Killshot: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 4) Read online

  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.

  “Ja
ck!”

  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 b
usiness 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.