Moon Panic

by Bradley Birch

  Michael reviewed the orbital maps and, sure enough, found that twenty-two minor class starships had joined the known USSN cruisers in lunar orbit. The timeline matched exactly with Erin’s claim of the Zettafleet arrival. This was news. Michael tabbed to his word processing app and started the headline, “Zettafleet: The Unsung Heroes of the Lunazoe War.”

  The keys stopping clacking. Michael wheeled himself back a foot from his living room desk and looked up at the ceiling fan. He pushed the wheels in opposite directions and turned 360 degrees. It was his version of leaning back in an office chair and spinning in a circle.

  Moon panic was becoming a real thing. Spaceports were seeing the leading edge of an Earth exodus, which would flare up after each reported moon plume and wouldn’t reverse until a later chapter. The terror that had been growing in the wombs of people’s minds was now birthing real action. Michael could already imagine the coming riots, the food shortages, the transportation shutdowns. He held in the delete key until the headline vanished. He started anew.

  “United States Space Navy: Ill-Equipped to Handle the Lunar Crisis?”

  After the publication, Michael set his PPC to alarm him every time Erin sent a correspondence. He pressed her for details about everything from the official progress reports to rumors overheard on the toilet. She seemed needlessly focused on secret communications, which made no sense to Michael. Every hobbyist on the planet had their dishes turned towards the sky, streaming moon whispers around the clock.

  Michael did some cursory research. He read the CSC specifications for the SOS hail. The signal could broadcast hundreds of lightyears. A bit overkill, but better safe than sorry, Mike presumed. It transmitted on a band that could not be blocked without highly illegal jamming technology. Overall, it was impressive how perfect the technology was for signaling distress.

  Sunlight from the bay window faded as Michael’s research turned towards the Pelagic institute. Tomes had been written about them since the P4 incident, but Michael wanted to go back further. The institute’s history began late in the 21st century. They studied highly contagious airborne pathogens. The Pelagic facilities were some of the most secure in the world. Researchers worked under domes built deep beneath the open waves. That the institution would later build bases on the Sea of Tranquility was sheer poetry.

  After Nora Dobbs was placed in charge of the institute half a century later, Pelagic shifted focus towards nanite-anitibiotics. This was during the nanomanufacturing revolution of 2124-2130, when every company under the sun was throwing out nano-buzzwords. As it turned out, antibiotics was a practical use for the technology, and the underwater organization stayed afloat while so many others sunk.

  The bulk of the publications regarding Pelagic invariably focused on the P4 incident. It was a great irony, Michael thought, that in trying to create a cure for the Waste, Pelagic created something seemingly worse. He read old documents about the quarantine. The USSN was quick to avoid another horrible plague. The isolation of the moon made it the perfect place to study the virus, though pathologists said the alien pathogen had no resemblance to Earth viruses. At a quarter of a million miles away, the moon seemed so far away. It didn’t feel that far these days.

  The USSN was transparent regarding the quarantine. It was a public show. People were fevered over the Waste epidemic. A show of strength was paramount to keeping order. A show of control. Of power. The footage Delta-V released was borderline propaganda. All but the essential infrastructure was drained away between then and the start of the lunazoe war. Michael compared orbital maps from when the USSN first raised the quarantine to the years following. Honestly, it looked to Michael like there were still more ships and spaceport stations than was necessary. Tax dollars at work. It’s not like people were trying to breach the perimeter to sneak in and steal moon rocks. Nobody in their right mind wanted anywhere near the moon.

  Michael scratched his stubble. Light began filtering in through his bay window. It was a nice feature of the apartment. He tapped on his PPC and the holowindow switched to nighttime again. Michael closed out of the orbital maps. They were unimportant to his story, anyway. This is why he made a better field reporter—he couldn’t be distracted by tangentially related articles if he wasn’t sitting in front of his computer like some legless cripple.

  He closed more articles, working backwards from the quarantine. Back through the Pelagic history. All the way back to the technical documentation regarding SOS signals.

