“You’re afraid of us,” Andy said, bringing the rifle back to vertical to deflect the blow he knew was going to follow his words.
Kassresh lost control. The alien took a wild swing, trying to cave in Andy’s skull. Andy caught the blow on his rifle, and jumped into the impact as it came, letting it carry him up, onto the table, and across it. His body scattered his gear off the table as he went, all pattering down on the deck around him as he tumbled off the far side of the table. Andy knew he was going to have more bruises to show for this bright idea, but it had worked. He grabbed one item from the floor as he rose.
The alien was coming around the table for him. Andy could see hate, fury, shame, and fear all warring in the Naga’s eyes and body language. He wondered if the little ear slug was translating those for him along with the spoken language, or if these beings were more like humans than they seemed on the surface.
It didn’t matter. He slapped the magazine he’d picked up from the floor into his rifle, then pulled back the charging handle in one smooth motion.
He watched Kassresh’s eyes widen as the alien realized his ruse. Impossible to grab the ammunition so tantalizingly close while alien claws were reaching for his throat. But when he was thrown over the table, he had both space and time to reload his weapon.
No time to aim, but he didn’t need to, this close. He fired a burst that impacted against Kassresh’s body armor. The alien staggered back. Andy looked behind Kassresh, where the pit was still open, and fired again. Again the rounds’ impact drove the alien back. Before Kassresh could regain his balance, Andy fired an aimed shot into each of his arms. Then as the alien howled in pain, Andy followed those shots with two more bursts to the chest, where the armor was already pitted and scored. He’d punched at least one hole, and the alien bled black goo across his chest. It clutched one claw to the injury, taking two more steps back.
“Finish me, vermin. Or I will surely still find the strength to kill you,” Kassresh rasped out.
“Oh, I’m not going to finish you,” Andy said, his eyes cold. “This is for Paul, you son of a bitch.”
Realization dawned in the alien’s eyes. Andy pulled the trigger, emptying his weapon in a rapid blast of automatic fire that drove Kassresh back over the edge of the pit, down to where the Naga hatchlings were still waiting.
And as Kassresh himself had said, they were always hungry.
The first thing Beth heard as the Satori’s ramp lowered was a bell-like claxon. She stepped quickly but carefully down the ramp, watching for movement but seeing none. Once she and John were both clear of the ramp, it lifted silently back up to the ship, vanishing into the Satori’s cloak.
“So, you said you had a way to track Andy?” she whispered.
“This,” John said, handing her a wristwatch. She looked more closely at the device, and saw it wasn’t a watch at all. Instead, it showed simple readings for direction and distance. “Andy wanted me to get chipped after a scuffle a few years back, so he could find me. I said I’d do it if he did. We’re the only ones who know the codes to activate each others’ chips.”
Beth peeked at the readout on the device. It said Andy was toward the bow of the alien ship from their position, about three hundred meters away. She cursed under her breath; she’d been hoping he would be held closer to the hangar. That distance put him right near the front of the ship, by her guess. It was going to be a dangerous trip.
She’d rather avoid the aliens as much as possible. Silently, she led the way into a large corridor heading toward the bow of the alien ship. All clear. Beth knew it was too good to last. Any minute now, this area would be teeming with aliens investigating the Satori’s dramatic entrance. And this corridor seemed like their most likely avenue of approach. They had to get to a smaller side passage, and fast!
She set out in a steady jog down the hall, John following in her wake. The hall was dimly lit, and her footsteps sounded strange to her ears. They found a passage leading off to the port side of the ship and turned down it. Just in time – Beth could hear the rasping voices of the aliens now, coming along the main corridor toward the hangar.
Dan and Charline would keep the ship safe, she told herself. They had to.
But she didn’t want to be nearby if they opened up with the railguns. Time to get moving. She glanced down at the tracking device. Andy was waiting.
A few twists and turns and one trip up a flight of stairs later, and she was pretty sure she was lost. The tracker was still pointing the way toward Andy, but getting back to the Satori might be a problem.
“Any way to use this thing to get back to the ship?” she whispered to John.
“I can tweak it to home on a signal from Majel,” he replied. “But I think I can guide us back. I’ve been memorizing our path.”
Beth cocked an eyebrow. “Really?” she said dubiously.
He tapped his temple with a finger. “Good head for directions.”
She shrugged. Either way, they were committed. Best to find Andy and figure out the rest after. In the distance behind them, she heard the sounds of railgun fire punching through metal, a whistling and cracking sound, and she could feel the air moving – the hull had been penetrated, somewhere in the ship. She swallowed hard. They hadn’t brought spacesuits on this hike.
She picked up her pace.
The tracker said they had just forty meters left to go when they first heard gunfire. Beth’s first reaction was to duck back against a support beam on the wall, trying to get out of sight.
Then she realized that wasn’t one of the aliens’ guns. The sound she’d heard was the sharp report of Andy’s rifle. One shot, and then nothing else. She peeked out from behind her beam. The noise had gotten attention from a pair of the aliens, too, and they were bustling down the hall about fifty meters away.
She raised her rifle as one of them saw her, barking to alert its companion.
