Read Online Adventures of the Starship Satori 4: No Plan Survives Contact by Kevin McLaughlin - Free Book Online Page A

should have.
    The Naga round took her in the center of her chest, knocking her onto her back. Her head hit the rock floor and she saw stars for a moment. Nausea hit her like a truck. This was it, then. She’d been shot again, and this time she wasn’t going to have a last minute save or medical nanites to pull her through.
    John was saying something to her, but she couldn’t hear him through her dizziness. She took a shaky breath to reply, her chest burning with pain. She let the air go and tried another breath. This one hurt less, not more. Beth looked down at her chest. Her uniform was scorched where the round had impacted, revealing the dragonscale armor they all wore beneath it. That was singed, but intact.
    “Oh thank you so much Andy I can’t tell you how grateful I am,” she managed to gasp out.
    “Glad it worked!” he yelled back between bursts of fire.
    “We’re in trouble,” she said.
    “Tell me something I don’t know,” John replied. “Are you OK?”
    He helped her sit back up again. Her head hurt more than her chest now, and even that pain was beginning to fade a little. She’d taken worse hits. Beth shook her head, trying to clear it. She had to tell them what she’d seen.
    “It’s worse than you know,” she said. “I don’t know how it’s even possible, but that thing out there, the one in power armor? It’s Paul.”

16
    D an was breathing hard , his pulse pounding in his ears. The reel of copper wire was outside the ship now, spinning away under the force it had picked up from the air venting out the hatch. Every second he clung there their last chance at getting away was drifting further.
    He couldn’t make himself let go. All the air was gone, the torrent of wind was over. But he still couldn’t get himself to unclench his fingers from the rail. Space hung out there, vast and unforgiving. What had he been thinking? There was no way he could go out there. This was pointless. He was a broken doll, cast aside by the real space agency and only picked up to chauffeur John around in the Satori because his friend wanted to give him something to do.
    “Dan, can you hear me?” Majel asked in his earpiece.
    He didn’t reply at first. His teeth were clenched too tightly together to answer. At least the only witness to his cowardice was a machine. No one else would know.
    “Dan, the Naga have reached the surface. They’re going after the landing party,” Majel said. Her voice was soft, and sounded almost gentle. “They’re going after Beth.”
    He froze. Majel was right. Beth was down there, and their team would be hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned by the Naga landing party. Her only hope was that he could get the ship down to rescue them in time. He knew what the Naga did with their prisoners. Andy told them all stories of how the Naga commander had fed Paul to a pit full of their young to be eaten alive, and then started in on torturing Andy himself.
    There was no way he would let that happen to Beth.
    Inside his head Dan was still screaming to himself that it was hopeless, that he was going to die if he went out there. That there was nothing he could do. With great deliberation he pushed those thoughts aside, battling them back. He released one hand from the rail. It was the hardest thing he had ever done.
    “I’m here, Majel,” he said. “I lost my grip on the reel during the decompression. Going to go after it now.”
    The wire was still hanging in space in front of him, the other end hooked up back in the engine room. He couldn’t just give it a tug though - it was unspooling as it went out, already a dozen meters away and still drifting further. All a tug would do was unspool more wire. He was going to have to go to the spool.
    He grabbed hold of the wire with his free hand. The only contact he had with the ship was the other hand on the rail. He didn’t want to let go. But everything depended on his being able to do this.
    “Damn it, I have scores of hours of EVA. This