23
Marshall flew headfirst out of the node and into the command module, almost missing a handhold and managing to stop himself before tumbling into Poole and Garver.
“I didn’t know taking inventory could be that exciting,” Poole said bemusedly, looking over Garver’s estimates. He adjusted a pair of reading glasses on his nose. “Find something interesting, Mister Hunter?”
“Them!” he blurted out. “I’ve found them!”
Poole peered at Marshall over his glasses, his interest piqued. “Clarify, please,” he said, dispassionately projecting calm to get the young officer to settle down himself.
Marshall caught his breath. “I found the Jiangs.”
Poole exchanged surprised looks with the chief, and Marshall noticed sideways glances from the other crewmembers. “Now you’ve got my interest. Where and how, Mister Hunter?”
“In their command module—I mean, I used the biomonitors to home in on their position. I powered up their module interface to access inventory logs, figured I could get through it faster. The biomonitor came on, I reset it, then it came back with faint telemetry—their suits are still transmitting data but it’s really weak, sir. I used their directional antenna to get a bearing on them.”
“And?”
Marshall tipped his head up toward the cupola, where RQ39 still loomed outside. “They’re at the asteroid. With the ISRU and cargo sled gone, I think they’re probably on it.”
“But you couldn’t pin them down with just one bearing,” Poole said, thinking out loud. “We’ll need to get multiple bearings and triangulate.”
“Do you know the frequencies their suit telemeters used?” Garver asked.
“Haven’t found that yet, Chief.”
Garver looked for Rosie, who’d been watching intently from the far side of the cabin. With a jerk of his thumb, she took off down the tunnel into Prospector. He looked back at Marshall. “It’ll be faster to let her find it, sir.” He glanced at Poole. “I suspect you’ll be busy with other things soon.”
“Damn straight he will,” Poole said. “Get the shuttle prepped for departure ASAP. Once Rosie comes back with their suit frequencies, set your radios accordingly to get bearings on them.” He raised his voice, drawing the crew’s attention. “I know you’re all a bunch of damned eavesdroppers, so let me make it simple: Mister Hunter here may have found our missing spacefarers. Before anybody gets their hopes up, at this point remember we are almost certainly recovering casualties.”
Turning back to Marshall, he lowered his voice. “Now there’s something you don’t know about.” He handed over the message printout.
Marshall’s brow furrowed as he tried to digest it. “I . . . don’t understand. China has an interplanetary spacecraft we didn’t know about?”
“More correctly, we did know about it,” Poole said. “We just thought it was a fuel depot.”
He stared at the message, trying to recall what he knew about the Peng Fei and make sense of it. “Nobody in CIA or the Pentagon had a clue? How could they miss that?”
Poole regarded him with grim amusement as he took back the paper. “I’m just impressed that’s your first thought and not ‘Yippee, someone’s coming to our rescue.’ Makes me glad I kept you on the crew.”
Marshall blushed. “There’s that too, sir.” He hadn’t been looking forward to spending the next several months counting out all those meals and subsisting on a starvation diet.
“So what are your thoughts, Mister Hunter?”
Was the captain really asking him that? If he was, he might as well go with his gut . . .
“The Chinese lifted a lot of mass up to L1 over a couple of years to build it,” he said slowly. “It was supposed to be a waystation for their lunar ops, but those never really got going, did they? Not to the extent they’d need a propellant depot that large. And if they put engines on it without us noticing, then what else is on it?”
“Meaning?” Poole prodded.
Marshall shrugged. “We’ve got weapons, we’re just up front about it. They’ve already kept one big capability secret. There’s got to be more they’re not talking about.”
Poole poked him in the chest with the rolled-up paper. “Very good, Mister Hunter. Maybe when you get back from your next trip you can help us figure that out.”
With their departure burn complete, Liu saw to it that the Peng Fei’s crew fell back into their normal routine as it sped away from the Earth-Moon system. They had trained and rehearsed scenarios to the point where any contingency could be reacted to from memory. Now, it was vital that the men be either at their posts or resting, ensuring the ship ran smoothly now that their mission beyond Earth was underway.
