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

  *

  Sitting on the lid of his coffin, with his back to the aft wall of the hab, Skyler watched Jack and Alexei playing their stupid rope game. Men in their forties, dicking around like teenagers! And now, would you look at that? They’d got Meili to join in. Skyler tch’ed disapprovingly to himself. He knew about the Jack-Meili thing—knowing stuff like that was his job—and he privately approved of the fact that Meili had broken it off. He hoped this did not portend a reconciliation. Skyler admired the quiet, highly competent Chinese woman, and believed she deserved better than Jack Kildare.

  Their psychological assessment results didn’t put it so bluntly, but Jack and Alexei were both the classic, Type A test pilot type. They had an emotional age of fifteen and an unhealthy fascination with big, phallic rockets. Kate was the rare and even more deadly female of the species.

  It irked Skyler that Kate thought he was some kind of warmongering shit-stirrer. Had it never occurred to her that they, the ‘professionals,’ were the ones who’d made their careers dropping bombs on people? Jack had served in Iraq, so had Kate, and Alexei had fought in Russia’s dirty war in Chechnya.

  If he could count on them to be on his side, that would be one thing.

  He sighed, mentally acknowledging that he was in a shitty mood. When he visited Hannah in Engineering earlier, she’d blown him off. Literally chased him out, saying she was busy. They used to shoot the breeze for hours, and those were the best times Skyler had ever had on board the SoD, but recently she barely even greeted him at meals. Their friendship seemed to have withered away to nothing.

  He thought sometimes about having it out, laying his cards on the table, opening his heart, pick your cliché …

  An alarm went off, faintly.

  *

  An alarm went off, loudly. Hannah dropped her new charcoal filter. Warning lights flashed on the housekeeping turbine status display.

  Shaft overspeed.

  Her fingers boogied on the control panel. Nothing happened. She’d lost her electronic controls.

  She had no idea what could’ve caused the failure, but she didn’t need to understand it to react to it. Overspeeding, the turbine was accumulating too much steam in its drum. Pressure was building up. That had to be stopped, or the steam drum would explode in a cloud of superheated plasma.

  Sure, it was only the housekeeping turbine.

  An explosion wouldn’t destroy the ship.

  The crew would just die for want of the electricity that kept their life-support systems running.

  She braced her feet against the port wall. Hauling on the heavy lever, she manually closed off the feed of steam to the turbine.

  The lights blinked, and came back on dimmer, as the ship’s systems automatically switched over to running off the fuel cells.

  Hannah bounced back to the starboard wall. The reactor was running at 15% of max output during this coast phase of their journey.

  Should she shut it down?

  The risk-averse technician in her said yes. But that technician had trained on the ground. Out here in deep space, shutting down the reactor would have far-reaching consequences. It would take days before it was safe to reboot it. They’d have to survive for that long on the power that could be generated from the limited stores of LH2 and LOX in the fuel cells. She glanced at the fuel cell status indicators. Not a single one of them stood above 50%.

  ‘Below’ her, in the turbine room, a sudden crack!! rang out. Hannah’s heart missed a beat. She was turning in the air when the intercom squealed. “Hannah!” It was Kate, on the bridge. “We’ve lost all electronic controls. Do you have controls? Confirm.”

  With relief Hannah remembered she didn’t have to make this decision on her own. “Kate, no, I do not have electronic controls. I’ve manually shut down the housekeeping turbine. Do you want me to shut down the reactor?”

  Kate swore like a sailor. Hannah glanced down. She was afraid she knew what had made that cracking sound. Her still. She wanted to find out how bad the damage was, even in the midst of a life and death situation. “Are we exceeding the capacity of the primary heat exchanger?” Kate demanded.

  “No. The reactor’s only running at fifteen percent. The radiators can dump that much heat over the side.”

  “Then do not shut it down. This is bad enough without losing criticality. Son of a hairy-assed bitch!”

  A wheeze and a clangorous thud interrupted Kate’s cursing. Hannah flinched, and glanced up. Her mouth dropped open.

  *

  Jack, clinging to the rope, flinched at the alarm that shrilled faintly from Engineering.

