“Incoming neutrino AV!” yelled Denise over his suit comlink.
On the front screen the images of Higgs disintegration and antimatter destruction moved to one side of the screen. In the middle came the image of a HikHikSot cheetah-leopard. Black spots covered its short tan fur. Tool straps lay over its shoulders and waist. Two pawhands reached for Jack. Golden yellow eyes fixed on him. “Human! You will be the meat of our other ships! They will be here soon!”
Jack pointed his sword at the Alien. “You lie. Only 36 remained in this system. The rest are far away, in the depths of deep space. And with the death of your other ships, only 28 ships are now present in this system. Many of them are hours away!” The Alien’s triangular ears bent forward as it white-tufted tail whipped wildly behind it. Three other HikHikSot moved in the room that seemed to be a Command Bridge, their actions hurried as if they feared imminent bad news. “Is your reactor nearing magfield loss? Surrender to us and perhaps we will retrieve you and your crew before you become ionized vapor.”
The Alien screeched wildly in pure anger. “How did you move from your place in the distant deeps to here so quickly? What you did is not possible!”
Jack grinned broadly. “Secret weapon.” Lying felt right. And he was not about to tell the truth when the hundreds of other HikHikSot ships were no doubt listening in. “Just as we now use two other secret weapons. One is an antimatter beam. The other is a matter disruptor beam that kills local gravity and the ability of subatomic particles to come together. See, we use the very matter of your moon Morning Light as fuel to push it toward your world Hunt Home! And what you now see we are broadcasting system-wide! On normal AV and on neutrino AV. See and learn how deadly it is to Challenge humans!”
The Alien’s pale brown lips opened wide, showing stubby white canines as it screamed. “Nooooo! No! No! Our first world is Hunt Home. It cannot die!”
Jack laughed. Perhaps it would translate. “It will not die totally. Perhaps a billion HikHikSot will die upon your moon’s impact. Perhaps you will have a century of only winter. And perhaps your younglings will learn that the sight of a human is something to be feared!”
“Leader!” cried a cheetah-leopard in the back of the Command Bridge. “The reactor is—”
White light filled the front screen. And the side portholes.
“Oh!” cried Elaine, lifting her hands in instinctive reaction to shield her eyes.
Jack’s vision grew dark as his helmet automatically polarized. Which also happened to the helmets worn by everyone in the Pilot Cabin. Including Blodwen.
“Uh, Captain Jack?” she called.
The front screen flared back on with its true-light image of the giant shaft being cut into the heart of the moon Morning Light, while the yellow-white of antimatter plasma flared in a ring about the shaft. The flames from those antimatter impacts reached dozens of kilometers high.
“Yes, Blodwen.”
“I think you are on the way to creating an operant conditioning imprint in millions of HikHikSot.”
He hoped so. Killing hundreds of Alien people in predator ships, thousands in Cold Sleep capsules and now hundreds of millions once the moon’s fragments impacted on Hunt Home was not something he expected to ever forget. If he was lucky, he would not have to repeat this object lesson. He felt certain the neutrino broadcast words and imagery of this event would spread among the other social carnivores of the Orion Arm.
♦ ♦ ♦
Eight hours later the moon Morning Light fragmented.
It showed three large cracks that, slowly, became kilometers deep chasms. Those chasms became wider, wider and ever wider. The white of the moon’s outer regolith soil gave way to the gray of granite, followed by the red glow of inner core rocks. While the moon had no spinning inner iron core, it did have a radioactives rich inner core that now spurted out molten lava into the frigid vacuum of space. Faster than rock congealing in underwater volcanoes, the molten lava turned black hard.
Black space finally showed beyond the inner core cooling as the chasms became three giant fragments. Slowly they fell away from each other.
The yellow Higgs Disruptor beams still bit into the nearest fragment, as did the nine black antimatter beams.
Archibald appeared on the front screen among the images of his fellow captains. “Fleet Captain Munroe, orbital vector change achieved. Lagrange transition vector guaranteed.”
Finally. “All ships! Cease firing. And follow me back out into the depths. We will wait there until the moment of impact.”
Hideyoshi caught his eye. “Fleet Captain, will you join me for a Shinto memorial to my dead crewmates? We plan to hold it once we arrive at our new location.”
