Prometheus stood up. Athena burst through the door.
"Doctor! It's Aithousa! ..."
Prometheus got up and walked quickly to the lab, followed by Dana and Lance. When they got to the lab, Dana ran out in front of Prometheus and Lance.
Aithousa lay on the lab floor, not moving except for her clearly labored breathing. A yellowish fluid was coming out of one of her nostrils.
Dana knelt down, trying to diagnose what was wrong with Aithousa.
After three breaths, Aithousa stopped breathing. Her open eyes turned from green to black.
Dana paused, then put her head down to the creature's chest. She checked pulse points on her wrists, then her neck. She then put her hand down on a side of her groin.
"It's ... she's dead," said Dana.
Prometheus's face held a look of horror. He knelt down next to Aithousa's body on the opposite side from Dana.
While everyone else's attention was focused on Aithousa, Lance visually surveyed the room, looking for what might start a cascade of computer failures.
Knowing he might only have one chance, he selected a computer bank centered on the wall. If it was connected to the computers on its left and right, making one overload might be enough to make all of them go.
A table on wheels was about six feet away. Lance slowly moved toward it.
He managed to get over to the table without attracting Prometheus' attention. He put his hands on one end.
Suddenly, he started walking with it, then pushed it as hard as he could. The table rolled until it crashed into the computer toward which Lance had aimed it.
A boom, followed by a shower of sparks, was the result.
Prometheus looked up from Aithousa's body. He started running toward the computer banks.
"GET DOWN!" yelled Lance to Dana, jumping on top of Dana and Athena.
Prometheus was a step away when the entire wall of computers exploded. His body took the full blow of the blast. He was knocked clear across the room against the opposite wall.
Lance could feel what he assumed was parts of computers — or maybe parts of the wall — whistle past him. Lance, Dana and Athena all bounced off the floor after an explosion shook the room, followed a few seconds later by another.
The entire wall of computers was now aflame. Smoke quickly filled the room.
Prometheus lay on the floor of the lab. His head and part of his body looked human, but his second set of arms had reappeared. His eyes glowed a sickly green color. There were large black blotches on his skin.
Athena held his head.
"I ... miscalculated," said Prometheus haltingly. "... I thought ... you would ... willing ... perfect ... environment ..."
"To breed a race of conquerors of our own planet?" said Lance coldly. "You didn't study humans very well after all. We've fought for our freedom — we've died for our freedom — for thousands of years. And if your species is coming here, we'll fight them too."
"You ... have doomed ... my species ..."
"Your species may be doomed anyway," said Dana. "Our environment has millions of microorganisms ... bacteria. Life forms on this planet ... humans ... are used to them. Your species is not. That's what killed Aithousa. She died because she got sick. You couldn't filter out the human factors."
Prometheus' eyes changed to black, the same as Aithousa had.
Another explosion rocked the lab.
"If we don't get out of here, we're doomed ourselves," said Lance.
"How are we going to get out of here?" asked Dana.
"That's the part I hadn't gotten to figuring out yet. It's a long swim."
"There's a tunnel underneath the pool," said Athena. "Follow me."
Athena, followed by Lance and Dana, left the lab as another explosion rattled the island.
Dana fell down. Lance stopped, went back, and picked her up in his arms.
Athena shed her clothes as she led them to the pool. She dived in, followed by Lance carrying Dana.
Had it not been for the peril they were in, Lance thought he would have very much enjoyed seeing Athena's ass and genitals right in front of him as they swam downward, Athena's legs opening and closing.
Lance felt Dana's arms around his shoulders.
At the bottom of the end of the pool, there was a dark circle. Athena swam in, followed by Lance and Dana.
The horizontal tunnel ended with a vertical tunnel. Athena swam upward, Lance and Dana following.
The three broke the surface of the water below a ship held in the air above them. They got out onto the walkway around the pool.
Lance actually stopped and stared at the ship. It had a dark gray skin, with sweeping curves from the top of the fuselage flattening where they met the wings. Two pods were mounted on the wings, with small fins on top of them. The wings drooped downward outside of the engines.
Lance estimated it was about 100 feet long, about 50 feet wide from wingtip to wingtip, and about 20 feet from its landing gear to the top of the fins. There didn't seem to be a flat surface on the entire ship.
It was the most incredible ship — plane? Flying thing? — he had ever seen in his life.
