Eagle Station

“Yeah, but not by much.” Miller brought the controls for the spaceplane’s five big LPDRS engines back online. Another random evasive maneuver rolled the Shadow ninety degrees back to the right. Through their forward cockpit windows, the rugged lunar surface seemed to tilt sideways. “So we’re done with coasting along up here like one of those stupid ducks in a carnival shooting gallery.”

Hundreds of miles away, a second blinding flash lit the blackness. A new hissing roar of static signaled yet another near-miss.

Indicators turned green on Miller’s head-up display. The flight control computer had finished its calculations. “Hold tight,” he snapped. Then he shoved all five throttles forward to maximum power. The big engines relit instantly — flaring brightly as they burned hard against the S-29’s direction of travel.

Jolted forward against their harnesses by enormous deceleration, the two Space Force pilots saw the cratered lunar surface coming up at them fast. Slowed far below the velocity needed to stay in orbit, they were again falling along a descending arc. A third dazzling flash erupted, this time right on the edge of the horizon. The static noise in their headsets was softer. This rail gun shot had missed them by a wider margin.

Straining to breathe under 5-G’s of deceleration, Craig focused on her instrument readings. “Our altitude’s down… to… forty miles.” At this range, more than four hundred miles from the Sino-Russian base, they were now also below the plasma weapon’s line of sight. “Rate of descent is… three hundred feet per second… and increasing.”

“Copy that.” Slowly, Miller pulled the throttles back all the way. “And… main engine cutoff.” Blessed near-weightlessness returned. “Discontinue evasion program.”

“Order confirmed,” the computer agreed. “Evasive flight program discontinued.”

Twenty miles above the jagged surface of the moon, Miller flipped the S-29 end-over-end so that its nose pointed forward again. Then he throttled back up — accelerating to arrest their descent. Another short, 5-G burn took them up to almost 3,700 miles per hour, the velocity needed to orbit this close to the moon.

Slowly, he floated back against his seat. “Well, that got ugly fast.”

“Sure did,” Hannah Craig agreed.

Miller glanced across at her. “You ready to tangle with those guys again, Major?”

“Yep.” She nodded. She was already busy entering targeting data on one of her multifunction displays. “You have a plan, Colonel?”

“I sure do,” he told her with a quick, fierce grin. “This time around, we’ll come in low, say about sixty thousand feet off the deck… where they can’t see us until our laser is in range. Then we pop up, and you nail that damned plasma gun first thing. After that, I figure we blow the shit out of the rest of that base. And then, we head on home.”

Ahead of them, as they came back around the curve of the moon, they saw the half-lit blue-and-white earth as it rose — majestically outlined against the black backdrop of space.

“It’s a great plan, Dusty,” Hannah Craig said quietly, gazing up in wonder at their native planet in all its breathtaking beauty. “Especially that part about heading home.”

Forty-Three

Sky Masters Aerospace Inc., Battle Mountain, Nevada

A Short Time Later

From his workstation in the improvised Sky Masters control center, Brad McLanahan listened closely to the radioed transmissions between Colonel Miller and Major Craig and Space Force headquarters out at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado. Despite the two hundred and fifty thousand miles between them, there was remarkably little electromagnetic interference. Fortunately, the sun was in a quiet phase.

“Yes, sir, we are down to about forty-five percent of our hydrazine,” he heard Miller tell General Kelleher. “But since we’re going to come in low this time, we won’t need to run the evasion program until just before we pop up to make our attack run. So we should have a decent margin. The same goes for our main engine fuel reserves.”

As the Space Force pilot continued outlining their attack plan, pictures of the Sino-Russian base taken by the S-29’s sensors during its first pass scrolled across the control center’s wall screens. Through its communications array, the spaceplane’s powerful computers were automatically transferring vast amounts of data back to Earth.

“Very well, Colonel,” Kelleher said. “You and Major Craig have a green light to proceed.”