Shiplord: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 3) Read online

  SHIPLORD

  EARTH’S LAST GAMBIT

  VOLUME 3

  FELIX R. SAVAGE

  Copyright © 2017 by Felix R. Savage

  The right to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by Felix R. Savage. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author.

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  Lifeboat was written with the assistance of science guru Bill Patterson. Subscribe to Bill’s Worlds to find out what he’s working on and when it’s coming out. He won't spam you, send you pictures of cats, or what he's eating. http://SmartURL.it/BillsWorlds

  Additionally, the author warmly acknowledges the contributions of AJM, Dr. Martin “X-Ray Eyes” Miller, Paul Cornucopiist, and the original Nene.

  THE EARTH’S LAST GAMBIT QUARTET

  Freefall

  Lifeboat

  Shiplord

  Killshot (forthcoming)

  SHIPLORD

  CHAPTER 1

  Jack Kildare, pilot and acting commander of the Spirit of Destiny, clung to the ship’s truss tower just north of the bioshield. He stared up at the bloated disk of Jupiter. He was sick of the sight of it, and was actually looking for something else: the Cloudeater, the alien shuttle that should be descending at any moment from the looping orbit that had brought it up from Europa’s surface.

  The Cloudeater had made dozens of trips up and down to the SoD in the last three months. When the alien colossus known as the Lightbringer burned out of orbit, it had left the SoD stranded. The SoD’s magnetoplasmadynamic (MPD) engine ran on water. And the Lightbringer had drained it dry.

  But now the bioshield tank—the manifold for the SoD’s primary water cycle—was full again. So were the external tanks mounted at the back of the ship. Large plastic bags nuzzling the bioshield held still more water. You can’t really have too much.

  All that H2O—radioactive as hell, but it does the job—had come from Europa. Ice chunks mined on the surface had been slung into low orbit by a mass driver built from meteoroid iron, for the Cloudeater to collect.

  And here came the Cloudeater now, a bright speck on Jupiter’s equator. Jack relaxed a tad as he visually confirmed its trajectory. Descending, the speck resolved into a wide-body Concorde with a bulbous conical tail. A skirt of spiky fins behind its swept-back wings dumped the heat from its fusion reactor.

  Yes, its fusion reactor. The alien shuttle had a star in its belly. But it was still just a shuttle. It had limited tankage, crappy delta-V, and no life-support capacity to speak of. All it could do was go up and down.

  Now its work was done, and it was coming up for the last time.

  “Looking good, Keelraiser,” Jack said into the radio of his Z-2 spacesuit.

  “I see you,” said Keelraiser, the Cloudeater’s pilot. “Engaging thrusters for final deceleration.”

  Plasma boiled from the Cloudeater’s auxiliary thrusters. Although the shuttle was still a kilometer away, the telemetry display in Jack’s helmet registered a brief external temperature spike.

  “Relative velocity three meters per second,” Keelraiser said.

  The Cloudeater drifted lower. It blocked out Jupiter. Jack suppressed a flinch as the undercarriage dropped towards his head. For an instant he felt sure Keelraiser was going to mess up. Orbital docking maneuvers were like playing football with an orange in four dimensions, as Jack knew well, having docked the space shuttle with the ISS in low Earth orbit before.

  “Little bit to the right,” he said.

  “Get your eyes tested, Jack,” Keelraiser replied.

  They had done this dozens of times.

  “Relative velocity one meter per second.”

  “Mind the bioshield!” Jack teased, grinning.

  “Oh,” Keelraiser said. “Whoops.”

  The Cloudeater completed its descent, without, of course, hitting anything.

  “Yawing a tad,” Jack said, not kidding anymore. The SoD had no visual yaw or roll indicators for Keelraiser to look at. These two craft had not been designed to dock. They hadn’t even been built in the same star system.

  “Yes, I know,” Keelraiser said. “Hang on.”

  Minute puffs of exhaust gusted from the auxiliaries, turning the Cloudeater around its axis. Now the shuttle was sailing through space in perfect synchronization with the SoD, as if glued in the vacuum two meters above the truss tower. Its tail stuck over the bioshield, which protected the SoD’s crew from gamma rays shooting out of the reactor. But that was OK. The Cloudeater’s own rad-shielding would protect its passengers.

