Prometheus and the Dragon (Atlas and the Winds Book 2) (22 page)

Tom frowned. “How the hell would you know that?” he asked, shocked at the idea he’d been so transparent.

Cole shrugged. “A lucky guess,” he said, grinning almost like his old self. His face told Tom that it wasn’t a guess at all. “Mica told me you’ve been working on a plan for our phased withdrawal from Stormhaven.”

“She did?” he said, angry the computer would expose him like that.

“Yeah,” he said. “I was working on the same thing, and she mentioned that we should collaborate.”

“So, what do you think?” Tom said.

“It’s all about timing,” Cole said. “I think we’re still a bit ahead of ourselves.”

“But things are starting to unravel all over the world. If we move our base of operations up there, we’re going to be a lot safer.”

“Yeah, but we’re still not far enough along,” Cole said. “We’ve got too much of our production capacity here to take the downtime we’d need to move it to Sentinel. If the Chinese fold, we’re going to have to work harder to get people up there.”

“Viki says we’re already set up for sixty thousand people,” Tom said. “How big do you want it to get before we make the move?”

“We’re not there yet,” he said. “Not even close.”

“Jesus Christ, Cole. At the rate we’re building, we’ll have enough room to move every employee of Stormhaven
and
all its subsidiaries up there in another two months. Who else are you planning on taking?” he said.

“Them,” Colton said, pointing out the doors at the refugee camp as the blank look settled back over his features. Another thought had sideswiped his train of thought, and Tom had no time to stand around waiting.

“As long as they don’t eat us first,” Tom muttered under his breath as he turned to walk away.

***

Lunagrad Base, Boscovich Crater, Luna:

Sergei Titov had arrived at the Russian lunar colony expecting little, so he was impressed with how much had been done in such a brief time. The Russian Cosmonaut had volunteered for this assignment, something that had taken his wife by surprise. He had nearly died in the ISS disaster, and she’d been most displeased at his eagerness to go back into space.

He had explained this was not like the assignment to the Station, and soon enough she and their two sons would be able to join him there. She wasn’t impressed. She wanted him home, to spend the last days they might ever have, together. He’d assured her they would all be together soon enough, and he hadn’t been misleading her.

He stood by, watching the crew capsule bouncing across the rough terrain. Normally it was far less frightening to witness than to experience a lunar landing with the beach ball style recovery system, but this time Sergei felt his heart jump, as the airbag encased capsule carrying his family ricocheted haphazardly over the landing zone.

As the Medical Director of Lunagrad, he seldom took the time to go out on a recovery run, but today he’d insisted, pulling rank on several of the usual team members before getting a seat on the rover truck. He wore a space suit, and sat strapped into one of the rear jump-seats, but he wanted to make sure Svetlana knew he was there when her head quit spinning.

She’d been given high priority as a doctor herself, but since her specialization was obstetrics, she wasn’t supposed to arrive until after they’d completed the construction of their hospital facility. But as nature will, one of the crewmembers in the colony had become pregnant, so she’d been pushed up through the schedule until she’d arrived at the top of the list. At eighteen months, and five years old, their two sons had both made history as the youngest residents of the moon, and the youngest cosmonauts ever.

He was proud of his boys, and as the retrieval truck picked up the capsule to swing it onto the flatbed, he clung to the side of it, leaning against the small porthole in the hatch, and staring into his sons’ beaming faces. They both waved at him, grinning like they’d just finished the most amazing carnival ride of their lives. Svetlana was covered with a fine layer of sweat, her eyes carrying the same ‘get me the hell out of here’ look he’d seen riveted to most of the people who had experienced a lunar-bounce landing. He grinned to himself. Her face would go back to normal in a day or two.

***

Deep Rock, Colorado:

The United States had sixteen major underground complexes for housing military personnel and governmental staff, although most of them sat empty much of the time. But the President had decided they were going to need to be brought up to service ready, just in case.

Dr. Jacoby had been put in charge of certifying they were suitable and assessing how many people they could shelter if it became necessary to bunker-in. She didn’t like being sent all over the country, but it was something that had to be done, so she accepted the assignment without question.

Deep Rock was one of the bases that had been built in the 1980s, sitting close to the continental divide in the rugged part of the Rocky Mountains. It had operated as a support annex to Space Command’s Cheyenne Mountain facilities, and had been enlarged into a huge complex capable of housing almost five thousand people. It was also as far to the west as Dr. Jacoby had wanted to consider for an underground facility. Since ground zero for Antu had moved out over the Cascadia Fault line, where it ran under the ocean off the coast of Washington, she was more than a little concerned with seismic stability and the advisability of hiding in a cave, no matter how strong it was.

She had a staff of engineers following her around as she toured the facility, each of them interested in a different aspect of the complex’s structure. She didn’t need to oversee them, but since she had been put in charge, she was responsible. She took that to mean she had to be there.

The President wanted her report to be delivered on the day the Chinese missile was scheduled to arrive at its target. She glanced at her epad. The Chinese screensaver said: 35 days: 2 hours: 31 minutes.

***

Chapter Fourteen:

To Weep for the Dragon

The Bridge of the Eagle, 145 million miles from Earth:

Warren McDermott sat at the Command Station of the
Eagle
, staring out the window, lost in the vast view of space. He was commanding a mission that had set so many records for manned space flight he’d lost count. Furthest manned flight, fastest manned vehicle, first manned flight beyond the Earth-Moon system. The list went on and on. It was quite an achievement for anyone, and would have been the high point in his career, except he had no intention of retiring after this mission. The
Eagle
had opened up so many new possibilities he felt like he was at the beginning of his career again, staring out into space for the first time and dreaming of what the future could be.

