Eagle Station

Thirty-Nine

Followed by his father and Nadia, Brad McLanahan entered the large space vehicle assembly room wearing a hooded sterile coverall, surgical mask, safety goggles, and slip-on booties over his shoes. Nobody wanted bacteria, dust, or other contaminants damaging sensitive electronics. The room itself was close to the size of a football field, with a hundred-foot-high ceiling. At the far end, a floor-to-ceiling door led out to a loading dock. From there, the Sky Masters satellites and other space vehicles assembled here could be ferried off to different launch sites by cargo aircraft, tractor trailer, or rail.

A long, hanging screen cut off their view of half of the clean room. Jason Richter and Hunter Noble waited for them near the end of the screen. Richter was Sky Masters’ CEO and chief inventor. Besides being a brilliant cybernetic engineer in his own right, he was also a remarkably gifted high-technology project manager. Over the past few years, the steady stream of innovative aircraft, space construction robots, satellites, and other hardware pouring out of labs and factories under his guidance had made Sky Masters hugely profitable.

“Ready to see what we dug up for you from Hangar Five?” Boomer asked eagerly. Hangar Five was used to store Sky Masters’ experimental aircraft, space vehicles, and other pieces of advanced hardware that had never made it into large-scale production. Helen Kaddiri, the company’s president and chairman, sometimes cynically referred to the hangar as “Never-Never Land” or “the Warehouse of Expensive Dreams.” Boomer and Richter, on the other hand, saw it as a place of as-yet-unrealized potential. Maybe the prototypes stored in Hangar Five hadn’t found a market yet — but they all represented revolutionary design concepts and technologies that might someday prove invaluable.

Brad smiled at his friend’s obvious enthusiasm. This level of excitement was almost always reserved for machines that had the potential to explode in new and interesting ways. “Sure, Boomer. Go ahead and spring your big reveal.”

“As you wish.” Boomer turned toward a Sky Masters technician waiting by a set of wall panel controls. “Hey, Sarah, you can pull the curtain now.”

The tech flipped a switch. Overhead, an electric motor kicked in. Slowly, the screen rolled back — revealing a forty-foot-long white cylinder resting horizontally on what looked like glorified helicopter landing skids. It was ten feet in diameter. At one end of the cylinder, a truncated cone cap ended in a docking port and hatch. A large rocket nozzle surrounded by gold-colored spherical fuel tanks was fitted to the other end. Four smaller thruster motor assemblies, two on each flank, were mounted along the cylinder’s longitudinal axis. On one side, below the thrusters, a wide, curved hatch opened into the interior.

They stared at it in silence for a few moments. “Okay, what the hell is that?” Brad asked at last. “A giant beer can for really out-of-control office parties?”

“Not a bad thought, but no,” Boomer said, clearly amused. He gestured grandly. “Behold the next big thing in lunar lander designs… the XEUS, pronounced like ‘Zeus’ with an ‘X.’”

Nadia frowned. “It looks more like a rocket’s upper stage turned on its side,” she said critically.

“Well spotted, Major,” Jason Richter said. “Xeus stands for eXperimental Enhanced Upper Stage. It is basically a Centaur stage from the Atlas V rocket converted into a revolutionary lander. That big motor at the back is an Aerojet Rocketdyne RL-10 cryogenic main engine burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. And those Katana side thrusters you see give it a vertical landing and vertical takeoff capability. Overall, we think it should be able to ferry around five tons of payload, either personnel or cargo or a combination of the two, down to the lunar surface and back up into orbit.”

Brad moved closer to the cylindrical spacecraft. He glanced back at Richter. “Is this one of your designs?”

The other man shook his head. “I wish I could claim the credit, because it’s a really cool concept… but no, this isn’t one of mine. Xeus was originally developed by one of our competitors, another innovative private aerospace company called Masten Space Systems — working in tandem with Lockheed Martin and Boeing’s United Launch Alliance.” He shrugged. “But they shelved the program about five years ago. And since Sky Masters is always on the prowl for nifty technology, we moved in and picked up both this prototype and the rights for a song.”

“It sure doesn’t look like any other lunar lander prototype or mock-up I’ve ever seen,” Brad mused.

Richter nodded. “That’s because engineers are fundamentally conservative,” he said. “Nobody messes with success. So, since the Apollo LM worked beautifully, the holy writ has been that all future lunar landers should be scaled-up or scaled-down versions of that same machine.”

That certainly applied to China’s Chang’e landers, Brad realized. From the outside, they appeared to be almost exact replicas of the four-legged spacecraft that had carried Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and the other Apollo crews to the surface of the moon in 1969.

