Earth Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series 1) (37 page)

Jack looked to Júlia just as the woman looked aside to her ComChief. “Is there any signal from the modulated neutrino comlink?” he asked.

“Not yet, my Captain,” Júlia said. “Do we resume laser fire?”

“Yes! All ships fire HF lasers on enemy ships!” Jack glanced to Maureen’s holo. “Grandma, use your blue whiptail against those destroyers! They all carry thermonuke torps. Fire now!”

“Weapons,” called Minamoto as he looked left. “Join our particle beam fire with that of the
Uhuru
! Take out the two destroyers farthest from us. And fire our lasers on the frigates!”

“Target Locked on the two closest destroyers,” Maureen said hungrily. “Firing!”

“Torps launched!” cried Elaine. “From the four destroyers and the
Cromwell
! Range to us is two thousand three hundred and twelve kilometers and closing!”

Jack sucked in his breath. Then he tapped his Tech station and took control of the
Uhuru’s
two side HF laser pods while Maureen switched her particle beam fire from the two destroyers to the fifteen torps launched by the five ships. A job made harder by the onboard Attack and Evade expert programming that shifted the torps vector line sideways, up, down and diving, even as all torps grew closer at eleven kilometers a second. He set the pods to infrared heat Detect and Fire at the closest approaching objects. Which added their laser fire to Maureen’s particle beam fire.

“Two destroyers gone!” cried Elaine. “The
Cromwell
is cut in half by the
Bismarck
! One corvette and three frigates are venting air and falling out of orbit! Six torps still approaching. And . . . Jack! Menoma’s ship has just appeared behind us and on our same orbital vector!”

Enough!
Jack looked up to Akemi, whose own small bridge showed frantic activity by its strapped-in crew of four. “Akemi! We go to grav-pull drive now! Synchronize by laser link time-lock! New position is ahead of the enemy fleet and just above their fusion exhaust! Then we blip jump on them in Pod Attack Formation Beta Seven! Use laser fire on the remaining nine ships!”

The seven ship captains whose images filled the top of his front screen began to blur, then disappeared as Akemi’s Drive Engineer told every ship of Jack’s fleet to simultaneously use their grav-pull drives to blip jump three thousand kilometers ahead of their current position. It took barely the time to gasp a breath before the gravitational lensing stopped and normal space reappeared on the front screen. His captains also reappeared. As did Menoma’s ball embedded in a flat rectangle ship, which had followed them to their new position. It fired a blue neutral particle beam at one of Minamoto’s destroyers.

“The
George Washington
is gone!” grunted Minamoto, his expression grim.

“Akemi! Lead our combined fleets into Pot Attack Formation Beta Seven against the surviving enemy ships! We will handle Menoma!” Jack looked at the holo wavering above his lap. “Maureen! Fire your particle beam at Menoma now! Force him to blip jump before he can fire again on one of our ships! Max! Blip jump us to Menoma’s current position!”

“Pod Attack now!” cried Akemi as her
Orca
, the other five Belter ships and Minamoto’s surviving five ships all blurred into grav-pull blip jump, heading for the remaining nine enemy ships. Coming up on the Unity ships from the rear should help them. But Jack thought the tornado funnel of Akemi’s lead ships would do a great job of enveloping the clustered Unity ships.

The gray-white Moon and the blackness of space both blurred as the
Uhuru
went after Menoma’s ship.

They emerged from blip jump into empty space, the location where Menoma’s ship had been just seconds before. But as the HikHikSot alien had earlier boasted, his ship automatically blip jumped when targeted by a neutral particle beam.

“He’s between us and the two fleets!” cried Elaine, her Astro panel throwing up a side screen image that showed the orbital positions of all ships. “His ship shares our motion vector.”

The front screen live light image showed Menoma’s ship with its snarling face of a cheetah-leopard, two claw-paws flanking it on the flat rectangle hull. It hung still in space.

Maureen’s holo image spoke. “Do I zap him now with the antimatter beam?”

