Linda blinked a few times. She looked shocked and confused. Charline could see awareness and memory leaking back into her eyes, and then all at once Linda burst into tears. She was wracked with long, heaving sobs.
Charline didn’t know what to do. She had no idea how to help. She wrapped her arms around Linda and held her close, murmuring comforting words into her ear as the sobs slowly eased and turned into softer, more mournful crying.
Twenty-Six
John checked his air gauge. They were out of time. Technically, they’d already passed the point where their ascent wouldn’t be safe, but they were rapidly heading into territory where they would have to go back to the surface and risk the bends, or suffocate.
He looked over at Andrew, who nodded and gave a thumbs up motion. He agreed. They’d done all they could here. If the Cyanaut conclave was going to reach a decision, they’d have to do it on their own.
“You are leaving?” the whale colony thought at him. It was still unnerving to have his mind read like that. No matter how calm his logical brain wanted to be, part of him rebelled at the idea.
“We need to go,” John replied. “Without our ship, we have limited air here. We will die if we do not ascend.”
“We understand. We will guard you while you surface. We are very sorry about what our brethren did.”
The colony even sounded apologetic, at least in his mind. Not that their apologies made the situation even a little better. He was pretty sure that if Dan had been able to bring the ship back, he already would have. Something had gone wrong with the wormhole jump. Without the Satori, they were stranded here. John had no idea how he was going to get the team home. He wanted to rage at them, but it wouldn’t have done any good. It wasn’t their fault, it was his. Beth and Dan were gone because he’d led them here.
John kicked his flippered feet, beginning the long, slow climb back toward the surface. “We’ll have to take it slowly,” he said to Andrew.
“Gonna be tight.”
“We’ll make it,” John said.
There was a flash of movement from off to John’s left. He turned to look. One of the sharks was coming straight at him, moving torpedo fast. He tried to raise his gun , but was only able to bring it up to his chest level before he thing closed with him. Toothy jaws snapped tight around the weapon, narrowly missing his hands. John couldn’t get the weapon back under his control, but he didn’t dare let go, either. It was the only thing keeping those teeth away from him.
“Desist! These are guests!” the whale colony said, swimming fast toward the melee.
“We don’t need them anymore,” the shark colony replied. “We have what we wanted from them.”
“What have you done?” John shouted.
“We have the cure. Now we will spread it throughout our world.”
The surface team. They must have found a way onto land and hit Charline and Linda! He’d been so sure they couldn’t get out of the water, but clearly he’d been wrong. Again. Were the women even still alive? John felt his heart sink with the hopelessness of it all. First Dan and Beth. Now Charline and Linda? He’d led them all into disaster. He could feel his fingers slipping from the speargun as the shark twisted him about, working to dislodge him. The whale colony wasn’t going to arrive in time.
Just as he thought he couldn’t hold on another moment, there was a bright flash and the left side of the shark’s body erupted in a splash of red.
John fell backward from the thing’s body, dazed by the burst. The shark flopped a little, but it was dying quickly, bleeding out into the water. John looked over toward Andrew, who was already reloading his speargun.
“Explosive tips,” Andrew said. “I thought we might need some serious firepower down here. You OK? That went off damned close to you.”
John nodded, unable to speak for the moment. He felt dazed. The concussive force had been like a mighty slap. The suit protected him somewhat, but he was probably going to be hurting a lot more once the shock wore off.
“We’ve got more of them coming,” Andrew said. “Stay close to me.”
John looked up to see over a dozen of the sharks closing. Several of them peeled off to keep the whales at bay, but the rest drove straight on toward the humans. He realized he’d lost his gun when the spearhead blew. It was probably still in the maw of the dead shark, on its way to the bottom. That left Andrew as their sole defense. There were too many targets for one speargun to deal with, and both of them knew it.
Without warning two of the sharks exploded, bits of them floating off in all directions. The remaining sharks seemed confused. They twisted around in their swim patterns, trying to evade whatever had killed their brethren. It didn’t work. Two more blew apart in flashes of fire.
“That’s railgun fire!” Andrew shouted.
It had to be the Satori, returned at last! John’s heart surged as the ship slipped into sight, chasing a few more of the sharks. Another one was cut in half by a railgun round. The others must have decided they’d had enough, because they split and swam away in different directions.
The Satori slowed and drifted toward them. Once it was close enough, John could see Beth sitting at the controls.
“You looked like you two could use a cavalry rescue,” Beth said.
“You were just in time,” John replied. “Have you checked with the surface team?”
“Already picked them up. Linda’s in a bad way. Charline is in the back taking care of her. “
“And Dan?” John asked. He didn’t want to ask. He knew it wasn’t going to be good. If his friend was all right, he’d be the one sitting at the steering console, instead of Beth.
Beth’s face fell. “We were captured by the Naga after the jump. I hid. He was taken. I had to leave him, John!”
The despair and hurt in her voice broke his heart. Those two were going to drive him crazy, one of these days. They’d always been something special. That they had allowed their damned careers and self-involved thinking get in the way of that had been a tragedy. One he’d been hoping might correct itself if they spent enough time together. Maybe it finally had.
