Freedom Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series Book 3) (12 page)

An elbow in his right ribs pulled him out of wandering thoughts. Nikola. His lifemate smiled at him.

“Hey! Where are those Cuban cigars you promised everyone?”

“Stored under my chair,” he said, looking around the table at the 40 people gathered there. “Until dinner is finished. Why? I thought you never smoked anything.”

She gave him her Woman Superior look. “Well, I inhale your cigar smoke in our habroom! Truth be, I trade your cigars to a friend of Maureen’s for knitted sweaters she makes. She gives the cigars to her husband for their Winter Solstice celebration, and I have a man-sized Shetland Island wool sweater as a birthday gift for someone I know.”

“She got you!” Cassie teased from his other side of the table.

Jack smiled. His youngest sister looked nearly healed from the beatings she’d taken. Slim, tough and beautiful enough for her to star in any AV vidcast put out by one of the Prime mercantile families, she seemed happy. And recovered from the loss of her fellow spy Howard. It was past due for him to leave behind his own morose musing and instead look to a hopeful future. After all, the steaks they were eating had been traded in by an Argentine spaceship sent to Ceres by its newly independent government. One of Elaine’s cargo transport friends had brought the prime beef to Mathilde. It was lots tastier than grilled guinea pig.

“So true.” He looked across the table to where Elaine sat beside her lover Ignacio, their heads close together. The two had announced their plans for a civil Covenant Ceremony in a week’s time. Which gave them time for Ignacio’s other cousins to arrive from 16 Psyche while his Mom no doubt would spend days shopping with Elaine for the exactly right wedding dress. He looked around at the other happy couples. His buddy Max was holding hands atop the table with his girlfriend Blodwen, while Maureen was chatting animatedly with Gareth. It seemed their Belfast granny liked having a younger man pay romantic attention to her. But his battle ally Hideyoshi sat alone in his Mars red uniform, with no female company. While the man had chatted earlier with Minna, Júlia and Denise, he now sipped a glass of warm
sake
, his gaze downcast. Well, there was one sure way to lift his spirits.

“Hideyoshi, you happy with that neutral particle beam mount that the engineers fitted to the belly of your
Bismarck
?”

The man looked up abruptly, his expression surprised. Then he gave Jack one of his rare smiles. “Yes. It’s very nice to have a mobile particle beam. Our nose mounted beamer hampered our combat versatility.”

Jack refrained from mentioning the memorial stele he and the other captains had erected in the torus’ park habitat. It bore the names of the four crew people the admiral had lost during the last battle against the HikHikSot. And also the names of Ignacio’s two dead cousins and Minna’s drive engineer Anneli Korhonen. There had been a burning of incense, a solemn ceremony overseen by Shinto priests and low drumming by fellow Asian crew members. He and Nikola had attended the memorial ceremony, as had nearly everyone present at the table. To lose just seven people in multiple space combat battles was remarkable. Still, the losses stung. He nodded, then banged the table with his metal spoon.

“People! Let’s talk about the future.” Conversations went quiet and everyone shifted their attention to Jack. “How do we bring freedom to the stars?”

Casual looks turned intense as ship captains whose names he barely knew focused on his question. They all understood that defeating the Unity had been about more than just bringing liberty and freedom to the subject nations of Earth. Those captains in Gareth’s and Hideyoshi’s fleet who had stayed in Sol system during their first interstellar trip had known well the threat posed by interstellar predators. Nature was indeed red of claw and tooth and unforgiving to lifeforms that failed to defend their home ecozone. They had all heard Denise’s lectures on Animal Ethology and how natural selection clearly worked at the interstellar level. But even the vidcam records of their battles and talks with Aliens had not brought home to the ships that stayed behind the reality of one simple truth: either a predator species like humans kept expanding their resource territory, or some other predator would expand into humanity’s resource zone. That principle was behind the Alien-dominated system that now ruled the Orion Arm. Liberating a few nearby subject peoples from bloody domination by some predators would not put an end to the workings of evolutionary biology in the galaxy.

