Eagle Station

Forty-Six

The Xeus’s crew was shoved forward against their harnesses as the spacecraft’s main engine fired a second time. This time it was aligned directly against their direction of travel — burning at full power to slow them down as the lander streaked just above the moon at more than five thousand miles per hour.

“And… MECO, main engine cutoff,” Brad McLanahan said three minutes later. Zero-G returned as the rocket motor shut down. He spun the lander back around.

“Good burn,” Nadia reported from her seat. “No residuals. We are in lunar orbit. Very low lunar orbit,” she emphasized.

No shit, Brad thought edgily, watching the rounded peaks, escarpments, and craters of the moon’s far side rushing toward him at more than a mile per second. At an altitude of roughly five thousand feet, they were practically skimming the surface — darting low across a battered landscape that might make Hell itself look like the Garden of Eden. They were coming in along an orbital track just a few degrees north of the lunar equator, circling west straight toward the Sino-Russian base that had killed Dusty Miller and Hannah Craig.

Seeing a chain of interconnected craters curving ahead across one of his displays, he fired thrusters — climbing just high enough to clear the steadily rising terrain. That was the Leuschner Catena, the result of a massive asteroid impact that had created the moon’s vast, 560-mile diameter Mare Orientale more than three billion years before. Huge masses of molten rock, hurled outward from the center of that collision, had cascaded down across this part of the lunar surface, hammering out this series of linked craters.

Brad kept his attention riveted to his screens. Sweat was starting to puddle up under the communications cap that held his headset and mike in position. Orbiting this close to the rough moonscape required constant adjustments to his flight path with the lander’s four vertical thruster arrays — both to clear steep-edged crater walls and scarred mountains, and to cope with sudden changes in lunar gravity caused by unseen anomalies buried deep below the battered surface.

Given several more months to prep the Xeus for this mission, Sky Masters engineers and computer techs could have equipped it with the equivalent of a digital terrain-following system to handle this low-level orbit. Without it, piloting the spacecraft through these hazards required a man in the seat… and Brad was that man. The fact that he had to rely on exterior cameras to see anything outside the spacecraft cabin was one more worry. One minor electrical fault could leave them flying blind, without anything except the computer’s inertial navigation system to tell them where they were at any given moment.

“That’s the Michelson crater dead ahead,” Nadia told him. She was tracking their progress on the navigation computer’s detailed maps. “And we’re passing Kohlhörster now, off to our right.”

Brad saw the feature she meant growing larger across his forward-looking screen. Michelson was heavily eroded, almost erased by dozens of newer, smaller craters. He fired more thrusters, shaving off some altitude to come over its slumped rim wall at no more than a few hundred feet. It was imperative that they stay well below the horizon of the Russian plasma gun all the way in on this run.

“Thruster fuel is at sixty-eight percent,” Peter Vasey reported. While Nadia handled navigation, he was charged with monitoring their engines, fuel status, and other systems.

“Twenty seconds to the Hertzsprung crater,” Nadia warned.

Brad nodded tightly. Hertzsprung was another huge-impact crater. Billions of years old, it was even larger than some of the dark volcanic plains that early astronomers had mistaken for seas. And like the moon’s other big craters, Hertzsprung contained a significant gravitational anomaly buried at its core.

The anomaly made itself felt the moment they crossed the crater’s outer western rim. Here, the moon’s gravity was stronger, tugging them ahead faster and also dragging them downward toward Hertzsprung’s center, which lay nearly fifteen thousand feet lower. If they’d been orbiting higher up, the effects wouldn’t have been as pronounced and they would have had more time to react. As it was, Brad rotated the Xeus a few degrees and went for a prolonged thruster burn to offset the higher gravitational pull.

“Our thruster fuel reserves are down to fifty-five percent,” Vasey said coolly. That was a little lower than they’d predicted in their planning and simulator sessions back on Earth. The digitized maps created from hundreds of thousands of oblique images taken by earlier orbiting satellites hadn’t fully revealed the ruggedness of some terrain features or the exact irregularity of the moon’s gravitational field so close to its surface.

