He beckoned toward the ceiling, fingers outstretched like he could grasp those bright lights through the rock over their heads.
His voice dropped to almost a whisper. “Today, we join them.”
John took two steps closer to the ship, then reached out to lay a hand on it. The touch was gentle, careful, like a caress. All of the emotions John was feeling were evident in that simple stroke of a hull panel. Dan could feel the excitement in the room, and the passion.
“Today,” John said, gaining volume as he spoke, “we take our first steps toward the stars. Today, we leave behind what we were and reach for what we can be! And so – today, ladies and gentlemen –”
John raised the bottle high above his head. Then with a sharp motion, he smashed it over the nose of the ship.
“I give you the Satori!” John's voice had reached a baritone crescendo. And suddenly, everything clicked for Dan.
Satori had been an amazing woman. Her death had almost broken John.
Space had been her dream. She'd wanted to reach out and touch the stars.
And now, John had found a way to bring her there.
Dan found himself cheering with everyone else, and crying at the same time. He looked around and saw flushed faces and bright eyes. None of them would forget this moment. John caught his glance, cocked his head at an angle. Dan bowed his head, smiled.
“It was the right name, John,” he said softly.
John closed his eyes. “She's the only star in my sky, you know.”
Dan nodded in understanding. Then the emotional moment passed, and John was all business again.
“All right everyone. Places. Crew aboard, everyone else to the flight control room,” John said. “Liftoff in fifteen minutes.”
Thirteen
Andrew watched Dan snap the latches that clicked his chair into place on the deck of the bridge. He smiled in admiration. John had been right about him, that was for sure. He’d been a wreck when Andy picked him up outside that bar. He honestly wasn’t sure what Dan would be like once he had cleaned himself up and dried out a bit. But the man who wheeled himself up the ship’s ramp and settled himself down in front of the flight controls was a completely different person from the broken shell Andy had first seen. Dan had been through the ringer, but he was every inch the professional in here. A man completely in his element.
Andy looked around the control room. Six seats, six consoles. Dan's console faced forward, toward the curved window at the front of the ship. An empty seat was next to him, also facing the front – that would be Paul's, but he was in the engine room. They had two engineers on the trip, so one would remain back with the alien engine and power systems to monitor them while the other rode in the front of the ship. Keeping the engineers separate meant they could handle any problems on either end. More darkly, if something catastrophic happened and one of them was hurt or killed, the remaining engineer might still be able to do something from the other compartment.
Four more seats were along the outer walls, two per side. Each had a console. Technically, anyone could do their job from any console. Only Dan's was specially built with controls for steering the ship through space, but even that could be managed from one of the other stations in a pinch. Again, redundancy on everything they could manage was at the core of the ship’s design.
Everyone else was taking their seats at consoles. He slipped into his own, near the back of the bridge. Not for the first time, Andy wondered what the heck he was doing here. He was present as a weapons specialist, sure. But he was more of a field man, not a desk jockey. He'd practiced working with the railgun controls enough that he could operate them like a pro. The worried voice in the back of his head had a funny feeling that anyone they ran into capable of achieving star-flight was going to laugh off the iron shells his weapons spat out. Any fight they got into would be short indeed.
“Control, evacuate air from the hangar,” John said from the seat next to him.
Red lights flashed outside the ship as huge pumps prepared to pull the air from the room. Andrew felt himself holding his breath, and had to stop himself. The ship had its own atmosphere. If their seals failed, this was going to be one of the shortest space missions ever, and holding his breath wasn’t going to help.
“Bring drives on line, Beth,” John said.
“Drives on line...now,” she replied.
There was a collective grunt as the engines lifted the ship off its landing struts a few inches and everyone's weight more than doubled in an instant. The drive created a gravity field within the ship, but it wasn't Earth normal gravity. Whatever planet the ship's builders had been from, they seemed to be comfortable in about three quarters the gravity of Earth. Still, after the gentle gravity of Luna, even three quarters felt briefly uncomfortable.
“Helm responsive,” Dan said.
“Control, open bay doors,” John said into his radio.
“Door bays opening,” came the response from the flight control room. “Godspeed, Satori.”
Huge doors opened on one side of the hangar, revealing an upward-bending tunnel. It had been there when the humans arrived, a remnant element of the ancient base. John had crews clear rubble and reinforce the tunnel, but it had been largely intact. It opened on the surface, some miles away from the lunar base he'd built, and it was their passage into space.
“Dan, bring us out,” John said. Andrew found himself holding his breath again as the ship slipped forward toward the exit. But Dan was as good as John said, it seemed. He eased the ship out of the hangar and into the tunnel, then adjusted the angle of the ship slightly, tilting up toward the surface, and applied more power.
The front of the bridge was a set of huge transparent panels, windows to see out into the world. Ahead – it was hard for Andrew to think about it as up, because of the gravity field – he could see stars. He gripped the arms of his chair hard as the ship leapt toward that starfield. Rock flashed past the windows.
“Easy Dan,” said John. “Keep it gentle. This is our first run.”
