Earth Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series 1) (6 page)

“You gonna light those thrusters you’re sitting on, or not?” muttered Max over the comlink, his Polish-accented English conveying a sense of nonchalance they both knew was just bravado.

“Hang on.” Jack looked down at the pyramidal cluster of the Rizen gravity-pull drive and its three attachment plates, connected by long cables to the thruster unit. Hard to believe the cluster of tubes and central globe generated enough local gravity that it caused gravitational lensing of starlight when it passed by the ship’s hull. Even harder to believe the thing allowed any ship to move at right angles to its trajectory in a kind of inertia-less glide that was swift, slick and damned Alien. What the hell . . . “Firing.”

He tapped at the NavTrack panel sitting atop his lap, mentally crossed his fingers, and hoped the navigation software would guide his unwieldy booty over to the
Uhuru’s
empty Lander module. Below him, hydrazine thruster jets flared yellowish and his butt felt heavy. Jack looked up. Ahead, the long tube of the
Uhuru
, with its boxy modules at rear, middle and nose plus the forward habitat torus, gleamed whitely in the pale yellow light of distant Sol. “Heading your way, Max. Be ready to snag this pile of junk! I wouldn’t want it to drop in on Administrator Grübingen’s committee meeting.”

Max chuckled. “You mean you’d rather not get caught. But,” his friend’s comlink voice turned somber, “we made a promise that I intend to keep, legalities be damned.” Even after three months back at Charon Base, Max hadn’t gotten over the death of his lover Monique d’Auberge. “Fuck the Administrator. Fuck the Unity. If they don’t want to believe in predatory Aliens, I’m not going to waste more time convincing them.”

“Don’t blame you.” Some folks on Charon, and no one on Earth, wished to believe the Unity’s dogma—that any star-traveling Aliens would be wonderfully peaceful, civilized and non-violent—was a crock of methane. Instead, the Unity blamed him and Max for screwing up humanity’s First Contact with an Alien species.

“Your NavTrack looks good,” Max said, his tone a little less sour.

“Thanks. I’ll try not to punch a hole in the Lander module.”

Max chuckled like the Max of old. “Fine. Just stay away from my Drive Engine—that toy of yours may make it obsolete, but it’s my baby and it got us back home.” He paused. “How long do you think we’ll have to stay on station in the Kuiper Belt? Scouting for the Rizen, or other Aliens?”

“Six months at least.” The Communitarian Unity wanted to appease the Rizen, wanted to negotiate with them despite the bloody murder of four humans. As an anthropologist, Jack understood all too well about the human will to believe, even in false dogmas contradicted by reality. They hadn’t been sent back to Earth, yet, because he and Max were the only ones able to make sense of the salvaged Rizen ship, which orbited Charon just ten kilometers away from the
Uhuru
, and Earth desperately wanted to know how the Alien stardrive worked. That they still didn’t know. However, they’d discovered the globe-pierced-by-a-spearhead spaceship of the Rizen aliens had
two
drives—the FTL stardrive housed in the midbody globe and the gravity-pull drive for in-system maneuvering that Jack had just swiped. It was the gravity-pull drive that had given him and Max fits at QB1 and it seemed the best thing to have if they again faced the Rizen—or other predatory Aliens.

“Jack, watch out for the anchor line! I’m launching it now.”

“Watching.” He looked toward the long box of the Lander module as it enlarged slowly, spotted the orange-and-white striped figure of Max in his EVA suit, then sat tensely as his friend shot a cable and grapple his way. The grapple passed through the middle of the drive’s tube-works, snagged on it, took up cable slack, then Jack’s ‘Grand Theft property’ shuddered as it lost vector inertia. It swung slowly in an arc toward the open bay of the
Uhuru
. Jack waited until he and his ‘toy’ were less than two hundred meters from the open bay, then he touched the NavTrack panel. Ahead of his feet, small hydrogen peroxide thrusters flared like a spray of snowfall, and their forward momentum slowed to near-rest. Like a ballet dancer on point, twirling in place, Jack and his Alien shipdrive floated to a stop just outside the open module. It was empty at the moment since their Lander still rested on QB1. In smooth, efficient movements, Max hauled the weightless mass with seven tons of inertia into the roomy module, closed the outer airlock doors, and then—with Jack’s help—maneuvered the bulky assemblage into a lock-down cradle that would keep the stuff from tumbling about during their departure from Charon orbit.

