Earth Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series 1) (16 page)

“That hide,” Max growled, “reminds me of a coral snake I once knew. That’s aposematic coloration, just like the Rizen lions. And Müllerian mimicry with the claws, teeth and body build. Jack?”

He nodded silently. “Greetings,” Jack called to the unspeaking Alien. “Your ship below is our meat today. We eat. Leave, or we will attack.”

The Alien wolf-giraffe flared a tufted tail. Behind it, two others glanced their way, saber-like teeth showing as they pulled back purple lips. “You claim Meat under the Rules of the Great Dark?” it said in a deep bass voice, its English guttural and rough.

The blood pounded in Jack’s ears.
Trust to your instinct
, he thought. “Yes! We claim Meat right! This is
our
hunting range. We drove away the Yiplak and made them meat. We do the same to you.”

Long eyelashes flicked down over the pale yellow eyes of the Alien and its smooth skin rippled to autonomic muscle contractions. “We are Nasen. We are the Pack. The Pack eats where it chooses. We have eaten Yiplak. We have eaten Rizen,” it said, glancing at Max.

Jack squeezed his armrests tightly. “We eat! Now! Will you add to our kill?”

The Nasen alien showed its teeth in a throaty snarl. “You Humans are new to the Great Dark. You have much to learn, perhaps at the Watering Hole. This time, the Pack hunts elsewhere.” The image vanished. The two Nasen ships blip jumped away from the comet. A third gravitomagnetic signal showed briefly, but disappeared without leaving any vector track.
What the?

“Yeah!” said Max with relief.

Maureen gave him a thumbs-up from her holo. “We win.” She looked aside at her sensors. “For now, that is. Jack,
Wolverine
is moving in to help
Badger
. Shall we extend our congratulations to Aldecoa? After all, it took guts to sit still while tigers like the Nasen closed in on you.”

That it did. Jack recalled Ignacio’s earlier boast about the sons of Euskal Herria, and how centuries ago they had gone to sea with Magellan, then to the New World with the Spanish conquistadores. Earlier still, Ignacio’s kinsmen had ambushed Charlemagne’s rear guard in the Pass of Roncesvalles, around A.D. 778, and given risen to the plaintive
Le Chanson de Roland
. Now, once more, the Euskaldunak had driven off the invader, the stranger. Had they been doing this ever since Cro-Magnon man entered the Pyrenees? Only time, a bottle of rum and the boastfulness of Ignacio Aldecoa might solve Jack’s puzzle.

He nodded at Maureen. “Good point.” Jack sent a Come-Back signal to Ignacio’s ship, then sat up with concern as the return image showed thick black smoke still on the man’s Bridge. “Ignacio? Your blowers down?”

The stocky man waved dismissively. “Fires are out. Vacuum works wonders.” The man who’d served as Bait for a pack of Alien social carnivores choked on the slowly thinning smoke, then looked at them triumphantly. “But my three cousins still live, the hull breaches are being sealed as we speak, and now it is time to dispose of the
gorputz
out there.”

Jack knew little of the man’s Guipúzcoan dialect, but recognized that word. “The corpse? You want first rights to salvage the Nasen ship corpse? Of course, Ignacio. You and your relatives have earned that honor. Please, eat at your leisure.”

The man broke into a broad grin. “We will! And after we ‘eat’ this carcass, I will come over to your ship and smoke one of those cigars you keep in the safe. Yes?”

“Yes,” Jack said, laughing at the man’s boldness. “Come. Please. All four of you.” The Comlink panel blinked suddenly. “But I must take this call from Captain Kekkonen. She needs appeasing too, yes?”

Ignacio frowned, his manner concerned. “That she does. But beware of Finns who hide their trump card.” The man’s image vanished.

The pale-skinned image of Minna replaced the face of her fellow Captain. Her blond hair had been braided tightly and her blue eyes now swept over him and Max. “Captain Munroe, the ambush worked perfectly. My regards to Commander O’Dowd on a brilliant deception plan.” The cool-mannered Finn paused and Jack wondered briefly if there might be substance to Ignacio’s dour warning. “And Captain, please accept my congratulations. You did well. We did well. Yes?”