  “What the fuck was that?” Alexei shouted up at him.

  “Sounds like we’ve just found a new failure mode,” Jack yelled back, not sure yet whether to be frightened.

  The noise of fans died back to a quiet hum. The lights blinked, then came back on, not as bright as before.

  OK. Be frightened.

  Another alarm shrilled, this time from someplace forward.

  Alexei took off running towards the bridge.

  Jack, still riding the rope, realized he was swinging higher and higher. Shit! This was why you didn’t stay on the bloody rope for more than a minute or so! It was wrapping around the central axis.

  Two alarms. Two problems.

  Three, actually, counting the problem of his own present position.

  The garden had shrunk to a green carpet, and he was now too high to drop off the rope without breaking an ankle, or worse. He was never going to live this one down.

  Round and round.

  Faster and faster.

  Nearing the axis tunnel that ran through the center of the hab, he saw a dark head emerge from the opening that led to the secondary life support module. Xiang Peixun.

  Jack took one hand off the rope to wave at Xiang, upside-down. He shot the Chinese astronaut a sickly smile.

  Xiang, halfway out of the keel tube, paused to goggle at the alarming sight of Jack whizzing round and round on the end of a rapidly shortening rope, conserving angular momentum like billy-oh.

  Xiang rested his elbows on the lattice and grinned. All he needed was a bucket of popcorn.

  Jack understood that if he smashed into the axis tunnel at this speed, he’d damage himself rather badly. Therefore, he decided not to. At the last possible minute, he released the rope. His momentum carried him over the top of the axis. He reached down and grabbed the lattice with both hands, nearly pulling his arms out of their sockets. Then he switched his grip and let his remaining momentum carry his legs around so he was sprawled across the axis, between two banks of growlights. Zero-gee embraced him.

  “And for my next trick, getting down from here,” he gasped. Xiang grinned and did a golf clap.

  Abruptly, a volley of ponderous booms echoed through the ship.

  Jack did not wonder for long what had caused the noise. He knelt on top of the axis, staring aghast at Xiang.

  CHAPTER 4

  Xiang Peixun was trapped in the pressure door.

  It had slammed shut on his waist.

  Jack plunged through the nearest hexagonal gap in the lattice, into the axis tunnel. He pushed off with one bare foot and flew headlong down the tunnel towards Xiang.

  Pinched between the pressure door and the bulkhead, Xiang couldn’t even get the breath to scream. His arms and head jerked. Bloody foam bubbled from his mouth and nose.

  “Hold on, mate,” Jack cried. He’d trained in advanced medical support. It had to be said that the instructors had not covered ‘stuck in a pressure door.’ But he knew he had to prevent Xiang from spasming and doing himself an even worse injury. It looked like he may have bitten through his tongue already. “I’ve got you!”

  Crouching in the end of the keel tube, he gently seized Xiang’s shoulders to steady them.

  The entire top half of Xiang’s body came away in Jack’s hands.

  The hydraulics drove the pressure door the rest of the way shut.

  Xiang’s guts fell o
ver Jack’s legs in a hot cascade, and the man’s grimacing face nuzzled against his breastbone. Jack toppled over backwards into the axis tunnel with the severed torso of Xiang Peixun on top of him.

  *

  Alexei reached the forward keel tube a few seconds after the pressure door slammed shut. He stood on the stairs, panting, staring at the untarnished plug of steel.

  Kate’s voice quacked from the intercom speaker beside the door.

  Back at the other end of the hab, Jack suddenly started yelling. No, not yelling. Screaming.

  Ignoring Kate’s voice, Alexei hurtled down the stairs and ran back the way he’d come.

  When he was in Chechnya, he’d lost friends to enemy fire. And friendly fire. And bar fights. The survivor’s guilt he brought home from that miserable war had lodged in his soul like a splinter.

  He couldn’t let it happen again.

  “Where are you?” he yelled, staring up.

  Warm rain spattered his face.

  He wiped it away, and glanced at his fingers.

  Blood.

  *

  Kate, on the bridge, shouted into the PA system. “All hands to your stations! Do you copy me?”

