Eagle Station

Twenty-Five

Brad McLanahan glanced over his shoulder when his father and Kevin Martindale entered the secure conference room he’d commandeered for his special analysis team — which he realized was sort of a grandiose term for a group that really only consisted of him, Nadia, and Hunter Noble. Still, it was better than adopting Boomer’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion that they call themselves the Triad of Genius Analysts, or TOGA for short. “Hey, Dad! Hey, Mr. Martindale. It’s nice to see you guys in person for a change, instead of just on camera.”

By air, Scion’s Utah headquarters was only three hundred miles from Battle Mountain — less than an hour’s flight time for one of Scion’s Gulfstream executive jets. He’d been hoping his father would take advantage of that. They hadn’t seen much of each other lately. Between the joy of actually being married to Nadia and the day-in and day-out hard work needed to train new Space Force crews to fly and fight Sky Masters — built spaceplanes, whole weeks and months seemed to have slid past in a blur.

“Glad to be here, too, son,” Patrick McLanahan said warmly. “With things heating up, we thought it was best to—”

“Is that situation board up-to-date?” Martindale interrupted, waving a hand at the conference room’s large LED screen as he took a chair. The screen showed a 3-D image of the moon, with the orbital paths of different spacecraft depicted as green lines circling it. Red triangles indicated the current reported positions of each vehicle.

Nadia swung round angrily. Her eyes narrowed. She’d never had much patience with the former president’s flashes of arrogance and condescension. There were moments when Martindale — highly intelligent though he was — completely misjudged the temper and tolerance of those around him.

Sensing the imminence of a full-on Rozek-McLanahan explosion, Brad quickly interceded. “Yes, sir, it is.” He helped his father to a seat, noting sadly how much more awkwardly the older man moved, even with the most recent software tweaks for his LEAF exoskeleton. “We’re getting continuous updates from NASA tracking stations, from DOD’s space surveillance satellites, and from its ground-based telescopes in New Mexico, Hawaii, and Diego Garcia.”

Taking his cue, Boomer nodded. “Brad’s right. We’ve got a pretty good handle on everything going on in lunar orbit,” he told Martindale and Patrick. He shrugged. “Well, everything happening on the near side of the moon, anyway.”

There was the rub. The United States didn’t have satellites or telescopes in position to see anything happening on the far side of the moon — the side permanently hidden from anyone on Earth. Unfortunately, the same restriction did not apply to the Chinese or their Russian partners.

Five years before, China had put a communications relay satellite, called Queqiao, or Magpie Bridge, in a halo orbit around the Earth-Moon system’s Lagrange-2 point, L2. Lagrange points were places where the gravitational forces of larger bodies, like the earth and the sun, combined to produce points of relative stability. Smaller spacecraft and satellites could hold station at these Lagrange points without having to expend large amounts of fuel. From L2, about forty thousand miles from the moon, the Magpie Bridge communications relay allowed Beijing and Moscow to continuously monitor space operations on the moon’s far side.

Boomer pointed to a red triangle currently circling east to west across the moon’s near side, about sixty miles above the Sea of Tranquility — the site of Apollo 11’s historic landing way back in 1969. A tag identified it as the Chang’e-10. “So here’s the deal. About five hours ago, both the ascent stage and the descent stage of that Chinese lunar lander successfully entered stable, circular lunar orbits. Right from the get-go, they were in close formation, maybe only five to ten miles apart.” His mouth tightened. “That’s pretty damned impressive flying, considering each machine covered more than two hundred and fifty thousand miles to get there.”

Patrick McLanahan and Martindale nodded somberly.

Calmer now, Nadia took up the thread. “Two hours ago, during their second consecutive orbit, the Chinese vehicles conducted a successful docking maneuver. They are now mated together, apparently joined as a single spacecraft.”

Martindale frowned. “Without any signs of trouble?”

“None,” Brad answered. “From what we can see, everything about that lander appears nominal.”

Patrick raised an eyebrow. “That’s a pretty neat trick.”

