Earth Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series 1) Page 5

  The Incoming Signal light blinked suddenly on the Comlink panel. “Max, someone’s calling us. Think we should answer?”

  “Sure. We got all the weapons, not them.”

  Jack grimaced. Stealing the gravity-pull drive had been only their biggest theft. Earlier, when it became apparent no one else at Charon Base was going to join their Fight The Aliens crusade, they’d scavenged some ice-mining gas lasers, a neutral particle beam projector, some geo-penetrator rockets that should work well as kinetic kill vehicles, four hand-sized laser rock cutters, and a couple of barrels of ball bearings. They had affixed most of the stuff to newly installed “hard-points” they’d arc-welded to the outer hull of the Uhuru, but there was still work to be done. Like attaching the gravity-pull drive to the innards of Uhuru and writing a few hundred thousand lines of software code so the ship’s NavTrack computer could tell the Alien drive’s control system “Go Gravitate!” Jack felt a secret relief the code writing would be Max’s job, not his. “Yeah, you’re right. We got the weapons. Switching on the signal.”

  A color image appeared on the front screen. The angular Swiss-German features of Andrea Grübingen scowled at them. “Munroe, Piakowski, what the hell are you two doing? Ground Control telemetry says your Main Drive is Hot and moving to Pinch Mode. Shut it down. Now!”

  Jack grinned insouciantly at the motion-eye above the screen. “Oh, Andrea, dear Andrea, have we upset your committee assignments?”

  Max hiccupped behind him. Andrea’s scowl deepened and her sharp gray eyes fixed on him. “Jack, I’ll forget all this if you shut down. Don’t run off on this crazy wild crusade of yours. Please?”

  Jack gave her points for figuring out the obvious. “Andrea, you know, and I know, that people don’t just waltz up to a keystone predator like the Rizen carnivores and say—Wanna be friends?” The blond-haired woman stayed silent. “Look. You saw the vidcam digitals, heard the vocals, and you even hugged us when we got back. Andrea, what’s happened to you?”

  The woman who’d shown true empathy upon their return looked off to the side, as if confirming her outer office was empty, then faced back to him. Her frozen expression relaxed into normal worry lines. “Look, I’m just a science administrator, not a political type. I believe you. I don’t blame you two for—” Max leaned forward in his seat, coming into pickup range of the motion-eye “—for killing those Rizen. The attack was unprovoked. What they did to Monique and the others was terrible. Still, there are more First Contact experts on Earth than out here. Give them a chance to handle this craziness. Please?”

  For a moment, Jack was tempted. Then he recalled his Grandpa Ephraim’s death in the Belter Rebellion of 2072 and how the Unity bureaucrats, after the war ended, came in and taxed every Belt family for the cost of the war and the lost commerce. Twenty-six years later, people in the Asteroid Belt still nursed a quiet hatred of distant Earth’s arrogance and vindictiveness. “Nope.” Andrea looked disappointed. “But we’re leaving the Rizen ship in orbit. The FTL stardrive is still inside and Earth is welcome to haul it back in-system. Whenever they send a cargo ship to you. Let their supercomputers take a crack at it.” The woman looked relieved at that news. “And you have the body of Destanu the Rizen guy. Hortie’s buddy Gordon is diving into its dissection. See what you can learn about the Rizen from Gordon’s efforts.” He paused, recalling how he and Max had entered the Rizen ship after the battle and found only the bodies of Destanu and his aide onboard. “But we are going back to get Monique’s remains and to fight the Rizen—or anyone else—who wants to turn Sol system into a hunting zone.”

  Andrea winced at his directness. “Surely there’s another way than violence?”

  “Jack,” Max muttered to him, “we’re at Pinch Mode. Ready to leave orbit.”

  He nodded formally at Andrea. “Administrator, with the Rizen, either you dominate them, or you’re their next meal. Goodbye.” Jack shut off the AV link and looked back at Max. “Let her blast!”

  “Blasting!” Max touched the plasma release control. “On a trans-ecliptic trajectory toward Smiley!”

