Two Hackmot ships vanished into quiet clouds of disassociated nuclei.
Seven enemy ships broke open under the onslaught of the antimatter beams. Five of the ships disappeared in yellow-white globes of plasma as their fusion reactors lost containment. The remaining two split in half, white air and water gushing from the breached hulls.
“Hold fire!” Jack ordered, looking right at Elaine. “The two incoming fleets of disk-ships—are they changing course?”
“No . . . Yes!” cried Elaine as she threw her Sensor panel detections up onto a split-screen. “One group of seven ships is still incoming, based on the graviton streaks of their grav-pull drives,” she said hurriedly, her tone anxious as she worked her Sensor panel. “But the other group of six ships has stopped in space. They . . . they are reversing course and heading outward toward the asteroid belt.” His sister’s amber eyes met his. “Maybe they plan to hide among the asteroids? Like our commerce raiders did in Sol system.”
“Maybe. Nikola, please follow those six ships on your Schmidt scope.” Jack looked at the seven disk-ships coming in on the fleet’s eastward front. Silvery graviton streaks on the Sensor screen showed the Hackmot were using their grav-pull drives for all they were worth. At the top of the split-screen showed red numbers that counted the minutes and seconds left until this new enemy fleet arrived at their position just above the Warm Lands planet. “Fleet! Adjust our ring position to face the incoming enemy ships. Keep our drive flares facing toward them!”
Stars moved to one side on the front screen true-light image as the Uhuru and the fleet’s six other ships used attitude jets to move their ring from facing toward the small moon into a position that faced the oncoming Hackmot ships. It was a seventy-degree attitude change, but one every ship was used to.
“Arrival in one minute, five seconds!” said Elaine loudly, her brown curls held tight to her sweaty head by her headband.
Jack twisted in his seat and looked back through his helmet globe at his ship guests. Blond-haired Blodwen, swarthy-skinned Ignacio, red-cheeked Archibald and brown-skinned Aashman all wore EVA suits with seat restraint straps over their shoulders and waists. Blodwen was leaning forward, her yellow-gloved hand resting on Max’s EVA-suited shoulder. Ignacio nodded at Jack, but kept his attention fixed on Elaine, who was as at home in an EVA suit as any Belter who grew up wearing them could be. Lanky Aashman nodded at Jack, the Hindu acting as calm as if he were on the bridge of his own disabled ship. Recalling the man’s blue turban that he wore when among his Sikh crewmen, he wondered if the man had any combat ideas. He was, after all, a former Belter commerce raider who had brought his ship to join Jack’s anti-Alien crusade.
“Captain?”
Aashman’s brown eyes fixed on Jack. “Yes?”
“What would your chief Sikh guard suggest? As a means of defeating these Hackmot Aliens? Or you might consider, based on your Kshatriya caste heritage.”
The man whose family had called Uttar Pradesh province their home for the last seven hundred years pursed his lips, looked thoughtful, then looked past Jack at the graviton streaks of the incoming ships. “As we saw during the comet battle, and now here in this system, the Hackmot are true to their reptilian heritage. They defend their Hunt territory with a ferocity that is surely instinctive. I noticed the tail of the Hackmot leader who spoke to us was waving wildly from side to side. Another sign of stress emotions. No doubt their hormones are driving them to this head-on attack, when a thoughtful attack plan would bring them in behind the planet, out of direct reach of our beams. They could then split up and come at us from any part of the planet’s horizon. Which in space is 360 degrees.” The man fixed on Jack. “Captain Munroe, since this new group of Hackmot surely have imagery of our recent battle as transmitted to them by their neutrino comlinks, why not try something they have not seen?”
Jack nodded, his mind mentally counting down the seconds until the arrival of the Hackmot ships. “Such as?”
“Use our grav-pull drives to move outward, away from this tight cluster. Make this fleet into a giant ring through which the oncoming enemy disk-ships will pass through at eighty percent of lightspeed.” Aashman grinned. “It will take some fancy Auto-Track targeting, but it allows us to point our drive flares toward the central vector the Hackmot will follow, while allowing us to hit them as they approach, pass through our ring and depart from us on their inertial vector.”
Jack blinked. Aashman was right that the hormone-driven Hackmot would attack them with every weapon at their disposal. But surely their leaders would assume his fleet would maintain the formation that had been successful against the fleet arriving from the outer planets.
