Saucer: The Conquest Read Online Free PDF

muttered to Rip, who didn’t respond. He was intent on the television, listening to the commentator, ignoring everyone around him.
    The countdown went smoothly. There were two minor holds, for only a few seconds each, and the commentator didn’t give the reasons for either.
    The spaceplane looked weird with the two huge external fuel tanks attached to its side. This particular ship, Jeanne d’Arc, was a proven platform, with three round trips to the moon already in her logbook. Rip thought about that now, reassuring himself that everything would go well, that Charley would come back safe and sound.
    Still, better than anyone else in the room, he understood the dangers involved in space flight. Not to mention going back and forth to the moon. The French lunar project was mankind’s biggest leap yet off the planet, akin to tackling the Atlantic in a rowboat.
    His heart was pounding and he was covered with a sheen of perspiration when the first glimmer of fire appeared in the nozzles of the spaceplane’s rocket engines. The flame grew steadily until it was as bright as the sun, overpowering the television camera’s ability to adjust for light.
    The roar came through the television’s speakers, a mere shadow of the real thing. Still, it filled the living room and drowned out the last of the conversations.
    The spaceplane began moving. Faster and faster, accelerating. The nose wheel stayed firmly on the runway as the ship accelerated past a hundred knots, then two hundred. A small number at the bottom of the screen reported its increasing velocity.
    At 264 knots the nose rose a few feet off the pavement. At 275, the ship lifted off. Seconds later the landing gear began retracting.
    The nose kept rising, up, up, up. The ship was exceeding four hundred knots when the nose reached fifty degrees above the horizon and the autopilot stopped the rotation.
    Soon the fireball from the engines was all that could be seen on the screen.
    It gradually became smaller and smaller as the sound faded… until it was merely a bright point of light in the heavens.
    The camera followed the light until it was out of sight, then returned to the tarmac. The cameraman focused on the spot where the spaceplane had begun its roll, a spot now empty.
    “She’s on her way,” Egg said.
    Rip Cantrell took a deep breath and exhaled very carefully. He surreptitiously wiped at the tears that were leaking down his cheeks. “Yeah,” he whispered. “She’s on her way.”
    • • •
    Inside Jeanne d’Arc Charley Pine monitored the instruments as the ship roared away from the earth. To her left Jean-Paul Lalouette was similarly engaged. Her duties were to bring any anomaly she noticed to his attention. Her eyes swept the panel again, looking for warning lights, errant pressures, a gauge indication that hinted something, anything was not as it should be. Yet all was precisely as it should be, perfect, as if this were a simulator ride and the operator had yet to push a failure button.
    Both pilots wore their space suits, complete with helmets, in the event the plane lost pressurization during launch. They planned to take them off after all the systems checks were completed in orbit.
    The acceleration Gs felt good, pushing Charley straight back into her seat. The voices of the French controllers passing information about the trajectory and data-link information sounded clear and pleasant in her ears; the background was the low rumble of the rocket engines.
    When the external tanks were empty, they were jettisoned explosively. The engines then began burning fuel from the internal tanks as the spaceplane continued to climb and accelerate.
    Charley’s eyes flicked to the windscreen, four inches of bulletproof glass. At this nose-up angle the night sky filled the windscreen, full of stars and a sliver of moon. As they climbed through the atmosphere the stars became brighter and ceased their twinkling, and the crescent-moon gleamed more starkly against the