Freedom Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series Book 3) (9 page)

“The ramp is ten meters this way!” he yelled over the comlink to his crewmates. “Follow me to warmth!”

The clang of his metal boots hitting the ramp echoed in his ears, surprising him until he recalled the amplification ability of the enviro-suit. It took less than five seconds for him to reach the open airlock hatch. He plunged inside, followed by Maureen, Max, Ignacio, Mabry and seven marines. They filled the airlock. Jack reached out and slapped the touch panel to close the outer lock hatch. “Hang on!” he yelled to the face masked marines who could not fit into the lock. “It will recycle in a ten seconds! Then you can all make it inside.”

“They damn well better be inside,” Mabry muttered as the man pulled his face mask off and glared around the yellow-lighted space. “Give me empty space any day!”

In his arms Cassie looked up at him, giving him a smile of wonder. “You did it! I thought for sure I was going to die there. I’m so sorry . . . sorry I caused all this trouble,” she said, tears filling her lovely eyes.

Jack shifted her weight, pulled off his own face mask, grabbed her bleeding legs, and bent down to kiss her on her black-smudged forehead. “We all did it. Lieutenant Mabry and his brave marines. Max and Ignacio here. And grandma Maureen. We’ll lift off from this fucking ice box as soon as the last marines come aboard!”

Cassie blinked, wiped tears from her eyes, looked around at the black-suited crowd, then winced. She looked down at her shoeless feet. “That bastard guard cut me with laser. Don’t look bad tho.”

The inner hatch opened with a slight hiss. Jack stumbled out into the cargo hold of the lander, then turned and ran for the Pilot Cabin, still holding Cassie. “We can fix it. There’s medkits by the airlock. And Elaine wants to hug you sooner than yesterday!”

“Give her to me,” said a woman marine as Jack reached the pilot hatch. “I’ll get her strapped in and then medoc her.”

Jack handed his sister, her long black hair, hazel eyes and stubbornness still intact, over to the woman whose name stencil read R. Munoz. “Thank you Corporal Munoz,” he said, reading her rank tab. “And thank you for volunteering for her rescue. I will not forget the efforts of you, your buddies and Lieutenant Mabry.”

“Get the hell in here,” yelled Maureen from the co-pilot seat of the lander. “The Sensor panel says there are two inbound helitack copters from McMurdo. They show weapons hot! I need you to fly this thing while I work the lasers.”

Jack sat at his Pilot seat, tapping active the NavTrack panel. “Mabry!” he called over his suit’s comlink. “Everybody inside?”

“Inside!” yelled the marine leader.

“Lifting off,” Jack called over the lander’s announcer system. “Lock your straps and be ready for sharp jolts! We’re under attack and the jet stream over the South Pole is a bitch!”

His butt felt the pressure of the lander rising on belly jets, with a shuddering from the impact of the blizzard winds. The view through the lander’s front screen was a solid sheet of white illuminated by the ship’s nose lights. He switched off the lights, not wanting to make easy the targeting of the incoming helitacks. While the lander could fly fast enough to make orbit, still, the heat-seeking missiles carried by the helitacks could accelerate faster than they could. Tapping on his panel, he felt the lander swing about to show its front-mounted lasers at the oncoming enemy craft.

“Firing!” yelled Maureen as she worked the two lasers.

Bright green beams slashed out through the snow, vaporizing the air and snowflakes with their passage. He glanced over at Maureen’s Tactical Display panel. The helitacks were within forty kilometers of the academy site. The panel showed two red blobs as it showed weapons lock-on by the helitacks.

Even in atmosphere lasers travel faster than human reactions.

First one red blob, then the second blob expanded in the panel image.

Ahead of them two bright yellow lights glowed as the helitacks exploded.

“One missile launched!” Maureen yelled. “Get us the hell out of here!”

Jack tapped the Drive controls and felt the lander push him back against his seat. Tapping again he put the craft into a vertical climb. On Maureen’s panel a tiny red dot left a glowing red trail as the missile tracked on their heat glow and followed, moving at Mach 3 speeds.

“Maureen! Can you hit that thing with your lasers?”

“Trying!” she grunted.

Behind Jack came the clatter of rifles, canteens and other loose material clattering against the metal floor of the cargo hold. He heard a low moan from Cassie as the accel pressure pushed against some wound of hers.

The panel image showed the missile closing. Ten klicks away. Five. Three—

“We’re free!” yelled Maureen as her panel showed the distance between the lander and the missile expanding.

Jack gave mental thanks for the missile’s limited fuel load. While such a weapon could travel up to a hundred kilometers and climb as rapidly as a fighter jet, their lander was already moving at Mach 7 and going hypersonic through Earth’s upper atmosphere.

