Lifeboat: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 2) Read online

  LIFEBOAT

  EARTH’S LAST GAMBIT

  VOLUME 2

  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)

  LIFEBOAT

  CHAPTER 1

  Jack Kildare checked the star sights. He lined up the ship’s telescope on a bright star, measured its right ascension and declination, and punched the angles into the computer. Then he repeated the process. Then he repeated it again. He’d performed this routine every day for the last two years. Yes, of course the computer could do it, but Jack had had systems fail on him before. Anyway, he wanted the practice.

  The star sights told Jack precisely where the Spirit of Destiny was right now.

  43,040,922 kilometers from Jupiter.

  Further from Earth than any humans had ever gone before.

  “The Prince of Wales is moving to the moon,” Alexei Ivanov said, floating beside Jack on the SoD’s bridge.

  “Didn’t his ex already move to,” Jack snapped his fingers, “what are they calling it?”

  “Camp Eternal Light.”

  “Right. That’s going to be bit awkward.”

  “Not really. There are eight hundred people there. They won’t bump into each other every day.”

  “Alexei, I’m not sure this moon base actually exists.”

  “It exists,” the gaunt, bearded Russian cosmonaut argued. “It’s a complex of five domes, igloos really, shielded with regocrete—concrete made from lunar regolith—”

  “I know what regocrete is. You’re always banging on about it.”

  The moon base existed, all right. Jack was just winding Alexei up. The thing Jack didn’t like about it was that it had been built and monetized by private aerospace companies … and the entire private aerospace sector, pretty much, was now affiliated with the Earth Party, an amorphous movement that combined the worst features of Facebook and the Glastonbury music festival. They didn’t strike Jack as the right people to run a moon colony.

  “The moon is rich in building materials,” Alexei went on. “They’re mining ice from Shackleton Crater. You can Google it.”

  “Maybe next time I’m bored,” Jack said. This was a joke. They were always bored. “I tried to search for bug-swatting techniques the other day. Gave up after the first hour and a half.” The SoD was now so far from Earth that signals took 47 minutes to travel one way. Despite the SoD’s wideband Ka communications system, the internet wasn’t much fun anymore.

  “Why were you searching for bug-swatting techniques?”

  “Need you ask?” Jack said, as a fly looped the loop in front of his face. The flies had shown up soon after they departed Earth orbit. Katherine Menelaou, the SoD’s commander, thought their eggs must have snuck on board in a sack of soil. Jack clapped his hands on the bug, but it fluttered away, and Jack’s own movement propelled him gently backwards until he bumped into the rear wall of the bridge.

  The wall was a double bank of lockers. The other walls were inlaid with consoles. The SoD’s bridge had screens instead of windows—well, it had windows, but the six-inch portholes just held fish-eye bubbles of space. The main screen displayed the view from the forward-facing cameras. Jupiter, bigger than any human being had ever seen it. The SoD was racing towards the gas giant at 58,300 kph, a steel can filled with humans … and plants … and flies.

  They could already see Europa on the screen, when the little moon orbited to this side of Jupiter.

  They couldn’t see the MOAD.

  Not yet.

  “Like this,” Alexei said. He maneuvered his toes into the foot tethers in front of the copilot’s couch. The bug wobbled above the consoles. They could fly in zero-gee, but always looked as if they were hammered. Alexei slowly raised one hand, then slammed it down onto the comms screen. “Got you, svoloch.”

  The MOAD.

  The Mother of All Discoveries.

  The alien spaceship that had burnt into Europa orbit ten years ago.

  Observably damaged, the MOAD was presumed to be a wreck. It had done nothing since its arrival except grow colder. Yet how could we ignore it? We couldn’t, and that’s why the SoD had been built, at an eyewatering price-tag of $300 billion plus cost overruns, and sent on its historic mission, with a crew of three Americans, one Russian, two Chinese, one Frenchman, and Jack, who held US/UK dual citizenship.

  All of them had different reasons for being here. Curiosity might be the common factor. Duty might be another. But Jack could only speak for himself, and he was haunted by an unsettling conviction that the MOAD spelt doom. He never forgot his friend Oliver Meeks’s reaction to the discovery: If they’ve got the ability to travel between the stars, they also have the ability to squash us like a bug.

  Now Meeks was dead, but Jack was here. His gaze drifted to the set of controls high above the pilot’s seat, which he wasn’t allowed to touch, even though he was the pilot. The controls for the SoD’s railguns.

  Those would sort the MOAD, if need be.

  Music suddenly erupted from the comms console and from the intercoms throughout the ship. Jack and Alexei groaned and clapped their hands over their ears. Mission Control continued to remind them that even at this distance, they still possessed the ability to torture the crew. “Elton John!” Alexei said darkly. “England has a lot to answer for.”

