“Is that situation board up-to-date?” Martindale interrupted, waving a hand at the conference room’s large LED screen as he took a chair. The screen showed a 3-D image of the moon, with the orbital paths of different spacecraft depicted as green lines circling it. Red triangles indicated the current reported positions of each vehicle.
Nadia swung round angrily. Her eyes narrowed. She’d never had much patience with the former president’s flashes of arrogance and condescension. There were moments when Martindale — highly intelligent though he was — completely misjudged the temper and tolerance of those around him.
Sensing the imminence of a full-on Rozek-McLanahan explosion, Brad quickly interceded. “Yes, sir, it is.” He helped his father to a seat, noting sadly how much more awkwardly the older man moved, even with the most recent software tweaks for his LEAF exoskeleton. “We’re getting continuous updates from NASA tracking stations, from DOD’s space surveillance satellites, and from its ground-based telescopes in New Mexico, Hawaii, and Diego Garcia.”
Taking his cue, Boomer nodded. “Brad’s right. We’ve got a pretty good handle on everything going on in lunar orbit,” he told Martindale and Patrick. He shrugged. “Well, everything happening on the near side of the moon, anyway.”
There was the rub. The United States didn’t have satellites or telescopes in position to see anything happening on the far side of the moon — the side permanently hidden from anyone on Earth. Unfortunately, the same restriction did not apply to the Chinese or their Russian partners.
Five years before, China had put a communications relay satellite, called Queqiao, or Magpie Bridge, in a halo orbit around the Earth-Moon system’s Lagrange-2 point, L2. Lagrange points were places where the gravitational forces of larger bodies, like the earth and the sun, combined to produce points of relative stability. Smaller spacecraft and satellites could hold station at these Lagrange points without having to expend large amounts of fuel. From L2, about forty thousand miles from the moon, the Magpie Bridge communications relay allowed Beijing and Moscow to continuously monitor space operations on the moon’s far side.
Boomer pointed to a red triangle currently circling east to west across the moon’s near side, about sixty miles above the Sea of Tranquility — the site of Apollo 11’s historic landing way back in 1969. A tag identified it as the Chang’e-10. “So here’s the deal. About five hours ago, both the ascent stage and the descent stage of that Chinese lunar lander successfully entered stable, circular lunar orbits. Right from the get-go, they were in close formation, maybe only five to ten miles apart.” His mouth tightened. “That’s pretty damned impressive flying, considering each machine covered more than two hundred and fifty thousand miles to get there.”
Patrick McLanahan and Martindale nodded somberly.
Calmer now, Nadia took up the thread. “Two hours ago, during their second consecutive orbit, the Chinese vehicles conducted a successful docking maneuver. They are now mated together, apparently joined as a single spacecraft.”
Martindale frowned. “Without any signs of trouble?”
“None,” Brad answered. “From what we can see, everything about that lander appears nominal.”
Patrick raised an eyebrow. “That’s a pretty neat trick.”
Brad nodded. “Yep.” He pulled up a graphic of China’s Long March 5 rocket. “But it explains how they blindsided us. The maximum payload a Long March 5 can send to the moon is around nine tons. Since any decent-sized crewed lander, like the Apollo Lunar Modules, weighs in around eighteen tons, we figured the Chinese would have to design, flight-test, and build a new type of heavy-lift rocket first. Before they could kick their plans to send taikonauts to the moon into gear, I mean. What we didn’t figure on was the idea of sending a lander’s ascent stage and descent stage to the moon separately… and then assembling them in lunar orbit.”
“Which brings us to the next piece of this complex enemy space mission,” Nadia said bluntly. Using a keyboard, she zoomed in on the 3-D image of the moon — revealing another red triangle so close to the Chang’e-10 that it had been invisible at the larger scale. Its alphanumeric tag identified it as the Federation 2. “The unmanned Russian spacecraft has conducted its own successful lunar insertion burn. And it now trails the Chinese lunar lander by just a few miles.”
Martindale grimaced. “Good God,” he muttered. “You’re telling us they’re actually going to make this work.”
“Barring some unforeseen accident while docking, that’s the way to bet,” Brad agreed. He hesitated, just for a second or two, and then went on. “Which raises an ugly possibility…”
His father nodded. “That Beijing and Moscow are lying through their teeth. What if that supposedly
