Freedom Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series Book 3) (2 page)

“Will do,” the middle-aged man said as, behind him, his fellow Welsh crewmates worked at their own stations. “We could use our Higgs Disruptor set at wide footprint to disintegrate all five at once?”

Jack shook his head. “No! I want to keep the Higgs secret from the Unity Naval Command as long as possible. Plus I want to salvage at least one NavTrack computer from an enemy ship. And maybe the grav-pull drives of those ships.” He looked up at the image of the admiral. An image that was real-time thanks to the passage of their neutrino signal through another dimension, according to Archibald. “Admiral, you heard me. You take out two ships. Maureen will take out two and Gareth will kill the fifth ship. Understood?”

“Understood.” The man looked aside as one of his crewmen came up, dressed in the same Mars red formal uniform worn by the admiral. “We are entering Alcubierre drive shell now!”

The man’s screen image wavered, grew jagged from the gravitational lensing that preceded any ship going into either grav-pull drive or Alcubierre FTL drive, then it disappeared. Leaving him looking at Gareth and the five frigate class ships of Earth’s Communitarian Unity. He wondered why the Unity had chosen to attack the Asteroid Belt now, not that long after the death of former Dictat Ludwig Carsten Berthold Maathias aboard the HikHikSot colony ship. And how had the Unity ships found 253 Mathilde? It was a base left over from the First Belter Rebellion in 2072 and not known to Earth. Somehow they had learned it was the base for Jack’s fleet of seven ships and now attacked.

“Exiting the tunnel,” Elaine called from her Pilot station. She tapped on her NavTrack panel, causing their vector line to appear on the front screen as a third image that showed them turning toward the asteroid’s south pole.

“Max! Take us to the south pole on fusion pulse thrust! Stay off grav-pull! Don’t want to emit a graviton pulse that these bastards will detect on their gravitomagnetic sensors,” Jack said. “Let’s have them looking in every direction for Belter attack!”

“Moving from Pinch Mode to thrust now,” called Max from behind them.

On the front screen a second ship vector joined theirs as Gareth’s
Dragon
moved up alongside them on his own fusion thrust. Jack looked right to where his sister sat, working her NavTrack panel. “Elaine, you heard what I said to Gareth. Enter that course vector and give me a two second warning before we arrive at the asteroid’s equator. And keep us in ground-hugging transit! Damned well don’t want those Unity ships to know we are here until we fire on them!”

“Vector laid in,” she said softly. “I’m glad Ignacio is out on patrol.”

“Following your vector,” Gareth called.

Jack turned back to watch the front screen images of Gareth, the five Unity frigates and their navigational vector track. He understood his sister’s worry for her Basque boyfriend. Ignacio Aldecoa and his cousins were always the first to attack, the first to find a way out of an impossible situation and among the few ships to have lost crew during their earlier space battles against the HikHikSot predator Aliens.

Below them the gray rock surface of the carbonaceous chrondrite asteroid that was 253 Mathilde moved by in a near blur. They could not speed along at the twenty percent of lightspeed normally allowed by their fusion pulse drive, let alone the eighty percent of lightspeed granted them by the Alien-built gravity-pull ship drives. To date their three fleets possessed only grav-pull drives salvaged from Alien ships killed in Sol system and in their recent interstellar voyage to the HikHikSot home system. Maybe that would change in the future. The presence of five Unity frigates arriving here on grav-pull said the Unity government of Earth had built new grav-pull drives from the engineering specs given them when the HikHikSot Aliens tried to add Earth to their Hunt territory. Those Aliens were social carnivores who resembled a cross of cheetahs with leopards. They were one of the Hunters of the Great Dark who enforced the rule that ‘only predators travel star-to-star’. Now it seemed that tech gift had encouraged someone on Earth to try to reclaim control of Sol system. Despite the rebellion led by Jack, Gareth and Hideyoshi.

“Two seconds!” called Elaine. She tapped on her panel. “Putting up a north ecliptic Tactical Display view of Mathilde, the enemy ships and our ships.”

“Ready to fire!” called Maureen from the holo above Jack’s lap.

