Dark Side of the Moon

by Alan Jacobson

  “No,” Uzi said. “Hold it.”

  “Canceling the alarm,” DeSantos said. He hit a switch on his panel and the cacophony immediately ceased.

  “Too late,” Carson said as he tapped at his screen. “But I think that burn—I think that we’re back … um, wait.”

  “Did it work or not?” DeSantos said.

  “Not sure. Stand by.”

  “SITREP,” Maddox said, his voice uncharacteristically tense. “I’m not seeing what you’re seeing.”

  “Uzi,” DeSantos said, “you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  Uzi turned to Carson. “Digger, you sure of your readings? This could be more false data. Malware.”

  “I … I don’t know. A little help here, CAPCOM.”

  “I’m showing you’re still on orbit, descending to twelve thousand feet now.”

  “Descending—?” Carson slammed a fist into his panel. “None of this is making sense. I—I can’t trust what I’m seeing.”

  “CAPCOM,” Stroud said, “can you talk us through this? Looks like we’ve got more problems with avionics.”

  There was a moment of silence, then Maddox said matter-of-factly, “Roger that. Less than ideal, but sounds like we’ve got no choice. Switch to manual. Ignore your instrument panels.”

  “Switch to manual and ignore the computer?” Stroud would have come out of his seat had he not been strapped down. “How the hell can we fly this thing—and land safely—without instrumentation?”

  “They’ll just talk us through it,” DeSantos said.

  “Here’s the thing,” Maddox said. “There’s a 1.3 second delay in comms. Not real noticeable in regular conversation, but if you’re relying on us to fly, not sure how that’ll work. Soon as your instruments sense an attitude or speed change, that signal will get beamed to us and we’ve gotta send a response back to you. That’s a three second lag. That’s huge.”

  “No choice,” Stroud said. “Give it your best shot.”

  “Roger that, Raptor. Get ready to shut down the engine. The twelve minute burn is just about done. We’re gonna try to time this right, but we’re winging it a bit more than usual.”

  Uzi had to give the guy credit: he maintained a sense of humor when things got tense.

  The loud growl of the engine caused a slight but noticeable vibration in the landing craft.

  “Ready to execute per your instructions,” Stroud said.

  “Terminate the burn on my mark … and … mark.”

  “Roger. Burn terminated.”

  “Well, what do you know,” Maddox said. “Looking good.”

  Uzi let out an audible sigh of relief.

  “You’re coming up on seven thousand feet. Pitch upright so the rocket will be firing perpendicular to the surface.”

  “Copy.” Carson followed Maddox’s directions and the Raptor lowered like a roughly vibrating elevator on its way to the ground floor. “Thirty-one feet per second, going through five hundred,” Carson said. “Twenty-five feet per second, through four hundred.”

  “A little high. Correct it.”

  “Corrected,” Carson said.

  “You’re passing the edge of Sherlock,” he said, referring to one of their landmarks. “The Camelot crater should be ahead.”

  “Roger,” Stroud said. “I see it. And Trident’s on the left, Lewis and Clark on the right.”

  “Just don’t pass Camelot. Move toward the target.”

  “Read you loud and clear. No worries, CAPCOM.” Stroud tapped away at his screen. “Passing over what looks like the Chinese craft. Yep, make that an affirmative. The Chang’e 5.”

  A moment later, Uzi leaned forward in his seat. “I see Camelot.”

  “Nine feet per second,” Carson said, “down at two hundred. Going down at five. Cut the H-dot. Fuel is—” Carson cursed under his breath but everyone heard it over the radio. “We’ve got a problem.”

  Stroud leaned closer to his panel. “Fuel’s critically low. Five seconds left. Get us down, Digger—quick!”

  “Four,” Uzi said. “Three seconds. Two. One.”

  “Ten feet,” Carson said.

  But the engines cut out abruptly and they slammed into the surface, the shock absorbers on the struts buffering much of the impact. Everything shook and rattled … but at least they had struck the dirt squarely and had not tipped over onto their side.

