Nebula

by Howard Marsh

  *

  The two aliens were indeed heading to the five guns arranged around the planet. They knew that they couldn’t get back to the one at their base. The humans had control of that area, at least until reinforcement ships could arrive. Their job now was to disable all the other guns so that there would be a clear approach path, shielded by the mass of the planet. Once assault troops could land, they could attack from multiple directions and retake the base. They knew that the humans would figure this out, so they wanted to act fast, disable the guns, and then try to escape in the shuttle craft.

  They reached the first gun and started the delicate work of disabling it without completely destroying it. Once the reinforcements took back the base, they’d want to get the guns back on line without having to do major repairs, so they decided to attack the computer memory and the fire control circuits. The memory could be dumped and some of the integrated circuits in the fire control module could be blown. All those things could be repaired by skilled technicians in only a few hours. They sent a message to the fleet, advising them of what they intended to do, and then they got to work.

  The first gun was disabled in about ten minutes. In addition to the two things that they planned to do, they also decided to destroy one of the circuits in the radio link to the control systems at the base. Now the humans wouldn’t be able to work the gun at all. When reinforcements came, they could set up initially to work them from the local controls while the radios were repaired. They looked at their work one last time, were satisfied, and got back into the shuttle to fly to the second gun.

  The work at the second gun went as smoothly as the first one, but as they arrived at the third location, they saw that they would have a problem finding a landing spot that was close enough for them to do the work without having to make a long trek. The problem was that the cannon had been erected in a slight valley between three small hills to its north, a plateau to the east, a deep gully to the west, and a ridge to the south. The terrain immediately around it was uneven and cluttered with large boulders, some of which had been piled up when the installation team prepared the site. They were annoyed at the idiots who had put it in such a bad location but resigned themselves to landing in the only good spot nearby. It was on the plateau to the east of the cannon, about one hundred meters away. They would have liked to land closer, but they settled for the plateau and hiked the hundred meters.

  They started to remove the access panel to the fire control electronics when Lu’s shuttle appeared. They were surprised to see that the humans had come in the shuttle rather than one of their own ships, but they realized almost immediately what that meant. The humans were only a small group and probably without any ships or other support. They quickly sent that information back to the fleet and then returned to the task of removing the panel. They were in clear view from the ridge where the humans’ shuttle was headed, so they needed to work fast or be exposed to fire from that location.

  Lu had already been aware of the aliens’ presence at the site long before they came into view. The sensors that she brought onboard detected the alien ship’s gravity engine emissions before the aliens had touched down, and Lu saw the local topography and decided to land near the top of the ridge, just beyond line-of-sight to the aliens. Bob and Ave were ready to jump out and start to fire at the aliens as soon as she brought the shuttle down. They had the hatch open even before it reached the ground, and they bolted to the top of the ridge and began to fire their pistols at the two aliens.

  The panel wasn’t off yet, and the aliens had to retreat behind the cannon to avoid being hit. Now they had a problem. The side of the cannon that they were on was one that had little of value except for a heavy electrical cable that carried power to one of the plasma generation units. They were soldiers, not engineers, so they weren’t certain of what would happen if they cut that cable, but it would obviously do something to degrade the gun’s performance, maybe even create an imbalance that would cause it to destroy itself if fired. So they cut it and then tried to figure out what to do next.

  They were clearly in a difficult situation. Their shuttle had more weapons in the storage locker, including a plasma gun and a couple of x-ray machine guns, but the shuttle was too far away and too exposed for them to reach it.

  Lu, Bob, and Ave saw that they had the upper hand, and they began to deploy to give them the best shots if the aliens tried to reach their shuttle. They were aware of the heavy weapons in their shuttle’s locker, but they didn’t want to use anything that could damage the cannon, so they decided to try to get to a vantage point where they could hit the back side of the cannon, where the aliens had taken cover.

  Lu quickly devised the plan. “Bob, you stay here and use your rifle to keep them pinned down. Ave and I are going to move around to that hill where they landed and see if we can get a good position to pick them off. We can also disable their shuttle so they’ll be stuck here even if we can’t stop them from damaging this cannon. If anything goes wrong, use the plasma gun in the locker to destroy their shuttle, and get back to base. We can expect Colonel Haverford to send help pretty soon, and alien reinforcements won’t get here sooner than a day or two. I’ll take one of the communicators and you keep the other one so that we can keep in contact.”

  With that, Lu and Ave took off, crawling along the ridge and keeping low to the ground as they made their way toward the plateau where the shuttle was parked. The aliens saw them as they dashed across the twenty meters of open space near the plateau, and they managed to fire a few shots from their x-ray pistols before Bob’s covering fire drove them back. So far, no hit from either side, but the humans’ tactical position was improving, and the aliens had no practical options left. They cursed again at the idiots who had put the cannon in such a terrible location.

  “What now, boss?” Ave asked as they both ducked into cover of the plateau.

  “I’ll go to the top where the shuttle is. I can take cover there and have good position to fire at them if they try to move in this direction. You try to work your way around the hill and see if there’s a good firing position on its north side. I should be able to see you when you get there. I think that the shuttle is in a good spot to look down in that direction. When I know that you’re there, I’ll fire a shot in the direction of the cannon. That will let you know that I can provide covering fire if you can work your way toward them. It looks like there are a lot of those big boulders that can give you cover.”

