Adventures of the Starship Satori 4: No Plan Survives Contact (6 page)

J
ust like that
, they were out of time. It had to be a Naga ship bearing down on the planet. Nothing else made sense. They knew the Naga would be on their way. Why couldn't the damned lizards have taken their time responding? Of course, it was really their own fault. The Naga had to be watching this planet carefully. They'd been met - and beaten, if barely - by the team on this world. An unknown race, with at least some technology as advanced as their own. It had scared the heck out of them, from what Andy relayed.

Any alert from this world was going to be taken seriously.

"It's breaking and releasing smaller ships," Charline said. "Probably shuttles. Looks like they are descending through the atmosphere."

"Why is the AI letting you see all this?" Dan asked.

He'd already verified the radar data through Majel. The Satori's sensor system was mostly part of the old tech their AI was tied into and retained control over. She was able to display a good set of tracking data for him on the little laptop. Three smaller ships were streaking toward the surface. One of them was larger than the other two, so he was guessing it was actually a shuttle and two fighters. No sense saying that over the radio and tipping off the Naga AI, though.

"I asked it that. It said it was still hoping I would surrender," she said. "I think it's more worried about the C-4 than it's letting on."

Dan grunted a response. A computer would shoot for the best probability of success. Even a powerful AI was just a fancy algorithm machine. It might out-think a human because it could calculate odds better, but it was always going to be playing the odds. The human element mattered too.

That didn't mean an AI was without its uses. He shut off his radio for a moment. It was time for a little chat with their own computer.

"Majel, is there any way you can engage the Naga AI directly? Try to overcome it?"

"Affirmative. But the local wifi system is too weak to broadcast well. What you are suggesting would require more bandwidth."

"Can't I just tie you back into the Satori's systems?" Dan asked. "That would give you the home ground advantage."

"It is unlikely you can splice the fiber-optic cable Charline cut before the Naga cruiser closes on this ship," Majel replied.

Crap. Charline rescued Majel by cutting that cord. But cutting it had shut their AI off from being able to engage the enemy AI a little too well.

"There might be another way," Majel said. "If you can tie a hard-wired line directly from my main system to one of the radio antennae."

Dan sucked in a deep breath. Majel was talking about him taking a walk outside. He felt his guts grow a little weak at the thought.

"You don't have to do this, Dan," Majel said.

He blinked. If he didn't know it was impossible, he'd have thought that was genuine compassion coming from the AI. He knew that couldn't be. She was lines of code. She wasn't really alive. She was an 'artificial' intelligence, not a real one. Right?

But she'd been acting strangely ever since they'd been forced to tie her into the alien computer system. Acting more like another member of the team, and less like the computer helper she'd begun as. Hell, even he was calling her a 'she' now. When had he started doing that?

"I can do it," Dan said, taking a breath. There was no way he was going to let fear stand between him and what needed to be done. "What are your odds of success?"

"Unknown," she replied. "I have too little data on the Naga system. If it is more powerful, then I will likely be overwhelmed and destroyed."

Dan grimaced. "If you fail, I think we're all about to be overwhelmed and destroyed."

"Your assessment is logical. Shall we proceed?"

If there was any other way, he'd keep Majel the hell away from this fight. She was damned precious. Maybe more valuable and important than any of them knew. He was already beginning to think of her as another member of the team, despite his earlier misgivings. But this mission was placing every member of the team at risk. Dan figured Majel had the right to risk herself, too.

"Tell me what I need to do," he said.

With Majel's instruction it didn't take long to jerry-rig the connection. Dan was surprised how well his body remembered how to get into a space suit. Sure, he had to roll back and forth a bit to get the thing on, but he made it work. Latching and securing all the pieces was all old muscle memory for him. He'd been in space a score of times on other missions.

That was before his accident. Before he'd lost the use of his legs. Before he became the maimed man that NASA didn't want anymore. He'd been cast aside. John picked him up off the floor of the bar he crawled into quickly enough, but John was a friend. Somewhere deep down Dan was always wondering if John had really done so because he was the best for the job, or out of pity.