When Max finished, he looked at Jack, his face easily visible through the clear helmet. Thick black eyebrows beetled together. “We gonna steal the Charon shuttle too?” The Drive Engineer gestured at a Lander module porthole and the clearly visible shuttle that station-orbited not far from them.

Jack shook his head. “Nope. The last of our supplies are out of it. Let Charon Control bring it down on Auto-Land mode. We’ll get back our Lander when we reach QB1.” The air pressure reached ship-normal in the cavernous bay and they exited into the EVA prep room. “And then we’ll bring back Monique’s remains.”

Max scowled. “Won’t bring her back to life. Nothing will.” He proceeded to strip off his EVA suit, as did Jack.

Nothing would bring back Monique d’Auberge. Nor make alive their other three crewmates—Gail Winston, Hercule Arcy de Mamét, and Hortense Muggeridge-Mbasa. Four who had given their lives so that humanity might be free, might avoid the fate of servitude—or worse—to Aliens. Before leaving QB1 they had recovered the body chunks of Gail, Hercule and Hortense from under the fragments of the Engagement dome. But Monique had been buried under the dome’s heavy airlock debris. “Hey, don’t you want to go and fight Aliens, enjoy a good steak and cigar, and be spit upon by your fellow humans?”

Max looked over his shoulder, squinted suspiciously, then grinned. “Thanks for the effort to cheer me up.” The Pole headed for the entry hatch to the Spine corridor. “Now, don’t you think it’s time we got our Fusion Drive online and got out of here? Andrea may be a whiz at delay by means of committee assignments, but she’s not stupid. We were supposed to be prepping the Rizen ship for hauling back to Earth, not cannibalizing it.”

Jack followed Max into the Spine, then turned up-ship for the Pilot cabin at the nose-end of the
Uhuru
. The corridor echoed emptily and felt cold despite the heavy wool coveralls he wore. “Wish we had Hortie with us.”

Max free-floated ahead of him, pulling himself along by handholds. “Me too. We could use an Ecological Biologist if more Rizen turn up. Or other Aliens. Guess you’ll just have to rely on those long talks you had with her. Right, Jack?”

His eyes stung and wetness appeared suddenly. Hortie hadn’t been Jack’s lover, but she had been one of the few people on Charon who didn’t shun him because of his family’s Belter Rebellion ancestry. Among those raised according to the Communitarian dogma, a family history of anti-social behavior like the Rebellion made you a social outcast. “I guess I will,” he said softly, then looked down when Max glanced back.

“We’re there,” the man said gruffly a few minutes later.

They piled into the cramped Pilot cabin, a place of six seats arranged in two rows, with the Pilot seat at left-front, Hortie’s Comlink station at middle-front, and Max’s Engineer station at right-rear. Jack floated past Max, pushed down into the Pilot seat, snapped on his restraints, and touched on the NavTrack autopilot. Behind him, Max waited for the Main Drive controls to lower from the cabin’s ceiling, then the stocky Pole worked at bringing the Drive up to Hot status. Far, far behind them, in the Drive module, a mixed gas of deuterium and helium-3 swirled and spiraled inside a steel cylinder that, very soon, would use intense magfields to bring the mixture into a ‘pinch mode’ that would fuse the two isotopes into one substance. Which would degrade into helium-4 and a hell of a lot of raw energy. The Drive magfields would immediately go to peak containment as they squeezed the fusion plasma out of the cylinder’s funnel end and into a seventy kilometer-long drive flare that, if maintained long enough, could move the
Uhuru
up to twenty percent of lightspeed. It all made for a big kick in the pants.

The Incoming Signal light blinked suddenly on the Comlink panel. “Max, someone’s calling us. Think we should answer?”

“Sure. We got all the weapons, not them.”

Jack grimaced. Stealing the gravity-pull drive had been only their biggest theft. Earlier, when it became apparent no one else at Charon Base was going to join their Fight The Aliens crusade, they’d scavenged some ice-mining gas lasers, a neutral particle beam projector, some geo-penetrator rockets that should work well as kinetic kill vehicles, four hand-sized laser rock cutters, and a couple of barrels of ball bearings. They had affixed most of the stuff to newly installed “hard-points” they’d arc-welded to the outer hull of the
Uhuru
, but there was still work to be done. Like attaching the gravity-pull drive to the innards of
Uhuru
and writing a few hundred thousand lines of software code so the ship’s NavTrack computer could tell the Alien drive’s control system “Go Gravitate!” Jack felt a secret relief the code writing would be Max’s job, not his. “Yeah, you’re right. We got the weapons. Switching on the signal.”

