Battlegroup (StarFight Series Book 2) (15 page)

Jacob liked what he had heard. But it was just the beginning, he hoped. “The other five types of tech? What are they?”

Alicia looked aside to Richard. “The chief, uh Richard, says one of the tech forms is definitely a video display. It’s a flat black rectangle. They saw the tech showing imagery in that sleeping room his people entered. The other four types we are not sure about. Just that the tech has a different shape and size that we call other tech categories. Some might be control units for temp or gravity. Once we power them up, my geeks will run feedback analyses on them.”

Jacob was not surprised at the minimal results from the tech. It was just a few days since the
Sea
had returned to Valhalla. Another thought hit him. “I watched the All Ship video feed when your people put the wasps in the Forest Room. I saw what everyone saw. How do you evaluate their reaction to Richard’s Marine showing them how to use the wall controls for lighting, gravity, heat, humidity and such?”

Alicia smiled. “They loved it! Leastwise, that’s my impression and the impression of Gunnery Sergeant Diego. All the wasps watched the demo done by Diego. Then the leader wasp quickly changed the lighting to white-yellow, like the Kepler 22 star’s light, set grav to a half gee, ran the heat up to 89 Fahrenheit and set humidity at 60 percent. The oxy level was ramped up to 30 percent.” The Science chief noticed Jacob’s thoughtful frown. “Recall those controls give a local emission of heat, humidity and oxygen whenever there’s a change, so the wasps did not have to understand our numbers. The other changes they felt directly. Clearly they like jungle heat and moisture levels. The trees can handle the light change. The other changes will not affect the vegetation in the Forest Room unless it’s left that way for a few months.”

He glanced down at his tablet, saw its image of the
Tsushima Strait
as the ship moved to the orbital station for its turn at repairs, then looked to Lori. The exobiologist was intently following what Alicia had said. “Lori. What did you decipher from seven days of watching the wasps relate to each other? From the bio basics to social relationships?”

“A lot,” she said, putting down her can of beer and sitting back. The Russian glanced to Alicia, Joy and Richard, then back to him. “Jacob, these aliens have a remarkable resemblance to Earth’s yellowjacket wasps. They are very similar to the wasps of the family
Vespidae
. We all saw that from the first part of the meeting site video. Like most predatory wasps, they have an eight centimeter long stinger on their tails, their body has three parts of abdomen, thorax and head, their vision is by way of a mix of two compound and three simple eyes, their arms and grasping appendages form the upper two of six limbs, and their mandibles masticate plant and animal food. In appearance, they most resemble our
vespula germanica
wasps.” She looked around to her audience. “But . . . they are gigantic for insects! From stinger to head they measure five feet or 1.5 meters! Their two wings are each as long as their body, which explains how they can fly. They lack smaller hind wings like on Earth wasps. The chitin that makes up their outer body shell, or exoskeleton, is lighter than bone. When one of them landed on a spot in the
Sea’s
habitat room that had a weight scale in the floor, that individual’s weight came out to 70 pounds or almost 32 kilos. Compare this size and weight to the largest known Earth wasp, the
megascolia procer
, which is 7.7 centimeters long with a wingspan of 11.5 centimeters. Clearly this alien species comes from a low gravity world, otherwise they could never grow to such a large size.”

Jacob listened as Lori continued her exobiology report, but Daisy’s lavender perfume was subverting his attention. Was it stronger than usual? Pushing aside his wonderment about whether his girlfriend needed personal time with him, he nodded quickly. “Understood. That’s the bio stuff. It’s important. But what about their society? Their culture? Their motivation for repeatedly attacking us? What are your ideas?”

Lori grimaced. “Do you want facts or speculation?”

“Both,” Jacob said, showing his friend his command mode. “Facts, informed speculation, wild guesses, give me anything that will help our fleet survive its next encounter with the wasps.”

