Saucer: The Conquest

by Coonts, Stephen

  One would think that every click and clang inside the ship would carry throughout the structure, and it did, but not as audible noise. The ship was too well insulated for that. If one put a hand on the outside hull, the random tapping and rapping could be felt. One could almost imagine the ship was alive. She rested her right hand on the frame of the side window to enjoy the tiny tremors.

  She was gradually coming down from the adrenaline high that had kept her wired for the last twenty-four hours. Maybe after this watch she could sleep.

  She yawned. Actually, she was getting sleepy now.

  Okay, Charlotte, old girl, stay awake!

  The good news was that if she drifted off, any ship’s system that failed or exceeded normal operational parameters would illuminate a yellow caution light and sound an audible warning. It sounded like a siren and would wake the nearly dead. A different tone would sound if one of the flight computers disagreed with the other two.

  If she slept, the ship would continue on course, precisely as if she were awake, and Mission Control would give her a blast if she missed her hourly call-in. And yet, she was a professional. “I am not going to sleep in the cockpit,” she declared out loud.

  “I certainly hope not,” said a male voice behind her, startling her. She had heard nothing as he came in.

  She glanced over her shoulder. Pierre Artois.

  “Bonjour,” she said, successfully hiding her irritation at being surprised.

  “Bonjour, mademoiselle. How do we progress?”

  In answer, she punched up the navigation display on the MFD and pointed to the readouts. “Zipping right along, as you can see.”

  “So how does Jeanne d’Arc compare to your flying saucer?” Artois asked as he maneuvered himself into the pilot’s seat and donned a seat belt to hold him there.

  Charley considered her answer before she spoke. “This ship is nicer, more people-friendly. The saucer was more of a pickup truck, designed to haul people and cargo back and forth from orbit to a planet. The saucer had no cooking, sleeping or toilet facilities. Very Spartan.”

  “Ah, the creature comforts. These days one expects them.”

  They discussed the differences for a few minutes, then the conversation petered out.

  Finally Artois said, “And Madame Courbet, your stateroom companion, are you getting along with her?”

  “She’s very nice.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “Nice. Indeed.”

  Artois sat for a few more minutes, then unstrapped and pushed himself out of the pilot’s seat with a gentle nudge. As he floated aft for the hatch he said, “I hope you have a good voyage.”

  “You too,” said Charley Pine. She glanced back to make sure he actually left the compartment.

  What was that all about? she wondered.

  A few minutes later Joe Bob Hooker caromed into the cockpit. “Just like a goddamn cue ball,” he said to Charley. He held himself suspended behind the seats and stared through the windscreen.

  “Oh, my God! Would you look at that?” He shifted so he could look out the pilot’s side window. “If that don’t beat all! Who’d a believed it, I ask you that? Who’d a thought it?”

  “So is this worth twenty-five mil?”

  “Can’t take it with you, kid. No, sir.” Hooker crept forward so that he could look back over the tiny left wing at earth. Finally, when he had had enough, he slid backward and stabilized in a position where he could look at her. “It was more than that, actually, with the exchange rate and all. And the Frenchies made me pay a half million for my flight suit. They don’t know it, but I’m taking it with me when I get home.”

  “Hell, yes.”

  “I’m from Texas,” he continued. “Little crossroads in west Texas nobody ever heard of. Grew up without a pot to piss in. Went to Dallas right after high school and looked for something to get into. Figured cars were the deal. Everybody’s always going to need a ride. Everything else comes and goes, but everybody will always need wheels. Started with a used car lot and learned the business. Bought another. Finally got into new cars. Sold my soul to the banks, but finally made it pay. Own a string of dealerships now. Can sell you any brand on the planet that’s legal to sell in the U.S. of A.”

  “Already have a car,” Charley said.

  “They wear out. That’s the good thing about ’em.”

  “So you’re married?” Charley asked, for something to say.