“No!” Jack said, “not yet. Gotta talk with him first.” He turned in his seat. “Denise! Adjust your broadcast settings so the visual part of the signal transmits far-red light at 730 nanometers.”

The redhead looked puzzled? “What? Do what?”

“You heard me. Now!”

“Complying my captain.” She tapped in the new AV parameters on her comlink panel

“Now, broadcast this on Charon Standard Channel Four,” Jack said. “Menoma! I dare you to face me in a personal Challenge combat!”

Would the Alien go after Akemi and Minamoto? Or would he choose to face Jack, the human who had destroyed his base on Sedna and then had broken the Rule of the Watering Hole?

“Incoming AV signal!” Denise said suddenly.

Menoma’s cheetah image suddenly appeared on the front screen. “Your efforts are useless,” the Alien said in a throaty-cough. “Your Unity government has agreed to an alliance with us. Sol is now part of HikHikSot territory! Surrender, escape to your Kuiper Belt, or die under my beams!”

Jack clapped both hands, causing Menoma’s yellow whiskers to flare widely, his triangular ears to perk up and his golden yellow eyes to show what might be the Alien version of surprise. “We live! The Challenge is still open! As Destanu of the Rizen once said to me—
Shna tok torn, shna opp sem!
Are you a tiger or a sheep?”

“A tiger!” Menoma’s pawhand moved forward.

“A sheep!” Jack yelled, trying to keep their two-way broadcast going. “You used other Alien predators to fight humans! Instead of using your own ship to face me or another human in a true Challenge! But why did you not come to us and seek a hand-to-paw Challenge? The way Destanu of the Rizen did? His Challenge was at least honest in that it pitted his physical abilities against ours. Are you HikHikSot afraid of personal pain?”

Menoma’s posture tensed on the bench that served him for support. “You know nothing of the Rules of the Great Dark! Or the proper role of Challenge. My people discovered your system. We deserve to take you into our home territory! You Humans will benefit and we HikHikSot will ease your Earth’s over population.”

“You mean you will require us to provide you with an annual meat protein tribute of dead humans!” Jack said, counting the seconds of the dual Come-Back link.

“We prefer live prey,” Menoma said throatily, his pink tongue passing swiftly over pale brown lips. Behind him a white-tufted tail whipped from side to side. “But we also mentor subject peoples. Your Geneva leaders have been given the design for our grav-pull drive. No longer will your fellows have to waste days in traveling about your star system.”

“But no stardrive?” Jack said.

“Of course not!” The Alien’s black eyebrows and under-eye fur creased in an intense look. “Only tigers travel star to star. Never the subject peoples. But you will control your affairs, under our guidance.”

Menoma’s forearm, which had pulled back from touching a beam control, began to move forward again. But jerkily.

“So you
do
fear personal body harm!” Jack yelled.

Menoma blinked suddenly, as if startled. “Not at alllll!” he said, his words stretching out a bit. “But if . . . other com . . . petitors choose per . . . sonal danger, that—”

Jack tapped off his AV sound. “Maureen! Fire the antineutron beam!” He tapped the sound back on.

“that is . . . their . . . choice. Like . . . your choice . . . to now die . . . under—”

On the screen the black beam of antineutrons flashed out to Menoma’s ball in a flat rectangle ship, its cheetah hull glinting under Sol’s light. The beam hit the upper half of the ball.

“Strike!” cried Maureen.

“Keep firing!” Jack yelled.

Yellow-orange light blasted from the ship’s upper hull as its metal underwent a total matter-to-energy conversion. The ball of raw light grew and grew, consuming the upper half of the ship.

Menoma’s image wavered. “my beams. No! You. . . you cannot make antimatter . . . it is not—”

The raw light, fed by Maureen’s continuous output of antineutrons, suddenly surged to encompass the entirety of Menoma’s ship.

A star exploded in front of them.

“Damn!” Elaine cried. “That must have been his reactor going. No more Menoma.”

Jack shook with relief. His most dangerous Alien foe was dead. Gone. Vaporized by antimatter. As was the entirety of Menoma’s ship. Whatever secrets his ship had sheltered, beyond the gravity probes that bent laser beams away from its hull, had disappeared in the star-like blast.

