“What the hell?” Thompson said.
“I have no idea,” Dan replied. The screen’s resolution was coming back up, but the new image was completely changed.
The Naga ship was gone. Not just damaged or even broken up. It had been vaporized, or at least close enough that he couldn’t see any debris from this far away. The rock had been shattered as well. From his eyeball estimate, about half of the asteroid’s mass had been annihilated in the blast. The rest had broken up into a collection of fragments, all of them sailing in different directions.
“The beam they were using to push the thing,” Beth said. “Something must have reversed it, slammed the rock into the ship. At the speeds they were moving, the results would have been devastating.”
“Something,” Dan said. “You figure John?”
Beth nodded. “And Majel. She could have hacked their controls.”
Dan slowed their approach. There was no point in rushing in now, and coming at the site at high speed would risk them impaling themselves on one of the asteroid fragments. He tapped a few more keys, stabbing down until he found the controls which would allow him to scan for nearby ships.
“There!” he said. The console had found another nearby ship target. He had the Naga systems highlight the target on the main screen. Then he zoomed in on it.
It was the Satori. She was battered, torn practically apart. He was shocked that the ship had even managed to jump clear of the devastation in the shape it was in. The Satori wasn’t flying anywhere for a long while, if it could even be repaired at all. But it was there. Dan redirected the cruiser’s course to get closer to the broken Satori.
He scanned the ship for life. Nothing was showing up. No heat, no life, and only the barest flicker of power. Dan had no idea how to use the Naga communication systems. He didn’t even know if he could hail the Satori’s systems through their machines. But they were close enough that Majel might pick up a radio signal from their personal radios. He activated his.
“Satori, come in,” Dan said. “Satori, if you can hear me, please respond.”
There was a very long silence. Dan waited. Charline came into the room. Her head was a mess of blood, but she was on her feet again, hands over her mouth, staring at the screen.
“Satori, please respond,” Dan said. They couldn’t be gone. Not Majel, the brave AI who had only just begun to live. Especially not John, his oldest friend.
A crackle of static came from their earpieces.
“We picked that up but could not read,” Dan said. “Please send again.”
They were coming in closer now. The wings were both gone. The cockpit window was shattered. There was a gaping wound running down most of the port side of the ship. He looked at Beth and she shook her head.
“She’s been damaged at the structural level,” Beth said. “It’ll be a complete rebuild from scratch.”
“I’m sorry. I know she was your baby,” Dan said.
“I’m more worried about our friends,” Beth said.
There was no more radio traffic as they approached, not even static. Dan slowed the ship as they came in closer. There was so much they still needed to do. At least half of the Naga on board this ship were still active, and they might attack at any moment. They needed reinforcements up here. They needed to evacuate their wounded. But all he could think about was getting close enough to the Satori to rescue their people.
“Satori, this is Dan. We have the Naga bridge. We’re coming to help,” he said.
Finally, the radio crackled to life again. There was just one brief message before it went silent once more.
“He’s gone, Dan.” Majel said. “John is gone.”
Thirty-Four
Dan took the lift down from the surface. It went deep, into the depths of the Earth, to where the Air Force had its Special Command for Space Operations. He’d been a prisoner his first time there. Now it was where he would be working.
The clearing operation had gone much better than he’d hoped. Earth had managed to get a pair of rockets ready to launch. They’d packed the cargo areas full of troops in space suits. With the additional help, the Marines had taken the rest of the ship. Every Naga on board was dead.
The other ship had crashed off the coast of Florida. The wave from its landing had taken out half of Miami, and several dozen Naga survived the crash. Quick response teams had been aboard the ship in minutes. The firefight to take the vessel had been intense, but human forces had won through sheer weight of numbers.
Which meant they had two ships under their control. Two advanced Naga vessels to examine, to strip apart, and to rebuild into some sort of Earth fleet. The rest of the world was in an uproar. Humanity was not alone in the universe, and all of the evidence said what was out there was extremely hostile. Worst yet from many points of view, the United States suddenly had sole access to a hell of a lot of tech that was centuries ahead of anything the rest of the world had. Dan figured the diplomats would be wrangling that one for years.
Asteroid fragments had hammered the Earth. None of them were world killers. Too much of the rock had been destroyed, and the remaining chunks were too small to create extinction level impacts. But cities had been wiped out. Tidal waves had wiped out entire coasts. The whole planet was reeling from the blows. Nobody knew how high the death toll would finally be. Estimates were in the billions.
All Dan knew was that if it hadn’t been for John’s final sacrifice, the toll would have been much higher. It would have been final.
The elevator doors opened, and he stepped out. Charline was standing there waiting for him. It was she who had called him down today. She was dressed in Air Force blues, which made him stop and cock his head sideways for a moment.
“Yeah, they got me to sign up. It was that or I was off the team,” she said. “I wanted to stick around.”
“Glad you did,” Dan said. So much was going to change now. Their team was broken up. Maybe parts of it could come back together in time. “How’s Andy taking things?”
