Frontier

by Patrick Chiles

  Major Wu slewed Peng Fei around, swinging the bulky ship about until its nose was pointed in their direction of travel. With a quick pulse of thrusters, he stopped them with the distant speck of the Borman centered in the forward windows.

  The gray-white bulk of RQ39 loomed not far away, though Liu was much more enamored with the steadily approaching American ship. Exploration could wait; they first had to ensure their area of operations would be secure.

  Slowly growing as they drew closer, the Borman still appeared indistinct. Compared to Peng Fei’s bulk, he’d expected to clearly see the American ship’s dartlike profile clearly by now. That it was obscured concerned him—perhaps the damage was worse than he’d been led to believe?

  He flicked a thumb controller by his chair and fine-tuned their approach, tweaking their pitch angle until the ship was centered in the docking camera’s crosshairs. He zoomed in on the image until it became ragged with optical distortion. He backed off, but it remained indistinct. It was like looking at a toy encased in a snow globe. “Lieutenant Zhou, is that electronic noise?”

  “No sir,” Zhou said, confirming what his commander thought. “It appears to be debris from their tank explosion.”

  The cloud was following them in orbit, as these things tended to do with no atmosphere to disperse them. So they had not managed to even maneuver out of their own debris field?

  It was both irritating and satisfying. The Borman was still obscured behind its own wreckage, and now it was out of contact as well. No doubt the Americans had not wanted to reveal the extent of their damage, and he couldn’t blame them. He’d have done the same.

  With no communications and a cloud of shrapnel to negotiate, it would be far too dangerous to attempt docking. Liu had kept his own EVA crew on standby, a team of six marines.

  Liu pressed the intercom channel to their airlock node. “Captain Huang. Is your boarding party ready?”

  “Ready, sir. All team members have completed pre-breathing and suit integrity checks. Weapons have been inspected and secured to their MMUs.”

  “Very good. Instruct your marines they should expect to find two civilians aboard; our intel reports they are most likely confined to the medical bay, multipurpose module P-3. They must be protected at all costs.” He paused. “Even if it threatens your tactical advantage.” He did not question Hu’s professionalism, but he’d found young infantry officers could be overly aggressive.

  “As you command, Colonel.” Even over the intercom, Liu could hear the commando leader’s begrudging tone.

  “Ultimately it is they who have brought us here,” Liu reminded him. “They are your mission objective, Huang. You take care of them, I will take care of the Borman.”

  “Ten klicks,” Wylie reported from the pilot’s station. He was pressed up against a forward window with a handheld optical rangefinder. “They’re still hailing us, sir.”

  “As they should,” Poole said from the observation dome. “I wouldn’t want to come up on us in the blind.”

  “Pretty sure I don’t like them coming up on us at all, sir,” Garver said from behind him, in his EVA suit and pre-breathing through a mask. “She’s a big bastard, ain’t she?”

  Poole answered with a grunt as he studied the PRC ship through his binoculars, judging what he saw against the constantly changing intel estimates. It reminded him of a club: forward pressurized modules and structural supports formed the handle, its cluster of massive propellant tanks the head. A sextet of radiator panels protruded like spikes from the bulky drum of the gas-core fission engine on its tail, completing the spacecraft’s semblance of a blunt instrument.

  Form follows function, Poole thought. A blunt instrument was exactly right. The spooks had clearly misjudged the PRC’s true intentions—which was admittedly hard to do—but how had they missed that big cement-drum cluster of nuclear engines? It still glowed cherry red from its braking burn, casting a dull glow on the spherical tanks ahead of it.

  Evaluating the other guy’s capabilities was straightforward, guessing their intentions was a wholly different matter—that took a level of access and personal understanding that he doubted they possessed. One tended to superimpose one’s own cultural proclivities onto the enemy. This made it hard to determine what they might really be up to; conversely it made it hard for them to do the same. He recalled once meeting a PRC general who refused to believe that decades of American misadventures in the Middle East had not sprung from an intricately plotted conspiracy. He could not accept that it simply been a tragedy of errors, a series of bungled plans and missed opportunities instead of a sophisticated scheme hatched by forward-thinking leaders.

  Poole laughed to himself: Nobody in Washington was forward thinking, unless you counted the next election cycle. It was hard for Americans to grasp the intricacies of a regime that planned for timelines measured in centuries. Freewheeling, unpredictable Americans had been giving hostile military leaders fits for centuries. Poole was happy to be counted among them.

  It was hard to get inside of another person’s head, especially when they were often pursuing wildly different goals. It was not so hard to understand the purpose of the ship he was now looking at. As it had rotated about to face them after decelerating into a common orbit, he realized their commander couldn’t have planned it any better as a demonstration of force: After a few hours of watching their powerful gas-core fission engines on full display, he pirouetted his ship to face them, providing a slow-motion reveal of its full size and capability. No doubt much of its loadout was concealed, but what he could see was enough.

  He handed the binoculars to Garver. “What do you think, Chief?”