Now he’d tasted the potential of real space flight, he knew he’d never give it up. It whetted his appetite for more, for the new horizons that lay out among the stars. It fed the fires of his childhood dreams and made reality out of his wildest fantasies.

But Commander McDermott was not one to wax poetic. He was above all, a practical man of controlled action. So instead of reveling in pride, he allowed himself only the smallest feeling of self-satisfaction, and felt terribly indulgent.

In the next hour they’d be passing the
Zhen-Long
missile. It was out there in front of them, already on their radar screens, a small echo surrounded by absolutely nothing. Their original course was supposed to take them three thousand kilometers sunward of the missile, while it was still more than seventy million miles from Antu. In fact, they’d be passing much closer than they’d realized. Probably within a few hundred miles.

Their plan was to sail past the missile, arrive above the asteroid and in position to start deploying their payload, twenty-five days before
Zhen-Long
was scheduled to detonate. They had three more days of decelerating and reversing themselves into the path of Antu before they made their rendezvous. All told, it took them seven days to arrive at a destination further from Earth than man had ever traveled. It still took a conscious effort to wrap his mind around the sheer velocity they were traveling.

“Good morning, Commander.” Kara Chapman, his pilot and First Officer, walked onto the bridge and took up her station. She swiveled her chair to face him and smiled like a kid on Christmas morning. The truth was they’d all been doing that ever since they’d left Earth. Looking like they were dreaming.

“So, have we caught the ZL yet?” she asked.

“It’s still about 216,000 kilometers ahead,” he said, looking at the screen. “We’re closing at about ninety-four kilometers a second. If it doesn’t change heading we’ll pass within a couple hundred kilometers.”

“Thirty-eight minutes or so,” she said, doing the math in her head.

“Give or take a little,” he agreed, yawning and stretching.

“Why don’t you run down to the galley and grab some coffee,” she said. “I’ll hold the fort, and you can make it back before we pass.”

“It’s not like it’s a big thing,” he said, but in a way it was. Meeting something from Earth 110 million miles from home was like meeting someone from your high school class, in Antarctica, in the middle of winter, on a snowmobile, naked.

It wasn’t a biggie, but it was worth noticing.

“Ok, I’ll be right back,” he said, getting up and heading out. “The bridge is yours.”

He spent a few minutes in the galley talking to the engineer, Lars Nelson, and the payload specialist, Annalyssa Trevor, but still made it back with a few minutes to spare.

“Are we there yet?” he asked, walking up to the window beside the pilot station to stare out into space.

“Five thousand kilometers from the ZL,” she said. “Delta-V is 92.8 kilometers per second.”

“How close are we going to pass?” he asked.

“About 125 kilometers,” she said. “Maybe close enough to see it.”

“If we knew where to look,” he said, shrugging.

A small circle appeared on the window. “From your current position standing on the bridge, the
Zhen-Long
is centered in the targeting ring,” the AI said. “I can also display the position of Antu, if you would like.”

“I didn’t know you could do that.” McDermott said, glancing over at Kara and shrugging. A second ring appeared slightly to the left of the first one. Directly in the center of it was a dim star: Antu.

“The window has a crystal film display on the inner surface,” it answered. “If you had asked, I would have used this function before. I assumed you were aware of it.”

“Nope,” he said, sitting down at the navigator station. Both rings shifted, adjusting to his change in position. Antu remained in the center of the second ring but the first ring was shifting slowly to the right as the parallax moved the two objects apart.

“We are currently 3,200 kilometers from the
Zhen-Long
missile,” the AI said. The first ring was moving faster to the right.

The computer lowered the light level in the bridge, and the faintest spark became visible in the center of the ring. “There it is,” he said, amazed at being able to see the missile at this distance.

***

Sentinel Colony:

“Where am I?” Carter felt the room assembling itself from fragments within his mind. He blinked his eyes several times, but still couldn’t tell what he was looking at. It looked like a face, but he was having trouble connecting the shapes together.

“Welcome back,” a voice he recognized said. She was attached to the face but he still couldn’t see her well. A red fog surrounded the woman’s head.

“Dani?” he whispered. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m where I’m supposed to be,” she said. He didn’t understand.

“Where am I?” he asked again. The room behind her looked like a bedroom, but he gradually became aware of sounds around him. Whirring and beeping. He frowned.

“Are you in pain?” she asked, concern assembling itself on her face and in his consciousness at the same time.

He shook his head and felt the room whip into a twisting frenzy.
Don’t do that again,
he thought. So he said, “No, should I be?”

“You don’t remember what happened, do you?” she asked. He could feel her hand holding his. It felt good. Soft. Warm.

Concentrating, his eyes rolled back in his head and he felt himself drifting off to sleep. He snapped back into reality, jolting him painfully. “I remember something. The Control Room exploded. Then being outside and crawling. I remember the ground shaking and being buried in dirt.” The memories were painful. “What happened?”

Another face appeared beside Dani. A man dressed in a white jumpsuit. A uniform?

“Dr. Anthony,” the man said. “I’m Dr. Cochrane. It’s ok that you’re having trouble remembering what happened. It’s your mind’s way of protecting you. In time, some of the memories will start coming back to you, but for now don’t worry about them.”