22
While Marshall was supposed to be busy taking inventory on Prospector, Garver was on comm duty with Ops. It amounted to not much more than staying dialed in to their voice frequency with Ops and having to fuss with a headset while he was busy with other work—in particular, calculating exactly how few calories each of them could tolerate and remain halfway functional. It should have been simple math, but he couldn’t balance the equation based on the food they’d brought with them.
He had his doubts about what they could scavenge from Prospector as well, unless Hunter found some secret stash of protein powder and vitamin supplements. Which, given its unique crew, could’ve been entirely possible. The Jiangs might have been insanely rich, but that didn’t make them foolish. They’d come up the hard way, escaping real poverty to make it big in America. They showed the hallmarks of being careful, conservative planners. Maybe they’d built in enough reserves and redundancies in their own stores to save everyone’s bacon.
It was tempting to poke his head into the docking tunnel, just to check on Hunter’s progress, he told himself, but knowing it was really to hurry the kid up. There hadn’t been a peep out of him since he’d disappeared into the bowels of Prospector’s logistics module. Garver looked down at the small loop of wire from his headset, jacked into the radio panel between the pilot’s seats. If it had been longer, he’d have been in there taking inventory himself.
As if to chastise him for questioning his orders, that was the moment the channel lit up and a chime sounded to alert him to incoming message traffic. “We copy your transmission, Ops. Ready to receive,” he said. “Got a data packet for us?”
After nearly a minute’s light delay, the voice on the other end returned. It was hesitant, uncertain. “Not exactly, Borman. This is a heads-up, you’ll be receiving a text transmission relayed to us from the commandant.”
“Say again? Understand we have incoming from the Pentagon?” Garver said, raising his voice and motioning for Poole’s attention. By the time Poole arrived at his side, HQ replied.
“Affirmative, Borman. Relayed to them via the State Department. It’s an offer of assistance from the Chinese spacecraft Peng Fei.”
Their L1 station? Garver was skeptical. “Don’t know what kind of assistance they can offer, Ops, but we’ll take it.” Garver made eye contact with Poole. The Earth-Moon L1 point was a cheap—in terms of fuel—jumping-off point for sending spacecraft farther into the solar system. Maybe they had a supply ship ready to shoot out in their direction?
Another minute passed. Uncertainty returned to the comm officer’s voice. “Yeah, it kind of surprised us too, Borman. Fleet HQ advises they are standing by for Captain Poole once he’s read their message.”
“Copy,” Garver said. “Stand by.” He pulled up the message window and printed off a hard copy for Poole, who still preferred to get official traffic the old-fashioned way. In the meantime, he satisfied himself with reading the on-screen copy.
ATTENTION USS BORMAN//CAPT SIMON POOLE
FROM PRCS PENG FEI//COL LIU WANG SHU
WE HAVE RECEIVED WORD OF YOUR SITUATION AND OFFER OUR ASSISTANCE.
OUR NATION HAS BEEN AWARE OF THE PIRATE GROUP CALLING THEMSELVES THE “SPACE LIBERATION FRONT” AND HAVE BEEN CONCERNED ABOUT THEIR INTENTIONS FOR SOME TIME. IT IS TO OUR DEEP REGRET THAT YOUR FIRST KNOWLEDGE OF THESE BANDITS HAS COME AT SUCH HIGH COST. THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA WILL NOT ALLOW SUCH A BRAZEN ACT OF PIRACY TO STAND.
MY SHIP AND ITS CREW ARE AT YOUR SERVICE. WE CAN RENDEZVOUS WITH YOUR VESSEL IN SEVEN DAYS. PLEASE ADVISE IF YOU REQUIRE ANY SPECIAL MEDICAL ASSISTANCE.
WITH KINDEST REGARDS,
COLONEL LIU WANG SHU, COMMANDING
“Well,” Poole breathed. “Didn’t see that one coming.”