Vigdis Sturludottir, captain of the Belter ship
Hawk
, raised a slim, long-fingered hand. “Fleet Captain Jack, can you illustrate for those of us who stayed home the scope of what we face? Like where these predator Aliens live? And the size of the . . . the Hunt territories they claim?”

He looked to his lifemate. “Nikola, can you help?”

“Yes.” The woman who had been Chief Astronomer at the Charon moon base of Pluto pulled out a yellow datapad from her rucksack. She tapped on it. “I’m co-opting the cafe’s entertainment system in this area. Here’s a holo of what we gained from the Nasen astronomer Nalik.”

Above the middle of their long table there grew a man-high hologram. It contained a dense stream of stars of all colors, with one end linking to another galactic star stream.

“This portrays the part of space that we call the Orion Arm. There are anywhere from 600 million to a billion stars in the arm,” Nikola said, her tone professor formal. “Based on the records of predator Aliens, the folks we know as the Hunters of the Great Dark, there are 113 predator species within this space.” While Jack had seen this before, he still felt amazement as purple dots appeared over the 8,000 light year long stretch of the arm. “The purple dots are the Home systems of each Alien predator species.”

Rad-tanned Vigdis peered closely at the holo. “It seems there are very few predator species out there.”

“True,” Jack said. “But as we learned, there are ten ‘subject people’ Aliens for every star-roaming Alien species. These are the 1,203 stars occupied by ‘subject people’ Aliens, as shown by these red dots. But there’s more. Nikola?”

“As my lifemate said, there are plenty of stars occupied by intelligent peoples.” She gestured at the glittering holo that held millions of stars. “There are 14,317 star systems in Orion that are occupied by
juvenile
species. Those are Aliens who have not yet reached their outermost planet. Thus they are not part of any predator’s Hunt territory. Yellow dots mark those systems.”

The sudden appearance of thousands of yellow dots caused many at the table to gasp.

Vigdis fixed her blue eyes on Jack. “It would take centuries to visit all those people!”

“True,” Jack said. “Which is why I asked Nalik to focus in on a 400 light year wide sphere of space. At our FTL speed of four light years per day, this is the zone we can have the most effect in. The next image group shows the stars, names and Hunt territory boundaries of those predator peoples who live near to us. Nikola.”

“I’m adding in the stars of juvenile peoples,” Nikola said hurriedly. The holo image enlarged, enlarged again, then stopped. Within it shone hundreds of stars. Sol blinked at the center.

“Predator stars are marked here by a black claw,” Nikola said, her tone matter of fact. “Subject peoples stars show a blood-red slash. Juvenile people stars carry a yellow bar. The Nasen home star Zeta Serpentis glows white. The HikHikSot home star Delta Boötis B glows blue. As everyone can see, there are plenty of Alien peoples who do not belong to any Hunt territory because they are viewed as juvenile species by the Hunters.”

Zhāng Dingbang coughed. “The subject peoples stars,” said the middle-aged Chinese woman. “Do we know how long those peoples have been dominated by predator Aliens? I noticed in your vidcast of the Nuuthot system conquest that it was easier to bring them to rebellion than the Mikmang invertebrates. I recall the Mikmang were ruled longer by those Hackmot reptiles than the Nuuthot were ruled by the Krisot avians.”

Jack had wondered about just the matter raised by Zhāng. “Don’t know. Maybe our astronomer does.”

Nikola tapped on her datapad. “That data was embedded in the datafiles transmitted to me by Nalik. Which she did, by the way, using a brain implant that allowed her to mentally tell her own datapad to talk to mine.” She gestured at the enlarged area. “Subject people stars that have been occupied for 200 years or less now have a yellow dot on top of their red slash. Subject stars without such a dot have been conquered for a longer time. Recall that this galactic predator system has been around for 3,000 years.”

Elaine hummed. “There are a lot more juvenile star systems than there are subject people stars, or predator home stars. Do we know if there are predator Aliens camped out in the cometary Kuiper Belt of each juvenile people star?”