Though he had hoped to someday be the first to do so, he could still be satisfied in the knowledge that the first people to escape cislunar space had indeed been Chinese even if they had been using American-made equipment. Whether the Jiangs still thought of themselves as Chinese mattered little to him—it was their heritage, as inescapable as the physical laws that defined their travels out here. It was a pity that they could not reconcile themselves to that reality, though they had to know the Party would not tolerate their insolence forever. They had already made a worldwide nuisance of themselves spouting insufferable lies about the supposed deprivations suffered by average citizens—as if they had experienced such oppression themselves!
They had finally found the limits of their own supposed freedom. Expatriates or not, they had gone too far for their own good, at long last running afoul of their birth nation’s economic and security interests. As an officer of the People’s aerospace forces, he could feel no sympathy for their plight. Leaving the confines of Earth’s atmosphere and straying far from its gravity well exposed them to innumerable hazards, most instantly fatal. It was an environment not meant for humans, and it was only through meticulous preparation and exhaustive training that even the most superior specimens could hope to withstand an extended tenure in deep space. The thought of an average Americanized upper-class couple making such a jaunt filled him with disdain. What could they hope to accomplish other than survive? They accomplished nothing without the tireless work of hundreds of unheralded workers behind them, yet they achieved all the notoriety and amassed all the wealth.
It was the way of the world, Liu knew. His people had found a better way, one which the Jiangs had chosen to abandon. Not just abandon, he knew—they had actively opposed it from every vantage point they could take. And as their illicit fortunes had grown, they had found more ways to undermine his nation’s unity. From speaking at universities, to mouthing their propaganda on news programs, to addressing foreign government assemblies, to ultimately financing those querulous little “nongovernmental organizations” that harassed and undermined the PRC . . . No, the corner of his soul that at one time might have felt concern for their plight was instead filled with contempt.
Their failures needed to be held up to the world as an example. Their disappearance had already shown the world how dangerous deep space was, and the crippled American vessel sent to their rescue only served as a punctuation of this fact. Never a place for the timid, it was certainly not a place for the foolhardy or the overly confident, which the Americans certainly were. Now, they’d tempted fate and needed rescue themselves. Fortunate for them that his ship was in a position to offer aid and assistance as the world watched in morbid fascination. Watch, and hopefully learn.
While used to being under constant scrutiny from military and party leaders, Liu was not accustomed to being in the public eye. Already known for being coldly efficient, he was compelled to see that his crew exceeded the already high standards he’d set for them.
He brought this merciless focus to bear on the mission plan and status report now laid out before him on the widescreen monitor in the command deck. Major Wu hovered behind him, feet slipped in floor restraints and hands clasped behind his back in a stiff parade-rest stance. This allowed him to surreptitiously worry at a fingernail, keeping his apprehension out of Liu’s sight as he awaited questions from his commander.
“I see we are over two meters per second below our target velocity,” Liu noted. “In one day’s time. Why is this, Major Wu?”
“I am investigating this anomaly, sir. Our residuals after shutdown were within the lower bound of acceptable error, but clearly they have propagated more than anticipated.”
“Clearly,” Liu said. “And be careful about what you consider ‘acceptable error,’ Wu. What may be acceptable to the mission planners in their offices is not acceptable to us. There are no fuel farms, ocean currents, or jet streams out here to turn to our advantage. Every meter per second represents future opportunity to be lost or gained—ours or theirs. Is this understood?”
Wu lowered his head deferentially. “Of course, Colonel.”
Studying the projections further, Liu decided to let him off the hook a bit. They had lost more velocity than planned but it could be made up with a correction burn soon. If main engine cutoff had indeed occurred almost at the exact second—which it had, he’d been there when it happened—then it left few alternatives. “Either our trajectory planning is in error or our mass budget has been miscalculated,” he said, stroking his chin. He turned to Wu and lowered his voice enough that the rest of the command deck crew couldn’t hear. “You know I don’t like to guess, Wu. But since I am in a position to, I would speculate that it’s the latter. We are carrying too much mass. Whether it is essential equipment, or our crewmen smuggled too much into their personal allowances, we may have to lose weight.” He patted his flat stomach. “It’s rather late to put the ship on a diet, correct?”