  “Standing off,” Keelraiser said. “Stable.”

  Inside the truss tower, feeling like a monkey clinging to the bars of its cage, Jack turned his head. He couldn’t see past the cylindrical bulk of the storage module. “Alexei! Ready?”

  “Ready,” answered Alexei Ivanov, Jack’s crewmate and co-pilot.

  “Let’s do it.”

  Jack pulled himself out through one of the diamond-shaped gaps between the struts of the truss tower, taking the arc-welding kit with him.

  Alexei flew towards him, under the Cloudeater’s belly, wrangling three 4-meter angle irons.

  Just nickel steel, actually.

  Forged on Europa, in the same furnace that made the hoops for the mass driver.

  Full of impurities, you bet. Even alien technology couldn’t achieve high-quality steel production in a bunker under the ice of Europa. The nickel and iron comes from a melted-down meteoroid. But it’s all we’ve got, so we’ll just have to cross our fingers and hope.

  And do a bloody good job with the welds.

  Jack rose up towards the alien arabesques of pilot lights on the Cloudeater’s belly, visually measuring the distance to the lifting lug above the nearer wheel well. Alexei passed him one of the angle irons, and tied the others to the truss to keep them from floating away. They’d run out of everything, even duct tape. They were using rope manufactured by the rriksti on Europa from chopped-up plant stems.

  Jack flipped back the cover of the Cloudeater’s lifting lug and shoved one end of the angle iron into the dent. To his relief, it fit.

  “Got it.”

  “Got it,” echoed a new voice in his helmet.

  “Got it.”

  “Got it.”

  Lithe black shapes materialized out of the void. Brbb and its friends had come out to help. Their elongated bodies writhed. Their hair swirled like tentacles stirred by an ethereal tide. They wore their work lamps on their chests, which made them look a bit inhuman. That was understandable, as they weren’t human. They were rriksti, like Keelraiser.

  Brbb and company used to be bad guys. Now they were good guys. The Lightbringer had left them behind without so much as a see-you-later. They had been living on the SoD ever since, lending a hand with everything from hydroponic gardening to ice-melting …

  … and now, welding a shuttle onto the truss.

  “Watch out for the spatter,” Jack said, setting his teeth.

  Everything’s trickier in freefall. And that definitely includes welding. With no gravity to hold things down, a pool of molten metal is a whimsical and dangerous beast. Nudge it the wrong way, and it might detach from the work piece and go wobbling out to sear through your spacesuit.
/>   One of the rriksti held Jack’s legs while Alexei and the other rriksti held the angle iron steady. The electrode holder coughed sparks over the hull. Too many cooks! Everyone was jostling, trying to help. Jack squinted at the dazzling arc, muscles trembling from the effort it took to just stay still. Sweat oozed out of his pores and detached from his face to form a suspended rainfall inside his helmet. Thank God the rriksti had built this shuttle on the ground, so it had lifting lugs in the first place. On Imf—which was what the rriksti called their home planet, known to humans as Proxima b—advanced manufacturing in orbit had been banned. Too easy to weaponize. Of course, that hadn’t stopped the rriksti from wrecking their planet. Everything can be weaponized.

  “Having fun out there?” Keelraiser said.

  “Unlike you, I only have five fingers on each hand,” Jack gasped, “but consider one of them raised in your general direction.”

  Alexei said, “The real fun will start when we hook up the plumbing.” They planned to splice the Cloudeater’s onboard plumbing into the SoD’s potable water cycle. “When we built the SoD in Earth orbit,” Alexei went on, “we had to learn this stuff. I am an elite cosmonaut, OK? Go make Russia proud. That’s what they told me. Then they made me learn plumbing. I fucking hate plumbing.”

  Jack had had the same experience except they’d made him learn welding. He let out a shout of laughter. “Alexei, remember when we calculated our hourly wages? I’d have made more money as a welder in the UK than I did working on the SoD.”

