With a few taps to the controls he changed his vector, then applied all the speed the craft could muster. He burst away from the space station, building speed. His pursuers rocketed after him. Which was pretty much what he’d expected. They opened fire. He dove and turned a bit, moving about to make it harder for them to track him. One bolt of green fire flashed past his cockpit, near enough that the brilliance startled him.
“Whoa, way too close,” he said.
Time to try something different. He shut down the main thrusters and hit the attitude thrusters, which spun his nose completely around without changing his course at all. Now his steering was crap, but the chasing fighters were right in his sights. Literally. He’d taken a bit of the Naga blood that had spattered on the edge of the cockpit from the pilot he shot and smudged a targeting reticle onto the front of his canopy. Since the targeting computer was still not allowing him to lock his guns on Naga ships, he was stuck using World War One era targeting.
He could work with that.
Dan fired, blowing one of the Naga ships to brilliant bits of burning metal. The second one tried to veer away, but he caught its wingtip with a second burst. It didn’t need wings to fly in space, but the force of the impacts sent it into a spin. Dan tracked the damaged ship with little jets of thrust, gently nudging it into his targeting area, and then unleashed a burst of fire on it.
It exploded.
He spun the ship back around on its axis so that the nose was again pointing in the direction of travel, then hammered the main engine to maximum again. It had been a risky play. He was already halfway between the station and the globe of fighters. If the station’s guns had been retasked to shoot him down, he might have been toast. He was gambling that they had every gun that could be aimed at the globe, searching for signs of the Satori.
That meant those same guns would be able to target him soon, but he was going to be in the middle of all of those fighters before the guns could lock on him, and then they’d have to shoot their own people to hit him. He hoped they’d hesitate to do that. With Naga, you never could be certain.
“You’re insane,” the Cyanaut in his ear said. “We’re both going to die.”
“There’s only a hundred or so of them,” Dan said aloud.
“As I said.”
It felt good to have someone to talk with, even if the little alien was being a sourpuss. It could be right, after all. He was about to stir up a massive mess in there. The fighters were going to be all over him as soon as they realized he was there, but to do that they’d have to break off encircling the Satori.
The real question was going to be how to get close enough to the Satori to get back aboard. He didn’t really see a way, not with so many fighters all over them. And good as he might be, he didn’t think that he could take down that many fighters. Not even with the Satori’s help.
“Here we go,” he said aloud, bearing down on the first fighter and firing hi guns. It exploded, and he was off to go hit the next one. All around him the fighter pattern shifted as the nearby craft broke apart from their formation to engage the new threat.
Thirty-Three
John watched Dan’s ship make its daring rush into the middle of the fighters. They broke apart, shooting off in different directions to engage him.
“There!” he said, stabbing a finger. “Majel, make for the breach he gave us!”
“Already on it,” she replied. The Satori blasted through the swirling mass of fighters. Andrew took down two with the guns when an opportunity presented itself. It was chaotic enough in this mess that John thought their detonations would largely go unnoticed, but Majel quickly alter course after each shot anyway just in case.
They were clear! Dan had done it. But now he had scores of fighters chasing him, instead. He was going rapidly enough that they were struggling to get into range to engage him, but that wasn’t going to last forever.
“Can we overtake him?” John asked.
“Affirmative,” Majel said.
“Get us right next to him if you can,” John said. “I have an idea.”
He thought about the little Cyanaut in his ear. It was odd that it had elected to remain with him. He’d expected it to want to stay behind when they left. The one speaking with Andy had slid off his finger and onto one of the whale colonies.
Really, he’d have been happier if it had remained behind. John’s feelings about the Cyanauts were mixed. They’d lied to his people and almost gotten some of them killed. But right now they also represented the only way he could possibly reach Dan.
“Tell him we are coming,” he thought to the alien.
“Message sent,” it replied.
John tapped a button to open a radio link to the engine room. “Beth, how close would Dan’s fighter have to be to enter the wormhole with us?”
“Are you nuts?”
That probably meant ‘very close’. John grimaced. “No. It’s the best shot I can think of to get all of us out of here, Beth. How can we make it work?”
There was a pause before she replied. “Maybe a meter. Two, tops. Anything more than that and it’ll be outside the envelope. But John, he’ll have to maintain that distance through the transit. If he veers off even a little, he’ll be destroyed by the wormhole. If even a little bit of his fighter is behind the Satori when our tail enters the wormhole, it will close and cut his ship in half. This level of precision…”
Her voice trailed off. John could hear the fear behind her words. He didn’t want to leave Dan behind any more than she did, but he couldn’t think of anything else.
“Do you see any other way to get him home with us? Given what we are facing out here?” John asked her.
“No. Damn it.”
“OK. We’ll be outside the station’s gun range soon. Get ready to jump.”
Dan was fleeing around the planet, keeping the fighters trailing him between him and the station to avoid its guns. Soon the curve of the planet itself would handle that job. As soon as they were hidden from the station, it would be time to jump. Otherwise once they rounded the planet on the other side the station would unload everything it had at Dan, and he’d be lost.
