The Orion Protocol

by Gary Tigerman

  Whether credited or criticized, Deaver’s command decision and pilot Augie Blake’s deft handling of the spacecraft would forever be dissected at the Air Force Academy for the benefit of gonzo freshman cadets.

  Once radio contact with Houston was restored and all the shouting was over, the astronauts made a concerted effort to keep their heads down and stick to the script, hoping to dissipate unwanted distractions caused by such hotdog heroics.

  But the real history being made by Apollo 18 would be made in secret: when Commander Jake Deaver and Colonel Augie Blake became the first human beings to walk among the ruins of an extraterrestrial city on another world.

  After securing the spacecraft and completing the public aspect of their first day on the Moon, the two men suited up, switched to the secure channel for communications, and set out from the landing site in an open rover.

  “My God,” Jake said, gawking as best he could through his gold helmet visor.

  “It’s awesome.” Augie stopped the $20 million little Jeep-like rover with the huge wheels.

  Looking up and out from this vantage point, they could now see what satellite photos only hinted at: they had set down inside the remains of a desiccated dome structure. In all directions, the two astronauts were surrounded by a construct of thin, spidery beams eroded to near invisibility and arching high up into the black daytime sky.

  Jake lifted his protective visor, accepting the brief UV hit in exchange for a clearer view. It was breathtaking and hugely exciting. Both men were pumped up like Super Bowl athletes taking the field.

  “Holy fuck. It’s big.”

  “Houston, y’all should see this damn thing. Wish you were here.”

  “We copy, Augie Doggie. You are our eyes and ears.”

  But Augie had already hopped out of the Lunar Excursion Module and begun making a deliberate panoramic sweep of the site with a hand-wound eight-millimeter film camera.

  “I’m taking a slow pan now. Looks like a lot of broken glass . . .”

  “We copy. Commander, we show your visor in the up position. Over.”

  “Roger that.” Deaver pulled the visor back down as he extracted a large-format seventy-millimeter Hasselblad still camera from its compartment in the rover and used the zoom to get close-ups of the long-abandoned alien biosphere.

  “Augie’s right. Looks like glass panels on a convex-dome frame . . .”

  In a vacuum, glass can be made hard as steel and would be a logical thing for space farers to build with. Jake documented several shattered silicate panels still clinging to lower sections of the dome, refracting and reflecting sunlight into the lens in smeary little flashes.

  “How high is this thing, Dog Man?”

  “Ten clicks, easy.”

  The metallic-looking framework was also about twenty-five kilometers across at the base, and grew more and more skeletal as you moved up from the bottom to the top and it gradually became denuded of its glass panels. Jake photographed the biggest openings and noted their locations.

  “Jesus, Augie. You see those gaps?”

  “Hell, yes, podnah.”

  The descending orbits of their programmed approach had been more hazardous than they’d imagined. Luckily, gaping sections of the broken dome yawned blackly open in all directions, some a mile in diameter or more. They had to have sailed blindly through one of these huge gaps, probably in their last orbital go-around before the final descent.

  “Wouldn’t have known what hit us.” Augie stared up at the ravaged metal spires reaching out like anguished fingers, some as thin as peanut brittle from millennia of cosmic rain, other sections still sturdy enough to have meant certain death if Augie had crashed into them.

  “Houston, do you copy that?” Jake said, suppressing his anger, but adding a task to their already tight schedule: this structure would have to be thoroughly mapped in 3-D for the safety of the next mission. “Houston? We need to take altimeter readings. Over.”

  After the few seconds of signal delay, the mission director and former Gemini pilot came back sounding strained and apologetic: better satellite reconnaissance would have put them less at risk.

  “Uh, loud and clear, Commander. Get everything you can. Over.”

  Jake secured the Hasselblad, released the altimeter from its cushioned Velcro cubby, and measured every dimension of the lunar architecture until their first day’s covert EV time was over and they had to head back.

