“There!” cried Nikola as the silvery sparkle of another spaceship appeared perhaps fifty kilometers away. “That’s the Bismarck! We’ll be able to see the other ships shortly.”
In less than a minute the laser tight-beam images of every fleet captain ran across the top of the screen. No one was missing. And no one’s image showed any smoke or battle debris. And everyone still wore their EVA suit and helmet. His pulse slowed a bit. “Hideyoshi, congratulations! We picked up your colony ship’s thermonuke blast just before we transited out of the belt. Uh, any ship damage? We had some counterfire but nothing that got through.”
The Mars admiral’s manner was always formal. This time, though, there seemed more to it. “Glad to hear your subfleet exited with no damage. Our ships were not so lucky. Laser hits on each of the Belter ships. Our Bismarck, tho, sustained a particle beam impact. On our belly pulse laser node. It’s gone. We lost four people.”
Profanity did not fit this moment. “My condolences to you, to your command staff and to the families of those you lost. We of the Belt will include their names and images on a memorial stele, once we return home. As we did with Anneli and Sabino.”
“Arigato,” the man said in Japanese.
“Admiral,” called Maureen from her seat, “how did the enemy achieve those strikes? Our drive flares absorbed all beams shot at us.”
The man’s black eyes looked wet, as if the loss of his four crewmates had touched him deeply. He shook himself, moving back to the professional manner Jack had always known him to show. “Side angle shots. It was our bad luck that when we arrived at our target emergence point, there were enemy ships lying to either side of our inward track. Six of them. While our drive flares stopped the beams from the three ships ahead of us, those enemy ships on either side of our track had an open shot at us. Their Auto Track and Defend computers are clearly as good as ours. They only got off one barrage before our own antimatter and particle beams took them out. But that first barrage got through. No one hurt on the other ships. And their mech bots will likely have pressurization restored by now.” The man looked to Jack. “Fleet Captain Jack Munroe, the Bismarck, Orca, Mongoose, Leopard and Caiman are ready for combat. Your orders?”
“Join up with us. Use your grav-pull drives. It does not matter,” he said, seeing the surprised reaction of the other captains and Elaine. “Our enemy knows we are here now. And I have a reason for wanting them to know our current position.” He looked back. “Denise, activate the neutrino comlink pedestal. I have an announcement to make.”
“Activating,” she said, her tone focused. “Any AV reply will appear on the front screen.”
Jack unlocked his seat restraints and stood up. Looking at the front motion-eye, he spoke.
“HikHikSot of Delta Boötis B, I am Jack Munroe, Pack Leader of the human fleet that has come to teach you a simple lesson. Challenge a human and you die. Visit Sol system and you will never return.” He gestured to Denise to transmit the AV vids of their destruction of the Sol colony ship and the new colony ships. “Duotat brought your colony ship to Sol system and sought to claim Earth and humanity as your subject people. We accepted his Challenge and destroyed him. Totally. By the Rules of the Great Dark, we humans are starfaring predators just like you!” He paused, noticing the sudden appearance of the Bismarck and other fleet ships in the front screen. “The two colony ships you built in your asteroid belt are now subatomic vapor. You will never again add new subject people to your Hunt territory! If you do, look upon me and my ships and know that we will be there. To kill you and take from you that star system.” Jack leaned down, grabbed Old Roy from where it lay beside his Tech seat, and stood up. He pointed the silvery tip of the Viking sword toward the motion-eye. “This is our simplest tool, one we humans used in our drive to be the apex predators of Sol system. We have now added two star systems to our Hunt territory. We took the stars Epsilon Eridani and Omicron2 Eridani from the Krisot and Hackmot predators! We will take more systems in the future. Now, we are coming into your system to teach you one more lesson about how dangerous it is to Challenge humans. Learn!” He waved to Denise to shut off the neutrino comlink.
“Nicely put,” Maureen said, looking up at him with a speculative look. “How soon do we learn about the next step in your vow to teach the HikHikSot a permanent lesson? And to achieve operant conditioning of them?”
