Saucer: The Conquest

11

Pierre Artois felt that sense of sublime satisfac-tion that comes to those who dare great things, run tremendous risks and win. A deep calm descended over him. He was standing on a mountain peak with the world at his feet. Actually he was standing on the moon, looking up at the earth, but the folks on earth were looking up at him. All of them.

Indeed, he reflected, he had won. Three spaceplanes were in orbit, one of which carried extra fuel to recharge the orbiting fuel tank; the other two would top off and journey on to the moon. In the unlikely event anything went wrong with the spaceplanes, Newton Chadwick and Egg Cantrell were on their way to the moon with the Roswell saucer, which Chadwick had managed to steal from under the nose of the U.S. Air Force. Most important, the government of France had surrendered, renounced the republic and proclaimed Pierre Artois emperor, pledging loyalty, honor and obedience.

First France, then Europe, then the world. Fame, fortune and power," he said to his wife, Julie. "Life doesn't get better than this."

"We haven't won yet," Julie pointed out. "The British are just across the Channel, their moat, and they can be so tiresome."

"That little ditch won't save them this time," Pierre said confidently. "We can handle the British."

"Then there are the Americans. The U.S. president is a Neanderthal — I don't know why they elect such men."

"Probably couldn't find any better," Pierre said, and made a gesture of dismissal. He didn't want to fret about the Americans today. He felt like music, a banquet, champagne and, afterward, Julie in a large, soft bed. He eyed her speculatively.

"Forget it," Julie told the emperor of France. "We don't have time."

Aboard the Roswell saucer, coasting toward the moon, Newton Chadwick and his two French friends were nearly as ecstatic as Pierre Artois. The news of the French government's surrender came to them via a battery-powered radio that Chadwick had brought aboard. Egg sat listening, saying nothing.

Later Chadwick locked himself in the saucer's head. He wore a small fanny pack at all times, and it contained, Egg suspected, his antiaging drug. Egg wondered if the drug took the form of a pill, a liquid that must be injected or some kind of cream. Egg also wondered about how much of the drug Chadwick had with him. Hmmm…

When he tired of plumbing the depths of the Roswell saucer's memory, Egg Cantrell amused himself by frequency surfing on the saucer's radio; he listened to taxi drivers in Rio, police calls from Moscow, ships at sea, soldiers on maneuver and air traffic controllers talking to airplanes. And he caught part of the great debate over the demands made by Pierre Artois. Amid the babble he could hear a steady, hard drumbeat of voices insisting that while Pierre's promises were very nice, the ability to vote out unpopular governments — the freedom to choose — was more important. Egg paid particular attention to American news reports. Charley Pine was in America; he concluded that the space-plane she stole from the moon was probably also there. The three spaceplanes in France had taken off, presumably on their way to the moon. Finally, someone had stolen the saucer from the National Air and Space Museum in Washington and flown it into space.

Chadwick and his friends were asleep when Egg heard the flash about the other saucer, and still asleep when the reporters figured out that apparently Rip Cantrell and Charley Pine were the guilty parties.

So the equation had changed, Egg mused. He had agreed to fly the saucer for Chadwick because he feared for Rip and Charley's safety, and his own. Chadwick and his thugs certainly weren't above using force if he failed to obey Chad-wick's demands. Yet if they disabled or killed Egg, Chadwick would have to fly the saucer — if he could. If he couldn't, he and his two pals would also die in this thing.

Egg wasn't ready to die just yet. He enjoyed life and wanted more of it.

And now wasn't the time to play the hero. The best way to get back to earth was to continue on this trajectory, which would slingshot the saucer around the moon and start it back for earth unless he fired the engines to slow it and put it into lunar orbit.

He turned the saucer so that earth filled the canopy. He searched the jeweled darkness around the planet, trying to spot the twinkle of rocket exhaust that would indicate the presence of a saucer or spaceplane. A saucer or spaceplane accelerating for a journey to the moon. He saw nothing of the kind, of course. The distances were too vast, the exhaust plumes far too small.

