She watched Beth during the whole process. The woman was back up on her feet again, which was pretty miraculous by itself. But she was more pale than Charline liked, and she was clearly tired. The nanites might do a great job healing her, but the energy and materials to do the repairs still had to come from somewhere. The accelerated healing process was taking a lot out of her.
“Shall we head straight back to the lab?” Charline asked. “Or can I get you some real food first?”
“Food. Please,” Beth replied.
Pete was perfectly happy to help them out with that. Take out from a local Tex-Mex place solved the hunger issues, and then they were airborne again. Eating seemed to help. Beth was already looking more pink and less worn than she had. Charline would have to keep an eye on her, though. It was going to be tough keeping Beth from overdoing it. She had a habit of chronically taking too much on even when she was healthy. She doubted that her friend would allow even a severe injury to slow her down as much as she should.
“You think the results will be in by the time we get there?” Beth asked.
“Maybe?” Charline said. “I hope so anyway. I’m ready to get out of here.”
The sense of danger she’d felt since arriving on Earth hadn’t faded. It had only receded a bit, still lingering in the back of her mind like a stalking predator. She thought about everything she had seen. People were on edge. More so than she remembered. It was subtle, an undercurrent. But it was there, like the smell of lightning before a big storm. It wasn’t just the close call in low Earth orbit. It was like everyone she met down on the surface was a little more wary than she thought was reasonable. Charline knew that things were bad on Earth with the energy crisis, and getting worse. But what she was seeing was enough to put her on guard.
The sooner they could land, collect results, and get back into space, the better Charline would feel.
She called in to Linda as they were cruising in toward the campus. Her phone rang a couple of times before anyone answered.
“Charline - are you on your way back?” Linda asked as she picked up.
“Yes, we’re arriving shortly.”
“I’ll meet you on the roof. My first tests were…” she paused, then went on. “Interesting. I have a lot of questions to ask you.”
“I’m sure,” Charline replied. How many of those questions could she answer without giving away too much? This was going to be tricky. But that’s why John had sent her in the first place, right? She was good at managing people, almost as good as she was at tinkering with computers. They were a lot alike, after all. Do this, get that result. In some ways, human beings were even more predictable in their responses than computers.
Especially computers like Majel, John’s AI. It was loaded into the Satori, and something odd had happened while they were away on their unexpected trip. Charline still wasn’t sure what to make of it. Majel had begun acting unpredictable. She’d done things that Charline could only call spontaneous. They’d been forced to merge her systems with the alien hardware that made up the backbone of the ship Satori had been built around. They’d been pretty sure that those systems were hardware, without any software still operative. But what if they were wrong? There was a lot of work to be done, to see what precisely was up with their AI at this point.
“We’ll be down soon,” she said into her phone, bringing her head back to the present.
“I’ll meet you on the roof again,” Linda said. “See you there!’
A few minutes later the engines were spinning down again. Charline could see Linda inside the glass room, waving excitedly. She’d found something interesting all right. No shock there! The black goo was something completely different from anything Charline had ever heard of before.
“Thanks for the great trip,” Charline said. “Almost as quick as the last two.”
“I think stopping for food slowed us down a few minutes,” Pete said.
“But it was so worth it,” Beth said, patting her belly and chuckling.
As they were getting out of the air-car, Cory bumped into Charline.
“Sorry,” he mumbled.
She opened her mouth to protest. He’d slipped something into her pocket - she’d felt his hand slide it there. What the hell did he think he was doing? Was he trying to bug her? Plant something? It was a clumsy attempt, if he was trying to by sneaky.
Before she said anything, she slid her hand down to see what it was he’d slipped her.
It was a small pistol.
Her eyes narrowed as she looked at his face, trying to read him. He gave her the tiniest of head shakes in return.
What was going on here? Who should she trust? She had a sense of impending danger again, coming ever closer. Still, it felt damned good to have a firearm on her. She was almost as good a shot with a pistol as with a rifle. If it came down to a fight, she could make excellent use of the weapon. And she had a feeling Cory knew that too.
“No problem,” she said. She’d keep her mouth shut. For now, at least.
Eight
Beth winced as she stepped from the air-car. Her confidence at the hospital hadn’t been all bluster, but she was still more sore than she’d let on. The wound where the alien gun punched a hole in her chest was closed, but it still ached like mad. And it might have been her imagination but it felt like her whole body was itching from the machines crawling around inside her. She wanted to scratch, but was masterfully ignoring the urge. So far.
Nanites spooked her. There were little robots running around inside her, messing with things. Sure, they were fixing the injury. Knitting together new tissue faster than her body could possibly do by itself. It was an amazing technology, and from an engineering perspective Beth was thrilled. She was less excited to be the subject of that technology. It was creepy, knowing that thousands of little droids were running around in her bloodstream. The nanites would all shut off and die in about twenty-four hours. That was a precaution, a failsafe that kept them from running amuck longer than they were supposed to. It was still about twenty three hours longer than she wanted them there.
She glanced at her watch again. Twenty-one hours and nineteen minutes left. Damn it.
