“Majel, what is it? Asteroid?” Dan asked. The larger object was still showing as about five hundred meters long and nearly half as wide. If it was a rock, it was going to make one hell of a crater, and they’d need to be long gone before it came down.
“Negative,” came the computer’s answer. “Object is decelerating.”
Which meant it was under control. Which meant it was a ship. Oh, crap. Dan pushed his wheelchair back from Beth’s console, bolted himself hurriedly into his own spot. “OK, we have company coming. I’m not thinking this is a random visit, Beth.”
“You’re thinking the satellite that fired on us?”
“Had some sort of messaging system. Right.” Dan’s fingers flew over the control panels as he called up trajectories and possible landing sites closer to the ground party.
“So... We presume hostile? I’ll get the railguns warm,” she said.
Dan chuckled drily. “I always figured those railguns were going to be useless. Anyone we met with another ship out here was probably going to laugh them off, then blow us up.” He thought about it another moment, then shrugged. “Actually, I’m still pretty sure that’s the case. As far as I’m concerned, our best weapon right now is the cloak. Seemed to work on the satellites. Hope it works on the ship, too.”
“Those smaller objects are moving faster than the big ship now,” Beth said, her voice picking up pace.
“Fighter screen. Or drop shuttles. Or something like that. Majel, we have full power back to the drives?”
“Affirmative.”
“OK. Here we go!” His hands flew over the controls, and Satori leaped into the air at his command. He brought the ship up twenty meters, then darted forward toward the ruins. He heard Beth gasp behind him. Broken buildings shot by on either side of the ship as he zipped between them. This, he could do. This, he could do like no one else. He felt exhilaration, reined it in a little and replaced it with focus. Wouldn’t do any of them any good to smash into something because he got distracted.
Once they were deeper inside the ruins, where the buildings might help break up a radar scan even if it could penetrate the cloak, he slowed the ship back down, slipping stealthily through the broken columns toward the rest of his team.
The radar showed the first wave of smaller ships closing on the ruins, half of them slowing down as they prepared to land while the other half curved their flight paths to circle overhead like birds of prey. That looked like a cluster of troop transports and air support. Hallmarks of a military operation. He had to get to the team and get them the hell out of there. This company didn’t look friendly at all.
Charline continued eyeballing the metallic blocks before her. The whole layout reminded her of something, but she couldn’t remember what.
“Looks almost like a room full of big filing cabinets,” John said off-handedly.
“Room full of what?” Andy asked.
John chuckled. “Showing my age. Filing cabinets. Big boxes that offices used to hold paper records. You still see ‘em around sometimes, even though most places have gone over to computers.”
“That sounds about right to me, John,” Charline said. That was the memory she was trying to tease into the open. An old film she’d seen; in one part there was a room full of steel boxes, and the boxes were all full of paper. The room also reminded her of a huge server farm, stacks of computers filled with data storage all lined up in rows.
She shone her flashlight along the top edge of the box, brushing dust away with her other hand to examine it more closely. Sure enough, there was a thin seam along the edge. You could barely see it, but it was there.
“I think you’re right. I think these are drawers. Lots and lots and lots of drawers...” she said, growing more excited as she looked around at the boxes, trying to estimate how many there were.
“Full of what?” Andy asked the question all three were wondering.
Charline was burning with curiosity now. She had to know what was in these drawers.
And just like that, the drawer in front of her clicked, and opened a few centimeters.
John stepped around to investigate, and looked up at her, surprised . “What did you do?”
Charline shrugged. “No idea. I wasn’t even touching it when it popped open.”
“OK, very odd.” John stuck the barrel of his rifle into the gap and gently wedged in into the drawer. She watched it slide open soundlessly. Whatever mechanism it opened on had to be incredibly well built to still work so well after all this time.
She shined her flashlight into the drawer as it opened. The beam glinted off row after row of small, white cubes, apparently identical to the ones on the Satori that seemed to run the computer, cloak, and engine. They were carefully set into hollow slots in a large sheet of padded material, each one secured apart from the others. She whistled softly, then caught John’s eye.
“This is a treasure trove, John. We have to bring these home with us. Near as I can tell, each of those cubes on the Satori is some sort of quantum computer. The data which could be stored on even one of these...!”
Charline’s stunned jubilation died off as the walls and floor started vibrating, and a rumbling filled the air. Dust settled around them from the ceiling.
“Could be the Satori coming in. I’ll go to the entrance and check,” Andy said, jogging down the hall.
John picked up one of the cubes from the slot where it lay, examining it closely. “They do look just like the Satori’s cubes,” he said.
Charline did some quick math in her head. “There are more than a hundred just in this drawer. It looks like four drawers per box. And scores of boxes in the room... This is incredible. The data here...” She waved her hands in the air, helpless to describe the wealth of knowledge this might represent.
“Or they could all be empty. Maybe this was where they stored empty hard drives before they filled them,” John said. “But I think your answer feels more likely. This is more care than empty drives would have been given. Might have to wait though. I don’t want this roof coming down on us.” The vibrations hadn’t stopped, had in fact grown more intense.
