“Jack!” Her gray eyes glinted under short black curls, her manner at once sardonic, skeptical and matter-of-fact. Like Max, she had the rad-tan of a lifelong Belter, a triangular face covered with hair-fine wrinkles, and a trim figure. “Don’t try to vibe me—I knew your Grandpa way back when, and he told me all about your slick ways. Try to be a ship’s Captain for a change, rather than a know-it-all Anthropologist.”
Max winked at Jack, then busied himself with setting up their stolen gravity-pull drive for an inertialess blip jump outward, to the spaces beyond Pluto, the place where roamed the Hunters of the Great Dark, species like the Rizen and the Yiplak—and now Humans. “Told you compliments don’t work with her,” the grizzled engineer said. “Maybe a few hydrogen bomb-tipped torpedoes would, hey?”
Maureen stayed quiet, monitoring her Combat station sensors. Max’s shiny white teeth gleamed in his rad-darkened face, as if the man enjoyed putting Jack on the spot. If the Pole weren’t such a good Cook and apprentice Ecological Biologist . . . Well, Jack was in a forgiving mood. After all, he was the Captain of this ship, the first human ship with its own internal grav fields and the ability to jump around in space like a crazed bumblebee. “Max, I got no thermo-nukes to pass around. Lasers, kinetic kill rockets and—”
“Alarm! Alarm!” yelled the artificial voice of the local area radar.
“Damn!” Max touched it to narrow sweep mode. “Got a Unity vessel inbound from Pluto! IFF transponder says it’s . . . the Prince Otto von Bismarck, a heavy cruiser, home stationed at Ceres Central.” The man slammed his fist against the seat’s armrest. “What luck! They must have left Charon Base and been heading back in-system on a cross-vector to our tangent when they detected us. Captain? Jack?”
A cold chill ran down Jack’s spine. This stop at 5145 Pholus had been intended solely as a memorial, as a ceremony to mark the passing of human innocence about Aliens and to commemorate the sacrifice of his four crewmates. He, Max and Maureen, along with Kekkonen and Aldecoa, had no wish to battle Earth ships—even though his allies had newly installed gravity-pull drives. Their target and their challenge were Alien ships that even now roamed the distant dark spaces of the Kuiper Belt, where proto-cometary objects orbited just beyond Pluto. “Maureen, don’t fire on them. Max, don’t blip jump yet either. I’ll try talking to them first.”
“Young fool,” whispered Maureen at him.
His cheeks burned warm, then he pulled out the Comlink panel on the left side of his Technologist’s armrest, tapped it on, and keyed in Charon Standard Channel Four. “Greetings to the ship Prince Otto von Bismarck. Who commands?”
The front screen blurred briefly, then the color image of an Asian man appeared on-screen. He wore Unity Naval blues and a blank expression. “Who commands your vessel? I am Fleet Admiral Hideyoshi Minamoto, in command of the Bismarck, inbound from Charon Base.” Behind the admiral, a half dozen petty officer types free-floated about the Command Bridge as the ship’s crew moved to Thrust-Gee Standby stations. “Identify yourselves!”
Jack felt a sinking feeling when he heard the man claim Fleet Admiral status. This was no senior Captain on remote patrol duty. This was one of the men in charge of the pacification of the Asteroid Belt, one of the Ceres Central types attached to the Unity Governor’s military arm. The only question worth asking now was—did Admiral Minamoto owe his command to politics or to his field abilities? Jack hoped the former. He smiled pleasantly at the stiff-faced Asian. “I’m Jack Munroe, Captain of the Uhuru, outbound for the Kuiper Belt.” Shock filled the admiral’s face, then anger mixed with determination. “Please, don’t believe everything the Unity has said about me. I and my fellow Captains of the Wolverine and the Badger, we have no quarrel with you, Admiral.”