Egg grinned widely. Rip and Charley, a real pair of aces.

He loosened the safety belt that held him in the pilot's seat, leaned back and drifted off to sleep thinking about his nephew Rip and the beautiful Charley Pine.

The ride into space was even more exciting than Rip remembered it. He wanted to sing, but managed to stifle himself.

Charley Pine was all business. When the rocket engines stopped, signaling that the saucer had achieved orbit, she began tuning the radio that she remembered from her previous adventure in this ship. Like the one Egg was listening to in the Roswell saucer, this radio was also capable of receiving and transmitting on an extraordinarily wide band of frequencies.

She knew the one she wanted: the spaceplane's orbital refueling freq. She had to play a while with the radio, then finally found it.

The spaceplanes were already in orbit and were now rendezvousing with the fuel tank. The problem was that she didn't know where the tank was. Oh, she knew it was orbiting the earth at a height of about a hundred miles, more or less, but where above the earth was it?

As she listened to the French pilots chat back and forth between themselves and their controller on the ground, she tried to reason her way through the problem. When she and Lalouette had launched in Jeanne d 'Arc, the launch was timed so that when the spaceplane reached orbiting velocity, it would be in the vicinity of the fuel tank. She suspected the French had done the same thing this time. Indeed, if they hadn't, the spaceplanes would waste prodigious quantities of fuel and time maneuvering for a rendezvous.

She and Rip hadn't timed their launch, of course. They had to find and rendezvous upon the spaceplanes before they successfully refueled and began their lunar orbit insertion burn. Once they did, she and Rip would never catch them in the saucer; it didn't have enough fuel.

She examined the radar display, running it out to what she hoped was maximum range. The only way to determine what that range was would be to find a target and let the computer figure a course and burn to intercept. She could make an estimate based on that.

Which was beside the point, because the display was empty.

If the radar was working.

But why wouldn't it be working? Everything in the saucer had worked as it was supposed to from the day Rip and his friends hammered it from a sandstone ledge in the Sahara. Assume that it is working, Charley told herself.

"How are you going to find these dudes?" Rip asked. He was watching over her shoulder.

"I don't know that we can." She gestured toward the radio. "They're already rendezvousing with the fuel tank. We don't know when they launched, so they could be anywhere above the planet."

"Let's ask for help."

She looked at him. "Who from?"

"How about Space Command? Bet they know where that tank is." Space Command was a branch of the U.S. Air Force charged with monitoring the position of satellites, among other things.

Charley Pine thought about it. "The duty officer will refer the request to Washington, and they'll have to staff it, which could take a day or two. We have a few hours, at best. And if the U.S. government helps us, Pierre will be most unhappy with them. They will suspect that."

"Life's full of trade-offs," Rip remarked. "If Pierre gets those spaceplanes, he'll be sitting in the catbird seat. Most

Americans must be very unhappy with him right now. The worst that Space Command can do is say no."

"And make a lot of threats."

"I don't figure we're winning any Citizen of the Year Award points now. Oh, I know, I don't have any more faith in politicians than you do, but at some point you have to throw the ball in their direction and see if they can catch it."

Charley began tuning the radio. She certainly didn't know what frequencies she might use to contact Space Command, but no doubt the U.S. air traffic controllers did. Charley tuned to that portion of the VHF band where she thought air traffic controllers might be, and sure enough, there they were, working airliners into and out of… Miami.

She waited until there was a moment of silence, then said, "Miami Approach, this is Saucer One with a request, over."

The controller didn't miss a beat. He must get calls from flying saucers every day. "Saucer One, Miami, you have a flight plan on file?"

"That's a negative. We have a request, though. We need a frequency that we can call Space Command on. Can you recommend one?"

"Where are you, Saucer One?"

"In orbit."

"Stand by."

