Earth Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series 1) Page 8

  Jack choked back a comment on what young, resilient people thought might be fun. “Yeah, it’ll be fun, Denise. I’ll show you my Grandpa Ephraim’s grave and introduce you to my family clan. You’ll like my sisters.”

  She nodded happily, as if just moments ago they hadn’t been close to joining the Main Drive’s fusion bottle when it flared into a plasma cloud. “Is the rest of your clan as daring as you? Will they join our battle against these predator Aliens?”

  Would they? The entire Belt was still smarting from its defeat by the Communitarian Unity . . . but sensible people do not lightly take up arms, kill strangers, and bury the bodies of their relatives. “Don’t know. I think we can refit in the Belt. The rest, who knows?”

  “Who knows indeed?” grumbled Max, his deep voice vibing off the cabin walls. “But before we leave, let’s salvage some gravity-pull drives from those small ships that Denise laser-zapped. We’ll need them if we get Belter allies. Then I’ll pick High Card for who gets the last steak. Deal?”

  “Deal!” Jack and Denise replied together, then laughed at each other.

  Laughing still, they blip jumped after the dead Yiplak vessels, three predators who’d won a battle and now needed to rest, eat and pretend life wasn’t deadly.

  Max hummed. “Denise, tie up that hair of yours! Can’t block your vision in an EVA excursion!”

  “EVA? Wow! I’m ready for that!” cried Denise, pulling her red hair up into a bun.

  Jack smiled as he looked forward to grav-pull drive scavenging in company with Max and Denise. Humans were good predators. And they were even better scavengers!

  Nikola free-floated with Jack as they observed the refitting of two new Belter ships with the salvaged gravity-pull space drives he had gained in Uhuru’s battle against the Yiplak aliens at comet Karla. Even though both wore EVA suits inside the giant Dock Cavern of 253 Mathilde, and were tethered to the cavern wall, he felt her grip on his left arm. A grip he had cherished ever since she had chosen to leave Charon Base and search for him.

  “You seem to have adjusted well to this hollow rock ball,” Jack said as they watched ships, people and automated machines move about the airless interior space which his Belter ancestors had discovered within Mathilde.

  “It helps that we can live inside that outsized habitat torus up by the cavern’s ceiling,” she said over their suit comlink as her clear helmet glinted with reflected plasma welding light.

  Jack kept his eyes on the arrowhead shapes of the Belter volunteer spaceships Badger and Wolverine. But his memory of years spent growing up on other asteroids with his family filled his mind with what she saw. The microgravity of 253 Mathilde, and that of nearly all asteroids, was so small that people had to live inside spinning habitats. The habitats produced spin-gee in order to avoid bone weakening, muscle atrophy and immune system dysfunction. Following the design of early O’Neill habitats which now orbited Earth, his fellow Belters had used the metal ores they solar distilled from stony and metallic asteroids to build giant ring-like habitats where the outer edge of the ring was the ‘floor’ of rooms and corridors that filled the torus. Attitude thruster jets kept the spin stable and fast enough to produce one-half Earth gee or better in artificial spin-gee. Spin-gee allowed Belters to live their entire lives in the Asteroid Belt, have children, raise them, and then send them out in Hopper ships to locate new sources of water ice, metals and tholin organics for making veggie gardens.

  “You were born in Prague, weren’t you?”

  Nikola turned inside her helmet to look at him. “Jack! You know that. And you know that my family emigrated to Mars when I was four years old.” Her pale blue eyes looked him over. “You only talk non-sequiturs when something is bothering you. What is it?”

  “My youngest sister Cassandra,” he muttered over the comlink as a distant EVA-suited form jetted toward them from the far side of the asteroid’s cavern. “She’s twenty-two. Finished with polysci grad school. Dumped her boyfriend. Wants to be a spy. For me and my Alien crusade.”

  “Oh.” Nikola’s brown hair floated away from her sequined headband. She blinked long lashes as she looked away from him to the cavern’s busy interior, then back to him. “Jack, any chance your older sister Elaine can talk her out of this scheme? Elaine’s a trained pilot and a medoc. Plus spending time on Ceres Central is not the choice of most Belters. From what your Mom and Dad have told me.”

