Earth Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series 1) (18 page)

“Jack? Something on your mind?”

“Yeah.” He gestured at the front screen. “The Aliens. Out there. You’re the Animal Ethologist here. Got any ideas on
why
they are behaving the way they are?”

Denise’s green eyes blinked, then held steady under his gaze. “You mean why, beyond the obvious efforts to claim Sol system as part of their home territory?”

Maureen waved a hand over her lap panel, shutting down a combat simulation that she had been playing with. The woman looked back over her shoulder at Denise, her expression intense. “Add me to that query list.”

“Me too,” said Elaine, her gaze swinging from the front screen to Maureen and backward to Denise. Who blushed at the attention being paid to her.

“Hey Max! Help!”

Their Drive Engineer gave their 19 year-old a bemused look, his rad-tanned face crinkling. “Young stowaway who likes our cigars too much, help yourself!”

Denise, strapped in to her station seat like everyone else, gave a shrug, which made her wool leotard jiggle nicely. “Well, Jack, you and Max have done a lot of study on natural selection, evolutionary biology and such. Including human culture variation, right Jack?”

He leaned his chin on his uplifted right fist and stared at her, wondering if he could increase her blush. “Yup. We have. I have. So?”

The red freckles on her pale white face got notably darker. But her green gaze turned tough, as if she knew what he and Max were doing. What the other older folks were doing. Being smart, she understood how boring space travel was and how they all needed some entertainment after a week in space, the last few days spent streaking along at twenty percent of lightspeed. Still, they had not yet reached the 40 AU limit where Jack would start to worry about Alien predators. And Denise was not going to complain about being selected as the generational entertainment.

“Behavioral ecology says there is a reason for every action and every behavior shown by any animal,” she said calmly. “Which is what humans and these Aliens are. Jack, you keyed into that when you used the Rizen’s evolution under a Sol-like star to reset their circadian body clock using far-red light during your talks with them. You used what is known as a
zeitgeiber
to do that.” She paused, noticing how she now held the attention of everyone, even Maureen, who rarely showed deference to anyone. “Well, that is an inbuilt, genetically-evolved reset cue that we humans share with most Earth animals. For sure there are similar cues for these Aliens. What they are for the Yiplak and the Nasen, we don’t know since they never said anything about their home stars. Although, when I reviewed our vidrecords, the light on board the Yiplak ship had an orange-red tinge to it, while that aboard the Nasen ship had a yellow-white tone. Sooo, I would speculate the Yiplak evolved under a K or M-type star F-type star while the Nasen likely evolved under an F-type star.”

Maureen grimaced. “Cute theorizing, girl. Possibly correct. But again,
why
are these Aliens here, in Sol system? Why is there this interstellar culture of predators roaming space looking to claim other star systems as part of their territory?”

Denise frowned. “Well, Animal Ethology says every animal species possesses what we call territorial acquisition behavior. That translates to going out beyond your home nest and looking for a broader ecological niche in which to find food, find a mate and to discourage other predators from mooching on your territorial resources.”

Jack nodded. “That’s what Max and I read about, back at Charon Base right after our fight with the Rizen. Buy
why
has this animal behavior gone interstellar? These are thinking peoples, after all!”

Denise sobered as she scanned the four of them. “Thinking, yes. Similar to us, yes. But not the
same
as us. For example, Captain Akemi Hagiwara can give you plenty of reasons for why modern Japanese still practice the tea ceremony. A useless behavior when you can tell your kitchen autobots to make you a cup of tea with a simple verbal command. A puzzle to us Belters. And she’s
human
.”

Elaine nodded slowly. “Denise, granted we humans do behaviors that make no sense to other humans. But how does this relate to the Rizen, Yiplak, Nasen and other Aliens out in the Kuiper and beyond?”

Denise bit her lip. “It relates to the Aliens because, as John Alcock said last century, ‘cultural evolution involves selection for various learning abilities that permit individuals to adopt the cultural practices of their societies’. In short, the Alien social predators are
here
because it is genetically favorable for them to compete among themselves for more territory to add to their ecological niche.”

Jack raised a finger. “But Denise, the resources the Aliens might gain from taking over Sol system cannot be fully transferred back to their home system. And the cost of fighting us is high. So why
fight
, when they could just trade star to star for whatever rare resources they might need?”

Denise smiled like the mouthy teen who’d stowed away on board the first
Uhuru
. “Because it makes
cultural
sense. Star to star combat does not have to make economic sense, if it makes cultural sense back home. We can guess that the winners of new territories gain in cultural prestige, power, influence and perhaps mating opportunities when they return home with proof of their success at territorial acquisition behavior. Understand?”

Jack nodded slowly. “So . . . we have social predators camped on our stellar doorstep because
their
cultural pattern requires them to fight
us
for more territory. But Denise, evolution requires that any behavior must benefit the individual inclusive fitness of a person. Or so I’ve read. Yet this cultural behavior does not make genetic sense for individuals.”

“Yes it does,” Elaine said abruptly, her look sour as if she had bitten into a lemon. “Warfare on Earth in the last century and into the early part of this century caused many individual deaths. But the point was to preserve the national territory and national resources for the entire nation. Preserving your national territory equaled survival for your spouse and offspring back home. Right Denise?”

“Right!” The redhead looked pleased that her Why answer had achieved some acceptance among Jack’s crew.

He sighed, understanding intellectually the point Denise was making, but still, it felt
wrong
. Course, wrong was often an individual perspective, when what mattered to the genes of a species was that they were propagated into more territory, either through genetic adaptation or through capture of territory once held by a competing animal. And now, Denise had made the point that natural selection operates at the interstellar level.

Maureen snorted. “So we know why they fight us. But what the crap can we learn about them that will be useful in
killing
these bastards!”

