Earth Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series 1) (8 page)

Jack heard the echo of Denise’s freefall approach up the Spine corridor as she headed for the Pilot cabin. He smiled encouragingly at Max. “Hey, I helped you with the algorithm that let the ship’s Autonomous main computer duplicate back-up function codes for the Rizen control nodule. That helped, didn’t it?”

His Polish ally nodded tiredly at Denise as she free-floated into the cabin, then he eyed Jack with a glint of good humor. “Yeah, you helped. For an Anthropologist who pretends to be a Technologist, you managed to not crash the Lander. You ready to try out this thing?”

Denise pushed down into the Astrophysics seat opposite Jack, her face pale from long hours down on Smiley and from what she’d seen. “Try out what thing?”

“The gravity-pull drive of the Rizen.” Jack turned forward to face the diamond and velvet colors of the main screen. “With plate contacts at our ship’s nose, tail and the outer edge of the habitat torus, Max says the thing will put out a spherical graviton field that encloses us. The way the Rizen ship was enclosed. Remember the gravitational lensing of the light about the Rizen ship in the images you saw?”

“Yeah.” Denise tapped on the synthetic aperture radar, set it to local sweep, then activated the gravitomagnetic sensor. She looked aside at him with a wry smile. “We gonna get real pull-down gravity inside
Uhuru
?”

“No way,” muttered Max as he brought up the Main Drive to Hot. “Just the ability to maneuver at right angles to our vector, to bounce around like a bumblebee, and to use that pile of tubes for straight-line acceleration without a drive flare. Local area ‘frame-dragging’ á la the Einstein-Lense-Thirring Effect we got, thanks to the Rizen. But internal ship gravity control takes more code-writing than I have brain cells left. Maybe later. Or maybe Earth will figure it out when they study the hulk of the Rizen ship.”

Denise looked disappointed. “Oh? Well, you’ve done great, Max.” She tied her long red hair into a bun while behind them, Max blushed at the compliment. “Do you think—”

“Alert!” squealed the gravitomagnetic sensor’s fake voice.

Jack looked at the main screen, then at the sensor monitor below it. “Damn! Something with a big gravity field just dropped in on us. Maybe the Rizen have returned for their Lander down on the comet? Max! You at Pinch Mode yet?”

“Two minutes.”

Denise pointed suddenly at the front screen. “There they are!”

A cold chill ran down Jack’s spine as an Alien ship moved into a matching orbit above them, at a distance of five hundred kilometers. Trouble was, the Alien craft had no resemblance whatsoever to the Rizen ship they’d ‘slagged’ over three months ago. This ship resembled a water droplet, with several smaller droplets embedded into its sides, while the silvery metal hull showed curving streaks of black and yellow, as if they’d been painted on. This looked like new Aliens.

“Ah, shit,” cursed Max. “No drive flare, no thruster jets. They have gravity-pull, like the Rizen. But they sure as hell don’t look like them. Jack?”

“I agree. These are new Aliens.” Beside him, Denise looked frightened but determined as she gripped the refractor telescope’s joystick control and enlarged the image of the Alien craft.

“Notice the color pattern of a predator that doesn’t mind drawing attention to itself?” she said. “Black-and-yellow streaks on the hull? This sure as hell isn’t cryptic coloration—they aim to be seen, not camouflaged.”

“Hey, Jack,” Max said sharply, “if they’re social carnivores like the Rizen, they’ll try to take us out. But what if they use a different part of the Kuiper ecozone, in resource partitioning, the way Lack and MacArthur showed with birds of prey and warblers? Would they still try to drive us out?”

“Good point, Max,” he said. “Your Charon biology research is on track with what I learned from Hortie. But for sure they’re predators, based on what we see here and now. What else they are—” Jack waited a moment for an audiovisual signal from the new arrival. Nothing happened. No contact from the Alien ship, but no obvious threat either. “Denise, bring out the Fire-Control panel we jury-rigged at Monique’s station. But don’t fire the mining lasers. Let’s see—”

“It’s splitting up!” Denise yelled.