  Everything was deafeningly quiet. The loud engine rumble was gone, the vibration stilled. The radio was silent.

  Uzi leaned back in his seat. “Raptor has landed.”

  Maddox laughed nervously. “Welcome to the Moon. Bit of a rough landing, but you made it. Congratulations, gentlemen.”

  45

  Virginia Presbyterian Hospital

  The nurse recorded Vail’s vitals then shook her head. “You were lucky.”

  “How’s my friend? She okay?”

  “Can’t discuss another patient with you, but generally speaking, yes, she’s fine. She said she’ll be in to check on you in a few minutes. She had a call to make.”

  As the woman left the emergency room cubicle, Tim Meadows walked in.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “That’s a great way to show your gratitude to the guy who saved your life.”

  Vail drew her chin back. “Come again?”

  “I’d like to, but that would imply I came the first time.”

  Vail looked at him.

  “Okay, clearly you’re not in the joking mood. So I was on the phone with you when you lost control of your car. And I’m—”

  “I didn’t lose control.”

  “And I’m the one who called the ambulance and pinpointed your location using your open cell signal. So, you’re welcome.”

  “Thank you. But I must’ve missed something. How did you save my life? I broke my arm but I think the airbags saved my life.”

  Meadows shook his head. “Shoulda known you’d be ungrateful.”

  A physician entered, his white lab coat displaying a blue embroidered script that read, “Gerald Farber, MD.” “How’s my patient doing?”

  “Meet the man who saved my life,” Vail said, gesturing with her chin.

  “Ah. Gerald Farber.” He shook Meadows’s hand. “Friend?”

  “Colleague. I think I’m a friend, but sometimes I’m honestly not sure.”

  “Tim …” Vail closed her eyes.

  “Right.” Farber looked from Vail to Meadows and back. “I think I’ll stay out of that one. Ms. Vail, the orthopedist will be here in a few minutes to set that fracture. I’m going to write you a script for Ibuprofen. I don’t think you’ll need anything stronger. You have any questions?”

  “Nope. I’m good. Well, broken arm and a totaled car aside.”

  Farber gave her a chuckle and walked out.

  “So let me tell you what I think happened,” Meadows said.

  “Is this as a friend or a colleague?”

  “Given what happened,” Meadows said, ignoring her, “I believe your car was hacked.”

  “You’re kidding. Couldn’t it just have been a catastrophic failure of the … I don’t know, of the—”

  “Of the brakes and the steering—simultaneously? No, my dear. Your car is a high-tech computer, with all its separate systems now interconnected and run by onboard computers—and complex operating systems bulging with one hundred to two hundred million lines of code. Add internet connectivity, infotainment entertainment systems, Bluetooth, and real-time monitoring like OnStar, and you’ve got a problem waiting to be exploited. Actually, no one’s waiting. It’s already happened. A lot of car manufacturers are way-y-y behind the curve. And the hackers have been warning them about it. They’ve breached core systems—entertainment systems, air bags, brakes, steering. Including, apparently, yours.”

&nbs
p; Vail spaced out for a moment: the mention of operating systems, lines of computer code, and hacking brought her back to her conversation with Lansford. Is he behind this? Impossible—he’s still in custody. But Kerwin. Shit!

  “You okay?” Meadows asked.

  “Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. What you’re saying makes sense.”

  “You admit that?”

  “Tim, I never ignore what you tell me. It just seems that way.”

  “Thanks … I think.”

  “Okay, I’ll run with this, Tim. Nice work.”

  “So much praise at one time,” Meadows said as he parted the curtain and walked out. “Not sure I can handle it …”

  46

  Taurus-Littrow Valley

  The Moon

  Carson and Uzi were the first to debark from the Raptor. They entered the airlock, donned their white EVA pressure suits, and then opened the door to the lunar “atmosphere.”