Brad eased up slightly on his burn, letting the Xeus drop a couple of hundred feet as they sped over the western curve of Hertzsprung’s inner ring wall, a rugged massif made up of four-billion-year-old anorthosite rocks flung upward when the original asteroid slammed into the moon at more than thirty thousand miles per hour. Seconds later, the sheer escarpment that marked the vast crater’s outer eastern rim appeared over the horizon. It was around forty miles off — less than a minute’s flight time at their current orbital velocity.

Frowning in intense concentration, he took the lander right through a gap torn in the cliff by debris from a later asteroid strike. Their side-view cameras showed slopes rising almost vertically above them, studded with broken boulders that were easily a hundred feet high.

He breathed out a bit as they emerged from the gap and headed across a steadily rising plain. A couple of minutes later, he spotted what looked like a jumbled mess of secondary craters, torn cliffs, and rounded hills.

Nadia leaned forward, peering closely at her display and then comparing it with her maps. “That is the Tsander crater,” she said confidently.

Brad nodded again. Tsander, large and heavily battered over hundreds of millions of years, was as far as they could safely go, even at this low altitude. Once past this ancient, eroded crater, they would come out onto a wide plain dotted with hundreds of much smaller craters. Across that steadily rising plain, the Russian plasma gun, mounted high up on the rim of Engel’gardt crater, would have a clear field of fire against anything flying more than a few dozen feet above the surface.

He twisted his hand controllers, spinning the Xeus around on its axis so that its main engine pointed ahead, against their direction of travel. Brad switched his display to the cameras rigged to the aft end of the lander. His eyes narrowed as he watched Tsander’s scarred outer edges grow larger and more distinct.

“Almost there,” he muttered, more to himself than to Nadia or Vasey. One side of his mouth twitched upward in a crooked grin. Could he really call this “flying by the seat of your pants” if the only thing holding him in his seat in zero-G was his safety harness? On his screens, he saw a tiny craterlet come into view. Sited several miles east of Tsander’s broken rim wall, it was more of an indentation in the lunar soil than a real crater. But it was definitely the aiming mark he’d picked out after spending hours studying maps and photos of their projected course. “Coming up on our retro burn… just… about… now.” He punched the RL-10 engine icon on his touch-screen control panel. “Main engine ignition.”

This was a hard, full-power burn to shed their orbital velocity. Slammed against his seat straps by deceleration, Brad fought to stay focused as his apparent weight tripled and then quadrupled in a fraction of a second. As the Xeus slowed rapidly, it began dropping toward the surface, now just a couple of thousand feet below.

Brad’s eyes darted back and forth between the aft-mounted cameras and others set on the lander’s underside, which showed the ground coming up with dismaying speed. As soon as the spacecraft’s forward velocity dropped to nothing, he shut down the big rocket engine and then immediately triggered the lander’s vertical thruster arrays to slow its rate of descent.

Less than a minute later, as their thrusters flared brightly, he brought the Xeus in for a landing. Dust billowed up, obscuring his view just before the skids touched down. He chopped the thrusters off, and they dropped the last few feet — hitting the ground with a thump that rattled the cabin.

Smiling in relief, he turned to the others. “Okay, maybe that wasn’t exactly smooth. But at least it was definite. We’ve landed. So… welcome to the moon.”

In answer, Nadia leaned over and gave him a lingering kiss through his open helmet visor. “You are a wonderful pilot, Brad McLanahan.” He felt his face redden.

With a big grin of his own, Vasey reached around her and clapped him on the shoulder. “Not bad for a Yank, I guess.” His smile faded as he unstrapped himself and stood up, moving carefully in the moon’s low gravity. “If we had champagne, I’d offer a toast… but we’re on the clock, so—”

Brad nodded and reached for his own safety harness release buckle. The other man was right. This successful landing only completed the first phase of their attack plan. But they were still more than two hundred miles from the Sino-Russian base. Since they had been under constant observation by the Kondor-L radar satellite as they orbited around the moon, they couldn’t hope to achieve complete surprise. But there was at least a slim chance that moving fast now might throw the base’s Chinese and Russian crew off-balance.

He stood up and helped Nadia get out of her own seat. Then he turned to Vasey. “Okay, Constable, the ship is yours,” he said quietly.

Solemnly, the Englishman nodded. He was tasked with waiting here to fly in and pick them up if they succeeded… or to die alone, if they failed.

