Earth Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series 1) (15 page)

“Weird,” muttered Max as he reached up to touch the magfield controls for their Main Drive. “So these Aliens want to control Sol system to increase the resources available to them? How the hell do they get anything back to their home systems?”

He’d figured that one out while searching the Rizen ship after their first battle. “Faster than light stardrive. There’s no way to make interstellar combat useful without FTL. And even then, what they bring home is small potatoes compared to the resources common in any star system. Like all the water, ice, hydrogen, methane and other elements present in our Kuiper Belt and the outer Oort Cloud. But it seems there is some kind of interstellar culture where Alien predators
do
go hunting for new territories around other star systems.”

Maureen frowned in the holo, her look worried. “Which raises the issue of just how many different Alien groups are roaming the Kuiper? Is Sol system the savannah and Aliens the hunting lions?”

“That seems to be the way things are,” Jack said, his gut feeling unsettled at the implication that humanity was a herd of gazelles being stalked by lions. “But we’re not prey.
We
are predators, the apex predators of Earth.”

His two crewmates went silent, making him wish once more that Denise had chosen to stay with their ship rather than join Minna’s crew. But the lure of Minna’s commerce raider reputation had pulled the young woman in. And now was not the time to ignore external reality. Up front, on the screen’s black velvet backdrop, there gleamed the reddish ball of 1993 FW, the pink dot of Mole, the close-in track of
Badger
, UV and IR emission sources, the faint trace of the solar wind, still pulsing with the force of a distant hurricane, and the all-critical gravitomagnetic sensor, which would give the first alert that some Alien ship—using its own gravity-pull drive—had dropped in on this part of their hunting range. “Max, are you satisfied with the job Minna and her crew did on integrating the grav-pull drive with their NavTrack computer? Is their Control software ready to vibe that ship?”

“I’m satisfied. It worked fine on the trip to Pholus and then out to Karla. As did Ignacio’s grav-pull.” The Engineer glanced up at the front screen, his gaze moving across it as if by act of will he could make their opponent appear from the Great Dark. “Minna did a brief Power-On test before we moved to this hideaway orbit. It worked fine, for a short blip jump. Why? Could that power test have been detected?”

Jack shifted under the restraint straps that he, and the others, still wore out of force of habit. “It was a calculated risk, but a necessary one. We had to know if—”

“Alert!” beeped the artificial voice of the gravitomagnetic sensor. “Alert. Alert. A—”

Max slapped off the voice alarm and stared at the new sensor image on the front screen. “Gravity anomalies! One, two . . . three of them! Damn.” In the holo, Maureen cursed quietly to herself—multiple Alien ships had been a possibility, but one they’d hoped would not occur. Max added new data. “Vectoring in from a north ecliptic heading, their backtrack angle suggests an approach from the outer part of the Kuiper Belt,”

“Ship size?” Jack asked, his gut churning as he rested his hands on the Navigation controls. “Mass? Delta-vee? Any—”

“Data requested?” spoke the Astrophysics voice-activated expert system.

“Shut up you bag of electrons!” Max said tensely as he checked both the Astrophysics data dump and his multiple sensors. “Light-pulse now processed. Size, half that of
Bismarck
and twice that of
Uhuru
. Ship mass estimate is 200,000 metric tons—again, half the mass of
Bismarck
. Inherent delta-vee . . . about one percent of lightspeed or 3,000 kps.” The Engineer paused as, on the front screen, the three anomalies approached the two-body system from one hundred thousand klicks out. “They’re blipping. Whoa! They sure slowed down. New track is online with the last one, but now at 50 kps. Range down to twenty thousand klicks.”

“Max,” called Maureen. “What’s their hull reflectance spectra? Metal? Ceramic? Some kind of exotic stuff? My lasers—”

“One moment,” Max interrupted as he tapped on a preset function of their ship telescope. “Filter spectrophotomery says a steel alloy. Fourier spectroscopy says . . . the alloy is a titanium-steel overlaid with a carborundum coating. Think of diamond-hard body armor.”

“Just lovely!” Maureen said, then cursed in Gaelic, her accent thick enough to scrape paint from a freighter.

