Earth Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series 1) (10 page)

“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 the 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?”

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.