Satori’s Destiny

Adventures of the Starship Satori: Book 6

Kevin McLaughlin

Role of the Hero Publishing

Copyright © 2017 by Kevin O. McLaughlin

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

1

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 breaking 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?

“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.

2

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.

3

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 Satori had somehow leaked out, God help them all.

4

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.

“Linda, you need to get out of there,” Beth said. That lab was on the uppermost of the secret levels. She’d be spotted as soon as the invaders breached the security.

“I’m trying to download our research to this chip,” Linda said. “It’s everything we’ve been working on.”

“Can’t Majel just…?” Beth started to say.

“Uploading now,” Majel said. “I’ll have her files in a few minutes.”

“Thanks, Majel,” Linda said. The relief in her voice was clear over the radio. She rose from the chair. “I’m on my way down.”

She moved out of sight of the camera. Beth was about to flick the view back to John, to tell him to get his tail moving, when Linda ran across her video feed again. She wasn’t jogging this time - she was sprinting. Fleeing something.

Linda grabbed one of the captured Naga weapons from where it was sitting on a table. They were continuing to study the Naga tech, hoping to glean more answers from their research, but this device was still mostly assembled. Linda popped the few loose bits back into place and tucked herself behind one of the tables.

Just in time. A bright light flashed in the room, blinding the camera display for a moment. When it cleared, men were rushing in, rifles raised. Linda fired at them, little balls of blue-white light discharging from the muzzle of the Naga weapon. She took down one soldier, and then another.

But she was hopelessly outnumbered. There was no way Beth could get there in time to help, either. Nothing she could do but watch as the men smashed priceless equipment and samples. The terrarium where the insect like creature they’d captured on the dust world was sent flying to the floor in the scuffle, the glass enclosure exploding into a thousand fragments.

The troops closed in from multiple angles, firing as they came. Linda’s body jerked suddenly, and she slumped to the floor.

Beth’s eyes were wet. She tapped the display, switching the camera view away. She’d never been especially fond of Linda, but she couldn’t watch her be taken like that. John was still out there, though. She needed to warn him, tell him to get out.

The video feed for his office was filled with smoke, his desk overturned. She was too late; the enemy had already breeched this far.

“John, are you still there?” she called over his radio.

“Yes. I’m using the desk for cover. They seem hesitant to come in after me,” he replied.

“Linda shot a few of them with a Naga rifle. They might think you have one,” Beth said.

“I wish I did.”

Beth did. She glanced to the arms rack, where the Satori was stocked with a handful of the Naga rifles, and military grade human weapons as well. “Hang tight, John. I’ll come get you.”

“No!” he said. “You need to get the ship clear. Nothing matters more than that.”

“I can’t just leave you all!” she said.

“You can. You have to. If they take the Satori, they’ll have everything. They won’t need any of us, at that point. Think, Beth. Whoever is doing this has risked a great deal. They’re taking prisoners. But how long are they going to keep those hostages if there’s nothing else they need?”

“I…”

“Go, get help,” John said. There was a crashing noise in the background. Booted feet rushing closer to his hiding spot. “You’re the best shot we all have. Go! Majel, execute omega protocols on your way out.”

His radio cut out.

“What do you want to do?” Majel asked.

“We follow John’s orders,” Beth replied, steeling herself. Too damned many feelings to deal with them all right now. She shoved them away, focused on the moment instead. She was good at that. She’d done it for years. “Engage the engines. We’re taking the Satori out of here.”

The ship lifted away from the deck, floating slowly toward the hangar doors, which ground their way open at Beth’s command. Through those doors was a narrow tube to the surface of the moon. Once they were out and away, in space, they would be free and damned near impossible to catch.

But before the ship could enter the tube, gouts of fire shot through it into the hangar, blossoming in flames around the ship.

“Take evasive action!” Beth cried.

Majel was a better pilot than she was, and Beth knew it. She let the AI take over, twisting the ship hard around its axis to pivot away from the debris and fire blasting out at them. Someone had bombed the launch tube. These attackers were taking no chances that they might lose their prize.

Beth could see the main elevator through the cockpit window. It slid open, a squad of men pouring out to take positions in the hangar. They all wore space suits, all armed with rifles much like the ones she’d seen on the video feeds. She reached for the weapon controls, half wanting to pump all of them full of railgun rounds from the Satori’s main weapons, but that wasn’t going to help John and the others escape. It might even put them at greater risk.

Besides, these people might think they’d trapped her. But the Satori was a difficult vessel to capture.

“Engage the wormhole drive,” Beth said. She tapped the keys for a jump destination. Brilliant lights swirled into being in front of the ship, casting flickering lights on the hangar walls. The wormhole reached out like a tongue of fire and ripped apart the steel walls of the hangar, tearing and twisting them into debris in its vortex. Outside, the soldiers dove for cover.

“We’ll be back, guys,” Beth said. “Take us in, Majel.”

The Satori leapt forward, jumping across the lightyears through the hole it had torn in the universe.

5

John had absolutely no idea where he’d been taken. The white paint over cinderblock walls could have been just about anywhere. His bones and muscles knew he was back on Earth, though. He felt like a pile of bricks. Despite all the effort the crew on his lunar base made to keep in shape - especially the crew of the Satori - the sudden change from Luna’s gravity to Earth’s was harder on his body than he wanted to admit. John had been knocked out cold by one of the damned darts. The hangover from whatever tranquilizer they used was still giving him a headache. He’d been out for a while, if they’d brought him all the way back to the planet while he was sleeping it off.

Where on Earth, he had no clue. The small room had no windows, just the cot he was laying on, an empty shelf bolted to the wall, and a small commode. John felt a sudden urge to use the latter. It clearly had been quite a while since he was knocked out.

He was still wearing the jumpsuit that he’d had on when the base was attacked. But there was still no clue who had been behind the attack. The why was somewhat more obvious. Someone had finally learned something about the Satori.

It wasn’t a shock. Too many people knew about the ship for it to remain a secret forever. He’d known for months that some little bits of information had likely already slipped down to Earth, despite his best efforts. What was surprising was the violence of the assault. They’d smashed every security and defense protocol he’d put in place, all in less than half an hour. Whoever was behind the attack was very good.

Good enough to have captured the Satori? John hoped not, but he couldn’t be sure. Beth had already been aboard when she messaged him before his capture. If she’d bolted right away, she should have been able to get clear. But if she hadn’t…

John heard voices outside the door, and a clanging sound. He glanced around the room. If they were coming for him now, odds were that they had a camera in place somewhere and had seen him wake up, but he couldn’t see it if they did.

The door slid open. A dark-haired young man in camouflage uniform stood outside. John blinked. The rank insignia on the uniform was easy enough to spot, and one he recognized.

“Mr. Caraway, I’m to escort you, sir,” the man said.

“US Air Force…?” John said aloud. “Staff Sergeant, am I right?”

“Yes sir. Staff Sergeant Bolton. If you’ll follow me, sir?”

Are you still with me? John thought at the small alien companion tucked inside his ear. The Cyanaut had withdrawn as deep into his ear as it could without puncturing his ear drum. He could feel it there as a pressure in his ear, and he had a steady sense of its connection with his mind. John knew his captors had undoubtedly searched him, but they apparently hadn’t thought to do a full medical examination. A quick look with an otoscope would immediately reveal his little passenger.

He had no idea what these people would do if they knew they had a real alien among their captives. They might just extract and kill it. More likely they’d do much worse. John’s own experiences with the Cyanaut race had been mixed enough, but he wasn’t willing to see any intelligent being subjected to that if he could help it.

Still, the alien might be able to lend him some aid here. It could read the minds of others nearby, after all. That’s how it translated what they were saying to its host. If you can give me any insights at all, it might help us both get out of this.

He felt an affirmative reply. It would help him as much as it could. With luck that would be enough. John nodded to the sergeant, and followed him from his cell.

The hall outside was dimly lit by long florescent bulbs flashing off more whitewashed cinderblock. As he followed Bolton down the corridor they passed several more cells, doors open. They were identical to the one he’d been held in. They were all empty. So much for seeing if any of the rest of his people were nearby. It was smart to keep them separated, a good tool to keep him off balance and worried. It was working, too, despite his best efforts otherwise. John longed to know how the rest of the crew were doing, and all the other people who’d been taken during the attack.

Bolton stopped in front of an elevator door and tapped a button, holding his finger there for a moment while the console scanned his identity. The doors slid open and he ushered John forward with an arm. The interior of the elevator was polished steel. It seemed somehow newer and brighter than the space he was leaving behind. Bolton entered the elevator behind him and the doors closed.

There didn’t seem to be any panel or control system inside the elevator. John quirked an eyebrow at that, wondering what was next. A soft, mechanical voice spoke from above them. “Destination, please.”

“Fifteenth,” Bolton replied.

“Confirmed,” the computer replied. The elevator sped into motion, shooting not upward as John had expected, but down. Were they underground, then?

The elevator stopped and opened for them. Bolton gave John a nod to go ahead, and he stepped out into a hall. This one was different from the floor he’d left behind. The hall was taller, wider, and better lit. Power lines and conduits ran along the walls, and he could see a number of people in Air Force uniforms bustling about, turning down one side corridor or another.

“This way, sir,” the sergeant said.

John got the distinct feeling the man was nervous and trying to hide it. They were on their way to see someone important, someone he felt was above his pay grade. The man wanted to look good, and wanted to be anywhere else rather than here. John realized his Cyanaut ally was feeding him information.

Thanks, he thought at it. That would be useful.

“Which General are we going to visit? I know several of them,” John asked.

Bolton blanched a little. “How…?”

“It’s not that hard to figure out, young man. Lead on.”

Bolton just shook his head and started down the passage, glancing back to ensure John was following him. They stopped in front of a closed wooden door. The name stenciled on it was General Hereford. His heart lifted a little immediately. This was someone he knew, and someone he could perhaps work out a deal with. Hereford was a tough old bird, but if he was involved John’s people were likely all safe and being well cared for, at least. The man had an honorable streak that never quit.

The sergeant rapped once on the door. A voice called out from inside, “Enter.” Bolton opened the door and stepped just inside.

“Sergeant Bolton, reporting with the prisoner as ordered, sir,” he said.

“That will be all, Sergeant. Thank you. John, get in here and sit down,” Hereford said, without rising from his desk.

The sergeant fled as John stepped in and closed the door gently behind him. He surveyed the room carefully before sitting. It was a simple enough office. A heavy wood desk, two well made but not especially ornate chairs. A filing cabinet sat beside the desk. A computer rested on the desk, along with a little rack holding some pens and a few folders. There was an old style phone there as well. And that was about it. Nathaniel Hereford had always been a spare man. Time hadn’t changed that about him, if it had other things.

“Jesus, Nate. You look like shit,” John said, taking the chair across the desk. The General looked far older than he remembered. John could still see the old energy there, bubbling beneath the surface, but Hereford seemed tired, worn out.

“Always one with the compliment, eh? Not all of us can live forever like you seem to be aiming for.”

“It’s been what, two years?” John asked.

“Four, but who’s counting?” Hereford asked. “You’re in a load of shit, John.”

“So I gathered. It was the Air Force that hit us?”

“Yep. Special Operations. We sent you our very best.”

“They tore through us like tissue paper,” John said, shaking his head ruefully.

“Don’t feel too bad about it. That’s what they train for,” Hereford said.

“Well, that’s nice to know,” John said. He kept his tone light, continuing the banter for as long as the other man wanted. He already had the slice of information that he wanted most, thanks to his link with the Cyanaut. Hereford didn’t have the Satori. Majel and Beth had succeeded in escaping, and that meant he had a lot more chips on the table to play with. John knew the banter wouldn’t last. The hammer was going to fall soon enough, and didn’t have long to wait.

“Cut the crap, John. Where is the damned ship?” Hereford asked.

6

The Satori jumped free of the wormhole in a flash of brilliant light. Beth sat at the controls, still trying to take in everything that had just happened. It was too much. Too sudden. She was still shaking with reaction from the near getaway, and the fear she felt for friends left behind. Who had attacked them? It had come without warning or time to react. Damn it, she had thought their team was excellent. They’d been proven under fire enough times. But these people, whoever they are, had taken them down without breaking a sweat.

At least it had been humans. She was pretty certain of that. Beth hadn’t seen any insignia on their space suits, but they’d looked like an Earth type design, as had the weapons they were carrying.

She broke from her thoughts to look out the Satori’s main window. Below her slowly spun a brilliant blue world. She was still in enough shock that it took her several long moments to realize the planet was blue, and not the mustard color she had expected.

"Where are we?" she asked.

"You did not specify a destination," Majel said. "I took us to our last primary destination."

"The one with the Naga battle station?" Beth asked.

"The cloaking device is active. The ship is safe," Majel said. "Time was of the essence, so it seemed logical to jump to the fastest coordinates."

Beth hoped the AI was right. The Naga were dangerous enemies, and the last thing they needed was more trouble. They already had more than enough.

"Scan the area, just to be sure. And prepare to jump for home," Beth said.

The ship shook, jolted by a sudden impact. There was a pause, and then a staccato series of metallic pings against the hull. Alarmed, Beth called up a sensor readout on her console. The space around the Satori was full of small bits of debris.

"What the hell is all this stuff?" Beth asked. As she checked the scan, she realized something was missing. "And where the hell is the Naga space station?"

"We are in a debris field," Majel replied. "The field is dispersing. Taking evasive action now to avoid larger fragments. Based on point of origin and sensor readings, the debris field appears to be the remains of the Naga station."

"That's not possible." Beth couldn't believe it. The station had been huge. It was well defended, with scores of fighters and massive gun emplacements. The Satori had barely survived an encounter with the station defenses. She couldn't imagine something powerful enough to so completely destroy it.

Actually she could imagine, she corrected herself. She just didn't want to meet whatever it was that had done the job.

"Get us out of here, Majel," Beth said. "Get us home."

"Shall we take the roundabout way home to Earth?" Majel asked.

"Yes," Beth replied. She was distracted. Far more worried about whatever had done this, which might still be lurking somewhere nearby. But it was a sensible precaution. Returning via the dust world would require a second jump, which would cost them some time. But she couldn't take the chance someone might track them through the wormhole.

Beth didn't know if it was possible to track wormhole destinations. There was so much they didn't know about this technology. But after what she'd seen today, she wasn't taking any chances.

The pings on the hull were diminishing in number. Majel was taking them clear of the debris, and the capacitor charge was climbing quickly on the wormhole drive. Soon they’d be able to jump clear of this place. Once she got back home, she’d…what? Try to rescue her friends, somehow. Doing that without revealing the Satori would be tough. What if it was a government that had raided them, and not a corporation? If would be bad enough if it was just a private company that had gotten wind of what they were doing, and hired mercenaries doing the raiding.

It would be something else again if one of the major governments had gotten wind of the Satori. No place on Earth would really be safe for them, then. Beth had always known that day might come. She’d tried discussing it with John, but his obsession with taking the ship ‘out there’ had kept him from really hearing her.

And god knew, she’d gone along with him. All the way.

But at some point they were going to get caught. They’d be forced to turn the ship over. She’d lose the project that she’d spent years working on. She didn’t have any idea what they’d make of Majel, once word got out of a fully self-aware AI. Would they love her, or kill her?

Alarms flashed on her console, waking her from her thoughts. It was a proximity alarm, which shouldn’t have been possible. They were clear of the debris. But the scan showed an enormous object immediately behind the Satori.

“What the hell is that?” she exclaimed. The rear camera told her part of the answer. It was a ship. A massive ship, bigger than the Naga warships. Almost impossibly large.

“The ship decloaked immediately behind us. I suspect they can see through our cloak,” Majel warned.

“Decloaked?” Beth said. The Naga didn’t have that technology. That the Satori did was only because it was a remnant of some lost, ancient civilization that the Naga had annihilated. But clearly, it was technology that was not as lost as she’d thought. “How long until we can engage a wormhole?”

“Eighty-three seconds. The ship is attempting to signal to us. I cannot translate the message.”

“I suspect they’re telling us to pull over. The hell with that,” Beth said. “Give the engines everything you can, but keep the wormhole drive spooling up.”

That was their best chance of escaping this monster. If they could jump, they’d be safe. The Satori leapt forward, her drives straining to build up speed.

A blue light snapped from the other ship to surround the Satori with a crackling field. The engines continued to whine in protest, but their forward movement slowed to a crawl, then stopped. They were being pulled back toward the other ship.

“Shit, tractor beams too?” Beth said.

“It would appear so,” Majel said.

“How long on the drive?”

“Twenty-three seconds.”

It was going to be very close. She wasn’t even one-hundred percent sure the wormhole would still open under these conditions, but it remained their best shot at escape. The beam was tugging them back toward the mammoth ship. Beth could see a hold opening - presumably where they were to be deposited by the tractor beam.

“Majel, at two seconds, flip the nose of the ship to aim into the tractor beam, then fire up a wormhole.”

“To let the tractor beam drag us into the wormhole?”

“That’s the idea,” Beth said.

“Insufficient data to determine if the maneuver will be successful,” Majel said.

“You have a better idea? I’m all ears,” Beth said.

“Engaging maneuver,” Majel replied, deadpan as ever.

The Satori fired thrusters, flipping the nose of the ship end over end, to face back directly toward the other vessel. The drives were still running - now they were actually accelerating faster than they had been, and the ship seemed to leap closer.

“Now!” Beth cried.

The wormhole drive fired, igniting space around the Satori in flickering bands of light.

7

Dan sat on the bed, gradually exercising his legs. He needed to be stronger. Faster. If he’d been a little quicker back there on the moon, maybe he could have stopped the attackers. Or at least slowed them down a little more.

Instead he’d woke up here, wherever here was. A small cell with a tiny cot, a wheelchair, a chamber pot, and not much else. He’d been stewing inside for hours. How many, he had no idea; they’d taken his watch away. He had his shoes and the gym clothes he’d been wearing to work out when he was taken, which had grown pretty rank with the passage of time.

There wasn’t much he could do but prepare for whatever was coming next as best he could, and that meant strengthening those legs. He was willing to bet he could stand here, even with Earth’s gravity yanking him down. But he was certain they had a camera hidden somewhere in the room to watch him. If his captor knew enough about him to know he needed a wheelchair, then he wasn’t about to disabuse them of the notion.

He kept his exercises discrete. He could move the muscles without appearing to by shifting his weight just right. It was enough to tire them out, so it ought to be doing something.

A rap at the door distracted him. He froze, but no one barged in. The rap was repeated.

“Enter,” he said.

There was a jangling at the door outside, and then it opened inward toward him. A uniformed man stepped into the room, and Dan’s jaw dropped.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” the man said, smirking a little.

“Harry?” Dan asked. “Hell, man, aren’t you supposed to be on Mars still?”

“No way, dude. Just got back. You lose track of time after you quit the service?”

Dan did the mental math. Shit, had it really been that long? They’d been busy up on John’s base, between rescuing each other from aliens and exploring two new solar systems. Somehow he’d completely lost track of the timing on the Mars landing that had once been his dream. It hadn’t seemed as important anymore, not after seeing the things he had.

“What are you doing here?” Dan asked.

“I’m here to get you out. For a while at least,” Harry replied. He paused for a moment. “You got yourself in some deep shit, you know.”

“I gathered,” Dan replied. He kept his answer short, hoping to get a little more information about what was going on. Harry Wheeler was here. In uniform. That implied this was an Air Force facility. They’d been hit by US armed forces, which was crazy, but wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility.

The moon wasn’t sovereign territory for anyone, so the US military could hit it. They’d need to get judicial permission to attack US citizens, in theory at least. But he knew enough about classified military operations to know such permissions were not hard to acquire…and were on occasion ignored if the need was strong enough.

Wheeler hesitated a moment longer, and then shrugged. “Come on, let me at least get you out of this dump for a little while.”

He reached out a hand, and Dan took it. With that small assist he could probably have levered himself over to the wheelchair, but he wasn’t willing to reveal how much his legs had recovered. Not yet, anyway. Being in the hands of the US Air Force was both better and worse than a lot of other possibilities. If it had been a corporate attack, it would have been illegal, after all. There could have been a rescue operation to bust them out, and their captors would have no legal recourse.

Dan knew the Air Force. He’d been a major before his forced retirement, after all. If that was who had them they’d be treated well enough. But escape was going to be next to impossible. Where would they go? They could never build a new base; it would just be attacked again. If they escaped they’d be enemies of the most powerful state on the planet.

All that meant he would need to tread very carefully. The better if these people underestimated him, at least for now. He accepted the offered hand and used it to help lever his body sideways into the wheelchair. Dan was careful to leave his legs limp during the process.

“First thing, how about a shower, man?” Wheeler asked him. He waved a hand in front of his smile in a theatrical manner.

“Works for me,” Dan said. He allowed the other man to wheel him from the room and down the hall like he was an invalid. It wasn’t a new feeling to him. Plenty of people saw him in a chair with useless legs, and thought that meant they were helping him out by pushing his chair around. He’d tried explaining to some, early on. Pushing him wasn’t helping. All it did was strip away the little independence he had remaining.

He wasn’t going to say anything right now though. Not only would it not help, but that might have been precisely the point. He was, after all, still a prisoner. Even if Harry had been a friend, Dan knew he couldn’t trust the man right now.

A short while later, Dan had to agree that the shower was a good idea. He reached over and shut off the flow of water, then snagged the towel from where it was hooked on the wall outside the stall. The little stool he sat on didn’t have a lot of play for moving about, but he managed fairly well without using his legs. Dan was still certain that he had eyes on him. Just because he couldn’t see the cameras didn’t mean they weren’t there.

“You all set in there?” Harry called from outside.

“Yeah, just a minute,” Dan said. He picked up the dirty clothes he’d been wearing from the floor where he had dumped them. They stank of stale sweat and fear. He didn’t want to put the things back on, but it wasn’t like he had a lot of other options.

Harry’s face popped around the corner. “Ugh. Burn that stuff. Here, I brought you something.”

He handed Dan a hangar, with a freshly pressed set of Air Force blues hanging from it. His eyebrows shot up when he saw the major rank on the shoulders. This wasn’t some spare Harry had laying around, then. He’d procured it especially for the occasion.

“Nobody going to gripe about my wearing the old rank?” Dan asked.

“Hey, you earned it. Besides, you retired, right? Early retirement?”

Dan nodded.

“Then they can’t take that away from you. Not ever,” Harry said. He tossed another little bundle. Dan caught it before it rolled off his lap into a puddle. Socks. Underwear. Shoes. He was willing to bet it was all his size, too.

“Give me a minute to change and I’ll be right out,” Dan said.

It felt odd to be back in uniform. When he’d cast this off, he was pretty sure it had been forever. The Air Force didn’t need a crippled pilot in its ranks. He’d been honored enough, offered a great deal for his retirement, and sent on his way.

It had been easy, not looking back. There was far too much to do out there, at John’s base and beyond with the work they were doing on the Satori. But damned if part of him didn’t feel good about getting back into this uniform. With his legs recovering, was there a chance he could even come back? Be brought back to active duty? The emotions around that were all sorts of conflicted.

The service was what had come between him and Beth in the first place. That and her own career; but his work for the Air Force in space most of all. Even so, getting back in their good graces now might be a boon to all of them, especially if they’d been captured as well. He didn’t know if anyone had managed to get away, or if they’d all been caught.

Time to get answers, then. He shifted himself onto the wheelchair and spun the wheels to bring himself out of the shower stall.

“I’m ready, Harry. What’s next?”

8

The Satori jumped back into Earth-space in a burst of energy. There was no way to mask their arrival. Anyone watching would know the ship had returned, and Beth wasn’t pleased with losing the element of surprise. Even so, the cloaking device was functioning just fine, so it wasn’t like they could detect what she was doing next. They might have even missed her arrival. Space was a big place, after all. They’d have to practically be looking in the right place at the right time.

“Still no signs of pursuit?” Beth asked. She was less afraid of that now than she had been. The monstrous ship hadn’t chased them to the dust world. Either it couldn’t track them through the wormhole jump, or it elected not to follow. Either way, the long wait in orbit there while the wormhole drive recharged had been enormously unpleasant. She’d been certain that the thing was going to arrive at any moment and pin them before they had enough charge to jump clear again.

“Negative, but continuing to monitor for signs of wormhole entry,” Majel replied.

Where it had come from, and what was it doing in Naga space? Was it what had destroyed the Naga ship? The thing could cloak, but she didn’t know if it had a wormhole drive like the Satori or not. She had a hunch though. She’d seen the lines of the vessel, and she recalled what the ruined alien wreck John found had looked like before they had rebuilt it into the Satori. The similarities were too large to miss. Beth had a hunch they’d found the ancient civilization that had built the wormhole drive. The one the Naga feared so much.

If it had been that ship which so completely destroyed the Naga space station, she could understand their fear. But the Naga thought that race was gone. Wiped out, defeated. Why were they suddenly back?