A slight smile from Wu. “Correct, sir.” He eyed the connecting tunnel behind them, toward the aft modules. “If I may?”
Liu nodded his assent.
Wu cleared his throat. “I inspected each crew’s personal equipment packages before launch, sir. If there is a gross error in that budget, I take full responsibility.”
A thin smile crept across Liu’s face, ending at his eyes. “But a gross error of that magnitude isn’t likely, is it, Major?”
Wu continued. “It is not, sir. It is likely that our consumables inventory is in error, but much of that was predetermined on the ground. No, I believe it is one of two things: either density variations in our hydrogen and oxygen—”
“Which would be in our favor, over time,” Liu interrupted.
“Yes sir, we’d have more propellant than budgeted,” Wu agreed, “or Captain Huang’s squad brought more equipment than they reported.”
“That seems most likely to me as well, which in the end also redounds to our favor. Do not waste your valuable time with further investigation. Focus instead on correcting the shortfall with our next burn.” Liu’s eyes narrowed, though they signaled amusement. “One can never have too much fuel or ammunition.”
Nick Lesko had been stuck with what little fare was available on the base hospital’s limited television service, and with no internet he couldn’t even stream from his own accounts. His phone was useless, as was the expensive laptop still sitting in its rad-shielded case by his bed. That thing could probably split atoms but it might as well have been a paperweight to him now.
He flicked through the same baker’s-dozen channels, most following the same banal formula with only the faces changing. There was exactly one news station, but that at least meant the occasional sports programming so he could maybe catch up on some of the bets he’d laid before leaving Earth.
Lesko drummed his fingers impatiently. Not even two weeks yet, and it felt like a lifetime ago. There’d been too much work to do even without his contacts in Macau scrupulously monitoring every aspect of their preparations. He had no illusions that they hadn’t also managed to plant an informant somewhere in Stardust’s mission control team back in Cali.
If things had gone to plan, they’d have expected to hear from him by now. But things had most definitely not gone according to plan.
Why had he done it? There’d been a plan to eliminate the others after reentry, about which Lesko had his doubts—not that it couldn’t have been done, but that it couldn’t have been done without him somehow being connected to it. The alternative had seemed like an easy choice once it presented itself. “Natural causes” were always a better choice than an obvious hit if you had the opportunity.
But his sponsors had been fanatic about sticking to the plan. They always were. It was a trait he’d observed all across East Asia. They would want to know why he deviated from it, and how it had come to place him in an American military hospital.
He’d been wondering that himself. I ain’t no rocket scientist, he told himself. I didn’t know it would cook our spacecraft, though he vaguely remembered some dense blather from their trainers about cosmic radiation and something called the Van Halen belts.
Maybe he’d stumbled into the limits of his abilities, in which case he counted himself lucky to have realized it. No more space adventures for me, he decided. From now on, he would stick to machines on the ground.
He settled back into his bed, resigned to another repetitive cycle of news. Yet this time, their lead story piqued his interest:
“In what has become a rash of similar incidents, another communications satellite has ‘disappeared’ from sight. INDOSAT-21 is believed to still be functional, but its control center in Jakarta has been unable to send any commands or receive any information from the satellite. More worrisome for the region is this constitutes the bulk of their space-based information network. SinoComp Holdings of Macau has offered the use of its own satellites in order to plug what has become a considerable hole in the region’s information network.”
Carefully positioned for the camera in front of what Lesko assumed to be an Indonesian satellite antenna farm, the reporter droned on as colorful but mostly meaningless graphics followed.
So that’s what their game was. There must have been a hell of a lot of money in cornering the developing world’s communications networks. The bosses always withheld the full story and he’d have to figure out the big picture later, but that’s how it went. If everybody knew the plan, somebody would eventually get pinched and bring down the whole shebang.
Lesko smiled to himself and reclined in his bed, patiently waiting for the sports report.
