Eagle Station

Forty-Four

“Shadow Bravo One, this is Peterson Mission Control, do you read? Shadow Bravo One, this is Peterson Mission Control, do you read?… Shadow Bravo One—”

Slowly, Brad McLanahan removed his headset, cutting off the melancholy radio calls to a crew and spaceplane lost forever. The failure of the S-29B to come back around the edge of the distant moon signaled its fate all too clearly. He put the headset down and looked up at the subdued faces of Nadia, his father, Boomer, and Peter Vasey. “Well,” he said quietly. “That’s it. Looks like we’re up.”

Nadia, red-eyed with sorrow, nodded fiercely.

Beside her, Vasey offered him a wry smile. “I should have listened to my old dad,” the Englishman said, shaking his head. “‘Never volunteer,’ he told me a thousand times. ‘You’d have to be daft to volunteer for anything.’ Now I know what he was rattling on about.”

“Which means you’ll go?” Brad asked.

“Of course,” Vasey said. “If you’ve all gone stark, raving mad, why should I pretend to be the only sane person left in the room?”

Reluctantly, Brad smiled. Then he turned to the Sky Masters technician in charge of their communications setup. “Patch me through to the president.”

After several minutes, President Farrell’s strained and somber image appeared on-screen. He had been following developments from the Oval Office. “Yes, Major McLanahan? What is it?”

“Sir, we’ve worked out another plan of attack,” Brad told him. “My team and I believe that it’s vital that we go again — and go as soon as possible. Right now, the Russians and Chinese are probably figuring out how to strengthen their lunar base defenses. If we give them too much time to prepare, they’re likely to deploy lasers of their own, and maybe even long-range, guided missiles. And once that happens, no force we can possibly send to the moon will ever be able to take that base on with any hope of success.”

“Hold on there, Major,” the president said heavily. “One thing’s for damned sure: I will not authorize another spaceplane raid against the Sino-Russian moon base. God knows, I admire your guts… but I am most definitely not in the business of abetting suicide. Because from where I’m sitting, there’s no way in hell a spacecraft in orbit can take on that Russian plasma gun in a straight-up fight and win.”

Brad nodded. “Yes, sir, I agree,” he said evenly. “That’s why we plan to go in on the ground this time—”

Even across four hundred thousand kilometers, Colonel Kirill Lavrentyev could tell that Marshal Leonov and President Li had more bad news to share with him. Discovering that the Americans could send armed spacecraft to lunar orbit had already shaken the strategic and operational assumptions on which all their plans were based. But even so, no one had imagined the spaceplane’s attack might come so close to success. No one except for Tian, he reminded himself silently. From the beginning, his Chinese counterpart had foreseen the danger… and gone on steadfastly to prepare to meet it — knowing all the while that doing so might mean his own death.

Leonov pulled no punches this time. “Our space sensors and ground-based telescopes have detected a new American spacecraft on its way to the moon.”

“Another one of their S-29s?” Lavrentyev asked, unable to hide his sudden concern.

“No, Colonel,” Leonov assured him. He sketched out what they knew. Some hours before, another Falcon Heavy rocket had launched — this time from the SpaceX complex near Brownsville, Texas, on America’s Gulf coast. Originally scheduled to carry commercial satellites for a number of different private companies, the rocket instead had carried a secret U.S. government payload into space. Neither Russia’s GRU nor China’s Ministry of State Security had been able to learn much more about this mysterious payload except that it had originally arrived in Texas aboard a Sky Masters — owned 747F cargo jet.

After entering a parking orbit — probably to check out its systems and flight readiness — the Falcon’s second-stage Merlin-1D engine had boosted this payload outward, toward the moon. Still concealed by its fairings, it was on course to enter the moon’s gravitational influence in approximately forty-eight hours.

“But nothing else is known about its nature?” Lavrentyev pressed. “This must be some kind of weapon, right?”

“That is undoubtedly so,” Li said. For once, the Chinese president’s tone conveyed his own sense of unease. “General Chen Haifeng and his Strategic Support Force experts have speculated this might be a maneuverable orbital bomb, perhaps even equipped with a nuclear weapon.”

