Vaz 4: Invaders

by Laurence E. Dahners

  None of these thoughts prepared Balan for Second Officer’s answer of, “No… No exhaust at all.”

  Balan blurted, “How’s it decelerating?” Then she realized that, of course, Second Officer couldn’t have an answer to that mystery.

  Second Officer replied, “I don’t know.” Balan heard a tremble in Second Officer’s voice—as if he was frightened.

  Balan realized she felt alarmed by the implications herself. “How much longer until it hits us, if it does?”

  “If it maintains its deceleration, about two centidays (one renda centidays = 15 Earth minutes).”

  “And its relative velocity at impact?”

  “Zero. Or very close to it.”

  The aliens are intercepting us! Connect me to Captain Levon…”

  When the connection had been made Levon seemed irritable. Balan proceeded to explain the decelerating object to Levon.

  “You’re calling me because something might hit you?! Have you even tried to deal with it yourself?”

  “Well… it probably won’t hit us…” Balan said, wondering if Captain Levon had missed the implications of the object’s deceleration. Did she not understand that this was an alien ship? “At the rate it’s decelerating it may just come to rest near us.” Balan slightly emphasized the deceleration to be sure Levon didn’t miss it. “Should we…” Balan was going to say, “attempt to communicate,” but Levon interrupted.

  “Use your meteorite deflection system.”

  Balan got the distinct impression that Levon was about to disconnect the call so she quickly said, “It’s too big to deflect! Shouldn’t we attempt to com…”

  “Fire your deflection system and make an evasive maneuver,” Levon said as if speaking to an idiot. This time the call did disconnect before Balan could say anything further.

  Balan’s second officer said, “What are we going to do?!”

  “You heard the Captain. Evasive maneuver.” Balan turned, “Third Officer. I assume the deflection system is ready, go ahead and fire it.” The deflection system’s laser doesn’t have enough power to move an object over 20 fargs in diameter! she thought. In fact it didn’t have enough power to deflect a rock much over half a farg.

  Balan heard the firing of the deflection laser, then the maneuvering thrusters began to rotate the lander for the evasive maneuver.

  ***

  Tiona checked the countdown for the zero-zero intercept. Twenty five more minutes. She was sick of two Gs and couldn’t wait to match up with the daughter-ship and go weightless for a while. She glanced at the screen displaying the image of the daughter-ship, hoping to get some idea of what it looked like. It was still much too far away to pick up significant detail since the camera had no telescopic magnification. Blowing up the image didn’t manufacture detail that wasn’t present to begin with.

  Suddenly a loud bang behind her put her heart in her throat. She spun, thinking that someone had fired a gun. As she turned she felt surprise, since Stoddard—in her mind the most likely person to discharge a weapon—was sitting beside her in the front row. He’d insisted on it. Stoddard was spinning to look behind himself as well. Shouts were erupting in the cabin.

  The saucer lurched. It felt like it was tilting to the side and Tiona’s heart spasmed. Are we having a breakdown? She spun back to the front to look at the status screens barking, “Cut thrust!” at her AI.

  They were suddenly weightless.

  A diagram on the screen popped up showing the hexagonally arranged 2.66 meter thruster discs. One of them was flashing red.

  With the thrumming thrusters quieted, the sudden silence made the hissing of an air leak suddenly evident.

  Her ears popped and her AI said, “Cabin pressure is dropping.”

  We’ve been hit by a meteorite! she thought. As she grabbed for her helmet she shouted, “Helmets on!” As she put on her own helmet she wondered why the radar system hadn’t given them a warning and the AI at least started evasive maneuvers before the meteorite hit. As her helmet locked into place she released her harness and grabbed the armrest, pulling herself up and over it, then shoving off toward the patch locker. She wondered if she should be checking everyone else’s helmets, but decided that patching the hole in the cabin should be priority number one.

  Pulling the patch-kit out, she thought, Thank God the meteorite didn’t hit the fusor! Without power they’d be in serious trouble.

