“And because my name is Tian Dao Lin and I am telling you to do it.”
Namche almost leapt off the chair in fright. It was a name mothers used to frighten their children to stay safe in their beds at night. A name that brought fear even as far away as Nepal and Tibet. The light level in the room increased, a dim glow coming from recessed strips around the top edge, and the bright light above his chair began to dim. Namche blinked, as his eyes slowly adjusted. Finally, he could see a large teak desk. The surface was covered with papers and scrolls. And behind the desk a tall chair. And in the chair what appeared to be a man, with liver spots on his bald head, but the face and eyes were unnatural.
It was the eyes that riveted Namche. He had been in the Himalayas all his life. He had met the old wise men who followed the path of Buddha, men who could do remarkable things. But he’d never seen eyes like these. They glowed with a red fire and fixed him to the seat with their stare. “Do you understand?”
Namche could only nod.
A door to Tian Dao Lin’s left rear opened and a man walked in. He was thin, his face like the edge of a knife. His skin was pale white. He went to the side of the desk and stood rigidly at attention.
“This is Tai,” Lin said. “He is the man you will guide to those three bodies.”
The last word barely registered on Namche for a moment, then it hit home.
“You may wait outside,” Tian Dao Lin said.
Namche got to his feet numbly and walked out of the door. Tai remained standing, still as a statue.
Tian Dao Lin turned his seat toward Tai. “You understand what you are to do?” “Yes, Father.”
Tian Dao Lin reached into a drawer and pulled out a small wooden flask. The exterior surface was intricately carved with many Chinese symbols, the interior lined with animal gut to make it waterproof. “I give you the gift of my own blood. It will allow you to survive the climb, but you must be swift.”
“Yes, Father.”
Tian Dao Lin handed Tai the flask. “Do not drink until you are ready to begin the climb.”
With the decimation of the American shuttle fleet, the most active spaceport on the planet’s surface was no longer Cape Canaveral in the United States, but Kouros in French Guiana. Set on the coastline of the South American country, Kouros was originally the launch site picked by the European Space Consortium.
The reasons the European Space Consortium chose to locate their launch facility on a different continent were several and practical. Europe’s population density was too great to safely put a launch site there. Also, the politics of which country would get the site was a problem none had wanted to wrestle with. From the engineer’s point of view, there was also the question of latitude, as all of the participating European countries were rather high up on the planet, making a launch less advantageous.
Kouros was on the ocean, which meant a launch took place mostly over water. It was near the equator, making possible the use of centrifugal acceleration of the planet’s rotation, the so-called catapult effect, to help launch payloads. The ESA ran Kouros more as a business than a nationalistic endeavor like NASA and the American space program. As such, one of its goals was to try to make money; because of this, anyone who anted up enough cash had access to both the facilities and launchpads and even rockets if they paid enough. The Russians had even gotten in on the deal, providing Soyuz rockets as platforms for commercial satellite launches.
A state-of-the-art satellite preparation complex had been financed by Arianespace, the ESA, and GoStar, a private company that, unknown to most, was financed by Vampyr. The EPCU, Ensemble de Preparation des Charges Utiles, was a massive complex, covering over ten square kilometers, with buildings occupying four square kilometers of that area. It held three twenty-meter-high “clean” rooms connected by corridors eight meters wide by twelve high. Components moved along the corridors on hovercraft, ensuring smooth and efficient transportation.
For the first time in its short history, the EPCU was being used for only one task. In three of the four buildings were specially designed components that had just finished their final testing. They were part of a revolutionary concept from GoStar that had been in development for over eight years and finally neared completion.
From Building 4, a maneuvering-and-thruster assembly was loaded onto a hovercraft and floated down the corridor to Building 1, where it was set on the center platform. From Building 3, an environmental-and-shield assembly was finished and also moved to Building 1 and fitted to the M&T assembly. And most important, in Building 2, the crew compartment had just been finished. It had been hovered to Building 1 where, like the last piece of a puzzle, it was connected to the other two assemblies.
The X–Craft was ready.
Technically the first flight was scheduled to be launched in two days and was labeled simply a test flight to make sure the craft was functional. It was to be anything but that.
At the knock on his office door, Adrik looked up from his computer screen. “Enter,” he called out.
The man who entered was short, wiry, and impeccably dressed. Petrov had traded his military uniform and the blue beret of the Spetsnatz, the Russian Special Forces, for tailored suits over six years earlier and had never looked back.
“Sir.” Petrov may have traded camouflage for suits, but his manner was all military as he stood ramrod straight in front of Adrik’s desk.
The office was dark, lit only by recessed lighting above rows of bookcases that lined all the walls. They were on the first level of the most modern office building in Moscow. The books on the shelves would have made a collector weep with envy. First editions dating back hundreds of years, they were an eclectic gathering for a mind that had grown bored with the world around him many centuries earlier.
Other than the recessed computer screen, the desktop was clear. Adrik sat in a high-backed, black leather chair. There were two halogen lights behind the desk that pointed forward, fixing Petrov in their glow, while Adrik was hidden in shadow.
“Have you ever been in Lubyanka?” Adrik asked. “Yes, sir.”
Usually Adrik liked Petrov’s lack of verbosity. He detested those who spoke and said nothing. At the moment, though, he needed a little bit more from his subordinate. “When?”
“Several times in my career, sir. During my time in Spetsnatz we worked closely with the KGB and SVD’s paramilitary people.”
“Have you ever been in the tunnels underneath Lubyanka that connect with the Kremlin?” “No, sir.”
“You will be. There’s something down there I need you to get for me.” “Yes, sir. And that is?”
“Blood.”
Vampyr’s jet was taking the shortest route from Seattle to Moscow, flying over the top of the world. He sat in the rear, with only the glow from a large flat-screen display illuminating the cabin. Through one of his defense contractor companies, he had access to the United States military’s secure Interlink system. He also had the proper code words to bring up data from just about anywhere in the system.
Vampyr accessed Space Command, headquartered underneath Cheyenne Mountain outside Colorado Springs. That was the unit responsible for tracking all objects, man-made and otherwise, in orbit around the planet. He brought up the data on the derelict mothership. He projected its orbit and was pleased to see that it was stable.
He stared at the image of the Earth floating on the screen with the mothership’s orbit projected in red for a few seconds. Then he accessed the Space Command database and checked to see if the mothership’s orbit would intersect at any time in the near future with the orbit of any other object.