Free Earth Vs. Aliens (Aliens Series 1) by T. Jackson King

itself?” she said. “Black-and-yellow streaks on the hull? This sure as hell isn’t cryptic coloration—they aim to be seen, not camouflaged.”
    “Hey, Jack,” Max said sharply, “if they’re social carnivores like the Rizen, they’ll try to take us out. But what if they use a different part of the Kuiper ecozone, in resource partitioning, the way Lack and MacArthur showed with birds of prey and warblers? Would they still try to drive us out?”
    “Good point, Max,” he said. “Your Charon biology research is on track with what I learned from Hortie. But for sure they’re predators, based on what we see here and now. What else they are—” Jack waited a moment for an audiovisual signal from the new arrival. Nothing happened. No contact from the Alien ship, but no obvious threat either. “Denise, bring out the Fire-Control panel we jury-rigged at Monique’s station. But don’t fire the mining lasers. Let’s see—”
    “It’s splitting up!” Denise yelled.
    On the front screen, the Alien ship had indeed split up. Where once there was a single ship that resembled a giant teardrop, the attached teardrops had now broken away into twelve smaller mini-ships, leaving behind only a central attachment core. The cluster of mini-ships, each carrying blatant streaks of black-and-yellow, spread apart into cloud that curved as one, like a swarm of bees. A swarm headed straight at the Uhuru . “Max!” he yelled. “Power on that gravity-pull drive and get us out of here!”
    “Powering on!” said the Engineer.
    “God they move fast!” whispered Denise. “Just like hunting hyenas.”
    The starfield outside blurred briefly as gravity equal to a small black hole formed outside the Uhuru , then it focused differentially on one side of the graviton sphere, drawing the ship sideways and toward the intense gravity locus. Jack reached toward Denise and reset the telescope to auto-track on where the Alien mini-ships had been a moment before, then saw the ships had already adjusted their course. Like the Uhuru , they moved without drive flares, blip jumping sideways to match the Uhuru’s evasive maneuver. Their closing distance shrank to a hundred kilometers. “Denise! Switch on Hortie’s radio! Give me a way to talk to them. Now!”
    Denise reached over and tapped on a pre-set Comlink panel function. “You’ve got Charon Standard Channel Four.”
    “Alien ships, respond please. This is the Human ship Uhuru , outbound from Charon Base. Respond!”
    Nothing came back. Jack heard only the crackle of radiowaves, pulses emitted either by distant Jupiter, nearby Uranus, or from millennia-old supernovae. He looked at Denise. “Why don’t they answer? Any ideas? Quickly!”
    Denise swallowed hard. “I don’t think they’ll talk back to you—it’s not their Way.”
    “What is?”
    She squinted at the onrushing swarm. “Threat displays. Exaggerated posturing. Efforts to assert dominance over us. It’s called agonistic behavior.” She looked unnerved. “I’m guessing, but think of a pack of hyenas coming in to take down solo prey, or scavenge after a kill by the Rizen lions.”
    “Hyenas?” Jack wondered if an Earth social carnivore analogy really applied here. But these mini-ships did behave like a pack of predators, cooperating as a unit for a common objective. “Max, try the drive flare trick we pulled on the Rizen, but don’t slag them. Put us into a pinwheel tumble and let the drive plasma flare around us—then shut it off.”
    “Doing that!” the Engineer said tersely. “What are we signaling?”
    “That we’ve got sharp claws and we mean to use them!” Jack hoped the overt display worked with these new Aliens as well as the circadian photo-period trick had worked on the Rizen.
    “Jack!” Denise said nervously. “They’re sixty klicks out and closing. We have to impress them enough to make them back off, if only for a moment. Anything else we can do to scare them?”
    Behind him, the Main