Chapter 19

Well, that lack of families for low status Utorians was a good place to start. Besides, if we did work on the idea of families for everybody, it would give us a good start on breaking up the authoritarian attitude that the Utorians seemed to be wed to. There was one thing for damned sure: we were going to Utor to exact some sort of retribution for their attack on us. I hoped that we could do it without killing a lot of Utorians, but I did plan to eliminate the bosses who were trying to bully the galaxy. Oh, well, I can dream, can't I?

Jake landed the Utorian spaceship on some empty land to the southwest of Worster about 15 miles away from our home. There was no place closer where she could put the ship down without causing it some major damage. The consolation was that we were able to use a lot of the space that had been cleared of trees by the aliens. Chuck, Ann, and Jimmy monitored the landing from their airmobiles, and they were highly complimentary of Jake and her ability to control the landing.

Ann picked me up and flew me back to our home. Everybody else stayed on the alien spaceship while I tried to set up some place to house them. The Avenger stayed in space waiting to see what happened and to provide some protection for the grounded spaceship in case the other Utorians got belligerent.

We had a long discussion of what to do about the "rescued" Utorians, and we came to the decision that it was best for them to stay where they were for now. We could protect them where they were, and they could live in familiar quarters until we could work out something better.

Meanwhile, Ed, Bill, and Joe organized some large industrial fans to blow fresh air through the spaceship to clear out the disagreeable odor. They mounted some fans at vents cut in the top of the spaceship and sucked fresh air through the ship. Intake vents were cut in the sides so that the air could be changed fairly rapidly. It was windy inside the grounded hulk, but it was that or endure the stink. Most of the Utorians were willing to endure the wind.

It took about 10 days to get the stink dissipated, but the hulk was finally tolerable to Utorians and humans. Fortunately, there was a good paved highway leading to the hulk from our home, so we were able to operate trucks between the two. We had found some semi tractors in good condition, and their motors were pulled and replaced by electric motors modified under instruction by Jake to let them run off the alien power supplies. By now, we had a few former big-rig truck drivers in our community, and they were happy to be back at work at a job they knew.

Most of the things we needed could be built aboard the hulk by robots with minimal direction by Utorians. They, too, were happy to be at work, and they were overjoyed to hear that they would be paid for their labor. There was not much of a place to spend their money, so gambling became very popular. Naturally, most Utorians lost their wages by gambling, but that made no difference to them, since the concept of being paid a wage was so new that they classified that as part of the game. Eventually, that would have to change, but I let it ride for the present.

Now that we had the facilities of the Ankrock Xeron, we were able to convert larger submarines to spaceships and to provide them with FTL drive. We also were able to fit FTL radios and radar on board. Both Ann and Jimmy turned out to be first class pilots for the George Washington. This was the name of our first converted super submarine, and it received the class nomenclature of B-1 for battleship number one.

Once the George Washington was reworked, it was large enough inside to house a mixed crew of humans and Utorians. I pulled rank again and appointed myself captain of this spaceship. I had seen enough reruns of the Star Trek TV shows and its sequels that I just had to emulate Capt. Kirk. My one regret was that we did not have a transporter the way the Enterprise did. Oh, well, we would just have to depend on shuttle service.

By the way, we found some semi-conductor experts who were able to reduce the universal translator to a tiny chip that could be implanted just behind and under the left ear. It was always on and ran off the body's naturally generated electricity. Jake was so impressed that she wanted one. We soon were able to mass produce the gadgets so that every one of us, human and Utorian, had one implanted. That made life a hell of a lot easier for all of us. That was the first triumph of human technology over something impractical or impossible over the rest of the known galaxy.

Some other humans found a way to modulate the beam from the ray gun so that it could be throttled back for short range use. It was also refashioned to have a human-style trigger and could be adjusted by a thumb control to have a maximum range of as little as 5 yards to as much as a mile. It only fired a pencil beam, but we were quite happy with it. This modified ray gun became our standard issue and was supplied with a detachable and/or foldable shoulder stock for greater accuracy in aiming long distances.

Some alien technology was modified to give us much simpler space suits that were more comfortable than the NASA units that we had swiped. They were not a perfect solution to ventures outside of the spaceship, but they were better than what we had. Jake didn't know who had originally developed the space suit that we used, but it was not Utorian. Oh, well, it was the fact that it worked that was important. One day we would run into the inventors and would thank them then.

Once we had the second space battleship, the Abraham Lincoln, B-2, ready, we launched our campaign against the spaceships orbiting the Earth and stealing our trees. The first one we approached refused to surrender. They started shooting at us, and we launched two of our kinetic torpedoes at the enemy. The torpedoes had a tiny but very effective rocket engine that took the torpedo up to about 0.5 c (c=speed of light) within a few miles.

The solid mass of the torpedo striking something solid at that speed produced a tremendous release of energy. The result was the complete destruction of the Utorian spaceship from the one torpedo, and we had wasted the second shot. It did have a simple guidance system that would take it into the sun if it lost its target. That way, it was not a permanent menace to space navigation.

We were sorry that so many Utorians lost their lives, but there was nothing else that we could do. We had to hit six more Utorian spaceships before there was one willing to surrender. It was ordered to land beside the Ankrock Xeron. Unfortunately, there was a blood bath aboard the ship before it touched ground. However, the flight crew was spared, and the ship made it to Earth without further mishap.

This spaceship took up so damned much ground space that we had no more room for spaceships at that location. Therefore, the next spaceship to surrender was sent to land in the Mojave Desert. It was led there by the Avenger. At this point, the remainder of the Utorian spaceships surrendered as they were approached. They were all sent to the Mojave Desert to land beside the current residents. By the time we finished, there were 30 Utorian spaceships parked virtually side-by-side and nose-to-tail over a significant portion of the desert.

We were going to have to work fast to keep a lot of Utorians from dying, either from starvation or from civil war. Some of those idiots just would not forget the old customs. Fortunately, if they were left alone, the living food animals on board would reproduce fast enough to feed the resident Utorians. What we had to do was to keep these animals from dying for one reason or another. It turned out that the animals ate the waste cellulose byproduct from the conversion process used by the distilleries. Dammit, we were going to have to go back to cutting some trees, but we could control it this time, and there would not be the wasteful cutting methods used by the aliens.

The harvesting machines were all turned off remotely, except for a few that were left to feed the food animals. We were just going to have to live with that for now, but we would try to find an alternative. Nevertheless, it did kind of irk us to have to continue the alien style of harvesting.