  Only Hannah responded. “The pressure door just slammed shut! I didn’t do that!”

  “All the pressure doors are shut,” Kate said grimly. “We may have a hull breach. The doors are designed to close automatically when the pressure sensors trip. What’s our power status?”

  “We’re running on fuel cells and batteries. Emergency life support and ventilation are working.”

  Kate glanced at Giles Boisselot. He floated in the left seat, groaning. “Giles is with me,” she said. “He’s had some kind of seizure.”

  “A seizure, ma’am?”

  “He hollered like he got poked. I gave him CPR. He’s breathing, but not responsive. Giles!” Kate leaned over and shouted into his face. “Can you hear me?”

  “Ma’am! Was he grounded at the time when he had the seizure, or whatever it was?”

  “Grounded?”

  “Was he touching metal?”

  “He was looking into the telescope viewfinder,” Kate said.

  “He got shocked. The circuit breakers on the secondary heat exchanger failed. That’s what caused the turbine shaft to overspeed.” Hannah’s voice was rapid, high-pitched. But not hysterical. Hannah had the ability to use her brain under pressure. “The whole ship got shocked, ma’am. That’s why the doors closed. We don’t have a hull breach! We just have a bunch of fried pressure sensors.”

  “We do not know that,” Kate snapped. Common sense, however, told her that if there was a big hull breach, they’d already be dead, and if there was a small hull breach, they still had time to fix it. She thumbed the main hab intercom. “Jack, Alexei, Skyler! Gimme a sitrep!”

  Skyler came on the intercom. “I’m getting lighter,” he said.

  “Yes,” Hannah said. “The hab is gradually spinning down. The fuel cells don’t have the power to sustain three RPMs.”

  “Turn the housekeeping turbine on as soon as it’s safe,” Kate ordered. “How long will that take, Hannah?”

  “About forty-five minutes.”

  “Great.” Kate bit her lip. “Can you cut the power to the doors, Hannah? Then we could lever them open.”

  “The problem,” Hannah said, and now she did sound a bit hysterical, “the problem is I can only cut the power in big blocks. If I cut the power to the doors, we also lose the lights, the ventilation, everything. The hab spins down immediately. The plant life goes airborne.”

  “Someone’s up in the sky bleeding,” Skyler interrupted. “It’s falling like rain. Wait. Jack’s coming down.”

  Jack came on the intercom. He said, “Hannah, do not cut the power! OK? Leave the power to the main hab on.”

  “We need to get the doors open,” Kate snapped. Giles groaned again, and the little hairs on her neck stood on end. God help her, she did not want to be stuck in here with him if he died.

  “I will get the doors open,” Jack said. Then he was gone, leaving Kate shouting helplessly into the intercom.

  *

  Jack spun away from the intercom in Medical, a.k.a. the Potter space under one of the aft staircases, where he’d brought Xiang Peixun’s top half, for no good reason. The man was dead.

  Alexei sprinted around the hab towards him, dragging Meili by one arm. “She was hiding in her coffin,” Alexei said when they were close enough for their heads to be pointing in the same direction.

  As gently as he could, Jack said to Meili, “We have to get the doors open. The locking mechanisms are fried. Hannah says it’s the pressure sensors. Can you fix or replace them?”

  Meili opened her mouth to speak. Then she saw Xiang Peixun’s top half lying on the gurney under the stairs. Too late, Jack cursed himself for not covering Xiang up.

  “Ta si le! He’s dead!”

  Most of Xiang’s blood had come out as Jack carried him down from the axis tunnel, but enough of it had remained to soak the gurney bright red—Chinese red, in fact, the color of the PRC flag, as if Xiang lay on a patriotic funeral bier. With his legs missing.

  “He’s dead!” Meili shrieked again.

  “Yes, he’s fucking dead,” Jack shouted. “And his legs are in the secondary life support module, and I’d quite like to get in there, because that’s where the hull repair kit is, and it would be a good idea to have that, if we do in fact have a hull breach!”

  “He’s dead,” Meili repeated for the third time. And then she started to laugh.

  Alexei slapped her.

  She started to cry.

