Saucer: The Conquest

20

"Where the devil is that saucer?" the president asked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs after another look at his watch. They were standing on the reviewing platform that had been hurriedly erected in front of the huge hangar at Andrews Air Force Base, on the outskirts of Washington. Three days ago the president had specifically told Charley Pine eleven o'clock. She and Cantrell were twenty-two minutes late.

"Hard to say, Mr. President," the general replied. "We can't see the thing on radar — it's very stealthy. Every now and then the operators get a stray glint from a leading edge, but only on a sweep or two, and only occasionally."

The president was in no mood for technical explanations. The French spaceplane had burned to cinders in an accident yesterday at the Bonneville Salt Flats — a fuel leak, according to the press release — and this morning the French ambassador had delivered a note to the state department demanding reimbursement.

"A billion and a half dollars for a used spaceplane?" the president exclaimed to the secretary of state. "Don't be ridiculous."

"They're very adamant," she retorted.

"Tell 'em we'll deduct a couple hundred mil from the bill we're sending them for a new White House, an arch in St. Louis, the bridges in San Fran and that stadium those folks in California want."

'You intend to bill France for a football stadium?"

"Damn right! Dirt, grass, skyboxes and everything, the whole works."

That conversation had taken some of the shine off the president's bonhomie. He looked at his watch again, glanced over at the press mob, which was restrained by a rope and a dozen military police, and tried to look relaxed even though he was worried. Twenty-eight minutes after the hour now.

The air force said two objects had reentered the atmosphere over California, one yesterday and one the day before. When he received the report on the first one he knew it wasn't Pine — she couldn't have made the trip from the moon that quickly. It must have been the Roswell saucer, the one Pine had fought on the moon, the one stolen from Area 51. He had tried to call Pine on the radio and give her a warning, but she never acknowledged. Probably had the radio off.

After it came into the atmosphere, the Roswell saucer had been spotted over Missouri by people on the ground, over Illinois by an airliner going into O'Hare, and by several pilots flying over Canada. The Canadian military had been searching for it ever since without success.

The president wondered if he should have canceled this event. He had decided not to because it had already been announced and publicized.

As he kept checking his watch, he fretted.

If he had only known that Pine and Cantrell were late because they had overslept, he would have been infuriated.

A passing ship, a freighter out of Baltimore, woke them from their deep sleep. They heard the screw noises; then the saucer rocked slightly as the disturbed water reached the bottom. Charley Pine looked around, blinked, then looked at her watch. Omigawd! Half past eleven.

"Rip! Rip! Wake up. We're late."

She stumbled over to the pilot's seat, wiping the sleep from her eyes. She donned the headset, pulled the power knob all the way out and lifted the antigravity control on the left side of the seat. The saucer didn't want to come out of the mud. She lifted the control a good bit, and finally the mud released its grip.

The heavy saucer rose slowly, lifting a column of water above it. Impatient, Charley shoved the stick forward while lifting the antigravity control. Instandy the spaceship began moving through the water, faster and faster as the saucer-shape began developing lift. She lifted the nose a tad and the ship planed upward toward the surface. The flying saucer accelerated nicely and shot out of the water in a ten-degree climb.

A fisherman in a nearby boat was nearly swamped in the mini-tsunami. He stared openmouthed as Charley lit the rocket engines and the saucer accelerated away in a long, sweeping turn to the north.

Aboard the freighter, a severely hungover sailor who witnessed the saucer's departure swore off booze. Never again, he vowed, as he squeezed his eyes shut against the glare of the rocket exhaust and belatedly clapped his hands over his ears.

Jean-Paul Lalouette was in pain. The stump of his left arm was turning gangrenous, he suspected. He and Chadwick had bandaged it as well as they could, and then gradually loosened the emergency tourniquet to restore blood flow, but the bleeding had been so bad they had had to tighten it again or he would have bled to death.

During the three-day journey to earth he had fought the pain and shock, and watched in horror as Newton Chadwick aged before his eyes. The whole flight from the moon had been a living nightmare. He was already suffering the tortures of hell and he wasn't even dead. Yet.

Chadwick had wanted to go to Missouri so he could kill Egg Cantrell when he arrived, as he would sooner or later. Lalouette thought that request sounded reasonable. He wanted the sweet taste of revenge himself. He dropped Chadwick at Cantrell's farm, refilled his water tanks and left. If the other saucer didn't show up for a week or two, he suspected he'd be dead when it arrived. His time was running out. He needed to intercept the saucer as soon as it came back to earth.

Charley Pine. He was going to kill her before he died.

Then he would be ready to go. Not until then, though.

