Earth Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series 1) Page 4

  Later they would move back out into the Kuiper Belt, even into the distant Oort Cloud, hunting the Hunters of the Great Dark. Today had been a skirmish. Tomorrow would be War, human-style.

  Jack shivered, his regret over the passing of innocence a true thing. Still, humans were predators, not servants, not serfs, never meat.

  So his Grandpa had told him. So the Rizen had taught him.

  He grinned hungrily. “Max, you want a steak?”

  The shy man who’d lost his lover looked startled, then grinned. “Yeah. And one of those Cuban cigars you keep locked up in your shave kit!”

  “I’m found out!” Jack said, joining his friend’s laughter.

  Laughter after death and the loss of good people. It might not be the right recipe for survival, but for Jack and his buddy Max, it was what might keep them sane during the long haul back to Charon.

  The crowd gathered in the Audience Hall of Charon Base included most of the 147 adults and children now resident at the Unity science base. Jack saw Gordon Sørenson, a Danish research buddy of Hortense and a fellow Ecological Biologist. Beyond Gordon stood Max, talking animatedly with Archibald Wheeler about the gravity-pull drive of the Rizen aliens. Max had said he needed help in reverse engineering the pyramidal pile of tubes and central globe that formed the reactionless drive. He sighed, then looked up at the elevated back wall stage where Andrea Grübingen, Chief Administrator for Charon Base and a Weberian symbolic-interactional Sociologist by training, talked animatedly with her Command Committee members. Blond-haired Andrea had hugged both him and Max when they’d returned two days ago from QB1 with their bloody tale. Now, at Jack’s and Max’s insistence, she would play the telescope, Lander and Suit vidcam records of their disastrous First Contact event.

  “Try not to worry, Jack.”

  He nearly jumped roof-high in the low gee gravity of Charon. But he knew that voice very well. He turned and gave a careful nod to Nikola Rádsetoula, Chief Astronomer for the base and his off-and-on lover. “Of course I will worry. Everyone should worry. Humanity’s First Contact with Aliens has turned into a life or death matter.”

  Nikola’s sandy brown eyebrows lifted. “You are sure of this? There was no provocation, no manner in which the crew—”

  “They attacked us!” he said too loudly, drawing concerned looks from other researchers who’d brought their hopes, their spouses and their children to humanity’s most distant outpost in the solar system. “Nikola, you heard what Max and I reported from orbit, after threading past Hydra, Kerberos, Nix and Styx to get here to Charon! But don’t take my word for it. Just watch the replay from the Suit vidcams worn by Monique, Gail, Hortense and Hercule.”

  Nikola reached out a tanned arm and hooked his elbow to stand side by side with him as Andrea turned to face the gathered crowd. “I believe you. It’s just hard to understand. Why . . . why would any star-traveling species be focused on dominating another species long light years away from their own world?”

  “Don’t know, my beauty.”

  She squeezed his arm then fixed pale blue eyes on his fresh-shaven face. “I’m glad you lived. Very glad.”

  “Thank you. But survival has its own pain.”

  Jack breathed deep. The pain of losing his four crewmates still hit him deep inside. It was a pain similar to that he’d felt decades ago, when his pet hamster Furball had died during his family’s move from one asteroid habitat to another. Furball had been with him since before he’d taken up the Hopper job of ferrying air, water and food supplies to fellow Belters engaged in setting up solar distilleries on metal-rich asteroids. It was his way, as eldest brother to his two sisters, to help support their family. But the pain of losing Furball did not compare to the inner pain he felt at losing his four crewmates. He should have—

  “You are not to blame!”

  He blinked and left Andrea to focus on the Czech woman who had found time to show him love, caring and support even though he was a Belter, a member of an ethnic group that the entire Unity still considered to be deadly rebels. Tall as him, slim and middle-aged beautiful, he had wondered why their romance had its ‘off’ moments. Times when Nikola focused only on her neutron star and Dark Matter research. Had his love for her been a career burden?

  “Thank you.” He grinned, knowing that his Tennessee country boy look was his best feature around women. “I warned Monique. I really did! But she insisted we meet the Rizen. Even I did not expect the violence that met us.”

