In the chamber Kelly Reynolds’s eyes were still closed, but her head turned up as if she could see what was happening miles above her. A smile played across her lips.
The six talons changed course. They were headed for the mothership now and they were going even faster than they had been.
Turcotte hummed to himself as he walked through the massive cargo bay, checking everything. All was set. The ruby sphere was chained to one of the bays that had once held a bouncer. The specials — four nuclear warheads — were lined up on the floor near the bouncer that Quinn had loaded for him.
The bouncer looked like a kid had gone wild and mixed together his flying saucer model kit with that of a rocket ship. Four rocket boosters had been attached to the outside of the bouncer, pointing out from the bottom in perpendicular directions.
Turcotte planned on giving Aspasia back the ruby sphere and much more. He knelt down next to each warhead and entered the PAL code that armed each. Then he checked his watch.
He climbed on board the bouncer and got inside. He shut the hatch behind him and powered the craft up. He could see the outside clearly. Flipping open the lid on the remote, Turcotte read down the buttons. He pressed the one that read: DOORS.
The massive doors to the cargo bay swung open with a hiss of the air escaping into space. They swung wide until Turcotte could see the stars again. Turcotte was glad everything had been tied down as he felt the artificial gravity in the cargo bay disappear.
The engine cut out and Surveyor began the long fall down toward Cydonia. Inside the capsule the scientific devices rested in their containers. Also inside was a small three-foot-long-by-two-wide cylinder. It had been loaded into the capsule prior to launch the previous year by someone with an ST-8 clearance. NASA had fussed and fumed about it, but in the end had accepted the authority of the clearance and reduced the payload elsewhere to make room and to make weight.
Inside the cylinder the codes Coridan had punched in armed the nuclear warhead. It was set to go off on impact.
A talon flashed by the cargo-bay opening. Reconnaissance, Turcotte knew. The bouncer was oriented in the cradle so that the front end, which simply meant the end that Turcotte faced when sitting in the pilot’s seat, was facing out. He looked down at the rough controls that had been installed to the right of the depression he was in. He hit the lever that released the arms holding the bouncer in the cradle. Then he pressed the button that fired the booster pointing to the rear for just a second.
The bouncer floated free, slowly edging out of the cargo bay into space.
Turcotte swallowed, seeing all six talons lined up, tips pointing in his direction. “It’s all yours, assholes,” he muttered. He pressed the button again and held it for a few more seconds, picking up speed, accelerating away from the mothership. One of the talons turned in his direction. The other five headed toward the cargo bay, edging in.
A glow appeared on the nose of the talon that was following Turcotte. A golden beam of light flashed out. It singed across the bottom of the bouncer, burning into the metal.
Turcotte slammed his fist down on a button and the right booster fired, just as another golden beam of light again sliced through space where he had been. He rocketed away and as he did so he hit the firing button on the remote.
Inside the cargo hold, suited Airlia figures had been coming out of the lead talon, heading toward the ruby sphere, when the four nuclear weapons went off in a blinding flash of light and heat.
The thermonuclear explosion took in the ruby sphere and added its power.
Turcotte cringed in his seat as a second sun came into being behind him, flooding space with its light. The shock wave hit, knocking him about as the bouncer tumbled.
In Central Park it was thirty minutes before dawn and the scheduled Airlia landing. The dignitaries and millions crowded around the park looked up in awe as a false daylight came in the form of a bright orb of light that suddenly appeared overhead, shining even brighter than the noonday sun.
CHAPTER 41
Then there was the darkness of space again, Turcotte desperately firing boosters, trying to regain control. After a minute he had the bouncer stopped. Turcotte turned in his seat. The mother-ship was still visible, a tribute to the engineering capabilities of the Airlia, but there was a tremendous gash over half a mile long in the side where the cargo bay had been. There was no sign of the five talons that had been in the entrance to the bay.
Turcotte froze. The sixth talon, the one that had fired at him, was between him and the mother-ship, several kilometers away. Turcotte relaxed when he saw that the ship was slowly tumbling end over end, out of control.
“Now comes the fun part,” he muttered to himself as he looked down at the Earth under his feet. He hit the transmit button on the SATCOM radio.
Deep inside Easter Island Kelly Reynolds had cried out in pain as the guardian picked up the destruction of the talon fleet. But the guardian still functioned; it still kept the shield guarding the island up, and it still kept her in its field, a prisoner in the war Earth thought it had just won.
“I’ve got hold of someone from JPL who should be able to figure out how to get you a trajectory into the atmosphere without burning up,” Quinn said. He hit the patch linking Larry Kincaid to Turcotte.
Turcotte fired the various boosters as directed by Kincaid, who was tracking him from the JPL control room. Slowly the bouncer got closer and closer to Earth’s atmosphere, until finally it was caught in the gravitational well and pulled down.
Turcotte put his hands on the control bar for the bouncer as the craft hit the edge of the atmosphere, skipped, and then began to descend. Now came the tricky part, hoping the magnetic engine kicked in before he hit the Earth’s surface at terminal velocity.
The skin of the bouncer reflected heat as the ship screamed through the sky, the air getting thicker around it. Turcotte pulled back on the controls: nothing.
“Goddamn,” he whispered.
“Do you have any control?” Kincaid called out over the radio.
“Negative.”
“One hundred and sixty thousand feet and descending,” Kincaid informed him. “You’ve got plenty of altitude to gain control.”
Turcotte looked about. He was over North America. As near as he could tell somewhere over the southeast, heading west.
A minute later Kincaid wasn’t so reassuring. “Fifty thousand feet and terminal velocity. Have you got anything?”
Turcotte moved the control stick. “Nothing. I think the ship took some damage from a hit.”
A new voice came over the radio. “Get out of there!” Lisa Duncan yelled. “Use the emergency gear.”
Turcotte reached over and grabbed the parachute that was strapped to the floor next to his seat. He threw it over his shoulder, fighting the buffets the uncontrolled craft was sustaining as it fell.
He quickly buckled the chute on, then grabbed the snap link and hooked it into the cable that was just behind his seat, running up the top hatch.
He grabbed the controls, once more trying to save the craft. Nothing. “I’m getting out of here,” he yelled into the radio.
Turcotte pulled a red lever up. Explosive bolts fired, blowing the hatch off. Air swirled in. Turcotte pushed himself out of the pilot’s seat. He slid along the cable and banged into the top near the hatch. He pulled himself through into the hatch.
Then he let go and fell out of the bouncer. The static line for the parachute quickly paid out and the chute blossomed above him as the bouncer disappeared below.