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

Drive flared at the same time as the maneuvering thrusters tossed them into a pinwheel spin. His partners grunted with the sudden inversion of up-down senses, felt as dizzy as him, and no doubt wished for internal grav control. But Jack kept his vision fixed on the front screen. “We don’t shoot at them. We need to try something else first.” The separation closed to forty kilometers as the Main Drive suddenly shut off, so the Uhuru wouldn’t be slagged by tumbling through its own plasma flare. Freefall hit them again. “Denise! Tell your Fire Control panel to lock-on to the Rizen Lander down on QB1. Fire one of the HF lasers at it as soon as the panel confirms Lock-On. Hurry, please.”
    She hurried. “Firing.”
    Ahead, on the Weapons display that had now appeared in a corner of the main screen, the blocky shape of the Rizen Lander exploded violently in a spurt of yellow-orange flame. Jack looked up at main screen.
    “They stopped!” Denise yelled excitedly, her freckles bright-red against her white skin.
    “Good shooting,” Max said from the rear. “We’re blipping again.”
    The starfield blurred once more as the Uhuru jumped laterally in its orbit, moving to one side of the mini-ship Swarm, yet still between the Alien ships and the comet below. Something clicked in Jack’s head. “Max, keep us in pinwheel mode, but flare the thrusters. Keep them in thrust balance! Maybe bright emission colors will warn them we’ve got more teeth than just the mining laser.”
    Denise nodded. “Good. Somehow we’ve got to do, in space, the equivalent of snarling with teeth, fluffing up our fur and screaming insults and defiance at them. Otherwise . . . ”
    “Otherwise what?” Max asked, the odor of his sweat filling the cabin.
    She looked at Jack, her manner completely serious. “Otherwise, those mini-ships will attack us directly. Maybe with lasers of their own. But they’ll retreat from us if we make them think they’ll be injured and hurt badly by the effort to hunt us.”
    “Good idea.” That fit what Jack remembered from his courses in Darwinian biology and the behavior patterns of social predators. “With no way to talk with or vidimage them, we go on what we see, here and now, of their behavior in space. Max, blip us toward the Swarm, but at a tangent, not head on. Okay?”
    “Okay. Blipping.”
    The front screen changed again. The Swarm of black-and-yellow streaked mini-ships hovered less than twenty kilometers away, similar to their orbiting above the beige-and-white surface of comet QB1. They moved as a loose group, yet the Swarm hadn’t englobed the Uhuru . Jack suspected if the Swarm ever did englobe them, it would be all over. They’d go the way a wildebeest goes when a pack of yipping hyenas close in to rip and tear the flesh from its bones, with the deadliest of them being the lead matriarch. “Denise, they’re not moving at us, but they’re spreading out, trying to englobe us. What now?”
    “Uhhh—” Their Animal Ethologist stared at reality, at real life on the screen, not some textbook filled with Communitarian excuses for why tooth and claw weren’t really civilized ways to interact. “Move sideways. Blip a lot. Don’t let them englobe us.” She paused, licked her lips, looked sick when Max carried out a series of fast blip jumps that ranged across the face of the Swarm, then looked directly at him. Wide-eyed fear showed in her face. “Jack, I’m scared. What if this doesn’t work?”
    “I’m scared too,” he said reassuringly, felt his gut churn with another of Max’s blip jumps, then thought of the next several steps. “Denise, you’ve got two hydrogen-fluorine lasers riding on the outer rim of the habitat ring. Fire them near to, but not at, the mini-ships, alternating your adaptive optics pulse-firing from one laser to another.” She bent to her Fire Control panel, touching it rapidly. “That will give you a break between peak power draws from the main fusion