by D F Capps
Was this why Charlie wanted him out here in Datil, New Mexico?
“Thanks,” Sean said.
The man nodded and walked off.
So, Sean thought, I’m in the right place.
* * *
Diane arrived at Peregrine Base late that afternoon and reported in to Hollis.
“Do we have a count on how many saucers got in through the hole?” she asked.
“Several hundred, I’m afraid. The Xinjiang transmitter is online now and the aluminum and barium are up to usable levels in the upper atmosphere, so however many saucers we have to deal with is fixed. The planetary shield is complete. The Zetas can’t get any more saucers in.”
“At least one large saucer is here. I don’t know how many more slipped in before we got there, but my impression is that it was an invasion level force.”
Hollis nodded and glanced at the floor. “That agrees with my assessment. We recorded seven large saucers entering. Your squadron shot one down, as did you. That leaves five out there, somewhere.”
Diane looked up at the ceiling for a moment as she collected her thoughts.
“We lost seven fighter craft in the battle. The Russians lost two. We need replacement craft, and we need them now.”
Hollis blew air out through his lips. “Four new craft are here now. We will be back up to twenty-four craft before tomorrow morning. President Andrews has the funding and the production facility has set up in a new place. They will have six times the manufacturing capability.”
“Will have” wasn’t helping her feel secure at the moment. “Any news from Russia and China?”
Hollis nodded again. “Both the Russian and Chinese Space commands will be up to twenty-four fighters each within the next day to day and a half. We’re going to be as ready as we can be, given the timing.”
She sighed. “I just hope it’s enough.”
Chapter 59
Diane sat on the bed in her room and held the Zeta Grey flash gun in her hand. It’s not like it came with an instruction manual, she thought. Three buttons . . . three levels of power?
She examined what she assumed was the front—the flat end. It looked like some sort of a lens inside a rotating collar. Focus control? Like our tactical flashlights? It was time to find out.
She slipped the flash gun into the inside pocket of her coat and headed for the main entrance to the underground base. When she reached the main security checkpoint they stopped her and asked her to wait for Captain Collier.
He arrived three minutes later and asked, “What’s this all about?”
“I need some air,” she said.
Collier stood there and looked at her. “You’re going to have to do better than that. What do you really want?”
She glanced around the room. “Okay, I need to try something out.”
He tipped his head. “Like what?”
She hesitated. “Can’t you trust me on this?”
He shifted his weight to his other foot. “Maybe. It depends on what it is.”
How was she going to explain this? “Look, I really don’t want to make a big deal out of this, but I think it could lead to something important.”
Collier took a step closer to her. “And you can’t tell me?”
She shook her head. “No. Consider it something personal.”
Collier studied her for a long minute. “How long do you need?”
She glanced around the room again. “Twenty, maybe thirty minutes.”
He turned his head and stared at the exit for a few seconds then settled his gaze back on her. He walked over to the desk, picked up the phone, and called Hollis.
“Yes, sir, Zadanski is asking to go outside for twenty to thirty minutes.” He looked back at her. “She has the same look in her eyes as the night she went to the simulator room.” He continued to stare at her. “Yes, sir, the night she figured out the jinking.” He glanced at the exit again. “Yes, sir, I agree.” He hung up the phone. “You want an escort?”
She closed her eyes for a moment. “No.”
He rubbed his chin, apparently deep in thought. “Personal, right?”
She nodded. “Right. Personal.”
He glanced at the blast door again. “Okay if I wait at the mine entrance for you?”
She hesitated. “I guess.”
Collier took a coat from the rack and an H&K MP5 with two extra magazines from one of the guards.
“Open the blast door, then close it again when we’re clear.”
He led her out through the mine entrance into the dark of the winter night. The moon was up and the light snow on the ground allowed her to see where she was going.
“Thirty minutes, I come looking for you,” he said.
She smiled. “I’ll be fine, thank you.”
Diane wandered south through the canyon for about five-hundred yards and stopped. She stood silent and watched the scrub surrounding her. She saw what appeared to be a coyote investigating a hole in the ground. She raised the flash gun in her right hand and put her thumb on the rear button.
Sorry if I get this wrong, she thought. She pressed the button.
There was a quick strobe of bright light from the weapon, similar to the electronic flash from a camera. The coyote dropped to the ground and four birds fell out of several trees. She slowly approached the coyote and cautiously put her hand on its chest. It was still breathing.
Stun function, she thought. Handy. She studied the trees. The birds had fallen off of limbs spread out over forty feet apart. She had been maybe sixty feet away from the coyote.
So, wide angle. She rotated the front collar to the right, aimed off to the side into the scrub and pressed the front button. The flash was definitely more intense. A three-foot diameter tunnel appeared in the scrub brush. She walked to the tunnel and examined the ends of the branches. They were cut clean. She worked her way for fifty feet next to the hole cut in the scrub brush. The diameter seemed smaller. She pressed on. At a hundred feet the ends of the branches were smoking and no longer cleanly cut. Beyond that, the void in the brush shrank in size. A little farther and she found the end of the hole created by the flash gun.