“Approaching target ship,” the NavTrack’s computer voice said.

The
Uhuru
and the other 32 ships of the fleet still orbited at two hundred kilometers above the South Pole. Jack tapped on the laser comlink.

“Admiral Hideyoshi Minamoto, please demolish the factory building! We are clear and nearing the fleet.”

“With pleasure,” the man’s deep voice said. “
Bismarck
is firing.” A moment of silence echoed over the laser comlink. “Target destroyed. All above ground structures at the academy are now vapor and rubble. We left intact the access tunnel as a shelter for the refugee students. For which I and my crew thank you!”

Jack nodded. While the students might be a future problem, his aim with Earth was to kill its spaceflight ability and to destroy the factory that made the Unity’s grav-pull ships. A job half done. Now came the destruction of Earth’s other space launch facilities. And the incitement of rebellion by some of the nation states that were members of the Unity. He smiled. Inciting rebellion was a job he loved!

CHAPTER SIX

Jack sat in his Tech station seat at the front of the
Uhuru
and scanned the screen ahead. The images of all captains and the admiral showed across its top, while below were the true-light image of Earth’s South Pole, Elaine’s NavTrack plot of their orbital vector and a spysat image of the North American Cooperative. That part of the Communitarian Unity included the old nation states of Canada, America and Mexico. It was ruled by the rich oligarchs of Wall Street, Mexico City and San Francisco. The sat image of North America showed six anti-satellite interceptor rockets rising from Vandenberg Air Force Base and the silos of North Dakota. They were followed by the silvery cigar of a fusion pulse drive destroyer launching from the White Sands Missile Range in southeast New Mexico. The vector arcs of all seven were curving southward toward the orbital position of his three fleets. He sighed.

“Admiral Hideyoshi, Captain Gareth, everyone, time to teach the North American elite the foolishness of being part of the Unity. Let us all blip jump in grav-pull to just above the Grand Canyon! That will allow us to target both these launch sites.” He looked to Elaine. “Pilot, send a laser comlink timelock for simultaneous grav-pull ignition by all ships. Max, initiate grav-pull drive once that’s done.”

“Sending timelock!” called Elaine, her tone sounding relieved. Perhaps the presence of their sister Cassie at the back of the cabin, seated just behind Nikola, was the cause.

“Blipping,” called Max from the rear, his tone intensely focused.

Elaine looked up at the ceiling of the cabin. “Anonymous, integrate anti-sat and destroyer vector tracks onto a projected NavTrack as viewed from the Grand Canyon area of Southwest America,” she said, bringing into the mix the ship’s nearly self-aware expert system computer. “Display launch site locations and launch vectors against the true-light image of Earth once we emerge from blip jump.”

“Integrating,” said the mech voice of the computer that ran nearly every system of the
Uhuru
. “Prepared to display. Waiting for emergence.”

Jack blinked as the two true-light Earth images on the front screen grew hazy from the gravitational lensing of external light. It was a side effect of the use of a gravity-pull ship drive. It signaled that Object A was about to be in Space B, without a smooth trajectory adjustment. Inside, Jack felt nothing unusual, thanks to the lines of software code that Max had written months ago during their ship rebuilding at 253 Mathilde. No longer did they worry about thrust-gee, spin-gee or Coriolis drift. Max simply told the Drive computer where they wished to be and they straight-line translated to the X-Y-Z coordinates of that locality. When one is used to the constraints imposed on space travel by reason of Newton’s First Law, the real life functioning of the gravity-pull drive can be very disconcerting. Now you see it, now you don’t, and the bumblebee stings before you know it. And the transit over such a small distance was nearly instantaneous. On screen, the starfield blurred once, blurred twice, then cleared as they emerged from grav-pull jumping.

“Displaying locations and vector tracks,” said Autonomous.

Below the fleet lay the fluffy white clouds, brown soil and reddish rock of the canyon cut by the Colorado River from the raw guts of Mother Earth. Above those clouds and clawing for space were six anti-sat rocket tracks, their white vapor trails vanishing as the missiles rose above most air. The destroyer’s track rose more slowly, due to the need to keep alive its crew rather than accel at more than ten gees. All seven objects now twisted in their vector tracks, turning toward his fleet’s new orbital position.

“NORAD’s OTH radar is pretty good,” muttered Maureen from the holo above Jack’s Tech panel. “They’ve detected our new position and have re-routed those missiles. And the destroyer. Someone down there wants us dead. Real soon.”