  He licked dry lips, recalling the family confab that had happened two days ago. Inside his clan’s room compound inside the torus that spun above them. Cassandra, dressed only in a black leotard and soft boots, had looked at Richard their Dad, Julia their Mom, her sister Elaine, and Jack, then declared her intention to be a spy at Ceres Central, saying she had no desire to be a roving rockrat. His parents, recalling the martyr death of Grandpa Ephraim, had chosen lives of moving from one asteroid to another in their family’s ancient Hopper ship, locating mineral outcrops on the smaller asteroids that had no IAU names, plotting them, planting a Claim Beacon, then selling the exploitation rights at Vesta’s Central Hall market. It was a traditional Belter life and career, one that many Belters chose for its personal freedom and ability to escape the formal attention of Earth officials like the Belt’s Governor Aranxis. Jack, Elaine and Cassandra had grown up in that life, relying on the Open Libraries and the Belt’s many Remote Tutors to earn an education. While his mother Julia did hire out as an IT troubleshooter, Belter society had always been dispersed. After the defeat of the Belter Rebellion in 2072, that dispersal had allowed most Belters to avoid ‘indentured’ service to Unity officials and businesses. Others called it what it was—serfdom, just shy of legal slavery. Like everyone, his family paid annual taxes to Ceres Central based on their declared income from Central Hall rights sales. And like every living Belter, his family lied each year about just how much income they made. While Aranxis sometimes sent Tax Agents to monitor rights sales at Vesta Central Hall, tracking down Belters who’d sold those rights was often impossible. So the Unity settled for ‘official’ control of the Belt while the Belters lived lives of hard work, some desperation and deep memory of the lives lost twenty-six years ago.

  “No luck. Elaine tried that two days ago when Cassandra first brought it up. Even offered Cassie a place on her own cargo ship.” Jack watched as the suited figure drew closer to him and Nikola, his memory matching the suit’s white and orange stripes with a familiar name. “Max is coming to visit. Maybe he has news on the fusion pulse Main Drive module we bought for the new Uhuru.”

  Nikola moved to insert her arm inside his arm. Their love had grown deeper after Nikola left Charon Base and found Jack in the Belt. She’d said, on arrival at Vesta a month ago, that she’d left due to the arrogance of Earth managers sent to Charon to ‘help’ Administrator Grübingen ‘deal with’ the disruption caused by Jack and Max’s First Contact vidrecords. The managers had required her to justify every skywatch moment for the giant ten meter reflector scope placed on Charon’s surface. As if she were suspected of secret talks with Aliens by way of her scope! But the time she’d spent with his Mom and two sisters had shown that her motivation was deeper than science. More than disgust with Earth’s political blindness. It had moved him deeply. Two weeks ago she’d moved into a private habitat room with him on Mathilde torus. They were building a life partnership—in the moments when she was not building a new scope inside the giant basin of Ishikari Crater and he wasn’t recruiting Belters to his crusade.

  Nikola hugged his arm. “Max looks excited. Maybe he’s finished the refurbishing and welding together of those two space tugs to make your new Uhuru?”

  “Possible,” Jack said, raising his gauntleted right hand in greeting as Max deceled to free-float just above them. “Hey Max! You done installing the grav-pull software on Minna’s and Ignacio’s ships?”

  The Drive Engineer from Lodz fixed twinkling gray eyes on him and Nikola. “Kinda hard to make out in vacuum, ain’t it?”

  “Max!” Nikola sputtere
d, her tone good-humored. “Anyway, I hear you’re spending time with that Belter vet Maureen O’Dowd. You two trying out a few Polish waltzes?”

  Jack’s friend grinned at Nikola’s jibe, then shook his head. “Nope. But Jack needs to meet her. Could be a fine convert to our crusade.” His friend and fellow survivor turned from Nikola to him. “And yes, I’m done with installing the software on our Belter allies’ ship computers. And the plate contacts are welded to the nose, tail and mid-body of each ship. They’ll be ready to blip jump in a day or two.”

  Jack sighed. That meant his time leading a normal life of love and remembrance with his parents, sisters and Nikola would soon come to an end. “Excellent news! And the Main Drive module, is it matched up to our new Uhuru?”

  Max nodded inside his helmet, his thick black eyebrows beetling with concentration. “It’s matched up. Plus I’ve added structural welds throughout our new ship’s double-hull body to allow it to cope with the graviton field stresses when we use the grav-pull drive. That sphere of the drive is filled with what our local physicist calls Thorne Exotic Matter. Makes the energy needed to create an external gravitational node.”

