Earth Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series 1) Read online

  “Bastard!” Jack screamed over the ship-to-ship link. “Why! Why attack us? Why kill—”

  “Shut up,” Destanu said coldly, turning to face Jack and Max even though the Uhuru sent no Pilot cabin image.

  “Jack?” moaned Max. “Is she, is she dead?”

  “They all are.” Wetness touched his eyes. His mouth soured and Jack felt like vomiting. But maybe, maybe, his last minute fix would work. If the air pressure sensor worked, if—

  Destanu opened its toothy mouth. “The Engagement is—”

  “Blammm!”

  The dome interior erupted in yellow flames and white gases. Each person’s suit was a ball of yellow flame and flying fragments. Including Monique’s. The dome-hatch juncture next to her body cracked open to vacuum. A high whistle came over the suit vidcam, then stopped. On the tilted vidcam image, red-and-black striped Aliens puffed up at the sudden loss of pressure. Red fluid erupted from eyes, mouth and hindquarters. The blood-spattered Rizen tottered, looked up as the dome roof crashed down in slow motion, then all disappeared as the vidcam melted from the thermal heat put out by the suit fuel cells. Leaving them with only the view from the Lander vidcam.

  Max punched his back. “You killed the Rizen! How?” The Engineer now floated immediately behind Jack’s seat.

  “Dead Man Switch,” he muttered, sick at heart, sick to his stomach with the after-image of dead Human and Alien bodies. “I set each suit’s fuel cell to spark and blow the hydrogen they usually use during electrolysis—whenever the suit lost pressure. Being near the airlock, the blasts from four suits were enough to crack the dome.”

  On the front screen, the red-and-black striped body of Destanu looked aside at some device, trembled suddenly, then it faced them. “So. The Engagement is not yet complete.”

  “Engagement!” Jack yelled, wishing he held a laser, a knife, a mortar launcher, anything with which to strike back for the deaths of his crewmates, his . . . his friends. “You said you were diplomats. You said—”

  “We lied.”

  Max sputtered more Polish curses. Coldness flooded over Jack’s skin. “Lied? Then, but—”

  “Enough.” Destanu waved a taloned foot-hand at them. “The Rules of Engagement have been observed. The new species has had the chance to assert its right of survival through personal combat. Your team failed, though I honor your treachery. What kind of explosives did you use in the suits? We detected no chemical charges.”

  Jack’s coldness seeped down to his feet. He barely felt Max’s hand on his shoulder. “So this was all a setup? You intended to kill us?”

  “Of course.” Destanu sighed. “You are so naive,” he said, his tone that of a Midlands country baron trying to explain the Hunt to red foxes. “The Rules of the Great Dark, the rules adhered to by all space-going cultures, are that we leave juvenile species alone, so long as they do not travel beyond their outermost planet. To waste Engagement challenge on immature ones is to stain the Rules. But you have now traveled beyond your outermost planet. So we invited Engagement. Tell me, will your species now surrender to Pod Victorius, of the Rizen? ”

  “Surrender?” howled Max. “Not on your fucking life!”

  Destanu nodded once. “Stupid. But expected. You need to understand the proper role of prey to predator. After we Rizen cull out a few hundred million, your species will be healthier—and your home planet less crowded.”

  “Why? Why!” Jack yelled. “Why treat new species this way?”

  Destanu paused. On screen, its red-and-black skin plates rippled like a snake moving toward its prey. “Why? In our language, the Rule says—Shna tok torn, shna opp sem!” Destanu looked aside as a second Rizen entered the room. “In your terms, only tigers travel star to star, never the sheep. Did you think the Rules of natural selection do not prevail in the Great Dark? That predators do not roam the Great Dark, hunting prey? They do. We do.” The Alien’s image blanked.

  “Son of a bitch!” growled Max.

  “Think!” Jack shouted. “Think! Weapons? Anything we can use for weapons? Max!”

  The free-floating Engineer wiped tears from his gray eyes, glanced once at the screen image of a red, yellow and black-striped spearhead-through-a-globe, then sighed. “No weapons. No real ones. Too far to toss survey charges at them. Too far to do anything—”

  “The maser!” Jack leaned over to Hortense’s companel, touched in new parameters, overrode a software caution, then slapped the transmit pad. “Belt in, Max! We’re gonna fry them with microwaves!”