Charline was already chatting with the woman who'd come to meet them. The lab coat and jeans she wore made her seem like Beth's sort of person. If she'd been feeling better she would have liked to chat, to take her measure a bit. As things stood she was just as happy to let Charline take the lead on this one.
"Not here," Charline was saying, her poker face on. She didn't have all that good a poker face. Beth could see the excitement she was working hard to contain. "Let's talk in the lab."
"Right!" Linda replied. "Of course. Follow me, please."
Beth followed the other two into the elevator, still feeling sluggish. Between the heat, the nanites, and the remnants of her injury, she was willing to admit at least privately that she was nearly wiped out. It would be a cold day in hell before she said that aloud, of course. Beth noted as she stepped onto the elevator that the security team stayed up on the roof. Pete was talking into his radio as the doors slid closed. Cory was nowhere to be seen. Where had he gotten off to?
The lift had barely begun to slip downward into the building when the lights blinked, a deep red tone replacing the normal lights. A siren began to sound. The elevator stuttered, then started to descend rapidly again.
“What’s going on?” Charline asked.
“Fire alarm,” Linda replied. “Nothing to worry about. It’s probably another damned drill.”
Beth wasn’t so sure. Having an alarm go off right as they arrived tickled her paranoia buttons. They’d been through too much recently for her to trust that everything was always going to be as it seemed. Even here on Earth. Something was up. This fire drill was too convenient.
“How do we stop this thing?” Beth said.
Linda stared at her. “You can’t. It’ll stop on the ground floor, and then we need to evacuate the building until they clear it.”
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“Which everyone knows, right?” Beth said. “All personnel are going to be removed from the building? Everyone?”
“Sure,” Linda said.
“Even security?” Beth added.
“Most of them, yes. Why?” Linda asked.
Beth shared a look with Charline. She could see from the other woman’s eyes that she agreed. A glance upward showed her a hatch that might work for escape. “We need to get up to the lab. Now.”
“You’re not in any shape for this,” Charline protested.
“I’ll manage,” Beth replied. She would, somehow. Her chest still hurt, and she wanted nothing more than to just lay down and rest, but she’d bull her way through this the same way she did everything else. “Give me a boost?”
Charline made a cup with her hands. Beth stepped up onto them, shoving up hard at the hatch set into the center panel of the elevator ceiling. The hatch popped open and Beth dragged herself through. The movement hurt her chest enough to pull a gasp from her.
“Your turn,” Charline was saying to Linda in the elevator below. Linda’s head appeared a moment later. Beth helped her up onto the top of the lift, then reached back down to clasp Charline’s hand.
The strain of lifting her friend was too much. The pain made stars streak across her vision, and she almost lost hold entirely. She would have dropped Charline back into the elevator, but then Linda was there, grabbing Charline’s other hand and helping her upward. Beth lay back for a few breaths, trying to get the pain under control again.
“We need to get off this thing,” Charline said. She was watching the floors slip by. Beth wondered how many were left until they reached the ground. There couldn’t be many.
She stood and slammed the hatch closed. If anyone was waiting down below, there was no sense telling them how they’d gotten out. “We’re going to have to jump.”
“You two are nuts,” Linda said. “You’re going to get me fired.”
“You’re about to have a lot more to worry about than your job,” Beth replied. The timing was too precise. She remembered seeing Pete on his radio. Who had he been calling? John hired the best for everything, but had he slipped up this time? It didn’t have to be Pete, of course. Anyone watching would have known when they were on the lift, would have been able to pull the alarm, would have been able to predict precisely how the building would respond to the fire drill.
Beth waited until the next floor was coming up and jumped onto the narrow ledge in front of it. She landed just to one side of a set of doors. That would be their ticket out of the shaft. The other two women jumped a moment later, catching their balance on the edge. The elevator continued to drop away below them. They were committed now. A fall would be messy and probably fatal.
Linda was clutching to a steel structural beam and panting hard, her eyes wide. Beth felt a moment of sympathy for her. The scientist was used to an ordinary life where shit like this didn’t happen. Charline on the other hand was alert and ready, her fingers already fishing into the gap between the doors. Charline gave Beth a quick nod to tell her that she was ready to move. They’d been through enough together to both keep their cool in a crisis.
“Help me pull this thing open?” Charline asked.
Beth reached over. Charline had managed to create a little gap in the doors, and together they widened it enough that they were able to slip through. Beth looked back. Linda still hadn’t moved from the spot she’d jumped to. She clung, trembling, to the steel bar.
“Linda, come on,” Charline said, holding out a hand. The woman didn’t move.
“We have to leave her,” Beth said. “There’s no time.”
Below them, she could hear the elevator ding as it hit the ground floor and the doors slid open. There was a set of soft sounds like someone smacking a pillow multiple times. Then voices speaking urgently to one another.
“Linda, right now!” Charline hissed.
The frightened woman reached out and took her hand. Charline hauled her through the gap, out into the hallway.
