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

  The storage module’s airlock only took two people at a time. It would be a long while before they all got in. Jack gave the welding kit to Alexei and drifted the other way, into the Cloudeater’s unpressurized cargo hold. Dull red light gleamed on the heavy machinery riveted to the floor. They had brought the two 3D fabbers and the ‘upcycler,’ an indispensable tool for turning rubbish into fabber feedstock. Alien technology for the win.

  On top of the upcycler sat a figure wearing a skintight rriksti spacesuit. It was, however, the wrong shape for a rriksti—shorter legs, narrower torso, no bio-antennas. In fact it was Skyler Taft, the fourth surviving member of the SoD’s crew.

  “Sky!” Jack flew up and hugged him, clumsy in his Z-2. They hadn’t met in months, as Skyler had been down on the surface, helping with the mass driver. It’d been Skyler’s idea in the first place. There was more to Skyler Taft than met the eye: some of it bad, more of it—Jack had begun to hope—good.

  “I’m just staying in here until the crowd thins out,” Skyler said, via the transmitter attached to his air supply mouthpiece. That, plus the goggles he wore under his suit, made him look snouted, bug-eyed. “Some rad-shielding is better than none at all.”

  They had all had terrible experiences with radiation exposure during their time at Europa. By rights they should all be dead. Those memories made Jack uncomfortable. “Great stuff,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  He unclipped his tether from his belt, leaving it attached to a handle on the upcycler. He pushed off from the floor and flew up to the airlock. It opened at the touch of a button—no wearisome hatches to undog, not in the technological future where the Cloudeater came from. The chamber also cycled quicker than on the SoD.

  He rose into the dimly lit passenger cabin. Discarded garments drifted in the air amidst globules of vomit—evidence of the panic caused by the killer iceberg, or just space-sickness? Another terrible thing about the rriksti’s plight was that maybe ten of them were astronauts. The rest were civilians, the rriksti equivalent of senior public servants, who’d signed up with their families 70 years ago for a voyage to Earth that had not—to put it mildly—gone as planned. They came from the future, technologically speaking, but for that very reason, they weren’t used to the rough-and-tumble of space. They were used to things just working. Their exile on Europa had been a nightmare for them. Travelling on the SoD was going to be ten times worse.

  Jack flew forward through the cabin. His heart beat faster with anxiety. He felt nervous about seeing Keelraiser again. They’d worked together so closely during the ice delivery operation that they almost lived inside each other’s heads. But for all these months, Keelraiser had just been a voice on the radio. They hadn’t met face to face since April. Now it was August. On Earth, people would be picnicking, going to the beach … staring up at the summer sky and wondering what was going to break out of it in two years’ time.

  A narrow, dark corridor led to the cockpit. The door was open and Jack flew straight in. Smaller than the SoD’s three-man bridge, the Cloudeater only had two crew couches in the cockpit. The commander’s seat was empty.

  Keelraiser sat in the pilot’s seat, sweeping its seven-fingered hands across the banks of consoles that projected from the forward wall, powering the shuttle’s systems down. Jack’s mouth went dry. “Well, we did it,” he said cheerily. “Should be smooth sailing from here on out.”

  “I thought that might be you,” Keelraiser said. Its mouth opened, but its grave, musical voice did not come from its lips. Like all rriksti, it spoke with the bio-antennas swirling around its shoulders like snaky hair, in the radio frequencies. Keelraiser’s bio-antennas were black. Its face was paler than Jack’s, a foot long, flat as a shovel, pointy-chinned, dominated by huge dark eyes. Minimal facial mobility limited the rriksti to a bare few expressions. Mouth-opening could indicate distress, or delight, or the complicated rriksti emotion that Jack understood as amusement. “Do you need help getting out of that thing?”

  “No, I think I’ll just evolve double-jointed shoulders,” Jack said dryly. The rriksti had double-jointed shoulders. Humans did not. However, the Z-2 could only be doffed via the rear entry port, which the wearer couldn’t reach on his or her own. Way to go, NASA.

