Dust & Iron (Adventures of the Starship Satori Book 9)

by Kevin McLaughlin

  Charline set up some code to begin the process of deciphering the mess in front of her and set it running. By the time she was done, her eyes were trying to close of their own accord.

  Dimly, Charline was aware the exhaustion was a result of the nanites using her resources to rebuild her damaged body. The little robots burned her body’s resources to do their work. The IV drip in her arm probably carried key nutrients into her blood along with water and pain medicine.

  Her friend Beth had hated having nanites inside her. She’d said that she could feel the things wriggling around. At the time, Charline told her that she was imagining it. There was no way the body could feel something that small.

  Now she was feeling the same creeping sensation. It was unnerving. She was gonna have to apologize to Beth when she saw her again.

  The good news was that in less than twenty-four hours, the nanites would be done and her body would begin flushing out their inert bodies. In the meantime, Charline needed sleep more than just about anything else. She set aside the tablet and closed her eyes. Just a little rest, and she’d be back at it again.

  When she opened her eyes again, the light had changed. The air smelled different, too. She’d been moved. The ceiling over her head wasn’t metal anymore. It was dusty dun-colored rock.

  “What’s going on?” Charline asked. She felt much better. The pain was still there in her right arm and leg, but it was bearable. She tried to sit up and stopped as a wave of dizziness assailed her.

  “Hang on,” Karl said, rushing over. “I’ll help you sit up, but you need to take it slow. You stand up right now and you’ll just drop to the ground.”

  “Gotcha,” Charline replied.

  He helped her lever herself into a sitting position. Charline recognized the new spot at once. She was back in the cave – at the very top, the area they’d caved in to protect themselves from ratzards or other threats on the surface.

  “Where’s the shuttle?” Charline asked.

  “Still outside. But we started receiving transmissions from another Bug ship a few hours ago. We moved everyone out of the shuttle and back into the tunnel,” Karl said. “Better safe than sorry.”

  That was more than fair. “What are they asking?”

  “We don’t know. Can’t understand them.”

  Charline fished next to her. The tablet was gone.

  “Looking for this?” Karl said, holding it out for her.

  “Thanks! How long was I out, anyway?”

  “This time? About six hours,” Karl said.

  Charline booted the tablet with hope, even as she cursed herself under her breath for being asleep so long. She knew her body needed the rest, but that didn’t make her feel any better about losing so much time. Now they had an enemy ship out there, probably headed their way. They’d send more than one shuttle to investigate. Of that, Charline felt sure.

  The program she’d written had done a lot of the legwork for her. It had a log of possible meaning shifts. This was good. With that information she ought to be able to translate the messages sent their way. Whether she could respond with anything more than a few basic words was another question, but it was a start.

  It didn’t take Charline as long as she thought to run the transmissions that had been sent to the shuttle through her program. She was surprised how fast it went. There ought to be more drift over a thousand years! But the dialect was almost the same as the bits of language she’d recovered from thousand-year-old data cubes.

  That implied a stagnant culture. Hell, that was so static she needed to invent a new word for it. These bugs barely changed at all over the course of hundreds of years. Charline was willing to bet their technology hadn’t adapted much, either. That explained how they were able to so quickly interface with the power cells on the armor Andy’s team was wearing. It wasn’t a matter of trying to interface with long-forgotten tech. The stuff they’d discovered in the cave was almost the same design as the equipment the aliens still used.

  Wild and unexpected. In the battle it had worked against the humans, but now it would be a boon. Those transmissions were easy enough to crack. The rest of the ship’s systems should be doable as well. She listened to the first message.

  “Get Andy,” Charline said before the message was even complete. Karl took one look at her face and dashed off without argument. He came back a few minutes later with Andy in tow. She’d had a chance to listen to the first several messages by that time.

  “What’s up?” Andy asked.

  “I cracked the language. Those messages? They’re transmitting to us that they’ve come back for pickup,” Charline said. “They were called away. Something about a battle. Sounds like a big fight. But they came back for the crew. They’re starting to sound a little uptight. I don’t think we have long before they come for a visit.”

  Based on the message contents, she was surprised they hadn’t already arrived. Something else must be keeping them preoccupied or they’d surely have already sent down another shuttle to investigate. She didn’t know what caused the delay, but it was a stroke of luck for them.

  “What do you want to do? I can get everyone inside the cave, button the place up again,” Andy said.

  Charline shook her head. She let her feet drop to the ground and gingerly shifted her weight to her legs. Karl was there by her side in an instant, steadying her as she tried to stand.

  “You’re going to be tired for a while yet,” Karl warned.

  “Understood. But there’s work I need to do,” Charline replied. “No, we’re not going back into hiding. We’re almost out of food, and there’s no guarantee they won’t just come in after us again. We won last time, but we might not be as lucky next time.”

  “What did you have in mind?” Andy asked. “I thought we were waiting here for the Satori?”

  That was the plan, and it might still be the safest course. Charline wasn’t so sure, though. Hiding in a hole might keep them alive a little longer, but they’d eventually starve to death unless someone came to save them.

