We've Seen the Enemy Read online

Page 7


  Timothy got up from the chair he was sitting on and hobbled over to Ruth. He caressed her face as he wiped the tears off, and held her closely until she stopped sobbing. By now all the monitors had shut down, the noises had ceased and there was an eerie quiet in this whole place except for the constant low hum coming from below. They were about to get up and leave when Timothy thought of another question.

  “HAL, how many humans live out near the stars?”

  HAL analyzed Timothy’s question, noting that it had never stated that humans had gained star-flight capability. “Parameters, please,” it finally responded as it continued to study Timothy.

  “You mentioned China Lunar Base, on the moon. It was obviously built by humans. If they went that far, it only stands to reason they went farther. Or at least the possibility exists. How many humans live there and in the hea…I mean near the stars?”

  “Those are two questions, Timothy. In both cases, I don’t have enough information to give you a correct answer.”

  “HAL, you can be very difficult at times. Do a significant amount of humans live up in the HEAVENS?” Ruth purposely used the word because she knew HAL, machine or not, was being obtuse.

  HAL added this bit of information to its I.Q. calculations, and replied, “A significant number of humans live in space.”

  Ruth glowered at it, unsure of whether it could see her or not but guessing that it could.

  Timothy let it go for now. He was convinced that this HAL was much more then it appeared to be and that it was something to be taken very seriously.

  “Ruth, we have to find a place to sleep tonight, and food, come to mention it. HAL, where can we get some food around here?”

  “No consumable food has survived from the past. But a number of mammals live in the generator level, and there are fish that live in the river itself. Perhaps you can find a way to get them.”

  “A river in the generating level?” Ruth asked.

  “Follow the hallway back to the elevators and press the button marked ‘GL’.”

  Before they left, HAL interrupted them. “If you don’t mind, I would like to ask you both a personal question. Have you two mated? Do you have any children?”

  Timothy’s face blushed and he expected the same with Ruth, but was surprised to see both of her eyebrows up and a slight smile on her lips. “No HAL, no children.”

  “That’s unfortunate,” was HAL’s reply.

  “You’re darn right HAL. I’ve told Timothy the same thing,” Ruth said laughing.

  After she allowed Timothy a few awkward moments, she asked HAL, “Is our test over?”

  There was silence as HAL calculated her intelligence quotient and concluded that it must surpass Timothy’s.

  “Not yet,” it replied, and compiled an interim report on the events and packeted it off as Ruth and Timothy turned to leave.

  They left the Control Room and headed for the elevator as HAL had instructed. As they walked, Timothy thought back to the displays in the Control Room, and then he asked Ruth, “Ruth, that door you brought me in through on the surface, did you close it after you came through?”

  “No, Tim. It was jammed partly open, just enough for me to drag you through. Why?” Ruth replied.

  “Just curious…”

  ***

  Unknown to them, Rat followed them from the beginning and had snuck into the Control Room after they had left. He was thin and short, and his skin was greasy and pale, although the dirt that clung to it gave it some color. His fingernails were dirty and broken and his teeth ragged from biting on things that shouldn’t go anywhere near a person’s mouth. His beady, close-set eyes didn’t miss a thing as he ferreted out information and used it for his benefit, which earned him only the wrong kind of friends. He would have been shunned had Pliny not been his father.

  He looked over the equipment and watched as the monitors stayed black, wondering what it was that they had been up to. He dropped to his hands and knees and carefully scanned the light dust on the ground, noticing that they had gone from one of the screens to the other, as if they were looking at something.

  He had also heard a another voice, but once in the room he had found no sign of anyone else. Puzzled, he thought it over, thinking that perhaps they were onto his presence and were trying to fool him, but the way they walked past him in the hallway as he hid behind the metal monster told him they weren’t.