  The music meant that Jack’s shift on the bridge had ended. Without a word—formalities of every sort had long since been discarded—he flipped in the air and flew towards the keel tube. As he brushed past Alexei, he got a pungent whiff of the other man’s body odor. He knew he smelled just as bad. Two years without a shower would do that to you. They had hip baths in a small tub once a month. The rest of the time it was reusable wet wipes, which were as revolting as they sounded. The men, bearded and shaggy, now looked more like Cro-Magnons than spacefarers. At least Jack kept his beard trimmed.

  He sank feet first down the keel tube. Grime from the constant touch of hands discolored the padded walls. The bright grow-lights from the hab threw his shadow past his head.

  Another shadow blocked the light. Jack expected it to be Giles Boisselot, who’d be relieving him on the bridge, but the shadow was the wrong shape, too small …

  “Meili!”

  The SoD’s hydroponics and electronics specialist, Qiu Meili, never visited the bridge. Jack retreated to let her through. The keel tube was wide enough for two people to pass each other, but not without physical contact.

  “Wow, this place stinks!” she said brightly.

/>   Meili did not stink. She was no cleaner than anyone else, but to Jack, her body odor was a tantalizing perfume.

  “I go for piss,” Alexei said. “Jack, you cover for me. Five minutes.”

  Alexei winked at Jack as he headed for the keel tube. Jack turned in the air and flipped him the bird behind his back.

  “I need to talk to you,” Meili said as soon as they were alone.

  They’d been sleeping together most of the way from Earth. They’d broken up a couple of months back—Meili’s idea. In her highly organized way, she’d presented Jack with a laundry list of the reasons why he apparently needed a full personality transplant. In space, little niggling things about another person could take on deal-breaking dimensions. Jack hated the fact that Meili picked her nose and he wasn’t too fond of her giggle, but he missed their lost closeness. He sank into the center seat and fiddled with the internal optic feeds. He wondered if she’d come to chat about their relationship.

  “This is important,” she said.

  Internal cameras in every module monitored the astronauts. There were cameras on the bridge, too. But the only place you could see the feeds was right here. So the bridge was the only private place on the whole ship. Jack wondered if Meili could possibly have come for make-up sex. He dismissed the thought as too good to be true. A second later, he caught a glimpse of Giles, emerging from the secondary life support module aft of the main hab.

  “Giles will be here in a minute,” he said.

  Meili sank through the air to his side. “The mission is in danger,” she whispered.

  She was hugging herself, her body language defensive: Don’t touch me. Noted … “What? Why?”

  “I already told you!”

  Jack sighed. “You mean that sabotage business?” This had been a running theme of Meili’s for a while. During construction of the SoD, two years ago, there’d been an attempt to sabotage the ship. Meili had told him that she feared another attempt. “That’s history, honestly.” The saboteur had been eliminated. Jack knew this for a fact. Why? Next question, please.

  Which was why Meili had always disbelieved his reassurances. Now she frowned angrily. “You’re complacent.”

  “I assure you I’m not. Nor is anyone else,” Jack said, thinking of the MOAD.

  “If there’s a sabotage attempt, it will start here! So just do this for me. Never leave the bridge unattended. OK?”

  “We never do. You know that.” Jack, Kate, and Alexei had staggered their shifts so that at least one of the three of them would be on the bridge at all times. “There’s always one of us here, like it says in the regulations.”

  Something else it said in the regulations—or at least very strongly implied: no shagging. Jack and Meili used to sneak around during the lights-out period in the main hab, in terror of getting caught. Of course, they weren’t the only ones doing that.

  “Meili, if something’s really bothering you, mention it to Kate. She won’t eat you, you know.”

  “I have!” Meili said. “She doesn’t take it seriously. Just like you.”

  The shift change music was still playing. The sappy lyrics sneaked inside Jack’s defenses, and he felt a pang of sadness. Rallying his spirits, he decided that Meili was getting a bit weird. It could happen to anyone, after two years out here. He racked his brains for some way to take her mind off her paranoia.

  Alexei returned to the bridge as the music died away. “No problems?” he said, leering. Jack crossed his eyes.

  Meili flew out of the bridge. Jack gave her time to get clear before following. On his way down the keel tube, he encountered Giles. The xenolinguist squeezed past him with a cheery “Salut” and a waft of Gallic B.O. Jack smiled, and gave Giles a friendly whack on the arse to speed him on his way. If Meili’s fears turned out by some remote chance to be justified, and something … anything … happened while Giles was on shift, he’d be about as much use as a chocolate fireguard. But Alexei could handle anything that might arise. And nothing ever did happen, anyway.

  *

  Down in the engineering module, Hannah Ginsburg performed her second daily set of propulsion system status checks. The SoD’s reactor, built in Russia, had run without a hiccup for two years. She kept waiting for something to go wrong. As an engineer, she thought constantly about risks, in order to head them off at the pass, but at the same time she expected trouble, and had mentally gamed out scenarios ranging from a stuck air bleed valve on the primary heat exchanger loop to life-endangering clusterfucks of various flavors. It spooked her that none of them had yet come to pass.

