Dan wheeled himself side by side with Harry as they entered an elevator. He hadn’t had to insist on using his own arms for propulsion this time, which he wasn’t sure was Harry suddenly being more thoughtful or not. It was good enough for him that he was able to take a little bit of control back.
“Where are you taking me?” Dan asked.
“You’ll see,” Harry said, waving his fingers theatrically.
The coy act was grating on his nerves. Harry was going to string this along for every bit of time that he could manage. Dan was giving him a little slack. The man had gotten him out of his cell, managed to find him a shower, and acquired fresh clothes. But he wasn’t sure how much more of this he could take.
Harry seemed to sense that he was nearing the end of his patience. “Relax. We’ll be there in a minute. I could get in some shit for showing you this, but… Let’s say I don’t think you’re leaving here any time soon, eh?” He winked after he said that. Actually winked. Dan was about ready to stand up out of his wheelchair and slug the guy. It might give away that his legs were a hell of a lot better than they thought, but it would probably be worth it.
Before he could do anything rash, the elevator doors snapped open. Harry turned away and strode out. Dan followed, grumbling under his breath.
He didn’t grumble long, though. What was just outside those doors took his breath away.
It was a massive hangar. Easily ten times the size of the one they’d built to house the Satori. It was about two football fields placed end to end. The ceiling towered overhead. Gangways ran along the outer wall at several elevations. The place was enormous, and clearly secret. Not a single window graced the entire structure. In fact, from the construction Dan was willing to bet it had all been built underground. Someone didn’t want any word of this place leaking out to the world.
He could see why. A double row of fighter jets ran down most of the length of the hangar. Dan counted twelve fighters. They had the combination of boxy design and sleek build characteristic of a stealth fighter. He rolled a little forward. The nearest was only about thirty feet away, and there was something odd about it that he couldn’t quite place his finger on.
“Cool, huh?” Harry asked. He was acting less like a light colonel and more like a kid showing off his favorite Christmas present. Dan could get it, though. He clearly didn’t get to share this very often. “The F-50 Yeager. Newest fighter in the Air Force of the United States.”
“And about as classified as anything in the world, I’m betting?” Dan asked.
“Yup. We’re pretty damned sure that China is going to go all out sooner rather than later. This is our ace.”
“It’s cool, but it’s just a fighter, right?” Dan asked. “And why call it the Yeager?”
After Chuck Yeager, he supposed. The first man to break the sound barrier. A nice honorific, but it wasn’t usual to name fighters after people. That was more for naval vessels. Even tanks. But not airplanes.
“Inside joke that got approved. Yeager’s flight program was pushing planes faster and higher, right?” Harry said.
“Until the space program came along and pretty much shut them down, sure.” In Dan’s opinion, getting into space was a hell of a lot more important.
“The old program was a space program, Wynn. Or would have been if they had kept it going. Get a plane moving fast enough - and able to fly high enough, and what do you have?”
The Satori. Or something like her. But he wasn’t going to spill those beans right now. “A spaceship,” he said instead.
“Right,” Harry replied.
Dan waited for him to go on, to explain, but he just stood there grinning. He looked at the nearest fighter again, really examining it closely now. Shit, were those thrusters on the nose? Attitude thrusters would have minimal effect on the ground, but they’d make a fighter much more maneuverable in zero gravity.
The weapon muzzle sticking out of the fighter’s nose didn’t look like a standard gunpowder weapon, either. It looked very familiar… In fact, he was willing to bet it was the same weapon Beth had attached to the Satori. They’d hooked this thing up with a railgun. The power drain would be enormous. These things wouldn’t have the Satori’s alien engine producing power. But even if they’d solved the power problem, it still just wasn’t the most efficient weapon for an in-atmosphere battle. The rate of fire would be too low. In space, however? The gunpowder weapon would have a hard time firing, but the railgun would work perfectly.
“You’ve built space fighters?” Dan breathed.
Harry cocked his head sideways and looked down at Dan. He didn’t say anything for a moment, but the carefree attitude was gone. The serious officer was back.
“You probably know more about space fighters than I do, Wynn,” Wheeler said. “After all, you’ve flown one, right?”
How much did they know already? Best to stay with a safe answer until he knew more. “I’ve flown a lot of ships in space.”
“Cut the shit, Dan,” Wheeler said. His face had grown flushed. He stepped around behind the wheelchair. For a moment Dan thought he might take a swing at him, but he merely grabbed the handles and pushed the chair down past half the row of fighters. Parked there between two of the Yeagers was a craft Dan was a hell of a lot more familiar with.
The Naga fighter was there, floating a foot above the deck and humming away. He could almost feel the power and menace radiating from the thing. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Seeing it here, like this, filled Dan with a deep sense of dread.
“We’ve learned so much since we found your little toy,” Wheeler said. “Shit, man. The engines are light years ahead of anything we have. So are the weapons. And I have a hunch that ‘light years’ is the operative word. Where did you get it?”
Dan was only half listening. He was doing mental math in his head, trying to remember how long it had taken the Naga to respond when they’d accidentally triggered an alarm on one of their floating satellites. Hours? Not many hours.