  “OK. Getting around the hill should be pretty easy. I don’t see any obstacles from here, and the boulders look good enough to let me get a lot closer, but covering fire will be much appreciated if I end up needing it. Let Bob know what we’re planning so that he doesn’t make a mistake and pick one of us off.” Ave gave Lu a thumbs-up and both of them started to move to their new positions.

  Lu climbed to the top of the plateau and looked through binoculars to see if the aliens had moved from their hiding positions, but there was no sign of them. Then she saw Ave at the bottom of the plateau, about one hundred meters from the cannon. She fired a shot in the direction of the cannon and saw the bullet hit the ground and throw pieces of sand and fragments of stone into the air. Still no sign of the aliens.

  At the sound of the shot, Ave began to move toward the cannon, keeping as low to the ground as possible and trying to keep large boulders between him and the aliens. Lu could watch from her vantage point at the top of the plateau and kept an eye on both Ave and the cannon, looking for any sign that the aliens had seen Ave and were going to fire at him. There was no sign of any movement except Ave’s. He made his way quickly from boulder to boulder until he was only about ten meters away from the cannon. Then he stopped and made hand signals that Lu knew meant that she should tell Bob that both of them should open up with automatic fire to distract the aliens while Ave made the final dash to the cannon, hopefully without the aliens even knowing that he was that close.

  Immediately after Lu and Bob started firing, Ave went t
o the side of the cannon where he could see the aliens hiding. He opened up with his automatic pistol as soon as he had a good shot, and they never had a chance at that range. He fired five shots in rapid succession, three of them hitting one of the aliens in the chest and hitting the other in the arm, just below the shoulder as he ducked for cover behind the one who was clearly dead or dying. The fifth shot missed, but the shoulder wound would put the alien out of action. The pistol packed a pretty big punch.

  When the shooting stopped, Lu and Bob knew that the fight had ended and that Ave had most likely killed both of the aliens. But they held their positions and waited for some sort of signal from Ave.

  They got the “all clear” signal a couple of seconds later. Ave fired several short bursts into the air to let them know that he was OK. Then he ran up to the fallen aliens to make sure that they were either dead or sufficiently wounded that they couldn’t cause any trouble. His main concern was the one that had been hit in the shoulder. That one might still be able to put up a fight. The other one was almost certainly dead.

  When Ave reached the aliens, he saw that one was definitely dead, with three bullet holes through his suit, in places where he must have vital internal organs. The other one was unconscious, with something that looked like blood coming out of a hole in his space suit. Ave figured that most of it stayed inside the suit, so he had no idea how badly the alien was wounded or if he would just bleed out and die. He was surprised that the blood was a color somewhere between red and the blue color of human blood that was depleted of oxygen. It looked a lot like human blood might look in the very thin Martian atmosphere. It was also beginning to froth and at the same time thicken as the processes of freezing and boiling competed in the near-vacuum and cold temperature. Ave realized that he should do something to keep the alien alive. This was standard practice for dealing with a wounded enemy, and even though all his experience was with simulated human enemies, he knew what he should do.

  He took a piece of tape from the dispenser built into the side of his suit. The tape was meant for temporary repairs of holes in the space suit, but it had many other ad hoc uses, like the duct tape of earlier days. He first used a piece of tape to mend the hole in the alien’s suit. Then he used longer pieces to bind the alien’s arms and legs. Now it was time to stop the bleeding. His space suit had many places to store essential items. One of these was a standard tourniquet. Ave took out the tourniquet and assumed that it would work on aliens just like on humans. The wound was pretty high up on the arm, but there was just enough room below the shoulder joint to tie it. Most of the blood had been draining into the suit even before the hole was patched, and now all of it would be trapped inside the suit, so there was no way of telling if the tourniquet had done any good. But he did what he could, and it was only an alien anyway, not a real person.

  Lu and Bob arrived just as Ave had finished with the tourniquet. “Good job,” Lu said as they approached. “Is this one still alive?”

  “I think so, but I don’t know for how much longer. If this tourniquet works, we may be able to get him back to the base. Maybe someone there can do a better job with him. This other one must be dead. I got him in three spots that look like they’d kill anything remotely like us.

  “Right. Let’s get this wounded one onto their shuttle. It’s closer than ours. Can you fly it or do you want Bob to take it?”

  “I should be able to. You had no problems with the other one, did you?”

  “No,” Lu answered. “It’s pretty much the same as our shuttles. The controls are a bit different, but they’re like the alien ship simulators that we used to practice on.”

  “OK, then I’ll get back with him. What are you and Bob going to do?”

  “We’ll check the damage that they did to the gun and pick up anything that may be worth taking. We shouldn’t be too long.”

  Bob listened as they spoke and then offered his own comment. “By the way, I can’t help noticing that we’re referring to the aliens as if they’re people, not things. Ave even did a bit of first aid on this one. Curious, huh?”

