The saucer’s computer read Charley’s brainwaves, and the optical crosshairs appeared on the canopy.
Perhaps, she thought, she had braked too much. The spaceplanes and the tank were growing larger, but the closure rate seemed slow. She glanced at the flight display, trying to judge the distance. Now she could have used a radar screen calibrated in miles or kilometers or whatever, but she didn’t have it.
She maneuvered slightly to put the crosshairs on the fuel tank.
Still closing.
“What’s the range of the shooter?” Rip asked.
“How would I know?” Charley said, her voice so tense she had trouble getting the words out.
“No atmosphere to siphon off antiprotons,” Rip mused. “Why don’t you give ’em a squirt now, just to see what happens?”
She thought of the Frenchmen she had trained with—and nothing happened. No! She shouted, “Shoot! Goddamn it, shoot!” Instantly the weapon began discharging a steady stream of antiprotons. As it did so, a small warning light appeared beside the optical crosshairs.
As Rip had implicitly predicted, without an atmosphere, there was no chain lightning effect. The only visible evidence that the antimatter weapon was working were the sparkles that appeared on the side of the tank.
The saucer was now less than a mile from the other ships. “Better stop your forward progress,” Rip urged, “before that thing—”
The tank exploded in a blinding flash. Fire shot away in every direction.
The concussion rocked the saucer. Dead ahead, the brilliant red and yellow fireball, expanding rapidly, grew larger and larger and rushed toward them, engulfing the saucer.
As the saucer bounced in the turbulence, Charley Pine ripped off the headset and shut her eyes. She didn’t want to collide with anything, if indeed there was anything left to collide with, yet she didn’t want to coast out of the area.
Seconds ticked by, and finally she opened her eyes. The expanding gases were still glowing, as if a new universe had been born. Her eyes slowly adjusted to the glare.
“What do you see?” Rip asked, his hand hard on her shoulder. She reached for his hand, grasped it hard.
The incandescent gases gradually burned out. Where the explosion had occurred, nothing remained. “Oh, God!” Charley moaned. “I think we killed them all.”
“There, to the left!”
Charley looked left. A spaceplane, perhaps two miles away, pointed almost at the saucer, was moving perceptibly away from the epicenter of the blast. The burning, expanding gases must have pushed on the side of it, like a sail, imparting a velocity vector. It wasn’t stationary, but was in a slow, flat spin, like a Frisbee. Of course; the blast pushed harder on the vertical tail, less so on the nose.
Rip grabbed at her arm. “Up there, to the right!” There was the other one, also moving away. Its nose pointed up and farther right.
One or both might have completed refueling and be capable of flying on to the moon. But which one?
The spaceplane on the left spun through one more revolution, the spin visibly slowing; the motion ceased when the nose pointed west in relation to the planet below, a direction over Charley’s left shoulder.
“Maybe that’s the tanker,” Rip said, “and it had finished filling the tank. Maybe—”
Before he could speak again, the rockets in the tail of that westward-pointing spaceplane ignited. It began accelerating in the direction it was pointing.
“Maybe it’s going—” Rip shouted as the ship crossed Charley’s left shoulder.
“Going to reenter the atmosphere,” Charley muttered. The rocket burn must be decreasing the spaceplane’s velocity in relation to the spinning planet below, which would send it into a lower orbit. If the deceleration burn was long enough, the spaceplane would reenter the atmosphere.
As the ship shot out of sight behind her, she looked again at the ship high and to her right. The distance was probably three miles. Its orientation had also changed. Now it was pointing more along the vector in which it and the saucer were orbiting, and the nose was up above the horizon, about ten degrees. If the rocket engines fired, it would accelerate and climb. If the engines burned long enough, it would reach escape velocity and, perhaps, be on its way to the moon. To Pierre and Julie, for conquest and glory.
She turned the saucer, pointed it toward the spaceplane and asked the engines for power.
As the saucer’s rockets responded, the high spaceplane’s rockets burped to life.
