Earth Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series 1) (35 page)

“Brother! I so missed you. And worried about what might happen to you out at Sedna.” She sighed against his ear, then stepped back a little, looking up at him with her hazel eyes. “That AV vid you sent to Mom at Mathilde was amazing!”

Jack stepped back too, though he kept his arms around the slim waist of his youngest sister. The volunteer spy. He grinned. “Hey, you did good with that info from Ceres Central about the forced retirement of Admiral Minamoto. He’s joined our crusade against the Aliens!”

“Really?” She brushed away her thick blue-black hair and moved to walk with him through the hatch and into the Spine corridor that led upship to the Rest area, Med Station, Food Refectory and finally the Pilot cabin, where his other sister and crew awaited them. “Great news. As you perhaps already know, nearly all of his original crew are still on
Bismarck
, including my ex-boyfriend Bridge Lieutenant Howard Goldin. Is Elaine okay? And what happens next?”

He walked beside her as they headed up the Spine, its white walls still showing the float-grips that were normal in a spaceship when the only gravity you felt was thrust-gee or spin-gee. “Elaine is fine! And an excellent Pilot, medoc and Astrophysics researcher. I’m lucky to have her.” He paused, feeling the warmth of her hand that he held, realizing how good it was to once again be with Cassie. Now what should he share and in what order? “First, we’ll be blip jumping back to where the fleet is located three Mars diameters out, exactly on a line from the Sun to Mars. Second, Minamoto is installing grav-pull drives on the
Bismarck
and the five destroyers that were on station at Deimos. Third, well, that
was
a secret. But Max is working on a special weapon that our Grandpa Ephraim gave me the design data on.”

“A secret weapon?” she enthused, looking to him with a big grin on her rad-tanned face. “Ohhhh, I gotta know this!”

He grinned back, then gestured ahead as they neared the hatch leading to the Pilot cabin. “Soon enough. But first, you gotta give your sister a hug! She was so worried about you doing this spy stuff. She worried you might get found out and be held captive in order to force my surrender.”

They entered the
Uhuru’s
spacious Pilot cabin. Elaine squealed and stood up hurriedly. “Sister!”

“Big Sis!” cried Cassie as she rushed to embrace Elaine.

Jack stood back and watched as his two sisters hugged tightly. To his right Max looked on like an uncle, which in truth he had become during their time on 253 Mathilde. Denise, sitting at her ComChief seat to the left of Max’s station, also remained seated but looked on with curiosity. In the front row of three station seats, Maureen looked back from her central Combat Station post, a look of indulgence on her dark rad-tanned face as she saw two young women who perhaps reminded her of her own early years. Jack patted the empty seat that lay directly behind his Tech station seat.

“Hey Cassie! We installed a seat right here for you. Next to Denise and just behind me. So you and your sister can take turns second-guessing me!”

They all laughed, including Max who was too often somber and serious. Course the man had reason to be happy. Jack had handed him an engineering job that was out of the ordinary. He walked past Denise, clapped Maureen on a jumpsuited shoulder, then sat at his Tech station. He looked back.

“Cassie! Now sit and lock your restraint straps. Time to leave. We got Moon arrival planning to do!”

His sister Elaine watched their byplay as she pulled on her headband and set the NavTrack computer to reorienting the
Uhuru
so it pointed directly for the fleet’s position. Behind her Max tapped at his grav-pull drive panel, getting ready to generate the gravitational lensing that would send them streaking across Martian space at eighty percent of lightspeed.

“Going to grav-pull blip jump!” Max said.

Ahead of him the front screen blurred whitely, then went dark as Elaine shut off the live light feed to the scope. Cassie kicked the back of his seat.

“Bossy brother! Tell me about this secret weapon you got Uncle Max working on!”

