Saucer: The Conquest

by Coonts, Stephen

  “And so, this is where your journey led. To the moon, eh?” Artois was jovial. He slapped Chadwick on the back. After all, he was the emperor of France. “Show us how this saucer works.”

  Newton Chadwick gave them the tour, explained the propulsion system, the antigravity rings, gave summaries about the various computers and let each sit in the pilot’s seat wearing the headband.

  A long hour later, Artois asked Chadwick, “This saucer has a weapon?”

  “Oh, yes.” Chadwick put the optical sighting crosshairs on the canopy and ran through what he had learned of the system from his explorations of the computer.

  Artois listened intently. “With this weapon we can prevent the saucer that is on its way here from Washington from hurting us.”

  “True,” Chadwick admitted.

  “Can you fly this ship?”

  Chadwick took a deep breath and held it while he studied the instrument panel. He had watched Egg do it, of course. Watched intently. Wearing the headband, one merely asked the computer for the appropriate maneuver and it manipulated the various propulsion, control and navigation systems. And yet …

  Newton Chadwick exhaled. “No,” he said forcefully. He glanced at Jean-Paul Lalouette, then looked Artois in the eyes. “I could teach him, though. He is a pilot. He has the … the confidence, the judgment, the experience … that I do not.”

  Artois looked expectantly at Lalouette, who was not thinking of the saucer but of Charlotte Pine. She would be flying the saucer that he was supposed to attack. She had become famous last year by flying it, and now she was at it again. He had gotten to know her fairly well during the training cycle for the spaceplane mission. A U.S. Air Force Academy graduate, Pine served a tour in F-16 fighters before she went to test pilot school. When Artois had hired her to fly the spaceplane, Lalouette was very skeptical. He didn’t believe anyone could learn the ship in the short time available. And she had. Not only had she learned to be a copilot, she had flown it solo back to earth and landed in Utah. She was, he thought now, perhaps the finest natural pilot he had ever met.

  Lalouette cleared his throat and examined the various displays on the instrument panel. There was no book that explained all this. One had to intuitively grasp the significance of what one was seeing or … or else.

  He looked again at Artois. “You want me to shoot down the other saucer?”

  “Yes.”

  So there it was. Lalouette rubbed the stubble on his jaw. He found that Salmon was staring at him, his face expressionless.

  When Salmon captured Jean-Paul’s eyes, he said, “If you don’t fly this ship, the other saucer may destroy or hopelessly damage it. The only other ship on earth capable of reaching us is in the United States. The American president will probably order it destroyed. The lunar base will be our burial crypt. Do you want to die here?”

  Still Lalouette hesitated. When he was younger he spent three years flying Super Entendard fighters. He fingered the throttle grip on the antigravity lever. The water necessary to refuel this saucer was here, at the lunar base, but without a radar or GCI controller, intercepting the other saucer at altitude was impractical. The interception would have to be made low, near the lunar base, while the other saucer was on its final approach with the antigravity system. Yes, he decided, that was the best way to do it.

  “Chadwick will fly with you,” Artois said. “He knows the systems. He doesn’t want to die.” He turned his gaze on the redheaded American. “Do you?” he asked.

  There was something in the tone of his voice that sent a cold chill up Chadwick’s spine.

  “BILLIONS AND BILLIONS OF STARS. DO YOU EVER STOP and wonder what’s really out there?” Rip said to Charley Pine. Head to head, they were staring through the canopy at the Milky Way, that huge splash of stars that streaked the heavens, our galaxy.

  “Our species will be exploring it until the end of time,” Charley replied. She too felt the magic of the moment. Hurling through space toward an uncertain rendezvous, with life hanging in the balance, still there was time to look at the eternal … and wonder.

  “Like Egg, I’ve spent time this winter and spring surfing the saucer’s computer,” Rip said. “But the people who built the saucer stopped making entries 140,000 years ago. What have they learned since then?”

  “If they still exist?”

