption that what worked would go on working. Not in space, thicko. In space, things only work until the Shit We Need runs out. You were the one who called CELL a leaky ark. An ark needn’t be sunk by a micro-meteorite or an ICBM; nitrogen loss will do it.
Most of Keelraiser’s computer monitors were the rriksti type, too murky for human eyes to read. But one was a Dell 16-inch flat screen. It displayed a wall of text, arranged in a familiar layout of chapters and verses.
21:25 And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself would not contain the books that should be written.
“The Gospel according to John?”
Keelraiser came around the other side of the desk and shoved him in the chest, pushing him away from the monitor. “I didn’t say you could look.”
“What’s that got to do with nitrogen and carbon shortages?”
“Everything, perhaps,” Keelraiser said, opening his mouth in the rriksti grimace of sorrowful amusement.
“Can I see the actual numbers?”
“They’re all in base 14. I could convert them for you. But I don’t want rumors getting around. Some of my people have already started to suspect that all is not well.”
“All is not well. I’ll say.”
“Siftik, for one; you work with him. The crop geneticist.”
“Good old Siftik. He’s always such a ray of sunshine.”
“Dreams rot when they die. They poison the mind as surely as methane poisons the air.”
That was a bit too poetic for Jack, although he knew exactly what Keelraiser meant. “Do you know what Linda was planning to do?”
“Yes, of course. I blame myself for letting her live.”
“That’s on me,” Jack said mechanically.
“I suppose I was hoping you’d kill her for me,” Keelraiser said.
“Is that why we both wound up at the sewage plant?” Jack had to laugh. “You thought I might seize the opportunity to do away with her … and instead, I slept with her.”
“Did you enjoy it?”
“There’s no such thing as bad sex. All the same, I wish I’d never gone near her.”
“I had sex a few months ago.” Keelraiser said, making it sound like an epochal event. “It was rather awful.”
Jack had absolutely no wish to know who Keelraiser had slept with. He mooched back around the desk and drank some more water. “You know what she’s accused me of?”
“I’ve been informed, although I confess it doesn’t make much sense to us. We don’t call that kind of thing a crime. We just call it the weekend.” Keelraiser laughed softly.
They leaned on the desk, side by side. The wall facing them had a whiteboard on it, scribbled all over with drawings for arcologies. The drawings were old, blurred and smudged.
“I made a complete arse of myself,” Jack said. “Not for the first time, admittedly.”
“Oh, you’re not alone. Do you see those drawings? That’s what I was going to build. Arcologies. That’s how we survived on the Darkside. The environment is scarcely less hostile than this. It’s minus one hundred outside. The glaciers moan like Hell’s gates opening. Freezing gales blow and ice storms sweep over the domes. But inside, everything is cozy and warm … and the twilight zone is only a few hours away by road. I forgot about that. Or rather, I thought I could compensate for it by ramping up the mining operations. People used to gather in here at all hours, brainstorming, sketching, planning. Now the excitement’s died. They’ve stopped coming.” Keelraiser shrugged. “As you say. I’ve made a complete arse of myself.”
Jack looked down at the rriksti hand gripping the edge of the desk next to his own. Seven fingers, white knuckles. He twitched with the desire to touch it. Pick it up. Kiss the webs between the fingers. He could practically taste the salty musk of Keelraiser’s skin. Even after all these months, the pull was so strong that he nearly despaired of himself. “Why did you want to see me?” he said roughly.
Keelraiser turned his head to look at him. “I just wanted to talk to you,” he said.
That wasn’t what Jack wanted. “I’ll tell you what I want,” he said, staring straight ahead. “I want to get away from you.”
“Then go,” Keelraiser said immediately.
“Nowhere on this moon is far enough away. The Andromeda galaxy wouldn’t be far enough.”
“It may come to that in the end,” Keelraiser said darkly. “They say that the dust we’re made of drifts through the stars for all eternity.”
“I don’t care about eternity. I care about winning.” Recriminations boiled out again. “We had a chance to win this thing, and instead you decided to sit here and conquer a useless ball of rock.”
“A place for my species to survive—a place your species doesn’t want or need, anyway!”
“We could have saved Earth!”
“Is it my fault that eight billion human beings were too incompetent to save their own damn planet?”
“Oh Jesus, fair enough on that,” Jack said, rubbing his forehead.
“I did everything I could to save Earth! I can’t do anything more.”
“Right. It’s my job. It’s always been my job.”
“On the way here, I started a revolution. I thought I could change the way we live. Put an end to the cycles of punishment and conquest. Well, you know how that ended. Five thousand dead and a few survivors trapped on Europa. But I never learn. When we got here, I was hopeful. Nine hundred humans—they’d show us the right way to live! So I gave Coetzee the technology he needed to optimize his management system.”
Jack groaned.
“I can see my mistake now,” Keelraiser muttered. “I assumed all humans were basically like Alexei, Giles, Skyler, and you.”
“You need your head examined,” Jack said, aching with affection.
“I need a miracle,” Keelraiser said. “I wanted to build arcologies. All I’ve built is Europa all over again. And I can’t even get another kilo per day of nitrogen out of that fucking crater.”
Jack took a deep breath. “And we’ve not got the Moon Express anymore. And there’s an ICBM aimed our way. Right. Let me take the Cloudeater. They won’t fire on that.”
“No,” Keelraiser said, recoiling.
“At a minimum I’ll be able to pinch the supplies they’ve laid in at Sky Station. Best case scenario, I’ll refuel, land somewhere out-of-the-way, and … and …” With an effort of will, Jack dismissed his visions of nukes. “And bring back all the Shit We Need.”
“No,” Keelraiser said again. He took a step backwards, lips stiffly sealed. “You can’t fly the Cloudeater.”
“Oh, I’m sure I can manage. I’ve seen you do it often enough. Is it the bunker’s power requirements you’re concerned about? I know the Cloudeater’s reactor is powering a lot of stuff in here. But that’s what we’ve got the thorium reactor for. You had Skyler start that up because you planned to take the Cloudeater away some day.”
“Yes. But I’m the only one who can do it.”
“Why?”
“All our ships are built in the same way. The Cloudeater is a smaller version of the Lightbringer. Just as the Lightbringer has a Shiplord, so does the Cloudeater.” Keelraiser touched the back of his neck. “Me.”
“You’ve got a chip in there?”
“Yes!”
“It’s … an authorization key? Like the one they gave Hannah for the Lightbringer?”
“The one they forced her to host in her brain, yes.”
“Does it have remote functionality?”
Keelraiser went back behind his desk and sat down. “Not outside bio-radio range,” he said, typing. “That’s why Eskitul was unable to interface with the Lightbringer from the surface of Europa.”
“The whole system seems a bit … I don’t know. What happens when pilots are reassigned?”
“Their implants are also reassigned. But that can only be done from the Temple on Imf.”
“Well, can’t you just lend me the Cloudeater? Authorize whatever needs to be authorized, and I’ll take it from there.”
“It wouldn’t work.”
“Why not?”
“It just wouldn’t! You can’t fly a rriksti ship without a rriksti implant.”
Jack realized he was probably committing some kind of offense by asking Keelraiser to lend him his ship. How would he have felt if Keelraiser had asked for a loan of the SoD? At the same time, he felt that Keelraiser was being unreasonable. The time for caution was past. “Well, can’t the chip be removed?”
Keelraiser stared at him. “Certainly it can be removed. You could cut my head off and extract it that way. That’s what Ripstiggr did to Eskitul.”
“Ah.”
“Here!” Keelraiser reached under his desk. His hand came back into view with a knife in it. He threw it, lightning-fast. Jack didn’t even have time to flinch before the knife hit the mirip plant and stuck in its plastic pot. It was one of the old knives from the CELL kitchen. Grains of metal-rich soil drifted down. “Use that! It’ll be easier than you think. One hard pull and it’s over. The chip is embedded at the top of the spinal column, but that’s only to make it difficult to remove. You could implant it in your forehead, on your scalp, wherever you like.”
Jack wrenched the knife out of the plant-pot, bringing the plant down. Soil scattered all over the floor. He shied the knife into the far corner. “What do you think I am?”
“A killer,” Keelraiser said. “Like me.”
“I’m nothing like you,” Jack said, turning away. He remembered that he’d once marvelled that he and Keelraiser, born in different star systems, were so much alike they could finish each other’s sentences. He recognized the dark, violent impulse that had made Keelraiser throw that knife, and needed to get away from it.
Behind him, Keelraiser said, “I’ve told Coetzee he’s not to punish you.”
“Don’t go to any trouble on my account.” Jack slapped the wall. It ripped. He went out.
CHAPTER 29
Coetzee did not punish Jack.
He just reassigned him.
“Someone has to take McFarlane and Hall’s places,” he said.
So Jack found himself employed at the waterworks. Not in the solar distillery on the crater rim, but on the sharp end. At least once per shift he had to descend into Shackleton Crater to help the robots do their jobs. On his second day, he saw another crater rat step in a puddle of liquid oxygen. The guy’s foot snapped off like glass. It reminded Jack of Lance Garner, his head flash-frozen inside his helmet, an icicle protruding from his mouth like last words he’d never gotten a chance to speak.
*
President Flaherty said, “We will never stop fighting. We will never trade our freedom for alien chains.”
Applause overloaded the speakers of Kuldeep’s laptop. Kuldeep zoomed in on the president, behind his lectern in the NORAD complex.
The worse things got, the more presidential Flaherty got. Heavy creases scored his face, and his hair had gone almost entirely gray. Kuldeep felt a protective twinge, despite—or because of—the fact that he was 1,900 miles away from Colorado.
Zoom out. Standing ovation in the conference room under Cheyenne Mountain. This was not the typical audience for a presidential address. Beards, camouflage, tattoos, and piercings predominated. These were freedom fighters from all over the Midwest, some from as far away as the East Coast. Now, we call them freedom fighters; a couple of years ago we’d have called them bikers, ex-cons, preppers, social justice activists. Social justice now had an entirely different meaning than it had before the squids came. More freedom fighters were participating remotely from all over the world. The engagement counter in the corner of Kuldeep’s screen showed 112,038 people on line.
A tumultuous Q&A session started.
Richard Burke, watching over Kuldeep’s shoulder, said, “He’s not getting enough sleep.”
“Who is?”
“There’s someone who is,” Burke said, nodding at the daybed in the corner of the glassed-in balcony. Burke’s nineteen-year-old daughter Savannah sprawled on it, snoring. Ever since she got pregnant, she had been taking long afternoon naps. Kuldeep’s protective instincts blazed up with the force of a forest fire. The baby in her belly was his. He would slaughter any squid that dared to lay a finger on her.
He still felt a little bit embarrassed about hooking up with Burke’s daughter. But Burke and his wife, Candy, approved of their relationship, at least outwardly. They’d made Kuldeep feel like part of the family. He reciprocated by giving 200% to his job, which was to protect the former NASA director and his team from any security threats that might arise.
Not that any ever did, in the mountains of Arecibo, Puerto Rico.
Kuldeep went out through the sliding glass doors and sniffed the almondy smell of the mamey apple trees, the heaviness of coming rain. Keying his radio, he checked in with the security operators stationed around the chalet. Nothing to report, boss. Nothing to report.
Clouds hung low over the forested peaks below the chalet. Turning left, Kuldeep saw the receiver of the Arecibo Observatory hanging like a huge metal spider above the dish hidden behind the trees. They were here to try to work out what was happening on the moon. The squids had occupied CELL. They exchanged encrypted radio bursts almost daily with the Lightbringer. Quantum encryption. Let the remnants of the NSA tear their hair out over that. Of much more interest to Kuldeep—and everyone at Arecibo—had been the faint Ku-band signals from Skyler Taft.
Ten years ago, Skyler had replaced Kuldeep as Lance Garner’s partner in crime. Of course Kuldeep was curious about him. They’d never met, so all he had to go on was Skyler’s NXC dossier. It contained the fatal words SELF-ALIENATED. Burke—always ready to give ‘his’ astronauts the benefit of the doubt—had never stopped insisting that Skyler was one of the good guys. But the classification remained: SELF-ALIENATED. So they weren’t allowed to communicate with him. Even now, NXC security protocols were unbreakable. They just listened in while he wasted precious radio minutes trying to persuade his brother to go to the hospital. It had got to the point where the Arecibo team, caught up in the saga of Trekker Taft’s health, began to research cystic fibrosis treatments.
But as of last week, Skyler had stopped calling home.
What in the hell was going on up there?
Kuldeep wandered back inside. He watched the Q&A portion of the president’s talk with half his mind on the moon. The screen grabbed his attention when he noticed the engagement counter trending up.
“Look at that, Rich. Two hundred thousand people online. Two ten … They’re gonna crash the server.”
“Maybe it’s the Brussels thing,” Burke said, at the same time as Flaherty took a question from an online participant in France.
“Mr. President, is it true that you will be attending the global peace summit in Brussels?”
The Lightbringer’s pet talking heads had been hyping this summit for weeks. It was supposed to be an opportunity for ‘unaligned’ leaders to come to the table and discuss the future. In other words, surrender.
Flaherty responded, “They say security is guaranteed. But I’m telling you, if anyone trusts a rriksti guarantee of security, they must have been hiding under a rock for the last year and some.”
Applause. But Kuldeep frowned. “He didn’t say he’s not going.”
“He called them rriksti,” Burke said. “That’s a first. It’s always ‘squids’.”
“Yeah. Huh.” A worm of unease twisted in Kuldeep’s stomach.
He forgot it—and the president—as Savannah turned over, groaned, and sat up, pushing tousled hair off her face.
Kuldeep helped her to her feet. She smelled of the fruity Mexican detergent they had to use in place of shampoo. On her, it was a good smell. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I wanna puke my guts up, as usual,” she said, but she gave him a soft, sleepy kiss. He stroked the tiny bulge of her tummy. “I want pretzels, Kul. Potato chips. Greasy french fries. Salty junk food. Please. Noooow.”
Kuldeep would’ve flown to the moon to get her what she wanted, but junk food had vanished from the shops of Puerto Rico. In fact, most of the shops had vanished. The Arecibo team lived on prepper fare: rice, beans, plantains.
“My mom says that means it’s a boy,” he said. “Salty cravings.”
“I agree,” Candy Burke said, coming out on the balcony. “Look at her skin. Milk and honey. A boy for sure.”
The things that had vanished. Gynecology clinics. Ultrasounds. Kuldeep felt panic when he thought about the baby being born up here, with only its grandmother attending.
“Oh yeah, Dad,” Savannah said. “I forgot to tell you. The computer picked up something weird last night.”
Burke’s team was so short-handed that his wife and daughter, and Kuldeep, and the security guys, took turns monitoring the telescope.
“What kind of weird, honey?” Burke said.
“Like a whole bunch of data downloaded itself.”
Burke and Kuldeep rushed up the hill to the telescope in about fifteen seconds flat. They hurried to the monitoring room, where the NASA woman on shift pulled up last night’s data.
Savannah, slower getting up the hill, came in. “So, is it anything interesting?”
Burke turned from the screens with a tired smile. “It’s just the James Webb Telescope, honey.”
“The what?”
“Our biggest and baddest deep-space telescope. It was originally designed to look at galaxy and star formation, but we retasked it in 2019 to track the journey of the Lightbringer. It’s a long way away: it orbits the Sun at the L2 Lagrange point. So the Lightbringer never had a chance to trash it, like they did everything in Earth orbit.”
“So it’s still working.”
“Yes. Still repeating its last set of commands to infrared-scan the outer solar system.” Burke gestured at the window of the ops room, and the pewter bowl of the telescope below. “We happened to pick up one of its weekly data downloads.”
“Oh.”
“It used to transmit to the Deep Space Network. Three big radio telescope arrays in California, Australia, and Spain. We haven’t got those anymore, but smaller telescopes can also detect the signals.”
The NASA woman interrupted. “I’m processing this data, Rich,” she said. “It does look kind of interesting. But we didn’t get all of it.” Frustration tinged her voice.
After examining the data, Burke said, “Damn. Way to leave us hanging.”
“Why didn’t we get all of it?” Savannah said.
“Fixed dish, honey. We can’t track the JWST across the sky. We can only see what’s in our perception cone.”
“Well, it’s going to download its stuff again next week, right? So find a dish that moves.”
Burke laughed hollowly.
Kuldeep said, “I might actually be able to do that.”
Savannah’s coffee-colored eyes spurred him to make big promises he didn’t know if he could back up.
“We haven’t got the Deep Space Network anymore, but we’ve got the Trekker Taft network. Let me email him.”
“The no-contact protocol,” Burke protested.
“Screw the protocol.” Nothing ventured, nothing gained. He was going to be a father. “If there’s anyone on Earth with access to a radio telescope, Trek will know how to find them.”
CHAPTER 30
“Thanks for this, Mike,” John Kildare said.
“I’m not altogether keen on leaving you here on your own,” Mike Vaughn said, as they got John’s kit out of the car boot. Mike no longer drove his Prius. The cops had confiscated it a couple of months back. He had replaced it with a beat-up Corolla that had one inestimable advantage: it attracted little attention.
Leaving the Corolla parked on the side of the road, they carried John’s tent and duffel bag across a frost-whitened field. A fence, more symbol than deterrent, was easily stepped over. They trudged into the grounds of the Bayfordbury Observatory.
“I’ll be fine here,” John said. He put down the duffel in a leafless copse. He wished his tent was not so very red. Like a fishing lure. But there didn’t seem to be anyone around to notice it. This was rural Hertfordshire. Nothing here to loot. The nearest potential target was the University of Hertfordshire, a couple of miles away.
Beyond the trees, domes stood in shaggy parkland, like the relics of Byzantine churches.
“I’ll help you put up the tent,” Mike said.
“I’ll be fine,” John assured him. “Go on, get back. And don’t go through Rugby.”
“Not likely.”
On their way here from Nuneaton, they’d driven into the outskirts of Rugby to visit a friend of John’s. That had gone all right, but on their way back to the M1 they had run into some cops. Their Battenburg-checkered cars had been decked with flaming skull-and-crossbones flags, like the covers of the heavy metal records that Jack had been into for a mercifully brief period in his teens. It was enough to make you miss the days when Earth Party walkers were the worst threat roving the Home Counties. Loudspeakers had ordered Mike to pull over. Instead, Mike had stepped on the accelerator and shot across their noses, muttering words that were quite inappropriate for a general practitioner and father of four.
“I’ll stick to the back roads,” he assured John. “And I’ll be back to recover your frozen corpse on Wednesday.”
John smiled. “Tell Helen she’s not to worry.”
“Will do.”
Mike strode away between the bare-branched trees. John erected his tent, reflecting on the pointlessness of telling Helen not to worry. He’d left her in a state of worry so exalted it approached a religious trance. But she was not worrying about him. She was worrying about Jack, their only child, who was alive—alive, ALIVE!—on the moon.
John, this is Avigdor. I hope this email finds you. I’ve been writing to your usual address but have not had any response.
John had not received any of those emails, because his phone had gone out when everyone else’s did. He had been in regular contact with Avigdor Taft before that, but knowing how bad things were in America now, he’d sadly assumed he would not be hearing from his fellow ‘NASA Dad’ again. He had continued to pray, however. And last week his prayers had been answered in the form of a crumpled printout, passed from hand to hand before it reached him. Somehow Avigdor had got the email address of the Catholic school where John had taught before he retired.
My younger son, Trekker, is something of an internet whiz-kid.
Well, that explained it.
In November, Trek made contact with Skyler. He is alive and well at that goddamn sci-fi colony on the moon. He says that your Jack is also alive.
Alive. ALIVE! That was as far as John had read before shouting for Helen. She’d come running, afraid he was having a heart attack. He almost had.
Everyone at Our Lady of the Angels had celebrated with the Kildares when they heard the good news. But in fact, John and Helen’s feelings oscillated between joy and acute anxiety. Why was it easier to believe your only child was dead than to know he was alive, but to know nothing of what was happening up there?
For contact with the moon had been lost again, Avigdor Taft said, and now he had a favor to ask—a request passed along from what remained of NASA—which might or might not help their sons.
Anything, Avigdor. Just name it.
And that’s why John Kildare was breaking into the Bayfordbury Observatory on a freezing January day.
Tent set up, he walked across the parkland to the telescopes. The sun, a red wintry ball, had risen high enough to melt the frost off grass that had not been mown in months. Beyond the domes, a large dish pointed skywards on a goosenecked support, looming over a one-storey building. This was the East Anglian Amateur Radio Observatory.
Although located on the university observatory’s grounds, EAARO was actually run by a non-profit … and the science director of that non-profit lived in Rugby. John knew him from the days when they were both active in the local astronomy society. That was who he’d gone to see this morning at the crack of dawn. It had felt like a miracle to find Hubert still ensconced in his home, and determined to remain there, although broken windows and crime scene tape marred his street.
The second part of that miracle was in John’s pocket.
Glancing over his shoulder, feeling like a housebreaker, he stepped up to the EAARO building and took out Hubert’s master keys.
Inside, the air was stale and dusty, but did not smell of people. No one had been in here recently. John wondered if he should move his bivouac in here. It might be safer, and would certainly be warmer … but that seemed like an offense too many. He was not a squatter.
He fumbled through the darkness to find the circuit-breakers. The power’ll be off, Hubert had said, but there are on-site generators. After all, data keeps raining down from the sky whether or not the bloody power company’s on the job.
John had taught science to teenagers. A balky electrical system had no hope of resisting his organizational powers. Half an hour later, he had everything humming. He fired up the computers. The databanks contained the ephemeris of all radio-emitting missions in the sky. John selected the James Webb Space Telescope.
The giant antenna stirred into motion. Silently, it hunted through space for its target.
That day, the JWST stayed mute for all of the twelve hours it was above the horizon. This was as expected. According to Avigdor, the telescope automatically downloaded its data once a week. Tomorrow would be the big day. John had just come early in case it took him longer to get set up than he expected.
He wasn’t the only one waiting for the JWST’s data, he knew. Trekker Taft had found a chap with access to a telescope in Hungary, and someone in Spain, in NAA-held territory.
The NAAs were probing through the Channel Tunnel now. One heard shocking, scarcely believable rumors from Kent. But that was the last thing on John’s mind as he went to sleep in his tent after a supper of hard-boiled eggs and soup from his thermos.
In the small hours his eyes popped open. He couldn’t have slept another wink if you’d paid him. It was like the early days of First Contact Syndrome all over again. Nothing to do with the cold.
He put on his layers and went out. The bare branches webbed the face of a nearly-full moon. John stood gazing up for he couldn’t have said how long, in a trance comparable to Helen’s distracted state of mind as she dropped dishes and pulled up carrots instead of weeds. A prayer repeated in his heart. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Nothing else could ease the intolerable burden of hope.
He snapped out of it at the sound of a car. Headlights flashed across the field. Voices hallooed. John cowered beneath the trees like a criminal.
When morning came, he moved his tent and belongings into the EAARO building.
He was not feeling well. Stuffy head, a touch of fever. That’s what comes of camping out in January. His ridiculous reluctance to squat on someone else’s property had cost him.
Achy, sore-throated, he once again fired up the computers and sent the antenna hunting. Even inside the building, it was so cold he could see his breath. He leaned back in the controller’s chair and spread his sleeping-bag over him like a blanket.
“It’s open!”
“Careful.”
“Someone in here, bruv.”
John sat up. He had fallen asleep. He stumbled to his feet.
They surrounded him in a second. Black faces, hoodies. The light from the computers caught the gleam of a knife.
“Who this?”
“Who you?”
John dredged up his classroom voice. “I’m in the middle of an extremely important project. Do you mind?”
“What project?” The knife-wielder prowled to the computers. John saw that the JWST had been downloading data for almost four hours.
“Don’t touch anything!” Heedless of the knife, he bent over the computers. “I have to send this data to NASA.”
“What for?”
John set the data to copy itself to the thumb drive he’d brought. Facing them, he said, “When was the last time you had a hot meal?”
They exchanged glances, laughed in the way young men laugh when they don’t know what to say.
“I’ve a friend coming later to drive me home. You’re welcome to come to our church for supper. You’ll have to leave your weapons at the door, mind you.”
“Nah, bruv. We staying at the uni. We just saw your tent last night, came to warn you. Cops always nosing round here, innit? They catch you, they’ll fuck you up.”
John let out his breath. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for the warning.”
That afternoon Mike came to pick him up. John Kildare returned to Nuneaton with a high fever, two university students in the back seat, and the James Webb Space Telescope’s entire observational data queue on a thumb drive in his pocket.
Helen took the thumb drive to the Catholic school and sent its contents to Boston.
Trek dug through it, failed to make head or tail of it, and forwarded it to Arecibo.
CHAPTER 31
The carbonaceous chondrite meteorite hunters returned to CELL empty-handed. They had been away for two weeks, camping in an inflatable shelter they took with them. They’d flown boxes in the short-hop lifters, scanning the south pole’s craters in search of a meteorite that satisfied Keelraiser’s highly specific criteria. They had not found one. Alexei suspected that mattered quite a lot. If it didn’t, why would Keelraiser have approved this expensive and risky mission in the first place?
But their failure faded in importance compared to the state they were in.
Blue lips and fingertips. Fever. Their breath rattled and wheezed in their lungs.
“Acute silicosis,” Alexei said. “That goddamn inflatable shelter. You were tracking moon dust in every time you used it. You’ve been eating and drinking the stuff. Breathing it.”
All ten meteorite hunters needed immediate treatment. Silicosis had no conventional cure. Extroversion might work. Alexei triaged them, and Nene took the five worst cases to the clinic in X-ray country. She hadn’t the resources to treat more than that at a time. There weren’t enough extroverted rriksti on the moon, never had been.
“I miss Brbb more every day,” Giles said as they tried to make the other victims comfortable in the mess.
Alexei glanced at his friend, knowing it wasn’t just a throwaway remark. Giles had been very close to the Krijistal platoon led by Brbb.