Jack could see that. He smiled. Trying to kill a ship with grav-pull blip jump drive was like trying to kill a teleporting fly that invisibly zipped from one spot to the next without any ballistic arc. He looked up at the Come-Back laser images of his allies.

“Admiral Hideyoshi, would you please take out that destroyer? The rest of you, go after those missiles with your lasers!”

Green laser streaks shot down from two dozen fleet ships.

“Got one!” yelled Maureen happily.

“Second one dead!” cried Minna, her two yellow braids swinging wildly.

“Two dead,” said Zhāng Dingbang from the Mars destroyer
Admiral Chester M. Nimitz
, her tone professionally calm.

“Got one!” cried Vigdis Sturludottir from the Belter ship
Hawk
, her Icelandic-accented English sounding light and musical.

“Last one dead!” yelled Ignacio from the
Badger
, the man’s tone sounding happier than Jack had heard in weeks. Perhaps due to the two new Basque cousins who had joined his crew, allowing the ensigns loaned by
Bismarck
to return to their ship.

Jack saw a black antimatter beam streak down and hit the rising shape of the destroyer. It blew apart in a yellow-white cloud of ionized plasma and particles, leaving only a few fragments to fall down through a hundred kilometers of air.

Hideyoshi gave Jack a wry smile. “Target vaporized, per the report of Lieutenant Marlena Lopez. As you could see.”

Their fleet of 33 ships was alone in space for the moment, moving on a polar orbital track just two hundred klicks above ground. Time to take out Vandenberg before it went over the horizon. He looked at the two Belter captains who had been among the first to join his crusade to save humanity from Alien enslavement.

“Captain Kasun of the
Leopard
and Captain Aashman of the
Mongoose
, will you please blip jump to just above Vandenberg? Use your antimatter beams to destroy every surface part of that space launch site!”

“Assuredly,” said Aashman, turning to speak to his Sikh pilot.

“Acting,” replied Kasun, whose crew of Sri Lankan natives wore traditional Sinhalese dress while on their commerce raider ship.

“Fleet Captain Jack!” called Gareth loudly. “The
Dragon
will follow those two ships to their orbital station above Vandenberg. We will sweep the arrival site with our Higgs beam to ensure there are no stealth mines or other devices occupying that orbital space.”

He nodded, happy to see others taking the lead in vital actions. “Perfect, Captain Gareth. Do as you say.” Jack looked at the other captains of his First Belter Fleet. They were Minna, Ignacio, Júlia of the
Caiman
and Akemi of the
Orca
. Rad-tanned like every person who had spent most of their life in the Asteroid Belt, these four had fought the hard fight against Aliens both in Sol system and around other stars. It was time for him to include them in the fleet action. While he valued greatly the Mars fleet ships and Gareth’s Second Belter Fleet, there was no way he would ignore the people who had stood shoulder to shoulder with him during the sword fight in the Gathering Hall on the dwarf world of Sedna. “Captains Minna, Ignacio, Júlia and Akemi, please join me in vaporizing the space launch facilities at White Sands. The place lies at a small diagonal from our current orbital track. I believe your ship telescopes can give you adequate true-light imagery of the launching site.”

“
Hai!
my
shogun
,” cried Akemi, her Japanese-accented English sounding Belter-normal.

Minna of the yellow braids smiled hungrily. The woman had always been eager to attack first, salvage later. Her hardy self-confidence was a reflection of the harsh life led by the people of Finland during the centuries they had spent fending off attacks from Sweden and Russia. “May we on the
Wolverine
shoot first, Captain Jack?”

“Me!” yelled Ignacio. “We Basque are always the first to fight, the first to lead, the first—”

“Enough!” he yelled. But he could not keep the grin off his face as Júlia looked sour from not speaking up faster. Well, the Brazilian should know by now that if you wanted a tasty steak you grabbed first and asked permission later. “My allies, my first friends, let the five of us take aim together while the rest of the fleet keeps watch against Hunter-Killer torps and automated mines. Minna gets to fire first! The rest of us then shoot as fast as we can slap our touch panels. Maureen, will you identify our targets at White Sands?”

“Bout time you paid attention to your senior veteran!” The holo image of the woman looked down at her Fire Control panel, then up to Jack. “As you all can see from this true-light imagery, there are two target components to the launch site. One is the White Sands Space Harbor while the second is the Holloman Air Force Base to the east. Both sites lie north of Highway 70. There is no need to target the town of White Sands, which lies south of the highway. The destroyer ship launched from Holloman but the harbor site is also a missile and orbital launch venue.”

