Freedom Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series Book 3) (14 page)

“Anyone want a beer?” Jack asked.

♦   ♦   ♦

The
Uhuru
and the 22 other ships of the fleet dropped out of their Alcubierre drive shells three days after entering that altered space-time. Jack focused on the front screen’s image of Tau Ceti, a yellow G8.5V main sequence star. In the foreground shimmered the brown streak of a thick dust, rock and comet ring that circled the star from 35 to 50 AU out. The images of his other ship captains appeared at the top of the screen. Then the screen split into two side-by-side images as Nikola worked the adaptive optics of the ship’s 30 meter-wide Big Eye reflector scope. One image showed the system’s true-light view from their current location while a second image contained seven half disks that glowed faintly against the velvet darkness of space.

“Nikola. That’s more planets than the five we were expecting,” Jack said, wondering at the reason for the variation.

“Correct,” she said from behind him, tapping on her Astro panel. “Denise, send this imagery and my comments to the other ships via our tight-beam laser link.” She held silent a moment. “Okay, I think I know what we are detecting. See my orange cursor point?”

“Yes,” “Yes”, “Yes”, said Jack, Maureen, Elaine, Denise, Cassie, Blodwen, Archibald and Max simultaneously.

“Good. I like an attentive audience,” Nikola said lightheartedly. “Well, as Jack said, we knew this system had five rocky planets in it similar to Earth. Astronomers earlier this century labeled them as planets b, c, d, e and f. Those five ranged in size from one and a half times Earth diameter to two times.” She paused, tapped again, and the front image expanded to focus on the seven planetary shapes, some of which lay on the far side of the star as seen from their emergence point. “The habitable zone around this star runs from one-half AU out to 1.35 AU. Planets ‘e’ and ‘f’ are the only ones in that liquid-water zone. The inner three planets are Mercury analogues. Planet four, or ‘e’, resembles a super-Venus. Planet ‘f’, while getting much less light than Earth gets, has a thick atmosphere with decent carbon dioxide in it. Which has caused a greenhouse effect. Plus there is plenty of oxygen in it. While ‘f’ is four times the size of Earth and maybe six times its mass, it is the best candidate for our local juvenile species.”

“Hey Nikola,” Elaine said as she tapped on her Sensor panel. “Those two new, outermost planets. They have an infrared signature but it is a pretty cold one. And they are big!”

“So they are,” his lifemate murmured. “They look to be the size of Uranus and Neptune. And their position at five and seven AU is too cold for inner planets. The spectrophotometer light spectrum returns say they are mostly hydrogen and helium with a bit of nitrogen. Which makes them small gas giants.”

“Nikola,” called Blodwen from the rear. “Did the Nasen astro holo have info about the species occupying this system? Like their planet, their bioform, their tech level and stuff like that?”

“Nope,” Nikola said. “Whatever data the ancient predator Aliens got during their swing-by of this system, the Nasen holo just provides five data points. Which are the system location, the year of its discovery, the presence of space-going ships, the fact that the local people have not reached their outermost planet and the system’s classification as a ‘juvenile’ species location.”

Maureen, sitting to Jack’s right, tapped on her combat simulation holo so it copied the seven planet imagery. “Nikola, why did we miss those two outer planets? I thought the Long Baseline Stellar Interferometer was the final word on nearby systems with planets.”

“It was. Still is,” Nikola said, her tone bothered. “The interferometer should have caught these two gas giants. While we knew the first five only from radial velocity analysis, not from transits of the star, that was fixed later on. Maybe their gravitational signal got mixed up with the inner edge of the debris disk?”

The problems astronomers had with their tech devices was of minor interest to Jack. The people in this system were what mattered. “Nikola, give us the basic data on that planet ‘f’, like its distance from the star, orbital period, air, gravity, any moon, stuff like that.”

“Yes my imperial fleet captain,” she muttered from behind him. Jack prayed his fellow captains would not remember her sardonic tease. “Planet ‘f’ is located 1.350 AU out from Tau Ceti. Which means it gets just 27 percent of Earth’s light level. That should make it a cold ball of ice over rock. But its air is almost a duplicate of Earth with lots of carbon dioxide. My Astro data estimates its temps range from minus ten to plus forty degrees Celsius. Which means that while there will be ice at its poles, any water on the surface will be liquid most of the year. As for its year, that is 642 days.”

