Java screeched, “Light up the windows and GO!”

“Give me a second to look this over, Java.”

“I’m not Java, I’m Raya. Touch the window icon on the right of the menu bar.”

Menu bar? Menu bar?

Raya’s control console was bristling with menus like the screens of phones, all glowing with the most confusing squiggles and glyphs. Four of the panels were round, three were oval, the others had rounded corners, and nothing looked in the slightest way like a menu bar.

The heart of the console was a 3-D navigation display, which, since we were inches from the ground, only showed Dilby Dunkle’s bubble gum wrappers scattered along the bottom of the fence. I sat back waiting for Raya to tell me how everything worked.

“What are you doing?!!” Raya as Java screamed at my ear. “It’s by your right foot. Do it NOW before we’re all KILLED!”

Touching the bar brought big screens suddenly blazing to life all around the cabin, as if the walls and ceiling had suddenly turned into windows. Overhead, the kind old apple tree embraced us with its branches, the moon was a brilliant lamp in the starry, while, across the field the other ship hovered malevolently.

“Can they see us?”

“Like the spider waiting for the fly.”

“No problem. The minute I try to fly this thing we were all going to die.”

“Stop joking, Ridley! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR!”

With a deep breath I raised my head the way I’d seen Sona do. My left paw moved back, and the ground gently dropped away.

Incredible! These things fly themselves!

BOOM! The edge of the saucer slammed into the tree with a drumbeat of hard green apples bouncing off the ship.

The spider jumped.

“GO Ridley!” Raya urged. “They’re onto us! GO! GO! GO!”

Pulling my left paw back a little, we started edging away.

As I leaned over to the right to see where we were going, my damp paw skidded on the gravity cushion with a squeak. Instantly the ship responded by shooting low over the ground in a fast curve, heading straight toward the other ship. We were hot on his tail.

He zigged to the left and we zigged.

He zagged to the right, and we zagged.

This was so easy.

“What are you doing?” screamed Raya. “They’re going to turn around and blow us out of the sky if you keep this up.”

“So what do I do?”

“Head for the mountain. Get over that ridge and lead them away like you’re supposed to do.”

We crossed the field in a wide fast curve, a giant Frisbee pulling up in time to avoid a smash-up in the trees.

I heard Java breathe a sigh.

Trying a trick I’d seen Sona use, with a flick of my tail and a sharp nod, a shimmering tsunami of muon energy heaved out from the engines in a great gasp that thrust us over the mountain ridge faster than a cat jumps onto a chair.

We shot over the trees, down into the same canyon where MeMe and I first flew into space three nights before. I could see the cliff where we both almost fell to our deaths.

“How do you make this thing invisible?”

“We use wave-particle stealth.” Raya explained. “Maybe our ship is too old for the other pilot to know how to detect it.”

Too old? It was amazing the ancient thing still held together.

Raya’s trick worked. The Alna destroyer overshot the ridge above us, streaking down into the canyon without spotting us. When the enemy ship surged across the broad Susquehanna valley, its frigid engines carved a thick frosty ice cloud in the humid summer air.

I was worried about Java. He had to eat some grass so he could cough up that Pearl. We watched the ice cloud stretch across the river in a narrow band behind the enemy ship, sprinkling a sudden snow shower down like Christmas in July.

At that point my paws were soaking wet and I was done. I turned to Raya happy at least that my career as a space pilot was over.

“Ok, it’s gone. We lured it away like you said, so let’s head back and ditch this antique. You have a date with Dr. Mina about our friend Rose.”

Java nodded his head enthusiastically.

“We must make sure they haven’t doubled back,” Raya warned. “We wait here.”

“Alright, so tell me about this thing you know that’s going to save Rose?”

Java looked at me steadily, but it was Raya who spoke. “We travel through an alternate dimension. Space is not an empty vacuum.”

“More of this weird talk,” I muttered to myself.

Raya tried to explain. “Particles and antiparticles constantly come and go in the physical world from a place we call the Saah-Ray. That’s the fabric underlying the universe, the foundation of everything.”

“I know, Rose said people used to call it the Ether a hundred years ago. But what’s that got to do with with what’s killing her?”

Raya addressed me like she was lecturing some college professor’s cat.

“The Saah-Ray is the soil of the universe from which everything grows. It nurtures patterns forming the natural world around us. Through our atoms and their sub-atomic particles, and the particles of those particles, on down through the layers like an onion—”

“Neko told me onions were sacred to the Egyptians.”

“And bad for cats,” Java added in his own voice.

“Yes, Java, eating onions can kill a cat,” Raya agreed patiently, “The ancients understood how our life-force ripples across the universal fabric, connecting us as one, because at one time they were visited by those who came from far away.”

“And they made Rose sick?”

“The space cats who entered recently opened a Yerh-Ah.”

“A wormhole like you said before. I know, it was on TV.”

“It was? What’s TV?”

I shook my head. “Never mind, you’re better off without it. . . anyway, I get it. You need to close this yoo-hoo. It’s time to go back to Rose so you can do that.”

“Not yet!” Rays insisted in her firm soprano. “We wait longer.”

While we waited, I looked around the console for weapons. “Where’s the ordinance on this thing? What do we do if that ship comes back?”

“The what?”

“Rockets and Bombs. How do we fire off those violet rays the way they do on that other ship?”

“My expedition came in peace. This ship doesn’t carry weapons.”

“WHAT?!!” Java and I both said at once. “What can we do without weapons?”

What could one little ship do against an army, even if we had them? I wondered.

“You use your head,” Raya snapped peevishly. “Just don’t use Java’s. I don’t see a whole lot going on inside here.”