  “Attention,” called Andrea, her Swiss-German features set in a tense look. “The Command Committee has agreed to replay the entirety of the recent First Contact episode that was experienced by the crew of the Uhuru.” The woman who had shown compassion to him and Max when they had taken the Charon shuttle down to the base, now glanced at Jack and then Max. “Two members of that ship’s crew survived . . . the sad encounter with Aliens. Watch. First Contact of this . . . sort affects every person living on Charon. Afterwards, I will invite Max and Jack up to the stage to answer questions from any base member. And parents, hold your children close to you. The committee decided everyone, of any age, must see the vidrecord. But the level of violence in a part of the ship’s encounter is beyond what we scientists know. Except from the history of last century.”

  Nikola hugged him closer to her, as if she knew how much pain he would feel on seeing once again the murder of his crewmates. Jack hugged her back, knowing she cared for him. And had cared for his dead crewmates. On Charon Base everyone knew everyone else. Whether you were straight, gay, lesfem, bi, trans or celibate like Hercule, it was known. Your bad habits were often chattered about. Your good side was sometimes appreciated by a few close friends. But no one, not even Hortie’s coworker Gordon nor Max’s fellow Engineer Archibald, could know what it felt like to see one’s ship buddies being eaten.

  The stage darkened. The two-dee images from the pressure Suits, the Lander’s vidcam and the Schmidt scope took form in a three-dee holo. Expert software filled in the depth gaps based on prior imagery of his crewmates. But the Rizen stayed two-dimensional since they had never before been recorded by Base videyes. Somehow that made them even more fearful in their actions.

  “No!” screamed a teen girl from a nearby Slovenian family as the first images of the dome attack began.

  “Bastards!” grunted Matthias Binder, the Austrian Technologist who had mentored Jack in his Technology second career. The swarthy white-bearded man glanced his way, nodded respectfully, then smiled as the fuel cell units blew up each person’s suit, causing the dome to fragment and collapse.

  The rest of the vidrecord, including his closing talk with a rad-blinded Destanu, their landing on QB1 to gather the body fragments of Gail, Hortense and Hercule, their maglock to the Rizen ship hulk and their return to Charon Base allowed people to reach some degree of calmness. Although many families with young children were holding them close, whispering reassurances to them. Jack wished he could feel reassured.

  “Incredible,” murmured Nikola as the stage holo vanished and the Hall’s lights came back on. She looked him in the eyes, wetness showing in hers. “Your tech tricks saved you and Max. But I know the Unity is going to hate your insistence that these Aliens are keystone predators focused on dominating Earth and humanity.”

  Jack knew that. But reality was reality. “Nikola, I’m glad I survived to return to you.” He gave her a kiss on her brown cheek. She grinned wryly. “And yeah, this all goes against the Unity theme of One Happy Family.”

  “Jack!” called Andrea from the stage, then looked to Max. “Max. You two, please come up on stage. I see folks have questions for you.”

  He nodded to Andrea, then squeezed Nikola’s hand. “Hey Ms. Wander About, I gotta go onto center stage.”

  She smiled at his English translation of her last name, slowly shaking her head, her look bemused. “Yeah, go on up there. You earned it. And you have my support for whatever you and Max have to do to protect us from these deadly Aliens.”


  Jack left his smart lover behind and walked slowly in Charon’s low gee gravfield, seeing the eyes of more than a hundred people fixed on him and on Max, who’d left his confab with Archibald. Just before he reached the ramp leading up to the stage he noticed a group of older teens staring intently at him. Two girls and three guys. As if they had something in mind. Catching the impatient look of Andrea, he walked up the ramp and stood to one side of her as Max flanked Andrea’s other side. He held up one hand.

  “Folks, before the questions get going, you gotta understand two things we learned from this First Contact.” Andrea hissed in her breath, clearly not liking Jack’s usurpation of her leadership role. “First, there are Aliens out in the Great Dark, as they call it, and they have some kind of faster-than-light stardrive that lets them roam star to star,” he said. “Second, the Rizen are not the only Aliens on Sol’s doorstep. It’s clear from what Destanu said that other Aliens are camped just beyond Pluto in the Kuiper Belt. And these Aliens are smart social predators who will dominate Earth—unless we fight back!”

  Behind him several members of the Command Committee reacted strongly to Jack’s defiance of Unity dogma, muttering words like “fool”, “what do you expect form a rebel” and “he’s dangerous.”

  Andrea gripped his left arm, her fingers pinching him even through his wool shirt. She looked out at the other humans who resided at Charon Base. “My people, Unity policy is best left to Earth. What is factual is that Aliens have found us. They killed our people. And we have to figure out, as scientists, how best to cope with this danger.”

