Dan looked up, locked eyes with his friend.
“It's got a wormhole drive, too. Near as we can tell, anyway. It vanishes everything we send into it, and best we can extrapolate, it's shipping them someplace.”
“You can't tell for sure?”
“The ship didn't really come with a manual,” John replied with a wry grin. “We're figuring all this out as we go along, although we've made some headway in translating the language, thanks to Majel's assistance. The destinations programmed in all seem to be light years away. We sent out a couple of probes, but we think it might be decades before we get any kind of direct signal back from them. But when we opened the wormhole again we were able to make radio contact with the probes, and the video they sent back to us showed star-fields which were not from our solar system.”
Dan settled back in his seat, trying to take it all in. “So you've found an impossible ship that's thousands of years old, buried in the moon. It can cloak. It can travel between stars. You intend to use it to go visiting these other stars. And you want me to fly her?” Dan watched John's smile grow wider with each word. As if there was any doubt how he would answer. “I am so in. Wouldn't miss it.”
“Knew you'd be crazy enough that I could count on you.”
There was a short buzzing sound, and the ship snapped back into view. The abrupt appearance of such a large object right in front of him was a startling experience for Dan. It was like it was not there one moment, and then suddenly visible.
“Who's messing about and slowing my work crews down?” asked a voice from nearer to the nose of the ship.
Dan blinked. He knew that voice. He pulled his wheelchair back to get a better look at the speaker.
And there she was, wearing the same bright orange jumpsuit as the other crew working on the ship. Her hair was back in a ponytail, but he knew if she pulled the hair tie out it would float about her head in a mass of uncontrollable brown curls. No makeup. She hardly ever wore any, and never when she was working. He'd never thought she needed it.
How long had it been?
Beth was taking long strides down the length of the ship toward them. Her mouth was set in a hard line, and her eyes narrowed a bit when she spared a quick glance for him.
“John,” she said, “Bad enough you set me an impossible deadline. I don't need you down here mucking about and delaying my crew.”
“Sorry,” John said, the twinkle in his eye belying the contrite tone of voice. “I'll try to stay out of your way. I was just introducing Dan to the ship.”
She looked down her nose at Dan. “Welcome aboard. I hope you can fly this thing as well as John thinks you can.”
Dan felt his hackles raising at her tone. “I'm sure I can figure it out, if you and the grease monkeys can get her ready to fly.”
John's eye movements flickered back and forth between them. “Right. OK, Dan, time to go. Lots to do. I've set you up in a room, and given you priority access to Majel's processor cycles, so she can work with you on simulations of piloting the ship. She's extrapolated the flight sim controls from the results of our experiments.”
Beth had already turned and was walking back to her crew, calling out orders as she went, so Dan missed seeing her close her eyes, missed the pain etched in her brow. He only saw her stalk away from him.
He wheeled back to the lift, John following close behind. Dan waited until the lift doors had closed before saying another word.
“You could have warned me, John,” Dan said, eyes locked on the elevator door.
“Would you have come, if I had? Or would you have kept drinking yourself into a stupor every night?”
“That's not fair.” Dan spun in place to face John, one wheel going in each direction like the halves of his heart in that moment.
But it was probably an accurate assessment, he mused. The prospect of seeing Beth again might have been enough to keep him away.
“Do you regret coming?” John asked softly.
“No.” The prospect of flying a ship to other stars? That trumped everything. It was every little kid's daydream. And a chance to live his adult dreams again, too. “No regrets.”
Nine
Charline Foster pulled her van into a quiet alley nearby the Texatronic Industries headquarters building. She couldn’t get onto the actual company campus anymore without raising too many eyebrows. Oh, she could probably hack a brief clearance for herself and be admitted. The guys working the main gate knew her. They wouldn’t think anything was up if she popped in one more time to grab a few things.
But then she’d be on cameras. Her arrival and departure times would be logged. Charline wanted this little expedition to be so totally off the books that no one would be able to trace any of it back to her. So instead of slipping into the compound, her van was parked half a mile away, between Terry’s Bar and a store covered with signs saying they would ‘pay top dollar’ for gold and silver. It wasn’t the sort of neighborhood she wanted to stay in for long, but it ought to be OK for long enough to get the job done.
She glared down at her laptop as she hammered the keys. Fire her, would they? Charline fumed quietly to herself. She was the one who Fred Heimsman had come on to. She was the one he’d asked into his office for a private conference, which turned into a session of him asking her for a ‘special massage’. Which she declined, and when the asshole tried to persist she hammered the point home with her knee into his groin.
Charline had taken the issue directly to Human Resources. She’d been told to go home, that they would deal with the matter. Three days later she was holding a pink slip. Was that really how they thought the world worked? They figured they could just get rid of the victim and absolve themselves of problems? Charline had already contacted a lawyer who was going to have a little chat with them later in the day.
But first, she was going to get a little of her own back. They’d hired Charline because she was one of the best network defense specialists in the world. Well, they were about to learn that all of those tricks that made her good at securing their systems could also be used for an offensive.