“We’re not going to leave him,” John assured her.
He hoped they would not have to, anyway. John was pragmatic enough to realize they were going to have an uphill battle trying to fight their way through to him. It might be damned near impossible. The station would be very well defended. They’d already seen the fighter ships, and who knew how many armed guards were stationed aboard? But they couldn’t leave him. He just needed to find a way.
“We can reach him,” the whale colony thought at John.
“What? How?”
“They have implanted one of our kind on him. We can feel his thoughts. We can connect you to him. And if he is very brave, we might be able to do a bit more. We owe you that much, for our kind’s treachery against you.”
Twenty-Seven
Dan screamed again as Garul pressed his device up against his ribs. Tears streaked down his face. His back went rigid from the waves of agony coursing through him. He ground his teeth together, trying without success to hold back another cry of pain. His body jerked so hard that he felt something give way in his back.
“We can keep this going forever,” Garul said. “That was your spine breaking. No matter. We can repair it. We can fix all of the damage we do to you. I will do this again and again until you tell me what I want to know.”
The Naga set his pain making device aside and picked up another tool. Dan shuddered as the thing was placed against his back. Every inch of his body felt raw, but even the lightest touch against his spine burned with a familiar agony. Had he really broken his spine again? He remembered the months of rehab just to get some control back over his legs, after the car hit him. The thought of going through all of that again was too much. They were breaking him down, and he knew it.
This new device didn’t bring pain, though. If anything, it numbed the agony, and he was able to take a deep breath without it feeling
like his lungs were on fire. He gasped, taking in big gulps of air in shaky breaths.
“You see? I can be kind as well as cruel,” Garul said. “Now tell me what I need to know. Then all of this will be over.”
“You’ll just kill me,” Dan said.
“Perhaps. Or perhaps not. There might be other uses for you.”
Dan remembered what the others had told him about Paul. They’d thought he was dead, but the Naga had saved him, rebuilt him. Now he was some sort of cyborg killing machine working for the enemy. It was only dumb luck that they hadn’t managed to get whatever information they needed out of him. Perhaps the damage to his brain had been too severe, or maybe he just didn’t know well enough where Earth was in the universe to be useful to them.
Dan did. He’d always loved astronomy, even as a kid. He could list enough nearby stars, complete with their colors and proximity that the Naga would have no trouble narrowing their search down. But he’d be damned if he was going to give them that information.
“No? Then we begin again,” Garul said.
The shock as the pain device touched him again felt even worse than before. The brief pause in his agony made the renewed torture even worse.
But then it was gone, as quickly as it had come. Dan could feel that Garul was still touching him with the tool, but it wasn’t working on him anymore. He felt somehow detached from his body, like he was floating free inside his head. He tried to twitch a finger and couldn’t. He felt his head loll forward, tried to stop the motion, but had no control over his muscles. Was he dying?
“No,” came the thought in his mind. “We are shielding you.”
At first Dan thought he was going crazy, but then the images of oceans came to his mind, of blue water and massive fish swimming through the waves. It was the Cyanauts! They were talking to him, and shielding him somehow.
He was vaguely aware of Garul muttering something about weak mammals. The Naga was going for his healing device again. He must assume Dan had lost consciousness. The Naga had no idea what their slaves were really capable of. If they knew more, Dan thought they would have destroyed this planet rather than taking Cyanauts as translation tools.
“Can you help me?” Dan thought at the Cyanaut.
“We can disable him briefly. You will need to escape.”
“How?” Dan thought.
A map appeared in his mind, images of place after place, a set of directions pieces together from the minds of many Naga, all of them walking around the station with Cyanaut earpieces. The map led to a hangar full of fighters.
“You want me to fly one of their ships out of here?” Dan asked.
“You think you can,” came the reply. “We saw that in your mind.”
“Maybe,” Dan thought back. He wasn’t really sure. It was alien tech. There was no telling how long it would take him to learn it…
Another download into his brain, sent by the Cyanauts. Suddenly he knew all about how to fly the Naga fighter craft.
“You guys are really useful,” Dan thought. “But I still need to get past Garul.”
“We will disable him. Then you must go quickly. Your ship will distract them. They will open the fighter bays and launch against your ship. You must be ready to fly out when they do.”
“Thank you,” Dan thought back. With their help, he had a shot. It was a long shot, but it was a lot more than he’d had before. He couldn’t have lasted much longer under Garul’s tender care. “How can we ever repay you for your help?”
“It is we who are repaying you, at great risk. But our race has dishonored itself. We will redeem ourselves by aiding you,” the Cyanauts thought at him. “When we release you back to your body, you must be ready to act immediately.”
“I’m ready,” Dan thought.
With a snap he was back in command of his body again. He tapped the controller on the right arm of his chair, bringing the wheelchair up to full power. Beth had tinkered with this thing. She’d said that he might need to have something with more juice than an ordinary motorized chair, someday. She was right.