“Those were silenced pistols,” Charline said. “Or air guns, maybe. Hard to tell which at this distance. We need to get up to the lab.”
Charline would know. Beth had seen her in action. Maybe Andy knew firearms better - maybe. But she had no doubt her friend was right. Someone had been down there waiting for them. Whether those people had been planning to kill them or capture them was still a question, but Beth didn’t want to wait around to find out which it might be.
“Can you lead us to the lab?” Beth asked. Linda still seemed upset, but she’d lost the wild-eyed look she had in the shaft.
“Yes,” Linda said. “Stairs are this way.”
She led them down the hall a short distance and opened a door into a stairwell. There was no one in sight. Charline took the lead, pulling a pistol from her pocket. It was a small automatic, snub nosed but still deadly looking in her hands.
“Where did you get that?” Beth asked.
“One of the security guys slipped it in my pocket.”
“Got another one?” Beth asked.
Charline shook her head and began climbing the stairs, leading with the gun.
Nine
Dan wheeled after John into his friend’s private office. The appointments of the place were pretty basic. Dominating the view was a massive screen John had imported from Earth. Most of the base had been built on site, 3-D printed from lunar materials. There was plenty of aluminum and silicon here for creating things, and John’s premise was to build as much of the base as possible from native sources, rather than trying to lift everything out of Earth’s gravity. He’d saved enormous expense that way.
But he’d brought the massive screen up anyway, at great cost. Every pound was pricey, and that screen weighed a lot. Dan knew how much John loved the thing though. Right now it was set to an image from a camera outside, with the sun barely peeking over the horizon of the moon, casting long shadows from every rock and ridge. He found himself staring at the view, expecting the shadows to slowly move. They wouldn’t, of course. Not noticeably, anyway. The lunar day was about two weeks long, followed by another two weeks of night. Those shadows would stay the same for hours. He shook himself and rolled over next to John’s desk.
“You said you had something to tell me,” Dan said.
“To show you,” John corrected. “Yes.”
He tapped a keyboard on his desk, and the image on the big screen changed. The lunar surface was replaced with a dozen rows of colored squares. Dan recognized the patterns at once. They were the colored symbols for how the alien wormhole drive stored data about travel destinations. The twelve sets of symbols where the ones Majel - their AI - had been able to pull from the ancient alien database.
Desperate to save the ship from an impossible situation, Dan had yanked one set of those coordinates and opened a wormhole to that destination. The jump had worked. The drive had taken them to another star system, hundreds of light years from Earth. And then they’d managed to reverse the wormhole and jump back home.
One set of those codes seemed to bring a ship to Earth’s system. One represented their in-system jump, which had landed them almost inside of Jupiter’s atmosphere by accident. Another led to the dangerous system they’d investigated, where they’d met the Naga - and almost died. But the other nine…?
“Do you know where they go?” Dan breathed.
“Not yet,” John said. “I’ve got Majel working on it, but there simply isn’t enough information to decode their system yet. We’ve made some real progress almost by accident, though. While we were working on the cubes Charline rescued from the ancient city though, we found these.”
He tapped a key and a new set of symbols appeared. Similar to the first - same style of symbol and patterns of colors. But this time there were dozens of them. Scores of them. Then hundreds of them as they continued to scroll down the screen. An impossible array of coordinates, destinations that had to be different star-systems and planets that t
he ancient alien race had explored.
“It looks like at least a small bit of the data she rescued was some sort of atlas. Maybe a book for educating children, for all I know. But locations,” John said.
“Lots of them,” Dan said.
“A universe full of them. All potentially out there waiting for us to explore them,” John said. “If we dare.”
For a long moment Dan stared at the screen, pondering what it all meant. A thousand or so years ago, some civilization had explored all those places, visited all of those stars, and mapped them all out. Now they were gone, the last remnants of their technology rotting beneath ruined cities on a dead world, or hidden in smashed bases like the one John had discovered by accident on Luna.
Those aliens had done so much. They had power sources beyond anything people on Earth had dreamed up. Their wormhole drive was so advanced it might as well be magic. They had used their technology to explore who knew how many solar systems. And despite all that, they were gone, wiped from the face of the universe as if they’d never been. Perhaps they were still out there somewhere, but surely they would not have simply abandoned the cities on that planet had they been simply moving on to a new place. Something terrible had happened to them.
Was it worth the risk, to try to pick up where they had left off? To try to see the things they had seen, to explore in their footsteps? They had already discovered that the universe beyond their star could be a deadly place. But the explorer in him told Dan that they had to go and try anyway. Wasn’t that what humanity always did when it came across a new frontier?
In his heart, Dan knew the answer had to be yes.
“When do we go?” he asked John.
“Soon. We need to fix the ship, first. And we will need more time for Majel to analyze the code structure before we can get even a vague idea where these coordinates lead,” John said, waving his hand at the screen. “But I agree that we need to get back out there. We already know we’re not alone. We know we’re behind the curve, when it comes to technology. If the Naga had discovered Earth before we discovered them, well…”
Adventures of the Starship Satori: Book 1-6 Complete Library Page 28
