That was as far as he’d gotten, though. Even though he’d brought the Satori down in the clearest spot he could find, the whole area was still strewn with debris. His wheelchair wasn’t up to the struggle of getting over that mess. Defeated, Dan retreated back into the ship.
“Were they really garages?” Dan asked, interested. Any sort of machinery left behind by the alien civilization that had once lived here might give them clues.
“No. Not outhouses either, thankfully,” Charline said with a laugh. “Just buildings. Whatever stuff these people had seems to have been taken with them, destroyed by time, or picked clean by someone else before we got here.”
“That’s too bad,” Dan said. Right now they needed information more than just about anything else. Anything they could learn about the universe now open to them would expand the incredibly scant information they’d found so far.
“Well, if this works out, we should learn a lot,” Charline said.
“If,” he replied. He had some reservations about this mission. They were speeding toward one of the satellites surrounding the planet, targeting the one that had fired on them the first time they visited. He’d avoided the missile then by cloaking the ship, so it was a fair guess the cloak would prevent an attack this time too. But he was going to have to get a lot closer if Charline was going to try to hack its system.
“Stands to reason they’re Naga devices,” Charline said. “Since they didn’t shoot at the Naga ship. I learned a little about the Naga computer tech from Majel’s scans. I’m pretty sure I can create an interface that will work.”
Dan turned back to his console, watching the three small dots that indicated the location of their friends on the surface. They were still setting up Beth’s ratzard trap. She’d created a fairly elaborate system using a variety of baits. Whichever bait the animal took would be registered and recorded when the trap closed. Pretty cool stuff. The best part was that even if they had to beat a hasty retreat, the trap could be left behind. They could always return to see if it had worked later.
He felt nervous about John splitting the team again, even though he understood why he’d ordered Dan and Charline into orbit before the ground team was finished. Clearing the nearby buildings had taken a long time. Setting up the trap was going to require still more. The longer they remained here, the greater the risk that something would pop in and find them. Rather than risk not accomplishing both parts of the mission, John chose to split the team. Of course, splitting up was what had given them so much grief the last time they’d been here…
They were getting close to the satellite. No time for worrying about it now. Their best shot would be to get near enough that Charline could hack the thing, and then get out. All while watching for any sign the thing had detected them and was getting ready to open fire again. He punched up the magnification on his video feed, watching the object closely as he slowed the ship down to approach. It was dark, hard to spot against the black of space except an occasional faint glimmer when sunlight caught it just right. There was no sign of life from the thing. But that didn’t make him feel much better. It had seemed dormant until right before it fired, last time.
“OK, we’re almost there,” Dan said. “Are you in range to connect remotely yet?”
“I’ll check,” Charline replied, leaning forward into her console and typing some commands.
They continued to slide slowly toward it, drifting ever closer. Dan decreased their relative velocity until the Satori was holding her distance at a mile away.
“We need to get closer,” Charline said. “It’s not picking up my signals. Dan, I might have to interface with the thing directly.”
“By directly, you mean physically plug in a cord?” he asked. He tried to keep the heat from his voice, but this wasn’t part of the plan. How did she expect him to get them in that close without being blown to bits? “You want me to dock with the Naga satellite?”
“Pretty much, yeah,” she said. She held up a cable with an unusual looking adapter at the end of it. “The Naga rifles we recovered have a port that fits this. I extrapolated the connection from there. I’m hoping I can use this to plug into some system on their satellite.”
“Why can’t you just contact it remotely?” Dan asked.
“I have. I don’t have the right protocols, and I can’t break their encryption. The computer over there,” she said, pointing at the satellite, “is asking me to board and make a direct connection.”
“It’s asking you to board.”
“Safety feature,” she said. “To ensure we’re not some non-Naga race trying to hack the thing with a fly-by.”
“Which of course is precisely what we’re doing.”
“Yup. But if I can get in there with a wired link, I might be able to work some magic.”
Dan sighed. This was getting much more risky and complicated than he’d been figuring the already risky and complicated operation was going to be. He backed the Satori away from the satellite, getting them a few extra miles of clearance, and then pinged the surface crew.
“John, we’ve got a situation up here,” Dan said into the radio.
“What’s up?” John replied, immediately alert.
Dan filled him in quickly, with Charline outlining the technical end of things. It wasn’t that Dan didn’t know how computers worked, but it was going to be Charline doing the connecting and she knew what she was talking about far better than he did.
“You think you can do this?” John asked over the radio.
Charline bit her lip. “I honestly figure our odds at about fifty-fifty.”
Dan held his breath, waiting for the answer. He’d let John make the call on this, but it sounded way too risky for such a low probability of success.
“Abort, then,” John said. He sounded disappointed, but firm.
“But…” Charline started to say.
“No,” John replied. “Our main objective is to get everyone home safe. We can make return trips another time, maybe after analyzing your scan data and being better prepared. Come back down to the surface.”