  The local physicist Max meant was one Matthias Binder, the Technologist who’d taught Jack his second trade and who’d recommended him to join the crew of the Uhuru on its Kuiper Belt cruise that had resulted in the Rizen First Contact. Like Nikola, the Austrian white-beard had left Charon Base after the Unity managers had invaded. Being told to ignore the reality of what Jack and Max had discovered, that had been too much for the old man. His arrival at Vesta on the same cargo flight as Nikola had led Jack to invite him to the Belter Rebellion base at 253 Mathilde. The man had found plenty of work as a tutor for the asteroid’s smart teens. Like Denise Rauvin, who’d laser-faxed a Kiss Off message to her parents on Charon Base. Their recent crew member was already chatting up Captain Minna Kekkonen of the Wolverine, hoping to join the Finn’s ship.

  “Good news, Max.” Looking beyond his Drive Engineer, Jack saw the stretched-out diamond shape of Uhuru jet away from its Dock frame and aim for the giant tunnel that led to the surface of the 53 kilometer wide ‘fat potato’ that was Mathilde. “Who’s moving our ship out of Dock?”

  Max grinned. “Madame Maureen. She’s talented in many ways. Any place on Mathilde’s surface that you want Uhuru parked until we all head out?”

  “Yep. Next to my grandpa Ephraim’s grave. At the bottom of Ishikari Crater. Can do?”

  Max’s look turned serious. “Can do.” He tapped his wrist compad to feed the coordinates to the Uhuru. Then he looked at Jack and Nikola. “Done. What next?”

  “Next?” Jack looked to Nikola. “Miz Star Peeker, you want to join me and Max as we jet out to Ishikari? I need to look over my new ship and meet this O’Dowd woman. And you can check on the mechbot construction of your new reflector scope in the crater.”

  Nikola smiled softly, her blue gaze traveling over him slowly. “Yes, I choose to join you and Max. While I must stay here to finish building my new scope while you two head off on your crusade, we three can take a few moments to give homage to the memory of your grandpa.”

  His heart beat faster. His eyes felt wet. And Jack knew that Nikola’s love for him was as deep as his determination to kick Alien interlopers out of the Kuiper Belt. It was a duty his grandpa would have understood. And that his Dad supported, even though the man had never understood Jack’s drive to discover the meaning of what it meant to be human. His drive to learn more and more. His drive to look beyond the next horizon and see what surprises the universe had in store for him. Well, maybe when they returned from this upcoming Kuiper trip he would hear some spy news from Cassandra. Make love with Nikola. And perhaps gain more ship allies.

  Whatever happened, he knew the future held more surprises for him and his allies!

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Just beyond the orbit of Neptune, at the aphelion curve of the Centaur comet 5145 Pholus, Jack brought the new Uhuru into a matching vector above the dark red surface of icy Pholus, a place rarely visited by man or his machines, though the Communitarian Unity feared it. The Unity feared Pholus the way a person avoids a crack in the sidewalk—it knew the comet would not soon curve in and impact Earth, nor would any of the other Centaur objects that roamed between Jupiter and Neptune—but still it kept a nervous eye turned this way. Which made all the more urgent his and Max’s vow to bury on Pholus four crewmates murdered by the Rizen aliens. But burial in space is never easy.

  “Max,” he called back to the man who’d figured out how to make their gravity-pull drive work. “Are the Wolverine and the Badger matching our vector change?”

  Max glanced up at the front screen of the Pilot cabin, which now showed multiple overlays from NavTrack, the gravitomagnetic sensor, passive infrared and ultraviolet sweeps, and local synthetic aperture radar. The heavy-built, red-tanned man squinted. “Yup. Captains Kekkonen and Aldecoa are flying wing-position to either side.” The man from Lodz then looked over at Jack and grinned. “Course, you might want to check with Madame O’Dowd on whether she’s ready?”

  The third person in the Pilot cabin cursed in rough Gaelic. “Max Piakowski,” grumbled Maureen O’Dowd, “you’re just hopeless! Housebreaking an Engineer to social politeness is like leashing cats—an Alice in Wonderland delusion.”

  Jack smiled to himself. But he did not let Maureen, a 78 year-old grandmother and military historian who’d fought in the Belter Rebellion at the tender age of fifty-two, see his smile. She had a stinging slap, as he’d discovered when he’d interviewed her at 253 Mathilde, much to the amusement of Max. “Maureen,” he said evenly to the woman sitting to his right, in the Combat station seat, “are the geo-penetrators ready for firing?”

  “They be so,” Maureen said with a hearty Belfast accent. “Your four crewmates will rest deep inside Pholus for the next few million years. Once we launch them into space.”