Jack lowered the sword, turned and sat back down in his seat. Letting the sword fall to the deck with a clank, he looked at his fellow captains. “My allies, are you willing to help me cause the fall of planet three’s moon onto its ocean?”
“Damn!” murmured Max.
“Nice,” whispered Maureen.
“Oh boy,” said Nikola from behind him.
Hideyoshi smiled slowly. It soon became the biggest smile Jack had ever seen the man show. “My crew and the Bismarck are eager to join your quest!”
“We too,” said Gareth from the Dragon. “We Welsh have always loved a challenge. And we know how to dig through, under or around any obstacle!”
“My shogun,” called Akemi. “The Orca and all my people will join you in making happen this incredible lesson! Our poets will write of this exploit, our samisens will make music about it and our youth will be vitalized!”
Minna fixed her steely blue gaze on him. “We Finns have always fought against the odds. Sometimes we won. Sometimes we lost. But we never surrendered! My ship the Wolverine looks forward to sinking its teeth into yonder moon!”
“Bombard a planet?” called Aashman. The brown-skinned Hindu stood in formal poise, his three Sikh crewmen behind him. All four wore their solid blue turbans. “Shiva the Destroyer marches with us! And the Mongoose will be your messenger as surely as vigjnahartā Ganesha removes every obstacle before man and gods!”
“Bai!” called Ignacio from the Badger. The man’s eyes shone and his face seemed alive with eagerness. “What a wonder we will achieve. And what a wonder it will be to behold!
“Will this action allow us to cease killing for awhile?” asked Kasun. The tall, black-haired man seemed conflicted.
“Captain of the Leopard, you and your Sinhalese crew may hold apart from this action, if you wish. Your bravery and loyalty has always been foremost in our battles.” Jack paused, noticed that Elaine and Denise were watching him for his answer. “As to your question, yes, this action should imprint an operant conditioning on the HikHikSot to such a degree that we will never again have to kill one of them. And it is a more limited choice than the other option I had considered.”
“Then you have our allegiance and our support,” Kasun said calmly. “Our ship will be with your fleet.”
“What is necessary must be done,” said Júlia of the Caiman. The woman who had left two teenage sons on Mathilde in order to join his crusade now wore a brilliant Shalwar Kameez dress in Brazilian Parrot colors. Her tight-curled black hair made a crown for her queenly looks. “We will fight as always. For the right. For the freedom. For the people.”
“Thank you all,” Jack said, his lips feeling dry. He reached down and grabbed a squeeze bottle of water. He put it against his helmet’s intake valve, sucked on the in-helmet tube, then looked to Elaine. “What is the status of the 437 grav-pull graviton traces? How many are heading out our way?”
Elaine jerked, then glanced down at her Sensor panel. “Uh, uh, it seems that 383 grav-pull ships are headed out this way. We killed 18 ships in the colony ship attacks. That leaves just 36 ships in-system.” She looked at him. “You expected them to do this, yes?”
Jack nodded. “Yes. The neutrino comlink is FTL, so their choice to come after us should have been almost instant. As the gravitons from their grav-pull emissions now show.”
Elaine smiled. “Well, once more I am very glad that gravitons are spin-2 bosons that propagate through space-time faster than light. Thanks to our discovery that gravitons are background independent under the Standard Model and in terms of General Relativity.”
“Just so.”
He looked at the split-screen Sensor image that showed the vast majority of grav-pull ships now leaving the inner system and heading south of their ecliptic plane to the position of their fleet. At 50 AU out from Delta Boötis B. They were coming for him and his ships at eighty percent of lightspeed. Which meant it would be eleven hours or so before they arrived at his position.
Hideyoshi caught his attention. “Fleet Captain, may I ask what other option you considered? That was less limited than causing a moon to fall onto a planet?”
Jack took another suck of water from his tube, then slid the bottle into his seat’s hold bag and gave the Mars admiral a look that he rarely showed to anyone, inside or outside of family. “The less limited option was for this fleet to Alcubierre transit to within two-tenths AU of this star and then bombard it with antimatter beams. Eventually some beams would cut through the corona and impact on the plasma surface of the star. Those impacts would cause stellar flares. Or, perhaps, coronal mass ejections of a size large enough to cook an entire planet.”
