Saucer: The Conquest (8 page)

“Been watching television,” Egg reported as he regained his breath. “The French pilot is sick. Charley flew the space-plane into lunar orbit.”

“Good for her.” Rip meant it.

“They’re also having trouble with the main engine. The news is on all the channels.”

Rip found himself staring at the moon. “Shouldn’t be a problem,” he said. Since Charley left for France, he too had been reading everything he could find on the French space-planes. “Still, something’s wrong.”

• • •

“I think it’s the heaters,” Florentin said to Charley.

They were in the crawl space forward of the engines, between the engines and the fuel tanks. “Looks to me as if the heater circuit got a short and the temp is too low in the engines for the igniters to fire.”

“Terrific.”

“If that is the problem, sitting on the surface of the moon should thaw the engines. The surface temperature during the day is about 107 degrees Centigrade.”

“How about the other engines?”

“The heaters seem to be working.”

“Okay,” Charley said, and flippered backward out of the tunnel.

She regretted ever agreeing to a hurry-up training schedule. Eighteen hours a day for forty-two days, and it didn’t seem nearly enough. Sure, if Lalouette were not sedated, she would merely be backing him up. Now she was the pilot in command and she had no backup at all, no one to tell her to slow down or rethink a problem. The pressure to get it right the first time was building inexorably, and it was beginning to take its toll. For the first time since that overwhelming first day in the simulator, she wished she hadn’t agreed to do this.

True, she had been working for this day all her life. If she screwed up and the error cost her life, so be it. She had come to terms with that risk the very first time she went up alone in an airplane. Pilots have to believe in their own abilities and come to grips with their own mortality. That goes with the territory. Yet there were seven other lives at risk here. If I get there, they will too, but if I don’t, I will have killed them.

On the flight deck she committed the spaceplane to another orbit while she read the mission-planning manual again and talked the situation over with Bodard in Mission Control. In her mind’s eye she could see his intense eyes, revealing the fire and intelligence he brought to his job.

“We think the problem is the heater,” Bodard said finally. “You can reprogram the flight computers to compensate for your seventy percent power capability. Once that is done, we will check your data.”

“Roger.”

Charley began programming the computers. In five minutes she had finished. The solid-state computers readily took the new parameters, but the spaceplane was now out of radio contact behind the moon. Both the parameters and the navigation solutions would be automatically relayed to Mission Control when radio contract was regained.

She had been awake for twenty hours and was tired, so she rechecked her entries twice, keystroke by keystroke. If she screwed up the approach to landing she would have to abort. There was only fuel for one shot. Landing too far away from the lunar base was not an option, not if she expected to have the fuel remaining to get back to the fuel tank in earth orbit. Crashing on the surface was not an option, either.

Artois offered her an insulated bottle of coffee. She accepted it gratefully, stuck the straw through the port in her face mask and sucked gingerly. Ahh. Then she sat looking through the windshield at the lunar surface sixty miles below. She could see the lava flows and craters quite plainly, stark places that didn’t resemble any terrain on earth because there had never been any erosion. Without the eternal erosion of wind and water, the land was jagged, the mountains taller and steeper than any on earth, their relief exaggerated by the stark brilliance of the unfiltered sunlight.

Artois maneuvered himself into the copilot’s seat and said nothing. Charley ignored him. Her thoughts were occupied with the task before her, and with thoughts of Rip.

“We have telemetry again.” Bodard’s voice sounded in her headset, ending her reverie.

Five minutes later he told her, “Looks good. You are go for landing.”

“Roger that.” Her voice sounded flat, she thought. She was very tired.

After Charley manually aligned the spaceplane for the approach burn, the autopilot refused to engage. She punched the button futilely. The ship was again behind the moon in the radio dead zone, so there was no one to complain to except Artois, sitting in the copilot’s seat, and he would be no help.

“It’s enough to piss off the pope,” she muttered in English. She reached behind her on the overhead and found the circuit breaker, recycled it, then tried again to engage the recalcitrant device. Nope. Well, she would just hand-fly this garbage scow.

