Earth Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series 1) (14 page)

“You got that right!” Max grunted. His friend looked at him, open worry showing on his face. “Jack, let
Badger
and
Wolverine
comb the debris fields. We should stay on Combat Alert, ready for either the Unity or a Great Dark Hunter. Yes?”

Minna and Max both made too much sense, and Maureen no doubt agreed. “Yes. Shift our orbit into a high polar one above 1993 FW—but use only maneuvering thrusters. I don’t want to advertise our presence to anyone hanging around and listening for stray gravity wave pulses.”

Max suddenly snapped his fingers. “Hey, Minna! I just realized how you can narrow your search focus.” The Pole’s excitement over solving an engineering puzzle made darker his rad-tanned face. “Set your gravitomagnetic sensors to a low G-Band sensitivity. If any ship debris still carries a working gravity-pull drive, it will be giving off a ‘local frame’ gravity distortion equal to what exists on our three ships under internal gravity. There won’t be any gravitational lensing of the starfield, but the shape of local space will be slightly impinged.” Maureen clapped admiringly. “I’m sending you and Ignacio the sensor reset parameters now,” Max said, sounding calmer. “Good hunting!”

Minna nodded formally, said “Thank you,” and then vanished from the front screen. The reddish image of 1993 FW Karla reappeared before Jack, as did the tiny pink dot of Mole, thanks to the scope’s auto-tracking. To one side, the screen showed NavTrack vector traceries, radiowave emissions from distant Jupiter, UV and IR emission sources that ought to be stray debris from the battle five months ago, and the distant IR point-glow of other Kuiper Belt objects. They reminded him that Luu and Jewitt, the discoverers of the Kuiper, had estimated the Belt contained at least 35,000 objects larger than 100 kilometers and up to ten billion proto-comets of much smaller size. A lot of places to seek the Hunters of the Great Dark, and plenty of places in which to hide. Jack gestured to Max. “Drive Engineer, please move us into sentry orbit.”

Max nodded, looking happy with the challenge of doing orbital mechanics the old-fashioned way. “Vectoring. Our new polar track will regularize within twelve orbits of FW.”

“Thanks, Max.” Jack glanced aside at Maureen, who still kept her short curls a lustrous black despite her age. It had been his comment on the apparent tinting of her hair that had brought the hand slap, months ago when she’d showed up and volunteered to “Hunt Aliens, eat a good steak, and smoke a cigar” with him and Max. That had been their recruiting mnemonic among the old-line Belter families, and if there was anyone they could trust, it was Grandmother Maureen.

Noticing his inspection, she lifted one eyebrow and smiled agreeably at him. “Yes, young man? That’s a look I don’t often see these days.”

He blushed, but not from middle-age angst. Jack wanted to please Maureen, and through her please the memory of his Grandpa Ephraim, the man who’d
kamikaze
’d at Kirkwood Gap. He gestured nonchalantly at her. “Nothing racy, Combat Commander. Just a wonderment—if
you
were a Hunter of the Great Dark, how often would you visit the larger Kuiper objects . . . on the prowl for prey? And would you leave behind a trip-wire sensor?”

Max sat back in his seat as the vector change began, looking interested in the question. Jack waited for Maureen. Who now tilted her head to one side, the way a sparrow does when waiting for a worm to appear from its hole. “Good question. If there’s one thing that Sun Tzu, Georgie Patton and Stanislaw Sosabowski ever agreed on, it was—always anticipate your opponent, never grow complacent.” To the right rear, Max smiled warmly at Maureen’s historical reference to the general who’d commanded Poland’s 6th Assault and Attack Brigade in WWII. Their Historian smiled back, then eyed Jack. “Yes, I would leave behind a sensor, but one that is mostly passive in operation. As for prowling after prey, I’d do it the way wolves do it—always hunt in a pack, continually move from place to place in your hunting range, and always know the habits of your prey-meat.”