  The rrikstis’ hair danced. “We think it is funny that you had to build your own spaceship,” Brbb said, speaking for its friends, who had not mastered English.

  “Oh yes, I agree, it’s downright hilarious,” Jack said, shaking his head violently to get the sweat out of his eyes.

  “On Imf, specialists built spaceships by the dozen. The crews were rock stars. Is this correct?”

  “Do you mean they spent most of their time drinking and shagging?”

  “Yes, yes.” Rriksti laughter. “Until the last war.” No more laughter.

  They completed the weld, and then welded the other end of the angle iron to the truss. Now the Cloudeater was secured to the truss at a single point.

  They moved on to another lifting lug on the opposite side of the cargo bay.

  “Watch out for the power cord …”

  The arc-welding kit ran on a rechargeable power pack the size of a car battery. The rriksti had batteries the size of a smartphone that held kilowatts of charge, even in Europa’s sub-glacial cold. But they didn’t have a welding kit. They had fled the Lightbringer in a hurry ten years ago, taking only what they could cram into the Cloudeater, with a priority on edibles. What they’d managed to do since then, with no inputs except scavenged meteoroids and plant husks, was nothing short of amazing. It proved that stuff expands to fill the space available, even if you live in a bunker on a Jovian moon. The Cloudeater had had to make several trips to bring everything and everyone up to the SoD …. and even so, loads of stuff was getting left behind. It would freeze on Europa in the derelict bunker, an archaeological puzzle for spacefarers in the distant future.

  Jack glanced down in the direction of Europa. They were orbiting over the moon’s nightside, and all he could see right now was afterimages of the electrode arc, anyway. That was fine with him. If he never saw that barren, radiation-drenched moon again, it would be too soon.

  “Jack!” Giles Boisselot, another survivor of the SoD’s original crew, spoke from the bridge, where he was monitoring their EVA.

  Jack guessed immediately that something was wrong. “What, what is it?”

  “Ice chunk,” Giles said, in the same sort of calm voice that Jack’s father, thirty-five years ago, had used to tell his space-mad son that the Challenger had exploded.

  Keelraiser broke in. “Yes, I see it. I’m ranging my comms maser on it now.”

  “How big is it?” Jack demanded.

  “Size of a fucking house,” Giles said in the same unnaturally calm voice. “It is five klicks away. It is coming this way.” Pause. “Merde.”

  CHAPTER 2

  “Can you deflect it?” Jack yelled.

  “We’ll see,” Keelraiser said.

  Suddenly, the angle iron Jack was holding jerked in his gloves. He let go. It speared down through a gap in the truss. The one they’d already done sprang loose at the bottom like an unstrung bow.

  “Damn. Have to re-do that weld,” Jack said, striving for calm. As the Cloudeater settled a few inches to port, everyone on the truss tower dived inside the lattice to safety.

  “Sorry,” Keelraiser said. “My payload shifted. In other words: everyone got out of their seats and stampeded for the exits.”

  “Tell them to sit down and fasten their fucking seatbelts!”

  “I have,” Keelraiser said, its impatient tone hinting at the limits of its authority over the other rriksti.

  Jack wrapped one arm around the truss, the other around his precious welding gear, and closed his eyes. It killed him that he wasn’t on the bridge of the SoD. He had scored a string of successes, in the emergencies of this type that had arisen now and then in the last couple of months, when ice chunks wandered too near the ship. Supposedly the mass driver had flung the ice from Europa into a much lower orbit, but the whole thing was one big seat-of-the-pants hack, and it was actually a miracle that the SoD hadn’t suffered a collision yet. At 30,000 kph, even a snowball could be a lethal projectile. So you had to make sure they missed.

  What Jack did was train the comms laser on the offending snowball and pour on the power. Do that for long enough, and the ice would sublimate in jets of water vapor, which nudged the snowball off its collision course and onto one that passed harmlessly by. Smaller chunks just exploded.

  He’d learned this trick from Keelraiser, who had had to pick off a lot of inconvenient snowballs while gathering ice chunks in orbit.