Jack’s fingers trembled as he held them above the Navpanel, ready to activate their pre-set blip jump toward
Badger
—once the Bait had been taken. “Max, have they alerted to
Badger
? Any course change—”

“Course change!” yelled Max as the inrushing Alien ships, pale dots on the ship’s telescope image, once again blip jumped. “Same delta-vee but now they’re angled toward Karla and Aldecoa. Converging tangent. Time on target . . . six point six minutes or less!”

Jack shook his head at the swiftness of the Alien approach and keyed in a laser link pulse to the adjacent
Wolverine
. Both ships had worked out a common offensive tactic for rescuing
Badger
and Minna needed only to set her Drive timer to match the first light pulse she got from
Uhuru
. Then things would proceed automatically—unless Jack sent a set of double-pulses. “Kekkonen is alerted. Max? What do they look like?”

The Engineer pointed at the front screen. “Check it out! The IR, UV and visible light pulses are resolving. Getting shape definition.”

Jack eyed the downlinked image, then the hair stood up on the back of his neck. “Good god!”

The tigers had come. Their ships, shaped like javelins thrust through a ring that appeared to be a weapons mount, were painted as a leaping carnivore. Just below the slit pupils of a cat ran a line of teeth one-third the length of each ship, backed up by extended legs, an image that resembled the leap of a tiger and yet conveyed a sense of Alienness that made Jack want to turn and run. Like a shoal of barracudas, the three ships moved as one in space. Then, strangely, each ship angled inward, nearly touching noses with the others. Where had he seen that behavior before?

“Jack,” growled Maureen, “how much longer do we wait? Aldecoa could be dead by the time we bring up the rear guard.”

The nose-touch . . . he’d seen that in an old image of hunting wolves! The ritual told the pack leader the other pack members were hungry. “Now! We go now, Maureen!”

On screen, the
Badger
had sighted the onrushing Alien ships and now fired its deuterium/helium-3 gas fusion Main Drive, trying to change orbit and get Karla between it and the local predators. To the swift and deadly Pack, the Earth ship’s apparent lack of a gravity-pull drive made it seem sluggish and injured, the very image of a goose with a broken wing who leads the predator away from her goslings. Aldecoa had sharp laser teeth and a badger’s tenacity, and a hidden ability to out-maneuver the blip jumping of Aliens with his own grav-pull drive. But shortly, Aldecoa would be englobed, then one of the tiger-ships would go for his belly.

The Basque ship pinwheeled suddenly, flaring its long plasma tail at the onrushing ships. Aldecoa had abandoned his attempt to outrun the Alien Pack and now threatened deadly injury. But the Pack had seen this before. On screen, Jack watched the three javelin ships blip sideways, avoiding the flare of the plasma tail. In short moments all ships would be within laser weapon range.

The starfield blurred, blurred a second time, then blurred continuously as Max threw them headlong into high speed acceleration that would put them on target, just above the Pack, in less than a minute. “Standby for emergency decel!” he warned. “Internal grav may not hold up!”

Sweat filled Jack’s armpits, sweat cold as the Great Dark beyond Pluto. Warmth flushed over his face. In her holo, Maureen growled low, no words needed for the depth of her desire to ambush the Pack before it could ravage their Bait. Jack called to her. “Don’t waste the lasers, Maureen. Hit the nearest Pack ship with the neutral particle beamer and try to cut it in half. Shock them! Force the other ships away from their pack-mate!” Up front, the comet 1993 FW grew to massive size as the
Uhuru
stopped suddenly, with the Pack caught between them and the
Badger
. They’d achieved a classic pincer-position, but would it all be for naught?

A grinding noise filled the Pilot cabin as the internal gravity field briefly shut off, the hybrid body of two old space tugs groaned from the decel stresses, then his own high-gee gray-out vanished as the internal gravity returned with a shuddering snap. Max jerked back from his restraints and touched the Main Drive controls. “Firing plasma! Maureen? Full power now to your Battle Module!”

“Firing!” she yelled.

