Eagle Station

His order triggered another inflatable decoy. This one was shaped to mimic the visual and radar signature of Chang’e-10’s discarded descent stage, still sitting far below them on the rim of Engel’gardt crater.

Aboard Federation 2, Major Liu Zhen saw the approaching lander’s ascent stage change shape, seeming to double in size as what looked like Chang’e-10’s missing lower half suddenly ballooned from its aft section. He swung toward Yanin. “They’re coming in fast, Dmitry. We need to clear our docking hatch.”

The cosmonaut nodded. His fingers danced across the control console. “I’m setting our decoy lander loose.”

Federation 2 shuddered. Cut loose by tiny explosive charges, their own full-sized Chang’e-10-shaped decoy slowly drifted away. Seconds later, small, one-use thrusters that were attached to the decoy’s Kevlar-like outer layer fired. The decoy veered away under lateral thrust, and when it was several kilometers off their orbital track, self-destruct charges detonated — shredding it into several thousand tiny fragments of torn fabric and bits of polymer foam in one blinding flash.

Liu triggered their lidar. Laser pulses confirmed Chang’e-10’s ascent stage was still on track for its rendezvous. Like so much else on this mission, the sheer speed required for this maneuver was unprecedented. To keep the Americans from realizing they’d succeeded in landing on the moon, Chang’e-10 and Federation 2 had only a few minutes remaining to dock. There was almost no margin for error.

With breathtaking swiftness, the two spacecraft seemed to rush together. Tiny flashes of light briefly lit the lander’s flanks and upper hull. It rotated slightly and decelerated. More numbers flowed across Liu’s display.

“Chang’e, this is Federation,” he radioed. “Range now two hundred meters. Closure rate is down to five meters per second.” A red-tagged alert popped up on his display. “Time to AOS is now just ninety seconds,” he warned.

“Understood, Federation,” Tian replied coolly over the circuit. “Stand by for docking.”

The lander closed in, growing larger and larger on-screen. Its thrusters fired again, distinct now as puffs of glowing gas. “Closure rate now two meters per second,” Liu intoned. “Range forty meters. Time to AOS forty seconds.”

Abruptly, Chang’e-10’s upper hull thrusters fired longer than expected — decreasing its relative velocity to zero while the two spacecraft were still twenty meters apart. “Automated docking program failure,” Tian reported. Astoundingly, his voice sounded completely calm. He might have been announcing the weather on a clear, sunny day. “I’m taking manual control. Stand by, Federation 2… there might be a bit of a bang.”

“Shit,” Yanin muttered in disbelief. “The fucking computer just crashed? Now?”

Liu felt his teeth clench. In less than thirty seconds, they would come back around the edge of the moon. On-screen, more thrusters pulsed and Chang’e-10 seemed to jump toward them.

“Range five meters,” he said, swallowing hard as the other spacecraft loomed up fast, completely filling their camera view. “Four… two…”

Anticipating an impact, Liu and Yanin gripped the edges of their control console.

SCREECH.

Chang’e-10’s docking probe scraped noisily along the inside of the Federation command module’s cone-shaped port and then came to rest. Latches closed around the probe and retracted, pulling the two spacecraft tightly together.

“Capture,” Tian declared, still sounding cool and collected. “Docking complete.”

Seconds later, the two mated spacecraft swung back around the curve of the moon and into full view of America’s watching satellites and telescopes. To all appearances, this was just another routine orbit, one of nearly twenty since the Sino-Russian mission first reached the moon.

Four hours and two orbits later, Tian, Lavrentyev, Liu, and Yanin separated their Federation command module from the now-empty Chang’e-10 lander. Back under control of its onboard flight computer, the smaller Chinese-built spacecraft’s thrusters fired again. It slowed and descended, curving downward under the pull of the moon’s gravity. Eventually, the abandoned lander and its own attached decoy would crash close to the Reinhold crater on the moon’s near side — disappearing in a brief burst of exploding fuel and debris.

Higher in lunar orbit, the DM-03 space tug’s rocket motor relit. Boosted out of the moon’s gravitational clutches, the Federation command module and its four-man crew began their three-day voyage back to Earth.

The first essential phase of Operation Heaven’s Thunder was complete.

Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Washington, D.C.

Several Days Later