Eagle Station

Thirty

For once, Marshal Leonov was forced to admit that the theater-sized control rooms Gennadiy Gryzlov had built as a propaganda stunt served a useful purpose. During this status briefing on the progress of Operation Heaven’s Thunder, their enormous, wraparound projection screens made the televised images streaming from the moon even more impressive.

Right now, he and General Chen Haifeng were watching a recording of one of China’s large Mă Luó cargo landers as it touched down at Korolev Base, high up on the rim of Engel’gardt crater. Its rocket engine flared brightly in the last few seconds and then winked out. When the haze of dust cleared, they saw the spacecraft silhouetted against an infinitely black sky. Beyond it, they could see the shape of another cargo ship and the abandoned descent stages of three manned landers. One belonged to the first spacecraft to reach this site, Chang’e-10. The other two were more recent arrivals.

Slowly, the remote-controlled camera panned across the desolate moonscape. It zoomed in on what looked like an inflated, whitish-gray cloth cylinder anchored solidly to the surface. This was the first of the base’s planned habitation modules. Based on concepts originally developed by a pioneering American space technology company, Bigelow Aerospace, Korolev One was twelve meters long and six meters in diameter. The inflatable habitat gave the four cosmonauts and taikonauts currently stationed on the moon close to three hundred cubic meters of living and working space. Multiple layers of insulation, foam, Kevlar, and Nomex cloth produced half-meter-thick walls — offering excellent protection against micrometeorites, radiation, and the moon’s harsh temperatures.

Thick orange power cables snaked across the gray moonscape. They connected the habitation module to a much smaller, metal-walled upright cylinder deployed at the base of one of the Chinese cargo landers.

Chen peered intently at the three-meter-tall cylinder. “That is the fusion reactor?” Leonov nodded proudly. “So small,” the Chinese general said slowly. He shook his head in amazement. “And yet it produces two megawatts of power.”

“More than enough for all of Korolev’s needs,” Leonov agreed. The fusion power breakthrough Russia had achieved was what made the establishment of this manned lunar base possible in the first place. Without that reactor, its crew would have been dependent on solar panels — which were useless during the moon’s fourteen-day-long nights — and on backup batteries, which were comparatively heavy and inefficient. Limited-duration visits would have been possible, but not any sort of permanent presence.

One of the Russian officers assigned to monitor communications with the base turned toward Leonov. “We have a live feed from Korolev Base, sir.”

“Put it on-screen,” he ordered.

Briefly, static flared across the huge displays. When it cleared, Leonov and Chen could see Colonel Tian Fan and his Russian counterpart, Kirill Lavrentyev, looking back at them. They had arrived on the lunar surface forty-eight hours ago, as part of the Pilgrim 3 mission — joining Liu and Yanin, who’d already been on the moon for nearly two weeks. The video signal, routed through the Magpie Bridge relay to Russia’s network of military communications satellites, was remarkably clear, with only minimal distortion. Wearing green flight suits, the two officers sat next to each other at a console. Racks of electronic hardware and storage compartments lined the curving habitat wall behind them.

“Korolev Base here,” Tian said without preamble. “All of the payload aboard that just-landed Mă Luó appears to be in good condition. Liu and Yanin are outside now, off-loading the consumables. Once we have those stored safely, we’ll begin assembling the rest of the equipment.”

“Excellent work, Colonel. And you, too, Lavrentyev,” Leonov said warmly. While the automated furnace and chemical reaction unit built into Chang’e-10’s descent stage could supply the base with precious oxygen and water separated out from regolith, food and other necessary stores still had to come all the way from Earth.

A little under two seconds later, he saw the two men nod as his words finally reached them. Every signal from Earth to the moon’s far side had to travel 450,000 kilometers to the Magpie Bridge relay satellite and another 60,000 kilometers from there before it reached Korolev’s antennas. The communications lag wasn’t crippling, but it was just long enough to render conversations somewhat more stilted and less spontaneous.

“Thank you, Comrade Marshal,” Tian replied.

Chen leaned in beside Leonov. “When do you believe your base will be fully operational?”

This time Lavrentyev answered. “We still have considerable EVA work left to excavate the necessary sites for our sensors and other hardware. But we expect to be finished by the time the next cargo lander arrives. After that, it should only take us a few days to install, camouflage, and test all our systems.”

Leonov nodded. Teams at Vostochny Cosmodrome were preparing another heavy-lift Energia rocket for launch in the next week. Its payload was a third Chinese-built Mă Luó spacecraft destined for the moon. This robotic lander would carry the final components needed to make Korolev Base a full-fledged instrument of offensive Sino-Russian military power.

“Do the Americans realize we’re here?” Tian asked seriously.

“Not yet,” Leonov assured him. Chinese agents and cyberespionage had confirmed Washington’s belated realization that Pilgrim 1 had been a manned mission… one that had successfully landed cosmonauts and taikonauts on the moon. In a way, that made the follow-on Pilgrim 2 and Pilgrim 3 missions easier, since they didn’t need to carry and deploy decoy landers of their own. However, to hide the fact that crews were staying behind at a permanent base, Pilgrim 2 and 3’s empty Chang’e ascent stages were flown back into lunar orbit under remote control. Once there, they docked with waiting Federation command modules, which then returned to Earth… supposedly carrying full four-man crews. To all outward appearances, Russia and China were simply carrying out a series of short-duration exploration landings — with the aid of rovers and other scientific equipment delivered by separate cargo spacecraft.

For now, Beijing and Moscow claimed they were keeping more details of their “purely scientific program” secret because they didn’t want to provide data that could aid the United States in its greedy quest to “rape the virgin lunar soil for riches.” Feeble though that excuse was, a number of Western environmental groups and left-wing political parties seemed willing to believe it.

President Farrell and his advisers were deeply suspicious, Leonov knew. All available intelligence indicated they were scrambling to mount their own missions to lunar orbit. But they were starting too far behind. The months they’d wasted trying to uncover the secrets of his fictitious Firebird spaceplane program simply could not be made up.

Two hours and forty minutes after liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 37B, the Delta IV Heavy rocket’s powerful second-stage engine relit. Within seconds, as the booster accelerated, its attached payload began moving into a much higher, far more elliptical orbit.

Several minutes later, the RL-10B engine shut down on schedule. Bolts fired and slowly the Delta Heavy’s second stage fell away from the satellite it had just launched toward the Earth-Moon Lagrange-2 point. This Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) U.S. military communications satellite, the seventh in its series, had originally been intended as a replacement for the aging AEHF-1 in geostationary orbit high over the Galápagos Islands. Now it had been given a new purpose. As the satellite moved away from the earth at more than twenty thousand miles per hour, its twin solar panels unfurled in response to commands from ground controllers.

It had taken weeks of frantic work by Space Force civilian contractors to make the hardware and software alterations needed to fit AEHF-7 for service in deep space. Once it reached stable orbit around the distant Lagrange point, the satellite would act as a jam-resistant radio and data-link relay for any U.S. or allied spacecraft operating in lunar orbit. Routing signals through its powerful antennas would give both human crews and robotic spacecraft the ability to communicate with Earth in real time while swinging around the moon’s far side.