Jack scanned the true-light image put up on the front screen by the ship’s Schmidt refractor telescope. The scope’s CCD imaging used adaptive optics to cut through the atmospheric haze common to views through Earth’s air. The imagery of Holloman and the Space Harbor was crystal clear, it being early morning in New Mexico. He looked up at the four fleet captains. “There are three long runways at Holloman, plus the ancient Navaho Launch Complex, and four hangars that house jet fighters and spaceship bunkers, plus a nearby fusion power plant. Kill those sites. Ignore the base housing area that lies nearby. As for the Space Harbor, there is just the one control building and a nearby hangar. Plus a long runway. Kill those three locations. Captain Minna?”

The Finn gave him one of her rare smiles. It was also the look of a hawk about to dive on its prey. “My crewwoman Elie Hämälänen will fire our antimatter beam. Beginning . . . now!”

A black thread of antineutron antimatter shot down through the air of Earth, its passage leaving a yellow streak of vaporized air and no doubt many sonic booms. The thread struck the hangar housing three spaceship bunkers. A yellow-white ball of pure matter-to-energy plasma blossomed above the rectangular building. The plasma ball spread to include all of the hangar as Elie kept the
Wolverine’s
beamer pouring out more antimatter. Much longer and there would be a deep crater where the hangar once stood.

“Finally!” yelled Maureen from the holo, her hands flying over her Fire Control panel.

A second black antimatter thread struck down from the
Uhuru
, followed quickly by three other antimatter threads from the
Badger
,
Orca
and
Caiman
.

“Yes!” cried Júlia. The woman’s dark Afro-Hispanic skin seemed to glow under the yellow lights of her ship’s Pilot Cabin. She had spent most of the last two weeks on Mathilde with her three high school age kids, hearing their stories, their frustrations and their hopes. Yet her single mom status had not kept her from answering Jack’s fleet activation call after the Unity attack on Mathilde.

“Runways are vapor,” Akemi said from the
Orca
, her slim arms moving smoothly as she tapped on her Tech panel, while behind her five crewmates worked their own panels. “My
shogun
, the Space Harbor structures are also gone.”

Gareth reappeared on the front screen. A broad grin filled his bearded face. “The Vandenberg site is gone.
Dragon
is back with
Mongoose
and
Leopard
.”

“All Holloman hangars gone!” yelled Ignacio. “Cousin Aligarde was perfect in his aim. The Euskaldunak decimate once more!”

Jack gave a thumbs-up to the short, black-mustached man whose swarthy skin had grown darker under the impact of Sol. His grinning ally wore the same black beret that Jack now wore. The
boina
was a sign of his adoption in to the Basque clan of Ignacio’s people. It was an honor rarely given to persons not born within the Euskaldunak people. His brother’s four cousins also looked happy.

“Well done, my brother,” Jack said. “Now we need—”

“Launches!” yelled Elaine. “My Sensor panel says there are ten Aurora space planes launching from Biggs Army Airfield at Fort Bliss, just east of El Paso. They are . . . going hypersonic now!”

Shit
. The American military establishment was a major arm of the Unity Space and Land Forces. Besides hosting a large armored division at Bliss, he recalled that the site was an anti-missile defense location and the launch platform for the Aurora space planes that had been in use for the last fifty years to perform ground to orbit missions. Other nations like China, Russia, Germany and Brazil had such planes, but none had challenged them while passing over northern Europe. Now it seemed the loss of Vandenberg and White Sands had not been enough. Someone in NORAD’s headquarters under the mountain west of Colorado Springs was sending up these attack platforms. While loaded with Fire-and-Forget heat-seeking and radar-guided missiles, the Aurora planes were no match for any ship of Jack’s fleet. He looked to his Welsh ally.

“Captain Gareth, would the ships of your fleet please take care of these incoming space planes? I have a worldwide video and diginet broadcast to do.”

The man from Conwy, Wales nodded abruptly. He looked to one side. “Angelique! Please apply our beam weapons against those planes!” Gareth looked down at his Tech panel, then up to Jack. “I’ve asked Helena Antonov of the
Grizzly
to join the
Dragon
in our sharp-shooting. Other Belter ships will join in with their own weapons loads.”

Jack waved acknowledgement, noted the space planes were still a hundred kilometers below the fleet and looked back to Denise. Before he could give the order he was interrupted.

“Young Jack!” yelled Maureen from his holo, her expression angry. “You can’t leave me out of this turkey shoot!”

He grinned at her and at the watching captains. “Maureen, go ahead. Take on whatever target you wish. Gareth, you and Angelique and Helena and the rest of your fleet, please take care of these craft. I’m getting tired of these senseless attacks.”