  “The Satori might well have been destroyed. Maybe that was the battle they were talking about. If that’s the case, then we’ve got no rescue coming anytime soon,” Charline said. “We’re going to have to rescue ourselves.”

  “How?” Karl asked, looking from Charline to Andy, who was grinning. He’d figured out what she had in mind, at least. Better still, he wasn’t telling her that it was too dangerous. The boy could be taught!

  “We’re going up in that shuttle and we’re taking their ship,” Charline said. “Then we’re getting out of this Dust-ball system and heading for home.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Charline barely looked up from her tablet keyboard for the next few hours. There was too much work that no one else could do. She wrapped some new code around the quantum cubes powering the armor. It was a hack job. She’d need weeks to ensure they were truly protected, and even then a sufficient effort would probably crack her encryption.

  It wasn’t as simple as just removing wireless connectivity. The alien cubes all communicated with each other on a quantum level. Somehow any cube was capable of being tuned to talk to any other one. It was probably possible to completely block a cube off from being hacked and shut off, but she had no idea how it might be accomplished.

  The short-term fix was easier. She simply wrapped some code in place to deny any signal that attempted to access the power generation. They weren’t using the cube’s more complex processing properties anyway. It was simply a power core that happened to have a supercomputer riding along. It wouldn’t stop a dedicated hacker from breaking through, given enough time. But it would slow the hacker down. Hopefully, that would be enough.

  By the time she was done with the code, Charline was shaking with exhaustion. Her pain levels had crept back up. The nanites were healing her, but it took time. That healing was pulling energy and materials from her body, too. She eased back against a wall of the shuttle cockpit area, settling in for the rest of
the tasks ahead.

  “You keep pushing too hard, you’ll damage yourself,” Karl said. “Those nanites work wonders, but they need time to do a good job.”

  “No time to rest right now. If I don’t get this done, we’re all dead anyway,” Charline said.

  “And no one else can do it?”

  “Can you create a code interface on the fly that will let us take this ship up into space, dock with an another ship, and not blow ourselves to bits?” she asked.

  He grinned and shook his head. “Not hardly.”

  “Then best leave me to it,” she replied.

  “OK. But I’m gonna hit you with another IV. You’re looking more worn out than I like. I’m guessing you plan on being back in the front lines when we get up there, right?” he said.

  “The thought had crossed my mind.” More than that, she’d already ordered the repairs on her armor. Halcomb was itching to get out there himself, but she’d pulled rank. Nobody knew the armor better than she, and they didn’t have time to train someone new. It was going to be all hands on deck, anyway. There wouldn’t be any bystanders.

  “Then I’ll run two bags one after another. Better safe than sorry,” he replied.

  Charline just nodded her assent and got back to work. She’d had to do something similar once before. The Satori’s human control system had been damaged by an explosion and it had been up to her to jerry-rig a software solution that allowed them to fly the ship. This was even harder. Before, Charline at least had a few weeks to gain familiarity with the Satori. This shuttle was partly familiar, but partly a mystery too. There was damned little time.

  But she’d also grown a lot since that early challenge. The things she’d done since…! The old Charline would never have imagined half of them. She applied her sharp mind to the problem, delving into the code to find the elements she hoped they’d have. There! That looked like what she needed: a return-to-base protocol. It made sense, if you thought about it. The shuttle was deployed from a larger ship. Having a simple command which told it to return to the ship it had come from was logical.

  “I’ve got it,” Charline said.

  “Already?” Andy replied. “We’ve barely finished loading everyone on board.”

  “Well, it’s not full flight control. I don’t think we have enough time for that. I can get us docked with the other ship, though. After that…”

  “After that we take the battle to them. If we can capture their ship, then you can figure out how to get us home, right?” Andy asked.

  “It might take a little while, but yes. I can,” Charline said.

  Of course, they had no idea how big the ship they were docking with might be. Did it have dozens more bugs on board? Hundreds? Thousands? Was it alone up there, or part of a flotilla? So many questions, and no way to answer them from the ground. This was a serious roll of the dice.

  But Charline’s gut said they were looking at one relatively small ship. If there were many ships, surely they would have already sent another shuttle before now? The same would be true if it was a very large ship. But if it was one ship, they might be using the delay to figure out what was going on.

  “Tell everyone to buckle in. Armor combatants to their suits. I’m going to send them a message that we were attacked by local wildlife and took damage,” Charline said. Well, she’d prepped a few words that she understood and would have the quantum cubes transmit them. It should be enough to convey the intent while also hopefully fooling the bigger ship into thinking they were more heavily damaged than they really were.

  It helped that there really was damage visible from outside the ship. The large cargo area had a gaping hole in the side from the fighting, and the shuttle’s armor was pocked from scores of shots. As soon as the mothership got a look at their shuttle on cameras, the visual would support the story she was telling them.

  “All right. We don’t have space suits for half these people, though,” Andy said. “I figured we’d set them up in the cockpit area. We can maintain a breathable seal here.”

