Saucer: The Conquest (36 page)

Man, the general thought as the saucers rocketed between the buildings, those fools are just flat-out crazy!

• • •

Bleeding profusely, in shock and screaming with pain, the here and now—this moment—was all that mattered to Jean-Paul Lalouette. At some level he knew he would never live to see France again. He tried to ask the computer to fly him into a building, to end it right now, but he couldn’t make himself do it.

She was probably behind him, closing in for the kill. Why didn’t she shoot?

He got a glimpse of Central Park ahead, rapidly approaching, just a blur of green.

Charley too saw the park coming up and knew that this was her chance. Perhaps her only chance. She would try to drop the enemy saucer in the park. She would fly right over him, using the wash from her saucer to force his into the ground. She lowered the nose of her bird and dove, closing the distance.

As the southeast edge of the park flashed under them, Lalouette began a gentle turn to the left. The distance between the two ships was less than a hundred feet. Charley turned harder left and added more power as the enemy ship began moving under her nose.

At precisely that instant fate took a hand. A moment of clarity broke through the fog of pain that held Jean-Paul Lalouette in its grip. He didn’t want to crash in the city, kill innocent people.

He reacted automatically. Full power, nose up, he screamed at the computer. And the saucer instantly responded. It pulled up directly in front of Charley Pine, rising in an eye-blink right though her flight path.

The beast of rocket exhaust and the wash from the saucer ahead flipped Charley’s saucer ninety degrees onto its side as the enemy saucer did a maximum-G pull into the vertical.

She was on a knife’s edge, a hundred feet above the treetops of Central Park, doing about three hundred knots— with no visible means of support. Her saucer was flying a parabola into the ground.

Horrified, she slammed the stick sideways to right the ship and pulled the antigravity collective up into her armpit. The saucer responded, but not quite fast enough. It hit the top of a tree, bounced back into the air and settled into another. Clouds of leaves exploded behind her as the saucer once again caromed into the air.

Power, power, power, she begged the computer. As the engines responded, Rip Cantrell lost his death grip on the panel and the back of the pilot’s seat and tumbled aft.

• • •

The lucky network that had captured images of the saucers had three helicopters over Manhattan: one over lower downtown, one over Greenwich Village, and one over midtown. Each broadcast its video in turn as the saucers raced north. The last helo got the saucers in Central Park, the lead saucer pulling up abruptly and the trailing saucer gyrating wildly and smacking into the treetops. As the clouds of leaves exploded skyward, the network lost the video feed from the helicopter.

Back at Andrews, the president had his nose a foot from the screen when it went blank. Forgetting the presence of his granddaughter and the two dozen other people crowded around trying to see, he swore a mighty oath and smashed his fist down on top of the recalcitrant set. The picture stayed blank.

• • •

The Roswell saucer rose vertically on a plume of fire. A severely wounded Jean-Paul Lalouette thought of France, so the computer began to slowly tilt the saucer toward the east, toward the North Atlantic.

Lalouette had lost a lot of blood, and the Gs of acceleration quickened the blood flow from the damaged area. His blood pressure dropped precipitiously. In seconds he lost consciousness. Twenty seconds after that his heart stopped.

The saucer continued upward, tilting slowly to the east, accelerating…

The exhaust plume of the Roswell saucer was impossible to miss. Charley Pine stayed on the juice, trying to catch Lalouette. Unfortunately he was perhaps twenty seconds ahead.

The combined roar of the two saucers was the loudest noise ever heard in New York. It rattled windows all over the five boroughs and shook the buildings of Manhattan. Elevators jammed. In offices and apartments, restaurants and bars all over the island, floors and walls trembled; dust rose from gypsum drywall and settled from the ceiling light fixtures. People dove under furniture or ran for doorways as the pictures on their televisions finally reappeared, depicting two incandescent white-hot fireballs rising between the towering clouds.

Rip clawed his way back to the pilot’s seat and fought the Gs to stand erect. He took one look at the brilliant star that was Lalouette’s exhaust plume and said, “There’s no way. We’ll never catch him.”

Charley didn’t reply. She was offset to the right of Lalouette’s flight path so that she could avoid the turbulence created by his ship. This offset meant that she couldn’t bring her antimatter weapon to bear.