“We all do,” Alexei said, not knowing what else to say.
Giles sneered. He flung himself down to watch television. James Coetzee and Carla Giacometti, the CELL doctor, covered the silicosis sufferers with suizh-fiber blankets. Anguished CELLies gathered around.
Things just keep going wrong, Alexei thought. On the big screen at the end of the mess, boats carved wakes across a choppy gray sea. A CNN reporter holding an umbrella jabbered about the symbolism of this historical moment. Jet engines throbbed on the audio channel. A plane swooped out of the drizzle. Water geysered up, with bodies and pieces of boat in it. “This has been going on all day,” said the CNN reporter, with the unstudied callousness Alexei remembered from his own war in Chechnya.
The invasion of Britain was not proceeding smoothly, from the point of view of the invaders. But its outcome was a foregone conclusion. The Channel was a 50-kilometer open door. Alexei felt ashamed of his own country’s role in the invasion: Russia had provided a lot of the NAA’s hardware.
More planes droned over the flotilla, dropping projectiles. Alexei thought they were civilian jets, not RAF planes, although he wasn’t sure. He’d have liked to ask Jack, but Jack was freezing his balls off in Shackleton Crater. Maybe it was just as well he wasn’t here to see this. Based on the experience of Germany, civilian resistance was a bad idea. The Krijistal and their allies won anyway, and more people died in the process.
The picture changed to an exterior view of a cathedral. A banner proclaiming GLOBAL PEACE SUMMIT 2024 flapped wetly on its gothic façade. NAA soldiers faced a restive crowd, cradling their weapons. The European Parliament had taken over the cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula as its headquarters after the destruction of much of official Brussels. A small, plump man stood on the cathedral’s steps. He spoke in French. Simultaneous translation kicked in: “We hope and pray our friends in the UK will, ah, will get the situation under control so that they may attend the summit.”
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. Clips 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 infantry. 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!”
Hannah sat—collapsed—beside Ripstiggr. She put her arm around him, in a reversal of the way he usually sheltered her. It only went halfway around his broad back. “Oh, Ripstiggr,” she said, tears in her eyes.
“They’re going to take one look at this mess and nuke us from orbit.”
She couldn’t respond to what he had said about love. It would feel too much like admitting defeat, for some reason. She focused on the threat from the Liberator and Homemaker. “We’ve got to stop them.”
Ripstiggr waved at the mountainous bulk of the Lightbringer towering over the airport. “You never saw her when she was undamaged. She was a beauty. Unstoppable, next to invulnerable. And now we’re facing two of them. I think there were also plans to upgrade the point defenses.”
“There has to be a way.”
“We have one ICBM and four unarmed shuttles.”
“We might have something else,” Hannah said. The decision came easily.
“What?”
“I’ve been working on something. You know how I was trying to fix up the other wrecked shuttles?”
“Yeah. You took a whole reactor apart and put it back together, and I had to spend the whole day putting you back together.” Ripstiggr gently tugged on a curl of her hair. “That was fun.”
Hannah nodded. “Well, it was worth it. I figured out how the gauge field works.”
“You could have just read the manual.”
“The manual doesn’t tell you how to reverse the gauge field’s polarity.”
Ripstiggr turned to look at her. His sunglasses hid his eyes. Hannah reached up and tugged them down on his nose.
“It can be used as a weapon,” she said.
“I heard something about that back home. The Lightsiders weaponized reverse gauge fields during World War ten thousand and something. It’s messy, dangerous. Short-range.”
“It’s doable.”
The silence said what they both knew: she had not said anything about this before, because she hadn’t been able to decide who to use it on. She shrugged awkwardly.
“I’ll show you how it works. We can add the capability to the shuttles. Give them a fighting chance.”
*
Keelraiser closed down the comms link to the Lightbringer. He threw his head back in the classic rriksti posture of exasperation.
“Didn’t go well?” Jack had stayed behind after the others left to listen in on Keelraiser’s conversation with the Lightbringer, but since it had almost all been in Rristigul, he might as well not have bothered. He peeled himself off the wall where he had lurked out of camera range.
“They’re panicking,” Keelraiser said. “They’ll waste the next two weeks running around like headless chickens. Is this correct?”
“I wouldn’t wonder.”
“Oh, well. It was my duty to warn them.”
Jack prowled around the room, considering and discarding options. “So, if anything’s going to be done, we’ve got to do it ourselves.”
“Yes.” Keelraiser straightened up and began to type, glancing from one monitor to the other. “We’ve got two weeks. We’ll ramp up the output of the thorium reactor to meet the bunker’s baseload requirements, fill the Cloudeater’s reaction mass tanks, and carry out thorough systems checks. The life-support systems will need a tune-up, and some new components may have to be fabbed and calibrated.”
“You’re giving me the Cloudeater after all?!” Weeks ago, Jack had pressed Keelraiser for a loan of his ship. That was when he thought their worst enemies were space, time, and the nitrogen cycle. Now, they faced two planet-killers. He couldn’t imagine what one unarmed shuttle could do against that. But at least he’d be doing something. That was better than doing nothing.
“No,” Keelraiser said. “I am not giving you the Cloudeater. I’m going to fly it myself.”
Jack screwed up his face. He did not like the idea of being a passenger. But again: better than nothing. “There was this movie,” he began. “Star Wars. You must have seen it …”
“Yes,” Keelraiser said. “How we laughed. The Liberator and the Homemaker are not Death Stars. They were designed by experts, not entertainers.”
“Yeah, but they’d still go boom if you threw a flying fusion bomb at them—”
“There are two of them, and they have excellent point defenses. Anyway, I have a plan. Save your space combat fantasies for a time when I can just get drunk, close my eyes, and listen to you talking about explosions.”
Jack grinned, shrugged. “Lay it on me.”
As Keelraiser explained what he had in mind, Jack’s tenuous optimism soured into dread.
There was no way this was ever going to work.
CHAPTER 33
Kuldeep bent over the screens in the monitoring room at Arecibo, watching Alien Spaceship No. 2 blaze towards Earth. Jill Crawley, the NASA data analyst who worked with Burke, had constructed a model based on the JSWT data. In a touch of dark humor, she’d chosen a skull-and-crossbones icon to represent the spaceship. Its fiery tail blazed across the screen, closing the distance to Earth.
Kuldeep glanced at Burke. The former NASA director looked about a thousand years old today. Everyone in the room was silent. The whole world seemed to be silent until gunfire popped down the hill.
Reacting with scalded-cat speed, Kuldeep pushed Savannah towards her mother. “Get into the generator room. Lock the door.” He ran out into the hall, reaching for his radio.
“Contact,” was all he heard. Then more shots. Loud over the radio, faint in his other ear.
He leapt down the stairs. Most likely, thugs from San Juan in search of loot.
Burke hurried down the stairs behind him.
“Sir, let me handle this!”
Kuldeep rounded the landing. Below, daylight poured into the visitor center. Interactive displays and exhibits stood in front of big windows overlooking the telescope’s dish.
Clack. Clack. Clack. A squid stalked across the floor, turning its helmet from side to side.
Kuldeep gripped his .38 but he did not draw it. He had never actually seen a squid before. Eight feet tall, it wore battle armor. Curved, reflective surfaces. A helmet the size of a beach ball, shaped like a blunt pyramid. Many-clawed hands held a scarily minimalist rifle. The future had come to Arecibo.
It saw him—or smelled him, or sensed him—and aimed its rifle in his direction.
His .38 clattered on the landing.
More footsteps echoed below. A human woman scuffled into the visitor center, wearing sunglasses, a flak jacket, and designer jeans.
“Rich!” she screamed, and hurtled up the stairs.
Burke brushed past Kuldeep. He and the woman hugged, laughed, cried.
Kuldeep recognized the one and only Hannah Ginsburg. Relief tinged his wariness.
“Where are my guys?” he said gruffly.
Armored squids surrounded them, rifles aimed at the men’s midsections.
Hannah said, “Your guys would be the wiseasses who shot at us back there? One of them got hurt. He’ll be OK. They shouldn’t have started shit.”
“Can you blame them?” Kuldeep said, looking up at his own reflection in the mirrored helmets.
Hannah’s lips crimped. “You know what, I’m not into this conversation. We’re in a hurry.” She and Burke started upstairs, still doing their Oh my God it’s so good to see you thing. Burke was clearly over the moon to be reunited with his protégé. He always had been a big softie.
Upstairs in the monitoring room, the analysts peeked out from underneath desks. Hannah waved at them. “Hi, guys.” She turned to her alien escorts. “OK, we need all the computers. Take everything. And disable the internet connection.” She faced Burke. “Rich, I’m really sorry. But you have to come with us, too.”
Kuldeep found his voice. “We’re not going anywhere with you.”
“Yes, you are,” Hannah said, mildly.
Kuldeep shut up. He couldn’t see Savannah or Candy. They ought to be hiding in the generator room. Dared he try to sneak away?
Hannah gravitated to the computer where the model of Alien Spaceship No. 2’s trajectory was still looping on the screen. “This is it, huh?”
Burke nodded. “This model incorporates new data from a JWST wide-angle experiment. Just one of the observations the telescope has been running automatically for the last two years. As soon as the ship started burning, it showed up like a firework display.”
“Where are you getting this data?”
“We have a guy in the UK. He’s been downloading the JWST’s data dumps.”
“The UK, huh. Ouch. Can he process the data? Does he know what he’s seeing?”
“No. Only we have those tools.”
“I knew it had to be you leaking the data,” Hannah said, to Kuldeep and the analysts as much as Burke. “Well, I knew it had to be someone in the US, because of the NASA connection. And this is the only working telescope in US territory.”
“How’d you get here?” Kuldeep said.
Hannah turned her gaze on him. Her eyes were brown. Human-shaped, human-sized. Yet that profound, penetrating stare—that was not human. He grew even more afraid.
“Shuttle’s parked on Route 129,” she said. “We borrowed a couple of trucks to get up here.”
“Oh.”
“We have to take you with us,” she told the analysts. “Sorry, but we just can’t have this shit getting out. We’d have a global panic on our hands.”
Burke said, “Is the Global Peace Summit really going forward?”
“You bet. It’s more important than ever to make a show of confidence. I’m going to be there.”
“With that on the way?”
“What am I supposed to do, run around wailing that the sky is falling?”
Burke nodded. “I never doubted you, Hannah. I knew you’d end up doing the right thing.”
Pink tinged Hannah’s tanned cheeks. She examined the model again, clicked around for the underlying figures. “Only one ship?”
“The latest data indicates that eight days of travel time separates them. This is Ship Number 2. As you see, NASA naming conventions are as imaginative as ever. It’ll arrive on Valentine’s Day. Ship Number 3 will arrive on the 22nd, assuming an identical deceleration burn.”
“This is good stuff, Rich. You can set up your lab again when we get there. Keep observing the ships as long as your guy in the UK remains un-beheaded.” Kuldeep grimaced at the reference to the invasion of the UK. Internet rumor said that the front-line NAA troops were committing atrocities in London. “Hell, we can set you up with a radio telescope so you can download the JWST data yourself.”
Burke said, “Hannah, where are we going?”
“To hell in a handbasket, I expect. But, you know. One thing I’ve learned from the rriksti?” She gestured at the armored squids who were carrying the computers out of the room. “Never, ever, ever give up.”
A door opened on the far side of the room. Candy peeked through.
“It’s OK, honey,” Burke said. “It’s just Hannah.”
Kuldeep ran to Savannah and hugged her, pressing her frightened face into his chest.
“All right, everyone,” Hannah said. “Time to go. We can pick up your stuff from the chalet on the way.”
In the back of a stolen delivery truck that smelled of chickens, bumping down the mountain road, Savannah threw up. Hannah, who was riding in the back with them, offered a water bottle and a clean towel from her own rucksack.
Savannah leaned against Kuldeep, staring over the truck’s tailgate, groaning.
“Carsick, huh?” Hannah said sympathetically.
“I’m not carsick,” Savannah said. “I’m pregnant.”
“Oh.” A shadow crossed Hannah’s face.
“I’ve been stuck in fucking Puerto Rico, eating plantains, and now you’re dragging us off to Africa. And all I want is to go to McDonalds.”
After a moment, Hannah reached into her rucksack. “Well, it isn’t McDonalds, but …” She lifted out a can of Pringles. A bag of Doritos. A packet of cheese-flavored rice cakes. “I have a total weakness for this stuff myself. It’s really bad, but I got the guys to fly to South Africa and load a whole junk food aisle into the plane.”
“Oh. My. God. Gimme.”
Kuldeep wished he could have been the one to give Savannah the chips she’d been craving. As she crunched blissfully, he took a Dorito and let it melt on his tongue. The flavor brought back a lost world.
Hannah moved to sit next to him. “You’re the NXC guy, right?”
“Yeah.”
“President’s liaison to NASA?”
“NASA. Ha. Yeah.”
“We’re going to the DRC first. Drop everyone off. But then I have to head to Brussels for the summit. I’d like you to come with me.”
Kuldeep’s arm tightened around Savannah. “What if I say no?”
“Jeez. I put it nicely. I didn’t have to. To be clear, you’re coming. We have five days to conquer the world, and I need your help.”
CHAPTER 34
Alexei found Jack in the CELL dorm where he’d been hot-bunking since the destruction of the rotating hab. Jack was lying on his bunk, drinking krak and flicking through photos on an iPad.
“What’re you doing?”
“Isn’t it obvious? I’m having a fit of crippling existential doubt.”
“Oh. I thought you were getting drunk.”
“No, that’s the part where I’m trying to motivate myself. Time to go, huh?”
That was why Alexei had come looking for him, but he sat down on the bunk near Jack’s chest. “Who’s that?” The pictures on the iPad all featured the same serious-faced little boy.
“Linda’s kid.”
“Jack.”
“Don’t worry. I have a lot of reasons to get drunk but she’s not one of them.”
“Good to know.” Alexei adjusted the cross-over of his robe. He had Zhenya tucked in there, asleep. He shouldn’t be drinking when he was babysitting, but he reached for the bottle of krak anyway. “I have a hundred reasons to get drunk, too.”
“Yeah?”
“You’re leaving me here with Coetzee. That’s ninety-nine reasons right there.”
“So come with us.”
“I can’t.”
“Probably wise.” Jack tossed the iPad aside, laced his hands on his chest, and stared up at the underside of the bunk above. “This feels all wrong.”
“When you’re feeling in the dumps …” Alexei sang softly.
“Don’t be silly chumps,” Jack picked it up, and then broke off. “But we are being silly chumps. We’re going to put ourselves out there as bait for the Liberator, get ourselves captured, and sabotage the ship from the inside? It’ll never work.”
“But you’ve got a different plan, haven’t you?” Alexei said. “You’re going to nuke them. Where there’s an ICBM there’s a way.”
Jack laughed. “How did you guess?”
“It’s these implants,” Alexei said, indicating his eyes. Cleanmay had developed filters that enabled humans to see in the rriksti-visible spectrum. He’d had them implanted when he went under the knife to have his bones done. “They give me the ability to read your mind.” He cackled at Jack’s expression.
“What do they actually do?”
“I can see in the dark, see more gradations of darker colors.” Alexei lifted the crossover of his smock to let Jack peek at the snoozing Zhenya. “I can tell them apart now.”
“Hello, little guy,” Jack crooned. He reached out a forefinger and touched the sleeping baby’s foot. Jokily, he said, “You know, he doesn’t look much like you.”
Alexei cringed. He’d known Jack would ask about this sooner or later. “They aren’t mine, idiot. I am sure all my sperm have two heads at this point.”
“Right. Mine probably glow in the dark.”
“They’re Keelraiser’s.” Alexei hated the way that sounded. “Nene had to choose a father. She chose him. It was a sperm donor type of arrangement.”
Jack’s face was unreadable, but he said loyally, “They’re obviously not his in any meaningful sense. They’re yours.”
They walked through the operations section towards the airlock. CELLies sat in miserable huddles, getting no work done. They all knew about the Liberator and the Homemaker. That was bad enough. They didn’t know about the other issues that Keelraiser had filled Alexei in on: the nitrogen and carbon shortages that were going to kill them all in a few months, anyway. When Alexei thought about that, he felt a surge of resentment so intense that he wanted to tell Jack he’d changed his mind. I’m coming with you …
Jack stopped outside a closed door with a biometric reader next to it. “I was just thinking. If you’re not coming, there’s room on the shuttle …”
“And?”
“I’d like to take Linda.”
“Do you really think that’s a good idea?”
“I think she’d do anything to save Earth. That makes her an asset.”
“What will Keelraiser say?”
“I don’t actually care.”
Alexei pressed his palm to the biometric reader. The door unlocked. He pushed it open. Linda sat on the floor in the converted office that had become CELL’s jail. There was nowhere else to sit.
She spat at him.
“Be nice,” Alexei said. “We’re letting you out of here. You are going back to Earth.”
“My way of saying sorry,” Jack said. “Offering you another chance to die horribly. Are you up for it?”
“Hell, yeah!” Linda’s face lit up. She hugged first Alexei, then Jack. “Thank you. You guys rock.”
“At least I won’t have to deal with you anymore,” Alexei said.
They hurried to the airlock. In the changing room, Jack and Linda donned rriksti EVA suits.
Coetzee strolled around the banks of lockers. Alexei zeroed in on this tempting target for his resentment. He went up to Coetzee, deliberately invading his personal space. “Going to see them off?” Coetzee wore a rriksti suit, doffed to his shoulders.
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 whipped 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?!” Keelraiser 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.
The surviving Krijistal stood on the end wall of the command module, gripping their blasters, glaring up.
Jack, Keelraiser, and the others from the Cloudeater clung to various bits of sideways furniture, like treed cats, staring down at them.
Yes, down. Sky Station now had gravity, of an unwanted sort. With the lower docking pad gone, and the top pad plus Cloudeater still pulling away in their higher orbit, tidal gravity gripped the station. The interior layout treated the modules as long tunnel-shaped rooms. The ends of the modules pointed towards Earth. In zero-gee, that had been irrelevant. But now, the Earthwards ends of the modules had become floors. Everything that had been lightly velcroed to walls had fallen off and landed on them. It was worse than the bridge of the SoD during a burn. To complete that old-timey SoD ambiance, the zero-gee toilets had malfunctioned. The smell of sewage pervaded the station, tinged with the musky reek of the rriksti now crowding the place.
Jack adjusted his headset and pitched his voice to carry through the module. Everyone might as well know. “I launched the damn missile. I didn’t have time to task it before you lot showed up.”
Keelraiser glared at him, then looked down at Ripstiggr. “I did not approve the launch, and I won’t approve any radio contact with the missile. If you planned to aim it at the Liberator—”
“Of course I did,” Ripstiggr said. “Hit them first, hit them hard.” Jack was dismayed to find himself in agreement with this strategy.
“That’s not a plan,” Keelraiser said. “It’s suicide. You always did think that hitting people would make them like you. It doesn’t work, you know.”
He sat on the side of the radio operator’s seat, staring down at his fellow Krijistal. He clearly intended to defend the radio with his bare hands, if it came to that.
Given the odds, Jack could not understand why Keelraiser was being such a jerk about the ICBM. He guessed that he was watching the murky last stages of a reciprocity cycle decades in the making. He also guessed that Keelraiser was trying to break the cycle. But he did not see how being gratuitously rude and condescending fit in.
“Let me explain,” Keelraiser said.”There’s another ship behind this one. If we take out the Liberator, we’ll then have to contend with an extremely pissed Homemaker. That is unlikely to end well.”
“They’re extremely pissed anyway,” Ripstiggr said.
“That’s my point,” Jack said.
Keelraiser looked at him. “What were you thinking?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Jack snapped. “We’re about to be slaughtered. Throwing something at them seemed like a better use of time than playing Monopoly.”
“If in doubt, nuke it? That’s how we got into this mess in the first place.”
“No,” Ripstiggr shouted, “we’re in this mess because of you!”
Ripstiggr really was a splendid specimen of a rriksti. His height and hulking build looked even more striking in the flesh than on camera. If he was human, he’d be Arnold Schwarzenegger. He threw himself at the wall and began to climb, swarming up the consoles, pushing off from sideways desks.
Keelraiser unfolded to his feet, balancing on the seat-arm, ready to take the bigger rriksti on.
A small human form fell past Jack and collided with Ripstiggr, knocking him off the wall. Entangled, man and rriksti fell to the end wall. The man was Skyler. His fists flailed, pummelling any bit of Ripstiggr he could reach.
Rriksti laughter crackled on the radio frequencies. Jack dropped off his perch to go to Skyler’s aid, but by the time he got there, the other Krijistal had plucked the young man off their commander. In no great hurry, Ripstiggr got to his feet and held Skyler up by the scruff of his shirt like a kitten. “You need to train your humans better, Iristigut.”
Skyler’s feet pedalled in the air. His face turned red as the collar of his shirt cut into his windpipe.
“You’ve won, now let him go,” Jack said, pushing between the Krijistal. His eyes met Ripstiggr’s. Yes, the commander was amused. He could take a joke. Jack’s reluctant respect for him grew.
Ripstiggr tossed Skyler in Jack’s direction. He sneered up at Keelraiser, “My humans don’t act out like that.”
“I seem to recall your favorite human nearly crashed the Lightbringer,” Keelraiser said.
“That was then. Now she sucks my cock.”
Skyler let out a howl and fought to reach Ripstiggr. Jack held him back, with some difficulty.
Ripstiggr tilted his head. “On weekends, I fuck her until she screams. She begs for it. Says there’s no way she’d ever be satisfied with a microscopic human dick after experiencing my mighty tool.”
“Bastard!” Skyler sagged in Jack’s restraining grip, obviously on the verge of tears.
Jack felt a surge of anger at Ripstiggr’s cruelty. “Do you know who you’re talking to? This isn’t just some out-of-luck astronaut like the rest of us. He’s a very highly ranked NXC agent. If he was on Earth, he’d be one of the most powerful people on Earth.”
“Don’t work for them anymore,” Skyler grunted. Jack gave him a shake: I’m trying to save your life here.
Ripstiggr looked interested. “Really? Want to give Hannah some tips? She’s meeting with the American leadership tomorrow. I can get her on the maser.”
Skyler’s eyes lit up. It was as if the prospect of speaking with Hannah threw a switch in his brain, shutting down any sense of dignity he possessed. Jack despaired of him.
“Are you completely delusional?” Keelraiser said, perched above them, a knot of knees and elbows and glittering eyes. “You’re parleying with guerrillas, while extinction threatens the entire human species?”
“Not to mention us,” muttered Hriklif.
“If I can get them to surrender unconditionally, the brass might accept that as a result,” Ripstiggr snarled.
“Hey, that might actually work,” Skyler said.
“Unlikely,” Keelraiser said, crushingly. “And if you nuke the Liberator? Out of the question. Unless you were planning to hang that around my neck.”
“Busted,” Ripstiggr said, hair dancing.
“They wouldn’t believe you,” Keelraiser said. “They think we are all in this together. And we are, aren’t we?” He didn’t give Ripstiggr time to respond. “It was my rebellion to begin with. Now it’s yours.” He vaulted into the next seat up the wall, which was the station radar operator’s. He tapped commands into the keyboard and viewed the resulting radar plot. “Fortunately, the missile’s now drifted around the curve of Earth. It’s out of radio contact. No one will be tasking it.”
Jack groaned. They had wasted more time than he’d realized. “And where’s the Liberator?”
“Hold on,” Keelraiser said.
The entire station fell silent, except for the whirr of fans and the gurgle of toilets peacefully overflowing in the hab modules. The Krijistal fingered their guns. The humans twitched at every staccato tap of a rriksti fingernail on a keyboard.
“It’s here,” Keelraiser said. “It’s orbiting at 160 kilometers. It must have arrived while we were trying to kill one another.”
Jack’s mind whirled. He had thought that star looked bright. What he had actually seen was the Liberator’s final burn into orbit.
“I thought we had hours!” Linda shouted, from high up on the wall.
“We were going on a projection based on data from human instruments,” Keelraiser said. “Any minuscule error could have thrown the model off. Anyway, they are here.”
There was a rush by the rriksti from the Lightbringer to view the radar. Keelraiser retreated to a higher perch.
“What’s this?” Ripstiggr shouted, stabbing the screen.
“It looks to me like a shuttle,” Keelraiser said. “Draw your own conclusions.”
Jack fought through the mob of Krijistal to get a look. Sure enough, a Cloudeater-size object was bending towards Sky Station. His fingers itched for a targeting laser.
“Make your choice, Ripstiggr,” Keelraiser said. “Flee to Earth, and await the end … or wait here.”
*
One hour later, Sky Station’s top airlock sighed open. Masked faces peered in. Jack pictured what they beheld, and imagined their astonishment at the sight: twenty rriksti and a handful of humans clinging to the walls of the command module, staring back at them in silence.
No one had opted to flee to Earth. Jack respected Ripstiggr for sticking it out to the bitter end. Not that Ripstiggr approved of Keelraiser’s plan, any more than Jack had. The idea of deliberately getting captured seemed like madness.
Then again, the alternative was simply getting killed.
From his perch halfway up the module, Jack stared at the newcomers, waiting for them to open fire, and trying to convince himself that he’d be OK with it ending here. It didn’t work. He wanted to live.
The paralysis of mutual shock lasted for a microsecond. Newcomers piled in from both airlocks, shouting and flourishing blasters. They fired pulses at random, beams dialed down to burn and scar, rather than kill. After all, you can’t interrogate corpses.
Smarting from third-degree burns, clutching blinded eyes, heads ringing (Jack, Skyler, and Giles) or fainting from the onslaught of harmonics (Linda and Coetzee), the prisoners were herded into one of the hab modules. They all landed in a heap on the end wall, which was now slick with sewage that had trickled down from the toilets.
The newcomers took up positions above them, balancing on the edges of bunks, shelves, and ventilation units, blasters aimed at the prisoners.