  She turned back toward the cabin, wondering where the hole was and realizing that with the helmet on she no longer had any directional sense to the sound of the leak. She’d thought it was behind her when she was in the front row of seats, but that was about all she knew.

  To her consternation she saw Stoddard was struggling with his helmet. Nunez was helping Kline with his. Kurt Shapiro had evidently passed out. He lay flopped back in his seat without his helmet even near him. Shit!

  Wondering again if she should prioritize the helmet over the hole she scanned the cabin for a perforation.

  It wasn’t evident.

  Tiona pushed off for Shapiro. If it’s going to take a while to find the perf, I should get him in a helmet, then look for the hole.

  As she coasted toward Shapiro, Nunez cast off from Kline toward Stoddard. Kline’s helmet looked sealed and Stoddard was still struggling with his, but Tiona was surprised that Nunez was ignoring Shapiro who didn’t have anything holding his air in. Maybe she saw me heading that way? “Lieutenant, did you see where we’re holed?”

  “Under Shapiro’s chair,” Nunez said tersely.

  Tiona’d grabbed Shapiro’s helmet and started maneuvering it toward his head. She stopped to stare at the diplomat’s face in shock. Oh, that’s why Nunez wasn’t putting his helmet on, she thought, taking in Shapiro’s bulging lifeless eyes with a sense of horror. Then Tiona focused on tendrils of smoke drifting away from a spreading mass of goo beneath Shapiro’s head. That’s odd, she thought. During their incredibly rapid passage through objects, meteorites didn’t cause all that much heating. She tore her eyes away from Shapiro and looked up at the roof of the cabin.

  There wasn’t an opposing hole there.

  As Tiona pulled back around to look under Shapiro’s chair she wondered how a meteorite could go through Shapiro like that without enough retained velocity to break the overhead windows. Besides, where was the exit wound? She wondered if it was possible that a meteorite which had perforated two decks of the saucer could have been stopped by Shapiro’s head, but that just seemed so unlikely. It must have exited or just grazed the back of his head. Thank God it didn’t break the window or we’d have had an explosive decompression!

  She couldn’t see under the back of Shapiro’s reclined chair so she pulled herself around to the side of it and pushed the button to sit it up. Sitting the chair up seemed disrespectful to Shapiro’s corpse, but her responsibility had to be to the living.

  The three-quarter inch hole was under where Shapiro’s head would have been. The edges of it looked melted and burned which puzzled Tiona, but she forced herself to focus on fixing the problem rather than understanding it right now.

  A flat patch probably won’t seal against the carpet, she thought. Then, Maybe carpet wasn’t the best choice for flooring. Digging through the patch bag she found a smaller bag full of conical plugs and picked a plug that looked about the right size. She held it near the hole, decided it would work, and let the air flow suck it in. The soft material bulged around the hole as air pressure forced the plug into it. For a moment Tiona thought it might pop on through to the other side, but then it stopped.

  As Tiona searched the ceiling of the cabin for the exit hole, her AI calmly intoned, “Cabin pressure has stopped dropping…” A moment later, and said, “Cabin pressure has begun to rise.”

  This suggested she’d plugged the only hole. Tiona continued looking around, still finding it hard to believe that the meteorite hadn’t passed all the way though the saucer and made a second hole on its exit. The starfield wheeling by the upper windo
ws made Tiona realize that the saucer was slowly tumbling. As she scanned the rest of the cabin she spoke to her AI, telling it to stabilize the saucer using the equilateral triangle of thrusters that didn’t include the one taken out by the meteorite. She told the AI that if the thrusters worked okay, it should gradually put on a tenth of a G acceleration so people could move around the cabin more easily.

  She glanced up again, thinking that the meteorite might have cracked the window without going through. If a window blew out and the explosive decompression sucked someone out the hole that would be a disaster. She didn’t even see a mark. She settled to the floor of the cabin. “AI, was anything but the one thruster damaged?”

  “Not that I can detect.”

  Wondering what the aliens thought of the bizarre maneuvers the saucer’d made when they’d been hit by the meteorite, she said, “Where are we relative to the alien ship at present?”