“So Peng Fei isn’t a propellant depot after all,” Garver observed flatly.
“Clearly not.” His eyes narrowed. “This is my shocked face, by the way.”
“That always was a hell of a lot of tankage,” Garver said. “Way more than they needed for lunar surface ops.”
“I’d love to know what they’re using for propulsion,” Poole said, “preferably before they get here.”
“Got to be nuclear, Skipper. Maybe electric, like VASIMR thrusters, but there’s definitely a nuke plant running it.”
“Agreed,” Poole said. “I want to know how we missed this.” He sighed. “Chief, your priorities just changed. We need Hunter to finish his inventory, but calorie intake isn’t our concern anymore.” He stared out the window, back toward the tiny blue marble of the distant Earth and the heretofore unknown Chinese deep-space vessel orbiting it. “I need all available information on this Peng Fei and her skipper. I want to know everything about her and the man running it. What modules did the Chinese use to build it, what kind of propellant is in those tanks, and more importantly, which PRC agency does it report to? Because it sure ain’t their space agency.”
“We’re in a real fix, and they are offering help, sir,” Garver said, having to point out the diplomatic angle. “We have to be careful about biting the hand that feeds us.”
Poole looked annoyed, though he knew the chief was just offering the kind of contrarian advice he needed when his dander was up. “I know, Chief. And I’m not turning down a helping hand. I just want to know what’s in the hand they’re keeping behind their back.”
Marshall was able to isolate and power up Prospector’s comm and datalink system, which wasn’t what he’d been ordered to do but it wasn’t exactly against orders either. If finding the Jiangs, alive or otherwise, was their ultimate mission out here then any reasonable action he took in pursuit of that goal was, by extension, within the scope of their orders.
When the directional antenna showed it was alive, he began slewing it to find the source of those weak biomonitor signals. It was simultaneously thrilling and somber—they were out there, waiting to be found, but he also knew they’d be long dead by now. He’d only be recovering their bodies.
Their suits were the only sign of life left. The thought crossed his mind that those suits must have had fantastic batteries, maybe solar rechargers built into the life-support packs.
It soon became obvious that he needed to trace out a search pattern that made sense. Just slewing the antenna around blindly would do nothing but waste time. He had to focus on which region of space they were most likely to be in.
That had to be RQ39, didn’t it? It was the reason they came, after all, and they were supposed to have deployed a couple of surface experiments, both of which were missing. Wherever they were, the Jiangs should be too.
He rotated the antenna dish to face the asteroid, and was almost immediately rewarded with a solid green light on the biomonitor screen. So they were in the vicinity all right. Could they have been on the surface?
It would’ve made sense. That had been their intention; everyone had just assumed they never got there because of the wrecked spacecraft. What if they had? What if they’d been stranded on RQ39 after watching their home get blasted? To be standing there on a pile of space gravel, with Earth a really long way away, and seeing your only refuge, your only way home, torn apart . . .
The thought made him shudder.
That had to be where they were, given the evidence. Hell, the directional antenna was literally pointing at them even if was only somewhere on that big flying rock pile.
One question nagged at him: Why hadn’t they tried to make it back to Prospector? At the time it would’ve been close enough, it was only over the intervening week that it had drifted far enough away in its own orbit to make returning impossible for their small emergency maneuvering packs.
He thought through what he knew of their EVA plan. The whole thing was a proof-of-concept experiment to see if humans could productively mine asteroids for resources in ways that robots couldn’t. It had started with them deploying a pair of CubeSats a few days prior; in fact the little toaster-sized probes should have still been in orbit around RQ39. He made a mental note that they could be important later, if video from them could be retrieved.
The surface experiment package was externally mounted on its own sled, which included methane-powered maneuvering jets with enough propellant to take them to and from the surface. Its gravity was so low that they wouldn’t even be landing, just floating above it. The only item that had to be mounted on the surface was the in situ resource unit so it could crack oxygen and hydrogen out of the regolith . . .
