Free Saucer: The Conquest by Stephen Coonts Page A

the autopilot refused to engage. She punched the button futilely. The ship was again behind the moon in the radio dead zone, so there was no one to complain to except Artois, sitting in the copilot’s seat, and he would be no help.
    “It’s enough to piss off the pope,” she muttered in English. She reached behind her on the overhead and found the circuit breaker, recycled it, then tried again to engage the recalcitrant device. Nope. Well, she would just hand-fly this garbage scow.
    At least all three flight computers were in perfect agreement. Thank God for modern computers! How the Apollo astronauts did it with the primitive junk they had was a mystery.
    The clock ticked down. “Here we go,” she said over the intercom, and punched the button on the yoke to start the engines. The four small engines fired off, pushing her into her seat. Yeaaah! She concentrated on keeping the crosshairs centered on the display in front of her. Flying backward takes some getting used to.
    On the completion of the burn, she waited impatiently for the new trajectory data to become reliable.
    “Tres bien,” Bodard said when the spaceplane came out from behind the moon. He was looking at the telemetry data on the trajectory.
    Satisfied that she wouldn’t need another burn, she waited. Waiting is the hard part, she thought.
    The ship was descending at about a thousand feet per second. She had fifty more miles of altitude to lose. She checked the three-dimensional display on the trajectory computer and ensured that the remote cameras were on—she would need them in the final phase of the landing—and that the radar and laser backups were functioning properly.
    The base site was still over the lunar horizon, nearly six hundred miles away.
    The nose was well up now, the ship flying backward down the glide slope. Through the windshield she could see only stars. The earth was behind her, over her head. Now any burst of engine power would slow the descent. What she needed was the ability to finesse the power, so she selected a lower level of engine power, just thirty percent, so that the timing on the burns would be less critical.
    The ship plunged on toward its rendezvous with the moon. The engines had to fire now when she asked for power or the ship would crash into the surface at this rate of descent.
    Another burn was coming up. Fifteen seconds… ten… five…
    She waited. And lit the engines. They fired. A two-second burst. Too much would shallow the descent and carry the ship far beyond the target landing area; too little would require more power later on and screw up the trajectory. She adjusted the ship’s attitude to keep it perfectly aligned.
    So far, so good.
    Two minutes later she gave the engines another burst. The trajectory was almost perfect, just a little shallow.
    The rate of descent was still a thousand feet a second, only twelve miles up now. She checked the altitude on the radar, cross-checked with the lasers. Due to the irregularities of the surface, the readings were merely averages.
    Coming down, coming down… bringing the nose up as the speed over the surface dropped, using power to slow the descent rate, coming down…
    Now the landing area came into view on the radar. It didn’t look as she expected. The land was all sunlight and long, deep shadows; the mission had been timed to arrive just after the lunar dawn.
    Cross-checking everything, she was shocked to realize that the computer had somehow mislocated the target landing area. Or had it?
    She had an instant decision to make. Was the trajectory right or wrong?
    Still flying the bird, she punched up the landing zone’s coordinates. They looked right. The trajectory looked right. She looked again at the radar picture and keyed in the camera that was slaved to the radar’s point of sight. Yes, the landing area looked as she had seen it in the simulations.
    She was overthinking this, she decided. Rely on your instruments! Don’t panic!
    Later she couldn’t