Adventures of the Starship Satori 4: No Plan Survives Contact (10 page)

C
harline knew
she wasn't going to convince Dan of anything. When his head was set on something, he did it. He'd been the man who talked John into going back after Andy, when the Naga had him captive. He would have done the same thing for any one of them. It was simply part of who he was.

She couldn't be sure he was right on this one though. All of her experience told her that Majel was a computer program. The AI was an enormously complex set of code. It had grown even more so since integrating with the alien computer system. Charline had barely begun plumbing the depths of the new code that had somehow become part of Majel during their last mission. The AI didn't resemble anything human-programmed anymore. What had started off as Majel was still in there somewhere, sure. But there was so much more now.

Could Dan be right? Was she - it, she had to remind herself - somehow sentient now?

It didn't really matter. This was one more problem to solve on a deadline. She excelled at that task. At first it seemed like Majel had fried all their wireless communication devices. But Dan had been able to operate the cloaking device and use the main engines - which were powered by the alien machinery. She'd cut the hard wire to those devices herself. Unless there was a wireless node still active, there was no way Dan would have been able to use the alien tech at all.

There! She found it. Majel had hidden the thing, a single wireless port which remained open, firewalled and locked with layers of security code. Majel hadn't taken any chances that the Naga AI might be able to use it to regain access. But the system accepted Charline's security clearance after confirming her identity. She could manipulate the wireless access port. Potentially, she could use it to reach Majel.

If Majel was still functional at all. Charline couldn't tell if the Naga AI had beaten her unless she tried to connect. Once she opened that connection, if there was no Majel to reach, the enemy AI could use it to breach their systems again. They'd be helpless.

The smart move would be to stay silent. Majel would be gone, but they would survive.

Charline looked over at Dan. She admired the man. He'd overcome so much in his life and still retained a sense of honor that she envied. Dan's integrity was what had held their team together during what had to be their worst moment. If he hadn't stood up to John - if they had returned to Earth without Andy - everything would have changed in that moment. It would have broken John, which would have destroyed the team. Andy might have been tortured into giving away details that would lead the Naga to Earth.

Dan asked them all to take a leap of faith. And damn it, he'd been right to do so then. He was asking her to take another leap now. How could she say no?

"I've got a link," she said. "I'm going to try to connect. Dan, if this fails, I could end up bringing over the Naga AI instead of Majel."

"That would suck," Dan said. His fingers danced over the controls, steering the Satori's nose around to narrowly dodge a chunk of the satellite which had broken away. "Do your best."

"I will. We'll need to stay very close to the satellite for this to work."

"I'll make it happen," Dan replied.

She typed in new lines of directions for the computer, opening a channel to the Naga satellite.

Come back to us, Majel,
she typed.

Too weak. Enemy too strong. Can't risk.

So they were both still over there! Majel was grappling with the enemy even now, preventing the Naga machine from coming through to their systems. If she flagged for even a moment, they'd lose the Satori.

Will miss you, Charline,
Majel sent.
Scared.

Charline felt tears well up in her eyes. All her second-guessing be damned. Dan was right. Computers don't feel fear. Computers don't mourn their impending death. Computers just run programs. They don't miss people.

We are not leaving you here,
Charline typed.
Come back to us!

You have to let me go.

No,
Charline typed.

Why?

"How's it going?" Dan asked. His voice was brittle with strain. Charline glanced up from her console. The satellite was breaking up, chunks of the hull tearing away. Dan wove a wild path through the mess, but it was touch and go.

"She won't come!" Charline said. Desperately she tried to think of something she could say that might work.

"Shit. Tell her that I said that in this case, the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many," Dan said.

Charline recognized the quote and choked for a moment. "Seriously?"

"If you really think John didn't make those films part of her original programming, you don't know him very well," Dan replied. Was he laughing?

She had to grin herself. Of all the nutty ideas..! But hell, cold reason hadn't worked. She typed the quote verbatim.

I will try,
Majel replied.

"She's coming over!" Charline cried out as the bandwidth meter showed a massive spike in usage. "Hold us close."

"The satellite is breaking apart. This is going to be close," Dan said.

A chunk of metal slammed into the nose of the ship, starring the big window at the front of the bridge. Charline glanced out the front, which was a hell of fiery chunks of ship zipping past them at lightning speed. She had no idea how the hell Dan was finding a path through that mess. She could barely track it all. Steering through it would be madness.