“Gravity?” called Max from his Drive seat.

“Three times that of Earth,” Nikola said. “We could walk on its surface and live there for awhile. But if we fell down, it would break every bone in our bodies. And while air and space pilots can handle accels of up to nine gees, nobody lives at that level for more than a few minutes.”

“Except for the people who live here,” Denise said, her tone eager, as if she wanted to meet and greet the locals sooner than soon. “Uh, looks like there’s  a moon orbiting it.”

“True,” Nikola said. “My Astro algorithm computes it to be the size of Earth’s Moon with the same mass. Pretty big.”

Jack felt eager to meet the kind of people who evolved under a gravity three times that of Earth. But first things first. “Elaine, what do your sensors say re moving neutrino sources? Whatever these people look like, do they have fusion pulse ships?”

“They do!” cried Elaine as she looked aside at her armrest Sensor panel. “Got six moving neutrino signals, color of green, ranging from planet ‘g’ inward to planet ‘e’. Uh, one of those six moving sources is in orbit about the gas world ‘g’. No graviton signatures, so no grav-pull drives in the system,” she said thoughtfully. “There are also multiple neutrino signals coming from planet ‘f’ itself. But they match the pattern put out by fusion reactors.”

Maureen tapped her Combat panel into three dee simulation mode. “Loading those sensor readings now, along with the orbital tracks Nikola described. Plus the data from our UV, gamma ray, x-ray, neutrino, graviton, EMF and other sensors,” she said, her voice calm. “Ah! There are the six moving neutrino sources.”

Jack tapped on his left armrest Weapons panel, which allowed him to back up Maureen’s Combat station. “That single ship out at planet ‘g’, do you think the locals are bringing in deuterium and helium-3 isotopes from mining the atmosphere of that planet?”

Maureen shrugged her slim shoulders, her black leotard showing muscles where few women had them. “Possible. Or it could be an exploration ship. What matters is there is no ship traffic out to planet ‘h’, the seventh and outermost planet. So we have some time before predator Aliens arrive.”

Jack looked to his Pilot. “Elaine, you certain there are no graviton sources in that cometary ring? That’s where any predator Alien would set up an observation post.”

She gestured at the front, which now showed a third split-screen that illustrated neutrino, IR, UV, gamma ray, x-ray, radio and other EMF sources. “You see what I see. Nothing in the ring. And since gravitons travel at FTL speeds, we would see any grav-pull use anywhere in this system.”

Relief flooded through Jack. They had arrived before any Hunters of the Great Dark. He looked back at Denise, who was once again chewing on a red braid. “Hey ComChief . . . what are you getting for AV broadcasts from planet five?”

She looked down at her Comlink panel, then up. “Anonymous, I’m tracking 113 AV emissions from planet five. Characterize them by signal strength, active content and audio complexity.”

“Characterizing,” said the ship’s central computer. Jack wondered if there was a distracted tone to the expert system’s mech voice. “Emissions come primarily from northern and southern temperate zones on planet five, based on presumed ground temperatures. Seventeen emissions are the strongest. Audio is present in each emission. All emissions contain graphic imagery.”

Denise grinned. “Display the strongest graphic imagery AV emission.”

“Displaying. Forward.”

Jack did like everyone, including his fellow captains who were getting a Come-Back sharing of the Anonymous analysis of the strongest AV signals, and peered at the front screen.

A fourth image occupied the middle of the screen. In it they saw a landscape of dark blue sky, rolling hills, green trees, purple bushes and a crowd of blocky, hippo-like aliens with six legs, a squarish head with two big eyes, six neck tentacles that acted like tiny hands and a cavernous mouth full of flat white teeth. The planet five Aliens were gathered in a horseshoe cluster, watching four individual hippo Aliens to push large gray boulders up a brown hill. That hill was just ten meters high. The Aliens did the pushing with their heads, their short thick legs straining to move the boulder up slope. At the top of the hill were two hippos dressed in red robes that covered their back and sides. One hippo held a tech device that it looked at regularly. Low hooting sounds came from the group watching the four pusher Aliens. In the air above them hovered a sausage-like balloon. The bottom of the balloon was festooned with circular tech, which Jack guessed might be three dee holo recorders. They were certainly too big to be standard AV recorders.

