CHAPTER 6
The sun was shining and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The three-stage, liquid-fueled Kalam rocket sat poised on the launch pad as the countdown clock moved closer and closer to zero. The first launch hadn’t gone well—one of the engines unexpectedly shut down just a few seconds after liftoff, causing the mighty rocket to veer off course to the point where range safety officers had to initiate the self-destruct sequence. Fortunately, the first launch had been unmanned. Today there were people on board.
Riding in the crew capsule were two men, neither of whom had yet flown in space. The capsule looked astonishingly like the latest developed by Russia in support of its lunar and Mars exploration programs, and just about everyone involved in studying India’s space program knew this was no coincidence. India’s cyberespionage programs were among the best, and increasingly aggressive toward friends and foes alike.
Mission Commander Mayank Sharma, like many of the engineers who helped build the rocket and capsule in which he was riding, studied physics in Russia before returning to India. Sharma was impatient to begin their rendezvous with the already on-orbit habitat and in-space propulsion stage that would allow them to arrive at the Artifact a week after the Chinese and the Americans.
Sharma noted that all systems were showing green as the countdown clock reached zero, just after which he could feel the vibrations accompanying the lighting of the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen powered first stage. Moments later, he and his fellow astronaut were forcefully pulled back into their seats as the strap-on solid rocket motors ignited and the rocket began climbing from the tower toward space. Sharma grinned like a five-year old on Diwali holiday. He was finally going to space!
Sixty seconds into the flight, just as the rocket was approaching “Max Q,” the point at which the atmosphere exerts maximum mechanical stress on a vehicle, the status board in the cockpit went from green to red in an instant. In the main fuel tank, one of the support struts that buttressed the thin skin of the tank, allowing its weight to be minimized for the loads it was carrying, buckled, causing a series of cascading failures throughout the vehicle. Sharma noted with alarm the change in status at about the same instant he felt the excessive vibrations beginning to shake the massive rocket just as it was undergoing maximum stress. Sharma knew that he and his crewmate had only seconds, if that, to abort the launch and get their capsule off the soon-to-be-destroyed rocket. Fortunately, the automatic system was reaching the same conclusion slightly ahead of its human crew and fired the launch abort system rocket affixed to the top of the capsule.
To those watching the launch from the viewing area, it all happened very suddenly and violently. One minute, the rocket was rising gracefully into the blue sky. The next, the entire lower part of the rocket appeared to buckle and bend back in on itself while an unexpected burst of light came from the top where the abort system rockets fired and pulled the capsule from what was now an exploding ball of liquid hydrogen and oxygen.
Though lasting only a few seconds in real time, to the viewers it looked like a slow-motion race between the menacing and growing fireball and the rising, rocket-propelled capsule that was attempting to help its fragile human cargo escape the conflagration. For an instant, it looked like the fireball might win. But, like a baby bird learning to fly, the capsule emerged from the expanding ball of destruction, veering upward and to the right where it deployed its three large parachutes, carrying it gracefully to the Earth.
Inside the capsule, Sharma and his crewmate were still trying to make sense of what had just happened. Something had gone horribly wrong, but only now were they coming to grips with the fact that they had almost died. Sharma began to shake. He was thankful that he was wearing an astronaut diaper.
The dark-haired man in the Western style suit, complete with a handkerchief in the suit’s breast pocket, leaned forward as he watched the ill-fated launch on his corneal implant. The drama that was playing out on the projection in his eye, the race against time for the survival of the two Indian astronauts onboard the now-crumbling and exploding launch vehicle, mattered not to the man. He was a chess player, and the fate of a single pawn, or two of them together, didn’t really register as a major concern. His eyes were set on the world stage and the much bigger prize, the queen that was the Artifact in deep space. He was seeing the failing rocket and watching Plan A fail with it. As head of India’s intelligence service, it was his job to make sure that Plan B was executed expeditiously.
The man’s real name was irrelevant. He’d used no less than five names in the course of his tenure in the intelligence services, and, truth be told, he didn’t much care for his real name or the family it connected him to in the slums that characterized so much of India. His family embarrassed him and he was glad to leave them behind. He made the transition from just another hungry street person, conscripted into the military to fight against the Caliphate as they tried to cross the Pakistani border into India, to military intelligence. From there it was a matter of making sure that the right people supported him at the right time—even those that didn’t really want to support him did so anyway, with the right incentives.
The man turned off the video feed, reached into his right desk drawer and removed a silvery over-the-ear device that looked like the early twenty-first century Bluetooth headsets. He then activated his communication implant and signaled the head of the European Desk, a protégée of his named Jabari Patel.
“Yes?” said the man’s voice on the other end of the connection. Jabari’s voice was flat and matter-of-fact.
“Go secure,” said the man, who then listened for the tell-tale “whir” that would indicate that the over-the-ear device had scrambled the signal using third generation quantum cryptography so that no one, not even the Americans or Chinese, could eavesdrop on their conversation. The whir came, just as it was supposed to.
“Jabari, we have a problem. You were watching the launch?”
“I was. Those men were very lucky to survive.”
“They survived? No matter. The launch failed. That means we won’t have a chance to find out the secrets of the Artifact ourselves. We cannot let that stand. Whatever the Americans and Chinese learn, we need to make sure they don’t keep it to themselves.”
“Understood. Our asset in Brussels might be able to help.”
“Keep me informed. And see to it that, once we get what we need, there are no traces to our involvement. No loose ends.”
“There will be no loose ends, I assure you.”
The man severed the connection and leaned back in his chair. He wasn’t used to relying on anyone with something this important, yet, in this case, it wasn’t just anyone. It was Jabari. Jabari was the best operative he had in the field and had been one hundred percent reliable in the past. The man, however, was still concerned. After all, who knew what the Americans and Chinese were going to find out there? How could anyone second guess an alien, dead or alive?
Then the man smiled. This was a new game and he was bound and determined to learn the new rules—and win.