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

by Kevin McLaughlin

  It fell to the floor, thrashing hard enough that its churning body tripped Charline’s legs. She tumbled forward on top of the alien.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Alarms blared around her head. All Charline could see in her view-screens were flashes of claw and writhing bug. It was stuck beneath her, trapped under the weight of her armor. She didn’t know if the wounds she’d delivered were mortal or not, but it was still alive and dangerous. Any of those claws might drive through a vulnerable spot on her suit and stab her.

  She shoved off with her left arm as hard as she could. The move rolled her over onto her back. From there she was able to sit back up and take in the scene around her.

  The room was roughly round. Instrumentation and machinery lined the walls everywhere except the entrance they’d burned through to get in. Two more bugs were struggling with three of her armored squad at close quarters. Unlike her suit, the other armor didn’t have blades mounted. That was something she needed to change if they were going to keep fighting melees.

  This had to be the ship’s control room! Forward toward the nose of the ship, one way in and out, lots of machinery…

  She couldn’t say for certain, of course. But if this was a human ship that would be her first guess. She glanced past the ongoing struggle and spotted another alien in armor, working at the control panels at the farthest point of the room from the door. That couldn’t be good. Whatever it was doing that it considered more important than fighting the armored soldiers invading its ship had to be bad news for the humans.

  “Andy! One enemy disengaged. I’m out of ammo. Can you take it out?” Charline asked.

  There wasn’t any reply. She could hear Tessa and Arjun talking back and forth as they struggled against the bugs. Charline looked down at the alien she’d been fighting. Its thrashes had dropped to the barest of twitches. If it wasn’t dead, it was at least out of action for the time being. Should she help her people or take the fight to that last alien?

  She rolled to her feet and was taking long strides forward before she was even conscious she’d made the decision. There was no doubt in her mind that bug was up to no good. Its movements were frantic as it touched the controls with a variety of its legs. Whatever it was doing had to be important, which meant it had to be stopped.

  Charline let her momentum flow into the sword swing. It smashed into the alien’s body just below the head. It never had time to react to her presence or defend itself. The alien dropped to the ground, dead before its body fell.

  The console lights were still flashing. A video display was showing a set of images which flickered rapidly from one to the other. Charline thought there was a pattern in that display, but she couldn’t figure it out without more study.

  Now wasn’t the time for that. She turned back toward her people, who were slowly being pushed out of the room. One armor unit had been torn up, with a hanging arm and limping leg. The other armor was covering the wounded one’s retreat. Where was Andy? She didn’t see his armor anywhere. Was he one of the ones on the floor? Had he been hit?

  The bugs were too engaged with her team-mates to see her coming. Charline swung her sword at one. It connected, but she didn’t have enough force to drive the sword through its armor this time. It was weaving in a way that made it hard for her to connect with her blow. Vibrations from the impact went up the arm, making her teeth rattle. She pulled back the sword for another swing at the dazed alien.

  This time her sword drove through the armor. A splash of goo spattered from the wound, and more flowed down the alien’s armor. She’d hurt the creature inside. It crashed to the floor and scuttled away from her, but the damaged armor unit fired its plasma guns at the fleeing bug. The plasma splashed over the alien’s armor, melting metal and pouring through the hole Charline’s sword had cut. The creature curled up on itself like a crisped spider as it died.

  Only one alien left. It slashed at Charline with furious energy. She dodged backward, trying vainly to stay away from its deadly claws. The bug tore long gouges in both her arms. She took another step back, using the damaged arms to shield her torso from the ferocious attack. If she could keep it focused on her for long enough...

  The other two armor units used the distraction to fire their guns. Both unloaded plasma all over the bug. Charline dropped backward and to her left, diving out of the line of fire. The plasma fire struck the alien with enough force to throw it to the ground before burning through its shell and killing the insect inside.

  It was over. Charline’s armor hissed and crackled from damage. She tried to get it upright again, but the arms wouldn’t respond to her commands. The damage was too severe.

  She checked the gauge for air outside her cockpit. It registered as breathable. When she popped open her cockpit, the smell that hit her nose made her want to shut the thing again.

  “Ugh, that stinks,” Charline said.

  “You all right down there?” Tessa asked over the radio.

  “Yeah, but my armor isn’t getting up until Halcomb fixes it again,” Charline said.

  She heard Tessa chuckle. “He’s going to get tired of you breaking his toys, you know.”

  “Oh, I’m sure I’ll hear about it,” Charline said.

  She stepped carefully from her cockpit. The floor was spattered with gobs of green goo. Bug guts. Yuck. Charline didn’t want to put her boots down inside any of those puddles. That seemed to be where the bad smell was coming from, and if she stepped in them the stink might never come out.

  “That bug was working on something over on the front console. I’m going to go check it out,” Charline said.

  “Sounds good. I’ll make sure none of them are playing possum,” Tessa said. “Arjun, check on the rest of the team.”

  “Will do,” Arjun replied.

