Eagle Station

Forty-Five

Brad McLanahan floated across the Xeus lander’s small cabin and grabbed on to the back of his crew seat. Nadia looked up at him. She was already strapped in to the next seat over. Her dark hair billowed around her head like a halo.

“Is everything all right?” she asked.

“Seems to be,” Brad allowed. “But I thought I heard a kind of funny noise coming from one of the atmospheric pressure control valves.”

Peter Vasey leaned around from his position at the end of the row of three crew seats. “Like a metallic rattling sound?”

“Yeah,” Brad said. “Why?”

Vasey shrugged tiredly. “Because that’s the same bloody noise I heard about ten hours ago, while you and Nadia were catnapping.” He smiled. “I just banged on the side a few times until it stopped.”

“Ah, you know my methods, Watson,” Brad said dryly.

Sky Masters engineers and technicians had worked miracles to fit out the Xeus lander prototype with a working life-support system, flight controls, and navigation sensors in less than three weeks. But not even their superb craftsmanship and attention to detail could overcome the fact that this was essentially a shakedown cruise for a brand-new spacecraft. Meshing so many complicated mechanical and electronic systems and expecting them to work together perfectly the first time out was just not realistic.

Brad, Nadia, and Vasey had been lucky so far. Nothing major had gone wrong. But they’d been kept busy over most of the past two days in space improvising fixes for minor electrical faults, computer control program software glitches, and other small mechanical problems. As a result, none of them had gotten much deep, restful sleep. They were either working on some piece of equipment to keep the Xeus’s different, interconnected systems up and running… or worrying about what might crap out on them next. Brad had gotten to the point where he’d scrawled a notation on a page of their maintenance logbook: Next time, bring more chewing gum and duct tape… plus several reels of baling wire.

Maneuvering carefully in zero-G, Brad pulled himself over and down into his seat and buckled in. Then he reached out and tugged his control panel and its attached hand controllers away from their “at rest” position against the lander’s curved forward bulkhead. A key press on one of the panel’s three LCD touch screens brought it live.

Nadia pulled her own panel into place. “Approximately ten minutes to our planned correction burn,” she announced after a quick check of their navigation program.

Brad nodded. Ever since the Falcon Heavy’s second stage had boosted them toward the moon at more than twenty-four thousand miles per hour, the Xeus had been coasting “uphill” against Earth’s constant pull. Now it was just about to glide over the top of that gravitational gradient and enter the moon’s own influence. And as the lander sped up again, they needed to make a very precise, short burn with its main RL-10 rocket engine — one that would align the spacecraft to come in very low over the lunar surface as it raced around the far side. “Okay,” he said. “I guess it’s time to pop the top on this space-going beer can of ours.”

“It has been getting a bit stuffy in here,” Vasey said. He pulled up a command menu on his own display and quickly entered a key code to activate it. Then he tapped one of the menu bars. It glowed green. “Fairing jettison Master Arm is on.” He glanced toward Brad with just a hint of devilish glee. “Permission to set off a number of explosive charges just outside our spacecraft, Major McLanahan?”

“Be my guest, Constable,” Brad said grandly.

Nadia rolled her eyes. “Boys and their toys.”

“You’re just upset because I’m the one who gets to push the button,” Vasey noted.

“Well, yes,” Nadia admitted with a smile of her own.

“Thought so,” Vasey said. Triumphantly, he tapped the glowing menu bar.

WHAANG. Small explosive bolts detonated, shearing through the connections between the twin halves of the payload fairing and the Xeus itself. Fractions of a second later, powerful springs shoved both fairing panels away. Cameras rigged to various points outside of the lander showed them whirling off into space.

“This would be a lot cooler if we had windows,” Brad said meditatively. Unfortunately, Jason Richter and Boomer had adamantly vetoed the idea of adding windows or viewing portals to the Xeus. Given the short time available to finish retrofitting the prototype for space flight, neither of them wanted to risk the structural integrity of what was basically just a converted fuel tank by slicing through its hull any more than was absolutely necessary.

From her station, Nadia set their stellar navigation program in motion, instructing her computer to find their position relative to three prominent stars. Comparing those results to the data provided by their inertial guidance system, which had been measuring every change in the spacecraft’s velocity or direction since liftoff, yielded a remarkably precise fix — accurate to within a few hundred feet, despite the fact that they had already traveled more than two hundred thousand miles.

Using one of his hand controllers, Brad rotated the Xeus, swinging the spacecraft around so that its main engine was aimed correctly for the upcoming burn. He opened new windows on his LCDs. They showed information collected by the sensors set to monitor different parts of the RL-10 engine. “Fuel line temperatures look good,” he said aloud. “Tank pressures are good, too. The engine looks ready to go.” He glanced along the row of seats at his crewmates. “Fingers crossed, guys.”

