Frontier

by Patrick Chiles

  “Probably not, sir. They might think us rude.” He was also tired of hearing the same phrase ceaselessly repeated over their radios, though he had to admire the discipline behind it.

  “We can’t have that, now can we?” Poole selected the shorter-range UHF and depressed the voice-activated mic switch. “PRCS Peng Fei, this is USS Borman. Nice to see you. We read you five by five. How copy?”

  Whoever was on the radio sounded remarkably unaffected by finally having his calls answered. “Good day, Borman. We receive you loud and clear. Please stand by.”

  That meant they were putting the boss on the freq. The precise-enunciation guy was followed by someone whose English seemed much more seasoned, comfortable but not casual. “This is Colonel Liu Wang Shu of the People’s Liberation Aerospace Force. With whom am I speaking?”

  Poole felt a momentary tang of regret that he hadn’t devoted more time to learning their language himself, though he might have if his time in uniform hadn’t been interrupted for so long. Too bad these weren’t Russians, he thought. He could’ve spoken the language and might have been a lot less suspicious of them. “Greetings, Colonel . . . Liu or Shu, you said?” he asked, knowing the answer.

  “Liu,” he answered. “Again, with whom am I speaking?”

  Was there a hint of irritation there? Poole wondered. Every tell was helpful, though it could be hard to discern over the radio. Liu might be playing with him as well; Poole expected it in fact. “Colonel Liu, this is Captain Simon Poole, commanding officer of the Borman.”

  “Greetings, Captain Poole,” Liu replied. None of that “Captain Simon” crap, then. That told him Liu wasn’t playing around anymore and they could drop the Pidgin English routine. “We have been trying to make contact with you for some time. What is your spacecraft status?”

  “We’ve seen better days,” Poole said. “I regret the delay in answering your earlier transmissions, but we are having intermittent issues with our long-range comm. We’ve been limited to UHF line of sight.”

  “You were relaying communications through your shuttle’s directional high-gain system, were you not?” No doubt they’d noticed Specter was missing.

  “We were,” Poole said. “We had to cut it loose. Long story.” Which wasn’t quite a lie, not that he cared.

  “That is unfortunate,” Liu said. “The debris cloud surrounding your vessel will make it too hazardous for us to dock. We will hold at the inner boundary of your approach zone and disembark a team to assist your crew in transferring to our vessel.”

  Poole pursed his lips. Here we go. “That won’t be necessary, Colonel. We have a highly experienced crew of extravehicular specialists and we wouldn’t want your people to risk transiting that debris field.”

  Liu didn’t take long. “I’m afraid it will be necessary, Captain Poole. Our protocols require that our own specialists oversee any extravehicular activities in proximity to our vessel.”

  “I understand. They can just easily do that on the other side of the hazard zone.” Poole adopted a casual tone. “If you folks can just sit tight, we can be on our way and nobody else needs to risk getting holed.” He was counting on Liu’s sense of subtlety to get the message across.

  “We are confident that won’t be a danger,” Liu said calmly. “Captain Poole, prepare to receive our boarding party.”

  Poole flicked the voice switch off and turned to Wylie. “At least he’s being honest.”

  Rosie watched with rising alarm as a string of six PRC spacers made their way across the gulf between the two ships in single file, carefully negotiating the close-in hazards that surrounded the Borman to arrive at its airlock.

  She was concealed behind a large section of Mylar insulating foil, about ten meters away from Chief Garver, who had found his own piece. The other pair of spacers on their crew drifted another fifty or so meters away, likewise hidden behind pieces of what used to be a hydrogen tank. Each had used their MMUs to stabilize their personal piece of flotsam so that it was stationary relative to the ship, giving them a safe hide to watch from.

  They were too far away to make out details of the other team, but the blocky gray and black protuberances jutting at right angles from each Chinese spacer’s MMU were unmistakable. “Those look like weapons all right. You seeing this, Chief?” she whispered—unnecessary, but she felt reckless speaking out loud.

  “Oh yeah.” Garver said, and flicked on his helmet camera. “Now the skipper is, too.”

