Adventures of the Starship Satori: Book 1-6 Complete Library

by Kevin McLaughlin

  Andy closed his eyes, too tired to contemplate climbing back up all that way. Too hot. He was having a harder and harder time breathing.

  “Not so fast,” came the voice over his radio. He felt a tug on his line. “I've got you!”

  “John...?” he murmured.

  “Hang tight. I'll get you up. Again. This better not become a habit, though!” He could hear John's familiar grin in his banter.

  Andy tried to keep his breathing even and steady in the increasing heat as he felt himself begin slowly ascending toward the ship again.

  Twenty-Six

  Beth smiled. She was panting now, her air very thin. The blown seal was worse than she’d thought at first, and her suit was running through its reserves like mad. She'd exchanged the main air tank once already for the backup one that was hanging on the engine room wall – just for cases like this, where someone needed more air. But her suit was leaking too fast. The suit was trying to retain proper pressure for her, but the result was a lot of air leaking out.

  So instead she'd turned down the pressure settings in her suit. She was working in the equivalent of a very high altitude environment on Earth, and her body wasn't used to it. The air leak seemed to be a little slower, anyway. The suit was compensating for less pressure loss than it had been. But the lower pressure left her feeling lightheaded, and she found it increasingly difficult to force herself to concentrate on finishing the last of these emergency repairs. More like patches than real fixes, but they would get power to where it needed to be. The rest of the damage could be cleaned up later.

  But she'd gotten the job just about done. Charline had booted Majel, and Dan had been able to use the AI's assistance to right the ship, slow their descent. That had given Beth just enough breathing room to patch Majel's server directly to the alien systems. At this point, all she needed to do was flip a switch, and Majel would be linked to the main drive, wormhole drive, the alien computer bank, and whatever else was stored in that black box of tech that she'd only just begun to understand. If Charline’s code could manage to connect the two, maybe Majel’s program could activate the drive and get them out of there.

  “Charline, it's ready,” Beth said.

  “You OK?” Charline asked for the hundredth time.

  “No, not really. Let's get this done and get out of here.”

  She didn't reply, still typing on the command line interface.

  Beth flipped the switch, and felt power hum through the ship. She'd restored the main power line from the engines to the human components. All over the ship, power should be coming back. They’d have consoles on the bridge. Life support would be back. They still needed engine control, though. That part was out of her hands. She looked over at Charline, still pounding console keys at a rate Beth didn’t think she could have managed even without a spacesuit on.

  “Power's back. Can Majel handle controls, Charline?”

  “She should be able to. I've written a new program that I think will enable her to interface with the alien computer system. Maybe. It depends on how good their programming was, really; because mine is a hatchet job. And I've got her programmed to route all commands sent to her from the bridge down to the drive components.”

  “Somehow, it just seems wrong to be using her as a glorified wifi router, though,” Beth said ruefully.

  “Not really. I've managed to extrapolate a few of the the communication protocols, but if this is going to work its going to take a lot of on the fly code adaptations. Only a system as strong as Majel could handle this,” Charline replied.

  Beth relaxed against a wall. Her arms and legs felt like lead. She heard Charline calling over the radio net. “Dan? Majel has access to the drive system. See if you can get her to fire up the engines and get us the hell out of here!”

  “Got that,” Dan said back. “I'm on it.”

  Beth got shakily to her feet. When had she sat down? She didn’t remember doing that. She’d been leaning up against the wall and then… The room was beginning to wobble around her, vision swimming. She almost fell, but Charline got a shoulder under her arm before she could.

  “Thanks,” Beth said in a whisper. She hadn't meant to whisper. What was wrong with her? Something about air... She was having a hard time thinking clearly.

  “Hang on,” Charline said, walking her over to the exit door. She swore when she saw the door, then tried poking at something on the wall next to the door, something... Beth couldn't see. Her vision was going all fuzzy now.

  “That last bomb must have damaged the door, Beth. The control panel is shot. Hang tight, going to try to force it open.”

  Charline set her down gently against the wall, but Beth couldn't keep her feet under her. She slid down the wall to sit on the floor – the drive must be back on, she realized. Normal gravity had set in again. Blackness was creeping around the edge of her vision.

  She watched Charline tug at the door, pound on it. She saw her grab a piece of scrap metal and try to force it into the center seam where the two doors slid together and met. But the door just sat there, looking all gray and solid. The black was closing in around her sight more now, and she heard a roaring sound in her ears.

  “Anyone! The doors are jammed here in the engine room,” she heard Charline's voice over the radio. “I can't get them open, and Beth is leaking air. She's almost out.”

  Beth heard the desperate fear in her ship-mate’s voice, and knew something about the situation should have bothered her, but she couldn’t think clearly enough to remember what that might be. She smiled anyway. Beth couldn’t see anything anymore, but she could still feel the drive through the hull, the steady thrum of her engines as they pushed back against the gravity of the giant planet below with their incomprehensible power. She'd fixed her baby, made it soar again. That asshole Paul had hurt her engines. But they were all better now, and it was time for a nap.