“How long has it been running?” Dan asked.
“Since we got it back here,” Wheeler said. “Wasn’t hard to figure the thing out.”
“You need to shut it down. Now.”
“Why?”
“Because if you don’t some very bad things are going to happen,” Dan said. He was sweating now. He didn’t know if the Naga could trace that fighter. He wasn’t sure they couldn’t though. “Harry, we had that fighter towed in. It’s never been powered up in this solar system. We couldn’t risk turning it on and activating some sort of homing beacon.”
“Relax. It’s not transmitting anything,” Wheeler said. His eyebrows raised at the words ‘in this solar system’, but he kept any comments to himself.
“That you can detect, anyway,” Dan replied.
That got under Wheeler’s skin a little. Dan saw the confident facade crack. Wheeler knew he was dealing with something he didn’t understand at all. And as happy as he was with the new toy, he also knew when he was playing with fire. But he still wasn’t entirely convinced. Dan was going to have to come clean with him - at least a little.
“Harry, that fighter belongs to an advanced and extremely hostile alien race. We’ve gone to enormous lengths to make damned sure they never find out where Earth is,” Dan said. “When you turned that on, you probably lit this planet up for them. Shut. It. Down.”
Wheeler hesitated, but took a step toward the fighter to comply. “I don’t know if you’re full of shit or not right now, Wynn. But better safe than sorry.”
Better safe than sorry would have been great before they turned the thing on in the first place, Dan wanted to say. But berating him more would only make him dig in his heels. That wasn’t going to help anyone, so he held his tongue.
Wheeler set his hands on the ladder and made ready to climb up to the cockpit, but before he could ascend the lighting in the hangar changed. Red lights came up, and a loud klaxon began sounding somewhere overhead.
“Shit,” Harry sai
d. He lunged up the ladder and climbed into the pilot’s seat, fingers moving uncertainly over the controls as he shut the Naga ship down. It took far longer than Dan liked. The alarms sounding couldn’t be anything good. If they were lucky, it was just the Chinese launching an all-out assault on North America.
If they weren’t lucky, well… It was probably a Naga battleship arriving in orbit.
The overhead speakers crackled with static, and then a voice called out over them. “Lieutenant Colonel Wheeler to the briefing room. Stat.”
Wheeler climbed down from the cockpit. He stared at Dan for a long moment, and seemed to make a decision.
“You’re coming with me,” he said. It wasn’t a question, but Dan wasn’t inclined to argue. If the worst had happened, they were going to need his experience. If the Naga were here, then Earth itself was at stake, along with every human life.
Ten
The briefing room was buzzing as John followed General Hereford in. The buzz calmed somewhat as people saw the senior officer, but the staff who had already arrived remained busy at their tasks. Something big had overturned this apple cart. John’s gaze flickered to the large screen dominating one wall of the room. It showed an image of Earth, and near-planetary space. For a moment he felt a rush of hope that Beth was doing something dramatic, and maybe they had a rescue on the way. Problematic as busting out of this place might be, it would still likely be better than remaining here as prisoners.
But the screen was showing three contacts, not one. They were approaching the planet slowly, staying in close formation. That wasn’t Beth. He wasn’t sure who it was. Not knowing chilled him. More than anyone else in the room, John knew how damned dangerous it was out there.
“Can we get more than telemetry on those objects?” he asked in a voice loud enough to carry over the background noise in the room. “Visual would be ideal.”
He missed Majel. He missed he Satori and her powerful scan capabilities. In his ship, he’d already know what those things were, whether they were a threat or not, and be preparing actions.
“Sir…?” One young woman with captain’s bars glanced at John sideways before looking at Hereford questioningly.
“No, he is not in charge here. He’s a…guest. But his request is a good one. How long until we have visual?” Hereford asked.
“Under a minute, sir. We’re retaking a satellite to get a look. The resolution will be bad, but we should be able to get something.”
The screen flickered, dividing into two images placed side by side. The radar image filled the left half. The right was a grainy look at space. They must have dialed up the resolution as much as possible, because the image quality was terrible. It was improving by the second though as the objects grew closer. The quality didn’t really matter though. John recognized the objects as soon as he saw them.
Three Naga battle cruisers were closing on Earth.
John sucked in a breath, feeling the world tilt around him. Nothing they had done to prevent the Naga finding Earth had mattered. They’d been discovered anyway. He leaned on a chair, trying to calm his breathing. His heart was pounding, and he had a hard time drawing in air. He had done this. His stupid, reckless actions had doomed his world to this.
Hereford saw his reaction. “John, are you OK?”
John waved him off. “Will be fine. Just…shit.”
“Not friends of yours, I take it?”
“No.” John straightened his back, ignoring the tightness in his chest as best he could. He hoped he wasn’t headed toward a heart attack. He’d been too long in low gravity for this sort of stress to be good for his heart in a gravity well.
“Care to enlighten us?” Hereford asked. He didn’t try to veil the sarcasm in his tone. “I think the time is past for secrets.”
