Twenty-Three
One moment, Charline was squatting next to Beth, pulling a panel off a computer. The next, she found himself sprawled against one of the walls of the engine room as sections of torn deck smashed around her. Dizzy, she shook her head, trying to clear it, but the movement only made things worse. Her ears were ringing, and the coppery taste in her mouth told her she’d bitten something when she slammed into the wall. Charline panted, panic taking over for a few seconds. What had happened? Where was Beth?
“Beth? Can you hear me?” Charline said. There was no immediate response, but then John’s voice came over her radio.
“You all right in there?” John said. “One of the other bombs went off.”
The other bombs. Of course. That helped Charline calm her frayed nerves and take stock of her situation. She looked down at her suit's status readout on her wrist. Miraculously, the suit had no breaches; the thing was still intact. Charline thanked whatever god was out there keeping an eye on her for that. A hole in her suit would have been fatal. She glanced about at her surroundings. The engine room hadn't fared as well.
A section of the decking had torn upward, shards of hot metal pinging against the walls and ceiling. One larger chunk had blasted past her head to crash against the door Beth had hotwired to get in. It must have narrowly missed her faceplate. Door motors came briefly to life, as emergency systems within the door read the impact as a threat and strained to close the door again. The door shut with a grinding of metal on metal that she could feel in her boots.
Beth! She'd been right in front of the explosion. Was she all right? Charline looked for her in the dim light, the haze from the explosion making her search difficult. She spotted Beth floating near another wall, and pushed off toward her to help.
“You OK?” Charline asked.
“Yeah, I think so.” Beth was checking the suit readout on her left wrist. “Shit.”
“What? Are you hit?” Charline eyed her suit carefully, looking for a hole to patch.
“The suit says no punctures, but I think I lost a seal somewhere. I can hear a hissing noise.”
“I can't patch that in here. We need to get you up to the bridge and get you into a new suit.”
“No time,” Beth said, turning back to her work. “We're almost out as it is. Can't you feel gravity starting to tug at us? We'll be flopping around in here with every spin of the ship before too long.”
She ran wires from the power lines in the conduit over to the human mainframe. “I need Majel online fast. I think I have an idea. Can you get her rebooted, as soon as I get power to her system?”
Charline grinned weakly. She could reboot a computer in her sleep. “That, I can do.”
Charline pulled herself over to a console that was hardwired to the mainframe and checked it out. It had been far enough from the explosion to be spared damage. In fact, she realized that most of the equipment in the room was undamaged. Paul’s placement had been damned precise, or they’d just gotten really lucky. She had the feeling that last bomb would be another story, though. It sounded like that one was right underneath the alien tech. If it blew, Charline had no idea how much harm it would do to the alien power source, their drive, and all the other stuff housed back there. Hell, if it blew up the power unit the secondary explosion might kill them all. She shoved the thoughts away. It wasn’t helping her focus. A flash of light told her Beth had restored power to the mainframe and her console. Charline typed out a series of rapid-fire commands, and the main computer began its reboot.
“OK, starting Majel’s boot process. What now?” Charline asked.
Beth was back at work again. She grunted, pulling more wires apart with a shower of tiny sparks showing how hot they were. “I'm hoping to use Majel as a control interface. The wires to connect the bridge controls are a shambles, and it's going to take me hours to connect them all. But if I can hook up basic controls to Majel, we might be able to direct her using wifi from the bridge, and have her control the alien tech directly.”
“So you want me to get our AI to interface directly with an alien computer that your best guys haven't been able to figure out with months to work on it. And I've got what, ten minutes?” Charline asked.
“More like five. But yeah. If you're up for it.” Beth grinned. “If you can't, I don't know how we're getting out of this, short of going outside to push.”
She noticed that Beth was panting a little. “How bad is that air leak?”
“Not as bad as it's going to be for all of us in a few minutes if I can't get those engines online. They were hit by some of the bits from the blast,” Beth replied. “You worry about your impossible task, and let me worry about mine.”
Charline raised an eyebrow, but turned back to the console, opening a command line interface and sending the signals to bring Majel back to life. That was the easy part. Once she had the program working again, she was going to need to figure out how to build an interface between human software and an alien computer that none of them understood in the slightest. In the space of a couple of minutes. This task wasn’t just impossible, it was insane. Majel finished booting, and Charline started typing commands as fast as she could, making up the code as she went along.
Programming wasn’t just about algorithms, it was about language. At Charline’s level of skill, code was art as well as science. If she could make this work it would be a masterpiece of effort. Totally focused on the task, she drove her fingers to fly over the keys.
Twenty-Four
John had been completely shielded when the bomb went off. He hadn't even realized what had happened at first, but when he saw Andrew slammed backward, he knew something was terribly wrong. Just like everything else on this little jaunt – one wrong thing after another. Try as he might, he couldn't seem to get things back under control.
The safety line snapped taut, with Andrew dangling a couple of feet below the ship. Because he’d clipped in near where he was working, John couldn’t just reel him back to the airlock. He was going to have to go out after Andrew himself. John clipped his own safety line to the airlock frame and started out toward his young friend. He growled, pulling himself along faster as the tug of gravity continued to increase. He had to get Andrew awake or back inside the Satori. The fact that they were feeling gravity at all meant that the ship's surface area was slowing their descent a little. If the ship was still falling toward the surface at the same speed as a rock, they'd still be weightless. But those broad wings were meeting some resistance already.