  Garver squinted into the eyepieces. “Like I said, Skipper—that thing’s a beast. Figure she masses at least two hundred metric tons with full tanks.” He adjusted the focus. “I count two forward missile racks, two lateral PDC turrets. Looks like that optical turret’s connected to some beefy power conduits . . . it’s gotta be a laser, sir. A telescope doesn’t need to be jacked into a big capacitor bank like that.”

  “See the sensor masts?” Poole asked. Two trusses covered with antenna booms and radar panels extended from opposite sides of the superstructure, just aft of the pressurized modules.

  “Phased-array radars, UHF and VHF antennas . . .” Garver’s voice trailed off. “And a few things I don’t recognize. What’re those geodesic clusters on the end, sir?”

  “Those disco-ball looking things?” Poole asked. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “They’re either shells protecting directional antennas, or the surface geometry’s the antenna itself. Lots of talk about them deploying quantum encryption, sir. Maybe that’s what we’re looking at.”

  Poole frowned. “If that’s the case, we don’t have a prayer of reading their mail.”

  “Hoping we don’t need to, sir,” Garver said. “I’d just as soon get our hands on their playbook.”

  “Me too. Time to get going, Chief,” Poole said, more casually than he felt.

  “Aye, sir.” Garver pushed away to float down through the command deck and into the forward node.

  Rosie and her team had likewise been pre-breathing from masks in the forward docking node. When they saw Garver emerge from the command deck and lock down the inner door, they knew it was finally time to put away their masks and lock down their visors. He watched as each spacer, without a word, switched over to their personal tanks and disconnected from the ship’s oxygen supply.

  “Report,” Garver said tersely as he backed into his maneuvering pack by the outer door. The others were already locked into their backpacks, making the airlock node even more crowded than usual. They had already begun to unconsciously choreograph their movements inside the compartment: If one person turned left, the person behind him moved right, keeping out of the way.

  “Suit checks complete. Outside is as clear as it’s going to get,” Rosie said. “We’re ready, Chief.”

  Garver locked down his MMU, lifted his
own carbine from a nearby weapons rack, and snapped it into a carrying plate on his chest pack. He looked each spacer in the eye one at a time, gauging their readiness for himself. In them he saw that unknowable mixture of tension, anticipation, and cold determination that he’d thought he would not see again. This was literally the last place he expected he’d ever have to prepare for a shipboard assault. Never say never, he thought to himself. He turned a dial to depressurize the airlock.

  Poole’s voice crackled over his radio earpiece. “Sentry team, comm check.”

  Garver let each spacer check in before doing so himself. “Borman Actual, this is Six.”

  “Copy, Six. You are go for EVA.”

  With one last look at his team, Garver opened the outer door. It fell open silently and the harsh, unfiltered light of the Sun flooded the compartment. He reached for the rim and pulled himself out into the void. He tapped his MMU controller and did a quick spin to check his thrusters and stability control before jetting off to the side, clearing the way for the rest of the team. Rosie was the last to emerge, and pulled the outer door shut behind her.

  Garver led the team away from the ship, concealing them among the haze of debris surrounding the Borman.

  At a young age in the mountains of Colorado, Marshall Hunter had learned a great deal about flying gliders from his father. He’d been unable to resist the urge to swoop along ridgelines, close enough to wave at hikers tackling the fourteeners. Flying so high yet so close to the ground had been the most exhilarating experience of his life until he’d learned to fly rocket planes.

  Now that he was doing a little bit of each, it was unnerving. Piloting a spacecraft precariously close to what amounted to a free-flying mountain was different than skimming the Rockies in a glider. Its surface filled the shuttle’s windows, almost in arm’s reach. Too small to orbit, he was instead flying alongside RQ39, constantly making small adjustments as its weak gravity perturbed their common orbit just enough to threaten them. It was “lumpy” to boot, with mass concentrations that exerted stronger pulls in some areas.

  His eyes kept darting back to the RCS gauges. He’d topped off from Borman’s tanks before departing but was having to expend more than he’d bargained for to keep formation with the asteroid. Moving farther out risked losing their cover, but it would save propellant. He hoped it would all be a moot point soon.

  “Can you see them yet?” Max Jiang asked. They’d been surprisingly quiet despite having done nothing but float around the shuttle’s small cabin for hours now.

  “We’re still below line of sight,” Marshall explained, glancing at the chronometer on his panel. “It’s not time for us to pop our heads up yet.” They had worked out a communication schedule before departure based on the Peng Fei’s ETA. Marshall would pull away from his hiding place just far enough to pick up any signals from Borman. If by radio, it meant Captain Poole was comfortable enough to talk in the open. If by light signals from the cupola, it meant something else that he preferred not to contemplate, which is why he did not expect to see his radio receivers come to life. “What frequency band did your CubeSats use?”

  “VHF,” Max said. “Very simple, adapted from aircraft radios.”

  Marshall frowned. These were spiking on the edge of the UHF band. “That’s what I thought,” he said. “I don’t understand where this could be coming from.”

  He risked pulling farther away from the surface, just enough to give him room to turn and follow the directional antenna. He pivoted the shuttle’s nose away from the surface, pointing it out into space. As the gravelly regolith moved out of view, a twinkle of light in the distance caught his eye. “What’s that?”