Minamoto leaned back as an aide floated over and whispered in his ear, then the man eyed them sternly. “What you and your allies have admitted to—in open broadcasts to the inner worlds—is enough to warrant your seizure. And Brussels has issued an Order of Arrest.” The man accepted a yellow datapad from the aide and began reading. “Murder of the representatives of two Alien species. Attacks on Alien vessels. Theft of the gravity-pull drive from Administrator Andrea Grübingen of Charon Base.” The man paused, catching his breath as, to Jack’s right, Max winced at their notoriety. “Kidnapping of Unity citizen Denise Rauvin—”
“Hey!” yelled Max angrily. “Denise was not kidnapped! She’s told her parents—”
“—citizen Denise Rauvin,” Minamoto repeated remorselessly. “Arming of civilian vessels with military armaments. Failure to file flight plans with Ceres Central for your three vessels. Failure to surrender Alien devices to lawful authorities. Failure to—”
On the front screen, Minamoto’s image moved to one side and the other side filled up with the coffee-brown face of Captain Ignacio Aldecoa, an ethnic Basque from the mines on 16 Psyche who’d brought his own ship to the cause, in company with their other ally, Captain Minna Kalevic Kekkonen, late of Finland and the asteroid 65 Cybele. Minna’s pale-skinned image also came on-screen, appearing just below Ignacio’s scowl.
“Captain Munroe,” said Ignacio tersely. “I’m insulted by this Unity admiral’s attitude. May I attack him?”
On screen, Minna smiled thinly, her blue eyes and blond hair a deceptive appearance for a Suomi commerce raider. “Munroe, do you think he’ll believe us if we tell him we joined you of our own free will?” she said. “As did our crews, including young Miss Rauvin?”
Maureen chuckled skeptically and Max snorted with disbelief. Jack waved them to silence, then answered his allies even as Minamoto continued listing their sins. “Ignacio, Minna, no, I don’t think it will help. I’m afraid we rather upset the Unity when we transmitted on open vidcast our . . . violent encounters with the Rizen and the Yiplak.” He hoped Minamoto would wonder just what the suddenly silent-voiced Uhuru captain might be saying. “Kind of made it hard to sell Earth and Mars and the Belt on the fiction that any Alien species who comes visiting us must be civilized, peaceful and non-violent?” He grinned tightly. “The way the Unity says all we nice people must be. Or else.”
“Or else indeed,” said Minna, her gaze hardening. “Want some help?”
Ignacio glowered at both him and Minna. “Help? Of course the sons of Euskal Herria will come to your aid! No Euskaldunak has ever run from a fight! My cousins and I stand ready for battle.”
Jack had no reason to doubt the man. The Basques—or the Euskaldunak as they called themselves—had driven batty the Spanish and French national governments as the most ancient of European ethnic groups asserted their fueros, or local rights. Similarly, the Finns of Suomen Tasavalta could be counted on to back up the Uhuru. He waved both Captains silent. “Allies! Fellow Captains, please!” They quieted just as Admiral Minamoto finished his litany of their crimes. “Uhuru can handle the Bismarck on its own. Please, veer off from this vector and let us teach Admiral Minamoto a necessary lesson. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” muttered Aldecoa, then switched off.
“As you wish,” said Kekkonen tersely, then she too disappeared.
On screen, Admiral Minamoto lifted thin black eyebrows. “Are you and your fellow Captains willing to surrender, Captain Munroe? We are ordered by Brussels to enforce the Unity’s Order of Arrest for you and your allies as outlaws. And while your ship’s design does not match our records for the Uhuru, I must follow my duty.”
Jack detected in the final comment a suggestion that Minamoto was more than a political admiral. Only someone with real combat experience expressed regret at the possibility of new combat. “Admiral, don’t pick a fight you can’t win. Humanity has need of combat ships like yours. If you won’t join us, at least pass us by—our duty lies in the Kuiper Belt.”
Minamoto lifted one eyebrow. “You think a Fleet ship cannot handle a Belt raider like you? We can.” Behind the admiral, crew in Naval blues strapped in and the purple light of Thrust-Gee Imminent strobed in the background. “You are—” the man looked
aside, frowned, and faced back to Jack. “Your allies are deserting you. We will catch them later. Do you surrender?”
“No!” With a slap at the Comlink panel, Jack killed the ship-to-ship vidlink. “Maureen, I think—”
“She’s already gone back to the Battle Module,” Max said grumpily. “While you talked, we prepared.”
“Oh.” Jack had never cared for his new Captain status, but it had fallen his way as the ship’s Navigator/Technologist/ Anthropologist, the only one of them with prior cross-cultural experience within the Unity. “Good. Range to the Bismarck?”
Max looked at the front screen, once again filled with the real-space images of icy Pholus, NavTrack vectors, IR and UV emission sources, and solar wind plasma pulses. “Nineteen thousand kilometers and closing at one hundred kilometers per second. We’re both on parallel vectors, but we’re sitting still compared to him.” He paused a moment. “He’s gone to thrust-gee! All Minamoto has to do now is match our tangent.”
