Earth Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series 1) (9 page)

“Main Drive thrusting,” said the Engineer. “But Jack, we won. Isn’t this a violation of the Rules of Engagement that Destanu talked about?”

Jack felt thrust-weight as a flare of plasma bright as the Sun kicked their backs. Max’s concern was reasonable, but this confrontation had ended too quickly. “Maybe it is a violation. Or maybe threat and menacing posture don’t come under the Engagement Rules. But we have to do more than just bluff the Swarm. We have to chase them out of their home base, maybe even destroy it.”

Denise reached over and touched his bare wrist, drawing his attention away from a fixed stare at the Swarm ship. “Jack. Why do we need to know where their home base is? The Kuiper Belt is big. There’s enough room in it for us and for them. Isn’t there?”

He sighed. The Unity’s wishful thinking dogma had finally surfaced in their Ethologist. “No, Denise, there
isn’t
enough room. We’re lions, like the Rizen, not just scavengers or bold hunters, like this group.” On screen, the Swarm ship blipped again, this time on an outbound course. “There!” He tapped NavTrack to copy the Swarm vector and load it into their own navigation ephemeris. “They’re headed for someplace on the far side of Pluto’s orbit. Probably one of the larger Kuiper comets.”

Denise had been watching the NavTrack screen. “I think they’re heading for 1993 FW. Or comet ‘Karla’—the Soviet spy nemesis of Smiley.” She exhaled tiredly. “Jack, you’re taking us to their home territory. You realize they’ll defend that to the death?”

Silence filled the Pilot cabin. “I know.” Behind him, Max moved as if he might come forward, then stopped. “But we’ve got to finish this job. Humans can’t let another species camp out on their home territory. And the Kuiper Belt is ours!”

Three days later, the
Uhuru
approached comet ‘Karla’ from above the plane of the ecliptic, with the fusion drive offline, moving on momentum and with no use of the gravity-pull drive. Jack had no doubt that if humans possessed a gravitomagnetic sensor able to pick up sudden surges in gravity fields, so did the Swarm—or whatever they called themselves. Maybe he’d see their faces before the battle began. Maybe not. At least he, Denise and Max had been able to work out a simple battle plan. The application of ‘bait and switch’ tactics to interstellar hunting ranges might be something new to the Swarm, but his Grandpa had described how it had been applied during the Belter Rebellion. Now it was their turn.

Max floated into the Pilot cabin, then pushed forward to where Jack sat, held securely by freefall restraint straps. “Jack, you know I want vengeance for Monique. But is this wise? We’ve got the only working gravity-pull drive—maybe we should hand it over to the Unity, or to Ceres Central, before we get killed?”

“I thought Wheeler made copies of everything you two did?” He eyed the man who’d worked tirelessly on Charon to decipher the workings of the gravity-pull drive. “Didn’t he?”

Max folded his hairy arms and floated in mid-air. “He did. But we’ve got the only Alien-built drive. It would take the Unity three, maybe four years to build a copy, then months to duplicate the control software needed to integrate it with our NavTrack computers.” The Pole lifted thick black eyebrows, his expression sardonic. “Wheeler is good, but he’s a theoretical type, not a ‘bang it into shape’ bench-type like me.”

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!”