At least all three flight computers were in perfect agreement. Thank God for modern computers! How the Apollo astronauts did it with the primitive junk they had was a mystery.

The clock ticked down. “Here we go,” she said over the intercom, and punched the button on the yoke to start the engines. The four small engines fired off, pushing her into her seat. Yeaaah! She concentrated on keeping the crosshairs centered on the display in front of her. Flying backward takes some getting used to.

On the completion of the burn, she waited impatiently for the new trajectory data to become reliable.

“Tres bien,” Bodard said when the spaceplane came out from behind the moon. He was looking at the telemetry data on the trajectory.

Satisfied that she wouldn’t need another burn, she waited. Waiting is the hard part, she thought.

The ship was descending at about a thousand feet per second. She had fifty more miles of altitude to lose. She checked the three-dimensional display on the trajectory computer and ensured that the remote cameras were on—she would need them in the final phase of the landing—and that the radar and laser backups were functioning properly.

The base site was still over the lunar horizon, nearly six hundred miles away.

The nose was well up now, the ship flying backward down the glide slope. Through the windshield she could see only stars. The earth was behind her, over her head. Now any burst of engine power would slow the descent. What she needed was the ability to finesse the power, so she selected a lower level of engine power, just thirty percent, so that the timing on the burns would be less critical.

The ship plunged on toward its rendezvous with the moon. The engines had to fire now when she asked for power or the ship would crash into the surface at this rate of descent.

Another burn was coming up. Fifteen seconds… ten… five…

She waited. And lit the engines. They fired. A two-second burst. Too much would shallow the descent and carry the ship far beyond the target landing area; too little would require more power later on and screw up the trajectory. She adjusted the ship’s attitude to keep it perfectly aligned.

So far, so good.

Two minutes later she gave the engines another burst. The trajectory was almost perfect, just a little shallow.

The rate of descent was still a thousand feet a second, only twelve miles up now. She checked the altitude on the radar, cross-checked with the lasers. Due to the irregularities of the surface, the readings were merely averages.

Coming down, coming down… bringing the nose up as the speed over the surface dropped, using power to slow the descent rate, coming down…

Now the landing area came into view on the radar. It didn’t look as she expected. The land was all sunlight and long, deep shadows; the mission had been timed to arrive just after the lunar dawn.

Cross-checking everything, she was shocked to realize that the computer had somehow mislocated the target landing area. Or had it?

She had an instant decision to make. Was the trajectory right or wrong?

Still flying the bird, she punched up the landing zone’s coordinates. They looked right. The trajectory looked right. She looked again at the radar picture and keyed in the camera that was slaved to the radar’s point of sight. Yes, the landing area looked as she had seen it in the simulations.

She was overthinking this, she decided. Rely on your instruments! Don’t panic!

Later she couldn’t remember the exact sequence of the final phase of the landing. She used the engine, monitored the displays, kept the ship’s nose rising toward the vertical while she monitored her ground speed. The objective was to zero out speed, drift and sink rate at touchdown—and land at the proper place. And use as little fuel as possible doing it.

With a final burst of power she slowed the descent to fifteen feet per second. Now she was glued to the television cameras. There was the mobile gantry for unloading cargo, the radio tower and the bank of solar panels for charging the base’s batteries—don’t hit them! Still moving forward at twenty feet per second, no drift, three hundred feet high… two hundred, engines on low, just ten percent power… dust began to rise… one hundred feet, fifty… zero groundspeed.

At fifteen feet Charley killed the engines and let lunar gravity pull the ship down. It contacted the surface sinking at one foot per second. The shock absorbers in the landing gear had no trouble handling this descent rate.

As the dust slowly settled on the television monitors, she keyed the intercom and the radio. She had to clear her throat to speak. “Jeanne d’Arc has landed.”

Beside her Pierre Artois exhaled explosively. “Tres bien,” he muttered, then decided that phrase didn’t describe his emotions. “Magnifique!”