They wore rriksti suits, patterned in an unfamiliar style: exaggerated lips and staring eyes printed on their faces made them resemble war-painted African warriors, or maybe Japanese actors in masks.
In the door from the command module, halfway up one wall, an imposing figure appeared. It wore one of those toga-type VIP robes over its suit.
The Shiplord of the Liberator had come in person to find out why three rriksti shuttles were parked at a human space station.
In the dead silence, the Shiplord doffed its suit to the neck, revealing a face more ochre than the rriksti norm, and reddish-orange bio-antennas. Jack had absorbed enough of a rriksti perspective on beauty to understand that by their standards, the Shiplord was a knockout.
Keelraiser said very quietly, “This isn’t right.”
“You’re telling me,” Jack muttered.
“I know the Shiplord of the Liberator. That’s not him.”
“Oh.”
“Clever plan: dead on contact.” Keelraiser nudged Ripstiggr. “How good are you at improvising?”
“Better than you are,” Ripstiggr said, and broke off as the Shiplord pointed at the prisoners and gurgled in a deep pleasant voice.
Giles translated in a whisper: “We meet again, Hriklif.”
Hriklif?
The atomic engineer pulled himself out from under a pile of wounded Krijistal. “Khashaz,” he gulped, staring up.
The Shiplord laughed. “No longer Khashaz,” it said, and Giles muttered in English. “Now I am Eskitul.”
Of course, that was not a name, but a title.
Shiplord.
“It is a pleasure to meet a fellow Lightsider here,” the Shiplord gurgled. “Although it is not sufficient to offset my absolute disgust at the mess you have made of this mission.”
“It doesn’t sound like it’s speaking Rristigul,” Jack whispered.
“She, Khashaz is a female title. She is not,” Giles whispered back. “This is the Lightsider language. It’s actually a lot easier.”
The Shiplord scanned the prisoners with piercing gold eyes. “What are all these animals doing here?”
“Never mind that,” one of the wounded Krijistal shouted. “What’s a Lightsider doing in command of the Liberator?”
The Shiplord gestured. Her guards—themselves Krijistal, of course—picked out the rriksti who had spoken and shot him. The body fell near Jack. He bent, straightened out the limbs, and closed the eyes, honoring the rriksti who had had the courage to speak up.
Keelraiser spoke—in English. “Shiplord.” Jack looked away, bracing for the inevitable shot. “You find us on the verge of a historic victory over these animals.”
No shot came. Sewage trickled out of the open door of a toilet booth halfway up the wall: drip, drip, drip, the tiny noise loud in the silence.
Keelraiser went on, “At this very moment, our representatives are preparing to receive their unconditional surrender, in a city in the part of this planet known as Europe. We came here to await your arrival, and beg you to accept this triumph on behalf of the Temple.”
Although Jack knew, none better, how well Keelraiser could play this part, it was still hard to hear. Doubts crept in, worrying at his mind like insects he couldn’t swat away.
“That sounds fishy to me,” the Shiplord said, suddenly switching into the crisp TV English spoken, more or less, by all the rriksti Jack knew. “Why are there any of them left alive to surrender? Never mind. I know why. The Lightbringer failed abominably in its mission, that’s why. However, a full inquiry must await the arrival of our colleagues on the Homemaker. In the meantime …”
“Now she’s speaking English!” Jack whispered.
Giles whispered, “They don’t understand each other’s languages. Or they don’t want to admit that they do. Zhigga, the Lightsider language, was banned on Imf. I had to get Hriklif and that other Lightsider, the electrician with green hair, to teach it to me.”
“In the meantime,” Ripstiggr blurted, “we have one week to plunder the fuck out of this planet! Shiplord, we’ve been down on the surface for the last year. Because of circumstances. For which I take responsibility. Although it’s really his fault.” He pointed at Keelraiser. “Anyway, we’ve discovered untold mineral and biological wealth—”
“Imf requires nothing of Earth except its immediate and total surrender,” the Shiplord shot back.
“Which is just what we have obtained, by the grace of Ystyggr,” Keelraiser said. “Our triumph only requires your seal of approval …”
Hriklif interrupted, speaking in the Lightsider dialect. Giles translated, haltingly. “Shiplord, we Lightsiders are an inquiring people. We’re not like these brutish Darksiders. We value knowledge, not power. At least that’s what I was always taught. I and many others joined the Lightbringer because we were told it was a scientific mission. Now, with your long-awaited arrival, we have a chance to make that lie the truth.”
Giles paused, obviously moved. He resumed translating.
“At the very least, we could carry out some basic zoological and geological surveys, which I’m positive these Darksiders haven’t even thought about. They’ve been too busy blowing things up …”
The Shiplord said, “Knowledge is power.”
“Yes!” Hriklif cried piteously.
“Hmm,” the Shiplord said. She sat down on the side of the door, swinging her legs. She stared at the human prisoners. “Can these animals actually talk? They don’t look like the ones on the television. I thought that stuff was mostly propaganda.”
Hriklif pulled Skyler to his feet. “Say something.”
“Um, nice to meet you?” Skyler said in a thin but brave voice. “It would be nicer if you weren’t pointing guns at us. But anyway, I’m a scientist, too. I really wanted to spend my life studying proto-stars. I ended up here. I guess maybe we’re in the same situation …” He trailed off, nervously clutching his peace symbol.
The Shiplord’s hair danced. She spoke to her entourage, and Giles translated. “Go back to the ship and get my sampling equipment and analysis tools. Refuel my shuttle for a deorbit burn. Task another two hands of shuttles to accompany us. We are going to have a look at this planet before the Darksiders wreck it for everyone.”
*
The airlocks of Sky Station worked like a bellows, letting out group after group of people. The last to leave was Ripstiggr, closely guarded by Krijistal from the Liberator. Jack imagined it must sting to be considered a traitor to his own people.
But maybe he was wrong. As the airlock closed, Ripstiggr stared at Keelraiser. He raised one hand, fingers parted in two groups of three. A rriksti salute.
Keelraiser returned the salute.
The airlock closed.
The silence returned.
Jack, Keelraiser, and Coetzee were left alone with half a dozen Lightsiders fresh from cryosleep, twitchily fondling their weapons.
CHAPTER 37
The Shiplord’s shuttle, the Beauty of Destruction, deorbited, streaming fire from its thermal shields. Skyler had a window seat. He was tied into it, actually. That didn’t stop him from looking.
In the distance, more fiery daggers plunged into Earth’s atmosphere. The Shiplord was taking no risks. This would be the most heavily armed scientific foray ever.
Skyler had often envisioned his own return to Earth, but he’d never imagined a catastrophe like this.
Ripstiggr sat next to him, similarly tied hand and foot to his seat. “‘Ey. Oo. Skyl’.”
What? Whose voice was that? It had been an actual voice, not a radio-frequency transmission digitally converted into the acoustic frequencies. Skyler knew that for a fact, because they’d taken his headset. He couldn’t hear anything the Lightsiders were saying to each other. Giles and Linda were somewhere at the back of the shuttle.
“Skyl’.”
He tried to turn his head. Gee-force crushed him into his seat. He was in quite a lot of pain, actually. His seat was shaped wrong for a human body, and on top of that he was in shit condition, having spent the last year in lunar gravity. He should’ve spent more time in the rotating hab while it still existed, lifting weights like Jack. He wouldn’t be able to walk ten paces when they landed, let alone go in search of Hannah.
Not that she’d want to see him, anyway, if what Ripstiggr had said was even half true.
She sucks my cock…
Tears leaked from his eyes as the shuttle plunged into the stratosphere.
Something touched his chin, the side of his face. Velvety, hot, strong.
Ripstiggr’s bio-antennas curled around Skyler’s head and turned it on the seatback, tipping his chin up at the same time, so he was staring into Ripstiggr’s huge flat face.
“Skyl’. ‘Ear me?”
“You can talk?” Skyler gasped.
“‘Een ‘acticin’.” The rriksti lips clumsily formed the words, each short phrase pushed out on a gust of smelly breath. “‘Or ‘Annah. Wanted sur’rise ‘er.”
I fuck her until she screams …
“You need to work on those plosive consonants.”
“Louder. My ears no ‘ood. ‘On’ worry. ‘Ese ‘astards can’t ‘ear.”
“OK,” Skyler shouted. “That’s interesting. So what?”
“Oo NXC. America. Oo know any of ‘ese freedom fighters?”
*
Jack slipped away while the Lightsider soldiers were interrogating Keelraiser. They had been instructed to treat the prisoners as animals, and that’s exactly what they were doing. What did they care where a small, hairy animal like Jack went? After all, he couldn’t go far.
He climbed in a mental fog of rage and hopelessness through the hab module formerly used as a dorm for Sky Station’s crew. Swinging from handhold to handhold, he felt like a monkey. He was a monkey. A mere evolved ape. Fitted for survival in Earth’s biosphere. Not for anything else.
What had possessed humanity to imagine we could reach the stars?
Apes can’t fly.
Birds can fly.
No wonder the rriksti are winning.
In a corner of the dorm, Jack found what he was looking for: a locker with a fat red cross on it. He ransacked it, tossing some items to the distant floor, pocketing others. Monkey make mess. Oop, oop, oop.
He hoisted himself into the factory module adjoining the hab. The only light came, dimly, from the open pressure door behind him. Inoperable fab equipment gleamed in the dusk.
A putrid reek tainted the air. Fermented urine, feces, rotten meat, and blood all mixed up together. That was how it smelled when someone got gut-shot. Jack gagged, covering his mouth.
Hobo, the pilot of the Dealbreaker, had bled out in vacuum.
Jack had retrieved his body and stashed it in here, moments before the Krijistal invaded the station.
He’d stuffed the body underneath an electrophoresis distillation unit on the Earthwards side of the module, where it would be hidden from a casual inspection. He pulled it out, smearing bile and blood across the floor. Crouching, he rolled Hobo onto his front. He found the doffing patch on the life-support backpack and held it down until the suit flowed away from the dead flesh. The backpack burped, squeezing out vile fluids.
Jack pushed Hobo’s bio-antennas away from his shoulders. Limp and cool, they felt like kelp washed up on a beach.
So you went to school with Keelraiser, huh?
Face down, in the gloom, Hobo could have been Keelraiser. Same jet-black bio-antennas. Same smallish build.
A decent sort. Very conventional.
How conventional?
This conventional: Hobo had worn his service swords into combat, under his suit, where he couldn’t even get at them. Just for the principle of the thing. Because he was a Krijistal officer.
The stiletto-style blades nestled along his spine in sheaths attached to a featherweight harness, identical to the one Keelraiser had.
Jack drew one of them.
The edge, just a few tungsten atoms wide, caught a bio-antenna and sheared it off. Jack had exerted no pressure at all.
Goddamn, these things are sharp.
Jack touched the scar on his cheek. It had been left by a sword just like this. Well, not so much by the sword as by Skyler’s hamfisted stitching job.
One hard pull and it’s over.
Banishing second thoughts, he grabbed a handful of bio-antennas, planted a knee on Hobo’s back, and set the sword against the base of the rriksti’s neck.
Blood flowed sluggishly as Jack dragged the blade through skin, muscle, and cartilage. The sword bounced off bone. He sawed at the spinal column, retching. The act of butchery nauseated him. But now he’d started he had to finish it.
The vertebrae parted with a wet pop. Jack wrenched the head sideways at right angles to the neck. The exposed spinal column gleamed black in the dim light. Rriksti bones were not white. They were charcoal-colored.
He couldn’t see shit in here. Didn’t even know what he was looking for.
It turned out to be obvious.
A thin white wafer, adhering to the topmost vertebra.
He dug it out with the point of Hobo’s sword, careful not to damage it.
Nanofilaments, too thin to see, retracted into the package as he pulled it free, brushing his fingers like invisible fur.
Jack held the chip up to the light. It reminded him of a Communion wafer from childhood Masses. Father Cullen used to break them into slivers like this when there weren’t enough to go around.
If he put it down he’d lose it.
He held it in his teeth, tasting Hobo’s blood.
Raised the knife and cut a shallow gash in his own scalp, near the top of his head.
Holy fuck that hurts.
Oh God.
Oh Jesus.
His own blood sheeted into his eyes. Swearing, gasping, he jerked up the skin flap on his scalp and shoved the chip in, as deep as it would go.
Then the betadine wipes.
Antibiotic ointment.
Butterfly bandages.
The only thing missing from Sky Station’s first aid kit had been painkillers. Of course.
Jesus that fucking hurts.
His hands shook so much he couldn’t apply the bandages properly. They didn’t stick, anyway, on account of his hair. If he were doing this correctly, he’d have shaved the area, but he needed the hair to hide the wound.
Hurts.
Head feels … funny …
Wrong ...
Jack puked.
Vomit drooling from his mouth, he crawled back to the door of the factory module. He pitched over the lip of the pressure door and fell to the Earthwards end of the hab module, like a bird that couldn’t fly.
Lying on the end wall, he heard thumps and crashes from the command module. An indistinct, panicky shout—Coetzee.
Then nothing.
*
Vivid dreams.
Eight years old, alone in his room. Overhead, his model spaceships hung on strings beneath constellations of glow-in-the-dark stars. Dad had helped him glue wee LEDs to them, powered by watch batteries. Coruscant, his fleet of space shuttles and TIE fighters flew through the winter dusk on some ill-defined but glorious mission, and Jack was blissfully content.
Fifteen or sixteen. Alone in his room, again. Wanking. Of course. Solitude was no longer contentment; it was frustration. The little dark-haired girl from Form 2 smiled in his mind, but it was the spaceships, now dusty, that watched him come into a fistful of tissues.
Nineteen. Lying face down on a grotty futon. What’s wrong? Life. The door bursts open. There’s only one person who kicks doors open instead of knocking on them. Meeks. “You’re coming for a jar,” he announces. Jack rolls off the futon. Life is suddenly good again. There’s no problem that can’t be solved down the pub …
… but before he can stand up, he crumples. Dizzy. Heaving. The room goes dark.
“Hold still.”
Someone’s wiping his mouth.
“Drink this.”
Salty-sweet liquid trickles between his lips, takes away the taste of bile and blood.
That’s how it smells when someone gets gut-shot.
He wasn’t supposed to find that out for years and years yet.
“Sssh.”
What second-hand futon ever smelt like the seashore? Someone’s spooning him, curled around his back. Chest to spine, belly to kidneys, groin to arse, legs entwined, stuck together all the way to the toes. A fast heartbeat. A hand splayed on his stomach.
“If only I could help.”
You are helping. You’re nice and warm. Don’t go away. My head’s killing me.
“You’ve got a blood infection. Your temperature is very high. The Liberator’s Shiplord is stalking wild animals in Tanzania. She left a hand of soldiers here to guard us. I killed them. I killed them, and now there is no one here who can help you.”
None of this really rings a bell.
“I can try.”
Who’s that? Don’t like that voice. Can’t remember why, though.
“Please. Let me try.”
“You are just a human.”
“Not anymore.”
“Oh … try, then.”
A hand on his forehead. This one’s smaller, cooler.
Lovely and cool.
Ahhh.
The filthy rotten pain ebbs. It doesn’t go away, but it gets bearable.
Sleep.
This time, there are no dreams.
*
Jack.
“Huh?”
Jack. Lividdr ag estambibul. Tzh? Sharn?
“What?”
Suddenly alert, Jack opened his eyes. The darkness coruscated, like the ceiling of his childhood bedroom. Golden squiggles and lagoon-colored graphs danced, staying in his field of vision when he turned his head. He sat up, catching his breath in wonder.
He scarcely noticed that his head no longer hurt.
Jack! The voice spoke in his mind, and new skeins of information sprawled across his vision.
“Who are you?”
Svamblizat. Ifl, LIVIDDR. Tzh? Sharn? Zyghret?
Things started to click. That graph over there could only be a radar plot. And next to it, that’d be the altimeter. The numbers were just squiggles, but there were the altitude acceleration and rate scales, and the radar altimeter …
An entire virtual cockpit.
All at once he got it. These were readouts from the Dealbreaker.
His new ship.
“Jesus Christ!” he shouted exultantly. “It worked!”
He was sitting on a carpet of unzipped sleeping bags. A Sky Station hab module stretched above him. A hot, stale miasma of human and rriksti funk filled the air. Next to him, Keelraiser sat up, hollow-eyed in the darkness. When Jack looked at him, the graphs and notifications collapsed into an unobtrusive HUD bar. The chip could tell when he was focusing his gaze on something else. It was slick as hell. This is the future, baby.
He’d woken up next to Keelraiser. A confusing pang of shame stabbed him. But the miracle of the Dealbreaker allowed him to ignore it. Keelraiser of all people should be able to understand how fantastic this was. “The Dealbreaker is talking to me! Unfortunately it only speaks Rristigul. I don’t have a clue what it’s saying, but the instrumentation looks fairly self-explanatory. I’ll just need to get a feel for the base 14 notation system, or maybe I can program it to count in base 10. Then I’ll able to fly it, no problem.”
“It took Hannah a year to figure out how to interface with the Lightbringer,” Keelraiser said.
“The Lightbringer’s a flying city, and Hannah is an engineer, not an astronaut. The Dealbreaker is just a shuttle, and I’m a pilot. This is the same shit I’ve been doing for twenty years.” Jack gloated over the readouts, mentally labelling each one based on what it looked like and where it was in relation to his visual memory of the Cloudeater’s cockpit. His labels appeared in block capitals where he wanted them. “I knew it would work.”
“You did not know it would work. You gambled with your life, hoping it would work.”
“You got me through it, anyway.”
Keelraiser shrugged. “You nearly died. If not for Coetzee, you probably wouldn’t have made it.”
“Coetzee?”
“He performed extroversion on you.”
“He did what?”
“Unforeseen consequences of messing around with programmable skin grafts. Cleanmay will be over the moon when he hears about it. Of course, this proves that extroversion is epigenetic, rather than a gift of Ystyggr. What a surprise.” Keelraiser stood up and kicked through the tangle of sleeping bags, looking for something.
Jack suddenly realized he wasn’t wearing his headset. He brushed his head with his fingers, found nothing but a sore place. “I can hear you. How?”
“The implant doubles as a comms chip. It has a very limited wireless range, but the Dealbreaker is sitting on the ceiling. If you want to communicate with it from further away, you’ll need to piggyback on a stronger transmitter.”
Jack pinched his lips shut and concentrated on speaking without making a sound. “Testing. Check one, check two.”
“I can hear you perfectly,” Keelraiser said.
“Is this what it’s like?”
“What what is like?”
“Being you.”
Keelraiser tossed a slimline backpack at him. His suit. “Yes, now you know what it’s like to have self-inflicted brain damage.” He slipped the loops of his own suit backpack over his shoulders.
“Self-inflicted brain damage,” Jack echoed. It seemed pretty wonderful to him.
“There are side effects,” Keelraiser said darkly.
“Like what?”
“You’ll find out.” When Jack pressed for more details, Keelraiser said. “Remember you no longer have any expectation of privacy. That’s one of them.”
In the command module they found Coetzee monitoring the radio. “She’s on her way to Brussels.”
“Right,” Jack said, compartmentalizing the friction with Keelraiser. “Can I have the short version?”
Keelraiser said, “The Shiplord of the Liberator has four hands of shuttles on the surface now. They have captured and killed more animals in the last week than your people manage in a decade. She’s announced her intention to build a comprehensive DNA database of Earth’s biome.”
“She’s been capturing and killing people, too,” Coetzee said. Stubbled, in underpants and a rriksti-size tank top, he looked more like a homeless man than the 21st century’s most successful entrepreneur.
“Yes,” Keelraiser said. “Nothing is as dangerous as the quest for knowledge. That’s why we went to war with the Lightsiders in the first place. Anyway, James, see if you can get her HQ staff on the radio.”
“Will do.” Coetzee punched buttons. To Jack, he said, “Good to see you’re feeling better.”
Sensitive to any hint of condescension, Jack stiffly thanked him for his help.
Coetzee shrugged. “You can owe me. Or not. Who’s keeping track?” He seemed like a different version of himself: lower-key, the smug arrogance pared away. Jack realized he wasn’t going to be able to hate him anymore. That actually came as a relief. They were just two humans now, in the deepest of deep shit.
Coetzee raised someone on the radio, and Keelraiser spoke to them in Rristigul.
Apart from the background hum of systems, Sky Station was oppressively quiet. Jack glanced up and down the command module, wondering where their Lightsider guards had gone. He had a dreamlike memory of Keelraiser saying he had killed them. He was about to ask Coetzee what had happened when Coetzee said, “It’s interesting how self-mutilation is the first step to getting anywhere with these people.”
Jack did not equate what he had done with what Coetzee had had done to himself. Peaceably, he said, “Yeah, it’s desperate, isn’t it?”
“How’s it going with the Dealbreaker?”
“So far, so good. You know what they say: the computer flies the ship, and the pilot is just there to take the abuse.”
“Has it told you anything in particular?”
“It may well have done, but it doesn’t speak English.”
“Did it say anything about a lividdr?”
“I think it did, actually. Do you know what that means?”
Keelraiser got off the radio. He reached a doublejointed arm behind his back and donned his suit. “Lividdr means enemy or ally, depending. In this case it means the Homemaker.”
Coetzee asked tensely, “How long until it gets here?”
Jack did the sums. He had been out of it for a week. The Homemaker had been due to arrive in a week.
“Six hours and fourteen minutes.” Keelraiser levelled a stare at Jack. “You’re going to have a very steep learning curve.”
CHAPTER 38
“Wait,” Jack said. As urgent as the situation was, he needed some answers. “What happened to the guards? The Lightsiders the Shiplord left here to make sure we didn’t get up to any mischief. Where’d they go?”
“I killed them,” Keelraiser said flatly.
“And then he called the Liberator’s Shiplord, and told her what he’d done!” Coetzee said. This display of rriksti nerve clearly impressed him. What impressed Jack was the fact that Keelraiser had managed to get the drop on seven armed Lightsiders. How had he done that?
Keelraiser said, “Both Lightsiders and Darksiders subscribe to a philosophy I can best describe as ‘testing to destruction.’ By leaving me here with those guards, the Shiplord offered me the opportunity to take an aptitude test. I passed.”
“Aptitude for what?” Jack said.
“Killing, obviously.” Keelraiser’s hair tossed. “The other thing you should know is that she’s not on the best of terms with the Homemaker’s Shiplord. It would suit her very well, in fact, if the Homemaker ceased to exist.”
Jack saw it. “And that’s our job.”
“My job.”
“Our job. We’re coming with you.”
Coetzee seconded this enthusiastically. “I want to see inside one of these ships.”
Jack frowned. “See inside it? No need for that. We’ll recover that ICBM, fly it close to the Homemaker, and take them out Star Wars style.”
“No,” Keelraiser said. “We’re doing it my way.”
Jack stared at him, appalled. He should have remembered the way Keelraiser hung onto supposedly good ideas, refusing to let go of them even as they fell apart under the weight of events.
“You don’t have to come, Jack,” Coetzee said. “One human would be enough, right, Keelraiser?”
Keelraiser nodded. “As a matter of fact, I’d prefer you to stay here, Jack. You need time to familiarize yourself with the Dealbreaker.”
Jack gritted his teeth. If he refused to go along with Keelraiser’s plan, Keelraiser and Coetzee would simply go without him.
The only thing worse than deliberately getting captured by the Homemaker would be sitting alone on Sky Station, waiting to die.
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, towards 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 Fiestas.
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.
Fuck you, too, Homemaker.
He tossed the blaster back into the locker. “Right, let’s go. Looks like the welcome committee is getting impatient.”
*
Rriksti seized them roughly as soon as they exited the airlock. Blows fell on Jack’s head and shoulders. He crooked his arms over his head, too late to block a punch that landed on the still-tender gash on his scalp. He mashed his lips together on a scream. Even as tears of pain blurred his eyes, he realized the rriksti weren’t really hitting to injure. This was their way of saying hello. Clout ‘em and see if they yell.
When everyone in the welcome committee had got in their punches, they kicked and flung Jack and Coetzee across the dock. While spinning through the air, Jack glimpsed rriksti swarming around the Dealbreaker’s airlock. He would soon find out if his deception with the corpse held up.
He hurtled through an autorip and bounced off the steel wall of an airlock chamber. Powerful jets of air blasted from the ceiling. The chamber pressurized, captives and captors spilled out into a corridor that seemed to be carved out of a sapphire the size of a subway tunnel. Jack wouldn’t be surprised if it was. His captors snagged him out of the air and spun him right way up for the local orientation.
A crowd of soldiers jammed the corridor. They all wore the familiar orange uniforms. This ship, at any rate, was still under Darkside management. The soldiers stared at the two humans with the red-rimmed, unblinking eyes of vultures. They’d been in cryosleep for almost 70 years. This would be their first sight of the species they had come to exterminate. They looked as if they would like to get started right now.
A rriksti dragged Jack’s hands behind his back and pressed the doffing patch on his backpack. His suit flowed away, leaving him feeling as if he were wearing a wet towel. He was actually naked, but heat and moisture saturated the air. The musky seaside reek of Imf cloyed his nostrils. Never had it smelled less sexy.
Coetzee, also naked, hung in the grip of an enormous rriksti nearby. Jack picked Keelraiser’s voice out of the clamor of Rristigul, turned his head to look for him—and caught himself. Idiot. It would be fatal to let them see that he could hear the bio-radio frequencies.
Keelraiser had showed them how to disable automatic radio-frequency transmission of their voices—a function built into the CELL comms implants, which the rriksti had not previously shared with the humans. Jack’s implant came with the same function. The drawback was that turning it off also disconnected him from the Dealbreaker. Already, he had got so used to the shuttle’s presence in his head that its absence bothered him.
Heart going like a kettle-drum, he glared at the crowd of gawpers.
Go on, yuk it up, guys.
However, none of the rriksti laughed or pointed. That was probably a bad sign. You don’t laugh at animals, when they haven’t done anything funny.
