Eagle Station

She frowned. “The kind I like?”

“Maybe,” he answered, sounding hopeful.

As they zoomed off, Nadia smiled and slipped her arm through his. “Be brave, mój bohater. My hero. If I do not like your surprise, I will give you a thirty-second head start.”

“Sounds fair,” Brad said with an answering smile of his own.

For the next several minutes, they listened with growing interest while Richter drove them down the central corridor — rattling off quick explanations of some of the projects going on in the labs they were whizzing past. Basically, under his leadership, teams of cybernetic engineers and scientists were developing many of the robotic components needed for America’s planned lunar helium-3 mining operation.

It also quickly became clear that Richter could scarcely contain his enthusiasm for the president’s plans. He was like a kid given an unlimited budget and turned loose in a candy store. “Mining helium-3 in usable quantities is just the first step,” he told them. “Because once we can actually build and fuel serious fusion power plants and some of the direct fusion spaceship drives we’re designing now, the whole solar system starts to open up. Mars, Jupiter, Saturn… the asteroids. Everything from here all the way out to the Oort Cloud, someday.”

Nadia leaned forward over the golf cart’s seat. “All of which is incredibly exciting,” she agreed. “But I still have one question.”

“Only one?” Brad murmured.

She elbowed him and turned back to Richter. “Why are we here now? We’re not engineers or fusion power experts.”

“True,” Richter said, glancing over his shoulder with a lightning-fast grin. “But you two also happen to be the world’s most experienced surviving CID pilots.”

“You have developed a new human-piloted robot design,” Nadia realized.

“Got it in one, Major Rozek-McLanahan,” Richter acknowledged. He pulled in beside a large metal door and hopped out. A sign over the door announced that this was the manned lunar activity lab. “Come on, I’ll show you. I think you’re gonna like this.”

Cybernetic Infantry Devices, or CIDs, were combat robots. First developed by Richter years ago in a U.S. Army research lab, every piloted war machine carried far more firepower than a conventionally equipped infantry platoon. Protected by highly resistant composite armor, their powered exoskeletons were faster and stronger than any ten men combined. Haptic interfaces and direct neural links to a CID’s computers and sensors allowed the robot to move with uncanny nimbleness and precision — while also giving its human pilot astonishing situational awareness. In the right hands… or in the wrong ones, now that the Russians had developed their own, slightly less capable designs… CIDs were, quite literally, killing machines.

Richter swiped his own ID card through an electronic reader next to the door. It slid open and Brad and Nadia followed him inside.

Across a large room filled with computer equipment and large 3-D parts printers, technicians were busy around a pair of almost twelve-foot-tall, humanlike machines. Each had two arms, two legs, a broad-shouldered torso, and a six-sided head studded with sensor panels. At first glance, they appeared identical to combat-rated CIDs, but on closer inspection they seemed slightly shorter and squatter. They were also bright white.

Richter nodded toward the two large robots. “Well, there they are: the first prototype CLADs.”

Nadia raised an eyebrow. “CLADs?”

Suddenly Richter looked slightly less sure of himself. Somehow, whenever he came up with names or acronyms for new pieces of equipment, something always went wrong. No matter how memorable or descriptive he thought his choices were, everyone else usually thought they were dorky — like the LEAF life-support exoskeleton he’d designed for Brad’s father or the CIDs themselves. “CLAD, as in Cybernetic Lunar Activity Device?” he offered.

Now he waited uneasily while Nadia gave it some thought. “CLADs?” she muttered, sounding it out. “CLAD.” Then she shrugged, and to his obvious relief, admitted, “You know, that is not actually a completely horrible name, Dr. Richter. And just what are these manned robots for?”

“Originally, I designed them for construction work on the lunar surface,” Richter said. He led them across the lab, shooing the techs away so they could get a better look at the large robots. “I spent a lot of time studying the records and films of all the Apollo-era EVAs. And it was pretty obvious just how tough even ordinary physical labor was in those bulky conventional space suits — even in low gravity. Those guys were really sweating just to grab rock samples and set up a few experiments. And between exhaustion and limited battery power, the Apollo astronauts couldn’t spend much time outside on the moon. Heck, the longest EVA back then was only something like seven and a half hours.”