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  To my grandchildren: Sophie, Connor, Abby, Logan, Carson, Hunter and Brenden

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Series Ad

  Also by Stephen Coonts

  About the Author

  Copyright

  On this small planet

  Orbiting a nondescript star,

  On the edge of a humongous galaxy

  Wheeling endlessly in the infinite void,

  The river of life flows on and on …

  Let it flow.

  1

  Adam Solo wedged himself into the chair at the navigator’s table in the small compartment behind the bridge and braced himself against the motion of the ship. Rain beat a tattoo on the roof over his head, and wind moaned around the portholes. Although the seas weren’t heavy, the ship rolled, pitched and corkscrewed viciously because she was not under way; she was riding sea anchors, being held in one place, at the mercy of the swells.

  Through the rain-smeared porthole windows Solo could see the flood and spotlights of another ship several hundred feet to port. She was also small, only 350 feet long, roughly the size of the ship Solo was aboard, Atlantic Queen. She also carried massive cranes fore and aft, was festooned with floodlights that lit the deck and the water between the ships and was bobbing like a cork in a maelstrom.

  Through the open door to the bridge Solo occasionally heard the ringing of the telegraph as the captain signaled the engine room for power to help hold his ship where he wanted her. Johnson was the captain, an overweight, overbearing slob with a sneer engraved on his face and a curse on his lips. He was cursing tonight as he wrestled the helm; Solo ignored the burst of mindless obscenities that reached him during lulls in the wind’s song and concentrated on the newspaper before him.

  “Possible Alien Starship Found in Australia,” the headline screamed. Beneath that headline, in slightly smaller type, the subhead read, “Wreckage buried in coral reef moved ashore for study.”

  Beside the story was a photo of two men and two women posed in front of a massive pile of unidentifiable junk. Solo studied the wreckage. It was not possible to even determine what the original color might have been. The two men were identified in the caption of the photo as Mr. Rip Cantrell, a young man in his early twenties, and Mr. Arthur “Egg” Cantrell, a rotund, balding man in his fifties. The woman, lean and athletic with her hair in a ponytail, was identified as Charlotte Pine, a former U.S. Air Force test pilot. Beside her stood an Australian archaeologist. Solo studied their faces in the photo, then read the article as rain pounded on the windows and the ship rode the back of the living sea.

  The article mentioned that this was not the first spacecraft Rip Cantrell had discovered. About a year before, as a young engineering student on an expedition to the Sahara, Cantrell had uncovered a perfectly preserved saucer in a sandstone ledge and had even figured out how to make it fly. He almost lost his life when greedy thugs tried to steal the saucer and its valuable technology. Only with the help of former test pilot Charley Pine had he managed to save that saucer and keep it safe. Soon after, a Frenchman named pierre Artois, an evil genius bent on world conquest, had even managed to steal the famous Roswell saucer the air force had kept hidden for decades at Area 51. Once again, Charley Pine had saved the day when she chased the Roswell saucer and it crashed into the ocean as millions watched on TV. Since then, saucer technology had been revolutionizing the world economy. Great leaps forward in alternative fuels, antigravity and computer technology, solar power, metal fabrication—all these advances in man’s knowledge were leading to new products and improvements in old ones.

  Solo was a trim man with short black hair, even features and skin that appeared deeply tanned. He was below average in height, just five and a half feet tall, and weighed about 140 pounds. Tonight he was dressed in jeans, work boots and a dark green Gore-Tex jacket.

  He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes, savoring the movement of the ship.

  Ah, once, long ago, he had been out on this ocean in winter, in a vessel much smaller than this one. How the wind had howled in the rigging; spindrift showered the men and women huddled under blankets and skins, trying to stay warm, as cold rain stung and soaked them. Occasionally the rain turned to sleet, and the ship and people were soon covered with a layer of ice.

  The motion of this ship brought the memory flooding back. Most of those nights he spent at the steering oar, because he was the best helmsman aboard and he was the captain. In that roaring, wet, absolute darkness the trick was to keep the wind in the same quadrant, keep the unseen sail drawing evenly, feel the way the ship rode the sea, actually become one with the ship. If he held the wind just so and the motion of the ship remained the same, he was steering a straight course. If the sail luffed or the motion of the ship changed, he would hear and feel it.

  Without a compass, without the moon or stars, raw seamanship was the only way a course could be sailed. Adam Solo had been good at it then, and after a week of storms and clouds and wind brought them all safely to land.

  Solo’s chin was on his chest when the door opened and a heavyset man wearing a suit and tie came in. He tossed a foul-weather coat on the desk.

  “Doctor,” Solo said in greeting.

  Dr. Harrison Douglas, the chairman and CEO of World Pharmaceuticals, was so nervous he couldn’t hold still. “This is it, Solo,” he said as he smacked one fist into a palm. “This flying saucer we are bringing up is the key to wealth and power beyond the wildest dreams of anyone alive.” Douglas added, almost as an aside to himself, “If it’s still reasonably intact…”

  “You’re sure?”

