She made a call impetuously, but it was a call she had considered making in the back of her mind for weeks: to NASA Director Nate Petan.
Conn got to the point. “Did you hear the avatar the other night avoiding the question about what’s happening on the moon? The Russians are launching probes in August, yes? Let’s have them find us a landing spot, and let’s go back,” Conn said. She shuddered with a momentary thrill at the idea. “To the far side this time.”
“There are certainly those in Washington who think it would be worth the cost. Until they hear what the cost is.”
“I can’t finance it, but I can get you to the space station on a Dyna-Tech rocket, if you can take it from there.”
“So you want me to pay. And let me guess, you have a crew in mind.”
“Daniels and I should land. We’ve met them before, and we speak the language.”
Petan was silent for long moments. “You get everybody to the space station. I’ll pay for you to build another lander. I don’t have the vehicles, and Europe doesn’t care if there are a bunch of avatars in America. I’ll get approval for the rest.”
“You’re a doll, Nate,” Conn said, and when she hung up, she was smiling for the first time in a long time.
# # #
Jody loved his new job, working with a bright, energetic team to find ways to exploit pressure field tech in new ways. It wasn’t long before he decided he wanted to come out to California to be with his coworkers in person. That almost exactly coincided with Conn heading to Houston and Brownsville for the next five months, but they got to eat a couple meals together.
“Do you think Pritam is one?” Conn asked him over lunch, about a week and a half after her appearance on Hayley Brigham’s feed.
“No.”
“Who do you think is?”
“Honestly? I don’t get what the big fat deal is. It’s not like anybody married an avatar—and no, I don’t think the Pelorians would have done that, and anybody who says they did marry one is trying to sell a story. So some tangential people in my life might have been aliens. I hope they learned what they wanted to learn. Buh-bye.”
“I guess it’s more that the country has had one put over on it.”
“Not the first time,” Jody mumbled.
The US government seemed unsure whether to reassure people that, yes, they knew all about this, everything’s under control, or act like they’d found out at the same time as the rest of the country. Since they couldn’t decide, they did a little of both. Conn was skeptical that anyone in the government had known about the avatars; it would have come out, even as a discreditable conspiracy theory.
Conn had to testify before the US Senate Subcommittee on Science and Space to explain what she was going to do with all the money they were ready to throw at her. The committee made it clear that she was making this trip not as a private citizen, but as a duly appointed agent of the United States. Conn gravely accepted her responsibilities.
They would use the same command module as Conn’s previous mission, and once again, Jake would be the pilot. Five months to build a new lander was pushing it, but her people would get it done, at NASA’s expense.
In August, Russian probes went to the moon. They beamed back some interesting pictures from orbit. They located a good spot for Conn and Daniels to land. A relatively flat area not far from the forty-by-forty kilometer fortress the aliens were building.
FORTY-EIGHT
Departure
August, 2035
The Pelorians were walling in a kilometer-tall mountain along the rim of the enormous crater Hertzsprung. Inside the perimeter, they looked to be burrowing under the mountain, though there were plenty of vehicles and equipment visible inside the compound. There were also what looked like enormous antiaircraft guns rimming the barrier. Conn shuddered when she imagined them aimed at their lander on its way down.
There was debate over whether to land inside or outside the walled perimeter. Conn’s preference, to land outside, prevailed. It was true that for the trip to be worth the cost, she and Daniels would have to get inside the fence. Conn’s plan was to ask nicely. She stuck to the belief the Pelorians had some benevolent purpose. Daniels was vocally skeptical, but was grudgingly won over by Conn’s logic. It would be easier to go from trusting to not trusting than to burn bridges right away and only then discover the Pelorians had been on their side. Conn knew well from her experience in the Arctic Circle that a single incident could turn the aliens against them.
The photos of the lunar reconnaissance were classified; it had taken a great deal of delicate maneuvering to get the Russians to share them at all. But that didn’t stop them from getting out.