  Keelraiser floated over to him and unlatched the port. Jack writhed free of the bulky suit, into steamy heat and a salty smell that pulled at things low in his belly. This was how the rriksti liked it. Christ, they were going to be miserable on the SoD. That was one of the things he’d come to talk to Keelraiser about. The other was …

  “The killer iceberg,” Keelraiser said, proving again that they lived inside each other’s heads.

  “Yeah. That.” Flapping his sweat-soaked t-shirt away from his chest, Jack drifted into the center of the cockpit. The ceiling swept down into a concave forward wall, making a curvilinear arrowhead-shaped space. Electronics filled the tip of the arrowhead, but when Jack hovered in just the right place, behind the pilot’s seat, the whole cockpit turned transparent, and he seemed to be floating in space, wearing nothing but a t-shirt and underpants. The illusion induced vertigo, it was so perfect.

  However, the SoD’s rotating hab took up most of the view. It rose in front of the Cloudeater’s nose like a steel wall with a curved top. The view to starboard was not much better—that is, Jack could see Jupiter, which he was heartily sick of seeing. He glanced to port. No icebergs.

  Not that he’d be able to see them coming with his naked eye. He looked around for the optical telescope, and saw that Keelraiser was talking to him, its hair undulating. But the turbines aft made a fair bit of noise, and he couldn’t catch the faint words coming from his Z-2, which drifted in the air between them like a fat, dark gray corpse. He was so flustered he’d forgotten his headset. He retrieved it from the Z-2’s thigh pocket. Rriksti electronics: better than wearable—crumplable, and they still work. He uncrumpled the headset and jammed it onto his dirty blond curls. It transposed rriksti bio-radio frequencies into the audible range. The integrated mic did the same thing in reverse.

  “I was just saying you haven’t got your headset on,” Keelraiser said, its hair dancing, picking up red and green glints from the lights on the consoles. The ‘hair’ was bio-antennas. Iron particles mixed with keratin.

  “Very funny. Before that.”

  “There may be more icebergs where that came from. I’ve set the optical telescope to scan the whole sky. The computer will alert me if it sees anything. But there’s a blind spot in my coverage …” Keelraiser joined Jack behind the pilot’s seat. “… the shape of your rotating hab.”

  Jack nodded, looking down at the length of the SoD. The truss tower beneath the Cloudeater enclosed the secondary hab modules. The SoD embodied the unspoken human rule that spaceships had to be steel gray. The spacesuited rriksti queueing outside the storage module provided a splash of color. They were a tall people, between six and eight feet, not counting their manes of bio-antennas. Their spacesuits sported lurid patterns that alluded to Imfi flora.

  “It’s like stepping back in time,” Keelraiser whispered.

  “I see what you mean about the telescope coverage,” Jack said awkwardly.

  “Yes. Can you set your telescope on the bridge to scan the forward regions of the sky?”

  Jack sighed. “No. The computer can’t traverse the telescope, and we haven’t got software that could analyze the feeds from the external cameras to look for snowballs. It’s all got to be done manually.” He hated to admit how primitive the SoD’s systems were, in comparison to the Cloudeater’s. But it was no secret to anyone. “I’ve had someone on ice chunk lookout duty whenever I’m not on the bridge. Usually Brbb or one of its friends. Giles caught this one. He just happened to be looking in the right direction. The computer had nothing to do with it.”

  “Maybe we could integrate the computer systems,” Keelraiser said, without much hope. The SoD’s flight computer was state of the art circa 2010—rad-hardened electronics always lagged
a few years in terms of performance. The Cloudeater had a quantum computer. Yes, a freaking quantum computer. Scientists on Earth would wet their pants. You might as well try to integrate a jet engine into a WWI Sopwith.

  “Not worth the risk of breaking both things,” Jack said. He was not a person to weight fat-tail risks too heavily, as a rule. ‘Have a go’ was his motto. But since being named mission commander, he had felt compelled to play it safer than he normally would. He was trying to model himself on their previous commander, Kate Menelaou, who’d been murdered by the bad guys on the Lightbringer.

  Keelraiser’s hair stirred and subsided, producing a noise like a sigh. “Well, the lookout idea is good.”

  “So you think there are more where that one came from,” Jack said.

