Saucer: The Conquest by Coonts Stephen

Author:Coonts, Stephen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-07-20T04:00:00+00:00

THE RIDE INTO SPACE WAS EVEN MORE EXCITING THAN Rip remembered it. He wanted to sing, but managed to stifle himself.

Charley Pine was all business. When the rocket engines stopped, signaling that the saucer had achieved orbit, she began tuning the radio that she remembered from her previous adventure in this ship. Like the one Egg was listening to in the Roswell saucer, this radio was also capable of receiving and transmitting on an extraordinarily wide band of frequencies.

She knew the one she wanted: the spaceplane’s orbital refueling freq. She had to play a while with the radio, then finally found it.

The spaceplanes were already in orbit and were now rendezvousing with the fuel tank. The problem was that she didn’t know where the tank was. Oh, she knew it was orbiting the earth at a height of about a hundred miles, more or less, but where above the earth was it?

As she listened to the French pilots chat back and forth between themselves and their controller on the ground, she tried to reason her way through the problem. When she and Lalouette had launched in Jeanne d’Arc, the launch was timed so that when the spaceplane reached orbiting velocity, it would be in the vicinity of the fuel tank. She suspected the French had done the same thing this time. Indeed, if they hadn’t, the spaceplanes would waste prodigious quantities of fuel and time maneuvering for a rendezvous.

She and Rip hadn’t timed their launch, of course. They had to find and rendezvous upon the spaceplanes before they successfully refueled and began their lunar orbit insertion burn. Once they did, she and Rip would never catch them in the saucer; it didn’t have enough fuel.

She examined the radar display, running it out to what she hoped was maximum range. The only way to determine what that range was would be to find a target and let the computer figure a course and burn to intercept. She could make an estimate based on that.

Which was beside the point, because the display was empty.

If the radar was working.

But why wouldn’t it be working? Everything in the saucer had worked as it was supposed to from the day Rip and his friends hammered it from a sandstone ledge in the Sahara. Assume that it is working, Charley told herself.

“How are you going to find these dudes?” Rip asked. He was watching over her shoulder.

“I don’t know that we can.” She gestured toward the radio. “They’re already rendezvousing with the fuel tank. We don’t know when they launched, so they could be anywhere above the planet.”

“Let’s ask for help.”

She looked at him. “Who from?”

“How about Space Command? Bet they know where that tank is.” Space Command was a branch of the U.S. Air Force charged with monitoring the position of satellites, among other things.

Charley Pine thought about it. “The duty officer will refer the request to Washington, and they’ll have to staff it, which could take a day or two. We have a few hours, at best.

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