  “It’s moving,” Max said.

  Marshall had only taken his eyes off the mystery satellite long enough to keep up his instrument scan and prevent them from scraping RQ39’s surface. It hadn’t been necessary to ask Max Jiang to help keep a lookout—he’d been glued to the other window the whole time while Jasmine sat brooding behind them.

  Marshall pointed at the glowing blue exhaust from its tail. “Now we know how it gets around,” he said. “Ion engines. Low thrust but very efficient. That thing can move about almost at will.”

  “It would have taken a long time to get out here, then,” Max said, thinking through the mechanics of it. “How long do you suppose it’s been waiting?”

  Marshall watched it approach and silently pass by overhead. He raised Specter a few meters to ensure ground clearance and pivoted the shuttle about to keep it in sight. “If I had to guess—which I do—it’s been here since before either one of us arrived.”

  “There wasn’t anything in the catalog when we finalized the mission plan,” Max said. “Nobody had surveyed RQ39 yet, that’s why we came.”

  “That made it a very attractive side trip on your Mars flyby,” Marshall said. “I remember reading about that a few times.”

  “They get it backwards all the time,” Jasmine said crossly. “When Max worked out the orbital periods, it became clear that going to one would take us to the other. Nobody was going to invest in us flying to a barren rock in the sky, but you’d be amazed at how much capital flowed our way when we added Mars to the itinerary.”

  “It complicated the mission since we wanted to explore RQ39 for a while,” Max said proudly. “We needed a larger upper stage for the velocity changes, but by that point money was not an issue.”

  The satellite sparkled in the sun as it emerged from RQ39’s shadow, the glow of its ion engine diminished in the harsh light. Marshall dimmed the overhead windows to reduce glare as they studied it from afar.

  It was dagger shaped just as they’d said, the body forming an elongated cone with a pair of what he assumed were either solar or radiator panels mounted on opposite sides of its tail, ahead of the ion engine grid.

  The satellite turned to point its narrow snout in the direction of the Borman as it came to a stop behind a puff of thrusters. Marshall frowned. Whatever it was, he didn’t care for strange satellites pointed at their ship. He gave the thrusters a kick and they began climbing away from the surface.

  The Jiangs grew alarmed. “You’re moving closer?”

  “Four gomers, stacked at the outer door,” Poole said, picking them up with an external camera. He pointed out their pattern on the video screen: The remaining two PRC crewmen stayed back to take up positions on either side. “Looks like two of them have MMUs and they’re pulling two spacers each.”

  Wylie leaned in for a closer look. “Smart. That keeps the entry team nimble enough to get inside while a maneuvering element covers the exits. Wonder where they think we’re going?” He smiled.

  “They’ll be wondering about more than that in a minute.” Poole switched back to the UHF channel. “I have visual on your team, Colonel Liu. Can you please explain why they’re armed? That kind of thing might give a man the wrong idea.”

  “Please do not be alarmed, Captain. They do not present any danger to your crew or your ship. This is our common practice when boarding a different nation’s vessel. It is just our ‘SOP’ as you would say.”

  “No danger,” says the guy with guns pointed at us. “I wasn’t aware you had much practice boarding o
ther spacecraft, Colonel.”

  “There is always a first time, Captain. Rest assured our team has drilled this procedure many times. We have been expecting it to be necessary someday.”

  I’m sure they have. “Well then, I’m afraid we’re going to have to decline your offer of assistance, Colonel. It’s not American ‘SOP’ to allow armed agents of another country onto one of our vessels. It’s just bad manners.”

  Marshall was able to get a much better look at the satellite as they drew closer. Holding back at five hundred meters, he could make out surface detail. One reason it had been hard to see before was the fact that it was nearly all black, as close to camouflage as could be achieved in space. It wasn’t uniformly conical; the aft section was more barrel shaped and appeared to be the power module. That ion engine would need a lot of electricity, but this seemed like overkill. What looked like multiple capacitor banks surrounded the barrel behind the radiators; just ahead of them it was encircled by a ring of antenna and sensor blisters.