Oh my God.
His eyes darted back to the biomonitor screen. Did that steady green mean it was still getting live data, or was it just an open channel to two dead people? Their control center would know, but nothing was making it back to Palmdale after the explosion put the spacecraft in safe mode.
He stared at the green status bar, thinking through the implication. It just couldn’t be. They couldn’t be. Still alive, after this long? Even if the ISRU had supplied them with water and oxygen, their suits wouldn’t protect them from radiation for that amount of time.
What must that have been like? They’d probably seen everything . . .
Then it all made sense.
He scrambled for the forward hatch, banging his head off a panel as he tumbled through their small command module. “Sim—” he began to shout, before catching himself. “Captain!” he stammered. “Captain Poole!”
Colonel Liu Wang Shu of the People’s Liberation Aerospace Force made one final sweep of his quarters. He expected it would be some time before he returned, allowing himself to sleep for only a few hours at a time, and that he would accede to only when he was assured there would be no need for him to make critical decisions for his ship.
In truth there were very few decisions that weren’t critical when operating such a complex spacecraft as the Peng Fei, whether in his eyes or those of his superiors in Beijing. He had campaigned mightily for a level of autonomy never before granted, shattering the long-established relationships between spacecraft and their ground control teams. While he understood the general staff’s need to know where its capital ship was and where it was going at any time, no military vessel could function with every detail of its crew’s activities planned and monitored to the degree he’d endured as a taikonaut aboard their Tiangong-3 station. At least not from the ground, he’d argued. There would be no aspect of their daily lives that didn’t escape his notice. The general staff would have to trust him just as they would the command pilot of a strategic bomber, or the captain of a capital ship.
It had taken months of lazily orbiting Lagrange 1, the first region between Earth and Moon where the two bodies’ gravity wells essentially cancelled each other’s out. It was a highly desirable strategic location for a number of reasons, all centered on the fact that it took relatively little energy to reach and even less to depart in any direction they chose to move. That neither the Americans, Russians, or Europeans had not seen fit to establish even a perfunctory presence here was remarkable.
Or perhaps not. They were all locked into their own modes of thinking—and in the grubby Russians’ case, strangled in the crib by a thieving government that had barely kept their economy above third-world levels. Though their research and development had been invaluable to his own nation’s space program, they’d had no hope of funding such technology, being reliant on the rest of the world’s table scraps. Pity for them, but the results of their early work now powered his own vessel.
The Anglos were constrained by their own bureaucratic inertia, the Europeans especially so, though the Americans could be annoyingly inventive. They were continually surprising, which made near-term planning a difficult exercise. Long-term, however, their government could be counted on to keep doing things the way they’d always been done. Upstart, troublesome businesses like Hammond Aero and SpaceX were another matter, but they at least weren’t deploying armies on Earth or warships in cislunar space.
Peng Fei had been his country’s answer to that. While it had its place as a waystation between Earth and Moon, it was far more than just a fuel depot. After years of steadily building its capability with successive small modifications, each delivered on launches from Earth as their cargo carriers stopped for propellant en route to the Moon, this great ship was ready to show itself to the world. That it would be on a mission of mercy to rescue its only serious challenger was indeed poetic: Let your adversary first defeat himself.
Liu pulled the worn leather-bound Art of War from beneath the elastic straps on his desk to reverentially place it in a drawer with the few other personal effects he’d brought with him. There was another precept of Sun’s which he thought applied perfectly to this situation: When seeking to determine the conditions for battle, with whom lie the advantages derived from Heaven and Earth?
He chuckled to himself as he closed the small drawer: He was certain this would be the most unique application of that question yet.
There was a muted knock on the door of his sleep chamber—like most spacecraft, the commander’s quarters were not much larger than the closets that sufficed as berthing for the other crewmen. Until they could find more efficient methods to build ships in orbit, mass and volume would always demand a steep price.
“It is t-minus ten minutes, Colonel.”