Which meant they were already reacting to Jupiter's upper atmosphere.
That didn't leave a lot of time before the ship started heating up. It wouldn’t take long for things to go from ‘heating up’ to ‘burning up’. They were almost out of time.
“Damn it, Andrew, wake up!” he said over the radio.
“Guh?”
“You're awake,” John said, relief flooding his voice. “Are you hurt?”
“Uhhhh...yes?” Andy said. “But not too bad, I think. Going to be sore tomorrow though. My poor head!”
“Can you still stop the other bomb? We don't have much time.”
“I'll give it a shot,” he replied.
John reached out a hand to help him grab hold of the ship.
Dan was staring ahead at the front windows. Jupiter rolled by, then back away again, then back into view. It was beginning to make him feel a little dizzy, but it was either that or look at Paul. He didn't feel like looking at Paul – that made him more ill than the dizzying spin.
How could he? Paul had worked as hard on the Satori as any of them. He was part of their team. Dan didn't understand a man who could pretend to be someone's friend while all along plotting against him. Part of him was a little glad it didn't make sense, but it still bothered him.
Intellectually, Dan knew that people were often dishonest, and he'd told his share of little white lies. But there was a difference between pretending to be sick from work so you could get an extra fishin
g day in and hiding the fact that you were about to steal and/or blow up a spaceship around a bunch of people who thought you were their friend. The betrayal struck home deeply in his heart.
Dan was lost in those thoughts, and almost missed the little glow appearing around the nose of the ship as it spun past Jupiter. Almost, but not quite – and then his attention refocused quickly. He waited for the next spin – and there it was. Traces of atmosphere reacting with the hull. He activated the radio in his helmet.
“Beth, I know you're busy right now, but I thought you should know – we're dipping into Jupiter's upper atmosphere. Seeing traces of heat reaction against the hull.”
“Got that,” she replied. “Switch channels and tell Andy. He's still out there, I think.”
Dan fiddled with the controls for a moment to swap to channel two. “Andy?”
“Here,” came the reply.
“Andy, it's about to get hot out there. You need to get yourself inside, fast.”
“Can't yet, Dan. I'm still working on that last bomb. If it goes off, we're all toast.”
“Can you put a rush on it? I don't know how much time you've got, but it's not a lot.”
“We'll do what we can. Andy out.”
Dan looked around the room, wondering what he could do to help. He unhooked himself from his seat, and drifted toward Charline's station, where she'd gotten the power running. The ship tilted again as he drifted over, and he felt gravity shove him down like a hand. The seat came rushing up at him much faster than he'd thought, and he fell against the padding with a rush of air gusting out of his lungs.
Gravity. He thought about it a moment. That meant there was already some braking action going on. The ship's aerodynamics were slowing their descent. Gas in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere was reacting with their hull, generating friction and slowing them down every time the wings were flat to their angle of descent.
“I wonder if I can help that at all,” he muttered. He slid into the seat and tapped the keyboard. Char's screen came up, with a new notification, saying that Majel was online and awaiting instructions.
“Nice,” he said. The voice interface was still down. The emergency batteries running this console weren’t giving it enough juice to manage that. But if he could type out some commands to the AI, maybe something could be done.
He tapped out the words LIST COMMAND SUMMARY.
A string of commands came up. Among them were things he knew were offline, like the main drive.
He typed again: LIST AVAILABLE FUNCTIONAL COMMANDS.
This gave him a much shorter list. There wasn't a lot of power available, and all of the alien tech seemed offline still. Beth must be working at that. It was those alien drives that would save them, if anything could. She had to get those back online.
But there were other systems available. The Satori, for all that it was a starship with wormhole drives, was designed to handle planetary landings. Which meant it had been designed with aerodynamics in mind, not just space flight. Among the commands available for access were those for ailerons, flaps, and elevators.
No stick meant this was going to be tricky. He'd have to type each adjustment manually. But he'd logged a lot of hours flying, in the air as well as in space. Incrementally, he adjusted the wing and tail surface controls to counter the spin. Slowly, the crazy motion in the front window came to, if not a stop, and least a much slower slide. He put more flaps on, tilting the nose up a bit. The computer said that the Satori was now in a nose-up configuration for re-entry – a lot like the old shuttle craft used to use for landings on Earth.
Of course, those shuttles had never tried the routine going into Jupiter's atmosphere. He couldn't recall how fast Jupiter's winds were, but he remembered they were very fast. Things were going to get bumpy, soon, if they couldn't pull out. And warm too. The ship had good belly shielding against heat, but it was designed to land under power, using the gravity drive to control the ship's descent. The heat shielding wasn't intended to soak up the sort of heat this powerless belly-in method was going to generate. Whether the ship was torn to shreds by the wind shear or melted into slag by the heat of their atmospheric entry was moot. For the moment Dan had at least slowed the process down a little. It wasn’t enough to save them.