On the front screen, the Alien ship had indeed split up. Where once there was a single ship that resembled a giant teardrop, the attached teardrops had now broken away into twelve smaller mini-ships, leaving behind only a central attachment core. The cluster of mini-ships, each carrying blatant streaks of black-and-yellow, spread apart into cloud that curved as one, like a swarm of bees. A swarm headed straight at the
Uhuru
. “Max!” he yelled. “Power on that gravity-pull drive and get us out of here!”

“Powering on!” said the Engineer.

“God they move fast!” whispered Denise. “Just like hunting hyenas.”

The starfield outside blurred briefly as gravity equal to a small black hole formed outside the
Uhuru
, then it focused differentially on one side of the graviton sphere, drawing the ship sideways and toward the intense gravity locus. Jack reached toward Denise and reset the telescope to auto-track on where the Alien mini-ships had been a moment before, then saw the ships had already adjusted their course. Like the
Uhuru
, they moved without drive flares, blip jumping sideways to match the
Uhuru’s
evasive maneuver. Their closing distance shrank to a hundred kilometers. “Denise! Switch on Hortie’s radio! Give me a way to talk to them. Now!”

Denise reached over and tapped on a pre-set Comlink panel function. “You’ve got Charon Standard Channel Four.”

“Alien ships, respond please. This is the Human ship
Uhuru
, outbound from Charon Base. Respond!”

Nothing came back. Jack heard only the crackle of radiowaves, pulses emitted either by distant Jupiter, nearby Uranus, or from millennia-old supernovae. He looked at Denise. “Why don’t they answer? Any ideas? Quickly!”

Denise swallowed hard. “I don’t think they’ll talk back to you—it’s not their Way.”

“What is?”

She squinted at the onrushing swarm. “Threat displays. Exaggerated posturing. Efforts to assert dominance over us. It’s called agonistic behavior.” She looked unnerved. “I’m guessing, but think of a pack of hyenas coming in to take down solo prey, or scavenge after a kill by the Rizen lions.”

“Hyenas?” Jack wondered if an Earth social carnivore analogy really applied here. But these mini-ships did behave like a pack of predators, cooperating as a unit for a common objective. “Max, try the drive flare trick we pulled on the Rizen, but don’t slag them. Put us into a pinwheel tumble and let the drive plasma flare around us—then shut it off.”

“Doing that!” the Engineer said tersely. “What are we signaling?”

“That we’ve got sharp claws and we mean to use them!” Jack hoped the overt display worked with these new Aliens as well as the circadian photo-period trick had worked on the Rizen.

“Jack!” Denise said nervously. “They’re sixty klicks out and closing. We have to impress them enough to make them back off, if only for a moment. Anything else we can do to scare them?”

Behind him, the Main Drive flared at the same time as the maneuvering thrusters tossed them into a pinwheel spin. His partners grunted with the sudden inversion of up-down senses, felt as dizzy as him, and no doubt wished for internal grav control. But Jack kept his vision fixed on the front screen. “We don’t shoot at them. We need to try something else first.” The separation closed to forty kilometers as the Main Drive suddenly shut off, so the
Uhuru
wouldn’t be slagged by tumbling through its own plasma flare. Freefall hit them again. “Denise! Tell your Fire Control panel to lock-on to the Rizen Lander down on QB1. Fire one of the HF lasers at it as soon as the panel confirms Lock-On. Hurry, please.”

She hurried. “Firing.”

Ahead, on the Weapons display that had now appeared in a corner of the main screen, the blocky shape of the Rizen Lander exploded violently in a spurt of yellow-orange flame. Jack looked up at main screen.

“They stopped!” Denise yelled excitedly, her freckles bright-red against her white skin.

“Good shooting,” Max said from the rear. “We’re blipping again.”

The starfield blurred once more as the
Uhuru
jumped laterally in its orbit, moving to one side of the mini-ship Swarm, yet still between the Alien ships and the comet below. Something clicked in Jack’s head. “Max, keep us in pinwheel mode, but flare the thrusters. Keep them in thrust balance! Maybe bright emission colors will warn them we’ve got more teeth than just the mining laser.”

Denise nodded. “Good. Somehow we’ve got to do, in space, the equivalent of snarling with teeth, fluffing up our fur and screaming insults and defiance at them. Otherwise . . . ”

“Otherwise what?” Max asked, the odor of his sweat filling the cabin.

