A blue scythe struck out like a rapier from the Uhuru to the teardrop ship on the left. It cut the ship into two tumbling pieces, white air and water blossoming out from the inner guts of the ship.
“Firing,” called Amitar.
A second silver teardrop split open under the Yamamoto’s particle beam.
“Me!” yelled Ignacio from the Badger, his black boina beret sitting atop his head and inside the clear helmet of his vacsuit.
The third teardrop, which had begun turning away under maneuvering thrusters, broke apart under the slash of the Badger’s blue neutral particle beam.
“Big Momma,” called Kasun from the Leopard, “time to join your kiddies.”
A fourth blue beam shot out and split open the Yiplak mother ship at its mid-body. A fifth beam from Minna’s Wolverine cut the tail piece in half. A sixth beam from Akemi’s Orca did the same for the front half. The mother ship was now four tumbling pieces of silver metal covered in black and yellow streaks. White spurts of air and water gushed from the fragments. None showed controlled movement.
Jack grinned. It was his turn now. He tapped on his Tech panel’s railgun controls. “Launching bearings at Big Mother. The rest of you, ventilate your teardrop fragments.”
In thirty seconds every Yiplak ship fragment had black spots marking its hull. None showed controlled movement. And the blockhouse at the north pole of the comet had collapsed under the impact of a ball bearing barrage from the Yamamoto.
Jack scanned the eight ships of his fleet. All showed intact, with no damage from counter-fire. Of which there had been none. He tapped his Tech panel. “Launching spysats to survey the far side of the comet,” he said. Had to make sure there were no teardrop ships hiding out of sight on the comet’s far side.
“Captain Jack!” called Denise. “Incoming neutrino signal from the Bismarck!”
The image of Hideyoshi took form on one side of the front screen. The Mars admiral wore his formal red combat uniform, his left breast showing a few metal tabs that marked each Alien combat battle he and his ship had taken part in. The man’s receding hairline looked thinner. But his face showed professional satisfaction. “Our three target ships were located, beamed into pieces, ventilated and will shortly be inspected for salvageable grav-pull drives. Here is the image of one of those ships.”
Jack saw a disk-shaped ship with a tubular ring of laser mounts and two spines sticking out from the north and south poles of the ship. He recognized them as particle beam emitters. It was a Hackmot ship. Inside he felt good. Killing a few dozen bipedal Komodo Dragon lizard Aliens was doing the universe a favor, in his opinion.
“Excellent! Advise me once your lander has salvaged the grav-pulls.”
“Will do. Leaving to manage the salvage,” the elder Asian said. His image vanished.
“New incoming!” called Denise.
Gareth Davies appeared on the deck of the Dragon. A whisp of black smoke was drifting through the cabin. The man’s expression was weary but satisfied.
“Three Alien ships destroyed,” he said calmly. “Angelique says one of the ships used an Auto-Track and Defend system faster than anything we have. We took two laser hits in the midbody. No one injured. And she cut them in half. Our other ships are fine. They’re conducting grav-pull salvage. Here’s an image of the new Alien ship.”
An image of a golden yellow globe appeared. Laser mounts showed in an equatorial ring. Between the north pole and equator was painted the image of a strange predator. It looked like a white-fanged seal with two eyes. But instead of flippers, the creature had a ring of sinuous arms fixed with suckers, similar to those of an octopus. Jack got the impression of some kind of amphibian carnivore. Seconds later a blue beam sliced through the globe, opening up its inner passageways. Large amounts of water globules and some white air gushed forth. A second blue beam cut the globe halves into fragments.
Jack marveled at the amphibian social carnivore. The image’s mix of ocean predator sucker limbs with amphibian bipedal body no longer surprised him. As Denise had warned, new Aliens were bound to be both similar and strangely different from any animal lifeform recorded on Earth.
“Congratulations, Gareth. I’m sure Maureen will treat you to a toast. Please salvage grav-pulls from the ship fragments. And if you can find some intact Alien bodies, do an AV record of them and keep one for research by Elaine’s medoc buddies on Mathilde.”