  Jumping lightly into the rover in the Moon’s one-sixth gravity, Deaver grabbed Augie’s bulky arm and indicated the gaps in the dome above them.

  “You’re one lucky hotdoggin’ son of a bitch, you know that?”

  Augie grinned and strapped himself in behind the wheel.

  “Stick with me, Daddy-o.”

  Neither man would be able to sleep much aboard the lunar module, which gave the NASA medical team fits. They used this insomnia to record hours of audio commentary, including observations and speculation about all the things they couldn’t talk about except over the scrambled ALTCOM channel.

  The Dome, as they came to call it, obsessed them. They presumed that the immense biosphere would have contained some kind of breathable atmosphere. The ETs would’ve needed to generate a lot of power to maintain such an infrastructure, too, but nothing of that alien technology remained on the surface. At least, they hadn’t found it. But their imaginations leaped to fill in the blanks.

  Who were they? What were they like? When were they here and why? Where did they go and why? Had the city been abandoned or lost in some kind of catastrophe?

  They strained to get a sense of the beings who had walked and breathed and clearly lived here unknown thousands of years ago: intelligent entities capable of space travel and advanced enough to be building arcologies on other worlds when Man was still making tools from stones and bones and playing with fire.

  It was on their final excursion inside the Dome that Jake found the craterlike depression that was not a crater. Steering the lunar rover to within ten meters of the hole, the two astronauts checked their air supply and the battery life on their suits, then marked the time and their precise position.

  “Houston, I think we found something. It’s a large hole. Over.”

  “Roger. What kind of hole, Commander? Over.”

  Getting used to their bulky suits, Jake and Augie unstrapped, grabbed up cameras and flashlights, and disembarked in light jumps that were becoming almost graceful with practice.

  “It’s like a mine shaft. We’re going to take a closer look. Over.”

  “Negative, Commander. Spelunking is not on the schedule. Do you copy?”

  “Copy that, this definitely looks like it could be the entrance to a habitat or some kind of mining operation. We need to get coverage. Over.”

  As they documented the entrance with still cameras, their handheld lights penetrated only a few unrevealing meters into the tunnel, which was otherwise occluded by debris. Undaunted, the astronauts argued vehemently with Mission Control for permission to go inside the shaft.

  “Negatory. No way, gentlemen.” The Gemini alum wearing the vest in Houston was firm. “That is the word and the word is final: document what you can see from outside, then get back on the rover and back on sked.”

  Returning to the module, Jake and Augie went a little crazy, conjuring up what might be found in the ET tunnels underneath the Dome: technology light-years ahead of what the United States had at the time, logs, journals, corpses of extraterrestrials, which they argued could be brought back in their backup spacesuits and swapped out in an emergency. But Houston wasn’t buying.

  “At least let us take the cameras in. Ten minutes,” Jake begged. “That’s all we want is ten minutes.”

  But NASA management wasn’t going for it on any level.

  “That’s a negative, Commander. End of discussion. It’s a tremendous find, no question. Outstanding. But whatever’s down there will still be down there when we come back with the right tools for the right job. Do you
copy?”

  It was probably wise, but it was a political decision as much as anything. One awkward fall and one spacesuit torn on some unseen jagged piece of alien rebar, and NASA would have one unexplainable American tragedy on their hands: and a scandal that’d rock the program to its foundations.

  “Great work, gentlemen. Let’s move on.”

  The remainder of the mission seemed anticlimactic. But on the long coast home, with the blue of Earth getting larger every hour in the port window, Jake did have a consolation prize. Among the two hundred kilos of classified Dome materials they were secretly shipping home was a smooth, flat bladelike piece of indigo-colored silicate he had found that first day under the Dome.

  It was almost opaque, like other shard samples taken from the many pools of shattered ET glass. But when held to the light, this one showed six hieroglyphic symbols suspended in the center, somehow etched inside the blade without disturbing its smooth beach-bottle surface.