“You’re absolutely right,” John said. He’d been hedging the information he gave, keeping the Satori and her wormhole drive secret. As secret as possible, anyway - some of the men who’d been in the attack on his base had seen the ship depart, so they knew the Satori existed, knew she could vanish into thin air. He had deftly avoided telling them anything they didn’t already know, but that wasn’t going to stop the Naga.
The door opened again, and John turned to look at the late arrivals. A man he didn’t know was pushing Dan’s wheelchair into the room. Dan took in the screen and locked eyes with John. Instead of the sadness John was feeling, what he saw in Dan at that moment was potent anger.
“They have the Naga fighter, John,” Dan said. “They’ve had it powered up this whole time. That’s how they knew how to find us, I’m sure of it.”
John whirled on Hereford. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“You were playing your cards close to the chest,” the General replied. “Why would I give you more information if you weren’t playing ball with me?”
“Because then maybe I could have spared us all of this, damn it!” John roared, waving an arm at the screen. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“Enlighten me,” Hereford said.
Before John could speak, something changed on the visual screen. A blue pulse lashed out from the leading Naga ship toward the camera. The screen flared and then went dead. The captain who’d set up the connection worked at her console for a few seconds before looking up.
“The satellite is gone, sir,” she said. “Radar indicates smaller objects breaking off from the larger ships.”
“Missiles?” Hereford asked. He chewed his bottom lip as the new contacts were updated on the screen.
“I don’t think so, sir. They’re falling into formations. It looks like fighters,” she replied. “About sixty of them.”
Hereford drummed his fingers on the desk before saying anything else. Then he whirled on John again. “Give me the quick rundown.”
“The Naga are an extremely hostile reptilian race. Near as we know they have taken out entire worlds before - laid waste to them entirely. Enslaved others. They have energy weapons, some sort of fast hyperspace drive on the big ships, and lots of fighters. That’s about one third of their full compliment,” John said.
“They have any sort of shields? Other fancy tech?” Hereford asked.
“Lots of fancy tech. No shields,” Dan said. “Railguns will take them down.”
“Good,” Hereford said. He turned back to the captain. “I need to get the president on the line. We’re going to need to re-task some missiles outward.”
She scrambled to the phone and began making calls. Meanwhile, the general turned back to the man who’d pushed Dan into the room.
“Wheeler, I want your birds in the air,” he said. “Intercept those things and take them down.”
“They’ll be outnumbered three to one,” Dan protested. “And that’s assuming the Naga don’t just launch more fighters.”
“What birds?” John asked.
“They’ve got space fighters, John,” Dan said.
“I’m not sure that’s the best plan,” John said. “If those fighters are any good, we should save them for a moment when they can swing things. Right now, the Naga will have to send the fighters into our atmosphere to do anything. We can meet them there with conventional aircraft.”
“And risk them dropping a bomb on a city,” Hereford said.
“Yes,” John replied. He hated the idea as much as anyone else, but he had to convince Hereford. This was bigger than any one city. If they lost this fight, humanity was doomed.
“What the hell would you have me do, then? I can’t sit by and do nothing,” Hereford said.
John glanced up at the clock. By his calculations, Beth and Majel should have returned hours ago. They were out there, somewhere. The Satori was the best weapon they had, but under-crewed it wasn’t going to be as effective as it ought. They’d fought a single Naga battle cruiser once, and won. Barely, but they had beat the thing.
“Let me put a signal through to my ship,” John said. “Get us back aboard her, and we’ll do what we can to stop them.”
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“Just you, against all of that?” Hereford said, hands on his hips. “You think a lot of yourself and your people.”
“Yes,” John said, steel in his voice. “I do.”
Hereford looked like he might actually go along with John’s plan for a moment, but then he shook his head. “No. No way. They’d have my head. We stick with the Yeagers. Wheeler, get them in the air.”
“Yes, sir,” Wheeler replied.
“Ten minutes ago, man. Move!” Hereford said. Wheeler nodded and left the briefing room.
John found himself a chair. There wasn’t much else he could do at this point. Hereford was committed to his course, and he was powerless here. All he could do was watch the fight he knew was coming and pray that the Earth pilots were a hell of a lot better than they had any right to be at zero-G combat.
Eleven
Beth switched her console to the gun controls. Majel was going to have her hands full managing the Satori’s course as they streaked to intercept the Naga fighters. The guns were still computer controlled, of course, but taking the actual firing mechanism out of Majel’s hands would maybe reduce the strain on her processors.
Or hell, maybe it wouldn’t, and Majel could fly the ship and shoot the guns without her. But it made her feel better to be participating. She couldn’t just sit there staring at the screen. It was too damned much to take in.
The Naga had found Earth. She didn’t know how, and it didn’t matter too much. She’d more or less known that this day would come eventually, but she’d been hoping for more time. They all had. Instead the enemy had come knocking at the worst possible moment.
“We’ll be heavily outnumbered,” Majel warned.
“But they can’t see us,” Beth said.
“No, but if we shoot enough of them they’ll begin working to target us anyway. Predictive algorithms will eventually give them a decent idea where we are,” Majel said. “They only have to get really lucky with one shot.”
“Do what you can. I’ll try to take down as many as possible while we’re able.”
Adventures of the Starship Satori: Book 1-6 Complete Library Page 59