  Burial at space . . . it was a hard subject for Jack. His grandfather Ephraim had died in the Belter Rebellion twenty-six years ago, and the man’s distrust of the One World dogma of the Communitarian Unity had been passed on to Jack. Along with a native-born Tennessean’s distrust of wishful thinking. Which was all that had saved him and Max when the Rizen social carnivore Aliens attacked and murdered their crewmates at comet 1992 QB1, almost four months ago. He sighed. “Maureen, launch them.”

  “Launching,” she said, her tone Irish somber. Seated between Jack’s Tech station and the empty Astrophysics/Pilot station at the far right, Maureen handled her Combat station with casual confidence. The tough, wiry woman tap-tapped her weapons panel. Unlike the jury-rigged unit on the old Uhuru that had lost its Drive module, this panel was new. Like a lot of stuff on the refitted and refurbished ship.

  The Uhuru rocked slightly, then four Sol-yellow exhaust flares shot ahead of them, their spiraling flames a reminder of the outlawed Fourth of July celebration so beloved by Jack, his Dad, his grandpa and other Belters descended from old America. Never again do we surrender, he thought. Live free or Die! had been the motto of the old American state of New Hampshire, and it expressed his own convictions. The time for debating with the Unity about whether he and Max had screwed up two First Contacts with Alien species, out beyond Pluto, was over. He looked back over his right shoulder. “Max, you ready on the gravity-pull drive? I want to head out to the Kuiper as soon as we confirm impact and burial of the penetrators on Pholus.”

  Seated in the right rear of the Pilot cabin, Max frowned. “Trying to teach me my job?” His thick black eyebrows made intense his look. “We stay here until Monique, Hercule, Hortense and Gail are properly buried. Yes?”

  “Yes.” Jack could say nothing less. His friend had lost a lover in Monique and he’d lost a Captain with whom he’d often argued. The loss of Hortie, their Ecological Biologist had been hard for Jack. She’d been the one to chat with him on evolutionary biology, natural selection and predator behaviors. Chats which had helped him recognize the threat pos
ed by the Rizen encounter. He reminded himself that while the Rules of the Great Dark said only social predator species like the Rizen and the Yiplak could travel star to star, much like a lone tiger on the prowl, Humans did more than fight and contest territory. Humans buried their dead, remembered them with memorials, and then made sure to never again give in to wishful thinking about the supposed peaceful nature of star-traveling Aliens. And Humans hunted as a pack, unlike the solitary Alien predators they’d met. Now, Jack had a three ship pack and he was ready to see how well he could pack-Hunt any new Aliens!

  “Jack,” called Maureen, her tone musical as a dulcimer. “Impact! And the . . . penetration to a depth of one hundred meters is confirmed by signal bounce-back.” She paused as both he and Max stared ahead at the reddish surface of icy Pholus, his own vision a bit blurred. “Uh, nice paint jobs on Wolverine and Badger. Think we look as pretty to them?” she said, looking at him first, then over her shoulder at Max.

  Jack smiled despite his somber mood. For this third trip out to the Kuiper Belt, they had two allied ships and an entirely new Uhuru. Put together from two space tugs, like arrowheads stuck base-to-base, his ship looked ugly. But the Uhuru had teeth. Atop the ship’s spine rose the dual-barrel railgun launchers, while to the right and left of their ‘stretched diamond’ whirred the hydrogen-fluorine gas laser pods with adaptive optics focusing. And their tail sported the deadly Battle Module, the domain of Maureen and her neutral particle beamer. The ship’s underbelly housed the funnel of the fusion pulse Main Drive which, with magfield focusing, shot out a plasma tail nearly seventy kilometers long. Also a deadly weapon when used close-in. And they each had a comfy stateroom along the Spine hallway, instead of an unwieldy torus that spun around a ship stem. But the thing that pleased Maureen most had been the hull painting they’d done. The Uhuru resembled, to outside eyes, a leaping Jaguar. Snarling white teeth framed the Pilot cabin, dark Egyptian-style eyes loomed above, long claws curled about the ship’s midbody, and a whipping tail ended in the Battle Module. Gold and black jaguar spots covered the rest of the hull. The white-toothed, black-and-white color patterns of their sister ships reflected equally the names Wolverine and Badger. “Yeah, Maureen, I think we look pretty. Not as pretty as you, though.” He offered their Combat Commander a hopeful grin.