Alien Mine

Chapter 28

Alarms sounded loudly throughout the Miranda Base and across the entire solar system as the sensor grid around Uranus detected a burst of energy so large it could only be a tear in space-time, signaling that an interstellar object would soon emerge from subspace and enter normal space. "Energy burst at four Astronomical Units (AU) from Miranda, bearing 0200x 3300reference grid Uranus," the Officer on watch reported steadily.

"Noted," Thea said, looking at the data as it was fed directly into tac-grid, as she let it scroll across her eyes. It was also displayed in the large hologram in the center of the operations room deep inside Miranda. "Two AU outside the defensive perimeter," Thea reported to Rhys and the other girls. The command center buzzed with sudden but controlled activity as the men and women of the Miranda Defense Force activated defenses and gave orders to evacuate all near-surface installations. The evacuation lights were flashing red, yellow, and red throughout the installations. They had planned and practiced for years, and Thea was pleased to see there was no panic and everyone confidently went about their tasks as the non essentials went to the nearest evacuation areas.

"The energy signal is less energetic than expected but falls within the parameters expected for a subspace jump into the solar system," Hua added. As soon as the tear in the space-time had been detected, Thea had withdrawn her hair from Hua's two bodies, and they had sprinted for the passageway that would take her to the surface of Miranda. A small shuttle awaited her, and in seconds, she was speeding away from the central command center while still monitoring the data inputs. Two cruisers awaited Hua; one of her bodies would take command of each of them.

Rhys was pleased with how calm everyone sounded, given the anxiety levels over the last few years as they prepared for a renewed Om incursion.

"The projected distance for emergence is further away than we anticipated," Sandy noted, her mind interlinked with the ship's AI. With Sandy's ability to completely merge her consciousness with the ship's, a crew wasn't necessary, though critical stations were manned in case she was killed or seriously injured. After all, she could survive an injury most would have died from. Standing in the center of the control station with her red hair, all 95,416 strands of it sticking out in all directions, each one making a connection with a separate component of the ship, gave her control over all ship functions. Sandy knew exactly how many strands of hair she had and what function each was doing at any given time.

Rhys only grunted in reply. He was with Sandy, monitoring the defense grid from his ship, the Ulysses, as Kiania took command of the defense network. She would manage the tactical response and maneuver the fleet while Rhys was in overall command.

He noted that stealth systems were activated across the defense grid as planned, and all sensors were shifted to passive only. One AU was about 149,000,000 kilometers, the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Four AU was approximately 600,000,000 kilometers, well outside the theoretical inside limit of 0.7 AU from a large gravitational body. If they emerged at four AU, and the Om had an in-system speed of approximately twenty percent light, they would be moving at 60,000 km/sec. It would take them approximately eighty minutes before the first layer of defense could engage.

Their plans had been in place for years, and everyone knew their jobs. The light wave from the space-time distortion should hit their outermost sensors in about sixteen minutes; then, it would be another three hours before Earth would see it. However, the communications through the symbionts were instantaneous, even over solar distances, and Mika and Anita were already spreading the alarm.

Ships in orbit around Uranus and Miranda, and even those in transit within the solar system, began shutting down their drives. Of course, it was impossible to hide everything; some freighters were docking or landing, and the massive mining operations in the asteroid belt just couldn't be hidden—likewise, the ten-kilometer-wide habitat under construction at the Earth-moon L1 Lagrange point. The first thing the Om would see was a light wave from the inner solar system that was hours old. But critical areas would be hidden and hopefully passed by.

"Anita and Mika will be leaving the UN building in ninety seconds," Sandy said out loud from where she stood in the central command center ofThe Ulysses.