  In the spacecraft, Deaver photographed the symbols backlit by flashlights, uncertain how the pictures would come out, and studied them for hours, copying the glyphs with pen and ink until they were etched into his brain.

  Once back on Earth, however, Jake’s photos, sketches, and the indigo shard itself, along with all other artifacts from the Dome at Sinus Medii, were whisked off for examination and then archived away from public view.

  40

  “My God, Jake.”

  In Deaver’s warm high-ceilinged kitchen, what remained of Angela’s coffee was cold. Still enraptured by the story, she drank it off.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Setting fresh candles on the table, Jake had assembled a calligraphy brush, freshly ground black ink, and a pad of art paper. Angela’s eyes widened as he drew an elegant hieroglyph from memory, laid it next to the “Grotsky photo” of the Moon, and then continued with the boar’s-hair brush and ink.

  “Beautiful.” Angela stared at the alien rune. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Any idea what it means?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  Deaver kept drawing as Angela studied the Moon photo with fresh eyes.

  “And what about the stars in the daytime sky?”

  “Sunlight hitting pieces of glass on the dome.”

  Once Jake had inked all six lunar glyphs, he arranged them in a careful order on the table. Individually and collectively they seemed to radiate a profound sense of mystery.

  Deaver then slipped a graphite rubbing out of his art papers.

  “I found this on a wall of the Great Pyramid at Giza.”

  When the rubbing was set among the lunar glyphs, Angela could see the similarity. It was stunning.

  “Oh, Jake, people deserve to see this. The world deserves to see this.” She stood up, taking in all the ancient symbols together and shaking her head in disbelief. “And people think you’re crazy.”

  “Only for the last thirty years.”

  Angela looked at Jake and then leaned over and kissed him full on the mouth. It was partly a Desdemona kiss for the perils he had passed, partly an expression of appreciation for being entrusted with his secret, all in a moment of spontaneous affection that generated more erotic heat than either of them might have expected. What might be done about it remained to be seen, but it left Deaver surprised and somewhat nonplussed.

  Angela tucked her hair behind her ears and leaned back away from his face.

  “I suppose that was a lapse in professionalism on my part.”

  “I’ll still respect you in the morning.”

  Jake’s composure was returning, but it wasn’t hard for Angela to tell how he was feeling about that kiss. What he might be thinking was another matter.

  “You think I kissed you to recruit you?”

  Still standing close enough to have easily kissed her back, Jake made a wry face, took her empty cup over to the sink, and rinsed it out, dissipating the sexual tension.

  “No, you pretty much had me when I first heard your voice on the phone. But if you’re serious about what the world deserves to see, there’s some assigned reading. A report made to Congress in 1959 by the Brookings Institute about the risks inherent in exploring space.”

  Angela gave him a look with her smart green eyes.

  “Bring it on.”

  Ten minutes later, Angela Browning’s rented Cavalier blasted past the dark access road across from Jake’s property, rattling its way downhill to pick up the interstate back to Denver.

  In their nondescript burgundy sedan, the windows half fogged up by body heat, the FBI field agents made dutiful note of it. Markgrin checked the time on his luminous designer watch and entered it in the case log.

  “Guess he’s not getting lucky after all.”

  “Hold on.”

  Stottlemeyer first heard then saw a second car passing by at speed with its headlights off, and his attentiveness was rewarded with a flash of red brake lamps that gave up a little more information.

  “Subaru, early ‘90’s, dark green. Colorado plates. Needs a wash.”

  It was pretty typical: thousands of the little four-wheel-drive wagons with 100,000-plus miles on them could be seen thrashing around the Rocky Mountains all year long. Probably just some local guy in a hurry who forgot to turn his lights on. Stottlemeyer relaxed his vigil.

  “Fuck it. Time to drain the snake.”

  As Stottlemeyer opened the passenger-side door, the domelight flashed, fully revealing their stakeout in the dark road. Markgrin snapped it off.

  “Jesus. Put up a billboard, why don’t you.”