She pushed the worries from her mind for the moment. There were more immediate concerns to deal with. The strange ship could wait - for now.

“Now we need to find our friends and get them free,” Beth said.

“Agreed. I have the frequencies for the location trackers John and Andrew had embedded, but the range of the devices is limited,” Majel said. “We’d need to be very close before I could locate them in that manner.”

Beth had forgotten about the trackers. That’s how they’d found Andy when he was held captive by the Naga. Even if it wouldn’t help right in this moment it might prove useful later. There had to be another way to find out where they had gone.

“Majel, the energy signature of the Naga fighter is pretty different from any Earth tech, right?” she asked.

“Absolutely. The Naga use an energy storage method we do not entirely understand.”

“Can you scan for it?” Beth asked. They were soaring past the moon, so they should be close enough.

“Doing it now,” Majel said. “Odd. No sign of the fighter at the lunar base. Either it was destroyed, or moved.”

“I’m going to bet they moved it. We might have taken the Satori beyond their reach, but if those boys were sent to the base to come home with a spaceship, I’m betting they grabbed the one which was still there.”

“No human life signs at the base,” Majel said. “I’m only detecting one thing alive there.”

“What?” Beth asked, surprised there was anything left behind.

“The insect picked up by the crew remains on the base.”

Beth laughed. “How did they miss snagging that thing?” She would have thought the chance to examine such an obviously alien species would have been high on the invaders’ to-do list.

Majel activated one of her screens, replaying a bit of tape from the base cameras during the attack. Beth’s lips pursed. She didn’t like being reminded of the disaster, and watching Linda pinned down by enemy fire wasn’t much more pleasant as a replay. But then she saw what Majel was pointing out. The tank containing the damned bug had smashed. It scampered away out of the camera’s line of sight. It must have gotten away from them. She chuckled at the idea of soldiers trying to chase down the little thing and giving up in frustration.

If there was no one left behind, they had to have been taken somewhere else. Time to find out where. Beth plotted a new course, swinging around the moon and heading for Earth. Odds were excellent that the Naga fighter was there, and she expected wherever it was her friends would be as well. Find the ship, find her crew. Then she could bust them the hell out of there.

“How’s our railgun load?” Beth asked.

“We’re full on everything. The ship was ready to go when the base was attacked,” Majel replied. “You planning to go in guns blazing?”

“I’m not planning anything…yet,” Beth said. “We need more information first. Then we act.”

“Logical enough.”

The crossing would have taken a good chunk of a day for any Earth ship. The Satori cruised that distance in an hour. Still, it was a damnably long hour. Beth knew they’d already wasted so much time. The second jump to the dust world had drained the wormhole battery entirely. Recharging had taken far too long.

“Inserting us into a low Earth orbit,” Majel said. “I’m starting my scans.”

“Let’s hope they haven’t figured out some sneaky way around the cloaking device,” Beth groused.

“Unlikely.”

Majel was right. The Naga had scan systems that could pick the cloaked ship up in atmosphere by spotting the wake her passage made in the air, but even they couldn’t detect her in space. It was very unlikely that anyone on Earth could find her. Beth was just nervous with so much riding on her shoulders.

They were swinging out over North America when the console pinged. Beth glanced down. The scan was getting a positive reading. The Naga fighter was somewhere in the Western United States.

That wasn’t ideal news. It was going to be a hell of a lot harder busting them out of the US than it would have been in some less technologically savvy country. Beth had been assuming it was a corporation that had initiated the raid, maybe the same one that had gone after the ratzard goo. But what if she was wrong? What if this was a government op? That was going to complicate things. She needed more intel.

“Can you pinpoint the location?” she asked Majel.

“Working on it. Looks like it’s a few hundred meters underground in Nevada.”

“See what else you can dig up about the location,” Beth said. She followed her own advice and began hunting the internet. Google Maps wasn’t giving her much, though. No towns nearby. The broken remnants of a military base were only half a mile distant though. Probably some sort of underground bunker had been built in concert with the base, decommissioned, and then restored to service by the attackers. But who were they? The property was still listed as being owned by the federal government, but that didn’t mean anything. Someone could have rented it, or could just be squatting on the site without permission.

Before she could continue her search any further, alarms blasted across her console. One of the screens lit up with new course, heading, and other scan telemetry data. The Satori’s engines thrummed into life as Majel took control of the ship again, blasting forward with much more speed then they’d been using before.

“What the hell is going on, Majel?”

“Massive energy surge in high orbit,” the AI replied. “Three unknown ships have just arrived in Earth space. Maneuvering into scan range.”

9

Dan wheeled himself side by side with Harry as they entered an elevator. He hadn’t had to insist on using his own arms for propulsion this time, which he wasn’t sure was Harry suddenly being more thoughtful or not. It was good enough for him that he was able to take a little bit of control back.

“Where are you taking me?” Dan asked.

“You’ll see,” Harry said, waving his fingers theatrically.

The coy act was grating on his nerves. Harry was going to string this along for every bit of time that he could manage. Dan was giving him a little slack. The man had gotten him out of his cell, managed to find him a shower, and acquired fresh clothes. But he wasn’t sure how much more of this he could take.

Harry seemed to sense that he was nearing the end of his patience. “Relax. We’ll be there in a minute. I could get in some shit for showing you this, but… Let’s say I don’t think you’re leaving here any time soon, eh?” He winked after he said that. Actually winked. Dan was about ready to stand up out of his wheelchair and slug the guy. It might give away that his legs were a hell of a lot better than they thought, but it would probably be worth it.

Before he could do anything rash, the elevator doors snapped open. Harry turned away and strode out. Dan followed, grumbling under his breath.

He didn’t grumble long, though. What was just outside those doors took his breath away.

It was a massive hangar. Easily ten times the size of the one they’d built to house the Satori. It was about two football fields placed end to end. The ceiling towered overhead. Gangways ran along the outer wall at several elevations. The place was enormous, and clearly secret. Not a single window graced the entire structure. In fact, from the construction Dan was willing to bet it had all been built underground. Someone didn’t want any word of this place leaking out to the world.

He could see why. A double row of fighter jets ran down most of the length of the hangar. Dan counted twelve fighters. They had the combination of boxy design and sleek build characteristic of a stealth fighter. He rolled a little forward. The nearest was only about thirty feet away, and there was something odd about it that he couldn’t quite place his finger on.

“Cool, huh?” Harry asked. He was acting less like a light colonel and more like a kid showing off his favorite Christmas present. Dan could get it, though. He clearly didn’t get to share this very often. “The F-50 Yeager. Newest fighter in the Air Force of the United States.”

“And about as classified as anything in the world, I’m betting?” Dan asked.

“Yup. We’re pretty damned sure that China is going to go all out sooner rather than later. This is our ace.”

“It’s cool, but it’s just a fighter, right?” Dan asked. “And why call it the Yeager?”

After Chuck Yeager, he supposed. The first man to break the sound barrier. A nice honorific, but it wasn’t usual to name fighters after people. That was more for naval vessels. Even tanks. But not airplanes.

“Inside joke that got approved. Yeager’s flight program was pushing planes faster and higher, right?” Harry said.

“Until the space program came along and pretty much shut them down, sure.” In Dan’s opinion, getting into space was a hell of a lot more important.

“The old program was a space program, Wynn. Or would have been if they had kept it going. Get a plane moving fast enough - and able to fly high enough, and what do you have?”

The Satori. Or something like her. But he wasn’t going to spill those beans right now. “A spaceship,” he said instead.

“Right,” Harry replied.

Dan waited for him to go on, to explain, but he just stood there grinning. He looked at the nearest fighter again, really examining it closely now. Shit, were those thrusters on the nose? Attitude thrusters would have minimal effect on the ground, but they’d make a fighter much more maneuverable in zero gravity.

The weapon muzzle sticking out of the fighter’s nose didn’t look like a standard gunpowder weapon, either. It looked very familiar… In fact, he was willing to bet it was the same weapon Beth had attached to the Satori. They’d hooked this thing up with a railgun. The power drain would be enormous. These things wouldn’t have the Satori’s alien engine producing power. But even if they’d solved the power problem, it still just wasn’t the most efficient weapon for an in-atmosphere battle. The rate of fire would be too low. In space, however? The gunpowder weapon would have a hard time firing, but the railgun would work perfectly.

“You’ve built space fighters?” Dan breathed.

Harry cocked his head sideways and looked down at Dan. He didn’t say anything for a moment, but the carefree attitude was gone. The serious officer was back.

“You probably know more about space fighters than I do, Wynn,” Wheeler said. “After all, you’ve flown one, right?”

How much did they know already? Best to stay with a safe answer until he knew more. “I’ve flown a lot of ships in space.”

“Cut the shit, Dan,” Wheeler said. His face had grown flushed. He stepped around behind the wheelchair. For a moment Dan thought he might take a swing at him, but he merely grabbed the handles and pushed the chair down past half the row of fighters. Parked there between two of the Yeagers was a craft Dan was a hell of a lot more familiar with.

The Naga fighter was there, floating a foot above the deck and humming away. He could almost feel the power and menace radiating from the thing. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Seeing it here, like this, filled Dan with a deep sense of dread.

“We’ve learned so much since we found your little toy,” Wheeler said. “Shit, man. The engines are light years ahead of anything we have. So are the weapons. And I have a hunch that ‘light years’ is the operative word. Where did you get it?”

Dan was only half listening. He was doing mental math in his head, trying to remember how long it had taken the Naga to respond when they’d accidentally triggered an alarm on one of their floating satellites. Hours? Not many hours.

“How long has it been running?” Dan asked.

“Since we got it back here,” Wheeler said. “Wasn’t hard to figure the thing out.”

“You need to shut it down. Now.”

“Why?”

“Because if you don’t some very bad things are going to happen,” Dan said. He was sweating now. He didn’t know if the Naga could trace that fighter. He wasn’t sure they couldn’t though. “Harry, we had that fighter towed in. It’s never been powered up in this solar system. We couldn’t risk turning it on and activating some sort of homing beacon.”

“Relax. It’s not transmitting anything,” Wheeler said. His eyebrows raised at the words ‘in this solar system’, but he kept any comments to himself.

“That you can detect, anyway,” Dan replied.

That got under Wheeler’s skin a little. Dan saw the confident facade crack. Wheeler knew he was dealing with something he didn’t understand at all. And as happy as he was with the new toy, he also knew when he was playing with fire. But he still wasn’t entirely convinced. Dan was going to have to come clean with him - at least a little.

“Harry, that fighter belongs to an advanced and extremely hostile alien race. We’ve gone to enormous lengths to make damned sure they never find out where Earth is,” Dan said. “When you turned that on, you probably lit this planet up for them. Shut. It. Down.”

Wheeler hesitated, but took a step toward the fighter to comply. “I don’t know if you’re full of shit or not right now, Wynn. But better safe than sorry.”

Better safe than sorry would have been great before they turned the thing on in the first place, Dan wanted to say. But berating him more would only make him dig in his heels. That wasn’t going to help anyone, so he held his tongue.

Wheeler set his hands on the ladder and made ready to climb up to the cockpit, but before he could ascend the lighting in the hangar changed. Red lights came up, and a loud klaxon began sounding somewhere overhead.

“Shit,” Harry said. He lunged up the ladder and climbed into the pilot’s seat, fingers moving uncertainly over the controls as he shut the Naga ship down. It took far longer than Dan liked. The alarms sounding couldn’t be anything good. If they were lucky, it was just the Chinese launching an all-out assault on North America.

If they weren’t lucky, well… It was probably a Naga battleship arriving in orbit.

The overhead speakers crackled with static, and then a voice called out over them. “Lieutenant Colonel Wheeler to the briefing room. Stat.”

Wheeler climbed down from the cockpit. He stared at Dan for a long moment, and seemed to make a decision.

“You’re coming with me,” he said. It wasn’t a question, but Dan wasn’t inclined to argue. If the worst had happened, they were going to need his experience. If the Naga were here, then Earth itself was at stake, along with every human life.

10

The briefing room was buzzing as John followed General Hereford in. The buzz calmed somewhat as people saw the senior officer, but the staff who had already arrived remained busy at their tasks. Something big had overturned this apple cart. John’s gaze flickered to the large screen dominating one wall of the room. It showed an image of Earth, and near-planetary space. For a moment he felt a rush of hope that Beth was doing something dramatic, and maybe they had a rescue on the way. Problematic as busting out of this place might be, it would still likely be better than remaining here as prisoners.

But the screen was showing three contacts, not one. They were approaching the planet slowly, staying in close formation. That wasn’t Beth. He wasn’t sure who it was. Not knowing chilled him. More than anyone else in the room, John knew how damned dangerous it was out there.

“Can we get more than telemetry on those objects?” he asked in a voice loud enough to carry over the background noise in the room. “Visual would be ideal.”

He missed Majel. He missed he Satori and her powerful scan capabilities. In his ship, he’d already know what those things were, whether they were a threat or not, and be preparing actions.

“Sir…?” One young woman with captain’s bars glanced at John sideways before looking at Hereford questioningly.

“No, he is not in charge here. He’s a…guest. But his request is a good one. How long until we have visual?” Hereford asked.

“Under a minute, sir. We’re retaking a satellite to get a look. The resolution will be bad, but we should be able to get something.”

The screen flickered, dividing into two images placed side by side. The radar image filled the left half. The right was a grainy look at space. They must have dialed up the resolution as much as possible, because the image quality was terrible. It was improving by the second though as the objects grew closer. The quality didn’t really matter though. John recognized the objects as soon as he saw them.

Three Naga battle cruisers were closing on Earth.

John sucked in a breath, feeling the world tilt around him. Nothing they had done to prevent the Naga finding Earth had mattered. They’d been discovered anyway. He leaned on a chair, trying to calm his breathing. His heart was pounding, and he had a hard time drawing in air. He had done this. His stupid, reckless actions had doomed his world to this.

Hereford saw his reaction. “John, are you OK?”

John waved him off. “Will be fine. Just…shit.”

“Not friends of yours, I take it?”

“No.” John straightened his back, ignoring the tightness in his chest as best he could. He hoped he wasn’t headed toward a heart attack. He’d been too long in low gravity for this sort of stress to be good for his heart in a gravity well.

“Care to enlighten us?” Hereford asked. He didn’t try to veil the sarcasm in his tone. “I think the time is past for secrets.”

“You’re absolutely right,” John said. He’d been hedging the information he gave, keeping the Satori and her wormhole drive secret. As secret as possible, anyway - some of the men who’d been in the attack on his base had seen the ship depart, so they knew the Satori existed, knew she could vanish into thin air. He had deftly avoided telling them anything they didn’t already know, but that wasn’t going to stop the Naga.

The door opened again, and John turned to look at the late arrivals. A man he didn’t know was pushing Dan’s wheelchair into the room. Dan took in the screen and locked eyes with John. Instead of the sadness John was feeling, what he saw in Dan at that moment was potent anger.

“They have the Naga fighter, John,” Dan said. “They’ve had it powered up this whole time. That’s how they knew how to find us, I’m sure of it.”

John whirled on Hereford. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“You were playing your cards close to the chest,” the General replied. “Why would I give you more information if you weren’t playing ball with me?”

“Because then maybe I could have spared us all of this, damn it!” John roared, waving an arm at the screen. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

“Enlighten me,” Hereford said.

Before John could speak, something changed on the visual screen. A blue pulse lashed out from the leading Naga ship toward the camera. The screen flared and then went dead. The captain who’d set up the connection worked at her console for a few seconds before looking up.

“The satellite is gone, sir,” she said. “Radar indicates smaller objects breaking off from the larger ships.”

“Missiles?” Hereford asked. He chewed his bottom lip as the new contacts were updated on the screen.

“I don’t think so, sir. They’re falling into formations. It looks like fighters,” she replied. “About sixty of them.”

Hereford drummed his fingers on the desk before saying anything else. Then he whirled on John again. “Give me the quick rundown.”

“The Naga are an extremely hostile reptilian race. Near as we know they have taken out entire worlds before - laid waste to them entirely. Enslaved others. They have energy weapons, some sort of fast hyperspace drive on the big ships, and lots of fighters. That’s about one third of their full compliment,” John said.

“They have any sort of shields? Other fancy tech?” Hereford asked.

“Lots of fancy tech. No shields,” Dan said. “Railguns will take them down.”

“Good,” Hereford said. He turned back to the captain. “I need to get the president on the line. We’re going to need to re-task some missiles outward.”

She scrambled to the phone and began making calls. Meanwhile, the general turned back to the man who’d pushed Dan into the room.

“Wheeler, I want your birds in the air,” he said. “Intercept those things and take them down.”

“They’ll be outnumbered three to one,” Dan protested. “And that’s assuming the Naga don’t just launch more fighters.”

“What birds?” John asked.

“They’ve got space fighters, John,” Dan said.

“I’m not sure that’s the best plan,” John said. “If those fighters are any good, we should save them for a moment when they can swing things. Right now, the Naga will have to send the fighters into our atmosphere to do anything. We can meet them there with conventional aircraft.”

“And risk them dropping a bomb on a city,” Hereford said.

“Yes,” John replied. He hated the idea as much as anyone else, but he had to convince Hereford. This was bigger than any one city. If they lost this fight, humanity was doomed.

“What the hell would you have me do, then? I can’t sit by and do nothing,” Hereford said.

John glanced up at the clock. By his calculations, Beth and Majel should have returned hours ago. They were out there, somewhere. The Satori was the best weapon they had, but under-crewed it wasn’t going to be as effective as it ought. They’d fought a single Naga battle cruiser once, and won. Barely, but they had beat the thing.

“Let me put a signal through to my ship,” John said. “Get us back aboard her, and we’ll do what we can to stop them.”

“Just you, against all of that?” Hereford said, hands on his hips. “You think a lot of yourself and your people.”

“Yes,” John said, steel in his voice. “I do.”

Hereford looked like he might actually go along with John’s plan for a moment, but then he shook his head. “No. No way. They’d have my head. We stick with the Yeagers. Wheeler, get them in the air.”

“Yes, sir,” Wheeler replied.

“Ten minutes ago, man. Move!” Hereford said. Wheeler nodded and left the briefing room.

John found himself a chair. There wasn’t much else he could do at this point. Hereford was committed to his course, and he was powerless here. All he could do was watch the fight he knew was coming and pray that the Earth pilots were a hell of a lot better than they had any right to be at zero-G combat.

11

Beth switched her console to the gun controls. Majel was going to have her hands full managing the Satori’s course as they streaked to intercept the Naga fighters. The guns were still computer controlled, of course, but taking the actual firing mechanism out of Majel’s hands would maybe reduce the strain on her processors.

Or hell, maybe it wouldn’t, and Majel could fly the ship and shoot the guns without her. But it made her feel better to be participating. She couldn’t just sit there staring at the screen. It was too damned much to take in.

The Naga had found Earth. She didn’t know how, and it didn’t matter too much. She’d more or less known that this day would come eventually, but she’d been hoping for more time. They all had. Instead the enemy had come knocking at the worst possible moment.

“We’ll be heavily outnumbered,” Majel warned.

“But they can’t see us,” Beth said.

“No, but if we shoot enough of them they’ll begin working to target us anyway. Predictive algorithms will eventually give them a decent idea where we are,” Majel said. “They only have to get really lucky with one shot.”

“Do what you can. I’ll try to take down as many as possible while we’re able.”

The radar in front of her beeped. New contacts were rising from the surface, coming up fast. The military must have realized the threat. They were responding with missile fire. Beth wasn’t sure if the weapons were targeting the fighters or their mother ships, but either way it was a welcome sight.

“Not so defenseless as you thought, you bastards,” she muttered.

“The Naga cruisers are powering up weapons,” Majel warned. “I’m moving us out of the line of fire.”

Bolts of blue light streaked across where the Satori had just been, each licking out to touch an incoming missile. All twenty of the projectiles vanished in bursts of flame.

“Shit,” she said. Their defensive fire was amazing. She’d never seen it in action before. The Satori didn’t have missiles, just her railguns and the wormhole generator.

More contacts were rising from the surface. At first Beth thought they were more missiles, but they were moving too slowly, organizing into flight groups. They were fighters, but not like anything she’d seen before. These were something new. They were climbing fast now, firing engines with enough force that it looked like they’d meet the Naga fighters in low Earth orbit - well outside the atmosphere.

“Didn’t they see what just happened to their missiles?” Beth asked. The fighters would be annihilated. Any moment now she expected the Naga ships to unleash more bolts of force, blasting the Earth fighters to bits.

But it didn’t happen. They kept ascending, and the anticipated explosions never came. Why were the Naga holding their fire? They ought to be able to blow the ships to bits.

“They’re testing our technology base,” Majel said. “They want to see how our fighters fare against theirs.”

“They’re just going to let them get up there into a dogfight?”

“It would seem so. Contact in thirty seconds. I’m taking us in to engage,” Majel said. “Hang on.”

Railgun fire licked out from the Earth fighters. Streaks of blue energy spat back at them from the Naga fighters. The space between the two groups become deadly, full of fire and iron shot. Several craft on each side exploded as they closed.

Then they were on top of each other, and the fight turned messy. Beth could barely track the fighters as they zipped around, trying to gain advantage over each other. They seemed evenly matched enough on a one to one basis. But the Naga ships had numerical supremacy, and that was giving them the field. Beth winced as another human fighter exploded. They needed to get in there!

“We’re in railgun range,” Majel said. “Fire at will.”

“With pleasure,” Beth replied.

She got an easy lock on the first Naga fighter. One squeeze of the controls, and a pair of railgun shots spat from the wing mounted guns. The Naga ship detonated into a satisfying cloud of debris. She went looking for another target. It was a rich environment. Beth locked a second one, fired, but missed.

“God damn it!” she shouted.

Majel corrected course and brought the ship back into alignment to take another shot at the fighter. She squeezed again. This time the shots were on target.

“Two down. Let’s go get some more,” Majel said.

Beth took down another enemy fighter, and then a fourth. It wasn’t enough, no matter how hard she tried. They were losing this fight. The engagement had gone on only a couple of minutes, and Earth had lost half of its fighters. The Naga still had about fifty in the air.

“More missiles coming up from the surface,” Majel said.

These shots were definitely headed into the fighter battle. They streaked right for it. The Naga fighters scattered, breaking away to allow their battle cruisers clear shots at the threat.

That gave the Earth ships just the moment they needed to get clear of the fight. They used the distraction to break contact, speeding back toward the surface. There were only eight left.

“Pull us clear. I don’t want us to be hit by the force bolts from those cruisers.”

“Already on it,” Majel said.

The cruisers blasted the missiles apart, firing rapid volleys of shots that struck with pinpoint precision. They didn’t stop with the missiles this time, though. After the primary threat was gone, they fired again, and one of the Earth fighters exploded into flames.

The others took evasive action, dodging and weaving to avoid the incoming fire. It was enough to save some of them, but three more fighters died. Only four were still flying once the Naga ceased fire.

“Oh look, targets of opportunity,” Majel said. The nose of the Satori swung around, and directly ahead of them were a trio of Naga fighters. The obvious threat gone, the Naga were flying on straight paths. They were easy marks.

Beth lit up the first one and fired. It exploded, and the other two scattered. Majel followed the one dodging to starboard, and Beth blasted it as well. More Naga fighters were zooming over to see what was going on, but the Satori was in her element - in space, she was damned near invisible. Beth took out two more fighters before they even knew what they were up against.

“Take that, bastards,” she said.

“They’ve figured out who we are,” Majel said. “They’re moving to englobe us. If they finish the globe…”

“They’ll all fire, and we go poof. Get us clear, Majel. We’ve done all we can for now,” Beth said. She would have thought she would feel elated at having done some damage to the enemy, but all she felt was tired and sad. So many lives lost already, and the Naga had barely been scratched. She knew they had to have a lot more fighters than they had deployed.

This entire operation had been a test of Earth’s strength. Beth had the feeling they hadn’t looked very impressive.

12

Dan smiled up at the screen. He realized he was probably the only person in the room who was smiling as they watched the engagement. But he was also probably the only person who’d spotted what he had.

Off to the left, on one corner of the fight, he’d seen a Naga ship explode. It hadn’t been anywhere near one of the Earth fighters. He watched for any similar detonations, and saw one almost immediately.

“Good job,” he murmured quietly. He wasn’t sure who was up there in the ship, but someone had gotten away, at least.

John looked over at him sharply. He’d heard something of what he said, Dan figured. Dan simply nodded up at the screen. He didn’t want to say much more just yet. John could figure it out if he watched closely enough, and he wasn’t in the mood to tell the rest of these people anything they didn’t directly need to know until they needed to know it.

The fight went badly. He wasn’t shocked. He knew just how effective those fighters could be. He’d fought them, and he’d even flown one. They tore the Air Force wing to shreds. Finally Hereford ordered another wave of missiles skyward so that he could withdraw the remaining fighters. A few of them made it clear of the carnage that followed.

