Earth Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series 1) (11 page)

“No luck. Elaine tried that two days ago when Cassandra first brought it up. Even offered Cassie a place on her own cargo ship.” Jack watched as the suited figure drew closer to him and Nikola, his memory matching the suit’s white and orange stripes with a familiar name. “Max is coming to visit. Maybe he has news on the fusion pulse Main Drive module we bought for the new
Uhuru
.”

Nikola moved to insert her arm inside his arm. Their love had grown deeper after Nikola left Charon Base and found Jack in the Belt. She’d said, on arrival at Vesta a month ago, that she’d left due to the arrogance of Earth managers sent to Charon to ‘help’ Administrator Grübingen ‘deal with’ the disruption caused by Jack and Max’s First Contact vidrecords. The managers had required her to justify every skywatch moment for the giant ten meter reflector scope placed on Charon’s surface. As if she were suspected of secret talks with Aliens by way of her scope! But the time she’d spent with his Mom and two sisters had shown that her motivation was deeper than science. More than disgust with Earth’s political blindness. It had moved him deeply. Two weeks ago she’d moved into a private habitat room with him on Mathilde torus. They were building a life partnership—in the moments when she was not building a new scope inside the giant basin of Ishikari Crater and he wasn’t recruiting Belters to his crusade.

Nikola hugged his arm. “Max looks excited. Maybe he’s finished the refurbishing and welding together of those two space tugs to make your new
Uhuru
?”

“Possible,” Jack said, raising his gauntleted right hand in greeting as Max deceled to free-float just above them. “Hey Max! You done installing the grav-pull software on Minna’s and Ignacio’s ships?”

The Drive Engineer from Lodz fixed twinkling gray eyes on him and Nikola. “Kinda hard to make out in vacuum, ain’t it?”

“Max!” Nikola sputtered, her tone good-humored. “Anyway, I hear you’re spending time with that Belter vet Maureen O’Dowd. You two trying out a few Polish waltzes?”

Jack’s friend grinned at Nikola’s jibe, then shook his head. “Nope. But Jack needs to meet her. Could be a fine convert to our crusade.” His friend and fellow survivor turned from Nikola to him. “And yes, I’m done with installing the software on our Belter allies’ ship computers. And the plate contacts are welded to the nose, tail and mid-body of each ship. They’ll be ready to blip jump in a day or two.”

Jack sighed. That meant his time leading a normal life of love and remembrance with his parents, sisters and Nikola would soon come to an end. “Excellent news! And the Main Drive module, is it matched up to our new
Uhuru
?”

Max nodded inside his helmet, his thick black eyebrows beetling with concentration. “It’s matched up. Plus I’ve added structural welds throughout our new ship’s double-hull body to allow it to cope with the graviton field stresses when we use the grav-pull drive. That sphere of the drive is filled with what our local physicist calls Thorne Exotic Matter. Makes the energy needed to create an external gravitational node.”

The local physicist Max meant was one Matthias Binder, the Technologist who’d taught Jack his second trade and who’d recommended him to join the crew of the
Uhuru
on its Kuiper Belt cruise that had resulted in the Rizen First Contact. Like Nikola, the Austrian white-beard had left Charon Base after the Unity managers had invaded. Being told to ignore the reality of what Jack and Max had discovered, that had been too much for the old man. His arrival at Vesta on the same cargo flight as Nikola had led Jack to invite him to the Belter Rebellion base at 253 Mathilde. The man had found plenty of work as a tutor for the asteroid’s smart teens. Like Denise Rauvin, who’d laser-faxed a Kiss Off message to her parents on Charon Base. Their recent crew member was already chatting up Captain Minna Kekkonen of the
Wolverine
, hoping to join the Finn’s ship.

“Good news, Max.” Looking beyond his Drive Engineer, Jack saw the stretched-out diamond shape of
Uhuru
jet away from its Dock frame and aim for the giant tunnel that led to the surface of the 53 kilometer wide ‘fat potato’ that was Mathilde. “Who’s moving our ship out of Dock?”

Max grinned. “Madame Maureen. She’s talented in many ways. Any place on Mathilde’s surface that you want
Uhuru
parked until we all head out?”

“Yep. Next to my grandpa Ephraim’s grave. At the bottom of Ishikari Crater. Can do?”

Max’s look turned serious. “Can do.” He tapped his wrist compad to feed the coordinates to the
Uhuru
. Then he looked at Jack and Nikola. “Done. What next?”

“Next?” Jack looked to Nikola. “Miz Star Peeker, you want to join me and Max as we jet out to Ishikari? I need to look over my new ship and meet this O’Dowd woman. And you can check on the mechbot construction of your new reflector scope in the crater.”

Nikola smiled softly, her blue gaze traveling over him slowly. “Yes, I choose to join you and Max. While I must stay here to finish building my new scope while you two head off on your crusade, we three can take a few moments to give homage to the memory of your grandpa.”