As sky-high as the Pelorians’ popularity had been just a year before, it hit bottom now. The photos clearly showed a huge fortified area defended by some kind of weapons. The usual suspects stoked the belief that this must be meant as an act of war against Earth: Glenn Bowman was as smug as if he had actually been saying all along that the Pelorians were building a militarized fortress on the far side of the moon. But Conn had studied Bowman and learned his mannerisms, and she thought he seemed bewildered underneath the warlike rhetoric. She had the sense that he would have been happy for the Pelorian threat to remain something left to the imagination. He was a little out of his element now that the aliens might have turned genuinely aggressive.
Conn didn’t want to think about the implications if the Pelorians really were preparing to attack Earth. If so, she and Daniels might not make it out of the command module, or might not reach the surface at all. But blowing them out of the lunar sky didn’t seem like something the Pelorians she knew would do. Had they changed that much? Or fooled her that completely?
It was amid these troubling thoughts that, almost exactly one year after her first moon landing, she sat with Jake and Daniels on an Strummer I-IV rocket, ready to do it all again all alone on the far side of the moon. Nobody would be able to talk to them there. Nobody would be able to help them.
No aborts this time. The Strummer I-IV rocket launched without incident. The four- to five-G press was more tolerable for Conn this time. With all the rocketing to the space station she’d done, her body knew it was temporary, and didn’t send as many panic signals to her brain. The crew’s SSIV docked at the space station, and the three of them clambered out and into command module Rocinante. The lander was called Dapple.
As anxious as they were to get underway, the three of them went through the preflight inspection checklist item by item. Their concession to the hurry they were in was that they went through the checklist only among themselves, off-radio. For obvious reasons, Conn found herself keenly interested in the starter for the lander’s ascent engines. It was in good shape, as was the rest of the lander and command module.
As they completed their checklists, Conn saw someone at a window inside the space station, waving frantically to get their attention. She pointed him out to Jake. Jake tuned back in to the space station’s frequency, then blinked and gawped at what he heard.
Turning back to the moon frequency, he told Conn and Daniels, “There’s what they’re calling a swarm of Pelorian spacecraft inbound. Heading this way.” Daniels and Conn looked at one another. Daniels chuckled nervously.
“Doesn’t have anything to do with us. It can’t,” he said. But the spacecraft had gotten the astronauts’ attention. Jake told the workers to hurry it up.
Since they were in zero-G, Conn was able to pull herself up to the command module’s navigation telescope and look in the general direction of the moon. She saw nothing. Daniels took her place and shook his head.
Jake got back on the radio to the station. “Where’s this swarm coming from? We don’t see it.”
“Your four o’clock,” was the response.
Jake took a look. “Shit on a shingle,” he said. “At least a dozen. I don’t know how big they are, so I can’t tell how far out.”
Conn shouldered him aside. She’d seen plenty of Pelorian shuttles. She
gasped. “I don’t think those are shuttles. I don’t know how far away they are, either, but it’s not far enough,” she said. “Are those guys done out there yet?”
“They’re going over their checklist.”
“Can we afford to wait?” Daniels asked. A NASA veteran, Daniels would normally be the most rigid of the three of them when it came to checklists.
“They can’t be coming because of us,” Jake said. “Why would they be? How would they even know?”
“The feeds would have told them we were going to the moon,” Conn said. “But not when. Not now.” The world knew a team would go to the moon to reconnoiter the Pelorian fortress, but details were classified.
Jake radioed the contractors to clear away. They objected. Conn switched to their frequency. “This is Conn Garrow. The person who pays you. Unhook us now and get out of the way.”
Jake barely waited for confirmation they were untethered before he goosed a maneuvering jet. Conn hit the wall. Daniels hit her.
“Sorry,” Jake growled. “Strap in.”
They no longer needed a telescope to see the inbound craft. The ships winked in the sunlight, in roughly a rectangle formation, three rows of four. The astronauts heard Gasoline Alley operations trying to warn the inbound craft to slow down, as well as protesting to Jake that it was unsafe to proceed out.