  Well, there’s still time, she told herself, with an inward smile at her own pessimism.

  After all, the Juno probe had approached within photographing distance of the MOAD before it glitched out.

  Mainstream scientific opinion held that a meteorite had done Juno in, but Hannah thought differently. She’d been there in the control room at JPL when Juno died.

  The MOAD had done it, sure as shooting.

  The ugly, broke-backed alien craft actually seemed to have a smug look on its chops as it spun around Europa, although Hannah knew that was just an artifact of the thing’s design.

  Revealed in new images from the SoD’s advance landers, the MOAD resembled a sperm whale with a hole in its side. The ‘grille’ in front—or in back?—might be some kind of heat radiator. But it sure looked like a mouth.

  Anyway.

  Hannah turned from the reactor controls on the forward wall to the turbine controls on the aft wall. She believed the steam turbine was more likely to crap out than the reactor. The SoD’s magnetoplasmadynamic (MPD) engine relied on water for reaction mass. It had been invented by a friend of Jack’s, not that anyone ever mentioned that, because it was a bit awkward that the guy had been murdered, and Hannah held herself partially responsible, but if she thought about that she’d get all blue and she didn’t want that. Not today.

  Not ever.

  She finished the turbine checks and flew across the module.

  She ducked in the air to avoid the fat conduit that ran through the center of the engineering module and into the aft bulkhead. Then she dived into the keel tube and floated aft to the turbine room. The soothing roar of the housekeeping turbine engulfed her. There were two turbine cabinets affixed to the aft wall ‘below’ her. One was three times the size of a jet engine. That was the drive turbine, which wouldn’t be needed until they burned into Jupiter orbit. Hannah flew to the smaller housekeeping turbine cabinet.

  Before opening it, she glanced up at the hole in the ‘ceiling.’ Her long, curly dark hair swirled across her face. All her scrunchies had worn out and her hair just would not stay in a twist-tie. She’d thought many times about cutting it all off like Kate, but perversely, she didn’t want to sacrifice this symbol of her femininity …

  OK, no one was spying on her.

  The turbine room did have a door, but it wasn’t a real door you could open and close. It was just a pressure door that would slam shut if the sensors detected a loss of pressure anywhere in the ship. So she could not actually shut out the rest of the crew.

  But none of them ever came back here, anyway, except Skyler, and this was his exercise period.

  She was safe.

  She opened the locker. A sour smell wafted out.

  Time to check on her bread.

  CHAPTER 2

  Skyler Taft walked, daydreaming about Hannah’s generous curves.

  In the main hab module of the SoD, you could walk, as opposed to floating. The hab was 60 meters in diameter—the height of a twenty-storey building. Its slow rotation generated 0.3 gees at the outer wall, a.k.a. the floor. This had been deemed sufficient to keep the crew healthy. But just having gravity wasn’t enough, as any number of obese couch potatoes on Earth could testify. You had to exercise.

  Medium-height and slight-framed, Skyler had zero interest in building muscle. Even if he sweated it out on the resistance machines like Jack, Alexei, and Peixun, he’d never be in
the same league. And even if he were, Hannah wouldn’t notice. She saw him as a friend, if that. So why bother? He met his exercise quota by walking.

  He picked his way through avenues of staked tomato plants, between racks bristling with the leaves of sweet and white potatoes. Past dwarf avocado and lemon trees planted in canisters of ultra-lightweight rockwool. He stepped over squash and marrow tendrils crowned with flowers. He ducked under a pergola dripping with broad beans, and thought to himself, not for the first time, that this was getting ridiculous.

  The mission planners had worried that the hydroponics would fail.

  That the crew would die of starvation.

  As it turned out, they’d had to improvise canning and freeze-drying techniques. Meili had presented them with two freaking bushels of zucchinis yesterday, and everyone had groaned.

  The fans, whap-whapping away in the background, carried a varying menu of green and flowery scents to Skyler’s nose. The floor appeared to slope up, although the spin gravity made it feel like a level surface. When he glanced straight up, he saw, first, the axis tube, encrusted with fans and LED growlights, and further away, more bushes and leafy trellises. Twenty storeys up. Hanging upside-down.

  Apart from that, it felt exactly like walking through a garden.

  Around and around and around.

  Boring as hell, actually.

  The 200-meter laps would have gone faster with some music, and one thing Skyler had brought among his personal belongings was an iPod. He had the earbuds in his ears, but he wasn’t listening to anything, because exercise wasn’t his only reason for walking.

  Oh, no.

  Skyler worked for the NXC—the National Xenoaffairs Council. The NXC had grown, in the years since the MOAD’s discovery, to wield as much power in the United States as the CIA used to. They had enough power to get him on board the SoD, anyway.

  So he never stopped working.

  Walking, working.