  Michael stopped. There was something that looked familiar. It was a diagram of the siege of planet St Malo by neighboring planet New Stuttgart. Stuttgart ships had blown out all Malo satellites and orbital infrastructure, not that there was much. St Malo was an infant planet of less than six years. With the populace stranded beneath their fleet, Stuttgart deployed sophisticated jamming beacons in orbit around St Malo.

  The people of St Malo were extorted. They forfeited the raw material they had brought and were forced to produce goods for Stuttgart. Their cities were terrorized with fiery strikes from the heavens. They were slaves. Michael stumbled on the article because their freedom was earned thanks to the CSC distress specification. The beacon penetrated the Stuttgart jamming devices. The people aimed the call at their systems Webgate, and a USSN liberation force arrived in a fortnight and destroyed the Stuttgart oppressors. The planet was saved by a single SOS call.

  The Stuttgart orbital jammers—they were arranged in exactly the same fashion as the USSN quarantine guard.

  Michael turned the holowindow back to full daylight. It really was a wonderful feature that made him forget he was really holed up in some low-income housing located in what was essentially a ghetto for people withered by Waste. He started making PPC calls.

  It took almost four month for Michael to put the plan together, during which time he considered giving up more than once. If it weren’t for the followers he gained from breaking the Zettafleet story, he never would have been able to gather the funds. Michael lit a joint to celebrate—it eased the cramping in his shriveled calves—and toasted the little black drive on his desk.

  It was a leap of faith, in a way. Michael had no way of knowing if the teapot spy satellite was really being launched from the Jester. Michael’s contact piloted one a fleet of retro-futurism themed spacecraft that gave passenger tours of distant worlds along the Webgates. He made some side money by smuggling contraband, which usually consisted of dumping crates of synthetic drugs or the occasional stolen shipment of Waste vaccine.

  The pilot told Michael he could plot a vector that would allow him to slingshot the satellite into lunar orbit without violating the quarantine, but the Jester had to launch on a specific day of the month for the moon’s relative position to work with the spaceport location. Last month hadn’t been viable. On this month, that day just so happened to be Michael’s birthday. He watched the little drive intently.

  The teapot was exactly the size its name would suggest. It was as black as could be—invisible in the night sky—and emitted no radio waves or broadcasts. The solid state innards gave off no heat. It was a fly on the largest wall in Earth’s heaven. It was programmed to listen for two hundred days: to silently absorb every transmission from within the perimeter of the jammers. In just under seven months, it would send a burst transmission that only Michael’s drive could decrypt. Having given away its position, the teapot would then self-destruct. A red pinprick LED would light up on the drive when it received the data load—the only notification that the deed was done.

  The Jester was a shiny silver cylinder with a red nosecone and blue fins. Circular portholes were installed along rows to give passengers a classic view while they listened to 50s music. As it accelerated, a chute opened along one side and the spy satellite launched with no more than a little puff of steam. Twelve hours later, the ovoid crossed the quarantine and entered low lunar orbit. As luck would have it, the first moon vision would broadcast the very next day.

  The men and women of the Lunazoe Er
adication Council watched in silence as the moon vision played on the giant telescreen. A woman with dusty blond curls sat in a high-tech lab. The resolution was clear enough that Admiral Vogel could see the three freckles by her left eye. They watched as she spoke three sentences.

  “This is Sarah Coverman. I’ve made a breakthrough in my Waste research. I am requesting immediate pickup.”

  4.

  The first moon comm occurred after almost seven months of effort—days before Michael’s teapot was scheduled to unload its data and cease functioning. Michael had doubted God’s existence occasionally through his life and often after the Waste got him, but on the day his drive lit up, he was thanking Him endlessly.

  “Is this a playback of an existing video log?” Admiral Vogel asked. “Something that Coverman sent in the past?”

