Chapter 13

Joe adjusted the speed of the HAF-1 to match the speed of the chip carrier. That alone was a great argument in favor of us adopting the flying box for our air force. The flying box was able to maintain its position in the air at least as well as a human helicopter, so Joe just held his position until the chip carrier had dumped its load. As soon as it departed, Joe dropped to 50 feet above the factories roof and moved slowly in until Sam shouted for him to stop.

Joe held the position while Sam dropped the thermite bomb. They quit the immediate area before the first explosion, but waited around close enough to make sure that the distillery was destroyed. It was.

Joe then accelerated to catch the chip carrier. They caught it in less than two minutes, and Chuck was again given the honor of bringing it down. Joe pulled into position along side the chip carrier, and Chuck took less than five seconds to acquire the target and shoot it out of the air. Chuck was congratulated on bringing down the first flying enemy from a flying box, but all of the others in the crew were a bit jealous and wondered how long it would be before they had the chance at a similar shot. They all realized how unlikely it would be for them to get to fight against an alien flying box.

They returned to the cleared area and each of the gun crew was given a chance to shoot at the machines until they were all destroyed. Of course, only five had a chance at these particular machines, but the others figured that they would find more machines at work before the day ended.

Joe took them up to about 3,000 feet and they spotted six more areas being worked. They were going to have to hurry to get all of those machines destroyed before they had to return home. There was no chip carrier around, so they took out the five machines. That meant that everyone had been able to destroy one alien machine this day. Well, Joe did not get that chance, but he was busy flying, so he did not have time for that today.

Joe picked up on the radar an approaching craft so they waited around to see if it would lead them to a different distillery. They wasted 30 minutes waiting for the chip carrier to do its thing and head back to the still. Unfortunately, this still was the one they had destroyed about an hour ago, so they were somewhat annoyed about that. However, one of the gun crew was given the opportunity to shoot it down, so that salved some feelings.

Okay, it was back to the cleared sites to hunt for more harvesters. At 3,000 feet altitude, it was possible to see a hell of a long way compared to what they could do in the ultralights, so they chose another working site and flew to it. The chip carrier showed up while they were destroying the harvesting machines, but the miniscule computer that controlled it ignored them and left for its distillery as if nothing unusual had been going on.

This time, they found a working still and destroyed it just as they had the first one that day. A short chase resulted in the destruction of the chip carrier, and they went high to look for more active sites. Another one was hit and the machines were destroyed. Soon the chip carrier showed up, and they followed it. This chip carrier went to the distillery that they had just destroyed, so they killed the chip carrier and went looking for more harvesters.

The search at 3,000 feet was as productive as before, and they flew to the latest site. Uh-oh, there was a flying box on the ground, and five aliens were spotted wandering around. There was no way to know what they were up to, but Joe dove in after them. The turrets that could come to bear shot and killed all five aliens on that first pass. The destruction was so complete that there was no point in looking for ray guns or anything else.

On the other hand, the flying box was too good to pass up. They landed and looked it over. There was no sign of any more aliens around, and it looked that five ray guns were missing from the charger. Three were still in the rack, so they must have killed all of the aliens on the site. Jeff was along as one of the gun crew, and he was given the job of piloting the flying box back home. It was destined to become HAF-5. Sam moved over to take his gun position, and they went looking for more stuff to shoot.

They were not worried about running out of fuel. Ed had reported that he had found the power source. As far as he could tell, it was a "black box" that had no way to input energy. He guessed that it was a fusion plant, but he had no way of knowing for sure. In any case, it looked to him that it must be good for years of use, and they could relax about using it. He also suggested that they might replace their solar cells with one of the power units if they could find a flying box that no longer needed one.

Joe kept them searching until it started getting late, and some stomachs were already rumbling. They had destroyed two more sets of harvesting machinery and two more chip carriers, but they had found no more operating stills. He flew them home at the top speed of the flying box, and they covered the distance in about 15 minutes. Damn, those craft were fast!

Well, as any sane individual would expect, the flight to Hartford and the results were the topic of conversation at supper that night. We had a chance to critique every thing that was done and to repeat our congratulations to the participants. We were especially happy at picking up another flying box, and we planned to draft it into our budding air force as HAF-5.

We had enough guns to put one turret on HAF-2, and that was scheduled to start tomorrow morning. This quad-mount was to go in over the pilot, but we were going to mount some of the video cameras in other places to give the pilot a full view of the surroundings. Additional quad mounts would be installed as we got more guns and new people to use them.

It was now time to try to induce the aliens to attack us again. There was a harvesting operation going on north of Hartford very close to the border with Massachusetts. That would be a convenient place to send our next fight. Bill, Joe, Jeff, and Chuck stayed home with Helen while the rest took HAF-1 out to decoy the aliens. HAF-3 was sent to provide comfortable sleeping accommodations for over night so that there would be no chance of the aliens beating us to the site.

I suggested an experiment. That afternoon after the machines were immobilized, we used a ray gun set to fire the pencil beam to dig a series of foxholes. That would give us more protection than we would have just lying on the ground, and it was so easy to do that we had the job done in less than 30 minutes. That included deciding where the foxholes should go. We had 10 shooters in total, but we were sure that we were adequate to take care of any number that the aliens might send after us.

The aliens turned up just before 9:00 AM in four flying boxes. This time, they had stuffed 44 of their military arm into the four craft. They must have been damned uncomfortable during the flight, and I wondered if they were running out of flying boxes. Anyway, the radar on HAF-1 had detected their approach, so all of us were hidden in our foxholes when they landed. We had camouflaged HAF-1 and HAF-2 back among the still standing trees, so we were not obviously there, except for 10 small holes in the ground.

The aliens piled out of their flying boxes and just stood around waiting for someone to tell them what to do. Each of the four groups tended to remain together, and that made it easier for us to pick out our targets. About half of the aliens were not even holding ray guns when all hell descended upon them. Any bullet wound was going to be fatal because of their tendency toward uncontrolled bleeding, and we took advantage of that fact. Once an alien was hit by a bullet, no more were aimed at it.

Those with the air guns fired the first magazine on full automatic and swept the area. The rest of us took up the fight while those six guns were being reloaded. I accounted for three aliens with my M1, and the others were equally successful. I didn't time the encounter, but I think that it did not last more than about 30 seconds.