Frontier

by Patrick Chiles

  Poole pursed his lips. “So much for my acting career,” he muttered, and pressed the mic. “All the same, Colonel, they are also naturalized American citizens. We are ultimately responsible for their care and safe return to United States soil. We are prepared to bring aboard additional medical supplies.”

  Liu’s curt reply came immediately after the signal delay. “That will not be necessary, Captain. We can discuss particulars after rendezvous. Peng Fei out.”

  29

  “We have a predicament, ladies and gents,” Poole said to his small crew. At only half strength, their presence made the wardroom feel a lot more spacious than usual.

  It hadn’t escaped notice that the captain had pulled the compartment’s hatch closed behind him, keeping the all-hands meeting private and out of the Jiang’s hearing. He understood the need for secrecy, but they perhaps stood to lose more than anyone here. Marshall wondered if any of them would see the inside of this ship again after boarding the approaching Peng Fei. He was not concerned about their fate—there were no active hostilities between the US and the PRC, after all—but the Jiangs had legitimate reasons to fear them. The Chinese communists had shown themselves to not being above detaining troublesome expatriates when they were outside of their adopted country’s jurisdiction.

  “The PRC’s roaming battlewagon will be rendezvousing with us in less than thirty-six hours. You all know we have enough propellant left for a Hohmann transfer to Earth, but it’s a long trip and there’s simply not enough food for all of us. We could stretch it with a skeleton crew; myself and maybe three others, assuming we use Prospector’s remaining stores.”

  Rosie raised a hand. “Sir, pardon my stupid question—so the rest of us would have to ride home on their spacecraft?”

  “Affirmative.”

  She crossed her arms. “I have a hard time getting behind that idea, sir. Breaking up the crew is a bad idea.”

  “Abandoning ship could be a worse idea, Rosie,” he said. “Even if we hand it off to ground to bring home.”

  “Begging your pardon again, sir, but would this calculus change if we were talking about a friendly vessel?”

  Poole’s eyes narrowed. “Of course it would. I don’t trust them any further than I can spit. I would rather we all go on minimal rations and fly home together than split us up and see half of you stuck on a PRC vessel.” He looked to Marshall, who had been given responsibility for their passengers.

  “There’s another wrinkle to this,” Marshall began explaining. “The Jiangs. We can’t put them on survival rats for that long.”

  “But they want to,” Rosie interrupted, out of character. “They know the risks, sir.”

  “You need to think clearly, Petty Officer Rosado,” Chief Garver said, his narrowed eyes and blunt tone checking her. “This isn’t just an ethical question, there’s a practical matter. I’ve inventoried Prospector’s stores and there simply isn’t enough to go around, even counting their reserves. When Mr. Hunter says ‘we can’t,’ he means it.”

  “And leaving them on a PRC vessel, beyond our influence, is tantamount to leaving them on that asteroid,” Marshall finished, perhaps too dramatically but it accurately reflected his feelings. He noted Poole’s eyebrows arch at his hyperbole, but he didn’t correct him—which meant the skipper agreed. He drew in a breath. “I will volunteer to stay with them, sir.”

  “As I expected,” Poole said. “I’ll consider your offer if it comes to that. But I brought you all here because I want you thinking about alternatives.” He planted his hands on his hips and drew his breath, ready to take a leap with them. “I don’t believe in coincidence, and I don’t think their hands are clean. But we are also under orders to accept whatever assistance is provided as a show of good faith and maintaining friendly relations.”

  He eyed the group. “Good. I see you all think that’s a load of horseshit too.” He swiped at the monitor in the bulkhead and pulled up long-range photos of the Peng Fei. “We need either more propellant or more rations. They have both. Question is, how do we avail ourselves of it?”

  “Drive-plume spectrum confirmed they’re burning methane, sir,” Garver pointed out. “Carbon buildup from that stuff’ll trash our reactors.”

  “Over time, yes,” Poole acknowledged. “But we don’t have the resources to crack it and extract hydrogen in the quantities we need. Regardless, we don’t have common nozzle fittings and tank one doesn’t have enough volume, even if we could transfer.”