  Max floated back and belted in at his Engineer seat. “Good idea, bad physics. Remember inverse square law? Even a coherent beam of microwaves loses power as the inverse square of the distance traveled. In short, you’re down to one fourth the beam power at double the initial distance. Ship’s reactor can’t power a maser beam across a hundred klicks and still cook ‘em.” He touched an armrest control. “Plus they’re diverging from us on a polar orbital track.”

  Jack cursed their very, very limited options. “Then we reduce the distance and change orbit. Engineer, I need full power on the Main Drive. How soon?”

  “Three minutes,” Max muttered, reaching up for the nuclear fusion pulse Drive controls as they lowered from the ceiling. “You really gonna flash-boil them with the maser?”

  “Nope.” Jack recalled something from the Belter Rebellion, a ploy used by his Grandpa Ephraim against a Unity freighter. “Something better. Judging by the gravitational lensing of the starfield that just happened when they changed orbit, they have a gravity-pull drive, maybe even an FTL stardrive. I want it!”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “That I am.” Jack paused to mourn the memory of Monique, Gail, Hortense and Hercule, decent crewmates even if blinded by wishful thinking and a social dogma out of tune with reality. Hortense he especially missed. “But I’m not stupid. Destanu said other Aliens traveled the Great Dark. The Rizen are just the first to knock on our front door. If we don’t take them out, others will come. Either we defeat this ship, take its drive, and then go on the offensive, or Humans will shortly be indentured serfs. And an easy protein source.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Max said, then the heavy rumble of the Main Drive vibed the ship. They moved forward and into an elliptical curve, chasing after the globe-and-spearhead ship as both headed for the north pole of QB1.

  “Believe it,” Jack said. “I don’t know what the trophic structure of intersteller space is, as in who eats whom, but we’re facing a classic case of Gause’s Competitive Exclusion Principle.”

  “Gause’s what?” Max growled as he built thrust up to one gee.

  “Something Hortie told me about when I talked with her.” As they chased after the Alien ship, the details of someone else’s discipline flooded into Jack’s mind. “In 1934, G. F. Gause concluded that two species so similar that they compete for the same limited resources cannot coexist in the same place.” He paused, remembering something else. “You know, the Rizen may be what the ecologists call a keystone predator.”

  “And that means what?” Max said distractedly as he monitored the feed rates of gaseous deuterium and helium-3 into the Drive module.

  A chill ran down Jack’s neck. “It means they think they’re top dog around here.”

  “Do they have ship-to-ship weapons?” Max said worriedly.

  “We’ll soon find out.” Jack relaxed into the weight of thrust gravity. “If we can get close enough, I’ve got one trick that may take them out.”

  In the half-darkness of the Pilot cabin, Max chuckled. “If your trick is anything like the exploding fuel cells, I’m looking forward to it.”

  “So am I,” Jack whispered. “So am I.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Destanu, Link of the Pod Victorious, appeared on Jack’s screen once the Uhuru came within 70 kilometers of the Rizen ship. “We outmaneuver you, Human. See?”

  On the screen, the starfield around the spearhead-and-globe spaceship blurred slightly. The ship went vertica
l, then curved out thirty degrees, keeping the same distance, but making Jack’s vector match an impossibility. Leastwise, at one gee thrust it was impossible to match something that bounced around like a bumblebee. “You scared?” he said over the open channel. “The Engagement is still active, so long as we live. Isn’t that the full Rule?”

  Destanu’s hide plates rippled. “So you’re not stupid. Just foolish. Yes, the Engagement is open until one side or the other surrenders, or all its members are eaten.” The Rizen tilted its blocky head to one side. “I prefer to eat you and your dark-skinned ally.”

  “But if we defeat you?” Jack said. “What do we win?”

  Destanu’s shark teeth chattered like ivory cymbals. “That will not happen. But if it did, your win means your species survives—until another Hunter of the Great Dark visits you. We are predators. You are meat, or you are our servants. Choose!”

  “Fuck you.” Jack switched off and looked back at Max. “I need something to keep Destanu from blip jumping away just when we get close enough for my trick.” He recalled Hortie’s doctoral research subject in evolutionary biology. “Hey, Max, think you can fiddle Hortie’s com station broadcast so the visual part of the signal transmits far-red light at 730 nanometers?”