  Charline felt a pang of fear for Andy and the others. They weren’t responding to radio messages. That could mean their suits had lost power – or that they were hurt. Or dead. The fighting had been furious in the close space of the room. How many people had she lost in the fighting to take this ship?

  “Tessa, as soon as you’re done checking the bodies, pull security on the door. We don’t want any surprises,” Charline said. “And contact the shuttle. Make sure they’re OK. I’m going to see what that one was up to.”

  The console was set up for a tall being. The aliens could rear up to twice the height of a human. Many of the controls and screens in front of her were too high for Charline to reach. But the flashing symbols were just above her eye level. She could watch them flicker, one after another.

  There was something familiar about the pattern. That feeling had been her first impression on seeing the symbols, and it hadn’t left her. What could it be?

  Another screen sat directly above that one, with another set of symbols, this one static. Each of the symbols was colored differently – red symbol, white symbol, green symbol, green symbol, blue symbol, white symbol. Charline’s eyes widened as she realized what those controls must do.

  She’d seen that sort of color-coded symbol system before. It was the destination chart for the Satori’s wormhole drive. Which they’d discovered was originally built by the ancestors of these bugs. Why had their tech remained the same for so long? Nothing humans did was so stagnant.

  No time to worry about that now. The six symbols were a set of destination coordinates for the wormhole drive. That meant the other symbols below them were probably a countdown. The alien ship was getting ready to make a wormhole jump – and it was going to take her people with it.

  THIRTY

  She had to stop the wormhole drive. Charline didn’t know what destination the alien had set up, but she was confident it wasn’t going to be in her best interest to find out. That the ship had a wormhole drive was excellent news. If she could get it back under control, they could plot in the coordinates for Earth’s solar system and get back home again. The six colored symbols for Earth were burned into her brain.

  But first she had to s
hut the thing off. Her tablet! There might be a way to hack the alien computers from there. Charline raced back to her armor where she’d left the thing. She scrambled back into the cockpit and snatched the device from the pouch where she’d left it, then ran back to the control panel.

  The flashing symbols were still changing. No telling how long they had left before the ship made a jump. It could be an hour or more away, or it might happen any second. The timer was likely counting down until the engines had built up enough power to make the jump. The Satori had a similar system in place.

  “We’ve got a problem back here,” Arjun said.

  “I’ve got a problem up here. I’ll swap you,” Charline replied, distracted.

  “What? No – I mean, it’s Andy. He’s unconscious and looks hurt, but I can’t get his armor open,” Arjun said.

  Charline paused in her work. She wanted to race over and help. But if she did that, they might all be doomed. The others would have to help Andy.

  “I have to stop this countdown, or we’re headed to god-knows-where,” Charline said. “Tessa, give him a hand. Get Karl up from the shuttle to help him if he’s hurt. How are Jonas and Isabella?”

  “Isabella is OK, but her armor was badly damaged and shut down. Jonas took a set of talons to the midsection. He’s gone,” Arjun reported.

  Damn it, she’d lost another one. Charline wanted to scream her frustration. It was her job to bring these people home and instead she was losing them, one after another. They should have picked someone else for this job. Plenty of people could have handled leading this mission without screwing it up so badly.

  “Understood,” she said, keeping her tone even. “I’m continuing work on interfacing with the bugs’ computer. Keep me updated.”

  All her attention went back into her work. Charline dropped herself into her code, trying to work out the interface between human and alien tech. It would have been utterly impossible if she hadn’t already done this once with the Satori, and the job would have been easy if the bugs’ code hadn’t changed in a thousand years.

  But it had changed. Just enough that it was screwing up her code, and so little that it was maddeningly similar to the code base she was used to working with.

  She wiped away sweat from her forehead and glanced up at the screen. The countdown was still going on. How long did she have left? Tapping the tablet, she tried to engage a link between the two computers.

  The tablet spat back out another failure message. Charline went back into the code, cleaning up the newest set of bugs. This was taking too long. But there wasn’t any shortcut she could see.

  “Karl’s on his way with a medkit and a crowbar. We’ll get him out and taken care of,” Arjun said.

  “He’s still unconscious?” Charline asked. That wasn’t good. How long had he been out? A long period might indicate a serious injury.

  “Yeah, but he’s alive. We’re getting vital signs from him. Heartbeat is steady, breathing shallow but present,” Arjun said.

  That was something, at least. “Do what you can for him.”

  “We will,” Tessa said. Charline heard the sympathy in her voice and wasn’t certain how to take it.

  Sure, she and Andy were dating. But he wasn’t supposed to be along on this mission in the first place. He’d tagged along to protect her. Every risk, injury, and problem he faced while out there was because he’d wanted to help her out. It might have been easier if he’d simply stayed behind on Earth. Then she wouldn’t have to worry about having his death on her conscience, and she wouldn’t wonder what the other people on the team thought about the team leader and one of the other members being an item.

  The tablet beeped and almost made Charline jump. She’d been expecting another failure. But that sound meant she’d made a basic connection between the devices!

  “Progress,” she said. Now all she needed to do was figure out the alien controls enough to shut off the wormhole without killing them all in the process. No mean feat, but she approached the task with more confidence. The hard part was over. The rest of the job would be tedious, but she could handle it.

