Earth Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series 1) Page 7

  Jack grinned. He had wondered the same thing as Max. Should they take their tactical win and head inward, maybe to the Asteroid Belt where aged veterans of the Rebellion might lend a helping hand in their crusade to defend the Kuiper Belt? A few Rebellion bases still existed on obscure asteroids, including a ship manufactory his Grandpa had told him about. Or should they go for a strategic win that would remove the Swarm from the Kuiper Belt once and for all? Good sense said do the former. His human instinct, the instinct of a social predator with two million years of scavenging and hunting, before the niceties of agriculture, cities, and wishful thinking had set in, said—“Drive them out!” As did the old texts of Weston LaBarre, Clifford Geertz, Robert Ardrey, Carleton S. Coon, E. O. Wilson, Richard Alexander, W.G. Durham and Desmond Morris, scholars from the last century who’d argued for the biological basis of some human behavior and for the core nature of Man as the Hunter.

  “No, Max, we’ve got to drive off the Swarm. Kill them outright, hurt them bad, do whatever it takes.” There was a joker card in this situation—where two Alien species could be found, in less than four months, might not other Alien predators be watching how strongly and how forcefully Humans defended their home territory? Jack suspected many now watched even as only a few fought. “Others may be watching us.”

  His friend nodded thoughtfully. “I wondered about that too, ever since our talk that night in the Audience Hall at Charon. Hope Denise understands. She’s awfully young to bet everything on one roll of the dice.” Max unfolded his arms, pushed away and floated back to his Engineer station.

  Moments later, Denise floated in, whistling pleasantly and smelling like roses. She’d used her weekly water ration for a bath and hair shampoo. He smiled at her as she settled into the far right-side Astrophysics seat. “Welcome! Did you and the NavTrack computer come up with an approach vector to comet Karla that keeps us in radar shadow?”

  Denise nodded. “Yup.” She touched on the front screen, then tapped the Astrophysics control arm to display their approach trajectory and adjacent bodies. “Karla shapes out at 175 kilometers in size, a bit smaller than Smiley, but it is orbited by a small satellite. The way Dactyl orbits 243 Ida in the Asteroid Belt. Anyway, last century they named it Mole, like the mole on your cheek,” she said, teasing him.

  He blushed. Denise’s good looks, bright humor and irrepressible optimism had gotten to both him and Max. Romance wasn’t the cause. She’d come to mean too much to them and neither wanted her to die young. “Now I see why Hortie chose to mentor you—you’re a delight to have around.” The mention of Hortie made Denise frown worriedly. “Sorry.” He gestured at the front screen. “Ready to offload the Lander?”

  “Yes, we are,” Max interjected from the rear, “and she did a good job on that NavTrack program.” The Engineer’s compliment brought a smile to Denise’s young face. “The Lander’s Auto-Pilot is set for an open approach to Karla, the ball-bearings are on-board, and why do I have to sit back here?”

  Denise chuckled. “Because, good Max, the Engineer always sits at the back of the Hopper bus.”

  “You’re too smart!” Max said with a chuckle.

  Jack valued his friend’s release from depression over the death of Monique. But their luck in avoiding Swarm detection would not last forever. “Max, launch the Lander. And let it drift away from our vector for awhile before keying it to Thrust mode. I want us to be behind Mole before the Swarm sees our Lander and decides to look around for other ships.”

  “Launching.” Max hummed low, but pleasantly, as if he enjoyed the engineering challenge involved in a delayed start of the Lander’s Auto-Pilot computer. “In one hour, without any deceleration, the Lander will be a thousand kilometers from Mole and heading for a near approach to Karla.”

  “Jack,” Denise said tentatively, “we should make our final blip jump pretty soon, to set us up in the radar shadow of Mole. Like about now. You ready?”

  He glanced at the NavTrack panel that faced his Pilot seat. “Ready. Parameters are laid in. We’ll approach at high delta vee, using the gravity-pull drive, flip over, then decel abruptly using the Main Drive. You ready for four gees of thrust-weight?”

  “Yah.” Denise scrunched down in her seat, as if that would make her more comfortable. “Ready to feel squashed.”

