She fired twice, dropping two men, then started moving forward. She needed to get clear of the vehicle and find some cover. Too many targets, too many people shooting…! Some barrels up ahead might work. Charline dove for them.
Behind her more gunfire erupted from the back of the flyer as Beth and Cory came out, guns blazing. Beth was still using the pistol she acquired at the lab. Cory had come up with a small assault rifle from somewhere. He was firing single shots, not bursts, which raised Charline’s opinion of him a notch. Andy said that amateurs fired bursts. Professionals fired one round at a time.
“Make for the tower!” Charline shouted. It was the only part of this rust bucket that looked like it had been cleaned up for habitation. That was where they’d find the sample.
She stood up, guns blazing, and started making her way there. Cory covered her with his rifle, picking off targets she missed. Beth caught up with her and stood just behind and beside her, adding her own pistol fire to the mix.
“I’m out!” Beth said.
“Take cover,” Charline said grimly. She’d lost count of her own rounds. How many shots left? She cursed under her breath, wishing she’d kept better track. Andy would have known precisely how many bullets were left in his gun. She wished for a moment that he was there, standing beside her. Her foot slipped on something slick and she managed to not look down, already knowing that what she stood on was blood from one of her victims. She kept her feet beneath her and continued forward.
Cory dashed past her and made it to the door. He yanked, but it was stuck.
“Locked!” he shouted.
Shit. They hadn’t planned for that. How to blow the thing? There were too many armed men on this rig. The whole idea had been to dash in, grab the sample, and get the hell out. Three against thirty was not fun odds. Charline ran the last few feet, bullets striking the deck right behind her. She checked the door out. Not only was it locked - it was locked by a computer coded system.
“I can hack it, if you can buy me two minutes,” she said. She slipped the pistols back into her pockets and pulled out her tablet, trying to negotiate a connection with the computer lock.
“Make it quick,” Cory said, firing at the enemy closing in on them.
The tablet connected. She worked her way through the subroutines of the system, trying to find a path that would let her hack entry. She was good at this sort of thing. It was her bread and butter, after all. She just wasn’t used to doing it while under fire.
“I’m in!” she shouted. The door clicked as the lock disengaged.
Then the world exploded around her, a blinding flash of light and deafening sound cutting her off from her senses.
Seventeen
John’s hand hovered over the strange creature for another moment. His resolve wavered. What he was considering was damned risky. Even foolhardy. It went against all common sense. If Dan were still here, he’d never allow it. And yet…
What else could he do? Andrew might not be his son by birth, but he might as well be. John couldn’t stand by and watch him suffer. Not if there was anything he could do that might end that pain.
His instincts said Dan was right. The creature was not just carrying memories of someplace it had been, or images of coordinates it had seen. Dan had mentioned the idea that it might be sentient, and that rang true. If that was the case, then perhaps it could be reasoned with. But only if he could communicate with it, and there was only one person it seemed to be talking to… The one with whom it had connected.
“Here goes nothing,” John said aloud. He dipped his hand into the water and gently scooped the thing out. He was expecting it to feel slimy, but instead it felt smooth, even slippery. He almost lost his grip as he removed it from the tank and had to reach over with his other hand to catch hold of it.
Gingerly, he brought the thing up to his left ear.
“Moment of truth time,” he whispered. Hand shaking, thinking as hard as he could of Andrew, he held the alien life-form up to his ear. Sensing what was expected of it, the thing wriggled in his hand, slipping through his fingers and entering the outer ear canal. John winced as it made its way down to the ear drum, slipping against sensitive tissue during its descent.
And then…nothing. There was no pain. No sudden biting sensation. No agony of the little creature burrowing into his brain, as vivid as that image had been a few moments ago. It just sat there.
“Well, that was anti-climactic,” he said aloud. “Can you hear me?”
No response. Was it sentient at all? If it wasn’t able to communicate, then this might have been for nothing. Well, it was used to translating other beings for the one wearing it. He was going to need to find a way to engage it in conversation. If it was translating by telepathy, it had to be able to read minds. Maybe he could think at it?
“Andrew,” he said aloud, picturing the man in his mind.
Nothing. Apparently now that it had a new host, it wasn’t interested in Andrew anymore. Or it wasn’t hearing him. There was no way to tell. But the alien seemed to be aquatic. It had remained in the watery section of the terrarium ever since they’d placed it there, and most of the dreams Andrew had spoken of revolved around water. Maybe he could get it to engage if he thought about water.
“Ocean?” he tried. He brought to mind memories of the Maine seacoast, waves crashing upon the craggy shoreline, wind whipping through the shrubby trees.
Another image popped into his mind, of being underwater. The light above was bright, the water a vivid blue. It reminded him of pictures he’d seen of the Caribbean. He was moving through the water somehow, propelled along by some force. This wasn’t any memory of his. It was coming from elsewhere. The thing had responded to his mental image of the ocean.