  “Third marriage,” Joe Bob said with a sigh. “Cute little thing from Highland Park. Tan and toned up tight. ’Bout your age, I figure, a year older than my oldest daughter. I was the biggest bankroll available when she ditched her first husband. Loves to spend money and do the Junior League thing. She thought I was crazy to sign up for this flight, but what the hell, she’s fixed for life if I don’t come back, so she said yes. Get her a young stud-bucket the afternoon they tell her the good news.”

  “I see.”

  “Well, you should. You got the best seat in the house.”

  With that he squirmed around and launched himself aft.

  WHEN SHE FINISHED HER WATCH, CHARLEY PINE crashed in her sleeping bag. She awoke refreshed and alert.

  After another four-hour watch, during which Pierre Artois and two of the engineer passengers did a show for French television from the rear of the cockpit, she decided she could do with a bath. This task turned out to be a challenge in the weightless environment. One stripped and entered a tiny bathing chamber. A push of a button sprayed a minute quantity of water, about a pint, upon the bather from four dozen jets. When the dousing stopped, the bather scrubbed him or herself with a soapy rag. A touch of a button gave another few seconds of rinse water, which was then suctioned out of the chamber to be boiled and recycled.

  Charley managed to wet her hair, which would have to do. No wonder most of the men wore their hair very short.

  Water was precious. Jeanne d’Arc was carrying several hundred gallons to the lunar base for use there. It would have to be continuously purified and reused. Still, inevitably, some was lost. Charley knew that the French were drilling into the lunar surface searching for ice formed when meteors struck, or even older ice that crystallized after the moon was torn from proto-earth by a meteor billions of years ago. If they found a significant amount of ice, the lunar base had a bright future. If they didn’t, it would never be more than a research outpost, one that would only be manned from time to time when political and financial realities allowed.

  Artois believed the ice was there. Indeed, he had publicly guaranteed it to the French people. If it couldn’t be found he was going to be embarrassed and French taxpayers were going to get the shaft—which is what taxpayers had been getting since the dawn of time, so they sort of expected it.

  After she wriggled into her clean flight suit, Charley went exploring again, working her way aft and glancing into every compartment. Most of the other crew members were asleep, including Claudine Courbet. The adrenaline high that had carried everyone through launch and the first twenty-four hours in space had finally worn off.

  Charley carefully inspected the ship’s batteries, looking for acid leaks. All the ship’s power right now was coming from batteries and solar panels. Electrical power was one of the absolute requirements for space travel; without it the rocket engines couldn’t be restarted, and the ship would fly forever on a voyage into eternity.

  Even the chef was asleep. Charley sampled some bread, cheese and wine, hummed a few bars of something romantic, then moved on.

  Floating along the passageways was very cool, she thought. This small vessel of steel and aluminum reminded her of a seed pod. Filled with air and water, it carried its tiny blobs of protoplasm from one small island in space to another.

  The coolest way to shoot the passageways was with the minimum motion of hands and feet, she decided, sort of like a seal slipping through an ice tunnel under the Arctic. Just push off with a flip of the wrist to start moving, then sweeten the trajectory when necessary with a touch of the bul
khead or deck or ceiling.

  There was no one in the cargo bay. Charley flippered along the narrow passageways, checking tiedowns. When she found herself in front of the large container that Claudine and the male technician had been looking into, she paused. The container wore a key-actuated padlock.

  She pursed her lips, then began examining the other containers more closely. None was locked. In fact, five minutes of inspecting revealed that there was only one padlock in the bay. Perhaps on the ship.

  She went back to look again.

  Now she was curious. Why would anyone lock a cargo container? It made no sense. Everything in the compartment was on the manifest.

  Or was it?

  She idly reached for the lock and gave an experimental tug. It opened in her hand. She stared at it dumbly for several seconds before she realized that it hadn’t been locked. Whoever put it on hadn’t squeezed it hard enough, so the lock failed to catch.

  She took it off and began opening the six latches. Bracing herself, she lifted the container door.