“Well done Jack!” called Max. “But how did you know your circadian trick would work on him?”

He slumped back against his Tech seat. “Well, he
said
his home star was Delta Boötis B. That’s a main sequence yellow star just like Sol. He clearly came from a planet about that star. And my Tech station expert software said his ship’s internal ship-light was a close match for our spectrum and wavelengths. So, it made sense his circadian clock could be entrained, or photoperiodically reset, by use of far-red light at 730 nanometers. Thus making him too sleepy to respond quickly to Maureen’s antimatter beam.”

Elaine looked intrigued. Denise looked puzzled. “But Captain Jack, it usually takes a day or more to reset someone’s biological clock. Why did this happen so fast with Menoma?”

Jack grinned at their new grownup, who had kept her battle guts intact as well as any of them. “Denise, it varies. Some plants bloom after a single exposure to the photoperiod required for flowering. I was betting that his metabolism had enough phytochrome Pfr to respond to the far-red signal. It did. We live. He doesn’t.”

Maureen snorted from her holo. “Well, we almost didn’t live! But now that we do, shall we join up with Akemi and Minamoto? The Pod Attack is going well but they could likely use our lasers to take out those two frigates and two corvettes that have sped out in four directions, hoping to escape us.”

Jack scanned the front screen and the plan view imagery of Elaine’s. It showed scattered debris where once nine ships had moved on power. The four ships that now moved were all that remained from a fleet of twenty. And two of them, the frigates, were venting white air.

“Maureen, take out their drives.” He gestured to Denise. “ComChief, AV signal to our fleet and to Admiral Minamoto with a Come-Back request.”

“Transmitting,” Denise said.

His seat trembled slightly as the
Uhuru’s
left and right side laser pods shot out bright green beams at the two frigates. Maureen’s aim took out the thrust modules of both ships. Other lasers from the
Orca
,
Badger
and
Bismarck
took out the drives of the corvettes. Leaving four ships tumbling in space.

“Cease fire! All ships, cease fire. Fleet Admiral Hideyoshi Minamoto, do you wish to communicate with the survivors aboard those four ships and offer them rescue? If they cut their laser power and surrender?”

“Yes, my captain and leader,” Minamoto said solemnly as, behind him, his Command Bridge crew worked at touch panels and yelled to each other, yelling being faster than wireless datalink. “We will handle these survivors. And anyone in EVA suits in the other wreckage. My . . . my crew and I thank you for the opportunity to show mercy to our . . . former enemies.”

Jack nodded briefly. “Mars fleet earned its right to show mercy to survivors, even though they tried to thermonuke us. Please accept my condolences on the loss of your destroyer
George Washington
. The ship and its crew will be memorialized on a stele at our home base.”

Minamoto waved away a harried looking lieutenant as she offered him a yellow compad. “And where might be this base for your Second Belter Rebellion?”

Jack trusted the man. While formal in manner and a perfectionist in all he did, the man had honor. As when he accepted his crew’s plea to follow Protocol Seven of the Concord of Mars. Anyway, he would need the man’s help in securing Ceres Central from the control of Governor Aranxis. If anyone could get the Unity ships stationed there to surrender to his Belter allies, it would be Minamoto.

“Our base is the asteroid 253 Mathilde. It is where my Drive Engineer Max Piakowski created this new
Uhuru
.” He paused, thinking of future tasks beyond survival. “And it is the place to which we will take the Rizen ship hulk in order to decipher its stardrive. If you will give the order to the Deimos Yards to release the hulk to my fleet.”

“Deimos Yards will be ordered to do exactly that.” Minamoto frowned. “I have heard of this asteroid. It has no metals on it to speak of. Why ever did you choose it for a base?”

“Because while it is indeed made up of mostly carbonaceous chrondrite with a surface of phyllosilicate regolith, its low mass made it easy to hollow out. For our space dock.” Jack smiled. “And for the habitat torus inside the dock cavern. Twelve thousand people now call it home. Including my mother and father. Do your parents still live?”