Free First Contact (Galactic Axia Adventure) by Jim Laughter

the fleets available from the independent planets was the Axia able to outlast the Red-tails. Although these incidents had occurred nearly five years ago, it was still causing repercussions throughout the entire service. Suddenly hearing Leatha’s voice shook him out of his own recollections of history. Delmar struggled to hear Leatha’s hard, quiet retelling of the attacks.
    “We’d already experienced over thirty percent losses by the third hour,” Leatha continued with her story, “but we were starting to hold our own and even managed to get some of the damaged ships repaired and back on line.”
    “Then what happened?” Delmar gently asked. He could sense that there was considerably more.
    “Then early the next morning they hit our base unexpectedly and in force,” she said with a shudder. Visions of Delmar’s own encounter with the Red-tails came flooding back to him. “Within minutes they’d overrun our outer perimeters and were pressing us back toward the main buildings.”
    Delmar saw a tear trickle down Leatha’s left cheek. “A squadron of their ships over flew the landing area and torched virtually every ship on the ground. We watched crews we had just helped burn and die from those Red-tail rays.”
    Leatha paused and Delmar shuddered unexpectedly as his mind tried to fill in the gaps from his own experience the details Leatha was leaving out. The room seemed to echo the cold silence of space when Leatha again spoke.
    “Then it got worse,” she added, her voice cold and her eyes no longer seeing the chow hall around them. “One of their large troop ships landed in the middle of the base.”
     Delmar watched Leatha’s face grow ashen. “Hordes of Red-tails charged the building, killing indiscriminately as they advanced.”
    Her voice became hard and ragged. “We took up positions wherever we could, but still the Red-tails pressed us back, slowly separating off isolated groups which they slaughtered one by one.”
    The horror of the experience lit her face. “The group I was with took refuge in one of the supply buildings where we set up our defenses, but it wasn’t enough. By blasting through the roof they were able to attack us from all sides. It soon became hand-to-hand.”
    “What stopped them?” Delmar asked. He could feel his own hatred and loathing rising up within him.
    “Someone managed to get a call out on the comm before the Red-tails found him,” Leatha answered. “We found his remains burned into the ruined comm equipment.”
    Leatha wiped tears from her cheek and paused for a moment. She looked hard at Delmar. “The fleet heard our call and came to join the fight,” she said evenly. “The tide finally turned when more troopers landed. We heard the fire fight outside our building and the attack against us abated a little. We finally managed to repel them from our position. Troopers broke through to us and the Red-tails scattered. I was among only a handful of survivors in my group.”
    Her meal forgotten, she said, “They left me with a little souvenir.” Leatha concluded her narrative by sliding up her left sleeve. There across her upper arm was the unmistakable ragged scar left by a Red-tail the claw.
     

Chapter Five
    The scientists gathered around one of their number standing at a workbench in their cobbled-together lab. Before him was a jury-rigged affair connecting various pieces of test equipment and two recording machines. Patched in on one side of the first recorder was playback equipment holding the precious disc. Leads from the pile of equipment ran to a pair of speakers fastened to the wall above the workbench.
    “What I’ve done is use amplified harmonics to build a signal transformer capable of processing the signals at a speed we can understand,” he said to his colleagues. “The problem turned out not to be what we call a squirt transmission. The signal is in real time.”
    Several eyebrows went up at this revelation. “What gives it a highly