  Squashed was right. Jack looked back at Max. The man’s rad-tanned face twisted into a wry grin. “Well, Jack, I may have to sit in the back of this Hopper, but you two are going to learn what high-gee decel feels like. Activate your seat restraints, please.”

  “Yes, boss.” Jack looked forward, laid his head against the seat’s neck support, tapped the High Gee support control, and suddenly felt smothered in a pile of pillows.

  “Oh,” Max said lightly, “I forgot to tell you—the decel at four gees will last six minutes but feel like forever.”

  “Max!” complained Denise.

  “Blipping!” called out their Engineer.

  Ahead on the screen, the starfield blurred, blurred again and again in a series of sequential uses of the drive to pull them ahead on their approach to the backside of Mole. Then the blur of the starfield shifting in and out of focus became a constant blur as the graviton field, alternating like the frames of an oldstyle celluloid film, dragged along the Uhuru. Would the structural support weldings they’d done inside Uhuru stand up to the gravity-pull stresses? Jack felt sick suddenly, but not from the field effect. He felt sick due to the imminent possibility they might all die, quite soon.

  “It’s okay,” Denise murmured near him, her form also enveloped in high-gee pillows that fluffed out from her Astrophysics station seat. “I’m not afraid to die.”

  Jack closed his eyes. “You should be. Max and I, we know better than to believe all that crap about dying for glory. We’re doing this for one reason—to buy Earth some breathing time.”

  “And,” growled Max from behind, “because Jack and I made a promise to some ghosts.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Five minutes later, the weight of several asteroids sat on Jack’s chest. Denise and Max both cried out from sudden discomfort as the Uhuru fired its Main Drive, pushing against the vector that pointed at the middle of Mole the satellite. The ship vibed briefly as it ejected a spysat to peek at Karla. He felt like his bones wanted to sink through the floor. He wished they had had the time to write code and bring online the internal ship gravity enjoyed by the Rizen. Jack wished even more that Denise weren’t so young, so innocent of the bad luck that life dumped on you. He and Max had enjoyed half a life. She was too young to know what she might yet lose.

  “We’re in Mole’s radar shadow,” Denise said tensely. She pulled the Fire Control panel over her lap. “Power is on to all weapons systems.”

  Jack looked up at the last line-of-sight telescope image of comet Karla that they’d been able to grab, before disappearing behind the small bulk of Mole. Like Smiley, this comet was deep red in color, its water ice and methane snows long ago aged dark red from ultraviolet and cosmic ray impacts. Like Neptune’s moon Triton, its surface looked wrinkled and puckered as an orange. “Denise, enlarge the north polar section of that image, please. I think I saw something up there.”

  “Right.” Denise, still breathing hard under the ongoing four gees of thrust-decel, tapped her Astrophysics armrest controls. “See the enlarged image, upper right.”

  Jack looked away from the red, beige and white-gleaming surface of Karla, focusing instead on the enlarged, digitized and false-colored image of its north pole region. “There they are! Looks like it’s a standard behavior pattern, putting your ground base and ship at the north ecliptic pole of a Kuiper comet.” In the inset image gleamed the black-and-white streaked ovoid of the Swarm mother ship and its attached mini-ships, plus the black square of a blockhouse type surface structure.

  “Ritual behavior,” Denise gasped loudly, struggling against the decel weight. “All animals do it, even thinking animals like the Swarm. Perhaps there’s an ancient Rule among
the Hunters of the Great Dark? A Rule that lays out precisely how you establish your base, your home territory, your hunting range, your Challenge to local predators, and even how you respond to a competitive attack.” She paused. “Jack, you sure the Swarm won’t accept resource partitioning? Won’t share the Kuiper Belt with us?”

  “No, I think this is a pure example of Gause’s Competitive Exclusion Principle.” On the screen, the flare of Main Drive vanished and freefall returned, allowing his chest muscles to rebound. “If the Swarm are true social predators, the only way we could co-exist with them is to give up the ecological niche we both occupy—the Kuiper Belt. That would defer competitive exclusion. But territories are established and defended through agonistic behavior—if we don’t dislodge them now, it may never happen.”

  “He’s right,” Max said, his tone determined. “We’re too similar, even though both species are a lot more than just jungle Darwinism in action. The same with the Rizen. The Swarm is here now. Either we drive them out, or we lose and the inner solar system is ravaged.”