Her light brown face grew tense. She pushed black bangs out of her eyes. Her blue eyes fixed on him. “Captain, Jacob, I’ll do my best.” She glanced down at her own palm-sized tablet, tapped a few apps on it, then looked up. “First off, two wasps are digging a large hole in the soil of the Forest Room’s small meadow. The other two are munching on bark scraped from the oak, cedar, eucalyptus and pine trees. There are balls of wet, chewed up bark lying near the hole they are digging. This tells me the alien wasps prefer to build their home nests in the ground or in cavities in rock walls. I suspect they are building a fibrous nest similar to the honeycomb nests we see hanging below roof eaves. Except here the nest will be put into a hole large enough for them to fly into and out.” She frowned. “The metal floor of the room is twenty feet below the meadow surface. Maybe they won’t go that deep. Anyway, they can just widen the hole to make it large enough for the four of them.”

“Fascinating,” Jacob said, feeling just that way. “Other facts?”

“Well, they are depositing their solid waste in the sand pit that lies to one side of the meadow,” Lori said, her expression thoughtful. “Haven’t seen them piss yet. But they do have an abdominal organ similar to an ovipositor. It’s what makes up most of their stinger. But under the ovipositor is an opening that resembles the mammalian anus. Their poop comes from there.”

“How are they organized, socially?” he asked, wanting to get beyond simple behavior stuff.

She blinked, then shrugged. “It’s clear one wasp takes the lead in making decisions. The other three follow his lead.”

“Any mating efforts?” asked Quincy from beyond Carlos.

“Not yet. But it is likely they use the ovipositor organ when mating with each other or with a queen, if Earth wasps are any guide,” Lori said, clearly unperturbed by their friend’s mention of alien sex. “From what I saw in the Marine vidcam imagery, it’s apparent their society includes, at the very least, a queen female, fighters and workers. Those are the obvious castes. These captives were not armed. I would label them workers, led by a worker leader. None of the armed fighters were captured. However, my guess is that both male and female wasps are fighters able to sting, unlike Earth wasps where mostly it’s the worker females who can sting.”

“What’s the evidence for the queen?” asked Joy.

“Inference,” Lori said quickly. “The scores of pods all their ships dropped on planet four in the Kepler 22 system suggest the pods held larvae, along with at least workers, based on the multiple radio emissions between the pods. And since predatory Earth wasps sting to paralysis other flying insects and small prey like spiders, the pods also likely held fighter wasps who would fly out and gather in prey food while the worker types began building nests in excavated holes in the ground.”

“So these alien wasps are social and predatory,” Jacob said. “We knew that already from their meeting place attendance and how their ships fought us. But how much of their behavior is instinctive and how much thought out, rational, driven by thinking?”

“A lot is thought out,” Lori said. “Otherwise they would not need these pheromone signalers. There has been no evidence of vocal speech from the aliens. Which leaves a highly complex system of pheromone signaling as the likely means of communication between individuals.” She looked right to Carlos and Quincy, then over to Alicia, then back to Jacob. “Also, they are visual and see imagery similar to how we see it, based on the cartoon videos they sent us. However, it’s likely they see in the ultraviolet range and also pay attention to polarized radio signals. Their satellite sent out polarized signals. Which we could not decipher.”

“They have to have scientists,” Alicia said. “Otherwise they would have little tech. Their spaceships are as capable as ours, and their ability to create an artificial black hole field around their largest ship is amazing. Their lasers are as good as ours. Their lightning bolt beams are something I never thought to see. But they only have fission-based bombs, no thermonukes. Yet they use fusion pulse thrusters that rely on magnetically induced fusion in their engines. It’s weird how they have some tech we have, some we don’t and seem to be unaware of things we do have.”

“They’re
aliens
,” Lori said patiently. “They are also highly intelligent social arthropods who are seeking out colony planets the same as we are. That tells me their home world is overcrowded. So they need to expand. Which is why we found them in Kepler 22. It has the right kind of star and the right kind of planet for them. The fact they are eusocial and predatory makes them very similar to humans.”

