Eagle Station

Gritting his teeth, Miller pitched the spaceplane’s nose up and fired all five main engines, going for a hard, fast rolling climb in a desperate bid to evade their attacker. Only seconds later, the boxy Chang’e ascent stage flashed right past their cockpit, missing them by yards at most. “Zap that son of a bitch!” he ordered.

Face tight behind her helmet visor, Hannah Craig obeyed. Her fingers flew across her weapons control display. The S-29’s laser pod slewed on target and fired — hitting the lightly built Chinese spacecraft just as it swung around to make another pass at them. In a fraction of a second, the powerful, two-megawatt laser slashed through its thin metal skin. Flames jetted into space as the oxygen in its cabin ignited. And then, as its propellant tanks ruptured, the tiny craft ripped apart. In a cloud of frozen nitrogen tetroxide, torn and tattered pieces of debris spiraled downward, caught in the moon’s gravitational pull.

More than six hundred kilometers away, Captain Dmitry Yanin saw the American spaceplane appear on his radar screen. For one brief moment, as it evaded Tian’s doomed Chang’e-13, the S-29’s maneuvers were predictable. A bright red box blinked into existence onto his display. Korolev Base’s X-band fire control radar had locked on. “Target locked!” he snapped. He punched a control. “Firing!”

Half a kilometer outside the habitat module, the Russian plasma rail gun pulsed again — hurling a glowing toroid of superheated dense plasma toward the distant American spaceplane at ten thousand kilometers a second.

Hit squarely, the S-29B Shadow was knocked end-over-end — briefly engulfed by an eerie blue globe of lightning. Dusty Miller and Hannah Craig were slammed against their harnesses by the enormous impact. Searing heat flashed through the cockpit. Control boards, instrument panels, and displays all erupted in dazzling showers of sparks as they short-circuited.

Three of their five main engines cut out. But the other two, both under their right wing, kept burning as the spaceplane spun wildly through space. Lashed by uncontrolled electrical surges cascading through conduits and wiring, random thrusters triggered, sending it further out of control.

Blearily, Miller fought to lean forward against his straps. Hard, sharp jolts threw him from side to side. The cockpit was pitch dark. None of the emergency lights were working. Aw, shit, he thought.

He felt for the side of one of his dead multifunction displays and pushed the buttons set there. With their flight control computers knocked off-line or dead, their only chance was trying for a hard reset.

Nothing happened.

Through the cockpit canopy, he could see the jagged lunar surface coming up fast. Dragged downward by its two misfiring engines, the S-29 whirled around and around like an untethered kite caught in gale-force winds. Stubbornly, he tried resetting the computer again — aware that his copilot was trying the same procedure with her own control panels.

Ahead, Vavilov’s stony rim wall climbed more than four miles from the crater floor. They were plunging straight toward it at high speed. Damn, Miller realized. They were out of time, maneuvering room, and ideas. He sat back, feeling strangely calm. They’d done their best. They’d fought the good fight. And in the last seconds before impact, he felt Hannah Craig’s hand take his in the darkness and hold on tight.

Still flying at more than two thousand miles per hour, the S-29B Shadow slammed into the crater rim in a huge cloud of dust and shattered rock. And then it vanished in a brief, blinding flash of light as thousands of pounds of highly explosive fuel and oxidizer detonated.

Forty-Four

Sky Masters Aerospace Inc.

An Hour Later

“Shadow Bravo One, this is Peterson Mission Control, do you read? Shadow Bravo One, this is Peterson Mission Control, do you read?… Shadow Bravo One—”

Slowly, Brad McLanahan removed his headset, cutting off the melancholy radio calls to a crew and spaceplane lost forever. The failure of the S-29B to come back around the edge of the distant moon signaled its fate all too clearly. He put the headset down and looked up at the subdued faces of Nadia, his father, Boomer, and Peter Vasey. “Well,” he said quietly. “That’s it. Looks like we’re up.”

Nadia, red-eyed with sorrow, nodded fiercely.

Beside her, Vasey offered him a wry smile. “I should have listened to my old dad,” the Englishman said, shaking his head. “‘Never volunteer,’ he told me a thousand times. ‘You’d have to be daft to volunteer for anything.’ Now I know what he was rattling on about.”

“Which means you’ll go?” Brad asked.

“Of course,” Vasey said. “If you’ve all gone stark, raving mad, why should I pretend to be the only sane person left in the room?”