  “Sad,” said Denise. The scope’s front screen true-light image of Karla and the Swarm disappeared as they hid behind the Mole satellite. “Look! The spysat is sending us AV imagery via bounce-back. The Lander is coming in, on track for Karla.”

  “I see it.” Jack glanced at the front screen imagery as the Uhuru settled into its station-keeping orbit behind Mole. On a smaller screen and off to one side, the Lander neared Karla. He looked back at the main screen and its spysat relayed image of comet Karla. Sudden activity showed in the north pole area. “They’re launching. Big Mother and the mini-ships together.”

  “Jack,” called Max, “the Lander is still on the preloaded Auto-Pilot program. It will use the last of its chemfuel to curve toward the north pole base, as if attacking.” He paused. “Thank god for that spysat we put together on the trip out here!”

  “Agreed.” While they wouldn’t try to control the Lander, for fear of signal backtracking by the Swarm mini-ships, they could now watch the upcoming battle. And time their bait and switch move just right. Jack glanced at Denise. “You got your geo-penetrators primed and ready?”

  “Yes, Captain,” Denise said meekly, not reacting when he acted shocked by her reference. “Well, you are. The Captain I mean.” She pointed. “Look! They’re starting to englobe the Lander.”

  Jack looked, saw the Swarm clustering and realized it was all coming together. “Max, move us out of orbit. Take us in at a fast dive on a chord that glances off the north pole of Karla. I want us to miss that comet in case we have drive problems.”

  The starfield blipped as Max moved them around the blocking mass of Mole. Shortly they were in open space, at a sixty degree angle to the incoming Lander, with the comet at the apex of their angle. The surface base lay open, with no nearby ship protection. “Blip us fast! Fast as you can, Max!” They blipped a dozen times before the mini-ships noticed their approach.

  “Jack,” called Denise. “They’re breaking englobement of the Lander!”

  “Max? Let her rip!”

  On the screen, the Lander exploded in a pyrotechnic shower of chemfuel, metal debris, and thousands of ball bearings that burst outward in a near-perfect globular shock front. Four mini-ships exploded from bearing impacts and four more staggered in mid-curve, their attack power clearly damaged. But four of the small droplet ships raced ahead of the thinning cloud of ball bearings, aiming for the Uhuru.

  Jack nodded at Denise. “Fire the geo-penetrators. Three of the six we got. Dead center on the blockhouse.”

  With only a moment’s hesitation, Denise touched the Fire Control panel and the Uhuru vibed briefly as three fire-and-forget, solid fuel ground penetrating rockets shot away from their habitat ring launchers at planetary escape velocity. “They’re launched,” she said, her voice trembling with fear and perhaps with the realization she would shortly be the cause of multiple deaths. “Impact! The blockhouse is collapsed.” She paused. “Where’s Big Mother?”

  Jack felt a cold chill as he hurriedly checked the true-light imagery on the main screen, the Weapons screen inset in one corner, and the NavTrack screen overlaid in another corner. Nothing! To one side approached the four remaining mini-ships, but they’d be hard put to catch the Uhuru as she rounded the comet’s north pole, on an outbound escape trajectory. Maybe they would beat the odds. Maybe—

  “Jack!” wailed Denise. “The mother ship—it’s ahead of us! Must have circled around the comet on an intercept orbit.”

  Ahead loomed the black-and-white teardrop of Big Mother, already moving toward them with deadly intent. To one side, four mini-ships fired green beams of laser light. The Uhuru vibed with heat-impact from two of the beams. Alarm clanging sounded in the Pilot cabin and the Spine.

  “Blipping,” yelled Max.

  “They matched us!” said Denise. “Still blocking our escape.”

  Jack switched on the motion-eye over the front screen, keyed in Charon Base’s Standard Channel Four, and sent his image and words into space. “Alien craft, move aside and then leave our territory. Alien craft—”

  “Incoming signal, with visuals,” said Denise excitedly.

  “We lost two deuterium fuel tanks, Jack,” called up Max. “Their lasers are—they’re firing again!”

  On the front screen, the image of a Swarm alien took shape.