His heart beat faster. His eyes felt wet. And Jack knew that Nikola’s love for him was as deep as his determination to kick Alien interlopers out of the Kuiper Belt. It was a duty his grandpa would have understood. And that his Dad supported, even though the man had never understood Jack’s drive to discover the meaning of what it meant to be human. His drive to learn more and more. His drive to look beyond the next horizon and see what surprises the universe had in store for him. Well, maybe when they returned from this upcoming Kuiper trip he would hear some spy news from Cassandra. Make love with Nikola. And perhaps gain more ship allies.

Whatever happened, he knew the future held more surprises for him and his allies!

CHAPTER SEVEN

Just beyond the orbit of Neptune, at the aphelion curve of the Centaur comet 5145 Pholus, Jack brought the new
Uhuru
into a matching vector above the dark red surface of icy Pholus, a place rarely visited by man or his machines, though the Communitarian Unity feared it. The Unity feared Pholus the way a person avoids a crack in the sidewalk—it knew the comet would not soon curve in and impact Earth, nor would any of the other Centaur objects that roamed between Jupiter and Neptune—but still it kept a nervous eye turned this way. Which made all the more urgent his and Max’s vow to bury on Pholus four crewmates murdered by the Rizen aliens. But burial in space is never easy.

“Max,” he called back to the man who’d figured out how to make their gravity-pull drive work. “Are the
Wolverine
and the
Badger
matching our vector change?”

Max glanced up at the front screen of the Pilot cabin, which now showed multiple overlays from NavTrack, the gravitomagnetic sensor, passive infrared and ultraviolet sweeps, and local synthetic aperture radar. The heavy-built, red-tanned man squinted. “Yup. Captains Kekkonen and Aldecoa are flying wing-position to either side.” The man from Lodz then looked over at Jack and grinned. “Course, you might want to check with Madame O’Dowd on whether she’s ready?”

The third person in the Pilot cabin cursed in rough Gaelic. “Max Piakowski,” grumbled Maureen O’Dowd, “you’re just hopeless! Housebreaking an Engineer to social politeness is like leashing cats—an Alice in Wonderland delusion.”

Jack smiled to himself. But he did not let Maureen, a 78 year-old grandmother and military historian who’d fought in the Belter Rebellion at the tender age of fifty-two, see his smile. She had a stinging slap, as he’d discovered when he’d interviewed her at 253 Mathilde, much to the amusement of Max. “Maureen,” he said evenly to the woman sitting to his right, in the Combat station seat, “are the geo-penetrators ready for firing?”

“They be so,” Maureen said with a hearty Belfast accent. “Your four crewmates will rest deep inside Pholus for the next few million years. Once we launch them into space.”

Burial at space . . . it was a hard subject for Jack. His grandfather Ephraim had died in the Belter Rebellion twenty-six years ago, and the man’s distrust of the One World dogma of the Communitarian Unity had been passed on to Jack. Along with a native-born Tennessean’s distrust of wishful thinking. Which was all that had saved him and Max when the Rizen social carnivore Aliens attacked and murdered their crewmates at comet 1992 QB1, almost four months ago. He sighed. “Maureen, launch them.”

“Launching,” she said, her tone Irish somber. Seated between Jack’s Tech station and the empty Astrophysics/Pilot station at the far right, Maureen handled her Combat station with casual confidence. The tough, wiry woman tap-tapped her weapons panel. Unlike the jury-rigged unit on the old
Uhuru
that had lost its Drive module, this panel was new. Like a lot of stuff on the refitted and refurbished ship.

The
Uhuru
rocked slightly, then four Sol-yellow exhaust flares shot ahead of them, their spiraling flames a reminder of the outlawed Fourth of July celebration so beloved by Jack, his Dad, his grandpa and other Belters descended from old America.
Never again do we surrender
, he thought.
Live free or Die!
had been the motto of the old American state of New Hampshire, and it expressed his own convictions. The time for debating with the Unity about whether he and Max had screwed up two First Contacts with Alien species, out beyond Pluto, was over. He looked back over his right shoulder. “Max, you ready on the gravity-pull drive? I want to head out to the Kuiper as soon as we confirm impact and burial of the penetrators on Pholus.”

Seated in the right rear of the Pilot cabin, Max frowned. “Trying to teach me my job?” His thick black eyebrows made intense his look. “We stay here until Monique, Hercule, Hortense and Gail are properly buried. Yes?”

“Yes.” Jack could say nothing less. His friend had lost a lover in Monique and he’d lost a Captain with whom he’d often argued. The loss of Hortie, their Ecological Biologist had been hard for Jack. She’d been the one to chat with him on evolutionary biology, natural selection and predator behaviors. Chats which had helped him recognize the threat posed by the Rizen encounter. He reminded himself that while the Rules of the Great Dark said only social predator species like the Rizen and the Yiplak could travel star to star, much like a lone tiger on the prowl, Humans did more than fight and contest territory. Humans buried their dead, remembered them with memorials, and then made sure to never again give in to wishful thinking about the supposed peaceful nature of star-traveling Aliens. And Humans hunted as a pack, unlike the solitary Alien predators they’d met. Now, Jack had a three ship pack and he was ready to see how well he could pack-Hunt any new Aliens!