A color image appeared on the front screen. The angular Swiss-German features of Andrea Grübingen scowled at them. “Munroe, Piakowski, what the hell are you two doing? Ground Control telemetry says your Main Drive is Hot and moving to Pinch Mode. Shut it down. Now!”

Jack grinned insouciantly at the motion-eye above the screen. “Oh, Andrea, dear Andrea, have we upset your committee assignments?”

Max hiccupped behind him. Andrea’s scowl deepened and her sharp gray eyes fixed on him. “Jack, I’ll forget all this if you shut down. Don’t run off on this crazy wild crusade of yours. Please?”

Jack gave her points for figuring out the obvious. “Andrea, you know, and I know, that people don’t just waltz up to a keystone predator like the Rizen carnivores and say—Wanna be friends?” The blond-haired woman stayed silent. “Look. You saw the vidcam digitals, heard the vocals, and you even hugged us when we got back. Andrea, what’s happened to you?”

The woman who’d shown true empathy upon their return looked off to the side, as if confirming her outer office was empty, then faced back to him. Her frozen expression relaxed into normal worry lines. “Look, I’m just a science administrator, not a political type. I believe you. I don’t blame you two for—” Max leaned forward in his seat, coming into pickup range of the motion-eye “—for killing those Rizen. The attack was unprovoked. What they did to Monique and the others was terrible. Still, there are more First Contact experts on Earth than out here. Give them a chance to handle this craziness. Please?”

For a moment, Jack was tempted. Then he recalled his Grandpa Ephraim’s death in the Belter Rebellion of 2072 and how the Unity bureaucrats, after the war ended, came in and taxed every Belt family for the cost of the war and the lost commerce. Twenty-six years later, people in the Asteroid Belt still nursed a quiet hatred of distant Earth’s arrogance and vindictiveness. “Nope.” Andrea looked disappointed. “But we’re leaving the Rizen ship in orbit. The FTL stardrive is still inside and Earth is welcome to haul it back in-system. Whenever they send a cargo ship to you. Let their supercomputers take a crack at it.” The woman looked relieved at that news. “And you have the body of Destanu the Rizen guy. Hortie’s buddy Gordon is diving into its dissection. See what you can learn about the Rizen from Gordon’s efforts.” He paused, recalling how he and Max had entered the Rizen ship after the battle and found only the bodies of Destanu and his aide onboard. “But
we
are going back to get Monique’s remains and to fight the Rizen—or anyone else—who wants to turn Sol system into a hunting zone.”

Andrea winced at his directness. “Surely there’s another way than violence?”

“Jack,” Max muttered to him, “we’re at Pinch Mode. Ready to leave orbit.”

He nodded formally at Andrea. “Administrator, with the Rizen, either you dominate them, or you’re their next meal. Goodbye.” Jack shut off the AV link and looked back at Max. “Let her blast!”

“Blasting!” Max touched the plasma release control. “On a trans-ecliptic trajectory toward Smiley!”

Jack smiled at Max’s esoteric reference to QB1. When the hard frozen comet had been discovered back in 1992 by Jane Luu and David C. Jewitt, they’d named the first Kuiper Belt comet after the spy protagonist in the novels of John Le Carré. The second comet they found had been named “Karla”, after the old Soviet nemesis of Smiley. The two astronomers had quit naming Kuiper comets once their count exceeded five. Now, according to his girlfriend Nikola, there were over two thousand in the data banks, some of them locked into 2:3 orbital resonances. Since they share Pluto’s 2:3 orbital resonance with Neptune, those comets are known as plutinos. The further out Kuiper Belt comets are called Cubewanos, after QB1. Their orbital resonances range from 3:5 to 4:7. Only the orbitally unfixed comets of the Scattered Disk have the ability to swerve inward past Neptune, and become dangerous Centaur objects that could strike Earth and send the Unity the way of the dinosaurs. Jack and Max had researched the history of the Kuiper Belt on their return and turned up these tidbits of archaic Anglo-American history. But the minutiae of history had not erased his despair over the death of Monique and his crewmates. Whether to blame the Unity more than the Rizen for their deaths was an issue he still pondered.