“But Maureen,” he said, his fingers tapping his Tech panel to bring an IAU illustration of the Kuiper Belt to the front screen, “the Rizen and the Yiplak seem to be solo predators, not pack predators. To me, they more resemble intelligent tigers, grizzly bears and Nile crocodiles, all of which hunt their prey in solo mode. Otherwise, we would see clusters of ships from multiple Alien species, working together as pack hunters like killer whales, wolves and hyenas. But we don’t. It seems the Hunters of the Great Dark do it one prey per species, with other Aliens seeking prey in other parts of the Kuiper Belt.

“But Maureen’s point means,” Max said thoughtfully, “these Alien predators have been monitoring our broadcasts to Earth and Mars, and are probably aware of our encounter with the
Bismarck
. Right?”

“Right,” Maureen said softly, then reached forward to touch ON her Weapons status screen. “If it were up to me, I’d attack us now. While our tiny fleet is dispersed. But the Kuiper is big—we may get this done before new tigers show up.”

May
. She’d said may. Jack felt an adrenaline flush and the sudden pumping of his heart. “I don’t like being the Hunted. Do you, Maureen?”

“Nope.” She smiled, but it was a wintry smile cold as the carbon dioxide snow atop Mons Olympus. “But we’re stuck here. For now. And you were right to maneuver us on chemfuel thrusters. The smaller the spore we leave behind, the harder it is for a tiger to find you.”

Her talk of tigers reminded Jack that Minna possessed the only Ethologist among the three ships, their former crewmate Denise Rauvin. Denise understood Behavioral Ecology and the habits of social carnivores, though Max had made an intense study of it at Charon Base and later at 253 Mathilde. The
Uhuru
stood ready for a new First Contact. Still, the mind-image of Alien tigers roaming the Great Dark beyond Pluto unsettled him. Had they picked up the scent of Humans? He gestured thanks at Maureen. “Good advice, Combat Commander.” He looked ahead, facing the front screen and its red-line traceries of the
Badger
and
Wolverine
as their allies headed for likely debris fields. “Max, please keep the fusion cylinder on Hot backup. I want the option of a Plasma Pinwheel ready and waiting.”

“Will do,” said the man who’d watched helplessly as the Rizen aliens tore his lover Monique into red-spurting chunks of raw meat. “This time, there will be no wishful thinking. Like allowing the Nazis to control Danzig last century.”

Maureen looked over at Jack, her gray eyes thoughtful. “Speaking of which, my Captain, when are you going to slap down Minna the Cow? She calls you by your last name and everyone else by their first name. And she rarely addresses you by your title of Captain. A hunting pack can have only one leader.”

He damn well knew Maureen was right. He had avoided confrontation during their flight out from Pholus. But he knew he had to confront the Finn before any new Aliens showed up to challenge the Human ships for Sol territorial rights.

“I’ll take our Lander over to her ship later today, after she reaches her first debris field. When I leave, either she accepts me as pack leader, or the
Wolverine
will have a new Captain.”

Maureen nodded abruptly. “Good. Better to sort this out now, rather than later when we’re fighting for our lives.”

Jack closed his eyes, aware the search, salvage and storage of any grav-pull drive could take days. He was willing to wait, willing to ride sentry patrol for his Belter allies. For as soon as the other two ships recovered one or more drives with their unique Thorne Exotic Matter globe, that soon would
Uhuru
the Jaguar,
Badger
and
Wolverine
go on the prowl, a pack of carnivores on the hunt for raw meat.

CHAPTER NINE

Three days later, in a stealthy low-emissions orbit about the two-body system of 1993 FW and Mole, Jack counted his blessings. All three ships were safe, all three Captains were pleased with their salvage results, Minna had publicly accepted his leadership during his visit to her ship, and Maureen and Max still played chess despite her winning nine out of ten games. True, they’d found only three working gravity-pull drives in the fragmented debris, but no Alien tigers had shown up to attack them while the
Badger
and
Wolverine
crews jetted around in EVA suits. The debate over which ship would join the
Uhuru
in Maureen’s Broken-Leg Gambit had been intense, but was settled in favor of Minna, mainly due to her prior ship-to-ship combat experience. Ignacio, his Basque pride smarting, had insisted on taking the Bait role in Maureen’s plan to ambush any Hunters of the Great Dark who chose to check out 1993 FW for signs of competing predators. Jack had urged the short, swarthy man to follow Maureen’s deception script to the letter, rather than try some crazy
kamikaze
stunt. The purpose of their lying in wait, with
Uhuru
and
Wolverine
in a stealthy high orbit while
Badger
orbited close in to 1993 FW, was to defeat an Alien ship and salvage its grav-pull drive for other Belter volunteers—not to sacrifice human ship ranks.

