Black antimatter beams and the blue whiptails of neutral particle beams split through nearby space like a lattice of death, hitting and vaporizing Rizen ships in total matter-to-energy conversion, or slicing them into air and water leaking wreckage.
Three Rizen ships lying on the far side of the fleet shot green lasers and blue particle beams at the fleet. But the surrounding haze of fusion plasma generated by the Pinwheel Plasma Torch formation stopped those incoming beams. No Earth ship was hit.
But the yellow-white ball of a thermonuke torp explosion suddenly appeared just thirty kilometers from the fleet. Somehow one Rizen ship had shot out a torp before being vaporized.
“Elaine! Power to our EMF fields to deflect incoming charged particles!”
The other fleet captains gave similar commands to their Sensor people.
“Sneaky bastards!” growled Max.
Jack gave thanks for the fact that all Belter ships had a double hull construction, with a layer of water filling the space between. The water slowed down incoming neutrons and all other particles except for neutrinos and gravitons. Plus the charged electromagnetic field carried by every human ship worked to deflect any incoming charged particles. Like those from a strong solar flare. Or a thermonuke blast.
Giving thanks that only humanity had antimatter and Higgs beamers, Jack told the Uhuru’s dual railguns to shoot a load of steel bearings at the distant sector where Rizen ships had been split into fragments. Likely every lion-rhino was dead. But ventilating their hulls would guarantee zero air to breath. And zero survivors in vacsuits. Ball bearings that traveled at planetary escape velocities were quite effective in penetrating every metal. Though a meter or two of solid lead might stop a ball. But nothing could stop the black death of antimatter beams, the blue dismemberment of neutral particle beams or the melting caused by the fleet’s own green HF laser pods, now that plenty of Rizen hull fragments lay within the 3,000 kilometer range of the lasers.
The yellow dots on the side Sensor image blinked out in groups and singletons as his fleet laid waste to the Rizen Colony Fleet.
“Got two with one shot!” yelled Maureen from the holo above his lap.
Jack blinked. He tapped on his Tactical Display for a replay of Maureen’s particle beam shot.
The Fire Control imagery from Maureen’s Battle Module repeated its Targeting Lock imagery. Two Rizen spear-in-globe ships appeared at a range of 4,194 klicks. One ship lay almost directly behind the other ship, perhaps fifty klicks distant.
Maureen’s blue whiptail reached out faster than a blink and struck the globular middle of the first ship. Cutting through the globe, the whiptail continued onward to hit the ship behind it in the nose, shearing off the command and control portion of the second Rizen ship. Seconds later a black antimatter beam from Aashman’s ship Mongoose hit the middle and tail portions of that ship, turning all matter into the yellow-white haze of total matter-to-energy conversion. Another black beam hit the nose and tail fragments of the first ship speared by Maureen. Yellow-white energies blazed in the blackness of space. The Fire Control backtrack sensor said the second beam had come from Minna’s ship Wolverine.
“The Badger kills!” screamed Ignacio from the front screen.
Jack looked up from the holo in time to see the last two Rizen ships, now showing the haze of grav-pull drive activation, get struck by a blue particle beam and a black slash fired from his Basque brother’s ship.
Yellow-white blasts filled both spaces as the onboard fusion reactors failed and lent their plasma energy to the destructive impact of the Badger’s two attacking beams.
“My brother Ignacio, convey my congratulations to your Combat Commander, cousin Aligarde Ekaitz!” Jack said over the laser Come-Back link. “May his boina gain a new ship-killed star!”
The swarthy face of his Basque brother and Elaine’s lovemate smiled. He reached up to twirl his black mustache, found his hand blocked by his helmet, and gave a Who Cares? shrug. “Thank you my brother! And it is fine to see you wearing your own boina!”
Jack gave thanks he had remembered to don the boina beret worn by battling Basques, the beret given him by Ignacio when the man had formally adopted him into the Euskaldunak, or Basques of northwest Spain. He looked to Elaine’s Sensor image. No yellow dots showed.