  The Cloudeater had a comms maser, more powerful than the SoD’s laser. Masers used microwave energy. Tune it to the absorption spectrum of water, and watch the target start steaming like food in a microwave oven.

  Would that be enough?

  “I didn’t actually think there were any left this big,” Keelraiser said. “I thought I’d picked them all up.”

  “Is it going to hit us?” Jack demanded. His own helplessness was driving him bonkers.

  Keelraiser let out a creaky chuckle. “We’ll know in a moment.”

  “Ten o’clock high,” Giles interrupted. “It is sublimating like crazy! Ou la la!”

  Jack, Alexei, and the rriksti in the truss tower turned their heads as one, staring in the direction Giles indicated.

  A white blur hurtled past. It was blurry because, as Giles had said, it was trailing a tail of water vapor like a comet. “The maser does the fucking job!” Jack whooped.

  The work crew broke into a cheer.

  “That was a piece of it,” Keelraiser said calmly. “Here comes the other piece.”

  For a microsecond, the black slice of space visible beneath the Cloudeater’s belly turned white. A sharp vibration jarred through the truss into Jack’s gloves. The craggy white mass shrank into the blackness. The size of it stunned Jack. He had excellent spatial perception. He could judge sizes and distances quite well in space, and he knew that if there were air up here, they would’ve felt the wind of that thing passing like a truck on a killing spree.

  “That was not an ice chunk,” he said slowly. “That was an iceberg.”

  “Yes,” Keelraiser said. “Any damage down there?”

  “A piece of it hit us,” Alexei said. “It shattered on the truss. One foot to the left, and I would have ice splinters in my faceplate.”

  “Jesus,” Jack said. “Anyway, Keelraiser, you cut it in half! That maser is the business.”

  Alexei started to laugh. “Giles said ou la la. I’ve never heard him say that before. Giles, I thought the French only say ou la la in movies!”

  “One day the
y will make a movie about us,” Giles said. “Attack of the Killer Icebergs. Directed by Michael Bay.”

  Jack laughed with the others. “All the same,” he said. “that was too close for comfort. I can’t wait to get out of here.”

  “My passengers seem to feel the same way,” Keelraiser said. “They are getting out.”

  “No! We haven’t finished the welds yet …”

  By a combination of shouting and disabling the airlocks, Keelraiser contained the Cloudeater’s traumatized passengers until Jack got the welds done. The angle iron that had popped loose turned out to have bent. It couldn’t be used. There went the spare, so now they only had three angle irons. “It’ll do for now,” Jack said. “Three points is enough to stop it moving around.”

  NASA had bullet-pointed checklists for changing lightbulbs. When they set out on this voyage, they’d done everything by the book. Now they were in unregulated territory. The loss of that safety net gave Jack a sense of low-level uneasiness, though it also energized him. He enjoyed problem-solving, which was just as well since problems were not in short supply around here.

  The slag around the last weld had hardly cooled when Keelraiser opened the Cloudeater’s cargo hold. A ramp hinged down. Spacesuited rriksti spilled out, clinging to ropes. Their voices filled the men’s helmets in a racket of high-pitched squeals.

  “You’re hurting our ears,” Jack yelled urgently. The rriksti did not use their mouths to talk. They communicated by bio-radio, in a range of 800-2600 KHz, which unfortunately included several frequencies that set up harmonics with the men’s suit radios. The rriksti had to remember to tune their voices to avoid the harmonics, and when they were agitated, they often forgot. The noise was nails on a blackboard, a jackhammer digging into your brain—it made Jack want to hit someone. “Stop it!”

  The harmonics abated. The rriksti floated past Jack and Alexei, lowering their heads apologetically. They carried bales and bundles. Their hydroponics had come up separately—the Cloudeater had made five trips to transport that lot alone. The pathetic flock of refugees broke Jack’s heart. He was offering them an escape from Europa, but what did he actually have to offer? About 400 cubic meters per person, a lot of that unusable. NASA’s studies recommended 800m3, minimum. On the way out, the crew of the SoD had had ten thousand m3 each, and even then they’d fought with each other.