Java growled, “Alright! If you’re so smart, Miss Pearl, tell me how daylight savings time works,”

“Never heard of it.” Raya shot back.

Java beamed archly. “Ha! . . . You don’t know everything.”

“So tell me, genius.”

“Every year you spring forward and fall back. That way the sun comes up later in the spring and earlier in the fall.”

Java sat back with a knowing smile.

“Wait a second. . . You mean to tell me you Earth cats have a kind of strange annual solar ritual to make the sun come up earlier by doing some sort of a dance?”

“Bi-annually,” I added helpfully.

“Springing and falling,” Java asserted. “It’s this way Raya, when you spring forward, you’re really falling back and when you fall back you’re springing forward.”

“That’s the craziest thing I ever heard.”

“You get more light at night and less light in the daytime.”

“WHAT? That’s nuts! Why would anyone want to do that?”

Since we didn’t know the answer to that, the three of us wracked our little cat brains, trying to think of a way to defeat an enemy who had 300 armed ships and 5000 troop carriers, each with 500 hardened android fighters waiting somewhere near the moon for the signal to attack Earth.

“What if we pull their satellites around into other places?” Java suggested. “Sona said they use satellite navigation the same as people do on Earth, except they have their own.”

“How are you going to do that?” Raya sniped sarcastically. “With that cute cowboy lasso of yours, Texas Tom?”

Java growled. She was rifling through his private thoughts.

The Bengal cat had my sympathy because I happened to know Java’s secret dream was to run away to Hollywood and play Texas Tom in the movies — the famous cowboy cat. He practiced his walk in front of the mirror when no one was looking, and dreamed about the horse he’d sleep on at night.

“Well, what about Newton’s Law? Java suggested. “You know, for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction.” Turning to me he said sagely, “Sir Isaac Newton invented the cat flap door, you know, with a big one for the mama cat and a little one for her kittens.”

“Yes. but the kitties merely followed their mama through the same door.” I said and we high-fived, since that’s common lore among cats.

Thrilled he’d helped us come up with a plan, Java suggested, “We could push some of their satellites in different directions and others into higher orbits.”

“Great Cats! Nice work, Java. It could take them into August to sort it all out. When we’re done those blue cats won’t know Austria from Australia.”

Java said he agreed, because he often mixed them up himself.

Pushing satellites with blasts of muon particles from the ship’s engines seemed like science fiction to Raya. The two of them argued back and forth in alternating alto and soprano voices that made my fur stand on end. To tune them out, I fiddled with the ship’s strange Internet radio.

Suddenly Major Mau’s mendacious mug appeared on the monitor.

“Ooooh! There’s that creepy cat.” hissed Java

“Should we talk to him?” Raya asked.

Not being able to face the evil cat myself, Java addressed the Major with a bright grin.

“Major Mau! Nice to see you again! Where are you now?”

“Yowww!” Mau yelled in genuine surprise. “No! Not you two again!”

We watched Mau fall down hyperventilating.

I screamed into the cat cam.

“Where’s MeMe? What have you done with her?!!”

Mau instantly recovered, assuming the wise look of one who has taken your queen, “Why, your little friend is at this moment being prepared for shipment back to my home planet — as ah — a laboratory specimen.” He flashed a knowing smile. “If you cooperate and return my Pearl, I might consider making a trade. But you’d better hurry, her ship leaves at six tomorrow morning.”

Java gave him a hard look, but the next voice Mau heard was Raya’s, as she spoke through Java.

“So! This is the great Major Mau? You don’t look like much of anything to me. Return the cat MeMe, then pack up your robot army and go home! You will never succeed in conquering Earth!”

Enraged, Mau drew back muttering to himself.

“This doesn’t sound like that same goofy farm cat,” he hissed.

“Who is this?” Mau demanded.

“I am Raya, feline princess of Egypt.”

Mau was genuinely appalled. “Mother of cats! They’ve found that Egyptian mummy and brought her back to life!” His eyes grew wide in realization. “That must have been what Dr. Mina found when the lights went out!”

Mau fumed and panted.

“I had that Pearl right between my paws and I let it slip away from me,“ Mau raged. “Now I’m being bullied by an Egyptian princess disguised as a Bengal cat!”

We watched Mau run around his ship, furiously chasing his tail. He caught it in his teeth before the video feed went dead and we heard him scream in pain.

I threw my paws in the air., raving like a crazy cat, “Waiting here is nuts! We have to get back to the farm so Raya and Dr. Mina can help Rose. Sona can fly this ship. We’ll take Chocolate, Watson, and some others. We’ll corner Mau and hold him hostage. We’ll trade him for MeMe.”

Without waiting for any argument, I jumped back in the pilot seat and lifted off. We shot back over the ridge, skimming the tree tops, down across the field to the farm. Circling the barn, this time I parked in the shadows behind Detlow’s garage.

As soon as Java hopped out, he chewed on the thick Kentucky blue grass in Jeffry’s back yard. After he thought he’d swallowed enough grass for a good healthy yak, we started for the Matthews’ house to round up the other cats.

Java and I froze at that unmistakable harmonium sound.

“Run, Java,” I shouted to him. “They’ve followed us back. Don’t cough out that Pearl until you find the doctor. Raya will find a way to save Rose.”

In a minute or two, whoever was in that enemy ship would blast the whole neighborhood into a stone quarry and pick up the Pearl at the bottom, since the Pearls were indestructible.

There wasn’t time to find Sona to pilot the ship, so I jumped inside myself, to see if I could lead the enemy ship away from the farm one more time.