  “Yes.”

  “Right.” Jack had reached the same conclusion. “It wasn’t one of ours.”

  CHAPTER 3

  “That iceberg had a motor on it,” Keelraiser said.

  “You’re fucking kidding me.”

  Keelraiser turned a portion of the forward wall into a screen. The Cloudeater had captured video as the iceberg hurtled towards them. In slow motion, you could see the plumes of water vapor erupting from the iceberg as Keelraiser traversed the maser across it. Jack spotted shards of metal debris embedded in the ice.

  “It’s a flying nail bomb,” he marvelled.

  A crude engine bell also protruded from the ice. Keelraiser explained how it would have steered the iceberg to its near-fatal rendezvous with the SoD. Jack was not all that interested in the engine. It was just a little solid-fuelled thing he could have made in an afternoon in a decent machine shop. He was interested in where it came from.

  He stared into the vastness of space beyond Jupiter. At the moment, he knew, he was actually looking towards the outer solar system. But in his mind he saw the Lightbringer, a five-kilometer whale with a hole in its side. A wounded planet-killer. It had escaped from Europa orbit three months ago, after Jack fired a plutonium round at it, and missed.

  “They can’t think we’re a threat to them,” he said, feeling incredulous.

  “No,” Keelraiser agreed. “It’s just …”

  “The principle of the thing?”

  “Yes.”

  “I tried to nuke them, so now they’re throwing icebergs at us?” Abruptly, Jack started to laugh. It was a reaction to the stress and fear of the close call they’d had. “Icebergs!” he hooted. He had to wipe his eyes, as tears of mirth built up, but could not fall in zero-gee. “Fucking remote-controlled icebergs!”

  Keelraiser’s hair danced. “Exactly! The good news is that this proves they haven’t anything else to throw at us.” Keelraiser’s mouth closed in a somber line. “At least … not at the moment.”

  Jack gave voice to a fear that had nagged him ever since the Lightbringer’s departure. “Everything was trashed. But they’ve got railguns. A HERF mast. Muon cannons. Right? They’ll try to mend that stuff along the way. Do you think they can?”

  “I would not underestimate the ingenuity of the Krijistal.” The Krijistal were the rriksti special forces now in command of the Lightbringer. “Water and power. That’s all you need. The rest is chemistry.”

  The quote invoked the memory of Eskitul, the Lightbringer’s former Shiplord. Towards the end of their long voyage from Imf, she had changed her mind about invading Earth. That was all very noble, but then she’d changed her mind again when the SoD showed up. Betraying her faithful followers, she’d boarded the Lightbringer and resumed her position as Shiplord. She had died shortly after the Lightbringer’s launch. But that didn’t make her betrayal any less heinous. Keelraiser refused to even refer to her by name.

  Yes, her. You couldn’t tell a rriksti’s sex by looking at it. Alexei, who had lived among them on the surface for months, insisted that they really were male and female, two days out of eleven, or was it three days out of thirteen? Jack defaulted to it, rather than risk referring to the wrong rriksti by the wrong pronoun on the wrong day of the week. But he made an exception for Eskitul, the dark mirror of bright Kate. It really pissed him off that she had died before he could sort her out.

  Well, he’d settle for sorting the Lightbringer. The SoD still had a couple of nukes left.

  But would he ever get a chance to use them?

  He pictured the Lightbringer’s trajectory on a mental map of the solar system. It had burst out of Jupiter orbit at an angle that took it away from the plane of the ecliptic, after a narrow shave with the Io flux tube. He knew this from tracking it with the SoD’s radar. OK, he was a bit obsessed. So was everyone on Earth, of course, and they had the James Webb telescope, whose infrared sensors had portrayed the Lightbringer as a hot comet rising from Jupiter, gouting 1,600,000° water plasma from its business end as it continued to burn.

  And burn.

  And burn.

  After escaping Jupiter’s gravity well, the Lightbringer had thrust for a solid week, bending its trajectory back towards the plane where the sun’s planets resided.

  Back towards Earth.

  It was now 55 million kilometers away from Jupiter, coasting towards the asteroid belt, well launched on its mission of death.