  “I guess so,” Lu replied, and with that, Ave picked the alien up and headed for the shuttle. As he trudged up the hill, he was happy that the alien was so small and that the Martian gravity was so much less than on Earth.

  *

  Lu and Bob arrived back at the base about ten minutes after Ave. Nigel was already doing some emergency medical work on the wounded alien. They had removed his suit and most of his clothing to get at the wound, and all of them were amazed at how similar to a human he looked, a bit smaller and with an unusually yellow skin color, but aside from that and the fact of six fingers and toes on each hand and foot, the resemblance was remarkable, even a bit eerie. The only other humans who had seen aliens without all their space gear were the people at Nebula Ops who were dealing with the prisoners. Seeing one like this made them more conscious of killing sentient beings, very much like themselves. But war was war, and this one was started by them, not us. That’s the thought that ran through all their minds.

  “What’s the status of the big guns?” Brad asked, breaking the silence that accompanied the focus on the alien. “Can we get the damaged ones back into service? How long will it take?”

  Judith replied, “That’s a lot of questions. I’m going to need to inspect them before I can answer, but I suspect that they are only temporarily disabled and that the aliens did something to allow them to be repaired pretty quickly if they can retake the planet. What I do know is that they did something to the radios in two of them. The gun control stations lost the links to those two. And Lu told me that a big cable was cut on the third one. But these may be things that we can deal with. If Lu can get one of her guys to fly me out there, I’ll see what the situation is. Can Ludmila come with us? There may be some computer work that needs to be done as well as circuit repairs.”

  “Yeah,” Brad replied. “Get going. I want to know the situation as soon as possible.” Then he had Mikio send a message back to Ops to tell them that he was about to leave and that he’d have a wounded alien with him.

  Chapter 15

  The conference room at Nebula Ops was more crowded than the other times when Brad had returned for a planning session. The usual people were there. Seduro was at the head of the table, with Billingsley at his right and with two empty chairs at his left. Brad and Brendan were motioned to them by Seduro, and they took their seats. Then Billingsley introduced the others who had not been at previous meetings. Brendan apparently already knew them since Billingsley addressed only Brad with his introductions.

  “Colonel Lincoln,” he started. “You are probably wondering at the large crowd today. A lot has been going on here while you were otherwise occupied for the past few days, and we need to bring you up to speed.”

  Brad said nothing, so Billingsley continued. “Doctor Petrov is a senior psychologist with our medical team at Ops,” and he pointed to a tall, thin man with a beard. “The others are members of his team plus a few of our senior intelligence officers. You’ll get to meet all of them later. First, you need to know what Petrov has learned and how it can affect our next steps in dealing with these invaders.”

  Brad had a hard time not grinning since Petrov looked the part, right down to the beard and the absolutely ridiculous pince nez glasses perched on his nose. But he kept control as Billingsley continued.

  “Petrov has been working quite intensively with two of the alien prisoners, and we learned quite a bit about them and what to expect of them. Some of this is likely to involve you personally, plus one of your people on Mars. I’ll let him explain.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Colonel Lincoln,” Petrov began, with a surprisingly strong, deep voice and only a trace of accent. “And it’s nice to see you again Colonel Haverford. We’ve been following the exploits of your team on Mars, and you are to be congratulated for such a success.”

  Brad nodded but said nothing, so Petrov continued.

  “Yo
u’re aware that several of the aliens in the first battle group survived and were brought here as prisoners. We’ve managed to establish good communications with them and now have produced a voice translation device that allows easy oral exchanges, complete with most idiomatic phrases. This brought us to a mutual understanding of our respective objectives and intents in this war between our species. And I should say that, given this understanding, we may have a way to end the war on terms that are acceptable to both sides.”

  At this point, Brad interrupted. “Are you telling me that a simple truce or peace treaty is possible? I can’t believe that. We’ve been engaged in a war of annihilation with them. They planned from the start to destroy all human life on Earth, even from the earliest days when their exploratory ship was collecting data to create plagues and wipe us out. The recent attacks are further indications of their intents, so how can you be sure that you aren’t just being played for a sucker by these aliens who you seem to have grown to like?”

  “Wait, and I’ll explain,” was the reply. “One of the alien prisoners was an officer on the battleship that you and Colonel Haverford destroyed in that first battle. He’s a very senior officer in the alien command and was able to tell us quite a bit about what drives them to do the things that they’ve been doing. You see, they have almost given up hope of finding a suitable world to settle on. When that scout ship sent the message that Earth would be a perfect new home for them, they immediately returned, as you know, without waiting to rendezvous with the other scout ships. It was that important to them. They also knew that we already occupied the planet and that we were sentient beings, but they had no sense of how similar we were to them, other than the fragmentary data sent back by their scouts before they crashed and died. We now do understand each other much better, and that gives us a way to deal with our conflict without one of us simply annihilating the other. Now I want to introduce Radeek. That’s what we call him since it’s as close as we can get to something that sounds like his name and that we can pronounce. Most of their spoken language is difficult for us to pronounce. Our translator matches their speech to the words in their written language, based on what we read in their messages and archives. So their spoken words are translated to convey meaning. But names are different from ordinary words, so we try to reproduce the actual sounds of the names as closely as we can.”