On screen, the line of three Pack ships fired pink lasers at Aldecoa, the long rapier pulses clawing for his Drive module. But the Basque fired all the attitude thrusters on one side and rolled his ship, driving his plasma flare against the incoming laser pulses. Only the first barrage got through. The rest sputtered out as coherent photons met ionized plasma gas and mutually destructed. But two black furrows had been added to the
Badger’s
black and white striping. Air fountained from one laser cut, sheeting out like a snowy waterfall. Jack hoped no one had been amidships when the pulses clawed their way inside.

“Maureen!” he said. “Watch out!
Wolverine
is firing too!”

High above the icy globe of Karla, several things happened simultaneously.

The nearest Pack ship, its weapons ring rotating toward him and Minna, flared brilliantly as the blue-white whipcrack of Maureen’s neutral particle beam dug into the ring, then through it, cutting slowly into the deadly javelin. Before the Pack vessel could blip jump away,
Wolverine’s
own gas lasers added their melting force to Maureen’s attack and . . . the vessel split apart the way a toothpick breaks between two fingers. Its Pack mates, ranging around the flailing body of
Badger
, showed gravitational lensing about their hulls, then they blip jumped to south ecliptic, away from
Uhuru
,
Wolverine
,
Badger
and the mortally wounded Pack ship.

Aldecoa came online. Black smoke and loud curses filled his Bridge. “We still have teeth! Let me attack!”

“No,” Jack said firmly. “Close up with us! We’ll make our own Hunt Clan, with you in the center. Fire your lasers to one side of the Alien ships! Do it, Ignacio! We’re snarling defiance and threat at them!”

Wolverine
blip jumped ahead, as planned, and took up a blocking position between
Badger
and the remaining two Pack ships. Max touched his grav-pull panel again. “Jack, I sure hope this works!”

Starlight blurred.

Ships rearranged themselves.

Vectors changed the way a bumblebee flits around a cluster of flowers—except for the damaged Pack ship. Aldecoa’s
Badger
dropped its slow drive pretense and blip jumped closer to the
Wolverine
, even as Aldecoa fired lasers from his own weapons mounts. The Basque’s teeth were green and sharp! As were those of Minna, a wolverine ever ready to attack a larger opponent. Her ship now fired volley after volley of green lightning at the remaining Pack ships.

Jack blinked, took in the new arrangements, then sent a maser signal to Minna at the same time as he spoke to their Combat Commander. “Maureen, show them our defiance! Fire your lasers at them, but miss. Then shoot ball bearings at both pieces of the broken Pack ship—I want anyone on board dead, and dead quickly! Before they can blip jump away.”

“Dead they will be,” she said softly. The
Uhuru
shook as the ship’s dual railguns shot out four loads of buckshot.

Moving in three dimensions in space has always been confusing. Moving as a coherent Hunt Clan of human vessels, where one ship has taken damage, is even harder to do. But they got the job done. Jack wiped sweat from his eyes, felt his stomach dry-heave as the
Uhuru
added its HF laser fire to the streaking laser pulses that raked the near flank of the Pack ships, then gasped with relief as the Pack’s inward movement, an attempt to rescue a fallen Pack member, stopped when Maureen’s ball bearings ripped through the broken Pack ship. White and yellow gases burst out from both ship fragments, the thrust of a hundred leaks making them tumble and spin in space. No controlled ship movement now showed. The
Uhuru
,
Badger
and
Wolverine
closed in on the outgassing ship pieces, ready to salvage its grav-pull drive.

On screen, the two remaining Pack ships blip jumped away, on a curving vector that said the Pack would not linger long at this hunt site. But their Comlink panel pinged with notice of an incoming AV signal. Jack looked ahead.

The screen blurred, then filled with an Alien image more unnerving than the ship paint schemes. On Charon Standard Channel Four they beheld a body shape that resembled a wolf crossed with a giraffe’s long legs. The yellow eyes were two, arranged stereoscopically on either side of a large brain case. The head was carnivore-long, teeth-filled and purple-lipped. A pair of flexarms emerged from the wolf-giraffe’s broad chest. The body’s smooth skin had contrasting bands of red and yellow that ran its length. When the legs flexed downward like a recurved bow, Jack noticed long, crescent claws on each of its four feet. The Alien moved on-screen with a litheness born of wolf crossed with the long stride of a giraffe.