Garul looked up at him when he moved. “Back awake? Good.”
Then the Naga’s eyes lost focus. It seemed like he was staring into the distance at something that only he could see. That had to be the distraction. Dan shoved the throttle all the way forward on the chair, smashing it against Garul. The Naga went down, collapsing half on top of Dan. His injured body screamed in protest at the additional weight, but he managed to reach down and grab the Garul’s sidearm. He contemplated firing it, but there was no way to know if shooting the pistol would set off some sort of alarm. Instead he slammed the pistol down into the Naga’s head as hard as he could.
“There, you bastard,” he said, heaving Garul’s body from his lap onto the floor. “Enjoy the headache. And explaining how you let a useless mammal get away from you.”
He patted down the Naga’s body, looking for any other tools which might prove useful. A small box looked interesting, and a palm sized card looked promising as well. He took them both, and then turned to go. It was well past time to get the hell out of there.
Twenty-Eight
The doors opened smoothly for Dan, reminding him strangely of John’s base on the moon. The almost silent snik as they recessed into the walls on either side of the doorway was almost comforting in its familiarity.
Nothing else about the place was. The light had a yellowish-green cast. The walls were marked in a language he didn’t understand, and the Cyanaut seemed unable to translate text the way it did spoken language. Even the hallway outside his cell was shaped just a little bit differently from how a human would have made it.
He didn’t need to understand the language or like the architecture to know how to get where he was going, though. The map which the Cyanaut implanted in his memory was still there. Dan turned left out of the door, zipping down the hallway as quickly as his chair would carry him. So far he hadn’t run into any Naga, but his luck might not hold out forever. The sooner he could get to the hangar where the fighters were kept, the better.
At the next T intersection he turned right, and then left again. He had the vague idea that he was proceeding further away from the hub of the station, moving toward the outer edge of the ring he was on. Which made sense. The fighters would be stored closest to space.
“I hope you were right about those directions,” he muttered softly.
There was no reply from the Cyanaut in his ear. It hadn’t spoken to him since he left the cell. It was as much at risk here as he was. If he was killed trying to escape, it might die as well. But with luck he could get both himself and his little ally away.
Finally he sat in front of the last door in his mental map. On the other side of the door ought to be a hangar bay filled with a dozen or so fighters. He rolled up to the door, but it stayed closed. Dan narrowed his eyes, looking for some sort of latch or sensor that needed to be tripped so that he could enter. He couldn’t very well wait for the Naga to open the door for him!
The station shook, tremors running through the hull beneath his wheels. More shockwaves hit, and an alarm began to sound. The lighting changed, bright green lights flashing in a steady staccato pattern. That had to be the Satori starting her attack run. They were here to distract the enemy, and buy him time to escape. Pretty soon there would be a whole squad of pilots making for this bay to fly their fighters out into battle. He was out of time.
Dan examined the door carefully. There was a little window off to the left side. A control panel? Maybe some sort of retina scanner? If that’s what it was, he was out of luck. He had Garul’s pistol, but that wasn’t going to be enough to fight off an squadron worth of angry Naga.
The panel made him think of the little card he’d swiped from Garul, though. It had looked like an ID card of some sort, although there wasn’t any picture. Maybe it was set up to allow access? He mentally crossed his fingers and held the card up to the little window.
Nothing happened at first. Then
the door slide silently open, revealing the hangar beyond. He heaved a huge sigh of relief. If he hadn’t thought to search the body…!
“You could have warned me that the door was locked,” he murmured to the Cyanaut in his ear. There was no reply.
The door slid shut behind him as soon as he entered. Inside the bay were two rows of six fighters. How many wings of fighters were on this station? The way these were packed in, the place could hold hundreds of them. The Satori would be incredibly outmatched.
The alarms were still blaring. Pilots would be pouring into this room any moment. He was out of time. He rolled over to one of the furthest fighters, hoping that maybe there would be a little less notice taken of the more distant craft. Each fighter had a railed ladder attached which led up to the cockpit.
This was going to be the tricky part. If he just climbed in and left the wheelchair at the base of the ladder, the pilots would see it immediately when they came in. He had to get the wheelchair out of the way. Thinking fast, he powered down the chair right next to the ladder. Then he tore a strip from his shirt and used it to lock the little control joystick in the forward position. As soon as he turned on the wheelchair it would dash forward at maximum speed until it crashed into something. The wall where he’d aimed it was in shadow. With luck it wouldn’t be noticed.
He grabbed the rail of the ladder. He noticed as he did that it only extended partway down to the floor. It was built to be climbed by someone who still had use of his legs. If he slipped, or was jarred loose, he was never going to be able to make it.
Dan tightened his grip as best he could. He pulled himself most of the way out of the chair, and then tapped the on button of his wheelchair. It activated with a beep and then sped away, stopping with a thump once it hit the wall. As he’d hoped, the bump knocked his makeshift tie loose, and the wheelchair stopped in place again.
Adventures of the Starship Satori: Book 1-6 Complete Library Page 53