  “Oh, they’re out there,” Rip replied thoughtfully. “Someplace out there, amid all those stars, are people just like us. Professor Soldi was right, I suspect—they are our cousins. And they are probably looking our way and wondering about those colonists that went bravely forth into the great unknown a hundred and forty millennia ago.”

  “If you look into the abyss long enough, the abyss stares back. Didn’t someone smart say that?”

  “Speaking of the abyss, how are we going to go about rescuing Egg when we get to the moon?”

  WHEN JEAN-PAUL LALOUETTE DONNED THE HEADBAND that allowed the saucer’s computer to read and respond to his brainwaves, he felt as if he had walked through a doorway into another world, another dimension. He could see—

  Frightened, he ripped off the headband. He was in the pilot’s seat of the saucer, the panel was there … he fingered the controls, reassuring himself with their tangible solidity, the texture and sensuous shape of their surfaces. Yes, this was real.

  He looked at the headband, fingered it, then placed it back upon his head.

  Oh, now he understood. He was living in two worlds, that of the cockpit and, superimposed over it, that of the computer.

  He decided that the first command would be to lift the saucer from the lunar surface where it rested, and he instantly felt a tiny lurch as the ship rose until it was absolutely level, then severed its contact with the moon.

  He was up; he could see the change in perspective. Now forward—and the saucer began to move.

  Stop!

  Aft!

  Right!

  Left!

  Higher—oh, it was magic!

  “See how easy it is,” someone said. Chadwick’s voice. Chadwick, one of life’s spectators, one of those who lacked the courage to put his own lips to the silver cup.

  Lalouette snapped up the landing gear and let the saucer accelerate away from the base, out across the vast dark lava flow that stretched away to the south and east. It accelerated slowly, no doubt because the lunar gravity was so weak. Yet it was accelerating, faster and faster, until on just the antigravity system alone the saucer was doing about two hundred knots, which appeared to be terminal velocity unless he lit the rockets. He did—and the saucer accelerated abruptly.

  After a few moments he tilted the saucer and used the controls to turn and head back for the base, maneuvering freely to get the feel of the machine.

  With the rockets off near the lunar surface, he tilted the saucer to sixty degrees and used the antigravity system and a squirt from the ship’s maneuvering jets to turn a sharp corner. The G came hard and, after two weeks away from the earth’s gravitational field, almost blacked him out. He strained against it, fighting to stay conscious.

  He straightened out and raced back across the lava flow toward the lunar base, its solar cells marking its position. Behind the base was the first of the ridges. He climbed progressively higher and higher, aiming for the tops of the crags on the highest ridge, which towered fifteen thousand feet above the flat lava bed below.

  The ridges were knife edges, sheer and steep, untouched by the forces of erosion in a place without wind or rain, although they did bear the scars of weathering caused by the fierce temperature extremes between sunlight and shadow. The stark sunlight and deep purple, almost black, shadows made the jagged formations seem even more severe. The French pilot worked the saucer up the slopes and ridges, barely clearing the high points, turning first one way, then another, tilting right and left, staying just a few feet over the rock.

  He slowed the saucer and brought it to a halt, finally, above the highest peak—stopped it above that apex as if it were
mounted on an invisible pedestal.

  Now Lalouette took off the headband and looked around. Both Artois and Chadwick were unconscious on the floor. They had succumbed to the G forces. Salmon was conscious, however, strapped into one of the seats. He looked grimly at Lalouette.

  Jean-Paul snorted and shook his head, then donned the headband again. He looked up at the earth, which was merely a black spot against the sunlit sky.

  Pierre Artois thought he was the emperor of the earth, but oh, how little he knew!

  Jean-Paul dumped the saucer’s nose and let it accelerate down the slope. It accelerated slowly, pulled by the weak lunar gravity, as if life were being lived in slow motion.

  On the crest of a lower ridge he saw a sharp promontory, a spire of rock that had stood upright since the ridge was made. Even as the thought crossed his mind, the crosshairs of the antimatter weapon appeared on the canopy before him. The saucer turned slightly, pointing precisely at that rock finger, superimposing the crosshairs over it.