  He decided to put that aside for now, and walked back out of the room and into the hallway. He smiled and congratulated himself at his cunning, knowing that he was incredibly good at this sort of thing and that Pliny would be very happy with this new information. He had received many blessings from Pliny, who had saved him from sure death, being the misfit he was, but Rat wasn’t fooled. He knew that Pliny despised him, but he also knew that he was valuable. Pliny had even promised him a woman! He had a smile on his face as he contemplated Pliny’s reaction to what he had learned and the end result.

  CHAPTER 6

  BETA-9

  Jack watched as the aliens concentrated their attack on the shield division area of the ship she called home. Aliens knew that shields repelled each other, and that a ship that big couldn’t generate a single shield big enough to envelope the entire ship. A combination of two shields, one fore and another aft would protect the entire ship but where the shields met, they would flatten and slightly repel each other, like balloons squeezed closely together. To keep the shields from tearing the ship apart, the engineers worked out a nexus – a super-strong structure that connected both ends of the ship together and provided enough support to withstand an adequate amount of shield compression. Unfortunately, the aliens had learned that by concentrating fire in between the two ‘bubbles’ you could actually squeeze through a thin projectile or energy beam, opening the way for a larger missile.

  Jack’s ship was now dying as the shields collapsed and the nexus was torn apart from the projectiles. She was surprised by a large blinding light, and her eyes needed time to readjust themselves, but by the time she could see again her own ship was being severely buffeted by the planet’s atmosphere and her view had become distorted. She wondered if the aft section had indeed survived, but hoped not. With no way of moving, it was only a matter of time until that part of the ship drifted toward this planet and burned on reentry.

  “Jack, it’s time to eject. The Rapier will become unstable very soon.” It had no vectors, no controlling surfaces, no shielding and no way to remain stable in flight in an atmosphere. Even if it somehow miraculously survived atmospheric reentry, she would be killed long before it crashed, by the buffeting and spinning as the ship spun out of control.

  “Now Jack! If you don’t eject, I will have to take over.”

  “Fine! Speed?”

  “27,000 kilometers per hour.” She cursed Nancy, Scratch, her old boyfriends and most of all, the aliens. She thought about Bones as she jerked hard on the one of only two levers in the cockpit.

  There was nothing quite as ecstatic as free-falling from 160 kilometers up. Her seat had naturally spun backward to her direction of travel, and after stabilizing itself and firing the retro-rockets, it had automatically released the harness that held her suit tightly in place. Now that her Drop suit, better known as the MAXON T4 was disconnected, the suit comp told her that her speed was quickly dropping and was now at 22,660 kilometers per hour. The roar of the thin atmosphere rushing past her quickly increased to the point of being deafening, but she barely heard it as she looked down at the panorama of a distant surface. Jack stretched out in the standard pose, quite relaxed as she watched the ground far below. Her suit was at full power because its crystalline/metallic fused surface converted heat into energy and stored it until its ultra efficient capacitors were full. After that, any extra energy received was released automatically in timed pulses through the charge dump nodes on the surface of her suit. The more energy it received, the more intense the pulses were, until it was released as lightning.

  By th
e time she reached the troposphere, the intense electrical discharges would have blinded a nearby observer or shorted out any electrical circuits on passing craft. This particular unit had seen a lot of action, the last eight years of it from Jack herself. Jack could see the aura of the power discharging into the atmosphere as it soaked up the heat and re-directed it outward, and she felt her hair stand on end inside her suit from the ionized charge that seeped in. She had only done this once before on a training jump, and enjoyed every second of it while most of her student team retched in their own suits. The twenty minute dive was not nearly long enough for her.

  “5000 meters Jack,” her suit comp reminded her.

  Jack broke out of her reverie and looked around to find a suitable spot to land. She still didn’t know what she was going to do, and this barely habitable planet didn’t seem particularly welcome, but she might as well go where she had a better chance of surviving. She had no idea how long she was going to be here. ‘Perhaps the rest of my short life’, Jack thought. The bleakness and lack of significant vegetation depressed her.

  “4000 meters, deploying air brakes.”

