The whole idea reeked of fear. The Romans had been terrified of the Carthaginians. That’s why they invaded. That’s why they were so thorough in their destruction of the place. Who had these people been, that the Naga were so utterly terrified of them?
“Dustball works,” Beth muttered under her breath as they broke out of their descent. Andy couldn’t argue with her. The place was a vast desert, except for the oceans. Those were covered with ratzard blood.
“Coming in low over the ocean,” Dan said.
“Are we sure we’re doing this?” Beth asked.
“I can’t think of a better way to test the bacteria, can you?” John asked.
Beth pursed her lips, but remained silent. They’d hashed out the idea in detail for days. A trip to the ocean world was still necessary to collect samples for Linda to study. But an actual field test of the bacteria would be ideal as well. The planet was nearly dead. Coating the oceans had stopped evaporation, which had killed the clouds. No evaporation, no rain. No water and - well, you ended up with what they were seeing. An entire planet turned to barren desert.
If this worked out then all of that might change.
“There’s minimal other life for the bacteria to interact with,” Linda said. She still looked a little pale, and was gripping her seat with white-knuckled fingers, but Andy thought she was handling her first trip on the Satori pretty well all things considered. “I’ve made sure they can’t infect the insect life you guys found. They will do nasty things to any ratzards they infect, though.”
“I bet,” Andy said. He could imagine the effect of a bacteria which literally ate ratzard blood as its only food on any of the things which became infected.
“No great loss there,” Dan added.
“No. They’re also invasive,” Linda said. “It’s OK to remove them from the system. There is likely other life that we haven’t seen, though. Maybe something survived on the ocean floor, or inside protected cave systems like the one you discovered. It’s not perfect.”
She shrugged. “I can’t predict the results when our bacteria meets native life. But because there is minimal native life, the contacts should be small. And the bacteria was designed to have as little impact as possible on anything except the ratzard blood. If anything it should have less impact than the bacteria you already introduced during your earlier visits.”
They were cruising along the coastline, approaching the ruins of the ancient city they’d explored. Well, explored a little of, anyway. The Naga had wiped out most of the rest of the city with a massive bomb strike. Whatever other wonders existed in there, they might never know. If anything survived at all it would be buried under enormous piles of rubble.
“The best thing about this is going to be the Naga’s reaction,” Andy said.
John looked at him and cocked his head sideways. “Explain?”
“These people were the Naga’s boogeymen, right? They were terrified of us when we arrived, mostly because we were using tech that was out of the stories they used to frighten their kids. Or something like that.” Andy recalled the vicious little Naga young. Maybe the comparison wasn’t all that good.
“If this works and they see the planet coming back, they’re going to be scared and pissed. Seeing how they react to that will be interesting,” Andy said.
“Indeed,” John replied. “OK, let’s do this. It might be kicking over an anthill bigger than we thought, but let’s make it happen. Beth, your dispersal system ready to go?”
“Set,” Beth replied. “Dan, take us in low and slow along the coast. We’ve got enough material for about five miles at optimal spread.”
Ten minutes later the job was done. Beth had built an external tank into the Satori, with spray nozzles to release the bacteria into the water. As the Satori flew along the coast she engaged the device, sending gallons of the bacterial soup down onto the surface of the ocean.
“Dan, take us back over the course we just flew. Let’s take a look at the work,” John said. “Linda, how soon should we begin to see an effect?”
“Fifteen minutes?” she replied. “The first areas we sprayed might already be dissolving, but the process will be slow until the bacteria multiply.”
“Look down there!” Dan called out. “Majel, can you magnify that spot and put it on our screens?”
“Done,” the computer replied.
The image was not that different from the flat black of the rest of the ocean. The tarry substance was completely black, with a matte finish that seemed to soak up the light. But in one area the surface had taken on a reflective sheen. Magnified, Andy could see a few small bits of foamy bubbles appearing in the top of the stuff. Linda’s bacteria was working.
“It looks good,” she said. “Now we need to see if it will take hold. If the bacteria is strong enough, it will continue to grow and spread. Eventually the entire surface of the planet might clear out from this one delivery.”
“How long will that take?” John asked.
“I don’t have any way to estimate. If we come back here in a week or so I might be able to give you something but right now?” Linda shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
They knew the stuff worked, which was important. Now everyone was dancing around the elephant in the room. Well, maybe not Linda. She was new to the ship and might not realize what a monumental trip they were about to take. Everyone else was completely aware, though.
Five
“So we’re going to visit the Cyanaut’s home world next?” Linda asked. Her blithe manner expressed that she had no clue what everyone else was so uptight about. They’d never jumped anywhere except to this world and back home. Nowhere else. The idea of jumping to a new planet based entirely on coordinated planted in John’s mind by a small aquatic slug was leaving them less than happy.
“Cyanauts?” Dan asked. “Wait - did she just name them? Who gave her naming privileges?” He turned to grin at the offending Linda, who wasn’t quite sure how to take the sudden attention. “Who gave you naming privileges?”