Listening to the radio, Lalouette learned of the welcome-home event planned at Andrews. Then! That would be the time and place.

He flew northeast into Canada, found a lake in the woods and refilled the saucer's tanks. And he lucked out. There was an empty fishing cabin on the shore of the lake, already battened down for winter. He parked the saucer under a canopy of trees near the cabin. He broke into the cabin, found a sheet that he tore up for a new bandage, prepared a meal from canned goods the owners left behind and spent a miserable thirty-six hours huddled by a fire, consumed with rage. Jean-Paul Lalouette wasn't an evil man. Yet he had been beaten by a woman, and he was in severe pain and suffering from blood poisoning. He was no longer a rational human being.

Now he was gliding down toward Andrews from the northwest. The entire city of Washington lay under him. He ignored it, watching the sky for fighters. The Americans might try to intercept him, shoot him down.

He had timed his arrival for an hour after the event started. He would hover in front of the grandstand and kill everyone on it with the antimatter particles. Kill them all— Charley Pine, Rip Cantrell, the president, all of the bastards.

He saw airliners, but no fighters.

Despite the pain in his arm, he smiled grimly.

The people on the reviewing stand heard the low moan of the saucer's rocket engines before they saw it. People stood to get a better view; everyone scanned the sky. The president's granddaughter, Amanda, spotted the saucer first just above the horizon, coming swiftly from the southeast. She should have been in school today but demanded vociferously to see Charley Pine again, so her parents agreed that she could play hookey.

"There it is!" Amanda shouted, and pointed.

A wave of relief washed over the president, who collapsed back into his chair and mopped his brow.

The lenticular shape rushed toward them, its engines murmuring gently. Then the sound of the engines died away as Charley Pine put the saucer into a glide.

Charley concentrated on the parking mat in front of the huge hangar, trying to judge the closure rate. She could see the hordes of people, tens of thousands of them, the reviewing stand and the empty place in front where undoubtedly they intended her to land. Off to her right, on the northern edge of the mat, was the Goodyear blimp, which an enterprising television network had hired to obtain aerial shots of the saucer's landing.

Standing beside Charley's seat in the saucer, Rip Cantrell scanned the sky forward, right, left and as far aft as he could see on either side. So he saw the other saucer first, ninety degrees off the port beam, tilted at a seventy-degree angle, turning hard to come in behind.

"Nine o'clock high!" he shouted, pointing, then instinctively grabbed something to hold on to.

Charley Pine looked where he pointed and acquired the other saucer instantly. A surge of adrenaline shot through her. She twisted the throttle grip on the lever that controlled the antigravity rings wide open. The engines lit instantly. She shoved the stick left and began tweaking the nose up. The saucer laid over into a turn, its nose rising as it quickly accelerated.

The roar from Charley's engines hit the crowd below like the fist of God. Everyone had been watching the approaching saucer so intently that no one had seen the second one, circling high and maneuvering to drop onto the tail of the first.

The FAA administrator, who was on the reviewing platform, instantly assumed that Charley Pine intended to buzz the crowd, and roared, "I'll have her license for this." The noise was so loud that no one heard this promise.

When the second saucer lit its engines and passed overhead immediately behind the first, its sudden appearance shocked the administrator, the hundred thousand spectators and the audience around the globe watching on television, the vast bulk of whom had not even known that two saucers existed.

Although he knew all too much about the second saucer, the president's reaction was typical. "Oh, my God!" he said, and the words were lost in the deep bass thunder that massaged flesh and made the earth tremble.

Jean-Paul Lalouette thought he had Charley Pine as he turned hard, descending, to come in behind her. He had the antimatter reticle projected on the canopy in front of him, and he was ready to kill.

Then she lit her engines and turned hard into him. He knew that with his speed and descent angle, there was no way he could turn inside her, so he shallowed his turn and leveled the saucer, intending to accelerate and extend out, then turn hard and come back in for another pass. This course took him right over the assembled multitude below. Unfortunately, he was looking over his shoulder at Pine, hoping she would keep her turn in, so he didn't notice that he was still descending. The roof of the hangar flashing under him caught his attention, however.

He automatically fed in back stick and glanced forward, ensured his nose was above the horizon, then looked left to reacquire Charley visually.

Still accelerating, his saucer headed straight for the Goodyear blimp.

The cameraman in the gondola of the blimp couldn't believe his good fortune. He had a flying saucer coming at him head-on. He engaged the autofocus on his camera and got a shot that mesmerized his television audience: the saucer boring in, the black lenticular shape framed by the halo of white-hot exhaust flames that shot from its engines.

