Eagle Station

“Perfectly clear,” Lavrentyev replied stoutly. “It will be done.”

U.S. Space Force Operations Center, Colorado

That Same Time

“Shit,” one of the Topaz mission controllers suddenly blurted out loud. The lines of data streaming across his computer screen had stopped dead in mid-byte. He swiveled toward the senior officer on duty in the ops center. “I just lost contact with the AEHF relay, ma’am!”

“Same thing here,” another officer reported from his station. “One second, we were receiving good data from the comsat itself and from the Topaz-M… and now, nothing.”

More voices rose from around the room: “No connection to SHF Downlink Array One or Two. They’re both gone.”

“Satellite Crosslinks One and Two are out, too. Everything just dropped off-line in mid-signal.”

“No joy with any of the dish antennas, ma’am. I can’t route a connection request through any of them.”

Brigadier General Jill Rosenthal kept her cool as the noise level increased. The petite, dark-haired officer stayed seated. “Settle down, people,” she ordered. “Let’s work this problem by the numbers. Start running diagnostic programs on your hardware and software.”

She rocked back to talk more privately to her deputy. “Get on the horn to the backup operations group over at Shriever AFB, Phil. See if they’re still in contact with AEHF-7. Let’s make sure this isn’t just a systems or computer malfunction on our end before we freak out.”

The colonel nodded and picked up a phone. “Shriever Ops Center, this is McMahon at Peterson. We need you to—” Interrupted, he listened for a few moments. His expression darkened. “Okay,” he said at last. “Keep trying. Call us back pronto if you get anything.”

Rosenthal glanced at him. “No dice?”

He shook his head. “They’ve lost contact with the satellite, too.”

“Well… that sucks,” she said meditatively. Then she straightened back up. “Okay, let’s see what we can do about this.” She began snapping out orders to the various sections of her mission control team — setting in motion different methods of regaining touch with the distant communications satellite, and through it, the Topaz-M radar satellite, which was currently out of sight somewhere on the other side of the moon.

For the next several minutes, the once-calm space operations room was a hive of focused activity. But one by one, their attempts to recontact the AEHF com relay orbiting L2 failed.

Stone-faced now, Rosenthal came up to the rear observation platform to report to the president, General Kelleher, and the other VIPs. Briefly, she recounted the efforts her team had made so far to restore their links to the communications satellite.

“Without any result?” Kelleher pressed.

“No, sir,” she admitted.

Martindale frowned. “Have you found anything that could explain what’s gone wrong with that spacecraft?”

“Nothing definitive,” Rosenthal said. “Although we have spotted one weird anomaly in the last megabytes of data we received from the satellite.”

Patrick’s jaw tightened. “What kind of anomaly?”

“The AEHF’s tracking and stabilization subsystems show what appears to be strong, unexplained motion perpendicular to its orbit… just prior to the loss of signal.”

“You’re saying it looks like something hit it?” President Farrell realized.

“Yes, sir,” Rosenthal said quietly.

“Some kind of space debris?” Kelleher asked. Comets streaking through the inner solar system sloughed off long trails of dust and tiny rocks. They were a known hazard for craft on deep-space missions. On its way back from Mars in 1967, NASA’s Mariner 4 probe had run headlong into one of those drifting dust clouds — taking repeated impacts that tore away insulation and even knocked the spacecraft itself askew.

“Possibly,” she said, sounding unconvinced. “But if so, it was a hell of a lot bigger chunk of rock than we’ve ever detected around that Lagrange point.”

Patrick turned to look at the operations center’s central display. It showed that they had a little over twenty minutes left before the Topaz-M surveillance satellite was expected to emerge from around the moon. Once that happened, they could expect to reacquire its signals and download the results of its first radar sweep across the far side.

But only if everything went according to plan. Which isn’t the way to bet, he thought bitterly. He swung back to Rosenthal. “You might want to alert Goldstone and Greenbank, General. Just as a precaution.”

She nodded her understanding. If they couldn’t regain contact with the Topaz-M as scheduled, radar images obtained by using those large antennas should give them a look at the satellite itself. “I’ll get on that right away.”

An hour later, a tight-lipped Brigadier General Rosenthal showed them the first images picked up close to where the Topaz-M should have reemerged around the curve of the moon. They revealed a small field of debris drifting in a slowly decaying orbit. Quick calculations showed that those scraps of torn and twisted metal would impact the lunar surface sometime over the next several days.