“Charline, want to grab some coffee after?” he asked, working to bring his mind back to where he was. Running around on the surface of the moon was safe compared to some places he’d been, but that didn’t mean he could let his thoughts wander forever. Charline had been a little distant since their return. Something had happened when she and Linda fought side by side, and it wasn’t just Linda falling under Cyanaut control.
“Charline?” She didn’t answer. Andy looked ahead at the top of the ridge. Charline had disappeared across it, somewhere on the other side. They’d lost line of sight, but the radio should still reach her. The antenna shouldn’t impact their suit to suit coms.
He bounded up the rest of the hill, scrambling a little when he reached the crest to avoid taking a fast tumble down the far side. She was nowhere to be seen, but the terrain was littered with boulders and craggy chunks of rock. She could be just out of sight. Perhaps she’d slipped down the hillside like he almost did? He activated the tracking transponder on her suit, but it wasn’t showing up on his heads-up display.
Which was strange. Because even if the radios were on the fritz, the transponder would still show her location. It was running on a very different system. The only way thing that would keep him from seeing her transponder signal would be…
“Jamming,” Andy breathed. “Shit.”
He hesitated for a moment, wanting to go racing down the hill to find her despite the danger. But if he was right, then all of them were in danger now, not just Charline. He needed to get back to base. Pass the warning. Get a security team together and then come back after her.
He whirled in place, getting ready to launch himself off the ridge back in the direction he’d come. The entrance to John’s lunar base was in sight. He’d get to radio range in minutes.
But he never started the bound. As Andy turned around, something slammed into his suit’s faceplate. The glass starred with cracks, almost shattering. The impact stunned him. Something swept his legs out from beneath him, and he crashed to the ground.
Through the stars flashing in front of his vision he saw the blurring motion of something rushing toward his face. He tried vainly to block with his arms, but the impact struck him in the throat just under his helmet. He couldn’t catch a breath. The stars in his vision whirled, blending with the stars in the sky above until he couldn’t tell one from the other, and then his sight swirled into blackness.
Two
Dan heaved, pushing as hard as he could. Sweat dripped from his forehead freely in little streams and rivulets. His shirt was soaked with the effort. He exhaled hard, fighting against the weight with every bit of willpower he could muster.
“Twenty!” he gasped out, letting his legs relax, the weight sliding back into place again.
He glanced over at the Nautilus machine again. He had five hundred pounds stacked up there! In the light lunar gravity, that was only the equivalent of about a hundred pounds on Earth, but that was still much more than he’d been able to do since his accident. If he hadn’t just moved that weight twenty times, he would never have believed it.
One leg at a time, he lifted the limbs free from the leg press. It wasn’t possible, but there he was doing it anyway. His spinal damage was too great. Every doctor had agreed. There was no way it was going to ever heal.
Here on the moon Dan had managed to take a few steps now and again using a walker. He’d always retained a little mobility in his legs. But even here, it was mostly his arms keeping him upright. The weaker gravity made it work. It wasn’t healing, it was just taking advantage of the environment.
This was something different. Something had changed. He needed to make an appointment with medical to get his spine looked at again. It had to be the devices the Naga had used on him while he’d been captured. Some of them caused pain, but others had healed his wounds - so that Garul could torture him all over again. He shuddered at the memories, at the same time trying to delve through what he could recall of the experience. Had there been something there, some moment when the Naga healing device might have been aimed at his spine?
Could it have fixed the old injury as well as the new ones? Hope beat furiously inside him, but Dan forced it away with an effort. He couldn’t afford to get his hopes up about this, not now. He’d just finally come to grips with the idea that he wasn’t half a man.
Dan slid himself carefully from the weight machine back into his wheelchair. His arms shook. His legs felt like useless strands of spaghetti, for all that they were pushing two thirds of his body weight a short while ago. He was exhausted and sweaty. A glance at his watch told him that he ought to have just enough time for a shower before meeting with the rest of the crew. The Satori was repaired. Again. He grinned. At least this time the damage couldn’t be pegged on him. Beth wouldn’t be able to gripe about his wrecking the ship, not when most of the breaking happened while she was the only one aboard!
Thinking about Beth made him break into a broader smile. He held tight to the memory of the look on her face when she returned his ring to him. It was still there, on his hand. He’d never stopped wearing the damned thing. The two of them splitting up had never felt right. Beth had never seemed to mind the way he had. But that look she’d given him said that maybe she’d been re-thinking the decision, same as he had.
Time would tell. Luckily, they had plenty of time together now. “I’ll grow on her like a barnacle on a spaceship,” he said. Thinking about that, the simile didn’t sound quite apt. “Or something like that.
Dan wheeled himself toward the entrance to the gym. The elevator was right across the hall. Two quick floors down, and he’d be back at his quarters. A shower and a change of clothes, and he’d descend the rest of the levels to the hidden spot at the bottom of this base, where the Satori and everything else about the starship project lay hidden.
