Shadows of Mars (Broken Stars Book 1) I.O. Adler (read people like a book TXT) 📖

Carmen grabbed hold of the node. She didn’t have to do anything else. The encryption key didn’t require anything as mundane as a password. It was her, her mind, her being, something about her that Mom had set into place, which unlocked the harvester and handed the controls over.

She was in.

Now all she had to do was rescue her mom, save her sister, and get the Melded to surrender their claim to the harvester before she was discovered and executed.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Having one’s mind shoved into the virtual cockpit of a spaceship was like having a thousand television screens flickering on at once.

Jenna had called it overwhelming. The sensation was like drinking from a firehose. Scores of systems on a ship that could separate into a hundred independent vessels. Data feeds. Sensor inputs. Vaults of records that could take a lifetime to understand and process, from a ship which had been active for hundreds of years. Every selection on the virtual controls took a precious second to comprehend, as a daemon assisted with a rough translation that informed her of what each might do.

When she had logged into the ship the first time she had experienced a time disconnect. But now every moment counted. Even the smallest distraction might cost her minutes in real time, and at any second the Primary Executive would realize she had swiped the ship away before he could hack it.

The harvester continued to shadow the Cordice home ship. But a pair of spheres had detached. One followed so close it was almost touching the rear section of the home ship’s spine. The second one was larger and had done the heavy lifting. Or, in this case, the crashing. It remained lodged between the home ship and the Melded vessel.

How much damage had Jenna done?

Carmen wanted a better view. The trailing sphere obliged.

The Melded ship was a giant lumpy cigar box fixed with too many spokes and arrays, making it look like something made up of spare parts in a machine head’s garage. Her nephews had built neater spaceships with their knockoff Lego sets. Its front appeared to have suffered damage, as a small cloud of debris drifted from it. It still was connected to the Cordice home ship by a membrane attached to its front. The harvester’s gray sphere lay wedged against its bow. Frozen clouds of crystals floated off, no doubt vented air from the crash. The Cordice vessel had suffered as well, as the surface of a section of its spine was bent in and cracked.

She could withdraw the spheres and send the harvester off somewhere where she could find a way to shut off its data nodes to keep the Melded out. But it wouldn’t be enough to only deprive them of the ship. Her mom remained aboard their vessel. And Jenna…

She didn’t want to think about her sister. So much blood. Carmen focused on the ship and what she might do.

The crashed sphere was too big. How to utilize something the size of a freight train engine to perform a rescue?

The harvester instantly wanted her to understand how to better use the ship, but the detour for a crash course in gathering hydrogen for the reactor would take too long. She fought to stay focused and found what she needed inside the sphere.

What had Mom called it?

A spindlebot.

She didn’t hesitate. With a thought she was in the waiting machine.

The prickling heat across her “skin” made her want to gasp. But she didn’t have lungs or a mouth to cry out with, or skin for that matter, only sensors and displays and a speaker. This time she didn’t lose her balance as she asserted control. She focused on what the bot could feel and see and hear.

The interior of the sphere was perfect silence. No lights, but the spindlebot could see everything. The floor was solid beneath her and there was a slight pull downward as the ship moved and turned along with the Cordice vessel now that they were attached.

The home ship rotated vertically on its axis as its rings turned. But even without the benefit of the simulated gravity, her bot’s feet clung to the floor with magnetic attachments that caused each step to clack as if she were wearing tap shoes.

Her skin continued to itch. A phantom sensation, she knew, but couldn’t resist the need to touch her arms and shoulders as if to scratch a dry patch of skin.

She walked to the opposite side of the sphere. The hallway took a moment to depressurize. With a thought she opened an external hatch. The last remnants of atmosphere puffed out of the airlock.

The white hull of the Cordice home ship stood almost within reach.

She disconnected the magnetic seal on the spindlebot’s feet and lunged forward, her hands and feet touching the neighboring craft’s hull and fixing to it. Then she crawled. The bot’s programming helped her move as if this were an action she had done dozens of times before. She crept on all fours and kept her head low, sidling along like a metal spider as she navigated the bent and broken section of ship and headed towards the Melded spacecraft.

Her interface suggested three paths to access the Melded ship. One was the direct route, crawling to a point on the membrane where she felt confident she could tear through it and enter the Melded vessel’s forward airlock. She could also cross over the spine to another of the home ship’s airlocks, but that would take time. The third option was the fastest.

She could jump to the hull of the Melded ship and access an auxiliary hatch.

Mars’s smaller moon, Deimos, occupied the horizon beyond the intertwined wreck like a greenish-white river stone. Above her, below her, and to her sides was nothing but