  “But we do have common docking rings,” Marshall said. “Could we use them as a booster?” He pointed at the Peng Fei’s pair of enormous spherical propellant tanks. “It’s a good bet they’d have the delta-v capability.”

  “That’s my thinking,” Poole said. “If we mate at both vehicles’ forward nodes so we’re aligned with their thrust axis, it could handle the load.”

  “We probably won’t be able to use that ring ever again,” Garver said. “We’ll reach its lifetime load limit after the first push.”

  “Small potatoes, if it gets us home together,” Poole said. “This ship’s going to need work regardless.”

  “So how do we sell this to Liu? He didn’t seem very accommodating.”

  Poole tugged at his chin. “That’s the trick, isn’t it? We still don’t know his intentions, so we have to surmise how he benefits from this situation.”

  “We’re out of the fight, before the fight even got started,” Marshall said. “Before we even knew the PRC had this kind of capability.” He tapped on the fuzzy digital image of Peng Fei leaving L1 under power, in a blaze of blue plasma. “We can deduce an awful lot about their performance from these images and their trajectory here: mass, specific impulse, propellant volume. This thing could easily cover territory beyond Mars, and quickly. Six months round trip to the asteroid belt.”

  “I’m more interested in all that hardware hanging off of it,” Wylie said. “Those aren’t fueling booms or sensor masts.”

  Poole nodded. “You’re right. Their sensor suite’s distributed all across the vehicle. Smart design but complicated in a spacecraft—you can’t just upgrade it by berthing a new module, like ours. But you also can’t take it out all at once.”

  “Like ours.”

  “Precisely. Liu’s got eyes and ears all over this thing. And the rest of that hardware is just what it looks like: Missile mounts, point-defense guns, and an optical turret which I’m guessing is not a camera.”

  “Jeebus,” Rosie said. “Did they forget the rail gun?”

  “Not for lack of trying,” Poole said. “Those things have to store a lot of energy to discharge at once, even more than this laser turret. With the problems their Navy’s had deploying seagoing rail guns, I’m not surprised. Too much mass and trouble.”

  “It doesn’t look as if mass is much of a problem for them, sir.”

  Poole studied the images and overlaid a 3-D wire-frame diagram that represented the Defense Intelligence Agency’s best guess. “You’re right. I suppose we should count ourselves lucky they haven’t figured out warp drive yet.” He scrolled down a table of equipment and capability estimates along the side of the screen. “They put this together over three years after at least a dozen Long March 10 launches. That nuclear lightbulb engine’s a beast, too. They can move a hell of a lot of mass around the inner solar system with this setup.”

  “You believe they can boost us on our way, sir?”

  “With delta-v to spare,” Poole said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t even propose it. I’m not interested in commandeering anyone’s vehicles, and I’m sure as hell not letting them do the same to ours. I’m going to propose this as a mutually agreeable solution.”

  Rosie’s face twisted in doubt. “What if he doesn’t find it ‘mutually agreeable,’ sir?”

  “We’re going to test the waters gently. And if he doesn’t like it, then we do something less than gently.” Pooled glanced in Marshall’s direction. “That’s where you come in.”

  “Not sure what we
can do, sir,” Rosie said. “I’m a spacer, not a tactician.”

  “Good spacers are exactly the kind of people we’re going to need, Petty Officer Rosado.” He jerked his head aft, toward the medical module. “Along with people who speak fluent Mandarin Chinese.”

  “Retrofire initiated,” Wu reported, though Liu did not need to hear his words to know. Peng Fei shuddered from the full force of its engines, a cluster of seven transparent quartz reaction chambers, each containing the nuclear inferno of a reaction that flashed the ship’s methane propellant into plasma and channeled it through nozzles at the base of each chamber. The engine module itself resembled nothing so much as a cluster of incandescent torches clustered inside of a cement mixer.