Lavrentyev nodded slowly. In the absence of an atmosphere, nuclear detonations in space or on the moon could not destroy their targets with blast or thermal effects… but their radiation effects were far greater — with a lethal radius ten to twelve times bigger than on Earth. True, Korolev’s habitat module offered excellent protection against ordinary lunar and cosmic radiation. But while its half-meter-thick walls might shield his crewmen against a distant nuclear blast, the habitat could not save them from the radiation produced by a nuclear bomb going off at close range. And if anything, the base’s plasma rail gun and radars were even more vulnerable.

“If Chen and his officers are correct, can you defeat such a weapon?” Li asked curtly.

Lavrentyev forced himself to put a brave face on the situation. “I believe so, Comrade President. Major Liu and Captain Yanin have thoroughly analyzed the different evasive maneuvers employed by the American S-29 Shadow. Repeated computer simulations have helped them develop aiming protocols to enable our plasma rail gun to achieve kills against maneuvering targets — at least during prolonged battles fought out at long range.”

“Let us hope your confidence is justified, Colonel,” Li said dryly. “I would hate to see so many of my nation’s precious resources wasted — especially after the sacrifice of China’s bravest and most experienced taikonaut.”

From the sour look on Marshal Leonov’s face, Lavrentyev knew the Chinese leader’s thinly veiled gibe had struck home. Both nations had already committed huge sums of money and precious equipment to their attempt to gain control over Earth’s moon — and over the space-faring future it represented. Clearly, the near disaster three weeks ago had strained the alliance between Moscow and Beijing, at least to a degree. That was especially true now that Russia’s boasts about its “invincible” weapon had proved somewhat… hollow.

“As it happens, the Americans also appear supremely confident in their new weapon, whatever it may be,” Li continued. “Isn’t that right, Marshal?”

Leonov shrugged. “It seems so.” He turned his attention back to Lavrentyev. “We’ve observed a burst of renewed extravehicular activity near Eagle Station. Sky Masters space construction robots have gone back to work on the Orion crew vehicle and service module docked there.”

Li nodded coldly. “The conclusion seems obvious: the Americans expect to destroy your base and so they are again preparing for their own manned flight to the moon.”

President John Dalton Farrell stared down at the glossy printouts Patrick McLanahan had just placed on his Oval Office desk. Taken by the S-29B’s long-range cameras during its first pass around the far side of the moon, the enlarged, computer-enhanced photographs showed the Sino-Russian base in amazing detail. Working together, Sky Masters, Scion, and Space Force technical intelligence analysts had spent weeks poring over the images — doing their best to identify every single structure and piece of equipment.

With a worried look on his face, Farrell pulled out one of the photographs. It showed three oddly humanlike shapes standing motionless on the lunar surface near the enemy’s habitat module. An inflated tunnel with three separate branches connected them to one of the habitat’s air locks. He glanced up. “Are those goddamned things what I think they are?”

“Yes, sir,” Patrick said quietly. “The Russians have deployed moon-rated versions of their own robotic war machines, their Kiberneticheskiye Voyennyye Mashiny, at that base.”

“Do Brad and the others know about this?”

“They do,” Patrick told him. “Our analysts spotted those KVMs several days ago. I briefed the crew myself during one of their final mission planning sessions.”

Farrell frowned. “Several days ago? So why am I only finding out about this now, General McLanahan?” His face hardened. “When it’s far too late for me to call this mission off — even if I wanted to?”

“Because the team asked me to keep this information tightly restricted, sir,” Patrick replied. He didn’t sound particularly apologetic. “They didn’t want to risk an abort, even in these circumstances.”

“Jesus Christ,” Farrell muttered. “I think your son and daughter-in-law and that crazy Brit Vasey are gutsy enough to charge hell itself with a bucket of ice water.”

“Probably so,” the older McLanahan agreed somberly. For just a moment, the lines carved on his face by age, pain, and stress deepened, revealing his own fears for those he loved more dearly than life itself.

Farrell sighed. “Give it to me straight, Patrick. Do our people have any realistic hope of pulling this off and coming home alive?”

“I honestly don’t know,” the other man admitted. “But I guess that’s something we’ll find out for sure in just a little under three days from now.”