A beeping noise attracted Dan’s attention back to the console. That was odd; it was a proximity alarm. He glanced at the radar and saw that the satellite was a hell of a lot closer than it had been before. It was accelerating toward them.
“Shit, I think it’s tracking our radio signal,” Dan said. “We’re going radio silent, John. Satori out.”
He shut down the radio completely, hoping it wasn’t already too late.
Six
Charline looked down as her console beeped. A string of characters appeared on the screen, continuing to scroll in a steady stream. She tapped her keyboard, looking to interrupt the mess. Windows popped open in a series of flashes across her console, closing down almost as quickly.
"Shit!" she said. "Dan, get us out of here. We're being hacked!"
Whatever was over there - she had to assume this was coming from the satellite closing on them - it was doing a number on the computer. Literally eating each file as quickly as it scanned them. Read, delete; read delete. The process kept going and there seemed to be nothing she could do to stop it.
Her fingers flashed over the keyboard, trying to throw up firewall protocols to block the hack. Nothing was working. It was blowing through 128-bit encryption like it wasn't even there. That shouldn't be possible without one hell of a supercomputer. Who would put something like that on a satellite?
Someone who had computers way better than humanity did, maybe. Someone for whom that sort of data processing was insignificant. "Shit! Why aren't we moving?"
"I've lost drive controls," Dan said. His voice sounded grim. "And look, there goes the cloaking device. No wormhole control either. Railguns...ditto. We're dead in the water out here."
"Majel, can you stop them?" Charline asked.
"The ship's systems are being attacked by a highly sophisticated artificial intelligence," Majel said. "While it has yet to identify my presence, when it does
it will likely seek out my program and delete it."
"Shit," Charline said. "Majel, how much of your program is actually still in the human built computers?"
It was a question she'd been meaning to ask for quite a while now. There was something about how Majel had acted back on the station that had struck her as odd. The little delays in processing implied that it was using wireless settings way more than it should have had to. When she linked up Majel to the alien systems, it had been a desperate move. She had no way of knowing what that might do to Majel's programming, and she'd observed more than her share of strange happenings since.
"Less than two percent, Charline."
"Thought so," Charline said. "Majel, how long to download those elements to the alien system?"
"About zero point two seconds," Majel said.
"Do it," Charline said, rising from her seat and heading toward the engine room.
"Done," Majel replied before she had left her seat.
"Show-off," Charline said, grinning.
She rushed to the back of the ship, leaving Dan to struggle with the controls. He yelled something at her as she ran back, but she didn't have time to respond. Every second might count. The alien AI was hacking her human computers right now, but they were hard-wired into the alien systems they'd built into the Satori, legacy systems left over from the ancient starship John found on the moon. Nobody knew precisely how they worked, but while they were connected with the hard line to the oh-so-hackable human computers, Majel remained vulnerable.
The simple solution? Unplug the damned things. That wasn't quite as easily said as done.
There was one vulnerable point in the line, where it came up out of the deck plates and plugged in to the side of the alien mechanism. That machine controlled the wormhole drive, the cloaking device, the artificial gravity, the main engines... And probably other things Charline didn't know about. Beth would strangle her for this, but there wasn't any other way.
She yanked open Beth's toolbox and rooted around inside for a pair of bolt cutters. Grabbing the things, she brought the blades around the thick cable - and cut.
Charline had closed her eyes, half expecting something to happen. Explosions, maybe a big shocking jolt, the loss of gravity - she'd certainly expected something to occur. What she wasn't expecting was nothing. She opened her eyes again. Everything around her seemed precisely as it had a moment before.
"Majel?" she said, hesitant and hoping.
There was no reply. Whether that was because Majel was locked away inside the alien systems, safety cut off from the attack or because she'd been too late and Majel was already deleted she couldn't tell. Charline set the cutters down, hoping she'd been in time. Majel might be their best chance at getting out of this mess, but only if she was still intact.
She walked slowly back to the bridge. Dan was still fidgeting with his controls, trying to make something work, but she could already tell that it was useless. All of the screens around the cockpit area had bright blue screens. They were trashed.
"Where did you go?" Dan asked.
"Engines. To save Majel."
"Well, whatever you did doesn't seem to have worked. I've got nothing up here," Dan said, slapping the console in frustration. "That satellite is almost on top of us."
It loomed in the front windows now, several times the size of the Satori. It was a big sphere from the looks of it, with various black vanes and blockier objects protruding from the surface. As she watched, something jetted away from the thing toward them. She gasped.
"It's firing!" she said.
Dan turned back around to look, his shoulders tensing. But he relaxed a little when he saw the projectile.
"Too slow to be a missile," he said. "Looks like an anchor, or maybe some sort of docking clamp. I think they're bringing us in."
She slumped back into her seat. Neither of them said it, but Charline knew Dan had to be thinking the same thing she was. The satellite had to be what called the Naga battleship last time, signaling for help after it had fired the missile at the Satori. It was certain to have done so again now. They were stuck there floating in space helplessly, and it was a pretty good bet that unfriendly company was already on its way.