They had been climbing for at least five minutes and were now above most of the earth’s atmosphere. Above them the sky was dark. Stars began to appear. Below, the haze hid the sea.

“He must be badly injured,” Rip said, struggling against the G. “Or dead.”

Charley thought so too. She had refused to give in to her emotions since Lalouette attacked them over Andrews, but now the angst and remorse hit her like a hammer. Why me, God?

Finally Charley remembered to check her fuel. Less than five percent remaining!

She looked up, just in time to see the other saucer’s exhaust plume wink out, then reappear, then cease altogether. One second it was there, then it wasn’t.

Lalouette’s ship was at least seventy degrees nose up, so it decelerated quickly. The distance between the two saucers closed rapidly.

At first it was just a tiny dot against a darker sky; then it became a lenticular shape, growing larger.

Charley pulled the power, letting her excess speed bring her up onto the other ship’s tail. For the first time today the saucer cabin was deathly quiet, and she could feel her heart thudding in her chest.

Is he out of fuel? Why doesn’t he drop his nose? If he holds that altitude much longer, he’s going to run out of airspeed, and—

Even as she thought it, the big saucer stalled and the nose fell precipitously.

Charley rammed her nose down so she wouldn’t stall too.

The nose of Lalouette’s saucer fell and fell, and its trajectory became steeper and steeper until it was going straight down.

“He must be dead,” Rip said again, with finality.

Charley Pine stuffed the nose of her ship down, pointed it at the sea below, and began a gentle, three-G spiral to hold the other saucer in sight. The larger ship raced downward into the haze toward the waiting sea.

They were still over a hundred thousand feet high, Charley estimated, perhaps twenty miles up.

Her speed, which had dropped dramatically since she cut her engines, began building. The radius of her spiral became larger and larger. As the distance to the other ship increased, it began to merge with the gauzy, bright, sunlit haze. Don’t want to lose it, Charley told herself, and lowered her nose still further.

A minute passed, then two. Still the large saucer plunged downward.

There were no clouds. Now Rip and Charley could see the ocean below, a featureless blue plain. Lalouette’s saucer seemed suspended above it, although it wasn’t. Without a visual cue it was impossible for Rip and Charley to appreciate Lalouette’s closure rate with the waiting ocean.

Knowing they were low and it wouldn’t be long, Charley shallowed her descent rate even more.

Lalouette’s saucer never pulled out. One moment it was there, diving toward the sea, and then it disappeared in a mighty splash, a ring of white. When the white circle began to dissipate, the Roswell saucer was gone.

• • •

Skeeter Dunn and Ward Carroll were off the coast of New England in F-16s, inbound for the Cape, when they got the call on the radio to look for and attack any flying saucers they saw.

“What’s the world coming to?” Carroll asked aloud into his oxygen mask. Through the years he had developed a habit of talking to himself in the cockpit—and in the car and the shower and anywhere else he found himself alone. “Flying saucers!” He made a rude noise with his tongue and lips.

In the other fighter, out on Carroll’s left wing, Skeeter gave him an exaggerated shrug, which in less politically correct days had been known as the Polish salute.

Not that Carroll thought that the world was being invaded. Like every other person in the world between six and ninety-six, he had read and seen video clips of the departure of Charley Pine for the moon in the saucer from the National Air and Space Museum and heard about the theft of a saucer from Area 51 in Nevada. One reporter claimed the government acquired the Nevada saucer in 1947 in Roswell, New Mexico, after they found the crew of aliens all dead inside. The truth of it, Carroll believed, would never be known.

Now the government wanted all the saucers destroyed. Ahh! Guess things didn’t go so great on the moon, after all.

Not that these two F-16s, or any conventional fighters, were much of a threat to the saucer Carroll had gazed at in the museum. He and Skeeter had been over the ocean for a training exercise—practice interceptions—and now were inbound. As usual, both planes carried Sidewinder heat-seeking missiles on their wingtips and, since 9/11, a full load of ammo for their 20-mm cannon. And they were way below the fuel normally considered necessary for a combat engagement.