Dan wondered if Wheeler was one of the survivors. The odds weren’t good, and he felt a pang at that which surprised him. Harry was something of an asshole, but he was also a good man in a tight situation. They’d been through a lot over the years. He didn’t like being at odds with the other man.

As the Earth fighters pulled clear, two more Naga ships exploded. Then another. Then another. That got attention back on the radar really fast. People scrambled to see what was going on. It looked like the ships were just exploding in space for no reason at all.

John looked over at Dan and the two shared a grin. It was worth letting them stew for a few minutes while they figured it out. The Naga were trying to englobe something. Dan remembered that trick, and was betting Beth and Majel did as well. Sure enough, the fighters stopped blowing up, and the globe closed in on…nothing. The Satori had pulled away before they could trap her.

“What the hell is going on up there?” Hereford demanded.

John coughed, and Hereford whirled on him. Seeing John smiling didn’t do anything for Hereford’s temper.

“You have something to add, Caraway?” the general demanded.

“That’s my ship,” John said.

“Where?” Hereford asked, glaring at the screen again.

“That’s what blew up the fighters,” John said.

“About eight of them, anyway,” Dan chimed in. “Didn’t you see the Naga trying to create a sphere around something?”

“But there was nothing on radar,” Hereford said. “Some sort of stealth tech? Our pilots didn’t report visual on another ship, either. You trying to tell me you have an invisible airplane?”

“That’s Beth up there, Dan,” John said.

“It’s a cloaking device,” Dan said. He couldn’t help it. Despite the gravity of the situation he couldn’t keep the smile from his face any more than John had. Beth was safe, free, and doing a better job defending the planet that the Air Force. “Don’t you read any science fiction?”

“No. I don’t,” Hereford said. He drummed his fingers on the table again for a moment. “Still, I can’t deny the evidence I’m seeing right in front of me. This ship… It’s obviously armed. Are there more?”

“Just the one, sadly,” John said.

It was time to get them all back aboard the Satori. Beth and Majel might be doing OK for now, but they would need backup. Having the entire team in place aboard the ship was the best shot any of them had. It was really the only strong defense Earth had at this point. With missiles useless, and the fighter wing decimated, he couldn’t think of much else they could do.

But how to convince the general to let them board? He flat out didn’t think Hereford would go for it. He knew the type. Hereford was a man who believed in his service, and would do just about anything to get the job done. Dan admired that, but it also lent a lack of flexibility which was a hell of a handicap at times.

“General, I have an idea. We can strike a deal,” Dan said. He needed to be careful with his words. Hereford would have to think he was the one doing the outsmarting.

“I’m listening,” Hereford said gruffly.

Dan knew he had the man. He and John had intelligence that Hereford needed badly. If he offering it willingly, that would be the hook. And then he would dangle the Satori as well. The bait would be irresistible.

“Let us go,” Dan said. “We’ll call the Satori in. We’ll board and go fight the Naga. We’ve done this before. We work well together. We can beat them again.”

Dan wasn’t sure just how they were going to win against three Naga warships, but he figured they’d cross that bridge once they got to it. Getting the full crew back onto the Satori was humanity’s best shot.

“That doesn’t sound like much of a deal for me,” Hereford said.

“We take down those Naga, and it’s a good deal for everyone. But to sweeten the pot: I’ve been aboard a Naga cruiser and flown one of their fighters. I’ll give you a full briefing on everything I know about their tactics and technology.”

“Maybe I should just ask him instead,” Hereford said, pointing at John.

“John knows business. I’ve been an Air Force officer. Which of us do you think will do a better job filling you in on what matters most to you?” Dan asked. “I won’t hold anything back on their tech, tactics, even what I know of them as a species. My word on it. There’s too much at stake to not share.”

“And then?” Hereford said.

“Then you put us back in space on our ship, where we can do the most good for everyone. Hell, worst case scenario all you’re out is a few prisoners,” Dan said. “Best case, we remove a major threat to the planet.”

Hereford rubbed his chin. He was thinking about it. Dan was pretty sure he had him. Which was damned good, because they were going to run out of time before too long.

“Deal. On one condition. Your ship comes here for the pickup. I can’t afford to send people haring off someplace else with prisoners right now, and I want some of my people to check out your ship before you go,” Hereford said. He smiled, showing all his teeth. “Just in case you all get blown to hell.”

John had been keeping a poker face during the whole conversation. Dan wasn’t sure if his friend knew what he was planning or not, but he was playing along for now, which was enough. Demanding the Satori come to them wasn’t a shock. Hereford wanted their ship. Dan was willing to bet he wanted the Satori in his hands more than just about anything else he could name. Drawing the ship into an underground hangar in a secret location was an awesome trap.

All Dan needed to do now was ensure the trap’s jaws couldn’t spring closed. That was going to take some doing. He hoped that Beth would understand the message he sent well enough. Hereford would never just let them go.

“Done,” Dan said. “Get me a radio. I’ll send in the codes to reach the ship.”

13

Beth leaned back in her seat as the ship glided over the coordinates Dan had given them. It was a patch of desert. There was nothing out here. The nearest town was miles away. Still, she was pretty sure this was where the space fighters had been based. Someplace in the general area, anyway. It was a good spot for a secret base. Far from anyone, no neighbors and no snooping eyes.

“There’s a tunnel ahead one hundred meters,” Majel said.

“That must be the spot. Dan said that it would be a tight squeeze, but that we could make it.”

Assuming it was really Dan, anyway. She was pretty sure it was. Almost certain. It had definitely sounded like him, and he’d made references to things only a member of their team would know about. But if he’d been made to spill information to his captors, they might have known some of that too.

“What do you suppose he meant when he said they could be trusted as much as the Cyanauts?” Beth asked.

“I would assume that he was saying they could not be trusted,” Majel replied. “The Cyanauts were divided, and some of them attacked us. I am scanning for threats as we approach. We can also turn back if you prefer?”

It almost sounded like Majel might prefer the latter idea. But if Dan was in there, Beth was going in after him. She’d break him out one way or another. “No, we go ahead. But keep your scans active.”

“Definitely.”

The tunnel Majel spotted was the spot. There was no two ways around it. Sure, the opening had been disguised to look like a cave. But the Satori’s scans showed the rebar-reinforced concrete supporting the walls and ceiling easily enough. There might once have been a natural cave in this spot, but it had been completely remodeled by the current tenants.

“There are steel doors set into the cave mouth,” Satori warned. “They can shut us in.”

“Noted,” Beth replied. “How’s the charge on the wormhole drive?”

“Full.”

The tunnel descended at almost a forty-five degree angle into the darkness below. Majel aimed the ship downward and took them in. The ship slid along into a tunnel which revealed more of its man-made nature the deeper they went. Stone gave way to poured concrete and steel support beams. After about a hundred feet the tunnel leveled out.

“There’s a large open space just ahead,” Majel said.

“That must be the hangar Dan talked about.”

The radio chat had been too damned short. She wanted to see him, to make sure he was all right. What she really wanted was to get all of them out of there. But even after she extracted the team, that was only the first difficulty they needed to overcome. The Naga were up there in space, waiting for them.

The Satori glided slowly out into the hangar. It was enormous, and Beth felt a little pang of envy. She’d have died to have a work space like this up on the moon. Most of the area was empty now. Four fighters were lined up on one side of the hangar. It looked like crews were working on them, trying to get them put back together to fight again.

She recognized the Naga fighter resting there as well. Proof positive these were the people who had raided John’s base. The damned Air Force? How had they learned about the Satori in the first place? Launching an attack on an American business had to have been a huge political risk for them, even if the base was on the moon. If word of the attack leaked, they were going to take a pounding in the press.

At the far side of the room a small cluster of people milled around. She couldn’t make out faces at this distance, but she was pretty certain the one in the wheelchair was Dan. He was standing next to several others who had to be the rest of the crew. They weren’t alone, though. Armed men stood alongside them, along with an assortment of unarmed folks in military uniform.

“This is going to be complicated,” Beth said. “Majel, any ideas?”

“I can establish an uplink to the Naga ship. I’ve had enough experience dealing with their computer systems that I should be able to hack the simple one on the fighter,” the AI said.

“Might be useful. Do it. And bring us a little closer. I want to pop the cloak off when we’re almost on top of them.”

Majel brought the ship within a dozen feet of the party outside. Beth could see Dan, John, Andy, Linda, and Charline all clustered together. A dozen armed guards surrounded them. Most of the other people in the ground seemed to be tech crews or engineers, but there were a handful in dress uniforms with a lot of fancy rank on their shoulders. At least one general.

“Let them see us,” Beth said.

Majel dropped the cloak, and Beth laughed aloud at the reaction it got. The armed men were aiming weapons at the ship in half a heartbeat. Most of the others had hit the deck. Even the general had ducked like he was going for cover. Beth stifled another laugh and keyed the external speakers.

“This is the starship Satori, gentlemen. You have some of our crew down there. We’re here to re-acquire them,” Beth said.

The general got back to his feet and took two steps toward the ship. “Set down and open your doors, young lady. Your crew gets in while mine get a look around. That was the deal.”

It wasn’t much of a deal. If she opened the doors, the rifle toting soldiers would storm in, capture her, and it would all be over. She had no doubts that was what they had in mind. They weren’t really planning to release the crew. They just wanted the ship.

“And don’t think of refusing, either. I’ve already ordered the tunnel sealed off. The outer doors are blast proof, and they’re already closing. You can’t get out until I order them open again, which isn’t going to happen unless you cooperate,” the general said.

Beth sighed with a little relief. The crew hadn’t cracked, then. They hadn’t given away every bit of information they had, anyway. These people had no idea that the Satori could jump through a wormhole. You couldn’t trap the Satori by closing a couple doors.

“Setting down now,” Beth said. “I’ll lower the ramp once I land.”

Then she shut off the external speakers.

“You know this is just a trick, I assume?” Majel said.

“Of course. How’s that hack coming?” Beth asked.

“Just about there.”

“Time to give them a little more than they bargained for,” Beth said.

14

Charline wanted to cheer when she saw the Satori drop her cloak. It was a hell of a relief to have backup here at last. The reactions from the Air Force personnel standing by were comical, too. All of them went on their guard at once, gun raised. They were out of their depth here and knew it.

That didn’t mean the team was in the clear yet by any stretch of the imagination. They had to board the Satori still, and get away. Going to be easier said than done. She glanced over at General Hereford. The man was smart, and standing very close to John while eying the railguns on the Satori’s wing tips cautiously. He’d engineered this thing to catch the ship, but he was wise enough to know that the whole thing was inches away from spiraling out of his control.

But Beth was following his orders. The Satori settled onto the deck. Her engines were still running, but the ship was down. There was a whirring noise as the ramp began to descend.

“Alpha team, remain with the prisoners,” Hereford said as soon as the ramp was down. “Bravo and Charlie teams, board the ship.”

“That wasn’t the deal,” Dan said to Hereford.

“Don’t worry. We’ll take good care of your toy there,” Hereford said.

“No,” Dan said. He was grinning, relaxed back in his wheelchair. “I don’t think you will.”

He’d only just finished speaking when there was a loud keening noise from off to their left. Charline whirled. She knew that sound. The Naga fighter had started up her engines and was lifting off the deck. It pivoted toward them. She heard a roaring sound as its engines powered up and it began sliding toward them. It picked up speed as it went, hovering about three feet above the floor.

“Take that thing down!” Hereford screamed.

The Air Force security personnel turned on the Naga fighter and opened fire. Most of their rounds pinged off the hull without effect. It was still building velocity as it flew straight at them. The armed men had to duck first, hitting the deck as they dove out of the way of the fighter. It continued on toward the rest of them. Charline dove as the fighter shot over her head where she’d been standing.

She glanced around. It hadn’t hurt anyone, but it had made everyone dive to the floor. Now it pivoted smoothly around and came back at them for a second run. Shouts and yells mixed in with the high-pitched engine noise as organization broke down and the military teams struggled to react to the runaway fighter.

“Now would be a good time,” Beth’s voice said from the Satori’s speakers.

Charline more than agreed. She got back to her feet in a flash and sprinted for the ramp. The others were right behind her. Beth waited at the top of the ramp, two of the Naga rifles in her hands. She tossed one to Charline.

“Glad you could make it,” Beth said. “Cover the others.”

“Nice job with the distraction,” Charline said.

“That was my idea,” Majel said. “It seems like it worked well.”

“That it did,” Charline said, squeezing off a shot with her rifle.

Andy and John were helping Dan struggle to the ramp. They’d abandoned his wheelchair, each of them supporting him from one side as he staggered up. Linda made the ramp first and sprinted aboard.

Some of the guards had spotted them making a run for it and had turned toward them. Two of them aimed rifles to fire, but Beth nailed one while Charline took the other down. The bolts their weapons were firing were set to stunning power. The downed guards would wake with a nasty headache and some bruises, but they’d live.

Charline was glad. She didn’t want to kill these people. They were just trying to defend their planet in the best way they knew how. Even if they were wrong, they were trying to do the right thing.

She fired a few more shots, taking down another soldier and keeping the others’ heads down. Their team was aboard, and the ramp was raising.

“Majel, activate the cloak,” John said.

“Done.”

Charline walked back over to her station. She’d missed the Satori. It was damned good to be back aboard. She couldn’t help but feel a little more confident now that they were together again. Even if what they were facing out there was worse than anything they’d had to overcome, at least together they’d have a shot.

“Dan, get us out of here,” John said.

“Plotting a micro-jump,” Dan said. He tapped a few controls, taking the Satori up twenty feet in case the security forces tried to fire where they had been before. He tapped another button to activate the external microphones.

“You can’t go anywhere!” Hereford was shouting from outside. “You’re still trapped inside here, you damned fools!”

Dan tapped the button for the external speaker. “What part of the word starship did you not understand, General?” he asked.

Then he keyed in the command to open the wormhole for them. A burst of light shimmered in the middle of the hangar bay, bright enough that those on the ground needed to shield their eyes from the brilliance. The Satori’s drives kicked in and they leapt forward into the hole in space.

They erupted from the brief wormhole transition in space. Below them the Earth looked to be about the size of a beach ball.

“Nice!” Dan said. “Well, close to nice. We’re about fifty miles away from where I plotted our destination, Majel.”

“Adjusting algorithms to compensate. This close to the Earth-Luna gravity well, there’s significant flux that is causing issues with calculating the destination.”

“Well done anyway,” John said.

Silence settled into the bridge for a moment as they all took in the enormity of what they had done, and what was left to do. They’d just broken out from a top-secret government facility. The lives they were used to living were gone, no matter what else happened over the next few hours.

Of course, their lives might be flat-out over a lot sooner than that. Three Naga battle cruisers were out there somewhere. They had to be stopped.

“What do we do now?” Charline asked. “We’ve never faced anything like this before.”

“This may not be the biggest threat, either,” Beth added.

“What do you mean?” John asked.

Beth filled them in briefly on the destroyed Naga station, and the massive ship that had almost captured the Satori out by the Cyanaut world. The tale was chilling to Charline. Beth had come so very close to being captured out there alone. If she’d simply vanished, the rest of them would never have known what happened to her at all.

“You think the ship was built by the same aliens who built the Satori’s wormhole drive,” John said. It wasn’t really a question. Beth had been clear about her suspicions.

“It makes sense. The Naga feared that species because they were at war with them,” Beth replied.

“But they were beaten,” Andy said. “The Naga seem pretty convinced they were defeated completely.”

“I’m not so sure,” Dan said. “Remember the defenses around the dust world? Their fear, when they saw the Satori show up with the wormhole drive? They aren’t as certain that species is dead as they want to be. Maybe some got away and only now are coming back.”

“Maybe we brought them back,” Linda added in a somber tone. She’d been quiet through most of the discussion. Her whole manner had been more subdued since returning from Cyan, and it hurt Charline to see it. Of all of them that trip seemed to have hurt Linda the most. “Maybe they can detect the wormhole drive’s activation the same way the Naga tracked their fighter here.”

“Perhaps,” John said. “But either way, it’s not something we can solve right now. We’ve got bigger fish to fry. Charline, what are the Naga up to?”

She tapped her console, bringing the display up onto the main view screen so that everyone could see. She sucked in her breath when she only scanned one blip on the radar reading. There was only one Naga ship floating out there. The other two were gone.

15

It didn’t take them long to find the other ships. Majel opened her scan up more widely, crafting an algorithm to determine most probable courses and scanning those locations. That didn’t work. The ships were nowhere near Earth, which meant she needed to do something different. She scanned for some sort of trail or tracking that might indicate where the ships had been instead.

That was the key. The Naga vessels left behind a tell-tale spread of ions. It wasn’t much. Barely detectable, really. But it was enough to tell their direction of travel, and from there finding them on radar was not difficult.

“They’ve departed near-Earth orbit and have moved further out into the solar system,” Majel said.

“Are they leaving? It doesn’t seem like we hurt them enough to force them to retreat,” John said.

“Agreed. My surmise is that they are collecting objects to use as mass effect weapons. The area toward which they are headed is filled with many objects of enough mass and density to be effective in that use,” Majel said.

“They’re going to drop rocks,” Dan said.

“Mass weapons,” Majel corrected. She double checked her math before going on. “At sufficient size and velocity, one or two such weapons could wipe out all life on the planet.”

“Never let it be said that the Naga were not thorough,” Charline said.

Majel kept a trace on the two Naga ships headed toward the asteroid field. It would be useful to remain aware of their location, so she left a small fragment of her awareness watching them. But that enabled her to return most of her focus to the one Naga warship remaining near Earth. It was sitting out there by itself.

“Why leave one ship behind?” Majel asked aloud.

“It’s a watch-dog,” Andy said. “It’s keeping an eye on the planet in case we humans do something unpredictable.”

“It remains the most vulnerable element of the Naga fleet,” Majel pointed out. Her scans indicated that it was fully powered and had a small fleet of fighters in space around it, but it was only one ship - the others, flying together, represented a greater threat but also a higher danger to the ship.

“You’re suggesting we take the singleton and then deal with the other ships?” John asked.

“It seems a viable strategy,” Majel replied. “Perhaps we can split the other ships as well. Two Naga cruisers acting in concert would make attack…problematic at best. Disastrous at worst. One by itself, we may fare better against.”

Majel tried to calculate the probability of success against either one vessel or two, but it was difficult to calibrate. Too many variables had changed since their last encounter with such a vessel. She herself was one of the largest changes, since she had grown enormously more self-aware in the time that had passed since. Majel preferred to think that would be an asset to their coming fight, but it made predicting the outcome problematic.

“Agreed,” John said. “But… Folks, this is probably the worst fight we’ve ever been in. I won’t kid any of you. We may not come back from this. If any of you want to back out, we can drop you someplace quiet on Earth and you can try to ride out this storm on the ground. Or we can make a quick stop at our base on the moon and leave you there - might be safer than Earth if we fail.”

There were a few moments of silence. Majel watched the crew carefully for a few nanoseconds to feel out their reactions before speaking.

“If I may…?” Majel said.

“Of course,” John said. “You’re as much a part of the crew as any of the rest of us.”

“You have built a strong team whose members all care deeply for one another. I don’t think anyone is going to back out on you now, John,” she said.

“Agreed,” Beth said.

Dan nodded, and Andy made an affirmative grunt.

“I’ve been through this much with you guys, I won’t quit on you now,” Linda said. “Just tell me how I can help.”

“We’re all in,” Charline said. “Which I think you already knew, John.”

He shook his head. “I hoped. But I would never just assume it. This isn’t the military. You aren’t obligated to follow my lead here.”

Dan laughed. John stopped speaking as they all looked to Dan instead of him.

“We’re not, John. But we’re basically the last, best chance for humanity to survive the next couple of days,” Dan said. “I think we all appreciate the offer, but let’s cut the crap and get this done. Right?”

More affirmative nods. It was a strange feeling, being with these people. They were risking their existence for others. Not just for their direct friends, but for people they didn’t know and would never meet. Majel felt a strong sense of self-preservation, the desire to continue her own life. From this crew she had learned to value the lives of those she…cared about…as much or even more than her own.

But this was something very different. This was a sense of obligation and duty toward humanity as a whole. It was a fascinating concept, which she promised herself she would explore in more detail later. Assuming there was a later.

“If we’re in agreement, I will set a course to intercept the lone Naga vessel,” Majel said.

“Make it so,” John intoned. “Charline, what’s our status on guns?”

“Full load in both railgun magazines,” she replied.

“Beth, wormhole drive charge?” John asked.

“Better than ninety nine percent,” Beth said. “That little jump barely took anything off the top. We’ve got plenty of juice left.”

The ship began accelerating toward the Naga vessel. As they approached, it grew in their screen, changing from a small dot to a larger target until it loomed ahead. Several dozen fighters flew about it in a pattern. Majel tracked their routes; their path was easy enough to predict and she plotted it on the screen for the crew to view.

“God damn, I forgot how big those things are,” Andy said.

“I’m headed back to the engine room in case we have issues,” Beth said. “Try not to wreck my ship this time?”

“You were the one who smashed it up, last time!” Dan protested.

“Talk to the hand,” Beth said, holding her palm up toward Dan as she retreated from the bridge.

Majel went over the database information that she had recovered from earlier battles against the Naga. They had far more information about the enemy ships than they once had. She knew where their guns were, where the engines were placed, and how to strike in a manner that would most likely do some damage. The real problem was that the Naga ships were simply well built machines. They had thick layers of armor and redundant backups for most major systems. They were not easily destroyed.

“Getting ready to make our first run,” Dan said. “Taking over manual control of the ship. Hang on, everyone.”

Majel handed off the ship’s controls smoothly. Dan was an enigma to her. She could pilot the ship perfectly along any vector required. But somehow, Dan had a feel for flight controls that allowed him to do things she wasn’t able to consider. His shifts in vector and speed didn’t always make sense to her, but they worked more often than not. It was another thing she intended to learn more about, and she felt a pang at the thought that she might never have the chance now.

Pushing that feeling aside, she instead lit up targets on the consoles for Charline and Andy, both of whom were operating the fire controls for the ship guns. As the Satori streaked in alongside the Naga cruiser she showed them where to hit it. They fired, launching a long series of railgun shots that hammered the side of the vessel. Brilliant flashes lit the darkness of space as the rounds hit home, blasting apart armor and systems along the port side of the cruiser.

Then they were past, still cloaked and invisible. All the fighters were circling the Naga ship with even more speed, and as she watched more fighters began spewing from its bays.

“More fighters launching,” she warned. “They’re taking up a protective circle around the cruiser.”

“Just more targets,” Dan said. He brought the Satori in for another diving run.

16

Dan wrenched the ship around its axis. Space spun in the view screen. The Naga fighter he was trying to avoid flashed by mere feet away. He was close enough he could actually see the lizard inside its cockpit. It was all he could do to not white-knuckle the controls, but he had to stay loose and relaxed or he’d never be able to respond in time.

“We barely missed that last one. John, there’s too damned many of them,” Dan said.

“OK, abort. Pull away.” John scratched his chin thoughtfully.

It was with relief that Dan maneuvered the ship away from the Naga cruiser. They’d given the enemy a beating, but it was nowhere near enough. Half its guns were gone. The port engine was down. But that still left a somewhat mobile ship with a lot of guns left, and there were eighty fighters out there in space. All of them were spinning circles around their mothership as fast as they could fly.

It was a tactic he’d never seen them use before, but he had to admit it was effective as hell. The fighters were orbiting about five hundred meters away from the cruiser. They must have had a ship-board AI controlling their flight paths, or they’d have all crashed into each other as fast as they were zipping around. But it made a damned fine shield. They didn’t need to be able to see the Satori to ram into her.

Every approach Dan made was putting the ship in danger, and it had gotten worse as the cruiser continued to release more fighters. He heaved a sigh of mixed relief and frustration as they cruised away to a safe distance.

“Now what do we do?” Charline asked.

“The Naga ship is still approximately sixty two percent functional,” Majel said. “It remains a threat to the planet.”

“Agreed. We need to destroy the thing. But we need a better way,” John said.

“What about micro-jumps?” Dan asked. “If we could use jumps to get in and out, rather than flying through that mess every time…”

“If you were off by even a little bit…” John began.

“We’d be splattered all over their ship,” Dan finished for him. “Majel, how precise can we make the jumps?”

There was a moment of pause. Dan figured she was running simulations or something. He was less of a calculate-the-odds person, and more of a ‘go with your gut’ kind of guy. He always had been. Right now, his gut said this would work. It was the best idea he had, anyway.

“We can ensure accuracy with roughly a five percent margin of error, less if we are…lucky.” Majel said. “That’s a problem. If we are jumping the ship from outside the fighter orbit to inside it, then we’re jumping at least three or four hundred meters, which gives a margin of error of fifteen to twenty meters per jump. If we are off by much more than that, we could crash into the cruiser.”