“But the Apollo LM was designed for a very specific purpose and for very specific missions,” Richter went on. “There are no real laws of physics or spacecraft design that say something like the Xeus here can’t handle the job of landing on a low-gravity, airless moon. In fact, my bet is this design will turn out to be significantly more cost-effective and efficient.”

Slowly, Brad nodded. He could feel the broad outlines of a possible alternate attack plan coming together somewhere in the back of his mind. Admittedly, it was kind of wild and probably risky as hell, but at least it gave him a place to start. He made a mental note to reach out to Richter privately once they were finished here. He looked away from the beer-can-shaped prototype spacecraft. “So how do we get this thing to the moon in the first place?”

“Adding in propellant and payload, the total mass comes to around twenty-three tons,” Boomer told him. “That’s right in line with what that Falcon Heavy second stage we’ve already got parked near Eagle Station can put into lunar orbit.”

Nadia raised an eyebrow. “And you truly believe people can voyage to the moon in this…” She struggled to find the right words. “In this glorified fuel tank?”

“Yep,” Boomer said confidently.

Richter added more detail. “There’s no technical barrier to equipping the Xeus lander with life support for up to three astronauts. My team has already worked out most of the details. In fact, even with all the necessary hardware — crew seats, a lavatory, oxygen and water supply and recycling systems, carbon dioxide scrubbers, and the rest — this vehicle’s still going to be less cramped than the Apollo command module or the new Orion crew module.”

“What about power?” Brad asked. “I don’t see any solar panels on this thing. Or any places you could safely put them, for that matter.”

“We don’t need them,” Boomer replied. “Xeus can meet all of its electrical power requirements using a small onboard hydrogen- and oxygen-burning motor.”

“Sweet,” Brad said. Not having to rely on sunlight to generate electricity opened up a lot of potential landing sites and times, including during the two-week-long lunar nights or perpetually shadowed deep craters near the moon’s north and south poles.

Nadia studied the spacecraft in silence for a few more moments. Then she turned back to Boomer and Richter. “Very well, you claim this Xeus lander can take three astronauts to lunar orbit and then down to the surface, along with their equipment. Correct?”

They nodded.

She frowned. “But how do the astronauts return to Earth once they’ve completed their mission?”

“Well, see… there’s the problem,” Boomer admitted. He shrugged. “That’s one of the kinks we still need to work out….”

Under a cloudless, blue sky, the sharp-edged mountain peaks and ridges surrounding the sprawling Sky Masters complex were a lifeless brown. Heat waves shimmered across the landscape. The company’s newer hangars, office buildings, labs, and warehouses stretched eastward across what had been brush-covered wasteland, without even a hint of landscaping to add color. Flush with federal and private industry aviation and aerospace contracts, Sky Masters was expanding fast — so fast that construction crews were hard-pressed to keep pace. Amenities beyond paved roads and parking lots were pretty far down the priority list.

The Space Exploration Research and Development Laboratory, a massive structure with a rounded black roof, towered over all the other new buildings. It was more than a thousand feet long, two hundred feet high, and at least three hundred feet wide. There were some windows set in its curving, white-painted steel sides, but not many.

Richter himself was waiting for Brad and Nadia just inside the nearest entrance. “Hey, guys! Welcome to my newest slice of engineering heaven,” the tall, athletic-looking older man said eagerly.

With a wave, he led them through a pair of double doors and into a wide, high-ceilinged corridor that seemed to stretch the whole length of the enormous building. Branching hallways intersected it at different intervals. There were dozens of doors and interior observation windows opening into labs, computer rooms, and other spaces packed with machinery and electronic hardware. Stairwells and elevator shafts led to higher floors. Rather than waste minutes walking, technicians and scientists traveled from place to place using golf carts.

“So… what do you think?” Richter asked.

“It’s quite… large,” Nadia said carefully.

“You should write our press releases,” the older man said with a grin. Then he turned more serious. “What you’re looking at is more than a million square feet of state-of-the-art science and engineering labs and our very own supercomputer. Plus, we have special chambers fitted out with pressure pumps, high-temperature heaters, freezer units, and radioactive sources. Those allow us to test new hardware in simulated environments ranging from the vacuum of outer space to the lunar surface to the bottom of the ocean.”

Richter ushered them over to a golf cart marked “Chief Mad Scientist.” “Hop in the back… and I’ll give you a quick tour on our way.”

“On our way to where?” Nadia asked pointedly, climbing in beside Brad.

“It’s kind of a surprise,” Brad told her.

She frowned. “The kind I like?”

“Maybe,” he answered, sounding hopeful.

As they zoomed off, Nadia smiled and slipped her arm through his. “Be brave, mój bohater. My hero. If I do not like your surprise, I will give you a thirty-second head start.”

