Freedom Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series Book 3) (27 page)

“You’ve got a good point.” Jack fixed on Denise. “Your thoughts, genius of animal behavior. Like, how can people who resemble the smart raccoons of Earth be so bloodthirsty? While my ecology studies included examples of animal behaviors, I thought our raccoons were mainly lovers of fruit who made a point of washing their food in a nearby stream. And of being great at sneaking into human habitat areas for scavenging any food left out on a lunch table.”

The red freckles on Denise’s pale white face darkened under his gaze. The French-born teen who had had the guts to rebel against her scientist parents on Charon now wore her thick red hair in a bun on top of her head. No more braids hanging down. It made her look older. She scanned the faces of his fellow ship captains, then looked back to him.

“Captain Jack, these Niktoren folks clearly had an arboreal, tree-based evolution in the forests of the world Tree,” she said bluntly. “But they are
Alien
. Not Earth-evolved. And our raccoons, while indeed able to unlock complex locks and memorize numbers, were also omnivores in their food sources. They are members of the order
carnivora
, genus
procyon
. They ate insects, worms, fish, crustaceans, amphibians, bird eggs and sometimes birds,” she said bluntly. “Studies last century by Ulf Hohmann documented this. Among our raccoons, females were dominant even though males were larger in general.” She gestured forward. “But as we’ve seen, while these people have the black face mask and black and white rings of a raccoon grown to human size, their bioform is Alien! Their eyes are yellow orbs set atop chameleon-like muscles that allow independent eye movement. While they have stereoscopic vision, they also have the ability to look backward. And listen backward. They are highly adapted to an arboreal life and to life in open understory beneath the tree limbs. Their exotic vision and all-around listening ability says their brains are highly diversified.” She gave him an amiable smile. “I think they will be quite able to understand our anti-Hunter crusade and our reasons for it. While they might defeat a Challenge to Combat from future Hunters visiting this system, and thus become an ‘accepted’ member of the Hunters of the Great Dark, I think they will see the added value of supporting freedom of space exploration for
all
species that inhabit the stars of the Orion Arm.”

“Exactly,” Elaine said from her Pilot seat. His older sister had the manner of a medoc, someone trained to speak the facts even if distasteful. “Let’s contact these Niktoren. Even if they refuse our invitation, they may appreciate our warning about the Hunters and our zapping of Hunters hiding in their cometary belt.” She gestured at the front screen which had now changed to show a naval ship pulling into a cove of an island surrounded by a blue-green ocean. “I doubt they will like discovering there were predatory Aliens hiding in their system any more than you and Max liked it.”

“Thank you all.” He fixed on Maureen, who was playing with a combat simulation holo that depicted ships fighting one another in an asteroid belt. “Maureen O’Dowd.”

She jerked her attention away from her holo, her manner one of surprise at him calling her by her full name. Gray eyes scanned him. The woman’s hair-fine wrinkles bunched up as she grew thoughtful. “What?”

“How should we enter this system? And where should we emerge from blip jump?”

The woman from old Ireland’s northern town of Belfast grimaced. “With every weapon at the ready! In vacsuits. We should enter this system expecting a human-like reaction to the arrival of two dozen Alien spaceships.” She paused, brushed at the short black curls that adorned her head, then tapped on her Combat panel. “Here’s where we should arrive. Above the north pole of their moon Nightglo.”

Up front the screen showed a fourth image. An enlarged true-light image of a white, crater-scarred moon now appeared. A metallic sparkle gleamed at the equatorial level.

“The moon Nightglo is half the size of Earth’s Moon, at 1,700 kilometers across,” Maureen said. “It has a space station that is in equatorial orbit. Activities on its surface surely include mining camps.” Their battle veteran looked to him. “Fleet Captain Jack, we can expect every Niktoren spaceship to head for us once we appear above their moon. We should be prepared for every type of weapon that we have seen in other systems, including thermonuke torps.”

Jack looked back at Nikola. “Chief Astronomer, what can you tell us about their world Tree and the moon Nightglo? Based on your scope imagery and sensor data.”