“Cease firing!” he called out, though he noted that most fleet ships had already seen what he had seen. There were no Rizen grav pull drives active within the planet to moon space. Which still left eleven Rizen ships scattered throughout the system. He caught the gaze of the Bismarck’s commander. “Admiral Hideyoshi Minamoto, will you take the rest of our fleet out to kill the Rizen ships at the Rock Fields, gas giants and outer cometary ring? Using your Alcubierre drive of course, so you will arrive before they have time to flee? Though I suspect the other Rizen know there has been an attack, based on the colony fleet’s possession of neutrino comlinks.”
“As you command, Fleet Captain Jack,” Hideyoshi said, his tone formal. The man lifted a thin black eyebrow. “And your ship Uhuru, will it need assistance?”
Jack smiled. The Mars fleet admiral, the man who had played a vital role in bringing his Mars ships into action against the Aliens at Sedna comet, never questioned Jack’s orders. He simply offered support. As any good captain would do when speaking with another ship captain. “Not needed. Since the addition of the Higgs Disruptor nodule to our belly hull, the Uhuru has firepower the equal of your Bismarck. No, I plan to take us down to a low orbit above the world Green Grass. There to locate and decimate the Rizen colony.”
“Ahhh.” The man blinked black eyes, reached up to rub back his thinning hair, was stopped by his own helmet, gave a quick smile, and nodded. “Understood. Your duty to your dead crewmates of the first Uhuru is not yet complete. May you do their memory true justice.” The man, dressed in Mars red under his red and white-striped vacsuit, looked to his left. “Pilot Lieutenant Bob Wells, set the coordinates for those four Rizen ships in the asteroid belt of this system. Convey the coordinates to the other seven ships of this fleet.” The admiral looked back to Jack. “Fleet Captain, we depart shortly. Our good wishes on your hunting of these . . . these deceptors.”
Jack could only agree that the mildest term for the Rizen was deceptor. For that was exactly what Destanu had done when talking to his former captain Monique d’Auberge. “Thank you. Return to this battle space when you are done. We need to have a fleet battle conference once all Rizen opposition is killed.”
The man gave him a nod of agreement, then looked to his left. “Pilot, activate our Alcubierre drive pedestal. And the drives of our fellow fleet ships.”
With the suddenness of thought the man’s image vanished from the strip above the front screen. As did the faces of the other fleet captains, including Minna, Ignacio and his other Belter allies. He licked his dry lips, then looked to his right. His sister Elaine had anticipated him. Her gloved hands were held above her NavTrack panel, ready to set a vector line to the planet below them. “Pilot, set our vector to an orbit above the daylight side of Green Grass. Arrival at 200 klicks altitude, on an easterly orbital track.”
She gave him an easy grin. The grin was the same as when she had challenged him to a game of null-gee chess in their asteroid habdome, even as their sister Cassie tried to escape from her crib. They had strapped the year-old baby into her aircrib so they did not have to deal with her weightless antics. “Vector set. Transmitted to Max.”
Jack gestured backward. “Drive Engineer, take us in.”
Ahead, on the front screen, the white stars began to twinkle as the drive’s gravitational lensing bent their light. While their ship stayed in normal space-time during grav-pull, to an outside observer the 200 meter length of the Uhuru would appear to suddenly jump forward like a bee zipping from one spot to another. That was the value of a drive that could ignore inertia and which moved you at 80 percent of lightspeed. Which meant they would cross the 200,000 kilometers to the home world of the Doomat elephants in less than a sec
ond.
♦ ♦ ♦
The world of Green Grass was an incredible sight. White hazy clouds floated above three brown and green continents split apart by three blue oceans, with white ice caps at the north and south poles completing the world’s semblance to Earth. Jack felt his chest swell at the world’s beauty. Though he had grown up in airless space, with but an inflatable habdome to call home, he and his sisters had yearned for the impossible. A planet of their own. So they watched the Nature and Blue Planet vidcasts put out by the Open Libraries. While folks used to air stretching to the horizon, with pull-down gravity of one gee and oceans of water could take where they lived for granted, Jack never did. All the things normal to planet-bound peoples were carefully conserved by Belters. Air, water, fuel and food were their lives. With them any Belter family could manage a life among widely distant rocks and ice balls. But those vid programs had drawn him into an early study of Earth’s animals. Reality intervened as a teen. Jobs in the Belt required Tech skills. So on Vesta he had earned a degree in Technology, along with a second degree in Anthropology. Both of which had taken him to Charon and the first Uhuru. With a shiver he sat back and fixed his analytical mind on what slowly spun below.
