“Andrew!” John said. “Sedate that bastard. And then strap him up well enough that he can't pull anything else. Make sure he's got no more tricks handy, while you're at it. I don't care if you have to strip him.”
“Consider it done,” Andy said, advancing on Paul with a menacing look.
“No!” Paul shouted. “Wait!”
“I’ve had enough of this,” Andy said. He yanked the pen device out of Paul's hand and snapped it in half. Then he tore a strip of duct tape from a roll and slapped it across Paul's mouth.
Beth let go of the rail she'd been holding and pushed off toward Dan's chair. She grabbed hold of it and checked his neck for a pulse. It was there, still beating solidly. Her shoulders relaxed, and she exhaled with relief. He had small burns on his face and bits of hot plastic had singed the front of his jumpsuit, but he was alive. She couldn't very well detach his wheelchair from the console and let him drift around, so she worked around him, checking the extent of the damage to the flight controls. The answer didn't take long. The controls were trashed. She'd need to rebuild them from scratch, or close to it. They could re-route control to another console, but this one was toast. Whatever Paul had used as an explosive was both small and effective.
“Got the med kit,” Charline said, pushing off from the wall. She glided over to Beth, who helped her stop. Charline pulled a small medical scanner out of the kit and placed it on Dan's chest. Then she rummaged around in the kit for a moment.
“Andy, catch,” she said, and gently sent a capped syringe floating toward him. “Use it on that jerk.”
Paul continued thrashing ever more wildly. Andy injected the syringe into Paul's arm, and he went limp again. He pulled out some more duct tape and set about making sure Paul wouldn't cause any more trouble.
Beth turned back to Charline, who was expertly pulling out packets from the kit. She applied a salve to Dan’s burns, and steri-strips to a few of the larger cuts on his face. Charline peeked at the monitor beeping away on Dan’s chest periodically like she knew what the thing’s readout was telling her. Beth nodded in approval.
“You’ve done this sort of thing before?” Beth asked.
“I worked as an EMS volunteer in college,” Charline replied with a shrug. “I’m no doctor, but doing this sort of field medicine is like riding a bicycle. He’s going to be OK.”
“A woman of hidden talents. I’m impressed,” Beth said. Inwardly she felt an enormous relief at hearing Dan would be all right. When Charline frowned, Beth went on to reassure her. “I mean that. I’m glad you’re here.”
Charline smiled back with a warmth that lit up her face. “Thanks. You’ll forgive me if I sort of wish I wasn’t, though. This sort of adventure wasn’t really what I signed up for!”
“None of us did,” Beth chuckled. The woman’s humor had broken at least a little of the tension she’d been feeling.
John was flipping switches on his console, tapping his keyboard, trying to bring something up, but Beth could see there wasn't enough electricity reaching the bridge. The only power left in the room was emergency lighting, which was powered by local batteries. Even the vents which cycled fresh air through the ship had stopped hissing. Life support was out. Which was going to make the air a little stale soon, if they didn't slide back into Jupiter's embrace first.
“How bad is it?” asked John.
“Dan's OK. The console is shot,” Beth replied.
“Well, at least Dan's OK. What do you think that second explosion was, Beth?” John asked.
She thought a moment. “Most likely, it was a charge set near the coupling between the alien and human technologies. That's always been our weak spot. It's a choke point, the most devastating point of failure for the ship. I'd meant to put in a backup, but never had time. So everything went through one cable.”
“One point of failure also means one place to fix. Might make the repair easier?” Andy asked.
“If that's where it blew. Probably was. He is – was – one of our lead engineers. He knew exactly where to hit us to disable the ship,” Beth said. How could she have not seen this coming? She wasn't the sort to trust just anyone. How had Paul managed to slip under her paranoia radar? “I'll get suited up and go check. I can use the central corridor as an airlock.”
“Sounds good, but be careful. We can’t afford to lose you,” said John. “At the same time, alacrity would be excellent. Without the ship’s sensors we have no idea how bad this really is – but we're too close to Jupiter for comfort. We have to assume that even if we're not actively falling yet, our orbit is going to decay fast. Time is short.”
Beth rolled her eyes. “So you want me to be cautious but quick?”
“In a nutshell, yes,” John replied. He showed the first smile she had seen from him since Paul drew his pistol.
“Charline, try to see if you can route a little of the backup power to a computer terminal,” John said, “Get us something. Even a little power might help. Andy, keep an eye on the prisoner and Dan. Beth, I'll come back there with you. I might not be an engineer, but I can hand you tools and maybe help if there's any heavy lifting. I can keep touch with everyone as easily by radio from there as anyplace else. Let's go, folks.”
Beth glanced out the front windows and saw Jupiter glide past again, and then slowly vanish. They were still in a spin. Out of control and turning wildly in space, they almost had to be either getting closer to the gas giant or drifting away from it. If it was the latter, they had plenty of time to figure this mess out. Beth wasn’t counting on that, though. She was pretty sure Jupiter was growing larger in that view every time they rolled over so that she could see it. John was right. They were running out of time.