The front screen went hazy briefly, then a new image joined the ones before them.

“Arrived!” called Hideyoshi from the Command Bridge of the
Bismarck
. “Lieutenant Lopez is ready to fire our beamers.”

Jack watched as, flying just two kilometers above the asteroid’s surface, they rounded its equatorial bulge and came into view of the five Unity frigates. He saw ships that were hundred meter long spearheads fitted with energy weapons domes, railgun launchers and attack landers attached to the belly of each ship.

“Sensors say we are being painted by lidar and maser scans!” called Elaine.

“Fire!” Jack yelled.

A blue neutral particle beam and a black antineutron antimatter beam shot out from the
Uhuru
, impacting on two of the five ships. A second pair of such beams shot down from the
Bismarck
on the two outer Unity ships. The
Dragon
shot its sole antimatter beam at the middle ship.

Death in space usually happens quickly.

The three frigates hit by antimatter beams grew yellow-white flame globes in their middle, then exploded into ionized gases as their onboard fusion reactors lost magfield containment and added their fusion plasmas to the total matter-to-energy plasma caused by the antimatter beams.

The two remaining frigates were sliced in half, then into three pieces each by a second blue particle beam from the
Uhuru
.

Jack tapped his Fire Control panel, aiming the dual railguns of the
Uhuru
at the fragments of the two Unity frigates. Each railgun was loaded with a barrel of steel ball bearings that would exit the railgun launcher at planetary escape velocity. “Ventilating the frigate fragments. We do not need living captives when their NavTrack computers will tell us what base they left from and who gave them the orders to attack us.” He looked up at the older man of Japanese heritage who had renounced his allegiance to the Unity Naval Command in favor of protecting Earth from Alien domination. “Admiral, I know your decryption codes are six months out of date. But can your ComChief figure a way to gain access to the NavTrack computers of those two dead frigates?”

On the front screen dozens of black holes suddenly showed on the dimly shinning hull fragments. Tiny whisps of white air and water joined the massive gas balls emitted earlier when each frigate was diced twice by Maureen’s neutral particle beam emitter. No ship fragment showed any kind of controlled movement. Now, anyone left alive in a vacsuit would join those who had died under the first energy beam attack.

Hideyoshi glanced aside at a repeater screen image that showed him Jack’s ventilation of the ship fragments. He nodded abruptly, then turned to Jack. The man’s clean-shaven face showed resolute determination. “It will be done. We will find a way to decrypt the access codes. Recall that the
Bismarck
is a heavy cruiser. Our Library computer retains the codes, and code variations, from twenty years of cruising for the Unity.” The man blinked dark eyes, then lifted one black eyebrow. “What about the grav-pull drives on the ship fragments? Do we salvage them?”

Jack smiled. “Yes, please. Your Lander
Rudyard Kipling
is roomy enough to take onboard the two drives. Plus their control panels. Will be interesting to see how their grav-pull control software compares to that reverse-engineered by Max.”

“Captain Jack!” called Elaine. “We have twenty inbound grav-pulse ships! Coming in from Mars, Pluto, Europa, Ganymede, Titan, Enceladus and other parts of Sol system. They . . .” she looked down at her Sensor panel. “Their origin points match our last records of Belter and Mars ships doing system patrol duty. They’re ours.” Within the bubble helmet she wore her long brown hair looked sweaty under her headband. But Elaine’s amber eyes showed relief.

He nodded slowly, mind spinning with multiple schemes on what to do next. “Pilot, thank you. ComChief, send a Fleet Activation signal to every ship by way of our neutrino pedestal. Tell them to rendezvous here at Mathilde. We have a fleet battle conference to set up.”

“Transmitting,” called Denise from behind Jack.

He heard her whispering into the pickup for the modulated neutrino pedestal that Max had salvaged from a Hackmot Alien ship. He also heard the sighs of relief from Blodwen, Archibald and Nikola at the cessation of active combat. If only his heart would stop hammering faster than he could think. And he needed a drink. Reaching down he grabbed a water tube, stuck its nipple against the intake slot of his helmet ring, took the ring’s tube in his mouth and sucked long and hard.

