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25

Simon Poole waited just outside the medical module, purposefully staying out of the way while the Jiangs were maneuvered into hastily prepared EMS pods. They hadn’t expected survivors, and therefore hadn’t prepped the med bay other than to keep two sets of human remains on ice. He reminded himself to never again allow his crew to let their guard down like that ahead of a rescue op, or anything else for that matter.

Marshall and Rosie had quickly stripped out of their spacesuits back in the airlock and came up behind Poole. He regarded them briefly, as they were still in their cooling garments. It was a breach of procedure he’d address later. Right now he needed information. He nodded toward the Jiangs.

“So you found them in a cavern? Do I understand that right?”

“I wouldn’t call it that, sir,” Rosie said. “It was an overhang, maybe three meters across and a couple deep. It looks like they dug out part of it underneath, too, enough to fit their heads under, and piled up the regolith around the sides.”

“Like a lean-to?”

“Exactly. They were dug in real good, sir. I took some quick readings after we prepped them for dust-off and they made themselves a nice little hasty radiation shelter.”

“And they used the ISRU to crack oxygen out of the substrate,” Poole marveled as he watched them lay in the EMS pods. “Hell of a way to prove the concept.” He imagined they’d be anxious to get up and moving as soon as their bodies started to recover. “And a hell of a long time to be stuck in a suit.”

“Almost two weeks,” Marshall agreed. “I can’t imagine what was going through their heads that whole time.”

“That’s what I want you to find out,” Poole said. “You’ve been following them pretty closely, haven’t you?”

Marshall did a double take. “Begging your pardon, sir—how would you know that?”

“Inductive reasoning. You have an abiding interest in humans exploring the planets, and they’d have been the first to see Mars in person.” Poole smiled. “Plus there’s not much soundproofing between berthing spaces. If there was any news about them, you were watching it.”

“I’ll make it a point to use earphones from now on, sir.”

Poole waved it away. “You know more about those two than anybody else onboard. Once they’re up and about, get me a full debrief. Keep it loose. Informal. The kind of questions you’re probably itching to ask anyway.”

“Like how’d they survive that long outside their spacecraft?”

“That, and why didn’t they try to go back? It should’ve been close enough for them to reach, even after all of the crap hit the fan. What makes digging a hole on an asteroid seem like the better plan?”


Colonel Liu Wang Shu floated in his quarters, legs crossed tightly in a full lotus position that he found uniquely challenging in zero g. Once a person was limber enough, gravity helped the body’s own weight maintain the position with little effort. It had taken some practice to achieve the same state in freefall. Now he freed his mind to enter a state of deep meditation, aided by the steady hum of the Peng Fei’s air circulators.

He envisioned their position in space as if he were flying it himself like an open-cockpit biplane, with bare hands and the seat of his pants. He could feel the power of their nuclear engine when it fired, its roar silenced by vacuum but hinted at in the steady rumble conveyed through its hardened crew modules, reverberating like an echo of distant thunder.

Liu visualized himself among the Sun and planets against the still backdrop of stars. He traveled along an invisible road defined by gravity and velocity, understood only by a system of elegant mathematics that had not so much been invented as discovered—the universal language of nature itself, deciphered and available to anyone with the will to understand it. It defined his path among the cosmos and in a sense his own life. There was nothing in his mind that could not be defined by mathematics. Even his meditation could be described as such: equations of force and motion, tension and compression within the body, electrochemical reactions in the brain . . . even if leading to a heightened state of awareness, what some thought of as “projection,” he believed could be described by natural processes. Which in turn meant mathematics. The act of solving complex equations was its own form of meditation; pages filled with differential equations were a form of poetry to those who chose to comprehend them.

His mind moved beyond its own position in space along a curved path, arriving at the crippled American ship named for one of its hero astronauts—common for their culture, whereas he had been pleased to see his vessel christened with something more imaginative and meaningful. It had been amusing to see the Americans and their western allies utterly fail to appreciate its connotation. He understood the liberal West’s aversion to state disinformation, but was it propaganda when they chose to accept official explanations at face value for their own comfort’s sake?

They had chosen defeat without realizing it, long before the battle was joined. A part of him was saddened that this was so often the case, though in the end that way saves more lives than it takes: It is best to let the enemy defeat himself.

While politicians—including generals—were often foolish, he always respected the tactical leaders he was matched against. Some were more inventive than others, but an honorable man, whether in charge of a ship or an infantry battalion, could be dangerous indeed.

Simon Poole had proven himself to be a dangerous man in both the American naval and space services, though he’d let his guard down for the sake of rescuing those troublesome Jiangs. Liu reminded himself that Poole’s most consequential act had been chasing down a hijacked Orion spacecraft and arguably saving much of humanity in the process. And he’d done that as a civilian being paid to shepherd wealthy tourists around the Moon. He’d proven his survival skills and fighting sense—how would he respond now? That depended on how he perceived the root of his predicament, something Liu did not expect him to discern for himself. Therefore, expect the worst.

