Doomsday Warrior 19 - America’s Final Defense (13 page)

“You look—strange,” Chen commented.

“I’ve been through some strange shit,” Rockson admitted. “Get in. Come on.” The men hesitated. “Come on,” Rock said again. “After we board, I’ll pull the nuke device on with an anti-gravity beam. Save your strength.”

Detroit asked, “Rock are you sure you’re all right? Why were you out of contact for so long? Who’s on board?”

Rock sighed, “It’s a long story, no time to go into it now. I’m fine, and everything worked out, as you can see. The Glowers gave us this nifty spacecraft. Come on aboard. We’ve
really
got to go.”

Somewhat reluctantly, they all boarded the saucer. The men settled down into the contour couches arrayed inside, behind Rockson and Remaroo, who pushed some switches. The Glower didn’t bother to introduce himself. Once they’d strapped in, Remaroo started moving the thing up, using his hands inside the maneuver gloves. His suction-cup-tipped hands were deft at their work. The ship started to float above the sands, and the tripod landing gear retracted.

They all watched, amazed, through a viewport as the big black box containing the bomb floated up and into the side of the saucer, into a cargo hold.

“Oh, shit,” McCaughlin said, “I never liked flying.”

With a sudden waver, the saucer shot straight up, without any acceleration effect whatsoever. There were slight vibrations.

Detroit gulped as he stared out a side port, “God, you can see the curvature of the earth already! Rock—how come there’s no feeling of moving, no noise? We should be pinned into these couches.”

“The couches, I’m told,” said Rock, “are only a precaution for sudden so-called ‘gusts’ in the magnetic winds of the universe. Don’t ask me what we’d feel if there were a problem.”

Rock felt a thought from the pilot. Remaroo said, “TAKE OVER.” He slid his hands out of the maneuver gloves. Rock smiled. “Hold onto your pants, guys. I’m flying now.” He traded seats with the Glower and said, “Hey, listen fellas, I’m a little new at this. I only flew it around the Glower encampment before this. That’s like learning to drive in a parking lot. Expect a few mistakes.”

Chen rolled his eyes.

Remaroo suggested maneuvers. Rockson tried his hands—literally. His maneuvering ability was poor, and their course—as expressed on an “inertial-plotting graph” on the wall above the visi-port—filled with jagged lines. Still, the stars came out as Rock kept gaining altitude. A crescent moon appeared over the earth. It shook; the saucer wobbled madly. “Shit, pal, you can fly a chopper and a rocket,” McCaughlin protested, “but you sure as hell don’t have the hang of this yet,
do you,
Rock?”

“Shut up and let me concentrate!”

Rockson continued his practice at the helm, under the tutelage of Remaroo, for a half hour. The zigzag course left them all dizzy, but finally the maneuvers became smooth. Remaroo finally said, “YOU’RE GETTING GOOD, BUT I DON’T THINK YOU HAVE THE STABILIZERS FIGURED OUT YET. I’LL TAKE OVER.”

Rock took his hands from the steering gloves and relaxed as the Glower deftly brought them back on course toward the asteroid at altitude 14,000 miles. He brought them into a stationary orbit 20,000 miles from Earth and then set the autopilot.

“UNSTRAP NOW,” the Glower said in everyone’s mind. “BUT REMEMBER TO KEEP AT LEAST ONE FOOT ON THE FLOOR. THE ARTIFICIAL GRAVITY WORKS ONLY WHEN CONTACT BETWEEN YOUR FEET AND THE DECK IS MAINTAINED.”

Archer was already up, without waiting for instruction. The huge mountain man paid the consequences. He floated off the deck, flailed about, yelled for help. Archer’s big greasy flop-brim hat banged on the ceiling. Rock, laughing, caught Archer’s left leg and pulled him down to the deck. “Now, keep one foot down at all times—I hope you’ll do what the man says from now on.”

“Heeead hurt!”

“Don’t tell me your head is hurt; it practically repels bullets. A little bump wouldn’t hurt.” Rock knew the big man was just embarrassed.

Archer said sheepishly, “Me no like spaaace.”

“Ditto,” McCaughlin added.

There came a series of rapid beeps. Remaroo started working frantically at the controls, hitting a mess of overhead buttons he’d never explained to the Doomsday Warrior. There was a sudden electricity in the air, like a force field had been activated.

“What’s up?” Rock asked out loud, strapping down again instinctively, along with everyone else.

“BAD NEWS,” came the mental voice of Remaroo. “PREPARE FOR EVASIVE MANEUVERS.”

Sirens started to sound now, in addition to the beeps.

“WE’RE BEING ATTACKED,” Remaroo stated calmly.