Seven
John leaned against the wall of one of the half-ruined structures, sweat pouring down his face. He grabbed a canteen and drained it, taking long gulps of the cold water while he waited for Dan to come back on. Long minutes ticked by. He glanced down at his watch. Five of them. Damn it, what was taking so long? The Satori could fly rings around any satellite out there. In the worst case Dan could jump the ship back home, and then return again for the rest of them. There shouldn't be any significant threat to the ship.
After ten minutes passed with no further word from the ship, he began to worry in earnest.
"Damn it," he said. It had been a risk to split the team up. He'd judged it an acceptable risk. Hell, he'd even aborted the satellite mission at the first sign there was any trouble up there. It looked like it had already been too late. Whatever was going on in space, he hoped Dan and Charline were up to the challenge.
"What's going on?" Beth said as she stepped inside. She was drenched with sweat. The days on this world were hot. The last measurement was closing on forty-four degrees Celsius.
"Water first," John said, tossing her a full canteen. She drank gratefully.
"The trap is set," Beth said between gulps. "We should probably pull back a bit, leave it be and see if they'll take the bait. How's the space mission?"
"Not good. Dan said something about going radio silent - he thought the satellite was zeroing in on the radio transmission," John said.
"How long ago?" Beth asked. She glanced skyward, as if she hoped she might catch a glimpse of the ship through the crack-riddled ceiling.
John looked back down at his watch. "Fifteen minutes. Get Andrew. We need to move."
"Move where?" Beth demanded.
"If the satellite detected the ship, there's a decent chance they radioed for help," John said. "Which means we could have company showing up here any time. I'm not willing to gamble that they can't detect where the Satori set down a little while ago. Are you?"
She grimaced. "So much for the easy mission."
"Indeed. Now let's grab Andrew and get the hell out of here before we get company."
Five minutes later and they were on their way. Twenty minutes since Dan's last contact. Hells, that was a long time in a firefight. Dan should have been able to get back to them by now, unless he had actually fired the wormhole drive to get away. It would take time to recharge before he could return for them. That was their best hope. All they had to do then was hold out a little while, wait for the Satori to come and get them. The alternative scenarios were too unpleasant to reflect on. John would continue acting like there was hope for a rescue until there was clear evidence to the contrary.
"We can't keep moving outside like this for long," Andrew said. "It's too hot, and we don't have enough water for it."
"I'm open to suggestions," John said.
"I think our best bet is to head north along the shore," Andrew said. "The scans showed a network of caves a kilometer or so that way. If they're stable we might be able to hide out there."
"You memorized the survey scan?" Beth asked.
"Part of the job," Andrew said, tapping the side of his head with a grin.
"Good work, Andrew. And a good idea. Let's make haste that way, then," John said. "We'll leave the radios off. I think Dan's right, and the enemy is able to detect the broadcasts, maybe track us by the things. It's possible that's how they found us so quickly last time."
"What about contacting the ship?" Beth asked.
"Turn one radio on every ten minutes for one minute," Andrew replied. "Dan will keep broadcasting until he reaches us, once he can. That should keep our exposure down to a minimum."
John saw movement out of the corner of his eye. A small flash of dun colored something shifting rapidly from one
bit of shadow to another spot behind a rock. He turned quickly, but not fast enough to see whatever it was. He had a strong sense of being watched, though. The feeling that something was out there. John scanned the scene, looking for anything that might be out of place, but all he saw was sand, rocks, and rubble. The hot wind blew bits of grit in a little dust devil. Nothing else stirred. Whatever he'd seen was very good at hiding.
A hand falling on his shoulder made him jump a bit.
"See something?" Andrew asked.
"Maybe. Not sure. A ratzard, I think."
"Let's get moving then," Andrew said.
They set off in the direction as the caves. Andrew walked point, his rifle at the ready. Beth was right behind him, covering him from a few steps back. John picked up the rear. He kept looking back over his shoulder as they walked. Something was back there. John was sure of it. Something was moving just outside his peripheral vision, tracking them as they walked. Maybe just a ratzard. But this was a big planet, and just because the only creature they'd seen alive here so far were the ratzards didn't mean there wasn't anything else.
Eight
Charline went over to a supply cubby, rooting around inside for a few moments. The space was full of backup supplies, the stuff they might need to use to make emergency repairs on the fly. There was enough gear stowed away on the ship that she thought they could almost build a new ship if they really needed to. Luckily what she had in mind was nowhere near that complex.
A few minutes later she had what she wanted: three laptop computers. They were heavier than they looked, the sort of laptop you could probably toss against the wall a few times without the machine even noticing. She snagged a chunk of Ethernet cable as well.
She plunked two of the computers down on the console in front of Dan.
Adventures of the Starship Satori: Book 1-6 Complete Library Page 36