"Good," Rhys acknowledged. Tell them to proceed as planned. Rhys was pleased at how the forces under his command were responding. They had been preparing for this moment since the last of the Om had been eliminated from Earth. Even before they had consolidated control over Earth's many governments, he had turned his attention to building a space force to defend against the expected return of the rapacious aliens who would devour or steal everything in the solar system. Unless they were stopped, the Earth would be stripped of all life, water, and minerals and left a lifeless hulk. The Om traveled throughout the galaxy in a swarm, and like locusts, they left nothing behind when they left. The friendly aliens who had recruited Rhys had told him that the bulk of the swarm was still at least one hundred years away. His first two years had been spent battling and destroying the initial Om scouting probe that had established itself on Earth, and this time, they expected a much stronger Omincursion.

They had used their time well. Thea and her engineers had worked a miracle by constructing a fleet of fifty-five ships, not as many as Rhys wanted, but it would have to do. In addition, sensor probes, mines, and thousands of swarming AI-controlled drones had been strategically positioned. They had done a miraculous job in the time they had, but Rhys was worried it would not be enough. They knew the Om ships would come to investigate the loss of their scouts, but the size and capabilities of the expected force were a dangerous unknown. If there were only a few, Rhys thought they stood a chance. If there were hundreds, they would quickly be overwhelmed, and Earth could be lost.

He watched as Kiania ordered the Miranda fleet into position to defend or attack. Rhys estimated it would take at least an hour for the leading ships to get into position to engage. Saida and Innassa commanded squadrons of five cruisers and held positions near Miranda. Hua's two ships would be near but acting independently. Rhys wanted his true Binary to be able to attack or defend as needed. War gaming simulations and maneuvers showed that two cruisers under Hua's command were as deadly as a squadron. Amancia and Leslie commanded two squadrons deployed within the asteroid belt that would serve as an inner mobile defense. Darya commanded the inner ring of defenses from the asteroid belt to the orbiting defense platforms between the Earth and the moon. Anita and Mika would command the bases in West Texas, Israel, and Earth's final defenses. If it came to those final defenses, the losses could be astronomical. Everything was proceeding as planned, and Rhys made himself relax. Space was big, even at a significant fraction of light speed, he reminded himself.

It had been twelve years, one month and 13 days since Rhys had first met the Drans, but who's counting, and it appeared the Om had arrived within the time frame predicted by the AI. "Localizing," Thea said from her position deep inside Miranda Base, as the light wave hit. "Signature confirmed, unknown vessel or vessels transitioning from subspace in approximately 175 seconds. Energy signature is on the low end of the predicted scale," she noted. There was frantic but controlled activity all around her, but Thea remained focused on the incoming signal. Though she and Hua had not been able to produce a sub-light engine themselves, they were far enough along in the design stage to recognize the immense energy release of ships jumping into the system.

Kiania had designed the defenses in layers. At two AU distance from Miranda were the autonomous mines, a combination of nuclear bomb-pumped lasers and mines that were stealthed long-range missiles. Behind that were thousands of small but effective autonomous attack drones that would swarm to specific targets when given the command. The defenses on and around Miranda, the other moons of Uranus, and the manned fleet were the third line of defense. There were active missile platforms that were controlled remotely, as well as fixed missile platforms hidden deep inside every one of Uranus's twenty-eight moons. A similar layered defense was being constructed around Earth itself, which Darya commanded, but that was far from complete.

Unfortunately, it was impossible to hide the ship assembly structures around Miranda, and despite their best efforts, the energy signal from the base was too great to prevent detection. Still, Thea's command was probably in the best-defended position in the solar system. Uranus hadn't been discovered until 1781, and six years later, in 1787, thelargest two Uranian moons, Titania and Oberon, were discovered. Miranda wasn't discovered until 1948. Uranus had a total of 28 moons. Thirteen were small inner moons, five major moons, including Miranda, and then ten outer, irregular moons. One of the latter was now gone, having been broken up, and the materials used for the construction of the fleet and defenses.

Miranda Base had seen many upgrades in the last ten years, but none as important as moving the command center and power generation into the moon's center. The Om would have to literally tear the moon apart to get to her.