  Max grunted, then muttered. “Let the Earth topsucks put their bodies on the line!”

  Jack grinned, looking forward to the upcoming questioning. The men, women and children of Charon Base were the closest thing he had to family, until he returned to the Belt and spent time with his Mom, Dad and two sisters. And his Grandpa Ephraim had taught him one key lesson—“take care of family first!”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Jack hung suspended a hundred kilometers above the blue-white surface of Charon, largest of Pluto’s five moons and farthest outpost of the Communitarian Unity. He ignored the long way down and focused on the nearby shape of the Uhuru, with its red nav-beacon light put out by his friend Max. Floating in low Charon orbit, he pondered the risks of moving seven tons of Alien shipdrive from the Rizen ship over to the Uhuru. Did stealing an Alien drive qualify as Grand Theft under the Unity’s Rules, or just a Grand Insult to Communitarian wishful thinking?

  “You gonna light those thrusters you’re sitting on, or not?” muttered Max over the comlink, his Polish-accented English conveying a sense of nonchalance they both knew was just bravado.

  “Hang on.” Jack looked down at the pyramidal cluster of the Rizen gravity-pull drive and its three attachment plates, connected by long cables to the thruster unit. Hard to believe the cluster of tubes and central globe generated enough local gravity that it caused gravitational lensing of starlight when it passed by the ship’s hull. Even harder to believe the thing allowed any ship to move at right angles to its trajectory in a kind of inertia-less glide that was swift, slick and damned Alien. What the hell . . . “Firing.”

  He tapped at the NavTrack panel sitting atop his lap, mentally crossed his fingers, and hoped the navigation software would guide his unwieldy booty over to the Uhuru’s empty Lander module. Below him, hydrazine thruster jets flared yellowish and his butt felt heavy. Jack looked up. Ahead, the long tube of the Uhuru, with its boxy modules at rear, middle and nose plus the forward habitat torus, gleamed whitely in the pale yellow light of distant Sol. “Heading your way, Max. Be ready to snag this pile of junk! I wouldn’t want it to drop in on Administrator Grübingen’s committee meeting.”

  Max chuckled. “You mean you’d rather not get caught. But,” his friend’s comlink voice turned somber, “we made a promise that I intend to keep, legalities be damned.” Even after three months back at Charon Base, Max hadn’t gotten over the death of his lover Monique d’Auberge. “Fuck the Administrator. Fuck the Unity. If they don’t want to believe in predatory Aliens, I’m not going to waste more time convincing them.”

  “Don’t blame you.” Some folks on Charon, and no one on Earth, wished to believe the Unity’s dogma—that any star-traveling Aliens would be wonderfully peaceful, civilized and non-violent—was a crock of methane. Instead, the Unity blamed him and Max for screwing up humanity’s First Contact with an Alien species.

  “Your NavTrack looks good,” Max said, his tone a little less sour.

  “Thanks. I’ll try not to punch a hole in the Lander module.”

  Max chuckled like the Max of old. “Fine. Just stay away from my Drive Engine—that toy of yours may make it obsolete, but it’s my baby and it got us back home.” He paused. “How long do you think we’ll have to stay on station in the Kuiper Belt? Scouting for the Rizen, or other Aliens?”

  “Six months at least.” The Communitarian Unity wanted to appease the Rizen, wanted to negotiate with them despite the bloody murder of four humans. As an anthropologist, Jack understood all too well about the human will to believe, even in false dogmas contradicted by reality. They hadn’t been sent back to Earth, yet, because he and Max were the only ones able to make sense of the salvaged Rizen ship, which orbited Charon just ten kilometers away from the Uhuru, and Earth desperately wanted to know how the Alien stardrive worked. That they still didn’t know. However, they’d discovered the globe-pierced-by-a-spearhead spaceship of the Rizen aliens had two drives—the FTL stardrive housed in the midbody globe and the gravity-pull drive for in-system maneuvering that Jack had just swiped. It was the gravity-pull drive that had given him and Max fits at QB1 and it seemed the best thing to have if they again faced the Rizen—or other predatory Aliens.

  “Jack, watch out for the anchor line! I’m launching it now.”

