Free Adventures of the Starship Satori 4: No Plan Survives Contact by Kevin McLaughlin Page B

as soon as its head came into view. Shrieking fury at this new assault the giant bug rushed forward, half crushing Andy as it passed over him to attack these new oppressors.

18
    T he lights flickered all around the small control cubicle, startling Charline. It was the first significant change in the lighting she’s seen since arriving, the first noticeable fluctuation of any sort in the smooth operations run on the consoles around her.
    “Dan, what’s going on over there?” she asked into her radio. There was no response. Which meant something was up. Either the station was doing something to the Satori and Dan was too busy to reply, or Dan was up to something over there to try to pull her fat out of the fire.
    Either way, it was in her best interest to try to help out as best she could. If she could make a little trouble inside here, maybe screw something up for the AI, then she might be able to distract it long enough for Dan to break the ship away.
    She glanced at her timer. In another five minutes none of this was going to matter anyway. The C-4 would go off, taking her out of the picture. As much as she wanted to live, dying was actually preferable to the Naga capturing her. Their ship was on its way to the station, and would link up about a minute after her bomb went off.
    In the meantime maybe she could make some mischief. She had a small toolset attached to the leg of her space suit. It had seemed prudent to bring something of the sort along. No telling if she’d have to bust her way in to something or strip some sort of machine apart. She took the kit out now and began working at some of the panels behind the console machines.
    The things weren’t really designed to come apart though, at least not with the tools she had. It wasn’t shocking that the Naga didn’t connect things together with phillips-head screws, but it was inconvenient. Charline wasn’t going to let that stop her, though.
    “There’s more than one way to open a bulkhead,” she muttered, breaking into the kit for a small torch.
    Charline brought the torch against the metal. The stuff barely heated up. With a stronger tool she might be able to burn through it, but not with this mini-torch. That didn't mean the rest of the surfaces in the control room were armored as well though. She applied the torch to one of the screens. That did gather the heat - pretty rapidly. After a few moments the screen melted in a small hole around where she was applying the flame. She shifted the flame, and soon there was a book-sized hole in the middle of the screen.
    Beyond wasn't the standard grid of electrical wires and circuits she was familiar with. Instead Charline saw row after row of small crystals, all set in long rows. Were they some sort of quantum computing system? Or was each of those crystals actually a component analogous to a CPU? It was hard to tell. There were a lot of them though - a couple dozen in this array alone.
    If she had all day she would have loved to sit and study the thing to figure out how it worked. She had about three minutes left though. It was time to move a little faster. Charline grabbed the metal plate that the crystals were attached to and yanked hard. It didn't budge, but she could see where it was connected. She applied the torch to one of those spots and the weld holding it in place weakened enough for her to pull the entire plate away.
    The empty space it left behind had nothing else inside.
    “Damn it!” she shouted.
    She’d been hoping that the system would be connected to something else, and that to something else again. That if she kept ripping long enough she could eventually tear out something vital. But this system didn't appear to be connected to anything else at all. That was impossible, of course. It had to be linked. The links just didn't have to include wires.
    Charline left the board behind and fetched the C-4 charges from the airlock. She might not be able to rip her way into the central systems, but