And god knew, she’d gone along with him. All the way.
But at some point they were going to get caught. They’d be forced to turn the ship over. She’d lose the project that she’d spent years working on. She didn’t have any idea what they’d make of Majel, once word got out of a fully self-aware AI. Would they love her, or kill her?
Alarms flashed on her console, waking her from her thoughts. It was a proximity alarm, which shouldn’t have been possible. They were clear of the debris. But the scan showed an enormous object immediately behind the Satori.
“What the hell is that?” she exclaimed. The rear camera told her part of the answer. It was a ship. A massive ship, bigger than the Naga warships. Almost impossibly large.
“The ship decloaked immediately behind us. I suspect they can see through our cloak,” Majel warned.
“Decloaked?” Beth said. The Naga didn’t have that technology. That the Satori did was only because it was a remnant of some lost, ancient civilization that the Naga had annihilated. But clearly, it was technology that was not as lost as she’d thought. “How long until we can engage a wormhole?”
“Eighty-three seconds. The ship is attempting to signal to us. I cannot translate the message.”
“I suspect they’re telling us to pull over. The hell with that,” Beth said. “Give the engines everything you can, but keep the wormhole drive spooling up.”
That was their best chance of escaping this monster. If they could jump, they’d be safe. The Satori leapt forward, her drives straining to build up speed.
A blue light snapped from the other ship to surround the Satori with a crackling field. The engines continued to whine in protest, but their forward movement slowed to a crawl, then stopped. They were being pulled back toward the other ship.
“Shit, tractor beams too?” Beth said.
“It would appear so,” Majel said.
“How long on the drive?”
“Twenty-three seconds.”
It was going to be very close. She wasn’t even one-hundred percent sure the wormhole would still open under these conditions, but it remained their best shot at escape. The beam was tugging them back toward the mammoth ship. Beth could see a hold opening - presumably where they were to be deposited by the tractor beam.
“Majel, at two seconds, flip the nose of the ship to aim into the tractor beam, then fire up a wormhole.”
“To let the tractor beam drag us into the wormhole?”
“That’s the idea,” Beth said.
“Insufficient data to determine if the maneuver will be successful,” Majel said.
“You have a better idea? I’m all ears,” Beth said.
“Engaging maneuver,” Majel replied, deadpan as ever.
The Satori fired thrusters, flipping the nose of the ship end over end, to face back directly toward the other vessel. The drives were still running - now they were actually accelerating faster than they had been, and the ship seemed to leap closer.
“Now!” Beth cried.
The wormhole drive fired, igniting space around the Satori in flickering bands of light.
Seven
Dan sat on the bed, gradually exercising his legs. He needed to be stronger. Faster. If he’d been a little quicker back there on the moon, maybe he could have stopped the attackers. Or at least slowed them down a little more.
Instead he’d woke up here, wherever here was. A small cell with a tiny cot, a wheelchair, a chamber pot, and not much else. He’d been stewing inside for hours. How many, he had no idea; they’d taken his watch away. He had his shoes and the gym clothes he’d been wearing to work out when he was taken, which had grown pretty rank with the passage of time.
There wasn’t much he could do but prepare for whatever was coming next as best he could, and that meant strengthening those legs. He was willing to bet he could stand here, even with Earth’s gravity yanking him down. But he was certain they had a camera hidden somewhere in the room to watch him. If his captor knew enough about him to know he needed a wheelchair, then he wasn’t about to disabuse them of the notion.
He kept his exercises discrete. He could move the muscles without appearing to by shifting his weight just right. It was enough to tire them out, so it ought to be doing something.
A rap at the door distracted him. He froze, but no one barged in. The rap was repeated.
“Enter,” he said.
There was a jangling at the door outside, and then it opened inward toward him. A uniformed man stepped into the room, and Dan’s jaw dropped.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” the man said, smirking a little.
“Harry?” Dan asked. “Hell, man, aren’t you supposed to be on Mars still?”
“No way, dude. Just got back. You lose track of time after you quit the service?”
Dan did the mental math. Shit, had it really been that long? They’d been busy up on John’s base, between rescuing each other from aliens and exploring two new solar systems. Somehow he’d completely lost track of the timing on the Mars landing that had once been his dream. It hadn’t seemed as important anymore, not after seeing the things he had.
“What are you doing here?” Dan asked.
“I’m here to get you out. For a while at least,” Harry replied. He paused for a moment. “You got yourself in some deep shit, you know.”
“I gathered,” Dan replied. He kept his answer short, hoping to get a little more information about what was going on. Harry Wheeler was here. In uniform. That implied this was an Air Force facility. They’d been hit by US armed forces, which was crazy, but wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility.
The moon wasn’t sovereign territory for anyone, so the US military could hit it. They’d need to get judicial permission to attack US citizens, in theory at least. But he knew enough about classified military operations to know such permissions were not hard to acquire…and were on occasion ignored if the need was strong enough.
Wheeler hesitated a moment longer, and then shrugged. “Come on, let me at least get you out of this dump for a little while.”