The night before, she’d piloted a small drone onto their campus. The tiny thing was only a little bigger than her hand. So small that it was hard to hear, and almost impossible to spot the dark gray body at night. The drone was carrying a wifi extender, along with all the protocols it needed to link into the main building’s wireless internet. With the extender, Charline didn’t need to be in the building to access their secure internal network. She could punch directly into their hardware from right where she was.
The first computer she went into was Heimsman’s. She was curious how he’d managed to avoid getting the boot. Why had they dumped her instead? It became obvious pretty quickly. Heimsman had some potent blackmail material. Seems the company CEO had been involved in some extra-curricular activities while on a company retreat. Things that the Board of Directors - and his wife - would likely be a little upset about. Charline grabbed the files and set them to upload to Heimsman and the CEO’s public Facebook accounts in an hour. That ought to make life interesting for them.
It also meant that she was on a clock. Someone would notice the Facebook posts within minutes of when they went live. It wouldn’t take them long to realize their security had been breached. Charline had about an hour to do the rest of her damage.
The job took her half of that.
She hammered the system with everything she had. Her hand-crafted virus tore through their storage, reducing saved files to gibberish. Along the way she found a bunch of other files which were incriminating in one way or another. Those she grabbed and stored on her laptop. It might be useful at some point to have a little leverage - you never knew when it might come in handy to be able to threaten a few key people with prison time.
Then she smoked the machines themselves. Charline figured she was bricking a few tens of millions of dollars in hardware. By the time she was halfway through, the security teams inside the building had started to
catch on. They were trying to take the network offline to protect what hadn’t been hit yet, but it was way too late for that. She’d trained half of those people. It wasn’t hard to hack circles around them.
Oh, the company would survive. But between the data loss and the dead servers, she’d cost them about as much as her salary would have been for the next forty years. Served them right. Charline carefully disconnected from the servers, covering her tracks with each step of her retreat. Not that there was much left of the machines she’d invaded, but she wasn’t taking any chances. Then she pressed a button which would order the drone to fly out into the Gulf of Mexico and drown itself in the ocean.
Leaning back in her seat, she stared down at the laptop. It was done. She’d finished the job. Why didn’t she feel much better, then? The bad guys had got theirs. It just wasn’t enough to wash away the slimy feeling that lingered from the assault, and the even worse one from being fired for reporting it. Charline heaved a deep sigh and set the computer aside. It was time to move on, physically as well as emotionally. With her skills she shouldn’t have too hard a time finding a new job.
Someone rapped on the side door of her van.
Charline only froze in place for a second. Then her hand went to the small pistol in her purse. She pulled out the gun. Her parents hadn’t raised a fool. It never hurt to be cautious. She shot a glance at the side view mirror. There was only one guy outside. He had short-cropped sandy hair that was a little darker than her blonde. He was athletically built, wearing a dark suit and a tie. Was he a cop? The haircut and build screamed military or law enforcement. His outfit looked more corporate than federal employee, but it was hard to tell for sure sometimes. She aimed the pistol out toward the man and opened the side door of the van a few inches.
“What do you want? Am I blocking something?” Charline asked him.
His smile warmed the man’s face up considerably. “No, I’m just looking for someone. Are you a Ms. Charline Foster?”
“Who’s asking?”
“My name is Andy Wakefield. I understand you were recently fired?” he asked.
What was this about? Why was he asking about her job? What was this guy up to? “Maybe. You hiring?”
“Not me, but as a matter of fact, my employer wants to bring you on board for a special project,” Andy said.
“Wait - you’re offering me a job?” Charline said.
“Yup.”
Charline thought about it a few seconds. She had a lot of cash saved up. More than anything else, what she needed was some time. Take a trip, go on vacation, see some of the world. Her skills would be as viable in a couple of months as they were now, and taking some time for herself sounded more fun. Plus, who was going to seriously trust random men making job offers in dark alleys? The thing stank.
“How did you find me?” she asked, stalling and hoping for a little more information. Her hand remained tight around her pistol.
“License plate. Got it from the local camera systems. I knew you were in the neighborhood, so I looked around. Not a lot of vans out here,” he said.
Shit. She’d forgotten the traffic camera systems. That data would put her darned close to the hack at the time it went down. It wasn’t directly incriminating, but it was a potential problem. Maybe it was time to take that vacation after all. Ideally someplace far away. How had this guy managed to access traffic cam data so quickly, anyway? Was he a hacker too? Charline felt a little spike of curiosity, but clamped down on it. She wasn’t about to go out like the proverbial cat.
“No, thanks. Think I’m all set,” she said, slamming the door shut. He didn’t try to stop her, and she heaved a sigh of relief. Quickly she slid up into the driver’s seat and stuck her key in the ignition.
“All right,” he said from outside. “But if you change your mind and want to come work on a quantum computer system anytime in the next forty-eight hours, give me a call.”