Dan nodded, and the speed tapered off a bit. The ship flew steady as an arrow. And then they were out in open space, flying free of the moon. Dan accelerated a little more once they were free of the tunnel, and the lunar surface dropped away beneath them.
Before Andy could exhale the breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding, the radio crackled. “Satori, this is Control. We've picked up a course change from one of those satellites. They must have noticed something – they're headed your way.”
“Andrew?” John asked.
“Confirmed, John. Getting the telemetry on the satellite from Control now. They're over the horizon still, so no line of sight, but it looks like they're making a bee-line for us.”
“Time to go into sneaky mode, I think,” said John. “They'll wonder where we went, but I don't think they'll assume the ship suddenly turned invisible. I wonder what they saw that made them head over this way, though? That could be important.”
Beth pressed some keys on her console, frowned, and tried the sequence again. Her brow furrowed, and she tapped a few more keys. “I'm not getting any response from the cloak,” she said.
“Bad time for that to break! Can we abort and return to base?” John asked.
“No time. They’ll see us before we can get tucked inside,” Dan replied.
“All right. Dan, keep us low to the moon, moving away from the satellite. Try to keep us under the horizon from them,” John said.
Dan's hands moved deftly over his console, and Andy felt the ship alter course in response. His view of the moon spun wildly in the windows, but he could barely feel the change in course. Something about the way the engines worked was supposed to block or reduce the inertia they felt from course changes. Andy guessed at least that tech was working. Which was a good thing, because they would have pulled some serious Gs in that turn otherwise. John stepped up from his chair and went over to Beth's console to see what was going on.
“Paul, can you se
e if there's something interfering with the cloak? It's not responding to my controls here, maybe you can activate it from the engine room?” Beth said into the intercom. No response. “Paul?”
A warning burst of intuition tingled up the back of Andy’s neck, that little signal that had kept him alive in dozens of hot situations over his life. Something was wrong. The satellite knowing to change course. The cloak conveniently not working precisely when they needed it most. Paul suddenly not answering from the engine room. Something was up. Something bad. He started to turn away from his console display.
Then a flash of intense pain exploded in Andy’s skull, and he slipped away into unconsciousness.
Fourteen
The crack of metal on bone drew the eyes of everyone on the bridge. John looked over to see what was up, sparing just a quick glance before bringing his attention back to the screen tracking that blasted satellite. Then he realized what he had seen, looked back again, and stared.
Everyone else was staring, too. Having a pistol aimed in one's general direction was a decidedly uncomfortable feeling. The weapon Paul held was small, but the diameter of a muzzle isn’t all the relevant when it’s being pointed in your direction.
“Paul, what the hell are you doing?” Beth asked, her eyes wide.
Andy was slumped over in his harness, blood trickling from a spot just behind his ear. Paul stood next to him, a pistol in hand. His grip on the gun looked very steady. His lips were a thin, determined line, but a sheen of sweat showed on his forehead.
“I'm taking the ship, Beth. Doing what we all should have done,” Paul replied.
“You traitor,” John said, his face pale.
Paul trained the gun directly on John. “I'm not the traitor. I'm not the one who'd deny the most powerful weapon ever discovered to his country. Who'd keep it to himself like a new toy. I am a patriot, John.”
Dan was still mostly focused on flying the ship. They were too close to the moon for him to be distracted long. John could see the telemetry Control was sending them projected on the main screen. Another satellite up ahead had changed course to cut them off. They were stuck between two of the things, and it wouldn’t be long before one or both satellites got close enough to see them.
“John, we've got maybe two minutes before they're able to get visual imagery of the ship,” Dan said, confirming his fears.
John nodded. He had two minutes. Had to keep calm if this was to come out right. Above all else he was not willing to put this ship into the hands Paul had in mind. Even if it was the US government, that was bad enough. Word would leak out, and war for the ship would become almost inevitable. But there was no guarantee that just because Paul thought he was working with the United States that he actually was. John had put out feelers into the US intelligence community, listening as carefully as he could for any word about leaks. He might have missed one. It was possible. But he was fairly sure that the US hadn’t discovered the ship yet.
“What do you want, Paul?” John asked.
“Simple, really. Just hold course. The satellite ahead of us isn't unmanned; it has a crew of marines on board. They've got small craft that they'll use to jet over here, I'll let them into the ship, and we fly back to Earth.”
“And if we refuse?” John asked.
If John was right about his guess, there might well be men over there ready to take his ship. But the troops probably weren’t from the US military. Whether they represented some smaller nation or a corporate interest he didn’t know, but based on the intelligence he had, it was unlikely to be US soldiers. Bad as war over the Satori would be if the United States obtained it, he couldn’t imagine the danger if someone else won the ship. Imagine the ability to strike from a ship that could make itself invisible. No, better that the ship be destroyed than fall into nefarious hands. John thought hard, hoping to find some way out of this which didn’t end with all of them dead.
“Then I start shooting people, John,” Paul said. The deadpan way he said it sent chills down John's spine.