  Carson descended the twelve-step ladder first and unceremoniously jumped down onto the surface, his boots making noticeable impressions in the fine dirt.

  Uzi followed, but paused at the top of the lander to take in the view. It was at once spectacular, Twilight Zone-spooky, and, well, otherworldly. Off to his right, maybe a football field away, stood the Apollo 17 descent stage and to his left the abandoned lunar rover. This place is like a museum.

  Uzi turned and headed down to meet Carson, who was on his way to examine the engines. Uzi had not experienced any claustrophobia and was getting used to being wrapped up tightly in the pressure suit. Moving in one-sixth gravity was an odd sensation, however. He had to hop, sometimes skip and lift his legs in odd ways to get around—while keeping his balance. The simulator had helped give him a sense of what to expect, but it was nevertheless different from being tethered to a crane in a controlled environment.

  Unlike the Apollo missions, there would be no ceremonial driving of the American flag into the soil. The Raptor did not even have a flag decal plastered on its side—it had been removed in keeping with the covert nature of the op. However, because only a limited number of nations were capable of sending them to do what they had just done, there would be little doubt regarding who owned this spacecraft.

  “Uh … shit.”

  It was Carson’s voice.

  “What’s up, Digger?” Stroud asked.

  “Fuel tank’s way down.”

  “We know,” Stroud said. “We fell the last ten f—”

  “No, not the descent engine. We’ve only got about five thousand pounds in the ascent stage engine. It’s half empty.”

  “Half empty? As in—”

  “As in we’ve got no way to get off this rock once we’ve completed the mission.”

  Because of the weight issue, a rocket engine carried very little extra fuel than needed—leaving almost no margin for error.

  Uzi sidled over to Carson. “How can that be?”

  “Maybe it’s a false reading,” Stroud said. “Check out the thruster nozzles. I’ll look over the computer system, run a diagnostic. CAPCOM, you getting this?”

  “We are,” Maddox said. “Telemetry is not showing what you’re seeing. I’m conferring with our team. Stand by.”

  A moment later, Carson gestured Uzi closer. He was standing beneath the bottom of the lander, to the left of the ascent engine cone. “Everything looks intact. No evidence of a leak. But see that?”

  “There’s a residue on the edges of the ejection valve. I obviously can’t take off my helmet to sniff it, but I’m betting it’s fu—”

  “It’s fuel, all right,” Carson said. “We apparently jettisoned our fuel on descent.”

  “Why would we do that?” DeSantos asked. “It’s suicide.”

  “That’s the thing,” Uzi said. “We wouldn’t have done that, not knowingly. Opening the ascent valve on descent is—well, it’s just not done. An alarm should’ve sounded and it didn’t. More malware.” Uzi looked up at the fuel tank, directly above his head. “Whoever screwed around with the avionics didn’t want us getting off the surface, if we actually managed to land.”

  “Their failsafe,” DeSantos said. “In case we survived all the other malware-induced glitches, this one was designed to strand us.”

  “Right,” Uzi said. “We weren’t seeing the correct readings, so when we thought we were doing X, we were really doing Y. We actually caused a problem that didn’t exist—even though we were made to believe it did. If we look at what’s happened since liftoff, that’s been their plan all along. Much easier to dupe us into doing something stupid by sabotaging the operating system than sabotaging hardware like engines or fuel tanks.”

  “Even though we recovered,” Carson said, “I think that when I fired the steering thrusters, I jettisoned half the ascent engine fuel. So I thought I was stabilizing the Raptor but what I was actually doing was dumping our critical fuel supply.”

  “Only bright spot,” Stroud said, “is that Digger’s exceptional flight skills saved us. Most other astronauts probably would’ve crashed this thing.”

  “Little consolation,” Carson said. “Unless we find a way to blast off with half the fuel we need to rendezvous with Patriot, I only delayed our deaths by three days. And since there’s no gas station on the Moon, we’ve got a big problem.”

  “You made it possible for us to try to complete the important part of the mission. We’ll worry about getting off this rock later.”