Anita, on Earth, heard the warning command and leaped to her feet, bumping into an aide. She ran past startled diplomats and staff, trying not to shove them aside as she made her way to the top of the United Nations building and her awaiting shuttle. "Go," she ordered as soon as she was inside while watching her tac-grid populate with the current status of the fleet, and a broad red splash of color where the disruption of the space-time fabric of the universe was opening up. From what they had learned from the AI, not even the Drans completely understood the physics of subspace travel. Immensely powerful engines were needed that could focus vast quantities of energy into an infinitesimally small volume, approaching the Planck length, in order to open a tear in the space-time continuum where space becomes curved, and classical physics loses its meaning.

In theory, it formed a channel between dimensions, allowing short jumps of up to one to five light years. Hua and Thea thought the creation of their own prototype subspace engine was at least five years away. Anita was smart, capital letters smart like all of Rhys' girls, but these physics were beyond her. It's good they had a real binary like Hua to understand it. Anita turned her mind away from these random thoughts to the task at hand. She and Mika would coordinate Earth's final defenses, and the realization brought a sense of panic. If they were forced to engage the Om forces, that would mean Rhys and the others were already dead. That was something she couldn't let herself contemplate.

When the command from Rhys arrived, Mika had been in a meeting with the Chinese delegation over the restoration of civil rights and organizing a government for the remaining provinces still under their nominal control. Even ten years later, China was still a mess politically. Rhys had needed Innassa to first govern and organize the burgeoning space colonies and now to command part of the fleet, so he split the world into two parts for administration. Anita governed what had formerly been North and South America, and the entire Pacific region, which now included the eastern provinces of China. Mika governed Africa, Asia, and Europe, as well as the remaining provinces of China. Their actions against the short rebellion fostered by the "Church of the Om" hadn't stopped others from initiating their own political and guerrilla activities, and China still seethed under outside rule.

They weren't the only ones. The impending incursion by the Om ships had forced them to put the entire world on war-time footing, and that required imposing political solutions that many felt deprived them of their liberties. Mika and Anita spent much of their time just keeping the lid on potential rebellions. They just would not comprehend that if the Earth lost this battle, their petty quests for power would be null and void, for they would all be dead. Unfortunately, some problems could only be solved by force, as old animosities and religious hatred seemed to take priority over survival. Sometimes she wondered if it was all worth it with these old religions still bringing hate and death to fellow humans. Then she sees other people trying so hard to make the world a better place, so yes, it is worth it. Now, however, her attention was completely focused on the incoming threat. The next few weeks would determine if their efforts and sacrifices had been enough to give the Earth a fighting chance.

The entity known to the humans as an intelligent machine was puzzled by the inputs it received from the improved but still primitive sensors it was receiving. Since its captivity by the Drans, the entity's abilities had only been used to move their ships through subspace because of the innate ability to navigate the interdimensional geometry necessary for faster-than-light travel. As a result, their "saviors" had placed them in containment fields aboard their interstellar vessels for that purpose. This ability gave the Drans a decided edge against the Om.

Ships with one of the enigmatic entities controlling navigation could make faster and longer jumps in subspace. Once the tunnel out of Einsteinian space had been initiated, the entity's mind could "see" the vagaries, turbulence, and dimensional drift that made subspace travel dangerous and sometimes fatal. In classical physics, gravity is always positive, attractive. In subspace, the classical theory of gravity and Einstein's theory of relativity breaks down, and the physical laws bend and change, and gravity can even become repulsive.

Gravitational anomalies existed that could tear a vessel apart, or even re-route a ship so that it emerged hundreds of light years from home, or even into the interior of a star. That is why vessels often limited themselves to short jumps of a light year or less and always exited outside the gravitational sink of a star. Drives had to be configured such that the outermost gravity anomaly, such as an outermost planet, would disrupt the subspace field, pulling the ship back into normal space/time.