Jack licked dry lips. The human part of his job now called. “Yes, Admiral Hideyoshi Minamoto. I will be honored to offer joss sticks, incense and prayers for the souls of our departed crewmates.”
“Jack, captain,” called Max. “The new coordinates are entered into our NavTrack. And transmitted to the other ships by laser tight-beam. We can go to Alcubierre transit whenever you order it.”
He sighed. Now came the days of waiting for the fragments to be caught by the gravity of Hunt Home. After which they would spiral down into the planet. Which, Denise had told him earlier, contained six billion HikHikSot. Perhaps the fragments would land close together and only destroy one third of the planet. Still, giant earthquakes, tsunamis, and massive dust clouds would spread around the planet on its jet streams. There would be no normality on Hunt Home for a good century. While some people might be evacuated to the other Earth-like world that was planet four, and to orbital habitats, the vast majority of the world’s current population would stay on this world. And later generations of HikHikSot would avoid any imagery of a human, any record of Sol system. For he and his fellows had become a nightmare far more real than any supernatural story about the fallen angle Satan.
“Transit!”
The screen imagery shimmered, went jagged, then went black as the Alcubierre drive shell took them into a space-time bubble that had no interaction with the outside, with normal space-time.
A hand on his shoulder made him jerk. “Jack? Come with me. Back to our roomsuite. There’s something I want to share with you.”
What could that be? They had already shared their life histories, their hopes, their early toils, troubles and bumps on the road to adulthood and some kind of maturity. No matter. He stood up, turned and faced his lifemate. “Uh, what—”
Love and caring and empathy shone from her pale blue eyes. Her long brown hair lay in curling folds, gathering where her helmet met her suit’s neckring. She smiled, her sandy brown eyebrows rising as her eyes sucked him into her heart. “Something good. To share with you. Come.” She turned and headed for the open hatch leading to the Spine hallway.
With a gesture to Max to take over, Jack followed after the tall, slim, mature and incredible woman who had insisted on joining his anti-Alien crusade. A crusade that had grown beyond what even he had expected. He breathed deep and told his heart to stop thudding. Whatever secret Nikola wanted to share, he knew it would be special. And he had a deep need, now, to feel special.
♦ ♦ ♦
Fourteen days later the fleet Alcubierre jumped back into the space near Hunt Home. They arrived north of the ecliptic plane of Delta Boötis B, at a distance of one AU from the planet. Thanks to imagery from Nikola’s Big Eye, they had been able to time their arrival to just a minute before the first moon fragment entered the atmosphere of Hunt Home. Their one AU distance gave them at least ten minutes of safety before any HikHikSot ship could reach them. However, attacking humans did not seem to be the focus of the three hundred ships clustered about the world below.
“Graviton tracks do not show anyone heading our way,” called Elaine. “Sensor emission tracking on a side screen up front.”
“Understood,” Jack said absently. He was focused on the image of the blue, brown and white planet that filled the middle of the front scr
een.
While his fellow captains also watched, and were present in an icon strip above the true-light image from Nikola’s Schmidt telescope, they were not the focus of Jack’s attention.
Maureen reached out her EVA-gloved hand and gripped his wrist. “It was necessary, young Jack.”
“Essential,” called Hideyoshi from the screen.
He blinked.
The world below consisted of three large continents separated by four oceans. The north and south polar caps were just thick layers of ice reaching down to nearly touch the edges of the continents. The green of jungles and forests covered half the land mass surfaces. Large megalopi cities sparkled like silver in the yellow light of the system’s star. Several hurricane and typhoon storms swirled across the blue-green of the oceans, their movement following normal atmospheric streams and oceanic currents. It was a world of life, including Alien birds, Alien antelope and Alien whales and fishes. Which were about to experience something not known since this world’s last mass extinction event.
Already the red streaks of meteoric fragments from the breakup of Morning Light were diving down into the upper atmosphere of Hunt Home. Most were burning up. Some were hitting the land, mostly in desert areas. The impacts created small brown mushroom clouds.