  “Negative,” Dobbs responded. “The lunar bases never operated like that. All data was synced real-time with the orbital base. Any breakthrough would have been known simultaneously. And they wouldn’t have been sent by video like this. We had weekly status meetings with the base leads via video conference, but those were in real time and would have been with Dr. Alan Fabrycky.”

  “What’s Fabrycky make of this?”

  “I wish I could tell you,” Dobbs said. “He left the institute after the accident. Fell into an alcoholic spiral and eventually killed himself. A few other ex-employees have, as well. Survivor’s guilt, the professionals tell me.”

  Camry Vogel made a tiny sneer. “Then whoever may have worked with Coverman. Is it her?”

  “I worked with Sarah,” Dobbs replied. “It looks like her. Sounds like her. We compared it to audio clips we have of her and the voice is identical. Facial recognition gives it a 99% match.”

  “I’m sorry,” interjected the president, “but can someone please explain to me how in the hell something like this is possible? I don’t want to know what I’m looking at, because I can see it myself. I want to know how. This question is for you, Ms. Dobbs.”

  Nora Dobbs shifted uncomfortably on the screen. She was normally quick with her responses. The outburst from the president caught her off-guard.

  “We have a working theory,” she began. “You see, we don’t actually have a cure for the Waste. The vaccine that Hiro Labs produces works on the human side. It closes the receptors by which Waste infects the body. Miss a dose and you can still become infected.

  “Pelagic labs aimed to do something much better. Our nanites would live in the human body. They would self-replicate and spread from person to person like the Waste does, only the nanites were programmed for one thing: They bonded with Waste capsid and chemically altered the virus—turned it into salt, essentially, that could be metabolized by the body.”

  The president clenched his jaw and waited for her to get to the point.

  “Sounds like an easy task, right? Well, there’s so much we didn’t understand about the Waste. Still don’t. It’s just too alien. Our theory is that the Waste bonded with the nanites. A virus that infected the cure. We think that the alien pathogen has changed the nanites of the lunazoe, thus resulting in these … anomalies.”

  The president stood and put his hands on his desk. “Anomalies? You mean the ghost woman on my telescreen? You mean the messages we’ve been receiving from bases that collapsed? What’s your cure doing? Crossing over to the other side? Conducting a séance with the Waste? Traveling through time? How’s it doing this? Can you tell me?”

  Nora stuttered. She had not been expecting the anger.

  “Mr. President,” Vogel said, “maybe we should have our people take a look at this and reconvene next week.”

  The president agreed and they let the other members of the LEC disconnect to Nora’s great relief. The president sat and rested his forehead against one palm, lamenting.

  “I agree that this is troubling,” Admiral Vogel confirmed. “However, I think what we are seeing is part of the same progression. First, we received monotone hailing signals. Then, we started receiving messages. The signals got stronger. This is like those same messages, only now it has video. It even has the same structure: Just a few words or sentences.”

  It was true. The detailed moon whispers were all so brief. Their contents also had a sense of vagueness. In fact, they’d have been completely unremarkable had it not been for Sarah’s signing code at the end of each one.

  “What do you make of it?” the president asked. He looked up from his desk, hopeful, like a dog begging for scraps.

  Admiral Vogel cleared his throat. “Some of the brains have been suggesting for a while that the lunazoe is an emerging intelligence. I’m starting to agree. I think it’s been trying to communicate with us for ten years. Ever since the first moon whisper. Probably longer, to be honest.”

  “What should we do?”

  “I think we should attempt to answer its call.”

  From that point forward, a new position in the USSN was created. The title was Lunazoe Radio Expert. For twenty-four hours a day since the moon vision, that expert was tasked with sitting in front of a microphone repeating, “This is USSN to Sarah Coverman. Do you copy?”

  Maser sweeps were halted with confirmation that lunazoe growth had been pushed underground. Unfortunately, this led to more stress for Jason. He chewed his fingernails down to raw flesh, checking system readings continuously, waiting for that alarm that a new moon plume had erupted. He spent much of his shifts bickering with Erin. With no work to keep them busy, they resorted to idle chatter.