  “Watching.” He looked toward the long box of the Lander module as it enlarged slowly, spotted the orange-and-white striped figure of Max in his EVA suit, then sat tensely as his friend shot a cable and grapple his way. The grapple passed through the middle of the drive’s tube-works, snagged on it, took up cable slack, then Jack’s ‘Grand Theft property’ shuddered as it lost vector inertia. It swung slowly in an arc toward the open bay of the Uhuru. Jack waited until he and his ‘toy’ were less than two hundred meters from the open bay, then he touched the NavTrack panel. Ahead of his feet, small hydrogen peroxide thrusters flared like a spray of snowfall, and their forward momentum slowed to near-rest. Like a ballet dancer on point, twirling in place, Jack and his Alien shipdrive floated to a stop just outside the open module. It was empty at the moment since their Lander still rested on QB1. In smooth, efficient movements, Max hauled the weightless mass with seven tons of inertia into the roomy module, closed the outer airlock doors, and then—with Jack’s help—maneuvered the bulky assemblage into a lock-down cradle that would keep the stuff from tumbling about during their departure from Charon orbit.

  When Max finished, he looked at Jack, his face easily visible through the clear helmet. Thick black eyebrows beetled together. “We gonna steal the Charon shuttle too?” The Drive Engineer gestured at a Lander module porthole and the clearly visible shuttle that station-orbited not far from them.

  Jack shook his head. “Nope. The last of our supplies are out of it. Let Charon Control bring it down on Auto-Land mode. We’ll get back our Lander when we reach QB1.” The air pressure reached ship-normal in the cavernous bay and they exited into the EVA prep room. “And then we’ll bring back Monique’s remains.”

  Max scowled. “Won’t bring her back to life. Nothing will.” He proceeded to strip off his EVA suit, as did Jack.

  Nothing would bring back Monique d’Auberge. Nor make alive their other three crewmates—Gail Winston, Hercule Arcy de Mamét, and Hortense Muggeridge-Mbasa. Four who had given their lives so that humanity might be free, might avoid the fate of servitude—or worse—to Aliens. Before leaving QB1 they had recovered the body
chunks of Gail, Hercule and Hortense from under the fragments of the Engagement dome. But Monique had been buried under the dome’s heavy airlock debris. “Hey, don’t you want to go and fight Aliens, enjoy a good steak and cigar, and be spit upon by your fellow humans?”

  Max looked over his shoulder, squinted suspiciously, then grinned. “Thanks for the effort to cheer me up.” The Pole headed for the entry hatch to the Spine corridor. “Now, don’t you think it’s time we got our Fusion Drive online and got out of here? Andrea may be a whiz at delay by means of committee assignments, but she’s not stupid. We were supposed to be prepping the Rizen ship for hauling back to Earth, not cannibalizing it.”

  Jack followed Max into the Spine, then turned up-ship for the Pilot cabin at the nose-end of the Uhuru. The corridor echoed emptily and felt cold despite the heavy wool coveralls he wore. “Wish we had Hortie with us.”

  Max free-floated ahead of him, pulling himself along by handholds. “Me too. We could use an Ecological Biologist if more Rizen turn up. Or other Aliens. Guess you’ll just have to rely on those long talks you had with her. Right, Jack?”

  His eyes stung and wetness appeared suddenly. Hortie hadn’t been Jack’s lover, but she had been one of the few people on Charon who didn’t shun him because of his family’s Belter Rebellion ancestry. Among those raised according to the Communitarian dogma, a family history of anti-social behavior like the Rebellion made you a social outcast. “I guess I will,” he said softly, then looked down when Max glanced back.

  “We’re there,” the man said gruffly a few minutes later.

  They piled into the cramped Pilot cabin, a place of six seats arranged in two rows, with the Pilot seat at left-front, Hortie’s Comlink station at middle-front, and Max’s Engineer station at right-rear. Jack floated past Max, pushed down into the Pilot seat, snapped on his restraints, and touched on the NavTrack autopilot. Behind him, Max waited for the Main Drive controls to lower from the cabin’s ceiling, then the stocky Pole worked at bringing the Drive up to Hot status. Far, far behind them, in the Drive module, a mixed gas of deuterium and helium-3 swirled and spiraled inside a steel cylinder that, very soon, would use intense magfields to bring the mixture into a ‘pinch mode’ that would fuse the two isotopes into one substance. Which would degrade into helium-4 and a hell of a lot of raw energy. The Drive magfields would immediately go to peak containment as they squeezed the fusion plasma out of the cylinder’s funnel end and into a seventy kilometer-long drive flare that, if maintained long enough, could move the Uhuru up to twenty percent of lightspeed. It all made for a big kick in the pants.