Jack reached to the left, to a block that protruded from the cabin hull, and touched the green-glowing strip of the ship’s Intercom. “Maureen, do you vibe me?”
“Of course I do,” said their Combat Commander, Historian and ship’s Gardener, her tone cool and matter-of-fact. “Told you talking wouldn’t do any good. The module is powered up. Ready to draw peak power from the reactor. And—” she paused “—Fire Control has acquired the Bismarck. All laser and railgun pods are slaved to me and we are ready for combat. Orders, Captain?”
He considered his options. The Unity vessel did not have gravity-pull drive, so the Uhuru could bounce circles around it. Still, the whale-like body of the heavy cruiser carried repeating pulse-lasers in ventral and dorsal pods, had its own Fire-and-Forget thermonuke torpedoes, carried a neutral particle beamer at the nose, and doubtless felt itself a superior match for his ship. Too bad Minamoto had never faced predatory Aliens, but Jack had. It lent a certain clarity to one’s thinking. “Maureen, we’re gonna blip jump to north ecliptic of them, and rearward, in a series of random-spiraling blips. I want to cut off their fangs and claws, not blow them apart. Understood?”
“Understood.” Her clipped tone expressed clearly her opinion of his choice to show mercy.
“Maureen, save our particle beamer for ultimate defense. Use your HF lasers to slag his pods, then shield us from any thermonuke torps he might fire.” Jack touched the NavTrack autopilot controls in front of his seat, selected a preloaded option, then eyed a watchful Max. “Drive Engineer, blip us!”
“Blipping.” Max touched the grav-pull Drive panel, his fingers dancing as he selected a series of Control software algorithms.
From the outside, the Bismarck might have noticed a faint gravitational lensing of the starlight that passed by the Uhuru’s hull, and realized Object A was about to be in Space B, without a smooth trajectory adjustment. The blip jump would break their opponent’s Fire Control lock on the Uhuru, thus frustrating any plans Minamoto had made based on a study of their battles with the Rizen and Yiplak aliens. Inside, Jack felt nothing unusual, thanks to the new lines of software code that Max had written while they were rebuilding at 253 Mathilde. That hard work now enabled them to make full use of the Rizen gravity-pull drive, which included internal gravity control. No longer did they worry about thrust-gee, spin-gee or Coriolis drift. Max simply told the Drive computer where they wished to be and then they straight-line translated to the X-Y-Z coordinates of that locality. When one is used to the constraints imposed on space travel by reason of Newton’s First Law, the real life functioning of the gravity-pull drive can be very disconcerting. Now you see it, now you don’t, and the bumblebee stings before you know it.
On screen, the starfield blurred once, blurred twice, then blurred in increasing frequency as Max ran the Uhuru through a series of spiraling blip jumps that quickly moved them to the rear of the Bismarck, just above the flaring plasma tail of its fusion drive exhaust. The locality is one that is usually ‘blind’ to most human ships that rely on fusion pulse drives, and not a normal direction to point your weapons. Max eyed Jack. “We’re in place, a hundred klicks out, with matching delta vee. They’ll twig to us shortly, if only from our gravity waves. They have a gravitomagnetic sensor just like us. Time to act.”
Jack nodded. “Maureen?”
“Firing,” said the woman in control of their Battle Module. Her holo image now appeared atop his Navigator’s instrument panel. Maureen’s face held a deadly intensity as she attacked, a human jaguar pouncing for the unprotected neck and back of her prey.
On screen, the Bismarck gleamed like a white whale as its outer hull reflected the pale starlight. Then its dorsal pulse-laser pod blackened as the green pencil of their HF laser bit deep into the metal. A silent yellow explosion followed. Max touched the attitude controls on his left armrest. “Maneuvering on thrusters, going for the belly,” the Engineer said tersely. “Maureen? Take your shot as soon as the pod’s in sight!”
“Thanks!” On screen, the starfield shifted again, this time without blurring, and the underbelly of the Bismarck rolled into view. A bright green beam struck out from the Uhuru, targeting exactly the ventral pulse-laser pod. The pod had tracked around toward them but not fast enough. It now blackened, exploded, and only fused metal remained, along with the white snowflakes of atmosphere outgassing. “Both pods out of action!” Maureen said, her holo image looking up. “Recommend we—”
“Torpedoes!” yelled Max, who’d kept a close eye on the front screen. “Maureen!”