“Will do.” The Welshman looked to the side at someone offscreen. “My crew needs help sealing the hull gashes. Seems a few are too wide for the autobots to repair. I’ll call with the Alien body salvage info. Later.”
The man’s image blinked out.
“Third incoming,” Denise said. “I’m recording everything.”
On the front screen appeared the black face of Ras Mengesha, captain of the MacArthur. The man’s curly chin whiskers moved as he spoke.
“Fleet Captain Jack Munroe, the solo ship target ran away as soon as we appeared.” The man from the highlands of Ethiopia gestured to someone offscreen. “While our two ships fired at it, the Alien ship went to grav-pull blipping quicker than we could lock-on. Here is the ship image.”
A rectangular box with a globe embedded in it appeared on the front screen to the side of Ras’ image. The upper globe showed the bodyshape of a cheetah crossed with a leopard, its body stretched out in a leap.
“HikHikSot,” muttered Jack. He blinked, feeling a chill run down his spine.
“Well, the operant conditioning worked,” said Denise.
He shook himself. His duty had only begun. “Captain Ras, thank you for your efforts. As my ComChief said, this was a HikHikSot ship that chose immediate escape upon sighting a human spaceship. Which was the point of our fleet’s attack on their home world. As you may recall from the vidrecord of our first interstellar trip.”
The tall, gangly man, dressed in colorful robes, nodded slowly. His lips opened in a slight smile. “Good to know your battle efforts have caused one Hunter of the Great Dark to always run away from humans. But we lost the chance to salvage a grav-pull drive.”
Jack waved dismissal. “Not a problem. We have nine ship grav-pulls that your Mars and Belter battle partners are now salvaging. That gives us a start on expanding our home protection fleet once we return to Sol. Thank you! Feel free to rejoin Admiral Minamoto’s fleet at his target location.”
“Will do. Departing.” The man’s image disappeared.
Jack looked back to Denise. “Send out a digital fax over the neutrino comlink to all ships that they are to maintain position until salvaging is completed. Say they can rejoin our location once they are done. Then we will head into the system.”
“Working on it,” she said, looking down and whispering to her comlink.
Jack felt shaky. In fact, his fingers were trembling. He gripped both hands together, sat back, and fixed his gaze on the true-light image of the local star system. The five planets shone brightly as half-disks, while the home star was a small orange ball. To one side of the light image was the sensor map of neutrino and fusion drive emissions. Which in a sense were one. Every fusion drive ship emitted neutrinos from its Compact Fusion Reactor. As did every fusion reactor on the surface of a planet or moon. The main difference was that one was moving while the other type was stationary. He saw 14 moving green dots for the spaceships. There were dozens of white neutrino dots for power generation fusion reactors. Plus there was the bloom of neutrinos, x-rays and gamma rays from three spots close together in the asteroid belt between planets three and four.
“Blodwen, you got any idea why this Alien species would be setting off thermonukes in their asteroid belt?”
He heard a quick intake of breath as the woman alerted to his question. “Many possible reasons. Fighting between two groups, like the battles we had with the Unity. Or trying to move an asteroid toward planet three with fusion blasts that push it inward. Perhaps mining. Though it would have to be a really big asteroid, maybe a dwarf planet like Ceres, Ve
sta and Pallas, to withstand such massive blasts.”
“Thank you.” Jack pondered the woman’s answers. “Denise, are you receiving any AV broadcasts from planet three?”
“Uh, yes. Just coming in now.” She paused. Her heard tapping from her Comlink station. “Got 193 AV broadcasts, of highly varying signal strength and complexity.”
Well, they could not talk yet to these new Aliens. But at least they could see what they looked like.
“Put up the three strongest AV images on the front screen. One after the other. And send them by neutrino comlink to the rest of the ships in the fleet. Let’s see what our new neighbors look like.”
“Going up.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A new image appeared between the true-light star system image and the sensor imagery from Elaine. It was a forest of green-leaved trees, brown trunks, thick branches and a forest floor scattered with dead leaves, green shrubs and winding tracks beaten into the leaf litter. At first he thought the forest image was empty. Pretty, with the pale blueness of sky showing in the background. Along with a few brown peaks topped with white spots of snow. But the foreground, seen from about three meters above the forest floor, looked empty.