As predicted by Archibald and Matthias, the three primary moon fragments were following one after the other, stretching across an arc of 4,000 kilometers. Like Earth, the world measured just over 12,000 kilometers in width. The largest continent stretched for 1,700 kilometers from west to east.
“Oh!” cried Denise.
Bright white light flared from the middle of the world as the leading edge of the first fragment came into contact with the upper atmosphere of Hunt Home. In seconds that light flare grew brighter and brighter as more of the fragment encountered the world’s air. Colors along the fragment’s length ran the gamut from red-orange to yellow to white at the leading point. Behind it the leading edge of the second fragment now glowed white. The third fragment, smallest of the three, had begun to glow dark red at its front edge. It would take less than a minute for the fragments to enter, dive through the atmosphere and then impact.
“Angle of entry is thirty-seven degrees relevant to ground surface,” said Nikola, her voice calm and sounding as if every day one witnessed the fiery approach of a world’s doom.
“Ships are scattering,” called Elaine.
The more than three hundred HikHikSot grav-pull ships had been making mad dashes down to the surface of Hunt Home, landing in plazas, fields and desert areas, wherever their cheetah-leopard people lived. Scores piled into open hatches, which soon closed, sometimes cutting frantic beings in half as the ship rose on grav-pull impulse. Gravitational lensing showed about the edges of each ship, then they flashed away, heading for the safety of planet four. Or Dry Land as it was called in HikHikSot broadcasts. That world resembled Mars in its dryness, but its size nearly equaled that of Hunt Home. Which size had allowed it to keep its atmosphere over the billions of years of the planet’s existence.
“Thermal front preceding fragment contact,” called Blodwen from her seat behind Max. “It’s igniting everything!”
Their Sociologist now observed something unique. Something not seen since the death of the dinosaurs on Earth some 65 million years ago. But that extinction event had been caused by an asteroid measuring just ten kilometers or six miles in size. Nothing the size of these fragments had ever impacted the Earth. Leastwise, not since the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment about four billion years ago.
“So it is,” Jack murmured.
The solidity of the first fragment was becoming less firm, at least on the leading edge. The white glow of atmospheric impact was melting the rock there, causing streams of lava to flow back with the hypersonic slipstream that fled past the fragment.
He gasped.
“Impact!” cried Elaine.
“Gods!” moaned Denise.
“Impressive,” said Maureen, sounding awed.
The first fragment’s impact onto the landscape of the largest continent resembled a fusing together of two blocks, where the contact surfaces glowed white-hot. Except in this case one block was moving, sideways and downward.
It was followed by fragment two, which impacted in the ocean east of the largest continent. That fragment flashed most of the ocean into gas upon contact, filling the atmosphere with white haze. But the far edge of the fragment made contact with the second continent’s near edge, fusing with it immediately, then raising up the continent’s surface as if a shovel were being plunged into the landscape. Miles of lithosphere curled up and over from the second fragment’s leading edge impact. Eventually the curled up crust was blasted apart.
Fragment three streaked down across the top of fragment two and cut through the curled up crust like a laser through jello. It impacted in the middle of the second continent, dove deep into the soil and rock of that surface, then merged into the mass of continent two, leaving behind white-glowing ridgelines miles high.
“Continent three is intact,” Blodwen said.
So it was. But not unaffected by the superheated air, vaporized dirt and rock and thermal fronts created by the impacts of the three moon fragments. Scope imagery of cities on that continent showed anything higher than a hundred meters being knocked down by winds exceeding four hundred kilometers an hour.
“Fuck.” Jack sat back in his seat, images blurring before his eyes. Crying inside a helmet was not advised. EVA suit guidance said it could exceed the wicking capability of suit neck-rim absorbers. He sighed. “Blodwen, do you have an estimate of the death toll?”
She laughed, her tone just at the edge of hysterical. “Estimate? My guess is that three billion were vaporized, incinerated, buried or otherwise killed by these impacts.”
Half a world’s population gone. Still, it was better than the coronal mass ejection alternative. Jack shivered, the enormity of what he had had to do nearly overwhelming him.
“Fleet, time to leave. Ignacio, we’ll bury your cousin Milpeades on Sedna, alongside Sabino.” He was not about to go hunting in this system for a place to plant the remains of a good Basque man. “Nikola, give us the coordinates back to Sol. And the distance.”