  With the fission reaction contained inside of its quartz chambers, the exhaust itself was not radioactive though it was fiercely energetic. Now turned about to point its engines at its destination, the big ship rode atop a fireball that blocked its view ahead. Mathematics drove them now, and they were confident they would decelerate to arrive at the precise point at the prescribed time. It was the beauty of orbital mechanics: One could navigate around the solar system with nothing but a good watch and a precise star reference.

  It did serve to blind much of their sensor suite, however.

  Marshall was on watch in the cupola, fighting sleep to keep his eyes trained on the point in space where they knew Peng Fei would have to appear. The sudden appearance of what for all the world looked like a new star in the sky was startling, even though he’d done the calculations to determine when and where to look for it. He knew it was less of the sight itself than the realization of they’re here.

  Marshall tapped out a quick, predetermined alert message to Poole. Within seconds, a shrill alarm blasted throughout the ship followed by his voice over the intercom. “General quarters, general quarters, all hands to action stations. This is not a drill.”

  Already in his EVA suit, Marshall flew out of the dome and down into the forward node, through the connecting tunnel and back into the Specter shuttle where the Jiangs waited patiently in fresh launch-and-entry suits recovered from Prospector. Not meant for spacewalks, the L&E suits would still protect them from vacuum and temperature swings. And they were in much better condition than the spacesuits the couple had survived in—Marshall doubted he could ever get them back into those things short of the threat of certain death. As it was, he felt guilty just flying into the shuttle, ordering “Visors down” as he grabbed his helmet from a storage rack and made one last check of the M55A2 space-rated carbine in its cradle beneath them: magazine loaded, chamber empty for safety. His freefall weapons quals had been a long time ago, and he tried not to think about what using it for real might be like.

  As he strapped himself into the command pilot’s seat for the first time, he looked back to see them both reluctantly locking down their faceplates. After their ordeal he desperately wished they could have left them up, but the threat of getting holed with what they were about to try was too great. Hell of a way to do my first solo, he thought.

  With the shuttle already partially powered up, finishing the job had consisted of booting up the guidance platform and warming up the thrusters. “Specter is go,” he called over the ship-to-ship frequency.

  Garver answered him. “Copy that Specter, CO says you’re cleared to undock.”

  “On our way,” Marshall said. “Happy hunting, Chief.”

  Poole answered this time. “Just keep them out of harm’s way, Hunter. We’ll need them when this is over.”

  Marshall gave the mic two rapid clicks, signaling that he acknowledged his CO and that they were about to go silent. He made certain his radio transceiver was muted but the shuttle’s intercom was still on. He turned to check that the Jiangs were still strapped safely in their seats. “Okay, folks, we’re getting underway.”

  There was a muffled clattering as latches opened behind them, releasing the spring-loaded docking ring and pushing them away gently. He watched the Borman recede slowly behind them through a rear-view camera. Two quick flashes of light from the cupola signaled him that Poole had cleared them to maneuver. He pulsed thrusters and spun them about to face the ship as they slowly drifted away, back into the shadow of RQ39. The object that had sheltered them for so long would become their safe harbor in the coming hours.

  Information coming into Fleet Ops had been scarce enough—when the Specter shuttle undocked and took its directional antenna with it, thus breaking its relay with the Borman, the panic this threw its ground controllers into was palpable from the drone stations on the opposite end of the darkened amphitheater. Roberta watched with interest as figures, silhouetted against their consoles, began frantically dancing about each other. One trotted off to a side office and was followed back out by a crop of fresh faces, all of them awkwardly navigating between the rows of chairs and control consoles.

  “That’s the detachment from Borman,” Ivey pointed out. “They’ve been parked in here until their ride comes back in a few weeks.”

  She studied them. “Know anybody?”

  “Not a one,” Ivey said, then eyed her suspiciously. “What are you thinking, Roboto?”

  “Something’s up,” she pointed out quietly, not wanting to wear her curiosity on her sleeve. She watched as Ivey scrolled through the Ops internal message board. It took him a few seconds longer than normal, a lag which she attributed to the sudden chaos over in Fleet Ops.

  “Borman just went dark again,” Ivey said. “They lost the whole stack this time, including the shuttle. No voice or data, like they just turned out the lights.”