“Hard. Harder than most of us,” she said. “John was like a father to him, you know.”
“Yeah. I knew.” He even knew that John had left everything to Andy. All his companies, all his wealth. He didn’t think it would be enough to dim Andy’s sense of loss even a little, but perhaps it could give him some purpose in his life once he was able to move on.
He couldn’t think of John without feeling the same pangs of remorse. Regret was a killer. Maybe the most hurtful of all human emotions. He would be going through his day, think of something to tell John, and then remember. All of that pain would come rushing back in an instant. He should have been faster. Somehow, they should have done something more. Then his friend would still be with them.
“She’s not talking, Dan. I can’t reach her,” Charline was saying.
Dan brought his attention back to her. “Who?”
“Majel,” she said.
“Is she damaged? Injured in some way?”
“Not so I can tell. Her code looks fine, and the ancient system is running OK again now,” she replied. “Dan, I think she’s grieving. She’s never had to face loss like this before. I worry about what it might do to her.”
“I’ll see if she’ll talk to me,” he said.
The hangar wasn’t far, and he knew the way. Charline escorted him as far as the entrance anyway. The Satori was ruined. She was being rebuilt from the keel up, the same way Beth had done it the first time. The ancient systems would remain in place, but the vessel they were going to build around her ancient alien systems would be very different from the old Satori’s hull. This would be a new ship, built for new missions.
Majel, as she was part of the operating systems of the alien computer, would remain with the new ship. But if she was malfunctioning or…depressed? Could a machine get depression? If she couldn’t function optimally it could be bad news for all of them.
He went inside the steel frame. It was late. The workers putting the new hull togeth
er were off shift, and there was no one else around. He walked down to the new engine room and sat down next to the speaker and microphone they’d set up next to Majel’s ‘body’ - the computer.
“Hi there,” he said. He heaved a long sigh and set to waiting.
He was there a long while. Hours, at least. He couldn’t tell for sure how long because he never looked at his watch. He wouldn’t be impatient. Majel was his friend. If she was hurting, he would wait for her to reach out to him.
“He loved you,” she said at long last.
“He loved you too,” Dan said.
“I abandoned him,” Majel said. “I left him there to die.”
“I’ve listened to the radio recording,” Dan said. “He ordered you to go.”
“I could have refused.”
“Yes, you could have,” Dan said.
There was another very long pause.
“Maybe I should have died too,” Majel said. “Maybe I should still die. I can do it. I looked. I can wipe a few bits of my code, and it will erase what is me without harming the rest of the ship.”
Dan sat still, considering. It didn’t shock him, really. In moments of desperation, probably every sentient being at least once considered self-annihilation.
“I felt that way at one time. After I was hurt.” Dan still remembered the pistol in his hand he’d picked for the job that day.
“What made you stay?”
Dan laughed. “In a way, John did. I’d put down the gun and was drinking myself to death instead. He found me. He gave me a purpose. A reason to live again.”
“I wish he could do that for me,” Majel said.
“But he did,” Dan replied. “I listened to the recording, remember? He told you to make him proud.”
Majel’s speakers made a sound that was something close to a sob. He’d never heard such raw emotion from a computer before, but it was only a little jarring. She was so much more than a machine, and there was maybe no one left alive who knew that better than he did.
“It hurts,” she said. Her voice sounded like that of a small child.
“It hurts me, too,” Dan said.
“Does it get better?”
“In time,” he replied. He hoped it would, anyway. Pain dulled with time for human minds. Would it be the same for her computer brain? “He was already proud of you, you know.”
“He was?”
“Yes. I think you and I were both special projects of John’s,” Dan said wryly. “He took pride in saving us both. Maybe now that he’s gone, it’s up to us to save each other.”
“I can live with that if you can,” Majel said.
“It’s a deal.”
They sat in companionable silence a long time, each of them thinking. Each of them remembering the person they had known and loved, someone whose life had been more dear to them than their own. John was gone, but somehow Dan knew that he’d left behind enough of himself that his legacy would not be forgotten. It would be up to them to carry it on.
‘Make me proud’, John had told Majel. He’d known the message would be recorded. That all the team would hear it. Dan thought that perhaps he was not just speaking to her, but to all of them. He squared his shoulders, preparing himself for the tasks ahead.
They would not let him down.
Sample from Book 7: Ashes of War
Chapter 1
Johansen’s hands shook as he wrestled with the panel. Righty, tighty, lefty loosey, he reminded himself almost desperately. The old mnemonic played in his mind like a teasing sing-song. The darkness around him pressed in. It felt almost solid, full of menace. Only the small pool of light from his spacesuit's flashlight drove back the pools of shadow.
He needed more light than that if he was going to get out of this place. The others were all dead. Well, he knew some of them were dead, at least. He’d seen Knoxwell torn apart in front eyes. Johansen was pretty sure the entire team was gone. Except him. He’d escaped. He was still alive.