But it was something. They were moving slower now, and gravity was pointing more or less reliably in one direction, instead of rotating as the ship spun around. He felt a brief rush of relief, relaxed his hands a little.
One wing hit a pocket of denser gas, and the ship tilted wildly off to one side. His fingers flew over the keyboard to type in a correction. That pushed the right wing back too far in the other direction, and he had to shift the ailerons a bit more to compensate. Holding this brick steady wasn't going to be easy. Dan grimaced, bringing every bit of his years of flight experience to bear on the limited controls he had. Every second he bought them gave Beth a little more time to get those engines back operational.
Twenty-Five
The heat was beginning to distract Andy, even through his suit. The spinning had stopped, at least. The Satori’s spin had slowed down and then finally stopped altogether. It looked like Dan had managed to do something – that had to be his handiwork. But the spinning had stopped with the ship facing right side up. Which made great sense if you were trying to use the atmosphere to break the ship’s fall, but the bombs were on the bottom side of the ship, facing down toward Jupiter.
That left Andy dangling from his safety line underneath the ship as he tried to disable the last bomb. It was starting to get hot out there, even through his suit. Andy felt his body growing slick with perspiration inside the thick protective covering. If he couldn’t get that bomb free and get back inside the ship soon, he was going to cook. And the thing was stuck.
Not having any leverage wasn't helping, but he had to admit most of the issue was just the metal on metal of the bolt’s connection to the ship. Perhaps the hull was already heating up, and that was causing expansion of the metal plates. Whatever the cause, the bolt wasn't coming lose, not for all the prying he could manage. So Andy pulled out a small laser cutting tool.
“John, time for you to go back inside,” Andy said.
“Why? What are you doing with that?”
“The bomb won't come off. Going to burn through the hull around it. But I could set it off, trying. Don't want us both here if I do.”
“How can I help?” John asked, stubbornly staying put.
“By being where I don't need to worry about blowing you up, OK?” Andy laughed. “That would look bad on my resume.”
John retreated back into the airlock, with some grumbling. Once he was safely away from the blast area Andy slowly burned away the metal in a circle around the bomb. Ever so carefully, because if the heat of the laser warmed the bolt itself too much...!
Well, he'd been lucky to survive the first one going off. He didn't want to count on doing it twice. And even if he did, the bomb was positioned to damage the engines – which would kill their only way to escape this deathtrap.
He wished he could wipe the sweat away from his eyes. Definitely getting warmer.
“John, I might need you to haul me back in when I'm done. So don't go too far, OK?”
He heard John's steady laugh over the radio. “As if I would.”
There was a temperature gauge on the inside of his helmet. He'd stopped looking at it when it passed one hundred degrees. The suit was trying to compensate for the increasing heat, but it wasn't up to the task. No space suit had been designed that would survive re-entry into an atmosphere unshielded. He tried to put the temperature out of his mind.
Instead, he kept cutting. He'd keep cutting as long as he could.
The laser was almost done with its work. Only a slim bit of metal remained. There'd be a nice hole in the hull when he was done, but that they could patch. Just another centimeter to burn through, and he'd be home free. He could drop the bolt and make his way back to the airlock. Andy’s arms were burning from
the effort of keeping the laser steady as the ship was buffeted around by the increasing winds.
Then he felt a pop through his fingers, and the laser went out.
“Damn it! Not now!” he said.
“What's wrong?” John asked.
“The laser died. Not meant to survive in this heat, I think. Probably fried something inside it.”
“Hang tight, I'll bring another one out to you.”
Andy looked at the little sliver left to cut, and the silver dollar of hull he'd almost separated around the bolt. “No, I think I might be able to pop it out now.” He dropped the laser cutter – it was useless now, and he didn't have the time to put it back properly. Then he pulled out a wrench and rammed it into the gap he'd cut in the metal.
With a grunt, he hauled his legs up against the hull. Using his legs and increasing weight for leverage, he grasped the wrench with both hands, twisting and pulling against the spindle of metal left holding the bomb to the ship.
He felt it give a little.
Andy's eyes were drawn to a flashing red light in his suit helmet. The temperature indicator was giving a warning – suit temp had gone up over one hundred and twenty degrees. His breaths were coming in short, ragged gasps now as he pulled with everything he had, twisted with his arms and pushed with his legs.
And then with one last terrific effort, he broke the last of the metal. The bolt came away from the ship in his hands.
Without the metal supporting his weight, his legs pushed him off from the ship, and he plummeted down toward the planet below. He felt a brief jolt as his safety line went taut on the carabiner, but the device snapped apart, weakened by the cold and then intense heat. So he fell, and fell, and kept falling.
It felt like he'd fall forever.
And then the safety line jerked him to a halt at its full length, the spot where he'd fastened it to the airlock still holding fast. The bomb dropped from his fingers. He watched it tumble away from him, falling faster than the ship. Dan’s aerobraking move had the ship falling slow enough that the bomb seemed to plummet away until it was completely out of sight. A few seconds later, a small flash lit the clouds somewhere below. Damn, that had been close.
Adventures of the Starship Satori: Book 1-6 Complete Library Page 10