A slender, pewter-haired rriksti drifted out of the crowd. It tossed Jack and Coetzee orange uniform shorts. “Put these on. We do not wish to look at your repulsive bodies,” it said in a flat mechanical voice.
Jack heard the words three times at once: the mechanical voice in his ears, the same voice inside his head, and a normal, deep rriksti voice speaking Rristigul.
Released to put the shorts on, he spotted a scarab-like device stuck to the rriksti’s temple. The device had a little speaker. Instead of going to the trouble of learning English, the rriksti on the Homemaker had just built themselves the Imfi equivalent of Google Translate.
The rriksti, and the device on its temple, said, “I am on the Shiplord’s staff. My rank corresponds to colonel. I am tasked with dealing with you.”
Jack cleared his throat. “Good for you.”
“You are specimens of Homo sapiens. Is this correct?”
“Yes.”
“The pilot of your shuttle is dead. How did he get that way?”
Jack breathed a inwards sigh of relief. If it was unthinkable that humans should possess radio-speech implants, it was clearly even more unthinkable that a human could have flown the Dealbreaker here. A rriksti had been found in the cockpit, so he must have been the pilot. It was just happenstance that he had been shot straight through the top of the spinal column, obliterating any proof that he had or had not had a pilot’s implant.
“I shot him,” Jack said. “Any more questions? Because if not, I’ve got some for you.”
The colonel’s hair twitched irritably. “Why did you shoot him?”
“Why are you invading our planet?”
“Shut up,” the colonel said, and hit Jack in the mouth.
OK. Jack licked his teeth, making sure they were all still there. These guys plainly did not appreciate questions from the peanut gallery. His role was to answer. “When you hit us, we hit back,” he said, shrugging as best he could with his arms held behind his back.
The colonel opened his / her mouth in amusement. “You’ve been learning the way of the Temple.”
“Monkey see, monkey do,” Jack said
While this was going on, a hubbub had broken out around Coetzee. It was killing Jack to pretend he couldn’t hear it. But when Coetzee himself cried out, Jack’s head whipped around. The colonel slapped his face back to where it had been, but he’d seen a rriksti wrenching Coetzee’s left wrist over his head, displaying his seven-fingered hand for all to see.
Shit.
If technology-sharing was verboten, how much more so biology-sharing?
However, at the moment, it looked as if Coetzee’s augmented anatomy might have bought them an extended lease on life. The staff colonel, who had been thoughtfully fingering his or her sidearm, barked a command. The whole crowd jostled into motion along the sapphire corridor.
Jack tried to get a look behind them. Where was Keelraiser?
So far, as dicey as it looked, everything was going according to plan. Keelraiser would get credit for presenting specimens of Homo sapiens to the Homemaker. The Darksiders might lack the voracious scientific curiosity of the Lightsiders, but they were curious enough in their own way. While they poked at the humans, Keelraiser would try to track down some old friends on board he had vaguely alluded to.
At that point the ‘plan’ vanished into a mist of uncertainty. In Jack’s opinion, Keelraiser would have to get very lucky to successfully sabotage the Homemaker. Their brutal reception made the odds look even worse. There was no way Jack could see these suspicious bastards letting Keelraiser roam about the ship unsupervised, even if he had gone to the top Krijistal academy and once bought a car from the chief intelligence officer’s half-brother, or whatever.
But it was out of Jack’s hands now.
He and Coetzee just had to stay alive …
… until Keelraiser reached the Homemaker’s muon cannons.
Or not.
CHAPTER 40
A train ran the length of the Homemaker’s keel. It reminded Jack of those trains you see in big airports, complete with clusters of people impatiently peering down the tracks. Its latticework tunnel ran in zero-gee through the centers of progressively smaller rotating wheels, even the smallest a kilometer across, their inner surfaces furred with the ashy and dark colors of Imfi vegetation. Jack was impressed despite himself by the scale of this farming operation. He remembered how the plants on board the SoD had bio-fluoresced after they absorbed UV light. He imagined switching on the lights in here, and then switching them off. It would be a stunning spectacle.
Coetzee’s eyes shone. “It’s an O’Neill cylinder!” For him, this must feel like a visit to the future he’d spent his life wishing into existence. CELL had been just one small step towards the orbital habitats he envisioned, which would have looked a lot like this. Jesus, now he was fawning on the colonel, asking questions about the farms. His eagerness recalled his reaction to the Cloudeater’s arrival at CELL last year. Then, Jack had despised him for it. Now, it looked like a sort of courage. All the same, Jack suspected Coetzee had not yet appreciated the likelihood that neither of them would ever leave the Homemaker again.
The train terminated at a row of hexagonal airlocks ranging from tanker-size to rriksti-size. It was chaos on the platform, phalanxes of Krijistal charging around, shoving onto the train. Amidst the clamor of radio-frequency voices, Jack felt a strong urge to call the Dealbreaker. He wanted to know if he was still in wireless range.
No. Don’t risk it yet.
The colonel got hold of Jack and Coetzee’s arms and wrestled them into one of the smaller airlocks.
The darkness of a starlit night enfolded them. Without warning, Jack’s feet thumped onto the floor.
They stood on what had to be the Homemaker’s bridge. Keelraiser had mentioned that the Lightbringer had artificial gravity for the VIPs, generated by mass attractors. So did the Homemaker. After his months in the rotating hab, Jack was fine, but Coetzee swayed on his feet.
Dozens of rriksti stood in groups, or whisked to and fro, looking busy. Some wore Krijistal uniform, others had on VIP robes. Bursts of laughter and jovial shouts rose out of a hum of radio-frequency cross-talk. Jack used to appreciate the restful silence of rriksti crowds. Now, with the pilot’s implant in his head, he knew it had been an illusion. This place was just as hectic and noisy as any human forward operating base.
That comparison seemed apt. Even though Jack didn’t speak Rristigul, the confident tones of the exchanges, and the outbursts of euphoric laughter, reminded him of the first days of his deployment to Iraq in 2003, when the allied forces were rolling Saddam’s army up like a carpet. That must be how the officers of the Homemaker felt now.
The colonel dragged them across a floor inlaid with mosaics. As everyone spotted the humans, the talk died down.
If this were a football field, they’d be standing at the kick-off line. But it felt less like a stadium than a cathedral. The ambiance of the high-arched ceiling filled with stars, and candle-like lights twinkling in chancels shooting off from the main bridge, culminated in the enormous piece of furniture that occupied the wall between the two biggest chancels. It looked like a combination of altar and juridical bench. Flunkeys sat at computers on a dais raised above the floor. Higher up, a single rriksti sprawled in a cavity lined with cushions, which Jack could only think of as a throne.
He suddenly flashed back on his disastrous testimony in front of Congress in 2012, when he had spoken out of turn and gotten himself fired from NASA.
The rriksti on the throne sat up. It spoke in Rristigul, and in English, on both the radio and acoustic frequencies.
“Ohhhh,” said the mechanical, translated voice, accompanied by a sweet alto line of Rristigul in Jack’s head. “Aren’t you cute. Here, boys! Here!”
Jack would have preferred another round of punches to this. That said, among the Krijistal, you could have violence and patronizing superiority in the space of five seconds. A kick from the colonel forced them to shamble towards the throne. Jack supported Coetzee, who was still having trouble with the gravity. They stood in front of the throne, Coetzee drooping, Jack defiantly staring up.
This Shiplord made a night and day contrast with the golden elegance of the Liberator’s Shiplord, and for that matter with the grave majesty of Eskitul, the Lightbringer’s late Shiplord. She—Jack assumed her sex, going on the general pattern—was small, black-haired, skinny even for a rriksti, swimming in the folds of her bright red costume. Her rather bulbous eyes sparkled with curiosity. She slipped off her throne and descended to the floor. She was scarcely taller than Jack.
“Aren’t you hairy,” she marvelled, and petted his head. Jack flinched. It was involuntary. He was afraid she might notice the cut on his scalp. Thank God anyway that his hair might be fast turning gray, but it showed no signs of thinning yet. The cut was not obvious unless you parted the hair and had a good look.
The Shiplord laughed. “Don’t you like that?” She ran a hand over his chest, down to his groin. Jack could happily have ripped the hand off. He stood at parade rest, glaring into the distance, modelling his posture on the stony demeanor of Colin McFarlane and Peter Hill, God rest them. The Shiplord snapped the elastic waistband of his shorts and peered inside, making salacious comments that provoked gales of laughter.
Just stay alive. Don’t react. Pretend this is happening to someone else. It did feel like it was happening to someone else. It went completely against the grain to stand there and let himself be poked and prodded like this. In fact, part of the reason Jack hated this plan was because it required him to play the passive victim. He had overcome his reservations, telling himself that was just selfish ego talking. But God, it was difficult.
The Shiplord tired of his lack of responsiveness and moved on to Coetzee. “Is this the one with the … ah. Ugh.”
She picked up Coetzee’s seven-fingered left hand as if it were a slug, and dropped it.
“That is an abomination. How did it happen? Strange choice of words. Who did this to you?”
Coetzee raised his head. “Shiplord—uh, is this the correct form of address?”
“It talks! I was starting to wonder if this device was working. Yes, I am Shiplord of the Homemaker. And you are a human. How did you end up with a rriksti hand on the end of your arm?”
“Shiplord,” Coetzee said. “I just want to say that the Imfi conquest is the best thing that’s ever happened to humanity. I see our future together as extending beyond this star system, beyond the Alpha Centauri system, perhaps to Sirius, and then onwards—”
The Shiplord slapped him. “Are you aware,” she said, “that both our star system and yours are presently moving through a higher-density cloud of interstellar hydrogen, compared to the local bubble? That our ramscoop techology, which depends on extracting hydrogen from the interstellar medium, is barely viable as it is, and will no longer work at all when we exit this cloud in another 10,000 Earth years?”
“By then we’ll have invented FTL,” Coetzee muttered.
“You say that with remarkable assurance. Nothing is assured in life except death.” The Shiplord spoke with such bitterness that Jack shivered, despite the heat.
“But together,” Coetzee said stubbornly, “we could conquer challenges that have defeated both of our species. Humans and rriksti each have unique strengths to bring to the table, and—”
Another slap. “Why am I bothering?” the Shiplord said to the bridge in general.
“Do it the honor of dispatching it, Shiplord,” said the staff colonel.
“That would probably be the kindest thing,” the Shiplord said. “It is is a walking atrocity.”
Coetzee, though pale, said, “I consider myself a human-rriksti hybrid. A work in progress, yes. But it is an honor to have taken humanity’s first small step into the future, which we will share, regardless of what happens in the near term. Technology is borderless, contagious, impossible to contain. The genie is out of the bottle …”
The key to James Coetzee’s pioneering achievements was that he just didn’t know when to stop. Twice slapped down, standing defenceless on the bridge of an alien spaceship, he still continued to drone on about his vision. Jack saw that the Shiplord was getting crosser and crosser. “For Christ’s sake, put a sock in it,” he muttered.
Too late.
The Shiplord drew a small blaster from the folds of her robe and shot Coetzee in the head.
Coetzee’s monotonous voice stopped. Bubbles of blood burst from his lips. He pitched forward. The colonel caught him and slung him upside-down over his / her shoulder.
It all happened so fast that Jack didn’t have time to react. He started forward and then caught himself. The colonel backed away and handed Coetzee’s corpse off to a subordinate.
“Take it away and dissect it,” the Shiplord said. ”Do separate genetic analyses of the hands and the body, and a comparative analysis of human DNA. Then destroy it. Ugh.”
Jack watched Coetzee’s corpse travel away, bumping on the back of a broad-shouldered rriksti. Dead eyes stared up at the stars Coetzee had longed to conquer. Despite never having got along with the man, Jack felt a stab of grief, which immediately congealed into hatred of all the rriksti around him, especially the Shiplord.
She turned back to him. “Well, I still have you, anyway. I think I’ll keep you. Tshaveg says she’ll get me some specimens from the surface, but that bitch is completely unreliable. Not that it really matters. We aren’t here to collect exotic pets.” Her dark eyes held something that looked like—could it be?—sorrow. Despite her bling and her imperious manner, this young female gave off the vibe of a homeless veteran. She had seen horrors. Abruptly, she said, “What do you think?”
Careful, Jack told himself. Wrong answer gets you an energy pulse in the head. “What do I think about what?” he stalled.
“Us. Conquering you.”
Jack hesitated. It suddenly seemed paramount to be true to himself. “I can’t say how my life would have gone if you hadn’t invaded us,” he said. “But I’ve got no regrets.”
The Shiplord spun her blaster in her fingers. “What?”
Jack’s whole life flashed before his eyes. He thought of Xiang Peixun, Qiu Meili, and Kate Menelaou, who had died for Earth. He thought of his life-and-death struggle to save the rriksti refugees on board the SoD. He thought, guiltily, of Keelraiser. “I’d do it all again,” he said.
“I don’t even know what that means!” the Shiplord said.
“It means I don’t regret trying to stop you. And I don’t regret failing.” Come on, Keelraiser, he thought. Blow this ship the fuck up. I’d rather die in an explosion than be shot like a dog.
“I do not think this translation device is working, after all,” the Shiplord said. “I was told you were intelligent beings. Yet the other one was mad, and you’re speaking in paradoxes.”
Jack shrugged. “Paradoxes are a human specialty.”
The Shiplord opened her mouth. “No, they are a rriksti specialty. I wish to vivisect you, but I also wish to keep you around. Conveniently, I am an eighth-level lay cleric, so I can do both. Sparkshaft, remove it.”
She stalked back to her throne, hair thrashing. The colonel yanked Jack back into the mass of onlookers flanking the throne.
Her words reverberated in Jack’s mind. Vivisection? Oh, no. Please, no. I’ll take that energy pulse in the head, after all.
The colonel—Sparkshaft—dragged him towards the airlocks. Then stopped short.
The crowd had pulled back, leaving an empty space around the airlocks. Everyone seemed tense and expectant. Jack glanced at the Shiplord, that skinny knot of black bio-antennas and pure evil. She sat on her throne with one foot tucked under her, the other foot ticking to and fro like the tail of an angry cat. She, too, stared at the airlocks.
The smallest one opened.
A band of uniformed Krijistal marched onto the bridge, hauling Keelraiser.
Jack’s heart plummetted.
Keelraiser’s feet dragged along the floor. Blood smeared his face. He seemed barely conscious.
That’s it, then.
Keelraiser had been caught. Red-handed, by the looks of things.
He had failed.
Coetzee had died for nothing.
No hope remained.
Despair swamped Jack. He barely heard the mutters around him, the repetitions of Keelraiser’s name: “Iristigut.”
The Shiplord leaned down from her throne. Her voice dripped malice. “You’re famous, big brother.”
CHAPTER 41
The Beauty of Destruction touched down at Brussels Airport at the end of a journey that had meandered over the entire globe. The last planned leg of Shiplord Tshaveg’s scientific tour, to Scandinavia, had had to be cancelled when another meteor struck a volcano in Iceland, filling the skies over the northern Atlantic with ash. Tshaveg was furious. She left her seat while the shuttle was still taxiing and stalked forward to the cockpit. Skyler just sat there, gazing out at the blackened hulks of passenger planes stranded on the tarmac. He felt like those burnt-out jets looked. Beyond grief, beyond plotting and scheming, almost beyond despair. Que sera sera. Requesciat in pace, Earth.
The cargo hold of the Beauty and the other shuttles that accompanied it brimmed with dead animals, plants, and human beings, all deep-frozen to be examined later. Skyler had had the ‘honor’ of watching, in the Amazonian jungle, on the Russian steppe, on the Tanzanian savannah, and in an Australian nature preserve, as the Liberator’s crew bagged and tagged everything they could get hold of. They had not visited North America.
Ripstiggr clouted him on the leg. “Move it, Taft.” Skyler had been given his headset back, to facilitate his role as guide, so Ripstiggr could speak normally instead of struggling to form words with his mouth. Of course, that meant circumspection. “Shiplord wants us to find her a nice hotel in the city center.” Ripstiggr had added another human skill to his repertoire: a spasm of one eye that suggested a wink.
Nice hotels in Brussels in 2024 were few and far between. Some months back Ripstiggr had obliged his North African and Russian allies with a massive air strike on the European institutions. Nothing but rubble remained of the imposing official buildings Skyler remembered from his last visit to the city. A slight rise in the ground had spared the city center from the blast, but broken windows and looted shops abounded. NAA soldiers drove around, plundering what remained.
Giles took over. Thanks to his former association with the European Space Agency, he knew Brussels well. They ended up at the Hotel Amigo off Grand Place, where the North African Alliance was hosting many of the delegates to the global peace summit. The hotel occupied the same block as a police station. The Liberator’s crew turned their noses up at the hotel, occupied the police station, and began moving hotel furniture into the drunk cells. Meanwhile, the ‘advance team,’ including Skyler and Ripstiggr, headed for the cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula. The summit was being held there, owing to the vaporization of the European parliament.
Two entire blocks had been cordoned off. Skyler pulled up his hood and skulked into the cathedral.
Free-standing lights ran off a noisy generator. Long tables had replaced the pews in the nave. A huge drop-sheet covered the pulpit, emblazoned with the words ONE GALAXY in English and Rristigul.
The summit had been running for two days already, although the Homemaker’s orbital bombardment made the proceedings about as significant as a game of checkers during the apocalypse. Aides scuttled around, collecting water bottles and papers. The day’s sessions had ended. Skyler had missed his chance of bumping into Hannah.
He leaned against a statue in the shadowy north transept and felt in his pocket for cigarettes.
One good thing about being back on Earth: Marlboros.
Skyler had never smoked habitually, only when he wanted to piss people off. Now he was pissed off at the whole galaxy. Lighting up in a cathedral seemed like an an appropriate gesture.
His legs were giving out. He would have to call for the damn wheelchair to get back to the car. Cigarette clamped in his lips, he slid down to sit on the stone floor, and realized he didn’t have his lighter.
“Oh, fuck everything,” he muttered.
“Need a light?”
A parka-clad man about his own age stood in front of him, holding out a Bic. Looked Indian, but his accent was pure Joisey.
“Thanks.” Skyler lit up and exhaled smoke.
“Are you Skyler Taft?”
“How’d you know?”
“I worked with Lance Garner before you did. I’m Kuldeep Srivastava.”
“Oh, shit.” Lance. A tsunami of bad memories rolled through Skyler’s mind. “Yeah, he mentioned you. So what are you doing these days?”
“Was in the gaming industry for a while, now I’m back working for the government. Same job, higher stakes.”
“And what brings you to the once-fair city of Brussels?”
“Sightseeing.”
A Lance-type answer. Skyler cracked a smile. “For a minute there I thought you were serious.”
“What about you?”
Skyler was surprised Kuldeep had to ask. “I’m here to take all the brown M&Ms out of the bowls, double-check that the tables are high enough, and make sure there are no snipers in the belfry. You know the kind of thing.”
“You don’t look very busy.”
“Yeah, well. Meteors falling. Atmosphere rapidly filling up with CO2. I’m having a hard time getting motivated.”
Kuldeep sat down next to him. “Whose side are you on?” he said quietly.
“Earth’s side, of course.”
“There were question marks around you after the Victory episode.”
“Listen,” Skyler said. “It is possible to be on Earth’s side and also to think that some of the rriksti are cool. As far as the Victory goes, I happen to believe massacres are a bad thing. What about you?”
“Yeah,” Kuldeep said. “OK.”
“Are you here with Flaherty?” It was still difficult for Skyler to utter his ex-boss’s name. Rancor lingered.
“He’s here. But I came via Puerto Rico, with Hannah Ginsburg.”
Skyler stiffened. He stubbed out his cigarette and tried to stand up.
Kuldeep helped him to his feet. “You haven’t got your Earth legs yet, have you?”
Skyler gritted his teeth as he limped down the transept, leaning on Kuldeep. When they got back to the nave, Kuldeep pointed towards the doors.
There stood Hannah, silhouetted against the waning day. Skyler lurched forward, nearly losing his balance. “Hannah!”
She turned towards him … and a tall rriksti strode up to her and held out his arms. She went into his embrace. She had not been looking at Skyler. She had not even seen him. She had been looking at Ripstiggr, and now she pressed her forehead against his chest, as if his arms were home.
Skyler retreated behind a pillar. When he could speak, he said, “Can you do me a favor? Call for my wheelchair. Oh, and maybe a loaded revolver and a bottle of sleeping pills.”
“It ain’t over until the fat lady sings,” Kuldeep said. He pressed a scrap of paper into Skyler’s hand, and padded away beneath the stone saints.
*
Shiplord Tshaveg arrived at Hotel Amigo as night was falling. She ignored the crowds that had waited for hours to greet her, and went to ground in the police station, in a visibly foul mood.
“The Homemaker isn’t taking her calls,” Ripstiggr said.
Skyler was not inclined to take Ripstiggr’s calls, so to speak, after what he’d witnessed this afternoon. He sat at the piano in the hotel bar, playing Greensleeves with two fingers. Rain slapped the remaining windows and blew in past the trash bags that covered broken ones. Volcanic ash skinned the glass of wine Skyler had parked on top of the piano.
“It’s going to take years to wreck the climate like this,” Ripstiggr said, running the pads of his middle fingers along the dusty bar top. “A volcanic eruption here and there; that’s nothing. Planets are big.”
“Global warming denier,” Giles said with a hollow laugh. He was lying on a sofa, flicking through back issues of French gay magazines—the equivalent of Skyler’s Marlboros: an old pleasure that had lost its savor.
“It’s true,” Ripstiggr said. “CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but the main source of it on Earth was your filthy hydrocarbon-burning industrial base. Thanks to us, Earth’s industries basically shut down years ago. It’ll take a whole lot of meteors to equal the lost annual CO2 output from China, let alone from the world. So Tshaveg is really just pissed about the risk that one of the Homemaker’s rocks might hit us.”
“I’m a bit concerned about that, too,” said Hriklif, curled up on a sofa with a bottle of vodka.
“Oh, grow wings and fly, Lightsider,” Ripstiggr said. “She’s going to have her triumph, and then she’s going to return to the Liberator with her specimens and spend the next half a century hanging out in orbit while they try to alter the climate with a nail gun. Will you be going with her, or staying here with us?”
“I don’t know,” Hriklif said miserably.
Skyler spun his wheelchair away from the piano. He knew that his friend had been sickened by their global bagging and tagging tour. It turned out that Hriklif had actually grown up in the twilight zone of Imf, on the estate owned by Keelraiser’s extended family. He was as much of a Lightsider as Kuldeep Srivastava was an Indian. Skyler wheeled over to him and clasped his shoulder.
“I’m fine,” Hriklif snapped.
Linda, lying at the other end of the sofa, said, “He’s worried about Keelraiser and Jack.”
“No, I’m not,” Hriklif said.
“Well, I am,” Linda said. “They didn’t get left behind for no reason. Ms. T—” this was her insulting nickname for Tshaveg— “is going to use them as weapons, or bait, or some damn thing.”
“Good guess,” Ripstiggr said. “I heard the Shiplord talking to her people on the shutle. It sounds as if she’s put Iristigut into play as a deniable agent. If he can take out the Homemaker, Tshaveg is left in sole possession of the theater. If he fails … well, it’s no skin off her face. She just blames it on those filthy rebels off the Lightbringer.”
“And we lose either way,” Giles said, “Fantastique.”
That was how Skyler felt. But he said, “Or, maybe we don’t lose. Come on, Hriklif. Linda, change into your nice jeans. We’re going to a party.”
The scrap of paper given him by Kuldeep had two words on it: Le Cerceuil. Giles instantly nodded in recognition. It was only a few minutes’ walk from their hotel. Of course, in post-conquest Brussels, you could get killed several times in that distance. They walked and rolled across the Grand Place, crunching broken glass, avoiding heaps of rubbish. Nigerian irregulars paced alongside them, carrying machine-guns. With the power off everywhere, the urban jungle had reverted to primordial blackness; the hotel behind them blazed like a beacon in a wasteland.
“Well, this is it,” Giles said, regarding a smashed plate glass window.
Sentries materialized out of the shadows and challenged them in French. Kuldeep came out of a doorway. “Who are these guys?” he said, squinting at the Nigerians.
“They’re from Lagos. They’re on our side now,” Skyler said. “That’s the price of saving Earth, Srivastava. Roll with it.”
“The president is going to love this,” Kuldeep said grumpily. “And—fuck!” He had caught sight of Hriklif’s tall form and floating hair.
“This is Hriklif. He’s a friend,” Skyler said.
“If you’re playing me, Taft, you’re dead.”
“Hey there. You must be the NXC guy,” Linda spoke up from her wheelchair. “You assholes welshed on our deal to send my family to the moon, so don’t even start, OK? It’s too late for this dick-measuring shit.”
They left the wheelchairs at street level and filed into a basement filled with cigarette smoke and candlelight. The intonations of American English filled the room. All eyes went to the newcomers. Silence fell.
Skyler’s throat grew dry. It was like falling back through time. The basement was full of Lances. Oh, not that they all looked like Lance. Some were black, some white, some brown. But they were all American, and they all had the eyes of killers.
“Welcome to United States Army Europe,” Kuldeep said. “I kid, I kid. But we still had a lot of troops over here when the NAA rolled in. These are some of them.”
“What’s that squid doin’ here?” a southern voice yelled.
Hriklif switched on his field radio, and held up four bottles. His hands were so large he could hold them all at once, by the necks, like a bouquet. “I brought the vodka,” he said.
A while later, with rap playing from someone’s battery-powered portable, and Linda wheelchair-dancing with a Marine captain, Kuldeep got to the point.
“We’ve got the kinetic end covered. But I need your help with something else.”
Skyler moved his skull-shaped beer mug in circles. The table was a coffin with a skeleton inside. Pictures of graveyards covered the walls. Le Cercueil meant The Coffin. It seemed appropriate. “How can I help you?”
“We need a diversion.”