“Hideyoshi! All captains!” Jack barked. “Do as Captain Aashman has proposed. Go to blip jump now! Spread out so our ring measures nine thousand kilometers across. And aim our drive flares inward toward their vector track!”
“Now you tell me!” muttered Max, his sallow face sweaty within his clear helmet. The man’s gloved hands tapped on his grav-pull Control panel. “Blipping.”
Jack faced back to the front screen.
The gravitational lensing of outside stars caused by use of the grav-pull drive appeared on the front screen. The images of his fellow ship captains shimmered, then went jagged as the Uhuru blipped outward four thousand five hundred kilometers. The shimmering disappeared as Max shut off the grav-pull drive. The front screen true-light image of soot-black space and colorful stars shifted sideways so their drive flare faced toward the incoming vector of the Hackmot ships. Max would use attitude jets to make the drive flare swing down toward the central vector line that passed through their new ship ring. Thus keeping the seventy kilometer-long flare of ionized gas and star-hot plasma aimed between Jack’s ship and any enemy ship.
“Incoming!” cried Denise. “Twenty thousand kilometers distant.”
The front screen image blinked, then showed a new external view. In the middle of the image were seven disk-ships arranged in a circle. A circle wide enough to have surrounded their earlier flame ball formation. Each ship had its north pole particle emitter aimed inward, toward where the flame ball fleet would have been. If they had not adopted Aashman’s new formation. The south pole particle beam pillars aimed outward, toward where Jack’s fleets now lay in a larger circle. It seemed the oncoming enemy had no plan to use their equatorial laser ring to attack. The yellow-orange of plasma drive flares washed over the true-light image, making dim the shapes of the disk-ships.
In less than a second the Hackmot ships came ten thousand kilometers closer to Jack’s fleet.
“Auto-Track! Fire all antimatter and neutral particle beams. Gareth! Fire your Higgs Disruptor downward to hit their vector track just before they pass through our ring.” A crazy thought hit him. “All ships! Stop firing when any ship is passing through our ring. We might hit an opposing fleet ship with our beams!”
Maureen’s holo image shook her head. “Already coordinated, young man. With the combat commander on every ship’s Battle Nodule. Now shut up and let us fight!”
Jack shut up.
On the true-light screen the seven Hackmot ships shot first. Blue neutral particle beams came at each ship of Jack’s fleet in a one-on-one Target Lock.
Except those beams had to pass through the widespread drive flare of each ship. As before, each blue beam died away at sixteen kilometers from the drive module of each fleet ship.
“Firing!” yelled Maureen.
Seven black antimatter beams and six blue particle beams swept down from the inner edge of Jack’s fleet ring, angling toward the seven disk-ships of the Hackmot. Those ships had already begun trying to blip jump out of the way of the human fleet counter-fire. But lightspeed weapons work faster than orders given by physical minds and muscles.
Six Hackmot ships flared brilliantly into little suns as the neutral particle beams cut them open and antimatter beams consumed their interiors.
The seventh Hackmot ship blipped sideways three thousand k
licks, reappearing on the same vector track but this time much closer to the nearest human ship. Which was the Orca.
“Katana!” cried Akemi Hagiwara as her ship’s Battle Nodule shot a blue beam at the oncoming Hackmot ship.
But the yellow beam of the Higgs Disruptor reached the surviving Hackmot ship just milliseconds after its reappearance.
Akemi’s blue scythe cut through an expanding cloud of subatomic particles.
“Got them!” yelled Maureen, a big grin on her face.
Jack sat back in his Tech station seat, his body shaking from the stress of making a last minute change to their tactical disposition. Now if he could have five minutes to breath deep, crack a joke with Max and drink from a bourbon squeeze-bottle, he would count—
“Behind us!” cried Nikola. “There’s a Mikmang spaceship coming at us on fusion pulse! From around the back side of the planet. They’re aiming at us! Impact in five seconds!”
Jack fixed on Elaine’s Sensor screen. It showed a neutrino track approaching from the westward limb of the planet, the direction from which the anti-ship rockets had been launched earlier. By the crazy Mikmang leaders. A long spear-like spaceship dove at the Uhuru at twenty percent of lightspeed.
Why hadn’t their spysats on the daytime side of the planet spotted this ship’s launch?
