Free Saucer: The Conquest by Stephen Coonts

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,