Cassandra had always been the most impatient in his family, always too eager to experiment, to take a gamble, to go where good sense said Stay Away! Which is how she’d come to the notice of the rockrat when his family’s Hopper had landed on asteroid 243 Ida. She’d used her EVA suit jets to fly out to its tiny satellite Dactyl. The rockrat had followed her using a physical kickoff, with no jet flare to reveal his action to anyone on the grayish-brown asteroid. Jack had noticed the distant Sol light reflecting off the man’s oxy tanks. He’d grabbed his sword from the pile of household goods that his parents were piling up in a micrograv net and had jetted off after them. He sighed, feeling glad he had been there for his sister. Now, she was here for him. And out of the clutches of Ceres Central and Governor Aranxis. He had had the same worry as Elaine, but had not mentioned it to avoid adding to the worries of his Mom and Dad. His sister kicked him again.

“Stop!” he said, raising his arms in mock surrender. “I give up!”

To his right Maureen chuckled. “Just the words Menoma would love to hear!”

He lowered his hands to his seat armrests, glad that Maureen had chosen to leave her Battle Module and join them for the trip out to pick up his sister. “Cassie, I’ll let Max tell you what he’s working on. He tracked on the design plan and database algorithms a lot faster than I did.”

Max grinned at him. “That’s because I’m a Drive Engineer, Captain Jack, while you are . . . a talented Tech with delusions of anthropological grandeur. Now that we have Denise, neither you nor I need to guess any longer about the evolution of Alien animals into interstellar predators!”

“True,” Jack said. “Though I have a few ideas up my sleeve when next we meet Menoma. Tell Cassie about my grandpa’s third secret, beyond the thermonuke stockpiles and the threat to Ceres.”

Max grinned shyly. “Well, I have often prayed to the Madonna of Czestochowa for a miracle. Especially after Monique’s horrible death. And Cassandra, it seems your grandpa has delivered from beyond the grave.” He tapped a final sequence on his panel, then gestured at the front screen. “Antimatter is the secret. Up front, that’s an image of an inertial electrostatic confinement fusion device. Or fusor. Combine it with a magnetic mirror, and lots of deuterium-tritium gas, and you produce lots of neutrons. It’s called a sealed tube neutron generator. The trick is to take this eighty year-old design and make antineutrons. Well, your grandpa’s design and algorithms showed me how to do it. It was a weapon our Belter scientists were working on when the Ceres Surrender happened in 2072.”

Elaine looked back. “Max, how the heck do you make antineutrons? And how do your confine them since they have no charge?”

The man who loved to play chess with Jack smiled big. “True, neutrons have no charge. But neutrons are made up of quarks, which
are
charged. When you flip the charges of quarks you get antiquarks. Which then become antineutrons,” he said patiently. “As for confinement, well, you don’t. At least, not everywhere. You leave an opening in the sealed tube generator for this plasma of antineutrons to escape from. That opening can be aimed, like the beam ejector of Maureen’s neutral particle beam weapon. Electrostatic optics forces the plasma of antineutrons to exit through that opening. Whatever the beam of antineutrons hits undergoes total matter-to-energy conversion. In short, your target becomes a tiny sun powered by the amount of antineutrons. The more antineutrons you eject, the greater the mass you can annihilate.”

“Wow,” murmured Cassie as she looked admiringly at Max. “You’re a genius Max!”

The gruff, good-natured Pole shook his head. “Not me. Some Rebellion scientists who figured this out. Me, I just gotta engineer this stuff into an antineutron beamer that we can attach to Maureen’s Battle Module.”

“Outstanding,” Maureen said, her gaze also fixed on Max. “Plus, since the antineutron beam is charge-neutral it cannot be deflected by the ship EMF shell that we rely on for protection from solar flares. The beam will go straight into whatever it hits.”

Jack broke in. “How much longer until you have the beamer built and attached to the module?”

“Half a day. I think.”

Jack hoped Max was right. When he got word from Minamoto that the man’s six Unity ships were done with installing the grav-pull drives he’d given them, plus adding the control software to their NavTrack computers, that soon they could depart Mars orbit for the Moon. And a confrontation with the Unity forces that had been mobilized by the Combat Mobilization order which Geneva had sent out two hours ago.

Cassie turned to face him. “Brother Jack, our fleet will be thirteen ships strong when we head for the Moon. But the Unity fleet based at Copernicus Crater is twenty ships strong. Plus it includes their last two heavy cruisers. Can we defeat them?”