But the elevator snapped open before Dan exited the gym. He didn’t even glance up at first. The snick of doors sliding open was a common enough thing. This floor housed the dining hall, medical bay, and other facilities for recreation alongside the gym. There weren’t too many people out and about, but in another hour the place would be filled with employees on their way to lunch.
The first scream got his attention, though.
It was a woman yelling. Dan’s attention jumped to the sound, thinking of Beth immediately. It wasn’t her - it was a blonde woman whose name he didn’t recall, although he remembered that she worked in the kitchen and made great omelets. She was standing out in the hall, staring at the elevators.
Men in space suits swept from the elevator as soon as the doors slipped open. Each of them was carrying a rifle. Before he could act, one of the men raised his rifle and snapped off a single shot. Something spat from the muzzle of his gun and struck her in the chest. She went down without another word.
“Shit!” Dan said. He tried to reverse the course of his wheelchair, to duck out of view. The chair jangled, and two of the gunmen turned his way. Their weapons fired with quiet cracking noises.
Dan shoved his body sideways trying to avoid the shots. He moved hard enough that his entire wheelchair became unbalanced, turning on its side and crashing to the floor. Thudding impacts into the chair told him that the shots had missed, but only just. Dan looked at the spot where they’d hit and saw a pair of darts.
He had no idea who these men were, but the base was under attack. That the invaders had made it down this far without anyone sounding an alarm spoke to their professionalism and training. These people were good, whoever they were. If they were that good, they might well be able to bust through even John’s security measures and get to the bottom floor. To the Satori.
If nobody sounded the alarm.
Dan glanced at the wall. Every floor had an alarm pull in every room. It was a basic safety precaution for living in an environment as hostile as the moon, where anything that went wrong could be lethal. All he had to do was cross fifteen feet of floor to get to it before one of these men shot him.
/> He shoved himself up on his arms and pulled free of the fallen chair. Behind him he could hear booted feet rushing toward him. There was no way he had time enough to crawl all that distance. The only way he was going to make it was to run. But Dan hadn’t run since before his accident. He hadn’t managed more than a few hobbling steps in all that time.
“Workout isn’t quite done,” he said. He brought his legs up beneath him, bunching them up, and then pushed off with all the force he’d been using on the leg press.
On Earth, Dan would have weighed about a hundred and sixty pounds. On the moon, that was a little above thirty. He’d been pressing three times that, effectively. Pushing as hard as he could off the floor sent him sailing toward the wall. Darts hissed through the air behind him, skittering across the floor as they impacted where he’d just been.
He sailed through the air and smacked into the wall just to the right of the alarm. One pull down to clear the button, and then a hard slap to activate it.
Red lights flashed, and a loud klaxon sounded. The din was intense enough that Dan never even heard the snapping sounds of rifles firing again. He did feel the darts slam into his shoulder and thigh. Then he didn’t feel anything else at all.
Three
John sat at his desk, examining the holographic projection in front of him. It was an array of fist-sized cubes, carefully organized into a pattern. Their shining shapes made his eyes tear a little just looking at them, even in the projection. In person it was a little worse.
But those little boxes might just be the answer to everything. It was remarkable to think that something so small could solve so damned many problems.
“You think it will work?” John asked aloud.
“I believe so,” Majel’s voice said from the speakers above his desk. She wasn’t physically there - but as an AI, she wasn’t physically anywhere except in the computer systems on the Satori. “Each of these devices is more than simply a data chip. They’re complex computing devices with a quantum nature.”
“And you’ve arranged them into a setup like the one on our ship,” John said. “So you could in theory reside there, instead of on board?”
“In theory? Yes. But I’d need to wipe the data already present on the cubes, and I wouldn’t recommend that. We’ve only begun to catalogue the information there, and it would seem a shame to lose the rest.”
“Understood,” John said. Still, the idea was intriguing. If they could put the array into a humanoid robot that Majel could control, she could leave the ship, walk around with the crew. The idea of having her able to depart the ship when they were away on a mission was attractive.
Flashing lights and sirens broke into his thoughts. That was the general alarm! The blaring alarms were going to give him a roaring headache, but John ignored the ache building behind his temples. His people needed him here, now. Whatever the crisis was, he needed to be able to respond to it. The noise itself was something that he could do something about, though.
“Majel, shut down the audible alarm in this room,” he said. “Where’s the emergency?”
He didn’t bother asking if there was an actual danger or not. The people on this base were all well trained. Nobody was going to cry wolf here. If someone had pulled the alarm, then something was very wrong. Lives were likely at stake, and seconds could count.
“Level Four, in the gym,” Majel said. “Putting it on your screen now.”
The doors snapped open. John spared Beth a glance as she walked in before turning back to the main view screen which took up most of his office wall.
“What the hell is going on?” she asked.
Men in space suits stalked across the fourth floor of his complex. Men with guns. He swore softly under his breath. This was what he’d been afraid of. The ultimate worst case scenario.
“Looks like we have company. Analysis, Majel?” John asked.