  “We’re 11,450 kilometers away, still approaching at 29 kps. The alien ship has fired its plasma drive and is moving away at a vector perpendicular to our approach. There is presently no danger of impact.”

  Tiona wandered whether it was appropriate to continue to attempt to meet with the aliens or at least examine their spaceship after one of the team members had been killed. On the one hand it seemed terribly inappropriate to continue blithely on with their mission. On the other, if the aliens had come here bent on warlike destruction, quitting because an accident had killed someone would be crazy.

  She couldn’t help feeling bad about the fact that she hadn’t liked Shapiro. Rationally, she knew her dislike had nothing to do with his death, but she still felt guilty.

  Nunez said, “Is this our max acceleration?!”

  Tiona turned to look at the crew. Nunez was studying the screens at the front of the cabin. Kline looked like he was in shock, staring over at Shapiro, his mouth gaping in horror. Stoddard… Tiona wasn’t sure what the stony expression but unfocused eyes meant. Tiona said, “No, only one of our thrusters was damaged. We can still make one G using a triangular pattern of three of the remaining ones… Well, we could make more acceleration than that but I’m a little reluctant to push it without knowing whether that meteorite might have done some unrecognized damage.

  Nunez turned to stare at her. “That wasn’t a meteorite,” she said grimly. “The bastards fired on us. I suspect a very high-powered laser or particle beam weapon based on the way it heated Shapiro.”

  Tiona’s eyes turned back to Shapiro with an awful sense of revelation. His head wasn’t smoking, it was steaming. The water in a human body absorbs beamed energy quite well. A beam that had punched through a couple of layers of metal could indeed have been stopped by Shapiro’s flesh. Unfortunately for Kurt Shapiro, absorbing all that energy flash heated his tissue.

  Morbidly, Tiona felt grateful that his head hadn’t exploded, splattering the entire cabin with its contents.

  Nunez said, “Can you order some irregular movements so they’ll have more difficulty targeting us?”

  Tiona shook her head to clear it of her dismay, then spoke to her AI, telling it to roll ninety degrees to the direction the aliens’ plasma thrusters were pushing them. “Vary the thrust irregularly at intervals of 5 to 30 seconds. Use thrusts of a half G, a full G, or 1.5 Gs. Warn us just before you’re about to change the thrust and tell us what you’re changing it to.” She turned to Nunez as the saucer’s rotation cause the star field to wheel above their canopy, “Any other ideas?”

  “How much longer ‘til we’re past them?”

  The AI told them it was going to three quarters of a G and did so. Tiona answered Nunez, “About six minutes.”

  “It looks like they’ve stopped firing their plasma thruster. Am I interpreting your screens correctly?”

  Tiona glanced at the screens, but also asked her AI. It said, “The alien ship has stopped firing its thrusters and has rotated a little more than ninety degrees to face towards Earth and ourselves again.”

  Nunez said grimly, “I suspect the weapon is mounted in their bow. Pointing the ship toward us is a bad sign.” Nunez looked around the inside of the saucer. She said, “I’ve been assuming we don’t have any weapons. I haven’t missed anything, have I?”

  The AI announced the change, then decreased the thrust.

  Numbly, Tiona shook her head in response to Nunez’ question. She couldn’t understand why the aliens would have traveled between stars to take a shot at her. She glanced at Shapiro again, it was pretty hard to deny the evidence of her own eyes. “We seem to have a lot more thrust than they do. We could accelerate something toward them, then let it go. Assuming they didn’t maneuver, we’d probably hit them… but…” Tiona trailed off and shrugged her shoulders.

  “Yeah…” Nunez said as the thrust changed again. “Flying directly toward someone who might fire a beam weapon at you is kind of crazy.” She looked like she was thinking hard.

  Stoddard suddenly sat up as if rising from some kind of fugue state. He looked around and said, “Have you reported back to Earth yet?”