  “The question is,” Jack muttered, “how much reaction mass have they got? Obviously a lot, if they can afford to throw it at us …”

  “In human units,” Keelraiser said, “a metric fuck-tonne. Oh, I don’t know, Jack! I’m not a propulsion technician. I barely even knew how many water tanks we had on the Lightbringer, until they exploded.”

  Jack sighed. “Sorry. I was just wondering …”

  “If we could catch up?”

  “I swear, you can read my mind or something.”

  “No,” Keelraiser said, “it’s just that we think in the same way. It’s interesting, in and of itself, that two beings born on different planets can be so much alike …”

  Jack nodded. His mouth felt dry again.

  “… but it means, of course, that you already know what I’m going to say.”

  “Not a chance in hell,” Jack acknowledged. The Lightbringer had a four-month head start. It was travelling at a hair-raising velocity of 97,000 kilometers per hour. Jack continued to lie awake during his sleep periods, playing with orbital dynamics, and imagining tricks that could wring more delta-V out of the SoD, but he rationally accepted that it was hopeless.

  Especially if the Lightbringer was going to make a habit of shooting motorized icebergs at them.

  “Here’s what I was thinking,” he said to Keelraiser, snapping his fingers. “You should be our weapons officer. You know, I started off flying Tornados. Have you ever seen a Tornado?”

  He meant on television. All the rriksti had seen a lot of television. There had not been much else to do during their journey from Imf. That, too, was how they’d learned English. Keelraiser had wound up with an upper-class British accent straight off the BBC. There hadn’t been anyone in Jack’s RAF squadron who sounded that posh. He tried not to hold it against Keelraiser, reminding himself that everyone on TV had talked like that in the 1950s and ‘60s.

  “The Tornado’s got a pilot and a navigator,” Jack explained. “The navigator is also the weapons officer. He drops the bombs.” But the command was given by the pilot. Jack had dropped bombs on the wrong people once or twice. Faulty intelligence, a fat-fingered navigator—excuses could be made, but Jack took responsibility. Somewhere in Iraq, broken families still hated his guts, even if they would never know his name.

  “The Cloudeater is not armed,” Keelraiser said. “It’s just a shuttle. Do you mean you are putting me in charge of the SoD’s railguns?”

  “Er. No. But seeing as the main threat at the moment is remote-controlled icebergs …” Keelraiser didn’t seem as pleased as Jack had thought it would. “You did a fantastic job with that maser, plus you’ve got a better telescope, so I’d like to make that your official responsibility.”

  Keelraiser twisted its head and shoulders sideways, lik
e a horse shying. This was how the rriksti shrugged, as far as Jack could make out. “We should talk about how we’re going to leverage the Cloudeater’s life-support capabilities. I’d like to show you something.”

  It floated out of the cockpit, its coattails flapping.

  “What are you wearing, anyway?” Jack said in amusement as he followed. He had never before seen Keelraiser in anything but tatty shorts or a spacesuit.

  Keelraiser turned to face him in the narrow corridor. It wore a tailored jacket, long in the back and square-cut in front, open over its chest, with pleated Bermuda shorts. The whole ensemble was bright orange, except for some navy blue circle patches on the lapels.

  “My uniform.”

  “Aha.”

  “It seemed appropriate for the Cloudeater’s last flight.”

  “Surely not its last flight …” Jack had a vague ambition to land the Cloudeater at some symbolic location such as Heathrow or JFK. That’s what the shuttle was made for, after all: de-orbiting on a planet with an atmosphere. However, that was all so far in the future he hadn’t really thought about it. They had to get back to Earth first.

  “The Cloudeater is now welded to your low-tech disaster of a ship,” Keelraiser said. “That’s rather permanent-feeling.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t put that much faith in my welds …” Jack joked uneasily. Low-tech disaster? Well, yes, from Keelraiser’s point of view. It must feel like lashing a Prius to the deck of a fifteenth-century sailing ship. Still, no need to rub it in.

  “While I’m being pessimistic,” Keelraiser said, reverting to its usual self-aware, ironic tone. “About one-third of the civilians are quite sick.”