Aliens Vs. Humans (Aliens Series Book 4) (18 page)

Jack looked up at his fellow captains. “Hideyoshi, Gareth, Minna, everyone, let us assemble now into our Pinwheel Plasma Torch attack formation! When we emerge from our Alcubierre space-time bubble, let’s go to grav-pull to get within the 10,000 klick range of our ship weaponry.” He tapped on his Tech panel, moving it to Tactical Display mode with ship weapons systems status showing along one side. “Since the
Uhuru
, the
Bismarck
and the
Dragon
are our three ships with Higgs Disruptors, let us each assume a 120 degree angle of position about the pinwheel ball. Maureen, I’ll handle our belly Higgs Disruptor while you manage the antimatter and particle beamers of your module.” The holo above his lap that showed Maureen settling into her Battle Module seat caught her shrug. She was used to managing all ship weapons systems. But he felt two minds on weapons was better than one. “And everyone, do not waste energy using your lasers. Use your antimatter beamers with your particle beamers. I don’t give a damn for scavenging grav-pull drives. I just want these Rizen dead!”

Acknowledgements came from every ship of the fleet. He looked back, catching the gruff gaze of his buddy and fellow survivor. “Max, take us in on Alcubierre!”

The man nodded. He reached out to the Alcubierre pedestal that stood between his seat and Denise’s. He tapped a complicated sequence on the surface touch panel. “Drive activated. Transit time estimated at forty-five seconds. Heading inward!”

Ahead, the front screen went blank as the Alcubierre space-time bubble enclosed them. Ahead of them space was squeezed. Behind them space was expanded. They swept inward toward the world of Green Grass like avenging angels.

CHAPTER TEN

The front screen went live with true-light images of black space sprinkled with stars and silvery ship hulls. Elaine’s Sensor feed took shape to the right of the Schmidt scope’s imagery, with a schematic of the planet and moon, the twenty Rizen ships showing as yellow dots. One green dot of a Doomat ship showed next to the moon. Instantly with the Sensor image there showed a range to the nearest Rizen hull. It lay 9,129 kilometers distant.

“Attack that ship!” Jack yelled. “Max take us closer on grav-pull!”

Two things happened simultaneously.

The
Bismarck’s
nose particle beamer shot out a blue whiplash that hit the central globe body of the Rizen ship, splitting it in half. White gas and shiny water particles spewed from the opened corridors.

The stars and silvery ship hulls went hazy as the gravitational lensing of the grav-pull drive distorted incoming light photons.

In less than three seconds their Pinwheel Plasma Torch ball raced ahead at 80 percent of lightspeed, with their fusion thrusts flaring outward in a haze of plasma that would disrupt any incoming directed energy beams. Then the fleet stopped as it reached the outer edge of the Rizen fleet formation.

The Rizen fleet, which had been blip-jumping in unity like a shoal of fish or a flock of birds suddenly stopped moving as their onboard commanders sought to understand what was happening. It was just a few moments of non-movement. But it was enough for the Auto-Track and Defend systems of each fleet ship.

Jack aimed his Higgs Disruptor at the left flank of the fleet, a group of six spear-in-a-globe ships. He tapped Fire. A yellow beam set at a hundred kilometer wide footprint shot out across 3,000 kilometers. On the front screen those ships grew hazy. The golden hulls covered in red, yellow and black stripes expanded outward like a balloon. Then they each became clusters of metallic fragments that lost their gravitational coherence as the disruptor killed the Higgs Field that gave all matter the ability to form atoms, molecules, matter and energy. Jack thought of it as a ‘disintegration ray’ even though Archibald frowned at the term.

Yellow spears shot out from the
Dragon
and the
Bismarck
, even as each ship’s separate antimatter and particle beamers shot at solo ships lying outside the Higgs beam.

Black antimatter beams and the blue whiptails of neutral particle beams split through nearby space like a lattice of death, hitting and vaporizing Rizen ships in total matter-to-energy conversion, or slicing them into air and water leaking wreckage.

Three Rizen ships lying on the far side of the fleet shot green lasers and blue particle beams at the fleet. But the surrounding haze of fusion plasma generated by the Pinwheel Plasma Torch formation stopped those incoming beams. No Earth ship was hit.