  Jack smiled at Max’s esoteric reference to QB1. When the hard frozen comet had been discovered back in 1992 by Jane Luu and David C. Jewitt, they’d named the first Kuiper Belt comet after the spy protagonist in the novels of John Le Carré. The second comet they found had been named “Karla”, after the old Soviet nemesis of Smiley. The two astronomers had quit naming Kuiper comets once their count exceeded five. Now, according to his girlfriend Nikola, there were over two thousand in the data banks, some of them locked into 2:3 orbital resonances. Since they share Pluto’s 2:3 orbital resonance with Neptune, those comets are known as plutinos. The further out Kuiper Belt comets are called Cubewanos, after QB1. Their orbital resonances range from 3:5 to 4:7. Only the orbitally unfixed comets of the Scattered Disk have the ability to swerve inward past Neptune, and become dangerous Centaur objects that could strike Earth and send the Unity the way of the dinosaurs. Jack and Max had researched the history of the Kuiper Belt on their return and turned up these tidbits of archaic Anglo-American history. But the minutiae of history had not erased his despair over the death of Monique and his crewmates. Whether to blame the Unity more than the Rizen for their deaths was an issue he still pondered.

  Jack slumped in his seat as thrust-gee gave him weight. They were set up for a twelve minute burn at one gee constant thrust as the Uhuru aimed for a point north of the ecliptic of the solar system, a place above most of the cometary debris left over from the formation of the solar system. Up there, you could speed along faster than in the dust and rock-strewn disk shared by the planets and the Kuiper Belt. He was about to reach for a sandwich stored in his seat armrest when the ship intercom clicked on, in Voice-Activation Mode.

  “Help? Help!” called a young female voice. “I can’t hold on much longer. I’m gonna fall!”

  “What the—” yelled Max. “Jack, who the hell is that?”

  Jack looked back at his partner in crime. “Some damned stowaway from Charon Base, obviously. We’re the only humans out here, you know.”

  “I know that.” The Engineer glared at him. “But I was outside hauling in your ass. She must have come up on the last shuttle trip. You were last one off it. Didn’t you check?”

  “Damn. Double-damn and damn again.” Jack thought cursing out loud should carry more weight with the universe than silent cursing. As an anthropologist, he believed in the power of spoken incantations. Unfortunately, Einstein’s Space-Time Continuum didn’t share his belief. “And no, I didn’t check—this Alien-hunt romp through the Kuiper Belt was all supposed to be secret.” He glanced up at the ceiling intercom speaker, then over at the Comlink panel, which ID’d the signal source as a bedroom in the habitat torus. “She must have been standing on a floor of the torus when you applied thrust-gee. Which turned her floor into a wall. Wonder what she’s holding on to?”

  Max cursed in fluent Polish but kept his attention fully on the Main Drive controls. “How the hell should I know? I’ve got an engine to watch. You go save her.”

  Jacks sighed, then released his restraint locks. Thrust-gee complicated things. Getting over to Hortie’s nearby Comlink station without falling through the Spine hatch and all the way down to the Drive module was not easy, but he managed the task. He keyed on the intercom. “Hey, you! Whoever you are, stop squalling—I’m coming to help you.”

  “Help!” squalled the young woman, her tone a mix of indignity and fear. “Help, please! Oh, oouff—”

  “Stop interrupting me!” Jack tapped the intercom circuit to one-way control. “What’s your name?”

  “Denise Rauvin,” mumbled the girl, her tone more subdued. “Uh, I just landed on the bed. It’s a water bed. Do you think it’ll leak?”

  Jack threw up his arms before Max’s outraged expression—only his friend’s sleep room contained a water bed. “Denise, you better hope not. That bed is the prized possession of one Max Piakowski, lately of Lodz, Poland, and he i
s not very forgiving.”

  “Oh.” The girl did not say anything more.

  Jack left the intercom on Voice-Activation Mode, just in case his trip down the Spine resulted in trouble for him. “Back in a bit, Max. And smile—maybe she likes older men?”

  “What?” Max gave him a shy grin, then looked away, his black eyebrows snaking together as he squinted at a ceiling readout. “I’ve got too much work to do without hand-holding a kid.”