  “They should just starve the moon of mass,” Jason suggested. “Blow off chunks until we’ve vaporized the entire thing.”

  “Blow up the moon? That’s preposterous.”

  They argued about the logistics of destroying Earth’s moon. About the energy requirements. About the environmental impact on tidal zones. About the psychological impact of eliminating Earth’s oldest and largest landmark. Finally, Jason got tired of the subject and changed the topic.

  “How’s your brother-in-law? Is he still waiting for treatment?”

  “Oh,” Erin said as she turned away, “he killed himself.”

  The pair worked in silence for the rest of their shift. Jason was sorry for Erin’s loss, but didn’t mourn the death of someone with Waste. In fact, the best news he had received since the mission change was that Belew’s Zettafleet had been sent away. Jason was proud of his service in the USSN. Somehow, serving alongside someone tainted by Waste—a mercenary, no less—tarnished the whole Navy.

  The alarms sounded. Another moon plume. Jason and Erin looked relieved that they had something to do. When Captain Hawley later offered Jaston a promotion within the ship, he took it without a second thought. He didn’t want to be in a position where he was yearning to be attacked by the moon.

  Michael played cards with some other residents on his floor every other Friday. With a few beers and the game, he could almost feel normal while surrounded by freaks. Marty was the least affected. His right arm was almost useless, and his left leg still had most of its mass, though it was a few inches too short and had twisted so that his foot pointed directly behind him. He could get around pretty well with a crutch. Randall looked more like something birthed from incest. His chest was impossibly withered, leaving him with no neck and shoulders that had squished up directly under his ears. His lower jaw had receded as badly as his hairline, giving him an overbite so severe that made it impossible for his lips to touch. Randall spoke with a bad lisp, and he always wheezed in short little breaths as his lungs struggled to fill with enough oxygen to keep him alive.

  Geoffrey was the worst off and, like Michael, needed a wheelchair to get around. The Waste has affected him from his left armpit down to his hip. The force essentially bent him in half at a right angle, like a man with a gift for oblique stretches. His left elbow was lost in the fold somewhere, leaving only the forearm jutting up from his side. Still, he had pretty good strength in his thumb and forefinger and could hold his cards upright. He used his s
trong hand to slap the table after Michael told a pretty good joke about shitting on the president’s desk.

  Michael had a pretty good buzz on when he wheeled back into his apartment. He bumped into an end table. Bumped into the big ceramic pot with a half-dead plant that he could never remember the name of. Bumped into chairs that he had mostly for guests that were never invited. Michael rolled through the living area to stop at the restroom before passing out in bed. He sobered up quick when he glanced at his desk.

  The red light on his drive was lit up. The data dump wasn’t scheduled until tomorrow. Michael checked his PPC. It was just past midnight. He logged onto his terminal with sloppy keystrokes and plugged the drive in.

  Most of the data was inter-ship chatter between the USSN cruisers. These communications were encrypted and could not be hacked. Michael dumped every he could not read into a separate directory and found that this included over 99% of the transmissions. He was left with about thirty short video clips and a longer audio log.

  By default, the files were ordered chronologically, with the video clips older than the audio log. He started them in order. The first clip was of a woman. She looked into the camera and said, “This is Sarah Coverman. I’ve made a breakthrough in my Waste research. I am requesting immediate pickup.”

  Nothing exciting there. The next clip was of the same woman sitting at the same workstation. This time, she said, “This is Sarah Coverman. We need assistance. Please review the attached coordinates. Sarah out.”

  Michael’s heart began to sink when after he watched the third clip. They were all messages from the same person. He got through all of them in under an hour. By the end, he was nearly in tears. The teapot had been a financial risk, and it did not look like his gambit was going to pay off. He leaned his head on his desk after the last video finished. “This is Sarah Coverman. We request Pelagic aid at the attached location. Please respond as soon as possible.”