Thirteen

“T
WELVE UNIDENTIFIED OBJECTS APPROACHING AT GREAT VELOCITY. HOLD ON,” Remaroo said calmly. “WE ARE GOING TO GO BETWEEN THE BIGGEST ONES, IF POSSIBLE. WE MIGHT BE HIT BY—”

Wham! Wham! Wham!
Three impacts, but no explosions or breaking of the airtight hull. They all listened, cringing for another impact.

Silence . . . utter silence.

“VERY CLOSE CALL,” Remaroo said at last. “IT WAS PURE ACCIDENT THAT WE WERE NOT STR—”

Wham!

An object had penetrated the hull and flew through the cabin. It was immediately followed by a sudden rush of wind. The hull penetrated, their air was rushing out into space.

Automatic sealers tried to close off the hole. A white, pasty gunk oozed from the flooring around the six-inch, irregular hole. It wasn’t working.

Archer, whose couch was mere inches from the impact hole, sprang into action. He ripped his big smelly bearskin vest off and jammed it into the gap. The loss of air ceased. The lights had been flickering in the room, but now they steadied. The emergency warning buzzers ceased their clamor.

“Good work, Arch,” Rock praised. Archer grinned sheepishly. He liked being the hero.

“SAFE NOW,” Remaroo remarked. “AIR IS STABLE. I REGRET THE LOSS OF AN ARTICLE OF CLOTHING.”

“God, what hit us?” Chen asked. “It went right through the floor, but I don’t see an exit hole. Where is it?”

“The thing must have bounced off the ceiling,” McCaughlin said, pointing at a dent above him. “But I don’t know where it is now. Look around and watch out. It might be hot.”

Everyone started examining the floor, under the couches, along the walls. No foreign object.

“What kind of thing was it?” Scheransky asked as he examined the dent in the bulkhead above. “It’s too jagged a dent for a shell, I think. Maybe it was a meteor?”

“NO, NOT A METEOR,” Remaroo said in a low, halting voice. “IT WAS NOT MISSILES THAT ATTACKED US. JUST SPACE DEBRIS—LEFT OVER FROM THE EXPERIMENTS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. DEBRIS FROM OLD SATELLITES BREAKING UP. THERE ARE MILLIONS OF CHUNKS OF DEBRIS OUT HERE. THIS SAUCER IS CAPABLE OF AVOIDING ALL BUT THE SMALLEST ONES. WE CAN’T DETECT THOSE, EVEN ON THE FINEST OF OUR INSTRUMENTS. OUR COMBINED SPEED WAS FORTY KILOMETERS PER SECOND. WE’RE LUCKY ONLY ONE OF US GOT HIT.”

“What do you mean? Who got hit, Remaroo?” Rockson looked around.

The Glower didn’t answer that question immediately. Instead he said, “WE ARE MOVING INTO HIGH ORBIT, ROCKSON. PLEASE TAKE OVER THE CONTROLS, I CAN’T . . .”

Rock saw the Glower sag on his webbed feet.
Remaroo was the one who’d been hit!
Rock went instinctively to grab hold of him, but the Glower grabbed the edge of the pilot’s seat to steady himself, and said, “NO.” Rock saw that green-blue liquid, slightly phosphorescent, was leaking from Remaroo’s central torso. “AS FATE WOULD HAVE IT,” Remaroo said nobly, “YOU WILL HAVE TO FLY THIS CRAFT FROM NOW ON. GOOD LUCK, FRIEND. I WILL DIE NOW. IT IS GOOD TO JOIN THE UNIVERSE BEINGNESS.”

With those words a tremor passed through Remaroo. Then there was a brilliant white flash, and then—no more Remaroo!

An object fell to the floor. It was a rusted oblong piece of steel about six inches wide, the piece of space shrapnel that had struck Remaroo. It rolled a little, then stopped. Aside from the steel object, all that was left was dust! Dust collapsing to the floor, being blown around. It shimmered.

“Like pixie dust,” Scheransky commented, amazed. “Is that how Glowers die? They just disappear?”

Rock didn’t know the answer. He just sighed and took the wheel of the saucer.

“Do you think you’ll be able to fly this thing,” Chen asked, “to Karrak?”

“I think I can handle it,” Rock said. “There’s a lot of automatic control equipment built in. I’ve made big mistakes before, and the saucer self-corrected. The Glowers even installed that little monitor screen on your right. It prints out, in English, suggestions for correcting mistakes the pilot makes. I’m gonna need that. Keep your eyes on it.”

Rock slipped into the steering gloves, began correcting course, intending to rise again to the vector that would intersect the asteroid. But nothing happened.

The readout said, “Main engine LaBarre drive shut down, due to serious mechanical damage.” Chen, as he read it, groaned.

“Can we fix it?” McCaughlin asked, rushing to Rock’s side.