Interesting. Almost a hundred and fifty feet effective range. Not bad.
She worked her way back through the scrub to where she’d started. She looked for the coyote and the birds that had fallen to the ground. All of them were gone. She looked at the flash gun again and thought, Okay. Back button is for stun, front is for vaporize. The middle button must be for kill. This can work.
The wind picked up from the southeast. At first it felt like it was getting warmer; then the snowflakes drifted down at an angle. Diane stopped and looked at the night sky. Clouds were moving in quickly from the west, obscuring the sparkling stars.
She put the weapon back into her coat pocket and headed back to the mine entrance.
“I was about to come looking for you,” Collier said.
Diane shrugged. “No need, I didn’t get lost.”
Collier nodded. “Didn’t think you would. Figure out what you needed to?”
She smiled as she passed him. “I think so.”
He looked around at the blowing snow and shivered. “Then let’s go back inside. It’s really cold out here.”
* * *
Diane knocked on Helen Catalano’s door and Clay Obers’s door.
“My room, ten minutes,” she whispered. “Come alone.”
Helen arrived first, two minutes early. Clay was one minute late.
“What’s going on?” Helen asked.
Helen and Clay glanced at each other, worry filling their faces.
“Back on Baffin Island I picked up some things from the dead Zeta Greys. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with them.”
Helen and Clay looked relieved.
“Do with what?” Clay asked.
Diane picked up her coat revealing the flash gun on the bed.
“Is that what I think it is?” Clay asked.
Diane
nodded. “It’s a Zeta Grey weapon. On Baffin Island it was blasting holes through the trees. I collected three of them. Finally got a chance to try it out.”
Clay grinned.
“And?” Helen asked. She couldn’t take her eyes off the flash gun.
“Back button is for stun, middle button kills, front button vaporizes. Rotate the collar to the right for narrow beam, left for wide angle.”
Clay stepped forward to get a closer look. “Range?”
“Narrow beam vaporize, fifty yards max. Wide angle, I don’t know. I didn’t want to draw too much attention.”
Clay nodded. “Hollis is going to want those to go into research. He’ll want you to turn these in.”
Diane paused and looked at Helen. “I know. My intuition tells me to hang on to them, at least for a while.”
Helen nodded slowly, indicating she suspected what Diane had in mind. “You said you had three of them?”
Diane opened a dresser drawer and handed one to each of them.
“Our secret?”
Helen took one gently in her hands, grinning.
“For now,” Clay said.
Helen nodded in agreement.
“Be careful, there doesn’t seem to be any safety on them. Accidental discharge could be very bad,” Diane said.
Clay took the remaining flash gun. “Got it.”
Helen hesitated, then asked, “You know about . . . ?” She nodded her head toward Clay.
Diane smiled and nodded. “That’s why I asked both of you.”
Helen smiled. The expression of appreciation on her face was all Diane needed.
“Thanks,” Helen said.
Clay smiled and nodded in agreement.
“I’m guessing that they will wear down and need to be recharged at some point, and I have no idea how we would do that, so . . .”
A new loud alarm sounded.
“Battle Stations! Battle stations! All hands on deck!” came over the PA system. Helen and Clay ran to their rooms. “Saucer intrusion! Saucer intrusion! Multiple incoming saucers! Battle stations! Battle stations!”
Diane joined the rush of people in the hall as she headed for the elevators. She, Clay, and Helen were all carrying their flash guns. Ryan was the last person to jump into the elevator as the doors closed. His left arm was in a sling.
“You’re injured. You need to stand down,” Diane said.
Ryan shook his head. “And leave you out there alone? Not on your life.”
He took the sling off and tossed it into the corner of the elevator. “Never wanted the stupid thing anyway.”
He glanced down at the device in her hand and looked back up at her.
“Later,” she whispered.
The door opened and they ran to their ready rooms. With their flight suits on they ran to their fighter craft, climbed in, cinched the harness, and plugged into the master connector for the cooling and communications system. Ryan powered up the craft and went through the preflight checklist.
“We’re good to go,” he said.
Diane nudged the thruster, retracted the landing pods, swung into the vertical shaft, and up to her place on the flight deck. Hollis stood by the blast door. When the flight deck was full he hit the button and the massive blast door raised, red lights flashing.
“Multiple saucers, all converging on this base,” Hollis said. “This is it, people. The big guns will be more effective against saucers at a distance. Once they get through that, it’s going to be up to you to take them out. Stay sharp, stay aware, and stay alive.”
The first big particle beam cannon fired with a horrendously loud crack. It was uncomfortably loud even from inside the fighter cockpit with a helmet on. The sound drew Diane’s mind back to the night her brother was abducted when she was less than a hundred feet from a lightning strike. That event had shocked her down to the bone and left a bitter taste in her mouth. She stayed as far away from lightning as she could ever since then.
Lightning, she thought. Why did it have to be like lightning? She shuddered involuntarily. It’s not really lightning, she rationalized, it just sounds like it.
