Chapter 6

A reconnaissance flyover toward Tallahassee produced a startling result. There was what appeared to be a new pyramidal spaceship under construction! Judging from its appearance in the recon photos, it was only about 10% complete. The wasps could be seen working on it oblivious to the presence of human soldiers less than 100 miles away.

The question was immediately raised: should they try to stop construction on the pyramid or should they allow construction to continue in hope of capturing it and learning how its systems operated. It was decided to bet on other opportunities coming up for capture, so it would be prudent to destroy this citadel of the Wasps'.

A number of troops were rushed to the vicinity of the pyramid and an assault was organized. As the ground troops got close, the Wasps could be seen hurriedly erecting some sort of grid network around the base of the pyramid. This looked like bedsprings on posts, similar to early human radar antennas.

When the human ground troops got within three miles of the pyramid, they were attacked by a swarm of wasps. The human guns would not shoot! Over 1,000 human soldiers were lost before a few were able to escape out of range of whatever was keeping the guns from working. At five miles from the pyramid, the guns started working, and the survivors were able to fight off the attacking Wasps. This fiasco was devastating to the humans, but, at least, they learned why it had been so easy for the Wasps to beat off all human attacks.

Apparently, the Wasps had some sort of ray or force field that dampened fast chemical reactions so that gunpowder did not work. Dammit, the humans had to come up with a way to deliver the poison that did not depend on gunpowder. Jimmy thought of his atlatl as being the answer, but a History professor suggested crossbows, instead.

All of the soldiers knew how to shoot a rifle, so a crossbow would not be that much different. They just had to learn to compensate for the much shorter range as compared to a rifle. Somebody remembered seeing a design on the web for a repeating crossbow that was very much like a lever-operated rifle. Only a couple of days were needed to come up with a suitable design, and the repeating crossbow was rushed into production. Small leaf springs served for the bow, aircraft control cable served for the bowstring, and surplus rifles and shotguns served for stocks. Slugs from .50 caliber bullets were modified to tip the bolts. Thin strips of plastic were used to fletch the bolts. Within four days, they had a working prototype, and full scale production began in five days.

Most of the army remained equipped with their rifles; only a select few Special Ops troops were equipped with the crossbows—300 in all. More troops were moved in to Florida in readiness for a new attack on the pyramid, but they were kept back out of range of the gunpowder-disabling ray while the 300 Special Ops people went in to disable the defensive ray before the main attack.

The Special Ops people were dropped from the largest tubs at several strategic locations near enough to the pyramid that they would not have far to walk, but far enough away to keep from attracting immediate attack from the guarding Wasps. These men (all men because of needed high upper body strength) were carrying their crossbows and bolts, and axes to cut any cables that they could find running to the antennas.

They managed to get down to the landing zones OK, but they were hit by Wasps shortly thereafter. Fortunately, the bolts were just as effective against the Wasps as were the bullets, so they did not lose many men at this stage of the operation. As soon as they were ready, they set out for the pyramid. They did not make any effort to coordinate attacks from different groups, as multiple attacks at different times seemed to go a long way toward confusing the Wasps' defense.

The first group reached the nearest antenna only a few minutes after they hit the ground, and while they were still under attack by the Wasps. There were three fire teams in this group, a total of 18 men, and they divided responsibility by sending the two burliest men to chop any cable they could find while the other 16 men fought the Wasps. Actually, it was a one shot-one dead Wasp affair, since they had to let the Wasps get very close to them while making sure that they were within range of the crossbows. The fighting got very intense at times, especially when more than one Wasp attacked a single human. Fortunately, whoever was commanding the Wasps had them scattered about so much that this multiple attack rarely happened. As a result, the Wasps were thinned out very quickly.

The men with the axes were diligently hunting for control or power cables, but they could not find either one. Finally, one of them spotted a spherical object attached to the support mast, and this had a switch on it. He tripped the switch and used his pistol to fire a test shot; it worked. He moved the switch the other way, and the pistol would not fire. He moved the switch back and the pistol fired. Now they knew how to shut off the ray. He used his tactical radio to relay the information to all of the other Special Ops, and they raced up and down the line, turning off the ray transmitters.

Now that their pistols would work, all of the humans slung their crossbows and began using their pistols. This was all they needed to eliminate the Wasp guards as fast as they showed up or were found. At the first word of the elimination of the disabling ray, the main troop concentrations had started to march in. Their arrival, added to the work being done by the Special Ops, resulted in the capture of the pyramid installation in only a few more hours.

The pyramid appeared to be about 20% completed. An inspection and evaluation crew of eggheads from Auburn and surrounding universities was rushed in by airbus, and they went over the structure trying to figure out what each part was for and how it operated. About the only major discovery they made was in how the Wasps traveled in space. There were many little compartments, just large enough to hold a wasp, and it was discovered accidentally that each compartment was actually a tiny stasis box. When a switch was activated, anything inside the box was held in stasis until the switch deactivated the field. This way, the Wasps could travel for thousands of years without "aging," arriving in the same condition and at the same functional age as when they entered the box.

Another major achievement of the assault on the pyramid was the acquisition of hundreds of antigravity belts. These were salvaged from the dead Wasps that had been trying to defend the pyramid. At last, the humans finally had more of the antigravity belts than they had an immediate use for; however, they were not worried—they expected to find uses for them very soon.

It was interesting that there was a large number of Wasps working in and around the pyramid that did not have wings. There were other subtle differences in appearance between them and the winged Wasps, but he lack of wings was the most obvious. The humans got the impression that these were two different classes of Wasp: the ones with wings were the fighters and breeders, and the ones without wings were the common laborers. This immediately raised the question of how many other classes of Wasp there were, and where were they?

The electronics experts who looked at the ray control sphere came to the conclusion that they were going to have a hell of a time figuring out how it worked. The sphere appeared to be self-contained, including the power supply. The problem was that the insides were packaged as integrated circuits that were not going to be easy to reverse-engineer. It had become obvious that the Wasps did not have a very high order of intelligence, at least the ones seen so far, so how did they come up with these remarkable achievements? The conclusion by most people was that they had stolen the technology, but from where?

SON OF A BITCH!!! So that's how the Wasps made what they needed! The humans found a huge replicator buried into the bowels of the pyramid. The replicator had two compartments. A prototype of something desired was placed in one compartment, a switch was activated, and a duplicate appeared in the other compartment. Still, nobody could figure out how it worked or where the power supply was, but the damned thing sure as hell WORKED! Also, they could not find where the raw materials were stored for making the duplicate. It was as if the duplicate appeared by magic! Just as Arthur C. Clark had said, "Any technology sufficiently advanced appears to be magic." (The quote is not exact, but the spirit is!) The first items duplicated in any kind of quantity by the humans were the clip-fed rifles and more ammunition.