His hands shook as he latched the helmet into place. If he screwed this up because his legs wouldn't move, then they were probably all going to die. Charline and he would be captured by the Naga along with the Satori. The rest of them would be picked up before long. It was too much to hope that the Satori wouldn't yield enough clues for the Naga to find Earth. If nothing else, the database of wormhole jumps stored in the wormhole drive would give them that information, and he had no idea how that could be deleted.

If he messed up Earth was toast. Worse than that, if he failed Beth would be captured by the Naga. He could take whatever they wanted to throw his way if it came to that. He couldn't bear the thought of what they would do to her.

"So don't screw up," he said to himself. He checked his grip on the reel of wire he held. That was what he had to connect to the antenna. Once that was hooked up, Majel would be able to broadcast openly. She could warn John about the approaching enemy and attack the Naga AI. Until it was attached, they were all sitting ducks.

"Agreed," Majel said in his ear. "Are communications working?"

"Yes. Hatches sealed?" he asked. He'd closed the hatches to the bridge and most other compartments except for engineering. The wire he was trailing out into space would be cut if he shut a door on it.

"All compartments read as ready. The hallway and engineering still have atmosphere, so hang on to something." Majel replied. "This will be violent."

"Open the ramp, then," he said. He grabbed a rail with both hands.

The door slid open. Wind rushed around him as the air evacuated the rear areas of the ship, threatening to tug him away from the rail. Despite the warning Dan had not expected so much turbulence from the decompression around him. He clung to his handhold with everything he had, tucking one arm through the rail to hook his elbow around it. The movement jostled his grip on the reel of copper wire. It slipped from his fingers.

It spun twice in the wind, wildly unwinding wire as it flew away from his grasp and out through the open hatch into space.

B
eth couldn’t help
but look back over her shoulder into the dark tunnel as they ascended. She shuddered, thinking about the thing they’d left behind back there. Every clatter of rock made her jump again. The monster had been like something out of a nightmare. Huge alien bug from under the biggest rock in the god-damned galaxy.

What had she been thinking when she agreed to come out here again? This wasn’t for her. Beth felt like she ought to be wearing a red shirt, she’d been shot so many times. The insect hadn’t laid a claw on her down there, but that was because she had fled like a little girl, running for the tunnel and knowing even as she did there was no way she could possibly escape the thing. It was too fast and any moment she would feel those claws tear into her, and it would all be over.

But Andy had stood his ground against the monster while she fled. Not only that, he’d beaten the thing. While she was running in terror he had been fighting for all of their lives. She felt ashamed that she hadn’t been out there backing him up. One thing for sure, if she ever managed to get back home again she was done. This was it. She wasn’t leaving her home system again. She could help fix the Satori when it returned home, but this was her last mission.

“We’re almost back to the surface,” John said.

Daylight gleamed from somewhere ahead, lighting their way up the last few turns of the spiraling tunnel. Beth could already feel the heat wafting down the shaft toward them. Maybe the thing wouldn’t follow them into the light. Maybe they’d be safe up on the surface.

She hoped that Dan was all right. Worry about him tugged at the edge of her consciousness, and she kept shoving it away with an effort. Damn that man. Why did he have to come back into her life now? She wasn’t sure just how she felt about him after all the years apart, but she knew she still cared. He mattered. He was out there somewhere in the Satori, probably in trouble and without her by his side to back him up this time.

The opening to the tunnel loomed ahead at last. Beth was so lost in her thoughts that the first shot impacting the cave wall next to her almost went unnoticed. She realized what the shot was a second before John stepped into the mouth of the cave. Someone was shooting at them.

“Down!” she shouted. She dove forward, half tackling John to the floor. Another flash streaked by where his body had just been. Beth heard Andy curse. In her peripheral vision she could see him taking a knee and firing off a few fast shots at whoever was attacking them.

“Get some cover,” Andy said. He fired again, each shot carefully aimed and timed to give them a few moments. Beth and John didn’t hesitate. They rolled across to the other side of the edge of the cave opening.

“Naga?” John asked. It was the logical assumption.

A torrent of fire came at the cave entrance like a hailstorm. Beth knew those shots. They were the little pellets of energy that the Naga shot from their rifles. Shit.