“It’s going to the moon!” Rip shouted. He didn’t even know he was shouting.
Charley came on hard with the juice and turned to parallel the other ship’s course. Both ships were accelerating, but if she deviated from her victim’s course, she would drop behind.
“Get him, get him, get him!” Rip urged.
She was at full power now, trying to close that gap, the Gs pressing her backward into her seat. Beside her Rip held on for dear life.
She didn’t have the fuel for much of this nonsense, not if she hoped to ever return to earth. Even as that thought crossed her mind, the computer displayed the fuel remaining. Less than ten percent.
By God, she didn’t have enough now!
The gap didn’t seem to be closing. Desperate, she fired the antiproton weapon and swung the nose to the right, intending to rake the antimatter beam across the fleeing spaceplane. This would work or it wouldn’t.
The crosshairs projected on the canopy in front of her crossed the spaceplane, and she kicked rudder, trying to hold it there as the French ship widened the distance between them.
A second passed, then two. Three …
And the three smaller rocket engines on the underside of the ship went dark, leaving only the main engine and the two small engines above it still firing.
Instantly Charley cut off her rockets to save what water she had for a reentry attempt.
Ahead of her the spaceplane’s nose dropped as the asymmetrical power took effect.
Still accelerating, the nose fell through the planet’s horizon and continued down.
The ship was far ahead now, the white-hot rocket exhaust all that was visible.
The angle of that falling star continued to steepen—it dropped lower and lower and began to move aft in relation to the saucer. Charley rolled her ship so she could see the white pinpoint of exhaust.
Deeper it went, down into the darkness, down toward the waiting atmosphere that enshrouded the massive planet.
Finally, far behind and below the speeding saucer the exhaust plume twinkled out, and there was nothing more to see.
“I hope they’re dead before they hit the atmosphere,” Rip said softly.
“Yes,” she said, thinking of Marcel, with the black eyes and the shy smile. “If God is merciful.”
JACK HOOD WAS A FARMER IN KENT, ENGLAND, ONLY a few miles from the white cliffs of Dover. It was after midnight when his wife awakened him. “There’s something out there, Jack. Listen to the cows.”
Hood blinked himself awake and listened hard. The cattle were bawling loudly. Hood glanced at the bedside clock: It was at least an hour before dawn.
“I’d better go check,” he said, and rolled out of bed.
He had a gnarled shillelagh standing in the corner, and after he dressed and stomped into his Wellingtons, he reached for it, just in case. He made his way to the front door of the house without turning on any lights and went out.
It had rained last evening, so the earth was pungent and sweet. During the night the wind had moved out the clouds and now the sky was clear, ablaze with stars, with the moon low in the west. Standing on the porch in the moonlight, Jack Hood remembered the flashlight in the kitchen and went back for it.
The moon gave enough light that he didn’t need the flashlight to find his way to the barn. Last night Hood and his wife had watched all the latest news from capitals around the world on the telly and heard the demands of the man in the moon, so as he walked he flashed Pierre the finger.
&n
bsp; The cattle stopped bawling when they sensed his presence, yet still they milled about, looking toward the pond. Actually the pond was a small lake, almost two acres in size.
Hood let himself through the gate and walked toward the water. He flipped on the flashlight and swept it around the shore. Nothing out of the ordinary here. A few bushes, lots of mud churned up by cattle, here and there a small tree.
“Out here,” a voice called.
Elmer turned the flashlight toward the center of the pond—and saw a man standing there. In the pond. In only to his ankles. What the—?
“Hope you don’t mind treating us to a fill-up,” the man called. He had an American accent, which Jack Hood recognized from the movies. “We ran out of water and missed North America. We were skipping and hopping and hoping, and this is where we wound up.”
Hood went down right to the water’s edge. Now he could see that there was a shape, something dark, mounding up out of the water. Aha, the man was standing on something!
“Name’s Rip. Bet we woke you up, huh?”
Jack Hood didn’t know what to say. He simply stood and stared.
