by Dale Brown
This time, the lander’s rocket motor kept firing. They could see the east rim of the Engel’gardt crater growing larger and larger in their windows. Seconds from landing, it was all they could see. They were coming in on top of a flattened peak rising higher than any other point along the rim wall. Only a few kilometers beyond this high point, the ground fell away, plunging steeply more than four thousand meters to the crater floor.
“Altitude one hundred meters. Down at ten meters per second. Twelve meters forward. Fuel at fifteen percent,” Lavrentyev intoned, keeping up a running commentary as the computer brought them in.
Tian kept his eyes fixed out the window, watching the ground coming up at them with what felt like astonishing speed. There were only a few small boulders visible, widely scattered across the rim plateau. Part of him desperately wanted to shut down the computer and bring the lander in under his own control. Self-discipline instilled by years of training enabled him to resist the temptation.
Outside, a cloud of moondust billowed up, obscuring his view.
“We’re at five meters. Zero relative forward velocity. Down to three meters. Two. One. Engine cutoff!” Lavrentyev snapped excitedly.
The rocket motor shut down and Chang’e-10 dropped the last few centimeters. The spacecraft rocked slightly and then came to rest on its four landing struts.
Tian breathed out. After sharing an exultant grin with the Russian, he opened a radio channel to the Magpie Bridge communications relay. “Beijing Flight Control, Moscow Control, Korolev Base here. Chang’e-Ten has landed.”
Twenty-Seven
Korolev Base, High up on the Eastern Rim of Engel’gardt Crater, the Moon
The Next Day
The long shadow cast by the Chang’e-10 lunar lander stretched across a gray moonscape of compacted, fine-grained dust, rocks, and pebbles. There were no other shadows. This was the highest point on the lunar surface, rising nearly two thousand meters higher than Earth’s Mount Everest. Of course, since the approach slopes were so much more gradual, the vistas were not as dramatic.
Bulky in his space suit, Colonel Tian Fan leaned over the wheeled lunar rover he had just successfully extracted from a storage bay in the lander’s lower descent stage. He pulled open a small control box located on the rover’s side and flipped a switch.
Inside the rover’s chassis, a small rod of radioactive plutonium-238 slid out of its protective graphite container and into a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, or RTG. Now active, the RTG converted the heat produced by radioactive decay into electricity. An indicator light glowed green, showing that power was being produced. Unlike batteries or solar panels, the RTG would produce electricity continuously—even during the coming two-week-long lunar night, when temperatures would plunge three hundred degrees Celsius.
Tian waited a few more seconds for the system to stabilize and then flipped a second switch. This one activated the rover’s computer. More lights glowed. Satisfied, he closed the control box and stepped back.
Moments later, the rover started up and moved off slowly across the lunar surface. Guided by its programming, it drove a couple of hundred meters away from Chang’e-10 and parked. Although it was approximately the same size as the rovers carried by America’s long-ago Apollo missions, this machine had a very different purpose.
Equipped with a raised blade at the front and a hopper in place of seats, the rover was designed to scrape up regolith—loose dirt, dust, and rocks—and then feed it into an automated furnace and chemical reaction unit built into the base of the lander. Over the next several weeks, remotely controlled by technicians back on Earth, the system would accumulate stores of hydrogen, oxygen, and water separated out of the regolith. Those vital life-support and fuel supplies would significantly reduce the amount of payload mass needed by future manned missions to this site.
Tian turned and moved off toward where Kirill Lavrentyev was working, gliding and hopping across the loose gray surface at a rapid clip. Their EVA suits, though still awkward to move in, were more flexible than those worn by America’s Apollo astronauts. “How’s it going?” he asked.
“The last beacon is set and operating,” the Russian cosmonaut reported, looking up. He backed away from the small radio antenna and transmitter he’d just finished anchoring in place.