His elation quickly turned to horror as he realized the saucer was coming precisely at the camera. At the blimp. At him! He closed his eyes and braced himself.

Lalouette saw Charley Pine reverse her turn, whipping the saucer over from an eighty-degree bank to the left to a ninety-degree bank to the right. She was pulling hard too — he could see the swirl of a cloud forming on top of the turning disk and being swallowed by the exhaust flame.

He glanced ahead — and saw the blimp. He was going right at it. He was too close to avoid it. Even as the sight registered, the saucer hit the inflated blimp dead in the middle. Nearly supersonic now, the saucer cleaved through it in an eyeblink, like a bullet through paper, and shot out the other side.

Fortunately the blimp was filled with helium, a nonflammable gas, so it didn't explode. It folded like a ripped dishrag and felt straight down — into the base sewage-settling pond that just happened to be immediately below.

Five minutes later the pilot, copilot and cameraman staggered from the shallow pond, coughing, spluttering and uninjured. Lying on the bank covered in slime, the cameraman remembered the shot he had before his eyes slammed shut and began thinking about a Pulitzer.

Jean-Paul Lalouette eased back on the go juice and laid the saucer into a climbing, high-G turn. He wanted to get a shot at Charley Pine head-on or nearly so, and if the antimatter particles didn't do the trick, he was going to ram her. He didn't consciously think about it, but he knew that was the way it would go.

He lost sight for a second in the turn, and when he reacquired the other saucer visually, it had turned somewhat, making a head-on pass possible. He racked his ship around hard to bring the reticle to bear and opened fire.

He hadn't thought about what would happen when his weapon began squirting antimatter particles through a gaseous medium, so he was surprised at the tracer bullet effect as random particles annihilated themselves on positrons in the air molecules.

Charley Pine saw the streak of fire and smoke, and jogged to avoid it.

Lalouette suddenly realized that he could not bring the particle stream onto her ship as they closed, so he concentrated on ramming. He was pulling hard when his ship barely missed Charley's, passing immediately behind it, right through the rocket exhaust plume.

He immediately killed the rockets and began pulling back toward Charley, intent on getting behind her. The G killed his speed quickly, and indeed, Pine's saucer began to move forward on his canopy.

Yes! He was going to get her! Elation flooded him and he pulled even harder on the stick, forcing his speed to bleed off even quicker.

When Charley looked over her right shoulder and saw the enemy saucer banking toward her without its plume of rocket exhaust, she knew precisely what Lalouette intended — to get behind her for a killing shot.

She almost instinctively cut her engines, which would have set up a low-speed scissors, but she rejected that option. Her opponent was already slower than she was, so had the advantage. Instead she opened her throttle all the way, twisting the grip to the stop. The Gs shoved her backward into her seat.

Regardless of what else he was, Lalouette was a good fighter pilot. He knew he had been outmaneuvered when he saw the exhaust plume on Pine's saucer grow into a mighty torch, almost as bright as the sun. Too late, he ordered the computer to give him full power. Still, the enemy saucer began opening the range dramatically. He did manage to get Pine in his sights and fired. A river of sparks and smoke shot forward, but he sensed the range was already too great. None of the antimatter particles would survive to reach the target. Closer. He had to get closer.

As it happened, Pine was heading northeast when she stroked the rockets, so that was the way she continued. With Lalouette well behind, the two saucers shot away in that direction and soon disappeared from sight.

The thunder of their engines continued to reverberate around the hangar and parking mats of Andrews Air Force Base for almost a minute, however, before it faded below the threshold of hearing.

As the roar diminished, people began removing their fingers from their ears. Amanda exclaimed, "I'm going to be a saucer pilot someday, just like Charley Pine!"

The president was a thoughtful man. If Lalouette succeeded in shooting down Pine, there was nothing to stop him from refueling and returning to the moon to rescue Pierre Artois, nor from carrying technicians and parts aloft to repair the antigravity beam generator. As the excited voices around him became a hubbub, he turned to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and whispered, "Scramble every fighter on the East Coast. Shoot down that big saucer."

"There's no way for fighter pilots to tell those saucers apart," the chairman protested. "How will they know which is which?"

"Shoot 'em both down," the president ordered after a glance at Amanda, to ensure she wasn't listening. "The stakes are too high. We can't take a chance."

Flying straight and level at full power in a clear autumn sky, Charley Pine rapidly considered her alternatives as her velocity increased dramatically. She could zoom up into inner space, where the air was thin or nonexistent, turn at the top of her climb and take a head-on shot at Lalouette as she dove. Or she could turn hard and convert her airspeed advantage into an angular one, which if she played it right would eventually give her a shot at her opponent. Or she could combine the two tactics, climb and turn at the same time.

