CHAPTER 17
Gesling looked around in the cramped capsule and once again lamented the damage done to the Dreamscape. With the reusable space plane out of commission, the mission planners decided to take the Chinese up on their offer to provide the international team going to Sutter’s Mill with a free ride to space. The capsule was small and extremely uncomfortable. The chairs were crammed together so close that Gesling could feel Melanie’s breathing to his left and Mikhail’s obnoxiousness to his right. The thought made him chuckle, which was a relief under the circumstances.
“What’s so funny?” asked Melanie, who had evidently noticed Gesling’s guffaw.
“Oh, nothing, really. I was just wishing we were in the Dreamscape where we’d have a lot more room for the flight.”
“You’re not in your comfy little private space plane, Commander Gesling. Get used to it.”
Gesling was taken aback at the harsh tone of her rebuke. This wasn’t the first time Melanie had been short with him, but it was the first time she’d done so in public. And this was very public. They were on the launch pad in the Shenzhou-X capsule that the Chinese regularly used to send taikonauts to their base on the Moon. Liftoff was planned to be in less than thirty minutes and the world’s eyes were upon everything happening at the Chinese launch site.
“Oh, I realize that, Dr. Ledford. And I won’t forget it,” was Paul’s acerbic reply. Paul was only now starting to realize that Mikhail probably wasn’t the only other member of the crew who resented him being named mission commander. It must have been a significant blow for Melanie to not be named commander of the asteroid redirect mission when it supplanted Mars—she was to have commanded that mission after all. Paul looked around the cabin and realized that he was the commander of a team of commanders: Hui was in charge of the Chinese Moon mission a few years ago, Mikhail led the first crew in the Russian lunar base, and Melanie was to have been commander of the Mars mission. Oh boy, why didn’t I realize that before?
The crew was soon to launch into Earth orbit and dock with the rest of the Tamaroa—the ship that would take them to Sutter’s Mill. The nuclear propulsion system stages and the Deep Space Habitat were launched successfully over the last ten days and all that was missing was themselves—the people who would fly to the rogue asteroid and divert it from a collision course with Earth.
Gesling was again running through the pre-launch checklist on the touchpad before him when he began to hear more than normal chatter on the radio. Unfortunately, it was almost all in Chinese. From the tone, even Gesling could tell that something unexpected was happening.
“Hui, what’s going on?” Gesling asked.
“I was just tuning in. They’re saying that something has appeared on the radar flying inbound from the East and it’s only five miles away. They’re diverting one of the fighters to intercept it.”
Gesling knew that in China, just as in the USA, the airspace near a rocket launch was closed. And to make sure it remained closed, especially on a launch involving people, there were always a few fighter jets on patrol. He didn’t like the fact that whatever was coming toward them was so close already. Surely their radars could, and should, have picked it up from much further out.
More Chinese chatter came through the radio, sounding even more excited than before.
“They’re saying there is another one, coming from the South.”
“Do we evacuate?” asked Reudiger.
“Evacuate just because we’re sitting on a few tons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen waiting to be lit? Why ever would you think we’d need to do that?” replied Mikhail, trying to not sound too nervous himself.
“No, we sit tight until ground control tells us we need to do something,” Gesling replied.
“Paul, this is Bill.” Stetson’s voice came over the comm channel from mission control to Gesling’s headset. It was the command channel and only he could hear what was being said.
“The Chinese have picked up what appears to be two small drones coming toward the launch complex. They’re not moving very fast, so the jets are probably going to be able to intercept both of them before they pose a significant danger to you. The information we’re getting is sketchy, but they sound like the same kind of drones that damaged the Dreamscape.”
“Zhi Feng,” Gesling muttered.
“That’s what I’m thinking. The leadership here is scrambling trying to figure out if we should abort and get you guys off the rocket.” Stetson stopped speaking and Gesling heard someone telling him something, but it was too muddled for him to pick out what was being said.
“Paul, we want you off the bird now. We think the drones might be a diversion.”
Gesling didn’t hesitate. He punched the emergency abort button just below his right fingertip as he spoke to this crew, “They want us out of here now. This is a hot abort.”