  And found herself staring at a symbol spray-painted in red onto a steel container.

  She looked for five or six seconds, then shut the hatch, closed all the latches and installed the padlock.

  Should she lock it, or leave it as she found it?

  She decided that leaving it as she found it was the better choice. She glided on out of the compartment and shut the hatch behind her.

  Charley had seen the cargo manifest, actually looked through it, a week or so ago. She didn’t recall anything on the manifest that was radioactive. Nor should there be. Power at the lunar base was supplied by generators, batteries and solar panels. In fact, several solar arrays were in the cargo bay.

  Isotopes? For running down drill holes in the search for water?

  In the small compartment they shared, Claudine Courbet was zipped into her hammock fast asleep. She had tied the arms of her flight suit around one of the hammock hooks, so the legs and body were floating in midair, swaying to and fro as the moving air stirred them.

  Charley Pine eyed the sleeping woman, then felt the flight suit. Something hard in one pocket. She reached in and pulled the object from the pocket to inspect it. Yep, a radioactivity safety badge. A few seconds later she found the key to the padlock. She checked the leg pockets. Eureka! A digital Geiger counter, about the size of a fountain pen.

  She returned the objects to the flight suit pockets and headed for the cockpit. When she reached the door she saw Pierre Artois in the copilot seat. He and Lalouette were engaged in earnest conversation. They ceased the instant they glimpsed Charley.

  Very curious, she thought.

  3

  TWO HOURS INTO HER WATCH ON THE FLIGHT DECK OF Jeanne d’Arc, Charley Pine learned the subject of Artois’ and Lalouette’s conversation. The French pilot was sick. She listened in on the three-way radio conversations between Artois, the physician at the lunar base and Mission Control. Although she didn’t understand the French medical terminology, she understood the diagnosis well enough. Lalouette was suffering a gall bladder attack.

  Artois sat beside her in the pilot’s seat on the flight deck wearing Lalouette’s headset during this discussion. Aborting the mission and returning to earth was one possibility weighed by the decision makers. The other was to proceed to the moon. The physician at the lunar base was equipped to operate, and could as soon as Lalouette arrived.

  This development meant that Charley Pine was now in full control of the ship. She would have to pilot it into lunar orbit and thence to the surface without Lalouette’s help. Artois asked her bluntly, “Can you do it?”

  “Of course,” she said firmly.

  “Safety is paramount. If you prefer, we can skip the lunar landing, slingshot around the moon and return directly to earth.” Both she and Artois knew that reversing the ship’s course without the use of the moon’s gravity would take more fuel than they had. “As the pilot, you are responsible for the lives of everyone aboard,” Artois continued. “The decision to land or return immediately is yours to make.”

  She had flown the entire mission in the simulator numerous times; the computers and autopilot were working perfectly. Charley, Lalouette and the controllers monitoring telemetry data had only identified seven gripes on the spaceplane, none of them major. If the spaceplane were experiencing serious mechanical problems, she would not be as confident as she was, but she was in no mood to share that thought with Artois.

  “I can hack the program,” she told him now. “I can fly this bucket anywhere we have the fuel to go. You know the state of the medical facilities at the lunar base, not I. If you feel Lalouette will get adequate care there, then we can go on.”

  Wearing a trace of a smile, Artois asked, “Did you know that the simulator instructors referred to you as Captain America?”

  Her look of surprise widened his smile. Apparently satisfied, he keyed his headset microphone to tell Mission Control and the lunar base physician of his decision. “We continue,” he said. “Our destination remains the moon.” With that pronouncement, he gave Charley a nod and flashed another smile, then left the headset on the top of the instrument panel and went aft to check again on Lalouette.

  Charley Pine took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Whew! Double whew! She was going to have to be on top of her game—she had certainly been there before—and she was going to walk on the lunar surface. She would be the first American to do so since the Apollo astronauts left their footprints in the lunar dirt thirty-two years before. No doubt the footprints were still there. “Hot diggity dog,” she muttered, and smiled broadly.