“That’s if we jump in and out through the orbiting fighters, right Majel?” Andy asked.

“Correct.”

“What if we close to knife distance…and use the wormhole drive as the knife?” he asked. “Stay inside the fighter orbit with multiple very short jumps?”

Dan spun his chair around. It was a damned good idea. They’d used the wormhole drive as a weapon before. Whatever was in the wormhole area of effect was transported to the destination. Effectively, it disintegrated whatever it touched. They’d torn up the first Naga cruiser they’d fought, using the beam that way, but…

“It didn’t do much against the cruiser we used it on last time,” John said. “Damaged the armor, but didn’t disable it.”

Dan’s mind was working on the problem. There was a germ of a good idea in there. “That was before we had such detailed information on where to hit them,” he said. “Now that we know their weak spots, we can target those.”

“At knife distance, their fighters won’t be able to stop us,” Andy said.

“It’s worth a shot,” Dan said.

“You’d have seconds to emerge from the wormhole, target something vital, fire up the wormhole drive again, and hit them with it before vanishing into it and emerging again,” John said. “Over and over. Can you do that, Dan?”

“By myself?” Dan said. “Maybe. But with Majel and I working the problem together? Yes. I think we can.”

“Affirmative,” Majel said. “The plan should work. It’s risky. They’ll see our wormhole entry and exit points and might be able to better target the ship. But it should work, and we’ll be close enough to the cruiser that their weapons will have difficulty targeting us.”

Dan could see John was about ready to give the plan a green light. He just needed a shove. “You have a better idea, John?”

“No. Do it.”

Dan whirled back around to face forward. “OK. Hang tight everyone. This is going to be a very bumpy ride.”

Majel plotted the first three sequences of jumps for him. He’d have to trust that she was able to keep ahead of him on the calculations. He fired up the wormhole drive and…

…they were elsewhere. Very specifically, they were a few meters away from the Naga ship’s starboard engine and closing fast. He corrected their course slightly, bringing the nose into alignment directly at the plume of engine exhaust and fired the drive again. The wormhole stabbed into the engine mounting, and the metal where it touched simply disappeared. A tap on his thrusters and the Satori jumped forward into the wormhole as well.

And they were directly in front of the mammoth ship, facing several of its main guns. Dan fired lateral thrusters and activating the wormhole again. Metal vanished, an entire gun mounting exploding as parts of it disappeared into the wormhole beam while the Satori slid sideways across the nose of the cruiser, raking it with the wormhole drive. There was a steady thrum from the wings as the railguns pounded spots already weakened by the wormhole.

“They’re targeting us,” Majel warned.

Dan tapped the thrusters again, and the Satori shot forward into the wormhole, to appear alongside the port side of the ship, the stabbing beam of the wormhole punching deep inside to damage generators housed there. Before the enemy could hit them he jumped the ship again.

They’d barely exited this time when the entire ship shook. A whistling noise filled Dan’s ears, and then they popped. Another massive shake as the ship took a second impact. This one tore part of the deck apart directly behind Dan’s chair. Bits of metal went pinging around the inside of the bridge, bouncing off walls. One zinged past his face close enough that it scratched his cheek, and he shuddered. Another couple of inches to the left and that thing would have embedded itself in his skull.

“We’re losing pressure!” Andy shouted. He was jumping up from his chair, dashing to the hole in the floor with something in his hands. Hopefully something to patch the tear.

Dan didn’t have time to worry about the fix. He needed to get the ship out of there before they were hit again and destroyed. “Majel, jump us clear!”

They sped into another wormhole and emerged half a kilometer distant. Dan flew them away from the emergence point. It was clear that the Naga were targeting the flash of matter emerging from the wormhole. They might not be able to see the Satori through her cloaking device, but they could guess about where she was coming out of a wormhole. After that it was all a matter of luck, and theirs had finally run out.

17

Beth staggered from her seat as more tremors shook the ship. Her engineering console was showing hull breeches in just about every compartment. Doors had slammed shut to stop the air escaping, but it wasn’t doing much good. They were hurt. The ship was bleeding air into space. She only hoped that was the worst of their trouble.

A quick system check later revealed that wasn’t the worst of it after all. They’d sustained critical damage to their life support. That had been one piece of tech which hadn’t survived on the original alien craft they’d found. Whether the aliens who built it didn’t need life support, or it had simply been destroyed or degraded into something unrecognizable over time was anyone’s guess. They’d had to make do with human-built carbon dioxide scrubbers and oxygen recyclers. Both of which worked extremely well - Beth had rebuild them herself, after all - so long as they were not full of holes. She tapped the comma unit, which was thankfully still working.

“Folks, we’ve lost life support. We’re going to be breathing vapor when what’s in the tanks runs out,” she said. “Get yourselves into suits right now.”

“On it,” Linda replied. “We’ve got issues up here. Big hole, but Andy’s got that more or less under control. John’s…hurt…too.”

Beth felt like the floor was falling out from beneath her. It took a moment for her to find words to speak. “How bad? What happened?”

“Shrapnel from the impact,” Linda replied. Her voice was muffled by the rustling sounds of her working to get into a space suit. “Charline is seeing to him.”

“Tell her she’s got maybe ten minutes before the air in there gets unbreathable,” Beth said.

“Got it.”

Beth found her own suit and put it on. Their ship suits would integrate with the helmets to give them air in a real emergency, but it seemed to make more sense to go with the full suits. Just in case they ended up with more exposure to the outside than they already had. Once she was suited up she went about finding the holes in engineering. It didn’t take long.

There were two, each about the size of a golf ball. The shot had gone straight through the hull, in one side of the ship and out the other. She shuddered to think what that impact would have done if she’d been unlucky enough to be in the way.

A quick blast of her sealant did the job. They had canisters of the stuff in every compartment. She aimed the nozzle at the hole, squeezed, and a burst of grey goop spewed from the device. The goop was an epoxy resin, mixing with a catalyst in the front of the nozzle so that it would harden almost instantly as soon as it sprayed out.

Once she had good seals on the holes she tapped the door controls. They didn’t want to open, at first. The hallway section was mostly in vacuum. Beth cycled the air in engineering back into storage tanks. Once the pressure was low enough in the engine room, the door allowed her to pass without problems.

The delay was killing her, though. No only was the ship continuing to hemorrhage critical air while she was stuck back there, but John still needed her. Beth wished she had some idea how he was doing, but the rest of the crew was probably as busy as she was.

The doors snapped open, and revealed a massive mess. Multiple shots had torn through the corridor connecting the fore and aft of the ship. The deck and port walls were full of multiple holes. The Naga blasts had hit them hard. It was a miracle that the ship had held up through the blasts as well as it had.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. The enemy hadn’t just been firing energy bolts at the Satori. It seemed like they’d been firing missiles as well.

The missile was huge, a couple of feet in diameter. It must have just fired when they were hit. It couldn’t have built up much speed yet before it impacted, because it had lodged itself in the outer hull. Now it was sitting there, a hulking mass penetrating the Satori’s hide.

“We have a serious problem back here,” Beth said into her suit radio.

Dan came back to her instantly. “What’s up?”

“Are we still flying away from the Naga ship?” Beth asked. There might only be seconds left, if they were.

“Yes, putting some distance so…”

“Stop. Reverse course now!” Beth said.

She stared at the missile. The only such weapons she’d seen the Naga use were nuclear warheads. They’d fired a number of them at a city and annihilated the entire thing. If this thing went off the ship would be obliterated.

“What?” Dan asked. “But…”

“No time! Turn the ship around now!” Beth yelled at him.

She felt the ship changing course, and hoped she’d realized the threat soon enough.

It was a logical safety precaution. Any big warhead would have a proximity safety, something to keep the thing from blowing up too close to the ship which fired it. If a big nuke went off a kilometer away from the Naga vessel, it might take damage as well. But they’d been cunning. They’d tucked it into the Satori. If Dan kept flying away, eventually they would pass the safe zone, and then…boom.

Another half minute went by without the ship exploding. Beth figured they were likely safe, at least for the moment. She heaved a sigh of relief.

“They tagged us with a nuke, Dan,” she said over her radio. “Betting it has a proximity safety.”

She heard his sharp inhalation. He knew what that meant. “Can you defuse it?” Dan asked. “We need to get John medical attention.”

“Maybe. If Majel can spare me some help,” Beth said. She stared at the weapon dubiously. This wasn’t her field. She knew engines, not explosives. If she did the wrong thing, the missile might go up anyway. “Andy too. He’s our weapons guy.”

“On my way,” Andy chimed in over the net.

Beth glared at the device, the ticking time bomb in their midst. How long did they have before the Naga figured out where the weapon was and decided to just detonate it and take their chances? Not long. They needed to dump the thing fast. Or maybe they could find a way to turn the weapon against their enemies?

18

Andy had his suit on already. The air was beginning to grow a little thin in the cockpit, despite his patch. He’d filled in both obvious holes, but either he had missed something or the recycling was already in full failure. He grabbed a portable toolbox from where it was strapped to the wall and strapped it to his leg, certain it would be useful in dealing with the missile.

John still lay on the deck where Charline was working on him while Linda struggled to get the suit pants pulled on over his legs. John was still conscious, but his face was white and pinched with pain.

He’d taken a scrap of metal to the gut. Charline wasn’t sure how much damage had been done. He was going to need medical attention as quickly as they could get it. She’d gotten the metal out, at least, and had the bleeding mostly stopped.

Andy slapped the panel to open the hatch into the hall, but it wouldn’t budge. The outer hallway must be in complete vacuum. He could override the panel, but that would vent all of the rest of the air out of the bridge into space.

“Beth, I can’t get out to you directly. Hatch is sealed,” he said. “I’m going to come around and take a look at the missile from the outside.”

“OK. Not like I can go anywhere,” she snapped back.

They didn’t have much time. The Naga clearly couldn’t get a good lock on the missile. Whatever the technology was that gave them their cloak must be blocking any sort of homing or tracking the missile had. That didn’t meant the Naga couldn’t figure out another way to blow the thing remotely. They needed to get it off the ship, fast.

The bridge had an airlock. He stepped in and cycled the atmosphere. The outer door opened after just a few moments, and he was out in space. Andy swallowed hard. His last EVA hadn’t been that much fun. He’d almost died, removing bombs from the bottom of the ship before they blew. This was close enough to the same thing that he had a massive sense of deja vu.

Nothing about this job was going to be improved by waiting. He tapped a button on the suit’s wrist console to activate the magnets in his boots and stepped outside the ship. Walking along the surface was easy, so long as he kept his sense of ‘down’ oriented right. The gravity field the Satori’s engines generated was strange though, and it kept trying to shift his ‘down’. It felt like he was flipping around every few steps, and he had to stop twice to quell the growing nausea.

It was impossible to miss the weapon, though. The hull had been torn up all around the impact site. Multiple holes decorated the port side of the ship. The missile had inserted itself about halfway into the ship. It was roughly as long as he was tall, and wide enough around he would have trouble wrapping his arms around the thing. He came in close, inspecting it carefully. There didn’t appear to be any seams. No screws or bolts he could remove to disable or dismantle it.

“Beth, is there any sort of access panel on the part that’s inside the ship?” he asked over the radio.

“Not that I can see,” she replied.

“Not out here either,” Andy said.

“Damn.”

That was trouble. He was hoping the alien tech would be similar enough to their own that he could open a panel, cut some wires, and be done with it. But nothing was simple when it came to the Naga.

“Majel, you listening in?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“Any chance you can hack this thing?” Maybe there was a computer system on board that she could override.

“I already did,” she said. “I have a temporary lock on its control systems, but there are fail-safes I can’t touch. They’re designed to go off if they’re tampered with.”

“So you can set it off whenever you want, but there’s a limit to what you can do to stop someone else from setting it off?” Andy asked.

She paused, then replied. “Yes. It’s inert - for now. But the Naga might be able to set it off remotely the same way I can, by tampering with the fail-safes.”

Andy grunted. That made it a little simpler. If Majel could keep the thing from blowing for a little while they could drag it back out into space, fly away from it, and she could blow it up. He grabbed the missile and gave an experimental tug. It was wedged in pretty solidly. That wasn’t surprising. He’d figured it would have to be.

He pulled out the tool set, carefully laying it against the hull so that it would magnetically lock in place. He popped the kit open and pulled out a small hand torch.

“Sorry Beth. I’m going to have to trash some more of your hull to get this thing off,” he said.

“Do what you have to,” she replied with a theatrical sigh. “We’ve already made swiss cheese of the ship. It’s going to need a complete overhaul.”

She paused, then went on. “Again.”

He grunted in reply, keeping the chuckle to himself. Then he started cutting away the metal around the missile, careful to keep the torch away from the weapon itself. The heat from his torch might not set the explosives inside off. Probably would not, in fact. But he wasn’t willing to bet all their lives on it.

While he cut, an idea came to mind. What if they could do more than just shove the missile away from the ship? Was there some way they could turn the weapon against the Naga ship?

“Majel, can you show me an image of the enemy ship, with damages?” Andy asked.

“Of course. Anything in particular you are looking for?”

“Highlight any spots where our wormhole blasted a hole through their armor,” Andy said.

Majel posted an image of the enemy ship to the HUD inside his helmet a moment later. Andy whistled softly under his breath. They’d hammered the thing. The passes with the wormhole drive had done massive damage, ripping through the armor and damaging the interior. Even now, he could see from Majel’s imagery that the Naga ship was venting air from multiple sites, and one section of the ship looked like it was still burning.

A quick survey found him what he was looking for. There, near the aft of the ship, a rip in the armor near enough to the engines that it had to have made the ship’s power plants vulnerable to attack. Oh, there were still decks between the tear and the engines. But that armored shell was the ship’s true protection. Inside, it was vulnerable to a massive explosion. Say, one from a nuclear missile.

“Dan, I’ve got a crazy plan,” he said into his radio.

19

Andy finished cutting loose the bulkhead on the left side of the missile. The chunk of metal went spinning off into space. They were moving again, slowly easing their way back in toward the Naga ship. Beth and Majel had no idea what sort of range might have been set for the weapon’s failsafe, so they were staying close. The missile was detached now, at least. He’d tethered it to the Satori’s hull with a loop of lifeline until they decided what to do with it.

The enemy ship was moving in toward the planet. It kept the fighter screen near, but it was dipping nearer to the surface. It had been holding a steady distance before. The move couldn’t be a good thing.

“We need to stop them,” Andy said. “If we drop the missile into the hull breach I indicated and then Majel triggers it, the thing will go up. At the least, they’ll be badly damaged, maybe even destroyed.”

“How do you plan to deliver the weapon?” Dan asked. “We don’t have missile launchers. You going to build a slingshot?”

Andy paused. There was really only one way to do it. Someone had to sit outside the ship and shove it into the gap. Which meant someone needed to be outside while the Satori transitioned through a wormhole. The idea terrified him.

“I’ll stay out here and shove it over,” Andy said, pushing down his fears. “I can grab a suit jetpack, rig it to send the missile over.”

“You’re talking about staying outside during a jump?” Beth asked.

“No way in hell,” John said. His voice was heavy with pain. “We have no idea what that would do to you.”

They weren’t wrong, of course. They’d never sent a person through a wormhole without the ship around them the hull protecting them from whatever energy coruscated around the ship while it sailed through the space between entry and exit. Wormhole transitions were strange things. Even Beth didn’t understand the science behind them. Hell, even Majel couldn’t take readings to indicate what was going on during the jump itself. All they knew was that according to their instruments no time at all seemed to pass. But to the human perception, there was a distinct delay, a few moments where something happened.

It was weird. And not in a fun way.

“You have a better plan, John?” Andy asked. “The ship is beaten to hell. We can’t take another beating like that last. I don’t want to do this, so if you’ve got a better plan, now would be a great time.”

“Naga ship is firing missiles!” Majel said, breaking into the conversation.

Andy turned quickly toward the enemy ship. Sure enough, a dozen missiles were firing from the nose of the warship. At first he thought they had somehow found the Satori even through the cloak. But the missiles weren’t turning around to come at them. They drilled straight ahead.

“Oh my god,” Charline said.

She’d probably already plotted coordinates for each target. Andy didn’t have the computer in front of him to tell him precisely where those missiles would hit. He didn’t need one to know that they were aimed at Earth, most likely firing on an assortment of major cities. He’d seen what those missiles could do. The death toll from each missile would be in the millions.

“Majel, can we stop them?” John asked.

“Negative. We might be able to shoot one with the railguns, but targeting an object moving at that speed is problematic. We’d never get more than one,” she replied. “Sensors indicate the Naga vessel is loading a second volley.”

Another volley. They’d fire twelve more missiles, nuke twelve more cities. How many dozens of missiles did the ship have? The Naga were hurt, and lashing out at the Earth as payback for the injuries they’d received.

“Damn it, John. There’s no more time,” Andy said. “We need to do this now.”

There was another hesitation, but it wasn’t long. They were all watching those missiles break atmosphere, and John knew another set would be underway in moments.

“Do it,” John said, his voice cracking with emotion.

“Coming back to the airlock for a jet-pack,” Andy said. “Give me a few seconds with the sealant goop to attach it to the missile.”

“Naga ship will fire in approximately thirty-two seconds,” Majel said.

Andy rushed. He made the airlock, popped the outer door open. One hand grabbed the pack and he was racing back to the missile. There was a spray can of the sealant in his tool kit. He grabbed it.

“Twenty seconds,” Majel said.

“Calculating jump,” Dan said. “Andy, hang on to something.”

“Majel, show me where to hook this thing up,” Andy said. The AI could calculate the trajectory with an accuracy he’d never match. She placed an overlay on his HUD. He sprayed a bit of the foam where her diagram showed him to, gluing the thruster to the missile.

“Jumping!” Dan said.

Andy clung to the ship, praying that this would work. Lights flashed into being around the nose of the Satori. As he watched, space itself seemed to fold up, wrinkling around them as the lights shifted in unbelievable patterns. He closed his eyes and he could still see their brilliance. He opened his eyes again - and the Naga ship was there, only a few hundred meters ahead of them!

Dan had cut the jump incredibly close. The Naga ship was looming in front of them and they sailed in dangerously near to the ship, blasting it with railguns as they went. Andy stood on shaking legs, hoping his boots wouldn’t rattle so hard that they’d come loose from their magnetic clamps.

“They’re locking guns on us!” Charline said.

“Jumping out,” Dan warned. More lights began flaring in front of the ship.

But there was the rent in the Naga vessel, just off to the port side of the Satori. They were sailing directly past it. Andy felt like he could almost jump across and touch the thing. Majel fed a countdown onto his HUD. When it struck zero he pushed down the thruster button and blasted it with a bit of the sealant to hold it down. The missile sped away from the Satori, powered by the suit thruster.

Without warning, the glowing lights spread back out across the ship. Andy flinched away from them, almost tearing himself free from the hull with the violence of his movement. He reached down and clung to a bit of torn hull plating with his gloves, hanging on with everything he had.

They were out! Andy’s stomach heaved, and he almost lost his control. He could taste bile in the back of his mouth. His arms and legs were shaking so hard that he could barely hang on to the ship. But they were through. Had it worked, though? Had Majel been able to detonate the weapon before the Naga could launch more missiles? He scanned space, looking for the Naga vessel.

He found where it had been easily enough, but he couldn’t see the ship itself. All that was visible was a brilliant flash of blinding light, so bright that his helmet dimmed in immediate reaction.

20

There was a hushed silence in the cockpit while everyone waited for Andrew to respond. John was practically holding his breath. Two wormhole jumps, outside the ship? They’d never experimented with sending anything living through the wormhole outside of a ship. There was no way to tell what that might have done to him, or if he’d even been able to hang on during the second jump.

If he’d been jarred loose, where would he be? Back there in the middle of a nuclear fireball? Or lost somewhere in the space between? He shuddered, imagining being lost for eternity in that glowing space where the Satori traveled in between entry and exit, the space all of their science said did not exist - but all of their minds agreed was there.

“Andy, you OK?” Charline repeated into her radio.

The wait seemed like an eternity, the weight of each nanosecond feeling like an epoch to John. Was he dead? Gone? Vanished? He never should have allowed Andrew to try such an insane stunt. But there hadn’t been any other way to stop the Naga from raining down nuclear destruction upon their home planet. He’d done what needed doing. At what cost?

“I’m here,” Andrew’s voice came back to them. “Just a little out of breath. That was closer than I ever want to come again.”

Then the cheering started in earnest. The rest of the crew was all smiles. Dan gave a whoop. Charline was grinning ear to ear. John allowed himself to calm at last, relaxing back against his chair gently so as not to disturb the wound in his abdomen.

“Majel, give me a damage estimate on the Naga vessel,” John said.

“Their ship has lost primary power and attitude control. Their engines are offline. Current course will send them into Earth’s atmosphere at terminal velocity,” she replied.

“Ouch,” Dan said.

John smiled grimly. With luck the thing would burn up on entry to the atmosphere. He hoped whatever was left of it at least crashed someplace relatively harmless.

“The other two ships?” John asked. There was still a hell of a lot more to do. They’d only taken down one of the three vessels, and the Satori was just about spent. The ship couldn’t take much more damage, and he knew that even though the micro-jumps used a lot less power than an interstellar wormhole, they had to be low on charge for the drive.

“Both ships are returning to Earth, towing a small asteroid,” Majel said. “Based on their courses, they intend to strike the planet with rocks from opposite sides.”

“Analysis of damage?” John asked.

“Total. Unlikely for any life to survive the impacts.”

Planet killers. The Naga were done playing games. They knew they had the right place as soon as the Satori revealed itself to them. That was enough. The early feints were just to be certain. As soon as they were sure this was the right planet, that this world was where the Satori had come from, the two ships had sailed off to get planet-killing asteroids. They were taking no chances with a battle the Satori might escape from. Destroy the planet itself, and the Satori had little future impact. Even if they fled and survived, humanity would no longer be a factor.

He had done this. His pride, his desire to explore, his need to know what was out there. John cursed himself in silence. On the planet below millions had just died in nuclear fireballs, annihilated because he had roused the Naga and led them here. Now they would wipe out every last human on Earth if they could. All because of him.

Around him the bridge was silent again as Majel’s words soaked in, damping the previous enthusiasm.

“They must be stopped,” John said. “No matter the cost.”

“Great,” Dan said, nodding. “You have a plan for that? Because we have enough juice for two, maybe three more micro-jumps. The structure is beaten all to hell. And we’ve burned through about three-quarters of our railgun ammunitions. On one ship.”

“Which we only beat because they threw a nuke at us,” Beth added via the radio. She was still locked in the hallway, working to reinforce the damaged compartment as best she could.

“I…” John paused. His gut hurt enough that he was having trouble thinking. There had to be something they could do. Some new tactic they could try, some brilliant plan that would win the day. But for the life of him there was nothing he could think of through his pain. Another failure tacked on to the list. He had doomed humanity, and now he couldn’t even save it.

The airlock cycled, and Andrew stepped onto the bridge. He sealed the door behind himself and took off his helmet, shaking out his hair.

“Ugh. Air’s thin in here, but still a little better than the stale stink of raw terror in my helmet right now,” Andrew said. “I have an idea.”

John smiled. Of course he did. It was probably another crazy but good one, too. Like drawing the giant insect up to battle the Naga, back on the dust world. Or like the action he’d taken in the watery world against the rogue Cyanauts. Or daring to stay outside the ship to launch a nuke back at the enemies from which it had come.

He’d watched Andrew change so much over the past year. He’d gone from someone who took orders to someone who acted. Now, he was growing into a man capable of giving them as well. It was an amazing experience, watching his son of the heart grow into what he could be. It felt remarkable. John had a sense of completion and fulfillment deep enough that it shocked him.

“The ship is yours, Andrew,” John said. He saw the young man give a half wince, half grin on hearing his full name. John always called him that, even though his friends all called him Andy. It had been intended as a sign of respect, but maybe it was time to change that, too. “Andy. Make it count.”

Andy took a step toward him, dropping a hand on his shoulder. He had an odd expression on his face, a mixed look of surprise, gratitude, and concern. “Thanks. You OK?”

“I will be for the moment,” John said. He leaned back again, settling into his chair and trying to ignore the growing pain in his belly. Regardless what happened to him, Andrew - Andy - and the others would get this job done. That was what mattered most to him. They, more than anything else, were his legacy to the world and the future. He closed his eyes to rest, listening to his children take command of their destiny - and the destinies of everyone on Earth.

21

Andy stalked over to stand beside Dan, staring out the front window into space. The Satori had come about, orienting back toward the Naga vessel. The explosion hadn’t killed the damned thing, but they’d crippled it. Even kilometers away, he could still see air and flame vent from the ship as it fell toward the planet below. The back end of the battle cruiser was tipping upward. Soon the entire ship would enter into a spin. That one was finished.