Wait. Quantum what? There were a few people messing around with some quantum chips, but no one had an actual computer running yet. Did they?
“You’re mixing me with someone else. I don’t do tech development. I’m a software girl, not hardware,” she hollered out at him. She twisted the key and the van coughed to life.
“This isn’t hardware development,” he said.
Charline turned off the van. If they were looking for someone to develop software for a quantum computer, this wasn’t just bleeding edge - it was damned near science fiction. No one had that sort of tech yet. At least, no one she’d ever heard about. Which meant that this deal was something so far off the books that there wasn’t even a whisper of it out there. If there was, she’d have heard it. Her curiosity burned brighter than ever, and with a groan, she gave in to temptation. This Andy had known precisely what to say to get her attention.
She leaned over the passenger’s seat and opened the door. “Get in. No funny business. I have a pistol and I know how to shoot it.”
“No worries. I’m here to hire you, not to bother you. If you want me to get out anytime while we talk, just stop the van and I’ll leave. You won’t hear from me again,” Andy said to her as he got in and sat down.
Charline started the van up again, burning with questions she wanted to ask. She had the feeling she wasn’t going to ask the guy to leave.
Ten
The next few days flew by. John watched all the moving parts as carefully as he could, trying to make sure he didn't drop the ball on anything. It was exhausting work, not made easier by the fact that he was also managing a legitimate business. The mining work was critical to the Earth. The US military had first dibs on his helium-3, but he had governments – multiples – bargaining with him for output, once the mining operation was completely operational. For now, it was only producing a trickle supply. But the desperation in those negotiations disturbed him. It meant the energy situation was far worse than the public media was broadcasting, and the public version was bad enough.
And in his experience desperate governments take desperate actions. The last thing he wanted was for some government to decide they ought to control his operations up here. It could spark a war over the moon, if one government tried to claim the helium-3 resources here. That fighting over essential energy would lead to mass power outages on Earth was the least of the trouble. Without power, farms would fail. Transportation would break down. Starvation, looting, a breakdown of civil services - the result of a war could be catastrophic worldwide. Worse yet if that war resulted in discovery of the ship. Because it had the power to solve the problem, which would instead make everything worse.
The ship's engine drew power from an enormous power source that they still didn't understand. None of his people had been able to determine precisely what its power output limits were, or how long it would last. They didn't even have a good working theory about how it operated. But the ship used more power to hold a wormhole open for a few seconds than the entire North American continent.
For a planet that was tottering on the brink of energy collapse, it would be a panacea. If he could reveal that it existed at all. Because the energy crisis also had all the major powers, from China, to the USA, to the EU, to India, on the verge of war. All it would take would be a spark.
A spark like a single device that would solve all the energy issues, for whomever controlled it. A device that was based on such an alien technology that it would be decades, if ever, before humans could replicate it and build other such devices. Whoever controlled the ship’s power supply would have the entire world in the palm of their hand. No nation would allow any other to keep it.
No, revealing the ship was out of the question. It would ignite a bloodbath such as the planet had never seen.
The lift he was riding settled to a stop a level above the hangar. That floor was living and working space for the project's crew. The elevator chimed, breaking him from his reverie. A quick retinal scan, and the doors opened for him. He had called for a staff meeting of all the principals invo
lved. They'd be the crew for the first mission. And he still intended to fly the ship the day after tomorrow, if all went well.
The doors to the meeting room opened in front of him. Several team members were already present and seated around a table. Beth was arguing with her second engineer, Paul Weston. Dan was reading something on a tablet, studiously ignoring the pair of them. That the two engineers were arguing wasn't especially unusual. But since neither of them noticed him come in, John stood to listen to their debate.
“...and I still think it's too risky, Beth. We've been lucky so far, but we ought to be bringing the government into this now. It's too big. Too important,” Paul said.
“But what would they do with her, Paul?” she asked. “Hide her somewhere? Pick her apart like a carcass? After all the work we did to restore her?”
“What's the problem?” John asked, announcing his presence.
“Paul thinks we ought to hand the ship over to the government,” Beth said. “I hate the idea.”
“We haven't needed them so far,” Paul replied. “We've done great things. But don't we have a responsibility to share this?”
Paul looked around the room. “Listen, I know this is a touchy subject, but we all know how important – how powerful an asset – this ship is. When people find out about it – and they will find out, sooner or later – there's going to be hell to pay.”
Interesting that they seemed to be discussing the same thing which had been on his mind a minute before. Then again, maybe it was inevitable that his decision to keep the ship a secret would be questioned. John was glad Beth was still on his side regarding the matter. He wasn’t sure what he would do if both engineers presented a united front against him.
“And if we hand it to the US government, and word leaks out to other countries, Paul? What then?” asked John.
Paul opened his mouth to reply, then closed it. He looked down at the table, his cheeks flushing with anger.
Adventures of the Starship Satori: Book 1-6 Complete Library Page 4
