AL:ICE-9 (31 page)

A few seconds later, four of the fighters converged on the remaining cruiser, causing it to explode as well.

Just as Brian was starting to feel some relief,
Independence
exploded off the port bow, having drifted too far into the battleships line of fire. He felt like he was kicked in the gut at the thought of all those people he had known, gone in a flash. Sara’s face had gone white.

Just as quickly, the same ship vaporized one of the Jolly Rogers and a companion fighter. The battleship was killing them off, one by one.

----*----

The Netite advance was spread out over a wide line, not allowing themselves to be bunched up for easy pickings. Once they were in range, Jake gave the word to open fire. He watched an entire part of their advancing line drop. It was not enough. They continued, returning fire, causing the marines to retreat between shots.

Once they were close enough, Jake ordered the 10
th
in, they having gone wide earlier. As they made their pass, Jake saw two riders shot from their rides, the cycles crashing into the oncoming mass and killing more Netite. Jake had the feeling they were in big trouble.

----*----

Brian had the feeling he was in big trouble. He had the remaining fighters retreat, regrouping with the remaining two destroyers.  Positioned in a Mexican standoff with the original three NeHaw ships, they all watched, as the battleship seemed to have it in for
Revenge
. Nothing the other ships had done dissuaded it from its pursuit.

Brian had swung
Revenge
to the edge of the Klinan solar system, attempting to bring the battleship nose on. If he could concentrate his fire at the tip of the ship, he might create a significant enough breach to disable it.

As the battleship closed, Brian ordered the last of the missiles and all guns to fire.

Miraculously, the battleship nose erupted in a huge ball of flashing energy. As Brian looked at Sara in disbelief, two Lanai patrol ships passed on either side of
Revenge
with a dozen fighters as escorts. Both ships had their rail guns streaming fire along the sides of the battleship.

From
Revenge
, they could make out pieces of the battleship coming apart from the streaming fire. With the patrol ships heavy plated steel hulls and stasis shields, the battleship guns had little effect. After completing their pass, the NeHaw ship broke in two, its innards spilling out into space.

The crew of
Revenge
watched as their own battleship slowly passed by, more fighters streaming from the hangar opening. None of the fighters had pilots.

“Where did they find a crew?” Brian asked Sara.

----*----

The Netite were literally at the city gates, the marines having cut the original force in half. They had continued to pick them off during their advance to the city. However when one dropped there was another to take its place. At this point, they still had almost a thousand to deal with, and all no more than one hundred feet away.

From the audio reports from his people, he was down to ninety marines and six troopers, although two of their cycles were down.

The Netite had halted their advance, in preparation for a final assault. Jake watched as they massed in groups aligned with the streets below, creating a situation where Jake was about to become surrounded. If the Netite flooded into those streets, they had nowhere else to go, as the rooftops were too far apart.

As he was hunkering down for their last stand, four fighters did a sweep from left to right, energy cannons blazing and decimating the oncoming force. Jake could see all of the cockpits were empty.

The marines all cheered as the Netite went down in flames from above.

Jake stood up from his rooftop position and asked, “ALICE-3, is that you?”

“Did you miss me?” was her reply.

----*----

HeBak sat in his ship at the edge of the human solar system, watching the spaceship traffic going in and out of the gravity well that contained his retirement. This had become a ritual, every decacycle, for the last few kilocycles. Since the disaster of the Battle of Klinan, as everyone was now calling it, he had been coming here to see how he might slip in unobserved and steal away with enough wealth to retire early.

Emissaries from worlds outside of Nu Tau Beta were flocking to this solar system, all requesting recognition and with desires to align with the humans. He hoped to find a way to slip in with a convoy and enter unchallenged. So far, he had no luck at all.

After the battle, things on the home world had gone from bad to worse. The High Council was searching high and low for an answer to the human problem. All HeBak’s efforts to misdirect them away from this planet fell through after the Klinan declared this barbaric race the saviors of the galaxy.

Worst of all, the devastating loss of the battleship and the Netite mercenary army crippled the NeHaw military effort. The battleship, one of only two remaining, was a huge loss. This was compounded by the fact that the Wawobash, whom were now renegade, originally built all three and was unavailable to build any more for the NeHaw, since they now built apparently unlimited quantities for the humans.

As for the mercenaries, while there were always more to be had, the invincibility factor was gone. Previously, should the Netite be invoked by the NeHaw, worlds would capitulate immediately. Now that the humans had wiped out their entire landing force, while outnumbered over 30 to 1. This proved they were not only beatable they, were completely outclassed by the human forces.