“Excellent work,” Tian said. Setting up a network of six radio beacons across a stretch of the crater rim had been one of their primary tasks for this landing. Signals from those beacons would help guide China’s Mă Luó automated cargo landers to precise touchdowns during planned follow-on missions. “Then it’s time for us to prep for takeoff.”
“Twenty-four hours seems a very short time to spend here after so many months of training,” Lavrentyev said somberly. “Especially after so many decades.”
Tian knew what he meant. Both men were aware of the bittersweet irony involved in this mission. It had been more than half a century since anyone had walked on the moon. And while he and the Russian cosmonaut were only the thirteenth and fourteenth men in all of human history to do so, their achievement must remain a closely guarded secret for the time being. He laid a gloved hand on the other man’s shoulder. “Remember, Kirill, we’ll be back. And soon.”
Lavrentyev nodded.
Together, they turned and headed back to the waiting Chang’e lander.
Two hours later, Chang’e-10’s ascent engine fired. The upper half of the lander, separating from its descent stage, soared into space. It climbed fast along a rising arc that would intercept the Federation 2 spacecraft as it swung back around the moon’s far side. From his command pilot’s station, Tian monitored their progress. He glanced across the tiny cabin at Lavrentyev. “I show a good burn. Our trajectory looks perfect.”
The Russian studied his own readouts and nodded. “I concur.”
Quickly, Tian entered a series of orders on his display. “Ascent engine command override is off. Engine Arm is off.” Now that they were off the surface and on course to rendezvous with Federation 2, they no longer needed their powerful rocket motor. From now on, Chang’e’s smaller reaction control system thrusters would handle any necessary last-minute maneuvers.
Beside him, Lavrentyev moved on to his next task. “Standing by to deploy our camouflage stage.” He entered a command on his own MFD. “Deploying now.”
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
Originally built in the late nineteenth century to house the Departments of State, War, and the Navy, the seven-story Eisenhower Executive Office Building had long since outgrown its original tenants. Since it was located immediately adjacent to the White House, its offices were now occupied primarily by the Office of Management and Budget, the National Security Council, and other aides working directly for the president and his senior staff. The building’s ornate French Second Empire–style façade and its green slate and copper roof stood in stark contrast to the rest of Washington, D.C.’s federal buildings, which were either elegant neoclassical structures or ugly concrete monstrosities.
Apart from the vice president’s ceremonial office and other elegantly appointed chambers used for formal occasions—like the Indian Treaty Room, where the United Nations charter had been signed in 1945—most of the building’s more than five hundred rooms were assigned as ordinary office space. There were, however, a handful of larger conference rooms reserved for occasional interagency meetings.
Inside one of those rooms, Brad McLanahan and Nadia Rozek-McLanahan now sat side by side at a large oval table. Around them were more than two dozen men and women—all of them middle-ranked executives from NASA, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and an alphabet soup of other federal agencies. Officially known as the Sino-Russian Space Alliance Analysis Working Group, these people had been meeting daily to coordinate the federal government’s assessment of recent events in lunar orbit. At President Farrell’s insistence, Brad and Nadia, as representatives of Sky Masters and Scion, had been allowed to participate in this afternoon’s session.
But two hours into the meeting, Brad was beginning to think this would be more accurately labeled a “nonworking group.” Most of the officials crowding this room seemed to have been picked for their ability to speak eruditely and at length, without actually committing their agencies to any firm position. And while none of them were openly impolite, it was obvious that they saw him and Nadia as unwelcome outsiders shoehorned in by a president who didn’t fully appreciate how the permanent government was supposed to function.
Noting Nadia’s tight-lipped mouth, Brad knew she’d already given up on these people. She was probably right. This group of bureaucrats seemed determined to remain undecided. Still, he decided to try again to shake some kind of action plan loose. He leaned forward, wishing for the hundredth time that he could get up and pace around the room to burn off some energy. Sitting on his ass while other people droned on and on for hours had never been on his list of “things Brad McLanahan is good at.”