“Find me a guitar and I’ll sing Greensleeves.”
“Funny,” Kuldeep said. “If I hook you up with internet access, can you get in touch with your brother?”
CHAPTER 42
The Shiplord leaned down from her throne. “You’re famous, big brother,” she said to Keelraiser. “But you’re not the most famous one in the family anymore.”
Big brother. Jack’s jaw dropped.
Well, Keelraiser had once mentioned that he came from a prominent military family.
How prominent? The Shiplord of the Homemaker was his sister.
That’s why he had been so confident he could roam freely around the ship.
But it hadn’t worked out that way, had it? When the guards let him go, he had crumpled to the floor. Now he was struggling to stand up, drooling blood on the mosaics. Jack’s fists clenched. His own body felt like one big injury, aching with vicarious pain.
“Daddy was very disappointed in you, Iristigut.”
“What’s that to me?” Keelraiser said. He managed to stand. He was still wearing the bottom half of his spacesuit. He looked as under-dressed in this crowd as if he’d turned up to Ascot in a swimsuit. He touched his mouth, looked at the blood on his fingers.
Jack edged behind Colonel Sparkshaft. It wasn’t that he didn’t want Keelraiser to see him. Rather, he didn’t want Keelraiser to know that Jack was seeing him like this.
“Oh, I know you care nothing about how others feel,” the Shiplord said. “But you’ll be pleased to know Daddy didn’t let your betrayal get him down. He spent the first 2,150 years after your departure in cryosleep on Alpha Centauri Bb.” Rriksti years were like funny money. This only came out to about 60 Earth years. “Then he had himself awakened. The first news he received was of your rebellion. Shame and disgust spurred him into action. He led his fleet back home and carried out a successful conquest.”
It’s nothing but conquest with these people, Jack thought. Like spiraling a black hole in smaller and smaller circles.
“I did not know that,” Keelraiser said.
“Of course you didn’t. The first thing you blew up was the Lightbringer’s comms.”
“Is he … are they all … still alive?”
“Better than alive, they are famous,” the Shiplord said. “Daddy conquered both the Darkside and the Lightside. He unified them. Elevating the Lightside nobility to the Temple may have been a mistake, in my opinion. That was what inspired Tshaveg to mount her sordid little coup on board the Liberator. ‘If we are now partners in government back home, we should have an equal say in this invasion …’ Well, at least she didn’t blow a hole in the fucking ship.”
Keelraiser said, “So the wars really are over.”
“They’re calling Daddy the Great Unifier.” The Shiplord kicked her feet on her throne like a little girl.
“That’s it, then,” Keelraiser said quietly. “All unified under the Temple, forever and ever.”
“Daddy has only one unfulfilled wish,” the Shiplord said. “To see Earth brought under the rule of the Temple, too. That is my job. I’m glad you came to watch. You might get a kick out of this, considering how much you like blowing things up.”
The panoramic view of stars overhead spun. Earth came into view, filling half the ceiling. All the rriksti craned their heads back. Jack did, too, although this was not as comfortable a posture for him as for the rriksti. After a few moments he got a crick in his neck. Nothing was happening. Earth turned sedately on its axis.
“What’s the delay?” the Shiplord said.
A faint voice crackled, “Apologies, Shiplord. The missiles do have to be retargeted, which requires writing a new navigation program and downloading it to the onboard computers. We have not yet …”
“Oh, in the name of Ystyggr, how long can it take?” Without waiting for an answer, the Shiplord said, “All right, while we wait, here’s a replay.”
The ceiling displayed a long-distance shot of a meteor crashing into the North Atlantic. Oh cripes, Jack thought, that’ll be Iceland. Clouds spread east on the wind from a smouldering spider of magma.
“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.
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 Shiplord?” 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.”
2 km. Right on the edge of bio-radio range. So the Dealbreaker should have received his earlier instructions. But had it executed them? Where was it now?
Svamblizant. Come in.
Nothing. Either the Dealbreaker was now out of range, or it had been destroyed or disabled. A lot of debris must have gone flying when the Homemaker broke in half. Come to think of it, what about all those other asteroid chunks? They were still out there, hazards to any ship trying to thread a path through them.
Come in, Svamblizant. Come in.
The Shiplord got down on her hands and knees. She crawled up to Jack and stared into his suited face. “It’s talking.”
“I told you he was one of us,” Keelraiser said.
“He’s a hairy ape.”
“He’s a shuttle pilot. I consider him Krijistal. He’s earned it, for better or for worse.” Keelraiser got up. He scanned the consoles and found the one he was looking for. “Give him transmitter access.”
“No.”
“Do it!”
A second later: “Enabled.”
“I can’t tell the difference,” Jack said.
“Just talk,” Keelraiser said. “It’ll be broadcast over the ship-to-ship channel. But hurry up. They’re almost through the door.”
The red-hot spot on the door had spread into a circle 20 centimeters across. Jack recalled the way they’d dug out the CELL bunker with a comms laser. Same grindingly slow process. But in this case, there was only a few inches of metal to get through.
Svamblizant. Come in, damn you!
The calm voice of the shuttle’s computer answered, Svamblizant here.
“Yes!” Jack shouted. The readouts in his vision updated, flooding his brain with information. The Dealbreaker had followed his instructions to the letter. It was orbiting at a location which would have been a few hundred meters off the Homemaker’s bows, if the Homemaker had still been there. It was not. Keelraiser’s asteroid chunk had approached from below, against the Homemaker’s direction of travel. The impact had tossed the surviving fragment of the Homemaker higher, but robbed it of velocity, reshaping its orbital path into an ellipse that would steadily diverge from its former orbit. Already the Dealbreaker was several hundred klicks away.
Jack marshaled his thoughts into the shuttle’s format. Report to my location ASAP. Whilst underway, power up that system. The one hidden in the dorsal power busses.
Executing.
“Right, my shuttle’s coming.” He stood up. He ached all over, his throat was parched and sore from the smoke, and there was nothing to drink in a rriksti suit.
The Shiplord said, “What good will a shuttle do us, if we cannot get to the airlock?”
Keelraiser said, “We’ll simply have to get to the airlock. Put your suit on.”
“No, wait,” Jack said.
The Shiplord shrugged out of her robes. At the same time, an EVA suit flowed over her skinny body.
An energy beam stabbed through the door. It passed between Keelraiser and the Shiplord and seared into the wall. A console shorted out, vomiting smoke.
“Fuck that,” the Shiplord gasped. She froze for a second, then dropped low. “I’m venting the atmosphere.”
Loose objects in the drive chancel took flight, tumbling towards the hole in the door, where they caught fire as the energy beam continued to chew the hole wider.
The beam went dark.
“Opening the door.”
Keelraiser grabbed Jack in one hand and his sister in the other as the pressure door flew open.
Bright green emergency strip-lighting made the bridge look like an aquarium. Smoke streamed towards the airlocks. All seven of them gaped wide. The ragged end of the wreck would already have been depressurized. Now the remaining atmosphere was whooshing out of the bridge in a gale. Rriksti tumbled helplessly towards the airlocks.
Jack hooked a knee around the edge of the throne and held on, while the weight of the two rriksti threatened to pull his arms out of their sockets. Svamblizant!
Here.
Already the gale was dying down. The stillness of vacuum settled on the bridge. Too bad. The officers of the Homemaker peeled themselves off the walls. Unfortunately, they were professional enough to have donned their EVA suits as soon as the trouble started.
“My throne contains an emergency refuge,” the Shiplord said. She started to climb towards it.
In through the airlocks poured a solid mass of rriksti, thumping to the floor one after the other as they encountered the bridge’s gravity. It was like watching recycling bugs spill out of irrigation pipes. In fact, their black suits and wriggling bio-antennas made them look insectile. The surviving soldiers and crew of the Homemaker had just witnessed the destruction of their ship. Understandably, they were pissed.
Colonel Sparkshaft’s voice rose above the din of angry voices in Jack’s head. “Take them alive!”
“They don’t want to damage my chip,” the Shiplord observed. She turned to face the mob. “Is this a rebellion?” she shouted.
Keelraiser hissed impatiently. He dragged Jack onto the dais below the throne, disrupting his concentration.
“You lied to us,” Colonel Sparkshaft shouted. “You promised us victory!”
The Shiplord hopped onto her concave throne. “Sillies,” she said. “The only sure thing in life is death.”
The throne started to tilt upwards.
Closing like a clamshell.
“Gale! Wait!” Keelraiser shouted.
“Take it out on them,” the Shiplord said, nodding at Jack and Keelraiser.
“Gale!”
Jack. System is ready.
The rriksti flooded up the steps of the throne.
Aim at my position, Jack transmitted. And FIRE.
Fifty meters off the Homemaker’s bows, the Dealbreaker initiated the odd little system that drew on the gauge field of the shuttle’s fusion reactor. A transformer hidden in the reactor room inverted the polarity of the field. The electrical output of the reactor projected it up the dorsal power busses and out of a conduit at the shuttle’s nose.
The gauge field—Jack had learned in his years of messing around with Imfi fusion technology—strengthened the strong nuclear force so that it kept muons together long enough to catalyze fusion. That meant it kept protons, neutrons, and so forth together in a much tighter group than normal.
Someone, down on Earth, had figured out how to project the reverse of that field.
And beam it out of an improvised gun, at a target.
The Dealbreaker had once been an unarmed shuttle.
Now it was a deadly one.
Where the gauge field played over the hull of the Homemaker, atomic nuclei blew apart. The beam chewed through the armor in a haze of radiation. Liberated protons hungrily sought electrons. Freed neutrons drilled into everything in their path. Bolts of lightning lit the way as the starboard wall of the bridge simply disintegrated.
All the rriksti in the path of the beam vanished. Dismantled at the atomic level, they turned into clouds of single-proton hydrogen.
Jack stared, open-mouthed, at the typhoon of destruction he had caused.
He caught a glimpse of the Dealbreaker itself, hovering outside. Nothing between them now but space.
The storm front of gas clouds, shot through with lightning, marched steadily towards him, deleting reality in its path.
Keelraiser hurled him off the throne, putting it between him and the Dealbreaker.
In the few seconds before he hit the floor, Jack started to feel a little bit sick, and then very sick indeed, and then like death..
He retained just enough mental integrity to transmit: Svamblizant. Cease fire.
CHAPTER 44
Hannah stood in front of a mirror in the sacristy of the cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula, trying to fix her hair so it didn’t look like she’d been dashing around in the rain, making sure all the delegates got here on time, which was what she had been doing. She dropped the fancy Parisian barrettes, said “Fuck it,” and scraped her hair into a ponytail. Like anyone would give a shit how she looked, with Mt. Katla hurling ash all over Europe.
At least her black Chanel dress fit the mood. The long tables in the nave were solidly lined with suits and ties and conservative designer dresses. It was poignant, last dance on the Titanic stuff. The lights may have been dimmed to suit rriksti eyes, but it created the impression of a candlelight vigil. From the shadows, the Brussels Philharmonic played an oratorio. The violins brought unexpected tears to Hannah’s eyes. The rriksti were incapable of appreciating music, like so many other things about Earth. They had no idea what they were destroying.
Her valedictory mood took a sharp dive into fury as the delegates all stood up, applauding the entrance of Tshaveg, the Shiplord of the Liberator. Now that was going too far. You don’t have to fucking clap for the alien who’s about to take over your planet.
Tshaveg strode between the tables, flanked by two hands of battle-armored Krijistal. The tawny-skinned, scarlet-haired rriksti nodded to right and left. Her small attentions sowed blissful looks on the faces of famous politicians from all five continents. It was like they had been touched by the Pope. They desperately hoped this alien had brought them salvation.
Well, Hannah was a Jew, and her God was unabashedly partisan, when He wasn’t just a theoretical concept. Lately, that concept had been feeling less theoretical. It gave her strength when she had none of her own. She stood in the gap between the heads of the two tables, and did not flinch a millimeter as Tshaveg approached.
The two Shiplords gazed at each other—human to rriksti, conquered to conqueror, woman to woman.
Hannah thought: I’ve never met you, but I know you. You’re just an ordinary female with a chip in your head.
She imagined that Tshaveg was thinking: What’s with the ponytail?
When the moment had stretched to breaking point, Hannah spoke in Rristigul. Simultaneous English translation, provided by a Lightbringer rriksti, bounced around the cathedral. “Welcome to Brussels. Shame about the weather, huh?”
Tshaveg’s lips parted slightly. She was not letting on that she understood the Darkside language, let alone English. She uttered a string of gurgles.
A man’s voice, French-accented, said in English over the PA system, “I am sure the weather will improve when we have completed our agreement.”
Hannah nodded, satisfied. Tshaveg had acknowledged their quid pro quo. In exchange for Earth’s formal submission to her, she would have the bombardment stopped.
That was assuming she could have the bombardment stopped. Hannah just had to hope that Tshaveg really did have the power she claimed to stop the Homemaker.
They sat down. Tshaveg occupied a special high table. On her right and left, at the tops of the long tables, Hannah and Ripstiggr faced the Grand Marshal of the EU, the current supremo of the NAA, and the President Emeritus of Russia. Human and rriksti cameramen flocked around the tables to record the end of Earth’s independence. The speeches began.
Hannah got more and more interested in the Zhigga-English interpreter. He was standing somewhere outside the media swarm, so she couldn’t see him, but she was sure she knew that voice. She scribbled on her agenda, nudged it towards Ripstiggr.
Ripstiggr wrote in crabbed block capitals. It’s Giles Boisselot.
Giles?!? SPIRIT OF DESTINY Giles? Hannah sat up straighter and craned around.
Yes, Ripstiggr wrote. He came back from Europa with Iristigut.
Thanks for telling me. Strangely, it was not Ripstiggr’s lie of omission that bothered her. She was used to that kind of thing from him. It was the idea that Giles, her old crewmate, who had known her when she was just the SoD’s propulsion engineer, was observing her now, and judging her for selling out.
She scrawled, Now I’m suspicious. Who ELSE are you hiding over there at the Hotel Amigo?
Ripstiggr stared straight ahead. After a second he wrote: A woman called Linda.
Don’t know her.
And your friend Skyler.
Hannah’s cheeks heated.
If being seen by Giles would be bad, being seen by Skyler would be a thousand times worse.
As much as she believed she was doing the right thing—the only thing—to save Earth, in her heart she knew that she was betraying humanity’s core values. And for some reason, Skyler represented those values for her.
During the next few speeches, she rebuilt her inner poise to match her external poise. The stakes here were too high for her to be agonizing about her old crewmates. Tshaveg’s increasingly curt responses worried her. Was the Liberator’s Shiplord displeased with these lengthy human formalities? She passed another note to Ripstiggr. Think we should cut this short?
It’ll all be over in another few minutes.
Huh? No it won’t. We still have to hear from the American president. President Flaherty had the coveted position of last speaker, a recognition of the USA’s bygone prominence. He slouched on the Russian president emeritus’s left. From time to time he chuckled at nuances of irony no one else dared to laugh at.
Tshaveg’s hair twisted around her shoulders. She spoke in Zhigga to one of her aides. Hannah nudged Ripstiggr with her elbow and wrote, What’s going ON?
Ripstiggr just sat forward tensely, trying to follow the Lightsiders’ exchange. Clearly he didn’t know what this was about, either.
Amid the distraction of the Lightsiders, the last few speakers rushed through their remarks. Each politician began with the same form of address—“Shiplord of the Liberator, Supreme Unifier of Earth”—and concluded with the formula of submission that Tshaveg had required.
“In thought, word, and deed, in life and in death, Algeria submits to you.”
“Peru submits to you.”
“Indonesia submits to you.”
“The Glorious Republic of Central Hubei submits to you.”
“And last but not least,” the MC announced, “the President of the United States of America!”
Tom Flaherty stood up. Resting the knuckles of his right hand on the table, he cleared his throat, turned to glare at Tshaveg. A hush fell.
“The United States of America,” Flaherty said clearly and slowly, “does not submit to a damn thing. Not to you, not to them, not to anybody. We will never exchange our freedom for alien chains. And your so-called conquest will never be secure until you have hunted down and murdered every last American on the motherfucking planet. Think you can do that? Try it. For every one of us you kill, ten of you will die. That’s the deal we’re offering; take it or leave it.”
Flaherty sat down in a deafening silence.
“Been waiting years to say that to their faces,” he mumbled. Hot-mic moment of the century.
Disappointment and fury flooded Hannah. After all her hard work, the president of her own country had ruined the ceremony! She held her breath, waiting for Tshaveg’s reaction.
Bizarrely, the Shiplord of the Liberator hardly seemed to have noticed Flaherty’s defiance. Urgent gurgles of Zhigga washed through Hanah’s head.
“Oh, shit,” Ripstiggr whispered.
“What? What?”
Giles Boisselot, hidden in the Imfi gloom, took it on himself to clear up the confusion for everyone.
“Attention! This is a tsunami warning,” he boomed. “The Shiplord has received notice from the Liberator that a tsunami is sweeping north from … from … Mon Dieu. I think they are talking about Cumbre Vieja, in the Azores. The impact in Iceland caused the existing fault to widen. There has been a landslide. Half of the island has fallen into the sea.” Giles’s voice broke. “We cannot call this a tsunami. It is 300 meters high. Three hundred meters. Spain will be scoured to the bedrock.”
Yells of shock broke out. The passengers on the Titanic forgot their manners. They jumped to their feet. The threat of a mega-tsunami triggered visceral terror that overcame their fear of the rriksti. Politicians, aides, and media hacks surged towards the doors.
Giles shouted, “Don’t panic, you fucking cretins! The wave will hit Britain and the Low Countries in … I think it is five hours! There is time to evacuate the city in an orderly fashion!”
The exodus heading for the doors checked. People sprinted back towards the altar. Tables and chairs toppled.
Hannah thought for a second that Giles’s words had caused a mass outbreak of rational behavior. She stood frozen in her place, as if by staying outwardly calm herself, she could will order to prevail.
Then gunshots echoed off the gothic arches overhead.
And President Flaherty, seated at an otherwise empty table, chuckled.
Tshaveg’s armored guards formed a wedge around their Shiplord. They fired into the crowd to clear a path towards the doors.
Hannah rolled under the table. She crouched, paralyzed by the racket of gunfire, ricochets, and acoustic and radio-frequency screams.
Armored legs marched past her hiding place.
Stopped.
The big, beautiful face of Tshaveg peered out from between her guards’ legs. The Shiplord of the Liberator was down on her hands and knees, too.
“You will come with me.” A long arm whipped out and seized Hannah by the ponytail.
CHAPTER 45
Jack awoke in the dark, den-like warmth of a spaceship inhabited for too long by humans and rriksti.
Déjà vu.
Sort of.
This time, he was weightless.
The throb of turbines and the whooshing of fans reassured his astronaut’s hindbrain.
When he moved, a taut coverlet kept him from floating away.
Jack. The Dealbreaker spray-painted the darkness with readouts.
He yawned, mustered a bare modicum of concentration, about as much as you need to look at the time on your alarm clock. All systems operational. Reaction mass reserves low, but he already knew that. The Dealbreaker was orbiting alone, in the Homemaker’s old orbit. Both of the dead, cold halves of the Homemaker had drifted away. Good enough. Wake me if anything hits the radar.
He dismissed the interface, yawned again. He knew where he was now: in the crew area of the Dealbreaker, in one of the sleeping cocoons that could be anchored to the walls.
It was an open question how he’d got here, as the last thing he remembered was hitting the floor of the Homemaker’s bridge. But the answer could wait.
Happy just to be alive, feeling lazy and refreshed at the same time, he stretched. One hand encountered warm flesh. He was sharing the sleeping cocoon with someone.
He brushed his fingers over floating bio-antennas, the jut of a shoulderblade, the spare curve of a flank.
Keelraiser, of course.
Without thinking much about it, Jack snuggled up to Keelraiser’s back, inhaling his salty, beachy smell. Keelraiser seemed to be sleeping soundly. Jack could not remember ever actually seeing him sleep before. Not that he could see him now. Couldn’t see a thing. The darkness heightened the pleasures of touch and scent.
He pressed his face against the flat place between Keelraiser’s shoulderblades, intending to just lie there and enjoy this innocent, harmless cuddle.
Keelraiser’s ribs rose and fell in a placid rhythm. Jack idly stroked the underside of a thin arm, thinking about how a wing-like flap would once have been anchored there. He wondered if Keelraiser could remember being a little kid and flying, or if you forgot that, the way human children forgot being breastfed.
He pulled Keelraiser closer, settling the rriksti’s buttocks against his groin. He drifted a hand over Keelraiser’s chest. No nipples. Skin like rough silk. There was barely a trace of sticky residue on Keelraiser’s skin, thanks to long hours in a spacesuit. Jack used to fantasize about how their bodies would stick together in a tight, comforting seal, like the life-protecting seals of a spacesuit, if they ever got naked together. But this drier, silky texture had its own appeal …
Nestled in the cleft between the lean buttocks, his semi-hard cock stiffened.
So, things are back to the way they used to be, huh, Kildare?
In reality, it was too late for that.
Insistent desire dispelled his drowsiness. He rubbed himself against Keelraiser’s buttocks.
He might wake up.
I’ll wake him up. Nicely.
Jack reached around. His fingers encountered the loose, wrinkly skin between Keelraiser’s legs. The rriksti equivalent of pubic hair. Inside these hot, hairless folds he would find a little surprise, or a big one, depending on whether or not it was the weekend. He couldn’t remember for the life of him. But he knew from hearsay that just because it was a weekday didn’t mean nothing could happen …
Keelraiser caught his hand and moved it firmly away.
He was awake.
“Don’t touch me,” he whispered.
He rolled over, facing Jack in the dark. Jack’s cock rubbed against Keelraiser’s lower stomach. He was as hard as a heat-seeking missile. He could not imagine that Keelraiser wasn’t into it. “Why don’t you want to be touched?”
“Not everything has to be reciprocal.”
“Oh, rriksti words of wisdom. No … thanks.”
They floated face to face, mouth to mouth. Jack licked Keelraiser’s lower lip. He pushed his tongue inside the small, hot mouth.
They wrestled for a moment, straining together, the friction driving Jack wild, until Keelraiser forced his way out of the sleeping cocoon and kicked away into freefall. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Not now.”
“You mean it isn’t the bloody weekend.”
“That, too.”
Giddy with frustration, Jack wriggled out of the cocoon. The Dealbreaker’s sensors automatically lit the crew area to rriksti level. He snatched a pair of shorts out of the air and pulled them over his sagging erection. “I just don’t understand you.”
“We destroyed the Homemaker. We are orbiting at 56,000 kilometers with limited reaction mass.”
“I’m aware of that. There’s nothing that needs to be done in the next ten minutes. Actually, to be honest with you, it wouldn’t even have taken that long.”
“You have no idea,” Keelraiser said dryly.
“Oh for fuck’s sake. I just wanted to …”
“Did you really want to? Arousal is a common side effect of extroversion.”
“Who gave me extroversion?”
“Do you know what happened after you destroyed the bridge of the Homemaker?” Keelraiser floated, gazing up. Jack followed his gaze. The ceiling of the crew area was transparent. It doubled as the floor of the cockpit. The lighting had come on up there, too.
A dark form floated behind the couches.
Splayed arms and legs.
Limp bio-antennas.
Jack boosted himself up through the hatch at approximately the speed of sound. He shot into the cockpit, bounced off the ceiling, and floated down to …
… the dead body of Gale, the Homemaker’s Shiplord.
It horrified him that he’d been drowsing peacefully while this floated up here.
“Gimme some proper light,” he bawled. Of course, the Dealbreaker did not understand a crude, slangy order like that. He cudgeled his thoughts into the required format, forced the luminosity of the cockpit lights as high as it would go.
Reflections of the overhead fixtures floated in the Shiplord’s eyes like rubies drowned in puddles of tar. She had been shot in the forehead. There was not much blood. Trembling, Jack turned her over. No exit wound. Blasters could kill without that kind of mess.
Keelraiser perched on the back of the co-pilot’s seat, holding on with both hands and feet, like a big ungainly bird.
“She rescued us both from the wreck of the Homemaker. I was in bad shape, but conscious. You were … dead, as far as I could see.”
“The radiation.”
“Yes. She was unaffected, as she’d taken shelter in her emergency refuge. She came out after you stopped the attack. Dragged us to the Dealbreaker. Got us on board. Then she gave us extroversion.”
“I should have been dead,” Jack realized, remembering what he’d seen with his own eyes. What he’d done. People literally disintegrating into clouds of hydrogen.
“Yes, probably. Gale saved you. Eighth-level clerics can practically bring people back from the dead. She is … I mean … she was …”
Jack was trying to close the Shiplord’s eyes. They wouldn’t stay closed. “Did you kill her?” he said bluntly.
Keelraiser laughed. It was not his usual laugh, but a high, frightening squeal. “I couldn’t even move without vomiting.”
“Ah.”
“I lay there and watched her save you. Then she saved me. And then, while I was still weak, you know what it’s like, one is not even sure where one is …”
“Yes.”
“She faced in the direction of Imf and shot herself in the head. And all I could do was watch, and beg her to stop, and the words wouldn’t even come out.”
Jack gave up his attempts to prettify the corpse. He floated upright. “Why? Why did she do it?”
“She’d lost her ship. She faced utter failure. And Tshaveg rubbing her nose in it for the rest of their lives.”
“But … suicide?”
“Some people,” Keelraiser said delicately, ”when they have failed in everything they set out to do, double down and keep going. It’s possible to understand the view that killing oneself is the more dignified option.”
Jack himself had pigheadedly doubled down on failure and kept going. So had Keelraiser, in his own way. It had brought them here, to this high and lonely orbit, with the body of Keelraiser’s dead sister between them. Their victory over the Homemaker suddenly seemed less satisfying.
“I thought rriksti didn’t commit suicide,” Jack said. Mechanically, he slapped open storage hatches, looking for a body bag or something to wrap the Shiplord in. “Doesn’t your Temple forbid it?”
