Eagle Station (Patrick McLanahan) by Dale Brown

Author:Dale Brown [Brown, Dale]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: William Morrow
Published: 2020-05-26T05:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Five

Sky Masters Aerospace Inc., Battle Mountain, Nevada

Seventy-Two Hours Later

Brad McLanahan glanced over his shoulder when his father and Kevin Martindale entered the secure conference room he’d commandeered for his special analysis team—which he realized was sort of a grandiose term for a group that really only consisted of him, Nadia, and Hunter Noble. Still, it was better than adopting Boomer’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion that they call themselves the Triad of Genius Analysts, or TOGA for short. “Hey, Dad! Hey, Mr. Martindale. It’s nice to see you guys in person for a change, instead of just on camera.”

By air, Scion’s Utah headquarters was only three hundred miles from Battle Mountain—less than an hour’s flight time for one of Scion’s Gulfstream executive jets. He’d been hoping his father would take advantage of that. They hadn’t seen much of each other lately. Between the joy of actually being married to Nadia and the day-in and day-out hard work needed to train new Space Force crews to fly and fight Sky Masters–built spaceplanes, whole weeks and months seemed to have slid past in a blur.

“Glad to be here, too, son,” Patrick McLanahan said warmly. “With things heating up, we thought it was best to—”

“Is that situation board up-to-date?” Martindale interrupted, waving a hand at the conference room’s large LED screen as he took a chair. The screen showed a 3-D image of the moon, with the orbital paths of different spacecraft depicted as green lines circling it. Red triangles indicated the current reported positions of each vehicle.

Nadia swung round angrily. Her eyes narrowed. She’d never had much patience with the former president’s flashes of arrogance and condescension. There were moments when Martindale—highly intelligent though he was—completely misjudged the temper and tolerance of those around him.

Sensing the imminence of a full-on Rozek-McLanahan explosion, Brad quickly interceded. “Yes, sir, it is.” He helped his father to a seat, noting sadly how much more awkwardly the older man moved, even with the most recent software tweaks for his LEAF exoskeleton. “We’re getting continuous updates from NASA tracking stations, from DOD’s space surveillance satellites, and from its ground-based telescopes in New Mexico, Hawaii, and Diego Garcia.”

Taking his cue, Boomer nodded. “Brad’s right. We’ve got a pretty good handle on everything going on in lunar orbit,” he told Martindale and Patrick. He shrugged. “Well, everything happening on the near side of the moon, anyway.”

There was the rub. The United States didn’t have satellites or telescopes in position to see anything happening on the far side of the moon—the side permanently hidden from anyone on Earth. Unfortunately, the same restriction did not apply to the Chinese or their Russian partners.

Five years before, China had put a communications relay satellite, called Queqiao, or Magpie Bridge, in a halo orbit around the Earth-Moon system’s Lagrange-2 point, L2. Lagrange points were places where the gravitational forces of larger bodies, like the earth and the sun, combined to produce points of relative stability. Smaller spacecraft and satellites could hold station at these Lagrange points without having to expend large amounts of fuel.

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