Peace Army

by Steven L. Hawk

  Fifteen minutes. A thought occurred to Soo.

  “Notify all bases that we have arrived in orbit,” he commanded. “Alert the base being approached that the humans have a group of fast-moving craft headed their way.”

  “Yes, General.”

  “And have the base scramble all their personnel. I want every available weapon ready to defend against attack.”

  “Right away, General,” came the reply.

  His orders were relayed to the bases on the planet. Every Minith in the command center watched the fighters speed across the planet toward the base.

  “Can we get another view on the wall?” he asked the room.

  No one responded. The two Minith operating the video feeds looked at each other. Soo saw that they did not know the capabilities of the device.

  His anger exploded forth. Two quick steps and a flash of fist backhanded the closer of the pair. The Minith soldier sprawled awkwardly to the floor, but immediately scuttled to regain his feet, then his chair. He and the second operator quickly moved dials and punched buttons.

  The screen faded briefly before the twin views flickered, then became three. The mining base occupied by the humans took up half the wall. The other half was now split into two views. The top view showed the human ships speeding across the blurred ground below them, while the bottom view showed a base similar to the first, but manned by Minith soldiers.

  “Good,” Soo stated as he turned fully toward the screens. “Learn to work the device properly.”

  The second base showed a flurry of activity. Minith personnel were streaming from the barracks and into the doorways that led up to the top of the walls. All were armed.

  “Excellent,” Soo observed. These warriors and civilians were responding well to the approaching threat. He was anxious to see how the humans would react to such heavy defenses.

  “General, the human base,” Soo heard. One of his troops was pointing to the view of the human-occupied base. He immediately saw what had drawn the other’s attention. A second group of ships was leaving the base. They were also heading east.

  * * *

  “Alpha Leader, report.”

  “This is Alpha Leader,” came the response. “We are five minutes out from Base One, still en route to Base Five.”

  Grant was pleased. Alpha was right on schedule and Bravo Flight had just lifted off. Charlie Flight was still a half hour away from leaving the base.

  “Very good, Alpha,” Grant replied. “Let’s go through this just like we mapped it out. Conduct a low-level flyover of Base One at top speed. We need to get the Minith’s attention.”

  “Of course, General. No problem.”

  Grant knew the pilot, and the others in his flight group, did not need him to remind them of the plan. Mouse had trained them well. Their performance against the first Minith base had gone perfectly. But he felt better for having refreshed their memories, nonetheless. Grant offered a silent apology to all the former commanders he had cursed for doing the same thing. He knew now that those officers had not reminded him of his orders for his benefit. It had been for theirs.

  Directing the action from a safe distance was much more difficult than Grant had imagined. It wore on the nerves and on the body. If given a choice, and if he had the training, he would have much rather been piloting one of the fighters.

  This was the first pass over one of the bases, so Grant had ordered the low-level flyover. The fighters should be dropping rapidly from Gee’s planned altitude of six thousand feet, where the planet’s winds could give them maximum push, to an approach altitude of only a hundred. Grant knew the pilots would feel as if they were skimming the ground from that height, but he wanted maximum effect from the maneuver. The fighters were not going to fire on this base, but the sound and confusion caused by their passing should wake the base’s defenders.

  He had no doubt that the Minith were on alert, but it had been more than a week since the initial attack. Human troops grow tired and careless when on alert for extended periods. Hopefully, the same held true for Minith. That would help protect the pilots.

  On the other hand, he needed the aliens defending the base to be stirred up. And he wanted their attention on the skies.

  So, he was going to kick the hornet’s nest.

  * * *

  Soo watched the speedy human craft drop from the sky and set up an approach. He also watched the defenders on the base scramble to move personnel and weapons to the western wall. He hoped his warning had given the base time to put enough firepower in place.

  He would know soon.

  The incoming ships were not large. He guessed each held a single pilot, perhaps two. He did not know what type of weapons they carried. That, too, he would know soon enough.

  The Minith had nothing like these vehicles. The motherships the Waa built could move through space at incredible speeds, but carried no external weapons and were not very useful inside a planet’s atmosphere. When asked about the limitation, the Waa merely replied that the ships were not designed to regularly enter a planet’s atmosphere. While they were capable of atmospheric flight, once they were in space, they were meant to stay there. The Minith had repeatedly used that design flaw when it aided in their conquests of other worlds. Landing a mothership among the native population could be quite impressive to the conquered.

  The Minith also had a fleet of smaller interstellar craft. Like the motherships, they were non-military in nature, but aided in the delivery of small groups of personnel and troops to distant worlds. As did every Minith general officer, Soo had one of these ships at his disposal. It was one of these ships—the one possessed by General Brun—that had been used to destroy the Minith home world.

  Of course there were the large, slow-moving cargo ships that moved the wealth and spoils from conquered worlds into the Minith supply channels. Operated primarily by computer, these vessels were the lumbering dinosaurs of the Minith fleet. They moved continuously to and from the worlds as the need arose and as quotas were filled.