  Fire!

  Flashes from the rock. Shards and dust flew off as antiprotons found protons and the particles obliterated each other in bursts of pure energy.

  The spire was obscured in an opaque cloud of rock fragments when he stopped shooting at the last instant and pulled the saucer up just enough to avoid smashing into it. Accelerating downward toward the lava sea, the saucer quickly left the shattered spire behind.

  Lalouette’s face wore a terrible grin.

  15

  THE MOON WAS JUST ABOVE THE WESTERN HORIZON the next morning when the sun rose in North America. The weather was magnificent across most of the continent on this autumn day. As the earth spun in the sky over his head, Pierre Artois used his antigravity beam on the White House, then the arch in St. Louis, and finally, the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.

  Some California sports fans became positively giddy when the Rose Bowl was reduced to rubble. Perhaps, they thought, the feds could be induced to build a new stadium to replace it, one that might attract an NFL team.

  Pierre could have zapped a lot more places—the weather was perfect, the sunlight at a low angle gave the telescopic picture excellent contrast, and Julie was urging him to—but he refrained, preferring to pretend he had been forced to violence by a recalcitrant president who refused to listen to reason.

  The president of the United States had problems of a different sort. Millions of Americans watched the White House being reduced to splinters as they ate their breakfast. It was not a pretty sight, and the reaction was immediate. A delegation of infuriated senators and representatives called upon the chief executive at “an undisclosed location” and urged war on France.

  “That idiot Artois is the emperor of France, according to the French government, and he is waging war on us,” Senator Blohardt said forcefully. “We must deliver an ultimatum to the frogs—renounce Artois or suffer the consequences.”

  “And the consequences would be … ?”

  “Nuclear war,” said a senator from the Deep South, smacking a fist into his palm.

  “No, not that,” a California congressman replied. “Conventional explosives only. Surgical strikes. Radioactivity would poison the water and spread through the food chain.”

  “A blockade of all French ports,” another urged. “We’ll shut down their industry.”

  “I might support a boycott of French products,” the secretary of state said tentatively. “We might be able to get the UN to go along with a boycott, as long as there was a wine-for-food provision so that the French wouldn’t starve.”

  “Hmm,” said the president, and sent the delegation off with the secretary of state to argue the issue.

  “So what are we going to do?” P. J. O’Reilly asked the president when the legislators had been ushered out.

  “Nothing,” said the president, “until we hear from Rip and Charley.”

  “The latest polls say the public wants action,” O’Reilly reminded him. He gestured toward the television, which was replaying a video of the destruction of the executive mansion one more time. “You’re sitting on a volcano of outraged voters. You cannot remain passive.”

  “If you have any suggestions, trot them out.”

  O’Reilly thought hard, but he couldn’t come up with anything. The president couldn’t either, so he went to the gym to work out.

  “WHY CAN’T WE SEE THE SAUCER THAT IS COMING toward us?” Pierre demanded of Claudine Courbet. He was standing at the telescope controls staring at the computer-enhanced image as he scanned the scope slowly back and forth, trying to find a single tiny dot of light that moved in relation to the background stars.

  “You are looking for one grain of sand on a very large beach, monsieur,” Courbet said respectfully.

  “If only we had a decent radar!” Pierre declared. A radar unit that they could use to aim the antigravity beam or scan the sky for incoming spaceplanes would have been impossible to justify to the French politicians ; Pierre had used all the excess lift capacity he had transporting unmanifested items that he absolutely had to have. Now that he was emperor he could get anything he wanted on a manifest, if only he had a way to get it here.

  He gave up on the telescope and glanced over his shoulder at Egg Cantrell, who stood between Henri Salmon and Fry One against a wall. Pierre had had Egg brought here to watch the recalcitrant Americans being zapped in the hope that he would be suitably impressed. A videotaped appeal from a humbled Egg might be useful at some point.

  “So, you see how futile is the American resistance, eh?”

  “Did the thought ever occur to you that you might have killed people in those buildings you destroyed?”