Their Belfast granny grunted and looked to her Fire Control panel. Gareth gave him a knowing grin and Helena simply lifted her thin black eyebrows. The other ship captains were already busy with orbital defense, sending out spysats to other parts of Earth and being ready to battle any Unity grav-pull ship that might suddenly appear in their vector.

Green HF lasers, blue neutral particle beams and black antimatter threads shot down at the oncoming space planes. While highly maneuverable even at hypersonic speeds, the Aurora space plane could not dodge lightspeed weapons fire. Three died in the first burst. Then five more. The last two launched missiles while still forty klicks below the fleet’s orbital track. Maureen cackled.

“Finally!” Maureen growled. “Those missiles are just what I wanted for my lasers!”

The last two Auroras died under blue particle beams.

The four missiles they had launched now jinked and swerved according to their onboard Evade and Deceive software. Briefly Jack worried they might get close enough for their thermonuke warheads to damage the rad-hardened electronics of his fleet. But they were no match for the reflexes and sharp eyes of Maureen. Green laser streaks killed two of them shortly after the woman spoke. The other two died under a laser barrage by the
Grizzly
.

He looked up from the holo of his Irish vet and smiled at the watching ship captains.

“Well, that takes care of that. Please listen to my ultimatum to the Unity and to the member nations. Shortly there will be more work to do in taking out other space launch sites,” Jack said. He looked back to Denise, who spit out a red braid when she saw him looking at her.

“Yes?”

“Tie me into the worldwide diginet and pick a global AV channel for me to break into. Please.”

She tilted her head to one side, blinked jade green eyes and then looked up at the ceiling. “Autonomous, please pick five diginet servers to receive our AV signal. Then latch onto the carrier signal for the BBC Global broadcast.” Denise looked to Jack. “I’ve sent a laser Come-Back signal to every ship in the fleet. They will see and hear what you say to Earth.”

Jack nodded, reached up to push back his
boina
beret, hit the plexiglas of his helmet, felt stupid, then fixed on the motion-eye above the front screen.

“People of Earth, I am Jack Munroe of the Asteroid Belt, leader of space fleets from the Belt and Mars.” He gestured back to Denise. “Five ships of the Unity Space Force attacked my asteroid home where 12,000 people live. They used ten thermonuclear bombs. That attack violated the Fourth Protocol of the Mars Accord, which ended the First Belter Rebellion in 2072. Here is imagery of that sneak attack.” He paused to let his AV and diginet listeners absorb the new AV images. “As a result, today our fleet has destroyed the Brussels headquarters of the Unity bureaucracy, the nearby space launch site at Chièvres Air Base, and also the Unity Congress buildings in Geneva. We took care to minimize damage to nearby civilian buildings and housing. Something which the Unity ships did not do when attacking my home.”

Elaine raised one hand. “Sensors say we are reaching most of the population.”

Jack unlocked his seat restraint straps, grabbed his sword Old Roy and stood up. “The Second Belter Rebellion has been a success. Free peoples on the Moon, on Mars, in the Belt and in the outer moons have declared their independence from Unity control. We invite member nations of the Unity to do the same.” He paused, hoping the worldwide audience understood this was a turning point in Earth’s history. “Oh, shortly we will kill every rocket launch site on Earth as a means of stopping future Unity attacks against the free peoples of Sol system. However, the launch sites of those nations that declare themselves sovereign and apart from the Unity will not be attacked.” He grinned. “Nations that remain part of the Unity have one hour to evacuate all personnel from their launch sites.”

“Jack,” Denise called softly. “Four geosync comsats have gone dead. I’m switching to other comsats nearby to maintain our worldwide link.”

Jack nodded, then grimaced. “As for the American military sites which we destroyed today, that was done after those sites launched missiles and space planes against us. Any nation that attacks this fleet will suffer total defeat. Any national leader who wishes to convey their declaration of independence can reach me on UHF Channel 243.” He paused, wondered if he should say more, then spoke. “My cousins who live in the old state of Tennessee, and the independent-minded peoples of the American Southwest, deep south and Midwest, throw off the chains of your elites! Tell New York, San Francisco and Mexico City to go to hell! Reclaim our American flag and celebrate the Fourth of July!” Cheers sounded from Maureen’s combat holo. “Our fleet will leave Earth once we have killed all space launch sites that could be used by the Unity to attack us, the Moon or Mars. You people of Earth must decide your future for yourselves! I urge you to reclaim your national heritages! Reclaim for your citizens the can-do spirit that has made humanity the source of tough, independent people able to kill any interstellar predator!”

Elaine sighed, looked to Jack and gestured at the front screen. “Our AV signal is being hit with maser white noise, trying to block us. It’s from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. I’m increasing signal power and amplification.”