  Max pointed at its large wings, folded out accordion style from either side. “Those aren’t solar panels, are they?”

  “Radiators,” Marshall said, shaking his head as he studied it through the infrared filter of their docking camera. “Judging by the heat signature, it’s nuclear powered.”

  “Can it see us from here?” Max asked nervously, never expecting he’d have wished to be so close to that asteroid ever again.

  “Doubt it,” Marshall said. “I can’t see anything like optics or phased-array sensors. It’s got a ton of antenna blisters, though. Somebody’s controlling that thing.” He pitched the nose down to pivot away from the satellite and switched on Specter’s rendezvous camera.

  * * *

  The unexpected transmission from Specter was surprising enough, its video feed even more so.

  “What the hell is that?” Poole switched over to the encrypted channel with Specter. “Specter, Actual on secure channel. What are you sending me here?”

  Marshall’s voice quavered as it was attenuated by the frequency scrambling. “Unknown . . . pointed . . . you . . . eastern horizon. We’re . . . half klick abeam . . . enough to . . . line of sight.”

  “Stand by.” Poole pushed out of his seat and flew up into the cupola. He spied a bright speck glittering near RQ39’s eastern limb and reached for his trusty binoculars. “I see it.” He whistled. “Mean looking sonofabitch.”

  “Can’t see . . . shroud . . . nuke power . . . ion propulsion,” Marshall said.

  Poole filled in the blanks. “Ion engines, nuclear generator,” he said for Wylie’s benefit. “I’m checking out that shroud on its forward end now. Looks like optics.”

  “I’m not aware of anybody parking a telescope out here, sir,” Wylie called from below.

  “Way too overpowered for that,” Poole agreed. “And nobody in his right mind’s going to put a refractor into space. Too heavy and too complicated. That thing isn’t for collecting light.”

  “PRC laser,” Wylie concluded. “So we’ve got a nuke-pumped laser that gets around with ion engines pointed at us, a big-ass spaceship parked outside, and a squad of bad guys in armored spacesuits trying to bust in our front door. I’ve seen this movie before, sir.”

  “Me too,” Poole muttered. “And I don’t care for living out the sequel.” He flew back down to the second pilot’s station by Wylie and got back on the channel with Marshall. “Specter, be advised . . . it looks like that shroud’s covering a laser turret. Thanks for the heads-up and lay low. Check in at thirty. Over.”

  “Copy check in . . . laying low. Out.”

  Marshall gave the translation controller a gentle tap, pushing them back down to RQ39’s surface. From the corner of his eye, he could see relief wash over Max Jiang’s face. Jasmine sat still behind them, strapped into her seat with her arms and legs crossed. It was a natural compensation against having her limbs float free, but something told Marshall that defensiveness might have been her natural state at home under gravity. She wasn’t off-putting—if anything she’d been pleasant to him—but she carried herself with a natural dignity that became strictly no-nonsense when she sensed a threat, the counterbalance to Max’s unbounded curiosity that had kept them alive.

  “If it’s a weapon, it’s controlled by that PRC spacecraft,” she announced.

  Satisfied they were parked at a safe distance, Marshall turned to study her. “Why do you think that?” he asked. Focused on flying, he hadn’t had enough time to consider it himself.

  “If you didn’t detect any electronic emissions, then it’s not moving about of its own accord. Perhaps it’s preprogrammed, but it seems more likely that an orbiting weapon would need to be under active control of someone,” she explained. “Preferably someone close by.”

  “Within a fraction of a light-second,” Marshall agreed. “I see your point.” He thought back on their experience. “Can you go back over the time right before Prospector’s service module exploded?”

  “It was all very sudden,” Max interjected, “which is how I suppose these things happen. Everything’s fine until they’re not.”

  “We were both in the habitat module when it happened,” Jasmine said. “There was no warning.”

  Max explained. “Once we were beyond a few light-seconds from Earth, we had set up the master alarm to sound if a life-critical system exceeded certain parameters. It gave us a buffer against the time delay with our support team.”