“They don’t look like predators,” Cassie said from behind Nikola.

“Agreed,” said Denise, who was leaning forward, intently watching the behaviors of the hippo-like Aliens. “Their flat teeth suggest plant-eating herbivores. But their skin is covered with stripes of red, yellow and black. On Earth those are common warning colors for poisonous or deadly creatures, like a coral snake or the poison dart frog.”

“Well,” grumbled Max, “those skin colors are for sure not cryptic coloration meant to
hide
them from notice. So, are those colors aposematic signs of dangerous critters, or are they examples of Batesian Mimicry where harmless folks evolved to resemble the real predators of their home world? So they would look dangerous even if they are not?”

Denise nodded. “It could be either, though the flat teeth and lack of canines suggest these are people evolved these skin colors to avoid predation by local carnivores. They could even have other danger signals, or polymorphisms, the way tiger moths emit ultrasounds that tell hunting bats they are bad-tasting moths. So their looks could be an example of Batesian Mimicry. But these people dominate the planet and have spaceships, so somehow they outlasted this world’s social predators. Maybe they’re omnivores.”

Maureen snapped her fingers. “They resemble those Rizen Aliens that Jack and Max fought in their first encounter. Those predators looked like these people.”

“I disagree,” Jack said before Max could say the same. “The Rizen were a cross between a lion and a hippo in body shape. Plus the Rizen had talons and lots of canine teeth. These Hippo folks have neither. These people have a body shape similar to that of Earth’s bison. They are built for strength and endurance. My guess is they are herbivore plant eaters.”

“Hippo folks?” mused Elaine, giving him a patient look. “Jack, they could be carnivore Aliens. Those body colors might reflect Müllerian Mimicry, where the hippos are predators who evolved to look like
other
predators on this world. Earth carnivores eat flowers, buds and some plant stuff. Look there!” she gestured at the right side of the boulder-pushing image. “Three smaller Hippo folks are munching on those purple bushes. Could they be kids?”

“Could be,” said Blodwen. “Or they could be a different sex. But consider this imagery up front. It is being broadcast worldwide on a very strong signal. It looks like a competition of some sort. This could even be a sporting event, like the marathon runner events that show up on the diginet and Earth’s AV channels. If it is indeed a sporting event, that says something. Competition is a marker of social predator culture.”

Sports? Well, half of the AV channels on Earth were devoted to what some people called sports. If you consider tossing people into a lagoon filled with sharks to see how many swam fast enough to escape being eaten a kind of sport. Jack much preferred the Belter sport of dodging cryovolcanic blasts on comets and icy moons. That took talent. And with limited thruster fuel and limited air, the person to travel the greatest distance without being tossed into space by a cryovolcanic eruption usually won. “Denise, what about the other strong AV channels. Any imagery of cities, harbors, space ports, tech stuff like that?”

“One moment.” She looked down at her Comlink panel. “Anonymous, resort AV broadcasts to focus on images with metal in them.”

“Sorting. Complete. Projected.”

The boulder-pushing image was replaced by a daylight image of dozens of flat-topped pyramids arranged in a checkerboard pattern. The pyramids were a combination of metal struts and stone walls. Flatbed vehicles, resting on six balloon tires, moved slowly down brown roadways between the pyramid buildings. They were not enclosed. But Hippo folks rode on them, as many as twenty on the biggest flatbeds. And the Hippos were of two sizes, one smaller than the larger version. One vehicle stopped and a ramp now extended from its rear. Two Hippo people walked slowly down the ramp to reach street level. A brief haze showed when their feet touched ground, suggesting a dry dusty soil. Elsewhere, sausage-like blimps moved slowly over the city, but none of them contained passenger platforms. Jack didn’t blame the Hippo folks. They knew as well as he did that a fall on a world with three gees gravity would break their bones, no matter how tough their skin, tendons and bone might be.