Earth Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series 1) (5 page)

“Slagged!” yelled Max in a hoarse voice. “They’re
slagged
! All the way back to the globe midbody! We did it!”

“Yeah. We did.” Jack’s heart beat wildly. “Now all we have to do is wait for it to cool down.” The simplicity of his words did not match the churning of his empty gut.

The front screen flared with a vid signal. A signal from the Rizen!
What? Weren’t they dead?

Destanu appeared in the static-blurred image, its body already red-welted from too much radiation. Behind it, the body of its aide lay half in and half out of the archway. Both of Destanu’s eyes showed the white of new cataracts. “The Rizen are meat. You, you—” The Alien collapsed from view, the screen image blanked out, and all that floated against the reddish ball of QB1 was a scorched ship whose front end had melted under the drive flare of the
Uhuru
.

Max’s wild whooping peaked, then stopped suddenly. “Hey, you wanna go salvage that ship?”

Jack bent over and dry-heaved. When he was done, he grasped the rough hand of his friend, and fellow survivor. “Yeah, we salvage. After all, we humans started out as scavengers, graduated to two-legged hyenas, and then forgot there might be a reason for all the wars we ever fought.”

The Engineer stared at the ship on the screen, then nodded slowly. “I don’t think we’ll forget again.”

“We better not,” Jack said, then altered the NavTrack for a rendezvous with the Rizen ship on the far side of QB1, where its orbit would intersect with their own ellipsis. “Wishful thinking has killed too many people, here and in the Belt.”

“Amen,” muttered Max, then float-kicked back to his Drive controls, where he sat and worked to stop their tailspin. “Wish Monique had seen this,” the man said in a wistful voice.

“Me too. I miss her. And our other crewmates.”

Jack wasn’t religious, not like Hercule Arcy de Mamét the Jesuit, nor even like gruff and honest Max, who kept his holo block of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa stuck on the wall above his waterbed. But he
was
a descendant of the Belter Rebellion, the kind of man who did not forget when friends and shipmates died on his behalf. After they caught up to and maglocked the Rizen ship hulk to the
Uhuru
, they would tell the Lander to auto-return to their ship, board it, land again on the comet and recover the body parts of Monique, Gail, Hortense and Hercule. After that they would head home to Charon Base.

Later they would move back out into the Kuiper Belt, even into the distant Oort Cloud,
hunting
the Hunters of the Great Dark. Today had been a skirmish. Tomorrow would be War, human-style.

Jack shivered, his regret over the passing of innocence a true thing. Still, humans were predators, not servants, not serfs, never meat.

So his Grandpa had told him. So the Rizen had taught him.

He grinned hungrily. “Max, you want a steak?”

The shy man who’d lost his lover looked startled, then grinned. “Yeah. And one of those Cuban cigars you keep locked up in your shave kit!”

“I’m found out!” Jack said, joining his friend’s laughter.

Laughter after death and the loss of good people. It might not be the right recipe for survival, but for Jack and his buddy Max, it was what might keep them sane during the long haul back to Charon.

The crowd gathered in the Audience Hall of Charon Base included most of the 147 adults and children now resident at the Unity science base. Jack saw Gordon Sørenson, a Danish research buddy of Hortense and a fellow Ecological Biologist. Beyond Gordon stood Max, talking animatedly with Archibald Wheeler about the gravity-pull drive of the Rizen aliens. Max had said he needed help in reverse engineering the pyramidal pile of tubes and central globe that formed the reactionless drive. He sighed, then looked up at the elevated back wall stage where Andrea Grübingen, Chief Administrator for Charon Base and a Weberian symbolic-interactional Sociologist by training, talked animatedly with her Command Committee members. Blond-haired Andrea had hugged both him and Max when they’d returned two days ago from QB1 with their bloody tale. Now, at Jack’s and Max’s insistence, she would play the telescope, Lander and Suit vidcam records of their disastrous First Contact event.

“Try not to worry, Jack.”