  As for planet-based vehicles, the Minith were limited to various sizes of armed carriers. Although these possessed weapons and armament, they were primarily used to ferry troops from place to place. Trained warriors provided the bulk of their firepower and strength. There were a lot of worlds out there that contained life, but the reality was that few of those worlds contained sentient life, and of the few that did, none was advanced enough to stand against legions of trained Minith soldiers. The Telgorans were too stupid, and the humans—at least, until now—had always been too weak-willed.

  Soo wondered what had happened on Earth to change that. Not that it mattered. Humans were still weak sheep. They made good farmers and slaves, but they could never stand up to Minith in an extended fight. They were not aggressive enough, nor experienced enough in the art of war. Those were not skills you gained during a few short years.

  The proof was about to take shape on the ground below. The humans were in a tight formation. A lead ship was followed closely by two others flying side-by-side. The final, fourth craft followed closely behind.

  The view of the approaching ships suddenly merged with the view of the mining base. Soo watched with rapt attention as the firing began.

  The lead aircraft received the heaviest concentration of fire from the Minith defenders on the wall. None of the incoming aircraft returned fire.

  An excited gasp arose from those in the command center as the first explosion lit the screen.

  * * *

  “Alpha One and Alpha Two are down!”

  The exclamation hit Grant in the gut. The decision to do the flyover had been his call, and it had obviously been the wrong one. As a result, four people had just died. He filed the knowledge away and pressed on with the mission.

  “Alpha Three, how are you and Four?”

  “Um,” the excited pilot paused. “No damage to my carrier. Four has minor damage, but is still a go.”

  Grant closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. He
had known it was risky to send the fighters in over the base. The risk was not yet over. More of his pilots could die in the next few hours.

  “Continue the mission,” he ordered the pilot. “But I’m revising your flight plan. Regain altitude. Do not—I repeat—do not perform flyovers of Bases Two through Four.”

  “Yes, sir,” the pilot replied. Grant thought he heard relief in the man’s voice and could not blame him. “We are still a go for Base Five, right, sir?”

  “Affirmative,” Grant acknowledged. The attack on Base Five would continue as planned. They would be short two fighters, but they would have to do the best they could.

  He relayed the revised orders to the remaining flights. No flyovers were to be done en route to their final destinations.

  “Grant,” Gee called out.

  Grant held up a “not now” hand to the engineer. He needed to think this through.

  He reminded himself that he was not battling human forces. The calculated move to do the flyover was based on his experience on Earth. Either the Minith were not prone to getting sloppy, or the weapons and warning systems at Base One were much better than those they had employed within the base his forces now occupied.

  Either way, it was apparent he had not needed to kick the hornet’s nest. The alien defenders had their attention fully turned to the skies.

  “Grant.”

  Grant considered putting Flight Foxtrot in the air. He could send them west, into the wind, and they would probably arrive in time for the attack, but he discounted the move almost immediately. It was reactionary, and not in the best interest of his forces as a whole. He refused to leave the mothership unprotected unless he had no choice. The two remaining fighters of Flight Alpha would have to complete their mission alone.

  “Grant,” Gee persisted.

  “What, Gee?” He did not mean to snap at the engineer, but he was dealing with life and death decisions. He needed his full attention on the issue at hand.

  “We, uh… we have company,” Gee said. He dipped his head toward the monitor where he sat.

  “We what?”

  “There’s a mothership,” the other man said. “It’s orbiting the planet.”

  “You’ve gotta be shitting me,” was all Grant could think to say. He had wondered when the cavalry would show up, had hoped he would have more time before it happened.

  “The ship’s sensors picked it up a little while ago,” Gee said. “I just noticed it.”

  Grant’s mind raced. He was in the middle of an attack on the five remaining Minith bases, two of his fighters had just been shot out of the sky, likely killing the pilots, and now this. It was true that a plan was nothing more than a best-case scenario for what a commander thought would happen. But this was the worst-case scenario.

  He thought he knew how the defenders at the base were able to react to his fighters so quickly. They had been warned.

  “Gee, how good are these vid screens?” he asked. “Can the Minith mothership see us clearly?”

  “Oh, yes. If the Minith are using them, they would be able to see anything on this side of the planet.”

  “They knew we were coming,” he spoke to himself. Then he had an idea. “These ships can communicate with each other. Right, Gee?”

  “I would think so, yes.”

  “Can we listen to the other mothership without them knowing?” Grant grew excited and nervous at the same time. If he could listen to the Minith, it was possible they were already listening to him.

  “Amazing,” Gee said. It was clear he was analyzing the idea for its implications. That did not deter him from finding an answer, though. Grant watched as the engineer played with the controls and data systems on the ship.

  “Ha!” he cried after a few moments. “Yes, we can.”