She was torn, unsure of how to play this, when she saw clouds ahead. Aha! A front; a line of cumulus with bases at several thousand feet, tops at perhaps ten.

At her speed, now approaching Mach 7, she was in the clouds in seconds. Off the throttle, she turned hard to kill some speed — a turn that covered seventy miles of New Jersey in seconds. She asked the computer for the radar presentation, and got it. Numerous returns appeared on the display; after all, this airspace over New Jersey was full of airplanes. Lalouette would be easy to spot because his saucer would be the quickest blip on the scope — if she managed to get him into her forward quadrant, and if the radar could pick him up.

Her speed dissipated rapidly with the G she had on. Just as she was beginning to suspect that her tightening turn might have worked, the saucer shot through a relatively clear area and she got a glimpse of an airliner, a twin-engine commuter turboprop. She cleared it by a few feet; at the speed she was traveling the encounter looked close enough to trade paint. The airliner was gone so quickly that when she realized what it was, she was already well past it.

That was good. If she hit an airplane at these speeds in these skies, the accident would be over before she even knew it was going to happen.

She wondered whether Lalouette was using his radar. If he wasn't, he had lost her in this wilderness of gauzy, puffy towers.

There he was! On the display. She had slowed seconds before he had, so could turn tighter than he could. He was trying to turn, which was a mistake. Although he had an energy advantage, hers was now angular, and it would be enough to give her the victory if he continued to play her game for a few more seconds.

Turning hard, flashing in and out of the clouds, she closed on her opponent, who was merely a blip on the three-dimensional holographic display on the panel in front of her. She was on his altitude, turning inside him with the range closing nicely. She centered the symbol on the reticle and glanced down in time to see the target sinking toward the bottom of the display, which was her saucer.

Lalouette had lost Pine. When she entered the cloud he had lost sight of her exhaust plume. Now she was somewhere in this soup thrashing around, no doubt maneuvering to kill him. He had the radar going and was busy trying to figure it out, which was difficult since he was flying and fighting the pain in his arm and the general malaise that came with blood poisoning.

He had entered a left turn in order to scan with the radar and backed off on the power. All this he accomplished merely by thinking about it, since he was wearing the headband. Without the band he couldn't have flown the saucer one-handed.

These clouds… He eased higher. He wanted to get above them, so he could see right, left and behind.

He had just topped the clouds when the first antimatter particle detonated in the saucer behind him. He automatically looked left, inside his turn, and aft. There she was, coming out of the clouds and closing, only a couple hundred yards away, a river of sparks and smoke vomiting from the front of her saucer, straight at him.

Triphammer thuds behind him. Then a horrible pain in his right calf!

Power! Full power!

The Gs shoved him into the seat and the hammering stopped. He was out of the particle stream, accelerating quickly.

His leg! Blood. He felt it with his good arm. A cavity, a horrible wound, bleeding badly.

He didn't have much time left.

The separation between the two ships was increasing, so he made a gentle turn to the right. He wasn't thinking clearly, but he remembered the buildings of New York. He could hide in the concrete canyons.

Behind him a trickle of water flowed from the saucer's damaged main tank.

The two saucers raced toward New York City at full power. Lalouette dove back into the clouds, but he didn't maneuver, just ran flat out, and Charley couldn't close the distance. She tried a few squirts of antimatter particles when she got a firing solution on the holographic display. The particles had no apparent effect on the saucer ahead. Perhaps the distance was too great, perhaps the moisture in the clouds soaked up some of the particles, whatever.

She knew New York was in the direction that Lalouette was going, with her hot on his tail. There was nothing she could do about it; wherever he went, she intended to follow. If she let him escape now he would hunt her down and appear, probably, when she least expected it. She intended to follow him to the limit of her fuel unless she killed him sooner, which she was trying mightily to do. She and Rip would be at the bottom of a smoking hole at Andrews if Rip hadn't spotted the other saucer just seconds before Lalouette could open fire. A couple of seconds… the difference between life and death.

Other targets appeared on the display — airplanes. They were so slow they appeared nearly stationary. There were so many! Then she realized that Lalouette was embedded in the planes queuing up to land at Newark. And he was slowing.

The distance closed rapidly. Yet she dared not shoot; there were too many airplanes nearby.

She backed off on the throttle, felt the G ease up. She lowered the nose, feeling for the bottom of the clouds as she weaved to avoid the airliners.

She came out of the clouds at about fifteen hundred feet above the ground, still making at least Mach 2. Rip was right beside her, pointing out planes. She merely glanced, then resumed her concentration on the display on the panel.