“Yeah, at least twenty of them,” Andy said. “We’re pretty pinned down here.”

He leaned forward to take another shot, but had to duck back fast. The Naga were pouring fire on the cave like they would never run out of ammunition. And they wouldn’t, not any time soon. The power packs on those weapons carried a high level of charge.

“Got any more of those grenades?” Beth asked Andy.

“One, but I’d like to save it for when it will do the most good,” he said. “They’re too spread out right now.”

A roaring noise cut him off. Something crashed against the back wall of the cave, showering them all with fragments of broken rock. Beth ducked her head and avoided most of the blast. When she looked back up she saw that whatever weapon had fired blew a hole in the solid rock wall big enough to stick a few soccer balls into it.

“What the hell was that?” Beth shouted.

“Don’t know,” Andy said, trying to peek around his cover. “They have something big out there. Some sort of power armor maybe? I can’t get a good look from here.”

Beth was the engineer. If anyone could get an idea what they were up against with this new weapon it was probably her. She took a deep breath and ducked her head out from behind her cover. She scanned the outside, looking for movement through the shimmering haze of heat waves against the dun colored rock and sand. She spotted Naga, lots of them firing from behind rocks a few dozen yards away. A group of them were dashing up on the left side, trying to get closer to the cave.

Then she spotted the thing Andy had glimpsed. She knew in a moment that it had to be the source of the cannon that just blasted the cave. It was about eight feet tall, armored with metal from the neck down. Its arms both ended in weapons of some sort. One had a small barrel, the other had a bore about the size of her fist. That had to be the big gun. But it was the head that took her breath away, made her linger out from her cover for just a moment longer than she should have.

The Naga round took her in the center of her chest, knocking her onto her back. Her head hit the rock floor and she saw stars for a moment. Nausea hit her like a truck. This was it, then. She’d been shot again, and this time she wasn’t going to have a last minute save or medical nanites to pull her through.

John was saying something to her, but she couldn’t hear him through her dizziness. She took a shaky breath to reply, her chest burning with pain. She let the air go and tried another breath. This one hurt less, not more. Beth looked down at her chest. Her uniform was scorched where the round had impacted, revealing the dragonscale armor they all wore beneath it. That was singed, but intact.

“Oh thank you so much Andy I can’t tell you how grateful I am,” she managed to gasp out.

“Glad it worked!” he yelled back between bursts of fire.

“We’re in trouble,” she said.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” John replied. “Are you OK?”

He helped her sit back up again. Her head hurt more than her chest now, and even that pain was beginning to fade a little. She’d taken worse hits. Beth shook her head, trying to clear it. She had to tell them what she’d seen.

“It’s worse than you know,” she said. “I don’t know how it’s even possible, but that thing out there, the one in power armor? It’s Paul.”

D
an was breathing hard
, his pulse pounding in his ears. The reel of copper wire was outside the ship now, spinning away under the force it had picked up from the air venting out the hatch. Every second he clung there their last chance at getting away was drifting further.

He couldn’t make himself let go. All the air was gone, the torrent of wind was over. But he still couldn’t get himself to unclench his fingers from the rail. Space hung out there, vast and unforgiving. What had he been thinking? There was no way he could go out there. This was pointless. He was a broken doll, cast aside by the real space agency and only picked up to chauffeur John around in the Satori because his friend wanted to give him something to do.

“Dan, can you hear me?” Majel asked in his earpiece.

He didn’t reply at first. His teeth were clenched too tightly together to answer. At least the only witness to his cowardice was a machine. No one else would know.

“Dan, the Naga have reached the surface. They’re going after the landing party,” Majel said. Her voice was soft, and sounded almost gentle. “They’re going after Beth.”

He froze. Majel was right. Beth was down there, and their team would be hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned by the Naga landing party. Her only hope was that he could get the ship down to rescue them in time. He knew what the Naga did with their prisoners. Andy told them all stories of how the Naga commander had fed Paul to a pit full of their young to be eaten alive, and then started in on torturing Andy himself.

There was no way he would let that happen to Beth.

Inside his head Dan was still screaming to himself that it was hopeless, that he was going to die if he went out there. That there was nothing he could do. With great deliberation he pushed those thoughts aside, battling them back. He released one hand from the rail. It was the hardest thing he had ever done.