“Firing!”
The blue scythe of the neutral particle weapon, a beam of stripped hydrogen ions pushed by a radiofrequency quadrupole accelerator, struck out from the scorpion tail of the Battle Module, whipping across space at lightspeed and killing four torps the way a bullwhip snaps a knife from someone’s hand. Max slapped the grav-pull Drive controls. “Blip jumping ahead of them! We’ll settle in a thousand klicks above them! Their nose neutral particle beamer is axially fixed. They can’t shoot up at us.”
Jack swallowed hard, his tongue dry, his mind fuzzy, his gut churning with the swiftness of violence. He was not trained for this. None of them were, except for Maureen, who’d saved their butts when the nuke-tipped torps appeared, coming at them with a solid fuel accel that exceeded planetary escape velocities. They should have been dead, lying there just a hundred klicks from the Bismarck. Instead, they lived. But had they pulled all the fangs and claws of their opponent? “Maureen, give me a Threat Assessment from your Fire Control. Any active ranging of us by their Fire Control? Any Lock-Ons? Any—”
“Nothing,” she said, sounding tired as she looked at him from the holo. She licked her lips. “And their neutral particle beamer is powering down. Somebody on board understands they can’t defeat us. Jack, either we talk now, leave now, or we kill them. Which is it to be?”
“We talk,” he said. “Stay on Combat Alert, please. And load the railgun launchers with a few thousand ball bearings—if need be, we’ll put a load of hailstones through their hull.”
In the holo, Maureen grinned broadly. “Hey, atta’boy! Load your weapon before you talk. Exactly right!”
Max sat back in his seat, his forehead sweaty. The man reached up as the fusion Main Drive controls lowered from the ceiling. “And I, good Captain, am preparing our fusion cylinder to deliver the Pinwheel Plasma Torch attack—if that bastard sends any more torps at us!”
Jack understood Max’s unease. The torp attack with nuke-tipped warheads had been a desperation move and one rarely used by Unity warships. Minamoto, for whatever reason, had concluded the Uhuru and her crew should be dead rather than captured. Maureen’s reproof echoed in his ears. Ahead, on the front screen, the image of Admiral Minamoto appeared suddenly. His Command Bridge had few crew on it and those were belted in to their stations. They were still under thrust-gee, pursuing the Uhuru, but had nothing with which to attack. “Admiral, if you fire any more torps at us, I’ll slice you in half with our plasma flare. Arm
istice?”
Minamoto’s mouth thinned, then he nodded abruptly. “Agreed. Armistice. We will not attack you further.”
“You have nothing left with which to attack us. And your neutral particle beamer cannot reach us. You did right to power it down.,” Minamoto glared at Jack, but kept silent. “And the use of hydrogen bomb-tipped torpedoes against a human vessel or settlement is a violation of the Concord of Mars, Fourth Protocol. Isn’t it?”
The man glanced aside as an aide approached, then waved her away. Minamoto faced Jack, his expression uneasy and not happy. “It is a violation. Orders from Brussels. Again, my duty compelled me to act as I did.”
Jack relaxed slightly. The Unity admiral knew he and his ship could be destroyed at any time, knew that Jack had held back, and the man had no reason to worsen his situation. A situation where two human ships fought each other, rather than predatory Aliens. He nodded slowly. “Understood, Admiral. Tell me, where did you fight during the Rebellion?”
Minamoto looked surprised by the question. “At all three major engagements—the taking of Vesta Fortress, Hektor’s Gambit and the Battle of 2:1 Kirkwood Gap. Why?”
His Grandpa Ephraim’s words rang in his mind’s ear—The Unity believes all rights are conditional, never absolute, and belong to groups, never to individual citizens. That’s why they abolished the American Bill of Rights. European socialism has always treated its people as subjects, rather than as the masters of their personal fate. Jack answered the admiral. “My Grandpa fought at Kirkwood Gap. When his HF laser burned out, he rammed the Unity vessel he was attacking. Was only a frigate, but it never returned to Ceres Central.” Minamoto sat back in his seat, thin black eyebrows lifting in silent questioning. “Admiral, I should kill you and your crew, now. That’s what my Combat Commander wants me to do.”
Earth Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series 1) Page 9