Max looked over at Jack from his Drive Engineer station, the backup Fusion Drive controls still lowered from the ceiling, the grav-pull Control panel over his lap, and the strain of the last nine hours clear on his rad-tanned face. When Max smiled, his face crinkled with a thousand wrinkles. When he focused intently on the job at hand, his expression stayed blank and unlined. Like now. “Jack, explain to me again just
why
humans are going to win this encounter?”

Jack sympathized with his friend’s need for certainty. They all needed it and yet they all doubted their task would be easy. “Max, we have two million years of pack hunting, of Clan defense, of an innate instinct for group aggression, and using tools to make up for our biological weakness compared to bigger carnivores.” He paused as Maureen appeared in holo form above his Tech panel, checking in from her Battle Module station. He motioned for her to stay in AV link with them. “Like the anthropologist Sherwood L. Washburn said last century, and I quote, ‘Hunting is a way of life . . . In a very real sense our intellect, interests, emotions, and basic social life—all are evolutionary products of the success of the hunting adaptation.’ ”

“Yeah, the guy was right,” said the small holo of Maureen as she checked the passive sensors that reported to her module. “We’re a highly aberrant primate that has more in common with the social carnivores than with chimpanzees. The social predators, like us, share food, hunt cooperatively, range over a wide territory, have a sex-based division of labor, and some pair-bond for life. Our primate relatives are mainly vegetarian, rarely pair-bond, and they usually stay inside their territories.” She looked up from her sensor check, a feral grin on her face. “You’d never find a chimp or gorilla going out of their way to ambush a deadly predator, like we’re doing. Right, Jack?”

She was all too right. “You’re correct. Unfortunately, the Unity believes otherwise. Max, they ignore the social carnivore behavior studies of Schaller, Kruuk, and DeVore from the last century, and E. O. Wilson’s
Sociobiology, The New Synthesis
is still on the Unity’s list of proscribed texts. Along with W. H. Durham’s earlier work on the ecological foundation of group aggression.” But in the Asteroid Belt, Jack reminded himself, there still existed Open Libraries, places which stored any and all knowledge, no matter how controversial or at variance with the wishful thinking of some humans.

Max nodded, then looked back at his dual Drive controls, one set for the fusion Main Drive and one set for the gravity-pull. “I know the stuff about animal behavior and its parallels with human behavior. What I’m not familiar with is your anthro stuff, Jack. Patterns of human cultural behavior that lead to violence and group warfare. You know.”

“Yeah, I know.” He paused, thinking about how to illustrate his answer to something the Unity officially denied. “Max, group warfare is adaptive for humans. We benefit genetically from making war on other groups. Until we developed fusion weapons, that is.”

Max looked up from his grav-pull control panel, his expression puzzled. “We benefit genetically from warfare? I don’t follow that.”

Jack nodded. “E.O. Wilson made the case in his Sociobiology book that any behavior which advances the survival of an individual’s genes is adaptive, or good for their survival. So when we evolved human clans, we found that the clan members had a better chance of survival when they hunted together, than if they hunted solo.” Maureen looked up briefly in the holo, winked at him, then refocused on her Battle Module sensors. “Warfare is economically adaptive, and increases the individual’s success in living to reproduce, by gaining more territory and more resources.”

Maureen waved a hand at him. “You think that’s why these Alien social predators are here, at the outer edge of human territory?”

“Yup,” Jack said, recalling lessons taught him by his Grandpa and his Dad when he’d asked about the Belter Rebellion. “We go to war when we stand to gain more than we will lose in combat. And combatants gain even when they die if it results in survival for their spouse and offspring.”