Defenders of Destiny, book one, the Discovery of Astrolaris by Brenton Barwick

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Ambush

  “It’s the space station!” exclaimed mom. “you’d better steer around that.”

  The robot was overtaking the space station so rapidly that they were along side of it before Dad had time to push the stick sideways. The robot darted off into space. But not before they saw, in one of the small windows, the face of a female astronaut.

  “Do you think she saw us?” asked Sharianna.

  “I don’t see how she could not have,” confirmed Mom.

  Dad steered back toward the earth and a few minutes later they saw the sun rising on the horizon and they were flying over the Atlantic.

  “There’s Europe, the Mediterranean sea, and Africa!” exclaimed Joseph.

  “Slow down, or we’ll blast right past China,” cautioned Mom.

  “Go a little lower, Dad,” said Joseph.

  As Thomas began his descent, they suddenly heard a loud noise on the hull of the ship.

  “That sounded like another asteroid,” theorized Sharianna.

  “I think it was more like a metallic crunching sound,” observed Joseph.

  “It was a satellite,” deduced Mom.

  “Oops, I hope someone can do without their satellite TV,” said Joseph. “Or it could be radio, GPS, Internet, or even a military satellite.”

  “We might as well have rung the front doorbell, if it was military,” observed Sharianna.

  “I’ll fly down into the upper atmosphere so that we won’t hit any more,” decided Dad.

  “Watch out for airplanes,” warned Sharianna, as she remem-bered their near miss the day before. Was it really only a day ago? Or was it two days?” she thought to herself. It seems like we have been gone so long.

  “They don’t fly this high,” replied Dad.

  “I remember, when we went to the airplane museum at Hill Air Force Base, I learned that some of the spy planes, like the Blackbird, fly through the upper atmosphere,” corrected Joseph.

  “I think you are right,” conceded Dad. “I think we’ll just have to be careful.”

  Off to their right they could see the towering snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas, except that from their altitude they just looked like a little crinkle in the crust of the earth.

  “There’s China. But I don’t see the great wall,” said Joseph.

  “I guess you can’t see it from space after all,” said Mom with disappointment. “But I would sure like to see it anyway. Maybe we could go lower?”

  Dad brought the robot lower, until they were just above the clouds.

  Suddenly, the Great Wall came into view, snaking its way across miles and miles of countryside, but the clouds obscured most of it.

  Thomas slowed the robot some more and decreased their altitude until they were just below the clouds, to get a better look.

  The view was so spectacular that Thomas brought the robot to a stop and hovered in the air. Sharianna couldn’t resist taking some pictures.

  “Wow, we could go anywhere we wanted to,” marveled Joseph. “How about the pyramids? Those, you can see from space.”

  “I’d like to look at the Egyptian obelisks and compare them with the one on the moon,” said Mom.

  Suddenly, out of the clouds appeared five Mig fighter jets, only a few hundred yards away, and traveling at top speed. At that same instant, all five fired off two rockets each and veered up, back into the clouds. Dad’s reflexes were quick and his thoughts just as quick. Knowing that the fighters were in the clouds and not wanting to run into one of them, he chose to dive.

  The Mig commander must have anticipated the movements of the UFO because the rockets were deployed in a star pattern, with only the center rocket heading straight for them. The moment the jets were in the cloudbank they fired off another ten rockets towards the rear of the UFO in hopes that if the UFO attempted to retreat it would actually run into one of them, like moving landmines in the sky.

  The commander of the Migs was a very calculating man and had spaced the rockets so perfectly that they were impossible to avoid. He smiled as he watched his radar screen tracking seven other Migs who had been instructed to drop out of the clouds behind the UFO and fire all their rockets underneath it two seconds before the five Migs that had descended from the clouds in front of the UFO. The Mig commander dropped back out of the clouds just in time to see the perfect execution of his surprise attack as the UFO became engulfed in a huge explosion, as it dove directly into one of the rockets that he had shrewdly fired from behind.

  The exhilaration of his triumph was momentary however, for as he watched, he saw the UFO streak toward the ground, faster than any craft he had ever seen. His delight returned fleetingly as he thought that crashing with the ground was inevitable. A microsecond before impact, the UFO made an impossible 90-degree turn and sped away only a few yards above the ground. Within moments it had disappeared over the horizon.

  Just as they dove to miss the oncoming missiles, they heard a deafening explosion and the screen in front of them became shrouded in flames. Then the ground became the greatest threat as it came rushing toward them at an incredible speed. Thomas pulled out of the dive and the robot went zooming along the surface of the ground. The earth was all a blur.

  “Look out for that mountain!” screamed Sophia.

  Thomas pulled up enough to just skim the snow-covered peak. Thomas slowed the robot, in order to gain more control over his trajectory. Strangely, it occurred to him that they were flying much faster than the speed of sound and he wondered how loud the sonic boom must be along their flight path.

  Suddenly, they saw water ahead as they flew over the Yellow Sea. They saw a vapor trail from a rocket that had been launched from North Korea, but they easily veered to the right, flying over South Korea, and it exploded harmlessly in the air. They crossed the Sea of Japan in just a few moments and flew right over Tokyo. As they flew out over the Pacific Ocean, they suddenly saw a huge aircraft carrier with jets buzzing off its deck like a swarm of bees. Again, Dad veered right, putting them on a course due south. The supersonic jets were quickly left in the distance.

  Thomas began to realize the significance of what had just happened. As he brought the robot to a stop just above the surface of the water, he realized that the robot must show up on radar or some other tracking system.

  “They must be able to track us,” he said nervously, as he relaxed his white-knuckle grip on the controls. “There is no other way they could have surprised us like that.”

  “That was close, that rocket almost hit us,” cried Sharianna.

  “I think it did hit us!” asserted Joseph.

  “Do you think the robot is damaged?” inquired Mom.

  “I don’t think so,” responded Dad, but his thoughts were racing. He remembered hearing that radar could not track airplanes close to the ground. He hoped that they did not have any more sophisticated tracking devices than that.

  Joseph must have been thinking the same things because he verbalized Dad’s concern: “If the Chinese could track us so well then what about NASA, or our own military?” he paused, “How will we get back home without being detected and followed?”

  “They don’t know about us, they only know about a UFO. Right?” rationalized Sharianna.

  “That’s right,” agreed Dad, as he looked around in the sky for planes and across the waves to see if there were any more ships.

  “We could go back out to space,” suggested Mom.

  “But they would probably track us. Eventually, we would need to go home,” countered Dad. “I’ll bet they have satellite tracking for intercontinental missiles and who knows what else.”

  “They even saw us on the space station,” added Joseph.

  Low over the waves, they suddenly saw a formation of fighter jets screaming toward them.