He held up his hand, interrupting someone from the CIA who was assuring everyone that her agency would keep them in the loop if any new intelligence materialized. That was a promise Brad was pretty sure he’d already heard the same woman make at least twice in the past two hours. “Excuse me?”
“Yes, Mr. McLanahan?” the Working Group’s chairman said, raising a finely sculpted eyebrow. Adrian Yates was an executive in NASA’s Office of International and Interagency Relations.
“Between Sky Masters and Scion and all of your organizations, we’ve already checked and rechecked every piece of data gathered since the first two Chinese Yuanzheng boosters headed for the moon,” Brad pointed out. “Going over and over what’s already known isn’t going to get us any further. It might be smarter to focus on aspects of this supposedly unmanned lunar mission that don’t make any real sense.”
Yates frowned. “Such as?”
“Well, for starters, why did the Russians and Chinese keep that Federation 2 command module in Earth orbit for more than twenty-four hours after its return from the moon?” Brad suggested.
The NASA executive shrugged. “I fail to see that as some sort of deep dark mystery, Mr. McLanahan,” he said. “I assume Moscow and Beijing were conducting additional systems tests on a brand-new spacecraft that had just completed a prolonged circumlunar flight. That would be sensible policy, after all.”
“Maybe so,” Brad agreed, not hiding his own skepticism. “But that delay also meant we didn’t have any satellites in position to observe the command module’s reentry. Or its landing on Russian territory. What if that was deliberate?”
Yates sighed. “Are you still suggesting the Sino-Russian Pilgrim 1 mission might have been manned?”
Brad nodded. “It’s a possibility.”
“Based on your personal involvement in regrettable past armed conflicts, I understand your ingrained habit of assuming the worst, Mr. McLanahan,” Yates said with a wry smile. “But you should remember that neither the Russians nor the Chinese are really ten-feet-tall supermen. Besides, even if there were cosmonauts and taikonauts aboard Federation 2, what does it matter? When you boil the Pilgrim 1 mission down to its essentials, all Moscow and Beijing have accomplished is a test of lunar orbit rendezvous and spacecraft systems. That’s nothing more than our Apollo 10 mission demonstrated, almost fifty-four years ago.”
Fed up, Nadia snorted. “And could your agency repeat that Apollo
10 flight today, Mr. Yates?” she asked acidly.
Somewhat disconcerted, the other man admitted, “Well, no. Until our new heavy-lift SLS rocket is certified ready for flight, we can’t—”
“Exactly,” Nadia said. “So, at a minimum, Russia and China have just shown that they can reach the moon and return safely—a capability we no longer possess. Nor should we assume that is all they have planned. Because Brad is right: there are anomalies we must explore further.” She used her tablet computer to pull up a sequence of images and then sent them to the conference room’s larger screen for everyone else to see. “For example, this odd cloud of debris observed during Pilgrim 1’s seventeenth orbit. What could it be?”
The pictures showed a swiftly dissipating cloud of radar reflective particles near the docked Federation 2 command module and Chang’e-10 lander as they circled back around from behind the moon. Obtaining those images had not been easy. The glare of reflected sunlight from the moon’s surface made it impossible for ordinary optical telescopes to see small objects in close lunar orbits. These pictures had been taken by shooting a powerful beam of microwaves toward the moon from NASA’s Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California. Tiny radar echoes bouncing back from lunar orbit were then detected by the world’s largest steerable radio telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia.
For a moment there was silence in the room. Then Yates chuckled. “Oh, come now, Mrs. McLanahan. You’re not seriously asking us to waste our people’s time by asking them to study a cloud of crystals from what was probably just a test of a waste dump system, are you?” His smile grew wider. “I don’t think anyone here really needs an in-depth intelligence analysis of simulated Russian or Chinese urine, do you?”
During the wave of laughter that followed the NASA bureaucrat’s quip, Nadia leaned close to Brad and muttered, “Ci ludzie są głupcami. These people are fools.”