“Elaine, where is the Rizen colony settlement located?”
She tapped on her Sensor panel. “The AV broadcasts said the colony habitations were concentrated on the eastern part of the equatorial continent. Which is what is now passing below us. My Sensor feed shows to the right of the true-light image. I’ve marked the locations of fusion reactors. And there is a single graviton emitter near the eastern edge of the land mass. Next to that large urbus beside the river emptying into the ocean.”
Jack could see that. The continents of Green Grass were three. A northern one called Rocky Ice stretched an archipelago into the north pole zone. A southern one, squarish in shape and called Stormy Land, ended before reaching the free-floating southern ice cap. And the equatorial one. Called Lush Fields. Which resembled Eurasia of Earth moved down so it centered on this world’s equator. Jungles, forests, massive grasslands, savannahs and sharp-peaked mountain ranges covered Lush Fields. Denise’s SETI translation program had scoured the AV broadcasts and picked out the landscape names. And the centers of Doomat population. Which she estimated to be three billion, based on energy emissions, cities, transport hubs and cultivated lands. For the Doomat no longer relied only upon natural grasslands to feed their herds. They cultivated food like nearly every species known to Jack and his fleet. “Where’s the Doomat capital? Do they even have one?”
Denise laughed and Blodwen chuckled. “Captain Jack,” said their teen whose birthday would happen in a month, “the Doomat society is run by herd matriarchs. Very much like the elephant herds on Earth. Mass communications and a worldwide diginet have allowed for millions to belong to a single herd.”
“And,” called the cheery voice of Blodwen, “the source of the strongest AV broadcasts comes from that urbus located in the center of Lush Fields. On that high plateau. Note the many lakes there and the rivers that run off the plateau edges onto the central plains.”
Well, answers from his ComChief and his Sociologist were to be expected. They were the ship experts in these matters. He looked to Nikola. “Chief Astronomer, can you bring up a scope image of that graviton source on the eastern urbus? I want to see if it is a Rizen ship.”
His lifemate nodded slowly. “Can do. Being done. Image on the left side of the front screen.”
The image of the continent below was joined by a refractor scope image of the eastern urbus. Which enlarged as Nikola told the ship’s scope to magnify. The buildings of that place were totally different from the native Doomat domes. Large metal boxes clustered on either side of the brown river that split the city, with green parks spotted among the buildings. On the north side of the urbus lay the black rock of a landing field. Around it stood three hangar-like buildings, a Sensor tower, what looked like two weapons mounts and the shape of a Rizen ship. The globe pierced by a spearhead was pointed nose up. Its lower half lay below ground level in a deep bowl. The middle globe section of the craft touched ground level. Tiny black cargobots moved from the hangars to the ship and back. He looked down at the holo of Maureen, who was still on Combat Alert in the Battle Module. The face-on view was of her helmeted head as she leaned over her Fire Control panel. “Combat Commander, what do you detect in the way of aerospatiale lasers? Anywhere below? And are there any threats in our orbital track?”
The woman tapped on a side Tactical Display panel. “The eastern urbus landing field is protected by two laser mounts. Similar to what we know from the Moon, Mars and Alien worlds we’ve visited. My weapons sensors report a dozen similar mounts spread along the western boundary of the Rizen colony habitations. Along that mountain chain.” She paused, then clenched her fist. “Torps! Coming up on us from the eastern horizon. Our spysat says they are chemfuel driven. My panel reports 14 of them. No sign of automated mine fields. There is a single space station to the west of us. A large globe that is not spinning. It’s a graviton source. My guess is the Rizen put a grav-pull drive into that Doomat station for their convenience.”
He didn’t have to ask if the woman was aiming weapons at the oncoming torps. Which likely carried thermonuke warheads. Thinking back to orbital imagery of Earth, he realized the eastern portion of the Lush Fields continent resembled the landscape of old America. A weathered mountain chain formed the western boundary of the Rizen colony settlements. The Rizen cities filled the space between that range and the eastern ocean. Kind of like the human cities that ran from Boston south to Charleston. A distance just short of 976 miles. Or 1,570 kilometers. Black thunderstorm clouds showed on the central coastline. A hurricane spiral showed out at sea but it had not yet hit the eastern coast. Based on Elaine’s Sensor data, the dominant winds were from the west.
