Confederation -- 15
Chapter 15
As I mentioned, it was only a couple of light-years to the Pugs' star, so it wasn't long before we dropped out of FTL in the extreme outskirts of their solar system.
Their system was almost as dusty and barren as that of the Pug-bears; only one planet, but there was a wide belt of asteroids sunward of the planet. The asteroid belt was oriented at an acute angle to the planet's orbit and gave the Pug's planet something interesting in terms of its annual climate.
The asteroid belt was quite dirty and dense. From our observation point far out in the system, it blocked a significant amount of sunlight. It looked like the Pugs' planet passed through its shadow twice a year. Since their planet had a rather extreme tilt, whenever the shadow passage coincided with their winter season, the winter would be frigid, indeed.
With that kind of planetary setup, it was no wonder the creatures didn't care for very bright light. I also thought that the harsh environment would select for the toughest, most survival-oriented individuals, and that seemed to square with my experience. They all seemed tough.
On the other hand, I didn't care how bad their living conditions were. I wanted them isolated. Maybe if we could separate them from the evil influence of the Pug-bears, they might eventually turn into creatures we could deal with on a civilized basis, but at the moment, all I wanted to do was to keep them from ever reaching space again.
Our sensors could detect a single, smallish space station in orbit with no ships nearby. We might be missing a ship or two if they were somewhere else in the system, perhaps approaching at a slow rate from the other side of the star. That was always a possibility, but we couldn't abort our attack on just a possibility.
As we approached, we detected some shuttle traffic in the system. It appeared that the Pugs were mining in the asteroid belt. There was an intermittent stream of traffic between the belt and the space station and from the station down to the planet's surface. We'd have to disrupt that enterprise, probably by destroying all of their shuttle-craft and the station. I didn't think their grasp of technology was high enough to rebuild without the Sunnys' help.
Frazzle tried the comm trick, but there was absolutely zero Sunny chatter. There had only been a few Sunnys on the station in the Pug-bears' system, and we guessed the situation was the same here.
The station was unarmed. The lack of viable inter-stellar competition led to an overwhelming lack of security steps, something that I realized we should learn from. Earth needed to expand into space as quickly as possible, and we needed to keep a sharp watch for approaching ships; plus, we needed our space presence to be heavily armed.
My mind wandered back to the way it was before the alien invasion. In its quest to maintain political power, our government promised its citizens all sorts of free benefits. The benefits were paid for by a sort of Ponzi scheme that involved creating unbacked, fiat money out of thin air. Since the money essentially was free, there was no reason to tax the life out of working people and businesses, save to keep them off-balance and under control.
The biggest crime, in my opinion, was that we failed to spend more than a pittance on the type of technological development that would result in our moving into space. When the first alien invasion reached its climax with the EMP bursts that took our civilization apart, we'd only just begun to allow private investment into space travel. Before that time, the government maintained a monopoly on space. I felt that we had been almost terminally stupid, but perhaps, with our newfound friends, we'd have a chance to do things right for a change.
The lack of any large ships meant that we didn't try to hide our approach. We traveled directly towards the station as quickly as possible. When we were about a million miles out, the Pugs belatedly became aware of our approach and called on the radio.
Frazzle answered, speaking the hissing Pug language. I figured he had a Sunny accent because it seemed like he had to repeat himself several times, but I really couldn't tell if he was saying the same thing.
He finally turned to me and said, "De Pugs think we are Pug-bears coming to check on them. They say the last Sunnys died, and they need more to works on shuttles."
He paused and looked sad, then continued, "De stupid Pugs don't maintain anything and a bunch of shuttles are broke. They want them fixed for gold mining. They been finding some gold in the asteroids and want more."
I interrupted, "I think they are going to be disappointed. We're not going to fix the shuttles. We're going to destroy them."
I got Rudy and Holmes on the radio to coordinate, and we all three fired a long pulse with our bow cannons at the station. One moment it was floating there with a few shuttles drifting in space, sparkling a little in the light of the dim sun. The next moment, there was a flash, and the entire installation ceased to exist, leaving nothing at all. It might seem inhumane, but I'd seen too many humans killed by Pugs to care.
I delegated Holmes to hunt down all of the shuttles he could find and either capture them or destroy them; his choice. Meanwhile, Rudy and I brought our ships closer to the planet and began a detailed scan.
After several orbits, we determined that there was only one spaceport on the benighted place. There were several shuttles on the small landing field, but they didn't survive our next orbital pass. The waist guns destroyed the spaceport with the same efficiency that had wiped out a belt across the enemy's position in downtown Boulder several months ago.
Leaving the surviving Pugs to their own devices, we joined Holmes in his search of the asteroid belt. He'd captured four shuttles and destroyed three others by the time we got there.
A further search didn't turn up anything other than a small mining colony on a large chunk of rock. They didn't have a shuttle, and I figured they probably didn't have much in the way of supplies. I'd previously decided not to deal with Pug captives. They didn't respond to kindness and were just too troublesome to fool around with. We could have wiped out the colony, but I decided to leave them to their own devices. This, too, might seem cruel, but they wouldn't have hesitated to kill as many humans as they could get their bony hands on.
We reformed our small squadron and loaded up the new shuttles on the docking hard points. Regretfully, we didn't have enough storage for all four and had to destroy one. We sent it in a trajectory that would end in the sun. Then we turned towards Earth.
I still hadn't figured out a way to help the Sunnys rid themselves of the Pug-bears on their planets, but I had an idea that maybe Ian's research would lead to a solution.