Now the man bent over and rapped on the thing he was standing on. It rose slowly and gently out of the water. The thing was a saucer! A bloody flying saucer!
It was big! Ohmigosh, it was big, maybe sixty or seventy feet in diameter. As it came completely out of the water, the water level in the pond dropped, perhaps as much as a foot. The saucer moved gently over the pasture with the man still standing on its back. Its legs snapped down, and it settled onto the grass.
The man jumped down and strolled over. He was in his early twenties, clean-cut and lean. He reached for the flashlight and turned it away from his face, then grasped Hood’s hand.
“Rip Cantrell. Glad to meet you.”
“Righto,” Jack managed.
“Have a good night,” Rip said, and turned back to the saucer. He went under it and disappeared into the belly.
Seconds later it lifted and the gear retracted.
It moved out over the pond, accelerating, then a small flame burst from a series of rocket nozzles on the trailing edge.
When the saucer was perhaps two miles away, traveling at several hundred knots, the exhaust became intense and all the noise on God’s green earth washed over Jack Hood. The fireball rose almost straight up and kept going and going, shrinking to a pinpoint as it drifted toward the east. Finally it disappeared among the stars.
12
THE DISASTER THAT HAD CLAIMED THE THREE FRENCH spaceplanes was the topic of considerable conversation between Mission Control in France and Pierre Artois on the moon. Newton Chadwick listened on the battery-operated encoded radio in the Roswell saucer and passed on what he heard to his two colleagues. All of the conversation was in French and unintelligible to Egg Cantrell. From Chadwick’s reaction, he could tell that the news was bad.
When the radio had finally fallen silent, Chadwick and his colleagues discussed what they had heard for half an hour, and finally Chadwick shared what he had learned with Egg.
“A disaster. The orbital refueling tank exploded when the second of the two ships bound for the moon was refueling. The explosion was actually seen over Japan in the hours before dawn. The tank and that ship were destroyed. The crew of the tanker, which had carried the fuel aloft, thought they saw another ship in the vicinity, but they couldn’t be sure. It was black and saucer-shaped. They immediately fired their engines for a reentry, and talked to Mission Control before they entered the atmosphere and lost radio contact. That ship crashed somewhere in the Pacific, Mission Control believes.”
He sighed. “No one knows what happened to the third ship. There were several garbled radio transmissions, which the agency is studying, trying to decipher. An oil tanker in the western Pacific reported a large object—they thought it was a meteor—penetrating the atmosphere at a steep angle and burning up a few minutes before dawn.”
“Saucer-shaped?”
“A saucer!” Chadwick made a face. “The American news media reports that the saucer housed in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington was stolen in midmorning, several hours before the disaster aloft. An extraordinary coincidence that must somehow be explained.”
“Stolen?” Egg said, his disbelief evident in his voice.
“Of course not!” Chadwick replied acidly. “The American government obviously sent that saucer aloft to attack the spaceplanes while they were still in earth orbit. What kind of weapon the saucer used is unknown.” He stared into Egg’s eyes. “Is there a weapon on this saucer?”
Egg blinked and managed to look surprised. There was the antiproton beam on the saucer from the Sahara, of course, but—Naw! Certainly not! No one knew of it except Rip and Charley. No one in the government—
“Don’t be absurd,” Egg said sharply. “Do you really think the government converted this saucer to a weapons platform? If they did, where is it?” He made a show of looking around the compartment. “This thing has been sitting in an abandoned hangar in Nevada for how many years?”
Chadwick was thinking—Egg could see that. Obviously he hadn’t learned of the antiproton beam in his exploration of this saucer’s computer or he wouldn’t even have asked the question. In fact, Egg had only discovered its existence from studying the schematics. Chadwick wasn’t an engineer; he just wanted to get rich and live forever.
“How could the American government install a space weapon on a museum artifact in a few days?” Egg asked. “Do you think they bolted it onto the belly? Or put it inside here and cut a porthole in the leading edge to shoot through?”