  “Excellent. How long until you can get that going?”

  “Done,” he answered. The excitement in his voice was clear.

  Grant heard a hum fill the command center. It took him a couple of seconds to place it—it was the sound of a mothership in space.

  “And I’ve blocked our communications so they cannot listen to us.”

  Grant and Gee listened to the feed from the alien ship closely. Although they recognized the hum, they had heard no other sound. Grant was at the point of asking Gee if something was wrong when they heard it.

  “What next, humans?” the voice growled.

  There was no doubt as to the translation—both Gee and Grant spoke fluent Minith.

  Chapter 44

  “What next, humans?” Soo spoke to the two ships still heading east. They showed no sign of turning back toward the human base.

  The fact that none of the four aircraft had fired on the base was unusual, but did not alarm him, Perhaps they were on a reconnaissance mission.

  Whatever the purpose, the fact remained that two of them were now scattered across the plains outside the walls of the mining base. It was a nice victory, but there was more to be done before the war was won.

  “Send word to the base that a second group of aircraft is closing in,” Soo ordered. “Have them move all fighters from the east wall to the west. I want maximum firepower facing the approaching craft.”

  * * *

  So, Grant was right. The fighters on Base One had been warned. Now the Minith were moving even more of their forces to the wall facing Flight Bravo.

  “Flight Bravo, come in.”

  “Bravo One,” came the reply seconds later.

  “Maintain altitude,” Grant instructed the pilot. “Adjust your heading as far north as you can to avoid the base.”

  By moving the flight path to the north instead of flying directly over the mining base, Grant hoped to avoid any danger. The Minith weapons had limited range.

  “Will do, sir.”

  * * *

  The humans learned their lesson.

  The second group of aircraft safely skirted the base and the weapons that were pointed in their direction.

  Interesting, Soo thought. He wondered again at their purpose. He would continue to watch and report the human movements to the bases below.

  “Sir, the first flight is passing out of visual range.”

  “Can we position ourselves to keep them in sight?” he asked the officer in charge of piloting the mothership.

  “Yes, sir,” the other, a captain, replied. “But we will eventually lose sight of the human base if we continue to track the aircraft.”

  Soo considered his options. It was more important to track activity at the human base than to follow the two craft.

  “Very good, Captain,” he allowed. “Maintain our position.”

  Soo’s decision was validated minutes later when a third group of ships lifted off. Like the previous two, they also headed east.

  * * *

  “Flight Charlie, continue along the flight path you were assigned,” Grant said to the pilots taking off. “But I want you to fly as far south as possible when you reach Base One.”

  “Will do, sir.”

  He doubted the Minith weapons could reach them, but changing up the flight path from the north to the south seemed like a prudent step to take. Now that he knew the Minith commander would not follow the leading group to the other side of the planet, Grant could focus on the groups on this side.

  * * *

  Soo watched the fifth group of human aircraft begin their eastward journey. The past few hours had become almost boring in their similarity. The humans would lift off from their base, turn east, then avoid all contact with the Minith bases.

  The input he had received from the three bases on the far side of the planet relayed the same data. They saw the human aircraft in the distance—sometimes on the south side, other times on the north—but they never approached.

  The humans were up to something. Soo felt it. He stared at the screens showing the human base and the human ships. However he turned them, he could not fit the pieces together.

  Their actions refused to form a clear picture.<
br />
  * * *

  Grant took the Minith commander’s inactivity as a good sign. It meant he still had no idea what Grant had planned and was not defending against it. Any actions the Minith took now would not change the plan, but their lack of activity gave them a greater chance of success with the least amount of danger for his pilots.

  The Telgorans were in place, and his final group, Flight Echo, had just lifted off.

  Their attack was less than fifteen minutes away

  * * *

  It would not be long now.

  Titan waited with Patahbay and five hundred other Telgorans for Grant’s signal. The mass of solid gray flesh pressing in against him was proof that they were ready to move once he gave the word.

  This was the fourth time Titan had joined them on their march, the fourth time he had waited with the Telgorans as they prepared for an attack on the Minith. But this time was different.

  This time, he would be joining them.

  He lifted the pulse rifle and checked the charge again. As it had the last dozen times, it registered a full charge. The Telgorans had been offered rifles, but they held stubbornly to their tradition. They all hefted large rocks and carried stone staffs.

  Titan thought it was better this way. The Family had waited a long time to use those weapons effectively against their enemy. Now they were going to get their chance.

  It was Grant’s idea to dig channels from the Telgoran’s existing network of tunnels to the mining shafts the Waa had created. The information contained in the mothership’s databanks showed that each mining shaft was supported by elevators used for delivering agsel to the surface. Though large, the elevators would be of no use in the plan. What did appear useful were the wide stairwells the Waa had built next to the elevators. While the stairways did not reach the full depth of the mines, they went down far enough.