  “All right, almost there, folks. I think we’re going to be OK,” Charline said.

  A vibration started shivering through the ship. Charline glanced up at the screen again. The shifting symbols – they’d stopped!

  “Oh, shit,” Charline said. “Hang on to something, everyone!”

  There was nothing else she could do. That vibration was the wormhole drive activating. If she was back on the Satori, maybe she could have turned the ship away from the opening portal somehow or stopped the thing from opening.

  With the limited control she had on this ship, there was no way in hell.

  A white beam of light shot from the nose of the vessel, stabbing out into space ahead of them. It stopped dead a few dozen meters from the ship in a blazing ball of light like a small star. Then that ball of light exploded outward into a swirling cacophony of color. The vortex was large enough for their ship to pass through. Charline had a few seconds to stare at the beauty of the rip in space-time, still as amazing as the first time she’d seen it.

  Then the ship’s orbit carried them directly into the wormhole. One moment they were floating high above Dust; the next they were someplace else very far away. Behind them, the wormhole vanished, leaving no trace it had ever been there at all.

  THIRTY-ONE

  The ship rocked as it flew out of the wormhole, back into regular space. Charline grabbed hold of the console panel in front of her to avoid being spattered all over it. There was a moment of panic where she was afraid they were going to be blown to bits before they had a chance to do anything, but then she got her fears back under control.

  They were in an alien ship. The other bugs had no idea the ship was compromised, right? That should work in their favor. If they didn’t know humans were on board, they’d be more inclined to ask questions before shooting.

  Then they’d blow the ship and the annoying humans aboard into atoms, but it ought to at least buy her a little time.

  Her tablet beeped again, informing Charline that it had renewed the interface upon exit from the wormhole. She scrolled through the features available, trying to figure out which each was from context. That wasn’t working too well. There wasn’t much context to glean. The alien language was incredibly different from anything on Earth. Even her knowledge of the archaic form of the tongue was only getting her so far.

  “How’s Andy doing?” Charline asked.

  “He’s breathing. Karl will be here in a minute. Was that a wormhole jump?” Tessa asked.

  “Yup. I don’t know where we’ve landed. Still trying to get sensors online,” Charline said.

  “But no place good, I’d wager,” Tessa said.

  “No, not anyplace we want to hang out. I’m pretty sure of that one,” Charline replied.

  There, was that the icon for scanners? Charline tapped the symbol to test it, hoping she didn’t accidentally stumble across the self-destruct button.

  The screen in front of her changed. Now it showed an old red star in the middle of a system of planets.

  Nearer to the star were three rocky planets that were baked to a crisp. The red giant had to be expanding, or maybe it was in a contraction period and had been even bigger before. Either way, the star had left those three worlds charred husks. The fourth planet looked almost as bad, but it couldn’t be completely desolate.

  As the scan continued to resolve, Charline was picking up a lot of ship activity from that region. A hotbed for commerce, maybe? She couldn’t see the appeal of the environment otherwise. Most of the world lay covered in desert.

  Out beyond that were several gas planets. In fact, the whole setup looked a lot like Earth’s system – in a few billion years, maybe. Had the bugs once lived on more worlds than just the fourth one? They had space stations around various planets and moons, inner and outer alike. They’d lived in this place for a long time.

  It was definitely
the bugs. As the scans improved and brought in more data, Charline was able to spot ships with roughly the same configuration as her own. There were also a great many smaller vessels, and even a few which dwarfed the ship she’d stolen. They’d entered toward the outer edge of the system, which was a plus. The nearest alien ships were over ten light-minutes away. It would take that long for the light from their arrival to reach anyone in the system.

  Of course, it meant the information Charline saw was ten minutes old as well. But that was more than worth it for the time it bought them. The longer they had before bad guys came knocking, the better.

  Those symbols were counting down again, showing the charge slowly build up in the engines. Charline ran it through a translation program. The answer was iffy, but it sounded like “a really long time.” They were stuck until the wormhole drive recharged, but the enemy was going to be right on top of them long before then.

  Charline set a worm program to run through the alien computer, turning up anything it could find related to controlling the ship. They wouldn’t be able to fly it like pros, probably. But if they could get even some control of the ship back, it might be enough to spell a difference. They weren’t going to fight their way out of this one, that was for sure. Three of those ships out there looked like whales next to her little ship. If they had the firepower to match, then nothing was going to save her people in a straight-up fight.

  “How’s Andy?” Charline asked again, turning away from the tablet. She left it leaning against the console and walked back toward the other armor pilots.

  “Still out,” Kyle said.

  Damn, she needed him back on his feet again badly! Andy might have ideas for how to get out of this. She could at least bounce thoughts off him, maybe get some fresh ideas or places where her own thinking was flawed.

  But with or without him, she had decisions to make. She could see the question written on Isabella and Arjun’s faces. Tessa probably wore the same look up in her armor. All three of them wanted to know what they were going to do to survive, and she didn’t have a good answer.