The controller's supervisor soon appeared at his shoulder. Trying to keep his voice as dry and matter-of-fact as possible, the controller said, "Saucer One says she's in orbit and wants a freq for Space Command."

The supervisor had just returned from her break, where she had been watching news coverage of the saucer's theft from the Air and Space Museum, a story that had been sandwiched between the latest bulletins from Paris and the moon. "lust another day at the office," she said, and picked up the military hotline telephone.

A moment after she was given the Space Command frequency by Miami Approach, Charley Pine lost radio contact with North America. She figured out the conversion and dialed in the frequency. Even the ancients had classified frequencies by the number of cycles in a given time span. Although they didn't use seconds, Egg had figured out the conversion formula long ago, and both Charley and Rip remembered it.

As they rode over the Sahara and the Red Sea, Rip and Charley sat in silence, each lost in his own thoughts. Over the Indian Ocean Charley finally spoke.

"You know that they're going to want us to destroy those spaceplanes."

"If we pop the refueling tank, we don't need to destroy them. They can't get to the moon without more fuel than they can carry aloft. It'll take a while to get extra fuel into orbit."

"It's already in orbit."

"Okay, we pop the cow."

"Rip, I know these people. I trained with them in France. Blowing up the tank will kill some of them."

"Hey, I didn't talk Pierre Artois into trying to conquer the world. I didn't give the order to kidnap Egg. His Royal Moonness Emperor Pierre the First gave the order."

"Not the weenies in the spaceplanes."

"They signed up to be soldiers in Pierre's army. If you don't want to pull the trigger, get out of the pilot's seat," Rip said. "I'll do it."

"I just want to make sure you know what we're getting ourselves into."

"Little late for second thoughts, don't you think? Maybe we should have had this conversation outside the Air and Space Museum, before we walked through that door." "Maybe, but we didn't, so we're having it now." "Outta the seat. I'll do the shooting and I'll live with it afterward."

"We'll both have to live with it," Charley Pine said, and stayed in the pilot's chair. She was thinking of Marcel, who had stolen a kiss one evening in the simulator. Was he aboard one of those spaceplanes?

The president was in the cabinet room at the White House as the duty officer at Space Command, an air force two-star general, relayed Charley's comments via telephone. Around the table were the leaders of Congress, who were here to find out exactly what was in the president's speech to the nation, which he had yet to give.

"The French spaceplanes rendezvoused with the fuel tank twenty minutes ago," the general said. "They may have finished refueling and have made their lunar orbit insertion burn by the time the saucer gets there."

"Give Cantrell and Pine all the help you can," the president whispered into the telephone. Of course, every eye in the room was upon him, yet he didn't want his side of this telephone conversation on the news shows during the next hour. As he waited while the general passed the order to the supervisor, who passed it on to the operators monitoring the progress of the various craft orbiting the earth, the president toyed with the idea of leaving the cabinet room to finish the conversation. He decided to stay put because there wasn't much else to say.

When the general got back to him, the president said softly, "Tell me again about this weapon Pine says is on board the saucer."

•Sir, she didn't explain anything about it. Her only comment was that the saucer had a short-range weapon that she could use to attack the spaceplanes. We asked what kind of weapon, and she said, Antimatter.' "

"And that thing sat right down the street in a museum for over a year without our wizards learning that it had a ray gun on it?"

"I couldn't comment on that, sir," the general said diplomatically.

The president dropped the telephone into its cradle and stared without enthusiasm at the legislators sitting around the table.

"Well, sir?" Senator Blohardt prompted.

"Gentlemen — and ladies, of course," the president said, "the fact is that I haven't decided precisely what I want to say to the citizens of the country about this matter. Since you are here, I'd like to hear your views. Perhaps you could lead off, Senator Blohardt."

"In the first place, Mr. President, you couldn't cede or surrender an iota of this nation's sovereignty to a foreign power without an amendment to the Constitution, which you'll never get."

