Since the Pearl was almost indestructible, I figured the enemy ship would want to shoot me down over some open land and come back to recover the Pearl after the ashes cooled. It also might be possible cats from space might not like water. So to hold them off, I flew low over the Susquehanna River, looping under the bridges at Harrisburg a few times, skirting Three Mile Island, and soaring over the cooling towers at Peach Bottom. I skimmed the Conawingo Dam, zig-zagged around pylons under the 95 bridge, flipped over top of the old B&O railroad bridge, and tried a barrel-roll under the route 40 bridge, nearly crashing into an Amtrak train crossing the railroad bridge at Havre De Grace, before finally sailing out to clear water, happy as Justin Haley at the wheel of his Camaro.

Hiding my ship down the Chesapeake Bay in one of a million hidden inlets, I gave them the slip, with the help of Raya’s wave-particle stealth. With a deep breath, I shot straight up into space to see what Sir Isaac Newton knew about satellites.

The trip into orbit took around eight minutes. There wasn’t a whole lot to do during the flight except cram the ship’s manual, bone up on astrophysics, and think about how much I missed Neko. If I could survive this, I’d fly to him and never leave his side again.

It wasn’t hard to track the enemy satellites with Raya’s on board computers. Except, it took hours to chase them all over the sky. Some were out on the edge at 22,000 miles, poking along at 7,000 miles an hour. Others were practically scraping the trees a few hundred miles up, ripping away at over 17,000 mph.

Backing into them and blasting out waves of muons hadn’t made much more than a cat’s toot of difference in their orbits. I was pretty well fed up with satellites, when I happened to glance at what passes for the gas gauge on a flying saucer. Big surprise! I was on fumes.

Turning to that weird space Internet they hook into, I found a tutorial on juicing up your saucer. A pretty blue cat was saying, “You can get a full charge in seconds by bathing in radiation from solar flares, but without protection, the gamma rays will burn out your circuits if you’re an android, and kill most carbon life forms.”

“What’s a solar flare?” I asked.

A voice from the screen answered, “It’s an explosion from the sun associated with a sun spot.”

“What’s a carbon life-form?”

“A common example of that would be a cat,” she said.

The video went on to explain how important it is to cruise close to the surface of an iron-core planet, such as Earth, in order to recharge. Frustrated with myself that I’d wasted all my power on a wild goose chase, I fiddled with the radio hoping for some music, when there was Mau again in some other ship, screeching at one of his officers.

“Who gave you authority to move away from Washington?”

“Navigation tells us we’re on top of the Capitol, sir. But we seem to be drifting east toward some body of water.”

“That’s the Chesapeake Bay, you idiot!” Mau screamed. “I was just down there chasing that gold saucer. Make sure you don’t shoot it down over water, you hear me! There’s something on that ship I need to salvage.”

So! It was Mau all along. Here’s my chance to find MeMe.

Working himself into a rant, Mau shrieked, “Didn’t you see the tall thin white structure that was shot in half tonight?”

“The Washington Monument? We didn’t shoot it in half, sir. Archives sent you video from an old film because we couldn’t find it.”

One of my favorite movies, I thought, fondly recalling the scene.

The officer continued, “Some of our satellites are acting strange. It’s what you call a-a-a-a-a—”

“Rollicking rats!” Mau shouted. “What’s happening to my satellite signal?” I saw the Major chase his tail. He spun off camera, there was a shriek.

The officer’s transmission came back, “— but it’s a mess any way you look at it because the fleet can’t find its way around.”

Mau scratched his ear. “What’s behind this? Help me out.”

“No clue, sir—”

“Major Mau, sir!” Another blue cat appeared wearing a fancy cap and a gold braided collar, “When will you give the order to attack Earth? The fleet is cruising toward the target and the commanders are impatient to begin.”

“They’ll have to wait,” Mau grumbled impatiently. “First I have to recover something that belongs to me. After that you can lay waste to this horrible planet anytime you —”

The transmission dissolved into static hiss.

Amazingly, that crazy idea of Java’s was working. Their fleet was drifting off course and their communications were unreliable. Now, if I could get enough Earth juice to corner Mau, I’d make him give up MeMe, or die trying.

“May I have your attention,” a pleasant feline voice called from the ship’s speaker. “Please be aware of unusual activity on the surface of Earth’s nearest star.”

Out of nowhere, a large monitor appeared to my right, displaying a live image of the sun.

The voice explained, “Seventeen of the sunspots you see arrayed around the center of the sun average ten times the diameter of Earth. It is likely, should a solar event occur, it will impact this planet. If it happens, you will have eight minutes to descend into the protection of Earth’s atmosphere, ahead of the magnetic storm.”

I watched these shapes with mild curiosity until Mau’s transmission came back out of the static noise, still arguing with his officers.

“— Stop distracting me with this solar storm nonsense, I forbid you to warn the fleet,” Mau demanded. “My concern right now is to catch up with that rogue saucer. There’s something on it that I need. If we make hysterical predictions on the eve of war about magnetic storms and plasma waves engulfing Earth, we’ll look like nervous fools, or worse, like cowards. Anyway, it is highly unlikely that a massive solar event would directly impact Earth.”

An officer whose name tag said ‘Aloo’, cautioned, “But Sir, shouldn’t the transports be moved behind the shadow of the moon, or even farther out in space, just in case?”

Another officer named Krrip agreed, “You know Major, the Earth is largely protected by its atmosphere and by the powerful magnetic field of its iron core. However, anyone sitting out in space is vulnerable to solar events like, like...” Stuck for a metaphor, Krrip turned to Aloo for help.

“What is the quaint expression Earth people use for ambushing defenseless animals when humans murder them for sport?”

“Sitting ducks, is the term I think,” supplied General Aloo.

“Yes, that’s it,” said Aloo. “5000 troop carriers each containing 500 of our most advanced military grade androids just waiting out there in space, like sitting ducks.”

Outside my ship, a huge Alna military satellite wailed past at an altitude of 378 miles.

“Look at the size of that thing!” I whistled to myself. “It’s bigger than a K-Whopper with a 53-footer.”

Two years before, I’d spent time around the kitchen door at a truck stop up on I-80, making friends with a trucker named Tiny, the 280-pound driver of a Kenilworth semi. He and I’d put on weight hanging out together all that summer and the jargon was still in my head.

But there wasn’t time to reflect on how far along I’d come in life as a truck stop cat, because a red light was warning me that I needed to hammer down into the night below for a fast motion-lotion juice-up.

If Java had been along, he would have demanded to land on one of the cat islands to see if those Japanese kitties were as cute as they look on the Internet.

The ship’s charts were at least 3500 years out of date, and that strange Internet of theirs was only good for travel tips to Alpha Centauri. But I remembered from a war movie, an island called Okinawa with smaller islands around it. As I was turning toward it, a blinding violet light hit the skin of the ship with a loud screech.