She laughed. Andy joined in. He couldn’t help himself. The look on Dan’s face was too comical. Even Beth was smiling. John looked thoughtful.
“It’s a good name,” Majel chimed in. “But a bad pun, Linda.”
Which of course made them all laugh even harder. Majel was calling out bad puns. What was next?
They’d reached orbit by the time everyone was growing serious again. Soon they’d be far enough outside the weak gravity field of the planet below them that they could safely open a wormhole and jump away. It was getting darned close to moment of truth time.
“Well, Majel approves of the choice and the critter in my ear seems more bemused than anything else. If they have a name for themselves, it translates more or less as ‘people’,” John said. “Besides Dan, you were the one who said we ought to be naming things.”
“Well sure, but do we have to give the rookie naming rights? We let Charline do it and we ended up with ratzards,” Dan said.
“What’s wrong with ratzards?” Charline replied.
“Everything.”
The bridge devolved into a little more chuckling. Andy could see what John and Dan were doing, deliberately leading the conversation down lines which would bring a few chuckles or a laugh. It was a good way to blow off some steam and release a little tension. It couldn’t last though. Finally John gave a wistful little smile.
“Majel, how are those coordinates looking for the jump?” John asked.
“The same as the last time you asked,” she replied. “In theory, they look fine. They are in the right code structure for wormhole coordinates. In practice, I simply don’t have enough data to know anything at all about where it will take us.”
They had a probe on board which would be fired through first. But the probe was small, with a weak camera and transmitter. They could only keep the wormhole open a minute or so. It would leave them almost no time to ascertain what was on the other side before they had to make the
call to go through or not. They’d be able to see if there was open space, so it wasn’t like they were going to jump into the middle of a star. But they could end up literally anywhere.
“Dan, bring us to a full stop,” John ordered.
“Got it.”
The ship decelerated. They needed to be at rest so that the probe would be launched through the wormhole while the Satori remained behind.
“Engage the wormhole drive. Fire the probe in as soon as we have a confirmed wormhole,” John said.
“If we get a wormhole,” Beth muttered. She’s pointed out that bad destination coordinates would likely just not lock on anywhere, and the drive would spin up and then spin down without actually putting out a wormhole at all. Andy privately thought that was preferable to a wormhole opened into some random and completely unpredictable location.
“Engaging drive,” Majel said.
The space in front of the ship erupted in a bright display as the ancient device worked its magic on the fabric of the universe. It might as well really be magic as far as Andy was concerned. No one knew how the damned thing did what it did. Not even Beth had more than the smallest notion of how it actually operated. Somehow the drive generated massive amounts of power and then channeled that energy into forging a connection between two points of space.
“Firing the probe,” Beth said. She was trying to sound bored, but he could hear the same tension in her voice that everyone else was feeling.
Of everyone on the ship he was the most helpless right now. Andy had no part in this piece of the mission. He was the gun, and maybe the team tactician. But out here in space it was all tech geeks and fly-boys. It was maybe worse that this entire trip was really his fault. He’d been the one who had an alien life form inserted in his ear. It was Andy who’d almost gone nuts from said life form trying desperately to communicate after his friends got it out of his ear.
“I’ve got telemetry,” Charline said. “Probe is intact. There’s a planet nearby. Probe is starting scans.”
“Wormhole is destabilizing, John,” Dan warned. “It’s going to be a good hour before we can fire up another one.”
“If we go through now, can we return?” John asked.
“Affirmative,” Majel said. “The coordinates we have for Earth are destination codes. Source of departure isn’t relevant, as near as we have been able to determine.”
“We’re pretty sure that’s the case, but not certain,” Charline added.
John hesitated a moment. Andy could feel him wondering which path to take, trying to feel out the options. But he knew the old man. Andy already knew what he would do. He cinched down the straps on his harness a little tighter.
“Take us in, Dan,” John said.
Dan didn’t reply with words. He tapped buttons on his console and the Satori slipped forward toward the brilliantly spinning pattern of light directly ahead of her. Moments later she slid into the wormhole, jumping across space to appear…someplace else. Wherever it was they were going, it was going to be off the map. But wasn’t that part of the point? When most of the universe is uncharted space, anyplace you travel to is an adventure.
Six
The Satori slid out of the wormhole in a blaze of light. Dan was watching his console carefully as they entered this new system. He had no idea what to expect, so he was trying to be ready for anything at all. His fingers hovered over the controls, ready to make the ship dance at his direction.
That saved them.
“Encroachments! Multiple objects!” Charline shouted out.
“I see them. Hang on!” Dan said. The radar was full of blips, a horde of Naga fighters hovering around their entry point. He turned the Satori in a corkscrew maneuver, diving between the enemy ships. One loomed suddenly in the view screen and he twisted the Satori hard to the right, changing the angle of their spiraling path and accelerating out of the danger zone.
“Shit, that was close!” he said. “What the hell happened?”
It was clear the cloaking device was working fine. The fighters couldn’t detect them. The one they’d nearly collided with had not taken any evasive action at all. They’d slipped through without a single Naga ship opening fire on them.