  Jack exited the cabin and slowly, carefully climbed down the Spine ladder. Maybe the only thing good about finding a stowaway, after they’d already launched and were committed to their outbound trajectory, was Max’s shy grin just now. Anything that broke his friend’s depressed mood was something he welcomed. But would she welcome them? Or would she insist on being taken back to Charon? That was impossible of course—once Andrea discovered the missing gravity-pull drive, they’d be branded as outlaws. Andrea had to do that as the official base administrator, no matter how much she empathized with their loss. He climbed on down the Spine, wondering just who this Denise Rauvin was and what she would say when told the next six months of her life must be spent on-board the Uhuru, alone with two middle-aged men and subject at every moment to Alien attack.

  Denise Rauvin glared at Jack and Max as all three free-floated in the Pilot cabin, with drive thrust now off. Jack gave her credit for wearing ship-board coveralls and a leotard underneath, but downchecked her for stowing away. She, a self-proclaimed nineteen and looking mad as a wet cat, didn’t seem inclined to follow orders. “Sit down, in the Comlink station seat,” he repeated for the fifth time.

  “No!”

  “Redheads!” Max grunted, then floated back to his Engineer seat. “They’re more trouble than they’re worth. I bet she’s from Dublin.”

  “I’m not!” said Denise rebelliously, looking to Max and then back to Jack. “I’m French. From Aubagne, in Provence.” When Jack looked puzzled, she added—“Near Marseille, on the Mediterranean seacoast. God, you’re ignorant.”

  Yep, she was definitely French, Jack thought. She had enough arrogance for ten Belgians, five Brits or three Israelis. He changed tactics. “Why not? Why won’t you sit there?”

  Denise glanced down at the form-fitting seat, its contours designed for the cushioning of thrust-gravity, and shivered. “Because it’s Hortie’s work station. I can’t sit where she used to sit. Please?”

  So she’d known Hortie? She did look familiar . . . yes! She was one of the teens who’d been watching him and Max as they walked up to the Audience Hall stage. Jack pushed down into his own Tech seat and motioned for Denise to take the next seat beyond Hortie’s, the Astrophysics station once occupied by their dead Captain. “Try that one. Please.” She did so, casually buckling the restraint straps as if every day she jaunted off into deep space. “How’d you know that was Hortense’s seat? Did you know her?”

  The freckles on the girl’s pale white face darkened. “I knew her.” Denise looked ahead at the screen, watching the Great Dark rather than face him. She chewed her lip. “She was your Communications Chief and Ecological Biologist. I tutored under her on Charon, though my field was Animal Ethology. She . . . she was a good friend to me.”

  The girl’s voice had nearly broken at the last sentence. Jack wondered if there was more to this stowaway than just impulse. “She was indeed a good friend, to all of us.” Behind them, Max’s breathing sounded almost as loud as the air circulation blower. “Why’d you stowaway?”

  Denise looked abruptly at him. Earnestness filled her expression and emerald green eyes sucked at Jack. “I want to help! Help you and Professor Piakowski. You’re going to need someone who knows animal ethology and ecology, if you run into the Rizen again. I’m trained. Got my Baccalaureate in Ethology with a minor in Behavioral Ecology.”

  Max snorted skeptically. “Young woman, that’s all very nice, but someone your age doesn’t run off and leave behind Mom, Dad and the only people you’ve known since your parents shipped up to Charon Base, what, say, ten or eleven years ago?”

  “Twelve years ago,” Denise said tensely. “So?”

  “So, what are your real reasons for running away?” Belted-in Max slapped his seat armrest in sharp emphasis.

  Denise winced at the sound. “Well, I do want to avenge Hortie, to . . . to do something in honor of her memory. But you’re right. My parents insisted I leave on the next resupply ship for graduate school on Earth. I disagreed. We had big fights.”

  Jack could believe the fights. Left unsaid was just how those parents would react when they learned their only daughter had headed off to face carnivorous Aliens, or worse. “Denise,” he said gently, “we’ve got to signal Andrea and let her know you’re on board. Your parents need—”

  “They already know I’m gone,” interrupted Denise, who now eyed him with juvenile amusement. “Left a computer message on time-lock. They’ve got it by now. I suspect they’re pretty mad at you and Max.”