All had been trained for an on-pad abort, but none had ever before experienced it. Mikhail opened the capsule’s hatch and grappled with the basket that was latched to the side of the top horizontal stabilizer bar on the launch tower. The bar was designed to remain affixed to the capsule and rocket until just thirty seconds before launch, a time limit they were currently well within.
Gesling saw the crew board the basket in the order in which they’d trained: Hui Tian first, because where she was sitting with respect to the hatch; Then Reudiger, followed by Gesling and Ledford. Mikhail would be last, since he was the one designated to help the others board the basket. In less than sixty seconds, they were all in the basket.
“Release!” Mikhail shouted as he unlatched and sent the crew careening away from the rocket in what felt like an out-of-control roller coaster ride. The stark landscape of the Gobi desert and the bubble of civilization that was the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center momentarily distracted Gesling. But his attention was diverted for only for a moment. He knew that if they didn’t get distance between themselves and the rocket, then they could all die a fiery death.
As the basket accelerated, Gesling noticed a plume of smoke coming from the north. He realized at once what he was seeing—a missile. And it was coming straight at them. He couldn’t tell if it came from an aircraft or from the ground, but that didn’t really matter. It was coming.
He tried to keep his eyes on the plume, and the missile that was presumably creating it, as the basket passed sixty miles per hour and approached the hopeful safety of the bunker on the ground below. Gesling was gauging the progress of the missile against their own toward the bunker. It was going to be close.
The basket began to slow as it passed through the door of the bunker. Once they were past the opening, the massive concrete and steel doors began to close.
Gesling took one last look at the rocket that was to have carried them into space. He was still looking at it when the missile struck just below the capsule, about 175 feet above the ground. At first, Gesling thought there might be no effect from the impact, but he quickly learned that was not to be the case. The explosion and ensuing orange and white fireball quickly filled the sky as it and the pieces of the rocket consumed by the blast moved toward the almost-closed door of the bunker. Gesling and the rest of his colleagues could only watch the explosion as they slowed to a stop in the cavernous bunker. A red light just inside the door flashed continuously as they approached. There was no place else for them to go and no time to do anything other than gasp.
The door closed and a solid green light replaced the red flashing one. There was a huge audible clang as the door shut just as the blast wave reached the ground, causing the entire structure to vibrate and ring like a very low frequency bell. A bell they were inside of. Paul wished he could cover his ears or shake his head in order to alleviate the ringing in his ears, but he was in a spacesuit and he didn’t have time. The five astronauts scrambled from the halted basket and threw themselves to the ground, hands over their heads, in a position to hopefully protect themselves from any falling debris within the shelter. There was none. The door held and the bunker remained intact following the blast.
“Is anyone injured?” Gesling asked.
In response, he heard a chorus of murmurs but no positive answer, for which he was grateful.
“Zhi Feng. That son of a bitch. How did he manage to get that much hardware into China, for God’s sake? Two drones and a missile?” Mikhail exclaimed.
“He is a very resourceful and well-connected engineer. Remember, he managed to create a heating system to keep us alive in our damaged spacecraft when we crashed on the Moon. He knows how to build things and make them work. And, well, he is Chinese. He didn’t have to get anything into China that likely wasn’t already here,” Hui Tian replied.
“Hell, everything is made in China nowadays,” Melanie Ledford grunted.
“Well, your resourceful engineer friend may have just condemned millions of people to death,” Reudiger said.
“At a minimum he just cost your people hundreds of millions of dollars,” Paul added, thinking of the business end. Too many years with Gary Childers had shaped his thinking along those lines.
“The ship is fully assembled in orbit and waiting on us,” Mikhail said as he flipped the visor open on his helmet. “Understand the physics of our situation. The ship’s liquid hydrogen fuel is slowly boiling away and unless we launch and depart within a week, there won’t be enough fuel to get us there and back remaining onboard,” Mikhail said.
No one said a word in response. Gesling knew that what Mikhail said was true. Now that both the Dreamscape and the Shenzhou-X were damaged, how would they get to space in time?