Minutes later, Brad and Nadia stood outside on the surface of the moon. For now, the slim, silvery carbon-fiber space suits they wore kept them alive in this airless environment. Another Sky Masters innovation, the suits used electronically controlled fibers to compress the skin instead of pressurized oxygen. But EEAS suits were not designed for prolonged use under these supremely hostile conditions. Both of them were already starting to sweat as their suits’ limited environmental systems struggled to handle temperatures that hit 260 degrees Fahrenheit in full sun.

“We’re set,” he radioed Vasey. “You can open the cargo hatch.”

“Roger that,” the other man replied. “I’m activating the hatch now. Stand clear.”

There was no sound as the wide, curved hatch on the flank of the Xeus unlatched and swung open — revealing the lander’s crowded cargo compartment. More machinery spun into gear. Silently, pulleys and gear systems extracted two large, humanlike machines from the compartment and deposited them onto the surface. Insulated packs containing weapons, explosives, and other gear followed them out.

The two combat-modified Cybernetic Lunar Activity Devices, or CLADs, were no longer bright white. Instead, their composite armor “skin” was covered by hundreds of small, gray, hexagonal tiles. Made of a special material, these tiles could change temperature with amazing rapidity. Using data collected by its sensors, a CLAD’s computer could adjust the temperature of each tile to mimic that of its surroundings — rendering the robot virtually undetectable by infrared and other thermal sensors. Under combat conditions, that could be a lifesaver. But even on Earth, rapid movement with an active thermal camouflage system would drain batteries and fuel cells. Here, given the moon’s wild temperature fluctuations, where it was possible to experience swings of five hundred degrees or more just by moving from sunlight into shadow, this thermal camouflage system could only be used for very brief moments.

Each CLAD carried a second camouflage system, this one even more advanced — but equally limited by power constraints. Paper-thin electrochromatic plates covered each thermal tile. Tiny voltage changes could change the mix of colors displayed by each plate, giving the robot a chameleon-like ability to blend in with its environment while motionless or moving cautiously.

Brad glided over to the nearest machine. He reached up and pushed a glowing green button on a hatch set in its back. It cycled open. “Let’s mount up.”

“On my way,” Nadia radioed. She hit the hatch button on her own Cybernetic Lunar Activity Device, pulled herself up a short ladder, and crawled inside the machine. The hatch sealed behind her.

Brad did the same thing. As usual, he felt a momentary touch of claustrophobia as he wriggled upward into the lower level of the robot’s tiny cockpit. Green lights glowed on the right-sleeve control panel of his space suit. With its hatch closed and a human pilot on board, the CLAD’s own life-support systems had pressurized the cockpit.

Carefully, he undogged his helmet and pulled it off. His nose wrinkled at the faint odor of machine oil. Yeah, there was air in here, all right. Squirming out of the rest of his snug carbon-fiber suit in these tight confines took some doing, but at last he managed it. Then he worked his way upward some more, squeezing deeper into the robot’s haptic interface, a gray, gelatinous membrane. This was the material that took his body’s central nervous system’s signals, processed them, and turned them into robotic movement. At the same time, it acted as a direct neural link, meshing his mind with the machine’s sensors and computer systems.

For a moment, the small cockpit blurred around him and then vanished. It was as though his vision had grayed out in a high-G turn. And then just as quickly, his sight returned — only now he was looking directly out across the moon’s rugged surface and seeing it with crystal clarity, rather than through a helmet visor. The flood of information from the robot’s active and passive sensors through his neural interface gave him an almost godlike view of his surroundings.

Systems status check, he thought.

Instantly information flooded into his consciousness: All systems are fully operational. Power reserves at ninety-nine percent. Current life-support capability estimated at forty-four hours. He knew the status of every subsystem, every byte of computer output, and the position of every limb down to the fraction of an inch, just by thinking of it.

Good enough, Brad thought. He opened a secure connection to Nadia’s CLAD. “Wolf Two to Wolf Three, does your ride check out?”

“Wolf Three to Two,” Nadia replied. “I am claws out and ready to run.”

“Copy that, Three.” Brad turned away from the grounded Xeus lander. He picked up one of the camouflaged weapons and equipment packs and slung it into position across his robot’s back. Nadia took the other pack and did the same. “Then follow me.”

Together, the two machines bounded off to the west, moving easily in the moon’s low gravity.