Liu paused, letting his mind take in the tactical picture at asteroid RQ39. The privateer spacecraft misleadingly named Prospector sat among a haze of its own wreckage, the crippled American warship nearby and in a similar predicament. Though still able to make way on its own power, losing most of its propellant had left it essentially stranded. They had no hope of return before its crew ran out of food. Had Poole chosen to keep his ship fully armed, would it have made a difference?

Liu smiled to himself: No, it would not have.

There was a knock on his door. Liu’s mind withdrew from its deep contemplation. At first annoyed, he recognized the pattern of three brisk knocks on the door frame: Major Wu, with news.

Liu unfolded his legs, took a cleansing breath, and slid open the door. As expected, Wu hovered just outside in the corridor. “Yes, Major?”

“News from control,” Wu said stiffly. “The Americans report they have found the Jiangs.”

Liu lifted his eyebrows. “That is interesting,” he said, “but hardly worth the interruption, Wu.”

“Pardon me, sir, for not being more specific: They found them alive.”

His eyes narrowed. “I see.”


Finding a misplaced spacecraft was not something Roberta McCall had ever seriously contemplated, and she didn’t like it. Any other time it would have been an alarming curiosity, something left for the Ops planners to run down after so obviously screwing the pooch. That it happened while so many other satellites had been going dark all over the place put a decidedly different spin on things. Now she took a very personal interest in it, and was not about to leave it up to the intel weenies although she suspected they wouldn’t ignore her this time.

After running so many successful ops against unfriendly sats, her teammates weren’t used to having the opposing team pull one over on them. The tables were turned, and they took that personally. These weren’t even state vehicles, unless you considered a South American telecom consortium to be a state actor. And the privately contracted Stardust? That one was just weird. It should’ve been an easy target to run down, but its control center had lost contact days earlier.

That was something the intel group ought to have caught before the rendezvous, she fumed. Spacecraft rendezvous was no joke—if things weren’t exactly where you expected them to be, bad things could happen. They went to great pains to avoid collisions in orbit, as vehicles had a way of sneaking up on you if you misjudged a rendezvous and lost sight of them.

That was ironically less of a problem for X-37 operators, as the camera suite mounted in the drone’s cargo hold combined to give its operators an expansive, high-definition view. Roberta had already used them to sweep the area several times, slowly panning the cameras in a full circle around its axes. Nothing unexpected had turned up. Radiant dots in the distance could all be identified as previously cataloged satellites; conversely, no more in the vicinity had come up missing.

Word was the SAMCOM team had been annoyingly blasé about the loss of their satellite—it was near the end of its service life anyway. Their insurance company seemed a lot more interested in finding it. The Stardust people had been much more engaged, as orbital charters represented a considerable source of revenue and losing a spacecraft could seriously undermine their business. That particular concern was for the moment eclipsed by impatient inquiries from the government, as the fatalities onboard had invariably drawn the attention of the NTSB.

That all of this had missed the attention of the Space Control deltas in Huntsville and Vandenberg left her in a slow burn. Their Space Fence radar could track objects a few centimeters square if they passed over its antennas on Kwajalein and Ascension islands. That might work for the bulk of stuff in low and medium orbits, as everything worth worrying about would eventually cross their field of view. But GEO? The whole point of geostationary orbit was the stationary part. If a bird wasn’t already parked within the antenna’s sight, it wasn’t going to be seen.

She’d learned it was a capability gap that had frustrated a lot of satellite jockeys for a long time, but maybe now the brass could be moved to do something about it. In the meantime, they were still left with a hole in space. It wasn’t really her job to track down the missing targets, though she imagined this is what an F-22 driver would feel if flying an intercept mission only to find the target she’d been vectored to was gone. She’d be pissed off and wouldn’t stop looking for it until either the CO or her fuel gauges said it was time to come home.

Fortunately, the CO hadn’t waved her off and that ACES upper stage still had plenty of delta-v in the tanks—she hadn’t even started using her onboard Hall thrusters yet, saving the more efficient but lower-thrust engines for later after ACES was discarded. The latest tasking order had left their vehicle out, so she had time on her hands. Those birds had to have gone somewhere, it was just a matter of how much they could do with the propellant each had aboard. SAMCOM couldn’t do much more than descend to a lower orbit, where the Fence radars would eventually catch it. Assuming it hadn’t, that left it somewhere in GEO.

Stardust was a different animal. Its controllers said it still had over 3.5 km/second of delta-v left in its tanks. That was enough to either go all the way to the Moon, deorbit for Earth, or anything in between. Probably not the Moon, she decided. She suspected it didn’t have the nav program for that, and besides, what would be the point?

That left a lower orbit or reentry, which the Fence also should have caught. There was a lot of junk up there. Maybe it was as simple as they got lost in the noise?

Either way, it would’ve been maneuvering so its operators should have known what happened. That they didn’t know had to mean somebody else did. Spacecraft don’t just burn out of GEO on their own, particularly when the only surviving crewmember was back on Earth.

He was here, wasn’t he? Hadn’t they brought him home with those Borman crewmembers last week? Word was he was on some kind of quarantine at the base hospital. Sounded like a load of crap to her but it must have made sense to somebody.

She searched her memory for anyone she might have met from the provost’s office, and picked up the phone.


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Framed