Adventures of the Starship Satori 4: No Plan Survives Contact Read Online Free

said. “Are you in range to connect remotely yet?”
    “I’ll check,” Charline replied, leaning forward into her console and typing some commands.
    They continued to slide slowly toward it, drifting ever closer. Dan decreased their relative velocity until the Satori was holding her distance at a mile away.
    “We need to get closer,” Charline said. “It’s not picking up my signals. Dan, I might have to interface with the thing directly.”
    “By directly, you mean physically plug in a cord?” he asked. He tried to keep the heat from his voice, but this wasn’t part of the plan. How did she expect him to get them in that close without being blown to bits? “You want me to dock with the Naga satellite?”
    “Pretty much, yeah,” she said. She held up a cable with an unusual looking adapter at the end of it. “The Naga rifles we recovered have a port that fits this. I extrapolated the connection from there. I’m hoping I can use this to plug into some system on their satellite.”
    “Why can’t you just contact it remotely?” Dan asked.
    “I have. I don’t have the right protocols, and I can’t break their encryption. The computer over there,” she said, pointing at the satellite, “is asking me to board and make a direct connection.”
    “It’s asking you to board.”
    “Safety feature,” she said. “To ensure we’re not some non-Naga race trying to hack the thing with a fly-by.”
    “Which of course is precisely what we’re doing.”
    “Yup. But if I can get in there with a wired link, I might be able to work some magic.”
    Dan sighed. This was getting much more risky and complicated than he’d been figuring the already risky and complicated operation was going to be. He backed the Satori away from the satellite, getting them a few extra miles of clearance, and then pinged the surface crew.
    “John, we’ve got a situation up here,” Dan said into the radio.
    “What’s up?” John replied, immediately alert.
    Dan filled him in quickly, with Charline outlining the technical end of things. It wasn’t that Dan didn’t know how computers worked, but it was going to be Charline doing the connecting and she knew what she was talking about far better than he did.
    “You think you can do this?” John asked over the radio.
    Charline bit her lip. “I honestly figure our odds at about fifty-fifty.”
    Dan held his breath, waiting for the answer. He’d let John make the call on this, but it sounded way too risky for such a low probability of success.
    “Abort, then,” John said. He sounded disappointed, but firm.
    “But…” Charline started to say.
    “No,” John replied. “Our main objective is to get everyone home safe. We can make return trips another time, maybe after analyzing your scan data and being better prepared. Come back down to the surface.”
    A beeping noise attracted Dan’s attention back to the console. That was odd; it was a proximity alarm. He glanced at the radar and saw that the satellite was a hell of a lot closer than it had been before. It was accelerating toward them.
    “Shit, I think it’s tracking our radio signal,” Dan said. “We’re going radio silent, John. Satori out.”
    He shut down the radio completely, hoping it wasn’t already too late.

6
    C harline looked down as her console beeped. A string of characters appeared on the screen, continuing to scroll in a steady stream. She tapped her keyboard, looking to interrupt the mess. Windows popped open in a series of flashes across her console, closing down almost as quickly.
    "Shit!" she said. "Dan, get us out of here. We're being hacked!"
    Whatever was over there - she had to assume this was coming from the satellite closing on them - it was doing a number on the computer. Literally eating each file as quickly as it scanned them. Read, delete; read delete. The process kept going and there seemed to be nothing she could do to stop it.
    Her fingers flashed over the keyboard, trying to throw up