“We do not know,” Jack said bluntly, looking around the table. “The data files Nikola got do not include that info. It is likely some juvenile stars do have such encampments. The HikHikSot and other Aliens set up blockhouses on our outer comets as far back as 2072. But since there are hundreds of juvenile star systems just within this 400 light year globe, there cannot be enough predator Aliens to camp out on each one. Trained people and star-roaming ships are limited resources.”

Vigdis, Elaine, Hideyoshi and Minna all nodded their heads in agreement with his point. The other captains looked thoughtful, worried or puzzled. Blodwen of the curly blond hair leaned forward.

“Captain Jack, you began this meeting with a question,” she said. “How do we bring freedom to the stars? Well, it seems to me the simplest option is to first start by contacting these juvenile people star systems. They have spaceflight, otherwise they would not be listed here, according to what the Nasen folks told us. If these juvenile people are in space, they have surely thought about life around other stars. Making First Contact with these juvenile people would give us a chance to add them to the human Hunt territory, before they became dominated by some Alien predator.”

He liked Blodwen’s proposal. It made lots of sense. And the choices of juvenile people star systems were plentiful. Plus they would not have to battle their way into such systems. And thanks to Denise’s SETI translation algorithms, they would be able to talk to such Aliens.

“Very good point, Blodwen. And your Sociology training should allow us to figure out the workings of Alien social systems and cultures.”

She smiled, her pale green eyes looking around the table. The lanky woman put bony arms on the table, her manner professor patient. “Vigdis makes a good point about the relative ease of contacting Alien people who have not been dominated by the apex predator Hunters of the Great Dark. But . . . we could face plenty of problems relating to these juvenile species.”

Jack frowned. “How so? We clearly have Tech in common with them, otherwise there would be no spaceships roaming these systems and they would not be listed in this holo.”

“True,” Blodwen said. She pushed blond bangs out of her eyes. “It is probable humanity and other species will have in common six basic things. The need for food, for a living territory and for shelter will be common to all of us. Plus sexual dimorphism aids adaptability so there will be at least two genders in any juvenile system. We all share curiosity, or they would not be off their planet and in space. Finally, all animals and most organisms on Earth defend their ecological niche. So violence will be known to any space-going species.”

Elaine nodded, her expression thoughtful. “All that makes sense. So we will have a good foundation for communication and mutual understanding.”

Blodwen gave a shrug. “Maybe. While humanity and these Aliens will share those six commonalities, we could be vastly different in other areas. Do these Aliens see the way we do? By the primary light spectrum of their star? Do they communicate acoustically, through air, by pheromone emissions, by chemical expression or perhaps by skin color pattern changes the way octopi do? As for their societies, are they hierarchical, class or caste-based, gender dominant or some other pattern we’ve not seen in Earth animals.” The Welsh Sociologist looked up at the holo of streaming stars, then around the table. “To us, personal liberty and freedom of expression matter a lot. But some species may emphasize the clan, tribe or collective over individuals. Still, I would guess that any intelligent lifeform will not welcome the news that apex predators are aiming to claim their star system as part of a Hunt territory.”

Jack’s stomach rumbled. He was hungry for the rest of the steak on his plate. But their Sociologist had raised a mountain of uncertainties about their future interstellar trek. Time to add his Grandpa Ephraim’s dictum. “People, Blodwen raises many good points on what could be confusing or frustrating in future First Contacts. But I bet that curiosity will prevail! And remember our Belter can-do spirit! Most of us have lived in vacuum habitats, the most unnatural biome yet conquered by humanity. If we can do that, we can bring about a Freedom Alliance of thinking peoples!”

Hideyoshi nodded agreement. Minna gave him a thumbs-up. Gareth nudged Maureen, who gave him a fist-pump. Akemi, Júlia, Kasun, Aashman and Ignacio all smiled at his reminder of how they had made Alien allies and destroyed the HikHikSot ability to ever again harm humanity. Other captains from the ships left behind looked upbeat, their gazes scanning the holo of stars that portrayed their future venture.

Amitar Gupta of the
MacArthur
waved for his attention. “Fleet Captain Jack, this star map and culture stuff is all fascinating. But what about the tools we need to go out on a new star roaming? The weapons. The grav-pull drive. How are those coming?”