  Startled, Tiona realized that she should have. The people on Earth needed to know what was happening out here, especially if the aliens managed to blow up the saucer with their next shot. Supposing the aliens hit the fusor next time, leaving them powerless. They wouldn’t be able to call back asking for help, but at least GSI would know what was going on and could send someone to try to rescue them as soon as a saucer was available. Any survivors might be able to hold out that long in their suits

  To the general she said, “Sorry, no. I’ll get right on it.” Tiona had the AI aim their parabolic antenna at Earth and transmitted an encrypted message to GSI, NASA and the State Department. She thought about using soft wording like, “We appeared to have been fired on…” but decided there wasn’t any doubt. She told them that the aliens had fired at them and that they were taking evasive maneuvers. She guessed at the nature of the weapon, most likely a laser but possibly some other form of beam weapon. She told them sadly of Shapiro’s death, trying to make the diplomat sound brave. Or at least not to convey the dislike Tiona had felt for him before the attack. Finally, she informed Earth that they expected to be able to make it back under their own power unless they were attacked again. She told the AI to send a status update every minute and told GSI that they’d appreciate a rescue mission if they stopped receiving the status messages.

  The general insisted on sending his own message back to his team and superiors. When Tiona had her AI connect him, he dictated his message huddled over and speaking in a low tone so no one could hear what he said. Tiona was torn between thinking that Stoddard was probably overreacting to a misunderstanding and calling for some kind of extreme response… but then thinking that the damned aliens had shot at her and they deserved the most extreme response Stoddard could think up.

  It was about two and a half light minutes back to Earth. By the time Stoddard had finished sending his message, Tiona was beginning to get replies to hers. The first one she listened to was from her brother. Dante exclaimed over their narrow escape and urged her to get away from the alien ship and take a long detour back. He told her he was going to ask Rob Marshall to stop decelerating toward Earth and started accelerating toward Tiona’s expected trajectory in case she needed help. He’d also asked all of GSI’s saucers to boost their acceleration to two Gs if they could.

  NASA also advised pulling away from the aliens, but they and the military both demanded more information about the weapon that had struck the saucer and better imaging of the alien ship. They didn’t seem to consider the fact that the latter request was in direct conflict with their suggestion that she move further away.

  By then, the little saucer was making its closest approach to the alien ship. As they went by Tiona told the AI to shoot more pictures. Tiona sent the—still poor—images from that close approach back home, then had the AI turn the saucer back toward Earth and begin accelerating that direction. Instead of intermittently changing the acce
leration in a stepwise fashion as they’d been doing, she had the AI start varying it smoothly from a half a G to one and a half Gs while constantly changing the rate and direction of the acceleration changes. It felt something like riding a roller coaster.

  They had no way of knowing whether the aliens were still shooting at them since, despite the depictions in movies; beam weapons weren’t visible in the vacuum of space. All they could do was sit and worry. So far nothing had hit them again. Tiona had a feeling that it took them a while to recharge their weapon and her skin crawled within sensation that the aliens were taking a bead on the saucer while she wondered helplessly what to do.

  Nunez said, “Ms. Gettnor, are you varying our acceleration to make it harder for them to hit us? ‘Cause I’m pretty sure that’s a light speed weapon. All they’ve got to do is point it at us and fire, they don’t have to lead us based on our speed.” She nodded at Klein, “But I think the weight changes are gonna make him puke pretty soon.”

  Tiona frowned and looked at the screen, “By now, we’re about 1200 kilometers from them. It takes light about four milliseconds to go that far. Our velocity’s already up to three kps relative to them, so they’d have to lead us by about twelve meters over that distance. Varying our acceleration doesn’t make it impossible for them to hit us, but it’s got to make it a lot harder. Especially if, like I hope, it takes them several minutes to recharge their weapon.” She wished she felt as confident as she’d hoped to sound.

  Nunez grinned, “In that case I’ll get him a barf bag.”

  ***

  Balan put in a call to Levon, uncomfortably wondering what the mission leader’s reaction was going to be to the events. She decided that this time she wouldn’t word her description of the episode in a way that relied on Levon figuring out what had happened. She didn’t want to be misinterpreted this time. “Levon?” she said