She grunted, her tone sounding strained. “Transmitted to Elaine. And also to each ship’s NavTrack by laser tight-beam. Distance is 120.6 light years, back against the direction of galactic rotation.”
“Time in transit?”
“Thirty days,” she said calmly. “Time enough to heal. Time enough to give thanks.”
“For what?”
She touched his shoulder. “To give thanks than humanity now has a future among the stars!”
Oh. Yeah. That was the whole point of this crazy crusade to the stars. Maybe, just maybe, their future interstellar trips would be a bit less bloody. And maybe, in the future, they could liberate more subject peoples from the jaws of social carnivores who treated star systems and intelligent beings as convenient Hunt territories.
“Onward to the future!”
THE END
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
T. Jackson King (Tom) is a professional archaeologist, journalist and retired Hippie. He learned early on to question authority and find answers for himself, partly due to reading lots of science fiction novels. He also worked at radiocarbon dating labs at UC Riverside and UCLA. Tom attended college in Paris and Tokyo, then helped organize anti-Vietnam War demos in Tokyo and Knoxville, Tennessee. Tom is a graduate of UCLA (M.A. 1976, archaeology) and the University of Tennessee (B.Sc. 1971, journalism). Tom has worked as an archaeologist in the American Southwest and has traveled widely in Europe, Russia, Japan, Canada, Mexico and the USA. Other jobs have included short order cook, hotel clerk, legal assistant, telephone order taker, investigative reporter and newspaper editor. He also survived the warped speech-talk of local politicians and escaped with his hide intact. Tom’s novels are ESCAPE FROM ALIENS (Wilder Publications, 2015), ALIENS VS. HUMANS (Wilder Publica
tions, 2015), FREEDOM VS. ALIENS (Wilder Publications, 2015), HUMANS VS. ALIENS (Wilder Publications, 2015), GENECODE ILLEGAL (Wilder Publications, 2014), EARTH VS. ALIENS (Wilder Publications, 2014), ALIEN ASSASSIN (Wilder Publications, 2014), THE MEMORY SINGER (Fantastic Books, 2014), ANARCHATE VIGILANTE (Wilder Publications, 2014), GALACTIC VIGILANTE (Wilder Publications, 2013), NEBULA VIGILANTE (Wilder Publications, 2013), SPEAKER TO ALIENS (Wilder Publications, 2013), GALACTIC AVATAR (Wilder Publications, 2013), STELLAR ASSASSIN (Wilder Publications, 2013), STAR VIGILANTE (2012), THE GAEAN ENCHANTMENT (Wilder Publications, 2012), LITTLE BROTHER’S WORLD (Fantastic Books, 2010), ANCESTOR’S WORLD (Ace Books, 1996, with A.C. Crispin), and RETREAD SHOP (Warner Books, 1988, 2012). His short stories appeared in JUDGMENT DAY AND OTHER DREAMS (Fantastic Books, 2009). His poetry appeared in MOTHER EARTH’S STRETCH MARKS (Motherbird Books, 2009). Tom lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA with his wife Sue. More information on Tom’s writings can be found at www.tjacksonking.com/.
PRAISE FOR T. JACKSON KING’S BOOKS
EARTH VS. ALIENS
“This story is the best space opera I've read in many years. The author knows his Mammalian Behavior. If we’re lucky it’ll become a movie soon. Many of the ideas are BRAND NEW and I loved the adaptability of people in the story line. AWESOME!!”—Phil W. King, Amazon
“It’s good space opera. I liked the story and wanted to know what happened next. The characters are interesting and culturally diverse. The underlying theme is that humans are part of nature and nature is red of tooth and claw. Therefore, humans are naturally violent, which fortunately makes them a match for the predators from space.”—Frank C. Hemingway, Amazon
STAR VIGILANTE
“For a fast-paced adventure with cool tech, choose Star Vigilante. This is the story of three outsiders. Can three outsiders bond together to save Eliana's planet from eco-destruction at the hands of a ruthless mining enterprise?” –Bonnie Gordon, Los Alamos Daily Post
Humans Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series Book 2) Page 27