  “Sounds good. Oh, that means I need to get back into my suit too, right?” Charline said.

  “Yeah, there’s no airlock,” Andy replied.

  Charline nodded and slid slowly to her feet. The IV bag was almost done dumping its contents into her. She turned the knob to stop the liquid’s flow, then applied pressure to the insertion site and pulled the needle out. It had helped. She’d need to remember to thank Karl for the thought. Exhaustion still settled in on her like a heavy weight, but she’d dealt with worse. Just keep going a little longer. Take the ship, then she could rest.

  Andy walked with her back to the armor suits. They stood in rows and columns, filling the shuttle’s entire cargo area. The armor would give them a huge advantage in the assault. With any luck the aliens only wore their armored suits for attacks, not for daily attire. Either way, the die was cast.

  Charline stepped up the short ladder and climbed into her armor. The suit powered on at a touch from her palm. Lights and screens lit up. Fresh welds met her fingertips where the holes used to be. It looked as solid as ever.

  “You did a great job fixing her up, Halcomb,” Charline said over the radio.

  “Yeah, well, try not messing it up so bad this time,” he replied.

  “No promises,” Charline said.

  “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  Charline slipped out her tablet. Two buttons appeared on the screen. The first would send her transmission. The second would engage the shuttle’s engines and hopefully send them back to the ship waiting in orbit. Assuming this worked.

  “All right, everyone. Here we go!” Charline said. She pressed the first button and then the second. The tablet told her the message had been successfully delivered, but at first Charline thought the engines weren’t going to respond. About fifteen seconds after she engaged the program, a trembling started under her feet. That turned into a roar as the thrusters strained against the planet’s gravity.

  They were aloft, gaining speed as they climbed. Charline checked over the code. They were on their way toward the waiting mothership. She didn’t think she could shut the shuttle’s autopilot off and get them safely back to the surface even if she tried. Now there really was no way to turn back.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The roar of the shuttle’s engines died away almost entirely as they left the planet’s atmosphere behind. They were back in space, but microgravity wasn’t showing up.

  Charline nodded. She’d half expected as much. The Satori’s drive had a gravity field as well. It remained as much a mystery as the wormhole drive and some of the advanced sensor systems that had also been a part of the original alien ship they’d discovered. This shuttle had similar tech. It was more evidence that the same race had built both ships.

  “How do we know they’re going to bring us on board instead of just blowing us up?” Arjun asked over their radio net.

  “I’m counting on their being sure of their own superiority. This race is careful around their own people. Remember how the aliens have defended their young in the past?” Charline asked.

  “Sure, but there weren’t any baby bugs on this ship,” Arjun replied.

  “It implies a general respect for life – at least, for life of their species,” Charline said. “Even if they think something is up, they’ll still bring the shuttle in. That’s what we would do.”

  And they were not that much different from the aliens. That was becoming more clear with every contact they had. Sure, the aliens looked wildly different from humans. Frighteningly so. But at their core they were similar in so many ways! Their code was something she could recognize from the math basis of its structure. They’d exhibited cunning and curiosity. They cared about their young.

  Being a lot like humans wasn’t necessarily a good thing. The Naga were much like humans, too, and those similarities had resulted in the two races entering conflict with one another the moment they knew of each others’ existence. The same could be tr
ue here.

  Humanity could also be scared of anything that looked different, isolationist, and xenophobic. It was a failing that could get them wiped out if they kept ending up at war with every alien race they met. How many other species were out there flying between the stars? It was a big universe. Sooner or later they’d end up running into someone with a much bigger stick.

  “I hope you’re right,” Andy said.

  “Me too. We’ll find out soon. The shuttle is doing breaking maneuvers,” Charline said.

  Her tablet showed their progress through her connection with the shuttle’s computer system. The other ship was near. They were still closing the distance, but the alien ship was slowing down as it drew nearer. Charline worked through the system to get a sensor view of the other ship.

  It wasn’t huge, thank goodness. A bit bigger than the Satori. It couldn’t have more than one or two shuttles. They wouldn’t be able to fit more than that. Which explained why they hadn’t sent down another craft. That and – her eyebrows went up as she saw what had to be combat damage all over the larger ship.

  It had been pummeled. A tear ran down one side of the hull, showing on her scan despite the rough patch they’d put in place. In fact, repairs were still underway. She could see several aliens flitting about outside the ship working to heal its wounds.

  The vessel was a strange looking ship. Where human vessels tended toward the streamlined, these aliens took that a step further. She’d never seen a metal object so large constructed with such convoluted lines. Smooth curves and twisted arcs made up the frame of the main hull. It was beautiful and uncanny at the same time.

  Very close now. Charline took a deep breath, having forgotten to inhale for a bit there. It looked like she’d been correct. They weren’t going to blow up the shuttle. It was an educated guess, but it had been a gamble. She’d only been hoping she was right. Now a large bay door opened in the bottom of the larger ship. They were slowly being eased back aboard.