“Cameras have caught at least a dozen men, maybe more. They’re using unmarked suits, so I can’t tell who they’re working for. But their rifles are of US manufacture.”
“That’s not enough to go on. They could still be from anywhere,” John said.
“I concur. Their tactics do match US Marine operations procedures, but again, there are many paramilitary organizations which use their manuals for training,” Majel said.
John drummed his fingers on his desk. “Throw the base into lockdown. Shut off all power to the main elevator. Nobody goes up or down. Have all crews mobilize for defense of the base. And see if you can raise Earth. We need to see how quickly they can get support out to us.”
“I’ve already tried reaching Earth. With the main antenna down, we don’t have communications which can reach that far,” Majel said.
“Backup array?” Beth asked.
“Either down, or jammed as well,” Majel said.
They’d planned this well, whoever they were. John had to assume Andrew and Charmaine were captured. They might still be free out there somewhere, but he couldn’t count on that. He was about to ask Majel to locate Dan when he saw his friend’s body on the camera feed. Dan was face down on the ground near the alarm.
Beth saw him at the same time. “Dan’s out there! John, I have to go get him.”
“No way in hell,” John said. “They’ll have you in an instant. Dan will be OK. Look - see the darts? They’re taking prisoners, not killing people.”
“OK,” she said, in a voice that said it was anything but. “So what do we do?”
“We get ready to defend ourselves,” John said. “But I want you to go down to the Satori. Make sure the ship is secure, and warm up the drives.”
“I should be up here in case…”
“No. Nothing matters more than the ship. We lose the ship, and we lose everything, Beth,” John said. He heaved out a sigh. “We don’t know who these people are, or what they would do if they got their hands on the Satori. What if they’re part of the group that almost killed you and Charline? Whatever corp was running their operation is still out there, and they want what we have.”
It really didn’t matter if it was a corporation or a government. There were precious few people that John felt could be trusted with the enormous power of the starship they’d built. As either a weapon or a tool, it had enormous potential. He had a feeling most people would see the former more than the latter.
“John, the invaders are drilling through the elevator floor,” Majel said. “They’ll be through in a minute.”
“Are the defenses in the shaft still active?” John asked.
“Affirmative.”
They were going to get a shock if they tried coming through there. John had prepared these lower levels for the eventuality of having to defend them. It wasn’t going to be an easy conquest. He noticed Beth still standing beside him and shooed her off.
“Go!” he said. “Get the Satori warmed up. We’ll hold them off for a while, but if we can’t keep them off this level…”
“You want the ship ready to get us the heck out of Dodge. Got it,” Beth said. She dashed off.
With luck it wouldn’t come to that. But watching those men drill through the elevator floor, John wasn’t so sure. These people hadn’t even bothered taking out the cameras. They knew he was watching them, and they didn’t even care. That meant they were either incredibly sloppy, or extremely confident. Their success so far implied the latter.
“Hurry, Beth,” he said. “I have a feeling we need the ship ready to go.”
John settled into his chair. He wanted to weep. All his work, every bit of effort he’d made, and he was watching it all come undone. If this was a government attack, it was going to be very hard to keep a lid on things even if they successfully defended their base. Someone knew that he was hiding something up here - knew enough to risk a head on assault. It was a massive gamble, and they’d only do it if they were damned sure the prize was worth the risk.
Bad enough if someone had spotted the Naga fighter as they brought it in. If word about the Sat
ori had somehow leaked out, God help them all.
Four
Beth sprinted up the ramp into the Satori, flicking switches as she went. There might be time for a full pre-flight check, but she wasn’t sure so she hit the priority items first. Energy readings were at full charge. The wormhole drive was ready for action, and the cloak was performing properly. She flicked that on, just in case. The crew knew where the ship was parked, but anyone else who busted into the hangar would just see empty space.
“Majel, you with me?” she asked.
“Always.”
Beth nodded to herself absently. She routed half of the preflight check to Majel, then connected through to the base camera and communication systems. She was hoping to pick up as much of the team as possible, as quickly as she could. Her gut said that this was as bad as it could get. They needed to evacuate, and quickly.
But John was still in his office, trying to lock down the lower levels of the base as best he could. He clearly wanted to make a stand. Dan was… She couldn’t even see Dan at all. The intruders had finally knocked out the cameras on that level. More troubling, they’d knocked out the elevator cameras as well. That implied they were working on a way to get past John’s security systems and didn’t want anyone to see what they were up to.
Charline and Andy were both marked as being outside, but she couldn’t raise their radios or spot the telemetry from their suits. Either they’d tucked themselves away someplace, or they were captured. Or worse… But she didn’t want to think that way. Whoever these people were, they seemed to be taking prisoners, not just murdering everyone.
Beth flicked the camera to the bio-lab. There was only one person working there - Linda, their xenobiologist. She was sitting at a terminal, drumming her fingers rapidly on the table next to her console. Beth piped a call through to her radio.
Adventures of the Starship Satori: Book 1-6 Complete Library Page 56
