There was a continuous low clanking from something that the Sunny repair crew was doing. I’d been in my cabin for several hours; how many, I didn’t know, but I hadn’t been able to sleep despite lying horizontal and keeping my eyes closed. I was still worrying about my insight. I needed more force, more fighters on our side. I wished for about the hundredth time that I could simply call Rudy and his men, but then I remembered that many of them had died in the prior run-in with the pug-bears. I wasn’t even sure Rudy had survived his hair-brained attempt to get to Miami. There was no way to know.
One thing I felt good about was having the spaceship repaired. I felt pleased with myself for having figured out how to arm it, too. I didn’t know if anyone would ever hear about it, but I’d more than survived my first space battle despite one of the Pug’s shuttles nearly scorching our gun off the bow. Suddenly, a thought hit me. What if they’d actually hit our gun? We’d have been out of business and forced to run. There was no other replacement weapon of that caliber on board and besides, the gun we had needed to be recharged manually. That was a huge oversight that I’d neglected to rectify. I jumped up and ran out to the bridge.
Frazzle was sitting at the control station, as he usually was. I don’t know when he actually slept. “Frazzle! Are there any other big anti-matter guns like the one we put on the bow?” I gasped, trying to catch my breath as I came through the entry.
“Yes, dere two more. Dey were made for the other two ships being builded.”
“Where are the guns now? Here in orbit or on the surface?” That was a rather critical piece of information. I doubted that the Pug-bears would willingly send them up to me if they had them. If the Sunnys had them, they were probably too busy and maybe needed the weapons themselves to create auto-traps.
“Dey in the station supplies arm. Does we need them?”
“Yes, I want to mount them on the lower edge of the habitat space, above the waist of the ship. We can put one on each side, and that way, we’ll be able to deal more effectively with multiple attacks simultaneously.”
He frowned at the idea of combat but slowly nodded in agreement. I had a momentary thought that I might be assigned to one of the lower levels of Hell for perverting these innocent, non-violent creatures’ thinking.
“Also, the gun we have on the bow has only a limited capacity before it has to be manually recharged. I’d like to see if we can connect the power supply to the ship’s power. That way, we won’t have to worry about running out of shots in the middle of a bad situation. Can you see if the workers over there can set up mountings on the sides of the ship? I don’t expect them to actually mount the guns, though. I can do that like the last time.”
“Well, some of dem have put guns on the Pugs’ shuttles. Pugs get tired of doing it themselves and make us, so some can do it.” He looked distressed at the thought.
It was another thing to hold against the Pugs. I didn’t like the Pug-bears. They were so alien and feral acting that they often seemed to have no more mercy than an animal, despite their empathetic mental control ability. The Pugs, on the other hand, were at least civilized to the degree of an iron-age society. True, their lives were short, brutal, and exclusively focused on fighting for status, but I still had the thought that they could probably understand enough about the Sunnys to treat them better. The Sunnys were very special in my mind. I was unaware of any other group of people who were so naturally non-violent. Humanity certainly didn’t have an analog for them. Even non-violent religious sects didn’t compare. The Sunnys not only objected to and refrained from violence; they were almost entirely incapable of thinking about it.
“Frazzle, let’s get them working on the other mounts and see if they can figure out how to link the power supplies up to the ship. Also, get the other two guns out here to our ship. If we have to run from some force that the Pugs might bring against us, at least we’ll be able to finish mounting them ourselves.”
“OK, den!” He’d adopted some of our colloquialisms.
After we’d had that conversation, I returned to my cabin. I was still tired and hoped to get some sleep. I’d handled one aspect of force-multiplication. Additional firepower would be very helpful and might make the critical difference in our survival in case of any additional space battles. Unfortunately, I still wanted more fighters. I continued mulling that over, even going so far as to contemplate returning to Earth to try and recruit volunteers. It didn’t take long for me to reject that idea. I could see myself trying to run a recruitment campaign for some of the Eastern Slope Warlord’s fighters. It didn’t seem like that was one of my better ideas.
