Saucer: The Conquest

dropped them. 'What can I say?'

The sliver of new moon had set hours ago. Egg and Rip were lying side by side in the grass looking at the stars through gaps in the clouds when Rip said, 'She's on her way.'

'Wish you were with her?'

'Well, heck yeah. Big adventure. 'Course, she's an older woman and all. You just knew a romance like that wouldn't work out. She's a good pilot, though.'

'So what are you going to do with your life, Rip?'

'Get on with it. Nothing else I can do, is there?'

Jeanne d'Arc left earth orbit with a long burn designed to accelerate her to escape velocity. With the Global Positioning System (GPS), automatic star trackers and the small onboard computers that didn't exist in the mid-1960s when the Apollo craft were designed, the French ship was much more self-contained than the American moon ships had been. Due to the vast strides in computer technology, each computer on Jeanne d'Arc contained more computing capacity than all the NASA computers together had when Apollo 11 successfully voyaged to the moon.

The crew had taken off their space suits, positioned the ship in the proper orientation, checked the computer programs, locked in the autopilot and waited.

The burn, when it came, was a rush of acceleration and emotion. The trajectory they hoped to achieve was a parabola that would take Jeanne dArc to within sixty miles of the lunar surface. If the spaceplane didn't decelerate as it circled the moon, it would slingshot around it and return to earth. Tears leaked from the corners of Charley's eyes and were pulled back into her hair by the acceleration, which was designed to raise their velocity to a trifle over thirty-five thousand feet per second.

An hour later, with the engines secured, all the checklists finished and the planet slowly falling behind, Charley and Lalouette unstrapped and floated out of their ergonomically correct couches.

Lalouette gave Charley a big grin and said, 'You did very well. I have never before flown with a beautiful woman.' Apparently the fifty hours he had spent with Charley in the simulator this past month didn't count.

'I'm so happy for you,' Charley Pine said sweetly.

'We'll get to know each other much better in the coming weeks,' he said confidently.

'Down, boy. Remember the cameras.' Small cameras in the cockpit were sending continuous streams of audio and video back to Mission Control in Paris. Unfortunately there were no cameras in the sleeping compartments.

Well, she had known the French were romantically challenged when she signed up for this gig. She hadn't given that aspect of the adventure much thought, though, because she had been so busy. She didn't even know if Lalouette was married. Hadn't asked, hadn't looked at his ring finger, wasn't the least bit interested. The worst of it was that the more difficult she was to conquer, the more the Frenchman would enjoy the chase.

With that gloomy thought in mind Charley Pine floated down the passage toward the head.

'Jean-Paul Lalouette said you are rich. Is it true?' The person asking was Claudine Courbet, an engineer on her way to the lunar base for a six-month stay. She and Charley Pine shared a tiny cabin. Neither had any say in the pairing since they were the only women on the flight.

Since Claudine asked the question in French, Charley had to translate the question in her head, then think of an appropriate response. 'Oui, ' she said, not knowing enough of the language to deflect the question.

'Some people think that explains it.'

'What? Explains what?'

'Why you are here. Did you or your family agree to pay money so you could be on the crew?'

'No.'

'Someone said you probably did after they heard Jean-Paul's story. Pierre has invested his fortune in this project. Some say he is down to his last euro. That's why he sold a round-trip to the American. Still, he'll never get the money back.'

'Easy come, easy go,' Charley Pine said.

'On the other hand, some people said you are Artois' next girlfriend,' Claudine confided, then hurried to add, 'but I do not think that. He has a girlfriend, an extremely rich one — her grandfather is one of those Italian car people. She is very pretty even though her breasts are not real.'

'The curse of the store-bought tits,' Charley murmured in English. 'I thought he was married?'

'Oh, yes. Julie Artois. But men like Pierre also have women friends. It is expected.'

'I see,' said Charley Pine, who didn't. The thought of being some married man's mistress left her cold. She began the process of zipping herself into her hammock so that she could sleep. This was the first time she had tried it in the weightless environment, and she was finding it a serious chore. When she was in training, the French had told her all tasks in weightless environments took more time and effort. 'How do you say 'damn' in French?' she asked Claudine.

Her roommate ignored that comment. 'Pierre was under extreme pressure to include a European in the flying crews or lunar team,' she continued earnestly. 'For political reasons, you understand. The European Union and all that. He refused to be pressured, but he had to do something since the government is investing so much in the lunar project. He would have been wise to hire a European scientist long ago and be done with it, but he did not wish to chance a breach in security. I think he recruited you to silence his critics in the government.'

'Those pesky critics,' Charley replied. She managed to tug the zipper home and sighed in relief. She had hated sleeping bags since her camping days as a preteen. Just when you finally get zipped in, you have to go to the bathroom. Thank God she remembered to go before she started this evolution.

Before Claudine could get started on another juicy tidbit, Charley asked, 'How do you like your first spaceflight?'

That got Claudine revved up. Her husband refused to allow her to go, but she signed up anyway. This was the adventure of a lifetime; the view of the earth from space was fantastic; she had dreamed of standing on the moon looking at earth all her life, ever since she saw those photos of the Apollo crews as a child; she would just get another husband when she returned to earth. She was still chattering away when Charley drifted off to sleep.

Charley Pine awoke when Claudine Courbet closed the compartment door behind her as she left. Charley lay floating weightless in her hammock for a few minutes trying to get back to sleep. It was a lost cause.

She examined the compartment thoughtfully. It was not large; every cubic inch was utilized in some manner. Color-coded pipes and conduits ran through the room against the wall that was the ceiling when the spaceplane was on earth. Emergency oxygen masks were rigged on one wall beside a fire alarm and portable extinguisher. Near the portable extinguisher was a nozzle on a flexible hose that hooked into the ship's main firefighting system.

Arranged so that she could see it while lying in her hammock was a computer screen. She reached out and turned it on. In seconds she was looking at the main systems displays. A touch of her finger brought up navigation information. Another touch gave her a camera's view of earth, a huge blue presence surrounded by the blackness of deep space. She lay for a few moments watching the night line move over the surface as the massive orb rotated.

As she watched she realized that the planet was moving ever so slowly away from the camera. This was an illusion, of course. Actually the spaceplace was flying away from the planet in free fall on a course that would put it in orbit around the moon in about seventy hours.

Her parents had divorced when she was seven. She grew up with her mother, who taught school in a Washington suburb. During the summers she visited her father, a building contractor in Atlanta. She had an unremarkable childhood, doing all the usual things that bright girls growing up in the American suburbs do. She played soccer, field hockey, basketball and baseball, giggled with her friends, went on dates, made straight As in junior high and high school — and managed to avoid the marijuana and hard drugs that many of her friends dabbled in, and some were consumed by. Was in a bad car wreck and walked away with only a broken arm. Decided she wanted to fly and worked hard to get an appointment to the U.S. Air Force Academy.

The flying had been challenging, so she applied for the test pilot program and was accepted. Moved in with a few guys along the way and always moved out after a while.

Just when she gave up on the air force, Rip and his flying saucer came into her life.

Rip Cantrell. As she watched the earth on the monitor she thought about him, about his face and smile and touch.