  But Stottlemeyer’s hard shoes were already stumbling over field rocks and sounding uncertain of their footing until an extended splash and splatter, along with a half-suppressed moan, announced the arrival of relief.

  41

  The squat, gray Australian relay station had the spilled-beer and moldy laundry charm of a frat house. But for the Aussie grad student it was his kind of frat house: one with $100 million worth of fully automated digital satellite instrumentation and the only direct NASA connection to the Space Station Alpha under the Southern Cross.

  With lights on, provisions in, and the air-con blasting, Jonathan set fresh water down for Hudson, who was eagerly exploring.

  “A yawn, a piss, and a good look ’round?”

  After grabbing the chocolate Lab for a quick wrestle, he fed Hudson a doggie cookie. Then he got on the landline to Washington, D.C., and the man who had picked him for the job.

  “Colonel Blake? It’s John down under. Can you hear me now?”

  “Good. Much better. How’s it look, son?”

  “Looking good. No worries. We’re moved in and powered up.”

  “Let’s do a run-through.”

  Working through equipment presets on the station checklist was all they could do before handling a scheduled live feed from the space station.

  Launched two days earlier, the Pentagon’s Clementine III satellite had a last whip-crack flyby today on its way to mapping the dark side of the Moon. From Jonathan’s location in Australia, the outback dish would bounce video signals from Alpha and the visiting space shuttle Atlantis directly to CNN/London. The station was fully automated, but NASA required a live body in situ to monitor, maintain, and provide tech support for station equipment, which is how Jonathan would earn his pay for the next three months.

  “Okay, John-boy, there’s a VCR and a box of blank cassettes. Find CNN on receiver A. You’ll be archiving the Clementine flyby and everything on the event schedule from here on in. Comprende? And put me on the box, would you, son?”

  “Right.”

  Jonathan switched over to the speakerphone and found the tape in a black metal rack of relay equipment. Video monitors hanging from the ceiling were already showing test images as Alpha cameras zoomed in on the Earth terminus and the exact spot from which Clementine III would soon emerge.

  “John?”

  “Got it. Just gotta whack it in.
”

  Slapping a cassette into the VCR, he hit record/pause and surfed through the receiver channels until he found Judy Woodruff reporting from CNN/Atlanta. He then cued the tape up past the leader and hit record.

  “And next up, on CNN, step on board Space Shuttle Atlantis and the International Space Station Alpha, where the Clementine III satellite will be flying by at eighteen thousand miles per hour on its way to the Moon, coming up live on CNN. Don’t go away . . .”

  “Colonel Blake? Is that enough level?”

  “Loud and clear. You rollin’?”

  “Yes, sir. Green light is on.”

  “Make sure input audio isn’t pinning.”

  The Aussie grad student glanced around to see what Hudson was getting into, checked the record volume, and turned up Augie on the speakerphone.

  “Input audio looks good, sir.”

  “Okay.” Augie’s disembodied voice filled the cinder block room. “Now go to receiver B and punch up some numbers I’m going to give you. You should get a PIP window on-screen.”

  Jonathan entered the code Augie gave him and a box opened up in the corner of the station monitors showing the view from Atlantis’s open shuttle bay.

  “Whoa. I’ll be stuffed.”

  It was a privileged view: the curvature of the Earth seen live from high orbit. The PIP window then began cycling itself through a network of security cameras on board both Alpha and the space shuttle.

  “That’s the EC, the emergency channel. It’s on 24/7 as a safety backup. So, if you get bored, son, you’ve got all astronauts all the time.”

  Suddenly the channel switched to show a young Alpha astronaut, Lieutenant Heather Charney, floating in zero g at a space-station porthole.

  “Whoa!” Jonathan watched the attractive Lieutenant Charney set up a video camera to cover Clementine’s approach and final slingshot pass.

  The emergency channel then cycled onto another station, CNN came back from commercial, and Augie’s voice brought the grad student back down to earth.