“They must have responded to the wormhole effect,” Beth said. “It does have a rather specific energy signature.”
“If they responded that quickly with fighters, there must be a ship somewhere nearby. Majel, what are you picking up?” John asked.
Majel could analyze their scan data more quickly than any human could. Dan was going over the scans himself, now that they were out of range, but the AI could usually look at all the available data and give them specific points of interest more rapidly then any of the humans. This time, it wasn’t necessary though.
“Shit,” Dan said, staring at the massive structure floating in space a few hundred kilometers away.
“Large orbital facility dead ahead,” Majel said. “Presumed Naga construction. Confirmed Naga fighters and shuttles exiting it.”
“Well, that’s how they got to us so quickly,” Dan said.
The thing was massive, more like a small moon than a space station. It was roughly spherical, with small bits of machinery jutting from the surface. Dan was trying to get a feel for the scale of the station by comparing it to the fighters exiting from small bays. It might well be the biggest structure he’d ever seen constructed anywhere.
“Can we avoid them, Dan?” John asked.
“Hmm? Oh. Sure. It doesn’t look like they can see us at all. If past experience is any gauge, the only way they’ll be able to spot us is if they’re in atmosphere and close enough to detect the pressure changes from our wake through the air.”
“Good. Keep us well clear from them, then. I don’t want to take any chances,” John said. “We’ve got a mission to complete here, folks. We expected that the Naga might have a presence here. It looks like they’ve been a bit busier in this system than we’d hoped, but it doesn’t change what we need to do.”
There were a few affirmative murmurs from the rest of the team. Dan stuck to his piloting, veering the Satori sharply away from the station before starting a gradual descent into the atmosphere. This was a much bigger problem than John was saying. He hoped his friend knew that and was simply giving everyone encouraging words. It wasn’t simply that the Naga were here. No, this was a hell of a lot worse. The enemy knew they were here, too.
They’d seen the wormhole. As far as the Naga knew there was only one ship which had the capability of jumping from system to system that way - the Satori. The race that had created the Satori’s drive scared the Naga, and the fear of their return drove the scaly things to pay a lot more attention to the matter than Dan thought they really warranted. Sure, they’d been a thorn in the Naga’s side a couple of times, but they were a few people on board one ship.
To the Naga, they were the return of a nightmare from the past. And now they knew their nightmare was here, in this system. They knew the Satori was someplace nearby, cloaked and hiding. This was one hell of a big anthill to kick over.
“Oh, shit,” Beth said.
“What?” Dan replied. He glanced over at her, worried. No matter how hard he tried, if Beth was in trouble his knee-jerk reaction was always to go help her. She was all right, but her brow was furrowed with a worried look.
“I’ve just lost telemetry from the probe we sent through,” she said. “With all the dodging and weaving to get away from the fighters, we didn’t pick it on on arrival.”
“Did the Naga destroy it?” John asked.
“I don’t think so. I think they captured it,” Beth said.
Her voice was grim, and with good reason. They’d worked hard to ensure as little Earth tech fell into Naga hands as possible. Bad enough that Paul was still their prisoner. But he seemed to have been damaged enough from his experiences at their hands that so far they hadn’t been able to discover the location of Earth from him. That was the theory, anyway, based on the fact that no
Naga fleet had shown up in orbit.
Any additional clues they gave away might help the enemy find them, though. Even something as simple as the small probe would add to their understanding of humanity, and perhaps give them hints about where the Satori had come from.
They couldn’t hope to remain hidden from the Naga forever. Dan knew that sooner or later there was going to be a reckoning. But he wanted them to be much more prepared, when that day came. If the Naga attacked them tomorrow, Earth would be nearly defenseless. The Satori was the only ship really capable of taking on a Naga ship, and he knew they wouldn’t have a prayer against an entire fleet.
“The probe shouldn’t supply them with any critical data,” Beth said. “We did build it knowing it might be lost, so we took precautions.”
“Let’s hope,” John said.
Which was all they could do. Finding which ship had the probe out of the swarm of fighters buzzing around out there would be like finding a needle in a haystack. It wasn’t practical to try taking them all on in the slim chance of blowing up the right one.
The mood aboard the Satori was somber as Dan brought the nose down, beginning their descent through the upper atmosphere. Lights flashed on his console, alerting him to sources of power generation on the ground.
“Looks like the Naga are on the surface, too,” he said.
The planet was about Earth sized, but brilliantly blue. If Earth was two-thirds ocean, this planet had to be at least nine-tenths. Strings of islands broke up the blue, but most of the surface was water. One larger landmass about the size of Iceland seemed to be the focus of Naga activity. Every other island he saw was smaller. Most were a few kilometers across or less.
“I’m getting directions,” John said wryly, tapping his temple. He was talking with the alien living in his ear. Dan shook his head, wondering for the umpteenth time what that felt like. The idea of having something else talking directly into his head was strange at best, but it was also a little exciting.
Adventures of the Starship Satori: Book 1-6 Complete Library Page 45
