Eagle Station

Leonov felt his own eyes widen. Less than three thousand meters? That was dangerously low, even for a manned spacecraft. Could the Americans really have developed an automated flight program capable of navigating safely so close to the moon’s rugged surface? And if so, were they planning to fly this Xeus toward Korolev Base as if it were an aircraft trying to avoid radar detection on Earth — weaving in and out of craters and behind mountains, until it was close enough to detonate the bomb it must be carrying?

He stared up at Panarin. “Put me through to Colonel Lavrentyev on a secure link, Sergei! Now!”

Forty-Six

Aboard Lunar Wolf One, Crossing to the Far Side of the Moon

Fourteen Hours Later

The Xeus’s crew was shoved forward against their harnesses as the spacecraft’s main engine fired a second time. This time it was aligned directly against their direction of travel — burning at full power to slow them down as the lander streaked just above the moon at more than five thousand miles per hour.

“And… MECO, main engine cutoff,” Brad McLanahan said three minutes later. Zero-G returned as the rocket motor shut down. He spun the lander back around.

“Good burn,” Nadia reported from her seat. “No residuals. We are in lunar orbit. Very low lunar orbit,” she emphasized.

No shit, Brad thought edgily, watching the rounded peaks, escarpments, and craters of the moon’s far side rushing toward him at more than a mile per second. At an altitude of roughly five thousand feet, they were practically skimming the surface — darting low across a battered landscape that might make Hell itself look like the Garden of Eden. They were coming in along an orbital track just a few degrees north of the lunar equator, circling west straight toward the Sino-Russian base that had killed Dusty Miller and Hannah Craig.

Seeing a chain of interconnected craters curving ahead across one of his displays, he fired thrusters — climbing just high enough to clear the steadily rising terrain. That was the Leuschner Catena, the result of a massive asteroid impact that had created the moon’s vast, 560-mile diameter Mare Orientale more than three billion years before. Huge masses of molten rock, hurled outward from the center of that collision, had cascaded down across this part of the lunar surface, hammering out this series of linked craters.

Brad kept his attention riveted to his screens. Sweat was starting to puddle up under the communications cap that held his headset and mike in position. Orbiting this close to the rough moonscape required constant adjustments to his flight path with the lander’s four vertical thruster arrays — both to clear steep-edged crater walls and scarred mountains, and to cope with sudden changes in lunar gravity caused by unseen anomalies buried deep below the battered surface.

Given several more months to prep the Xeus for this mission, Sky Masters engineers and computer techs could have equipped it with the equivalent of a digital terrain-following system to handle this low-level orbit. Without it, piloting the spacecraft through these hazards required a man in the seat… and Brad was that man. The fact that he had to rely on exterior cameras to see anything outside the spacecraft cabin was one more worry. One minor electrical fault could leave them flying blind, without anything except the computer’s inertial navigation system to tell them where they were at any given moment.

“That’s the Michelson crater dead ahead,” Nadia told him. She was tracking their progress on the navigation computer’s detailed maps. “And we’re passing Kohlhörster now, off to our right.”

Brad saw the feature she meant growing larger across his forward-looking screen. Michelson was heavily eroded, almost erased by dozens of newer, smaller craters. He fired more thrusters, shaving off some altitude to come over its slumped rim wall at no more than a few hundred feet. It was imperative that they stay well below the horizon of the Russian plasma gun all the way in on this run.

“Thruster fuel is at sixty-eight percent,” Peter Vasey reported. While Nadia handled navigation, he was charged with monitoring their engines, fuel status, and other systems.

“Twenty seconds to the Hertzsprung crater,” Nadia warned.

Brad nodded tightly. Hertzsprung was another huge-impact crater. Billions of years old, it was even larger than some of the dark volcanic plains that early astronomers had mistaken for seas. And like the moon’s other big craters, Hertzsprung contained a significant gravitational anomaly buried at its core.