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

firewall protocols to block the hack. Nothing was working. It was blowing through 128-bit encryption like it wasn't even there. That shouldn't be possible without one hell of a supercomputer. Who would put something like that on a satellite?
    Someone who had computers way better than humanity did, maybe. Someone for whom that sort of data processing was insignificant. "Shit! Why aren't we moving?"
    "I've lost drive controls," Dan said. His voice sounded grim. "And look, there goes the cloaking device. No wormhole control either. Railguns...ditto. We're dead in the water out here."
    "Majel, can you stop them?" Charline asked.
    "The ship's systems are being attacked by a highly sophisticated artificial intelligence," Majel said. "While it has yet to identify my presence, when it does it will likely seek out my program and delete it."
    "Shit," Charline said. "Majel, how much of your program is actually still in the human built computers?"
    It was a question she'd been meaning to ask for quite a while now. There was something about how Majel had acted back on the station that had struck her as odd. The little delays in processing implied that it was using wireless settings way more than it should have had to. When she linked up Majel to the alien systems, it had been a desperate move. She had no way of knowing what that might do to Majel's programming, and she'd observed more than her share of strange happenings since.
    "Less than two percent, Charline."
    "Thought so," Charline said. "Majel, how long to download those elements to the alien system?"
    "About zero point two seconds," Majel said.
    "Do it," Charline said, rising from her seat and heading toward the engine room.
    "Done," Majel replied before she had left her seat.
    "Show-off," Charline said, grinning.
    She rushed to the back of the ship, leaving Dan to struggle with the controls. He yelled something at her as she ran back, but she didn't have time to respond. Every second might count. The alien AI was hacking her human computers right now, but they were hard-wired into the alien systems they'd built into the Satori, legacy systems left over from the ancient starship John found on the moon. Nobody knew precisely how they worked, but while they were connected with the hard line to the oh-so-hackable human computers, Majel remained vulnerable.
    The simple solution? Unplug the damned things. That wasn't quite as easily said as done.
    There was one vulnerable point in the line, where it came up out of the deck plates and plugged in to the side of the alien mechanism. That machine controlled the wormhole drive, the cloaking device, the artificial gravity, the main engines... And probably other things Charline didn't know about. Beth would strangle her for this, but there wasn't any other way.
    She yanked open Beth's toolbox and rooted around inside for a pair of bolt cutters. Grabbing the things, she brought the blades around the thick cable - and cut.
    Charline had closed her eyes, half expecting something to happen. Explosions, maybe a big shocking jolt, the loss of gravity - she'd certainly expected something to occur. What she wasn't expecting was nothing. She opened her eyes again. Everything around her seemed precisely as it had a moment before.
    "Majel?" she said, hesitant and hoping.
    There was no reply. Whether that was because Majel was locked away inside the alien systems, safety cut off from the attack or because she'd been too late and Majel was already deleted she couldn't tell. Charline set the cutters down, hoping she'd been in time. Majel might be their best chance at getting out of this mess, but only if she was still intact.
    She walked slowly back to the bridge. Dan was still fidgeting with his controls, trying to make something work, but she could already tell that it was useless. All of the screens around the cockpit area had bright blue screens. They were trashed.
    "Where did you go?" Dan asked.
    "Engines. To save Majel."
    "Well, whatever you did