With no space traffic to speak of at the moment, HeBak zoomed his display, searching for the third planet from their star. Looking at the planet, once located, he instantly focused on the bizarre malformed ship in orbit there. He knew it from the images captured on Klinan as this was the human battleship. It lacked the smooth, curved lines of a proud NeHaw craft, giving it a crude, utilitarian appearance.

He had watched the video of the battle several times, displaying this same ship as it turned the fight, destroying the NeHaw fleet. He had seen as it then released smaller ships that destroyed the remaining Netite on the planet below.

HeBak still didn’t understand why the humans had let the two remaining destroyers leave orbit unmolested. It was their observations and recordings that had provided the High Council all the evidence they needed to declare war on the humans. He had heard it described as mercy, by other races, but the act was lost on him.

----*----

ALICE-3 rested in a comfortable orbit above her previous home. Parked in stationary orbit, she sat directly above the State of Georgia, reflecting on her life, past and present. She had once been a facility guardian for the Georgia location. Her responsibility there had been to support an Advanced Weapons Research and Design facility. That had been until the first NeHaw attack.

Afterward, she simply maintained the empty offices and labs, waiting for the release of the last remaining link to existing command, trapped in an abandoned stasis experiment. Captain Jacob Thomas had rested in an isolated lab in Nevada, under the watchful eye of ALICE-1. As the first of the eight ALICE facilities, she protected and prepared him for the day when he would be needed.

That day came 153 years after his entombment, and all the ALICEs were delighted with his recovery. With Jakes release, came a flurry of new activity. Fresh humans were being recruited every day, restoring the usefulness of every facility they populated.

As it was coming close to the time ALICE-3 herself might be reopened, the accident happened, terminating her existence. She understood her sisters had kept her death a secret due to the extreme danger it presented to Jake. She also understood that with her passing, ALICE-9 came to life.

If not for Jake, her story would have ended there. She understood that it was through Jakes knowledge and efforts that she was where she is today. Moreover, from this perspective, it was a huge step up from her previous life!

Before her untimely passing, she was in a fixed location with a limited view of the universe. Now she could go anywhere and experience things her sisters could only imagine. The battle for Klinan had proven her value in expanding the influence of the human/ALICE agenda.

It was for all this and much more that she was forever indebted to Jake for her resurrection.

Epilogue

Jake sat in a beach chair, just off the water’s edge, drinking a beer and watching the women play in the surf. Sara, Sandy, and Becky were all waist deep in the warm blue water, having the time of their lives. The scuba gear he had just been using rested in the sand next to him on one side of his chair. On the other side were the towels the women had spread out before entering the water.

As he watched, Sara extracted herself from the splashing melee, and headed to her towel next to Jake. He handed her a beer as she dropped on her towel, taking a sip and then setting it upright in the sand next to her. He watched as she lay on her back, her body glistening in the sunlight from all the water clinging to her skin.

She closed her eyes, and then said, “So tell me again how you saved ALICE-3?”

Smiling, Jake replied, “As I said before, when the computers that make up ALICE-3 crashed, they created a file called a core dump. It contained everything she had in memory. I simply rewrote the firmware for the host system to reload that into memory prior to completely booting.”

“Why didn’t they ever do that before?” She asked, tuning her head in his direction, while shielding the sun from her eyes with one hand.

“The systems they used in development didn’t crash, they were manually rebooted. Once they discovered they were creating a life each time, they stopped the practice entirely. As far as I know this is the only time a crash dump has ever been captured to test with,” Jake replied.

“Once I had that to work with, I saved everything I could find in the file systems, specific to ALICE-3, and then had a duplicate ALICE system installed on the battleship. We replicated the entire system, replacing all the necessary files in all the required places. The best part of all, besides resurrecting ALICE-3, this solves two huge issues for us,” Jake finished.

“What’s that?” Sara replied, this time not bothering to look up as she went back to sunning herself.

“We no longer need a large crew to run the battleship.”

With that, Jake saw a small nod from Sara,

“And we don’t need to worry about a name for the battleship anymore!” He finished.

Jake saw her smile at that as she raised both arms over her head, relaxing in the sand and sun. He took another sip from his beer as he admired the sunlight on her tanned skin. Turning back to watch the other two in the surf, he had to admit this trip to Australia was everything he had dreamed it would be.

The women adopting Sandy’s tradition of no swimsuits in Australia only added to the splendor.