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

  Walking, working.

  Approaching the herb garden, he slowed his steps.

  From up ahead, he heard the voices of Meili and her compatriot, Xiang Peixun, speaking Chinese.

  He pressed a button on his iPod. Record.

  *

  Meili squatted over a tray of chives, thinning them by hand. She placed the sprigs she pulled out of the cottonwool-like substrate into a sack to be added to the compost.

  Xiang Peixun moved around behind her, slapping a coil of irrigation tubing from one hand to the other.

  “Shift-change is probably the right time to do it,” he said.

  He had seen her going forward to the bridge. And coming back five minutes later. He thought she’d been doing a practice run.

  He’d never know she had been trying to warn Jack, without actually telling Jack anything, which was, she admitted, kind of self-defeating, because why should Jack believe her, any more than Kate had believed her, when she hadn’t given them any facts to back up her fears? But she simply could not risk Xiang finding out that she’d spilled the beans.

  “Anyway, we have to decide how to do it,” he said. “There’s not much time left. We can’t keep putting it off.”

  Sharing a ship with Xiang was like being in a cage with a tiger. Meili remembered her granny taking her to the zoo in Shanghai when she was a child. She’d wriggled between people’s legs to press her nose against the glass window of the tiger enclosure. Back and forth he’d paced, swinging his beautiful striped loins. She’d felt sorry for him, imagining how he must long to return to the jungle.

  Meili had been a fearless child. She’d once been a fearless astronaut.

  But fear and apprehension had come to dominate her life as the SoD neared Jupiter … and the day neared when she would have to act.

  The tiger, after all, was not an object of pity. He was a ruthless predator.

  “You’re not just the gardener. You’re also the electronics specialist. Say you have to check for fungus behind the consoles, and you need my help.”

  “It won’t work.”

  “I need your help to pull this off,” Xiang pressed, standing right behind her. His body odor overwhelmed the delicate scent of the chives. “If you don’t help me, you know what? You’ll be finished. Your family will be finished. We’ll all be finished. You know that, right?”

  “But it’s impossible,” Meili blurted. “One of them is always on the bridge.” She hunched her shoulders, head down.

  She meant Jack, Alexei, and Kate, the troika who really ran this ship. And it did make her angry that the ‘multinational’ Spirit of Destiny mission was really just a Western mission in disguise. She and Xiang were camouflage for that ugly truth. The SoD consortium was using them as pawns in a mission designed to benefit the West and only the West. But did that justify the orders she and Xiang had been given?

  She didn’t think so. She hunched over her work, obstinately silent, while Xiang paced behind her, working himself up into a righteous strop. She was a tortoise, her back rounded like a shell. He was a tiger.

  Yet she could not fail to hear the fear seething under the surface of his lecture about our duty and it’s the right thing to do. Because if they didn’t carry out their orders, it would be his neck, too. His family, also, would be unpersonned, exiled to whatever godforsaken village their ancestors came from, if they didn’t wind up in the camps.

  Finished with the chives, she shuffled on her haunches to the tray of rosemary. Hannah had said she was going to bake bread today, and she’d like some rosemary to put on top. Even the food on this ship was Western …

  Footsteps squeaked on the plastic flooring. Skyler came out from behind a rack of lettuces. He smiled and lifted a hand. “Oh, hello Skyler,” she said gladly, before noticing he had his iPod on.

  *

  Hannah opened the housekeeping turbine cabinet and sniffed her sourdough bread starter. She’d bought it online a couple of months before they left Earth. She’d told the others it came from her Jewish grandmother.

  Hannah was nothing if not thorough, so she’d actually taught herself to bake. She could now laugh at herself for tackling it so earnestly: thumping dough in the small hours, falling-down tired after long days of training, in her little apartment in League City, Texas. Baking wasn’t that hard. She now turned out decent loaves by rote.

  But she hadn’t brought that starter because she couldn’t live without her sourdough, as she jokingly told the others.

  What is a bread starter, after all? It’s live yeast.

  She reached in under the turbine, into the dark warmth.

  The secondary heat exchanger loop ran right through this cabinet, swaddled in silvery-backed fiberglass insulation.