  “Boychick,” DeSantos said. “Malware? How?”

  Uzi sighed. “It probably reinstalled itself.”

  “But you checked everything out.”

  “First, I’m not a cryptographer. Malware keeps getting more sophisticated. If you don’t keep up on this shit daily, you miss new trends and concepts. So I can hack and put up a good defense against most kinds of attacks, but not something this sophisticated, in a matter of hours. Second, the person who did this is very, very good. My best guess is that this is beyond a single individual’s scope.”

  “Meaning?” DeSantos asked.

  “A well-funded army of people. Possibly even a state sponsor.”

  “What states have this capability?” Carson asked.

  “Iran has upped their game in recent years—they’ve attacked the highest levels of the US government—successfully. Russia, obviously, and China, also obviously. Oh, and North Korea, maybe. But both China and Russia are infiltrating our government networks on a daily basis. That’s not a secret. And it’s also not a secret that China’s got a lander a couple of miles from here and the Russians are on the way.”

  “How sure are you of this?” Stroud asked. “The level of sophistication.”

  Uzi thought a moment. “If it was done by a development team, and I think that’s likely, then they coded it so it can be modified and recompiled. I read something about this in the materials Eisenbach gave me on the tablet. It was just a mention in a footnote, but we apparently do this kind of coding on purpose, on our planetary probes. These people made a binary injection. I patched around it—which was not easy—but I’m guessing they inserted a piece of code to monitor that area of code, so it self-repaired—basically, it repatched itself. It activated another, similar piece of malware to restore the attack’s functionality. The fix that I thought I made with the patch worked initially, but in reality the attack was relaunched later by another piece of malware.”

  “I hate this shit,” DeSantos said. “Technology sucks.”

  “Technology just put four people on the Moon,” Carson said. “It’s bad guys who pervert technology that suck.”

  “So what are we looking at here?” Stroud asked.

  Uzi turned around and faced the desolate lunar surface. “Best I can say right here, with what we’ve got, is that it was a sophisticated attack. Likely by an organized group. State sponsored or not, I can’t say. We’d need a forensic examination, more th
an I can do here—or have time to do here. That transmit chip will probably give us some clues.”

  Carson moved away from the engine. “Assuming we make it home.”

  “So now what the hell do we do?” DeSantos said.

  “First things first,” Stroud said. “We have a mission to carry out. CAPCOM, how long till the Russians arrive?”

  “Eleven hours.”

  “That’s it?” DeSantos asked.

  “That’s it.”

  “Then we have to rethink our mission,” Uzi said. “And we have to do it fast.”

  47

  Virginia Presbyterian Hospital

  Alex Rusakov was fine following the accident—except for a minor hairline fracture of her left index finger, which was tandem taped to the adjacent digit.

  When Rusakov joined Vail, Vail’s arm was in a removable air splint and a sling was wrapped around her neck.

  “Sticks and stones—and car accidents—can break our bones,” Vail said, “but names … guess that doesn’t really apply. They just broke our bones.”

  “You know that’s a Russian saying. The literal, non-­Americanized version is, ‘The scolding won’t hang on one’s collar.’”

  “I’m familiar with it. No offense, but the American version is catchier.”

  Rusakov pushed through the door and they emerged by the hospital’s front entrance. “Well, I’m glad we came out of it with only a couple of broken bones. Could’ve been much worse.”

  “Yeah, as in we could be in the process of being laid to rest about now, six feet underground. When I find out who did this to us, I’m gonna rip him or her a new one.”

  “Only if you get there first.”

  Vail grinned. She could grow to like Rusakov.

  “Knox is sending a car. He got us an old GMC SUV with very few computer chips and no internet connectivity.”

  “Closing the barn doors after the horses escape. Government Standard Operating Procedure 101.”

  They arrived at the industrial park twenty minutes later and entered to find the brain trust gathered in the conference room. The place had been cleaned up and workers were replacing the door and surrounding masonry.