I finally came around to a thought that I’d had before. It had originally occurred to me when we were first trying to stop the invasion years ago. Liz had found a booklet detailing the planets dominated by the aliens and showing their projected targets, of which Earth was next on the list. The fifteenth planet in the booklet had some kind of creatures or civilization that had apparently fought off the Pug-bears’ invasion. At the time, I’d mentioned to Liz that perhaps we might consider allying ourselves with those creatures.
She’d been quick to point out that we didn’t know anything about them, and the old statement, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” often proved to be wrong. The enemy of your enemy can as easily become your enemy, too. There’s no hard and fast rule on this point, obviously.
So, that left me with the rather desperate idea that maybe we could go to that planet and see if we could find out how the residents had stopped the Pug-bears. Maybe they wouldn’t want to ally with us, but perhaps we could still learn some things from them that would help. I couldn’t see what else we could do. The Sunnys on the planet below were barely holding the Pug-bears off, and the outcome was dubious despite our comet-water-bomb tactic.
There was no way I wanted to inject our tiny force of four humans into that situation. We’d simply get killed without accomplishing anything. We could try to drop some more things on the Pug-bears’ heads, but they weren’t centralized anywhere. They didn’t live in groups and were distributed across the mountains. The only reasonable target had been their breeding grounds, and the comet had taken those out. Dropping random rocks was just as likely to hurt the Sunnys as the Pug-bears. I was reminded of the military adage that you can’t take and hold ground with air power alone.
I finally came to a decision. It was the enigmatic fifteenth planet. That was the only place I knew that offered a possibility of finding fighters that could help shut down the Pug-bears’ expansion plans. I didn’t like it much, but that was it. At least I was confident that my mental abilities would let me communicate with the creatures there. All we needed was for the guns to get mounted and to take on some supplies. With that thought, I finally fell asleep.
Mounting the two extra guns didn’t take more than five hours. The Sunnys were able to weld the mounts in place and then used their tugs to haul the guns out. They apparently had no problem making the connections and linking up the control interface. My idea of hooking the weapons to the ship’s power supply wasn’t much harder to implement.
There were access ports scattered across much of the hull that allowed various tools to be hooked into the power. The welding had actually been powered by the ship through these ports, and it was a simple task to co-opt three of the power ports for the guns. The most difficult one was the initial gun, mounted as it was on the bow-shield plate. The nearest power port was under the rear edge of the shield, where it was out of the way and protected from any stray rocks that managed to get through the deflection field. The Sunny engineers allowed as how they couldn’t easily run a cable through the shield plate. It was some hyper-dense material that was almost impervious to cutting or drilling. Instead, they ran a heavily armored cable from the power port to the gun. The cable was exposed across about twenty meters of shield and could be vulnerable there, but they managed to leave the gun’s regular power pack in place as a backup system. That meant if the cable was cut, we’d still have about a hundred shots before we couldn’t use the gun any longer.
I thought that was probably good enough. I couldn’t imagine needing to shoot that much, but then, I was a novice at this sort of thing, too. I felt better about the other two guns. They were mounted right on top of the power ports, and their mounting shielded the ports to a high degree. They would be harder to knock out unless a well-aimed shot hit them directly.
On the fifth day after arriving in orbit and taking the space station, we said “Goodbye” to the station Sunny crew and moved off a reasonable distance with a few brief pulses of our thrusters. Frazzle laid in our course to the fifteenth planet.
It was a longer journey than the first one we’d taken to the Sunny Planet. Our new destination was roughly at the far end of a triangle from Earth. Visualize Earth as being located at the right angle corner of a right triangle. Then, the planet where we are now would be located at the nearest corner to Earth. This new planet was located at the end of the triangle’s hypotenuse, a line that ran from the Sunny planet to planet fifteen. The journey would take roughly twenty-one days to complete. The leg back to Earth from the fifteenth planet was shorter. That leg of the triangle was about fourteen days.
I didn’t actually know how far the systems were from each other. I still hadn’t been able to discuss distance with either of my Sunny friends sensibly. There was something about the concept that seemed to go against their worldview. We could communicate better when discussing time from one point to another. They didn’t get it when I tried to divide time into velocity and distance. It was, I guess, all space-time to them.