“Yes.” Keelraiser rubbed his cheeks with his knuckles. Flakes of skin floated loose. “Gale, too, rebelled in the end.”
CHAPTER 46
Jack cranked up the long-range scanning equipment and acquired telescopic images of Earth. Combined with spectroscopic analysis, these confirmed his assumption that the Homemaker had not had a chance to launch its fatal Arctic-bound meteors. The methane content of the atmosphere had ticked up only a tiny bit, attributable to the multiple volcanic eruptions around the world.
“We did it.”
He was speaking to Keelraiser. They had put Gale’s body in the cargo hold.
“On the other hand, Spain looks a bit funny. In fact it looks like it isn’t there. No more holidays in Majorca, I suppose.”
He gnawed on a slab of soy jerky from Sky Station, poring over the images. Unease roiled his gut, and it wasn’t because the jerky tasted like shoe leather. He zoomed in on the coastline of Britain. The ‘toe’ of Cornwall didn’t look quite right, either.
“We destroyed one planet-killer,” Keelraiser said, slumped in the co-pilot’s seat, anchored by one bare foot through the tethers. It was strange to see him on that side of the cockpit. He looked out of place. His identity as a pilot had been lost with the Cloudeater. “But there is still one left.”
“Yeah.” Jack blobbed his little crosshairs icon on the Liberator, which he’d captured in his imaging data as it passed over Europe. “But didn’t what’s-her-name agree to lay off if we took out the Homemaker for her?”
“Yes.”
“But?”
“But she is a rriksti.”
“Meaning you can’t trust a word she says including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ Got it.” Jack bit off the words. It was stupid to feel such disappointment. He knew how the rriksti lied: habitually, strategically, and compulsively. He had just hoped against hope their fight could be over. “What’s the point of even making agreements in the first place?”
“Firstly, the lies people offer are clues to their true intentions. It’s like radio-location. We bounce signals off our environments all the time to determine where things are. That is how we survived the early stages of our civilization, when we were not yet the apex predator. On Imf, radio-location was a greater evolutionary advantage than sharp hearing. The same goes for truth-seeking, as opposed to simply believing everything one hears, like a gullible human.”
Jack aimed a mock-punch. Keelraiser ducked.
“And more fundamentally, rriksti often lie and tell the truth at the same time. I know, it’s paradoxical.”
“Gale accused me of speaking in paradoxes.”
Keelraiser toyed with the rosary floating around his neck. It had reappeared after they took Gale’s body below. Jack wondered if this were a non-verbal example of lying and telling the truth at the same time. “It was when I got a glimpse of the paradoxes at the heart of human culture,” Keelraiser said, “that I realized how much alike we are. Slaughtering you would be genocide. Something close to cannibalism. Yet I don’t understand these paradoxes. I can see they’re there, that’s all.”
“So what are we going to do about the Liberator?” Jack said after a suitable interval had passed.
Keelraiser tipped his head back. He was eating rriksti food he’d found in the Dealbreaker’s stores—high-calorie mirip pulp, packaged on Earth, by the Lightbringer’s manufacturing operations, into an economy-sized toothpaste tube. He squeezed out a glob and caught it in his mouth. “Stop them,” he said.
“And there I was hoping we could leave it to someone else,” Jack said.
“Who else is there? Ripstiggr’s people are trapped on Earth. Alexei, Nene, and—and the others are trapped on the moon.”
“I’d like to get in touch with them.”
“It’s your ship. But I think we should not use the comms until we’re ready to send our ultimatum. At the moment, we just look like another piece of hottish debris. The moment we start sending out signals, they’ll know someone is alive up here.”
“Hang on. What ultimatum?”
“The one you are going to send the Shiplord of the Liberator, warning her to disarm and evacuate her ship, or be destroyed.”
Jack scratched his stubble. He pondered the images on his screens. The shape of Cornwall had changed again. He double-checked the Dealbreaker’s reserves of water. They had just about enough for a single de-orbit burn. Eventually he said, “I know I was the one who brought up Star Wars, but I’ve sort of cooled off on that idea.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Calling in a reverse gauge field attack on my own position was enough suicidal insanity for one lifetime.”
“That isn’t what I had in mind, anyway,” Keelraiser said. “There are hundreds of unused asteroid chunks floating around up here. One would be enough to take out the Liberator.”
“Yes, but wouldn’t the Homemaker have to reprogram them with new targeting information? And the Homemaker’s gone.”
“I can do it.”
“Really?”
Keelraiser ate some more mirip-pulp toothpaste. “I’m good with computers.”
“Can you do it from here?”
“No.”
“All right.”
“When I diverted the missile intended for Mt. Aetna, I discovered that their onboard computers are short-lived, by design. The short-lived part is the power supply. Their capacitors were kept charged with beamed power from the Homemaker. By now, they’ll all have run out of charge.”
Jack queried the Dealbreaker. “No beamed power capability here.”
“No.”
Jack called up passive scanning data of the Dealbreaker’s own orbital path. He found a couple of dozen asteroid chunks drifting about three hundred klicks ahead of them, like huge ugly ducklings. “So we have to actually land on the goddamn things.”
“Yes.”
Jack closed his eyes. He did not want to do this. He was tired, tired of destruction, and Spain had vanished, and Cornwall was vanishing, and he desperately wanted to get on the comms and find out if there was anything left to save. But on whom did that depend now?
On the Shiplord of the Lightbringer.
And on him.
He offered one last objection. “There must be thousands of rriksti on that ship.”
“Tens of thousands.”
“You went to the wall to stop me from destroying the Lightbringer.”
“I’ve changed.”
“It’s not going to work if you’re just bluffing. She’ll be able to tell.”
“I am rather good at the traditional rriksti art of bluffing. Aren’t I, Jack?”
Jack whipped his temper down. He knew why Keelraiser was bragging about his own flaws like this. It was because he’d lost his ship—his identity. “You can’t fool me anymore,” he said flatly.
“Then you know it won’t be a bluff. If she doesn’t disarm and evacuate, I will destroy them.”
“All right,” Jack said wearily. “Calculating our burn now.”
*
He flew to the swarm of asteroid chunks. It wasn’t real flying, just applied orbital mechanics. He pulsed the main drive, dropping the Dealbreaker into a lower, faster orbit. This carried the shuttle a bit ahead of the asteroid chunks. Then he returned to a higher, slower orbit and dropped back towards them. Less than two minutes of burn time in total. If anyone on Earth had noticed, they weren’t saying so.
He used the attitude thrusters to maneuver the Dealbreaker into synch with the leading asteroid chunk, so close that the shuttle’s belly almost kissed the rock. No way to actually dock with this thing, but its orbit was as stable as—well, as a rock.
The other chunks trailed behind it at distances of a klick or two.
Jack inspected the engine the Homemaker’s crew had attached to this one, a ten-meter titanium bell sticking out of the rock. He had tucked the Dealbreaker in near it. He spacewalked and recharged the dead capacitor with an electrical cable—in fact, the very same cable that the unknown inventor of the reverse gauge field had put into the Dealbreaker to carry that lethal beam. He would not be using that again. He’d stick his head into the fusion reactor first.
When he got back to the Dealbreaker, he found Keelraiser wrestling with a large hatch at the back of the cargo hold.
“What’s that?”
“Give me a hand. The hydraulics are stuck.”
They pried the hatch open. Dust drifted out of a secondary cargo bay.
Clearly Jack’s virtual tour of the Dealbreaker had not been exhaustive. He shook his head ruefully. “I thought there wasn’t as much room in here as there was on the Cloudeater.”
“I knocked down the partition in my cargo hold while we were on Europa. We needed the materials.”
An egg-shaped craft about the size of a Humvee occupied the extra cargo space. Jack floated around it on his wrist rockets. It had a thruster on the fat end of the egg, gimbaled for maneuvering.
“Hydrazine?”
“Yes. I’ll have to borrow some from your tanks.”
“What is this?”
“A mobility pod. Each shuttle originally had two. We dismantled the Cloudeater’s pods for materials and parts. It looks as if Hobo disposed of one of his, too. I’m glad he left us this one.”
“I suppose you’re going to use this to go and recharge the computers on the other asteroid chunks?”
“Yes. We should be prepared to launch several, in case one or more is destroyed.”
At that moment, Jack’s HUD flashed. He blinked up a new notification from the Dealbreaker.
Jack. Text transmission from Kralshamat. Text follows. The text was in Rristigul.
“Well, well. Someone noticed us hopping around up here. And I thought I was being sneaky.”
“Who is it?”
“Kralshamat. What’s that?”
“The Lightbringer.”
They piled back into the ship. Keelraiser walked Jack through the procedure to bring up the transmission on a screen in the computer room. “It’s from Ripstiggr.”
“Anything about Skyler and Giles?”
“No. Ripstiggr is stranded in Belgium. He telephoned this message to the Lightbringer, which sent it to us. He says that diplomacy has broken down … and the Shiplord of the Liberator has Hannah.”
CHAPTER 47
“I am going to obliterate your fucking species,” Tshaveg said calmly. They were in a Belgian police van driven by a rriksti, speeding away from the cathedral. The Shiplord of the Liberator had dropped her pretense of not speaking English or Rristigul. “We’ll keep the chimps and gorillas. There’s very little difference, except that the apes are more polite.”
Hannah said, “Please. I’m sorry. I didn’t know they were going to do that.”
Gunmen had attacked the summit, mowing down delegates in a bid to take out the Liberator’s Shiplord. Tshaveg’s party had fought their way out of the cathedral, losing several rriksti to RPG rounds. Hannah had glimpsed some of the shooters. They wore civilian gear, but she knew they were American.
“You should have been better informed,” Tshaveg criticized. “What kind of Shiplord are you?”
“A human one. But I’ve done my best. Please, before you make your decision, let me show you what we’ve done in Africa. We’ve built greenhouses, factories, we were in the middle of building a pipeline to provide fusion energy to millions of people.”
“I will take a good look,” Tshaveg said, “from orbit. In order to accurately target your pathetic wreck of a ship.”
Hannah bit back horrified protests. Her family was on the Lightbringer. How could she warn them? She couldn’t. She was stuck in the back of a van with wire mesh over the windows, on the way to the airport.
The van progressed slowly. The tsunami warning had spread faster than they could escape. It turned out there were a lot of people left in Brussels. All those with vehicles, and many of those without, were heading for the hills. Tshaveg’s Krijistal fired into the gridlock, spreading panic. The van scraped through impossible gaps. Metal shrieked, wing mirrors crumpled. But even so they were barely moving at five miles an hour.
Tshaveg leaned back, apparently relaxed. She called to an aide, who brought, of all things, a magnum of Krug champagne. He managed to pour it into two beer steins, despite the jostling and bumping of the van.
“Share a toast with me,” Tshaveg said to Hannah.
Hannah gazed dubiously at the mug the aide offered her. $2,000 champagne in beer steins. How like the rriksti. “What are we toasting?”
“The destruction of the Homemaker.”
“What happened to it?”
“My agent destroyed it. The Darksiders had it coming.”
“Oh.”
“Oh? Is that all you have to say?”
“I’m a bit more concerned about the destruction of Earth.”
“But this is good news for Earth. That Darksider bitch, the Shiplord of the Homemaker, would have exterminated Earth’s native ecosystems by altering the climate. I will only exterminate Homo sapiens. So you may take comfort in the knowledge that your pretty animals and interesting vegetation will flourish under my personal care.” Tshaveg twisted the knife. “Your species was rapidly destroying them, anyway.”
Hannah gazed out at the grim, personality-free buildings of modern Brussels. She imagined them crumbling, buried beneath a green tide. The wolf and the bear coming back. No more music, no more art, no more champagne. No more human beings. Two big tears squeezed out of her eyes. “Guess I will have that drink,” she said.
Fifty meters ahead of the van, an office building exploded in a fireball.
*
Skyler’s seatbelt snapped taut across his chest as Kuldeep stepped on the brake. Their jeep crashed, gently, into the overloaded Volvo in front of them.
Further ahead, a building burned like a six-storey welding torch, impervious to the rain. Pieces of debris rained down on the traffic and the throngs on the sidewalk. The noise felt like someone had taken a cheese grater to Skyler’s soul.
Another building spontaneously combusted.
Something heavy fell on the jeep.
The windshield frosted over with cracks.
Kuldeep swore, gunning the jeep forwards, then reversing. Bumpers crunched.
Skyler braced his laptop—actually, Kuldeep’s laptop—on his knees and typed:
So, a couple of buildings just blew up.
The laptop had a dongle that turned it into a shortwave radio. Skyler was messaging with his brother, Trekker, thousands of miles away in Boston.
Yeah! Trek wrote. You’re gonna see more of that.
How’d you do it?
We hacked into the gas mains and increased the pressure. The membranes in the gas meters tend to rupture if the pressure gets too high in the mains. It's amazing how fragile they are. So you’ve got a lot of buildings with leaking meters. A few hours later, BOOM BOOM BOOM.
More explosions thundered through the city.
The whole city is going up, Skyler typed.
Well, you asked for a diversion.
“They’re trapped,” Kuldeep whooped. He was talking about the police van stuck in traffic a block ahead. Inside were the Shiplord and her entourage … and Hannah. “Out of my goddamn way, motherfuckers!”
He threw the jeep into reverse again. The rear bull bar tossed the Mini behind them onto its side. The jeep came from the Bundeswehr. Some remnants of the German army had joined the ragtag corps of US Army survivors who’d answered Flaherty’s call for volunteers. Kuldeep drove up onto the sidewalk, squeezing between lamp-posts and the hedge of the Parc du Cinquantenaire. People reeled out of the way, not that Kuldeep would hesitate to run them over if they didn’t, Skyler thought. Kuldeep only looked like a mild-mannered Indian programmer. He was cut from the same cloth as Lance Garner. Skyler had seen him personally shoot several summit delegates as they hustled Flaherty to safety.
Trek, Skyler typed. Thanks for the diversion. It’s awesome. Flaming clots of roof insulation landed on the cracked windshield. He flinched and hunched over the keyboard. But I actually called to warn you. Get out of Boston.
Why?
Tsunami. The East Coast is going to get a pasting. New York will be hammered. You might be OK up there in Beantown, but 10 meters is one big mother of a wave.
OK, Trek wrote back after a second. You’ve been right about everything else, so I believe you. Piper has a friend with a van.
Sounds good. Get on the road ASAP. Go inland.
Will do.
Give my love to Piper and Dad. Bye, Trekker-Wrecker. A nickname from their childhood.
Skyler shut the laptop. How long before the tsunami reached America? It would get here first, anyway.
But he had already decided he wasn’t going anywhere without Hannah.
“Aw fuck,” shouted Kuldeep, and the two SEALs riding in the back. “It’s moving!”
The police van had forced its way out of the traffic jam. It swung onto a side street.
Kuldeep drove after it, through falling gobbets of flame.
*
The cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula was empty.
Rain wept through shattered stained-glass windows.
Corpses strewed the floor.
Not all the corpses were actually corpses.
Giles searched the nave, righting the fallen tables and uncovering terrified politicians who had hidden beneath the tablecloths.
By and by he found the Grand Marshal of the EU, formerly the director of the ESA.
“Do you recognize me?” Giles said in French.
The man shook his head, near-catatonic with terror.
“Stand up, like a human being,” Giles said. “Look at me. I have seven toes on each of my feet, yet even I can stand.”
The man obeyed the steel in Giles’s voice. He tottered backwards and leaned against the pulpit, where the ONE GALAXY banner hung by one corner, bloodstained.
“My name is Giles Boisselot. You sent me to Europa to discover the secrets of the alien spaceship we called the MOAD.”
Eyes widened in recognition.
“You—all right, let’s be fair, I, too—believed the aliens would save humanity from destruction.”
Giles prowled closer. The man started to babble about how good it was to see him. Giles wondered if this was how he’d behaved when the NAA overran Europe. Probably. And he’d been rewarded for it.
This time, he would get a just reward.
“They cut off my hands and feet,” Giles said. “They stuffed me into a spacesuit and left me to die.”
“Please—”
“I did not die. I grew these.” Giles held up his hands. “Later, I grew to like the rriksti. Isn’t life strange? But it is not true, it was never true that they could or would or even wanted to save us.”
“I beg you—”
“We have to save ourselves.”
Giles took hold of the Grand Marshal’s neck and strangled him with his seven-fingered hands.
He dropped the body on the floor.
Then, despite what he had just said, he climbed the steps behind the pulpit to the altar. He knew he could not really save himself. The alabaster reredo depicted the Passion of the Christ. He fell to his knees, then sprawled full length, his face on the cold stone, weeping.
*
In the sacristy of the cathedral, President Flaherty was waiting it out, guarded by special forces and Army grunts who had rounded themselves up from across Europe and the Middle East. He burnt with love for these Americans of all colors who had stood up when duty called.
They’d been about to hightail it to Antwerp when the city started blowing up. Now they were trapped. On the bright side, this was probably the safest place in Brussels to be trapped. The 13th-century gothic cathedral did not have a gas meter.
Raised voices came from the sacristy door. One of them was female. Flaherty lifted his head. “Let her in.”
A woman in a wheelchair rolled into the room. Passion hardened the lines of her pretty face. The operative behind her said, “Mr. President, she had a gun.”
“Hi there, Linda,” Flaherty said.
Linda Moskowitz rolled her wheelchair right up to him. Her voice quivered with fury. “Take me to my family.”
“They’re back in the States,” Flaherty said. “In the bunker at Cheyenne. Safest place in the world.”
“Take me to them.”
“The city’s on fire, in case you didn’t hear. No one’s going anywhere right now.”
“Yeah, and also there’s a tsunami coming,” Linda said. “Good thing this church has high towers.”
“Chopper’s on its way,” Flaherty said. “If possible, they’re gonna land in the square out there. You will be on that bird, if I have to give up my own place to you.”
Linda’s face softened a touch. “So was it worth it?” she said. “Did we win?”
“That I don’t know yet.” Flaherty turned to his people. “Call Kuldeep and the other pursuit teams. Make sure they are providing updates on the target’s position.”
He hadn’t told Linda that the Chinooks on their way to him would be diverted, if necessary, to take out the Liberator’s Shiplord. Flaherty was not only prepared to kill for Earth’s freedom. He was ready to die for it.
*
Kuldeep said, “We’re not gonna catch them.”
One of the SEALs in the back repeated into the radio, “We’re not gonna catch them. We are on the freeway, in heavy traffic. Target is about one klick ahead, going like a bat outta hell.”
“Stay on them,” the radio crackled.
A sign whipped past: AÉROPORT DE BRUXELLES-NATIONAL.
“Get over in your lane,” the other SEAL said to Kuldeep. “We gotta get on that cloverleaf overpass.”
Skyler sighed. He felt failure blowing in, like the rain coming through the hole in the windshield that Kuldeep had knocked out so he could see to drive. They weren’t going to make it. Tshaveg would reach her shuttle and take off, leaving humanity to burn and drown in its own mess.
At least Hannah would be safe on board the Liberator. Maybe.
The radio squealed urgently.
Skyler turned in his seat.
Out of the back, he saw it.
Looked like a white line of smoke across the freeway.
Until he saw the cars and trucks being carried along like so much rubbish on its seething crest.
“It’s coming!” he yelled.
“What?”
“The tsunami! It’s here!”
“We were supposed to have five hours,” Kuldeep shouted.
“It wouldn’t be the first time the fucking rriksti were wrong.” Speaking of the rriksti, Skyler thought: where’s Ripstiggr? The bastard had just vanished in the middle of the action. The thought tore through his brain and away like a neutron. “Just fucking drive!” Entire houses were coming after them. Ripped off their foundations, swaying along like blank-eyed train carriages.
Screaming curses, Kuldeep floored it up the ramp onto the overpass.
*
Thunderous booms rolled through the rain, one after another.
“What was that?” Hannah cried, as the van charged along the overpass towards the airport. “It sounded like shuttles taking off!”
“Well,” Tshaveg said, “this airport is surrounded by low ground everywhere. It is barely above the level of the ‘sea.’”
“And?”
“The airport is now completely surrounded by water.” Tshaveg pointed down off the overpass. Hannah reeled at the sight of a flood tide sweeping under the overpass, laden with cars and pieces of houses. And bodies. Oh God. Bodies.
“Northwest of here,” Tshaveg continued, “the wave rolled up the estuary of the river Scheldt, and into the large canal that runs through the city. The cargo area of the airport abuts the canal. It is now underwater. The runways are being flooded as we speak.” Tshaveg lifted the magnum of Krug by the neck and drank straight from it.
“The shuttles?” Hannah said.
“Were forced to take off. Water is not good for spaceship engines. Not even water plasma ones.”
The Shiplord had made a joke. Hannah smiled a tiny bit. She took the offered magnum, emptied it.
“There is another bottle,” Tshaveg said reassuringly.
“So what happens to us?” Hannah said.
“We occasionally had floods on Imf. When a large chunk of a glacier breaks off, it can cause a river to overtop its banks. So we know what to do when this happens.”
The van swung off the overpass, onto a bridge. It crashed through a barrier and accelerated into a multistorey car park.
“One gets onto the roof of the nearest steel-reinforced building,” Tshaveg explained, “and waits to be rescued.”
“Um. By who?”
The Shiplord’s hair twitched, but she said nothing.
She doesn’t have a plan, Hannah thought. She’s just putting a bold face on it, like I used to do. Heading for higher ground and hoping.
The van rocketed up through the nearly empty car park, scraping the walls as it climbed the spiral ramps.
“Anyway, in the meantime,” Tshaveg said, “I will commence the extinction of your miserable species.”
Hannah contemplated hitting her with the empty magnum. She decided against it. “With what, the power of wishful thinking?”
Tshaveg laughed. “A filovirus, engineered to be highly contagious during the infectious period, and long-lived outside the human body.” Her eyes widened. “You didn’t think I was collecting all those specimens for fun, did you?”
The van shot out onto the roof. A few abandoned cars stood around, caked with volcanic ash. The van parked near the edge of the roof.
“The virus has been loaded into aerosol tanks,” Tshaveg said. “It will be hand-delivered to all major population centers … well, those that are left, after this.”
CHAPTER 48
“I’m not sure there’s any such thing as human culture,” Jack said.
“Michelangelo,” Keelraiser said. “Shakespeare. The Bible.” He continued to slice pieces off his sister’s semi-frozen face.
“Yeah, but that’s my point. That’s not human culture, that’s the culture of some humans. Mine, I suppose. But it’s not everyone’s. Rriksti must have various cultures, too, apart from this fake distinction between the Darkside and the Lightside.”
“Maybe we once did. The Temple erased them. Anyway, it is a universal practice to consume the flesh of the dead.”
Jack had to look away. Keelraiser had brought his sister’s body into the turbine room of the Dealbreaker to conduct this gruesome ritual. “Right,” he said. “Well, don’t take all day about it.”
Keelraiser muttered to himself in Rristigul, hacking away at the corpse. He had never looked more alien.
Jack went back to the cockpit and watched the Cumbre Vieja tsunami creep over the coastline of Belgium. It had already inundated northern France and was lapping at southeast England. He did sums, trying to estimate how far the surge would travel up the Thames.
Keelraiser reappeared in the cockpit, wearing his EVA suit. “I’ve finished. You’d better go.”
“Yup.” Jack kept it monosyllabic, fighting to stay focused. “Have you unloaded the pod?”
They’d agreed that Jack would have to take the Dealbreaker away from the asteroid chunks to deliver their ultimatum to the Liberator. It would defeat the whole exercise if the Liberator could pinpoint exactly where the threat would be coming from. Keelraiser would be able to survive in the mobility pod until he got back.
“Yes.” Keelraiser lingered.
“Right, then …”
“Jack, I do not want you to come back.”
“You don’t want me to—”
“There are two reasons,” Keelraiser said rapidly. “The Dealbreaker hasn’t much reaction mass left. You can come back here, or deorbit. It’s got to be one or the other.” Jack was silent, knowing this to be true. “And I want you to deorbit. Land on Earth and organize a resupply flight for CELL. They are stranded, helpless, they haven’t even got comms. And you know what their life-support situation is like. So you must resupply them with the Dealbreaker. After that, if the Lightbringer survives, you can use its two remaining shuttles to organize a supply chain, using Sky Station as a fuel depot.”
Jack pinched the bridge of his nose. He smelled blood on his hands.
“If we lose …” Keelraiser said.
“I thought the whole point was winning.”
“The odds are great that I’ll have to destroy the Liberator. Is that winning, or losing? But even in the best-case scenario, if our ultimatum succeeds, things are likely to drag on. It’ll be contentious, chaotic … and no one will be thinking about the moon. Except us.”
“I see your point,” Jack said. He did see it. His duty to the passengers of the SoD was not yet fulfilled. Once you save people, you’ve got to keep on saving them. “OK. I’ll pick you up on my way back. But that pod can only support life for what, a day or two? If you’re staying here longer, you’ll need extra consumables.”
They unloaded oxygen canisters and water sacks. Time was ticking away. Jack surveyed the pathetic supply dump next to the base of the engine bell, where the Homemaker’s crew had dug out tanks for the powdered aluminum and LOX that fueled the engine. Keelraiser had tethered the mobility pod to the onboard computer housing. Cables undulated between computer and pod.
Jack didn’t have the heart to say goodbye. He juiced his wrist rockets and floated away.
Head down in the computer housing, receding, Keelraiser said, “I want you to adopt my children.”
“Your … children?”
“Zhenya and Ithrilip.”
“Right, they’re your biological children. Alexei might have something to say about that.”
“Yes, of course, they’re his in every sense that matters. But if anything happens to him and Nene …”
“Don’t be silly. Nothing’s going to happen to them, or to you. I’ll be back before you know I’m gone.” Jack now knew that Keelraiser didn’t expect to survive this. He flew back to the Dealbreaker and settled into the cockpit. Working mechanically, he edged the shuttle away from the asteroid chunk, until he could no longer see the small figure toiling over the computer.