He nearly jumped roof-high in the low gee gravity of Charon. But he knew that voice very well. He turned and gave a careful nod to Nikola Rádsetoula, Chief Astronomer for the base and his off-and-on lover. “Of course I will worry. Everyone should worry. Humanity’s First Contact with Aliens has turned into a life or death matter.”

Nikola’s sandy brown eyebrows lifted. “You are sure of this? There was no provocation, no manner in which the crew—”

“They attacked us!” he said too loudly, drawing concerned looks from other researchers who’d brought their hopes, their spouses and their children to humanity’s most distant outpost in the solar system. “Nikola, you heard what Max and I reported from orbit, after threading past Hydra, Kerberos, Nix and Styx to get here to Charon! But don’t take my word for it. Just watch the replay from the Suit vidcams worn by Monique, Gail, Hortense and Hercule.”

Nikola reached out a tanned arm and hooked his elbow to stand side by side with him as Andrea turned to face the gathered crowd. “I believe you. It’s just hard to understand. Why . . . why would any star-traveling species be focused on dominating another species long light years away from their own world?”

“Don’t know, my beauty.”

She squeezed his arm then fixed pale blue eyes on his fresh-shaven face. “I’m glad you lived. Very glad.”

“Thank you. But survival has its own pain.”

Jack breathed deep. The pain of losing his four crewmates still hit him deep inside. It was a pain similar to that he’d felt decades ago, when his pet hamster Furball had died during his family’s move from one asteroid habitat to another. Furball had been with him since before he’d taken up the Hopper job of ferrying air, water and food supplies to fellow Belters engaged in setting up solar distilleries on metal-rich asteroids. It was his way, as eldest brother to his two sisters, to help support their family. But the pain of losing Furball did not compare to the inner pain he felt at losing his four crewmates. He should have—

“You are not to blame!”

He blinked and left Andrea to focus on the Czech woman who had found time to show him love, caring and support even though he was a Belter, a member of an ethnic group that the entire Unity still considered to be deadly rebels. Tall as him, slim and middle-aged beautiful, he had wondered why their romance had its ‘off’ moments. Times when Nikola focused only on her neutron star and Dark Matter research. Had his love for her been a career burden?

“Thank you.” He grinned, knowing that his Tennessee country boy look was his best feature around women. “I warned Monique. I really did! But she insisted we meet the Rizen. Even I did not expect the violence that met us.”

“Attention,” called Andrea, her Swiss-German features set in a tense look. “The Command Committee has agreed to replay the entirety of the recent First Contact episode that was experienced by the crew of the
Uhuru
.” The woman who had shown compassion to him and Max when they had taken the Charon shuttle down to the base, now glanced at Jack and then Max. “Two members of that ship’s crew survived . . . the sad encounter with Aliens. Watch. First Contact of this . . . sort affects every person living on Charon. Afterwards, I will invite Max and Jack up to the stage to answer questions from any base member. And parents, hold your children close to you. The committee decided everyone, of any age, must see the vidrecord. But the level of violence in a part of the ship’s encounter is beyond what we scientists know. Except from the history of last century.”

Nikola hugged him closer to her, as if she knew how much pain he would feel on seeing once again the murder of his crewmates. Jack hugged her back, knowing she cared for him. And had cared for his dead crewmates. On Charon Base everyone knew everyone else. Whether you were straight, gay, lesfem, bi, trans or celibate like Hercule, it was known. Your bad habits were often chattered about. Your good side was sometimes appreciated by a few close friends. But no one, not even Hortie’s coworker Gordon nor Max’s fellow Engineer Archibald, could know what it felt like to see one’s ship buddies being eaten.

The stage darkened. The two-dee images from the pressure Suits, the Lander’s vidcam and the Schmidt scope took form in a three-dee holo. Expert software filled in the depth gaps based on prior imagery of his crewmates. But the Rizen stayed two-dimensional since they had never before been recorded by Base videyes. Somehow that made them even more fearful in their actions.