Her breathing became more rapid. For the first time it seemed to take forever for the blast door to open. She couldn’t wait to get away from the deafening sound of the cannons.
Chapter 60
Sean Wells wandered out the front door of the guest ranch and looked around. The sound of distant thunder reached his ears. He searched the sky. The western two-thirds of the sky was covered with clouds. That’s when he noticed the flashes of light in the sky to the southeast. Dots of light moved swiftly across the sky from the east. The light flashes weren’t lightning. They were coming from the ground, hitting the dots of light, and making them disappear.
This is it, he realized. Something huge was going on and he needed to see what it was. He ran to his room, grabbed his camera, jumped into his rental car and headed east on U.S. 60. Snow was starting to drift in from the south. He kept looking up at the sky, enthralled by the display of lights and brilliant white flashes on the horizon.
* * *
More of the big particle beam cannons were firing—three, four shots per second. The launch lights turned green. Diane and the other first eleven pilots bolted from the flight deck as the rest of the fighters flew up the access shaft and took to the air. The falling snow became a blizzard pressing on the front of the clear canopy. They had to rely on just their instruments to fly.
“Stay low,” Diane said. “Let’s come up from their bottom side. Initiate jinking.”
The big particle beam cannons were firing rapidly now, with almost constant shockingly loud cracks, making it difficult to hear commands over the radio.
“All RIOs, boost the volume on your comm sets to overcome the sound of the cannons.”
We could fly above the clouds and the snow, Diane thought, but I think the element of surprise is more important—provided we don’t fly into a mountain.
“Affirmative,” came back over the system.
The fighter craft spread out, trying to cover the base. In the distance a hundred or more saucers dropped out of the sky after being hit by the big cannons. Even more raced across the horizon in the attack.
Scout saucers were getting through the cannon defense system here and there. Individual fighter craft were moving quickly to intercept. So far the losses are all on the Zeta Grey side, Diane thought. But that will change as more saucers get past the big cannons.
“All of the saucers are well above the clouds,” Ryan said.
Oh crap, she thought. “Spread out fast!” she ordered. “We have saucers coming in close to the ground, hidden by the snow. Move out low and engage!”
She and Buddha swung to the south down the valley and then east through the first mountain pass. A dozen saucers hovered just above the ground on the other side of the low pass, opening fire on them as they crested the edge of the pass.
“I need back up!” she shouted as she opened fire.
She banked hard left as Buddha peeled off to the right. They both swung around and came at the group of saucers from opposite sides, firing into the group. On the navigation display she could see the movement of four saucers that broke off from the group, two on her side, two on Buddha’s.
“Only two against one?” she said. “I like those odds.”
She banked and dipped as she used her targeting radar to lock onto the targets. She fired at the two saucers in front of her, hitting one, and then the other.
“Four on your six!” Ryan shouted.
She swung up and over in a sharp curl, firing upside down at the saucers closing in on her, hitting two more enemy craft. She spiraled down into a small break in the trees and came up at the far side behind the two remaining saucers, shooting as she rotated upright. One saucer broke left while the other turned sharp right. She banked left and closed in, shots first hitting the outer edge of the saucer and then the center. As soon as the saucer tipped, she banked back toward the pack hovering ne
ar the mountain pass.
“Bandit four high!” Ryan shouted.
Diane banked up and to the right. The saucer was accelerating up and away rapidly.
Why isn’t the main pack moving? she wondered. They’re trying to draw us away. Why?
She whipped around and aimed back at the pack of eight saucers still hovering near the mountain pass. Two more fighter craft slipped over the pass and engaged the hovering saucer pack. The saucers broke from their position and bolted away from the base, staying close to the ground. She, Buddha, and the other two fighter craft chased after them, engaging and hitting them one after the other. From what she was hearing over the radio, the other fighter craft teams were having similar encounters, all chasing fleeing saucers away from the base.
The realization struck. Yes! Away from the base!
* * *
Sean drove as fast as he dared while keeping track of the moving white lights and the flashes from the ground. The whole scene was now to his right, south of where he was on U.S. 60. The snow was getting heavier, obscuring his view of the lights in the sky. In his peripheral vision he thought he saw a dirt road zoom by. He braked to a stop and backed up. He hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards before he saw it. He swung onto the dirt road and headed south into the darkness, his surroundings punctuated by faint flashes of light as if a massive lightning storm were happening in the clouds above him.
* * *
“Jink to base. Do we have infrared satellite coverage around the base?”
“Yes,” Hollis said. “Saucers are bright yellow, moving away from the base at high speed. Fighter craft are in pursuit.”
Diane shook her head. “What about something only slightly warm? Something on the ground maybe?” There had to be something not so obvious going on.
“Checking . . . Oh no. I have two, maybe three hundred objects on the ground surrounding the base at a distance of ten to twenty miles. They’re only slightly warmer than the ground. They must have snuck in during the early evening and set down on the ground, waiting.”
