Saucer: The Conquest (32 page)

“Not so fast, Charley Pine,” Julie said gleefully. “Stop right where you are or Henri Salmon will shoot you dead.”

Charley glanced over her shoulder. Neither Julie nor her pals had yet retrieved their pistols.

She shoved Egg forward into the dirt and dove down herself. At the same instant the rocket engines of the saucer spurted out a blast of flame, several seconds’ worth.

The saucer hopped forward a few feet. One of the landing gear pads struck Egg a glancing blow on the arm, but fortunately he rolled away from it and it didn’t crush him.

Charley Pine lifted her eyes, looking for the man. He was flying above the surface away from the saucer, tumbling end over end, being carried along by the hot exhaust gases. He didn’t have his rifle.

Charley scrambled up, dragging Egg. She grabbed an arm and jerked him off the surface, half lifted him into the yawning hole in the saucer’s belly. He began scrambling too, and she pushed against his leg. He tumbled in and she leaped upward with so much vigor she struck the ceiling of the craft and almost fell back through the hatch opening. As she reached for the hatch a bullet spanged off it, making a spark. She grabbed the handle and pulled it closed.

Whew!

Charley Pine stood and looked through the canopy. The little knot of world conquerers in front of the air lock were milling around, collecting their guns, touching helmets together and probably asking each other, What now?

She climbed into the pilot’s seat. Lifted the saucer a few feet and aimed the reticle at Julie.

“Where are you, Rip?”

“In the lock.”

“Come on out.”

Julie Artois heard the transmission, of course, and spun around. She was facing the lock as it opened. Rip stepped out with his rifle leveled and moved slightly to his left to go around the group.

“Drop the pistols!” Charley ordered over the helmet radio.

Julie turned her head to look at the saucer, then turned back to face Rip. She lifted the pistol ever so slightly, aiming, probably.

Fire!

The antimatter particles caught her in the right side. Most of them passed harmlessly through her suit and her body and exited out the other side, where they penetrated the cliff and annihilated themselves in the rock. One of them didn’t, however. It exploded an atom in her lung. The pain was intense and sudden. She released the pistol as a second antipositron met its opposite number in her liver.

Cease fire!

Julie staggered. Blood flowed from her nostrils in a stream. She tried breathing though her mouth, and with every breath she gushed blood. Suddenly she was too weak to stand. She slowly toppled over.

Charley set the saucer down and rushed to the hatch. When it opened, Rip came scrambling in. He slammed the hatch shut and latched it, slapped her on the arm and whacked his helmet into hers. “You did great. Let’s repressurize and get the hell outta Dodge.”

“What about the antigravity beam generator?”

“I took care of it. Everyone in there is dead except for Pierre.” He didn’t take the time to tell her about the chef. “Salmon shot them all.”

Charley climbed into the pilot’s seat and began the pressurization process. The people milling around outside couldn’t hurt them now. One of them was bent over, looking into Julie’s faceplate.

Still, Charley had had enough of this place. She lifted the saucer on the antigravity rings, turned it and began moving across the lava plain to the southeast.

• • •

“What’s happening?” P.J. O’Reilly roared at the speakerphone. The president, the translator and O’Reilly were staring at it. The president was holding on to the desk so tightly that his knuckles were turning white.

“There was some kind of shootout,” the president muttered.

“God in heaven,” O’Reilly said, and mopped his brow with his handkerchief.

When the radio remained silent, he pleaded at it, “Tell us something, please!”

• • •

Henri Salmon came running in huge leaping bounds toward the open air lock. He didn’t even glance at Julie Artois, who was still lying on the lunar surface, unable to breathe, drowning in her own blood. He was the first into the air lock, and the others crowded in right behind him.

When the pressure was safe inside the lock, he jerked off his helmet and glared at the others. “Fools. Idiots! Our only hope of getting off this damn rock alive was that saucer, and you let it get away!”

“We still have the antigravity generator,” Claudine Corbet said calmly. “We can force the Americans to send the spaceplane back. Or the saucer. We aren’t beaten yet.”

