Earth Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series 1) (3 page)

CHAPTER TWO

Jack watched as Max closed the hatch leading to the Lander, locked it down, then depressurized the launch module. Their four crewmates waved at them through the thick plexiglas porthole of the hatch, then entered the Lander, a box surrounded by an Eight Pack of chemfuel rockets. The Lander had enough fuel to land five times on the Moon and over 50 times on the low-gee comet worlds they’d visited in the last six months. Their job had been to check on Kuiper Belt comets not locked into a 3:2 orbital resonance, to look for signs of outgassing, for any evidence they might deviate from their orbits and plunge inward as deadly Centaur groups. It was boring, simple work. But it kept them busy enough not to get on each other’s nerves. And it meant peace of mind for the Unity and a purpose for Charon Base.

“You coming?” Max asked as he headed for the Spine corridor that connected the midship Lander module with the Pilot cabin up front.

“Yeah.” Jack floated away from his wall-hold, kicked gently, and floated after the ship’s Engineer. “Max, why didn’t you just tell Monique to kiss off, start the Main Drive, and vibejump us out of here?”

The dark-haired man chuckled. “Defy Monique? What an earthquake that would have precipitated!” The stocky Engineer twisted in air, grabbed the corridor handholds, and pulled himself along the Spine, heading for the Pilot cabin and its bank of instruments that would keep them in touch with the Lander—and with the Alien ship, if need be. “Anyway, Jack, maybe she’s right?”

“I hope so.”

Jack noticed the man’s cloth boots were dirty, the grip-threads half-filled with food fragments, plastic debris, carpet fiber balls, and the shiny gleam of body fluids that adhere to everything after six months in space. They enjoyed thrust-gee only when leaving one comet and vectoring toward a new one, a choice mandated by the need to stretch out their deuterium-helium 3 fuel. The spin-gee of the ship’s habitat torus helped some, but not enough. This last month they’d all let personal hygiene slip a bit. Had their judgment also slipped as badly?

“Jack,” called down Max to him as they passed the habitat torus. “What were you doing with the EVA suit backpacks? They’re totally fail-safed, like the rest of this ship.”

Tell him? Not tell him? Jack felt his neck muscles tense up. “Just something I thought of at the last minute. I don’t like our people heading down there with no backup and no way to defend themselves.”

Max halted his forward drift and looked back over his shoulder. “Jack, this scene has us all vibed out. But Monique is competent. She’ll do fine.” He smiled reassuringly, then twisted around and resumed his weightless float forward using the Spine handholds.

“Sure.” Jack was less sanguine about the team’s chances. No one from Brussels had loaded any First Contact software into the ship’s NavTrack computer. No one had fitted the ship with gas lasers or kinetic kill vehicles or any of the stuff that had been used in the Asteroid Belt’s rebellion against the Unity, back in 2072. No personal weapons had come on board. They had nothing, except for the scientific instruments needed on a deep space mission. He prayed and hoped they would not need to resort to violence. While skeptical of the Unity’s “We’re All One Happy Family” social dogma, he had no desire to revisit war, or violence, or dead bodies. But the voice of his old cultural anthropology professor at Vanderbilt still spoke in his mind, still said—“Prepare for the worst, hope for the best, and expect a mess.”

“Here we are,” Max said as they reached the Pilot cabin.

Jack watched Max take his seat at the Main Drive station in back while he floated forward to Gail’s Pilot seat. He strapped in, touched on the front screen, and observed the image of a striped globe-pierced-by-a-spearhead, now a hundred kilometers away and ahead of them in equatorial orbit, as it floated above the reddish ball of QB1. Jack keyed the external maser tube into search mode for the Lander’s beacon, waited for acquisition, then punched in the vidlink. “Monique, how soon to touchdown?”

The screen flared white, then the Captain’s space-suited figure filled it. Her clear glass helmet hadn’t yet polarized—no bright Sun to make it do so. Her pale lips thinned at his informality. “Technologist Munroe, please observe ship procedures. This is not the time for informality.” She looked aside, then back to face him. “Our polar orbital track is nominal. In fifteen minutes we land a half kilometer away from the dome. Until then—”

“Will you leave on the Lander vidcam?” he interrupted before she could switch off. “So we can watch your landing?”