A figure rushed into the scene, moving so quickly Jack could hardly track it. He just knew that its furry body was covered in black and white stripes. That it was bipedal. And that it had disappeared behind the thick brown trunk of a forest ancient.
The figure was soon followed by a ground-hugging critter that resembled a cougar. Cat-like, with short fur that also showed a pattern of black and white stripes from nose to long tail, the creature moved on four muscular legs, black claws at the front of each paw. The oval head of the Alien cougar moved from side to side, its two red eyes searching the open understory of the forest. While the hunting animal resembled a cougar, it was different. It breathed from openings in its ribs, where the short fur opened and closed with each breath. Besides the red eyes which were set on either side of the long head, there were two pairs of triangular ears. One pair at the front of the head just above the eyes, and one pair at the rear, pointing toward the creature’s fluffy tail. Instead of hunting by smell like some Earth cats, it seemed to hunt by sight and hearing.
That was when Jack noticed a silvery globe floating in the branches of a nearby tree. A videye on it moved slowly, following the creature as it moved. Someone was watching. But why?
A gray rock whizzed down from a tree a few meters away, hitting the Alien cougar atop its skull. Right between the four ears.
“Yowllll!” it screeched, its tail lowering to the littered forest floor as it focused on the tree trunk that had been the source of the rock missile. It began a stalking crawl along the winding track, eyes uplifted, ready to dodge any new missile.
A second gray rock streaked down and hit the back of the creature. Red blood showed from a gash on the animal’s spine. It yowled again, swung toward the direction of the incoming rock, lifting its eyes to scan the thickly clustered branches of the trees. The green leaf foliage was thick and the limbs of one tree mixed with the limbs of other trees. Jack began to wonder if the creature’s attacker might be moving quietly from one tree to another, changing his angle of attack.
A third rock the size of a soccer ball flew down from the opposite side of the track that the cougar had followed. While not thrown with great speed, its descent was soundless. And fast enough.
The boulder hit the hindquarters of the cougar. The crack of a bone echoed loudly. The creature lifted its front limbs and twisted back toward its blood-gushing wound, as if to push away the boulder. Which had fallen to one side. But the animal’s hind feet did not move. It slumped to one side, partly paralyzed and unable to move.
“Yowlll,” it moaned low, as if bewildered by what had happened.
A brown rope loop sped through the air to land over the head of the Alien carnivore. A pull on the rope made it tighten. The front paws of the creature clawed at the rope, trying to slice through it or break it. Its toothy mouth bit it. The rope stayed intact. And Jack could not see more than the tight stretch of the rope running to the left and behind a brown tree trunk.
“Jack,” called Elaine softly, “what is this?”
“A hunt,” he said, gesturing to her to be silent. Behind him he heard loud breathing from Nikola, Cassie, Archibald, Blodwen, Max and Denise. Footsteps sounded as Maureen entered from the Spine, then stopped as she too watched the AV imagery.
A second brown rope loop streaked in from the right side of the forest track, landing atop the paralyzed legs of the Alien cougar. A pull on the rope caused it to tighten around one leg. More pulling caused the cougar’s body to shift to the right. In moments it was stretched out across the track, pulled by its neck to the left and by its hind leg to the right. Both ropes were taunt and unmoving.
Into the scene stepped a person.
“Damn!” Maureen growled from the rear. “He looks scary deadly!”
A squeak from Denise and gasps from Max and Nikola said they agreed with his Combat Commander’s statement. Jack felt the same.
Before them stood someone who resembled a walking raccoon. Covered in short fur from head to claw-tipped toes, the fur was covered in alternating stripes of black and white. Its face was carnivore pointed with a large braincase and two ears that were fluttering. A second pair of ears showed behind the first pair. The mouth was filled with needle-sharp teeth. But it was the two eyes that were truly Alien. They were mounted on squat cones of muscle under a forehead ridge. And they moved independently of each other.
“How the fuck does he decide what to look at?” muttered Max.
