Eagle Station

“Excellent work, Colonel. And you, too, Lavrentyev,” Leonov said warmly. While the automated furnace and chemical reaction unit built into Chang’e-10’s descent stage could supply the base with precious oxygen and water separated out from regolith, food and other necessary stores still had to come all the way from Earth.

A little under two seconds later, he saw the two men nod as his words finally reached them. Every signal from Earth to the moon’s far side had to travel 450,000 kilometers to the Magpie Bridge relay satellite and another 60,000 kilometers from there before it reached Korolev’s antennas. The communications lag wasn’t crippling, but it was just long enough to render conversations somewhat more stilted and less spontaneous.

“Thank you, Comrade Marshal,” Tian replied.

Chen leaned in beside Leonov. “When do you believe your base will be fully operational?”

This time Lavrentyev answered. “We still have considerable EVA work left to excavate the necessary sites for our sensors and other hardware. But we expect to be finished by the time the next cargo lander arrives. After that, it should only take us a few days to install, camouflage, and test all our systems.”

Leonov nodded. Teams at Vostochny Cosmodrome were preparing another heavy-lift Energia rocket for launch in the next week. Its payload was a third Chinese-built Mă Luó spacecraft destined for the moon. This robotic lander would carry the final components needed to make Korolev Base a full-fledged instrument of offensive Sino-Russian military power.

“Do the Americans realize we’re here?” Tian asked seriously.

“Not yet,” Leonov assured him. Chinese agents and cyberespionage had confirmed Washington’s belated realization that Pilgrim 1 had been a manned mission… one that had successfully landed cosmonauts and taikonauts on the moon. In a way, that made the follow-on Pilgrim 2 and Pilgrim 3 missions easier, since they didn’t need to carry and deploy decoy landers of their own. However, to hide the fact that crews were staying behind at a permanent base, Pilgrim 2 and 3’s empty Chang’e ascent stages were flown back into lunar orbit under remote control. Once there, they docked with waiting Federation command modules, which then returned to Earth… supposedly carrying full four-man crews. To all outward appearances, Russia and China were simply carrying out a series of short-duration exploration landings — with the aid of rovers and other scientific equipment delivered by separate cargo spacecraft.

For now, Beijing and Moscow claimed they were keeping more details of their “purely scientific program” secret because they didn’t want to provide data that could aid the United States in its greedy quest to “rape the virgin lunar soil for riches.” Feeble though that excuse was, a number of Western environmental groups and left-wing political parties seemed willing to believe it.

President Farrell and his advisers were deeply suspicious, Leonov knew. All available intelligence indicated they were scrambling to mount their own missions to lunar orbit. But they were starting too far behind. The months they’d wasted trying to uncover the secrets of his fictitious Firebird spaceplane program simply could not be made up.

In Earth Orbit

Several Days Later

Two hours and forty minutes after liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 37B, the Delta IV Heavy rocket’s powerful second-stage engine relit. Within seconds, as the booster accelerated, its attached payload began moving into a much higher, far more elliptical orbit.

Several minutes later, the RL-10B engine shut down on schedule. Bolts fired and slowly the Delta Heavy’s second stage fell away from the satellite it had just launched toward the Earth-Moon Lagrange-2 point. This Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) U.S. military communications satellite, the seventh in its series, had originally been intended as a replacement for the aging AEHF-1 in geostationary orbit high over the Galápagos Islands. Now it had been given a new purpose. As the satellite moved away from the earth at more than twenty thousand miles per hour, its twin solar panels unfurled in response to commands from ground controllers.

It had taken weeks of frantic work by Space Force civilian contractors to make the hardware and software alterations needed to fit AEHF-7 for service in deep space. Once it reached stable orbit around the distant Lagrange point, the satellite would act as a jam-resistant radio and data-link relay for any U.S. or allied spacecraft operating in lunar orbit. Routing signals through its powerful antennas would give both human crews and robotic spacecraft the ability to communicate with Earth in real time while swinging around the moon’s far side.

Thirty-One

Hangar Two, McLanahan Industrial Airport, Battle Mountain, Nevada

A Short Time Later