His Czech lifemate looked down at her Astro panel, then up. Her pale blue eyes fixed on him. “I put out Big Eye when you told Denise to feed us the AV broadcasts. Got a better image of the world Tree.” She gestured at the front screen. “As you can see, there are three major continents arranged in a North, South and East orientation, relative to their equator. Their world is tilted ten degrees, similar to Earth, so they have multiple seasons. They have two major oceans and four smaller seas that separate the continents. Like Earth, there are ice caps at the north and south poles. Gravity is close to one gee based on the orbital track of their moon. EMF radiation from fusion reactors, power grids and AV broadcasts suggests a total planetary energy production of about 190,000 terawatt hours. Equal to the Earth energy output of 2050.” She paused, tapped her panel, then nodded at the image. “I’ve displayed artificial energy emissions as a green circle atop each continent. The Northern continent produces the most power. How that relates to planetary population, I cannot tell. But their broadcast suggests a planetary population of at least one billion, based on 40 million youths becoming adult each year.” She tapped her panel, causing the planet’s image to enlarge slightly. Three silvery sparkles showed at its equator, moving in an orbital vector. “The Niktoren have put up three space stations. Likely due to their extensive asteroid mining and planet two ecoforming. That enough?”

Jack felt almost overwhelmed by the flow of data and opinions from his crew. He gave Nikola a thumbs-up. “Outstanding data analysis. Final question. How strong were those three thermonuke blasts in their asteroid belt?”

She grimaced. “Big. Each blast released 240 petajoules of energy. That is equal to our 50 megaton thermonuke torps. Which are descendants of the three-stage fission-fusion-fusion design of the Tsar Bomba that exploded back in 1961. Like our thermonukes, the fireball of the Niktoren blasts was eight kilometers in size.” She tapped her panel and an image of the Inner Rock Belt of asteroids appeared to one side of the Tree planet image. “Those ‘star blasts’ as the locals called them were focused on a dwarf planet named Mikto. They are doing some heavy-duty mining.”

So. Their fleet faced laser armed spaceships which had access to thermonukes as strong as their own torps. And since they had a space war not that long ago, other weapons like automated mine fields, laser platforms and such were a probability. “Elaine, where are the Niktoren fusion ships located right now?”

His sister pointed to the front screen image that showed white dots for stationary fusion reactors and green dots for spaceships. “Of the 14 ships in space, eight are in this Inner Rock Belt. Which is two AU out from their star. Two are between the world Tree and its moon Nightglo. The other four ships are near planet two or Haklo. Which is just two-tenths AU from their home world on a straight-line.” She tapped on her NavTrack panel. “Right now Haklo is leading Tree in orbit. So the distance is six-tenths AU for their ships to return to Tree.”

In short, every Niktoren spaceship could return to their home world within a half hour to an hour. Assuming their fusion pulse drives gave them the same twenty percent of lightspeed thrust that each fleet ship could put out. But arriving suddenly above their moon Nightglo and sending a broadcast to this Council of theirs should prevent any impulsive hostility. He hoped. Jack looked to the front screen images of his allies.

“Hideyoshi, Gareth, everyone, we leave for this moon of theirs within two minutes.” He gestured to his Pilot. “Elaine will provide you all with the NavTrack coordinates for our blip jumping on grav pull. Uh, when we arrive let’s communicate by way of our laser tightbeam Come-Back signals. And we move to a Pinwheel Plasma Torch configuration, with our fusion drives pointed outward.” He paused, trying to cover the vitals before they went to gravitational lensing and blipping. “We have six ships with Higgs Disruptors. Let them sweep the space around our arrival point with their beams to clear out any stealth mine fields that may be orbiting this moon of theirs. If we are attacked, we use our drive flares to disrupt incoming energy beams and our lasers and particle beams to kill solid stuff. Let’s keep our antimatter and Higgs beamers secret.”

“
Hai
,” said Akemi in the
Orca
.