Beth fired a burst, taking her target square in the chest. It went down, but she wasn’t sure if it was out. Both of these aliens looked like they were wearing the armored chestplates she’d seen on the planet’s surface. She shifted her aim to the second alien. Horrified, she saw its weapon already aimed at her. She froze.
A loud report sounded next to her, and the alien flew backward, spraying black goo. She blinked, looking next to her.
“Next time, give me a little warning before you start shooting, eh?” John said.
She was shaking a little. “Nice shot.”
“Well, just don’t ask me where I was aiming.” He gave her a grin.
“Our gunfire is going to draw more. Let’s get Andy and get the hell out of here.”
They started down the hall, but before they’d gone more than a few steps they heard more gunfire from Andy’s rifle. A lot of gunfire. They both broke into a run.
Twenty-Six
Charline cursed under her breath. Dan had tucked the Satori, still invisible, back into the hangar a bit, hoping to buy them some time. The ship set nestled between a pair of the alien fighters parked on the hangar floor. So far, hiding had worked really well. A few squads of alien troops had cautiously poked their noses out into the open area, then slowly moved their way through the area. The aliens were armed and obviously looking for trouble, but they couldn’t see any. They looked nervous, to her eyes.
Hiding the ship was a brilliant idea. The curse was for the big blocky thing more of the aliens were assembling just inside the main passageway – the same passage Beth and John had entered just a few minutes ago. She wasn’t sure what they were building, but it couldn’t be good news.
“Majel, what the hell is that thing?” Dan asked. He’d spotted it too.
“Device has a large power source. Scans also indicate it houses targeting sensors, currently inactive. Hypothesis: a weapon.”
Dan looked back over his shoulder at Charline. “Knew it was too good to last. Get ready on those guns,” he said.
Charline had a plan regarding the guns. She’d written a short scr
ipt for Majel to assist her with target determination. And she’d put a large image of the hangar area on her screen, with enemy locations indicated. The radar updated her display. And she could tap the display to override Majel’s target priorities.
She knew she wasn’t going to be better than Majel at aiming the railguns. But she could help Majel do the most damage in the least time by giving her guidance and letting the computer do the aiming. Now that it was time to execute the program, her stomach was one big knot. She knew her code was good; that wasn’t the problem. But all those guns out there were going to be aimed in her direction in a minute, and not even Majel could take them all out before some of them fired.
“Hang on!” Dan said – right before he poured power into the ship’s engines. A blast of air shot from beneath the ship as the Satori lifted from the deck. He brought the ship up about three meters rapidly, with a backblast that sent the aliens nearest the ship sprawling.
“Majel, execute!” Charline all but shouted.
Instantly, the railguns came to life. The concentrated fire of all four guns slammed into the alien weapon platform. It detonated with a blinding flash, searing the aliens nearby to ash, and sending shrapnel through more that were unfortunate enough to be too close.
Majel fired a second volley, and it took Charline a moment to realize what she was shooting at. She was watching for explosions on the deck around the ship, looking for shots fired at the alien troops.
But that wasn’t where the ship was aiming.
It took under a second for Majel to execute the new instruction set. But it involved a higher level order of decision making than the computer was generally set to solving. Tied into the ancient sensor array aboard the Satori, Majel had access to enormous amounts of data about the threats presented. The program Charline initiated gave her leeway in the order and manner of dealing with those threats, but required her analysis of the threats to prioritize targeting.
The weapon under construction was an easy first target. Even though it was incomplete, the energy output it was registering was high enough to indicate an 83% chance of a single hit disabling the ship. Even incomplete, it was the biggest threat in the room, and having never seen the device assembled before, she could not accurately determine how close to completion it was.
She recognized as she fired the Satori’s guns that a high-functioning computer was in control of its targeting, much as she controlled the Satori’s guns. A millionth of a second was spent on a new thought that she was having difficulty parsing: she wished she could speak to this other computer, which was destroyed even as she had the thought. She could not trace the source code for this thought, so she set it aside and returned to her primary task.
While the railguns recharged, she analyzed the infantry around the ship. There were thirty two combat-capable aliens remaining after Majel blew their weapon platform to bits, and seven more wounded, some of whom might recover in time to rejoin the fight. Their weapons were the same type they’d used on the planet’s surface, but her scan analysis indicated they had higher energy settings available than they’d used. The weapons could be set to a lower power anti-personnel setting – or a higher powered setting more likely to damage her.
Targeting thirty two disparate targets with four railguns was a difficult problem for her to solve. In fact, she believed it insoluble – some of the aliens were outside the tracking radius of her guns, so she literally couldn’t fire on them unless the ship rotated. And the time it would take to eliminate the targets would be too long. No firing solution she could determine would eliminate all the threats before they had a high probability of destroying her.
This decision – that the problem was insoluble as set – allowed her to expand the parameters of the assignment. If targeting the troops with her guns would not eliminate the problem, what other solutions were possible?
Andy stared into the pit where the wounded Naga fought for his life against the voracious hatchlings. Kassresh seemed to be holding his own for a few moments, but black blood continued to flow from his wounds, and Andy didn’t think he could sustain the effort long. He tried to feel something – anger, hatred, pity. Anything at all would be better than this clinical detachment that he knew from past experience meant shock was starting to set in.
