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
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
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
