Half listening while Boomer talked, Brad stiffened suddenly. What the hell? He tapped his display. It froze on one of the pictures transmitted by their recon satellites. This was a close-up of a station module, one of those that formed the vertical “bars” of what sort of looked like a sideways capital letter I.
His eyes narrowed as he studied the image closely. Now that the nanosats had a good angle on Mars One in full sunlight, their cameras were spotting odd discontinuities in its surface structures. What first appeared to be ordinary cabling and conduits girding a section of hull plating looked wrong somehow. He zoomed in on a narrow section of the image. There were definitely places where those cables and conduits didn’t connect up the way they should — not if they were supposed to serve any useful purpose. Yeah, he thought coldly, that’s not my imagination. They were fakes. Window dressing. But why would the Russians build a space station hull and then layer it with phony conduits?
Struck by what at first seemed a pretty wild theory, Brad pulled up more data from another of their nanosatellites. Sierra Two was one of those equipped with a sensitive thermographic camera. The images it had captured showed Mars One as a riot of psychedelic colors, revealing even tiny differences in the station’s surface temperatures. In some ways, that wasn’t surprising. Depending on whether a given section of hull was in sunlight or shadow, you could expect its temperature to range anywhere from plus 250 degrees to minus 250 degrees Fahrenheit. But even allowing for highly efficient insulation, some of the readings he saw were significantly outside the predicted norms.
And that matched up with his suspicions.
Excitedly, he turned toward Boomer. “Holy shit! Parts of that space station’s hull are definitely fake!”
“Fake? Fake, how?”
Swiftly, Brad highlighted sections on several of the pictures sent back by their tiny satellites and copied them to Boomer’s display. “See? These are supposedly solid sections of hull. But that’s bullshit. They’re actually camouflaged hatches or ports!”
Slowly, Boomer nodded. “Yeah, I think you’re right.” His mouth tightened. “Okay, let’s do our damnedest not to find out what’s behind those hidden doors the hard way.”
“…thought we’d swing by to pay our respects and welcome you folks to orbit.”
Strelkov was caught off guard by the American spaceplane pilot’s cheerful, friendly-sounding greeting. Why this sudden radio transmission from the spaceplane that had been trailing them in silence for more than half an hour?
Konnikov glanced over at him from his sensor console. “Should I reply, Colonel?”
Strelkov nodded tightly. “Be polite, Georgy. But instruct them to keep their distance.”
“Yes, sir.” Konnikov keyed his own mike. “Midnight Zero-One, this is Mars One. Thank you for the kind sentiments. However, for flight safety reasons, we must insist that you approach no closer.”
Long seconds passed before Strelkov heard the American’s elaborately casual reply crackle through his headset. “Copy that, Mars One. Don’t sweat it. We’ll be sure not to crowd you. The sky up here is plenty big for both of us.”
Perplexed, Strelkov turned back to the com screens showing Gryzlov and Colonel General Leonov listening in from Moscow. “What kind of game are these people playing?” he wondered. “First, they creep up on us in the dark… and now they pretend we’re all friends together?”
Gryzlov scowled abruptly. “They’re distracting you, Colonel,” he snapped. “Like a sleight-of-hand conjurer gesturing broadly with one hand while he palms a card with the other!”
Dismayed, Strelkov stared at the president’s furious image. “Distracting us from what?” he asked. “We have not detected any overt hostile activity from the American spaceplane since we made visual contact.”
“Don’t be an idiot!” Gryzlov snarled. “Remember those open cargo doors? They could have launched their weapons much earlier, while you were both orbiting through darkness!”
Strelkov saw Leonov frown.
“Using some kind of new stealth missile?” the colonel general asked dubiously. “A missile we’ve never heard of before? That seems highly unlikely—”
With an imperious gesture, Gryzlov cut him off. “Strelkov!” he demanded. “Is your L-band radar active?”
Despite the hydrostatic effects of zero-G, Strelkov felt the blood drain from his face. Mars One’s long-wavelength L-band radar was the best choice to detect stealth targets. Without it, they were effectively blind to any attack by weapons purposely shaped to reduce their radar cross section.
But Moscow’s earlier orders had been clear. To preserve the fiction that Mars One was a civilian space platform, they had been directed to avoid using either of their military-grade radars if at all possible. Unfortunately, caught up in the press of events since that American spaceplane appeared seemingly out of nowhere, he had neglected to request a change in those instructions. And equally unfortunately, the station’s L-band radar, with its substantial electricity requirements, was one of the systems he’d deliberately ordered kept off-line to free up power in case it was needed to recharge their directed-energy weapons.
He stabbed down at the intercom button. “Major Romanenko! Restore power to our radar systems! Right away!” Then, without waiting for a reply, he swiveled toward Konnikov — holding tight to his console to avoid spinning off helplessly across the compartment. “Georgy! Bring your L-band and X-radars online! And for Christ’s sake, hurry! We may already be under missile attack!”
Twenty-Two
Two bright red warning icons flared suddenly on Hunter Noble’s cockpit display. He tapped each of them. In response, text boxes opened, conveying information gathered by the S-19’s radar warning receivers: Unidentified L-band search radar detected at twelve o’clock, range one hundred miles. Unidentified X-band target search radar, same bearing, same range.
“Well, shit, that tears it,” Boomer muttered. The Russians aboard Mars One were lighting up powerful, military-grade radars — radars that no genuine civilian space station would need. Worse yet, the combination of radar types they’d activated indicated the Russians were definitely looking for stealth contacts like the Sky Masters recon nanosatellites. While that lower-frequency L-band system could detect stealth craft, it couldn’t provide the weapons-quality tracking data needed to engage them. But what it could do was tell the station’s X-band radar pretty much where it needed to look for potential targets to lock on to.
He glanced across the cockpit at Brad. The younger man was totally focused on his assigned task. The seven tiny satellites he’d launched were within seconds of their closest planned approach to Mars One. This was the point where any nanosat engine or computer malfunction could prove catastrophic, creating the very real risk of an accidental collision with the Russian station. “They’re onto us,” he said. “Better grab all the information you can while we’re still in data-link range of your birds… because I’m about to put some really serious distance between us and them.”