“If the robotics of this saucer can’t fix it, we sure as hell can’t,” Rock admitted. He quickly read out some of the velocity and air pressure numbers, and said, “We have thirty hours of oxygen. We fall back to Earth in twenty-six hours and ten minutes. We will burn up and crash before we suffocate, unless we can restart the LaBarre drive. That’s it. It doesn’t look good. Sorry, guys., I’m telling it like it is.”

“It’s odd,” Cohen, the head technical man, observed. “I feel so
safe.
It’s so quiet and comfortable in here.”

“M-must be a mistake,” another of the young technicians, Harpur, stated. “We
can’t
d-die now! We’ve come so close to—”

“Surely something can be done, Rock,” McCaughlin suggested. “Shouldn’t we look around under the hatches or something? Try to repair the saucer?”

Rockson shrugged. “Shit, I don’t even know if there
are
ways to get to the LaBarre Drive, or what the engine runs on. Remaroo said it was a ‘magnetic-gravity-flux.’ I don’t even know what that is.”

“The engine looks to be all in one piece,” Scheransky said glumly, crawling up out of the floor hatch and shaking his head back and forth. With heroic effort, the Rock team and the four young technical men had managed to unseal a dozen access hatches on the craft in the past two hours, as the saucer inexorably slowed and began to plummet back to Earth. They had explored the mysterious, totally alien machinery below deck without finding a thing they understood, let alone could fix.

“All of you, come back up here,” Rock said. “Let’s try another approach. Everyone, see if you can find some sort of technical manuals before you try to monkey with that stuff down there.”

They searched all over the main deck, found several drawers, one of which had a very, very ancient, dry-as-parchment technical manual—in English.

Rock handled it gingerly. The thousand-page manual, written in the 1980s by a James and John LaBarre of Mt. Kisco, New York, was the patent application for the LaBarre Antigravity Drive.

“God,” Rock said, “Remaroo told me that the propulsion system of the saucer was an old design—one rejected as ‘uncomprehensible’ by the United States Patent Office, just like some of Robert Goddard’s early rocket patents were. The LaBarre brothers based their design for the engine upon the location matrixes of the so-called ‘Ogum’ rocks scattered all over the northern hemisphere, particularly in Westchester County, New York. The brothers believed that the ancient Celts had access to the same sources of vast ‘magneto-electrical’ power that the Incas had used to build their walled cities, namely the inherent energy of the Earth’s own corefield. They plotted the locations of the ancient grid-marking rocks—some of which were on their 100-acre estate—and translated many rock inscriptions. They didn’t claim to understand them all. But they learned how to make a series of gravity-baffle levers, sort of Venetian blinds that block off gravity instead of light. It worked.”

“So,” Chen asked tensely, “can we fix the LaBarre drive using that manual as a guide?”

Rock flipped pages for a half hour, concluding, “Not a chance we can fix the drive engine. We’d need James and John here to explain some of their notes.”

“I have an
idea,”
Archer shouted.

“Okay . . .” Rock said, looking skeptical. “Shoot.”

Archer smiled and said,
“Siiimple. Geeet help.”

“Thanks a lot, Arch,” Detroit grumbled, “Where?”

“Aaat Frenchie space station.”

“What’s he raving about?” Chen asked.

Rockson quickly recapped—for the men who hadn’t been along on that particular adventure—that he’d once visited an old space station inhabited by Frenchmen.

“Archer’s idea is a wild one, but a good one,” Rock stated, after the mountain man explained. “Help me work the range finders. If we can get to the closest of the old space stations, like Archer here wants, there may be parts, or something like an old shuttlecraft, to use. We have a little bit of stabilizer power. Not enough to land on Karrak, or even get back to Earth. But Archer is right. There are a few old space stations up here.”

They worked the visi-screen telescopic search model until they found a large object in orbit. It was just 1,280 km higher. “Within range,” Rock said, smiling.

Rockson zeroed in the maximum power of the scope, right on the object. “There. That’s it. I have located the Frenchie junk space station. It is just coming over Earth-horizon. Wow! Looks like someone built a new flying Eiffel Tower design. I was sure the one I visited a few years ago was destroyed.”

“There’s no lights, and no radio signals,” Chen noted.

“There’s no signs of life,” Rock said glumly. “Maybe if we get closer we’ll see something. No other options, anyway.”

Rock looked over to Detroit, who was monitoring the stabilizer’s fuel situation. “How are we for gas?”

“Not enough to get there,” Detroit shrugged. “Sorry.”

“We . . . we can’t make it?” Cohen mumbled, collapsing onto a chair. “Then . . . it was all for nothing. So close, so close, and no hope.”

They all sat around, dejected, watching the Earth grow slowly closer.

“If only the Frenchies could reach us,” Rock said finally. He got on the radio, tried again for contact.