“Sounds fair,” Brad said with an answering smile of his own.

For the next several minutes, they listened with growing interest while Richter drove them down the central corridor — rattling off quick explanations of some of the projects going on in the labs they were whizzing past. Basically, under his leadership, teams of cybernetic engineers and scientists were developing many of the robotic components needed for America’s planned lunar helium-3 mining operation.

It also quickly became clear that Richter could scarcely contain his enthusiasm for the president’s plans. He was like a kid given an unlimited budget and turned loose in a candy store. “Mining helium-3 in usable quantities is just the first step,” he told them. “Because once we can actually build and fuel serious fusion power plants and some of the direct fusion spaceship drives we’re designing now, the whole solar system starts to open up. Mars, Jupiter, Saturn… the asteroids. Everything from here all the way out to the Oort Cloud, someday.”

Nadia leaned forward over the golf cart’s seat. “All of which is incredibly exciting,” she agreed. “But I still have one question.”

“Only one?” Brad murmured.

She elbowed him and turned back to Richter. “Why are we here now? We’re not engineers or fusion power experts.”

“True,” Richter said, glancing over his shoulder with a lightning-fast grin. “But you two also happen to be the world’s most experienced surviving CID pilots.”

“You have developed a new human-piloted robot design,” Nadia realized.

“Got it in one, Major Rozek-McLanahan,” Richter acknowledged. He pulled in beside a large metal door and hopped out. A sign over the door announced that this was the manned lunar activity lab. “Come on, I’ll show you. I think you’re gonna like this.”

Cybernetic Infantry Devices, or CIDs, were combat robots. First developed by Richter years ago in a U.S. Army research lab, every piloted war machine carried far more firepower than a conventionally equipped infantry platoon. Protected by highly resistant composite armor, their powered exoskeletons were faster and stronger than any ten men combined. Haptic interfaces and direct neural links to a CID’s computers and sensors allowed the robot to move with uncanny nimbleness and precision — while also giving its human pilot astonishing situational awareness. In the right hands… or in the wrong ones, now that the Russians had developed their own, slightly less capable designs… CIDs were, quite literally, killing machines.

Richter swiped his own ID card through an electronic reader next to the door. It slid open and Brad and Nadia followed him inside.

Across a large room filled with computer equipment and large 3-D parts printers, technicians were busy around a pair of almost twelve-foot-tall, humanlike machines. Each had two arms, two legs, a broad-shouldered torso, and a six-sided head studded with sensor panels. At first glance, they appeared identical to combat-rated CIDs, but on closer inspection they seemed slightly shorter and squatter. They were also bright white.

Richter nodded toward the two large robots. “Well, there they are: the first prototype CLADs.”

Nadia raised an eyebrow. “CLADs?”

Suddenly Richter looked slightly less sure of himself. Somehow, whenever he came up with names or acronyms for new pieces of equipment, something always went wrong. No matter how memorable or descriptive he thought his choices were, everyone else usually thought they were dorky — like the LEAF life-support exoskeleton he’d designed for Brad’s father or the CIDs themselves. “CLAD, as in Cybernetic Lunar Activity Device?” he offered.

Now he waited uneasily while Nadia gave it some thought. “CLADs?” she muttered, sounding it out. “CLAD.” Then she shrugged, and to his obvious relief, admitted, “You know, that is not actually a completely horrible name, Dr. Richter. And just what are these manned robots for?”

“Originally, I designed them for construction work on the lunar surface,” Richter said. He led them across the lab, shooing the techs away so they could get a better look at the large robots. “I spent a lot of time studying the records and films of all the Apollo-era EVAs. And it was pretty obvious just how tough even ordinary physical labor was in those bulky conventional space suits — even in low gravity. Those guys were really sweating just to grab rock samples and set up a few experiments. And between exhaustion and limited battery power, the Apollo astronauts couldn’t spend much time outside on the moon. Heck, the longest EVA back then was only something like seven and a half hours.”

He patted one of the big machines affectionately. “But an astronaut riding inside one of these guys will have superhuman strength, dexterity, and speed. One Cybernetic Lunar Activity Device could handle tasks that would otherwise require a whole bunch of specially designed and extremely expensive construction robots. And with additional life support and backup batteries and fuel cells, you could operate for up to forty-eight hours outside a spacecraft or a lunar base shelter.”

She nodded her understanding. Early on, it had become clear that CID pilots could go for long periods without needing sleep while neurally connected to their machines. Bad things happened to any human who pushed that too far — psychosis and other mental disorders, among them — but it gave them a useful edge in certain conditions. “You said you first designed these CLADs for construction work,” she said slowly. “And now?”

Richter’s expression turned somber. “Now, we’re refitting them for war, Major.”