• • •

Rip and Egg were glued to the television in Missouri, even though the time was a few minutes after three in the morning.

They heard Charley Pine’s words two and a half seconds after she said them, which was the period of time it took a radio signal to reach earth.

Rip’s shoulders sagged. He looked at Egg and saw that he had tears streaming down his cheeks.

He patted his uncle on the shoulder and wandered out into the night. The clouds had cleared somewhat. The moon was well below the horizon now. He blew Charley a kiss at the sky anyway, then walked down the hill toward the control tower and bed.

• • •

The passengers and crew had to walk from the spaceplane to the base air lock. The fact that Jeanne d’Arc was sitting on her tail complicated matters somewhat. Base personnel maneuvered the cargo gantry alongside so that the people could be lowered to the surface on the cargo elevator.

While Charley Pine and Florentin went through the post-flight checklists, the other members of the crew maneuvered the sedated Lalouette toward the ship’s air lock. Two people from the lunar base came into the ship to assist.

The pilot was near the ragged edge of exhaustion. It took intense concentration to work through the checklists with Florentin. The checks took over an hour to complete, and by that time Lalouette and the others were gone. Florentin exited through the air lock, leaving Charley alone in the spaceplane.

The lunar base would have to wait, she decided. She was about to sign off with Mission Control when Bodard passed her a message for Pierre Artois from the French premier. Congratulations, the glory of France, and all that. She copied it down, promised to give it to him and signed off.

“Another day, another dollar,” she muttered as she maneuvered herself out of her seat.

The descent of the main passageway was not difficult in the weak gravity of the moon. After shedding her space suit, she made a pit stop to answer nature’s call, then proceeded to the bunkroom she had shared with Courbet. She crawled into her hammock. In seconds she was fast asleep.

She awoke to the sound of hatches opening, metal scraping against metal. She knew what the noise was—base personnel were unloading the cargo bay. Who had done the checklists, to ensure the bay was properly depressurized and that the rest of the ship was maintaining pressure?

Galvanized, she struggled from her hammock and made her way to the flight deck. Florentin was in the pilot’s seat, which he had tilted forty-five degrees so that he wasn’t lying on his back.

“Bonjour, Sharlee,” the flight engineer said.

Charley muttered a bonjour. For the first time since waking, she looked at her watch. She had been asleep for five hours. Not enough, but she felt better. And hungry and thirsty.

They spent a few minutes talking about the main engine and what Florentin and the engineers from the base were going to do to check out the malfunction; then Charley lowered herself down the passageway.

In the weak gravity of the moon, getting into her space suit was easier than it had been on Earth. Actually the suit consisted of two pieces, an inflatable full-body pressure suit and a tough, nearly bulletproof outer shell that protected the pressure suit and helped insulate the wearer from the extremes of temperature present in a zero-atmosphere environment. Air for breathing and to pressurize the suit was provided by a small unit worn on a belt around the waist.

The unit hung at the small of the wearer’s back and was connected to the suit by hoses.

Donning the suit alone was strenuous. Only when Charley had triple-checked everything did she enter the air lock. With the pressure suit inflated, she felt like a sausage.

When the exterior door opened the light blinded her. She remembered her sun visor and lowered it with her eyes closed. After her eyes adjusted she got her first real view of the lunar surface. She had seen the photos many times, yet the reality was awe-inspiring. The land baking in the brilliant rising sun under an obsidian sky—she had never seen a place more stark, or more beautiful. And the day was going to be two weeks long!

The cargo gantry was alongside, so she used that for a ladder. Standing on the surface, she bent and examined the impressions her boots made in the dirt. Then she turned and looked for Earth.

There it was, behind the spaceplane. She bounded several paces away and looked again. Should have brought a camera, she thought. Mesmerized, listening to the sound of her own breathing, she turned slowly around, taking in everything. She saw the air-lock entrance to the lunar base, an illuminated bubble that looked like a large skylight, a radio tower, the gantry and the jagged horizon. In the absence of an atmosphere, the visibility was perfect.