Peace Army (30 page)

He had changed the Telgorans’ ways.

The time continued to drag, but Titan was content. The outcome would be worth the wait. What were a few extra days when the end was finally in sight?

* * *

Patahbay received the knowledge with the rest of the Family. The digger, a male named Pratalo, stopped digging, quietly placed his digging tool on the ground, and stepped back from the hole he had created. This was the last of the five tunnels they had been asked to dig by the general.

Patahbay consented to the direction of the mass mind and set out to find the human called Titan.

It was almost time to eliminate the invaders. The Family felt elation.

* * *

The mothership left interstellar mode and settled into a rhythm of steady hum as it approached Telgora.

“I want a clear view of the planet surface,” General Soo informed the team of warriors operating the controls of the large ship. “No closer than that for now.”

“Yes, General.” He received quick, crisp replies from all of those in the room. He nodded his approval. This was a new crew, and order had been instilled early. He had made it clear from the start of the journey that full and immediate acceptance of his orders was required. Less would not be tolerated.

Soo had not risen to the rank of general by luck, personal relationships, or even military genius. No, he climbed to the top by demanding strict allegiance and displaying a brutal hand to subordinates who displayed anything less. He was known within the Minith army as a vicious taskmaster who ruled with an iron fist and a cutting tongue. When Soo ordered his soldiers to jump, they jumped. When he ordered his troops to jump higher, they did not bother asking, “How high?” They already knew the answer and jumped as high as they could.

As Soo waited for his orders to be carried out, he considered his position. No further attacks had been carried out against the bases on Telgora, but they had hunkered down and assumed defensive positions. If an attack came, they would be ready. It did not take a military genius to know the first attack was a fluke. Its success was based on surprise and a superior number of fighters at the point of attack. If the humans attempted a second attack, they would find the walls of the mining bases heavily defended. All hands, military and nonmilitary alike, had been ordered to stand watch atop the walls in rotating shifts. Half of all personnel were manning the walls while the other half slept and rested. Every eight hours, they switched positions. At any time, roughly a thousand armed Minith were stationed atop the walls of each base.

Mining for agsel had been temporarily abandoned until the danger was dealt with, and that’s what Soo planned to do—deal with the humans on Telgora. The mothership was loaded with more than a thousand troops, advanced weapons, and attack craft. With the ten thousand troops civilians already on the ground, Soo felt his forces would be more than adequate to destroy a mothership full of humans.

The three other motherships Soo had ordered to Telgora from other, further planets, were overkill. The first of the three was due to arrive in five days, but by the time it reached the planet, the fighting would be over.

The Telgoran natives were a minor concern. General Soo had to keep his men from confronting them directly. Hand-to-hand combat with the stronger Telgorans would be dangerous. However, as long as his forces stayed in their fighting craft or inside the bases, the dim-witted natives should pose no threat. The stones and clubs the natives wielded were no match for the pulse weapons the Minith employed.

Chapter 43

Titan relayed the information regarding the Telgoran’s breach of the final tunnel to Grant.

Grant was seated in the command center of the mothership with Gee when he received the word. The ability to communicate with the key players—the pilots, Titan, and the forces at the mining base—could only be done from the ship. He felt disconnected from the action, but he had no choice. Adequate, prompt communication and his ability to coordinate the efforts of the players were vital to their success.

“Very good, Titan. How long do the Telgorans need before they are ready?”

Grant heard Titan speaking the native language and realized he was asking one of the Telgorans, probably Patahbay.

“The Family will be ready in two hours, Little Man.”

“Excellent. I will let you know when they can start.”

“You got it,” Titan replied.

* * *

“General, we have reached orbit.” Soo was pulled back from his thoughts of the coming attack. “The view of the primary base is coming online now.”

Soo turned toward the screens on the far wall of the command center. He had been inside a mothership dozens of times, but this was the first time the screens had ever been used. He was amazed at the scene that came into focus and wondered why he or his people had never considered these visual cues important.

The view was remarkable. It was if he were looking straight down into the interior of the mining base from a height of several hundred feet. He could see the details of the base, and the human forces stationed there, clearly. Defenders were stationed at regular points along the walls. They were armed and facing outward, clearly alert for approaching forces or craft. Inside the walls, the normally clear area was filled with human vehicles and carriers. He could not tell their purpose, but he knew they were designed for war.

Activity appeared along the western wall of the base and Soo watched as a group of weak-looking humans ran to several of the vehicles. Within sixty seconds, the vehicles, four in all, were airborne and streaking to the east.

“Follow those craft on a different screen,” he ordered. Seconds later, the wall broke into separate video feeds. One was still focused on the base, the other tracked the aircraft.

The craft were very fast—faster than the fighting ships Soo had in the bay of his mothership. A finger of doubt crept up his spine. He flung it roughly away.

These are just humans
, he reminded himself.
They may be capable of building faster aircraft, but they will never be fighters.

“How far are the human ships from the next base?”

“At their current speed, they will arrive at the next base within fifteen minutes, General.”

Fifteen minutes. A thought occurred to Soo.

“Notify all bases that we have arrived in orbit,” he commanded. “Alert the base being approached that the humans have a group of fast-moving craft headed their way.”

“Yes, General.”

“And have the base scramble all their personnel. I want every available weapon ready to defend against attack.”

“Right away, General,” came the reply.

His orders were relayed to the bases on the planet. Every Minith in the command center watched the fighters speed across the planet toward the base.

“Can we get another view on the wall?” he asked the room.

No one responded. The two Minith operating the video feeds looked at each other. Soo saw that they did not know the capabilities of the device.