“It also makes them very dangerous,” Richard said, his deep voice filling the room. He pursed his thin lips and fixed his eyes on Alicia. “Lieutenant, uh, Alicia, we’ve been here fifteen days. That means our Earth fleet is at least 30 days out from getting here. They might take longer. Can you decipher this pheromone talker tech before the fleet gets here? Or more important, before the wasps return?”

Jacob looked to his chief science advisor. She had gotten the other deck chiefs to support him as the ship’s new captain. And her advice had been valuable when she’d sat on the Bridge with him during the last space combat. She was older than him, at 43, with a good 25 years in the Star Navy, according to her personnel file that he’d found in the admiral’s comp pad. He felt she was loyal to him. As were the other deck chiefs except for Bannerjee. But could she and her algorithm pushers figure out the alien tech brought back by Richard’s Marines?

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, then looked to the man who loved combat. “Richard, I know your people paid a steep price for the tech you grabbed, and the captives your brought back. I knew and liked Chao Lee. He was a friend to many of my people. I wish I could say yes to both questions. I can’t. Reverse engineering is as much an art as a science.” She licked her pale lips, then folded hands atop the conference table. “I’ve got good people working on the tech. Lori has watched every hour of wasp video we’ve got. Like you, she and I know what you know, that
lives
depend on what we do. We’ll try our damnedest to figure out how to pheromone talk with our captive wasps. We are monitoring the air in the room and categorizing every scent, every pheromone the captives emit, whether sleeping or awake. Once we get a signaler working and emitting pheromones, we can compare what the tech emits with what our captives send out. Some of my people are working ‘round the clock on’ this.”

Richard frowned, then nodded acceptance.

Jacob looked over to Lori. “Any speculation? Informed or otherwise, based on what you’ve seen of the captives and how their spaceships behaved?”

She folded one arm over the other and leaned toward him, her blue eyes bright. “They learn fast. It took just a few times seeing how our ships used combined laser beams to hurt and kill a wasp ship for them to move from dispersed targeting to combined targeting. They are self-sacrificing. That happened when the smaller wasp ship flew into the path of our antimatter beam. Which otherwise would have killed the giant wasp ship that was clearly in command of their fleet.” Lori looked down at her tablet, then up, tiredness showing on her face. “Like Alicia, I know what rides on my efforts to figure out these aliens. They fight like us. They have tech like us. They are social and self-sacrificing like us. They attack in swarms of ships, like Earth wasps do when defending a nest. They defend their home territory, like on that ship the Marines boarded.” She paused, looked down, then up. “Jacob, there is one thing we possess that might give them pause.”

“What?”

“Planet three,” Lori said softly. “It’s an ideal colony world for them. When the wasps return, why not offer it to them as a colony world? Alicia’s people can make a simple cartoon video that shows the wasp ships going there, our ships staying here at Valhalla, and both species meeting in space to trade.”

“Nice idea,” Jacob said. He looked away from her. “Alicia, get such a video made ASAP.” He focused back on Lori. “What else could we do with planet three?”

She sat back. “You could threaten to destroy it.”

“What!” yelled Alicia, Carlos and Joy all at the same time.

Lori nodded. “Alicia could prepare another cartoon video that shows thermonuke warheads in orbit above that world. Have them rain down on the world. Include old imagery from the last century of big hydrogen bomb blasts and how the landscape looked afterward. Then add imagery of Valhalla, green and living, with our fleet orbiting above it. Show the thermonukes dropping on planet three as they attack Valhalla. That sends them the signal we will destroy the colony world they might want if they harm
our
colony world.”

“Mutual assured destruction,” Richard said somberly. “You destroy our world, we destroy the world you covet.”

Jacob did not like what he was hearing. But it made too much sense. So much sense that he felt compelled to add more. “Alicia, when you create this second video, add to it an image of Kepler 22’s colony world. Show it being destroyed by our thermonukes, in addition to the planet here.”

“Damn!” muttered Richard. “That’s even better.”

“Or more horrendous,” said Daisy, sounding deeply distressed.