“I think you know something you aren’t telling me,” Chadwick said, still gazing intently at Egg’s face.
“Think what you please,” Egg grunted, and floated toward the toilet facility.
As soon as he had the door closed he put his hands on his face, trying to compose himself.
He didn’t know if this saucer had a weapon on it—he hadn’t asked the computer. He wondered if Chadwick would. All he had to do was put on the headband and ask. If he knew enough to ask. In his explorations of the computer’s memory, Egg had spent months wandering along, poking here and there, completely on his own, before one day the thought occurred to him to ask the computer for the information he wanted. Then data spewed forth like an Oklahoma gusher.
What if this saucer did have an antimatter weapon of some sort and Chadwick learned of it? So what? They were on their way to the moon.
Given a moment to think about it, Egg put two and two together. If Rip’s saucer had indeed flown again, Rip and Charley Pine were in it.
Were they still alive? Were they safe?
If anything happened to them …
When he had himself completely under control, Egg opened the door and floated out into the main compartment. Chadwick had strapped himself to the pilot’s seat and was wearing the headband.
THE NEWS OF THE LOSS OF THE SPACEPLANES HIT Pierre hard. He had bet his quest—indeed, his life and Julie’s life—on the fact that his friends could get control of the French spaceport and continue to fly the spaceplanes to and from the earth. He was sure the French government would fold—he knew most of the ministers personally. They weren’t gamblers, they were politicians. They read the papers, were acutely attuned to the public mood and strove mightily to stay in front of the parade so they would appear to be leading. If the public could be persuaded, the politicians would go along, and Pierre knew how to sway the French public. Honor, glory, for the good of all mankind, which would be united under a French banner. The appeal would be irresistible.
And, mon Dieu! It worked.
Except for that Charley Pine. Stealing the spaceplane from the moon, stranding them.
He wondered if she had flown the saucer that attacked the three spaceplanes in orbit. His gut told him yes. She would do that.
It would take at least two years to build another spaceplane and test it, even on an expedited schedule. Then another fue
l tank would have to be placed in earth orbit and filled with fuel before a spaceplane could make a trip to the moon filled with supplies.
The lunar base was not self-sustaining, as he well knew. Oh, there was indeed water, but the hydroponic gardens would not sustain the forty-two people who were here. Make that forty-six, for four more were coming on Chadwick’s saucer. Nor were the complex carbon-based compounds being created in the lab yet edible.
Somehow, some way, Chadwick’s saucer had to be used to carry critical supplies back and forth across the chasm.
He was musing thus when Julie came into the com center. He told her of the disaster to the spaceplanes. She took the bad news well, he thought, although obviously it was a blow. They discussed how Chadwick’s saucer would have to be used.
“Even with the saucer, it will be difficult to sustain forty-six people,” she remarked distractedly.
Pierre nodded. “We will send as many as possible back to earth on the saucer.”
“Yes. We must lower the number somehow.”
The radio crackled to life. It was Mission Control reporting that the French space facilities were under attack. “Hangars are exploding, the fuel dump just detonated—” He was cut off in mid-sentence.
“The Americans,” Pierre said heatedly.
“Or the British,” Julie said. “We’ll give them a taste of their own medicine. They want war, and they shall have it! And I’m going to enjoy pulling the trigger!”
IT WAS STILL DARK IN WASHINGTON WHEN CHARLEY Pine drifted the stolen saucer to a stop ten feet in the air outside a large hangar at Andrews Air Force Base. One of the huge doors began opening, revealing a brilliantly lit interior and dozens of people. The saucer slipped through the open door. Inside, the gear snapped down; then the ship settled to the shiny, reflective white concrete beside Air Force One, a huge Boeing 747 that dwarfed saucer and people. Behind the spaceship, the door was already closing.
Rip and Charley dropped through the open hatch. The first person they saw was the president of the United States. He walked over with a hand out.
Saucer: The Conquest Page 18