John had the Cyanaut send the plan to Dan.
The image it projected back to him confused John at first, but then he laughed. Dan had sent it. A picture of a pig with feathered wings.
“When pigs fly, indeed,” John murmured.
“We’re out of sight of the station. Fighters are closing. They’ll be able to fire on Dan’s ship in ten seconds,” Majel said.
This was going to be close. “Open wormhole!” he said.
The Satori flashed into full view of the enemy as the cloak in device dropped to engage the wormhole drive. Every Naga fighter unleashed its fire at once, all of it aimed at the Satori. It was too little, too late - they would transit before they incoming blasts reached them. It was Dan he was worried about, not the Satori.
“Eight seconds to transit,” Majel said.
John watched as Dan’s little fighter streaked across the distance between them, blazing a trail with its engines firing for everything they were worth. John swore. He was too damned far away. He’d have to break his velocity, stop almost on a dime. There was no way he was going to be able to manage it.
“Majel, lower the landing gear!” John shouted.
Andrew gave him a confused look, but the AI was already complying. John could only hope that Dan would see the landing gear coming down and know what to do.
Thirty-Four
He wasn’t going to make it. Dan had been flying ships in space for long enough that he knew that cold truth in his bones. The physics had beat him. He would cross the Satori’s trajectory and then spin away into space. He’d pushed the little fighter to give its everything in the mad dash to try to link up with his friends, and he’d gotten just enough speed out of the thing to make it within shouting distance of the other ship.
His thrusters would never be able to brake enough, though, and the Sato
ri was already spinning up its wormhole drive. He could see the swirling patterns appearing just ahead of the ship’s bow. The Naga fighters had unloaded on the Satori. There was no way they could hold off and wait for him to take another shot at a linkup.
He’d missed the boat.
Somehow Dan felt calm about that. This whole escape had been an incredible long shot. It shouldn’t have been possible at all. He’d fought his way free of the Naga, stolen one of their ships, and even done a fair bit of damage to the enemy with their own weapon. He’d tried everything he could. It just hadn’t been enough.
“Only thing left to do is to see if I can take a few more of them with me,” he said aloud. He prepared to spin the fighter around and dive back at the incoming Naga ships.
Then he spotted something odd. The Satori was lowering its landing gear. Dan sucked in a deep breath. There was only one reason they’d be doing that. They’d seen he wasn’t going to make it, and they were hoping to give him a little bump.
He might be able to do even better than that, but it was going to be tight.
Dan spun the ship on its central axis so that his own landing pads were facing toward the belly of the Satori. All the while he continued to push his brakes for everything they were worth. Overload warnings flashed on his console as he took the engines to the breaking point and systems began to shut down.
If he could line his ship up perfectly he might be able to use the gear from both ships like a hook. He hoped it would be enough. Beth might be able to calculate how much punishment the Satori could take, but he had no idea. And there was no way of knowing the stress tolerance of the Naga ship.
There was a titanic screeching noise as his ship connected with the Satori, his landing gear gouging huge divots from the lower hull. Then a clang, and a sudden stop that threw him forward in his restraints as the landing pad in his fighter’s nose connected with the Satori’s right landing gear.
“Oof!” he grunted. “Did it!”
His ship began to rebound, drifting away from the Satori a little. He fired thrusters again to bring them into clanging contact once more.
The brilliant lights of the wormhole surrounded both ships, coruscating in that familiar, vivid display. Dan held his breath, fighting to keep his ship in contact with the Satori. If he let it drift even a few feet away he'd be toast.
Thirty-Five
Beth had just finished patching the latest hole in the ship’s hull when she was thrown to the deck by a massive impact. Then a sound like the world’s largest fingernails grinding on the universe’s biggest chalkboard echoed through the ship, followed by another crash that threw her back to the deck.
Something was up. Something big. She raced forward to the bridge so that she could find out what was going on. Alarm bells were sounding all around the bridge as she entered. It looked like every console was lit up red, which jarred with the flashing blue lights of the wormhole visible through the front view-screen. In another moment the colors were gone, though, leaving the flashing red of warning lights as the main illumination.
In the distance she could see the now-familiar dusty world they’d visited before going to the Cyanaut planet.
“We jumped?” Beth asked. “What about Dan?”
“We don’t know,” Andy said. He was working with his console, trying to pull up scan results without success.
“That banging was Dan trying to use our landing gear like the arresting wire on an aircraft carrier,” John said.
Beth stared at him like he was crazy. “Whose idea was that?”
“Mine,” John said. “We were out of other options.”
She stalked over to her console, unsure whether she could trust her voice or not. After all she’d been through - all they’d all been through - trying to rescue Dan, to have possibly lost him right at the last moment? She shoved the thought away. If she held on to the idea she might tear up, and that was the last thing she wanted to show to the rest of the team.
She dropped into her seat and called up the instrumentation. Sensors were a mess. Dan’s last dive had screwed with the entire underside of the ship, knocking out relays and antennae and who-knew what else.