Brad nodded. “Yep.” He pulled up a graphic of China’s Long March 5 rocket. “But it explains how they blindsided us. The maximum payload a Long March 5 can send to the moon is around nine tons. Since any decent-sized crewed lander, like the Apollo Lunar Modules, weighs in around eighteen tons, we figured the Chinese would have to design, flight-test, and build a new type of heavy-lift rocket first. Before they could kick their plans to send taikonauts to the moon into gear, I mean. What we didn’t figure on was the idea of sending a lander’s ascent stage and descent stage to the moon separately… and then assembling them in lunar orbit.”

“Which brings us to the next piece of this complex enemy space mission,” Nadia said bluntly. Using a keyboard, she zoomed in on the 3-D image of the moon — revealing another red triangle so close to the Chang’e-10 that it had been invisible at the larger scale. Its alphanumeric tag identified it as the Federation 2. “The unmanned Russian spacecraft has conducted its own successful lunar insertion burn. And it now trails the Chinese lunar lander by just a few miles.”

Martindale grimaced. “Good God,” he muttered. “You’re telling us they’re actually going to make this work.”

“Barring some unforeseen accident while docking, that’s the way to bet,” Brad agreed. He hesitated, just for a second or two, and then went on. “Which raises an ugly possibility…”

His father nodded. “That Beijing and Moscow are lying through their teeth. What if that supposedly unmanned Federation command module actually has cosmonauts and taikonauts aboard?”

“You think they might be planning a manned landing on the moon after all?” Nadia said slowly.

This time, Brad and his father nodded in unison.

“Whoa there, fellas,” Boomer interrupted. “Now, I know thinking outside the box is kind of a McLanahan specialty, but that’s pushing way beyond the envelope and out into wacko land.” He shook his head. “Particularly when everything we know about Leonov and the Chinese leader, this Li Jun character, suggests they’re both a hell of a lot more careful and cautious than the guys they took over from.”

“Cautious and careful doesn’t mean cowardly,” Brad pointed out.

“No, but at a minimum it means these guys aren’t stupid,” Boomer retorted. He shook his head. “Okay, look, I get the drift. A surprise return to the lunar surface would be a huge propaganda win for Russia and China. But the risks involved in using a wholly untested spacecraft for a stunt like that are huge. One serious hardware malfunction or one software glitch at just the wrong time and five gets you ten, you end up with a bunch of dead guys drifting in orbit or smashed to pieces in some crater.”

Nadia frowned at him. “You should not assume that Marshal Leonov and President Li Jun share our views on the value of human life.”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure they don’t,” Boomer allowed. He gave her a wry smile. “But I do bet they know how to figure out the right side of a cost-benefit ratio.”

Martindale looked pained, Brad noticed. He was probably remembering the argument he’d lost over rescuing Sam Kerr.

Boomer pressed his argument. “Look, guys, the Russians and the Chinese don’t need to take any more risks than they already have to rub dirt in our faces. As things stand, even this one unmanned flight to the moon leapfrogs all of our half-assed plans to send astronauts back there.”

“President Farrell’s helium-3 lunar mining operation is a pretty big deal,” Brad commented dryly.

Boomer waved that away. “One, it’s still all on paper. And two, even if that mine ever gets built, it’s gonna be automated.” He folded his arms. “Robots just aren’t sexy,” he said straightforwardly. “Not compared to real spaceman boots on the ground.”

A chime interrupted them. On the screen, the icon representing the Russian spacecraft turned orange. Numbers appeared beside the orange triangle. They were decreasing.

“That’s updated tracking data from NASA,” Brad explained to his father and Martindale. He looked closer and frowned. “It looks like the Federation 2 is conducting its final maneuvers to close with that Chang’e lander.” He turned back to them. “Based on those closure numbers, they’ll be in position to dock somewhere around the far side of the moon.”

“Well, there you go,” Boomer said. “If those ships are manned and they’re going for a real honest-to-God landing, we’ll know soon enough. Just as soon as that Russian command module comes back around the edge of the moon on some orbit without the lander anywhere in sight.”