Charline looked around at the room as the vibrations became outright tremors. Leave all this behind? When they’d only just found it?
Andy came running down the corridor then, shouting for them.
“Time to go!” he said. “Dan’s on the way. But we have uninvited guests arriving up there right now.”
Thirteen
“We need to go, right now!” Andy shouted again. “Dan’s bringing the Satori around to pick us up. He says we’ve got company.”
Andy shook his head, thinking about what he’d just said. Never mind how impossible that should have been. Company – here, who knew how many light years from Earth – could mean only one thing. Whoever was coming, they weren’t human. They might or might not be friendly, but they were not from Earth. He’d known intellectually that aliens existed. The Satori was proof enough of that. But actually running into live aliens was another experience entirely.
He tried hard to put that out of his head as he ran back down the hallway ahead of the others, toward the hole John had fallen through. He and Charline had followed John down, exploring. He’d worried about all of them heading into this underground warren. But... He’d agreed to come down there, and their safety was his responsibility. Charline seemed to think that what they’d found was valuable, but all he could think was that they were excruciatingly vulnerable here. One way in, no other ways out the could find, and a new threat on the doorstep. Maybe these aliens were dropping by for tea, but he hadn’t forgotten the satellites orbiting above that fired on the Satori. His gut said their company meant trouble.
And it was his job to get them out before this hole turned into a trap.
He reached the small pool of daylight coming in through the hole above, and quickly latched his ascenders onto the rope. With a tug to ensure the rope was still secure, he started climbing hand over hand toward the top
. Andy worked hard to keep himself in shape. Even with the heat, the climb was an easy one for him.
The lip was the tricky part. He was worried about John and Charline’s ability to handle the ascenders, but he was pretty sure they couldn’t manage the core strength required to get up through the last bit. He grunted with the effort, moving as fast as he could. With a last heave, he pulled himself up.
No time to rest. Rising to his feet, he unslung his rifle from his back and brought it up to his shoulder, moving quickly to the boulder he’d used to anchor the rope. With great care, he peeked up over the rock in front of him. He saw no movement, nothing new. Dan said the ships were close. Where were they?
Three vessels roared by overhead. Two were small, about the size of a fighter plane. The one flying between the other two was much larger. As he watched, the big ship slowed down, while the other two peeled off and gained altitude again. The larger craft began to settle toward the ground. It touched down perhaps a hundred meters up the street from where he was watching.
It was almost as big as the Satori, but lacked her sleek lines. The thing looked to Andy like nothing so much as a big cargo plane with the wings trimmed down to little nubs, and it shook the ground as it was landing. The vibrations they’d felt down below must have been another of the vessels touching down nearby. To Andy’s experienced eye, the ship’s look – and their fast moving escorts – were clearly military. He was sure he’d been right, now. Their company was not friendly.
Sparing glances at the ship when he could, Andy pulled the rope out of the pit. He hauled up the rope to reposition the ascenders for another climb, then dropped the assembly back down the hole to where John stood, staring up at him.
“Quickly and quietly! I’ll help you up,” Andy spoke softly down to John. “Where’s Charline?” He couldn’t see her anywhere near John, and a stab of worry gripped him.
Charline’s hands were shaking, hovering over the cubes in front of her. Her eyes darted around the room, catching hopelessly on each of the big storage devices, knowing that thousands of the cubes had to be there in those other containers, carefully stowed away. Waiting for someone to come and unravel their mysteries. Waiting for her.
It was impossible to leave them all. Any one of those cubes might solve...well, anything. What sorts of secrets could be in the computers of a race that skipped across the stars in wormholes? To be so close, and then lose all this, was too much to bear. She had to do something.
She started stuffing cubes from the open drawer into her pockets. The flight suits they all wore had lots of pockets, but she’d stuffed them all without even emptying a single drawer. Despairing, she looked around for some way to carry more of the precious data home.
Her canteen banged on the drawer next to her, giving her an idea. She pulled the canteen – empty now anyway – from its pouch. She tossed the canteen on the floor, and stuffed cubes into the pouch, filling it far too soon.
“Charline! Let’s move!” demanded John.
She knew he was right. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that they were missing out on the chance of a thousand lifetimes here, if they left all this behind. She might not be able to return to this place. But she’d grabbed what she could. Time to get away with at least that.
Resigned, but sick at heart, Charline gently closed the drawer again. She ran a hand over the storage unit. Perhaps it would keep the precious contents safe until she could return for them. She could only hope.
She ran down the corridor toward the beam of light showing the way out. She was out of breath by the time she reached the hole, and John was halfway up. He was hauling himself up a bit at a time, but she could see that Andy was pulling him up as well, the rope sliding against the rough edge of the hole in a way that made her wince.
She stepped back, avoiding some loose gravel dislodged by John’s climb. Her foot went into something sticky. Reflexively, she shone her flashlight down to see what she’d stepped in, and immediately wished she hadn’t. A pool of black, tarry fluid had spread from the body of the lizard-thing John had killed. Her foot had landed in the stuff, and now it was smeared all over the bottom and edges of her sneaker.