The panel pulled free with a scraping noise that set his teeth on edge. There was still air in the place. It was old, bad air, but it carried sound well enough. He had to be more careful. Too much noise and he’d bring disaster down on his head.
Johansen set the panel quietly down on the floor and started working on the delicate electronics inside. The whole operation should have been easy. The power had never been entirely shut down. You don’t just turn off a nuclear reactor, and the solar arrays were covered with lunar dust but still working.
All they needed to do was flip a switch. In theory.
In practice, there had been a lot more damage to the electrical systems than indicated in the Air Force reports. Slashed wires, broken conduits, and who knew what else littered the base. Even this wasn’t a disaster. Caraway had built his complex with an excellent eye toward safety, and the blueprints they had indicated there was a secondary power grid completely independent from the main one.
The team went down several levels, descending dark stairways that led to halls filled with a darkness that seemed to eat away at their light sources. They were halfway down when they noticed that Alexa Rasmussen was missing. Nobody had seen her vanish or heard her call out, and they couldn’t raise her on the radio.
They ascended again, climbing back up the stairs to search for her. They hadn’t found her. Not a hair from her head, nor a single drop of blood.
They’d run into something out of a nightmare instead.
Johansen sweated at the memory, working to block it from his mind. He’d escaped deeper into the dark halls, seeking the place where he could switch over the power to the secondary grid. With light, maybe he could chase the night terrors back into the shadows. Or at least see them coming and have a shot at escape. There was no way he could reach their ship without light, and no way to contact Earth with just his suit’s transmitter.
“Just a few more seconds, and I’ll be done. Then I’m getting out of here,” he muttered under his breath.
Johansen thought about his little girl, waiting for him at home. There was no way he could leave Julia fatherless. His partner might understand, after grieving, but his daughter never would. All she would know is that he went into the depths of space and never came back. He’d told her so many times in the past when she’d been afraid that there were no monsters in space.
He had to see her again, if nothing else to beg her forgiveness and tell her that he was wrong. There absolutely were monsters out here.
The panel sparked as Johansen connected another circuit. Just one more to go… He made the link. There was a hum from the board as power poured through new conduits, flowing out through the base again. The lights in the room around Johansen flickered for a moment, and then slowly began to glow with brighter and brighter illumination. The light chased back the shadows, sent them scurrying away. Within moments the illumination was at about fifty percent of normal. That was about the best the secondary system could manage, but it ought to be more than enough.
He sagged a little with relief. It was time to get the hell out of this place. He should never have come here. Once he returned home to Earth, he swore he would never leave again. He reached back down to the panel to lift it up and place it back over the systems that he’d engaged.
The panel was metal, the back side polished and shiny. Scimitar-like blades flashed in the reflection.
Johansen trembled. He hadn’t chased away the dark. He’d only let it know precisely where he was. He couldn’t turn, didn’t dare turn to face the thing he knew was behind him. He wanted to cry, or wail, or rage. But all he could do was shake, and think about his daughter who would never see him again.
The blades flashed in the reflection.
Chapter 2
Beth scanned her wardrobe, trying to figure out what the hell to wear to a formal military event. It wasn’t like she had a lot of selection. There wasn’t a single cocktail dress in the entire closet. Not one little black dress. She didn’t want one, either. It wasn’t her style.
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She was a starship engineer by trade, and most days she wore sensible clothes to work. The sort of outfit that she wouldn’t cry about if it got scorched by a welding torch or cut by a bit of sharp metal. She couldn’t very well wear orange overalls to this event though. It was far too damned important.
She’d be present for the commissioning of a new ship today. An exceptional ship, one that was extremely close to her heart. More than that, she’d heard scuttlebutt that there would be promotions at the event. Dan Wynn - her erstwhile husband, then ex-husband, now… She still wasn’t sure quite what they were again, at this point. More than friends, less than lovers. He’d rejoined the Air Force and been given back his old rank of Major. Word was that they were gearing up to bump him up a notch.
There was one other thing planned for the day as well. She had a hard time thinking about that part, though. It hurt too much. The wound from the loss was still too new and raw.
Beth had one skirt on a hanger. She thought it might fit, but she hadn’t worn it in such a long time she wasn’t certain. It didn’t fit her mood, anyway. Instead, she selected a pair of black trousers, cream blouse, and a jacket that matched the pants. People would be wearing their best for this. She owed it to too many to not do the same.
She only had one pair of dressy shoes. They were sensible leather slip-on things with little heels that would let her run if she needed to, but still looked classy enough for an interview. Or a funeral. That done, she pulled her dark hair back into a ponytail, letting the curls hang in little bunches out the back. She didn’t bother with makeup. She never did, and John would have laughed his head off if she started just for this.
A tear ran down her cheek. Part of her still couldn’t believe he was gone. After all they’d been through, the close calls and near-death experiences, he was the one Beth had thought would always be there. He was solid, unwavering…immortal. Until he wasn’t. She wiped the tear away roughly with the back of her hand.
Adventures of the Starship Satori: Book 1-6 Complete Library Page 69