As the air lock door opened into the interior of the base, Salmon nodded, staring at her. “You are right. First, however, I suggest we destroy the saucer. We must prove to those people we mean business or they will ignore us.”

Claudine grasped at this straw. She didn’t want to spend any more time on the moon than necessary, yet she certainly didn’t want to die here. She rushed off along the corridor toward the cavern while she unfastened her helmet and pulled it off.

Salmon was right behind her. They charged into the control cavern, fired off the reactor and computers and were soon charging the antigravity capacitor. While the charge was coming up they heard the rumble of the saucer’s rocket engines—except they didn’t really hear it, since there was no air; what they heard and felt was the concussion of the rocket exhaust traveling through the rocks.

“The saucer will rise toward the earth,” Salmon said. “We’ll pick it up on the telescope and fire the antigravity beam at it. That will ruin their day. We can’t let the Americans win a triumph.”

• • •

An hour passed before they caught the glint of the sun reflecting off the saucer. The engines were secured, and it was coasting toward earth with sufficient velocity to escape the moon’s gravitational field.

Holding it in the telescope was tricky. The telescope’s drive mechanism wasn’t designed to track a moving target, so the controls had to be adjusted manually. Courbet lost the saucer several times before she figured out the proper rate of traverse.

At her nod, Salmon fired the beam generator.

Since Rip had reversed the power cables, the generator no longer pushed against the moon; it repelled it. The generator shot away from the floor of the cavern, accelerating on its way into space. When it had risen to the length of the power cables, they tore out of their clamps, killing the power to the generator. Still, the velocity the unit had already attained was enough to carry it several hundred feet above the surface of the moon before it coasted to a stop and began to fall. When it arrived back in the cavern thirty seconds later it smashed itself to pieces on the floor. Flying metal cracked and crazed the bulletproof glass window, but didn’t break it.

An amazed Henri Salmon and Claudine Courbet watched the entire debacle, including the crash at the end.

“Mon Dieu.” she whispered. “We are dead.”

With shoulders sagging, she turned and walked slowly through the open air lock.

Henri Salmon kicked at the console in frustration. He shouted, he raged, but it did no good.

Finally, when the bitterness had ebbed to the point that he could again think, he sat on the stool in front of the controller trying to think of a way to save this situation. There was none. After an hour or so, even he had to admit it. He wandered through the open air lock doors into the interior of the base.

He looked into the com center at Pierre, who hadn’t moved from his chair.

The bastard isn’t worth killing, Henri thought. The damned fool sitting here out of his mind, his bitch wife outside in the dirt, everyone inside dead or going to die, all of this madness to the strains of classical music. Henri Salmon tried to laugh, but it rang hollow and died in his throat.

Out in the corridor he met a figure fully clad in a space suit, walking toward the air lock. Claudine Courbet.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

She ignored him, went to the main air lock and opened the inner door. It closed behind her. Salmon shrugged.

Two of the people who had been with him outside scampered from the mess hall when he went in. He glanced at the bodies as he walked toward the refrigerators—and felt nothing. Not remorse, not sorrow, not anything.

Salmon was looking into a refrigerator when he heard something solid hit the door. He half closed the door and scanned the floor.

A grenade! It had no pin, no safety lever. He glanced up. The chef was lying there looking at him, his face and stomach a bloody mess.

Then the grenade exploded.

• • •

Courbet found Julie Artois lying where she had last seen her. Her helmet faceplate was covered with blood. She didn’t seem to be breathing.

Claudine looked around, at the stark lunar mountains, the setting sun, the rubble of the radio tower, the earth hanging above her in the sky like a giant half-moon. Even at this distance she could see the riot of colors in the area still lit by the sun.

She lowered her gaze to the ground before her and began walking southeast, out into the vast lava sea that stretched away to the horizon.

Ten hours later the last three people alive who had been outside with Julie Artois walked by the com center.

Pierre was still there, rocking slowly back and forth, muttering to himself. Dressed only in their base jumpsuits, they opened the inner air lock door and stepped inside. When the green light came on that showed that the door seals were properly inflated, one of them reached up and pushed the button that would evacuate the air from the chamber.