  All alone in the cockpit, she took off and stowed her copilot’s headset. Although it would function perfectly if plugged into the pilot’s radio jacks, she wanted Lalouette’s. She transferred to the pilot’s seat and retrieved the headset from its glare shield bracket. She settled it on her head.

  It fit perfectly.

  She punched up a navigation computer display. The ship was within a minute of crossing the invisible boundary that separated the pull of earth’s gravity from the pull of the moon’s. Alone, covered with goose bumps, she watched the seconds tick down. Then they were across. As it crossed this invisible boundary, the ship had coasted to its slowest speed of the journey; now under the pull of lunar gravity, it would accelerate. Just for grins, she began monitoring the speed on the navigation readout. Within a minute it began to respond, picking up a few dozen feet per second with every passing minute. Only fourteen hours to go to lunar orbit insertion.

  The voice of the mission controller crackled in her ears. “If you are going to go it alone, we need to begin now on the systems function tests and checklist items.” His name was Bodard. Charley had spent many hours with him during training. He had a paunch and always smelled of garlic and tobacco.

  Charley’s mood instantly shifted to all business. “Let us begin,” she said.

  “ARE YOU READY?” EGG CALLED. HE WAS STANDING IN front of the hangar aiming a video camera mounted on a tripod.

  “I guess,” Rip Cantrell answered, loudly enough to be heard over the sound of the idling truck engine. He was seated in Egg’s old Dodge in the center of the grass runway. He had removed the batteries from the truck bed and installed two large generators in the engine compartment of the pickup, with sheaves and belts to power them from the fan-belt takeoff.

  “Any time,” Egg shouted, and bent to his viewfinder.

  Rip wiped the perspiration from his forehead, so it wouldn’t get into his eyes, and tightened the belts in his three-point harness. His stomach was tied into a knot. He goosed the engine a couple of times with the accelerator, watching the amp meter rise and fall. Oil pressure okay, radiator temp okay. He did it one more time, allowing the engine RPM to rise. The truck rose a few inches, then settled back onto the tires as he let the RPM drop.

  He had a small control box he had salvaged from a model airplane radio-control unit mounted on a piece of metal, a joy stick, protruding f
rom the dash to the right of the steering wheel. He moved the stick back and forth, left and right.

  “Here goes nothing,” he muttered, and jammed the accelerator to the floor.

  The truck rose into the air as the electrical power from the generators energized the antigravity rings under the pickup. The truck began to tilt backward. Rip moved the small control stick forward, lowering the truck’s nose and stopping rearward movement.

  The truck rose until it was about a dozen feet in the air. The natural gravitational field of the earth and the man-made one he had induced in the truck were repelling each other. As the engine under the hood roared at full power, Rip kept the pickup level and stationary by using the stick.

  Ha! Satisfied he had control, he moved the stick ever so slightly to the right. The truck tilted and began drifting in that direction.

  Now he leveled the truck, then tilted the nose down a trifle for forward movement. The truck obediently began moving. Slowly at first, then faster and faster. He jockeyed the stick to control the rate.

  After he had gone a hundred feet, when he was doing perhaps fifteen miles per hour, he laid the truck into a left turn. He had enough room. The nose of the truck obediently swung around, turning back toward the hangar.

  He had just gotten it stabilized when a cloud of steam rose from under the hood. Water and steam sprayed on the windshield. The radiator temp gauge needle pegged right. Rip let up on the accelerator.

  Not quickly enough. He heard a loud bang, then the engine noise stopped dead.

  Still slightly nose down, the bottom fell out and the truck dropped toward the earth.

  The shock of impact snapped his head forward and stunned him.

  In the silence that followed the crash, he became aware of his uncle leaning in through the window. He had trouble focusing his eyes. Part of the reason was the dirt in the air—he seemed to be sitting in the middle of a dust cloud.

  “You okay, Ripper?” his uncle shouted, only inches from his head.