Lalouette had to be the fast mover on the display. Now he was turning right, headed straight for Manhattan.

She tried to cut across his turn, shorten the distance. Yes. Closing… almost in range.

But beyond the saucer were buildings. People. If the particles were scattered by impact with the saucer's skin, or went all the way through it, they would hit those buildings and people. And if she succeeded in shooting down the saucer, it would crash into New York!

She held her fire and stayed high, just under the base of the clouds, which covered about half the sky. Visibility was excellent underneath.

Lalouette descended sharply, heading right for the Ver-razano Narrows Bridge at the entrance to the bay.

"He's going to hit it!" Rip exclaimed with horror in his voice.

Seconds later Charley replied, "No, I think he wants to go under it."

And he did. The shock wave off the now subsonic saucer rocked the bridge. As it swayed traffic stopped and people bailed from their vehicles.

The saucer continued up the bay, streaking past ships and ferries, only a few feet above the water. A roostertail of water rose behind it. From their perch Charley and Rip had a ringside seat — which was perfect. If Lalouette turned and climbed, they would have a shot, if they had to defend themselves. If he didn't, they could attack him after he left the city behind.

Lalouette headed for the East River, which was spanned by several bridges.

"God in heaven, he's going to go under them all," Rip said in awe.

Blood was soaking the leg of Jean-Paul's jumpsuit. He was in severe pain. He was flying without a plan because he could think of no way to end this nightmare. No way to destroy the saucer that he knew was behind him, hunting him, no way to kill that Charley Pine.

The sensation of speed this close to the water was sublime. He avoided a ship and two smaller vessels, weaving slightly, and saw the bridges ahead. Unconsciously he asked the computer to back off on the power, and it did. The saucer was down to three hundred knots now.

In seconds the spans shot over his head.

He had to turn hard to stay over the river, and the Gs made his leg bleed more. He screamed in agony.

There was no relief from the pain.

Desperate to do something, he commanded a pull-up and turn to the left. The saucer responded to his thoughts.

Now Charley saw the enemy saucer rising and turn-ing, cutting across midtown. This was her chance, her opening.

Yet she refused to take it. There was no way she was going to force Lalouette to crash in Manhattan. She racked her ship into a turn to preserve her angular and height advantage.

The French pilot soared over the buildings in a long, lazy turn that carried him across the island and out over the Hudson River, where he steadied out going south.

He was in too much pain to think, to look around for his opponent. He held on to his bleeding leg with his one good hand, trying to stanch the blood flow. To no avail.

When he saw the Statue of Liberty approaching his nose he turned again, descending.

"Now what?" Rip asked the gods.

The other saucer was in a descending turn. It looked for a moment as if it might go into the water. Then the nose came up and it skimmed the surface heading north toward the Battery.

Lalouette was again down on the deck. He shot over Battery Park at two or three hundred feet and actually went between two buildings immediately north of the park's small splash of green. Charley Pine pushed her nose down, intending to get immediately behind the other ship. Yet she was afraid to go as low as the French pilot.

He was frightened, she realized. He must be injured.

"Jesus," Rip said as the saucer ahead flashed between buildings.

A jog on Broadway, then straight north up the Avenue of the Americas toward Central Park. She was only a few hundred yards behind, but the larger saucer was lower, below the plane of the antimatter weapon. She couldn't bring herself to dive down to his level. The buildings whipped past like fence posts.

After the saucers fled the vicinity of Andrews, television producers were left without a main event. Talking heads took over as the producers ran replays of the footage they did have.

When it became probable that the saucers weren't going to return to Andrews, television stations in cities across the nation launched their traffic helicopters in the hope that the saucers would come their way. One of the networks now put on the air video of the two saucers racing along, one behind the other, between the buildings of New York.

In the presidential lounge off the main hangar floor at Andrews, the president and his advisers were called to the television by the president's granddaughter. "There they are," Amanda squealed, pointing at the set against the wall.

After watching for a few seconds, the president tightened his grip on the arm of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. "Where are those fighters?"

"I don't know, sir," the general said bitterly. As if a Pentagon four-star knew the exact location of airborne airplanes. If they were airborne. The alert had gone out about fifteen minutes ago, plenty of time for the alert fighters to scramble. But without guidance from their ground control station, the general knew, the pilots would have no idea where to go to intercept their targets. The general also knew that now was not the time to explain the facts of life to the president, but he did pry the commander-in-chiefs fingers off his coat sleeve as he concentrated on the television picture.

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 mat-

tered 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 tree-

tops 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 accelera-

tion 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 antigrav-ity 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.