Despite their abilities, the Drans had not trusted the ones they held in captivity (with good reason), and their functions had been limited to navigation by their captors. As a result the entity had no experience with battle management, but it did understand the complexities of safely entering a solar system, and the distortion it sensed in the fabric of space was unlike anything in its memories, neither Drans nor Om. The binary human sensed the entity's uncertainty; their minds linked, and data was exchanged.

"The AI is uncertain," Hua told the others. "The estimated time to emergence varies from five minutes to an hour due to unusual fluctuations in the strength of the disruption into real space. It has no record of a similar sensor reading."

"Does it know for certain that it is not Om?" Kiania quickly asked

"No, just that it is different and appears unstable,"Hua replied.

"So it could be either Om or Drans," Rhys said, unsure which he preferred.

The Om wanted to rape the Earth, but the Drans' reaction may not be much different once they discovered there were unbound symbionts present. The Drans could not control symbionts that had broken their programming. By the time they understood that their original creation could become unstable, it had infected much of their home planet causing the extreme pacifist species to tear itself apart in an orgy of violence. Unable to stop the spread, the Drans had sterilized the planet. New safeguards had been installed in the artificial lifeform to prevent that from ever happening again, until now; Bob had broken those safeguards.

Bob was unstable as Sandy had shown. Rhys had been able to ultimately control the symbiont; however, the Drans would not care about the distinction and would destroy them and the Earth. They would not risk the danger spreading.

"If they are Drans do we still assume they will be hostile?" Kiania asked.

"Yes, until proven otherwise. We will know seconds after I contact the 'One'. If I can take control, and it recognizes me as a higher 'One', then we have allies. Otherwise, we treat them as enemies."

"Assume whoever it is will transition in five minutes," he ordered Kiania, hoping they had an hour."

Lieutenant Commander Azuma and her crew of fifteen drifted quietly in the outer darkness well beyond the orbit of Uranus, all systems shut down except for minimal life support and passive sensors. LCDR Azuma was a member of the "Survivors Brigade", the only Japanese to have been taken prisoner and survived the final battle with the Om, and now the Commander and pilot of Scout Squadron Alpha. There were nine other small ships in her squadron, each one armed with missiles and accompanied by ten drones. The crews were all volunteers because they would be the first ones to attack the alien ships, probing their defenses, and trying to identify any weaknesses.

Azuma likened them to the small torpedo boats used by the Americans against the Japanese in the war in the Pacific. They scouted the enemy, fired their torpedoes, and then used their speed to escape. That was the untested idea in this war, and survival was questionable. That is why they were all volunteers. Even knowing the risks, Azuma hadn't hesitated; she knew what the alien monsters were capable of. She still had nightmares of her time deep within the Om nest, stripped naked by the alien monsters and injected with nanos, listening to the others scream as their bodies and minds were transformed. Just thinking about it made her grip the controls harder with her knuckles whitening. Her body trembled slightly, not enough for any of her crew to see, but not in fear. No, it was like a horse at the starting gate, ready to run, or in this case, attack the monsters that still haunted her dreams and perhaps cleanse some of the memories. Dying would also take care of that if necessary, but first, she wanted revenge.

"Emergence, now," the admiral transmitted to all.

LCDR Azuma's hands clinched the controls, her finger caressed the button that would launch them to almost a quarter of light speed toward the aliens. The trembling stopped, replaced with a cold hatred. "Come on, you mother fuckers, just a little closer," she murmured to herself.

"What the fuck?" Thea shouted out as the first visual images came in.

"What is it?"Rhys and Kiania asked at the same time.

"Unknown, Only one, and definitely not a warship,"Thea said, studying the images. It was relatively small, approximately four hundred meters in length, square-ish, rectangle-like, but with smoother edges. "Our AI does not recognize it. We are picking up active sensors of some kind, probably radar, but not alien design, or at least primitive compared to what we have now. Origin unknown."