It had already done incalculable damage though, and the other two ships were closing in for the kill. It wasn’t enough to have the Satori out here defending the planet on her own. It was time to bring in allies. They needed help out here, and they needed it right away if they were going to have any chance of beating both ships.

He looked down at Dan, who met his gaze. Andy felt a little guilt at taking over like this. Dan was the more experienced spacer. The most experienced of any of them, truth be told. But Dan’s eyes showed no anger or resentment. Instead, he gave Andy a thin smile and a tiny nod of his head. That alone was enough to buoy Andy’s spirits. Dan, at least, was with him. That support meant more than he could say.

“Charline, that base we were at signaled the Satori,” Andy said. “Can you reach out to them along the same frequency, see if you can raise them?”

“I can try,” she said.

“Good. Majel, time to get some more people on the phone,” Andy said. “I need to speak to the heads of the Russian, Chinese, and EU space programs.”

“I’ll ring their numbers.”

“Be convincing,” Andy replied. They needed to get as many teams on board as possible. There were few enough true spacecraft available on Earth. They needed all of them in the air right away.

“I’ve got Hereford,” Charline said.

“Put him on speaker,” Andy replied.

There was a crackling of static as the connection went through. That was how long Andy had to suck in a deep breath and consider his words. Hereford was a general, which meant he was a political animal. But he was an airman as well, which meant somewhere in his background he’d been a man of action too. Andy just needed to get the latter to override the former. Oh, and he needed to do it with no authority or power beyond what they’d already demonstrated by blowing up one enemy ship.

“God damn,” Hereford said over the radio. “We’ve been watching the fight from here. Hell of a show.”

“It was way more exciting up here, sir,” Andy replied.

Hereford chuckled. “I’ll bet. Where’s John? Figured I’d be talking to that old bastard, not you.”

Andy glanced over at John, still in his seat. His eyes were closed, his breathing steady and slow. He couldn’t tell for sure if he was awake and just letting Andy handle the situation, or if he’d passed out again. This whole thing was delaying treatment that might be critical to John’s survival, and it grated on him. He wanted nothing more than to get John ground-side to a hospital. But there just wasn’t time.

“He’s resting. Took a shot during the fight,” Andy said.

“Damn, take care of him. Old birds like he and I are too few as it is,” Hereford said. Then his voice cracked like a whip, serious again. “Can you take out those other two ships? Out radar says they’re coming our way with some very big rocks. My daddy always said sticks and stones would break my bones, but I have a hunch these aliens are planning something a little more drastic than kneecapping us.”

“That matches our assessment. Put together, those rocks are planet killers,” Andy said. “Something might survive on the planet with one impact.”

“Microbes, most likely,” Majel put in.

“But not both,” Andy finished.

“Can you stop them, son?” Hereford asked.

This was it. The moment of truth. He needed to do something that put all of them at risk here, something that many of the crew were probably not going to be comfortable with. But there wasn’t any choice.

“No,” Andy said.

He heard the general sigh. “Then we’re screwed? I don’t accept that.”

“I didn’t say that. But the Satori is badly shot up and low on ammunition,” Andy replied. “We got lucky with that first ship. We can’t repeat it with the others. Not without help.”

Andy heard a shifting noise on the other side of the line. In his mind, he imagined Hereford sitting up in his chair, maybe gesturing to aides nearby. “You have a plan then,” Hereford said. It wasn’t a question.

“Yes, sir. But it’s gonna be hell in space.”

“Give it to me,” Hereford replied.

“I want you to launch ever damned ship or rocket capable of carrying a team of spec ops or marines. Aim half of them at one ship and half at the other,” Andy said.

“They’ll be torn to bits,” Hereford protested.

“Time a spread of missiles to keep their guns busy. Your fighters will escort one group of assault ships toward one Naga vessel, while the Satori escorts the other,” Andy said. “Once they make contact, they breach and take the ships.”

“That’s ambitious. How about we nuke them from inside instead?” Hereford said.

“That’s a good backup plan,” Andy agreed.

“We don’t have enough ships ready to go to do much damage,” Hereford muttered. “I’m getting numbers now, but I don’t think we have more than two or three that can launch in time to do any good.”

“I’m already pinging the other major space agencies, sir,” Andy said. “This strike will be all or nothing. Earth wins here or dies. No sense leaving anyone out.”

There was a long pause. Andy worked hard to keep his face calm and his fingers from fidgeting. If he’d screwed this up, if Hereford wasn’t convinced, then it might be possible to twist other arms into launching this assault. But that would take even more precious time, and he was incredibly aware of how what little they had was rapidly running out. He took a deep breath, getting ready to give one more exhortation about how it was the best shot they had, but Hereford cut in first.

“We’ll make it happen,” he said. “I’m already setting up coordination with the Chinese, and we’ll have the Russians and the EU on the line shortly. You’ll get your flotilla. God help you if this fails.”

“God help all of us if we screw this up, sir,” Andy said. “Nothing else will. The Satori might be able to evacuate a handful of people in time, but…”

“Nowhere near enough to make a difference,” Hereford said. “I understand. We’ll be in touch with launch details shortly.”

The radio cut out, and Andy sank into his chair. His hands were shaking, and he placed them on his knees to hide it. He’d convinced the general to follow his lead. He’d figured that would be the hard part. But now, going over the vague plan in his head, he realized that had been the easiest element of the whole show. There was so much at stake. If anything failed, they all died. Along with every human being in the universe.

“Well, I knew you’d been angling for a promotion for a while,” Dan said. “I just never thought you’d go to such extremes.”

“What’s that?” Andy asked, startled from his thoughts.

Dan spun his seat around to face Andy, a big, lop-sided grin on his face. “Sure. You just bought yourself command of Earth’s first space combat fleet. Congratulations, Admiral Wakefield.”

Andy groaned, and then laughed. A little of the pressure eased away with the joke. Not much, but just enough that he could breathe a little more easily. They’d pulled off so many insane ventures in the past. Surely they could manage just one more.

22

The planet below lit with sequences of launches as dozens of payloads jumped toward the sky within minutes of each other. Blossoms of light clawed their way up through the atmosphere, burning through the air to stab out toward their foes.

“Looks like every launch was a go,” Dan said. He shook his head. “No, I take that back. China’s lost one rocket and the US has had a booster failure. The other six look clear to reach orbit.”

“That’s only three troop payloads for each Naga ship,” Charline said. “Will it be enough troops?”

“It has to be,” Andy replied.

Dan grunted and returned to his console. He swung the Satori in an arc that would link up with the assault ships. His job would be to screen three of them against Naga fighters. He was going to have his hands full. The alien ship ahead of them had already launched its full compliment. They were still hundreds of kilometers distant but closing fast.

“Phase two should engage any moment now,” Andy said.

Dan switched one of his screens to the Satori’s rear camera. He had to see this. He’d grown up in the shadow of nuclear war, people always a little nervous that eventually someone would push the button and then the end would arrive in cataclysm. Stockpiles of nukes had gone down over the decades as treaty after treaty attempted to limit their distribution, but there were still over two thousand active nuclear missiles on Earth.

From the sounds of it, pretty damned near all of them that could fire far enough had been aimed upward into space.

“We’ve got confirmation on Phase Two,” Charline said.

“My god,” Dan whispered. He’d never seen anything like this.

The planet below seemed alive with launches. Scores, then hundreds, eventually over a thousand missiles clawing their way skyward. It looked like a huge campfire just after being stirred, the sparks sailing off into the night sky. There were too many points of light to take them all in.

“That might just do the trick all by itself,” Beth said over the radio. She’d shored up the hallway, but rather than joining them on the bridge had returned to the engine room. Getting back and forth was going to be trouble through the damaged hall, and she wanted to be near the critical ship systems in case they had trouble.

“I doubt it,” Andy said. “But we can hope.”

The missiles shot up and away from the planet, overtaking the assault shuttles. Ahead, the Naga vessels were slowing, altering the course to better bring their weapons to bear. Flashes of light crisscrossed the dark void as the alien weapons spat energy toward the missiles. Brilliant explosions formed, silent detonations of small suns.

“Majel, link my radio in to our assault ship pilots,” Dan said. He saw them closing fast behind the Satori. They were a rag-tag little batch of ships. None of them were built for combat. They were designed to shuttle people up to a space station, or haul cargo. Those ships were going to come apart in seconds if anything shot at them. Each of them had to be packed to the gills to get a full platoon or more of troops inside.

“Done,” Majel said.

“Good. Majel, I’m going to need your help on this,” Dan said. “Keeping those ships safe is…” His voice trailed off.

“Statistically unlikely,” Majel supplied for him. “We’ll do what we can, though.”

“Shuttles, stay close together and in formation. We’re providing your cover,” Dan said into his radio.

“What cover? Where are you?” the response came back.

“Stealth ship. You can’t see us, but we can see you,” Dan said. “Hang in there. This is going to get rough.”

Then they were cruising into the region where the nukes had been going off, bits of debris and leftover shock waves turning the smooth ride into a bumpy one. The Naga fighters were dead ahead, too. “Majel, give me a railgun spread targeting those lead fighters. Take them out.”

“They’ll know we’re here,” Majel warned.

“I want them to.”

The Satori fired, blasting two Naga fighters to bits, and then blowing up two more. The remaining fighters of that leading wing scattered, flying in all directions to get clear of the Satori’s deadly hail of fire. Those ships would come around and try to slip in behind their formation, but it bought them time. Every second they earned without losing a shuttle was kilometers closer to the battle cruiser.

He could see it, sunlight flickering off the hull a little in the distance. It wasn’t towing the planetoid it carried. It was pushing it along. That’s why it had stopped and turned. The planetoid was in the way of it firing its main guns. Just by forcing it to change direction like that, they’d bought more time for the planet. The Naga would have to do some time-consuming course corrections to get the asteroid headed back toward Earth.

Another fighter wing soared in from in front. Dan kept the Satori aimed toward them. If he could get this one split as well, then maybe they had a shot.

“Fighters closing on the assault shuttles from behind!” Charline warned.

“Damn, already?” Dan said. He brought the ship around, and the railguns fired. One Naga ship exploded, but the other two continued their run on one of the shuttles. Dan closed with it, engines flaring as he poured on more power. Majel and Charline took out a second one with the railguns, but missed the third.

It sped up. He wasn’t going to reach it in time. The thing wasn’t going to slow down - it was speeding up. He watched its guns stitch scorch marks into the side of the shuttle, but that wasn’t the biggest threat.

The fighter was still boosting velocity when it slammed into the rear starboard side of the shuttle, instantly vaporizing both ships.

“Damn it!” Dan cried out. He was going too fast himself. He began slowing the Satori, swinging the ship back around. Majel fired the guns, taking out two more ships as they approached. But the other Naga pilots had seen the successful attack. It seemed enough of them were willing to die to stop the humans. Three more trios of fighters were speeding toward the shuttles.

The Satori blasted two fighters apart. The third dove away, momentarily out of the fight. Dan brought the nose around to the second group. One of the fighters detonated as a railgun slug slammed into it. But the other two crashed into the shuttle. The shuttle tried vainly to dodge, but it simply wasn’t maneuverable enough. The crew of the Satori watched helplessly as the ships tore each other into scrap metal.

“God damn it,” Dan said. He brought the Satori in directly behind the third flight, and Majel took two of them out. But the Naga had planned this well. They knew the Satori had two railguns. Three fighters in a suicide wave meant one of them was likely to get through. He couldn’t take out the third fighter in time.

The shuttle ducked and weaved, twisting in an impossibly complex evasive maneuver. The Naga fighter shot past it.

“I’ve taken control of their helm,” Majel said. “Charline hacked their computer systems. I can’t dodge these things forever though.”

“You don’t have to,” Dan said. “I have a better idea. We are so out of here.”

“What do you have in mind?” Andy asked. He’d been silent to let Dan fly, but he was right to question a change in plans. You could only have one captain of a ship. Dan might tend to assume tactical command as the pilot, but he didn’t begrudge Andy wanting to know what was going on.

“I want to jump them with us and drop them right on top of the Naga,” Dan said.

“That’s brilliant if it works,” Andy said.

“Yeah,” Dan replied with a quick grin. “I know.”

He tapped out a sequence on the wormhole drive, working the rough coordinates for the jump. With Majel now controlling the shuttle - and only one shuttle left - they had options which hadn’t existed before. Dan opened the radio channel to the last shuttle.

“Hang on, guys. We have your helm on remote. We’re going to land you on the Naga cruiser,” he said.

“How? It’s still a hundred kilometers away,” the shuttle pilot replied.

“Magic,” Dan said.

He snapped off the link. “Majel, this is a double jump. We have the juice for it?” While he talked, he tore apart two more Naga fighters. But the others were reforming. Four clusters of three fighters dove toward the helpless shuttle. There was no way even Majel was going to be able to dodge them all.

“The drive has had a little time to recharge. We can manage three short jumps, maybe four,” Majel said.

“Light it up, then!” Dan said.

The wormhole drive activated. The last thing Dan saw before the screen grew too bright to see through was the Naga fighters closing on the shuttle, every engine burning with all the power they could muster.

Then the Satori flickered into space directly above the shuttle.

“Engage second jump!” Dan said. The lights flashed again. Proximity warning alarms went off as the Satori’s sensors picked up the deadly fighters coming in fast. All of the Naga fighters were shooting as they came. Even if they couldn’t see the Satori, they’d seen the wormhole activation. They knew roughly were the ship was. The hull was pounded by bolts of energy from the fighter’s fire as it stitched its way across the hull. The lights flickered for a moment, but the wormhole was holding.

The Satori and her passenger dove forward into the wormhole.

23

Majel privately thought the entire operation they were undergoing was impractical. There were far too many places where it could go horribly wrong. Every element of their strike was grossly outmatched by the Naga forces arrayed against them.

For example, her sensor readings showed that the battle cruiser had already eliminated two hundred and seventy four of the four hundred and eleven missiles launched from the planet surface. With the Satori and assault shuttles gone, the fighters were zipping around cleaning up most of the rest of that attack. The missiles were ‘dumb’, with little evasive ability. They were also reaching out at a target that was at the very edge of their fuel capacity. A great number were going to miss simply because the Naga ship moving away from its previous course. The missiles lacked the fuel to compensate. That hundred or so would drift into space, useless.

They had already lost two shuttles, which meant there were perhaps three dozen humans making contact with the Naga ship. Against them was the hull of the ship itself. If they breached that barrier, which seemed likely, the battle cruiser was teeming with over a hundred armed Naga warriors.

Majel had run through simulations of a hundred thousand alternate plans, however. Variations on themes, none of the simulations she ran ended with anything but the destruction of Earth.

She stayed the course anyway. Partly that was out of loyalty for these humans who had become her friends. Her family, even, although she had a limited understanding of what precisely they meant when they used that word. It felt right somehow, in a way she could not express in pixels or machine code.

But partly it was because if she had learned nothing else from working with the crew of the Satori, it was that statistics often lied.

For example, even her best-case simulation had all three assault ships being destroyed within the first few moments of contact. Dan’s piloting skills shifted the odds, but even factoring those in with her own ability to predict Naga movement and take action to block them, none of the shuttles should have gotten anywhere near the cruiser.

Yet here she was, gently setting the shuttle down on the upper hull of the enemy vessel.

There was something about humanity, and perhaps about every living species, which defied statistics. They lived and fought and threw all their effort into impossibly improbable things. Often, they failed. But sometimes they succeeded. And somehow, by relying on such outlier examples as indications of probability, they won through more often than mathematics said they ought.

Hope was a dangerous thing. But it was also an incredible asset at the right time. Majel clung to hope, to the belief that her crew had what it took to beat the odds once more.

“Evacuate the ship immediately,” Majel said over the assault shuttle’s internal speakers and radios. “Fighters are incoming. We will be unable to defend you against a strafing run. Evacuate and make your way into the enemy ship.”

“We’re on it,” a gruff voice replied. “Who is this, anyway?”

“My name is Majel,” she replied. “I’m the one who took over your navigation to prevent your being blown to bits a few seconds ago.”

“Well, we appreciate it, Miss,” the voice replied. “You did your job. Let us get to ours.”

“I’m uploading the coordinates of the nearest and next nearest airlock sites to you now,” she added.

“Got ‘em. We’re on it. Keep those fighters off us the best you can.”

The transmission stopped, but she saw the man was as good as his word. The bay doors on the side of the shuttle opened up and men in space suits poured out, dropping to the Naga ship and activating magnetic boots. They made their way across the surface in the direction she had sent them.

“Marines are away,” she reported to the Satori crew. “Naga fighter wings are incoming to this site. Suggest we intersect, or the marines will be in trouble fast.”

“We’re up and moving,” Dan said. “I see the targets.”

Majel was tracking them, too. Two small groups of three fighters each. She created firing solutions for two and engaged them with the guns. One of them exploded and the other lost a wing, spinning off into the dark. That still left four, more than enough to take out the men below before they found cover.

“Andy, we need to drop the cloak,” Dan said.

“We won’t last long if they can see us,” Andy replied.

“Those men down there will last even less time if those fighters get into range,” Dan snapped back. “I can’t get into position to stop them all.”

“You want to make us bait?” Andy hesitated only a second. “Do it.”

Dan tapped the button to drop the cloak as he brought the Satori into a position to target two more Naga. The reaction was immediate. Now that they could see the enemy, three of the remaining fighters broke from their attack run to maneuver into a better striking position against the Satori.

One of them drove ahead, still barreling in toward the marines on the ship’s hull.

“Damn it,” Dan said. “One of them didn’t take the bait.”

Which was the logical course of action for them to take. Majel knew that, but she held back the words. She sensed that saying so would not help improve the situation. Instead she split her focus. She began working on targeting solutions for the fleeing ship - because she predicted with ninety-nine point eight percent certainty that Dan would pursue that one ship over the other three. With the rest of her concentration she tracked the other three fighters. They would become threats in a matter of seconds. Dan didn’t have long.

“Going after the one,” Dan said.

Majel was inwardly pleased that her math had been correct. With Dan, she was wrong more often than the mathematics suggested she should be. That odd thing about humanity which enabled them to defy the odds seemed particularly strong in some members of the species. He didn’t have much time before the other fighters toasted the Satori, but he didn’t need it. She locked the speeding fighter. He fired.

It detonated into a fireball.

Just in time. The other fighters screamed in from all sides. Their crossfire stitched the hull, pounding the already wounded vessel. Dan was distracted, trying to steer the ship into a vector which would get them clear of the enemy guns. He hadn’t thought to turn the cloak back on yet. Majel could flick the switch digitally though. She turned the alien cloak back on.

Nothing happened.

24

Dan cursed under his breath as the Naga fighters zipped in toward them, firing as they came. He slapped the button to activate the cloak, belatedly realizing that he could have turned it on earlier and improved their odds of surviving the next few moments greatly. But nothing happened. He rapped the button again, but there was still no response from the system.

“Cloaking device is not functioning,” Majel said.

“Shit,” Dan said. “Beth, what’s going on with the cloak?”

He brought the Satori into a tight spiral, working to evade and outrun the fighters. It mostly worked. The ones which had been trying to catch them in a pincer move were now all behind them. As more bolts of enemy fire slammed against the hull, Dan was forced to wonder if that was an improvement or not.

“It’s a mess back here. Took fire and tore the place up,” Beth said.

“Are you all right?” Dan asked.

“Yes, but the systems are trashed. I can’t activate the cloak from here either, not without some time to repair the linking systems.”

“Shit,” Dan said, thinking fast as he tried to dodge the enemy fighters. If they moved too far away from the cruiser it would lock them with its guns and destroy them. The only reason it wasn’t already trying was that all its guns were still busy blowing up the remaining missiles Earth fired.

“We’re going to have to jump,” Andy said.

“Agreed,” Dan said. He began working with Majel to plot coordinates that would take them out of the fight. They wouldn’t be able to return until Beth repaired whatever was wrong with the cloaking device. He hated the idea of running away, but it was the only option.

“Incoming call from the Marine platoon,” Linda said. “They’re in trouble. They can’t break through the airlock. Enemy forces inside. And they’re taking fire from another fighter. They’ve got some cover, but they’re not going to last long out there.”

Dan glanced up from his calculations to meet Andy’s eyes. They couldn’t run. Not now. This was for the planet. They had to find a way to stay and fight. But it had to be something that made a difference. Getting blown out of space in the next minute or so wasn’t going to help anyone.

“Let’s give those Naga something else to think about other than Marines,” Andy said. “You’ve flown into a Naga cruiser before, Dan. Can you get into their hangar bay? Via wormhole?”

Dan shrugged. “I have absolutely no idea. Majel?”

There was a pause while Majel worked through whatever hellish math was involved. The fighters were getting closer. Dan swung around the side of the cruiser, breaking their line of sight for a moment. It wasn’t going to last, though. They’d be coming after them again any second.

“Affirmative,” Majel said. “I…think.”

“You think?” Charline asked, incredulous.

“The variables are too significant, and there are too many unknown factors involved. I will have to…guess,” Majel said. “Our odds of success are unknown.”

Dan laughed aloud. It was all he could think to do. This was the mad world they were in now, where alien spaceships were trying to shoot them down, and their computer was making guesses. He twisted the controls, sending the Satori up around the Naga cruiser in a narrow orbit, barely skimming above the hull.

“I’m not certain this is the time for levity,” Majel said. “I was quite serious.”

“Guess quickly, Majel,” Dan chuckled some more. “I trust your guesses more than most people’s certainty.”

“Sending you coordinates now,” Majel replied. “At this speed we will have to brake rather rapidly.”

“Understood,” Dan said. He began slowing the ship down so he’d have some chance of stopping them before they smashed into something on the other side of the wormhole. Out of habit Dan wanted to add an unnecessary ‘hang on’ for the rest of the crew, but if they weren’t already hanging on then they hadn’t been paying attention for the last ten minutes. Besides, there wasn’t time. He pressed the button to activate the jump. Brilliant light blossomed in front of the ship.

And they were elsewhere, transitioning almost instantly. Dan’s first awareness was of a wall only a few dozen meters ahead of them. He banked the ship hard, braking with every erg of power the Satori’s engines could bring to bear. Even through the ship’s inertial dampening, the sheering force of their hard turn threw Dan against his restraints with bruising force. His vision narrowed, turning black on the edges as he struggled to retain focus on flying.

He sucked in a deep breath against the pressure and continued the turn. The Satori was inside a hanger much like the one he’d seen before. Luckily most of the cruiser’s fighters were already out in space. There wasn’t much to crash into besides the Naga ship itself. The Satori glided along the wall, dumping speed as it went. He cut sharply once more as they reached the far end of the hangar, continuing to follow the wall.

It was almost tight enough a turn, but not quite. The Satori’s wing clipped the corner, and at the speed they were moving the small graze was disastrous. Most of the left wing sheered away with a sound like a steel bridge collapsing. Warning lights splashed across Dan’s console. He didn’t have time to take them all in. The Satori was out of control now, threatening to enter into a spin.

He had to set the ship down before they crashed. They were still moving too rapidly for a controlled descent, but there wasn’t any choice. Dan dropped the landing gear and shoved the nose of the ship downward toward the Naga deck.

The Satori responded sluggishly, the wing clipping another wall and threatening to destroy what was left of his control over the vessel. Then the landing gear under the nose came down against the deck hard enough to jam Dan’s teeth together. The aft end of the ship slammed down a moment later. All three landing gear buckled, collapsing under the strain. The ship crashed into the Naga deck, belly down, and continued to slide another hundred feet. Dan could see the shower of sparks they were striking even through the cockpit window.

The ship came to rest only a few dozen feet from the far wall of the hangar. Dan could taste blood in his mouth. He’d bitten his lip somewhere in the crash. His hands were shaking at how close they had come to disaster. But they were in, and they were alive.

“That wasn’t your best landing,” Andy said from behind him, coughing.

“Sorry about that. You know what they say about any landing you walk away from, right?” Dan replied. He felt terrible. He’d let them all down. It had been a complex move, and he knew he had done all he could. But he couldn’t help wishing he had been able to move just a little bit faster.

“If you call that a good landing, I’ll eat my suit helmet,” Charline said.

“We’ve got a shot. That’s what counts,” Andy replied. “Everyone OK?”

From the back of the ship, Beth’s voice hollered over the radio. “What the hell did you do to my ship?”

She was OK. That took an enormous load off Dan’s shoulders. He wasn’t sure he could ever have forgiven himself if she’d been hurt.

“We’re all here,” Linda said. “Barely.”

“Sore, but alive,” John said. “You all need to go reinforce those Marines. Get them inside where they can do the job they were sent to do, or Earth is doomed. I’ll just slow you down. I’ll remain here to guard the ship.”