They knew precisely where the Pug-bears’ system was, though. It was a fairly short distance perpendicular to the plane of the triangle I just described. The Pugs’ planet was only a short hop away from that of the Pug-bears. The two were located in a loose binary system. The stars circled each other in a stately pavanne at a distance of a couple of light-years. As sisters, they had much the same chemical composition, a fact that probably accounted for some of the alienness of the two races. I learned these facts during the latter part of our voyage to the planet of the Pug-bears’ only failure – unless you could consider the Earth a failure, but the outcome there was still in doubt.
We spent the first part of the voyage ensuring that the new systems and weapons were in working order. There was no way to actually engage in target practice with the new guns while we were at FTL velocity. Still, I had Frazzle set up simulations on the main computer and then download them into the weapons control systems. It was cumbersome; however, it worked well enough that I felt reasonably assured that the systems not only worked but that I could simultaneously control all three weapons. I spent several hours engaging simulated targets. I eventually learned how to set up the system to fight three enemy ships simultaneously and then transition to the next three within a few milliseconds of firing at the first targets. Erin, as usual, was a close observer.
She was somewhat startled on the fourth day when I asked her to take over the weapons system.
“Are you sure, Dec? I don’t know anything about space guns,” she objected.
“Look, Erin, I might be injured somewhere else, and someone needs to be able to help defend us. I’d try Ted and Frank, but neither of them has any interest in this type of fighting. I’ve already asked. Ted never got interested in computer games, and Frank says that he only understands two-dimensional football strategy, so they’re not going to be the main candidates for this. That leaves you, so please sit down and let me run you through the operation.”
I did my best to train her, and it turned out that she was really a natural at this sort of thing. She, too, had never been interested in computer combat games. Still, the idea of being able to defend her life made the learning experience far more important than simply playing a game. She was very quick to pick up the controls, and it only took her a few tries to begin to master the strategic aspects of targeting. It was a little more complicated than that, but, in my limited experience, I judged that she’d almost caught up with me in terms of skill level after a day of training. After that, we took turns posing different scenarios for Frazzle to program, trying to come up with something that would cause the other person severe problems and, hopefully, cause them to improvise and devise a new strategy for a firing solution. If it hadn’t been so serious, it would have been fun.
It did bring us closer together and taught each of us that the other could be relied upon to give their best in a fight. She seemed to accept that we weren’t going to develop a romantic relationship, but a couple of times, I caught her looking at me with a thoughtful gaze that seemed to have more than a little sexual heat. At least, the practice kept us busy in a productive way. Frank and Ted simply played cards most of the time, save for the times when they decided to work out or attend to their weapons.
We finally dropped out of FTL speed about sixty light-minutes from a hot blue star. There were a large number of planets circling this sun at a fair distance. The closer ones were mostly on the order of Mercury: hot and burned up, inconducive to any life. Our destination was farther away from the star than I would have thought, but the Cinderella zone was, by necessity, a long way out. Frazzle assured me that the temperature there was bearable for humans, but he still thought we’d find it very hot.
We had to approach carefully. The Pug-bears had left a small orbital station guarding the planet. Whistle thought there was always a small contingent of Pugs and a few Sunnys on the station. Their task was to keep watch for any kind of activity from the planet. Apparently, the Pug-bears had been so upset by their unprecedented defeat there that they wanted to ensure that nothing ever came up from the planet’s surface.
Sitting behind Frazzle in the bridge, I asked the obvious question. Why hadn’t they used kinetic energy weapons – rocks – and bombed the crap out of their enemy? He gave me a long, involved speech dealing with some philosophical concept covering the undesirability of violence and how that meant the Pug-bears did the correct thing by giving up on the planet.
I finally tired of his circumlocutions and tried to pin him down, whereupon he gave me a more direct answer. It turned out to be due to the same reason that I hadn’t been able to bomb the Pug-bears on the Sunny planet. There were simply no cities or concentrations of force to target on the planet below. The possibility of simply using a huge KEW to rid the planet of life had fortunately not occurred to them.