  The hyena analogy seemed all too accurate. A doglike face peered at them. It possessed two eyes, a medium snout, two arms covered in black-and-white streaked fur, and a head crest blood-red in color. Behind it worked two other Aliens, their streaked backs to the camera, but visible enough for Jack to make out they were bipeds. Each Alien possessed hands and feet that ended in claws. On screen, the Swarm alien tilted its head to one side, then snarled, showing long white canines. “You killed the Mother! Our mother. The mother of us all.” Its head crest flared redly. “We Yiplak exist only to avenge her. Die, now,” it said in passable English. The image then vanished.

  “Max!” Jack yelled. “Flip us tail to nose. Emergency plasma flare and try to slag him.” As he tapped in a NavTrack change, trying to move them away from the nut-cruncher of the Yiplak mother ship and pursuing mini-ships, Jack shrugged apologetically at Denise. “Our bait and switch tactic only worked half-way. They ate the Lander bait and now they’re hungry for us. You got the neutral particle beamer online?”

  “Yes.” Her voice quivered but her movements held steady. “We’re pinwheeling.”

  Jack’s sense of up and down surged wildly as Max added a blip jump to their pinwheel and combined it with a side-swerve so they could bring the beamer into Lock-On with Big Mother while the two HF lasers pointed sideways at the onrushing mini-ships. “Fire!”

  Space exploded with light, billowing suddenly like Sol-rise over Ceres. The Uhuru shuddered, jerked, then all thrust-gravity shut off. The Main Drive? Was it—

  “Big Mother just sliced off our Drive module! With their own particle beamer,” Max yelled angrily. “Scramming the fuel feed! The magfields are gone. The fusion drive bottle is gone. We’re—”

  “I got three of the mini-ships!” cried out Denise.

  Jack reached over and touched the neutral particle beamer control. “Let’s see how they like a whirling scythe!”

  On screen, the closing shape of Big Mother turned from a head-on dot to a long teardrop form, its embedding cups making for a strange hull image. The blue scythe of their neutral particle beamer, a coherent beam of stripped hydrogen ions pushed to light-speed by a quadrupole accelerator, arced downward and sliced through the midbody hull of Big Mother. On screen, atmosphere erupted like a silver geyser from the Alien ship, then ebbed as its two pieces pinwheeled around each other. As Uhuru moved upward and outward with the momentum of its escape trajectory, Denise pointed at the image of the lone surviving mini-ship.

  “It’s heading for dock with Big Mother. Think they’ll leave now?”

  “Yeah,” said Max. “If they still have drive power on th
e rear piece. They hurt us bad, but Big Mother got the worst of it. Jack? Jack!”

  Shaking his head and swallowing his empty stomach, he looked back. His friend’s forehead dripped sweat and his dark skin seemed several shades paler. “What, Max?”

  “We have just gravity-pull drive now. No fusion drive. Nothing but inertial movement along our current vector and whatever vector changes we can make with our maneuvering thrusters. We need a repair dockyard, big-time.” The Engineer grinned hopefully. “You know someplace we can hunker down and lick our wounds?”

  “Yeah,” he said, shaking now with adrenaline reaction. “Old Belter Rebellion base at the asteroid 253 Mathilde. Deep inside the Belt. My Grandpa was based out of there. Don’t think the Unity has found it.”

  “Jack!” called Denise. “The Yiplak ship just blip jumped!” He looked back around. She pointed at the gravitomagnetic sensor screen. “Hey—that shows two gravity wave pulses.”

  “Damn!” Max muttered. “You called it right, Jack. Someone other than the Yiplak was watching us. Wonder who?”

  “Good question. Where are they based? And is there a central hangout where all these Alien predators gather to swap lies?” Jack watched as the radar track of the Yiplak half-vessel disappeared on an outward vector. He noticed there was no radar track for the second vessel, which meant it had perhaps jumped into hiding behind Karla. Running fingers through his hair, he gave the order. “Time to leave, I think. Time to alter our vector using the thrusters, then blip jump ourselves away from this trajectory. Max?”

  “Most assuredly,” Max said emphatically. “And I’m hungry for a cigar and a steak.”

  Denise looked at both of them with youthful eagerness. “And I,” she said lightly, “am ready to visit the Asteroid Belt. Won’t that be fun?”