  His gut felt like falling further than it already fell in free-float. “Mad? Why would they be mad at us?”

  Denise smiled sweetly, the very image of a teen who’d thought of everything. “Well, I said I was coming up to see you two. When they hear about the launch, they’ll figure you kidnapped me and are taking me along with you to Smiley.”

  “Kidnapped!” yelled Max, thrashing against his seat restraints.

  Alarm filled Denise’s face as she looked back at the flush-faced Engineer. “He, he won’t hurt me, will he?”

  Jack laughed, a bit tightly. “No, but he might spank you.” Denise whirled around to face him. He pointed at her. “Denise, as a member of this crew, your first job is to compose a vid message for your parents, explaining exactly how you came to be on board this ship. Then you will tell them not to expect you for six months. We’re outbound and not turning back.” Triumph showed briefly in Denise’s face when Jack called her a ‘member of this crew’. “Also, cut out the Little Girl act. You’re nineteen, an Honors college graduate, and we are not fooled by the act—we’ve seen better, believe me.”

  Denise stiffened, then she nodded, her manner turning serious. “Well, I thought the scam might not work on you two.” She sighed, looked ahead at the Great Dark of space that filled the front screen, a black tapestry filled only with tiny white diamonds. “They’re really out there, aren’t they? The Rizen?”

  “Probably.”

  Jack had wondered about that. Were other Rizen waiting on QB1 for their return? Had they come and left for some distant Kuiper Belt base? Or were the six Rizen who’d challenged the Uhuru crew to single combat beneath a dome on comet QB1 the only Rizen in-system? If so, were there other Hunters of the Great Dark, as the Rizen called themselves, who even now roamed the vast spaces of the Kuiper Belt, searching for a human ship foolish enough to travel beyond Pluto and thus qualify as a suitable Challenge subject? Jack didn’t know. He did know they had to recover the remnants of Monique and then do their damnedest to scare off any new Aliens. Otherwise, Earth would learn what it meant to be a hunting preserve.

  “You were lucky,” Denise murmured as she stared fixedly at the white-speckled screen. “With the Rizen, I mean. Social carnivores don’t usually stick around after the kill.”

  Jack had wondered about that, about why Destanu the Rizen captain had circled them the way a matador does a bull. “Lucky? How so?”

  Denise turned her deep green eyes on him. “You stumbled across one of their FAPs.”

  “FAPs?”

  She grinned. “Fixed Action Pattern. The basis of classical Ethology, as documented by Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen, in Europe of the last century.” Denise laced her fingers together, her mood college serious. “We know from behavioral ecology that some patterns of behavior are inherited, and some derive from interaction with the environment. A FAP is a behavior pattern that is innate, that is triggered by a sign stimulus. You know, the way a baby always grasps a finger, or smiles automatically at two dark spots on a white
circle? The response is set off by an innate releasing mechanism—an IRM. Like the male three-spined stickleback fish, who attacks anything with a red belly and ignores fish not colored that way.”

  Jack followed now, but not completely. “Sounds like you’ve seen the entire record of our encounter. So what was the FAP we activated?”

  Denise peered intently at the velvety blackness of deep space. “I’d call it the lion challenge response. You two didn’t curl up and offer submission, but defied the Rizen when you dove your ship at their craft. The Rizen instinctively went into prey circling mode, rather than just leaving you, or blasting you out of space.” She looked down at interwoven fingers. “Do you think we’ll be that lucky again?”

  Would they? “Don’t know, Denise. I hope so. Meanwhile, why don’t you get to work on that video to your parents?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said somberly, reaching into the seat armrest to pull up its recording screen.

  Jack turned away, allowing her some degree of pretend privacy. There wasn’t any, of course, not on a ship occupied by three people, with a voice-activated intercom, expert ship systems that argued with you and mostly automated ship functions. But he could pretend. As could Max. And Denise had already shown herself to be an amateur actress of some ability. Would she be as good a fighter? Could she overcome the social indoctrination of the Unity? He hoped so. He missed Hortie, and even a young student of the ComChief would be welcome company on their long trip.