Saucer: The Conquest

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.

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