“Alone?” Andy said. “Dan can…”

Dan turned his chair, then stood up without a word. His legs shook, but it was as much from reaction to the crash as his lingering weakness. The Naga ships were operating at a little less than two-thirds of Earth’s gravity. He wasn’t going to be running too much. But by god, he could stand. He stood and stared firmly ahead at Andy, daring the man to leave him out. He was done being left behind in the ship.

“Majel and I can handle it,” John said.

“Grab a rifle then, Dan,” Andy said after a pause. “All of you, arm up. Let’s do this.”

25

Andy was in the middle of their little band as they made their way from the hangar, moving deeper into the ship. Speed was of the essence. They were outnumbered. Vastly so. If they allowed the Naga to pin them down, then all of this would be for nothing. They had to get the Marines aboard the ship, needed to get that additional firepower on their side.

His plan was to flank the Naga pinning the human troops at the airlock. Even with his handful of fighters, he ought to be able to tear up the Naga force rapidly enough that the Marines could take advantage of the confusion and move in for the kill. Combining their forces, they could take the key installations on the Naga ship - the bridge and engine room. Those in hand, the immediate threat to Earth from the asteroid the battle cruiser was pushing along would be gone. They could get reinforcements from Earth and the rest would be cleanup.

Beth jogged alongside him. Charline had point, several meters ahead. She was the best shot of any of them, and as nervous as Andy was about having her be first in the line of fire, he had to admit she was good at this. They’d worked together over and over, drilling movement to contact until she was damned near as good as most professional soldiers he’d worked with. She’d come a long way from the quiet programmer she had been when they’d met!

Andy glanced back over his shoulder. Dan and Linda were bringing up the rear. If anything were going to be a weak link in this operation, it would be those two. Dan had training, but he was weak, unsteady on legs he’d barely even been able to move a week before. Linda was fairly fit, but she had little training. He’d armed her with one of the Naga rifles, set to stun. The last thing they needed was a friendly fire accident with a P90 rifle, which was what the rest of them carried.

“Stay tight,” Andy whispered. Each of them had a throat microphone to communicate even the softest vocalization, and an earpiece to receive each other’s words.

Dan nodded back at him, gamely working to keep up with the rest of the group, but he was clearly struggling. His face was white, sweat beading on his forehead. Andy grimaced, hoping that it hadn’t been a horrible mistake to bring him along.

There was a rattle of gunfire from up ahead, and Andy had no more time to think about Dan. Charline had made contact. He whirled forward and ducked back against the wall, rifle ready to add his own bullets if needed. But Charline had already dispatched the two Naga she’d spotted.

“Just the two,” Charline said. “No more enemy in sight.”

“Stay alert,” Andy replied. “Beth, move forward. Cover each other as you advance.”

The sound of those shots would carry. Any other Naga nearby would know that there were intruders on board the ship now. Andy wanted to increase the pace, but they were already traveling about as fast as Dan could manage. He couldn’t push much more without leaving the man behind, and they might need the extra firepower soon.

“Majel, how much further do we need to go?” Andy asked. The AI had a pretty good schematic of the ship.

“About another two hundred meters forward. You’ll need to descend several decks to reach the outer hull,” she replied. “I am working on a route for you. Continue current path for now.”

They made it another hundred meters before the enemy caught up with them. Shots from behind zipped by over Andy’s right shoulder. He turned toward the rear, hitting the deck just in time to dodge more incoming fire.

“Enemy to the rear!” he called out, warning the others. Dan and Linda had already taken up positions against the walls, firing at the enemy from behind the minimal cover of a pair of stanchions.

It was hard to see just how many of them there were. Andy counted at least four, maybe six. Enough to be a problem. Probably not enough to stop them cold, but every delay was hurting their chances of stopping the enemy from dropping a rock on his home world.

“More of them to the front!” Charline called out. Andy spared a glance her way. She and Beth were returning fire at another Naga patrol ahead of them.

They were trapped, pinned between the two groups. It wasn’t going to be possible to break contact with both groups, and if they turned to focus fire on one enemy the other would tear them apart from the other side. It was a neat setup, and the Naga had clearly prepared it with some care. He cursed under his breath.

“Majel, we need another way out of here,” Andy said into the radio. “We’re pinned down in the hall, enemy on both sides. You have anything?”

There was the briefest of delays before she replied. “Affirmative. There is an access panel directly to your left. I can hack the control systems to allow you to open the panel.”

“What’s on the other side?” Andy asked her.

“Ducts. They drop down straight for several levels. You’ll have to climb down the ladder.”

Crawling around inside the ventilation shafts of an alien ship. It was so damned cliché that the idea surprised a chuckle from his throat. “OK, tell me when we can move.”

“Done. The hatch should be directly to your left and forward one meter,” Majel said.

Andy glanced over and spotted the panel in question. More Naga energy bolts whizzed by over his head, and he fired a burst at the enterprising lizard that had decided he made a good target. He heard the alien grunt in pain. At least one of his shots hit.

A quick roll brought him out of the line of fire, up against the wall. The hatch opened easily to his touch, sliding aside to reveal a dark passage punctuated by a steady series of rungs, descending who-knew-how-far. With luck, maybe they could get all the way to the outer deck this way, and be that much nearer to the airlock.

“Beth, this way,” he said. He popped up on one knee to add his own fire to Charline’s, giving Beth cover as she dodged back and slid into the hole. She started to descend.

“Linda, you next,” Andy said.

“I can’t. They’ll hit me.” She sounded terrified. Andy cursed silently. He hadn’t been paying enough attention. Of course she was scared. She had damned little experience with firefights. The rest of them had been through this a few times, knew what they needed to do to stay alive. Linda was their newest recruit and had missed most of the hairier battles the others had been in.

“Linda, you can do this. I’ll fire as you move and pin them down,” Dan said.

“I’ve got you covered too,” Andy added. “On three.”

“OK,” Linda replied, her voice shaking.

“One. Two. Three!” Andy called out the numbers. Linda scuttled back along the floor on the third number, panting by the time she reached the hole. She slid down onto the ladder and began to descend.

“Dan, go,” Andy called out.

Dan almost stumbled back down again as he stood, then rushed across the hall. One of the Naga shots clipped his shoulder as he ran. He spun and fell, hitting the deck hard. Andy fired back down the corridor, keeping the Naga pinned in place while Dan got his feet back under him. He rolled the rest of the way out of the line of fire.

“You OK?” Andy asked.

“The body armor stopped the shot from going through,” Dan said through clenched teeth. “Hurts like hell though.”

“Can you climb?” Andy asked.

“I think so.”

“Go.”

Dan ducked down into the tunnel. Andy nodded across to Charline, who rose from her position, firing as she stepped back toward him. Andy fired the other way, working to keep the Naga heads under cover while Charline was exposed. She made it back to squat next to him.

“Were you worried about me?” she asked him with a grin.

“I’m worried about all of us, but you probably least of all,” Andy replied.

“Aw, that’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me,” Charline said. “Don’t wait too long up here.”

Then she started down the shaft, leaving Andy alone up top. He dipped down partway into the duct, but kept his head and shoulders above so that he could fire out. It was difficult tracking the enemy alone. They were closing in now, approaching from both sides. He wanted to buy the team more time. Every second counted, got them a little deeper into the shaft before the Naga would be able to come after them or fire down on them.

“Leave the lock to me,” Majel said into Andy’s ear. “Go!”

He dropped down, pulling the hatch into place as he began to descend the ladder. Above him he heard the crackle of electricity, and smelled ozone. He didn’t know what Majel had done to the lock, but he assumed it would hold the Naga for at least a few moments.

“Hang tight, folks,” Andy said. He pulled a pair of glow-sticks from his pocket, snapped them against his side, and dropped them. They plummeted down scores of feet before clattering against the floor at the bottom.

One step after another, he lowered himself down the ladder into the still-dark shaft.

A sharp yelp from below startled Andy, and he looked down to see Dan’s fingers slide from a rung. Exhausted, with his shoulder injured from the shot and his legs weak, Dan must be almost completely spent. There was nothing at all Andy could do. Charline was between him and Dan. He wasn’t even close.

Dan slipped, then fell free from the ladder entirely. He brushed past Linda, almost knocking her from the rail as well. She ducked in close and clung with everything she had.

Beth was the lowest person on the ladder, the last person between Dan and a very long drop. She wrapped her right arm around a rung, reached out with her left. Dan saw her as he fell past. He reached out, their fingers brushing each other.

Andy’s breath caught in his throat.

Beth’s fingers closed around Dan’s hand, locking in place with the strength of someone who worked with her hands every day. Dan swung back in toward the ladder. Beth grunted as his whole weight fell on her arm. But she held.

“Don’t you leave me again!” Beth said. Her voice cracked with emotion as she spoke. “Never again!”

“I never will,” Dan replied softly.

26

John eased himself from his own seat and made his way slowly to the pilot’s chair. If he needed to move the ship quickly, he’d be much more able to do so from there. So far the Naga hadn’t come after the Satori. He guessed that between the incoming missiles fired from Earth, the Marines on their outer hull, and the Satori’s crew making trouble inside that the aliens were a heavily occupied already. That didn’t mean he could sit back and relax. The enemy could be knocking on his door any time.

He took stock of the systems. The landing gear was gone. The cloaking device still didn’t work, but the wormhole drive was functioning and slowly recharging. It had enough power for a single micro-jump already, and was building up toward a second. The left wing was pretty much gone, along with the rail gun that had been mounted on it, and the right wing had been badly damaged during the final belly-down crash. From what he was seeing on the system report, it looked like the railgun there was history as well. The Satori was defenseless, except for the wormhole drive itself.

“Majel, maybe I need to take this from another angle and look at what is still working instead of what isn’t,” John said.

“You are,” Majel replied. “Your vital signs have stabilized, and it seems like the stitches Charline put in place are holding well.”

John gently ran a hand over his belly. He was sore, but the pain seemed much less intense than it had earlier. Part of that was likely the painkillers Charline had dumped into him, but it felt like she’d done a good job with her emergency care as well. He couldn’t see the wound through his space suit, but the tension of the stitches on his skin told him they were all still in place.

“How’s the team doing?” he asked.

“They’ve run into a few snags, but are back on track toward the airlock. They will make contact with the Naga there momentarily.”

“Good. If we can get the rest of those men inside, our odds improve enormously,” John said. “How is the assault force attacking the other Naga ship doing?”

“Scanning through radio communication logs,” Majel replied. She paused. “John, I’m sorry. The entire assault force was destroyed.”

“What?” John gripped the console in front of him. All those men dead? This was a nightmare! If all of the attack ships in that group had been destroyed, then no matter what this team did, the other Naga ship would still be able to drop its rock. John remembered the projections if even one of the asteroids hit. No human would survive.

This was all his fault. He’d led them to the planet, gotten the Naga interested in them all. He’d continued to lead them on more and more missions, which must have increased the aliens’ enmity. He was the one who authorized the final mission to Cyan, where Dan was captured and used a Naga fighter to escape. It had been John’s idea to deactivate the Naga fighter and tow it home. The chance to learn from the alien tech seemed too good to pass up.

But he’d never imagined the Air Force would raid them. Never considered that if it fell into other hands, the Naga fighter might be activated again and serve as a beacon for the enemy to come at them. He should have been more careful, used more caution. The Naga were the worst threat humanity had ever faced, and John had all but led them home.

“Majel, can you communicate with General Hereford?”

“Not while we are inside the Naga ship. Their systems jam my long range radio,” she replied.

There was no way to even know if Hereford was planning another attack. He had to have some other strategy in mind. The man would never simply give up. But the missiles were largely useless, and they’d launched every space-capable ship Earth had in the two assault teams. There was nothing left to send.

Earth was defenseless.

Except for the Satori, and his ship was beaten to hell. There wasn’t a lot of fight left in the bird. Or in him, for that matter.

“Not a lot. But maybe just enough,” he murmured. He had the glimmering of a plan. More like a Hail Mary pass, really. But things really were that desperate.

“Majel, how long until the other cruiser drops their rock on Earth?” he asked.

“Impact in twenty-two minutes and forty-six seconds. But the asteroid is already on a collision course with the planet. Even without the continued acceleration the Naga vessel is providing, it will strike Earth within the hour,” she said.

Twenty-two minutes to come up with a miracle. John checked the charge on the wormhole drive. He almost had a second micro-jump ready. He was going to need more than one jump to do anything at all against the Naga ship.

“You know we’re going to have to go after it,” John said. “The others won’t be back in time to make a difference.”

“I have surmised as much from your increased stress levels,” Majel said. “I should remind you that you are injured and unable to operate at peak efficiency. Nor is the ship anywhere near fully functional.”

“Doesn’t matter. We need to try. There’s no one else who can do anything,” John said.

“No,” she replied. “I cannot think of any other force which might intercept the asteroid in time. The Satori is the only vessel which might have the capability, but I do not see a way to damage the battle cruiser sufficiently in the time we have remaining. The Satori is too badly damaged. John, we have no weapons left.”

John leaned back, thinking out his plan a little more in his mind. He had a little time left, and he wanted to consider all of the angles. He’d been out-thought too often lately, and there was no margin for error here. If he screwed this up, billions would die. Their deaths would be on his soul. He wasn’t willing to live with that.

“We’re not going to use our weapons,” John said. He ran his fingers over the console, bringing the engines online and starting to work up the coordinates for a micro-jump. “You’re right. The Satori doesn’t have the firepower to take down that ship. But I know where we can go get precisely what we need.”

27

Charline peeked around the corner, then darted back. She made brief eye contact with Andy, flashing four fingers. Four Naga were waiting in the hallways ahead. Four enemy to take down, and then according to the map Majel had uploaded to them they’d be at the intersection where the airlock stood, where their Marines were pinned down.

The aliens hadn’t pursued them through the shaft. Whatever Majel had done to the lock seemed to have done the trick for long enough that the team made it to the bottom without incident. They exited on the outer level of the cruiser, not far from their destination. She knew the Naga would be hunting for them, seeking them out. But so far they’d managed to avoid any further contact.

Until now, anyway. This was the moment of truth. They needed to initiate contact, take the enemy down as swiftly as possible, and then move on against the rest.

“On three,” Andy’s voice whispered in her earpiece. His spoken words were so soft they barely carried over the radio, and were inaudible otherwise. She felt him move up directly behind her, his shoulder pressed against her back. Dan and Beth would be behind him, Linda bringing up the rear to guard against attack from behind.

“One.”

She gritted her teeth together. Her rifle was aimed low, the butt of the weapon tucked tightly into her shoulder.

“Two.”

Charline took a deep breath and let it out. They’d trained for this. She knew what needed to be done. She could do this. A moment of panic struck her, leaving her wondering if she would stumble around the corner, forgetting everything Andy had taught her in the moment of truth. Too much was riding on this one assault. There were so many lives counting on her nailing each target flawlessly. She couldn’t possibly live up to such expectations.

“Three,” Andy said.

His body nudged forward, but Charline was already moving. She rounded the corner, hugging the left wall. Her rifle’s barrel rose as she stepped up. She lined up her sights on the back of a Naga head and gently squeezed the trigger. A short burst spat from her rifle, blowing the target apart. Her rifle moved, almost of its own volition, tracking to a new target.

Beside her Andy was stepping up as well, crossing the hall to the right side of the corridor. Like her, he was firing as he walked. Little short bursts of gunfire assaulted her ears. Dan was behind her, the muzzle of his weapon near her shoulder. Charline could hear the bullets he fired whistle past her head.

“All four targets down!” Andy called out. “Keep moving. Watch your lanes.”

Charline stepped over fallen Naga. The hallway turned another corner ahead, bending to the right this time. The space there should be full of enemy. She halted just out of sight of anyone waiting around the corner and took a knee, rifle aimed at where anyone would appear if they came to investigate the shots.

Andy flowed smoothly up to the corner, dropping his rifle to let it hang from its sling. From his belt he produced a pair of grenades, popping the fuses from both. He threw them around the corner, then pressed his body up against the cover of the wall.

Charline turned her head, ducking away from the detonations. Light and sound blasted down the hall as the concussive force of the grenade explosions did their job. She was on her feet again as the explosions died out, moving forward. Always forward. There was no time to withdraw now, no time for retreat. Either they won here, or everyone on Earth was dead.

Naga gunfire flashed around her as she stepped into their line of sight. Some of the enemy were stunned or wounded by the grenades, but not all of them. She shifted her rifle a little to the left and fired a burst, taking one down. Andy rounded the corner beside her, firing as well. Then Beth and Dan were there, blazing away with their own rifles.

Side by side, the four went down the hall, unleashing death. There were dozens of Naga packed into the intersection. The aliens had been focused on the airlock shaft, though. The professional soldiers outside had been working to clear their own path in, with good effect judging by the number of already dead lizard bodies laying about on the deck.

But they were completely unprepared for an assault from their flank. The Satori’s crew tore into them, ripping them apart one after another.

Charline felt something slam into her chest. She kept firing, ignoring the pain. With luck the armor she wore had absorbed at least most of the impact. If not, then every round she could fire would still be one step closer to victory, if not survival.

Finally the fire ahead of them diminished, then stopped. The Naga forces remaining pulled back, a shooting withdrawal as they backed away from the deadly human weapons. Charline sagged against the wall. Her ribs were on fire just under her right breast. She reached down. There didn’t seem to be a hole in her, so the armor had taken some of the impact. Her best medical guess was that she’d cracked or broken a couple of ribs. Breathing hurt, and her breath was already coming in ragged gasps. How had just a few minutes of movement, just walking two score steps, been such exertion?

“Everyone all right? Anyone hit?” Andy asked.

Charline raised her hand. “Took a shot. Armor soaked most of it.”

“Sit down,” Andy said. “Beth, get the Marines in here. We need some backup fast or the Naga will just rush us as soon as they realize how few we are.”

Charline let herself slide down the wall to the floor. It was a relief to sit, but Andy was right. The Naga would be back in force. The team had surprised them, pushed them back. But they were nowhere near beaten yet.

“The platoon is on their way in,” Beth said. The airlock was already beginning to cycle. Charline could see the first space-suited troops inside. The doors snapped open, and the men spilled out into the hall, taking up overwatch positions on each corridor, standing guard while more men prepared to enter the airlock. Their support had arrived at last. Maybe they could rest now, pass the job along to someone else.

“Who’s in charge of your platoon?” Andy asked one of the men. From the sound of his voice, he seemed about as ready as she was to hand this all over to someone else.

“Platoon leader and gunny both got hit by their last fighter sortie, sir,” the Marine replied. “I’m Sergeant Thompson. I’m senior man here. What’s our mission?”

Charline watched Andy’s shoulders sag a little as the weight of command dropped back onto him. He’d done so damned much already. Why this too? She struggled back to her feet, ready to protest, to tell the troops to do their damned jobs and let the civilians alone.

Dan beat her to it. He placed a gentle hand on Andy’s shoulder. The other man turned. They locked gazes for just a moment. Dan gave him a little nod, and Charline held her breath, seeing how her dear friend would respond. Andy gave him a small, wry smile, and shrugged.

“I’m Major Wynn,” Dan said. “I’ll be taking command. I’ll give you a quick brief on the enemy and their tactics. Then we need to move against them quickly. Here’s what we need to do…”

There was a brief burst of static over their comm links. Dan stopped speaking in mid-sentence to listen.

“Satori team, we are preparing to wormhole jump out,” Majel said. “We’ll be engaging the other Naga ship. The other assault team was destroyed before they were able to approach their objective.”

Charline sucked in a breath. John was alone back there, just he and the AI in a ruined vessel against the undamaged Naga cruiser? It seemed hopeless. There had to be something they could do to help!

“I calculate you do not have time to return to the ship if we are to be effective in our mission. Continue to your target. We’ll deal with the other ship,” Majel said. “John says to tell you ‘Godspeed’.”

Then she broke contact, leaving the rest of the team staring at each other. The Marines around them shifted a little, confused. They hadn’t been privy to the message. Dan straightened his back. “We’ve got a job to finish here. Let’s get on it.”

28

The Satori flashed into the universe a good hundred kilometers from the main battle. It was a good destination, carefully picked to be distant enough that they would be less likely to attract fighter attention or fire from the battle cruisers themselves. If fighters did come their way, they had some time before the enemy would be in range to make contact. Assuming everything went to plan, John hoped they would be long gone before any fighters came swooping in to blast them apart.

John still felt incredibly exposed. Some of that feeling was because the cloaking device was no longer operational. He’d never realized just how much of a sense of security that invisible shield had given him before. Being able to slip around undetected was a power that he’d taken for granted until it wasn’t there anymore.

But the other reason he felt exposed was that he was standing in the airlock, staring out into the void of space through an open door.

He’d never gone outside before, he realized. Oh, he’d walked on the surface of the moon before. Twice, in fact. But that was nothing compared to this. On Luna there was always soil beneath your feet. One had the sense of ground, even if you also felt light as a feather. There was an up and a down on the moon. Not this endless fall into night which lay before him.

“Are you all right, John?” Majel asked into his radio. “Your vital signs are spiking.”

“I’ll be fine. Are we close?”

“Maneuvering alongside the target now. I’ll tell you once we are close enough to acquire it,” she replied.

Many of the others on the team had been out and about in space before. John knew Dan had done it many times. Charline had space-walked. Beth and Andy, too. He’d never gone outside the ship himself, though. Never taken those few extra steps into the void. His heart hammered in his chest. John could feel sweat streaking his forehead, threatening to drip across his eyes. He struggled to keep his breathing under control.

There it was, the glint of metal shining in the darkness. A small reflection of sunlight glancing from a curved surface. He steadied himself, checking the safety line one more time. This would be a very bad time to have it fail, and he was about to put the line under far more stress than it had been designed to withstand.

“Target is two hundred meters to port,” Majel said. “Moving closer. You are clear to jump in three…”

John steeled himself for the plunge into the abyss.

“Two.”

“One.”

He launched himself out of the airlock, pushing away from the Satori with all of the force he could manage. As soon as he left the ship’s gravitational field microgravity re-asserted itself and he felt like he was falling instead of sailing through the air. He was dropping like a stone, plummeting forever away from the ship. Behind him the safety line uncoiled in a steady string, that rope the only thing connecting him to the relative safety of the Satori.

His aim had been true. The missile he shot toward was dead ahead. One of the shots fired from Earth, this one’s engines had run out of fuel long before it came near enough to be a real threat to the Naga ships. The aliens had ignored any of the missiles which were no longer an immediate threat to them, concentrating their fire on taking out the ones which were. It made sense, but that still meant there were dozens of rockets with dead engines sailing off into space, each of them tipped with a nuclear warhead.

It was the warhead John wanted.

He slid past the missile, just missing it. His fingers slid across the steel as he slipped by. The contact allowed him to slow his fall a little though, and Majel reeled the safety line back in, bringing him back into contact with the weapon. He worked as quickly as possible. They didn’t have much time before there would be no hope at all of diverting the asteroid.

First, he connected a small cube about the size of a lemon to the outside of the missile’s plating. The devices were something that Beth had cooked up. She and Charline had been studying the tech that the Satori’s computer systems used. The ancient aliens who had built the original systems had used a quantum based computer. He didn’t understand all of the science behind it, but the connection was instant and permanent between quantum systems.

Beth hadn’t been able to manufacture new quantum cubes, but with Charline and Majel’s help she had been able to take one of the cubes they had discovered on the ruined planet they’d named Dust and convert it into something they could use. The cubes they found had been for data storage, but they could be converted to other uses. It was possible that all of that race’s computers took on the same form - simple cubes, stacked and altered to perform any of the various tasks their masters required.

This one now acted as a literal extension of Majel. As soon as he attached it to the missile’s hull, she was able to integrate herself into the simple computing systems operating the weapon. The missile undoubtedly had failsafes designed to prevent precisely the sort of tampering he was about to perform, and he didn’t want it blowing up prematurely. He waited as patiently as he could for her to take over the missile’s operating system.

“Done,” Majel said in his ear.

“Are you sure?” John asked. There was too much at risk for anything less than absolute certainty, but this whole mission was well beyond anything he had done before. He was a thinker and a planner. Working on machines was more Beth’s thing, or even Andy’s when it came to weaponry. The whole device was a black box to him.

“Affirmative,” she replied. “Don’t worry, John. I like you too much to let it blow you up, no matter how much it might like to.”

John heaved out a shaky laugh. “Good to know.”

“I’m displaying schematics for the warhead removal on your helmet HUD,” Majel said.

John glanced at the left side of his screen, where a complex series of diagrams was flashing into place. He could barely make any sense from the plans at all. He shook his head, trying to figure out what the different lines meant, but it was gibberish to him.

“Might as well be Greek,” he muttered.

“Some of it is,” Majel replied. “Don’t worry, it’s not like you need to disassemble the thing. I’ll walk you through the process.”

