She got out and ran alongside me. Together we wrestled Jake into the van and got him buckled into the rear seat. We screwed his helmet onto his suit and I put a quick patch, from his suit’s emergency kit, over the spot where the bag ladies’ stun shell had hit him.
“Do we have to listen to his snoring,” Nikki asked over her suit’s radio.
“We ought to keep track of him to be sure he’s breathing OK,” I lied. I figured there was nothing like hearing someone snore for a while to kill any romantic interest Nikki might ever have for him.
Behind us, the sky lit up around the rocket port.
“There goes our rocket,” Nikki said and pulled off the bridge.
Just as we crossed over the water, fire covered the roadway, lighting the area as if it were daylight. As the fireball from the road climbed into the air, a fighter screamed over the road, causing the flames to roll as the air was torn aside by its passage.
Radar had picked up our battle with the bag ladies. Now someone was aiming to even up the score and had just missed turning us into baked beings.
Chapter 24
“Oh, ——,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
The fighter wheeled about to make another pass at us.
Nikki didn’t need any encouragement. I fell back into the seat as we flew forward at maximum speed.
“Get the radar on them,” Nikki said.
“Good idea.” I struggled to overcome our acceleration and get my hand to the switch to turn the machine on. Then I had to turn the antenna to pick up what was behind us.
“Let me know if they fire any missiles.”
“They have those?”
“You better believe it,” Nikki said. ” I suspect he’s holding off because he doesn’t know what he’s dealing with.”
“A sitting duck.”
“But when he sees that we can keep up with the rocket, I’m sure he’ll try to get us before we get away from him—”
“Here come two missiles,” I said as I saw two small blips break off of the larger one behind us.
“Two! Can’t out maneuver two,” Nikki said. ” I’ve heard pilots talk… The new programs take alternate routes. One will always get you. How much time?”
“Coming fast. About… Oh… ten seconds away at a guess.”
I counted mentally as we accelerated and I watched the blip come racing at us, Three, two—
The van shuddered as Nikki flipped a switch on the control computer then jammed the van’s controls to cause it to go straight up (though our momentum kept us going forward as well). The metal skin of the van groaned; it was designed for low air resistance when it traveled forward, but not if it went straight up.
The two blips caught up with us and started to circle upward but as they went below us, they hit our anti-gravity field. I saw what Nikki was trying to do; deflect them with our repelling power. The missiles followed us but at ever slower speeds. Finally, they started to lose the race, fell back, then suddenly veered downward, tumbling out of control as we traveled upward. The missiles fell toward the ocean and auto-destructed, exploding far below us.
“All right,” I said, “Good job, Nikki. Oh, blank it. Another blip.”
“How long until impact?”
“About eight seconds this time, seven, six, wait, now six… It’s dropping off. We’re outrunning it.”
We left the missile behind and it finally ran out of fuel and dropped into the Florida swamp with a brilliant flash.
Nikki pushed the van through a series of twists and finally we were following the rocket toward Houston, hoping anyone watching us on radar would lose us when we left the atmosphere and would fail to realize we were following the Houston rocket to its destination.
We soon found ourselves dropping toward Houston to the tune of Jake’s snoring. We were afraid we weren’t close enough to the rocket to stay within its radar blip and we fully expected another fighter to be waiting for us when we reached the Houston field.
But there wasn’t one.
Nikki dropped us down on a road near the rocket port and we drove around to the huge parking lot and made our way on wheels toward the entrance rocket port buildings.
As we slowed down, we met the sixteen people we had freed. We parked the van nearby and everyone gathered around us as we stepped out. They cheered and clapped.
I smiled a moment. “Thanks. Well, I guess you’re free men and women tonight. We can give each of you some cash, uh… We can borrow a little from Jake, he’s the third member of our group and—”
“He caught a stun shell and is sleeping it off in the van,” Nikki explained.
“Yeah,” I added needlessly. “Anyway, you’re free to go if you want. But we’re in the process of starting up a, uh, factory, to make the anti-gravity rods. We have a lot of plans, a trip to the asteroids to get water, a couple of Moon bases, maybe even a starship down the way. We could use some people like you guys. So if any of you wants a job, whether you used to be on my team or were on the government’s black list, I can give you one. The pay isn’t much; in fact it’s nothing right now—”
Everyone chuckled politely.
“…but you’ll be as safe or safer than you’ll be on your own. And you can keep anything you steal and get away with.”
They were silent a moment as my words sunk in.
“I have a husband,” one of the women that had been trapped in the elevator shaft with me said. ” I couldn’t leave—”
“You’re free to return to him,” I said. “Just get some cash from us and head home. Later, if you and your husband would like to join up—”
“I’d like that,” she said.
“Yeah, well, any of you that have a family might want to head home, collect everyone, and then join us later.”
“What about kids?”
“Well, if we set up a real colony on the Moon or Mars, I suppose we’ll want some kids to keep it going,” I said, even though the thought of mouthy little children getting into things made me have second thoughts about what I was saying.
“Where do we meet you after we collect our families?”
Where? Good question. “Well. I guess you folks can keep a secret as well as anyone. Don’t suppose there are many traitors among those that Dobrynin was about to cancel.”
A nervous laugh this time.
“Our meeting place is a military surplus store near Galveston.” I gave them the directions to it. “Be there as soon as you can. After a week or two, I can’t guarantee that we’ll be there anymore. I suspect that there’ll be quite a few unsavory folks trying to find us after today. We probably won’t be staying there for long.”
A short time later, six of the group left after I insisted that they take some of the cash we fished out of Jake’s pocket to help them get to where they were going. I figured I could afford to be generous with Jake’s money.
All of my old team stayed with me. They waited while Nikki and I purchased an old junker from a near by used car lot and then we returned with it and everyone piled into it and the van (which meant we couldn’t fly without endangering them).
Jake was still snoring when we pulled into the parking lot of his surplus store. And with saliva snaking down his chin, he didn’t look a bit better after his long beauty rest. Nikki glanced at him and then quickly looked away.
We finally draped Jake across the table as we throw the best coming-home party I’d ever seen.
When things were winding down, Nikki took my hand and led outdoors, away from the dining room turned party center.
Chapter 25
Things flew along quickly. Within a week, we had all the rods cut up and incorporated into a fleet of junk vehicles that were to fly our huge party to the Moon. (After looking over some of the cars and vans we’d be taking, I figured we would be making Earth about three percent more beautiful simply by our leaving in the junkers.)