Eagle Station

Nadia and Vasey both nodded seriously. This was a make-or-break moment for their mission. If the Xeus’s big cryogenic rocket motor failed to ignite on its first-ever use, they would be condemned to swing around the moon on a free-return trajectory… a sitting duck for the Russian plasma rail gun deployed high up on the Engel’gardt crater rim.

“Coming up on the mark,” Brad said, watching as their computer counted down the time remaining. The digital readout flashed to zero. In response, he tapped the engine ignition icon on his panel. “Firing now.”

The Xeus start to vibrate slightly and they felt a sensation of weight return as acceleration pressed them back into their seats. On their screens, a camera set to monitor the RL-10’s nozzle showed it glowing bright orange amid the darkness around it. Seventy seconds later, the orange glow faded and weightlessness returned. “Main engine shut down. Right on time,” Brad reported.

Nadia ran her navigation program again. “That was a good burn,” she said in satisfaction. “We are on our planned trajectory.”

“Copy that,” Brad said in relief. He opened a radio channel to the earth far behind them. While the Xeus had been concealed inside its payload fairing, they hadn’t been able to communicate with ground control. Now the spacecraft’s computers were making up for lost time, dumping a huge amount of accumulated telemetry to both Sky Masters in Nevada and Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado. To hide the fact that this flight carried a human crew, Scion communications protocols would encrypt and compress any of their voice transmissions before they were sent. He checked their flight computer’s numbers and then keyed his mike. “Lunar Wolf One to Sky Masters Control, we are go for LOI. Repeat, we are go for lunar orbit insertion in fourteen hours and four minutes.”

National Defense Control Center

A Short Time Later

Leonov frowned in perplexity at the blurry radar images captured by the Kondor-L satellite. What sort of spacecraft was this? Even from what little detail could be made out, it didn’t look like anything in the known inventories of America’s private space companies or those of NASA itself. He turned to the younger staff officer who’d summoned him the moment the American craft jettisoned its payload fairing. “What do you make of that, Sergei?”

“I’m not sure, sir,” Major General Sergei Panarin admitted. “Our top analysts haven’t yet been able to positively identify it. Nor have the Chinese.” He nodded toward Leonov’s screen. “We may have better luck once those images are enhanced. Teams are working on that now.”

“No one has any ideas?” Leonov said sharply. “None at all?”

Panarin looked uncomfortable. “One of my most junior people did suggest that it resembled an experimental prototype he read about some years ago on an American space technology website.”

“Show me,” Leonov snapped.

Chastened, the younger man leaned over his superior’s desk and searched through the internet to find the appropriate site. “It was this one,” he said quickly, pointing to an artist’s rendition of a cylinder equipped with a rocket engine, an array of smaller thrusters, and helicopter-style landing skids.

Even more puzzled now, Leonov skimmed through the article on a long-shelved commercial lunar lander prototype called the Xeus. An interesting concept, he decided silently. And perhaps even better suited to its proposed task than China’s giant, enormously expensive Mă Luó cargo landers. But the American machine had never been flown in space. Not even on a single short test flight in Earth orbit. So who could have resurrected it now?

The likely answer flashed into his mind a moment later: Sky Masters, in all probability. Or maybe Scion, at the orders of its troublesome leader, Martindale, and his crippled warrior-engineer, Patrick McLanahan.

But if this was a Xeus spacecraft, what was it carrying now? All available information suggested the craft had originally been intended as an automated lander, ferrying cargo between NASA’s since-canceled lunar orbital station and the surface of the moon. If so, that seemed to confirm Chen Haifeng’s theory that the Americans now planned to use it as a robotic bomb carrier.

Panarin’s own computer chimed abruptly, signaling the arrival of an urgent message. The younger officer’s eyes widened in surprise when he read it. “What the devil?” he muttered. “That’s damned odd.”

“Tell me,” Leonov demanded.

“We’ve just received new information on the American spacecraft’s trajectory,” Panarin told him. “Unless it makes another correction burn sometime in the next several hours, it’s going to cross around to the far side of the moon at an altitude of less than three thousand meters!”