  Hot going out. Cold coming in.

  Hannah had hollowed out a hole in the insulation of the hot pipe. A metal canister sat in the hole, wired in place.

  There was a little stirring motor inside it.

  She’d used up nearly all her personal mass allowance bringing this stuff on board.

  A tube led from the canister to the return pipe, where she’d cut away enough of the insulation to coil the tube around it several times.

  The whole Rube Goldberg setup dripped its precious output into another canister.

  Hannah took this second canister out of the locker. She glanced over her shoulder once more, and then transferred its contents into her squeeze bottle, which had her name on it above the SoD logo. Everyone had one of these bottles. The only way to drink in freefall was through a straw, like a baby.

  200 milliliters, she eyeballed the volume of the liquid.

  Yep, she was going to have to run the still today.

  The distillation stage always filled Hannah with terror. It meant vapor trickling out of the locker, spiking the humidity. She was pretty sure that no one ever noticed a few potatoes missing. After all, it’s not like they didn’t have bushels of the things. And she was always careful not to be seen siphoning water out of the irrigation pipes. But the humidity sensors … she’d never figured out how to spoof those.

  It was just as well Kate Menelaou never noticed what was going on around her.

  Hannah closed the turbine cabinet and flew back up into the engineering module. On the way, she sealed her lips around the straw of her squeeze bottle and sucked in a mouthful of high-proof potato liquor, which she estimated to be equivalent to 0.2 of one standard unit of alcohol. She allowed herself one unit per day. She was systematic about it. She was an engineer, after all. She was also a high-functioning alcoholic, but no one knew that, and as long as her system held together, they never would.

  She raised her squeeze bottle to the photo of her sister’s family above the dollar meter, which measured how close to critical the reactor was. Bethany had wanted her to get help. She didn’t understand that Hannah could cope just fine.

  Look at me, Bee-Bee. This is not a fuck-up. This is a woman who designed and built a still, in secret, aboard a freaking spaceship.

  She took one more sip, swallowing so much this time that she almost coughed.

  The liquor burned sweetly in her belly. The demons of anxiety in her brain quieted.

  She placed the squeeze bottle in its webbing holder, and popped a sprig of fresh mint into her mouth. Chewing, she started to put together a new charcoal filter for the still. Her baking hobby also gave her a source of charcoal. Whoops, left that loaf in the oven too long …

  *

  Kate Menelaou sat in her office, nibbling on a hunk of Hannah’s delicious sourdough bread, procrastinating before she tackled her daily Calvary of paperwork.

  Well, bits-and-bytes work.

  Everything from LOX and LH2 inventory levels to the blood pressure, heart rate, and cognitive test results of each crew member had to be logged, tracked, and fired off home to Mission Control, every day.

  But what did all that data really say?

  It said nothing about the crew.

  It did not describe how the eight o
f them, after an initial period of friction and shifting alliances, had separated into three antagonistic camps.

  Camp One: the Professionals (as Kate thought of them)—herself, Jack, and Alexei. They were the only ones who really knew what they were doing.

  Camp Two: the Amateurs. Hannah, Skyler, and Giles … oh dear, Giles. The xenolinguist tried so hard, but he just wasn’t cut out to be an astronaut. He’d spent more time in think tanks than neutral buoyancy tanks. As for Hannah and Skyler, Kate had pretty much given up trying to turn them into team players.

  Camp Three: the Chinese. Kate winced at the very thought of Peixun and Meili. Her wince expressed shame, because try as she might, she just hadn’t been able to overcome her own antipathy for the Chinese, which they certainly sensed. But come on! As a major in the USAF, she’d been beaten over the head with the threat that China posed to US interests. Now she was expected to turn around and get all smoochy with them? And they didn’t even meet her halfway. They did their jobs in silence, and nattered to each other in Chinese when they thought no one was listening.

  She glanced up as Skyler hurried around the field of dwarf wheat next to her office. At first his head was at right angles to hers. The angle narrowed until he was standing right way up in front of her desk. This was her office: a desk next to the wheat plot, in the No. 2 Potter space—the nook underneath Stairway 2—with a ruggedized laptop on it.