Relief flooded over him. The human Clan still Hunted together. “Yes, we did! You maneuvered well. And I will appreciate your help in repairing Ignacio’s hull. Tell me, did you pick up the Pack broadcast? From the Nasen ship?”

Minna nodded slowly, her brief good cheer now fading. “We did. Tell me, Captain, how did the Nasen commander know to contact the
Uhuru
? There was no signal traffic to indicate which ship commanded our group.” Jack’s stomach churned anew—he hadn’t considered the Nasen’s action, just responded to the Challenge as best he could. Minna grew even more anxious. “And just what did the Nasen commander mean when he referred to the Watering Hole? What’s that? Some place in the Kuiper Belt? Or further out, in the inner Oort Cloud?”

Jack swallowed his indigestion. “Don’t know the answer to either question. But if it relates to the pattern of social predators tolerating each other as they gather around a watering hole, well, it may mean there is a place in Kuiper where all these Aliens get together and swap lies. Max,” he said, glancing aside from Minna’s holo image, “do you have any guidance from backtracking their arrival and departure vectors?”

His loyal friend nodded slowly as he looked aside at a NavTrack screen. “Yes, I do. Their exit vector is aimed far out, beyond the Kuiper Belt, toward where the dwarf planet Sedna now moves on its aphelion vector. Sedna got closest to us in 2076, at 76 AU. It’s now outbound at about 78 AU. The place is 1,041 kilometers big.”

Was Sedna the Watering Hole mentioned by the Nasen ship commander? Or just the home base of the Nasen? Well, the Yiplak home base had been at comet Karla, which came as close as 41 AU to Sol. But Sedna had a very strange, elliptical orbit that reached 937 AU out before turning back toward Sol. Maybe Nikola could tell him something about the place, once
Uhuru
returned to 253 Mathilde with their salvaged grav-pull drives.

“Thanks Max.” Jack looked to the front screen. “Minna, maybe we can next visit this Sedna, after we refit the salvaged grav-pull drives to more Belter volunteers?”

The Finn commerce raider grinned like a shark. “Excellent idea, Captain Jack. Letting those Nasen ships escape bothered me. Maybe we can eat them in the future?”

“Perhaps,” he said, feeling even more thankful that Minna was on their side. “I’m just glad no one died on our side, and that
Badger
will be getting an extra gravity-pull drive. Aren’t you?”

Minna stared at him a long moment, then she visibly relaxed with an infectious smile. “Yeah, I’m glad. And Jack, isn’t it about time I came over and smoked one of your cigars, ate a steak, and drank as much rum as Max? That’s the payment you promised me when we signed on.”

He took a deep breath, breathed out slowly, and felt the combat nerves of the last half hour fade away—though he still had the adrenaline shakes. Jack smiled back at the woman who’d clearly declared herself a full partner in their crusade. “Yeah, Minna, come on over. Max needs help in his chess game, Maureen wants to trade combat lies with you, and I could use some advice on how to set up our predator patrol of the Kuiper. You got some ideas?”

Minna’s blue eyes sparkled. “Plenty. But let’s eat first. We humans do that, don’t we, when we have something to celebrate?”

In front of him in the holo, Maureen yelled—“Damn right we do! Get over here, girl.”

Max waved welcome to their Finn comrade. “Minna, come celebrate before Ignacio gets here first. He might claim the last steak!”

Amidst the sound of shared laughter and common relief, Jack Munroe gave thanks to the memory of his Grandpa Ephraim, thanks for the man’s love and the lessons he’d shared.
Live Free or Die!
had been his Grandpa’s motto, one taken as much from Patrick Henry as from old New Hampshire. Humans, his Grandpa had once said of the Asteroid Belt, were good at adapting to new hunting niches. Earlier, they’d claimed the plains and mountains of Africa, then Asia, then Europe and finally the New World, from pole to pole. Now, it was time for humans to move beyond Mars and the Asteroid Belt, beyond the small bases on Europa, Enceladus and Charon. Time for a social predator to bare its teeth, unleash its snarl, and leap into the Great Dark.