  “Not yet comp, I want to drift over a bit.” Jack spotted an area that seemed unusual. It didn’t fit the natural surroundings, and she wanted to take a look. The aliens had come from this planet surface, and they obviously must have had either a huge base or a number of them.

  “Comp, mark location.” The computer tracked the direction of her eyesight, pinpointed the target area, and ‘marked’ the area for future reference.

  “3000 meters, deploying air brakes.”

  ‘Damn, still too far. Guess I’ll have to walk,’ Jack thought. She concentrated now on her landing, adjusting her air brakes to fine tune her descent. At 1000 meters up Jack started noticing something unusual on the target landing area displayed on her helmet, three round dots on an otherwise bleak and featureless area. She thought they were rocks until she noticed the three coming together.

  “Alien activity, 3 units, 800 meters below!” her suit blared, a moment after she noticed it.

  “Ants! Damn bugs are everywhere, even in my landing area!” She cursed and was about to shift her air brakes when an idea formed in her head.

  The oldest alien scout was also the last one to pick up the chemical message, his antennae being brittle and lacking sensitivity. The two younger scouts had just been hatched, and their keen sensors immediately picked up the tiny particulates of contrail condensation and residual hydrogen ions, and getting together to rub antennae, came to the conclusion that a (possible) human ship had landed nearby. This was critical information for the protection of the hive. All three had agreed on the course of action and were just about to turn away when one of the younger scouts suddenly stopped and noticed a shadow forming below him. It turned its head just in time to have the one side of its thousands of prismatic eyes register two large feet, just as Jack smashed into the three alien bugs.

  “YEEHAWWW!!! Did you get that comp?” Jack asked.

  “Yes.”

  ‘The boys back home are going to love that one’, Jack thought, as she laughed to herself over the incident. “Stupid bugs! Just wish there were more.” At close to 200 kilometers per hour not even a bug exoskeleton could protect it from a 400 kg suit and the 57 kilogram person in it.

  ‘Hmm, wonder what they’ll call me now. Bug Stomper,…Bug Squisher,…The Squisher,…Jack Squisher…wow that was terrible. The Hammer…Jack Hammer!’ Jack laughed at the thought, thinking back to good times and memories when someone else called her by that call sign, one she refused to use. She certainly wouldn’t use it now, knowing Scratch would turn it into something sexual once he found out. ‘Then again, he turned everything into something sexual’, Jack thought, but quickly scowled as she remembered that Scratch was probably dead.

  Jack’s suit had automatically inflated an internal air bladders to compress her body and protect her from the landing. While she waited for it to retract she scanned her surroundings to verify that the ones she crushed were dead, and to make sure there weren’t more.

  “Comp, atmospheric statistics.”

  “Nitrogen, 62%; carbon dioxide, 20%; oxygen, 11%; water, 4.5%; arsenic, .5 %; ammonia .3%, moisture, .2% and the rest are inert trace gases. Barometric pressure is 650 millibars and temperature is at 17 degrees.”

  “And gravity?”

  “Gravity, .8 Earth.”

  “Great, a veritable paradise. Might as well go see what those bugs are up to.”

  Because Jack’s suit augmented her every move, she didn’t notice the gravity difference. WF221’s gravity was kept earth normal, as was every other ship in the fleet. Legend had it that Earth had not been destroyed during the Great Escape, but that both it and some extraordinary people on it survived the cataclysm. Jack didn’t think she’d see a livable Earth again, but keeping gravity at normal was both logical and psychological, giving them hope.

  “Comp, give me power levels and alert me to any unusual movements or electrical activity,” Jack said.

  “81% and yes, Jack, I will notify you,” her suit replied. “By the way, that was very impressive.”

  “That was what?” she asked, surprised again.

  “Your decisive reaction to the situation and your calm demeanor was very impressive. My sensors showed that your heart rate spiked when you formulated your plan, probably out of excitement, but during the execution it never rose above seventy-eight beats per minute.”