His anger exploded forth. Two quick steps and a flash of fist backhanded the closer of the pair. The Minith soldier sprawled awkwardly to the floor, but immediately scuttled to regain his feet, then his chair. He and the second operator quickly moved dials and punched buttons.

The screen faded briefly before the twin views flickered, then became three. The mining base occupied by the humans took up half the wall. The other half was now split into two views. The top view showed the human ships speeding across the blurred ground below them, while the bottom view showed a base similar to the first, but manned by Minith soldiers.

“Good,” Soo stated as he turned fully toward the screens. “Learn to work the device properly.”

The second base showed a flurry of activity. Minith personnel were streaming from the barracks and into the doorways that led up to the top of the walls. All were armed.

“Excellent,” Soo observed. These warriors and civilians were responding well to the approaching threat. He was anxious to see how the humans would react to such heavy defenses.

“General, the human base,” Soo heard. One of his troops was pointing to the view of the human-occupied base. He immediately saw what had drawn the other’s attention. A second group of ships was leaving the base. They were also heading east.

* * *

“Alpha Leader, report.”

“This is Alpha Leader,” came the response. “We are five minutes out from Base One, still
en route
to Base Five.”

Grant was pleased. Alpha was right on schedule and Bravo Flight had just lifted off. Charlie Flight was still a half hour away from leaving the base.

“Very good, Alpha,” Grant replied. “Let’s go through this just like we mapped it out. Conduct a low-level flyover of Base One at top speed. We need to get the Minith’s attention.”

“Of course, General. No problem.”

Grant knew the pilot, and the others in his flight group, did not need him to remind them of the plan. Mouse had trained them well. Their performance against the first Minith base had gone perfectly. But he felt better for having refreshed their memories, nonetheless. Grant offered a silent apology to all the former commanders he had cursed for doing the same thing. He knew now that those officers had not reminded him of his orders for
his
benefit. It had been for
theirs
.

Directing the action from a safe distance was much more difficult than Grant had imagined. It wore on the nerves and on the body. If given a choice, and if he had the training, he would have much rather been piloting one of the fighters.

This was the first pass over one of the bases, so Grant had ordered the low-level flyover. The fighters should be dropping rapidly from Gee’s planned altitude of six thousand feet, where the planet’s winds could give them maximum push, to an approach altitude of only a hundred. Grant knew the pilots would feel as if they were skimming the ground from that height, but he wanted maximum effect from the maneuver. The fighters were not going to fire on this base, but the sound and confusion caused by their passing should wake the base’s defenders.

He had no doubt that the Minith were on alert, but it had been more than a week since the initial attack. Human troops grow tired and careless when on alert for extended periods. Hopefully, the same held true for Minith. That would help protect the pilots.

On the other hand, he needed the aliens defending the base to be stirred up. And he wanted their attention on the skies.

So, he was going to kick the hornet’s nest.

* * *

Soo watched the speedy human craft drop from the sky and set up an approach. He also watched the defenders on the base scramble to move personnel and weapons to the western wall. He hoped his warning had given the base time to put enough firepower in place.

He would know soon.

The incoming ships were not large. He guessed each held a single pilot, perhaps two. He did not know what type of weapons they carried. That, too, he would know soon enough.

The Minith had nothing like these vehicles. The motherships the Waa built could move through space at incredible speeds, but carried no external weapons and were not very useful inside a planet’s atmosphere. When asked about the limitation, the Waa merely replied that the ships were not designed to regularly enter a planet’s atmosphere. While they were capable of atmospheric flight, once they were in space, they were meant to stay there. The Minith had repeatedly used that design flaw when it aided in their conquests of other worlds. Landing a mothership among the native population could be quite impressive to the conquered.

The Minith also had a fleet of smaller interstellar craft. Like the motherships, they were non-military in nature, but aided in the delivery of small groups of personnel and troops to distant worlds. As did every Minith general officer, Soo had one of these ships at his disposal. It was one of these ships—the one possessed by General Brun—that had been used to destroy the Minith home world.

Of course there were the large, slow-moving cargo ships that moved the wealth and spoils from conquered worlds into the Minith supply channels. Operated primarily by computer, these vessels were the lumbering dinosaurs of the Minith fleet. They moved continuously to and from the worlds as the need arose and as quotas were filled.

As for planet-based vehicles, the Minith were limited to various sizes of armed carriers. Although these possessed weapons and armament, they were primarily used to ferry troops from place to place. Trained warriors provided the bulk of their firepower and strength. There were a lot of worlds out there that contained life, but the reality was that few of those worlds contained sentient life, and of the few that did, none was advanced enough to stand against legions of trained Minith soldiers. The Telgorans were too stupid, and the humans—at least, until now—had always been too weak-willed.

Soo wondered what had happened on Earth to change that. Not that it mattered. Humans were still weak sheep. They made good farmers and slaves, but they could never stand up to Minith in an extended fight. They were not aggressive enough, nor experienced enough in the art of war. Those were not skills you gained during a few short years.

The proof was about to take shape on the ground below. The humans were in a tight formation. A lead ship was followed closely by two others flying side-by-side. The final, fourth craft followed closely behind.

The view of the approaching ships suddenly merged with the view of the mining base. Soo watched with rapt attention as the firing began.

The lead aircraft received the heaviest concentration of fire from the Minith defenders on the wall. None of the incoming aircraft returned fire.

An excited gasp arose from those in the command center as the first explosion lit the screen.

* * *

“Alpha One and Alpha Two are down!”