  She closed her eyes.

  Twenty-Seven

  Dan swore under his breath as he struggled with the controls, trying to get them out of the mess they were in. His attention was split, worrying both about controlling the ship and about his friends. Andy and John were back on board, and on their way to try to help Charline and Beth out of the engine room. But Beth wasn't speaking anymore. Charline said she'd passed out. Dan wondered how much air was left in Beth’s tanks. Would they be able to get the doors open in time to help her? He wanted to rush back to assist them, to do something to save her. But what could he do, wheel his chair back and stare at them while they pried the door open? No, his place was here, not back there with her…no matter what his heart was telling him, Beth’s best chance for survival lay with him getting the Satori free from Jupiter’s grasp.

  But even that was proving problematic. They’d fallen deep enough that gravity was tugging hard at the ship. Worst of all, the main drives refused to operate at full power. Maybe Majel was just having issues with the interface, but he couldn't get enough power out of the drives to get free from the planet's pull. Dan was able to aim the ship back out of the gravity well and he was giving the engines everything he could, but it wasn't enough. They weren't even holding position – they were still slowly sinking down into the mists of Jupiter. They weren't in any danger from heat build up, going this slowly. But eventually the ship would reach a crush depth or run into a blast of hurricane force wind that would toss them off course, and that would be the end of them.

  “Majel, I am running out of ideas,” Dan said. And now I'm talking to a computer, he thought to himself. He looked over at Paul, but the second dose of sedatives had finally taken full effect. He had passed out a while ago. Not that Dan really wanted his company anyway. The surge of anger he felt even thinking about Paul was a distraction he didn’t need. At least the computer’s voice interface was active again. That gave him something to ‘talk’ to.

  “How long until we reach crush depth?” Dan asked the computer.

  “At present rate of descent, approximately thirty minutes remain unti
l the ship reaches an atmospheric pressure which the hull cannot withstand.”

  Thirty minutes was more time than Beth had, from the sounds of it. But the rest of them would follow her into death if he couldn't think of something.

  “Is there any way to increase power to the primary drive?” he asked.

  It seemed like there was a long pause before the computer answered. “Analysis does not reveal any method at this time. Recommend diagnostic of main power conduit.”

  “Yeah, great. I know the main conduit is out.”

  Dan set up a monitor to track their progress – or backwards progress, in this case, as they slowly slipped deeper into Jupiter's soup. A heavy burst of wind buffeted the ship, and he struggled with the controls for a minute, trying to keep the ship on course. With the drives running this hot, if the nose tipped down even for a moment, they'd plummet down and be in even worse shape.

  “Folks, how are things going with that door?” Dan asked.

  “No luck yet, Dan. We clear of Jupiter yet?” John said over his radio.

  “We're stuck. Actually, we're worse than stuck, we've slid another few hundred feet down since the engines came back. Nothing I am doing seems to be slowing us down. How's Beth? We could use her back on her feet again.”

  A moment passed. Dan stared at the mike. Nobody talking wasn't a very good sign. Then John said “She's still out, Dan. We're working on the door.”

  “I've hooked up my oxygen to her suit, buddy style,” Charline said. “But it's only going to last so long.”

  Dan pounded his fist on his leg. Beth was going to suffocate if he didn't do something. Charline sharing her air would keep Beth alive for a little while, but when it ran out both women were going to die if they couldn’t get through that door. Without Beth, repairing the damaged conduit was out of the question, and that meant there was no way to increase the engine’s power. They were stuck.

  “We've got a laser cutter, Dan,” said Andy. “But it's a small one, not going to cut through the door too fast. We can't budge it, even with a crowbar. It's jammed.”

  “Got you,” Dan replied. Up to him, then. And maybe...Majel. “Got an idea. Maybe. Charline? Need your help on this one.”

  Dan did a quick system check on the ship. Yes, all major systems seemed to be back up and functioning. More or less, anyway. He had power to everything he needed. Now all he needed to do was solve a riddle that no one had been able to solve for all the months every genius John could hire had been working on the project. Oh, and he had twenty-eight minutes. Dan rolled his eyes. No pressure.

  “I'm here. What's up?” Charline said.

  “You've got Majel directly interfaced with the alien computer, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “So does she have access to the database?”

  “I think so...? I can check.” There was a long pause. Then she said “Yes, relaying to your station now.”

  Thousands of entries whipped across his screen, each in a block of twelve incomprehensible symbols. Each symbol was color coded. He'd seen some of these before during briefings on the ship’s drive. No one had been able to translate what the symbols or colors meant. Nobody had any clue, except that they seemed to be some kind of sorting system for cataloging wormhole destinations.

  But Dan had an idea. They had a new data set that all those geniuses hadn’t before - a new set of wormhole coordinates from the last, short jump they’d made. If the data sets were stored in any sort of rational pattern, that might just give them what they needed to solve the riddle.

  “Charline, we've used the wormhole drive within this system now,” Dan said.

  “Yeah, I noticed,” she said.