The Asian’s look of curiosity turned to one of shock, as if he had just reached the edge of a high cliff and managed to not fall over into a bottomless deep. Then he became stone cold sober. “I am glad this fleet does not have to conduct such an . . . assault. Indeed, deorbiting the moon of planet three is a more limited object lesson than incinerating the entirety of planet three.”
“I thought so too.” Jack scanned the helmeted faces of his allies. “Now, here is how we will attack that moon.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Ten hours after Jack’s neutrino comlink broadcast the fleet arrived on the back side of the moon that orbited planet three. For a few moments they were out of view of anyone living on the planet, and the fusion-powered moon base lay on the opposite moon side. Which was tidally locked like Earth’s Moon. Still, there were comsats orbiting the moon in polar orbits, along with defensive devices. Like three Hunter-Killer torps in polar orbit that now ignited their thrusters and shot at the fleet at eleven kilometers per second.
“Targets killed,” called Maureen from the Battle Module.
He met the gaze of Hideyoshi. “Admiral, as we discussed, your Bismarck and the Uhuru will cover the eastern and western orbital vectors with our neutral particle beamers. But now, it is time for you to join your Higgs Disruptor with the Dragon’s beam.”
The man took a yellow datapad from a Command Bridge aide, gestured to someone else and nodded to Jack. “Fleet Captain, the cruiser Prince Otto von Bismarck now undertakes offensive operations!”
Jack watched the front screen as the Dragon and the Bismarck shot their yellow Higgs Disruptor beams at the equatorial center of the 3,300 kilometer wide moon. Called Morning Light by the HikHikSot. While just one-third the size of Earth’s moon, this Alien moon was quite large enough to produce tides in the oceans and seas of planet three. Or Hunt Home, which was the name given it by the HikHikSot, according to Denise’s SETI translation of their AV broadcasts.
The footprint of the beams had been expanded to a hundred kilometers in width, after hurried calculations and new programming by Archibald and Matthias, who remained on the Bismarck. Those two beams now made an oblong impact zone measuring two hundred by one hundred kilometers. Jack watched as the white regolith produced by meteor impact dust, volcanic flows and freeze-thaw at low Kelvin temps now lifted up in response to the Higgs Disruptors’ local negation of gravity, then became diffuse subatomic particles as the beams turned solid matter into disassociated baryons, mesons, hadrons, quarks, leptons and other subatomic particles that had lost their strong nuclear force ability to cohere into atomic nuclei. The footprint grew deeper, now reaching a kilometer deep. In less than a minute their Higgs beams had decohered trillions of tons of matter. And the attack had just begun.
“All ships! Fire antimatter beams at the perimeter of the Higgs impact zone!”
Nine black threads of antineutron antimatter slashed down and impacted the regolith not touched by the Higgs beams.
The yellow-white light of total matter-to-energy conversion now formed a ring of blazing plasma around the giant Higgs disintegration hole.
Jack had liked the idea of using the matter of the moon itself as a source of propulsion, thanks to the near total release of all energy contained within the matter contacted by their beams. Unlike the four or five percent energy release achieved through thermonuclear detonations, antimatter explosions released a hundred percent of the energy bound up in the positive charged matter once it came into contact with the negatively charged antimatter.
His fleet now assumed a ring formation above the antimatter flames that were now pushing the moon out of its ancient orbital vector. Every ship had their fusion pulse drives flaring outward, away from the moon and toward the angles of approach by any enemy ship. A change to the magfield coil parameters now caused the formerly tight drive exhaust to widen massively. That widening enlarged the arc angle of protection from incoming energy beams. Meanwhile, every ship kept firing its antimatter beams at the moon, while the Bismarck and the Dragon fired their Higgs beams.
Jack had been told by Archibald, after the physicist spent four hours working on it with the help of Autonomous, that the Higgs beams could split open the moon once they reached a depth of a thousand kilometers. While the Higgs disintegration would take hours to reach that depth, the current antimatter propulsion impact would move the moon and its eventual fragments into an inward spiral. Once the moon passed the Lagrange point of gravitational balance between Hunt Home and the moon Morning Light, the moon would gain downward speed as the planet’s gravity began a remorseless tugging at it. All the fleet had to achieve was to make the moon’s orbital vector change to one that took it to within the Lagrange point. Once that was achieved, planetary impact was certain.