  “Ma’am!”

  “What’s kickin’, Skyler?” He was the only person who still called her ma’am without fail. She smiled warmly at him.

  His return smile could have melted the Arctic ice sheet. Good-looking kid. Reminded her of Jim Morrison, not that she was old enough to actually remember The Doors, thank you very much.

  “Smoking gun,” he said quietly. “Maybe.”

  He slid her his modified iPod. It plugged into the USB port of her laptop. She downloaded the .wav file he pointed out, while he explained, “They were talking about taking over the ship.”

  “Really, Skyler?” She hiked an eyebrow. Kate Menelaou hadn’t got this far in life by believing everything she heard. “And you know this, because you speak fluent Mandarin?”

  “Ma’am, I’m the first to admit my Mandarin is shit. But I have been studying it. Um, Meili’s been giving me lessons, actually.”

  “Meili recently came to me with some concerns about potential sabotage. I think I mentioned that to you. Why would she do that, if she’s conspiring to take over the ship?”

  “She’s having second thoughts?” Skyler offered.

  Kate wrinkled her nose. “I’m still not seeing where the fire is in all this smoke.”

  “Kongzhi,” he insisted. “That means take control. At the twenty-eight second mark.”

  She dropped the .wav file into her encryption software, which had been supplied by Skyler’s outfit, the NXC. “I’ll shoot it to your guys, and we’ll get a real translation. Then we’ll discuss it.”

  The dwarf wheat rippled in the breeze from the fans. The constant roar of the air circulation assured Kate that everything was OK with the ship. If she ever got an oh-shit-I’m-millions-of-kilometers-from-Earth moment—and yes, even she got those—she just stilled herself and listened to the comforting noise of human technology around her. She did not believe Xiang Peixun and Qiu Meili would do anything that put the SoD at risk. After all, they were all in the same boat, literally.

  She said to Skyler, hoping to cool the hot gleam in his eyes, “You know what I think about sometimes? I think about how many years we wasted being afraid. Remember all the dire predictions before we set out? The reactor would blow up. A micro-meteoroid would hole our water tanks, and we’d die of thirst. The hydroponics would fail, and we’d starve.”

  She nodded ironically at the natural bounty around them. The hab used to be boring white. Now it was green.

  “Hello, Houston?” she said rhetorically. “A spaceship turns out to be a perfect environment for farming. Growlights beat the sun hollow, and plants love low gravity. We’re doing pretty good ourselves: apart from the muscle atrophy, we’re healthier than most people on Earth. Bottom line, the Chicken Littles were wrong. We have the technology to go interplanetary. We have had it for decades. It just took the MOAD to give us a kick in the pants.”

  Skyler said, “Yeah, but ma’am, we is a slippery word in this context. Who invented these technologies? Us and the Russians. The Chinese didn’t. And don’t think they are not aware of that. It was a major motivation for CNSA in joining the project.”

  Kate sighed. “You’re preaching to the choir. I told them if they let CNSA in the door, our IP will walk out the door.”

  “We have to maintain our technological lead,” Skyler said. He toyed with the silver peace symbol he wore on a short thong around his neck. “This mission is how we stay ahead of the pack.”

  Kate pursed her lips. She knew that Skyler’s agency saw their quest for the MOAD through the narrow filter of the 21st-century tech race. The NXC reasoned that an alien spacecraft, however banged-up, had to contain a treasure trove of potentially game-changing technologies. “With you all the way, bud,” she said. “Don’t worry.” But she felt a twinge of annoyance that a thirty-something Jim Morrison lookalike was effectively calling the shots on her boat.

  “For them, this is a chance to leapfrog right over the United States.” Skyler licked his lips. “All they’d have to do is kill us in our beds.”

  Kate scoffed. She thought that he needed to cool down. “You’re an astrophysicist,” she said. “Go look at some stars.” The problem was, the SoD really didn’t need an astrophysicist. Skyler was here because the NXC wanted eyes and ears on board, not because he had a Ph.D. from Harvard. “Or go visit Hannah. She could use some company.”