“Maureen!” he called to the holo of the woman with short black curls, hair fine wrinkles on her narrow face and a rad-tan like all Belters who’d grown up wearing a clear helmet atop their vacsuit. “Get the hell up here. I need current fleet status info from you. Plus your sneakiness!”

“Smart mouth youngling,” she muttered from the holo. “Heading up the Spine.”

“Fleet Captain Jack,” called Hideyoshi from the front screen. The man’s image now showed side by side with that of stocky Gareth, captain of the second Belter fleet and the current romancer of Maureen, their Belfast granny. “What do you plan for Earth?”

What indeed? “Well, I’m not going to hit them with asteroid strikes. Those nine billion people are enslaved by the Cooperative Consensus of the Communitarian Unity. But there are still riots going on from our broadcast of their last Dictat’s effort to put Sol under the control of social carnivore Aliens. And while the Unity Naval Command is clearly functional, I suspect there are some remnants of old nationalism that may welcome the chance to reassert local control. Maybe even the United States portion of the North American Cooperative.” He nodded to vacsuited Maureen as the woman entered from the Spine hallway and sat in her Combat station seat. She immediately began bringing up combat simulation holos that she had previously programmed. In her spare time. Jack refrained from grinning at the woman’s obsession with space combat maneuvers. That obsession had served them well during their recent interstellar roaming. “Admiral, I’m open to suggestions from every ship captain. Which makes for thirty voices at our conference. But . . . I think it wise to destroy all space launch sites on Earth. And to pay a termination visit to the Unity Civil Bureaucracy in Brussels and to the Unity Congress in Geneva. Beyond those steps, I’m open to everyone’s ideas.”

The admiral showed his usual restraint, allowing no emotion to show on his face. And rarely in his voice. “Reasonable. This violation of the vote by the Unity Congress to give up any effort to control Sol system must be punished severely.”

“I say kill them all!” growled Maureen, one gloved hand slamming against the armrest of her seat.

Jack smiled. The bloodthirstiness of the woman who’d known his Grandfather Ephraim during the First Belter Rebellion in 2072 was unchanged even now, twenty-six years later. “Good Maureen, your tactical advice is always welcome. As it will be at our upcoming fleet battle conference. And afterwards on any ship I command.”

The trim, slim woman glanced at him from within her bubble helmet. She gave him a wintry smile. “I have no doubt you will be deadly enough, youngster. Not after the object lessons we gave the HikHikSot. Loved your fragmenting and deorbiting of their moon. Made for lovely fireworks.”

Jack looked away. Killing half a world’s population was not what he would consider as a ‘lovely’ event. But it had been necessary to implant in the deadly Aliens the operant conditioning lesson that they should always run away from any human or human ship. Instinctively. If they wished to live another day. He nodded at Hideyoshi and Gareth.

“My friends, thank you for your service today. Admiral, please bring your ship into the Dock Cavern. We need to use your Admiral’s Mess room for our meeting.” He looked to his Welsh ally. “Captain Gareth, please put your ship in orbit to guard against further Unity attacks. Then join us in your Lander.” Jack unlocked the restraint straps of his seat and stood up. He looked to the rear and caught the gray eyes of his gruff, honest and sardonic buddy. “Drive Engineer, please stay onboard,  join up with the
Dragon
and keep the
Uhuru’s
Battle Module on Auto-Track and Defend mode. The rest of you, join me in our Lander. We need to get back to the Dock Cavern to reassure the Citizens Council of Mathilde that we will protect our home no matter who or what attacks!”

“Will do!” Max said, though he looked disappointed at not being able to join their meal and conference in the Dock Cavern.

Jack’s lifemate Nikola stood up, her sandy brown eyebrows bunching up as she frowned. “How many will we have to kill this time?”

“Lots!” grunted Maureen over the vacsuit comlink that connected everyone aboard the
Uhuru
.

Red-haired Denise and Blodwen both stood up to join him, Elaine and Nikola. To his right their chief physicist Archibald Wheeler was unsnapping his seat restraints. The man’s shock of unruly reddish-brown hair framed a worried look. “I hate the idea of attacking Earth.”