“A minute and thirty,” Dan called out. “I can't evade both satellites unless we break away from the moon, and then they’ll see us for sure.”
John clenched and unclenched his hands. “Paul, think about this. Please – if we bring the ship back to Earth, if we give it to a government, any government... The other governments would never allow it. Never allow one nation to have that sort of power. It would be war.”
“We aren't going to bring the ship back. I am,” Paul said. “You lot will be going to jail for treason. Now, cuff yourselves with these,” he said, tossing zip ties to John, Beth, and Charline.
“None for me?” Dan asked.
“I don't know how to fly the ship. Besides, it's not like you're going to rush me in that wheelchair, right? Do anything I don't like, and I start shooting your friends here.”
John moved his gaze to each of his crew. When his eyes met Beth's, he saw her jaw set in a determined line. He knew that look – she was about to try something. He gave her a little head shake. Barely noticeable, but she caught it. He saw the desperation leave her eyes a little. She was counting on him to come up with something to get them out of this mess.
Now if only he could do something that would actually save them.
“You can't have her, Paul,” John said. He worked to keep his tone even, despite the rage growing inside him. This man wanted to take his ship, steal Satori from him? He let a feral smile leak onto his face.
Paul saw and stalked closer to him, which is what he wanted.
“Cuff yourself, John. Now, or I shoot someone.”
John snapped the zip ties around his wrists. He needed Paul to be a little closer.
“You coward,” he spat.
That did the trick. Paul's face reddened, and he stepped close enough to punch John once, in the gut. John had braced for the blow, but the air whooshed out of his lungs and he almost fell over.
But that was enough. Paul was close to him now, which meant his attention wasn't on Dan anymore. As Paul raised his hand to hit him again, John gathered in a deep breath.
“Dan – ad astra!” John said.
Dan heard the order. Ad astra. It was Latin, and meant ‘to the stars’. It was a toast the two of them had shared back in college, when they first stepped onto the roads which would lead them into space. It had been John's idea to use the toast as a code word now.
Dan didn't even take a deep breath before executing the order. He'd practiced this with Majel enough times in the simulator – not the part about having a gunman in the bridge, but if that order was ever given, it would be a true crisis. It was a desperate move that might kill all of them, but he’d known the risks when he signed on for this job. He hadn’t been expecting to stare death in the face quite so soon, but every space flight had danger.
Dan checked the screen as he entered a code on his console. They’d be in visual range with the satellites in only fifteen seconds, and Paul had already turned his attention back on him. There was no time for anything else, nothing to do but execute John’s order. He rapidly initiated the program, said a quick prayer, and pressed the Enter button on his keyboard.
Immediately, the ship began to shudder.
Paul had time to say “What the hell?”
Beth shouted “No, Dan!”
But Dan remembered what John had said. At all costs – keep the ship secret. Keep it safe. And Dan trusted John like no other.
A beam of light shot from the bow of the ship, stabbing the night ahead of them. In its passage, a kaleidoscope of colors blossomed into being, opening like a pinwheel of blazing light. Dan's eyes traced the swirling patterns as the ship shot into the middle of the maelstrom, rocketing down the cone shaped passage formed by the wormhole drive. A moment was all he had, though.
Because after that, they were...elsewhere.
Fifteen
The Satori made a keening noise, wailing like a banshee as she jumped out of the wormhole into real space. Dan felt like
his mind had been turned inside out. He was dizzy, disoriented, and more than a little nauseated. Distantly, he could hear someone throwing up. He felt a heavy grip on the back of his chair. Paul's hand. Which meant Paul's gun had to be disturbingly close as well. Adrenaline soared through him, bringing clarity to his thoughts. The latches which held his wheelchair in place were designed to release quickly. If he could take Paul by surprise before the man could recover from the wormhole jump, he might have a chance.
He reached down with both hands, slapped the release buttons, and then shoved back with everything he had.
He looked over one shoulder as he shoved, to see where Paul was standing: directly behind him, with a dazed look on his face. The wheelchair hit Paul hard in the thighs. Paul's hand – and the pistol! – were just in reach. Dan grabbed for the gun. He got hold with one hand, then with both. But as soon as Dan got a grip on the weapon, Paul seemed to wake up to what was going on, and Dan had to struggle to keep hold.
Paul wasn't a small man, and he used his weight, trying to wrest the gun away. Dan tried to smash Paul's elbow against his shoulder, but Paul twisted his arm so that it glanced off. Dan could feel his fingers slipping.
Then he snapped an elbow into Dan's temple, and again into the back of his head as he tried to turn away. Dan saw stars. He realized he'd lost his grip on the gun entirely, and opened his eyes, fighting to focus on his adversary.
Paul had backed up two steps, the gun held very professionally in a two handed grip, trained on Dan's head. His mouth twisted in a snarl.
“That was a mistake, Dan,” Paul said.
Still dizzy from the blows, Dan replied “No kidding, shithead. Ow.”
Adventures of the Starship Satori: Book 1-6 Complete Library Page 6