“Jack,” called Maureen, her tone musical as a dulcimer. “Impact! And the . . . penetration to a depth of one hundred meters is confirmed by signal bounce-back.” She paused as both he and Max stared ahead at the reddish surface of icy Pholus, his own vision a bit blurred. “Uh, nice paint jobs on
Wolverine
and
Badger
. Think we look as pretty to them?” she said, looking at him first, then over her shoulder at Max.

Jack smiled despite his somber mood. For this third trip out to the Kuiper Belt, they had two allied ships and an entirely new
Uhuru
. Put together from two space tugs, like arrowheads stuck base-to-base, his ship looked ugly. But the
Uhuru
had teeth. Atop the ship’s spine rose the dual-barrel railgun launchers, while to the right and left of their ‘stretched diamond’ whirred the hydrogen-fluorine gas laser pods with adaptive optics focusing. And their tail sported the deadly Battle Module, the domain of Maureen and her neutral particle beamer. The ship’s underbelly housed the funnel of the fusion pulse Main Drive which, with magfield focusing, shot out a plasma tail nearly seventy kilometers long. Also a deadly weapon when used close-in. And they each had a comfy stateroom along the Spine hallway, instead of an unwieldy torus that spun around a ship stem. But the thing that pleased Maureen most had been the hull painting they’d done. The
Uhuru
resembled, to outside eyes, a leaping Jaguar. Snarling white teeth framed the Pilot cabin, dark Egyptian-style eyes loomed above, long claws curled about the ship’s midbody, and a whipping tail ended in the Battle Module. Gold and black jaguar spots covered the rest of the hull. The white-toothed, black-and-white color patterns of their sister ships reflected equally the names
Wolverine
and
Badger
. “Yeah, Maureen, I think we look pretty. Not as pretty as you, though.” He offered their Combat Commander a hopeful grin.

“Jack!” Her gray eyes glinted under short black curls, her manner at once sardonic, skeptical and matter-of-fact. Like Max, she had the rad-tan of a lifelong Belter, a triangular face covered with hair-fine wrinkles, and a trim figure. “Don’t try to vibe me—I knew your Grandpa way back when, and he told me all about your slick ways. Try to be a ship’s Captain for a change, rather than a know-it-all Anthropologist.”

Max winked at Jack, then busied himself with setting up their stolen gravity-pull drive for an inertialess blip jump outward, to the spaces beyond Pluto, the place where roamed the Hunters of the Great Dark, species like the Rizen and the Yiplak—and now Humans. “Told you compliments don’t work with her,” the grizzled engineer said. “Maybe a few hydrogen bomb-tipped torpedoes would, hey?”

Maureen stayed quiet, monitoring her Combat station sensors. Max’s shiny white teeth gleamed in his rad-darkened face, as if the man enjoyed putting Jack on the spot. If the Pole weren’t such a good Cook and apprentice Ecological Biologist . . . Well, Jack was in a forgiving mood. After all, he was the Captain of this ship, the first human ship with its own internal grav fields and the ability to jump around in space like a crazed bumblebee. “Max, I got no thermo-nukes to pass around. Lasers, kinetic kill rockets and—”

“Alarm! Alarm!” yelled the artificial voice of the local area radar.

“Damn!” Max touched it to narrow sweep mode. “Got a Unity vessel inbound from Pluto! IFF transponder says it’s . . . the
Prince Otto von Bismarck
, a heavy cruiser, home stationed at Ceres Central.” The man slammed his fist against the seat’s armrest. “What luck! They must have left Charon Base and been heading back in-system on a cross-vector to our tangent when they detected us. Captain? Jack?”

A cold chill ran down Jack’s spine. This stop at 5145 Pholus had been intended solely as a memorial, as a ceremony to mark the passing of human innocence about Aliens and to commemorate the sacrifice of his four crewmates. He, Max and Maureen, along with Kekkonen and Aldecoa, had no wish to battle Earth ships—even though his allies had newly installed gravity-pull drives. Their target and their challenge were Alien ships that even now roamed the distant dark spaces of the Kuiper Belt, where proto-cometary objects orbited just beyond Pluto. “Maureen, don’t fire on them. Max, don’t blip jump yet either. I’ll try talking to them first.”

“Young fool,” whispered Maureen at him.

His cheeks burned warm, then he pulled out the Comlink panel on the left side of his Technologist’s armrest, tapped it on, and keyed in Charon Standard Channel Four. “Greetings to the ship
Prince Otto von Bismarck
. Who commands?”