  “Your president has chosen to sacrifice American lives rather than doing the proper, honorable thing, which is to submit. I do what I must in the interest of all mankind. If lives have been lost, it is his responsibility, not mine.”

  Pierre was a megalomaniac so far around the bend he was out of sight, Egg concluded. Reasoning with him was a waste of time.

  Egg looked through the thick, bulletproof glass, if that was what it was, at the chamber beyond, with the antigravity beam generator in the center and the telescope and capacitor slightly offset, at the scaffolding against the wall, at the plates and hydraulic rams that could seal the chamber from the vacuum of space. The chamber was lit by brilliant sunlight, which was not streaming straight down through the hole in the roof but was coming in at a slight angle. Yet through the opening one could see stars in the dark sky.

  A remarkable engineering triumph, Egg thought. Quite remarkable.

  As Pierre chattered on about his plans for the people of earth, for the future of the species in the utopia that he would build, Egg thought about Rip and Charley, who were coming to the moon in Rip’s old saucer … to rescue him.

  Finally Pierre tired of Egg’s monosyllabic answers and turned to Claudine. “How is the weather over Japan?”

  “Clear enough, I think. The sun will not be up for hours but I believe Tokyo is very well lit. Perhaps we can see it. Clouds will obscure the islands tomorrow.”

  Pierre rubbed his hands together. “Then we must discipline them now,” he said, and turned to the control console.

  Egg’s thoughts shot down the road Pierre had inadvertently suggested. God rest you, Sigmund Freud. Julie Artois was standing at the console monitoring the reactor’s output and checking computer readouts. She would enjoy wielding the whip, Egg decided. A bit embarrassed at the mental image, he flushed slightly.

  So there it was. A megalomaniac and his dominatrix, shattering lives all over the globe because they knew what was best for everyone.

  Egg closed his eyes and concentrated fiercely.

  Power on!

  He let ten seconds slip by, then ordered, Rise from the surface, about fifty feet. Gear up.

  He was looking up toward the opening above the antigravity beam, into that brilliant sunbeam, when it momentarily dimmed, then brightened again.

  Egg stared at the hole, con
centrating hard.

  Now he saw it, the leading edge of the saucer. He brought it over the hole, completely blotting out the sunbeam, and lowered it until it was about ten feet above the opening.

  The dimming light instantly alerted everyone in the control room. They all stared upward at the stationary saucer suspended above the hole. As Egg’s eyes adjusted to the lower light level, he could see surface dust and debris forming a layer in the repulsion zone halfway between the saucer and the floor of the chamber.

  “WHAT?” PIERRE EXPLODED. “IS LALOUETTE FLYING the saucer? Is he crazy?” He grabbed the microphone on the console and pushed buttons.

  “Lalouette?” The name boomed over the public address system. “Where is he?” Pierre demanded in French. “If Lalouette is in the base, send him to the power chamber immediately.”

  Julie Artois stepped in front of Egg. Her eyes glittered as they stared into his. “You did this!” she said bitterly. “You foul little man.” She slapped him as hard as she could swing. Egg staggered from the blow, caught himself and put everything he had into a return slap. Henri Salmon blocked Egg’s arm; then he and Fry One pinned the American.

  “What is this?” Pierre shouted at Julie. “Why hit him? Someone is in the saucer!”

  “Who?” she demanded.

  It took ten minutes to account for everyone at the lunar base. Lalouette and Newton Chadwick rushed into the chamber while the count was being conducted. Chadwick and Julie huddled in one corner while the French pilot conferred with Artois.

  The two men holding Egg didn’t relax their grip, even though he wasn’t struggling. Egg tried to keep a poker face. He should have refused to fly the saucer for Chadwick, should have crashed it into the moon, should have had more courage …

  He was still berating himself when he heard Chadwick say, “Brainwaves are tiny electrical charges generated by the synapses in our brains. The saucer’s computers read them through the tiny wires embedded in the headband that the pilot wears. Cantrell must have programmed the saucer’s computer to perform certain maneuvers at designated times.”