“Firing!” called Maureen over the vacsuit comlink.
Jack tapped his Tech panel to Tactical Display with weapons systems status. He saw the black and blue streaks of dual beams from the ship’s antimatter and particle beam emitters. Two of the 14 incoming torps died violently.
“Maureen, you shoot just fine. But I don’t like rad showers like we got earlier. I’m aiming the Higgs Disruptor at this group of torps, with a thousand klick footprint. Any survivors are yours.” He tapped on his panel.
On the front screen true-light image, the yellow beam of the ship’s disruptor spat out eastward. The oncoming torps were random-walking with varying thrusts so as not to present a predictable approach vector. Still, they were approaching at near planetary escape velocity. Eleven klicks per second was covering the 4,000 kilometer distance very quickly.
Nine torps blossomed like flowers opening their petals. Then those metal fragments became a diffuse cloud of yellow and red particles. Which soon flew apart at the atomic level as neutrons, protons and electrons separated from each other. In two seconds nothing remained of the nine torps. Which left three still random-walking and drawing within a thousand klicks of his ship’s orbital track. Which was pushing the Uhuru toward the oncoming torps at an orbital speed of 17,450 miles per hour. Or 28,080 klicks per hour. “Maureen!”
“Got them!” she growled from the holo.
A green HF laser beam hit one torp, while the blue neutral particle beam did a zap-zap hit on the two other oncoming torps.
Three more yellow, red and orange flowers blossomed just 600 kilometers east of their orbital position.
Jack turned his attention back to their passage over the continent of Lush Fields. They would reach the eastern coastline in ten minutes or less. Which just wouldn’t do. “Max! Blip-jump us back on our orbital track! Make it 5,000 klicks back, which will keep us away from the space station.” A thought hit him. “Maureen, does that station show any weapons mounts? Any Auto-Track and Defend emissions?”
“Nope,” she said hurriedly as her Tactical Display filled with the true-light image of the metal globe. “Only emissions my p
anel is classifying as the usual low power radar and lidar associated with tracking incoming ships. So as to guide them to a docking with those dock mounts on the northern and southern poles of the station.” She touched her Fire Control panel. “But I can take out that station with either beam weapon. Or our lasers.”
“Hold off on that,” Jack said as the oceans, trees and mountains below them grew hazy as Max blip jumped them back along their orbital track. Their ship soon resumed their orbital vector. Which had them moving above Green Grass at 28,000 klicks per hour. He noticed they were passing over the central plateau that hosted the capital of the Doomat elephants. “Denise! Transmit down the vid record of our fleet battle against the Rizen Colony Fleet. Add in a verbal warning that any urbus which launches rockets or lasers at us will be vaporized. I’ll do my First Contact chat with the Doomat later. After we take care of the Rizen colonists.”
“Do I want to watch what happens next?” called Cassie, her tone uncertain.
Strange. His youngest sister had witnessed their battle to rescue her from the South Pole Naval Academy of the Unity Naval Command. She had even laser-zapped the academy commandant as Jack carried her toward the hangar exit. Course she had not seen what he and his super fleet had done to one of the two HikHikSot home worlds. “Yes, Cassandra, you do want to watch this. The loss of a single life is a tragedy. The death of millions is policy. And my policy is the same for these Rizen as with the HikHikSot—to make sure no Hunter of the Great Dark ever again attacks Earth, humanity or a human ship. Denise calls it operant conditioning.”
“Understood,” she replied, her tone now firm. “I do understand Denise’s point about how natural selection operates at the interstellar level. While I may not like it, I’m a realist. As you know.”
He did know that. She had been the one to insist on going to Earth to spy out the hidden location of the factory that had produced Earth’s own grav-pull ships. Four of which had attacked their home asteroid of Mathilde. And she had been onboard when they had liberated the captive ChikHo and Bizzdaw peoples. She understood the necessity of removing any Hunter colony from the home world of a captive peoples. Which these Doomat had been for a good millennia, under two different Hunters. Jack looked back, catching the attention of his Polish buddy.
Aliens Vs. Humans (Aliens Series Book 4) Page 14