  “If it holds the secrets I think it does, then yes.” Douglas braced himself and glanced out the porthole at the heaving sea between the ships. “You still think you can make the computers talk to you?”

  Solo nodded. “Yes, but you’ve never told me what you want from them.”

  “That’s right. I’ve kept my mouth firmly shut.” Douglas took a deep breath, looked around the little room, then fastened his gaze on Solo. “This saucer crashed into the ocean. May be torn all to hell, smashed into bits, but there’s a sliver of a chance…”

  Douglas turned to the porthole and rubbed the moisture from the glass with his sleeve. “… A sliver of a chance that one or more of the computers are intact. And if one is, I want you to find the formulas for any drugs that are in the memories.”

  “Are there formulas for drugs?”

  All the experts agreed that interstellar distances were so vast that a starship crew would die before they got to their destination unless their lives were artificially extended. Somehow.

  “Yes, there are drugs,” said Douglas. “Enough said. You know our deal. I’ll pay you ten million cash.”

  “A
nd make billions.”

  “I sincerely hope so,” Harrison Douglas said. He jammed his hands in his pockets and stared out the porthole into the night with unseeing eyes.

  Yes, he did hope to make billions, and if ever there was a drug to generate that kind of money, a drug that prevented aging was undoubtedly it. Well, Douglas was in the Big Pharma business. If arresting aging involved drugs, by God, World Pharmaceuticals could figure out how to make them. Every man and woman on the planet would like to stop the aging process, or if that proved impossible, at least slow it down, preserve quality of life and extend it free from the diseases that aging causes or enables. An extra ten good years—how much would that be worth to the average Joe? Or twenty? Or thirty? America, Europe, Arabia, India, Japan, China … the possibilities were awe-inspiring.

  Harrison Douglas twitched with excitement.

  Douglas smacked a fist into the palm of his other hand. Yes, the people of the saucers must have possessed an antiaging drug.

  Douglas was musing on how much money such a drug would make World, and himself, of course, the CEO who made it happen, when he heard Captain Johnson give a shout.

  Douglas glanced through the porthole. He saw waves washing over a shape even darker than the night sea.

  “It’s up!” he said excitedly. With that he grabbed the foul-weather coat and dashed through the door onto the bridge. He went straight through, right by the captain, onto the open wing of the bridge and charged down a ladder to the main deck.

  Adam Solo slowly folded the page of the newspaper that contained the story of the Australian artifact and placed it in his shirt pocket. He pulled on a cap and stepped onto the bridge. Ignoring the captain at the helm, Solo walked to the unprotected wing of the bridge and gazed down into the heaving dark sea as the wind and rain tore at him. The wind threatened to tear his cap from his head, so he removed it. Dr. Douglas was there on the main deck at the rail, holding on with both hands.

  Floodlights from both ships lit the area between the ships and the heavy cables that disappeared into the water. From the angle of the cables, it was obvious that what they held was just beneath the surface. Snatches of the commands the chief on deck shouted to the winch operators reached Solo. Gazing intently at the scene before him, he ignored them.

  As Solo watched, swells separated the ships slightly, tightening the cables, and something again broke the surface. It was a mound, dark as the black water; swells broke over it.

  As quickly as it came into view, the shape disappeared again as the ships rolled toward each other.

  Over the next five minutes the deck crews aboard both ships tightened their cables inch by inch, lifting the black shape to the surface again, then higher and higher until finally it was free of the water and hung suspended between the ships. The spotlights played upon it, a black, saucer-shaped object, perfectly round and thickest in the middle. It was not small—the diameter was about ninety feet—and it was heavy; the cables that held it were taut as violin strings, and the ships listed toward it a noticeable amount.

  Solo stepped back into the sheltered area of the bridge and wiped the rain from his hair with his hand, then settled the cap onto his head as he listened to the voices on the bridge loudspeaker. The deck chiefs of this ship and the other vessel were talking to each other on handheld radios, coordinating their efforts as the saucer was inched over the deck of this ship. The ship’s radio picked up the conversation and piped it here so that the captain could listen in and, if he wished, take part in the conversation.

  A moment later Dr. Douglas came in from the bridge wing, pulling the door shut behind him and brushing water from his coat.

  “Well, we got it up, Doctor,” Captain Johnson said heartily. “And they said it couldn’t be done. Ha! You owe us some serious money.”

  “I will when you have it safely on the dock in Newark,” Douglas replied.

  “We’ll get ’er there, you can bet on that,” Johnson said confidently. “The company has big money ridin’ on it. They promised every man in the crew a bonus, including me. Gonna be nice money, and I’ll be damn glad to get it.”

  It took twenty minutes for the deck crew to get the dark, ominous ovoid shape deposited onto the waiting timbers on Atlantic Queen’s deck and lashed down. The saucer was so large it filled the space between the bridge and the forward crane and protruded over both rails. It seemed to dwarf the ship on which it rode, pushing it deeper into the sea.

