“That might work,” Cady admitted. “Hell of a bang, that’s for sure.”
“Uh, Alan, if you have this rain of nuclear blasts distributed all around you, how do you expect to get out.”
“Well, you’re in a Bradley aren’t you?” Alan said, shrugging. “What’s a little radiation between friends?”
Shane and Cady looked at each other, then at Alan and then back at each other. Finally, Cady shrugged.
“What can I say, sir?” the master sergeant said, shrugging again. “This is what happens when you let rednecks play with nuclear weapons.”
Chapter 12
“This image here was taken when we first noticed the landing tubeway at the Moon.” Traci pushed her glasses back up on her nose and chewed on the end of an ink pen. She had worked so many around-the-clock shifts tracking the lunar invasion over the last ten weeks that her eyes just couldn’t handle her contact lenses anymore. She needed a full eight hours of sleep to get her contacts back. She didn’t foresee getting that anytime soon. In fact, she had slept on a couch in Roger’s office the past two nights and had showered in the fitness facility across the street at least three times a week rather than at her apartment. Her job was monopolizing all of her waking moments.
“Yes, I’ve seen this image, Traci.” Roger looked over her shoulder at her computer screen.
“Okay, now look at this one taken two weeks later. See anything interesting?” She waited for Roger to analyze the image for a moment.
“A dust cloud!” The image now revealed a cloud of lunar dust just large enough for the Hubble imagery to resolve encircling the landing zone. The tubeway was no longer there either.
“Uh huh, now look at the image at six weeks after the landing.” Traci clicked a button on the mouse and another image popped up.
“Okay, the cloud is a little bigger.” Roger leaned in closer over Traci’s shoulder to see the screen better. The scent of the former Hooters’ waitress’s perfume wasn’t lost on him. She might not have been home in three days but she still looked and smelled good.
“And this one taken yesterday at about ten weeks from the landing.” Traci didn’t seem to mind Roger leaning over her shoulder. He was always all business anyway. Damnit.
“Again, it’s larger than the previous one, but the growth in diameter is smaller.”
“Yeah, I really need close-up pictures to really track this, but from this data I’ve calculated a growth rate,” Traci said. “The surface area of the moon is about 152,000,000 square kilometers, give or take. So if you turn that into a circle with that area, then the radius of that circle is about 6,956 kilometers. And at the present growth rate of this cloud it will reach that radius at about five hundred and fifty days from the initial landing.”
“What is that, let’s see five fifty divided by three sixty-five is… uh… about a year and a half,” Roger muttered.
“The size of this thing is still only about six hundred kilometers in diameter right now. The big growth starts sometime around nine months to a year.” Traci chewed the pen’s cap reflectively.
“Good work, Traci. This tells us we still have a few months more than a year to prepare.” Roger patted her on the shoulder. “Hey, why don’t you take a couple days off and get some sleep.”
“I’m okay. You’re the one who needs to take a break. You’ve been doing this a year or more longer than I have.” She took her glasses off and massaged her nose and eyes.
“You might be right. But until I get a closer look at these things I don’t see that happening. I wish I could see them with a few centimeters resolution.” Roger mulled the thought over in his mind while at the same time considering sleep.
“Well, why don’t you just send a telescope up there and orbit the Moon so you can do just that?” Traci put her glasses back on and sighed. “How long would it take to send a probe to the Moon?”
“Well, rocket-wise we could get a small probe there in a few days. It would take maybe three months to build it and integrate it into a launch system… hmm… and from the Moon we could get basically real-time video — well, maybe a few seconds delayed. That’s a really good plan.”
“Why haven’t you considered it before?” Traci asked.
“Think about it and you’ll figure it out,” Roger replied darkly.
“Well, you see, Mr. President,” Ronny explained, “we really had no way of knowing how long these things were going to stay on the Moon and were not sure we had time to go forward with a lunar mission. Fortunately, Dr. Reynolds has surrounded himself with good people. His lead astronomer was able to measure the growth rate of the lunar dust cloud to project the timeline. If we assume they’ll do like at Mars and wait until the planet is mostly covered, that gives us at least fifteen months from today. Also, Dr. Reynolds’ launch team has been working around the clock to get as many launch systems ready and waiting as possible since the beginning of Asymmetric Soldier funding.”
“Good, Ronny, good. So how long before we can get a better picture of what is going on?” The President looked tired and Ronny could tell he needed to cut this briefing short.
“Within the next three to four months, sir.”
“Well, Roger, as far as the propulsion part of the mission is concerned it’s relatively simple,” John Fisher was explaining. Tom Powell sat beside John in Roger’s office nodding his head in agreement.
“Okay, you have the floor.”
“We’ll launch on a single Delta IV CBC with two solid strap-ons. We use a single standard RL10B-2 to circularize then kick to the Moon and once we get to the Moon we’ll use a bi-propellant thruster, just like on the Clementine mission, to put us in an orbit at about ten kilometers from the lunar surface.” John paused long enough to gauge Roger’s reaction.
“I’ve already got a team at Ball about two months into a spacecraft bus build that will work. I knew that we would want recon sooner or later so I kept the momentum going after the last mission. All we need are the science instruments and we’ll be ready to go.”
“Amazing foresight, John. I should have been thinking about this option.” Roger hung his head and exhaled. He felt really tired and dull minded.
“Rog, you can’t do everything, you know. I mean, that’s why you hired us, right?”
“I guess you’re right,” Roger said, nodding.
“One more thing, Tom here has worked out the trajectories so that we’ll come in on the opposite side of the Moon from the landing zone. This might give us a better chance at sneaking up on these things,” John added. “Does that cover everything, Tom?”
“As near as makes no difference. I would emphasize that we can really make use of the Clementine science instrument package design. It was small and put together in a hurry, just as we need to.” Tom rubbed his beard.
“Yeah, if we find a telescope in the eight-inch range in the next few days, we could launch in less than three months,” John added.
“Clementine…” Roger mumbled. “Why is it that is bugging me… Clementine… That’s it!” Roger pulled his laptop closer to him and started scrolling through files until he came across a pdf file labeled “Clementine Lunar Mineral Survey.”
“What’s it, old boy?” Tom raised an eyebrow.
“I know why they landed at the Sea of Vapors!” Roger opened the pdf file and scrolled down to a figure in the paper showing the near side and the far side of the Moon side by side. The mineral content was color-shaded on each lunar surface image. The far side of the Moon was mostly blue and light green and had absolutely no red on it. The near side, however, had two big red splotches on it and the brightest one was centered on the Sea of Vapors.