Nadia and Vasey both nodded seriously. This was a make-or-break moment for their mission. If the Xeus’s big cryogenic rocket motor failed to ignite on its first-ever use, they would be condemned to swing around the moon on a free-return trajectory… a sitting duck for the Russian plasma rail gun deployed high up on the Engel’gardt crater rim.

“Coming up on the mark,” Brad said, watching as their computer counted down the time remaining. The digital readout flashed to zero. In response, he tapped the engine ignition icon on his panel. “Firing now.”

The Xeus start to vibrate slightly and they felt a sensation of weight return as acceleration pressed them back into their seats. On their screens, a camera set to monitor the RL-10’s nozzle showed it glowing bright orange amid the darkness around it. Seventy seconds later, the orange glow faded and weightlessness returned. “Main engine shut down. Right on time,” Brad reported.

Nadia ran her navigation program again. “That was a good burn,” she said in satisfaction. “We are on our planned trajectory.”

“Copy that,” Brad said in relief. He opened a radio channel to the earth far behind them. While the Xeus had been concealed inside its payload fairing, they hadn’t been able to communicate with ground control. Now the spacecraft’s computers were making up for lost time, dumping a huge amount of accumulated telemetry to both Sky Masters in Nevada and Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado. To hide the fact that this flight carried a human crew, Scion communications protocols would encrypt and compress any of their voice transmissions before they were sent. He checked their flight computer’s numbers and then keyed his mike. “Lunar Wolf One to Sky Masters Control, we are go for LOI. Repeat, we are go for lunar orbit insertion in fourteen hours and four minutes.”

Leonov frowned in perplexity at the blurry radar images captured by the Kondor-L satellite. What sort of spacecraft was this? Even from what little detail could be made out, it didn’t look like anything in the known inventories of America’s private space companies or those of NASA itself. He turned to the younger staff officer who’d summoned him the moment the American craft jettisoned its payload fairing. “What do you make of that, Sergei?”

“I’m not sure, sir,” Major General Sergei Panarin admitted. “Our top analysts haven’t yet been able to positively identify it. Nor have the Chinese.” He nodded toward Leonov’s screen. “We may have better luck once those images are enhanced. Teams are working on that now.”

“No one has any ideas?” Leonov said sharply. “None at all?”

Panarin looked uncomfortable. “One of my most junior people did suggest that it resembled an experimental prototype he read about some years ago on an American space technology website.”

“Show me,” Leonov snapped.

Chastened, the younger man leaned over his superior’s desk and searched through the internet to find the appropriate site. “It was this one,” he said quickly, pointing to an artist’s rendition of a cylinder equipped with a rocket engine, an array of smaller thrusters, and helicopter-style landing skids.

Even more puzzled now, Leonov skimmed through the article on a long-shelved commercial lunar lander prototype called the Xeus. An interesting concept, he decided silently. And perhaps even better suited to its proposed task than China’s giant, enormously expensive Mă Luó cargo landers. But the American machine had never been flown in space. Not even on a single short test flight in Earth orbit. So who could have resurrected it now?

The likely answer flashed into his mind a moment later: Sky Masters, in all probability. Or maybe Scion, at the orders of its troublesome leader, Martindale, and his crippled warrior-engineer, Patrick McLanahan.

But if this was a Xeus spacecraft, what was it carrying now? All available information suggested the craft had originally been intended as an automated lander, ferrying cargo between NASA’s since-canceled lunar orbital station and the surface of the moon. If so, that seemed to confirm Chen Haifeng’s theory that the Americans now planned to use it as a robotic bomb carrier.

Panarin’s own computer chimed abruptly, signaling the arrival of an urgent message. The younger officer’s eyes widened in surprise when he read it. “What the devil?” he muttered. “That’s damned odd.”

“Tell me,” Leonov demanded.

“We’ve just received new information on the American spacecraft’s trajectory,” Panarin told him. “Unless it makes another correction burn sometime in the next several hours, it’s going to cross around to the far side of the moon at an altitude of less than three thousand meters!”

Leonov felt his own eyes widen. Less than three thousand meters? That was dangerously low, even for a manned spacecraft. Could the Americans really have developed an automated flight program capable of navigating safely so close to the moon’s rugged surface? And if so, were they planning to fly this Xeus toward Korolev Base as if it were an aircraft trying to avoid radar detection on Earth — weaving in and out of craters and behind mountains, until it was close enough to detonate the bomb it must be carrying?

He stared up at Panarin. “Put me through to Colonel Lavrentyev on a secure link, Sergei! Now!”