“I’m here, Majel,” he said. “I lost my grip on the reel during the decompression. Going to go after it now.”

The wire was still hanging in space in front of him, the other end hooked up back in the engine room. He couldn’t just give it a tug though - it was unspooling as it went out, already a dozen meters away and still drifting further. All a tug would do was unspool more wire. He was going to have to go to the spool.

He grabbed hold of the wire with his free hand. The only contact he had with the ship was the other hand on the rail. He didn’t want to let go. But everything depended on his being able to do this.

“Damn it, I have scores of hours of EVA. This isn’t rocket science,” he growled under his breath. Picturing Beth in his mind, locking the image of her face in his thoughts, he pushed off hard from the rail. He loosened his grip on the wire at the same time. The combined effort shot him away from the ship down the wire.

Dan shot out through the hatch. He was free falling through the stars, gliding down the wire away from the Satori. Ahead of him was the reel. He was gaining on it, closing the gap with every second of movement. The hard part was still coming. He knew that he was moving enough faster than the reel that stopping short was going to be hard. He needed to grab the reel of wire and pull himself short, then loop the copper wire through one of the locking mechanisms on the reel so that it stopped unwinding.

His breaths grew ragged as the distance from the Satori increased. If the wire broke when he impacted the reel, he’d go sailing off into space. There was nothing he could do to return the ship if that happened. There were three meters left.

Another meter of distance gone. He started gently closing his hand on the wire, slowing his approach a little. One meter left. He slowed his approach still more, and managed to glide to a stop relative with the reel. One hand still hanging on to the wire at all times, he looped the copper through the locking mechanism. This was the moment of truth.

The wire went taught, all of the mass of the spool and himself suddenly suspended from it. Dan whispered a prayer that the thing would hold. He’d connected it solidly enough in the engine room, but he had no way of knowing if the wire was thick enough to support that much stress.

The wire held.

But the combined motion of himself and the reel hadn’t been perfectly perpendicular to the ship’s relative motion. The reel stopped moving away from the ship, held at that distance by the wire. But the remaining velocity was converted into angular momentum. Dan was beginning a spin around the ship now, clinging to the reel as it began orbiting the Satori. The wire was wrapping the ship around its middle like ribbon on a Christmas present, and Dan had no way to stop the motion.

The first revolution felt lazy. He drifted around in a slow circle around the ship, the speed gradually increasing as the wire grew shorter, its length beginning to wrap around the hull. The second spin was almost dizzying in comparison. Dan was guessing the third was going to involve a fairly fast impact between himself and a wall of metal.

“Damn it, this is going to hurt,” he grumbled.

At least the fear was gone. The crippling terror he’d felt inside the hatchway had vanished, replaced by the cool clarity he was used to having when in a crisis. He was able to track the spin carefully. He’d impact on the upper hull, luckily not too terribly far from the antennae he was trying to reach in the first place. But the impact was going to be too fast. If he was knocked unconscious he’d let go and spin out into space again, probably repeating the whole spin in the opposite direction.

Dan spun his body around the spool, placing his lower body between it and the hull. His best shot would be to brake some of the impact with his body. He wasn’t going to be able to bend his knees much to soak the impact, but having his legs in the way ought to do something.

The crash was jarring when it came. He felt bones in his legs crack from the impact with the Satori’s hull, but the pain was distant. One positive side effect of having lost most of the sensation in his legs, as he was sure the agony would have been excruciating otherwise. It was dangerous as hell though. He had no way to tell how badly his legs were broken. He only knew that he’d blown out some bone or bones in both legs. There could be a chunk of bone protruding from the side of his leg and he wouldn’t even know about the compound fracture until he saw it.

Dan focused on catching hold of the hull instead of worrying about something he couldn’t fix. His legs had done something, soaking up enough of the momentum that he was able to grab the side of the ship with one hand while hanging on to the reel with the other. With careful movements he made his way to the radio antenna and plugged the cable in.

“Majel, I did it,” he said. He leaned back against the hull, his entire body feeling wiped out from the efforts of the last few minutes. “You’re on.”