She looked at Jack, her manner completely serious. “Otherwise, those mini-ships will attack us directly. Maybe with lasers of their own. But they’ll retreat from us if we make them think they’ll be injured and hurt badly by the effort to hunt us.”

“Good idea.” That fit what Jack remembered from his courses in Darwinian biology and the behavior patterns of social predators. “With no way to talk with or vidimage them, we go on what we see, here and now, of their behavior in space. Max, blip us toward the Swarm, but at a tangent, not head on. Okay?”

“Okay. Blipping.”

The front screen changed again. The Swarm of black-and-yellow streaked mini-ships hovered less than twenty kilometers away, similar to their orbiting above the beige-and-white surface of comet QB1. They moved as a loose group, yet the Swarm hadn’t englobed the
Uhuru
. Jack suspected if the Swarm ever did englobe them, it would be all over. They’d go the way a wildebeest goes when a pack of yipping hyenas close in to rip and tear the flesh from its bones, with the deadliest of them being the lead matriarch. “Denise, they’re not moving at us, but they’re spreading out, trying to englobe us. What now?”

“Uhhh—” Their Animal Ethologist stared at reality, at real life on the screen, not some textbook filled with Communitarian excuses for why tooth and claw weren’t really civilized ways to interact. “Move sideways. Blip a lot. Don’t let them englobe us.” She paused, licked her lips, looked sick when Max carried out a series of fast blip jumps that ranged across the face of the Swarm, then looked directly at him. Wide-eyed fear showed in her face. “Jack, I’m scared. What if this doesn’t work?”

“I’m scared too,” he said reassuringly, felt his gut churn with another of Max’s blip jumps, then thought of the next several steps. “Denise, you’ve got two hydrogen-fluorine lasers riding on the outer rim of the habitat ring. Fire them near to, but not at, the mini-ships, alternating your adaptive optics pulse-firing from one laser to another.” She bent to her Fire Control panel, touching it rapidly. “That will give you a break between peak power draws from the main fusion reactor. Plus it will show this Swarm that we could have clawed down one of the mini-ships, but chose not to.” A thought occurred to Jack, the image of what might happen after they won. “Don’t use the neutral particle beamer—we’ll save that for Big Mother, if needed.”

“Big Mother? Oh, the launching ship.” Denise grinned at him. “Yes! We claw the air, move fast and deadly, and we don’t back off from them.” She looked up at the Weapons display screen. “This may work.”

Behind them, Max worked to integrate pulse power feed with their crude weapons systems. “Jack, this ship wasn’t designed for bouncing around in orbit. We’re holding together, but every time we use the gravity-pull, it really stresses the
Uhuru’s
framework. We need to resolve this soon.”

“Agreed.” Jack watched as green laser pulses shot out from the
Uhuru
, passing alongside six of the mini-ships as they swirled and bounced in space. Two more barrages happened in less than three minutes. Would it work? Above them the Big Mother ship, on which the mini-ships had nested, now blipped down to within a hundred klicks. On screen, the darting shapes of the Swarm blipped up vertically to meet Big Mother.

“We won!” cried Denise, clapping her hands excitedly.

“Not bad for an anthropologist,” Max said tiredly. “Can we leave now? I’m tired of fighting Aliens. And I’m ready for that cigar and steak.”

Jack felt his heart thud as the Swarm re-connected with the mother ship and the reconstituted teardrop blipped out of orbit, heading away from QB1. “No, we can’t leave yet. Why did they leave? Why didn’t they fire on us? And how should we behave now?”

Behind him, Max slapped his armrest. “You know, they really are behaving like a pack of hyenas. We defended, then scared them off from this hunting range and they’re now retreating back to home territory.”

“Or maybe we set off a prey-switching behavior?” Denise murmured uncertainly. “Some predators will switch to another species of prey in their hunting niche, as a way of keeping their food species in balance.”

“Crap!” Jack said loudly. “We aren’t their food prey. This isn’t
their
hunting range. It’s ours!” He gritted his teeth, then realized what they had to do before the Swarm mother ship vanished from their radar tracking. “We go after them, back to wherever their home territory is. Then we drive them out of the Kuiper Belt. Follow them, Max.”