Roberta’s first thought at using an Advanced Cryogenic Exploration (ACES) stage to put a new drone in geosynch was “overkill.” It was a big stage for a relatively small payload, certainly smaller than the payloads the workhorse upper stage customarily moved back and forth from lunar orbit. The X-37’s role was a “multimission space maneuvering vehicle” used in low to medium orbits. GEO was considerably higher at over thirty thousand kilometers, and the drone needed an extra boost to get there, but this was a mighty large kick. It was the highest they’d ever taken one of the spaceplanes, and the four-engine ACES would deliver it with nearly half of its propellant load left over. It had all seemed very wasteful until they got the first mission brief: close with and inspect the abandoned Stardust and the nearby SAMCOM-3 communications satellite.
That would require another small kick up to the graveyard orbit, another three hundred klicks higher. It would also require a little bit of orbit phasing, as the distance was enough to put them out of synch. They could use the Hall ion thruster package for station keeping around vulnerable satellites, but they’d still be hauling that hefty upper stage around.
It turned out they would need it for the next series of taskings. Once finished, they would be taking the new drone a third of the way around the world to the next assignment: another reportedly dead satellite at a different location in GEO. Given the amount of propellant that would be left over, she anticipated yet another burn and movement to a different longitude after that.
“What’s bugging you?” Ivey asked from the flight station beside her.
“Reading the tea leaves in the propellant budget,” she said, distracting herself with her work at the payload station. “Trying to figure out where they’re sending us next. Why don’t they just put it in the STO?” she wondered as she exercised the manipulator arms, cycling them through their full range of motion now that the drone’s cargo doors were open. “Why keep us guessing? We can do a better job if we could plan ahead.”
“Compartmentalization,” Ivey said, mildly lecturing her as he flipped through the maneuver plan. “The probability of a secret being blown is directly proportional to how many people are in on it. They tell us what we need to know to accomplish the mission and that’s it.” He wore a sly grin. “But they forget we’re all rocket scientists here. What information they do give helps me figure out what we’re doing next. Look.” He spread the printout of their maneuvering plan between them. “Here’s the delta-v budget for this mission, with the margins we need to leave for the next mission.”
Roberta stared at the numbers, struggling to discern their significance. “How does that tell you the next tasking?”
“Because I know how much we have to keep in reserve to deorbit at the end of all this. After this op, we’ll have just enough in the tanks for two more before we lose ACES.” He showed her a crude graph he’d drawn over a pocket map of Earth, with rough ellipses over two areas equally spaced around the equator. “These are the other two zones where satellites have started going dark. Phasing burns to reach each of them leaves just enough to deorbit afterward. The way we’re configured, it makes sense that’s where they send us next.”
“Could be,” she said. “But it could be a lot of things. Wouldn’t this be a pretty short mission duration? These things usually stay up for months at a time.”
“Depends on the mission.” Another mischievous look flashed in his eyes. “And if I’m right, it’ll be fun tweaking the planning cell. Those guys think they’re smarter than everybody else here.” He pointed at Roberta’s console. “But don’t let me distract you. How’s your package?”
She fought the temptation to enjoin a double entendre and turned back to her console. “Manipulator arms checked out and stowed for maneuvering. Cameras are up and tracking.” She clicked over to fill one of their shared screens with the visuals.
Ivey looked puzzled. “Blank screen. You sure it checked out?”
Roberta twirled a small joystick that controlled the cameras. “Yeah . . . yeah. Focus and color balance looked good inside the spacecraft.”
“Sun didn’t cross its field of view, did it? That’ll throw the exposure off, send it into safe mode.”
“No, I made sure to rotate it antisolar.”
“Check your focal length,” he said.
“It’s set at infinity, right where it’s supposed to be.” She ran the camera through its full range of focus. “Yeah, it’s correct. And it’s pointed in the right direction.” She swallowed nervously. “Infrared’s blank, too.”
Ivey checked his own instruments against hers. The X-37 was at the planned orbit and oriented correctly. Jacob’s cameras should have been able to see their target by now. Instead, they were staring at a blank screen. The region of space where the abandoned Stardust and the SAMCOM-3 satellite should have been was empty.