  “Does the alien computer keep a log of destinations visited? We might be able to use that to get out of here.”

  “I don't know... I can try to write a search program for Majel to check,” Charline said.

  Her voice sounded hazy to Dan. He'd heard that sound before – she was losing too much oxygen to keep air in Beth's suit. That meant they were both running out of air. If Charline passed out before she could help Dan solve this, then they would be truly out of options.

  “Charline, you have to focus,” Dan said. “You have to get that search program running.”

  “I’m trying. Just…getting hard to think,” Charline said. Dan could hear her shaky gasps over the radio.

  He cursed under his breath. This was the solution. It had to be! Dan was certain he was right about this. But it sounded like Charline was going to pass out before she could get the program entered, and he didn’t have the foggiest idea how to do it himself.

  Twenty-Eight

  Back when John's crews had first been tunneling out the base on the moon, there had been a cave in. A support they’d used to shore up the roof while they mined had snapped under the strain, and debris had rained down, filling the passageway. Nobody was hurt by the falling rock – but two men had been trapped on the other side. They were in spacesuits, with a few hours of air left when the rock fell.

  John had been there. He personally participated in helping to move some of the rubble out of the way. The whole crew had worked in shifts, some shoring up the tunnel while others moved rocks. And he had kept on the radio through most of it, talking to the men trapped inside. He'd heard their voices growing more frightened as their air began to run down. Then he'd heard them get hazy, confused, as the oxygen level in their suits dropped and they began suffering from carbon dioxide poisoning. His crews had gotten the men out, just in time, and they'd made a rapid recovery once returned to a pressurized room. It was a near thing. John redoubled all his safety precautions for the construction crews after that event, which saved them from repeating it.

  John could hear the same confusion in Charline's voice now. Her suit just wasn't able to pump out enough air for both her and Beth. By trying to give Beth some air, Charline wasn't getting enough herself.

  He had listened in on Dan and Charline’s conversation long enough to figure out what Dan was up to. The main drive was not getting them out. With Beth down, they weren't going to get the drive back to full power in time to do any good. Which left the wormhole drive as their last option, if Dan could somehow make it work without getting them all killed. But he was going to need Charline to make the plan work. John bowed his head, sagging forward with the weight of what he knew he had to do. If Charline couldn't get the job done, they were all dead, he reminded himself. That didn't make the call any easier. This was the price of being the leader, he reminded himself. He was the one who had to bear the weight of making the life and death decisions. Even if it meant condemning a friend to death so that the rest of them could live.

  “Charline,” he said into the radio, “I need you to disconnect your oxygen from Beth's suit. You're not getting enough air. We need you to be able to focus.”

  “John, no!” Dan said over the radio.

  John ignored him. “Do it now, Charline.”

  “If I disconnect, Beth could die,” Charline said.

  “And if you pass out, we all die,” John replied.

  “I'm not doing it! I'm not killing her,” Charline said, gasping out the last word.

  “You can't do this, John. This is Beth we're talking about!” Dan said.

  John slammed his fist into the wall. “Damn it, Dan! I don't want this either. But Charline's barely staying awake right now. You can hear it in her voice as well as I can. If she loses consciousness, can you save the ship without her?”

  Silence over the radio.

  “Well?” John's voice was furious, insistent. “Can you?”

  “No,” Dan's reply came back quietly.

  “Then what do you think we should do?” John asked.

  “That's cold, John,” Dan said. John could hear the pain in his friend's voice, and it wrenched his heart. He prayed he was making the right call.

  “I don't think I can do this. There has to be some other way,” Charline said.

  “We're out of time
, Charline. We need you. You need your air. If you can't do this, none of us will survive. Including Beth,” John said. “We're all in your hands.”

  Charline bent over Beth's still form. She held back a sob, barely. This was someone she knew! Someone who was trusting Charline to get her through this! How could she just abandon her to die? But John wasn’t wrong. She could feel herself growing more light-headed by the moment. Another minute and she wouldn’t be able to think clearly enough to help Dan with the computers. If she couldn’t work her magic, then they were all going to die. It was the hardest thing Charline had ever had to do.

  “I'm sorry, Beth,” she said. Then she unclipped her buddy-breathing hose from Beth's suit.

  She knew John was right. But it hurt. It hurt so much. She had her medical training from working as a volunteer on ambulance crews while she was in college. She liked the adventure – until the first person her team couldn't save. The more experienced guys said it would get better with time. But it didn't. It got worse, until she couldn't stand the guilt from not being able to help someone anymore. She quit the team and set aside any thoughts of healing people, turning her mind completely inward toward computers and the programming which made them run. If a computer died on you, well, it wasn’t like it was alive. If you couldn’t fix it you went and bought a new one.

  As hard as the deaths those strangers had been when she worked on the ambulance, doing this felt infinitely worse. Charline hadn’t known them, after all. And she'd been fighting to save them, not pulling loose the air hose that was keeping them alive. Back then she’d failed a stranger. Today Charline felt like she was murdering a friend.