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

not afraid to die.”
    Jack closed his eyes. “You should be. Max and I, we know better than to believe all that crap about dying for glory. We’re doing this for one reason—to buy Earth some breathing time.”
    “And,” growled Max from behind, “because Jack and I made a promise to some ghosts.”
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER SIX
     
    Five minutes later, the weight of several asteroids sat on Jack’s chest. Denise and Max both cried out from sudden discomfort as the Uhuru fired its Main Drive, pushing against the vector that pointed at the middle of Mole the satellite. The ship vibed briefly as it ejected a spysat to peek at Karla. He felt like his bones wanted to sink through the floor. He wished they had had the time to write code and bring online the internal ship gravity enjoyed by the Rizen. Jack wished even more that Denise weren’t so young, so innocent of the bad luck that life dumped on you. He and Max had enjoyed half a life. She was too young to know what she might yet lose.
    “We’re in Mole’s radar shadow,” Denise said tensely. She pulled the Fire Control panel over her lap. “Power is on to all weapons systems.”
    Jack looked up at the last line-of-sight telescope image of comet Karla that they’d been able to grab, before disappearing behind the small bulk of Mole. Like Smiley, this comet was deep red in color, its water ice and methane snows long ago aged dark red from ultraviolet and cosmic ray impacts. Like Neptune’s moon Triton, its surface looked wrinkled and puckered as an orange. “Denise, enlarge the north polar section of that image, please. I think I saw something up there.”
    “Right.” Denise, still breathing hard under the ongoing four gees of thrust-decel, tapped her Astrophysics armrest controls. “See the enlarged image, upper right.”
    Jack looked away from the red, beige and white-gleaming surface of Karla, focusing instead on the enlarged, digitized and false-colored image of its north pole region. “There they are! Looks like it’s a standard behavior pattern, putting your ground base and ship at the north ecliptic pole of a Kuiper comet.” In the inset image gleamed the black-and-white streaked ovoid of the Swarm mother ship and its attached mini-ships, plus the black square of a blockhouse type surface structure.
    “Ritual behavior,” Denise gasped loudly, struggling against the decel weight. “All animals do it, even thinking animals like the Swarm. Perhaps there’s an ancient Rule among the Hunters of the Great Dark? A Rule that lays out precisely how you establish your base, your home territory, your hunting range, your Challenge to local predators, and even how you respond to a competitive attack.” She paused. “Jack, you sure the Swarm won’t accept resource partitioning? Won’t share the Kuiper Belt with us?”
    “No, I think this is a pure example of Gause’s Competitive Exclusion Principle.” On the screen, the flare of Main Drive vanished and freefall returned, allowing his chest muscles to rebound. “If the Swarm are true social predators, the only way we could co-exist with them is to give up the ecological niche we both occupy—the Kuiper Belt. That would defer competitive exclusion. But territories are established and defended through agonistic behavior—if we don’t dislodge them now, it may never happen.”
    “He’s right,” Max said, his tone determined. “We’re too similar, even though both species are a lot more than just jungle Darwinism in action. The same with the Rizen. The Swarm is here now. Either we drive them out, or we lose and the inner solar system is ravaged.”
    “Sad,” said Denise. The scope’s front screen true-light image of Karla and the Swarm disappeared as they hid behind the Mole satellite. “Look! The spysat is sending us AV imagery via bounce-back. The Lander is coming in, on track for Karla.”
    “I see it.” Jack glanced at the front screen imagery as the Uhuru settled into its