  A few minutes later, Kate shouted for Xiang Peixun. The burly Chinese astronaut jogged around the hab and stood in front of her desk, expressionless.

  “Hi, Peixun. Need you to run LOX, LH2, and water inventory checks for me,” she said pleasantly. He was the primary life support specialist. He ran these checks every day without being told to. But that wasn’t the point. She judged him—in fact, she judged every crew member—by their compliance with her orders, and her judgement was unforgiving.

  CHAPTER 3

  Music pounded through the main hab, signalling another shift change. Motorhead! Jack rolled his eyes. Moscow calling.

  For the first few months of their voyage, each shift change had showcased an American or Russian contribution to the musical canon. Gershwin vs Tchaikovsky, Bernstein vs Stravinsky, Bruce Springsteen vs Rimsky-Korsakov. About a week before the SoD neared the orbit of Mars, that had started to change. The crew had been subjected to Gustav Holst’s ‘Mars, the Bringer of War’ three times a day, every day, for ten days. It remained to be seen if ‘Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity’ would accompany their insertion into Jupiter orbit next month.

  Since they passed Mars’s orbit, however, the musical selections had alternated schizophrenically between insipid oldies from the guys in Houston, and heavy metal from their counterparts in Star City. It was the firm belief of the SoD’s crew that the Russians had done a secret deal with Giles. The xenolinguist loved this stuff. Everyone else loved to hate it.

  Jack stood at the foot of Staircase 3, one of the staircases that spiraled up the forward wall of the hab, shading his eyes against the growlights. “If you like to gamble, I tell you I'm your man,” he sang under his breath, despite himself.

  Kate climbed Staircase 2, upside-down, opposite Jack. She clung onto the handrail as she fought the shifting gravity field.

  A few minutes after Kate vanished into the keel tube, Alexei’s feet poked out of it. The top of Staircase 3 rotated around to him. He slid out of the tube, stepped onto the top stair, and padded down to Jack, without using the handrail. Show-off.

  Jack met him with a steely glower. “Best of three,” he gritted.

  Alexei’s lip curled. “I will bury you.”

  Jack had spent th
e last several hours transplanting potato seedlings, and wanted to take it out on somebody. “Put your money where your mouth is, Russki.”

  “You’ll regret this, English dog,” Alexei promised.

  In silence—although in Jack’s head, ‘Ace of Spades’ had changed into the Rocky music—the two of them sauntered to the walking track that ran around the middle of the hab. They found a bit of the track without zucchinis or strawberries impinging on it.

  “Here she comes,” Jack breathed.

  A rope-end swept towards them along the track, spinwards. It hung from the central axis of the hab. Jack had let it down a few minutes ago after he finished with the potatoes.

  With a grunt, he ran and jumped. You could jump quite high in 0.3 gees. He got his hands on the rope and his feet on the knot tied at the bottom. He immediately started to rise higher. Put a weight on the end of a rope and it turns into a bola. He was the weight. Alexei trotted along the track below, squinting up at him.

  “Geronimoooo!” Jack leapt off the rope.

  Down he drifted. It was the dream of flying you’d had when you were little, the one you didn’t want to wake up from. He stuck out his arms like a kid playing airplane. The track rose up at him. His bare feet struck—and he lost his balance. Caught himself on one hand.

  Alexei tipped his head back and howled like a wolf. “Ha! Loser! Now watch how a real man does it.”

  Jack jogged along the track, out of breath, watching Alexei rise on the rope. Three meters. Four meters. Madman!

  “Oh shit,” Alexei bawled in Russian as he let go of the rope. He, too, landed in a heap, and Jack duly gloated over him, before running after the rope to make a second attempt.

  If you stuck the landing, you won a point. One point equaled one dollar of imaginary SoD money. Jack now had $204 of imaginary SoD money in his imaginary SoD bank account. He and Alexei traded imaginary dollars for bandwidth to download pics of (possibly imaginary) actresses.

  But even that wasn’t really the point. The point was they had been trapped in a fucking tin can for two years.

  From up on the rope, he spotted Meili heading for the kitchen with a basket of lima beans. Maybe some exercise would take her mind off her worries. “Meili!” he shouted. “Come and play!”