“
No!
” screamed a teen girl from a nearby Slovenian family as the first images of the dome attack began.

“Bastards!” grunted Matthias Binder, the Austrian Technologist who had mentored Jack in his Technology second career. The swarthy white-bearded man glanced his way, nodded respectfully, then smiled as the fuel cell units blew up each person’s suit, causing the dome to fragment and collapse.

The rest of the vidrecord, including his closing talk with a rad-blinded Destanu, their landing on QB1 to gather the body fragments of Gail, Hortense and Hercule, their maglock to the Rizen ship hulk and their return to Charon Base allowed people to reach some degree of calmness. Although many families with young children were holding them close, whispering reassurances to them. Jack wished he could feel reassured.

“Incredible,” murmured Nikola as the stage holo vanished and the Hall’s lights came back on. She looked him in the eyes, wetness showing in hers. “Your tech tricks saved you and Max. But I know the Unity is going to hate your insistence that these Aliens are keystone predators focused on dominating Earth and humanity.”

Jack knew that. But reality was reality. “Nikola, I’m glad I survived to return to you.” He gave her a kiss on her brown cheek. She grinned wryly. “And yeah, this all goes against the Unity theme of One Happy Family.”

“Jack!” called Andrea from the stage, then looked to Max. “Max. You two, please come up on stage. I see folks have questions for you.”

He nodded to Andrea, then squeezed Nikola’s hand. “Hey Ms. Wander About, I gotta go onto center stage.”

She smiled at his English translation of her last name, slowly shaking her head, her look bemused. “Yeah, go on up there. You earned it. And you have my support for whatever you and Max have to do to protect us from these deadly Aliens.”

Jack left his smart lover behind and walked slowly in Charon’s low gee gravfield, seeing the eyes of more than a hundred people fixed on him and on Max, who’d left his confab with Archibald. Just before he reached the ramp leading up to the stage he noticed a group of older teens staring intently at him. Two girls and three guys. As if they had something in mind. Catching the impatient look of Andrea, he walked up the ramp and stood to one side of her as Max flanked Andrea’s other side. He held up one hand.

“Folks, before the questions get going, you gotta understand two things we learned from this First Contact.” Andrea hissed in her breath, clearly not liking Jack’s usurpation of her leadership role. “First, there are Aliens out in the Great Dark, as they call it, and they have some kind of faster-than-light stardrive that lets them roam star to star,” he said. “Second, the Rizen are not the
only
Aliens on Sol’s doorstep. It’s clear from what Destanu said that other Aliens are camped just beyond Pluto in the Kuiper Belt. And these Aliens are smart social predators who will dominate Earth—unless we fight back!”

Behind him several members of the Command Committee reacted strongly to Jack’s defiance of Unity dogma, muttering words like “fool”, “what do you expect form a rebel” and “he’s dangerous.”

Andrea gripped his left arm, her fingers pinching him even through his wool shirt. She looked out at the other humans who resided at Charon Base. “My people, Unity policy is best left to Earth. What is factual is that Aliens have found us. They killed our people. And we have to figure out, as scientists, how best to cope with this danger.”

Max grunted, then muttered. “Let the Earth topsucks put their bodies on the line!”

Jack grinned, looking forward to the upcoming questioning. The men, women and children of Charon Base were the closest thing he had to family, until he returned to the Belt and spent time with his Mom, Dad and two sisters. And his Grandpa Ephraim had taught him one key lesson—“take care of family first!”

CHAPTER FOUR

Jack hung suspended a hundred kilometers above the blue-white surface of Charon, largest of Pluto’s five moons and farthest outpost of the Communitarian Unity. He ignored the long way down and focused on the nearby shape of the
Uhuru
, with its red nav-beacon light put out by his friend Max. Floating in low Charon orbit, he pondered the risks of moving seven tons of Alien shipdrive from the Rizen ship over to the
Uhuru
. Did stealing an Alien drive qualify as Grand Theft under the Unity’s Rules, or just a Grand Insult to Communitarian wishful thinking?