Nineteen
Charline hooked a leg over the arm of her chair, then reached over to pull away the panel covering her console. She'd been weightless before, but she still wasn't used to this floating around thing. On the moon, she'd still had an up and a down, at least. Sliding under the console, she bounced off the floor a bit and had to steady herself. Her stomach was roiling. This whole zero gravity thing was going to take more getting used to before she was really going to be OK with it.
How the hell had she ended up in this mess, anyway? A month ago she had a nice, cushy job on Earth with a major tech corporation. One asshole made a move on her, and she ended up fired, in space, and lost in a damaged starship someone badly wanted to either destroy or capture. Paul didn’t really seem particular which result he got, either. This wasn’t what she had signed on for. Cloak and dagger stuff was awesome in the movies, but in real life it just sucked.
Charline remembered reading somewhere that the definition of an adventure was uncomfortable things happening to strangers far away. They felt a whole lot less like an adventure and a lot more uncomfortable when it was your life on the line instead of a character in a movie. Just then she’d have given nearly anything to have her feet back on solid ground again. But if she wanted to get back home, she was going to need to find a way to help them solve the stack of problems they faced. She reached out for some wires, and the movement sent her head bouncing against the floor again.
“FML,” Charline muttered under her breath.
“You OK in there?” Andy asked.
“Not really, no. I’m a hacker, not an electrician,” Charline said. “You want someone who knows the ins and outs of computer security? I’m your girl. But John wants me to hook up one of these terminals to a backup battery. Actually, to several batteries, since one of them isn’t going to give me enough juice to power it.”
“Can you do it?” Andy asked.
“Yeah, I think so,” Charline replied as she popped out from beneath the console. She pushed off and floated over to the ruins of Dan’s computer and flight controls. She was going to need wire. Lots and lots of wire. Hotwiring this thing to work off battery power would be a pain in the ass, and the best she could hope for was a cobbled together system that might run for a short while. But it would give them somet
hing, at least.
Charline grabbed a tool and used it to cut several arm-lengths of electrical wire out of the broken console. The wire was scorched by the explosion, and the rubber coating was torn in some places. She’d need to test each strand to make sure it was still conducting electricity properly before she could use it to patch the batteries together and wire them into the terminal. Even if she could get this console working again, they still wouldn't have control of the ship. She wasn't sure this was going to do any good. But it was better than sitting there doing nothing.
She glanced over at Dan, checking the monitor on his chest. At least he was going to be OK. The medical scanner said his heart rhythm was fine, and that was her biggest worry after the shock he'd taken. When the console blew it had shorted out, sending a charge through him since he’d been touching the thing. Charline had cleaned him up pretty well. He ought to wake up on his own before too long, and his wounds were all clean and patched up. She hadn't used those skills in a while, and patching him up felt good.
Once she’d pulled what she guessed would be enough wiring to do the job out of the trashed console, Charline pulled out her tablet and had it display schematics for the ship. Hunting around for the backup batteries would take too long, and unlike Beth she hadn’t designed the Satori, so she didn’t know where all the parts were by heart. Another reason why she was probably the wrong person for this job… But it wasn’t like she could do what Beth was trying to accomplish, either. Charline figured she’d have to muddle along as best she could and hopefully get this to work without frying herself in the process. The batteries should be stored behind a closed maintenance panel set into the ceiling in the center of the control room. Which would have been a pain to access, if they still had gravity. But without it? Charline pushed off from Dan’s console and floated over to the panel the schematics indicated. When she got there, she stared at the big plate in frustration.
“Something wrong?” Andy asked.
“Who the hell uses hex bolts to put something together?” Charline asked.
“Beth, apparently?”
“Well, I have Philip’s head and standard screwdrivers on my multitool. I don’t have a hex key,” Charline said. She was getting exasperated with the whole trip. The string of problems they’d run into were enough to melt your mind. It wasn’t enough to have a member of the team turn on them with a gun, no. He had to have planted explosives on the ship and managed to set them off. But only after they’d gone halfway across the solar system, so far from help that they might as well be in another galaxy.
“Here, got you covered,” Andy said, tossing a small case up to her. The plastic box glided through the air. Charline caught it with her free hand.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Hex key set, among other things. Basic repair kit. Every room on the ship has one of those, a first aid kit, a fire extinguisher, and oxygen masks. Emergency gear, for, well, times like these,” Andy replied.
The back of the box was covered with velcro which let Charline attach it to a pad on her thigh. She opened it up and carefully pulled out the tool she needed to remove the panel. Charline kept her hands moving slowly despite the urgent need to hurry this job up. They needed at least one computer on the ship powered up again very badly, but if she fumbled a tool and it went sailing off across the room in microgravity, it wasn’t going to get the job done faster. She took a deep breath and tried vainly to relax.
“Slow is smooth, smooth is fast,” she said in a soft voice.
“Heh,” Andy chuckled, apparently overhearing her.
“What’s so funny?”
“We used to say that back in the Army. But there, we were usually talking about clearing a room or bunker, not electronics work!” he replied.