  Jack dictated to himself that now was no time to feel sorry for her. “Can you or can you not open the fucking doors?” he yelled.

  Meili wiped her face with her hands, like a child. “Logic cards,” she sobbed. “Must replace. I have, in my office.” She broke down again. Jack couldn’t tell if she were laughing or crying. There was no difference at this point, perhaps. Xiang had been her closest friend on board, obviously: they spoke the same language and were always hanging around together.

  No more.

  Between them, he and Alexei got Meili to her office, which was the Potter space across the hab from Medical. They made her sort through drawers of parts until she found the right components. They collected her tools. Together, they climbed the stairs to the aft keel tube and knelt in Xiang’s blood while Meili removed the sensor cover and swapped out the melted logic card.

  Restored, the pressure sensor registered a normal air pressure of 7.35 psi, half of sea-level air pressure on Earth.

  No hull breach. Not in here, anyway.

  Before they opened the door, Jack pushed Meili behind him, so he, not she, would be the one to get Xiang’s severed pelvis and legs in the face.

  Oh God, this was bad.

  Jack pushed the body parts ahead of him, with his t-shirt hiked over his face so the floating globules of blood wouldn’t blind him.

  Despite the horrific tragedy, their first task was to check for holes in the SoD’s hull. They found no breach in the secondary life support module. Or the storage module.

  Hannah was trapped in Engineering. She reported via the intercom that there was no breach down there, either.

  Once they knew that they weren’t all about to die, they turned their attention to Xiang’s drifting legs.

  There were body bags in the storage module. Everyone had hoped they would never be needed. Now they bagged up Xiang’s bottom half. Meili helped, despite Jack’s attempts to deter her. They would add his top half to the bag later, then stash him outside. There was nothing else they could do for him. No funeral. No priest on board, Christian or Buddhist or any other flavor.

  Meili went back for another replacement logic board, and they freed Hannah. When the pressure door opened, Jack smelt burning. “Jesus! Hannah, what’s that smell? Is everything OK back here?”

  The keel tube framed Hannah’s besmutted face. “Stray sparks,” she expla
ined. “Don’t worry. I’ve got everything under control.”

  *

  Back in the main hab, Skyler spoke into the intercom. “They’ve all gone aft. I don’t know what they’re doing. They didn’t consider it a top priority to keep me in the loop.”

  “What I would like to know,” Kate said, “is, are they going to let me out anytime soon? Or has Jack decided he kinda likes it when I’m not there?”

  “I don’t know,” Skyler said, opting to let that particular fire smolder unchecked. He was more interested in finding out what the hell had just happened. “Do we know what hit us?”

  “It was some kind of electrical glitch,” Kate said.

  “Hmm,” Skyler said, guessing that she didn’t have a clue. “How’s Giles?”

  “I am fine,” Giles said, hoarsely. “Headache like I get kicked in the head. What happened?”

  CHAPTER 5

  What happened?

  That was the question on everyone’s mind when the crew assembled in the unearthly dusk of growlights running on half power. Even Hannah showed up for the meeting, to Skyler’s relief. She’d restarted the housekeeping turbine. Now it was just a matter of waiting for the output to creep back up. For the time being, the SoD was still running on power from the fuel cells. The plants hadn’t started levitating, but the hab had cooled down. A lot. Everyone was wearing their thermal shells, so they looked like a post-apocalyptic North Face advertisement. Long-unused socks covered callused feet. Meili kept saying she was afraid the strawberries would die.

  They met in the kitchen, which was a space amongst the greenery with a large table in it. Exhausted, depressed crew members sprawled in six out of eight lightweight aluminum chairs. The seventh chair silently rebuked them for being alive. Kate balanced one foot on the eighth chair, addressing the troops. Skyler hid his cynicism behind a mug of coffee. Kate had broken out their precious stores of Nescafe in an attempt to cheer everyone up. It wasn’t working.

  “A few essential tasks, gang. First of all, we have lost the pressure sensors, optic sensors, radiation counters, a whole list of stuff out there. That all needs to be repaired or replaced.” She looked at Jack and Alexei. “EVA specialists, I want that done as soon as this meeting concludes.”