As repulsed as she was to have the stuff on her shoe, she was also fascinated. She looked closer, and saw that it really did seem to be black, and not just a dark color. What sort of creature could have black blood? What was in it that made it black?
She wished she had a proper medical kit to take a sample. Briefly, she considered tearing off part of her the tank top she wore under her ship suit and using that to take a sample, but old habits of from her time working with emergency medical teams stopped her a moment. Who knew what sort of pathogens could live in that goo? She knew most microbes were pretty organism specific, though. Odds were good most alien ones wouldn’t match up well with human physiology.
And if they did, well – they’d already been exposed. In which case they might need a sample! And what she was going to have to scrub off her sneaker wasn’t going to be adequate. She tore off a bit of her shirt, swabbed some of the blood, then folded the cloth and tucked it into her pouch next to the cubes. She might have preferred a cleaner sample, ideally by sticking the ratzard and collecting blood in a test tube, but this would have to do.
John had reached the top. Charline could see Andy doing something with the rope. She hoped he’d hurry. Being alone down there was starting to get to her. The darkness felt like it was pressing in all around her, and she hefted her rifle carefully, keeping it at the ready. She kept taking peeks at the ratzard’s corpse, knowing it couldn’t rise up and come after her, but suddenly nervous of it all the same.
Fourteen
Paul knew he was screwed as soon as the slug from Beth’s pistol tore through his shoulder. He’d managed to get outside the ship. He still wasn’t quite sure how, through the screaming pain. But he’d staggered as fast as he could into some rubble a little ways off and hidden. Not that hiding had mattered much. The wound had bled a lot at first, and he was sure he’d left a blood trail.
That was the first thing he’d worked on, once he stopped running and the pain had receded a bit: staunching the blood. He wouldn’t last long, otherwise. Paul tore his t-shirt into chunks and bound up the wound as best he could. It hurt like hell, and he grunted through clenched teeth, holding his sound down as much as he could, in case Beth or Dan decided to come looking for him. He still heard answering cries, not from the ship, but from something out in the ruins, a kind of snarling howl. The sound shook him to the core, and he froze in place. Nothing came running out at him, though. Paul went back to tending the injury after a few moments, knowing that the scent of blood was as likely to draw animals as any sound he made. He bit into a chunk of shirt to keep from crying out again as he worked.
He moved on as quickly as he could. Something in his gut said that was a predator out there, and the last thing he wanted was to be sitting at the end of a blood trail waiting for it. He stayed near the ship. Maybe he could ambush John’s team when they came back. As the minutes crept by, and the heat drenched his body with sweat that dripped down, stinging his wound, he had to admit he wasn’t going to able to ambush shit. If he didn’t want to die alone out there, maybe his best chance would be to surrender himself. He tried to rise to his feet and failed. His legs were shaking. Too much blood loss, or dehydration? He wasn’t sure. It might have been a combination of both. But he wasn’t going anywhere. He scanned the horizon, hoping to spot John’s team when they came back. He could call for help, then. Beg for mercy. They wouldn’t just leave him out there to die.
Paul knew his only real hope was that he could call out to them as they passed, and ask them to just take him home. He’d take being locked in a cell for the rest of his life over this fate. Anything was better than dying out here slowly in this heat. Or waiting for something to come along and make a meal of him. He could still remember how that distant snarl sounded, and he shivered despite the heat.
His hope died when the Sa
tori lifted off, dust billowing from the passage of the invisible ship.
They’d gone. They’d left him out here to die. He’d never felt more alone.
Then Paul heard a sound, that same snarling howl he’d heard earlier. It was much closer this time. He wished he could just lay down and die, rather than be ripped to pieces by some animal. The adrenaline rush he got from hearing the snarl gave him enough strength to get back to his feet. Paul staggered a few steps, working hard not to fall back down again. He knew if he fell he wasn’t going to be able to get up a second time.
Paul tried to find something to arm himself with, but the best he could do was a fist-sized rock. His right arm hung limp and useless, agony searing through him with every move. But he would not go without at least trying to fight. If he could just find a stick, something he could swing...
He heard the scream of engines as a score of ships flew across the sky. One of the larger ones broke away from the others and settled to the ground not far from where the Satori had landed. He stood there gaping and watched as the ship set down. Dimly, he knew he was suffering from dehydration, maybe even sunstroke, and definitely from blood loss. But he couldn’t find the energy to look for cover again. Besides, something intelligent was flying those ships. Some other life form. Through the haze of blood loss, Paul figured that they couldn’t be any worse than whatever the snarling animal out there was. What was the worst they could do to him, kill him? Better than being eaten alive.
He was wobbling on his feet, watching the ship, when he saw big hatches on the front open, and disgorge monsters.
Dan slowed the Satori as he rounded the corner, fighting to keep the wingtips from scraping into the buildings on either side of the ship. These streets hadn’t been designed for spaceships to fly down them, that much was certain! He managed, but only just. According to the coordinates Andy had given him, the party was about a hundred meters ahead on the left.
Adventures of the Starship Satori: Book 1-6 Complete Library Page 17