He leaned back, covered his face with his hands and said, “Jesus. Jesus. Jesus.”
Please clarify, said the Dealbreaker.
“Nothing.”
He ignited the MPD engine and burned towards Earth.
The Liberator, of course, spotted his drive plume and hailed him before he had travelled a thousand klicks.
“I don’t know what any of that means,” Jack told the Rristigul-speaker on the other end of the radio. “At a guess, it was something along the lines of ‘Who the fuck are you?’ Am I warm?” The Dealbreaker informed him that a targeting laser had painted its hull. Jack’s mouth dried out. He had no defense against the Liberator’s charged particle cannons … except words. Staring at the lethal needle far below him, he said, “My name’s Kildare, and I’ve got bad news for you, motherfuckers.”
*
Hannah poured herself some more champagne. “It’s pretty, in a way,” she said. She and Tshaveg stood side by side at the wall that ran around the roof of the multistorey parking lot, watching the flood surge over the airport terminal buildings.
Tshaveg laughed. “Isn’t it! A Shiplord must have a taste for destruction. Perhaps you are a proper Shiplord, after all.”
“Have the shuttles delivered the virus yet?”
“They are still in the air. I will let you know when they carry out their mission.” Suddenly, Tshaveg’s hair stiffened. “Excuse me,” she said, and then, amusedly: “You’ve got to hear this.”
A voice spoke in Hannah’s head. Tshaveg was rebroadcasting a transmission that must already have been rebroadcast several times, from the Liberator to the Beauty of Destruction—now in the air with its deadly cargo—to the comms set in the police van.
Hannah had heard this voice thousands of times over the SoD’s intercom. It didn’t sound much different now than it had then.
“… bad news for you, motherfuckers.”
“Jack?”
Pause.
“Hannah?”
“Oh my God. Jack. I don’t believe it.”
“Where are you, Hannah?”
“On the roof of a parking lot at the Brussels airport.”
Jack did not say sorry or are you OK or too bad about the end of the world. He was not that kind of guy. He said, “How high is the water?”
Hannah leaned over to check. “Up to the fourth storey.”
“How many storeys are there?”
“Six.”
“Is it still rising?”
“Yes. All I can see is water in every direction. It’s like we’re way out at sea, with boats all around, but they aren’t boats, they’re buildings.”
“Right. Well, I don’t think it’ll rise much higher at the present time. The primary was about 80 meters high when it hit Belgium, and your elevation is 60 meters, so you should see the water begin to retreat soon. But you’ll want to watch out for the reflection off England.” Jack hadn’t changed a bit. Hannah forgot all the reasons she had once been wary of him, and smiled tearfully, overcome with nostalgic affection. “Anyway,” Jack said, “I was actually trying to call the Liberator.”
“Its Shiplord is right here beside me.”
Tshaveg had listened to this exchange with her lips quizzically parted. She said in English, “Well? What is it, human?”
“I am presently targeting your ship,” Jack said. “I’m prepared to assault it with overwhelming force. Did you see what happened to the Homemaker? We broke it in half. But that wasn’t really a satisfying outcome. I like explosions, you see. I’d have preferred to hit the reactor, watch it cook off, and then take pictures of the debris cloud. And that’s what will happen to the Liberator, unless you do precisely as I say.”
“Jack, she’s planning to wipe out humanity with an airborne virus!” Hannah screamed.
Tshaveg hit her. Her champagne mug flew out of her hand, down to the flood below. She staggered and fell on her ass. Her cheek felt numb for a second, and then pain throbbed through her whole face.
“Wow. Good thing I called when I did,” Jack said pleasantly, far away. “So that’s why all those shuttles are buzzing around? Call them off. Tell them the party’s cancelled.”
Sitting on the wet concrete, feeling the parking lot shudder beneath her, Hannah then heard Jack say precisely the wrong thing.
“Tell them that it turns out humans are smarter than you, after all.”
Tshaveg’s lips sealed in a line. She said, “My ship can see you, human. You’re in one of those wretched repair jobs from the Lightbringer. Who’s flying it? Iristigut, I suppose. Tell him that his weakness for humans has ruined him. But perhaps all he really wanted was to die like a human. I can help him with that, and he needn’t even crash his ship into the Liberator. Those shuttles haven’t got any armaments whatsoever.”
Hannah knew that they actually had. Assuming this was either the Dealbreaker or the Hairsplitter, it had a reverse gauge field beam weapon. She had put it there. But the shuttle would need to be close enough to the Liberator to spit on it before that would do Jack any good. Meanwhile, the Liberator’s cannons were effective out to tens of thousands of kilometers.
“My gunners are targeting you now,” Tshaveg said, “and will vaporize you on my command.” She stared out at the surging water.
“I knew you’d think I was bluffing,” Jack said. “But there’s something you’ve got to understand. I’m not a rriksti. I’m no damn good at lying. If I say you’re doomed, I mean it.”
Tshaveg shrugged. “Destroy him,” she said.
“Oh, no,” Hannah whispered.
“Well, I tried,” Jack said. “OK. I’m just getting my camera out … gotta make sure I get these pictures. They’re going to be historic. Goodbye, Shiplord.”
*
Jack, of course, did not really have a camera. His beloved Nikon had been lost with the SoD. But it was the thought that counted.
He broadcast an empty burst on the maser channel. That would tell Keelraiser, listening, to launch the asteroid chunks. Wheeeeeeeooow…. wheee … End transmission.
Jack. Charged particle discharge detected, the Dealbreaker said.
Jack reconfirmed his course. There was no point dodging. You can’t outrun particles that travel at the speed of light.
You can’t see them, either.
Coronal discharges lighting up the darkness? Only in the movies.
But neither can you see Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts.
To hit the Dealbreaker, the Liberator would have to fire through those zones of energetic particles captured in Earth’s magnetic field. The radiation belts would attenuate, defocus, and misdirect the charged particle beams.
Jack rated his chances pretty highly. Of course, if he was wrong, he’d never know it, because he’d be dead.
Floating in his straps, he watched the Liberator glide east across Asia. The alien behemoth took about two hours to circle the planet at its orbital height of 160 klicks. In another twenty minutes it would be hidden behind the limb of Earth.
That’d be Jack’s chance to nip down to the surface.
If he survived that long.
Charged particle discharge detected.
“Jesus …” He wished he’d asked Keelraiser to give back his rosary.
CHAPTER 49
Hannah sat on the rooftop. The ash-laden rain trickled down her face like dirty tears. The parking lot seemed to be swaying back and forth, as if it were a ship afloat on a filthy, rubbish-strewn sea. She imagined the water eating away the foundations, shoving at the support pillars. And there was no sign of anyone coming to rescue them. Maybe Tshaveg would end up drowning with her. That would be something.
The remaining guards stood at the four corners of the rooftop, scanning the watery horizon. Suddenly one of them shouted in Zhigga.
*
On the fourth floor of the parking lot, Kuldeep eyed the water swirling up to the top of the ramp. “We’re gonna have to go higher,” he said to Skyler and the SEALs.
They had barely made it into the parking lot before the surge swallowed the bridge from the overpass. They’d abandoned the jeep on the third floor, wary of alerting their targets. Since then, they’d just been sitting here with their thumbs up their asses … trapped between the rising tide below, and the heavily armed rriksti on the roof.
They’d radioed their location to the Chinooks on the way in, but got no response. Kuldeep had to assume the choppers were lost. The president was probably dead, too.
They were on their own.
They had one advantage. The rriksti didn’t know they were here.
But that advantage would only last until they exposed themselves. The SEALs had argued for charging the rooftop. Kuldeep had vetoed that. “Remember those energy weapons?” They’d all seen just how accurate they were, how deadly. Four guys emerging from the ramp, zero cover, armed only with a couple of M4s and Kuldeep’s own .38 … they’d get mown down.
That wouldn’t help Earth, and it wouldn’t help Savannah, far away in Africa, or her unborn child.
As he glanced indecisively up the ramp to the fifth floor, a wave swelled up the down ramp and swirled around his legs. He jumped back, swearing. The SEALs laughed their asses off.
They stopped laughing when the wave reached them, and kept rising, splashing around the support pillars.
“Holy fuck, that’s coming in fast.”
“It’s the reflection,” Skyler said. “First we got the primary tsunami. Now it’s hit Britain, and it’s splashing back at us.”
“Up to the fifth floor,” Kuldeep said, the decision made for him.
They climbed the ramp, slipping on the wet concrete, the water surging at their heels.
Now, when he looked up the next up ramp, Kuldeep saw daylight.
An armored rriksti prowled across the top of the ramp. It did not glance down into the shadows of the fifth floor. Kuldeep pulled his guys back anyway. His face felt swollen with fear. He never had overcome his terror of the aliens. He’d die shitting his pants. He glanced at Skyler, wondering if he was scared, too.
Skyler grimaced. “WWLD?”
“What would Lance do?” Kuldeep interpreted. Skyler nodded. “He’d have brought a flamethrower.”
Skyler laughed. “Wish he was here, for real.”
“Me, too,” Kuldeep said. “But maybe he’s looking down from up there … rooting for us.”
*
The guards clustered at the edge of the roof. Hannah went to see what they were looking at.
“A boat,” she said in amazement.
An honest-to-God boat, zipping over the tsunami, jinking around floating houses and barely-submerged rooftops.
Hannah laughed out loud. It was such a brilliantly obvious idea. So the world’s going underwater? Get in your boat, like Noah.
But this was no ark.
A small boat, with a low, streamlined cabin.
Blue hull. White cabin. Antennas sticking out of the roof.
A Belgian police boat.
She glanced at Tshaveg, wondering if this was the rescue the Shiplord had been waiting for.
Apparently so. Tshaveg’s hair lashed, and her mouth gaped in an almost wanton, weekendy grin. Her voice dripped with pleasure as she spoke to her aides in Zhigga. Hannah forgot sharing champagne with her, forgot their tentative rapport. She hated the other Shiplord with a passion so intense that adrenaline surged through her body.
The aides and guards jogged back to the van, presumably to get the comms set and whatever else Tshaveg wanted to salvage. Two guards remained with Tshaveg and Hannah.
The boat came closer.
The water had got a lot deeper in the last ten minutes. The boat rounded the parking lot and nosed into the lee of the structure, where an eddy of debris had collected. Hannah made out the shadowy forms of several rriksti in the cabin. One of them climbed out onto the foredeck. He had blue hair, so was probably a Lightsider. Balancing, he threw a line. One of the guards looped it over a parking ticket machine, mooring the boat to the building.
Tshaveg strolled across the rooftop to the improvised anchorage. She said carelessly to Hannah, “You can come if you like. There’s more champagne back on the Liberator. Wine, too, and all kinds of spirits.”
“And you do like a drink, don’t you?” Hannah said. “It comes with being Shiplord.”
“You’d know.”
“Nope. I was an alcoholic to start with. Being Shiplord has actually helped with that.”
Four more rriksti burst out of the cabin.
They vaulted onto its roof, which was now level with the roof of the parking lot. They leapt across the gap, easily clearing the wall.
They carried heavy-duty US Army carbines with two barrels each.
The one in the lead fired as his feet hit the roof. Flame spouted from the lower barrel. The nearest Lightsider went down.
Their battle armor was really made for blocking energy beams. It couldn’t stop rocket-propelled grenades at point-blank range.
The other rriksti off the boat fired their RPG rounds from the rifle barrels of their carbines, taking out several more guards, and then charged the Lightsiders emerging from the police van. Those upper barrels were shotgun attachments. Pellets shredded Lightsider flesh, riddled the side of the van. The noise drowned out the continuous groaning roar of the water.
Tshaveg grabbed Hannah, held her in front of her—a human shield.
Hannah hung in the other Shiplord’s grip, staring in joyful disbelief at the leader of the rriksti off the boat.
Ripstiggr.
*
“That’s gotta be our boys!” one of the SEALs said—or rather shouted, over the noise. Both SEALs charged up the ramp to the roof.
Savannah, this is for you, Kuldeep thought. Overcoming his terror, he ran after them. He wasn’t encumbered by an M4 and ammo belt, so he overtook them on the ramp.
And Skyler?
Weakened by his years in space, he couldn’t even climb the ramp. He had to crawl. They left him behind.
*
Ripstiggr lowered his carbine. He said to Hannah, “I came for you.”
“You were supposed to come for me,” Tshaveg said. “And where are the people I sent with you?”
“They walked into a gas explosion,” Ripstiggr said. “But not to worry. They died quickly, and so will you. I’m through with cycles of punishment. I’ll make it clean.”
“Not before she dies.” Hannah felt a tickle at the back of her neck. “Along with every other human on this planet.”
Hannah gasped, “She’s not kidding, Ripstiggr. She’s ordered her shuttles to disperse a deadly virus. If we kill her, who’ll call them off?”
“Cancel the attack,” Ripstiggr said, raising his carbine, aiming at Tshaveg’s face.
“That’s already been tried,” Tshaveg said. “Drop the gun, Darksider, and take a running jump.” She edged sideways, forcing Hannah to shuffle along with her, towards the boat.
As they turned, Hannah got a better view of the rooftop. Most of the Lightsiders lay dead, and so did two of the rriksti off the boat. The blue-haired one had herded the surviving Lightsiders—the aides, not the armored guards—into a huddle.
But Hannah only had eyes for Ripstiggr, who was facing the decision of his life.
“All right.” He tossed his carbine down. “You win. Give me Hannah.”
Tshaveg started to speak.
Then she coughed, an actual sound from her mouth—“H-huh.” The arm pinning Hannah’s arms to her sides went limp.
Hannah staggered away, spinning.
A knife clattered to the rooftop.
Tshaveg lay on her back, spasming, coughing blood.
A few meters away, a hoodie-clad Indian man stood with a pistol in his hand, looking from the weapon to the fallen Shiplord, gaping as if he couldn’t believe he’d actually done that.
Two beefy, tattooed Americans pounded across the rooftop. “Get down, ma’am!” one of them yelled at Hannah, as he halted and levelled his carbine at Ripstiggr.
“No!” Hannah screamed. “Stop! These are the good guys now!”
The carbine spoke.
Ripstiggr bent over. It looked as if he were trying to duck the rifle fire. Then he crumpled.
Time stopped for Hannah.
She saw a fourth human crawling across the rooftop. Skyler. He was calling out to her.
But he seemed to be far away, on the other side of a sheet of glass as uncrossable as the vacuum.
She dropped to her knees beside Ripstiggr, shaking him desperately. “Wake up! Honey! Baby, come on!”
Ripstiggr blinked up at her. His huge, beautiful eyes reflected the cloudy sky.
“I love you,” Hannah sobbed. “We’re gonna get help, OK? Don’t move, don’t try to talk—”
“So far from home,” Ripstiggr whispered. The words came out of his mouth. He was talking.
Hannah wept uncontrollably, like a little girl. She scooped his head into her lap and kissed him all over his face. She tasted blood.
“Never saw myself dying … on an alien planet.”
“You’re not dying. You’re not.”
“Don’t mind. You are my life.”
“You’re talking. I can hear you.”
“Learned. For you.”
Hannah did not know exactly when he died. She was crying too hard. They had to prise her away from his body. Even then, she screamed and fought to reach him, until they tipped him off the roof of the parking lot, into the flood that was ebbing now, but still seemed endless, unfathomable, enough to drown the whole world along with her love.
CHAPTER 50
Jack went in hot and fast.
He had to get down to the ground before the Liberator came back around the limb of the planet.
The steep dive towards Earth awoke ghostly memories of piloting the space shuttle. He’d never actually landed the shuttle, as his first mission as pilot had ended with the loss of the Atlantis, but he’d trained exhaustively for it. And at the end of the day the Dealbreaker was just another space shuttle. Better technology. Same thing.
He flipped, decelerated, flipped again. The wings caught the atmosphere. The thermal shields took the brunt. He flew S-shaped banking turns, bleeding off velocity, high above North America.
He was so deep in the old NASA mindset that he thought nothing of it when a familiar voice said, “Dealbreaker, this is Mission Control.”
“Reading you loud and clear, Mission … what?”
A chuckle. “Good to hear your voice, Jack.”
Jack stared at the comms console. The transmission was coming in over the maser channel. Now disbelieving his ears, he said, “Sir?”
“Richard Burke here. NASA—well, what’s left of it—has relocated to central Africa. I am speaking to you from the Lightbringer.”
“Burke,” Jack marvelled. He smiled, alone in the cockpit, pinned to his seat by re-entry gees.
“I sent eight astronauts to Europa. It’s damn good to see one of them coming back, even if you are flying a fusion-powered toaster.”
“At least this toaster doesn’t play the greatest hits of Queen at me.”
“In all seriousness, you’re looking good so far. But what is your landing plan?”
“Don’t really have one,” Jack said, hurtling towards the Mojave desert. “I was just going to put her down on an interstate somewhere.”
“An interstate? I can tell how long you’ve been away, Jack. The whole southwest is crawling with bad hombres who would very much like to get their hands on your flying toaster. That’s if you don’t hit a bomb crater and flame out. No, I’ve got a better plan for you. My lovely wife Candy is on the radio right now with White Sands. They will activate the radio beacon and ensure the landing strip is clear. I’ll talk you in.”
“Roger that, sir.”
So the last of the SoD astronauts landed on the dry gypsum lakebed at White Sands Space Harbor, in New Mexico.
As the Dealbreaker’s landing gear bit into the ground, Jack briefly glanced at the empty seat next to him. He was flying with ghosts. Their faces changed with the light, but at different times he had felt the haunting presences of Qiu Meili, Xiang Peixun, Eskitul, and Oliver Meeks. Now, while the hydrazine thrusters roared, braking the shuttle and crushing him into his seat, Kate Menelaou came to sit next to him. She looked up in wonder at the bright sun of Earth. Son of a bitch, she said. You made it, Killer.
Jack stumbled down the steps, shivering in his cast-off rriksti clothes. His ghosts came with him. The sun was a fuzzy blaze behind thin clouds. He smelled dust, scorched insulation, and the faint sage-like tang of creosote bushes from the hills around the facility. The scent momentarily transported him back to Bunkerville, Nevada, where he’d been crashing at Meeks’s house when the Mother of All Discoveries was confirmed.
Pick-ups roared across the lakebed, ringed the shuttle. People in tattered haz-mat suits pointed guns at him.
“Kildare?”
“Yeah.”
“Anyone else on that thing?”
“No,” Jack said, coughing in the dust. “No one.”
*
The current occupants of the White Sands Test Facility welcomed Jack, conditionally. Led by US Army personnel from the nearby test missile range, they included a few NASA leftovers and multifarious prepper types from the New Mexico area. They’d turned the facility into an armed camp. Suntanned children played outside the buildings. Jack couldn’t help staring at them. Human children! He hadn’t seen any in half a decade. They seemed like aliens to him, with their thin limbs and high voices.
Their parents knew about the tsunamis and volcanic eruptions ravaging the planet, but they maintained a pose of stoic indifference. They had survived the alien invasion, and they planned on surviving whatever else the future threw at them.
Some things, though, you couldn’t see to fight. Charged particle beams. X-rays. Ghosts. Filoviruses.
Jack had not forgotten what Hannah screamed at him over the radio. He asked to talk to Burke, and was connected with the Lightbringer via the ham radio network. “Sir, do you know anything about a—an airborne virus?”
“No,” Burke said. “Where’d you hear about that?”
“From Hannah.”
“Haven’t heard from her at all.”
“She was in Belgium.”
“Yup. So was my daughter’s boyfriend. She’s pregnant. Going out of her mind. We had to give her sleeping pills.” Burke paused. “Europe is gone, Killer. Just gone. We have to take pride in the fact that Kuldeep and the others accomplished their mission. They took out the Liberator’s Shiplord.”
Jack got off the radio. He could not bring himself to tell Burke that this was actually a catastrophe. The Shiplord had rejected their ultimatum. If she had died—swept away by the tsunami, her chip with her—there would have been no one to rescind her orders to seed Earth with a deadly virus. He breathed in the sweet, tangy scent of the desert and wondered if he was already breathing in poison.
Regardless, he had work to do. He cajoled sufficient water out of the White Sands gang to refill the Dealbreaker’s tanks. They wanted him out of their hair and were willing to pay in H2O for it.
When it came to supplies for CELL, they were less understanding. Vitamins? Cotton clothes? Chickens? Rabbits? They had most of those things, but they weren’t giving them away to anyone. As for liquid ammonia and dry ice to keep it cold—he might as well’ve asked for a million bucks in gold bars. Go piss in the wind, flyboy.
Burke was right. Jack had been away for a long time. Neither he, nor Keelraiser, had grasped how much things had changed on Earth … how much was just gone. Technology supply chains. The milk of human kindness. Europe.
The plan to resupply CELL was dead on contact.
Eight hours after he landed, he sat with his head in his hands on the flatbed trailer that displayed the rusting Lunar Module Ascent Stage from the Apollo program. Some madman had trucked it over here from the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamogordo, perhaps seeing it as an important piece of human heritage to be preserved. Now it looked not just historical, but prehistoric.
Out on the lakebed, the Dealbreaker’s tail stuck up like the fin of a futuristic shark.
Clouds scudded across the sun.
The voices of children came to his ears like the cries of birds.
What the fuck am I going to do?
He asked me to do one thing. One thing. And here I am sitting in the desert, about as much use as balls on a skeleton.
Jack.
The Dealbreaker wrote a notification on his optic nerve. He pulled his t-shirt over his face and closed his eyes so as to read it against the day.
Transmission received from the Liberator.
CHAPTER 51
Transmission received from the Liberator.
At least, that was what Hannah thought the Lightsiders’ comms set was saying. She only understood Liberator and the little squiggle that stood for an incoming call. The blue-haired rriksti, Hriklif, had retrieved Tshaveg’s comms set from the roof of the parking lot and plonked it in the cabin of the Belgian police boat. Hriklif was a Lightsider but he did not come from the Liberator. He was a good guy, according to Skyler. He piloted the boat through the debris with glum competence.
Transmission received from the Liberator.
Hannah blinked the notification away. The rriksti aboard the Liberator probably wanted to know what had happened to their Shiplord. An hour ago, she’d have taken the opportunity to gloat over Tshaveg’s death. That’s what Ripstiggr would have done. But Ripstiggr was dead, and nothing seemed to matter anymore. Not even the obliteration of the human species by tailored filovirus.
Anyway, looking over the stern of the boat, it didn’t seem as if there was anything left to obliterate. The sea had done it already. The tops of drowned buildings stuck out of the tide like gravestones.
Skyler sat opposite her in the cramped cabin, staring at her. He still had that dumb peace symbol, and he still had the habit of fiddling with it.
At last she snapped, “You’re bugging me.” She meant that she didn’t want him observing her grief. She stumbled to her feet and went out of the cabin. There was a small aft deck, piled with weapons. She stood at the rail, gripping it with white knuckles.
Skyler came out after her. The others stayed in the cabin: the Indian guy, Kuldeep; Hriklif and the one surviving rriksti who had come with him and Ripstiggr—a veteran of the Lightbringer’s infantry; and the two SEALs. One of those men had killed Ripstiggr.
“If that guy comes near me—” she said, jerking her chin at the cabin.
“He apologized,” Skyler said. “He just thought he was an alien.”
“Oh, and aliens are things we shoot. Right. They’re not people or anything.” Her voice got hollow and wobbly. “I loved him.”
“I know.”
“I don’t care what you think. I loved him so much.”
“I figured you were sleeping with him. I was so jealous, I used to daydream about torturing him, like he tortured you on the Lightbringer.”
Hannah bristled at this misapprehension. “He never tortured me. When I first met him, he was a typical Krijistal. OK, he was kind of the recruitment poster ideal of a Krijistal. Brutal, violent, dictatorial … but also funny and sometimes shy. But we were together for years. Little by little, he changed. And I changed. We changed each other.” Tears rolled down her face.
“So you were sleeping with him,” Skyler said.
Men. So damn fixated on sex.
“Look at everything that’s happened, and you’re mad that I slept with a rriksti?” She laughed, wildly.
“Oh, no,” Skyler said. “Everyone’s doing it. Alexei married one of them. Giles was doing about five of them. Even Jack had this weird thing going on with Keelraiser—he pretended it was nothing to do with sex, but it was. Me and Hriklif used to complain that we were the only people on the SoD not getting any.”
“Oh. Wow.”
“So, no. It’s just like, whatever.”
“It is not like ‘whatever’! Sure, it started out as sex, but it turned into love.”
She bowed her head, shaking with dry sobs. She had cried so much she had no tears left. If she were a rriksti, she’d be turning transparent from shedding so much of her skin.
Skyler said, “That actually makes it easier for me. Not that it matters what I think, of course. I just want to make clear that I’m not mad about it. I mean, I would be jealous of you banging some guy. But even I am not enough of an asshole to be jealous of love.”
Jealous. That word snagged in her brain. It wasn’t the first time he’d used it. “You were jealous? Of me and Ripstiggr?”
“Yup. It’s shitty. But then again, I was a little shit.”
“Why? Why were you jealous?”
“I loved you so much it used to drive me crazy. I took over as the SoD’s propulsion technician, just to try and stay close to your memory. Yes, you may laugh now. I loved you so much …” He stopped. Amended, “Love. I love you so much, present tense.”
Hannah was silent. Something scraped the hull underwater. Hriklif was taking it slow, wary of fouling the turbine on submerged obstacles.
“You can tell me to go away, and I’ll go,” Skyler said.
“Where would you go to?” Hannah said, gesturing at the horizon. As she spoke, she saw a hill sticking out of the flood, a brown lump of mud that must recently have been underwater. The tide was going down.
“Point,” Skyler said. “I guess you’re stuck with me for the time being.”
The ghost of a smile cracked Hannah’s lips. She was thinking about Tshaveg’s killer virus. Wondering if ‘the time being’ would be measured in weeks, or days.
