John Ringo - Von Neumann’s War

“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.

Roger turned his laptop around for the other two men to see. He pushed it over to the edge of his desk and let them study it for a while.

“What is the red supposed to be, Roger?” John asked.

“It’s titanium oxide. Whatever they are, they like titanium!”

The lunar reconnaissance mission development and launch went off without a hitch. The Neighborhood Watch team had just gone through a much harder drill with the design, build, launch, and mission with Percival and the Mars effort. Compared to Mars, a lunar probe was a piece of cake. Having John Fisher pushing the program and the damn near infinite budget didn’t hurt either. The launch went without a hitch and had taken only ninety days to prepare.

“The deceleration burn just started,” John heard Telemetry report over his headset. He looked up at the big screen display in mission control showing the graphic for the spacecraft entering into a lunar orbit on the opposite side of the Moon as the centroid of the alien dust cloud. The cloud had grown in the past three months to about six hundred kilometers in radius. Traci’s dust cloud growth model was still dead on accurate.

“Roger that,” John replied. “Lunar insertion is go. Let me know when the burn is complete.”

Roger Reynolds and Ronny Guerrero sat in the VIP lounge watching and listening as the little lunar probe slowed down and circularized its orbit around the Moon. The low resolution near real-time video — there was actually a three-second delay due to the buffer size and the speed of light limit — was continuously displayed on one of the big screens beside the telemetry and tracking map screen. The probe had three small cameras placed around it for star tracking and with hopes that whatever took Percival apart might get captured by one of the small cameras. One image of the Moon filled a screen. An image of a star field filled another. And an image with Earth in the background filled the third one. Ronny and Roger didn’t take their eyes off those screens until the imagery from the telescope was brought online.

“Burn is complete! Lunar orbit’s circularized and stable at approximately ten kilometers above the lunar surface,” came over the speaker in the lounge.

“Okay, the cloud is a little less than half an orbit away so that is about fifty minutes or so. And we’re going into the far side of the Moon now and will lose contact with the probe for that portion of the orbit,” Roger told Ronny although it was a piece of information both of them had known for months. It was something to say in the silence. The silence seemed to increase the stress.

“It’s okay, Roger; we’ll get a good picture of them,” Ronny assured his junior colleague.

“Right,” Roger said, sitting back quietly. After about a minute of that, he leaned forward and began clicking his teeth with his tongue.

“Dr. Reynolds,” Ronny said, softly, not looking up from the report he was reading, “if you persist in that annoying noise I will be forced to call in a guard and have you shot dead.”

“Yes, sir,” Roger said, composing himself and sitting back. After about a minute he began tapping his foot on the floor. Quietly but persistently.

“Dr. Reynolds…”

“Sorry, sir,” Roger said, concentrating on the blank screen.

“Were you diagnosed as ADHD when you were in school?” Ronny asked, still not looking up.

“No, sir,” Roger replied, trying not to grin.

“I believe there’s an exercise bike downstairs. Why don’t you come back in, oh, twenty minutes.”

“Yes, sir.”

Roger had just gotten back when the datastream from the probe picked back up. The little lunar spacecraft had made it around the far side of the Moon without a hitch and was sending back plenty of recon data.

“There is the dust cloud in the low res camera’s field of view,” Traci said over the speaker. “The main high res imagery is coming through now.”

Ronny and Roger watched as the image with thirty-centimeter resolution downloaded to the central screen. The low resolution video continued to stream on the other three monitors. The high resolution image was showing that the dust cloud was floating and shimmering with glints of larger objects moving around in them.

“Traci, this is Roger,” he said, donning his headset.

“Hey, what do you need?”

“Could you zoom the display magnification on the high res image to maximum so we can see better detail back here?”

“Hold one… How’s that?” she replied.

The image lurched, then zoomed in to the maximum display resolution with a ratio of one hundred to one, or one centimeter on the screen being the same as one meter on the surface.

Roger popped open his laptop. He had previously hooked it into the video feeds of the imagery display monitors. He toggled a few menu buttons, then the image being displayed on the monitor with the high res data was now being displayed on his laptop. He pecked the left touchpad button and the real-time image froze.

“Now I’ll just zoom in a bit here and… there.” Roger turned his laptop monitor toward Ronny. “Look at that, will ya?”

“Little flying things,” Ronny said, a furrow appearing between his eyebrows.

“Yeah, they look almost like a boomerang or something or a flying wing. And at this resolution that must be about four pixels across so that thing is about a hundred and twenty centimeters wide. But, God, they’re all over the place.”