Chapter 8

The Xytal must have supplied most of the technology used by the Wasps. The humans reached that conclusion because the almost "magical" power supply was used to power so many of the marvels used by the Wasps. Nobody could see the Wasps having the intelligence to adapt that power supply to other gadgets.

The only significant item for which the humans had not found a service manual was the pyramid, itself. And it wasn't for the lack of trying. Every one of the thousands of books in the library had been thoroughly examined by more than one investigator, but nobody had been able to find anything that even suggested a comment on the pyramid.

A number of people had suggested that the manuals may be buried somewhere deep in the memory of the pyramid computers. There must be help files available if they could just figure out how to access them. There were no keyboards associated with the display systems, but there were some joysticks scattered about the control center. Close examination of the facility had shown at least one microphone associated with each display, so there was some speculation that some of the pyramid systems were controlled by sound.

There was considerable danger associated with trying to activate the controls by random sounds since there was no way to predict what might happen. However, there seemed to be no other choice. But they decided to wait a while before they acted on that idea.

The move into the Miami metropolitan area was a time of triumph for the human army, and it was a time of experimenting. When they came to a major nest in a large building, they tried blasting it with a poison rocket before hitting it with a bomb. The idea was to see what would happen to the tactics used by the Wasps. It made no real difference; the Wasps came boiling out of the nest, but died before they could make an attack. Most of them drifted around in the air until the antigravity belt shut off, automatically, and dropped the Wasp to the ground. It was still necessary to bomb the building, since nothing else could be done to help the still living human incubators.

Every one of the large hotels on the beach had to be destroyed, as they seemed to be especially popular with the Wasps. Several people wondered what the Wasps would have done if they had faced a hurricane during the time they were using the hotels. Probably, they had never faced such a storm, before.

Not much effort was needed on the keys. The Wasps had not found much use for them, so the few that were there were cleared out in one day by the flying tubs. All of Florida was now clear of Wasps, since the Panhandle had already been cleared by this time. The advance had been stopped at Biloxi, MS, to allow time to consolidate the gains made so far and to set up priorities for the remaining push.

The replicator at Tallahassee had been turning out fighting tubs almost on a non-stop basis. There were now over 1,500 of the fighting tubs available, and crews were being trained as fast as possible. The change over to control through a joystick had made piloting a lot easier to learn, so training could usually be completed in two weeks, and almost anybody who had ever played a video game and had the right attitude could be a pilot. A lot of people who wanted to be pilots were unhappy at being relegated to gunners, but that was the way the ball bounced.

The Wasps simply could not stand up to a tub. A flight of three tubs was enough to take out 15-20 Wasps in a head to head fight, and this many Wasps were rarely encountered at one time. Now that weapons with fully automatic fire were the standard issue, it was a foregone conclusion that any Wasp spotted by a tub was living on borrowed time. They went through a tremendous amount of ammunition and poison, but now that the bullets were being made by the replicator, this was not a problem. Gunners were free to shoot as much as they wanted to.

Search flights were now being sent out to try to find other pyramids. Nobody knew how many pyramids had landed, so the only way to find them was to search. There could well have been thousands of pyramids in the landing party, since there was no way to resist them at the time. All that anybody knew with certainty was that the Wasps had not been deterred by anything that Earth's military could do.

A search grid was set up, and flights were sent out to search in a methodical manner to find all of the pyramids that they could. The tubs were fitted with cameras which took pictures of the ground as the tubs flew over. The gunners were there to supplement the cameras, and, between the two, everybody was sure that no pyramid escaped notice.

For no reason other than convenience, it was decided to sweep the USA first and to work from east to west. The plan was to find and capture all of the pyramids as the first order of business, and the boots would clean up the ground between them as quickly as they could.

The reason for this strategy was twofold: they wanted more pyramids for study and they were afraid that the pyramids might have additional weapons that the humans did not yet know about. If the latter were true, there was still a chance that the Wasps could win the war.

One glorious result of taking that first pyramid was that the humans now knew how to turn off the dampening field remotely. One of the engineers had found the information in the back of a manual. It was a safety feature to shut down the system in case of an accident. This shutdown was accomplished by an FM radio beam of a certain frequency carrying a musical tone in a complex pattern. Two tubs were equipped with transmitters that could broadcast this tone pattern and were sent to test the effect on the captured Georgia pyramid. It worked! They were finally able to shut off the dampener field that had been plaguing them because they had not been able to kill it.

The new strategy was to fly tubs around a pyramid to entice them to open the docking doors. As soon as this happened, the transmitters were turned on to shut down the field. A few seconds later, the poison rockets were fired into the open docks from short range. As soon as the rockets hit, the Special Ops troops would land, secure the docks, and wedge the doors open with their landing tubs. The troopers would wait in the loading dock for 30 minutes before venturing into the pyramid. By this time, the Wasps should all be dead, but, if not, their pistols would work and could be used to take out any living Wasp that they encountered.

This was the plan used against the first pyramid they attacked in the sweep north. A pyramid was found in Virginia and was successfully attacked with this plan. The only chancy part of the attack was during the first few minutes when the warrior Wasps first exited from the pyramid. It was necessary for the guarding tubs to shoot them down in the way that they had always used, but, after that, no more shots were fired.

One of the first places visited was the library inside the pyramid, and it was found to be exactly the same as the first one they saw. It was speculated that the Wasps simply duplicated the books and put them on the shelves by rote, having no idea why the books were being saved.

The only surprise this time was found in the control room. There were 27 of the young Wasps in there with the male, and it appeared that he had been impregnating them. This led to speculation that a female Wasp needed to be impregnated only once during her life, and she could store the sperm within her body until it was needed to fertilize an egg. Some terrestrial insects do this, and a similar thing can be done by kangaroos, though not the same in detail.

Two more pyramids were captured this way, one near Philadelphia and one on Long Island. The humans now had enough pyramids available that they could start their experiments on learning to work the controls. Several engineers eagerly volunteered to remain aboard the pyramid while the tests were being run.

It was decided to test the switches and push buttons, first. Photos were taken and the switches and buttons were marked with identifying numbers. The on-board engineers would punch a switch or button after receiving permission from a control station via radio.