  Max and Jasmine floated up behind him, crowding against the other forward window. “Not one of our CubeSats,” she said. “It’s much too big.”

  “Is it a piece of debris?” Max wondered. “From one of our ships?”

  “Not if it’s emitting EM radiation,” Marshall said. He squinted and leaned forward, straining to see details. “I think it’s another spacecraft.”

  “That must be it!” Max exclaimed. “The one we told you about!”

  Marshall eyed him, less skeptically now. Maybe they hadn’t been hallucinating after all. “You might be right, Mr. Jiang. You say it was cruciform?”

  “Yes, almost like a dagger. It narrowed at the nose. Two big wings near the tail, the wide end.”

  “And you thought it was surveying your ship after the service module exploded?”

  Their eyes grew wide at the suspicion in his voice. “Might it be a scout of some kind?” Jasmine worried. “How could they have known to look for us here?”

  “Pretty sure I don’t have a clue,” Marshall said. “We’ve been radio silent since yesterday and it’s not like anybody had time to be looking for a ghost satellite. But there weren’t any EM emissions to tip us off either . . .” His voice trailed off as he floated back into his seat, debating what to do next.

  “Can it see us?”

  Marshall didn’t take his eyes off their mystery companion. “You know as much—scratch that, more—about that thing than I do.”

  “Then what do we do?” Max asked.

  Marshall had been asking himself that very question. He had to assume it was somehow associated with the Peng Fei. If it was some kind of picket, then leaving their position would surely give them away. They had to remain hidden. “We lay low. If we can see it, then it can see us.” He pulsed their thrusters, moving them back to the relative safety of the asteroid’s surface clutter.

  32

  Nick Lesko by nature was not an inquisitive individual, at least not beyond the scope of whatever he happened to be working on at the moment. This was not to say he was incurious, it was that his mind was active if narrowly focused. It was a survival instinct he’d developed over decades of performing sensitive work for sometimes dangerous individuals—it was never good to be the guy who knew too much.

  His recent isolation, in space and on the ground, had begun to change that. His need to be mentally occupied led him down paths he normally wouldn’t have followed, whether out of disinterest or self-preservation.

  Whether by necessity or accident, the control software they’d loaded on his laptop had provided a window into the full scope of the “project” he’d been hired for. And there was more, no doubt being controlled by someone else and partitioned from his piece of the pie. This he deduced from the news feeds he’d been following, searching for something to fill his mind besides the inane blather of daytime television.

  Put simply, the space between Earth and Moon was getting dicey. Not only were all sorts of commercial satellites going dark, there were rumors that at least one high-priority US spy sat was out of contact. Putting the cherry on top, the military craft that rescued him, the one that was supposed to protect all this stuff in orbit, was now out of the picture.

  So who profited from that? He wondered.

  What most grabbed his attention was something that felt more personal. Lunar mining shipments which had been predictably arriving in their oceanic drop zones in a remote area of the South Pacific called Point Nemo were all of sudden not showing up in their drop zones. Someone was hacking and intercepting them—how? It would have to be early in their journey home. He’d learned enough to know that a small push one way in the beginning can lead to dramatic course changes at the end.

  But it was what the news announcer had called that particular spot of ocean: the “spacecraft graveyard,” the single point on the globe most distant from any land. That was supposed to have been their recovery zone after reentry. There would have been a trawler waiting to pick them out of the ocean, well clear of any prying eyes that might be interested in them.

  A chill shot through him. Had it been intended to be more than just a spacecraft graveyard? He was supposed to eliminate his teammates with a carefully planned “accident” during recovery, but what if that itself had been a ruse? First rule of a conspiracy is to eliminate the low-level
conspirators. So how “low-level” was Nicholas Lesko if this heist was as big as he now thought? Was that even the right way to think about it?

  Disrupted lunar mining shipments, owned by the same billionaire couple who’d gone missing on their way to that crackpot flyby of Mars. And the American ship sent to look for them was now disabled itself, with a Chinese ship on its way to help.

  He returned to the map and the concentration of hijacked satellites. Besides the fact that his sponsors were making a killing off it, someone had just made themselves a nice little surveillance network by hijacking other people’s satellites—at least one of which had apparently belonged to the US military.

  He hadn’t given any thought to the regions their zombie sats were working in until now. South America and the Indian Ocean. Who gave a shit about either, really?

  About ten minutes of internet sleuthing later, he had a good idea, both of Chinese strategic interests in both regions and their use of front companies in industries like telecom and banking to leverage their presence, so to speak.

  Did that include holding companies run by casino operators in Macau? He decided it probably did. That explained the high-grade encryption and near-unlimited budget.

  If a foreign government was involved, then just calling it a heist was thinking too small. What would the military call it?

  An operation.

  Lesko felt himself breaking into a sweat. He shut down the encryption key and snapped the laptop shut.

  33

  Poole’s hand hovered over the radio as someone in precisely enunciated English continued calling for his attention, as had been happening for the last half hour. I should feel a lot happier to be hearing a human voice out here.

  He turned to Wylie in the command pilot’s seat next to him. “Think we should keep them waiting any longer?”