Eagle Station

Nadia’s eyes narrowed down to slits as she watched the Russians trying to decide their next move. Quick staccato beeps pulsed through her headset, indicating that they were talking to each other. Like their American equivalents, the robots’ radio transmissions were first encrypted and then compressed into millisecond-long bursts. Plainly they were reluctant to move away and expose the base’s vital fusion reactor to her attack. Slowly, the enemy war machines converged, moving to within a couple of yards of each other.

Close enough, she decided tightly. She flicked on the power to her rail gun and sighted down its short barrel.

Alerted by the strong electromagnetic signature suddenly picked up by their sensors, both Russians spun in her direction. Their weapons lifted.

“Too late,” Nadia snarled. “Far too late.” She squeezed the trigger. A burst of sun-bright white light flared as the rail gun sent its projectile slashing across the intervening space at Mach 5. It streaked right between the two enemy robots and tore through the thick-walled fusion reactor.

She whirled away and threw herself prone.

When the reactor’s magnetic containment field ruptured, plumes of helium-3/deuterium fusion plasma erupted — spewing outward for a brief microsecond before they cooled and dissipated. But in that almost infinitely short moment, the two Russian war machines were caught amid temperatures above one hundred million degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than those found at the core of the sun itself. When the enormous glare faded, there was nothing left for yards around where the reactor had been — only a cooling circle of glass and fused metal.

Fifty

Korolev Base

A Short Time Later

Weeping openly now, Nadia stalked through the remains of the Sino-Russian base. Periodically, she stopped to destroy pieces of enemy equipment — automated rovers and inflatable tanks containing oxygen, water, and hydrogen — with her autocannon. She’d already summoned Peter Vasey to fly here to this place of death and desolation. What she hadn’t yet decided was whether she would board the Xeus when it arrived, or remain here, waiting to join Brad in death.

Despite the robot’s sensors, sorrow had narrowed her world. She moved on, conscious only of targets yet to be destroyed and the wreckage she had already left behind. And so she was taken completely by surprise when an ever-more-urgent warning flashed across her neural link with the machine.

Hostile movement alert, the computer signaled, somehow sounding desperate despite its cool, emotionless tone. Six o’clock low. Threat level extremely high.

Startled, she reset her visual sensors to look directly behind her robot. And there she saw the two men in bulky EVA suits. One Chinese taikonaut was down on one knee, with a launch tube on his shoulder, ready to fire. The other stood at his side, with another of the tubes slung over his shoulder. Weapon is a Hóng Jiàn-12, infrared-homing antitank guided missile, the computer reported.

They must have been hiding inside the base’s habitat module, Nadia realized, suddenly angry at her own stupidity. She had left the inflated habitat untouched in her rampage across the plateau, knowing that she would need to set explosives to breach its half-meter-thick walls. It was a mistake that was going to kill her. And it was also going to kill Peter Vasey, since the base’s surviving crewmen had another antitank missile to use against the Xeus lander when it came within range.

Knowing she would be too slow, no matter how fast she moved, she started to spin toward the Chinese missile crew… and then stopped.

The kneeling taikonaut’s space helmet exploded. Already dead, he jerked forward, falling slowly in the moon’s low gravity. The other Chinese crewman turned in surprise and then folded over. A huge fountain of blood, black in the weird half-light, erupted from the hole drilled through him.

Nadia’s eyes widened in amazement as an astronaut wearing a silver carbon-fiber space suit limped slowly into view. With a gesture of disgust, he tossed away the pistol he’d just fired twice and headed in her direction. Weapon is a Russian-made Vektor SR-1M 9mm pistol captured by Major McLanahan during the capture of Mars Station almost two years ago, her computer announced.

“My God,” she whispered. “Brad?”

“Yeah, it’s me,” she heard a familiar, pain-filled voice say over the radio.

Unable to speak for the moment, she stumbled toward him, with her CLAD’s large, armored arms held open.