“
Bai
,” came from Ignacio in the
Badger
, his black beret atop his helmeted head. The man gave a wave to Elaine.

“
D’accord
,” offered Heloise from the
Ferocious
.

“As you command,” said Hideyoshi from the
Bismarck
. “And I like the idea of keeping some of our weaponry secret. Gives us more options in the case of combat.”

“Damn right!” growled Maureen.

He smiled at the flood of agreement from the other ship captains. Twenty-two of them had seen the translated AV broadcasts, had heard the analysis of Blodwen, Denise and Nikola, and now were prepared to follow him into another First Contact with an Alien species who might become members of the Freedom Alliance. Or might not.

“Coordinates transmitted,” Elaine said, sounding cool and calm like the experienced pilot she was.

“Max, activate our grav-pull. Take us inward,” he said, sitting back in his seat and folding his gloved hands atop his gut.

Ahead the multiple images went blurry, then jagged as the gravitational lensing created by the artificial creation of an external gravity node caused warping of incoming photons. The
Uhuru
moved toward that node at a speed of eighty percent of light. They had five hours to pass until they reached their emergence point. Well, let someone else worry about a meal. His heart had been hammering too much during the AV broadcasts, especially when the Niktoren hunter youth had ripped the heart from the Magun predator. While the bloody Rite of Passage ritual had many Earth analogues among the Maasai, Zulu, Aztec and Huli tribes, it stuck with him. He was used to getting his meat from meat processors, whether on Mathilde, Ceres, Vesta or elsewhere in Sol. Which meant someone else did the tough job of separating meat from tendons, bones and vertebrae. But now, they were about to meet a Tech modern people who still killed the predators that had once hunted them. And they ate the raw meat of that dead predator. Idly he wondered if the Niktoren preferred their meat raw like the
sushi
of Japan, or chose to cook it over flame, broiler or microwave. Soon enough they would find out. Jack closed his eyes, slowed his breathing and did his best to banish his worries about his ability to lead his fleet and his people into unknown danger. Danger was part and parcel of building the Freedom Alliance. A part he accepted as simple reality. But it would be nice to run into a pacifism-focused Alien people . . .

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The fleet emerged from grav-pull 5,000 kilometers above the north pole of the moon Nightglo. Very quickly the front screen filled with multiple images. Nikola used her Schmidt scope to bring in an image of the two fusion drive ships that were just leaving the world of Tree. Elaine put up a sensor map showing the locations of all Niktoren spaceships, stationary neutrino sources and local rad emissions in the UV, IR, gamma ray, x-ray and graviton ranges, along with alerts on any weapons platforms she could detect. The images of his fellow captains popped into view at the top of the screen. In the middle was a true-light image that looked down at the cratered north pole of Nightglo. Which, unlike Earth’s satellite, was not gravity-tide locked to keep one face toward Tree.

“Ranging!” called Elaine. “Lidar from a mining camp near the pole has just scanned us. The two oncoming ships will do the same once they receive our true-light image. They are 380,000 kilometers distant. Uh, the equatorial space station is now lidar ranging us also.” She paused, tapped her NavTrack and Sensor panels. “No aggressive behavior yet. No laser or missile launches. But I think they have gravitomagnetic sensors in view of how quickly they ranged us.”

“Too damn quickly for my taste!” said Maureen from the holo that hovered above Jack’s Tech seat.

He had already activated his Tech panel and put it into Tactical Display mode. The ship’s dual railguns were loaded with barrels of ball bearings while the port and starboard laser pods were on Auto-Track and Defend. “Elaine, guide us into pinwheel formation with the rest of the fleet.”

“Complying,” she said. “Maneuvering thrusters firing to aim our drive module outward. The rest of the fleet is forming into a ball.
Bismarck
is at our north pole, the
Dragon
at our south pole,
Zhukov
is 180 degrees opposite from the
Uhuru
, while
Hawk
and
Ferocious
are 90 degrees to either side.
MacArthur
is next to us. Our Higgs Disruptor ships are placed to cover all approaches to us.”