But the yellow-white ball of a thermonuke torp explosion suddenly appeared just thirty kilometers from the fleet. Somehow one Rizen ship had shot out a torp before being vaporized.

“Elaine! Power to our EMF fields to deflect incoming charged particles!”

The other fleet captains gave similar commands to their Sensor people.

“Sneaky bastards!” growled Max.

Jack gave thanks for the fact that all Belter ships had a double hull construction, with a layer of water filling the space between. The water slowed down incoming neutrons and all other particles except for neutrinos and gravitons. Plus the charged electromagnetic field carried by every human ship worked to deflect any incoming charged particles. Like those from a strong solar flare. Or a thermonuke blast.

Giving thanks that only humanity had antimatter and Higgs beamers, Jack told the
Uhuru’s
dual railguns to shoot a load of steel bearings at the distant sector where Rizen ships had been split into fragments. Likely every lion-rhino was dead. But ventilating their hulls would guarantee zero air to breath. And zero survivors in vacsuits. Ball bearings that traveled at planetary escape velocities were quite effective in penetrating every metal. Though a meter or two of solid lead might stop a ball. But nothing could stop the black death of antimatter beams, the blue dismemberment of neutral particle beams or the melting caused by the fleet’s own green HF laser pods, now that plenty of Rizen hull fragments lay within the 3,000 kilometer range of the lasers.

The yellow dots on the side Sensor image blinked out in groups and singletons as his fleet laid waste to the Rizen Colony Fleet.

“Got two with one shot!” yelled Maureen from the holo above his lap.

Jack blinked. He tapped on his Tactical Display for a replay of Maureen’s particle beam shot.

The Fire Control imagery from Maureen’s Battle Module repeated its Targeting Lock imagery. Two Rizen spear-in-globe ships appeared at a range of 4,194 klicks. One ship lay almost directly behind the other ship, perhaps fifty klicks distant.

Maureen’s blue whiptail reached out faster than a blink and struck the globular middle of the first ship. Cutting through the globe, the whiptail continued onward to hit the ship behind it in the nose, shearing off the command and control portion of the second Rizen ship. Seconds later a black antimatter beam from Aashman’s ship
Mongoose
hit the middle and tail portions of that ship, turning all matter into the yellow-white haze of total matter-to-energy conversion. Another black beam hit the nose and tail fragments of the first ship speared by Maureen. Yellow-white energies blazed in the blackness of space. The Fire Control backtrack sensor said the second beam had come from Minna’s ship
Wolverine
.

“The
Badger
kills!” screamed Ignacio from the front screen.

Jack looked up from the holo in time to see the last two Rizen ships, now showing the haze of grav-pull drive activation, get struck by a blue particle beam and a black slash fired from his Basque brother’s ship.

Yellow-white blasts filled both spaces as the onboard fusion reactors failed and lent their plasma energy to the destructive impact of the
Badger’s
two attacking beams.

“My brother Ignacio, convey my congratulations to your Combat Commander, cousin Aligarde Ekaitz!” Jack said over the laser Come-Back link. “May his
boina
gain a new ship-killed star!”

The swarthy face of his Basque brother and Elaine’s lovemate smiled. He reached up to twirl his black mustache, found his hand blocked by his helmet, and gave a Who Cares? shrug. “Thank you my brother! And it is fine to see you wearing your own
boina
!”

Jack gave thanks he had remembered to don the
boina
beret worn by battling Basques, the beret given him by Ignacio when the man had formally adopted him into the Euskaldunak, or Basques of northwest Spain. He looked to Elaine’s Sensor image. No yellow dots showed.

“Cease firing!” he called out, though he noted that most fleet ships had already seen what he had seen. There were no Rizen grav pull drives active within the planet to moon space. Which still left eleven Rizen ships scattered throughout the system. He caught the gaze of the
Bismarck’s
commander. “Admiral Hideyoshi Minamoto, will you take the rest of our fleet out to kill the Rizen ships at the Rock Fields, gas giants and outer cometary ring? Using your Alcubierre drive of course, so you will arrive before they have time to flee? Though I suspect the other Rizen know there has been an attack, based on the colony fleet’s possession of neutrino comlinks.”