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” he said. “Wormhole.” He pictured the way the Satori’s star drive looked when it was generating a wormhole in front of the ship, the way the colors spun, igniting space and opening a rift to someplace else.
“Symbols,” he said, picturing the screen in his office, scrolling through rows of colored symbols.
This thought seemed to excite the small alien. He actually felt it twitch inside his ear for the first time since it had settled there - an uncanny sensation. Then a symbol popped into his head, one of the ones used by the aliens who’d invented the Satori’s drive, colored in bright red. It was replaced a moment later by another symbol in green, and then a third in the same color. The images continued through the sequence, ending in blue. The same pattern that Andrew had muttered in his sleep a short while ago.
A sense of longing filled him, rocking him to his core. John sank to his knees, tears in his eyes as the deep, savage despair filled him, the loss of everyone and everything he’d ever known, gone forever, lost and far away and beyond his reach for all time…
He squeezed his eyes shut as tightly as he could, trying to block the flow of emotion. Nothing worked. The thing was inside his mind, and he was feeling every iota of its pain. Was that what Andrew had endured? No wonder he'd been in such bad shape. John wasn’t sure how much longer he could stand it.
He reached out and tasted the pain, felt the nature of it, and something about it was familiar to him. He’d felt that sort of agony before, and in a flash he knew when. It was always there in his mind, lurking just out of view, an old scar that had never healed and would never entirely fade away. John knew in his heart that he would carry that pain until the day he died.
The thought triggered the memory, and then he was seeing Satori again - his wife, not the ship. She was pregnant, full of life, getting ready to bring their shared life into the world.
And then she was in the hospital. Things were going wrong. She was in desperate pain. John was there, holding her hand, as she slipped away from him forever. The love of his life and their son, dead together. John had the best doctors that money could buy, but there was nothing anyone could do.
The image of his dying wife seared through his brain. That was where he
had felt this sort of loss before. Everything that mattered to him in the universe, the center and sum of all that he valued, gone in an instant. The pain of that loss. The sense of being utterly alone. The despair.
Somewhere inside his mind, another set of thoughts met the wall of his agony and recoiled from it. He felt the presence of those alien thoughts recede a little, their weight ebbing from his mind. Then there was a new thought: satisfaction. It had made contact with a like mind, with someone who could understand and grasp the depth of its suffering. In John, the little alien had experienced something it had been missing for so long - empathy.
John opened his eyes, and through tear streaked vision reached out for the table in front of him. Using it for balance he staggered back to his feet. The room wobbled around him, trying to right itself.
He’d come through that agony once, thanks to his friends. Dan, Beth, and later Andrew had filled the void in his life, giving him hope that perhaps the future would hold some meaning for him. In time it eventually had. The pain would never be gone. He could never truly release it entirely, so it would always be a part of him. But he had learned to hope again, and love again, and through those things to live again. In his thoughts, he tried to share those emotions with his new companion.
Perhaps it grasped at least a little of what he meant.
“It seems we have reached an understanding, then,” John said. He allowed himself a little smile. This had been a hell of an adventure. Satori would have been proud of him.
The doors to the lab snapped open. John turned, and found a disapproving Dan staring at him, aghast.
“What the hell have you done?” Dan asked.
Eighteen
Linda held her breath as the air-car’s hatch opened. She could hear the gruff voices of men she didn’t know speaking to one another, and all she could do was keep herself as still as possible. She’d watched as the the others had jumped from the air-car into battle, guns blazing like they were in some sort of action movie. That wasn’t who Linda was. She didn’t think that she could ever act like that. And look what it had gotten them? It sounded like the fighting was over, and since the people opening the hatch were strangers, Linda was betting that meant her side hadn’t won. How was she going to get out of this mess now?
Instead of rushing out with the others she had stayed inside the vehicle and hidden inside a little nook under the flyer’s dashboard. The space was so small that she could barely squeeze herself inside it even with her small frame. It was the only hiding place in the flyer’s crew compartment, small as it was. There was nowhere else for her to go. Sweat trickled down her forehead, dripping into her eyes. She blinked, the only motion she could allow herself. She could hear the men chatting as they looked inside the car. Then the hatch was slammed shut again so abruptly that the sound made her jump.
From outside the flyer, she heard a muffled voice say, “All clear inside the vehicle. We got ‘em all.”
Somehow they hadn’t seen her when they looked inside. Maybe the angle had been slightly wrong, or maybe they had something else on their minds. Whatever had saved her, she was grateful for it. The other three had rushed outside, guns blazing, while she ducked her head and prayed.
Linda wasn’t made for this sort of action hero stuff. She was comfortable in her lab. She’d never wanted to get involved in more adventurous activities that looking through her microscope or analyzing data. How the hell had she ended up here?
She peeked up through the windshield. It was starred and cracked from the impact of dozens of bullets during their initial descent. She was pretty sure no one would be able to see her through it. She could barely see outward.