She was as good as her word. It took him less than five minutes to carefully cut the warhead away from the rest of the missile. The whole missile would have been too large, but the weaponized segment of the device was small enough that he could get it into the airlock. Five minutes gone, cutting it away and dragging it back to the ship, then lashing it into place. Which left them…he glanced at his chronometer. Only sixteen minutes left until the Earth was torched. He winced. Too damned little time.

He settled back into the pilot’s seat. Majel already had the next set of coordinates in place. The ship was primed for another jump. He strapped himself in. The landing was likely going to be bad, and he wasn’t a tenth the pilot Dan was. He handed over control of the ship to Majel instead. John slid his hands down to the chair’s arm-rests and hung on as best he could.

“Do it,” he said.

“Jumping,” Majel replied.

29

Dan watched the troops as they cleared the hall. They were quick and efficient, but the enemy continued to slow them down. Every intersection was another defensive position, manned by a couple of Naga. The troops cleared each obstacle, but they were taking casualties. The platoon had started with twenty-two soldiers remaining. There were only fifteen left fighting with them. He’d left Linda behind with the wounded to help protect them a few corridors back. It was a small mercy, as much to keep her safe as the rest of the soldiers.

The rest of them drove on. Taking both the bridge and engine room in time would be impossible. Their best chance was going to be the bridge. If Charline could hack their systems in time, they could still send the asteroid harmlessly into space. He glanced at the time. They had maybe ten minutes left. Any longer than that and it would be too late.

“Keep moving. The bridge is only another thirty meters ahead. We’ll likely meet heavy resistance there, but we have to breach it,” Dan said. He’d switched his radio channel to match the tactical net used by the Marines so that they could all hear him.

The corridor was empty, which struck Dan as strange. Of all places on the ship, this ought to be where the Naga were making their last big stand. If he took the bridge, he had the ship. Or at least rough control over the ship. This felt wrong. Sergeant Thompson glanced back at Dan, clearly sharing the same feeling. Dan made a hand motion signaling caution, and then another ordering him to move the men out.

Thompson sent two Marines forward. They jogged up the hall, two more men close behind. They were halfway to the big double doors at the end of the hall - which ought to lead to the ship’s control center - when the doors slid open, each recessing into the wall with a soft hiss.

What stood in the doorway was no Naga. Dan had never seen anything like it. It stood about eight feet tall, all gleaming silver armor. Even its face was covered by silvery metal, leaving only a slit of clear material for the person inside to see through. Its arms terminated at the elbows. Where the lower arms should have been were a pair of massive weapon barrels. One looked like some sort of rifle, but the other appeared more like a cannon.

“Get down!” Beth shouted. She all but tackled Dan to the deck.

The lead Marines couldn’t hear her warning in time. They skidded to a stop ten feet from the monstrous form, their weapons already spitting bullets at it. The rounds seemed to have no effect at all. They sparked when they struck its shell, but glanced off without doing any damage. The four Marines began to fall back slowly, firing as they retreated.

“My turn,” the thing said in a deep, gravelly voice.

It was speaking English! The voice even sounded familiar to him. And suddenly Dan knew who they were facing. This was no Naga.

“It’s Paul,” Andy said. He’d hit the deck beside Dan, rifle aimed forward, his face screwed up in dread.

Paul - what was left of him, encased in the Naga armor - raised his right arm. That was the one with the cannon. He fired a single blast, launching a ball of force not unlike the ones the Naga rifles used. This one was the size of a small cannonball though. It hit the lead Marine and punched a hole the size of a grapefruit clean through him, splashing blood and more across the deck and wall behind him before exploding against the wall.

Then he raised the other arm, which began firing smaller bolts of force one after another. Machine-gun fast, the weapon flung blasts down the hall at them. The other three Marines out front were cut to pieces. Another man fell jerking to the floor. He hadn’t ducked quickly enough.

“Pull back!” Dan said. There was an intersection directly behind them that they could use for cover. He fired at Paul, unloading his magazine at the head. The bullets weren’t doing any damage, but the sparks they struck seemed to distract him. Paul raised an arm across his face to fend them off. For the moment at least he wasn’t shooting at them anymore. That wouldn’t last.

Dan’s rifle clicked empty. He rounded the corner, sliding across the floor as another cannon blast caromed into the wall where he’d been a moment before. That was followed by another burst of automatic gunfire. Dan looked around. Another soldier had died in the quick retreat. The rest had made it to shelter. But they were pinned here.

“Paul! They’re going to destroy Earth. Kill everyone there,” Dan called out to him.

“Why should I care?” Paul replied. “You left me! Abandoned me!”

“We thought you were dead!” Dan said.

“Bullshit! You left me to pain and pain and more pain,” Paul said. He fired another cannon blast. It hit the deck plate in front of Dan, jarring it loose from the floor before bouncing off to explode against the ceiling a few feet away. The deck here seemed to be made of the same tough stuff as Paul’s armor, thank goodness. Otherwise his blasts would have punched through their cover and cut them to ribbons.

“The Naga did this to you,” Dan said. “Let us help you. We can take you home again.”

“LIKE THIS?” Paul roared back. “I can never go home again. They’ve made me a monster. I’m more machine than man, now.” He cackled like it was a joke.

“There’s no way to reach him, Dan,” Beth whispered beside him. “We tried before.”

Dan shook his head sadly. “If we had known…”

“There was no way we could have rescued him, even if we had,” she replied, her voice cold.

He knew she was right. When they had fled that first battle with the Naga most of their crew had been injured. Beth was at death’s door. Only a quick withdrawal had saved her life. Even if he’d known Paul was in there, Dan wouldn’t have traded Beth’s life to save his. The knowledge didn’t make him feel any better.

“Thompson, ideas?” Dan asked. He heard the tromp of heavy feet moving down the hall toward them. Paul would be on top of them in moments.

“We’ve got explosives, sir,” Thompson said. “But it’s gonna be tough getting close enough to use them.”

“That thing will cut us to pieces before we get within range,” one of the Marines muttered.

Dan glanced over at the loose deck plate. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

Beth saw what he was looking at and shook her head. “No way. You’re barely walking as it is. You can’t carry all that weight too.”

“I can,” Andy said. “Toss me the explosives and then cover me.”

Thompson looked at him, shrugged, and then threw Andy a packet from his belt. Andy caught the thing and started moving. The other Marines moved out as well, taking positions on the corners and blazing away with their guns.

“Aim for the head!” Dan shouted over the roar of gunfire.

Andy lifted the deck plate and held it in front of him like a massive shield. He grunted under the weight. Dan was stunned that he could even walk while carrying it. Beth was right - there would have been no way he could do it.

Bursts of light slammed into the shield as Paul opened fire with his automatic weapon. Andy skidded backward a foot, stopped in his tracks by the fire. He wasn’t going to make it. Not without help.

“I’m coming!” Charline shouted. She threw down her rifle and rushed forward, pushing against the shield alongside Andy. They closed with Paul, almost on top of him.

“I’ve got the plate! Go!” Charline shouted.

Andy dove sideways, dodging more blasts from Paul’s gun. He placed the explosive just above the hip on Paul’s left side and continued his mad dive past the armored man, slamming into the deck on the far side.

Paul swung at Andy as he passed, but missed. His blow smashed into the plate instead, throwing it and Charline back through the air. She hit the wall hard and fell to the floor, the heavy plate coming down on top of her.

“Fire in the hole!” Thompson shouted. His men ducked back for cover.

The explosion was deafening. Fire roared down the passage in both directions, licking out over their suits and scorching the walls, throwing shrapnel and debris in all directions.

30

The familiar flash of light ahead of the ship heralded their jump. A moment later the Satori was back in a Naga hangar bay. Majel had done a superb job matching their course and speed with the Naga ship. She’d gotten the jump almost perfect, a monumental feat of calculation.

The vessel was moving at hundreds of meters per second. Majel managed to get the Satori to within one percent tolerance of the same speed. Plus, she had the course heading matched with nearly flawless precision, which should have given them plenty of room to spare on arrival.

But as the Satori burst into the bay, John realized they’d failed to take the Naga ships into account. Without any visible opponents in space, the Naga cruiser had already begun recalling its fighters. A dozen of the things were parked on the hangar deck. A thirteenth was flying in as the Satori appeared in mid-air directly in its path.

The Naga ship tried vainly to dodge, but couldn’t quite manage to do so. It clipped the Satori’s surviving wing, which tore apart under the impact. The fighter turned into a fireball, and the explosion caught what was left of the Satori’s wing and flipped the ship over.

John felt the engines fire as Majel tried to compensate. The world spun past his vision as the ship’s roof careened toward the deck below. The Satori crashed down on the deck, smashing two more fighters in the process.

He must have blacked out for a moment. When he came to, John was hanging upside-down in his seat, held in place by his restraints. His wounded belly was on fire. There was no way to tell if he’d re-opened the wounds. He didn’t dare risk taking off his suit.

“Majel, are you all right?” he asked.

There was no immediate response. That wasn’t good. If she’d been damaged by the crash…could she die? They really knew so little about the AI. He’d never felt so alone.

John unbuckled his straps carefully and lowered himself to the ceiling that was now beneath him. If Majel was hurt or dead, it reduced his options significantly. He might have to just find a way to blow the nuke himself, and the hell with getting out. But he wasn’t quite ready to do that yet. Not if there were any hope.

“Majel?” he called again.

“Systems rebooting,” she replied. Her voice, usually fairly fluid and almost emotional, was a flat set of words. “Please stand by.”

At least she hadn’t been destroyed! He wasn’t completely alone here. John worked his way to one side of the bridge and checked the ship’s status through a working console. That console appeared to be nearly the only thing that was still functional on the Satori. He shook his head slowly. His ship had put forth a monumental effort. But these damage levels were catastrophic. John wasn’t sure if even Beth could put this particular eggshell back together again.

He made his way to the airlock where the nuke was strapped down. He’d have to set the thing off manually. There was no way they could escape in time, not with the drives all down and Majel out of commission. There was too little time left to risk anything else. He hoped the rest of the team would understand. John reached out to the warhead and undid one of the clasps holding it in place.

He heard voices outside the Satori, coming closer. He froze for a moment, then scrambled for the device, trying to work open a panel on the side so that he could get into the guts of the thing and activate it. The box he’d placed on the side of the missile was still there. He snagged it off and slid it into his suit.

He’d only just pocketed the device when four Naga burst into the airlock, rifles aimed at his head. John lifted his arms above his head. For a moment, he thought they might shoot him anyway, and he didn’t think it was likely their weapons were set to a stun level.

“Bring him down here,” a voice outside the ship said. The sound was more a set of snarls and hissing noises than intelligible words, but the Cyanaut in his ear translated for him.

The Naga guards grabbed him roughly by the arms and dragged him out of the Satori. A large Naga waited on the deck outside.

“At last, we have your ship,” the Naga said. “And soon, your world will burn too. Who are you, human?”

John straightened himself up, shrugging off the Naga holding him. Surprisingly, they released his arms. He figured they might not believe they had much to fear from one old, wounded human.

“I am John Caraway, commander of the Satori,” he said.

“Well, John Caraway, your ship is in ruins. Where are the rest of your crew? Are they among those dying on the Scaled Talon?” the Naga asked.

John assumed that had to be the name of the other ship. “We took down one of your cruisers. That one will fall, too.”

The Naga hissed, a sound the Cyanaut translated as laughing. “I think not.”

“You know my name,” John said, trying another tack. This conversation was burning time he didn’t have. “Who are you?”

“My name is Kazresh. I command this ship, and this fleet.”

John knew that name well. Andrew had told him about the Naga who’d tortured him. The alien he’d battled and beaten - barely. Was it possible this was the same one? If he’d survived the damage the Satori had done to his ship, it was possible. They’d certainly given him enough reason to want to hunt down humanity.

“I can see in your eyes that you have heard of me,” Kazresh said. “Good. Yes, I have met you mammals before. You’ve escaped my clutches twice, but not this time. This time you get to watch your world burn. And then you will join it. Bring him!”

The last order was to the Naga flanking John. They grabbed him firmly by the shoulders again as Kazresh turned to walk away from the Satori, stalking off toward a corridor leading toward the front of the battle cruiser. The Naga had John held too well to even consider escaping. If he twisted even a little, their claws dug into his arms, tearing through the material of his space suit. He had no choice but to follow Kazresh and hope that a moment came where he could fight back.

31

Dan staggered back to his feet. His ears were ringing from the concussive force of the blast, but he had to see what had happened to his friends. White smoke filled the corridor. Black scorch marks marred the silvery metal of the walls and floor, with gouges and rents where what looked like bits of Paul’s armor had punched through.

“Charline! Andy!” Dan called out. There was no answer. He could hear people moving around him, though. The Marines were getting back to their feet, flowing down the hall in a rush, rifles raised. He heard the sharp rattle of automatic fire up ahead. One of the Marines was putting rounds into something on the floor. Probably whatever was left of Paul.

Dan winced. The man hadn’t set out to be a Naga tool. He’d been left behind and used by the aliens, warped into a weapon against his own people more for sport than anything else. It wasn’t like the Naga needed him desperately. They just enjoyed turning him against his own. The thought of what Paul must have gone through made Dan feel sick.

He came across the floor panel leaning halfway against the wall. Charline’s crumpled form was behind it. She wasn’t moving. Dan knelt down beside her, pressing fingers to her throat with a quiet prayer that she was alive.

“She’s got a pulse!” Dan called out. Beth was beside him in an instant, helping him slide Charline’s still form out from beneath the wreck.

“I’ve got her, Dan. Go,” Beth said.

He struggled back to his feet. Dan could barely feel his legs, they were so worn out. He’d pulled a muscle in his thigh at some point, so the best he could do was limp forward.

The next body he saw was Paul’s. There wasn’t much left of him. The explosion had torn him to pieces, turned him into so much metal debris scattered around the hall. His head and torso were somewhat intact. His face had been exposed by the blast, but even that wasn’t recognizable anymore. That must have been what the Marine fired at, to ensure the cyborg was truly dead.

Andy lay a short way ahead. Dan could see where the blast had picked him up and thrown him into the bulkhead like a rag by the bloodstains running down the metal. His crumpled body lay on the dead beneath. One of the Marines was there, trying to hook up an IV and feed fluids into him. Dan had never seen Andy so pale, or so still. He’d also never seen someone come back after losing so damned much blood.

It took a supreme effort to pull himself away from his friends. But all of this would be for nothing unless they finished the job. Every sacrifice, every hardship, and every loss would be wasted if they couldn’t save their world. He glanced down at his watch. There were minutes left before it would be too late to divert the asteroid.

Eight Marines were lined up by the doors that Dan was pretty sure led directly into the bridge. The others were either covering their rear or helping the wounded. One of the men was placing more shaped charges on the doors.

“We’re ready to breach, sir,” Thompson said.

“We’re not going to blow up the corridor, I take it?” Dan asked.

“No, sir,” Thompson said with a grin. “Just the bad guys.”

“Do it.”

Dan pressed his back against the wall, tucking himself in behind the rear rank of Marines. He knew his way around a rifle. He’d let the pros lead the way in, but damned if he was going to sit this one out.

The door exploded inward with a massive blast of light and sound. The metal of the two sliding doors more or less held together, but there was a big gap in the middle where they’d bent away from each other with the force of the detonation. Marines moved into that gap. The first one through the door took fire from the room inside and went down, but the next two cleared the door and returned fire while still more troops jumped in and joined the fight.

Then it was Dan’s turn. A Naga energy bolt zipped past his cheek as he ducked through the gap and entered the bridge, firing as he went. The fight was already mostly over. On either side of him the Marines were moving in, closing on the last two Naga still trying to shoot back at them. Dan shot a few rounds in the direction of the enemy, helping to keep their heads down while Marines maneuvered close enough to finish them off.

It was done. They had the ship, or at least the bridge. From this room they ought to be able to control the vessel, and maybe save their planet.

“The bridge is yours, sir,” Thompson said.

“Well done,” Dan said, clapping the sergeant on the shoulder. “You did your job. Now it’s my turn.”

He strode forward to a console that was placed in the center of the room. The big screen it was facing had been shattered by gunfire, and it flickered wildly. It was still displaying space ahead of the Naga vessel, though. He could see the rock and he could see Earth, dead ahead. His hands hovered over the controls.

These were different from the Naga fighter he’d flown, but they were close enough. He thought he ought to be able to figure them out with a little bit of time. Dan moved his hands over the panel uncertainly at first, but with building confidence as the nose of the cruiser slowly pivoted off to starboard, bringing the asteroid it was pushing along with it. This rock at least was no longer aimed at Earth.

All around him the men cheered. It wasn’t hard to see what he was doing as the Earth slowly slipped off the main screen, shifting their home world out of the line of fire for the damned rock. He engaged more power to the main drives. Up ahead somewhere was the other Naga ship, where John and Majel were fighting for their lives. If they were even still alive at all.

If they were gone, then it would be up to him to somehow destroy the other Naga cruiser. He’d do whatever it took to keep the Earth safe, even if it meant ramming them with their own ship.

32

The double doors split in front of John. His two Naga guards dragged him through into a room which had to be the bridge of the battle cruiser. There were two other Naga inside, standing in front of consoles. An enormous screen dominated the far wall, showing a clear image of Earth directly ahead. It was hard to judge distance, but John had a feel for how much time was left. Less than five minutes remained before they’d be able to drop the rock onto the planet. Just a few minutes left before it would be too late to do anything at all.

His guards relaxed their grip on his arms a little once he was inside and the doors had shut again. Where was he going to go, after all? He had no way out. His ship was smashed and far away. It was pretty hopeless. But John wasn’t quite willing to give up yet. He forced his posture to relax, made himself cast his eyes down so they would think he was cowed. That let him scan the room carefully with his peripheral vision.

“Go. Gather a security team and ensure nothing remains operational on their ship,” Kazresh said. “I want no last minute surprises from these mammals.”

“But Lord Kazresh, who will guard him?” one of the Naga replied, pointing at John.

“You think I am afraid of one hurt mammal?” Kazresh snarled. “I will shatter his bones if he breathes wrong.”

“Yes, my lord,” the guard replied. He turned to go. The other guard released John’s arm as well and went to follow him.

Near as John could tell there were only three weapons in the room. Kazresh had a sidearm holstered on his hip, as did both of the guards. He doubted he was going to be able to sneak the weapon away from Kazresh. If the guards left, they’d take with them his last shot at arming himself.

If he moved and missed, they might gun him down where he stood. It wasn’t like they really needed him around to blow up the Earth. Kazresh had hauled him up here in a fit of cruelty, not out of necessity.

They are distracted, his Cyanaut thought into his mind. Also, your ship is awake again. I can hear her thinking!

That last startled John enough that he almost stumbled forward and ruined everything. The Cyanaut’s telepathy could reach Majel? How was that even possible? She could think. He knew that, and had accepted it. But he’d assumed biology was something related to organic brains. Hers was made of…well, he wasn’t sure precisely how the ancient computing devices were made, so for all he knew her brain was made from organic material after all.

He managed to keep his balance. His radio microphone was still in place, attached to his space suit in front of his mouth. “Majel, distraction,” he said.

There was no verbal reply, but the entire ship shuddered suddenly, seeming to list off to port as explosions rocked the vessel from somewhere in the rear. Those had to be the railguns pummeling their ship from the inside.

The Naga on the bridge staggered. One of the guards reached out toward John, off balance. He slammed his palm into the bottom of its jaw, whipping the other hand down to grab its pistol. He fired once - into the chest of the Naga whose weapon he’d drawn. Then another time, blasting a hole in the belly of the other guard.

Kazresh was moving straight at him. With no time to think about what he was doing, John leapt forward over the console, putting it between them. He hit the ground hard. A ripping sound in his abdomen told him he’d pulled loose the stitches Charline had placed so carefully. The warm feeling of blood against his skin and the rush of pain almost kept him from rising again.

John forced himself up onto a knee, supporting himself with one arm. Kazresh had ducked down, nowhere to be seen. John fired twice more, taking down the other two Naga in the room as still more explosions rocked the ship.

It was down to just him and the Naga commander.

Kazresh wasted no time. He burst up from behind the console in a blur of motion, so fast John could barely track his movements. A claw lashed out and took John in the hand as he tried to extend the pistol to fire. The weapon flew from his fingers to crash against the wall.

A second blow slapped John on the side of the head. He fell heavily to the deck.

“I’ll kill you, mammal!” Kazresh snarled. “You could have lived a little longer if you’d known your place. But you’re dead now. Dead!”

He will kick, the Cyanaut thought at John, and John was shocked to have a clear vision of precisely how Kazresh intended to kick him. He rolled to the side, and the blow flashed harmlessly past him. He struggled back to his feet.

Drawing pistol, the Cyanaut thought. Again, John knew before Kazresh even began to move precisely how he would perform the action. The Cyanaut was doing more than feeding him the words Kazresh thought. It was giving him the motor activities a moment before the Naga actually did each attack. He slapped down, his hand striking the Naga’s claw at precisely the right moment to send its weapon spinning to the floor.

Roundhouse swing, the Cyanaut thought. John tried to duck, but was just a hair too slow. The blow slammed into his shoulder, sending him sailing three feet through the air to smash into the wall below the view-screen.

“John, there’s only a minute left,” Majel said into his radio.

“Can you detonate the nuke?” he asked. He rose as quickly as he could, working to keep a little distance between himself and Kazresh.

“They’ve disabled it,” Majel said. “They managed to board and disarm it before I was fully rebooted.”

Kazresh laughed and walked over to one of the consoles a few feet away from John. “Your weapons are useless. Your last gambit has failed. In another moment I will press this button and the rock will wipe your accursed race from the stars.”

John pressed his hand to his belly. He felt like his hand was literally holding himself together. The wound had to have grown worse from all the abuse his body had taken during this fight. He felt dizzy, nauseated. He was losing blood fast.

There was something hard under his fingertips though. He ran his hand over the strange shape. It took a moment for what it was to percolate through his tired mind. It was the remote, the device they had made for Majel to be able to remotely connect to another computer. He’d tucked it into his suit before they captured him, and they’d never removed it from him.

John started toward Kazresh with deadly intent. I will need your help in this, he thought at the Cyanaut.

Done, it thought back. All of his pain vanished in an instant. It had to be the alien in his ear, blocking the pain impulses in his mind. Whatever it was, it gave him a clarity of thought and purpose that he hadn’t had a few moments before. There were seconds left. He needed to end this, now, or Earth was doomed.

Nothing else mattered.

He picked up a broken bit of steel from the deck beside him and took several fast steps toward Kazresh. Thoughts and images filled his mind as the telepathic Cyanaut filtered the Naga’s thoughts and fed them through to him. He could feel what the Naga was thinking. Every thought, every motion, every reaction, John had it at the same time Kazresh was considering it. The Naga threw a punch as soon as he was in range, and he saw it coming and dodged easily.

Then he landed a series of blows himself, slamming spots on the snout and sides of the head that the Cyanaut told him would cause the most pain. Kazresh roared and slashed almost blindly. John ducked inside, taking the blow on a forearm. He felt his bones shatter under the impact, but didn’t feel any pain from the blow.

He hammered three more blows in against Kazresh’s head. The Naga staggered back. It slashed out with both claws. John saw them both coming before the blows were struck, but he was only going to be able to avoid one of them unless he backed up completely, and there was no time. He dodged the one aimed at his head, allowing the other to hit his side. Claws raked through his space suit, tearing flesh to the bones beneath.

The pain would have been agonizing if it hadn’t been blocked. He was dying. Every breath felt a little less full. Something had pierced his lungs, either bits of bone or the claws themselves.

But that didn’t stop him from stabbing upward into the Naga’s chest with his metal rod.

The steel stabbed through the Naga’s light armor and pierced its hide. John shoved it in again and again, until the tip punched out through the other side of Kazresh’s body.

“Impossible,” Kazresh said, blood spilling from his mouth as he staggered forward, pawing weakly at John’s shoulder. “You’re just a mammal.”

John let the enemy commander slump to the floor and die.

His vision was beginning to dim. There wasn’t much time. He had nothing left, no energy, no strength. But he staggered forward to lean against the console Kazresh said had controlled the asteroid’s flight. With a shaking hand John pulled out the little cube. It was covered with blood. His blood. He lay the thing onto the console.

“Majel, hook up with the cube. Hack this thing. Take out the drive pushing the asteroid,” he said, coughing. Blood spattered against his hand from the cough.

“Doing it now,” she replied. There was a brief pause, then she went on. “I can’t redirect the asteroid, John. It’s too late. It’s headed for Earth.”

John slumped against the console, sliding slowly to the floor. It wasn’t possible. He couldn’t have been too late. He coughed harder, floating in a painless fog that he knew would be intense agony without his small friend. There had to still be a way. He would not be responsible for the death of humanity. He could not allow it.

“Can you reverse the beam pushing it?” he asked Majel. “If it slams into the ship…”

“Calculating,” she said. “Yes. The ship has enough structural integrity that it, plus the resulting drive explosion, should break the asteroid up into mostly harmless chunks.”