Could they?
“Yes! We can and
will
defeat them. I’ve transmitted to Minamoto the records of our fleet training maneuvers before we headed out for Sedna, while we were still in the Belt. He will put his six ships through that maneuver regime before we set off. And Captain Akemi will link our grav-pull drives together by laser link time-lock.” He paused, then gave a thumbs-up to Elaine, Denise, Maureen, Cassie and Max. “Hey! The
Badger
is back with the fleet and we have fifteen more grav-pulls salvaged from Sedna. Plus we have the Rizen hull inside Deimos Dock, ready for Max to decipher its Alcubierre stardrive!” He felt very pleased at that last item. The hull of the Rizen ship was the only Alien ship with an intact stardrive they had yet recovered. “Elaine, once we defeat the Unity ships at the Moon, we can return to Mathilde and outfit more volunteer Belter ships. That will give us a blip jump fleet big enough to control the Kuiper Belt against Alien invasion, while also preventing the Earth politicos from launching new ships against us!”

Maureen, her smile looking a bit forced, gave a sigh. “That bigger fleet is in the future. Right now, I gotta work with Max on where to put the controls for this new antimatter beamer in my Battle Module.”

Jack sat back in his seat and locked his restraint straps. The straps were a holdover from when the old
Uhuru
had a free-float environment. A time when they had had a torus habitat that rotated around the stem of the old ship in order to give them a half-gee for sleeping, eating and playing chess. The new
Uhuru
had no torus, even though it had free-float handholds in every corridor. While he loved having a one gee grav field everywhere in the new ship, and more room than in the old thanks to the welding together of two Belter tugs, still, Cassie’s worry was not silly. Though his fleet could jump around the other fleet like a cloud of bumblebees, lightspeed weapons like the HF lasers and neutral particle beam emitter struck fast as you could blink. And the two heavy cruisers had railguns which could shoot ball bearings at any of Jack’s ships just as easily as the
Uhuru
, the
Badger
and the
Bismarck
could return fire from their railguns.

“Jack?” called Max. “You can rely on me and Maureen. We’ll get this antimatter beamer up and running! Then no Unity ship will be able to defeat us!”

“Thanks,” he said, offering a thumbs-up sign to Max as he kept his thoughts internal.

It was the future behavior of Menoma and his powerful ship that worried Jack most. While the Alien may have given Geneva the design specs for a gravity-pull drive, it took time to build such a drive rather than salvage and relocate an existing drive into a new ship hull. Like they had done with all their ships so far. But it was the Alien’s gravity probes which could deflect incoming laser beams that worried him the most. Would Menoma use them to deflect his new antimatter beam? Or was there something Jack could do to slow down the Alien’s reactions? Something that would allow Maureen time to target lock, aim and shoot her new antimatter weapon before Menoma could blip away or deploy his defensive gravity probes? Well, there was one possible trick he could try. And it was a trick he had never broadcast on live AV, so the Alien’s spy probes had never heard about it. He bent to his Tech board and began feeding in HikHikSot parameters from what Menoma had said, and what they had all seen while at the Gathering Hall.

Admiral Minamoto looked at Jack from the front screen of the
Uhuru
. The man wore his Unity Naval blues uniform, but with the Unity globe-in-a-loop emblem removed. The man’s Command Deck crew also lacked the emblem as the
Bismarck
brought herself and her five destroyers to a rendezvous with Jack’s fleet. While the man’s Bridge showed the purple flashing lights of Thrust-Gee Imminent, none of the Bridge crew were strapped in. It looked as if
Bismarck’s
crew had adjusted to the constant one gee onboard gravity that their new grav-pull drive provided them.

“Captain Jack Munroe of the fleet lead ship
Uhuru
, greetings from the
Prince Otto von Bismarck
and our five attendant destroyers,” Minamoto said calmly, his black gaze quickly scanning everyone in Jack’s Pilot cabin. “We have completed our grav-pull maneuvers, thanks to the datafile you loaned us. We are ready to join your fleet in our joint effort to protect humanity from Alien enslavement.”