  When the cables that had lifted the saucer from the sea floor had been released, the sea anchors were brought aboard and the ship got under way. Solo felt the ride improve immediately as the screws bit into the dark water. The other ship, which had helped raise the saucer, had already dissolved into the darkness.

  “There you are,” Johnson said heartily to Douglas, who had his nose almost against the window, staring at the spaceship. “Your flyin’ saucer’s settin’ like a hen on her nest, safe and sound, and she ain’t goin’ noplace.”

  Douglas flashed a grin and dashed for the ladder to the main deck.

  Solo went back into the navigator’s shack. He emerged seconds later carrying a hard plastic case and descended the bridge wing ladder to the main deck, where the sailors were milling around, inspecting the saucer while they rigged ropes across it and chained the ropes to padeyes in the deck. Several of them were touching the machine … and marveling.

  As Douglas watched, Solo opened his case, took out a wand and adjusted the switches and knobs within, then donned a headset. Carrying the instrument case, he began a careful inspection of the saucer, all of it that he could see from the deck. He even climbed the mast of the forward crane to get a look at the top of it, then returned to the deck. As he walked and climbed around he glanced occasionally at the gauges in his case, but mostly he concentrated on visually inspecting the surface of the ship. He could see no damage whatsoever.

  Douglas asked him a couple of questions, but Solo didn’t answer, so eventually he stopped asking. One by one the tired sailors left the deck, heading for their berths. They had been hard at work for almost twenty hours and were exhausted.

  Solo crawled under the saucer and lay there studying his instrument. Finally he took off his headset, stowed it back inside the case and closed it.

  One of the officers squatted down a few feet away. This was the first mate. “No radiation?” he asked Solo. The sailor was in his early thirties, with unkempt wind-blown hair and acne scars on his face.

  “Doesn’t seem to be.”

  “Boy, that’s amazing.” The mate reached and placed his hand on the cold black surface immediately over his head. “So this is the one that went straight into the ocean like a bullet from over a hundred thousand feet up,” said the mate, whose name was DeVries. “Yeah, I heard all about it on TV. Saw all those reruns of the saucers chasin’ each other over Manhattan. Bet this thing made one hell of a splash when it hit! I didn’t figure we’d find it in one piece, I can tell you. An impact like that…”

  Solo studied the belly of the saucer as the raw sea wind played with his hair. At least here, under the saucer, he was sheltered from the rain.

  “Everything inside is probably torn loose, I figure,” DeVries continued, warming to his subject. “Scrambled up inside there like a dozen broken eggs. And that crazy Frenchman flying it must still be inside, squashed flat as a road-killed possum. Couldn’t nobody live through a smashup like that. He’s gotta be as dead as Napoleon Bonaparte and getting pretty ripe, I’ll bet. This thing’s been in the water a whole month.”

  The first mate turned to Douglas and asked, “So, Doctor, how come you’re spending all this money raisin’ this flyin’ saucer off the ocean floor?”

  Douglas said matter-of-factly, “Scientific curiosity.”

  “Eight million bucks is a lot to pay to scratch that itch,” DeVries said thoughtfully, a remark Douglas let pass without comment. The salvage operation was going to cost Douglas at least that much.

  As those two watched, Adam Solo had
placed his hand on the hatch handle and held it there. Now, after ten seconds or so, he pulled down on one end of the handle and turned it sideways. The handle rotated and the hatch opened above his head. Water began dripping out.

  Not much, but some. The saucer had been lying in 250 feet of water; if the integrity of the hull had been broken, seawater under pressure would have filled the interior. This might be leakage from the ship’s tank, or merely condensation. Solo wiped a drip off the hatch lip and tasted it. He was relieved—it wasn’t saltwater.

  Now Solo inspected the yawning hole. He stuck the wand inside and studied the panel on his Geiger counter. “Background radiation,” he told Douglas, who smiled in a self-satisfied way and rubbed his hands together, a gesture that Solo had noticed he used often.

  Solo turned off the Geiger counter. He carefully wrapped the cord around the wand and stowed it in the plastic case, then shoved the case up into the dark belly of the saucer.

  DeVries craned his neck, trying to see inside. “Like, when you going to climb into this thing?”

  A smile crossed the face of Adam Solo. “Now,” he said. He raised himself through the hatchway into the belly of the ship.

  Harrison Douglas bent down and crawled under the ship, then squirmed up through the hatch. Then the hatch closed.

  The first mate slowly shook his head. “Glad it was them two and not me,” he said conversationally, although there was no one there to hear him. “My momma didn’t raise no fools. I wouldn’t have crawled into that thing for all the money on Wall Street.”

  * * *

  The first mate made his way to the bridge. Captain Johnson was still at the helm. “Well, did you ask him?” the captain demanded.

  “Scientific curiosity, Douglas said.”

  “My ass,” the captain said sourly. “Oh, well. As long as we get paid…” After a moment the captain continued, “Solo’s weird. That accent of his—it isn’t much, but it’s there. I can’t place it. Sometimes I think it’s Eastern European of one kind or another, then I think it isn’t.”