“Maureen! Antimatter zap—”
“Firing!” cried Minna from the Wolverine.
A black thread of antimatter flashed out and impacted on the nose of the Mikmang ship. A yellow-white flame ball glowed suddenly. Then it began eating a tunnel through the length of the Mikmang ship.
A small sun flared just seven hundred kilometers out from the Uhuru as Minna’s antimatter beam killed the Mikmang ship’s fusion reactor.
“Shrapnel alert!” yelled Elaine.
Tiny silvery fragments of the Mikmang ship blossomed out from the sun ball of total matter-to-energy conversion. They were hull fragments not consumed by Minna’s beam. Still, they approached at twenty percent of the speed of light.
If any of them hit the Uhuru his ship and his people would be dead.
“Blipping!” cried Max.
The front screen imagery shimmered, then went jagged.
Silence filled the Pilot Cabin as each of them wondered if their grav-pull blip jump would happen before the shrapnel fragments intersected with their ship, their home, their hopes—
“Done!” grunted Max.
Normal starlight shown from the front screen as the Uhuru materialized in space. Jack saw no sign of the other fleet ships. How far had they—
“Twenty thousand klicks out from the Wolverine!” cried Elaine, her rad-tanned face pale as she caught Jack’s look. Then she looked back further. “Ignacio! Oh! Thank the Elder Gods you are alive. I so worried that you might die!”
Puking inside your EVA suit is not recommended. Jack fought back the impulse of his stomach and looked at Elaine’s Sensor split screen. It showed the graviton pulses of the fleet’s six other ships, still arranged in their giant ring pattern. He gulped.
“Hideyoshi! Gareth! Everyone! Blip jump to midways between the moon and the planet. Nikola’s sending you the coordinates. Let’s get the hell out of here before another Mikmang ship tries a second suicide run!”
“Slimy leggy bastards!” Maureen cursed from the Battle Module.
The front screen imagery went hazy, then jagged as Max sent the Uhuru into a series of grav-pull blip jumps. Covering fifty thousand kilometers at eighty percent of light speed did not take long.
“Off grav-pull,” Max said, his tone casual, as if he enjoyed showing Blodwen how easily he handled two space drives.
“I’m coming up,” Maureen said in her holo.
On the front screen, the other six fleet ships showed as fat spearheads. Except for the Bismarck, which resembled a fat whale. It was four times the size of the Belter commerce raider ships and twice the size of the Uhuru. The image icons of the other ship commanders showed atop the screen. Jack looked to Elaine.
“Sister! What does your Sensor screen show? Where are the six Hackmot ships? And where are the fifteen Mikmang fusion pulse ships? Any sign of more Hunter-Killer torps or mobile mine fields?”
“Moment,” she said as she scanned her Pilot seat’s armrest screen. She tapped it. “Here’s where stuff is,” she said, nodding to the front screen. “Admiral, captains, I’m also transmitting this stuff to you on laser link.”
Jack scanned the overhead plan view of the Mikmang star system. Jack’s fleet showed as a cluster of seven red dots lying between the moon and planet. The six surviving Hackmot disk-ships were yellow spots at the head of silvery graviton streaks. They were heading outward to the asteroid belt that lay at five AU. As for the Mikmang fusion drive spaceships that had been clustered around the first and second gas worlds at 30 and 20 AU, fourteen of them were headed inward toward the Mikmang world. Marked as green dots, those ships were spread out, a cluster of three here, two there, seven out by the outermost gas world. But all were heading inward at twenty percent of lightspeed. The infrared, neutrino, and radio sources were mostly natural, although the Mikmang ships showed as sources of maser emissions aimed at the planet, while the Hackmot ships had the white glow of neutrino emissions. Which must have been encrypted or everyone in the Pilot Cabin would have heard the translated words over their neutrino comlink pedestal. He did not see any moving neutrino sources, such as torps carrying thermonuke warheads, within one AU of their holding position.
He sighed, then looked to Denise. “ComChief, why the hell are those Hackmot ships heading away from us? And what behavior do you expect from those incoming Mikmang ships?”