He reached out a hand, and Dan took it. With that small assist he could probably have levered himself over to the wheelchair, but he wasn’t willing to reveal how much his legs had recovered. Not yet, anyway. Being in the hands of the US Air Force was both better and worse than a lot of other possibilities. If it had been a corporate attack, it would have been illegal, after all. There could have been a rescue operation to bust them out, and their captors would have no legal recourse.
Dan knew the Air Force. He’d been a major before his forced retirement, after all. If that was who had them they’d be treated well enough. But escape was going to be next to impossible. Where would they go? They could never build a new base; it would just be attacked again. If they escaped they’d be enemies of the most powerful state on the planet.
All that meant he would need to tread very carefully. The better if these people underestimated him, at least for now. He accepted the offered hand and used it to help lever his body sideways into the wheelchair. Dan was careful to leave his legs limp during the process.
“First thing, how about a shower, man?” Wheeler asked him. He waved a hand in front of his smile in a theatrical manner.
“Works for me,” Dan said. He allowed the other man to wheel him from the room and down the hall like he was an invalid. It wasn’t a new feeling to him. Plenty of people saw him in a chair with useless legs, and thought that meant they were helping him out by pushing his chair around. He’d tried explaining to some, early on. Pushing him wasn’t helping. All it did was strip away the little independence he had remaining.
He wasn’t going to say anything right now though. Not only would it not help, but that might have been precisely the point. He was, after all, still a prisoner. Even if Harry had been a friend, Dan knew he couldn’t trust the man right now.
A short while later, Dan had to agree that the shower was a good idea. He reached over and shut off the fl
ow of water, then snagged the towel from where it was hooked on the wall outside the stall. The little stool he sat on didn’t have a lot of play for moving about, but he managed fairly well without using his legs. Dan was still certain that he had eyes on him. Just because he couldn’t see the cameras didn’t mean they weren’t there.
“You all set in there?” Harry called from outside.
“Yeah, just a minute,” Dan said. He picked up the dirty clothes he’d been wearing from the floor where he had dumped them. They stank of stale sweat and fear. He didn’t want to put the things back on, but it wasn’t like he had a lot of other options.
Harry’s face popped around the corner. “Ugh. Burn that stuff. Here, I brought you something.”
He handed Dan a hangar, with a freshly pressed set of Air Force blues hanging from it. His eyebrows shot up when he saw the major rank on the shoulders. This wasn’t some spare Harry had laying around, then. He’d procured it especially for the occasion.
“Nobody going to gripe about my wearing the old rank?” Dan asked.
“Hey, you earned it. Besides, you retired, right? Early retirement?”
Dan nodded.
“Then they can’t take that away from you. Not ever,” Harry said. He tossed another little bundle. Dan caught it before it rolled off his lap into a puddle. Socks. Underwear. Shoes. He was willing to bet it was all his size, too.
“Give me a minute to change and I’ll be right out,” Dan said.
It felt odd to be back in uniform. When he’d cast this off, he was pretty sure it had been forever. The Air Force didn’t need a crippled pilot in its ranks. He’d been honored enough, offered a great deal for his retirement, and sent on his way.
It had been easy, not looking back. There was far too much to do out there, at John’s base and beyond with the work they were doing on the Satori. But damned if part of him didn’t feel good about getting back into this uniform. With his legs recovering, was there a chance he could even come back? Be brought back to active duty? The emotions around that were all sorts of conflicted.
The service was what had come between him and Beth in the first place. That and her own career; but his work for the Air Force in space most of all. Even so, getting back in their good graces now might be a boon to all of them, especially if they’d been captured as well. He didn’t know if anyone had managed to get away, or if they’d all been caught.
Time to get answers, then. He shifted himself onto the wheelchair and spun the wheels to bring himself out of the shower stall.
“I’m ready, Harry. What’s next?”
Eight
The Satori jumped back into Earth-space in a burst of energy. There was no way to mask their arrival. Anyone watching would know the ship had returned, and Beth wasn’t pleased with losing the element of surprise. Even so, the cloaking device was functioning just fine, so it wasn’t like they could detect what she was doing next. They might have even missed her arrival. Space was a big place, after all. They’d have to practically be looking in the right place at the right time.
“Still no signs of pursuit?” Beth asked. She was less afraid of that now than she had been. The monstrous ship hadn’t chased them to the dust world. Either it couldn’t track them through the wormhole jump, or it elected not to follow. Either way, the long wait in orbit there while the wormhole drive recharged had been enormously unpleasant. She’d been certain that the thing was going to arrive at any moment and pin them before they had enough charge to jump clear again.
“Negative, but continuing to monitor for signs of wormhole entry,” Majel replied.
Where it had come from, and what was it doing in Naga space? Was it what had destroyed the Naga ship? The thing could cloak, but she didn’t know if it had a wormhole drive like the Satori or not. She had a hunch though. She’d seen the lines of the vessel, and she recalled what the ruined alien wreck John found had looked like before they had rebuilt it into the Satori. The similarities were too large to miss. Beth had a hunch they’d found the ancient civilization that had built the wormhole drive. The one the Naga feared so much.