“Majel, have you got anything at all on Dan?” she asked. Even though she almost didn’t want to hear the answer, because she knew the odds of him being able to stop and then somehow follow the ship precisely through the wormhole had to be so damned slim… Still, if there was anyone who could do it, Dan could.
“Nothing yet, Beth,” Majel said. “No, wait!”
A Naga fighter jetted away from the ship, soaring from underneath them to flash ahead of the bridge. It waggled its wings as it sped by. The thing looked pretty torn up, but it came close enough that Beth could see Dan inside, waving across at them.
She waved back, smiling in spite of herself. John and Andy cheered. They’d cheated death yet another time, won through despite the odds facing them. She wondered how long their luck could hold. The thought made her feel cold.
Beth reached into her pocket for the hundredth time that day, touching the little keepsake Dan had left with her when he was captured. The one thing he wanted her to have, if he was gone forever. She needed to return the simple gold band to him, and then they needed to have a talk.
Satori’s Destiny
One
The airlock door flashed green as the last air was evacuated. Andy felt his heart thump with excitement. It wasn't every day he got to go outside, and he felt penned in after a few days of lockdown up in John's base. Oh, it was for a good reason. He understood entirely. When they had come back home from their last trip, it wasn't just the cloaked Satori coming through the wormhole. They had a Naga fighter with them this time, too.
If they were very lucky, no one on Earth had seen it arrive at all. If they were unlucky, then they were going to get a lot of strange questions coming their way. John's plan was to keep a low profile for as long as possible. It had been four days since there return, and no official inquiries yet. Andy took it as a good sign.
"I still don't think you need to be the one going outside," John said into Andy's ear via radio.
"You're absolutely right. It doesn't need to be me at all," Andy said. But he'd been glad to pull rank a little and grab the job. Anything to have something to do.
"We need to comms back up, but I've got techs to handle that sort of thing," John said. "This is a tense moment. I'd rather have my head of security close at hand."
"I've got one of those techs up here with me right now," Andy said. "If she can't handle it, I doubt any of the rest of your goons can. Besides, she's better company."
"Thanks, I think," Charline said. She bounded past him out the airlock, jumping up a little before landing in a poof of lunar dust.
"Well, be careful and come back soon. It still feels odd that the antenna would go down at this particular time," John said.
He sounded worried to Andy, and with good reason. It wasn't the first time that they had lost an antenna to a micro-meteorite. It wasn't the twelfth time, either. It happened more often than they liked, but it was an easy enough fix. Run outside, repair or replace the antenna, come back in.
Everyone was tense about the Naga ship, though. The Satori's cloaking device made it easy to hide. The fighter? Well, it just flew in and landed. There were precious few spacefaring vessels, and every one was identifiable by sight. A new one would be remarked upon. If anyone had seen it. The trouble was they had no way to tell if they’d been seen sneaking the thing in or not.
Having the antenna go down wasn't unusual. That it went down at the particular moment it did was giving John frown lines.
"We'll get it done and be right back," Andy said. Charline had gone a bit ahead, and he bounded a few more times to catch up. The damaged antenna was on a ridge about half a kilometer from the base. It was a short hop in the light lunar gravity.
"OK," John said. His voice crackled with static. "Be careful....there. Need....ack.....est."
"You're bre
aking up, John," Andy said. He tapped the radio, trying to clear up the signal without success. The signal was gone. "Damn."
"Everything OK?" Charline called. She was about a hundred meters ahead of him, a bit up the ridge. At least he was still receiving her signal all right.
"Sure, just the broken antenna messing things up even more than we'd thought," Andy said. "I lost contact with John."
"You think things are gonna go south?" she asked. "We're in private out here. You can give your honest opinion."
"I already gave it. If I'd thought that it was going to cause problems, then I wouldn't have agreed about bringing the fighter back,” Andy said. “But I think the risk was low enough, and the reward high enough. We had to try.”
He hoped that was the right call, anyway. If they’d screwed up… If a stealth satellite they’d missed had been snooping at precisely the wrong moment, or if someone on the base saw something and spilled a little too much information to the wrong person? He remembered all too well that Paul had already tried to take the Satori for the US government once. He wouldn’t be the only person who would feel it was his patriotic duty to hand the device over.
Some days Andy wasn’t entirely sure that Paul had been wrong. They were hanging alone out here, but their actions could hang everyone. Every jump they took was bringing danger onto not just themselves but onto all of humanity. The Naga were an existential threat, and it was clear that they’d rest at nothing to find the location of Earth.
He shoved the thoughts away. Andy trusted John. He didn’t trust the government. Not really, anyway. Probably no soldier did, and most of his adult life had been in uniform. The die had been cast, anyway. If things went badly, well, they’d figure it out from there. John had to have a plan for when the rest of the world discovered the Satori, anyway. He surely had to. Right?
Adventures of the Starship Satori: Book 1-6 Complete Library Page 55