Their redhead bit her pale lip, her attention fixed on the Sensor split screen. “Well, an ancient digitext by Greenberg and Crews was titled Physiological Ethology of Aggression in Amphibians and Reptiles. While it’s more than a century old, they documented how reptiles have a visceral stimulus response. They go immediately to action, power seeking and aggression. Except when engaged in mating.” Chuckles sounded from Nikola and Max. No one else thought the idea of six ships full of Hackmot reptiles engaged in sex was funny. “Since those ships are not attacking us, their flight outward to the asteroid belt must relate to reproduction. Somehow.” She gave Jack a tentative look.
“Fine,” he said, smiling encouragement. “We’ll know more about the Hackmot after we chase them down in the belt. What about the Mikmang? They are not reptiles, nor are they mammals.”
Denise nodded slowly. “True. They resemble land-bound crustacean invertebrates, albeit highly intelligent invertebrates who have an industrial base, a large world population and space flight that took them to that outer gas world at 30 AU.” She paused, tapped her armrest Comlink panel, and threw up a still image of the March Leaders. “Recall that first image of the Mikmang? How they were in a line carrying heavy bags hung from straps over their body segments? Then recall the language used by the March Leaders in their broadcast. Seems to me these local Aliens are omnivore animals who are socialized into tight groupings focused on follow-the-leader. These incoming ships are coming back home to do whatever the March Leaders tell them to do. Which could include attacks on us. To prove their ‘loyalty’ to any surviving Hackmot.”
Jack thought briefly about the weirdness of bipedal reptiles eating multipedal crustacean invertebrates. And yet both species were Tech-competent, had cultures and engaged in behaviors that, somehow, were evolutionarily adaptive for the better survival of individual members of each species. Leastwise that was what Optimality Theory said was the reason why any trait persisted in any species. “Focus on these Mikmang. What can we do to subvert the rule of these March Leaders, so we may gain allies against the social carnivores who control things right now?”
Denise put one elbow on her seat’s armrest and perched her chin on her folded fist. She stared at the still image of the Mikmang. “Find a population of divergent Mikmang. Folks who march differently from those folks we saw in the bro
adcasts. Then show them our combat vidrecords, tell them we are the strongest March Leaders in this system and anywhere else in space, and urge them to follow March Leaders who are willing to ally with us. And remind them that once, centuries past, the Mikmang controlled this star system and their world.” She looked at Jack, her red freckles bright against her pale skin. “Captain Jack, most behaviors and most cultural patterns are aimed at giving the individual more food and more chances at reproduction, for less effort expended. In short, these people should be as greedy as humans. Or as the social carnivore predators. Appeal to their greed.”
Jack blinked, then grinned. “Good girl! I like those ideas. Now, can you work on a broadcast that does just that? You can copy and paste digital imagery of me, Minna and Hideyoshi being leaders of our ships. Say our fleet is engaged in a great March to the Stars. Say they are invited to join our March. Okay?”
Denise grimaced. “Do I get to sleep sometime?”
Laughter came from Nikola, Blodwen and Elaine, as it did from most of the ship captains watching on the front screen. Maureen patted Denise on the shoulder as she passed the woman on her way to her Combat Command seat between Jack and Elaine. “Just right, young lady. Stand up for yourself! Don’t let no one bully you.”
Denise blushed, which made her freckles stand out even more. But the jade green gaze she fixed on Jack was determined. “Yes, Captain Jack, I will work on this propaganda vid. In between my study of the Mikmang primary language and the Earth records on invertebrates. And feeding my goldfish!”
Jack smiled his acceptance of her terms. After all, just because the young woman had no social life to speak of did not mean he could work her night and day. “Please say hello to your fishies from me.”
“Denise,” called Aashman from the back seat row. “How is it these Mikmang people can even cooperate? Have culture? Have Tech? Every invertebrate I’ve ever seen in Earth vids acted on instinct.”
She smiled, then looked back. “Captain Aashman, intelligence can evolve from any lifeform. Not just social predators with vertebrate spines who resemble some of Earth’s deadlier mammals.” She touched her Comlink panel. “Here’s an image of the isopod Hemilepistus reaumuri. From the deserts of North Africa. These small critters form male-female pair bonds, raise their offspring who know where their home burrow is, and all defend that burrow against outside attack or invasion by other isopods. These family groups stay together for a year, until the young ones leave home. They rely on distinctive odors to know who is the mate and offspring. But if these tiny isopods can have a family of sorts, why can’t these Mikmang centipede-lobsters evolve to the civilization we see below us?”
Humans Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series Book 2) Page 14