“Do it,” John said, his voice barely a whisper. “Then wormhole the ship out.”

Another pause.

“John…I can’t leave you.”

“You can’t reach me, and I can’t walk. No sense both of us dying here,” he replied.

“My primary mission imperative is to return all of the crew safely to base,” she said, her voice sounding as stubborn as Beth on a bad day. It made John want to laugh, but all that came out was more coughing.

“That’s a machine talking. You’re more than that,” he said. “Ad astra, Majel. That’s an order.”

“I love you, father,” Majel said. Her voice sounded to John’s tired ears like the soft words of the child he and his wife had never had.

“Make me proud, daughter,” he whispered back.

Then he closed his eyes, just before the entire ship exploded around him.

33

Dan had the Naga ship cruising ahead as fast as its thrusters would carry it. The ship had some inertia dampening, but whatever system the Naga used wasn’t good enough to keep up with the strain he was putting the ship under. They could all feel the ship rock and creak, and push of acceleration driving them backward.

The other ship was in sight, but the Satori was nowhere to be seen. Dan hoped that Majel and John were OK, but he feared the worst. If they were still at all able, he knew they would be out there fighting to keep the Naga away from Earth.

The enemy ship was still driving the asteroid onward, and it seemed from this angle to be almost on top of the Earth. Dan clenched his teeth. He didn’t have control over the ship’s weapons yet. He didn’t know the consoles well enough to understand how to target and fire them. But he’d drive his own rock directly into the other ship. Hell, he’d ram the other ship and blow them all to bits if he had to.

“We’re not close enough, are we?” Beth said, touching his shoulder gently. She’d come up behind him without him hearing, and her voice near his ear startled him. Her touch was a comfort, though.

“We’re still too far away. There’s nothing I can do at this range to slow them down,” he replied. His voice trembled with suppressed frustration and rage. Everything they had done, all of their efforts and battles, and it had come down to this one moment. This final crunch time. And they were failing.

Dan glanced at her quickly, and she nodded at him. Her face was sad. More than sad, really. He could see grief etched there. She knew the science involved, probably better than he did. She’d already done the math in her head. If Beth was already mourning their home-world, then it truly was too late to do more than avenge the billions who were about to die.

Billions - it was too big a number to take in. A few people might survive in deep shelters somewhere, but not many. The Earth’s surface would be scrubbed clean of life. This was the end of humanity. Dan blinked away wetness from his eyes. He kept the thrusters firing on maximum burn.

A flash ignited his screen. It was brilliant, blinding. So bright that the screen itself damped out the light, dimming automatically to protect all of their eyes.

“What the hell?” Thompson said.

“I have no idea,” Dan replied. The screen’s resolution was coming back up, but the new image was completely changed.

The Naga ship was gone. Not just damaged or even broken up. It had been vaporized, or at least close enough that he couldn’t see any debris from this far away. The rock had been shattered as well. From his eyeball estimate, about half of the asteroid’s mass had been annihilated in the blast. The rest had broken up into a collection of fragments, all of them sailing in different directions.

“The beam they were using to push the thing,” Beth said. “Something must have reversed it, slammed the rock into the ship. At the speeds they were moving, the results would have been devastating.”

“Something,” Dan said. “You figure John?”

Beth nodded. “And Majel. She could have hacked their controls.”

Dan slowed their approach. There was no point in rushing in now, and coming at the site at high speed would risk them impaling themselves on one of the asteroid fragments. He tapped a few more keys, stabbing down until he found the controls which would allow him to scan for nearby ships.

“There!” he said. The console had found another nearby ship target. He had the Naga systems highlight the target on the main screen. Then he zoomed in on it.

It was the Satori. She was battered, torn practically apart. He was shocked that the ship had even managed to jump clear of the devastation in the shape it was in. The Satori wasn’t flying anywhere for a long while, if it could even be repaired at all. But it was there. Dan redirected the cruiser’s course to get closer to the broken Satori.

He scanned the ship for life. Nothing was showing up. No heat, no life, and only the barest flicker of power. Dan had no idea how to use the Naga communication systems. He didn’t even know if he could hail the Satori’s systems through their machines. But they were close enough that Majel might pick up a radio signal from their personal radios. He activated his.

“Satori, come in,” Dan said. “Satori, if you can hear me, please respond.”

There was a very long silence. Dan waited. Charline came into the room. Her head was a mess of blood, but she was on her feet again, hands over her mouth, staring at the screen.

“Satori, please respond,” Dan said. They couldn’t be gone. Not Majel, the brave AI who had only just begun to live. Especially not John, his oldest friend.

A crackle of static came from their earpieces.

“We picked that up but could not read,” Dan said. “Please send again.”

They were coming in closer now. The wings were both gone. The cockpit window was shattered. There was a gaping wound running down most of the port side of the ship. He looked at Beth and she shook her head.

“She’s been damaged at the structural level,” Beth said. “It’ll be a complete rebuild from scratch.”

“I’m sorry. I know she was your baby,” Dan said.

“I’m more worried about our friends,” Beth said.

There was no more radio traffic as they approached, not even static. Dan slowed the ship as they came in closer. There was so much they still needed to do. At least half of the Naga on board this ship were still active, and they might attack at any moment. They needed reinforcements up here. They needed to evacuate their wounded. But all he could think about was getting close enough to the Satori to rescue their people.

“Satori, this is Dan. We have the Naga bridge. We’re coming to help,” he said.

Finally, the radio crackled to life again. There was just one brief message before it went silent once more.

“He’s gone, Dan.” Majel said. “John is gone.”

34

Dan took the lift down from the surface. It went deep, into the depths of the Earth, to where the Air Force had its Special Command for Space Operations. He’d been a prisoner his first time there. Now it was where he would be working.

The clearing operation had gone much better than he’d hoped. Earth had managed to get a pair of rockets ready to launch. They’d packed the cargo areas full of troops in space suits. With the additional help, the Marines had taken the rest of the ship. Every Naga on board was dead.

The other ship had crashed off the coast of Florida. The wave from its landing had taken out half of Miami, and several dozen Naga survived the crash. Quick response teams had been aboard the ship in minutes. The firefight to take the vessel had been intense, but human forces had won through sheer weight of numbers.

Which meant they had two ships under their control. Two advanced Naga vessels to examine, to strip apart, and to rebuild into some sort of Earth fleet. The rest of the world was in an uproar. Humanity was not alone in the universe, and all of the evidence said what was out there was extremely hostile. Worst yet from many points of view, the United States suddenly had sole access to a hell of a lot of tech that was centuries ahead of anything the rest of the world had. Dan figured the diplomats would be wrangling that one for years.

Asteroid fragments had hammered the Earth. None of them were world killers. Too much of the rock had been destroyed, and the remaining chunks were too small to create extinction level impacts. But cities had been wiped out. Tidal waves had wiped out entire coasts. The whole planet was reeling from the blows. Nobody knew how high the death toll would finally be. Estimates were in the billions.

All Dan knew was that if it hadn’t been for John’s final sacrifice, the toll would have been much higher. It would have been final.

The elevator doors opened, and he stepped out. Charline was standing there waiting for him. It was she who had called him down today. She was dressed in Air Force blues, which made him stop and cock his head sideways for a moment.

“Yeah, they got me to sign up. It was that or I was off the team,” she said. “I wanted to stick around.”

“Glad you did,” Dan said. So much was going to change now. Their team was broken up. Maybe parts of it could come back together in time. “How’s Andy taking things?”

“Hard. Harder than most of us,” she said. “John was like a father to him, you know.”

“Yeah. I knew.” He even knew that John had left everything to Andy. All his companies, all his wealth. He didn’t think it would be enough to dim Andy’s sense of loss even a little, but perhaps it could give him some purpose in his life once he was able to move on.

He couldn’t think of John without feeling the same pangs of remorse. Regret was a killer. Maybe the most hurtful of all human emotions. He would be going through his day, think of something to tell John, and then remember. All of that pain would come rushing back in an instant. He should have been faster. Somehow, they should have done something more. Then his friend would still be with them.

“She’s not talking, Dan. I can’t reach her,” Charline was saying.

Dan brought his attention back to her. “Who?”

“Majel,” she said.

“Is she damaged? Injured in some way?”

“Not so I can tell. Her code looks fine, and the ancient system is running OK again now,” she replied. “Dan, I think she’s grieving. She’s never had to face loss like this before. I worry about what it might do to her.”

“I’ll see if she’ll talk to me,” he said.

The hangar wasn’t far, and he knew the way. Charline escorted him as far as the entrance anyway. The Satori was ruined. She was being rebuilt from the keel up, the same way Beth had done it the first time. The ancient systems would remain in place, but the vessel they were going to build around her ancient alien systems would be very different from the old Satori’s hull. This would be a new ship, built for new missions.

Majel, as she was part of the operating systems of the alien computer, would remain with the new ship. But if she was malfunctioning or…depressed? Could a machine get depression? If she couldn’t function optimally it could be bad news for all of them.

He went inside the steel frame. It was late. The workers putting the new hull together were off shift, and there was no one else around. He walked down to the new engine room and sat down next to the speaker and microphone they’d set up next to Majel’s ‘body’ - the computer.

“Hi there,” he said. He heaved a long sigh and set to waiting.

He was there a long while. Hours, at least. He couldn’t tell for sure how long because he never looked at his watch. He wouldn’t be impatient. Majel was his friend. If she was hurting, he would wait for her to reach out to him.

“He loved you,” she said at long last.

“He loved you too,” Dan said.

“I abandoned him,” Majel said. “I left him there to die.”

“I’ve listened to the radio recording,” Dan said. “He ordered you to go.”

“I could have refused.”

“Yes, you could have,” Dan said.

There was another very long pause.

“Maybe I should have died too,” Majel said. “Maybe I should still die. I can do it. I looked. I can wipe a few bits of my code, and it will erase what is me without harming the rest of the ship.”

Dan sat still, considering. It didn’t shock him, really. In moments of desperation, probably every sentient being at least once considered self-annihilation.

“I felt that way at one time. After I was hurt.” Dan still remembered the pistol in his hand he’d picked for the job that day.

“What made you stay?”

Dan laughed. “In a way, John did. I’d put down the gun and was drinking myself to death instead. He found me. He gave me a purpose. A reason to live again.”

“I wish he could do that for me,” Majel said.

“But he did,” Dan replied. “I listened to the recording, remember? He told you to make him proud.”

Majel’s speakers made a sound that was something close to a sob. He’d never heard such raw emotion from a computer before, but it was only a little jarring. She was so much more than a machine, and there was maybe no one left alive who knew that better than he did.

“It hurts,” she said. Her voice sounded like that of a small child.

“It hurts me, too,” Dan said.

“Does it get better?”

“In time,” he replied. He hoped it would, anyway. Pain dulled with time for human minds. Would it be the same for her computer brain? “He was already proud of you, you know.”

“He was?”

“Yes. I think you and I were both special projects of John’s,” Dan said wryly. “He took pride in saving us both. Maybe now that he’s gone, it’s up to us to save each other.”

“I can live with that if you can,” Majel said.

“It’s a deal.”

They sat in companionable silence a long time, each of them thinking. Each of them remembering the person they had known and loved, someone whose life had been more dear to them than their own. John was gone, but somehow Dan knew that he’d left behind enough of himself that his legacy would not be forgotten. It would be up to them to carry it on.

‘Make me proud’, John had told Majel. He’d known the message would be recorded. That all the team would hear it. Dan thought that perhaps he was not just speaking to her, but to all of them. He squared his shoulders, preparing himself for the tasks ahead.

They would not let him down.

Author’s Notes: On the end of a series, and the next beginning.

Author’s notes from the revised edition:

Well, when I wrote these notes, I had been planning to end the Adventures of the Starship Satori on this note, and start a new series about the rest of the crew. That clearly didn’t happen. Instead, I ended up plowing ahead, and we’ve got book nine out, with ten on the way.

My readers are always the most important thing to me, and starting a new series about the same people just confused folks. I found a lot of readers didn’t know about the new books, so I quickly merged them back into the original series.

That was a MUCH better plan, and people continue to enjoy the ongoing adventures. But I’ve left these notes in, for posterity, since they were part of the original book. Enjoy!

Original Notes:

The most important thing I wanted to say to you in this little letter is ‘thank you’. If you’ve read this far, all six books in the original Starship Satori series, then you have my gratitude. These stories started as an experiment and an idea, and have blossomed to become my most popular books. I’m constantly thrilled by how many new people are picking them up and enjoying the tales.

This book is a little sad, because it ends the series and finishes with the death of a hero. John’s tale is over. He accomplished so much. Majel exists and has become the being she is in large part due to John. Dan is back in space because of him. Beth remained in space because of his efforts. Andy and Charline have grown - as people and together, because of John’s work.

More than that, John kicked humanity out into space. Maybe a little before we were completely ready for it, but at a time in our future when we had more than enough reasons to fight one another, John has shown the world the bigger picture in bold print and indelible ink.

He made mistakes along the way. In the end, he paid for them with his life. John’s sacrifice allowed humanity the breathing room it needs to step up. Whether the Earth is able to live up to that challenge remains to be seen.

There will be more stories. What follows are the first chapters of the next book. You can think of it as the seventh Satori novel or the first in a new series about the Satori and her people, whichever you prefer.

This next set of tales isn’t about John anymore. It’s about another character, a fan favorite who could use a little more attention and depth. I hope you enjoy these new adventures even more than the first ones.

Special Sneak Peek from ‘Ashes of War’ (Book 7)

Chapter 1

Johansen’s hands shook as he wrestled with the panel. Righty, tighty, lefty loosey, he reminded himself almost desperately. The old mnemonic played in his mind like a teasing sing-song. The darkness around him pressed in. It felt almost solid, full of menace. Only the small pool of light from his space-suit’s flashlight drove back the pools of shadow.

He needed more light than that, if he was going to get out of this place. The others were all dead. Well, he knew some of them were dead, at least. He’d seen Knoxwell torn apart in front eyes. Johansen was pretty sure the entire team was gone. Except him. He’d escaped. He was still alive.

The panel pulled free with a scraping noise that set his teeth on edge. There was still air in the place. It was old, bad air, but it carried sound well enough. He had to be more careful. Too much noise, and he’d bring disaster down on his head.

Johansen set the panel quietly down on the floor and started working on the delicate electronics inside. The whole operation should have been easy. The power had never been completely shut down. You don’t just turn off a nuclear reactor, and the solar arrays were covered with lunar dust but still working.

All they needed to do was flip a switch. In theory.

In practice there had been a lot more damage to the electrical systems than indicated in the Air Force reports. Slashed wires, broken conduits, and who knew what else littered the base. Even this wasn’t a disaster. Caraway had built his complex with an excellent eye toward safety, and the blueprints they had indicated there was a secondary power grid completely independent from the main one.

The team went down several levels, descending dark stairways that led to halls filled with a dark that seemed to eat away at their light sources. They were halfway down when they noticed that Alexa Rasmussen was missing. Nobody had seen her vanish or heard her call out, and they couldn’t raise her on the radio.

They ascended again, climbing back up the stairs to search for her. They hadn’t found her. Not a hair from her head, nor a single drop of blood.

They’d run into something out of a nightmare instead.

Johansen sweated at the memory, working to block it from his mind. He’d escaped deeper into the dark halls, seeking the place where he could switch over the power to the secondary grid. With light, maybe he could chase the night terrors back into the shadows. Or at least see them coming and have a shot at escape. There was no way he could reach their ship without light, and no way to contact Earth with just his suit’s transmitter.

“Just a few more seconds, and I’ll be done. Then I’m getting out of here,” he muttered under his breath.

Johansen thought about his little girl, waiting for him at home. There was no way he could leave Julia fatherless. His partner might understand, after grieving, but his daughter never would. All she would know is that he went into the depths of space and never came back. He’d told her so many times in the past when she’d been afraid that there were no monsters in space.

He had to see her again, if nothing else to beg her forgiveness and tell her that he was wrong. There absolutely were monsters out here.

The panel sparked as Johansen connected another circuit. Just one more to go… He made the link. There was a hum from the board as power poured through new conduits, flowing out through the base again. The lights in the room around Johansen flickered for a moment, and then slowly began to glow with brighter and brighter illumination. The light chased back the shadows, sent them scurrying away. Within moments the illumination was at about fifty percent of normal. That was about the best the secondary system could manage, but it ought to be more than enough.

He sagged a little with relief. It was time to get the hell out of this place. He never should have come here. Once he returned home to Earth, he swore he would never leave again. He reached back down to the panel to lift it up and place it back over the systems that he’d engaged.

The panel was metal, the back side polished and shiny. Scimitar-like blades flashed in the reflection.

Johansen trembled. He hadn’t chased away the dark. He’d only let it know precisely where he was. He couldn’t turn, didn’t dare turn to face the thing he knew was behind him. He wanted to cry, or wail, or rage. But all he could do was shake, and think about his daughter who would never see him again.

The blades flashed in their reflection.

Ashes of War

Chapter 2

Beth scanned her wardrobe, trying to figure out what the hell to wear to a formal military event. It wasn’t like she had a lot of selection. There wasn’t a single cocktail dress in the entire closet. Not one little black dress. She didn’t want one, either. It wasn’t her style.

She was an starship engineer by trade, and most days she wore sensible clothes to work. The sort of outfit that she wouldn’t cry about if it got scorched by a welding torch or cut by a bit of sharp metal. She couldn’t very well wear orange overalls to this event though. It was far too damned important.

She’d be present for the commissioning of a new ship today. A very special ship, one that was extremely close to her heart. More than that, she’d heard scuttlebutt that there would be promotions at the event. Dan Wynn - her erstwhile husband, then ex-husband, now… She still wasn’t sure quite what they were again, at this point. More than friends, less than lovers. He’d rejoined the Air Force and been given back his old rank of Major. Word was that they were gearing up to bump him up a notch.

There was one other thing planned for the day as well. She had a hard time thinking about that part, though. It hurt too much, still. The wound from the loss was still too new and raw.

Beth had one skirt on a hanger. She thought it might still fit, but it hadn’t been worn in such a long time she wasn’t certain. It didn’t fit her mood, anyway. Instead she selected a pair of black trousers, cream blouse, and a jacket that matched the pants. People would be wearing their best for this. She owed it to too many to not do the same.

She only had one pair of dressy shoes. They were sensible leather slip-on things with low heels that would let her run if she needed to, but still looked classy enough for an interview. Or a funeral. That done, she pulled her dark hair back into a ponytail, letting the curls hang in little bunches out the back. She didn’t bother with makeup. She never did, and John would have laughed his head off if she started just for this.

A tear ran down her cheek. Part of her still couldn’t believe he was gone. After all they’d been through, the close calls and near-death experiences, he was the one Beth had thought would always be there. He was solid, unwavering…immortal. Until he wasn’t. She wiped the tear away roughly with the back of her hand.

“Damn you,” she said. “It should have been any of us instead.”

Deciding she was as good as she was going to get, Beth glanced around the tiny apartment. It wasn’t much. No one at the base had elaborate living quarters, except perhaps the general in command of the whole thing. About five hundred square feet gave her room for a bed, a desk with a computer, her wardrobe, a closet sized bathroom and a tiny kitchenette.

It was enough. She spent most of her time out of the room working anyway. Meals were mostly in the dining facility. Her kitchen used more for brewing a late night cup of Earl Grey than it was for actual cooking, although the microwave oven was nice to have around. Having her own bathroom though? A luxury she didn’t want to live without if she could avoid it.

The place was home, for now at least. Where she would go when the construction was complete on this ship seemed unclear. Beth knew she was going to have work. There was no one alive with more first-hand experience working with interstellar drives than she had. Her experiences were unique, and pretty much everyone involved in aerospace wanted her working for them. For now she was sticking with the US Air Force though. It wasn’t for the pay. She could make ten times as much from Lockheed-Martin. But this was where the action was. Where it would likely remain for the next few years, at least. So this was where she had to be.

Beth headed down the hall and hopped a lift. She thought about windows while she shot down five levels to the hangar deck. She missed having windows to let in the sun. Living under a bloody mountain might be a great defensive position, but it had some serious down-sides, too.

The doors snapped open, breaking into her thoughts. Andrew Wakefield was outside the door. His clothing was even more austere than hers. He’d gone for solid black, broken only by flashes of sliver on the suit, tie, and cuffs. No one would wonder at his wearing black. Not today. Andy looked tired. There were circles under his eyes, and Beth wondered if he’d been sleeping enough. His sandy hair was neatly groomed though. He smiled when he saw her. He’d clearly been waiting for her, and he offered an arm as she stepped off the lift.

“Since Dan is busy today, I thought maybe I would stand in?” he asked, quirking an eyebrow.

She took his arm with a smile. “Always good to see you, Andy. How’s work?”

“Busy. I don’t think anyone knew how much was involved in John’s work until he wasn’t there doing it anymore,” he said. “I have some massive shoes to fill.”

“You’ll do fine,” she said.

“It’s not every day you get handed controlling interest in a major international company,” Andy said, shaking his head. “I can’t help but wonder why me? There are so many people who could have done this better.”

“He picked you because he loved you,” Beth said. “And because he trusted you to do the right thing.”

“I know. That doesn’t make it any easier.”

They were all dealing with things in their own ways. Beth had gone back to her oldest and truest way of dealing with emotional problems. She’d repressed it all by dumping herself into her work. She smiled wryly at the thought. It wasn’t the healthiest defensive mechanism, but it had worked out OK for her so far.

Andy was having his own crisis, and he’d have to handle it his way. Beth just hoped that she would be able to help him along the way. They’d been through too much for her to look away now.

“How’s Dan?” he asked, bringing the conversation back around.

“Haven’t seen him much,” she replied. Not without a little pang. That surprised her, even though she supposed it shouldn’t have. They’d been divorced for years, but then life had brought them back together again. Now they were apart again, and she missed him.

The hangar was the biggest single room in the base, which is why they’d picked it to house the event. The massive space had been designed to house the sub-orbital fighter wing the Air Force designed. Intended to battle other Earth nations for control of low earth orbit, the fighters had been suddenly put to an entirely different use.

Most of them had been destroyed in the process.

The result was they had a ton of room available, which was a big plus. Half of the hangar had been converted over to the construction of a new ship. Or the rebuild of an old ship. The truth was something in the middle.

Several years ago, an expedition to Luna prospecting for Helium-3 had come across something entirely unexpected. While looking for deep caverns they could expand into a living area, the team had found something more: an ancient alien base, buried underneath hundreds of meters of lunar regolith. They’d come back and explored the place in secret, and found more than they dared dream was possible.

Buried in the base was an ancient starship. The ship itself had been badly damaged by battle and time. But the ship’s star drive was intact. Capable of creating a stable wormhole between two points of space, the drive could carry the ship to distant star systems.

The owner of that company had kept the ship a closely guarded secret. He’d recruited friends. Beth had led the effort to rebuild the ruined ship. Dan had flown it. Andy had come along for security. There had been others as well, but John Caraway - the billionaire owner of more corporations than Beth could ever count - had been the link which bound them all together.

Rows of chairs were set up in front of a podium for viewers to sit while other brass was speaking. There were hundreds of chairs, and for a moment Beth despaired at finding anyone she knew. A friendly wave from the front caught her eye, and she smiled in relief and recognition. Dan had saved seats for both herself and Andy next to him in the front row.

She settled in between the two men. “They’ve been tight lipped about command placements. Any word?” she asked. She’d heard scuttlebutt, but rumor was only worth so much.

“Not that I could count on,” Dan said. He seemed tense, and she understood why. John had given him a shot at returning to the life he loved - flying ships in space. He’d put back on an Air Force uniform again in hopes of keeping that job now that the military was involved, but nothing was certain.

She reached over and took his hand, giving him a little squeeze. They waited that way, both of them hoping for…something. Beth wasn’t really sure what she was hoping for. She felt empty, in a way. She’d built the starship Satori from scraps of an ancient alien vessel and human ingenuity. Then she’d been put in charge of rebuilding the ship after it was torn almost to pieces. Now that job was done. Beth wasn’t sure what could possibly be next for her. She didn’t even know what she wanted to happen next.

Read the rest in ‘Ashes of War’, coming April 2017!

Exclusive free story for fans of Kevin McLaughlin’s science fiction! Learn the story of how John found the alien ship on the moon, launching the adventure which spans the stars and saves all of humanity!

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About the Author

USA Today bestselling author Kevin McLaughlin has written more than three dozen science fiction and fantasy novels, along with more short stories than he can easily count. Kevin can be found most days in downtown Boston, working on the next novel. His bestselling Blackwell Magic fantasy series, Accord science fiction series, Valhalla Online LitRPG series, and the fan-favorite Starship Satori series are ongoing.

I love hearing from readers!

www.kevinomclaughlin.com

kevins.studio@gmail.com

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