Cory, Beth, and Charline were all lined up in the flat landing area about fifteen feet away. They were on their knees, surrounded by armed men. The whole plan had gone sideways. What the hell had they been thinking? She knew it was important to get the sample back. But this was a job for the police. Or maybe the army. Not for a handful of people operating on their own. One man was pacing back and forth in front of them, saying something she could barely hear. Linda strained her ears to listen.
“Placed a tracking device, didn’t you?” the man asked.
“Something like that, Pete,” Cory replied.
“You are too damned smart for your own good,” Pete said. “You might have lived, if you’d left well enough alone. Now?”
Then the man Cory had called Pete lifted his pistol, aiming it at Cory. Before anyone else could so much as breathe he’d fired. Cory never even made a sound. His body just slumped backward onto the deck.
Linda stifled a scream. Making noise would just bring their attention on her. There were still two people out there she might be able to help, if only she could remain free. There were reinforcements coming, too. Charline and Beth had called for backup. She just had to hang on.
“We can’t stay here. They’ll have reported this location,” Pete said to the other men. “We’ll have to move the sample to another safe spot.”
“The bosses won’t be happy,” one of the other men said to him.
“They’ll be a lot less happy if we lose their new baby, whatever the hell the stuff is,” Pete said. “Pack everything you can in the air-car, then torch the rest.”
“You’re right, I am not happy,” a man said as he stepped from one of the structures built into the rig. “Not happy at all to be interrupted, anyway. But I have to admit that I am pleased to see who you caught for me.”
He stopped in front of Charline and looked down at her. “Been a while. I hope you remember me.”
“Heimsman,” Charline said. “I figured you to have crawled under a rock someplace. What made you slither back out?”
“Why, my dear! There are always companies willing to hire someone with my sort of skills, especially when I’m forced to not care much about ethics due to the nature of my last employment severance,” Heimsman said with a chuckle. “I had more than a few offers. Of course none were quite as good as the job you made me lose, but I got by.”
“You know this creep?” Beth asked Charline.
“Old boss. Came on to me and had to be told ‘no’ with my knee,” Charline replied.
“Yes, and shortly after I had you fired for that assault, my private files were open to the world, and the company computers were trashed,” Heimsman said. “It didn’t take much to figure out how that happened. But by then you were gone. Off the planet, it turned out. Out of even my extensive reach.”
“But it seems like fate has intervened, and I have a chance to pick things up where we left off,” Heimsman said. The oily smile on his face made Linda’s skin crawl, even with the windshield between them. He turned to the man standing nearby. “You lot - get to the loading. We want to be out of here soon. They’ll have more company coming, I’m sure.”
“You got it, boss,” they replied. He and five other men walked into the building that Charline had been trying to break open. That left only Pete and four guards out watching the other two women. There had been a lot more guards before they landed. Linda glanced around, looking for them, and finally spotted a row of bodies off to one side. She felt sickened but strangely satisfied at the same time. The warring emotions were confusing.
Pete was speaking again, aiming his pistol at Charline this time. Linda held her breath. She liked the other woman, had liked her from their first meeting. Was she about to die right in front of her? She cast about the inside of the cabin, looking for some way she could help.
Cory had opened up a locker before he went out. He’d grabbed a rifle and several magazines from it. There was another rifle sitting inside. Linda pulled it free, trying to figure out how to use the thing. That was the safety. She flipped the little switch to semi. There was already a magazine loaded. Did that mean it was ready to fire? She didn’t know. She looked back out the window.
“You’ve been a hell of a lot of trouble, lady,” Pete said. “Those were good men you killed.”
“You don’t
understand,” Charline said. “That stuff you stole - it’s dangerous!”
“It might be. But it’s valuable,” Heimsman said. “It’s gonna make us all wealthy.”
“It’s going to make everyone dead, if you’re not careful,” Beth said.
Pete’s pistol wavered away from Charline and aimed at Beth instead. She didn’t look away or back down. Linda was stunned at the display of courage. It couldn’t be easy, staring death in the nose and not blinking. She wished she was more like that.
“Well, we ought to keep at least one of you around. In case your friends show up,” Pete said. “A hostage might be useful.”
Then he whipped the gun back around at Charline, aiming it directly at her head.
“I’d prefer to keep her, if that’s all right,” Heimsman interjected, his voice almost a purr. “We have unfinished business.”
“You sure? You’re the boss, but in my opinion she’s too dangerous to keep alive,” Pete said.
Heimsman made a face, then waved his hand. “Very well. I pay you to give me security advice, I’d be a damned fool if I didn’t take it. Keep the other one as a hostage instead and shoot Ms. Foster. Make sure it hurts, though.”
“I can do that,” Pete said, his voice cold.
Linda started to turn her head away. Charline was a nice person, she didn’t deserve this… But she couldn’t bring herself to try anything. She was terrified. If she managed to somehow shoot the rifle, even if she somehow managed to hit someone, then what? The others would kill her, too.
Adventures of the Starship Satori: Book 1-6 Complete Library Page 32