Kassresh roared in fury. The alien had a brief pause in the fighting, and glared up at Andy, hissing hate. “I will kill you, mammal. I will hunt you and slay you. My oath on that!”
Then the youngling Naga closed in again, and Kassresh was too busy fighting to say anything more, buried underneath a wave of hungry mouths filled with sharp teeth.
The door to the room flew open behind Andy. He lurched unsteadily to face this new threat, bringing his rifle up to his shoulder. Belatedly, he recalled that he’d burned his entire magazine on Kassresh. He brought his rifle up like a club, ready to bludgeon someone, but his exhausted arms trembled. His breath came in gasps between gritted teeth.
Inside his head, that same clinical voice was telling him he had nothing left. He was spent. But another part of him growled that thinking away. He might go down, but he would not give up.
Two figures stormed through the doorway, and Andy readied his rifle to swing at the first.
“Andy!” it said. “It’s me! It’s John!”
His vision was blurring. Andy felt his traitorous knees giving out underneath him, felt the deck rushing up to meet him. Before he could crash to the floor, an arm dipped under his, supporting him, bringing him more gently to rest.
“Easy, son,” John said. “We’re here. We’ve got you.”
Twenty-Seven
Dan had time to register the explosion of railgun rounds impacting the outer hull of the alien warship before air started venting through the gaping hole left behind.
“What the hell?” He fought hard to maintain control of the Satori as the hangar decompressed around them. The ship slipped sideways a bit, but he poured on a little more power, and brought her to a stop. The aliens scattered around the open space were less fortunate, and most of them went spinning into the air in the sudden hurricane force gale that swept the place. He watched as they were sucked out into space.
“Charline, what did you do?” Dan asked.
She didn’t answer right away, and he spared a quick glance over his shoulder at her. She was staring at her console, dumbfounded.
“Charline?” Dan brought his focus back to the controls. A few of the aliens had hung on to something, but as he watched, one of those lost its grip and went spinning through the hole out into the void.
“Wasn’t me,” Charline replied. “It was Majel.”
“Affirmative.” The computer’s voice was serene. “Assignment to eliminate threats is ninety three point seven five percent complete.”
“End program!” Charline snapped. “Return railgun control to me immediately.”
“Complying.”
Dan swept his eyes across the scene in the hangar. Pressure doors had slammed closed as soon as they detected the hull breach, and the air had very nearly evacuated from the hangar. The last two aliens were unprotected against the sudden loss of pressure. First one, then the other stopped moving and fell to the floor.
“Threat 100% eliminated,” Majel said.
Unbelievable. That was the sort of out-of-the-box thinking Dan might have come up with himself. Or Andy. But he’d never seen Majel do anything but carry out simple tasks before.
A flash of blue caught his eye, over by the hole Majel had made. He looked closely, and saw a few more little flickers of blue light covering the hole. It looked a lot like the energy field that had covered the hangar entrance.
“Majel, what’s going on with the hull breach?” he asked.
“Breach has been sealed with an electromagnetic energy field, designed to repel gaseous particles. Sensors show atmospheric pressure in the hangar is rising.”
So the aliens were pumping air back into the hangar. They’d be back, and soon. “Can the Satori get
out through that field?” he asked.
“Affirmative.”
They had their escape route. Now all they needed was the rest of their crew.
“Hurry, John,” he said, pulling up a reading of the hangar’s atmospheric pressure on his console. The gauge was rising rapidly.
John laid Andy’s head gently to the deck floor, then looked back up, taking in the room around him. The dead alien was hard to miss. So was the huge hole in the floor. There were squeaking noises coming from the hole, and he peeked over the edge.
He looked down on a pit full of what had to be the aliens’ young. At least a dozen of them milled around, occasionally snapping at each other. Their teeth looked very functional. There was an opening in the wall at the bottom of the pit, and a trail of the aliens’ black blood leading into the opening. John spotted a bit of gray, and squinted to bring it into better focus.
He knew that material. It was a scrap of a shipsuit for his crew. Now that he knew what to look for, he saw similar scraps scattered around the bottom of the pit. He felt his gorge rise. That must have been Paul’s uniform. And they must have...
He pulled his head from that line of thinking. Andy was safe, for now. And he had to get all three of them back to the ship, get the ship out safely.
“We’ve got a serious problem,” he said.
“We’ve got more than one problem,” Beth shot back. She had shut the door, and knelt nearby with her rifle trained on the doorway like she was expecting a horde of the aliens to storm through any moment. “Which one were you referring to?”
John pointed at Andy’s unconscious form. “I was hoping Andy would be able to walk out, even if we had to help. I can’t see how we can carry him out and still fight any patrols we run into.”
“I don’t see how we have much choice.”
John thought, trying to find another way. He looked at Andy, and groaned inwardly. He knew just how rock solid those muscles were, and his back started hurting at the thought of carrying him all that way. But he’d be damned if he’d leave him behind now. He stepped closer to Andy, and slung his rifle so he’d have both hands free to lift.
Adventures of the Starship Satori: Book 1-6 Complete Library Page 23