  That was the first time Jack had ever heard of any suit doing something like this. “Is commendation in your programming?” she asked but got no response, again unusual.

  ‘I’ll have to get this checked out,’ she told herself before it hit her how stupid the thought was.

  She looked around the ground and noticed claw marks in the soft arid sand, took a bearing on their direction and starting jumping. At nearly a hundred meters per jump, it not only saved time but allowed her to see further into the distance. As she landed, she confirmed her direction with the same claw marks. She had to backtrack several times to find them again, and at one point spent several hours searching for sign over rocky terrain.

  Unless the aliens had a specific destination and purpose, they would randomly walk from one point to another. This was surprisingly effective when it came to scouting but made their actions predictable.

  Jack took one more jump, and in mid jump she noticed an unusual opening in the near distance.

  “Alien activity, multiple units, 2.2 kilometers bearing 221 degrees!” Her suit said, once again late on the call. “Uneven ground density, 65% probability of a subterranean cavity! Brace for landing!”

  As Jack came down, she noticed nothing unusual about the terrain but she loosened up and set herself up for a soft landing anyway. Suits were hardly ever wrong, and they were almost as complex as their pilot’s ship.

  The ground came up, and Jack felt it break up through the suit biofeedback. Before she knew it, she had sunk waist deep into soft volcanic rock, with her lower legs dangling free below the surface. She had stopped at her arms, which left her with little available movement.

  Jack hung there, feeling somewhat like a cork in a bottle.

  “What’s underneath me?” she asked.

  “A subterranean cavern of undetermined length, but greater than 200 meters south west in length and 123 meters northeast in length. The irregular cave bottom is approximately 10 meters down from where you are now. The temperature is 27 degrees Celsius, humidity is 65% and there is considerable more oxygen, at 16%. There is also life, unclassified, and mostly smaller than your head. This is all I can tell from this position.”

  Jack had to laugh at the reference to her head. “Is my head big?” she asked, and then added “How does this life compare to the size of my ass?” and giggled away until she remembered where she was.

  “Your head is slightly smaller…”

  “Cut it out, I was kidding,” Jack quickly added. She took stock of her situation and afte
r several attempts at moving, decided she was really stuck. “Isn’t that great,” she muttered. “What’s my energy level?”

  “78%.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “No,” the suit computer replied.

  “Any alien activity in the surrounding area?”

  “Only the aliens below us and those 2.2 kilometers away,” her suit comp replied.

  “How are the life forms below us reacting?”

  “They appear to be tending to their duties as before.”

  “Power down then, minimal life support but temperature at 18 degrees, and keep an eye out.”

  It was getting dark now and too much that happened for her to have any energy left to struggle. She drank water and took care of her bodily needs, things that the suit cared for automatically even when powered down. Jack looked around at the purple tone of the landscape, noticing the lava-like formations all around her. The wind blew strongly against her but she didn’t feel it. She could easily see the dust devils kicking up all around her and figured the double sun made the weather system on this planet go haywire. Still, the setting suns did look pretty, and she stayed there watching them until they finally disappeared over the horizon.

  Jack’s eyes finally fell on the ground she was now stuck in. Shards of volcanic rock lay all around her from the impact of her landing, though she figured the majority would have been driven below. After looking closely, she figured it must have been a lava tunnel that she had fallen through. The cave roof was less than a meter below, seeing as she could move her legs. She reached out and grabbed a piece of the rock laying near her and she easily crushed it in her suited up hands. As she thought about all this, she drifted off to sleep.

  Scratch had just gotten up from eating and was passing Jack with a tray full food and snacks for later. He had filled his pockets full of snacks too, and they were dropping out as he walked. Jack saw him coming and watched in awe at the amount of food he was going to eat between now and dinner. There was something about him that attracted her, and yet at times she felt angry at herself for it. This came out as aggression, and now it was time to be aggressive. She stuck her leg out.