Leap the way his Grandpa had rammed that Unity frigate. Fearlessly. But with hope.

CHAPTER TEN

Nikola free-floated before Jack as she held the control compad for the new ten meter reflector telescope that mechbots had built for her in the center of Ishikari Crater. They wore their EVA suits but with the helmets pushed back thanks to the air-filled dome that stood beside the vacuum-exposed scope. It was three weeks since their battle with the Nasen ships at comet Karla, and being back at 253 Mathilde felt good. He kicked against the oxynitro tanks that half-filled the room, floating forward. He pushed his arms under Nikola’s arms and hugged her against him.

“Hey! No sex play when I’m uploading the scope’s search software!” She turned her head to look back at him, the sharpness of her tone offset by a pixie smile.

Jack let go of her and kicked over toward the gray steel box that supported three flat vidscreens. The vertical screens would display the CCD input from the giant scope. He gestured at one that showed scattered white stars against the velvet blackness of Belter space. “Something there you want to see?”

“Nope.” Nikola brushed short brown curls out of her eyes with one free hand, then refocused on the control compad that wirelessly linked with the vidscreens and the low power magfield that pointed the scope where she wished. In the super-cold vacuum deep inside the Asteroid Belt, an exposed gear assembly would cold-lock metal to metal. Far better to use a non-contact magfield to aim the scope’s metal tube. “Just my guide star. For setting the light input sensitivity of the CCD units.” His look made her grin. “It’s how astronomers make sure the color of the object they are seeing is accurate for photometric analysis.”

He nodded, wishing he didn’t feel stupid about her tech area. “Uh, any chance we can image this Sedna dwarf planet I told you about?”

“Yup.” Nikola kicked over to the metal box filled with solid state whatever, tapped her compad, and pointed at the middle vidscreen. “Your Alien planetoid will show up shortly. Its normalized image will be reddish-brown. Like lots of KBOs and Scattered Disk Objects.”

“Oh.” Jack had escaped from the asteroid’s inner Dock Cavern, and Max’s work on fitting the four salvaged grav-pull drives to their new Belter volunteer ships, with the excuse he had to see Nikola and find out what she could tell him about Sedna. The place where two Nasen ships had run off to. He’d known about its weird orbit from astronomical studies under Maathias Binder. And that it was named after the Inuit goddess of the sea. But he knew nothing beyond those tidbits. Until he’d come here to see if Nikola could image the distant planetoid with her new scope.

“There!”

He looked where Nikola pointed. The middle vidscreen showed a reddish-brown globe that did not move. Nor did he see any moon orbiting it. “So what’s important to know about it?”

Nikola tapped her compad and the left-side vidscreen lit up with a long table filled with numbers and vector arcs. She pointed. “Well, we know that it’s now at 78 AU and heading outward toward its aphelion at 937 AU. Its surface is composed of carbon, condensed nitrogen, methanol and methane ices. But it’s the tholins, or hydrocarbons turned red by long-term UV exposure, that make it so interesting to me. Its co-discoverer, Chad Trujillo, called the tholins a hydrocarbon sludge.” She looked over at him, her pale blue gaze appearing uncertain. “Jack, what do you need to know about this place? I can transmit this data stuff to your own compad.”

He licked his lips, wishing the dome had a moisturizer unit. “I need to know why this place would appeal to Aliens. People who travel star to star. People like us, even if they are ferocious predators.”

She squinted at the table, then tapped her compad. The right-side vidscreen came on, showing a cross-section of the globe. Nikola pointed. “Well, early this century, the scholars Hussmann, Sohl and Spohn theorized that Sedna could have a subsurface ocean due to internal radioactive heating. Like Enceladus and Europa do. That help?”

“Yes!” He held his left suit arm up and tapped the attached compad so it would link to and copy the data displayed by Nikola’s vidscreens. “The tholins are hydrocarbons like those we know exist on Triton. And an ocean that is accessible from the surface could provide plenty of water, air, chemfuel and warm living space for subsurface habitats. Is this ocean confirmed?”