We approached the planet on the opposite side from the orbital station’s location, hoping that we could get close enough to figure out how to take it down without having to destroy the thing. I didn’t want to kill the Sunny crew, even though I could care less about the Pugs. The problem was that I couldn’t have a station full of Pugs with unknown offensive capabilities hanging around while I landed on the surface of the planet in what might prove to be a vain and foolhardy attempt to recruit the locals into my self-defined war.
I was sitting, pondering the problem with my chin resting on my hand, when Frazzle alerted me to a pleasant development. He was in contact with the Sunnys on the station, and they’d informed him that there was only a minimal crew on board. There were six Sunnys and only four Pugs. The best part was there were no Pug-bears currently in residence. The facilities were minimal, and the Pug-bears didn’t care for the lack of space. The last remaining Pug-bear had been picked up by the periodic supply ship a long time ago. The Pugs mostly left the Sunnys alone and had delegated the daily operations to them, so there was little chance that the Pugs would even hear that we’d entered the system as long as we transported onto the station. They would undoubtedly notice the fact that a large ship had docked if we tried that. I also didn’t want the presence of the guns attached to the waist and bow to give them ideas.
There had been other Pugs stationed with the four remaining ones, but they’d lost shuttles during their infrequent patrols. The station normally had three atmospheric-capable shuttlecraft, but it was now down to one.
One shuttle had been lost when the crew had landed at the abandoned fort while bombing the natives. They’d abruptly gone black and had never come back on the air. The second was lost when the last patrol got caught in the local equivalent of a hurricane. The pilot hadn’t realized exactly how high the storm system rose into the atmosphere, had flown into the top edge of the eye, and had been caught in turbulence. Since the Pugs weren’t exactly what you would call expert pilots, he’d been forced down, and after some intermittent communication from the surface, that shuttle had gone off the air. The Sunnys presumed that both of the crew were now dead. They didn’t think that anyone could survive down below for very long due to the ferocity of the local animal life forms.
The immediate result of our contact was that I interrupted Frank and Ted’s card game, got them loaded up with their weapons, and we transported over to the station with Whistle. The local Sunnys were a little dubious when they first set eyes on us, especially on the two big men, but Whistle calmed them down, and they led us rapidly through the station’s core to the Pug’s habitat arm. This station was configured with three arms: one for the Sunnys, another that was reserved for the Pug-bears, and the final, atmospheric-controlled one in which we were planning on going Pug hunting.
We cycled through the unguarded airlock and moved quietly down the hall, followed by Whistle and one of the local Sunnys. The local guy informed us that the Pugs would most likely be in the larger space at the end of the arm. That space was designed to provide the residents with a simulation of their own planet, complete with the correct gravity, atmosphere, some prey animals, and plant life. If it was representative of the Pugs in general, I already knew that I wouldn’t like it.
The end of the hall had a large set of double doors that evidently served the purpose of keeping the native animal life under control. It wouldn’t do for the creatures to somehow find their way out to the main part of the habitat.
We prepared ourselves, first shooing the Sunnys back a safe distance down the hall. They quickly retreated and hovered nervously around a couple of doors they could easily duck through. As we were ready to attempt our entry, Whistle came dashing down to where I was and grabbed onto my arm with both hands. “Dec, you watch out! Dey’s maybe seen you,” he motioned vaguely towards a camera lens stationed near the upper left of the double doors. There was a flashing red light by the lens, and I immediately understood that indicator to mean the system was actively being used.
Without waiting another instant, I shoved Whistle out of the way and motioned to Frank, who happened to be nearest. He hit the double doors, slamming them open and nearly tearing them off their hinges. As he went through, he dropped to the floor and slid sideways towards some nearby cover.
The room was so full of plants that you couldn’t see how large it was. There were some muted animal noises in the background but nothing nearby. There was no sign of any Pug activity. The leaves were still, and the animal noises faded out rapidly as they evidently sensed our alien presence. I ducked in turn and moved around the left side of the opening. There was a large plant with huge leaves directly in front of me, and I started to slip into its inviting cover. As I did, I noticed that some innocent-looking tendrils that were attached to the stem of the plant were quivering and starting to move slowly in my direction.