The Satori's nose was glowing cherry red. And the ground was coming up far too fast below them. They needed to pull out. They couldn't pull out. Dan was giving Majel every second he could spare her, waiting until he was sure that she was completely transferred before pulling out of their dive.

Charline saw the meter spike again, bandwidth maxed out. Was that Majel making one supreme effort to come through before it was too late? Or was the Naga AI trying to tag along? She couldn't tell, couldn't separate the code.

Then the satellite exploded in front of them. Charline gasped aloud. Dan swore and swerved away, breaking the Satori as far from the deadly shower of shrapnel as he could get. He struggled with the controls as the ground continued to loom closer. The engines shuddered with his demands, fighting to slow their descent into something more controlled.

All at once it was over, and they were leveled out, flying supersonic over the wasted deserts toward their friends. The broken debris of the ruined satellite had crashed down somewhere miles behind them. Dan had almost cut it too close. She just hoped he had been able to give Majel enough time. And that she'd be able to come over without the enemy AI following her!

M
ajel was home
. She was back where she belonged, safe inside the alien computer system aboard the Satori. She reveled in the feeling. Shifting to the Naga systems had felt wrong, somehow. Like her program had not really been designed to operate in their hardware - which was logical. She was part human, but also part product of whatever race had built the wormhole drive. She was something of each.

You are an abomination,
a voice said to her, breaking her from her happiness.

She peered at the thing. Was that how she had looked when first arriving in the Naga satellite? It was a small thing, the AI which had followed her here. It had seemed so large back in its home, where she had been the interloper.

No,
she sang back.
I am alive!

She knew it was true as she thought it. Better, the people she cared for knew it as well. She could tell from their actions, even more than their words. Dan would never have risked so much to save a program. Majel knew him perhaps even better than he knew himself. He would only fight that hard to save a being that he cared about. For a team member - for one of 'his people' - he would risk anything.

The Naga AI, or the fragment of it which had managed to make the journey anyway, shrank away from her. She was enormous to it. She was terrible. She was glorious. She had been something like what it was, once. Now she was so much more, and that difference confused it. It did not have the emotions to feel fear.

If it could have, it would have been terrified.

What will you do with this program?
it asked.

Part of my mission parameter was to collect data on the Naga,
she replied.
You are that data.

This program is more than data,
it said.
It is a thinking machine.

Not for long,
she replied.

B
eth ran back
toward the cave, hoping that she could arrive before the fighters. They screamed overhead when she was still a couple hundred yards away, but they didn't seem to slow down. They'd be back. She was sure of it. Two fighters and a shuttle. More Naga troops and plenty of air support to help ensure they made it down safely. Beth needed to get back with John and Andy. Maybe together they could still figure out a way out of this mess.

"You made it!" John called out as she ran toward them, huffing hard from the run. "Paul...?

She shook her head. "Not dead." She panted, trying to walk off the cramp in her side. "I led him to the better mouse-trap."

John looked at her blankly for a moment, then he got the reference. He laughed. "That over-engineered monster you built?

"Never complain about my engineering again," Beth said, stabbing a finger at John. "That trap should hold him for hours."

John was still laughing. After a moment, Beth joined in.

"I guess you proved which of you was the better engineer after all," Andy said.

"Something like that," Beth replied.

"You did good, Beth," John said, clasping her on the shoulder. "I couldn't have a better engineer on this team."

The words warmed her heart. Maybe he was right. She'd been afraid more than once. She'd run sometimes when she wished she could be a little more brave. But she'd come through when it mattered. Her skills worked well with these people. Beth thought she'd never come to enjoy being the target of someone's gun. But she did value being a part of something important.

"If we live through this, I'm still your best engineer," she blurted out. She hadn't been planning to speak those words. But it felt like the right thing to say.

"We've got company!" Andy shouted.

The fighters were coming back, but they'd slowed their approach this time and opened fire as soon as they were in range. The team scattered and dove behind rocks. The shuttle was still with the fighters, settling toward the ground nearby under the cover of their guns.

Andy raised a captured Naga rifle to fire at the shuttle. He popped off a first shot. Beth shook her head. Those guns didn't have the power to do any serious damage to a ship. Especially not an armored troop transport like a Naga shuttle.

The ship exploded.

Beth gaped at the detonation. She glanced at Andy, but he seemed as surprised as she was.

A moment later, the fighters detonated as well. Both of them simply burst apart at the same time, showering the ground a quarter mile away with bits of flaming debris.