"Treaties often cede sovereignty," a senator from the other party shot back.

After sex and violence, there is nothing Americans love more than legal wrangles, which is why football, which combines all three, is so popular. Naturally most of the legislators were lawyers, so away they galloped, arguing the case. The president sighed and slipped off his shoes. If Artois could figure a way to balance the budget and pay off the national debt, the president thought, turning the country over to him would be an idea worth discussing.

He kept the telephone close at hand.

The refuel tank was a third of an orbit away, behind the saucer.

Charley Pine attacked the saucer's flight computer. This was the first time she had attempted to program it to compute a maneuver more complex than a reentry profile. She couldn't figure it out on the first attempt, and said, "Rip, you're going to have to help me with this."

On the third attempt, there it was, a loop that took the saucer high into space and dropped it down on the predicted rendezvous point.

"My Lord, do we have fuel for that?" Rip murmured at Charley, who was already examining the quantity indications.

"It's going to be tight," Charley Pine said, "really tight. We won't have any fuel left to maneuver with when we reach the rendezvous — if the tank and spaceplanes are really there. Not if we ever expect to return to earth."

"I was sorta counting on getting down. One of these days."

"I was too."

"Well, hot woman, what do you want to do?"

Charley turned the saucer, pointed it in the direction recommended by the computer and came on smoothly with the power. The saucer leaped forward.

The maneuver the flight computer recommended sent the saucer over the top of a giant loop after a twelve-minute climb. Rip and Charley were no longer weightless in the saucer, which was now traveling in a long arc. They were pushed toward the floor of the saucer at perhaps a tenth of a G. Mild as it was, the acceleration force gave them a sense of up and down. The blue, green and gray earth was above them, over the canopy as they went slowly, lazily over the top and started down the back side of the loop.

Charley checked the flight display, upon which the radar target should be presented. It was empty. The spaceplanes and refueling tank were still somewhere to the west and far below, speeding along at eighteen thousand miles per hour toward that invisible point in space where they would rendezvous with the saucer. That is, if the designation of the spaceplanes' position was even in the ballpark.

The saucer hurtled downward on the back side of its prodigious loop as Charley and Rip waited, their eyes on the flight display. Seconds turned into minutes.

"Space Command, Saucer One, where are they?"

"Our computer shows you are four minutes from target merge."

Rip and Charley were looking straight at earth as the saucer accelerated toward it. Rip gave a gentle jump and did a somersault in midair, then landed on his feet. "Four minutes," he said, his voice dripping with disgust.

"I really admire your endless patience," Charley remarked. "It's one of your better traits."

"Hold that thought." Rip did another flip, but faster. "I always wanted to be an acrobat, but earth's gravity was just too much."

"Held you down, did it?"

After three more somersaults, he tired of it and decided to take advantage of the G to relieve himself in an empty water bottle. "Don't look behind you," he advised Charley Pine.

"I never do," she said. He was back at her side when she murmured, "Here they come."

The spaceplanes were slightly to one side, ahead, moving upward on the display. The displacement from dead ahead was, Charley knew, a graphic presentation of the inaccuracy with which she input the target's position. But she had come close enough. Maybe.

The nose of the saucer continued to rise toward the earth's horizon.

Charley Pine, jet fighter pilot, knew the rendezvous was going to work out.

They didn't see the spaceplanes until they were about twenty miles away. They appeared as tiny dots of reflected sunlight.

The saucer still had a speed and angular advantage, which caused it to close the distance. Ten miles out Charley Pine took over manually and used the saucer's maneuvering jets as a brake to reduce some of the overtaking speed. Her experience as a fighter pilot visuallyjudging closure rate was very helpful here.

At about ten miles she could see all four objects. There was the tank, with one of the spaceplanes nestled to it. But was that the donor or a receiver craft? The other two spaceplanes were nearby, within a few hundred yards of the ship that was joined to the tank.

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 hap-

pens?

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 were 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, Tack 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.

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.