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Slowly, Brad nodded. He could feel the broad outlines of a possible alternate attack plan coming together somewhere in the back of his mind. Admittedly, it was kind of wild and probably risky as hell, but at least it gave him a place to start. He made a mental note to reach out to Richter privately once they were finished here. He looked away from the beer-can-shaped prototype spacecraft. “So how do we get this thing to the moon in the first place?”

“Adding in propellant and payload, the total mass comes to around twenty-three tons,” Boomer told him. “That’s right in line with what that Falcon Heavy second stage we’ve already got parked near Eagle Station can put into lunar orbit.”

Nadia raised an eyebrow. “And you truly believe people can voyage to the moon in this…” She struggled to find the right words. “In this glorified fuel tank?”

“Yep,” Boomer said confidently.

Richter added more detail. “There’s no technical barrier to equipping the Xeus lander with life support for up to three astronauts. My team has already worked out most of the details. In fact, even with all the necessary hardware — crew seats, a lavatory, oxygen and water supply and recycling systems, carbon dioxide scrubbers, and the rest — this vehicle’s still going to be less cramped than the Apollo command module or the new Orion crew module.”

“What about power?” Brad asked. “I don’t see any solar panels on this thing. Or any places you could safely put them, for that matter.”

“We don’t need them,” Boomer replied. “Xeus can meet all of its electrical power requirements using a small onboard hydrogen- and oxygen-burning motor.”

“Sweet,” Brad said. Not having to rely on sunlight to generate electricity opened up a lot of potential landing sites and times, including during the two-week-long lunar nights or perpetually shadowed deep craters near the moon’s north and south poles.

Nadia studied the spacecraft in silence for a few more moments. Then she turned back to Boomer and Richter. “Very well, you claim this Xeus lander can take three astronauts to lunar orbit and then down to the surface, along with their equipment. Correct?”

They nodded.

She frowned. “But how do the astronauts return to Earth once they’ve completed their mission?”

“Well, see… there’s the problem,” Boomer admitted. He shrugged. “That’s one of the kinks we still need to work out….”

Space Exploration Research & Development (SERD) Laboratory, Sky Masters Aerospace Inc.

Several Hours Later

Under a cloudless, blue sky, the sharp-edged mountain peaks and ridges surrounding the sprawling Sky Masters complex were a lifeless brown. Heat waves shimmered across the landscape. The company’s newer hangars, office buildings, labs, and warehouses stretched eastward across what had been brush-covered wasteland, without even a hint of landscaping to add color. Flush with federal and private industry aviation and aerospace contracts, Sky Masters was expanding fast — so fast that construction crews were hard-pressed to keep pace. Amenities beyond paved roads and parking lots were pretty far down the priority list.

The Space Exploration Research and Development Laboratory, a massive structure with a rounded black roof, towered over all the other new buildings. It was more than a thousand feet long, two hundred feet high, and at least three hundred feet wide. There were some windows set in its curving, white-painted steel sides, but not many.

Richter himself was waiting for Brad and Nadia just inside the nearest entrance. “Hey, guys! Welcome to my newest slice of engineering heaven,” the tall, athletic-looking older man said eagerly.

With a wave, he led them through a pair of double doors and into a wide, high-ceilinged corridor that seemed to stretch the whole length of the enormous building. Branching hallways intersected it at different intervals. There were dozens of doors and interior observation windows opening into labs, computer rooms, and other spaces packed with machinery and electronic hardware. Stairwells and elevator shafts led to higher floors. Rather than waste minutes walking, technicians and scientists traveled from place to place using golf carts.

“So… what do you think?” Richter asked.

“It’s quite… large,” Nadia said carefully.

“You should write our press releases,” the older man said with a grin. Then he turned more serious. “What you’re looking at is more than a million square feet of state-of-the-art science and engineering labs and our very own supercomputer. Plus, we have special chambers fitted out with pressure pumps, high-temperature heaters, freezer units, and radioactive sources. Those allow us to test new hardware in simulated environments ranging from the vacuum of outer space to the lunar surface to the bottom of the ocean.”

Richter ushered them over to a golf cart marked “Chief Mad Scientist.” “Hop in the back… and I’ll give you a quick tour on our way.”

“On our way to where?” Nadia asked pointedly, climbing in beside Brad.

“It’s kind of a surprise,” Brad told her.