Denise’s red eyelashes fluttered and her face paled. But her jaw muscles tensed as she chose not to be pushed around by their Combat Commander. “Fine. We can try mimetic sign stimuli to let us get close enough to kill ‘em, in person or on ship if they accept a vidsignal from us.”

Maureen frowned. “Mimetic what?”

Max eyed Jack from beyond young Denise, his look interested. “Good point young Denise.”

The girl’s freckles got darker. She nodded at Jack, Maureen and Elaine as if their personal attention on her was normal. “Mimetic sign signal is when one animal species uses a movement or behavior to fool a predator into doing something, or not doing something.”

Elaine nodded slowly. “Example? Or examples?”

Denise held up one slim figure. “The false cleaner fish of tropical reefs. The true cleaner fish is a small fish that does an undulating dance as it approaches a bigger parrot fish. The dance causes the parrot fish to freeze into near immobility. When the cleaner fish arrives, it nips away at parasites and small critters adhering to the scales of the parrot fish. Both fish get something out of this cooperative behavior.” She paused, tapped her lap panel, and pointed to the right side of the front viewscreen, which now showed colorful images of reef fish doing just what she was describing. “The false cleaner fish does exactly what the true one does. But when it arrives next to the parrot fish, it snips a piece of flesh from the parrot fish and hightails it away! The bigger fish has been fooled by a mimetic action that
it
evolved to tolerate, usually to its benefit.”

“Good example,” Jack said. “Anything we could do to freeze up an Alien predator would be helpful in future confrontations. Other examples?”

Denise nodded, a half-smile on her young face. “Thank you, Captain Jack.” She looked over at Max, then faced everyone else. “Well, our ship hull design already makes use of the aposematic or Müllerian mimic principle to signal to other predators that
we
are dangerous predators. The way the red, yellow and black bands of a coral snake signal to the reptile-eating motmot bird that they must stay away from any stick-like object with these color stripes. Hmmm. We could try the parasitism principle.”

This was something new to Jack. “Parasitism what?”

Denise tapped her lap panel and nodded to the front screen. “It involves birds raising eggs of other birds. Guuillemots are oceanic birds that always recognize their own egg and will never host a stranger’s egg. But kittiwake gulls are the opposite. They never learn to discriminate between their eggs and those of an intruder.”

Elaine turned from the front screen to Denise, her look puzzled. “But we humans do not resemble the body shape of any of the Aliens we’ve met so far. So the chance we can convince an Alien to be cuddly friendly to us seems very low.”

“Exactly,” muttered Maureen, her attention wavering.

“You asked!” Denise said, then tapped her lap panel hurriedly. “We need to cause these Aliens to revert back to home range behavior, and away from territorial acquisition behavior. Since the home range equals their star system of origin, that means they leave us alone.”

“Great,” said Max loudly. “But
how
do we do that?”

Denise glanced over at their gruff bear of a man, then to Jack, Maureen and Elaine. She pointed at the front screen. “That’s an overhead, or ecliptic plan view of Sol system. You can see our planets, the Asteroid Belt and Pluto. The Kuiper Belt extends from Neptune’s orbit to beyond Pluto out to 48 AU. The extreme end of the scattered disk objects range is 100 AU, which includes the SDOs I’ve told you about.” She tapped her lap panel again, then pointed. “In red are the Kuiper Belt comets where we’ve encountered Aliens. Beyond that, in orange, are other comets 100 kilometers in size and larger. The dwarf planet Sedna is purple. The territory we are both fighting over ranges from 40 AU to 100 AU, with the reward being the inner Sol system. That’s the territory that is open to acquisition. In sum, we must make it too
expensive
for any Aliens to come into this territory and seek control of it, because we make their costs of taking it over higher than the reward they expect to gain from claiming Earth and Sol as part of their Hunt territory.”

Jack stared at the screen. Their young stowaway and expert in Animal Ethology had put her slim fingers on the exact problem he and his fleet were facing. He looked back to her. “And the way we increase the costs of claiming this territory is to kill a lot of Aliens, and grab their assets. Right?”

“Right,” Denise said somberly. “It also means no more mercy shown to ships that try to escape when we destroy their base or to one of their pack ships.”

“Damn right!” growled Maureen. “And my Battle Module is just the tool to do it!”

“Denise,” Jack said loudly, “please laserfax this image, and a vidrecord of what we’ve just discussed, to the captains of our other ships. They need to see and hear what we’ve figured out.”

“Will do, Captain Jack,” she said, her eagerness to do that signaling to him that she now felt she’d earned her place aboard the
Uhuru
.

“Denise.”

She looked up from her lap panel, her green gaze open. “Yes?”

“Starting after lunch, you begin seeing Maureen for instruction in aikido, karate, judo, and any other personal combat techniques she sees fit to teach you.”

“Oh.” Denise looked to Maureen, whose attention was fixed on the front screen image. “Uh, you expect that I may have to fight an Alien in personal combat? The way Destanu challenged you?”

“Yes. And there’s more to learn.”

“More?”

“Blade weapons. Like knives and swords. We will all carry personal weapons when we enter this Watering Hole on Sedna. And while I personally like our miner’s hand lasers, and the Teflon-coated revolvers that we bought at Mathilde, I suspect we will need unpowered hand weapons. Like Akemi’s
katana
sword.”

“Oh.” Denise blinked, then squinted. “Who trains me on this stuff?”

“My sister Elaine. She has long attended Renaissance Faire events where handmade stuff, like the Viking long sword I own, were shown off.” He and Elaine smiled at each other. “She knows sabre and épée sword fighting. It’s more . . . sophisticated than the hack and slash I do with Old Roy.”