Back to the Moon-ARC

“Bill, if it were anyone but you, I’d tell them where to shove this part of the plan. But I won’t. We’ll make it happen,” Rowan said.

Damn right you will, Bill thought to himself.

“There’s another problem.” Xiang was speaking again. “By the time you get to the Moon, it will be night.”

The implication of this statement was not lost to most of the space scientists and engineers in the room. Xiang continued.

“The Moon rotates more slowly than the Earth, completing one full revolution every twenty-eight Earth days. This means that the Moon’s day is fourteen Earth days long, as is its night. Though surviving on the Moon anytime is a challenge, getting through the lunar night is particularly difficult. The temperature drops to minus three hundred eighty-seven degrees Fahrenheit at night, requiring a considerable amount of power to keep things, and people, warm. Batteries capable of providing the power needed to keep a crew alive during the fourteen-day darkness period are far too heavy to fly in space. Without sunlight, solar power is useless. That’s why we didn’t plan on them being on the Moon at night.”

“That could be bad,” Rowan commented. “What kind of power do they have? Will they have enough to keep from freezing until we arrive? Since they landed at the beginning of the lunar day, that’ll mean they will have been in darkness for a little more than three days by the time we arrive. That is a long time.”

“It is hard to say.” Xiang replied. “If they are in their suits, and if the fuel cells survived the crash, then they could have found a way to use the various power systems on the spacecraft to keep themselves from freezing. Our engineers are quite well trained, and they know the systems of their spacecraft at least as well as your people know yours. There is a chance. Time is not on our side.”

“Well, then,” Stetson added, “I guess we’d better get off our butts and get busy.”

Chapter 20

In the three days since Paul Gesling and the passengers of the Dreamscape heard the plea for help from the stranded Chinese taikonauts, the inescapable forces of gravity had been pulling them back home toward Earth. The moment of their return was now imminent, and they were busily preparing themselves for entry into the atmosphere and a not-too-distant landing on the desert runway in Nevada.

To most of the passengers, coming directly back home and landing on the same runway from which they left seemed like no big deal. After all, didn’t airplanes do that sort of thing all the time?

To Paul Gesling, who understood the complexities of orbital mechanics, the relative rotation of the Earth, and the effects the pull of gravity from the Moon had on his craft, it was simply amazing. Here they were, coming back from a quarter-of-a-million-mile journey to another world, and they were about to enter the Earth’s atmosphere at speeds beyond the human mind’s ability to imagine to pull off a pinpoint landing at the same spot from which they had left several days ago. The timing had to be perfect, and, from all indications, it likely would be. Nonetheless, he was nervous and continuously checking for updates on their position from the onboard computer.

In-space acrobatics behind them, the passengers were all buckled in their seats, running through the various checklists now scrolling on the screens in front of them. True, many of their tasks were trivial and designed mostly to keep them busy and to make sure they didn’t hurt themselves as the pull of Earth’s gravity noticeably returned. But it worked.

Gesling was in the pilot’s seat, running through his own, less trivial, checklist. One by one, the ship’s systems were checked out and appeared to be in perfect operating condition.

Dreamscape would enter the outermost region of the Earth’s atmosphere within the hour and be on the ground shortly thereafter.

The Honda minivan was back in place and ready to intercept as much data as possible during the landing. The same group of engineers that had been with the operation from the beginning were again in the van, as was their leader, Zeng Li.

Zeng was intently watching the televised coverage of the Dreamscape’s landing being broadcast live on most of the major American cable, satellite, and television news networks. The coverage was, of course, interrupted by frequent advertisements and “this just in” updates about some celebrity or another, but the clear focus was coverage of the landing of the Dreamscape and the emergence of the people who had just flown past the Moon. For a short while, most Americans would know the names of current astronauts and not just those they had read about in their history books.

The entire Chinese team had been as taken aback as the rest of the world at the news that their country had attempted a Moon landing. When that news broke, they had been resting at their Las Vegas hotel (“resting” was a relative term). All were shocked, and one of the team had subsequently become careless. In his excitement to learn more about the failed lunar landing and its crew, and especially since he had a brother who worked for the Chinese National Space Agency, he violated protocol and used Skype to call home and speak with his brother. Though he did not mention where he was or what he was doing, merely contacting his brother had been enough to set in motion the events that would soon lead to his capture and arrest.

His brother, like many other engineers working on China’s military and civilian rocket programs—the two were almost indistinguishable—was on a CIA “watch list,” and all of his communications were intercepted. This particular call was no exception.

The entire call was recorded and analyzed by the supercomputers at the National Security Agency (NSA). The call was flagged for follow-up by a human reviewer since it originated geographically near a recently reported act of espionage involving a certain private space company with compromised computer chips and now-stolen technical plans for a hypersonic rocket and potential global-strike weapons system. The fact that at least one of the participants on the call was a rocket scientist was the bit of data that ensured the message was flagged.

Within a few hours, an assessment team was poring over the transcript of the call, looking at its originating Internet service provider in the United States, and identifying the hotel on the Los Vegas strip from which it had originated. Shortly thereafter, they had the room number of the hotel and the name of the renter to whom the Internet service was being provided for a “nominal daily fee of $11.95.” They were in the MGM Grand.

Taking a little longer, but not too long, voice-print-identification algorithms positively identified the brother of the Chinese rocket scientist and, based on other intelligence sources, had him firmly linked with his current employer—the Chinese equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency. His photograph was now displayed on the NSA conference-room monitors as the assessment team again examined the intercepts and weighed what, if any, connection there might be between him and the recently stolen plans for the Dreamscape. According to the computer, and readily accepted by the team, the two must be linked. It was time to call the FBI.