The Kremlin Strike

Epilogue

Silently, Brad McLanahan drifted down a narrow darkened corridor toward the space station’s command compartment. Behind him, farther back in the module, he could hear the whine of power tools and murmured conversations. Several Sky Masters technicians brought up in the surviving S-19 Midnight spaceplane were aboard — fixing broken equipment and translating Russian-language controls into English where possible… or replacing whole systems if necessary. Computer specialists on the ground had already identified and removed a number of destructive fail-safe programs hidden in the station’s operating software.

He felt bone-weary. The first days after they’d captured Mars One had passed in a blur of emergency work to seal hull breaches and repair some of the other damage caused by their boarding action. It would have been impossible without their COMS robots. As it was, they’d been forced to use the cramped Russian Federation orbiter as temporary living quarters until it was safe to bring the bigger modules back to life.

Electricity was still in relatively short supply, but that should pass soon. The captured fusion reactor module was in a parking orbit nearby, ready to dock and come online as soon as Jason Richter and a team of engineers were satisfied they knew all its secrets. In the meantime, to protect the newly renamed Eagle Station against a possible Russian counterattack, Hunter Noble’s laser-armed S-29B spaceplane was docked and ready to launch against any threat they detected.

He floated through a hatch and out into the console-crowded compartment. Ahead of him, Nadia Rozek, anchored by footholds in an upright position, was intently focused on one of their computer displays. Images, bright in the half-light, flickered across the screen.

Suddenly Brad heard her swear viciously under her breath. Oops, he thought nervously. Someone was in big trouble. He hoped it wasn’t him. Especially not right now, when he’d finally nerved himself up to take a step he’d been putting off for far too long.

“What’s wrong?” he asked quietly.

Nadia turned her head and gestured at the screen. “This,” she said tightly.

Brad reached out for a handhold and pulled himself closer.

She was watching a newscast from Russia. It showed a group of somber-faced government officials and military officers gathered outside the enormous triumphal arch of St. Petersburg’s Palace Square. With the Kremlin Senate Building and others around it reduced to tumbled heaps of blackened rubble by the surprise Rapira strike, the Russians had temporarily moved their seat of government to Peter the Great’s old imperial city.

Staggered by the sudden death of Gennadiy Gryzlov and hundreds of others in what Moscow claimed was a “treacherous attack carried out by Iron Wolf mercenaries when they illegally seized the Mars One space station,” the Russians had only grudgingly agreed to a cease-fire on Earth and in orbit. Brad’s suspicion, shared by Nadia, Martindale, his father, and others, was that they were just buying time while various factions inside and outside of Gryzlov’s regime wrestled for power.

Reading the text crawl across the bottom of the television pictures, Brad frowned. It appeared that the different factions had come to an agreement. Russia had just announced the formation of a Committee of National Defense. While the office of president was vacant, pending a new election, executive power would reside in the hands of a select group of experts. Seeing their names, he realized most of them were holdovers from Gryzlov’s council of ministers.

There was one exception, the newly promoted marshal of the Russian Federation, Mikhail Leonov.

Nadia stabbed her finger at the picture of the tough-looking soldier. “What if we’ve defeated a jackal, Gryzlov… only to see a tiger emerge from the shadows in his place?”

Studying a close-up of Leonov’s hard-eyed Slavic face, Brad felt a slight shiver of dread run down his spine. Nadia’s instincts were probably right. While the Russians loudly proclaimed that their new government was a committee of equals, he bet that Leonov would turn out to be, like the pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm, “more equal than others.” Scion’s intelligence pros said the Mars Project had been Leonov’s inspiration from the beginning — and they strongly suspected he was responsible for launching the warhead that had nailed Gryzlov when everything went south in orbit. All of which indicated this guy was going to be serious trouble for the United States and its allies going forward.

Then he forced himself to set his fears aside… at least for this moment. The last thing he needed right now was Nadia in a dark mood. Instead, he deliberately lightened his voice and shrugged. “A tiger, huh? Could be, I guess. Then we’ll just need to find ourselves a bigger gun.” With a grin, he waved a hand at the space station around them. “Eagle Station and the Thunderbolt plasma weapon we captured sure look like a pretty good start to me.”

Almost unwillingly, she laughed, though her eyes were still full of worry. “Perhaps you are right.” She shook her head. “After all, we have won a victory and lived to fight another day. In this world of ours, what more can we hope for?”

Taking that as his cue, Brad cleared his throat nervously. “Well, actually, there is something else that I’m hoping for—”

Maneuvering carefully in zero-G, he gently pulled himself down to a kneeling position and hooked a foot under a nearby console to hold himself in place. Then he unfastened a pocket on his Sky Masters flight suit and pulled out a small gold ring with a diamond that glinted even in the dim light.

Swallowing hard against a sudden lump in his throat, Brad asked, “Nadia, kochanie, wyjdziesz za mnie? My dear, will you marry me?”

Caught off guard, she gasped. Then, for a long moment, the longest moment he could ever remember in his whole life, she looked down at the deck without speaking. But when she raised her eyes to his, she was smiling. Firmly, she said, “Tak, Brad, zrobę to. Z całego serca i mojej duszy. Yes, I will. With all my heart and soul.”