  “Your people back in Palmdale reported a rapid temperature and pressure spike. It would’ve probably tripped your alarm just as the tank was failing, too close for you to notice.” Marshall thought about what had happened on Borman—a temperature spike, followed by rapidly rising pressure. The delta-p and delta-t warnings had sounded almost simultaneously before tank two went bang. He thought back to what he had seen of Prospector: an impact hole in the service module, and a large “exit wound” where their cryo tanks had been.

  How clean had that impact hole been? He wondered, searching his memory. It might have been a meteoroid, but that didn’t seem as likely anymore. Rapid heating did.

  “We didn’t get holed,” he said, referring to both ships. “We got lased.”

  The Jiangs exchanged looks as the thought sunk in. It had been one thing to be marooned in deep space—at some level, they’d always known that danger lurked—but to think it had been by a deliberate, hostile act?

  Jasmine was especially upset, it being her theory that this floating weapon was under PRC control. And now they were arriving in an orbiting fortress which no one who was supposed to pay attention to these matters seemed to know anything about. “Both our spacecraft have been crippled by hostile actors, and now those actors are coming to clean up the mess.”

  Marshall was having trouble believing it himself. How long had that hunter-killer sat been parked out here? It would’ve had to be launched well ahead of Prospector. “I don’t doubt the Party’s had it in for you two,” he said, searching for an alternative explanation. “But enough to commit these kinds of resources? To risk a shooting war?”

  Jasmine shook her head. “For all we know, RQ39 isn’t the only Earth-crossing asteroid they’ve staked out. We might have just gotten in the way and offered them a convenient opportunity, as was bringing your spacecraft out to find us.”

  Marshall stared into space, mentally connecting the dots. “They’re establishing territorial claims, like the South China Sea back in the teens.”

  “Which the West conveniently pretended wasn’t a problem, until it became unavoidable. I suspect the same thing is happening here.”

  Max laid a hand on his arm. “She’s correct. We don’t know military strategy, but we do know our home country. I’m afraid there’s no other way to see this.”

  “I’m curious, Mr. Hunter,” she said in clipped tones, “what are you and your captain prepared to do about it?”

  Marshall studied the glittering speck in his overhead window, wondering the same thing.


  34

  Studying the meager sensor returns on their latest visitor, Poole was coming to the same conclusions as the Jiangs. “It’s got a hell of a heat signature,” he said to Wylie. “Nuclear, for sure.” He pointed out its many hot spots on the thermal image, which painted a surprisingly detailed image of the satellite. “Good thing, because the radar cross section’s tiny.”

  “So not only did they park an H-K out here, they made it stealthy?” Wylie said. “Seems like overkill, sir. Stealth doesn’t mean squat when you’ve got that big of an IR footprint.” They could hide a spacecraft from radar, but the inability to dissipate heat without massive radiators guaranteed no spacecraft could hide for long.

  “I’ve got my theories,” Poole said. He switched on their more powerful fire-control radar, and the response was almost immediate.

  “We’ve got lock . . . whoa,” Wylie said. “Big burst of EM emissions there, Skipper.”

  “Not surprising,” Poole said. “Wait for it . . .”

  Wylie cursed when the return disappeared. “It’s jamming us,” he sighed. “Broke lock.”

  Poole waited to see if they could burn through, but the H-K was strobing their radar with false pulses in a jamming technique called “gate pulloff,” used by aircraft to evade detection. It didn’t make it invisible, but it did spoof the radar enough to keep it from locking on. And he was thankful Hunter had been smart enough to not try and paint the damn thing with his docking radar. The H-K seemed to “listen” passively across the EM spectrum and Specter would’ve been lit up like a Christmas tree if he’d turned on his radar. Broadcasting over a scrambled channel had been risky enough.

  So was the thing piloted or autonomous? It was the difference between a drone and a droid. It was a long way from Earth; the signal delay implied some level of autonomy. But the “long way from Earth” part was what stuck in his mind . . . what was it doing here in the first place?