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.
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.
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.