Charline smiled down at him. Andy had strapped himself into one of the chairs to avoid floating around. He’d stuck close to Paul, for which she was grateful. Having him around when that jerk woke up would be a real plus. There was something about Andy’s manner that just made her want to trust him.
“You ever wish you’d never come out here at all?” she blurted.
“Not really, no. I owe John too much. If I can help keep him alive through this mess, I’ll consider it worth doing,” Andy said.
“You really think we can get out of this?” Charline asked.
“We’ve got one of the best engineers in the world, one of the best pilots in the world, one of the best computer people in the world, and the most advanced spaceship humanity has ever created. I think we’ve got a better than even chance,” Andy replied.
His words made her feel a little better. Charline still wasn’t sure just how they were going to make it all work out, but trying was better than giving up. While they were still breathing, there was a chance. She’d fight every step of the way to keep that chance alive.
“Got a couple of batteries hooked together,” she said. “Now to test them.”
Charline connected two wires together, hoping to see a spark from the contact. Nothing. This was going to take a lot of work.
Twenty
The suit felt clunky around her. Beth realized that she'd been spending too much time in Lunar gravity. And too much time in an air-filled hangar. Oh, she'd logged enough hours in zero gee, and enough in a suit. But that was before the project. So now, when it counted, everything felt a little rusty. Assuming they ever got out of this Beth made herself a promise that she’d spend more time working in a suit. She was about to have to do a whole bunch of emergency repair work wearing the thing, and fumble-fingers wasn’t going to make this project any easier.
She checked the seals on John's suit. He was even slower getting suited up than she was, but not by a lot. He'd obviously made an effort to train with the equipment. How he'd found time for it, she had no idea. His suit checked out perfectly, though, as did her own when he went over it for problems. Both suits good, she checked the seals for all the doors off the main corridor. The central passage led just about everywhere in the ship, with storage, bunk rooms, an arms locker, galley, closet sized infirmary, and other spaces leading from it.
On one end of the long corridor was the bridge. On the other, the engine room. It wasn't a large ship, and they wouldn't lose a ton of air when they dumped it from the hallway, provided they could prevent leaks from the rest of the ship. The central hallway would act like an airlock from the rest of the ship to the airless engine room.
Once she was sure every hatch was sealed, she tried to open the engine room door. It had sealed shut automatically when it sensed the pressure loss, and the hard seal required a computer override. The problem was, the computers were down, so the little access panel on the side of the door was dead.
Not a huge issue for Beth. She always kept a few tools handy. She pulled a screwdriver from its place in a loop on her thigh, adjusted the head, and a few moments later had pulled the face from the panel. Inside was a hash of little circuit boards and wires. The tangled mess was a maze, but she'd helped install the things. She knew how they worked.
A couple of moments and a short circuit later, the hatch popped open a few inches. Air rushed from the corridor, sucking John against a wall, but neither of them were in any danger in their suits. Once the air had evacuated, she pulled herself up to the gap and pushed with both hands. The doors didn't slide easily, but they went back far enough that they were both able to get inside the engine area.
She inhaled with a low whistle when she got a good look at her engine room.
“I was right about where he hit us. Wish I wasn't,” Beth said over the suit radio. Those had internal power, so she and John could still speak to each other. It looked like the damage was focused precisely where she'd thought it would be. How Paul managed to get a bomb in here, she wasn't sure. But the damage had been precisely calculated to hit them right where it hurt the most. The explosion had ripped the floor to bits about midway down the conduit connecting the human and alien tech. There was no backup for that line. Installin
g a second conduit was something Beth had been planning to do, but John’s accelerated schedule made her set the idea aside in favor of higher priority tasks.
Part of her wanted to round on him with a hearty ‘I told you so’, but that wasn’t going to help anyone. The damage was done, and it was up to her to undo it. There would be plenty of time for her to give him shit over this later, assuming they all survived this mess.
“Stay here a minute while I survey the damage,” Beth told John. Starting with the cloak, since that's what had failed first. She needed to assess the damage one step at a time – slow is smooth, smooth is fast. She pulled the metal cover from the cloaking device. Paul had tampered with it, all right. It was a quick bit of sabotage. Obviously he'd set this up so that the cloak could be quickly reactivated, and the ship safely vanished to wherever it was he'd intended to bring it.
The alien tech was...odd was too light a word. Rather than using printed circuit boards and microscopic transistors, like human tech did, they used small cubes, about the size of the dice for a board game. The theory was that each was some sort of quantum computing device. But they had to be sequenced in the right order. Putting them together in the first place had been like assembling a puzzle with a hundred pieces, each identical to all the others. It had taken months, because they'd been jumbled all over the interior of the device.
To prevent future problems of the same sort, she'd used a marker on each one. Simple. But effective. She tested with washable ink at first, but when the device still worked without any problems, she switched to a permanent marker.
And that made spotting the sabotage simple. The cubes for sixty six and ninety nine had been swapped, both installed upside down so that they looked about right. But she knew her own handwriting. She swapped both cubes back, and that was one problem out of the way. She carefully replaced the cover.
Adventures of the Starship Satori: Book 1-6 Complete Library Page 8