“I’ve never seen this kind of spacecraft before,” Conn said. They had aggressive, harsh angles, noses shaped like bee stingers, and intimidating protuberances Conn imagined were weapons. It was as though someone had ordered a squadron of spacecraft that were exactly the opposite of the Pelorians’ friendly-looking “rocketships.”
“So they could be OK,” Daniels said. “We really don’t know what they are.”
“We’re not going to find out,” Jake said, clearing the docking bay and dropping below the plane of the space station’s orbit. “Hang on.” He fired an attitude jet, and Rocinante shuddered.
The Pelorian spacecraft each flared and fired jets propelling them in the direction of Rocinante. Some spacecraft broke formation and dipped down, seemingly to intercept the command module.
Jake wasn’t having it. He fired attitude jets three more times to point in the right direction, then let loose with the main engine. The sudden acceleration pressed the astronauts back against the command module walls, and Conn watched the viewscreen in horror as a Pelorian spacecraft got bigger, bigger, bigger. She winced, and braced herself—then they were past it. Jake hadn’t given any ground, so Conn figured the Pelorian had moved out of the way.
They were in their slingshot orbit around the Earth. Jake looked back at Daniels and Conn.
“I don’t think we’re out of the woods yet,” Conn said.
“No,” Jake said. “If they want to stop us, they can.”
“Maybe they won’t,” Daniels suggested. “Maybe they were trying to stop us from leaving, but now that stopping us would be dangerous...” His voice trailed off. Conn thought about how dangerous trying to stop them now could get.
“Man, I wish this was the Starship Enterprise, or something,” Jake said. “Something with scanners.”
“And shields,” Conn said.
“And photon torpedoes,” Daniels said. Conn and Jake looked at him.
They saw nothing as they fell through one orbit, then two. Then, it was time to go to the moon. Jake broke orbit.
“There,” Conn said, pointing at the starboard window. A Pelorian spacecraft was tracking alongside, keeping a safe distance. They saw another on the port side.
Conn unstrapped and pulled herself down to the window that partially looked below the command module. There were two Pelorian ships visible there.
They were surrounded. Rocinante was under escort, it seemed. Conn prayed escorting was all the Pelorian craft would do.
FORTY-NINE
We Come in Peace
August 28–31, 2035
For two and a half days, the Pelorians flew beside, beneath, and above Rocinante. It nagged at Conn that the Pelorian craft had presumably come from the moon or lunar orbit, then turned on a dime to fly back to the moon without refueling. Not for the first time, she daydreamed about getting her hands on all the aliens’ tech.
The command module felt crowded compared to her previous trip with Jake. She got aggravated with Daniels, ostensibly for crowding her, but really because she was in the mood to be aggravated. They didn’t pass their journey to the moon on affectionate terms. Jake made a crack about the cool temperature in the command module, and then let it drop.
It was unclear who the commander of the mission was. Conn thought of Jake as the commander, she couldn’t have said why. On their two-person moonshot, Conn and Jake hadn’t needed either one to be in charge. But Conn considered him senior to her, in age and experience. However, traditionally the commander on a moon mission landed. Also, Conn was now Jake’s boss. Daniels was the senior astronaut in terms of total time in space, and NASA was paying for the mission, so he often acted like he was entitled to order the other two around. Conn decided privately that she would take the lead once they landed. She found herself wondering more than once if Daniels would go along with that.
Conn missed Peo on the flight, more than she had in a long time. She hadn’t had the time to miss her recently. She knew Peo would have loved the fact she was going back to the moon. She reminisced with Jake, a pastime Daniels couldn’t really participate in, and thereby pointedly excluded the other astronaut. She asked Jake about his flight to the moon with Peo, and discovered something she hadn’t known—that Peo had never told her.