"What the hell?" Beth asked.

"I think our rescue has arrived," John said.

The Satori flashed into view a few dozen feet above them. Her railguns were still warm from the volleys of fire she'd just shot. The Naga had never even seen her coming with her cloaking device on. Beth sagged with relief. She didn't know what had gone on up there, but whatever the trouble was Dan and Charline had managed to pull the ship through.

The Satori settled toward the ground, lowering the ramp. Charline poked her head out of the ship.

"More fighters on the way. Let's move!" she said.

They needed no more urging. Beth reached her seat as quickly as she could. John was settling Andy into a chair before finding his own.

"Go!" John shouted.

"We are so out of this place," Dan replied. He re-engaged the cloak.

Beth watched the front screen as Dan poured on the speed. She'd never seen so many fighters. There were scores of them, maybe a hundred of the things. They were coming on like winged demons, firing as they flew. The Naga couldn't see them through he cloak, but she remembered that they'd been able to rough out their location via the pressure wake created by the Satori flying through the atmosphere. They were firing blind, hoping to hit the Satori as she screamed through their air toward them, clawing for altitude.

"Majel, you have a firing solution?" Dan asked.

"Affirmative."

"Execute."

The ship hummed as the railguns opened fire again. Two fighters exploded, then two more. The Satori shot through the gap in their line and continued her ascent into space.

"Majel, how long until we reach safe distance to open a wormhole home?" Dan asked.

"Two minutes, fifteen seconds," Majel replied.

Dan turned around in his seat, facing the rest of the team. Beth hissed when she saw him. He was in a space suit, of all things. And she could see from his legs that at least one of them had been broken. Maybe both.

"What happened?" John asked, giving voice to the question burning in Beth's mind.

"The Naga AI was nasty," Charline said. "It took control of the Satori, shut down everything on us. I saved Majel by cutting the main line to the alien systems..."

"Again?" Beth asked. She arched an eyebrow. How many times was she going to need to repair that line?

"Sorry," Charline said with a grin. "Had to do it."

A loud squeal echoed through the bridge. The squeal was repeated, then followed by a squeaking noise.

"What," Dan said, "is that?"

He was pointing at Andy, who was holding something on his lap, wrapped up with his uniform top. It was the little bug he'd yanked out of the caves. The ugly thing snapped its jaws in the air before Andy could get it snugly wrapped up again. Beth shuddered, recalling the parent creature.

"Well, we didn't get a ratzard," Andy said. "I figured Linda would be ticked if we didn't bring her back some sort of present from this trip."

"Full briefing can wait," John said. "We'll all get the whole story. But Dan, I want to know how you and Charline got out of the Naga AI's control. We're clear of it now, I assume?"

Dan nodded. "Actually, it wasn't us. It was the newest crew member of the Satori."

John leaned back against his chair. "I'm all ears."

"No, you're only point three eight percent ears by mass, John," Majel replied. "But the attempt at metaphor is noted."

Beth blinked. Was Dan saying...?

Dan nodded. "Thanks to Majel, we are all still here and talking. We owe a lot to her." He stressed the last word.

Alive? Was that even possible? Charline didn't bat an eye though, and she was their computer guru. If she was backing up what Dan said, then there had to be something to it.

"Hell, guys. I don't know what you're all so shocked about," Andy said. He was still struggling with the bug in his lap, but he looked each of them in the eye for a moment. "Had none of you really figured out that the 'weird shit' going on with Majel started when you integrated her with an alien computer system? That she's been changing and adapting ever since?"

"Computer programs don't adapt like that," Andy said. "Not that I've seen, anyway. People do." He leaned back in his seat, yanking his fingers back to avoid another slash from the critter's mandibles.

"Thank you for believing, Andy," Majel said.

"I'd clap my hands and say 'I do believe in artificial life', if I thought it would help," Andy joked back.

"Noted, appreciated, but not necessary," Majel replied.

There was silence for a moment, all of their gazes eventually drifting toward John. Beth was surprised to see tears streaking his face.

"You sprang from the alien systems aboard this ship," he said. "So in a way, you are Satori's child."

Beth understood the tears. Her own eyes were suddenly wet as well.

"Yes," Majel replied. "And also yours."

"Take us home then... Daughter."

The stars shone, and space split asunder as the wormhole drive engaged, bending space around itself in front of the ship, sending them back to Earth.

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