Hriklif called from the cabin, “I’m going to head for that hill over there. Need to reach dry ground before the engine dies.”
“Don’t go away,” Hannah said to Skyler. She went back into the cabin. The rriksti were poring over maps, looking for someplace to land.
Skyler stayed on the aft deck and lit a cigarette.
She remembered how he’d told her that he had faith in her to do the right thing. Had she justified his faith, or betrayed it?
Transmission received from the Liberator.
Oh … leave me alone, she thought.
Then she reconsidered.
Do the right thing.
Until she died, she was still Shiplord.
The right thing for a Shiplord to do was face up to reality, not hide from it … in a bottle … or in someone’s arms … or in a black hole of grief.
Accept transmission, she sent in Rristigul. She wondered if the comms set would even understand her. But it turned out that just like the Lightsiders themselves, it was only pretending to be different.
*
“Accept transmission,” Nathan Ziegler chirped, translating for his family what he had just said in Rristigul. He’d picked up the language as only a young child could. The radio headset he’d made at school was never far from his tousled head. Little show-off, Isabel thought. But love softened her frown.
Anyway, Nate’s proficiency came in handy at times like this, when all the rriksti were away from the bridge of the Lightbringer, dealing with the new deluge of refugees from the Lake Kivu area. Isabel’s parents were out helping, too. She and Nathan were alone with the Burkes and a few other families who’d been camping on the bridge.
Nathan looked down from the scaffolding that provided access to the comms chancel. “It worked!” he yelled. “Stand by for the transmission. I’ll try and translate it.”
He didn’t have to.
The voice in their headsets spoke in Rristigul, and then repeated what it had said in English.
“This is a message for all personnel on Earth. The Liberator has cancelled all pending and scheduled attacks. All shuttles deployed in an offensive capacity have been recalled. Forces currently on the surface are to consider themselves demobilized, and should cooperate on the individual and small-unit level with personnel from the Lightbringer, as well as with human units engaged in rescue and recovery efforts. To assist in those efforts, shuttles will be dispatched from the Liberator to deliver communications equipment and medical supplies to distribution centers.
“It is permissible to suppress violence, but not to offer it. Reciprocity will not be sought or enforced. Punishment for infringements of this policy will be harsh but commensurate. Do not be afraid.
“This is the new Shiplord of the Liberator, Iristigut, known in English as Keelraiser.”
CHAPTER 52
Alexei stood on the roof of the bunker, watching stars fall out of the sky.
Seven of them. The same as the number of fingers on a rriksti hand.
Deprived of comms, the community at CELL was completely cut off.
But they still had the telescope orbiting the Earth-Moon L1 Lagrange point.
They had watched in horror as the Homemaker meted out a drip-feed of agony to Earth, like—this was Nene’s analogy—Temple torturers meting out the pains of a punishment cycle.
They had watched meteors hit volcanoes, triggering massive eruptions.
They had seen a killer tsunami scour the Iberian peninsula and redraw the coastline of northern Europe.
It was the apocalypse. Down in the bunker, they huddled together for comfort, and spontaneously cut back on their food rations.
Koichi had said to Alexei yesterday, "Remember how they told us CELL might be an ark for the survival of the species?”
But this was a failing ark. Data from the farm already reflected declines in productivity, traceable to nitrogen shortages. Alexei had kept the truth to himself for now, telling only Nene where they stood, but soon people would notice for themselves.
Even when he was on the SoD, hundreds of millions of kilometers from Earth, he had not felt as alone and forgotten as he did now.
Yet an hour ago he’d been woken from a nightmare-ridden catnap by news. News!
The worst news possible.
They had not been forgotten, after all.
A fleet of shuttles had been sighted in orbit, and now here they came, dropping out of the black sky like fiery meteors.
They landed on the plateau between Shackleton and Shoemaker Craters, out of sight.
Alexei walked to the entrance of the bunker. He stood at the top of the ramp, breathing heavily into his respirator.
While he waited for them to come, he remembered his days in the Russian air force. What fierce, misbegotten pride he had taken, as a young man, in dropping bombs on other people. Now, that same pride served a better cause: the ideal of brotherhood he’d been fumbling after all his life. He had finally found it on the moon.
They came loping over the bare rock, twenty rriksti in extravagantly tinted suits, with guns to match.
“What do you want?” Alexei said in Rristigul.
“How many rriksti are down there? How many human beings?”
298 rriksti, counting all the babies, and 910 human beings, was the answer, but Alexei said, “There are 1208 people down there. And if you want to harm them, you’ll have to go through me.”
He had thought he was alone, but as he spoke, shadows fell past him up the ramp. Everyone who had a functioning spacesuit had come out of the airlock to stand with him. It moved him profoundly.
The rriksti confronting him said, “No, no!” It sounded puzzled. “We only want to know how much stuff you need. We have brought food from the Liberator’s gardens, some tanks of liquid ammonia, feedstocks for the 3D printers, and things like that, but we want to get a better idea of your requirements for our next trip. The Shiplord was really very vague. He just said, ‘Take everything.’”
Alexei held up a hand. “Wait. Wait. You’ve come to help us?”
“Yes, of course! This time, we’ve just brought emergency supplies, as I said. But next time we will start bringing the tools and materials you need to build arcologies. It can’t be much fun living underground.”
Nene pushed through the crowd to stand by Alexei’s side. “So it will be just like home?” she said—a challenge.
“A new home, for humans and rriksti to share. We were going to put the arcologies on Earth. But honestly, after so long in space, we like it better up here, anyway.”
Alexei drew a deep, shuddering breath and looked up at the lunar mountains. With his new eye implants, they no longer looked monochrome. The subtle tints of green olivine, silver mica, and pinkish diorites sparkled in the sun. “Yes,” he said. “It’s nice up here, isn’t it?”
CHAPTER 53
Jack took the Dealbreaker back into orbit and rendezvoused with the Liberator, 160 kilometers above Earth. A drumbeat of tension sped up as he slid the shuttle into the giant ship’s vacuum dock. He remembered what had followed his decision to dock with the Homemaker. Had that really only been ten days ago?
But this time, everything was different. The vacuum dock of the Liberator was half-empty. Most of the shuttles were away on missions to aid people in Earth’s disaster-struck regions. Others were shuttling supplies to CELL. And Jack’s welcome committee consisted of just two rriksti.
One was Hriklif.
“You finally made it,” the atomic engineer greeted him.
Jack had spent the last week in the desert. He’d done some climbing. Some hiking. Got the worst sunburn of his life. Tried to figure out what had happened. Eventually he’d given up.
“Thought I’d come and have a look around,” he told Hriklif.
“This ship is freaking amazing. It makes the Lightbringer look like the SoD. Sorry. You’ve got to see the reactor. One terawatt, baby!” Jack smiled; it was funny how Skyler had influenced the way Hriklif talked.
“We’ve even got a swimming pool,” said Hriklif’s companion, as they reached the corridor behind the vacuum dock. The Liberator’s version was not sapphire-colored, but amethyst, as if they floated inside a giant geode. They doffed their suits to the shoulders. Hriklif’s companion turned out to be a slender rriksti with gold bio-antennas and a pointed nose. “Nice to meet you,” it said to Jack. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“Nothing too scary, I hope.”
“I like scary stories. Which is just as well, because Hriklif has lots. You’re in most of them.”
Hriklif wrapped an arm around the gold-haired rriksti. “This is Solfiya,” he said. “We knew each other on Imf. I thought I’d never see her again. Turns out she volunteered to crew on the Liberator.”
“It was boring without you around,” Solfiya said softly.
“We want to get married,” Hriklif said. “Do you know how? It isn’t an Imfi thing. Well, it used to be, but the Temple banned it. So we don’t know how to do it.”
Jack stifled a smile. Here, then, was an example of rriksti culture the Temple had suppressed. Plain old marriage.
“Normally people just go to the register office,” he said. “But I don’t think there are any of those left. Alternatively, you could find a priest.”
“Do you know any priests?”
Jack remembered Father Cullen, the parish priest at Our Lady of the Angels in Nuneaton. The thought triggered a pang of worry. He’d been trying to find out how things stood in the UK. Were his parents alive or dead? The tsunami had left an information void in its wake. He’d have gone to investigate in person, but his contacts at the Lightbringer told him their satellite images revealed total devastation extending into the Midlands. There was nowhere to put the Dealbreaker down safely. Aid was being delivered to survivors by sea. After this, Jack planned to make his way to the staging area in France and get on one of those boats, by hook or by crook.
He described his plan to Hriklif and Solfiya. “I’ll let you know if I find a priest who’d be willingly disposed.”
They took him on a short tour of the Liberator. Although the ship was a carbon copy of the Homemaker, cosmetic differences stood out, no doubt attributable to the brief reign of Tshaveg as Shiplord. The lighting everywhere was brighter, albeit still red-tinted. The rotating gardens boasted more diverse vegetation, including olive-green thorned vines that climbed almost to the train tracks. Creatures like furry manta rays sailed around in freefall. The air was oven-hot, but less steamy than Jack was used to. Aft of the bridge, an extra set of mass attractors anchored a seven-sided Olympic-size swimming pool where rriksti splashed rapturously. Jack smiled at the sight, while wiping spray off his face. In fact, this was the difference that most struck him: the crew of the Liberator seemed happy. He commented on it to Hriklif and Solfiya.
“Oh, it wasn’t always like this,” Solfiya said. “Tshaveg was a slavedriver. People are just happy to get the weekend off.”
“And to not have to go to war, after all,” Hriklif said.
“That’s right,” Solfiya said. “We Lightsiders are not a warlike people, and unlike the Darksiders, we mean it. The crew of the Liberator is about half and half. That’s thanks to the Great Unifier.”
“Hang on,” Jack said. “Didn’t the Great Unifier do his thing sixty years after you left Imf?”
“Yes,” Solfiya said. “Lots of people switched sides when we heard about that.”
“Switched from Darksider to Lightsider?”
“Of course.”
“Er …” Jack had been under the impression the Darksiders and Lightsiders were two different races.
“Pretty much everyone is mixed,” Hriklif explained. “After all, we all come from the twilight zone originally. So if you’ve got enough of the other side’s genetic characteristics, you can just decide to be that.”
“And change your implant’s settings so everyone knows,” Solfiya said.
“OK.” Jack realized he was never, ever going to get to the bottom of the mystery that was Imf, short of going there.
“Well, here we are,” Hriklif said. They stood in front of a series of hexagonal airlocks, familiar from the Homemaker. “This is the bridge. Are you going to go in?”
“I feel like I’ve been here, done this,” Jack said.
“You’ve got to go in! You can’t leave without seeing Keelraiser,” Hriklif said anxiously.
“Sorry. I was just joking. Of course I’ll go in and say hello.” In reality, of course, he had come for no other purpose.
As his eyes adjusted to the gloom on the bridge, he spotted Keelraiser sitting on the floor, facing the altar-cum-throne.
His heart went into a spasm of hard beats.
Earthlight spilled down from the bright crescent on the ceiling. It fleetingly reminded him of the cupola on the ISS.
He crossed the floor, his secondhand Nikes squeaking in the silence, and stood between Keelraiser and the throne.
“So how’d you do it?”
“How did I do what?”
“How, for fuck’s sake, did you become the Liberator’s Shiplord? I left you on a asteroid chunk with a few days of air and water. Next thing I know you’re broadcasting to the whole world, telling everyone there’s been a change of management.”
“I screwed up,” Keelraiser said.
“What do you mean?”
“It took longer than I thought it would to reprogram the onboard computers.”
“So when I gave you the signal to launch the asteroid chunks …”
“I wasn’t ready. I continued to work desperately. I thought I was good at that kind of thing. I was dooming humanity to extinction … After the worst half-hour of my life, the mobility pod sent me a message from the Liberator. ‘Hello,’ it said. ‘Shiplord.’ When I realized what had happened, I requested a lift to the Liberator, and came aboard.”
“What had happened?”
Keelraiser touched his hairline. In the twilight, Jack made out a gash, sealed with a transparent plaster. “I got the idea from you.”
“You took Gale’s chip.”
“Yes. After you berated me about consuming the dead …”
“I didn’t—”
“I decided this would be a better way to honor her. Anyway, her ship was gone, as my ship was gone. The chip would just be like a piece of jewellery.” Keelraiser brushed the rosary hanging on his chest.
“You’ve still got that.”
“I kept it to remember you by. I took Gale’s chip for the same reason. But I didn’t know that when Tshaveg died, command of the Liberator would default to the only other person of equal rank … the Shiplord of the Homemaker.”
Jack drew in a breath. “We got lucky.”
“I suppose,” Keelraiser said with zero enthusiasm.
Earthlight glinted off something in his lap. A blade.
Jack lurched forward.
Keelraiser held out a service sword, identical to his old ones, and to the one Jack had used to saw off Hobo’s head. “I was trying to decide whether to start from the top or the bottom.”
“Of what?”
Keelraiser pointed a bio-antenna at the throne. “I can’t stand the sight of that thing.”
Jack snatched the sword by the hilt. Keelraiser drew its twin. “Always start from the top,” Jack said, and they set about demolishing the throne with the tungsten-edged blades, like they had demolished the seats in the passenger cabin of the Cloudeater, three long years ago.
The work went slower this time, as the throne was made of tougher stuff. It did not bring the same sense of catharsis. In the half-gravity of the bridge, chunks and splinters fell to the floor, instead of floating around. Jack hacked away with grim determination. When the throne at last lay in a pile of debris, he felt relief that a grueling task was finished, but no satisfaction.
Keelraiser kicked a piece of the emergency refuge into the air, sheathed his blade with a flick of his wrist, and said, “That will have to be tidied up.”
“Fuck it. You’re the VIP around here; you don’t have to keep everything tidy if you don’t want to. Is there anything to drink?”
Keelraiser poked around in the life-support chancel, clearly not sure where everything was yet. “Tshaveg must have raided all the remaining liquor stores on Earth. Vodka, champagne, schnapps, whiskey, gin, rum …”
“Is there any krak?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s have a jar of that for old times’ sake.”
They sat at opposite ends of a high-backed sofa, facing a section of transparent wall that joined up with the ceiling. It was like looking out a tall window. Earth hung at the top of the view like a blue sickle. Jack drank off his first glass of water in a gulp. He’d sweated gallons in the heat. He could smell Keelraiser’s sweat, pungent and beachy. He poured himself another glass, spiking it with krak this time.
“So what now?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
Jack raised an eyebrow.
“I didn’t have a plan for this. I didn’t want to be Shiplord of this monster. I was going to blow it up.”
“On the bright side, we didn’t have to kill another—what? Twenty thousand people?”
Keelraiser shrugged. “I’m losing count.”
Jack wasn’t. At least five thousand on the Lightbringer, another 20,000 on the Homemaker. The numbers boggled his mind, although they didn’t compare to the death toll the Lightbringer and Homemaker had wreaked on Earth. From a certain perspective, Keelraiser was the Hitler or Genghis Khan of his people. But he had saved Earth, as well as everyone on the moon. Jack wondered why he seemed so depressed.
“My father would be proud of me,” Keelraiser said, taking a long drink.
Well, that might be part of the reason why.
“My father was always proud of me,” Jack remembered. “Not in any complicated way. He was just enormously chuffed that I became an astronaut.” He stared at the shrinking rim of Earth. “I don’t know if they’re alive or dead. After this I’m going to go look for them.”
“Yes, you should. I’ll give you whatever resources you need for the journey.”
Jack shifted his weight miserably. “What’s wrong?”
Keelraiser hunched in his corner of the sofa, knees folded sideways in one of those painful-looking double-jointed poses. The cut on his forehead was livid in the Earthlight. “Nothing,” he said, and reached for the krak bottle. He poured and drank without having added any water to his glass. Jack had never seen him drink like this. Something was definitely wrong, and it wasn’t just his new job. The Liberator couldn’t be more than a larger version of the Cloudeater, with more moving parts.
Keelraiser put down his glass. “Jack? I am going home.”
Jack felt a jolt of panic. “What? Back to Imf?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I’ve learned one thing from all this: I am good at killing people. I may go and kill some more people there.” Keelraiser’s lips parted in an expression of bitter amusement. “This ship was built to destroy a planet. Imf could do with destroying.”
CHAPTER 54
“I’ll go home in triumph, and turn my guns on them,” Keelraiser said. “It will be satisfying.”
Jack scrambled mentally for words. Keelraiser was going back to Imf. The inside of his head was a panicky blank. “What’s your father, the Great Unifier, going to say about that?”
“Oh, he’ll be dead by the time I get there. He doesn’t have the patience to spend decades in cryosleep when there are interesting things to do, such as torturing and humiliating his enemies in the name of enlightened government. As for the Great Unification, it will be a mere historical footnote by then. Imfi regimes never last long.”
“I thought you said this time was different. All over bar the shouting.”
“It will be when I get there.”
Jack sat forward, resting his elbows on his knees. He felt a terrifying tightness behind his eyes. He wondered if Keelraiser really meant it. There was no indication he did not. “I suppose I can’t talk you out of this,” he said, as Keelraiser had said to Gale, on the bridge of the Homemaker.
“No. I’ve made my mind up,” Keelraiser said.
“Well.” Jack blew out a breath. “When are you going?”
“Soon. As soon as we’ve done all we can for the disaster-stricken areas. I expect some of the crew will choose to stay on Earth, some on the moon. I’ll offer them the choice when I make the announcement.”
Jack sat in silence. He was battling the impulse to walk out in anger. He did not want to part on bad terms. Eventually he mastered his temper. “All right,” he said, forcing a smile. “Well, if this is the last time we see each other, let’s make it count.” He topped up his own glass, went to top up Keelraiser’s and found it empty. He poured a generous measure of krak and showed it the water. “Let’s …” He tried to think of something fun to do. It had been so long since he did anything just for fun that he drew a blank. “Let’s watch a movie. You’ve probably not got any popcorn, but some of those fried bugs would do.”
“A movie?” Keelraiser stared at him. “All I’ve got is Tshaveg’s archive of snuff films.”
Jack shuddered. “Nothing else, really?”
“Nothing.”
“All right.” Jack had another idea. This one was an inspiration. He plonked his Nikes on the low table in front of the sofa. Energy brightened his voice. “We’re going to watch my favorite film of all time, Independence Day.” He pointed to the window onto space. “Imagine that’s our screen. I’m going to tell you the whole thing.”
“All right …”
“Appropriately enough, our story starts in space. On the moon, in fact. We see the shadow of an enormous alien spaceship blotting out the American flag. Then some jobsworth in the US picks up a mysterious signal …”
Jack remembered the whole plot, and had large chunks of dialog off by heart. Forgetting his own troubles, he got quite involved in the story as he narrated Will Smith’s fearless mission to nuke the alien mothership. “He volunteered to pilot the refurbished alien fighter! Just like me …”
“Jack?”
“What?”
Keelraiser mouthed the rim of his krak glass. “This is boring.”
“I haven’t got to the big space battle yet.”
“I know how it ends. The alien ship gets blown up.”
“You’re missing the point.” Jack had picked this movie as something they could share, a trip down memory lane. After all, they both liked explosions. But now he suddenly saw the plot in relation to real life, and understood where Keelraiser was coming from. The pleasures of nostalgia staled on him, leaving emptiness.
“Can we watch something different?” Keelraiser said.
Jack ran through his mental top ten list. None of them appealed. In fact, he might have finally outgrown sci-fi action flicks.
His head swam; the krak was hitting him. He massaged a thumb he had jammed against something when they were demolishing the throne. “Spaceballs? Monty Python?”
Keelraiser had his knees tucked up to his chest, his arms wrapped around them, as if he were a beetle with its legs pulled in. His voice sounded a bit blurry. “I don’t know if I can stand to hear ‘Look on the Bright Side of Life’ without breaking something.”
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.”
Jack wondered if Giles would recover fast. In some senses he’d suffered more than any of them. He said, “You and your parents should stay for a while. They’re getting on famously with mine. Mum is delighted to have a chance to use her French.”
“Who wants champagne?” Giles said. “It’s the real thing.”
Jack held out his glass. So did Skyler. So did Hannah. Jack saw Skyler shoot a quick glance at her. “It’s OK,” she said. “I’m going to have one glass. Because it tastes good.”
Keelraiser came out of the church, sliding his sunglasses over his eyes. “They’re almost ready,” he said.
“OK,” Jack said, but he was enjoying the evening and the champagne and the conversation. “So what’s the plan, Skyler? Are you going to stay in Lightbringer City?”
“For now.”
“He’s been offered a job,” Hannah said. “Running the United States.”
“Riding a desk,” Skyler said.
“President Flaherty escaped the tsunami,” Hannah explained. “The Chinooks disobeyed orders to go and pluck him out of danger. That’s how much folks love him. Linda got out, too. They’re in Colorado now, but they’re going to be moving the government back East. So he wants Skyler to go and work for him.”
“I really want to get back to astrophysics,” Skyler said.
“What about your patriotic duty?” Hannah teased.
“If Kuldeep can quit the NXC to work on connectivity in Africa, I can quit the NXC to hang out with you and write songs,” Skyler said.
Jack smiled wistfully as Hannah mock-punched Skyler, rriksti style. Both of them were bruised inside and out. He hoped they’d be OK.
“Well, what about you?” Hannah turned a challenging, searching gaze on Jack.
“Not sure yet,” he parried.
“What about you, Iristigut?”
“I don’t know yet,” Keelraiser said. “I may spend some time exploring Earth. There must be some regions that are actually habitable. Anyway, someone needs to stick around to stop you from blowing the place up.”
Hannah laughed. “You know, Iristigut, I still have my issues with you, but you’re a mensch. That’s a compliment,” she added. “From one Shiplord to another.”
Jack said jokingly, “On the other hand, there may not be room for two Shiplords on Earth. We’ve also talked about going back to Imf.” He held his breath. He and Keelraiser had gone round and round in circles about this. It had got to the point where Jack himself didn’t know if he wanted to go or stay.
Giles said, “Count me in.”
Keelraiser said, “We should go inside. They’re ready.”
Skyler had already slipped away. As they piled into the church, Jack saw him sitting up front, tuning an acoustic guitar. Beside him sat Stepstone, the rriksti instrumentalist, and a gaggle of locals with instruments ranging from a clarinet to a harp. The organ was broken, but there would still be music.
The impromptu band struck up the Wedding March. Solfiya stalked gracefully up the aisle, a striking figure in the white UV poncho that brushed her heels. She couldn’t hear any of it except for Stepstone’s part, yet her steps kept perfect time. Hriklif waited at the front of the church. Father Cullen commenced the marriage ceremony.
Jack missed the first part, as he was tinkering with the laptop and video camera Keelraiser had set up on a chair in the corner. “Can you see?” he typed.
Far away on the moon, Alexei typed, “Can see now. Wow. Beautiful.”
It was beautiful. The altar candles flickered, and even the small children sat rapt. It struck Jack that this was a fitting way for the Imfi conquest to end: two aliens getting married in an English country church.
On the moon, Nene squeezed into the frame beside Alexei. Lips parted, she marvelled at the ceremony, and then typed, “Please ask this priest if he will come to the moon.”
“He’s a bit old to travel,” Jack typed. “But now that the first arcology’s habitable, I know you’re being deluged with applications. Just put out a call for priests and religious.”
“Way ahead of you,” Alexei typed. “Building church in arcology. Getting icons sent from Moscow—”
The screen momentarily went black as a tiny hand covered the camera. Alexei pulled a baby away from the screen. Even with the sound off, Jack could tell the baby was giggling.
He looked around for Keelraiser, thinking he’d like to see the kids.
Keelraiser wasn’t anywhere.
Fear struck him. “Be right back,” he typed to Alexei, who nodded, baby-wrangling while Nene took notes on the ceremony.
Jack nipped around the ends of the pews and out into the evening. It was dusk now. Rriksti time. The sky was violet. The smell of sun-warmed asphalt tinctured the air.
“… and so what you’ve got to understand is that salvation isn’t earned. It’s a free gift from God, who came to live among us here on Earth two thousand years ago. I know it sounds incredible, but that’s what happened. And it’s plain that He also came for you.”
Jack recognized his own father’s voice.
“I believe it,” said another beloved voice—both in his head, and acoustically, in the crackly tones of a field radio.
“Exactly! It’s the only way to look at it in my view, Keelraiser. All this had to happen, so that the rriksti people could be saved, too. He’s been searching for you, calling your names across the void. But you had to come here to find Him.”
Jack spotted the two figures at the end of the graveyard, the one stoop-shouldered and gray-haired, the other tall and thin, but also stooped, intently listening.
Jack tiptoed between the gravestones, nettles brushing his jeans.
“What do I have to do?” Keelraiser said. “Now that I’m here, how do I find Him?”
“Well, I think you already have,” John Kildare responded. He gestured at Keelraiser’s chest. “I seem to have seen that before, actually. I gave it to my son five years ago. I hope he didn’t give it to you because he didn’t want it anymore.”
“No,” Keelraiser said. “He gave it to me to eat.”
“Ah.” John Kildare, understandably, seemed to be lost for words. Then he rallied. “Well, that’s actually quite appropriate. This is My Body, this is My Blood. Do this in memory of Me. It looks rather un-eaten, though?”
“I kept it because Jack gave it to me. But I cannot think of anything good enough to give him in return.”
“Talk some sense into him, that’s all I ask,” John Kildare said dryly. Then he caught sight of Jack standing nearby. “Ah, there you are. I’ve just been telling your friend about the Church.”
“We’ve barely scratched the surface,” Keelraiser said to Jack. “I want to hear more. I want to know everything.” He gazed expectantly at John Kildare.
Jack took Keelraiser’s hand and laced his fingers through Keelraiser’s cold ones. He hoped his father wouldn’t blow a fuse, but he and his mother would have to know at some point.
“Well,” Jack’s father said, gazing thoughtfully at their joined hands, “as good a place to start as any is Jesus’s commandment: Love one another. But you seem to have that covered.”