“Her landing on the moon was supposed to be a one-way trip,” Jake said, reddening. He clearly felt uncomfortable spilling the beans, having most likely assumed Conn already knew all this. “Her cancer diagnosis—it was before the mission. A year before, at least. She’d been given a death sentence, pretty much, and she decided to die on the moon instead of in a hospital bed.” Conn blanched. Peo had died in a hospital bed, after all. She fought back tears. “When we turned around and headed home, her life was saved. And then she beat the cancer—for a while. So...” Jake wouldn’t go on about the mission after that, and Conn didn’t press him.
Conn felt hurt that Peo had never told her. She wondered why Peo didn’t trust her with what was obviously information known only to a select few. But mostly she felt an even greater reverence for her mentor. The moon had been important enough to Peo that she was willing to die there. Did Conn have the same drive, the same sense of clear purpose in her life?
Did she want it? It would feel good to have something you were willing to die for—until you died for it.
As the moon loomed larger, the astronauts’ conversation was increasingly about their Pelorian escorts. What would they do when their course took them around the moon? Would they continue to shadow Rocinante? The idea seemed to have been to prevent them from leaving the space station—if so, might they obstruct the lander so that it couldn’t separate? Would these ships peel away and leave Conn’s vessel open to the antiaircraft guns around the Pelorian compound? That possibility scared her most of all. She imagined a silent, unseen blast from one of the guns vaporizing her without her even knowing what hit them. She had nightmares about it, during the brief times she was able to sleep.
They would find out soon enough. The Pelorian spacecraft held formation as they approached the moon.
“Rocinante, Brownsville. Telemetry looks perfect. We show you go for lunar orbital insertion.” Jody, clearly excited to be in the CapCom’s chair—he’d lobbied for it, and Conn thought he would be good at it, so she gave him a shot—didn’t display any anxiety about the Pelorian escort whatsoever.
“Not too late,” Daniels said. “We could just keep going.”
“Catch up with Callie?” And Grant.
“Roger that, Brownsville,” Jake said. “Stand by for lunar orbital insertion.”
The Pelorian spacecraft fell back. They were going to let Rocinante into orbit. Conn was
relieved—and troubled. She wondered how the Pelorians knew to break formation. None of the mission audio or video was going public this time. Were they directly hacked in to their radio? Or just following their telemetry very closely?
As they began to curve around the moon, Jake slowed, allowing the moon to catch the spacecraft in its orbit. There was no further sign of the Pelorian escort.
Conn and Daniels made their way to the lander. Conn thought the separation and descent checklists would go faster with two people sharing the work, but they didn’t—after one of them said out loud what they’d done from the checklist, the other would check or acknowledge it, then Brownsville would have its say. Safer, but certainly not faster.
“Dapple, Rocinante. I have you go for separation,” Jake said.
“Roger that.” Conn separated and slowed, Jody echoing her steps as she accomplished them and sounded them off. As absorbed as she was in her task, she spared some attention to worry about their descent and landing near the Pelorian fortress. Had the Pelorians let them come this far only to blockade them? Or shoot them out of the lunar sky? If Conn and Daniels did land safely, would they be surrounded and captured?
The fortress was enormous, as wide across as many of the moon’s deepest impact craters. Sailing over the crater Hertzsprung, itself in excess of five hundred kilometers wide, did nothing to diminish the scale of the structures the Pelorians had built.
The barrier around the mountain was the color of metal or concrete, its straight edge and uniformity setting it off from the similarly colored background. It had to be at least twenty meters high. Several small outbuildings were in evidence inside the fence line.
Conn tilted the lander into its descent to squeeze some more speed out of it. She wanted to make sure it cleared the perimeter, and if she could keep them out of likely range of the Pelorian antiaircraft weaponry, all the better.
She looked for a relatively flat area some manageable distance from the fortress. As the lander continued to descend, she got a glimpse of a number of huge vehicles inside the barrier, at the foot of the mountain. A ribbon of gouged-out ground that had to have been kilometers long showed that the Pelorians had burrowed at an angle underneath the mountain. Conn looked for the huge piles of removed stone they must have dug out; then she realized the Pelorians were probably using that material to make their walls and machines.
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