  Max looked at him as if he was crazy. “Yeah. I guess. Why far-red and why that wavelength?”

  Jack watched as the Rizen ship widened its arc separation. “To make Destanu suddenly sleepy. By entraining, or resetting, his biological clock. The bastard said they evolved on a planet and under a sun just like Earth and Sol. The expert software on the ship’s NavTrack module says their internal ship-light is a close match for our spectrum and wavelengths. So maybe his circadian clock is photoperiodically controlled—like the internal clock of humans, animals and plants.”

  “What!” Max snorted with disbelief. “You’re really reaching, but I can overlay the far-red onto the vid signal. Hey—doesn’t it take a lot of time to reset biological clocks?”

  “It varies. Some plants bloom after a single exposure to the photoperiod required for flowering.” On screen, the Rizen ship kept just out of reach. “Hell, I’m betting their metabolism has enough phytochrome Pfr to respond to the far-red signal. And I’m betting that light is the reset cue, or zeitgeiber, for this animal predator. It usually is, on Earth.”

  “And if it isn’t?” Max said as he got up, walked heavily under thrust-gee over to Hortense’s com panel, and began modifying the AV signal.

  “Then we’re no worse off than now. It’s all a matter of timing.” He nearly choked at the bad pun he’d just committed. “Next time we vibechat with them, piggyback the far-red light spectrum onto the carrier wave and leave me to do the talking.” Jack looked back at his ally. “The fusion drive—can you narrow the exhaust flare’s cross-section? Make it hotter and longer?”

  Max nodded, sweat dripping from his forehead. “Yes. Using the exhaust magfields, but the modulation software will need new parameters.” He left the com station and headed back to his Drive seat. “It’ll take a few minutes, but it will give us a higher ISP impulse. We’ll speed up. Hey—maybe we can ram them?”

  “Not likely.” Jack ran over his Grandpa Ephraim’s trick in his mind, wondering if it would work against this ship, at this place. Then he realized Destanu was playing with them, like a matador with a bull. “Max, can you flip us tail to nose when I say so?”

  “Yeah, but we’ll continue spinning like a pinwheel.”

  “Fine by me.” Jack fed in new NavTrack numbers, forcing the Uhuru into a three gee turn toward the Rizen ship. “We’re 50 klicks out now. The drive flare—how rad-hot is it?”

  Max looked startled. “Crisp them? With the drive exhaust?”

  “Yeah.”

  The Engineer grinned. “Nice idea. But we’re low on neutrons and high on plasma gas that cools down to 30 Kelvin at 70 klicks. If we can get close enough, though . . . ”

  Jack nodded. “I’m trying.” On the screen, the local starfield blurred and the Rizen ship blip jumped again, increasing the arc separation once more.

  “So am I,” called Max, sounding breathless from the increased thrust. “I’m tightening the exhaust magfields. Whoa! This is gonna be one hot afterburner!”

  “Great.” Jack reset the NavTrack again, then smiled to himself. The fusion drive of the Uhuru mixed deuterium and helium-3 gas inside a Compact Fusion Reactor cylinder where a radiofrequency injector ionized the gas mixture to a fuse temp of 900 million degrees Fahrenheit. The Drive design was a variant of the old Lockheed-Martin high beta CFR scheme where superconducting magnets held the plasma within the reaction chamber. But in the Drive’s case, one end of the axisymmetric axis was non-reflecting. That end formed the exhaust funnel. Feed in some more gas and the whole mess fused into lithium-5, which instantly degraded to lithium-4, one proton, and a banshee flare that kicked out enough ISP for them to reach 20 percent lightspeed. It was a flare hot enough to melt any metal, with secondary rad-showers as the metal vaporized.

  “Jack!” called Max anxiously. “We’ve got to swerve sideways at the same time we flip over. Otherwise—”

  “Otherwise we miss them, since they’re to our side.” Jack smelled the sweat-stink of his armpits. “Remember to cut fuel feed as soon as the flare hits the Rizen ship, otherwise we’ll pinwheel into our own exhaust.”

  “Damn! I’ll set that up now.”

  Jack’s hair stood on end at that close call. “Looks like the Rizen have no ship-to-ship weapons.”

  “Or they consider it beneath their Rules to beam us.” Max’s own sweat odor filled the cabin.

  “You ready to overlay the far-red wavelength?” he called over his shoulder.

