all astronauts who performed long-term tours in space. It consisted of four weeks of rest, along with several medical exams to document any changes in the body resulting from long periods of zero-g such as loss of bone density, muscle deterioration, reduced lung capacity, or radiation exposure. “I’m determined to knock the docs on their butts in surprise.”
“Go get ’em, sir.”
Kai wore a pair of monitor glasses that allowed him to privately watch and listen to television while he exercised, and he usually watched American, British, and Asian news channels. It seemed the news was all about China these days-but, not surprisingly, there was nothing about the sub-launched antisatellite-missile test. China seemed to be on a public-relations and foreign-affairs blitz, especially in the United Nations General Assembly. Trade, energy, military concerns, economic development, peace initiatives-whatever the focus, China had a representative discussing it and investing huge sums of money in improving whatever they thought needed improving. Chinese money and Chinese projects were springing up everywhere, especially in the Middle East, South America, Africa, and even Russia, along with its traditional spheres of influence in Asia.
It was certainly not the traditional China, no longer isolated and low-key; and yet, Kai thought, it was still the same in many ways: China was still secretive, still inscrutable. Even though the news seemed to be “all China, all the time,” no one had any idea of any of the fundamental questions about China: What were their strategic goals? Who were their allies? In what direction did they want to go?
When Kai finished his routine and chalked up his scores on the exercise equipment for others to try to beat, he showered in the vacuum shower, put on a clean flight suit, and floated back into the command module. He found Hunter Noble at Valerie “Seeker” Lukas’s console, flipping through various sensor downloads. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “Aren’t you flying in a couple minutes?”
“Postponed,” Boomer replied. He hit a few keys and pulled up a live video feed of the New Mexico Spaceport at Roswell, New Mexico. “Major snowstorm at the primary landing site. They might move it somewhere else, so I’m waiting for word.” He looked at Raydon. “What are you doing up?”
“Couldn’t sleep.”
Boomer looked at Kai’s fingers, which always seemed to be twitching or tapping or fiddling with something-did this guy ever sleep? he asked himself. He must be a bundle of raw nervous energy. “Even with all this circadian- rhythm nonsense going on in here?” Boomer commented. He waved his hand around the command module. The lights had been dimmed because it was “nighttime,” the same as Washington, D.C. “Whose idea was it to create a daytime and nighttime on a space station anyway?”
“They’ve done numerous studies on crew performance in long-duration jobs like submarines as well as space travel,” Kai said, “and they all agree that humans need to keep a circadian rhythm-there has to be a day and night, and it has to be the proper seasonal length, or humans start to mentally malfunction.”
“Sounds like bull to me.”
“Try it sometime-when you’re on leave and not flying my spaceplanes.”
“I do it all the time,” Boomer said. “I play cards at night in Vegas because the dealers and pit bosses on the graveyard shift are usually less experienced. I can play, fly, and work whenever.”
“Cardplayer, huh?” Kai realized that he had been working off and on with Hunter Noble for the better part of four years, and he knew very little about the guy. “Are you any good?”
“I probably would make a decent living playing poker if I kept at it,” Boomer said. “It’s a numbers game, and I’m pretty good at numbers. My problem is, I can’t concentrate on cards too long. I see a pretty girl or start turning over an engineering problem in my head, and I get distracted. Not a good thing for the bottom line. You like cards, General?”
“I don’t even know any card games.”
“What do you like? Craps? Slots? Horses?”
“I think I’ve gambled a grand total of five hundred bucks in my entire lifetime, mostly pro football and basketball office pools,” Kai admitted. “And Vegas is just too intense. It’s just a huge waste of electricity if you ask me.”
“So what do you do for fun?”
“I keep a little fishing boat in Long Beach, cruise up and down the coast, sometimes to Mexico, scare some fish every now and then. If I go to Nevada, I’d rather go out into the mountains with a backpack and camera and do some photo-hunting.”
“Photo-hunting? You hunt for photos?”
“Real funny. No, I bring back photos of wild game centered in crosshairs, critters I would’ve bagged if I had a gun. I have photos on my wall instead of animal heads.”
“Why don’t you use a gun? And why bother hunting if you’re not going to kill anything?”
“I’ve been hunting since I was fourteen,” Kai said. “I used to go out with my grandfather and uncles a couple times a season-pheasant and deer mostly. But I remember trudging back to the camper one cold snowy weekend without seeing one bird, and one of my uncles was so frustrated that he put the muzzle of his shotgun up to a little bird sitting on a fence and pulled the trigger. That little bird disappeared in a puff of feathers. Never killed another animal after seeing that.”
“How very PETA-friendly of you, General,” Boomer said.
“But I missed being out in the wide open, especially after becoming an astronaut, so I decided to use a camera instead of a gun.”
“Sounds weird. But the boat sounds nice.”
“Haven’t been on it in a while.”
“Married? Kids?”
“Divorced. The ex tolerated the Air Force, disliked Houston and NASA politics, and hated the boat. Three strikes and she was out. No kids.”
“Any lady friends?”
Kai glanced at Boomer, obviously not comfortable talking about himself or about subjects like this. Perhaps, he thought, Noble was just realizing the same as he was a moment ago: They’d worked very closely together for years but knew very little about each other. Despite his discomfort, he resigned himself to answering anyway: “Plenty of ladies…no friends.”
“Copy that.”
The two fell silent for several moments; then Kai asked, “So did Seeker show you how to use her console?”
“Yeah. I peek into a few places now and then-the Strip, my condo complex, Hainan Island. The Chinese are sure acting restless, like they feel the need to show they won’t be pushed around, especially by us.”
“Agreed.” Kai punched in instructions into his console and studied the responses. “Hmm…no recent reports on the Chinese convoy heading to Tanzania.” He punched in more instructions. “They should be off the coast of Kenya by now, a couple hundred miles north of Mombasa. Let’s get an updated image…” Now the info he was getting made him look worried. “No recent reconnaissance patrol sightings? Do they have weather problems out there, too?”
He motioned for Boomer to switch seats with him so he could use Seeker’s console, then called up positions of all the reconnaissance satellites available in his system. “Twenty-six minutes to a TacSat-3 overflight; there’s a NOSS satellite in the area, but the Navy hasn’t let us get access to its data yet.” NOSS, or Naval Ocean Surveillance System, was a satellite that could locate ships at sea by collecting and tracking radio signals. “Now, why can’t we get any manned or unmanned recce photos?” In a separate window he made several queries for status information…and his jaw dropped in surprise. “Datalinks inactive off the southern coast of Somalia -no one’s been able to make radio or satellite contact in the past two hours.”
“Sunspots?”
“Might be, but I think solar-flare activity was supposed to be normal this week,” Kai said. He punched in still more instructions. “I’m getting stuff from the Gulf of Aden and Djibouti, but the Combined Task Force reports nothing from patrols in the Indian Ocean, with occasional outages and unreliable datalinks, so UAV overflights were postponed.”
“The eccentricities of electromagnetic propagation, no doubt.”
“The what?”
“Something a buddy once told me. His explanation of the unexplainable.”
“Whatever the hell it is, I don’t believe in it,” Kai said. “We’ll have to wait for the TacSat overflight.”