If it had been that ship which so completely destroyed the Naga space station, she could understand their fear. But the Naga thought that race was gone. Wiped out, defeated. Why were they suddenly back?
She pushed the worries from her mind for the moment. There were more immediate concerns to deal with. The strange ship could wait - for now.
“Now we need to find our friends and get them free,” Beth said.
“Agreed. I have the frequencies for the location trackers John and Andrew had embedded, but the range of the devices is limited,” Majel said. “We’d need to be very close before I could locate them in that manner.”
Beth had forgotten about the trackers. That’s how they’d found Andy when he was held captive by the Naga. Even if it wouldn’t help right in this moment it might prove useful later. There had to be another way to find out where they had gone.
“Majel, the energy signature of the Naga fighter is pretty different from any Earth tech, right?” she asked.
“Absolutely. The Naga use an energy storage method we do not entirely understand.”
“Can you scan for it?” Beth asked. They were soaring past the moon, so they should be close enough.
“Doing it now,” Majel said. “Odd. No sign of the fighter at the lunar base. Either it was destroyed, or moved.”
“I’m going to bet they moved it. We might have taken the Satori beyond their reach, but if those boys were sent to the base to come home with a spaceship, I’m betting they grabbed the one which was still there.”
“No human life signs at the base,” Majel said. “I’m only detecting one thing alive there.”
“What?” Beth asked, surprised there was anything left behind.
“The insect picked up by the crew remains on the base.”
Beth laughed. “How did they miss snagging that thing?” She would have thought the chance to examine such an obviously alien species would have been high on the invaders’ to-do list.
Majel activated one of her screens, replaying a bit of tape from the base cameras during the attack. Beth’s lips pursed. She didn’t like being reminded of the disaster, and watching Linda pinned down by enemy fire wasn’t much more pleasant as a replay. But then she saw what Majel was pointing out. The tank containing the damned bug had smashed. It scampered away out of the camera’s line of sight. It must have gotten away from them. She chuckled at the idea of soldiers trying to chase down the little thing and giving up in frustration.
If there was no one left behind, they had to have been taken somewhere else. Time to find out where. Beth plotted a new course, swinging around the moon and heading for Earth. Odds were excellent that the Naga fighter was there, and she expected wherever it was her friends would be as well. Find the ship, find her crew. Then she could bust them the hell out of there.
“How’s our railgun load?” Beth asked.
“We’re full on everything. The ship was ready to go when the base was attacked,” Majel replied. “You planning to go in guns blazing?”
“I’m not planning anything…yet,” Beth said. “We need more information first. Then we act.”
“Logical enough.”
The crossing would have taken a good chunk of a day for any Earth ship. The Satori cruised that distance in an hour. Still, it was a damnably long hour. Beth knew they’d already wasted so much time. The second jump to the dust world had drained the wormhole battery entirely. Recharging had taken far too long.
“Inserting us into a low Earth orbit,” Majel said. “I’m starting my scans.”
“Let’s hope they haven’t figured out some sneaky way around the cloaking device,” Beth groused.
“Unlikely.”
Majel was right. The Naga had scan systems that could pick the cloaked ship up in atmosphere by spotting the wake her passage made in the air, but even they couldn’t detect her in space. It was very unlikely that anyone on
Earth could find her. Beth was just nervous with so much riding on her shoulders.
They were swinging out over North America when the console pinged. Beth glanced down. The scan was getting a positive reading. The Naga fighter was somewhere in the Western United States.
That wasn’t ideal news. It was going to be a hell of a lot harder busting them out of the US than it would have been in some less technologically savvy country. Beth had been assuming it was a corporation that had initiated the raid, maybe the same one that had gone after the ratzard goo. But what if she was wrong? What if this was a government op? That was going to complicate things. She needed more intel.
“Can you pinpoint the location?” she asked Majel.
“Working on it. Looks like it’s a few hundred meters underground in Nevada.”
“See what else you can dig up about the location,” Beth said. She followed her own advice and began hunting the internet. Google Maps wasn’t giving her much, though. No towns nearby. The broken remnants of a military base were only half a mile distant though. Probably some sort of underground bunker had been built in concert with the base, decommissioned, and then restored to service by the attackers. But who were they? The property was still listed as being owned by the federal government, but that didn’t mean anything. Someone could have rented it, or could just be squatting on the site without permission.
Before she could continue her search any further, alarms blasted across her console. One of the screens lit up with new course, heading, and other scan telemetry data. The Satori’s engines thrummed into life as Majel took control of the ship again, blasting forward with much more speed then they’d been using before.
“What the hell is going on, Majel?”
“Massive energy surge in high orbit,” the AI replied. “Three unknown ships have just arrived in Earth space. Maneuvering into scan range.”
Nine
Adventures of the Starship Satori: Book 1-6 Complete Library Page 58