  Roberta looked up at the tracking display on one of the big wall monitors. “That PRC ship’s about to rendezvous. Bad time to lose comms.”

  Ivey followed her gaze, building a mental image of the tactical situation out at RQ39. Peng Fei was no doubt unaware, probably blind as a bat while in the middle of its braking burn. “Depends on your definition of bad timing.”

  At Ivey’s insistence, he performed introductions as the senior of the two. “Excuse me, Commander?”

  Wicklund turned slowly. Like the others she’d seen come down from duty in orbit, his movements were reserved, tentative, reacquiring the habits and reflexes of living in gravity. The man’s face had the tan, weathered look of someone who had spent a great deal of time squinting into direct sunlight, like a pilot or spacecraft operator. His movements might have been slow, but his eyes were impatient as he regarded them both. “Yes, Lieutenant?”

  “Begging your pardon, sir, but I understand you were on the Borman. We operate the X-37s and spend a lot of time watching what other satellites are up to.”

  “I would imagine you do,” Wicklund said. “X-37’s an impressive bird. But the more freedom of movement you have in orbit, the more you do have to pay attention to other equipment. Half our job up there is to keep the lanes clear.”

  Roberta kept her hands clasped behind her back, clenching and reclenching her fists to keep from bouncing out of her boots. Ivey placed a hand on her shoulder. “Ensign McCall here is especially good at that, sir. I’ve found she’s got a real talent for pattern recognition.”

  “Is that right?” Wicklund asked, it being obvious this pair had some kind of agenda. He studied her for an uncomfortably long time before engaging. “I’m guessing there are some patterns you want me to recognize.” He jerked his head toward the tactical display on the big wall monitors. “You both realize things are starting to get dicey up there?”

  Ivey surreptitiously kicked Roberta’s heel to spur her on. She handed Wicklund a tablet with preselected slides. “Yes sir, and I believe you’ll find this relevant. This is a graphic depiction of all the satellite failures in geosynchronous orbit over the last two weeks.”

  Wicklund swiped through the graphs. “I’m aware it’s a real mess up there. That flare roasted a lot of birds. What’s your point?”

  “Or it covered up a lot that were about to get neutralized anyway. Sir.”

>   He looked up. “How so, Ensign?”

  Roberta hoped the blush she felt wasn’t showing. “The sats that went dark were clustered around two bands of longitude, 60 west and 100 east. In the beginning it looked like random distribution, but over time . . .”

  Wicklund scrolled ahead. By the end, his eyebrows lifted a millimeter. “Not quite a bell curve, is it?”

  “No sir,” she agreed. “I think they’ve all been either hacked or whacked. But I don’t know how.”

  He glanced over at Ivey. “You agree with her assessment, Lieutenant?”

  “I do, sir. We’ve run this by the S-2 and the S-3—”

  Wicklund held up a hand, stopping him. “But you couldn’t sell this to your own chain of command, and now you’re bringing this to me . . . why?”

  “Their hands are full dealing with the Borman and that Chinese spacecraft. We haven’t been able to get any traction with this, sir. There’s something shifty going on up there, it’s probably related to what’s happening out at RQ39, and I think the civilian you rescued might be involved.”

  A look of scorn crossed Wicklund’s face. “In that, you may be right. Lesko’s a weaselly little shit; I’ve had my eye on him ever since we took him aboard. And you’re definitely right about task saturation up at the decision-making levels, but they can’t go chasing conspiracy theories while they’re busy plugging leaks in the dike. They need hard evidence.”

  “Has anyone interrogated this Lesko character, sir?” Roberta asked.

  “No,” Wicklund sighed. “We were able to place him in the isolation ward for radiation exposure, at least that keeps him where we can find him until somebody decides to pay attention.” He laughed to himself. “Word is he’s going stir crazy from lack of connectivity.”

  “How’s that, sir?”

  “He’s in nuclear medicine, probably the most heavily shielded floor of the hospital.” He studied Roberta for a moment. “I’m guessing you’re a classmate of Hunter’s?”