Then he knew what it was — a UFO as soon as it took flight. If he could fly it, that is.
"How do you get in?" he said.
Then a door opened on the bottom of the craft.
Another explosion rocked the chamber. Beggars can't be choosers, he thought. He stuck his head in the opening, and got in, followed by Dana and Athena.
The cockpit was one step ahead of the entrance. It had two seats.
"Um ... I guess you'll have to share," he said.
Athena got in the right-side seat first, followed by Dana. Athena opened her legs so Dana could sit between them. Athena's arms wrapped around Dana below her breasts.
In front of the pilot's seat were two cross-shaped controls, with arrows up and down and left and right.
"What I'd give for instructions in English," Lance said.
Instantly the control listings changed from their previous language to English. "PITCH" and "ROLL" were on one control, while "YAW" and "POWER %" were on the other. The green button said "POWER."
"Well, here we go," said Lance, hitting the Power button.
A tremendous roar bellowed from behind him.
On an ordinary airplane, the pilot only has to push the throttle forward to get the plane to take off. This wasn't an ordinary airplane by any earthly dimension, but Lance hoped it worked like one. Of course, since they were in what appeared to be a cavern there seemed to be nowhere for them to go.
He pushed the Power % up arrow. The noise increased, but there was no forward movement.
Then Lance saw a blinking red light. Hoping it was blinking due to some sort of brake being on, he pushed the blinking light.
Suddenly the solid wall in front of them opened to the ocean. The ship started forward slowly. Lance hit the up arrow again.
The ship moved forward faster. Lance held down the arrow again.
The ship moved over the water feet above it from what Lance could see, the water moving faster and faster underneath them.
Lance pushed the Pitch up arrow. Now they saw sky instead of ocean.
Lance adjusted the pitch so they were flying level, as far as he could determine. They also were flying very fast, very high, and in no particular direction.
Lance scanned the instruments and saw what appeared to be the big four — altitude, airspeed (which said 7.02 ... of what?), vertical speed and heading. Vertical airspeed was at zero, indicating level flight. Apparently the aircraft, or whatever it was, was pressurized since according to another gauge they were flying at 70,000 feet, but they didn't seem to be running out of oxygen. (Unless, he thought, this was all a hallucination — flying an alien craft while naked at speed and altitude no other plane had ever flown — and they were all dead.)
He decided to fly east-southeast to fly parallel to the Equator and out of range of the U.S., the Soviet Union, China and Europe and their air forces, while he figured out what to do next. He didn't think they would be able to track anything as high and as fast as what he was flying, but he didn't want to take a chance beyond what they already were doing.
He looked at Dana and Athena. They were looking at him.
"I'm going to, uh, try to figure out somewhere to land," he said, leaving out the more critical part, figuring out how to land.
There were essentially two choices that he was most recently familiar with — Nellis Air Force Base back in Nevada, and Homestead Air Force Base back in Florida. On the one hand, he had no idea how much fuel he had left. On the other hand, he didn't know which, if either, had a long enough runway for a plane currently running at Mach 7.
He decided on Nellis, basically because that was in their general direction of flight. He tried to remember the coordinates he had flown to a few days earlier, but he couldn't.
"What did they call that ... Groom Lake? Area 51?" he said out loud.
Instantly a depiction of a globe appeared in front of him with two dots — one that was moving; that must be them, now over the Indian Ocean, having apparently just crossed Africa — the other a stationary dot in the western U.S., and a line between them.
"I hope one of those is right, because I guess that's where we're going," he said.
Less than three hours later — during which, unbelievably to Lance, Dana and Athena fell asleep — the map indicated they were nearing the U.S. Pacific coastline.
Suddenly the plane started to lose speed and altitude. By the time the map indicated they were crossing the central California coast, they were at 25,000 feet and 500 mph. The plane adjusted its altitude and heading downward as they flew toward southern Nevada.
"I hope this thing has landing gear or something," said Lance.
They were now low enough that they could see mountains below them, then desert. Their speed as measured by the ground going by seemed to increase as their altitude dropped.
"I, uh, don't know how this thing is going to land," Lance said to the women.
Or if
, he thought to himself.
The aircraft began to slow. Then it stopped, though it was still in the air. Then it dropped slowly. They felt the plane stop on the ground. And then the engines shut off.