Captain d’Auberge nodded stiffly. “Of course. I’ll also keep my suit vidcam active as we traverse to the dome. Satisfied?”

Tell them now? But surely Destanu the Alien was monitoring their com chatter. “Satisfied. But please, keep your suits on and pressurized even after you enter the dome.”

“Why?” Monique said, her tone suspicious.

“Rules.” Behind him, Max shifted in his seat as the Engineer leaned forward. “EU rules for EVA on airless bodies mandate it. A precaution, Captain.”

“Agreed. And our suit vidcams are in autorecord mode with an uplink to
Uhuru
through the Lander.” On screen, petite Monique d’Auberge turned away from the videye, floated over to her Lander seat, and strapped in.

Jack exhaled loudly. “Thank god!”

“What was that all about?” asked Max.

“Nothing.” That was a lie, but a needful one. “Max, I’ll tell you all about me and my stupid idea when they return. Fair?”

“Fair enough, I guess,“ Max grunted. “Look, they’ve gone into landing mode. The NavTrack radar’s got them in a nice glide.”

Jack watched as the Lander repeated what it, and some of the crew, had done 23 times over the last six months. Set down on the water-ice surface of a Kuiper Belt comet, autocycle to emergency departure mode, power down to maintenance mode, then exhaust air from the EVA airlock preparatory to the geological survey work they did each time they landed. The routine had been . . . put down sonophones, embed small explosive charges, move two hundred meters away, put down a radioisotope powered transmitter that would send back to Charon the dozen or so geophysical readings their sensors looked for, take a sample of surface ices, return to the Lander, lock up stuff, leave the comet before setting off the charges, confirm transmission of the sonophone readings that built a subsurface image of the comet, and hightail it down the line to the next big iceball. This time, the routine stopped with the depressurizing of the Lander airlock.

He and Max watched as their four crewmates entered the lock, cycled through, climbed down the ladder attached to one landing leg, then bounce-glided toward the clear dome that gleamed in the silvery starlight. From this distance, they could see the red-and-black striped bodies of Destanu’s ‘team’ inside the dome. And also the airlock set into the side of the dome. Minutes passed as their friends coped with the comet’s extremely low gravity. Then they stopped before the dome, looked around, observed the distant shape of an Alien lander, and stepped into the large airlock. It was big enough to accommodate all four of them.

“We’re entering the dome,” Monique said a bit breathlessly over the channel that fed through the Lander’s companel. “Air pressure checks out. So does air composition. I think—wait, the Rizen aliens are lining up against the far wall. Must be some kind of greeting ceremony.”

“Hey!” Max yelled from behind Jack. “You be careful Monique! You too, Hercule, you smart-assed Jesuit!”

The suited priest smiled good-naturedly at Monique’s vidcam, waved briefly, and then focused on the four unsuited, red-and-black striped Aliens who had risen up on their hind legs, leaving two feet-pair suspended in the air. “Hey,” Hercule murmured, “no booze, no chairs, no table, nothing for our vibechat. Captain?”

“I noticed,” said Monique, her tone tense. “Jack, set up a piggy-back comlink to Destanu. I’d like to speak with him.”

Jack reached over to Hortense’s companel, tapped in a preset function, then watched as the screen image split into two, one showing the team via Monique’s vidcam, one showing the Rizen ship in low orbit. “Done, Captain.”

“Link Destanu?” Monique called. “Would you please reply? We are in the dome with your people.”

The local stars around the Alien ship blurred, the ship changed orbit from equatorial to a polar track, and Jack suddenly realized the Rizen possessed a gravity-pull drive able to move at right angles to its apparent inertia. Before he could comment, Destanu’s sleek bulk filled the screen. The Alien looked the same as before, but the assistant was not present. “Replying, Captain Monique Catherine d’Auberge. Please be patient. The discussion of the Rules of Engagement will commence shortly. Tell me, you are inside the dome? You are ready to begin?”