“As you command, Fleet Captain Jack,” Hideyoshi said, his tone formal. The man lifted a thin black eyebrow. “And your ship
Uhuru
, will it need assistance?”

Jack smiled. The Mars fleet admiral, the man who had played a vital role in bringing his Mars ships into action against the Aliens at Sedna comet, never questioned Jack’s orders. He simply offered support. As any good captain would do when speaking with another ship captain. “Not needed. Since the addition of the Higgs Disruptor nodule to our belly hull, the
Uhuru
has firepower the equal of your
Bismarck
. No, I plan to take us down to a low orbit above the world Green Grass. There to locate and decimate the Rizen colony.”

“Ahhh.” The man blinked black eyes, reached up to rub back his thinning hair, was stopped by his own helmet, gave a quick smile, and nodded. “Understood. Your duty to your dead crewmates of the first
Uhuru
is not yet complete. May you do their memory true justice.” The man, dressed in Mars red under his red and white-striped vacsuit, looked to his left. “Pilot Lieutenant Bob Wells, set the coordinates for those four Rizen ships in the asteroid belt of this system. Convey the coordinates to the other seven ships of this fleet.” The admiral looked back to Jack. “Fleet Captain, we depart shortly. Our good wishes on your hunting of these . . . these deceptors.”

Jack could only agree that the mildest term for the Rizen was deceptor. For that was exactly what Destanu had done when talking to his former captain Monique d’Auberge. “Thank you. Return to this battle space when you are done. We need to have a fleet battle conference once all Rizen opposition is killed.”

The man gave him a nod of agreement, then looked to his left. “Pilot, activate our Alcubierre drive pedestal. And the drives of our fellow fleet ships.”

With the suddenness of thought the man’s image vanished from the strip above the front screen. As did the faces of the other fleet captains, including Minna, Ignacio and his other Belter allies. He licked his dry lips, then looked to his right. His sister Elaine had anticipated him. Her gloved hands were held above her NavTrack panel, ready to set a vector line to the planet below them. “Pilot, set our vector to an orbit above the daylight side of Green Grass. Arrival at 200 klicks altitude, on an easterly orbital track.”

She gave him an easy grin. The grin was the same as when she had challenged him to a game of null-gee chess in their asteroid habdome, even as their sister Cassie tried to escape from her crib. They had strapped the year-old baby into her aircrib so they did not have to deal with her weightless antics. “Vector set. Transmitted to Max.”

Jack gestured backward. “Drive Engineer, take us in.”

Ahead, on the front screen, the white stars began to twinkle as the drive’s gravitational lensing bent their light. While their ship stayed in normal space-time during grav-pull, to an outside observer the 200 meter length of the
Uhuru
would appear to suddenly jump forward like a bee zipping from one spot to another. That was the value of a drive that could ignore inertia and which moved you at 80 percent of lightspeed. Which meant they would cross the 200,000 kilometers to the home world of the Doomat elephants in less than a second.

♦   ♦   ♦

The world of Green Grass was an incredible sight. White hazy clouds floated above three brown and green continents split apart by three blue oceans, with white ice caps at the north and south poles completing the world’s semblance to Earth. Jack felt his chest swell at the world’s beauty. Though he had grown up in airless space, with but an inflatable habdome to call home, he and his sisters had yearned for the impossible. A planet of their own. So they watched the
Nature
and
Blue Planet
vidcasts put out by the Open Libraries. While folks used to air stretching to the horizon, with pull-down gravity of one gee and oceans of water could take where they lived for granted, Jack never did. All the things normal to planet-bound peoples were carefully conserved by Belters. Air, water, fuel and food were their lives. With them any Belter family could manage a life among widely distant rocks and ice balls. But those vid programs had drawn him into an early study of Earth’s animals. Reality intervened as a teen. Jobs in the Belt required Tech skills. So on Vesta he had earned a degree in Technology, along with a second degree in Anthropology. Both of which had taken him to Charon and the first
Uhuru
. With a shiver he sat back and fixed his analytical mind on what slowly spun below.