• • •

Egg’s left arm was badly bruised and swollen, although the bone appeared intact. He used his right arm to hug Rip, then Charley, then Rip again. “I’m sorry you had to come,” he said over and over, as Rip and Charley assured him getting kidnapped wasn’t his fault.

“You did the right thing, Uncle Egg. You didn’t get killed and you didn’t kill yourself. We made it. In three days we’ll be home.”

“Still—” Egg found that his eyes were leaking and he couldn’t stop the tears. Rip discovered he had the same problem, as did Charley Pine.

“You know,” Charley said after a while as she swabbed at her eyes, “bad as it was, at least you guys got a free trip to the moon.”

They had to agree. Rip didn’t mention the ten million dollars he had agreed to pay for repairs to the National Air and Space Museum’s glass wall, although the thought did cross his mind.

Finally, when they had their emotions under control, they told each other of their adventures on the moon. Rip’s report of how he sabotaged the antigravity generator delighted his listeners. “They won’t check it,” he assured them. “They’ll just turn it on and zot, it’ll fly out of there and destroy itself. All the emperor’s engineers won’t be able to put that puppy back together again.”

His report of how someone had shot all the people in the mess hall sobered them.

“I guess Julie was taking the people who were there with her, and to heck with the others,” Charley said.

“Including Pierre,” Rip mused. “I left him sitting in front of television cameras in the com center. I think he’d lost it. He didn’t even look at me when I prodded him with the rifle barrel.”

“Dreams die hard,” Egg said thoughtfully. “Everyone needs dreams, or ambitions, if you will, but sometimes they get too big, grow out of control.”

They didn’t talk any more of the people left on the moon. They were doomed, and there was nothing anyone could do. Or wanted to do.

Egg said, “I’ll bet the folks back on earth would like to know what happened up here. They can stop worrying about Emperor Pierre.”

“Let the party begin,” Rip muttered.

• • •

Ten minutes later Charley was talking to the president on the radio. She told him they were coming home in the saucer, just the three of them, and the antigravity generator on the moon was no longer operational.

“Can they fix it?” the president wanted to know.

“I doubt it,” Charley said.

“That’s very good news, extremely good news. When you get back, land at Andrews Air Force Base. The White House is in rubble or I’d have you land on the south lawn. I want to have a press conference with you folks so everyone all around the world can stop worrying.”

Rip made a face. Charley frowned at him, then said, “Yes, sir,” to the president. When she released the mike button, she said to Rip, “We have to do it and you know it. A lot of people won’t believe a government announcement. Would you?”

“Nope,” Rip admitted.

“See?”

“How many people are still alive on the moon?” the president asked.

Charley counted on her fingers. “Six or seven.” She wasn’t sure about the man she had blasted with the rocket exhaust.

“Was Artois one of them?”

“Pierre? When Rip last saw him, he was alive.”

“When we have a private moment, I’d like to hear all about it.”

“Roger that.”

“By the way,” the president added, “you can tell Rip that he won’t have to pay for the damage at the museum. I think we can probably get a special appropriation from Congress to cover it. They’ll undoubtedly want to pass a resolution thanking you for all your efforts.”

The president said his good-byes, and the conversation was over. Charley turned off the radio.

“How badly did you damage the museum?” Egg asked his nephew.

“Ten million dollars’ worth.”

“They should be at least that grateful,” Egg muttered.

Later, when Egg was asleep, Rip murmured to Charley, “That other saucer is around someplace.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” she admitted.

• • •

When the radio conversation was over, the president beamed at his advisers and cabinet officers, all of whom had listened to the conversation with Charley over loudspeakers. He aimed his smile at the secretary of state. “We didn’t have to declare war on France after all. I hope you’re pleased.”

“A great many French people are very proud of Pierre Artois.”

The president waved a dismissive hand. “That’s the way it goes. Sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you. They’ll just have to soldier on.”

“As a gesture of goodwill, I think we should offer to return the spaceplane to France. They may wish to use it again in their space program.”