“We are,” said Monique, sounding impatient. “If you would just tell your people to—”

“Watch out!” screamed Gail.

Red and black bodies flashed in sudden movement on the split-screen. They raced toward Monique, Gail, Hortense and Hercule, shark-mouths opening wide.

“No!” cried Max.

Jack froze. Unable to move, he watched as a Rizen alien jumped on one of his crewmates, talon-slashed through the suit fabric, then sank white shark-teeth into human flesh.

“Get it off!” screamed Hortense, whirling into the center of the dome as she beat at the Alien that had locked its mouth onto her midbody.

“Noooo!” whispered Monique, then she turned and reached for the airlock controls—just as the final Rizen hit her from behind. Red blood fountained into view as severed neck arteries gushed redly. Her shoulder vidcam twisted with her dying convulsions.

On the screen, the vidcam arced past the still, wine-red bodies of Gail, Hortense and Hercule, each the victim of buzzsaw teeth and talon-toes of a blood-spattered Alien. The side split-screen that carried Destanu’s image showed him unmoving, unreactive. As if he—

“Bastard!” Jack screamed over the ship-to-ship link. “
Why!
Why attack us? Why kill—”

“Shut up,” Destanu said coldly, turning to face Jack and Max even though the
Uhuru
sent no Pilot cabin image.

“Jack?” moaned Max. “Is she, is she dead?”

“They all are.” Wetness touched his eyes. His mouth soured and Jack felt like vomiting. But maybe, maybe, his last minute fix would work. If the air pressure sensor worked, if—

Destanu opened its toothy mouth. “The Engagement is—”

“
Blammm!
”

The dome interior erupted in yellow flames and white gases. Each person’s suit was a ball of yellow flame and flying fragments. Including Monique’s. The dome-hatch juncture next to her body cracked open to vacuum. A high whistle came over the suit vidcam, then stopped. On the tilted vidcam image, red-and-black striped Aliens puffed up at the sudden loss of pressure. Red fluid erupted from eyes, mouth and hindquarters. The blood-spattered Rizen tottered, looked up as the dome roof crashed down in slow motion, then all disappeared as the vidcam melted from the thermal heat put out by the suit fuel cells. Leaving them with only the view from the Lander vidcam.

Max punched his back. “You killed the Rizen! How?” The Engineer now floated immediately behind Jack’s seat.

“Dead Man Switch,” he muttered, sick at heart, sick to his stomach with the after-image of dead Human and Alien bodies. “I set each suit’s fuel cell to spark and blow the hydrogen they usually use during electrolysis—whenever the suit lost pressure. Being near the airlock, the blasts from four suits were enough to crack the dome.”

On the front screen, the red-and-black striped body of Destanu looked aside at some device, trembled suddenly, then it faced them. “So. The Engagement is not yet complete.”

“Engagement!” Jack yelled, wishing he held a laser, a knife, a mortar launcher, anything with which to strike back for the deaths of his crewmates, his . . . his friends. “You said you were diplomats. You said—”

“We lied.”

Max sputtered more Polish curses. Coldness flooded over Jack’s skin. “Lied? Then, but—”

“Enough.” Destanu waved a taloned foot-hand at them. “The Rules of Engagement have been observed. The new species has had the chance to assert its right of survival through personal combat. Your team failed, though I honor your treachery. What kind of explosives did you use in the suits? We detected no chemical charges.”

Jack’s coldness seeped down to his feet. He barely felt Max’s hand on his shoulder. “So this was all a setup? You
intended
to kill us?”

“Of course.” Destanu sighed. “You are so naive,” he said, his tone that of a Midlands country baron trying to explain the Hunt to red foxes. “The Rules of the Great Dark, the rules adhered to by all space-going cultures, are that we leave juvenile species alone, so long as they do not travel beyond their outermost planet. To waste Engagement challenge on immature ones is to stain the Rules. But you have now traveled beyond your outermost planet. So we invited Engagement. Tell me, will your species now surrender to Pod Victorius, of the Rizen? ”