He recognized Lieutenant Zhou’s voice—young, serious, eager to please. “Thank you, Lieutenant,” he said through the door. “I will be in the flight module shortly.”
“Very good, sir.”
Liu checked himself in the small mirror adjacent to his sleeping bag. His stiff, bristle-brush hair was clipped close, flecks of gray becoming more and more prevalent. He patted his eyes reflexively, as if working out remnants of sleep he hadn’t had in hours. He pulled at his chin, ensuring he hadn’t missed any stray whiskers.
His eyes swept the small stateroom one last time: nothing out of place, drawers and cabinets secure, sleeping bag tightly rolled up against the bulkhead. A small writing desk was folded into the opposite wall, beneath a personal TV monitor on standby and displaying the shield of the People’s Liberation Aerospace Force. By his design, it looked almost as if no one lived there. No distracting family photos or personal mementos other than a single peony blossom pressed between glass plates, which his wife had plucked from her garden before he left Earth. It had no identifying markings, no hand-scribbled notes attached, no photograph to perhaps put it in context. Privacy aboard a spacecraft was scarce and something to be carefully cultivated. Being the only man aboard who knew its significance made it all the more meaningful.
Satisfied that his chamber was secure, he made his way through the short docking tunnel into the forward control module. It could comfortably hold four men at a time—one fourth of his crew—not including him. As the ship was about to depart its long-occupied halo orbit at L1 for interplanetary space, all four flight stations were occupied: two pilots, an engineer, and a weapons officer, in pairs facing what would be forward once the ship was under thrust. The pilots sat before two large triangular windows. Between the two pairs of consoles was a single, simple chair unfolded from the floor. Though it was supposed to be stowed to open up space, it never had been. The commander’s chair was symbolic, it represented his command presence even during those rare periods when he was off duty.
He noted the command crew subtly tense up as he floated into the cabin. “As you were, gentlemen,” he said before someone could announce his presence on deck. It was one of the very few departures from military customs he was willing to allow: In orbit, there was nothing more ridiculous or counterproductive than a small crew trying to snap to attention when there was no way for them to properly stand. It made for an odd combination of naval and air force courtesies—while the ship itself could be more closely compared to a naval vessel underway, the crew had to function more like a strategic bomber crew in flight and nobody snapped-to every time the aircraft commander left the cockpit. He suspected the Borman’s crew would have been much the same had its captain not been such a dedicated naval officer in his former life. But then, there were undeniable parallels between this and the submarine service. They would see for themselves soon enough.
“Major Wu,” he said as he strapped into his seat, “are we ready?”
The command pilot, and Liu’s executive officer, turned to face him. “The ship is ready, sir, as is the crew. All off-duty crewmen are secure in their chambers. Control is awaiting your confirmation of final orders, sir.” He tapped a screen on the pedestal between the pilot stations and a message appeared on a tablet attached to one of Liu’s armrests. It did not waste words: CLEARED TO PROCEED.
“L1 departure approved,” he said calmly. “Initiate terminal countdown at two minutes from injection node, as planned.”
Wu entered a command into the flight computer and their new orbit path appeared on a large status screen mounted between the triangular windows. “Two minutes . . . mark. Countdown begun, sir.” There were muffled bursts of control jets outside as the ship automatically adjusted its trim angle to keep them on a precise course.
“Beginning ignition cycle,” the engineer, Lieutenant Zhou, reported. “Reactors will be at full capacity at T-zero, sir.”
Liu imagined he could feel the ship gathering its full strength as distant turbopumps began whining, drawing propellant from the massive tanks behind the crew modules and into the manifolds. It would all come together to ignite in the plenum chambers at the precise moment to put them on the optimum minimum-time trajectory to intercept the Borman. Harnessing the ruthless efficiency of their nuclear engines with such exquisite precision was deeply satisfying. He suppressed a smile. Ready or not, here we come, as the Americans would say.