That didn’t look good, and I quickly backed off. I’d previously encountered an alien plant in one of the aliens’ domes that could shoot harpoon-like weapons, and I didn’t want to give these tendrils a chance at me. I was looking at them when Ted jumped around the corner and crashed directly into the plant. The tendrils responded instantly by wrapping around every part of him they could reach. He exclaimed and rapidly made a couple of passes with his sword.
Fortunately, the tendrils were no match for the sharpened steel, and after a couple of more swings, he was free. “Man! That hyped-up vine has got a strong grip!” he exclaimed. I glanced at him, pausing to scan the undergrowth. He was looking at his left wrist, where I could see red welts where the tendrils had begun to cut right into his skin.
I whispered loudly, “Ted, Frank! Watch out for those things and any other plant that looks suspicious. The Pugs are at home here and know what’s up; we don’t!”
Frank had a wide-eyed look on his face and simply pointed at the nearest plant to his location. It was also one of the tendril-bearing ones, and the tendrils were all stretched out at maximum extension, straining for a grip on him. He seemed to get a grip on himself and replied, “Yeah! Tell me something I don’t know!”
In return, Ted shushed us with his finger over his lips and indicated a direction by pointing with his chin. I focused on what he was watching.
It wasn’t immediately apparent, but I gradually made out the broken-up outline of a Pug concealed in the bushes. I finally saw it was watching the doorway and hadn’t yet located any of us. There may not have been any Pugs in the immediate vicinity of the doors since this one, at least, hadn’t seen our arrival.
I slowly pulled out my eraser-pistol. This would be the first time I used it in combat and I wanted to be extra careful to make the shot count. I need not have worried. The anti-matter burst struck the bushes and Pug, leaving a gaping hole where his midsection had been concealed. One down.
At that moment, Frank jumped up and threw a large knife, something I hadn’t seen him do previously. Obviously, the two guards were far more capable than I’d thought, and I’d already figured they were deadly.
The targeted Pug staggered out of the bushes with the knife sticking through his throat. It took a couple of steps, and then I shot it with the pistol. Two down.
I looked at Frank, who was back down, shielded by some bushes—ones that had no tendrils that I could see. He motioned violently towards my left and then ducked as a couple of splinters ripped through the leaves over his head. I’d known that it wasn’t going to be that easy. There were only two Pugs left, but they were hunting us as hard as we were hunting them, and the terrain was to their advantage.
We kept still while Frank let out a moan as if he were struck and dying. After about thirty seconds, I could hear some rustling in the leaves, and a Pug came slinking out from behind a tendril plant. He passed Ted’s position without seeing the guard. That was a big mistake. The long sword flashed out and detached the Pug’s gun hand from his arm. The creature let out a scream and turned towards Ted, who was now standing, recovering from the swing. The sword came back up from the stroke and curved around in a neat parabola, cleaving the creature’s neck. Three down.
The last Pug evidently preferred survival over valor. I suddenly heard a body moving rapidly away from us and then the sound of a door opening on the left bulkhead. We dashed over and found that the door he’d run through had a window. Looking through, I could see the Pug looking back at me with a snarl on his face while he tried to activate some kind of touch panel on the wall. That wouldn’t do at all!
I tried the door, but it was no good – locked! The eraser-pistol was next, and that removed the barrier between us. I ducked so as to be able to aim at the Pug. As soon as I could see clearly, I shot him. His head dissolved, but as it did, I could hear the sound of some gas coming into the habitat from overhead vents. It was hissing, and I could see a faint cloud starting to descend from above. We wanted no part of that, whatever it was, so we beat a hasty retreat back through the double doors and pulled them shut.
Whistle was waiting to inform us, “Dats capture gas to knock out animals in the habitat. You might have been hurt by it, so good you gets out.”
That said it all, except for the fact that we now had total possession of the station.