The trick, Carroll mused, would be to get the saucer to fly low and slow enough that the fighters could get weapons’ solutions.

He was sitting in the cockpit watching his DME roll down as they tracked the TACAN inbound, and wondering if a Sidewinder would lock on a saucer, when he actually saw one plunge past him, going straight down. At first he wasn’t sure, so he rolled up on one wing and looked.

Holy cow! There it was, going straight down. Straight into the drink. The splash was awesome, like a meteor might make.

“Skeeter, did you see that?”

“Yeah, I did. And do you see the saucer at your nine o’clock high?”

Carroll looked. By all that’s holy—there it was, in a turn from left to right, maybe ten thousand feet above.

“Let’s strap it on,” Skeeter suggested.

Carroll glanced at his fuel gauges. “All the missiles together,” Carroll told his wingman, “then we gotta go home or swim.”

He advanced the throttle and lifted the nose.

• • •

With only a little water left in the tanks, Charley Pine decided not to use the rocket engines. She would coast down to the ocean and go back to Andrews on the antigravity rings. She had leveled out and was descending to the southwest when Rip took one more look at the widening circles where Lalouette had hit the ocean—and saw the two fighters in loose formation climbing toward the saucer. “Uh-oh,” he said. “Fighters. Coming at us from the right.” Charley continued to descend. She couldn’t get Lalouette out of her mind. Crashing into the ocean… Was he dead when the saucer hit, or did he intentionally fly it into the sea? “Missiles!” Rip shouted. “They shot missiles—” Charley Pine rolled the saucer onto its back and pulled. She also lit the rocket engines.

• • •

Ward Carroll had fired both his missiles and was watching them track when the plume of flame erupted from the engines of the saucer. He said a cuss word. The missiles would track the fire, a heat source a hundred times hotter than the jet engines the heat sensors in the missile were designed to guide upon. And they did. All four missiles shot through the saucer’s exhaust plume.

• • •

With her nose well down and the engines on, Charley quickly went supersonic and outdistanced the fighters diving after her.

When she thought she was well ahead of them, she killed the engines. She was only a thousand feet above the water.

She hoisted the nose and used the antigravity rings as a brake. Rip was thrown toward the canopy by the sudden maneuver.

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

“I’ve had enough of this crap,” Charley retorted, and lowered the saucer’s nose toward the water.

She braked again, just above the waves, then let the saucer slip gently into the sea. It was ten feet under and descending when the two fighters came roaring over the splash site with their 20-mm cannons blazing.

• • •

It was drizzling rain when the saucer came over the treetops at four in the morning at Egg Cantrell’s Missouri farm and landed softly in front of the hangar.

Rip pushed the power knob in to the first detent and climbed from the pilot’s seat. He was whipped. Charley was asleep on the couch with a blanket over her. He kissed her and held her hand until she awakened.

“We’re home,” he said.

“Oh, Rip,” she said, and hugged him.

“It’s over, Charley.”

“I hope.” She kissed him one more time, then tossed the blanket aside and pulled on her boots. Her French space boots, she noted wryly. Maybe someday I’ll sell them on eBay.

Rip opened the hatch, and Charley went through first. Rip followed. The gentle rain felt good on his skin. He closed his eyes and turned his face to the sky. After a long moment he followed Charley toward the hangar.

Egg was sitting on a folding chair to one side of the open hangar doorway.

“I’ve been worried about you two,” he said, after the hugs. “The news said that the military was ordered to shoot down all the saucers.”

“I figured it was something like that,” Rip said. “Lalouette crashed into the ocean, then we were attacked by two fighters, F-16s I think. They shot missiles at us. We put ’er in the water and stayed under until dark.”

“Lalouette’s dead?”

“Yes.”

“And the Roswell saucer is destroyed?”

“Nothing could survive a plunge like that. It’s history.”

“We’ve got to do something to hide this one,” Charley said. “They’ll be after it.”

“Maybe put it in a pond or something,” Rip said.

“That trick has been used too often,” Egg told them. “The government will look in every lake, fishpond and swimming pool in America. I’ve got a better idea. Been sitting here thinking about it.”

“I don’t want it destroyed, and I don’t want the government to have it,” Rip said heatedly.