Hopefully the hundreds of HikHikSot grav-pull ships would not think to try Jack’s new tactic of Alcubierre transiting deep into a star system. If that happened, the fleet would have to leave without assurance of moon impact. If it did not happen, they had ten hours before the arrival of large numbers of HikHikSot ships. Which left them only having to face 36 ships scattered about the system. Nine of which had been orbiting the planet Hunt Home. No doubt they were on the way to the far side of Morning Light.
“Automated laser forts coming into range!” warned Maureen from the holo above Jack’s laptop panel. “Targeting! Firing particle beam!”
Five blue beams shot westward at the forts, which approached on fusion pulse drive. The approach speed was slow, given that they had been in orbital track on the far side of the moon. But their lasers arrived in a flash.
“Impact!” cried Maureen. “All five forts destroyed.”
Jack let out his breath. He had hoped the drive flares would protect the fleet long enough for them to cut deep into the moon.
“Fleet!” called Angelique Vincent from the Dragon. “Laser platforms coming in from the east! I count six. Firing our HF lasers!”
Eight blue neutral particle beams shot out at the approaching laser platforms. Which fired before his fleet fired.
“Incoming!” yelled Maureen.
Green laser beams smashed into the blurry orange ionized plasma from the four fleet ships that faced eastward.
Jack tapped on his Tech panel, bringing online his ship’s Fire Control. While Maureen handled the ship’s beamers he would handle the simpler stuff. He felt the Uhuru vibrate as the dual magimpulse railguns atop their spine shot out barrel loads of ball barrels on a westward vector. Looking up at the Sensor split-screen he saw the infrared glow of thousands of bearings shooting westward. Other ships did the same. Soon, widespread ball bearing barrages were heading north and south, east and west, and outward, away from the moon and their ring formation. At least they didn’t have to worry about ships coming at them from the moon’s surface. Any device, ship or mine that tried a bottom approach would die under the nine antimatter beams that continued to feed the ring of fire that surrounded the depending Higgs hole
. Which now reached forty kilometers deep. The sides of the giant shaft were black, as the local sun lay at an angle to the fleet’s position. Jack didn’t care. He just wanted his fleet to last long enough to fragment Morning Light and send it inward on an unchangeable vector that would pass below the local Lagrange point.
“Incoming ships!” warned Maureen.
Jack saw the nine ships suddenly appear to the north, south, east and west of his fleet. Gravitational lensing at the edges of the ball in a flat rectangle ships shimmered, then ceased. Blue neutral particle beams struck inward at him and his allies.
“Flaring our drive!” called Max. “Shifting angle to better block them!”
The nine enemy beams struck into the orange glow of their drive flare plasma. The beams came on and on. They died at just five kilometers out from impact.
“They got closer because our flare is spread wider, not as tight as usual,” Max said, answering the question in Jack’s mind.
Eight blue particle beams shot out from the fleet ships, accompanied by the Dragon’s green HF lasers.
The enemy ships split apart, with five of the nine vanishing in thermonuclear blasts as their reactor magfields lost containment. The other three drifted, with no sign of control. Black spots appeared on the hulls of the three partial ships. The ninth ship, hit by the green beams of the Dragon, the Uhuru and five other fleet ships, staggered in its orbital vector. A deep black hole appeared in one side of the flat rectangle. Black dots suddenly adorned the central globe as bearings impacted at orbital velocity. White air gushed out from one side of the globe. But maneuvering jets tilted it to an edge-on exposure to the fleet’s beams and ball bearings.
“Denise! Activate the neutrino comlink! And put me and what I say out on the AV channels used by the Hunt Home people.”
Jack unlocked his restraints, grabbed his sword and stood up before the motion-eye. “Alien! Predator! You are our meat! Your entire world is our meat! Surrender and we may allow you to live and watch your moon Morning Light fall into your planet Hunt Home.”
Humans Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series Book 2) Page 26