The raccoon biped in the AV image was dressed in a short leather loincloth and nothing else. Its broad chest rose and fell as it breathed in through rib slits on either side of its chest. While there was no nose, there were high cheekbones. Its teeth, when the pale brown lips pulled back slightly, were sharp white canines. Its hands had talons at the tip of each finger. Three fingers and a thumb. The hand and palm were also very human-looking. Arms and legs were articulated with elbows and knees in the primate manner. But it was the Alien’s posture that shocked them all. It was leaning forward as if to pounce, its yellow eyes fixed on the stretched out form of the cougar.
“Mega mak to!” the Alien barked loudly.
Then it flew through the air in a predator leap that landed it on the back of the cougar. Holding onto the creature’s back with its muscular legs, the raccoon person moved like the wind. In less than a second its white canines were biting the upper neck of the cougar. Red blood flowed from the bite. Jaw muscles tightened visibly. A crack of bone sounded.
The cougar moan-squalled, flared its forelegs outward, then collapsed, all control gone from its body.
The raccoon person pulled its red-stained teeth away from the creature’s neck, spit to one side, then stood up. Standing by the hindquarters of the creature, it put one clawfoot on the body of the creature it had killed and looked up at the watching silver globe.
“Niktoren! Melak hab tho kit!” it said in barkspeech.
“Rite of Passage,” said Denise, her voice shaky.
Jack sighed, sat back in his seat and folded his hands together. “Denise, explain. Please.”
“This is an AV broadcast sent worldwide at high signal strength. It shows a single person hunting a predator in the forest that may have been the ancestral home for both species,” she said. “It was intended to be watched by many people. Like hunting shows on old Earth, where you watch a hunter going after a bear, an elk, a tiger, anything dangerous.”
“ Damn right that cougar was dangerous!” said Max. “And did you all notice how the two of them, the raccoon person and the cougar, both had fur covered in alternating black and white stripes? They looked very similar in bioform. I think this is a case of Müllerian Mimicry. Where two predators show convergent evolution of body colors that signal danger. To the benefit of each.”
Jack looked up at the images
of his fellow ship captains. Minna, Ignacio, Akemi, Júlia, Aashman, Kasun and Amitar. They all looked as shocked as he felt. He looked back at the image of the standing raccoon person, its clawfoot atop the cougar’s dead body. “What’s next?”
Into the scene walked four other raccoon persons. They were of two sizes, one being larger than the other three. These people were dressed in flowing yellow, green and brown robes. Similar to the ancient Greek chiton robes. And open at the sides for ease of breathing. Each wore a brown belt that supported small Tech devices. The larger person of the group reached out a hand and gripped the shoulder of the raccoon hunter.
“Niktoren hab tho Melak. Melak ik nok soren. Gok!” it said in a light-toned barkspeech, a voice not as deep as the hunting raccoon person.
“Is that a female?” said Maureen as she sat beside Jack.
“Could be,” Denise said. “Size differentials are usually an indication of gender differences. Could be we are seeing a female leading a group of three males who are . . . are congratulating the male hunter here. And perhaps telling him he is now an adult. If this is a Coming of Age ceremony with this hunt being a required ritual. Uh, I think the hunter’s name is Melak.”
“That is correct,” Anonymous’ dry mech voice said from the ceiling speaker. “SETI algorithm correlation of speech with behavior is completed. Converting AV language to Belter English.”
The hunter raccoon inclined his head to the taller person. His mobile eyes looked down. “Thank you Mother Of All. Melak offers you First Taste of this hunt.”
The taller, larger raccoon person whistled softly. “My hunger was satisfied before we arrived to watch your trek to adulthood. First Taste may go to your father.”
The Melak person looked up, fixed mobile yellow eyes on the one named Mother of All, then bent down. Thrusting a talon-fingered hand into the belly of the cougar creature, he ripped open its stomach, pushed aside white intestines, and pulled out a purple and red organ that still convulsed. Red blood squirted from two severed veins. “Father, may this First Taste reward you for your patience with me as I learned to throw the capture loop. I was not your best student.”
Freedom Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series Book 3) Page 19