  “Ready.”

  “Good. Watch for my thumbs-up.” Jack locked in the scope’s image of the Rizen ship, then touched on the AV carrier signal. “Destanu, why don’t you stand still so my maser microwaves can fry your brains? Assuming you have any?”

  The Rizen appeared split-screen, with the ship on one side and Destanu on the other. “We have brains. Enough to avoid any effort to ram us.” Destanu motioned for its assistant to move back. The other Rizen did so, but its mouth hung open, flashing shark teeth at its intended prey. “And your maser is too weak to harm us, even close up. Last . . . chance. Feed us or . . . serve uuus.”

  Jack gave Max the hand signal for the nose-to-tail flip. “Feed you?” he said, noticing how Destanu had slurred his words. “We might give you indigestion.”

  On the front screen, Destanu and his sharky aide stood stock still, black eyes open, their hide plates rippling autonomically, but acting disoriented. As if their minds were elsewhere.

  Jack watched as the red, yellow and black-banded spearhead-in-globe drew closer. The NavTrack showed they would miss the Rizen ship by 40 kilometers, the earlier vector changes far too sharp for the Uhuru to match. But spinning head for tail was apparently not something done by the Rizen, or done recently. The ship did not blip jump even when Uhuru’s nose whirled sideways toward them, then dipped as the flip gained thruster speed. Nor did Destanu and his aide move.

  “Yeah!” yelled Max.

  On screen, the yellow wash of the Drive flare enveloped the Rizen ship’s nose, then the CCD scope sensors reached overload and the screen went black. Uhuru’s Main Drive shut off, putting them in freefall.

  Had they hit the occupied part of the ship? Had the plasma of the drive flare punched through Alien metal? Had the secondary shower of radiation that happened every time plasma hit metal added enough neutrons to the flare to make a lethal rad dosage for the Rizen crew-members on-board? Jack would know once the tail-to-nose flip brought the Pilot cabin back into line of sight of the Rizen ship . . . assuming the Alien hadn’t blimp-jumped, or launched a torp, or fired a gas laser or—

  “Slagged!” yelled Max in a hoarse voice. “They’re slagged! All the way back to the globe midbody! We did it!”

  “Yeah. We did.” Jack’s heart beat wildly. “Now all we have to do is w
ait for it to cool down.” The simplicity of his words did not match the churning of his empty gut.

  The front screen flared with a vid signal. A signal from the Rizen! What? Weren’t they dead?

  Destanu appeared in the static-blurred image, its body already red-welted from too much radiation. Behind it, the body of its aide lay half in and half out of the archway. Both of Destanu’s eyes showed the white of new cataracts. “The Rizen are meat. You, you—” The Alien collapsed from view, the screen image blanked out, and all that floated against the reddish ball of QB1 was a scorched ship whose front end had melted under the drive flare of the Uhuru.

  Max’s wild whooping peaked, then stopped suddenly. “Hey, you wanna go salvage that ship?”

  Jack bent over and dry-heaved. When he was done, he grasped the rough hand of his friend, and fellow survivor. “Yeah, we salvage. After all, we humans started out as scavengers, graduated to two-legged hyenas, and then forgot there might be a reason for all the wars we ever fought.”

  The Engineer stared at the ship on the screen, then nodded slowly. “I don’t think we’ll forget again.”

  “We better not,” Jack said, then altered the NavTrack for a rendezvous with the Rizen ship on the far side of QB1, where its orbit would intersect with their own ellipsis. “Wishful thinking has killed too many people, here and in the Belt.”

  “Amen,” muttered Max, then float-kicked back to his Drive controls, where he sat and worked to stop their tailspin. “Wish Monique had seen this,” the man said in a wistful voice.

  “Me too. I miss her. And our other crewmates.”

  Jack wasn’t religious, not like Hercule Arcy de Mamét the Jesuit, nor even like gruff and honest Max, who kept his holo block of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa stuck on the wall above his waterbed. But he was a descendant of the Belter Rebellion, the kind of man who did not forget when friends and shipmates died on his behalf. After they caught up to and maglocked the Rizen ship hulk to the Uhuru, they would tell the Lander to auto-return to their ship, board it, land again on the comet and recover the body parts of Monique, Gail, Hortense and Hercule. After that they would head home to Charon Base.