Ocean of Storms

by Christopher Mari

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Good. Keep me apprised.”

  “Thank you, Madam President.” Deke hung up the phone and returned to the VOX. “Copernicus, you are a go for a preliminary EVA.”

  “Roger that, Houston, over and out,” said Benny. He switched off the VOX and turned to his teammates.

  The crew, who had spent the time since their landing preparing for this, was ready to go. They suited up, ran through a few more last-minute checks, then opened the hatch, venting out all the oxygen. Below them now lay the answer to perhaps every question humanity had ever asked.

  Donovan looked at Yeoh. “You’re the ranking Chinese astronaut,” he said over his mike. “This is your moment.”

  Bruce’s head shook inside his helmet. “Respectfully, I must refuse my country’s offer. I have never had a desire for fame.” He gave a quick smile. “Just greatness.”

  Donovan looked over at Benny, who put up his hands. “No, no. It just doesn’t feel right, you know? For me to play the hero. I mean, when all this started, we all made so much about who got the credit, who took home the glory. Then Bai and Moose. Now it just seems like maybe this isn’t anyone’s moment. Maybe it’s everyone’s.”

  Donovan nodded soberly. “You’re right, but someone’s still got to be first out that door.”

  Zell clasped Donovan’s shoulder, his broad bearded face grinning through his helmet’s visor. “Your father started this journey before you were born. Why not take the last few steps for him?”

  Donovan looked around at the crew. Their faces all showed their support. He gave them each a nod of thanks, then took a second to take it all in before heading down the ladder. He couldn’t quite tell what he was feeling or what he should be feeling. With communications back online, the whole world was now watching as he stepped down the ladder to become the first man to set foot on another world since 1972. He reached the last rung, then hung there a moment, feeling for one giddy instant that he should turn back. He had a wild flashback to second grade, when he climbed to the top of the ten-foot diving board at the public pool, only to retreat back down, his head hung in shame. Rather than entertain that notion even a second longer, he simply took his foot off the rung and planted it firmly in the lunar dust. He was down.

  “This is Donovan. I’m down.” He paused, then added with a smile, “Phoenix has landed.”

  In his headset, the cheers of both Mission Control and his teammates almost deafened him. Looking about at the gray wasteland, Donovan was awestruck by its sterile beauty. Over his head, he saw the Earth rise above him, a brilliant-blue orb in the ebony dark of space. In the last several hours, they had experienced unprecedented death and tragedy. But in this brief moment of triumph, Donovan felt a strange sense of joy. He thought of Syd, Syd with her broad beautiful smile—she would have loved this moment more than any of them.

  He knelt down and, using his finger, quickly scrawled something in the lunar dust. He stood up and looked at what he had written, knowing that it would remain there forever, and no winds or rain would wash it away.

  One word: Blackfox.

  June 27

  4:27 p.m., Houston Time

  4 days, 10 hours, 12 minutes, Mission Elapsed Time

  After a brief discussion with Mission Control, Wilson decided it would be best to deploy the lunar rover to aid in burying Mosensen. The rover’s mounted backhoe would allow them to dig a proper grave for their fallen comrade. Without it, he suspected burying Moose would be next to impossible. Wilson and Yeoh would remain in the Copernicus working out the repairs to the lander and the Tai-Ping with Mission Control while the others prepared the burial and the deployment of the Pigeon.

  The backhoe had been intended to clear through any debris that they might encounter on the way to the fissure. None of the crew had ever dreamed that they would be using it to bury a crew member on the Moon. Though their suits were considerably more flexible than the ones the Apollo astronauts had used, they simply weren’t designed for digging graves. The backhoe would not only make their work easier, but it would also speed up the burial and help them conserve oxygen. Once Moose was buried, they could all get back into the lander and follow the transmissions from the Pigeon in shirtsleeve comfort.

  The Pigeon was a small drone aircraft whose concept dated back to the old Predator drones used in the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War. It had a transmission range of about 250 miles and was about the size of a large shoe box. Unlike the Predator, it had no wings or rotary blades; instead it had a small ascent engine and maneuvering thrusters similar to the ones mounted on the Copernicus’s underside. Soong volunteered to deploy it as the others buried Moose. As they needed to conserve the precious amounts of air in their backpacks, there would be no way for her to attend the burial save through her headset.

  Soong tried not to watch as Zell, Donovan, and Benny pulled Moose’s body from the Copernicus. In one-sixth gravity the men had to hunch most of the way forward in order to stand upright. Once they brought Moose down the lander’s steps, they realized that there was no way for them to lift their friend and carry him to his final resting place without falling over themselves, so they dragged him through the lunar dust to a shallow grave Zell had carved out with the rover’s backhoe.

  To unpack the Pigeon, Soong had moved some hundred yards from the Copernicus and the nearby burial site. She used the landing site of Apollo 12 as a guide and walked toward it, occasionally having to lift her helmet’s sun shield for better visuals. The ugly little Pigeon was an engineer’s dream, simple and efficient, but it was as gangly and strange as their own lander, upon which its design was partially based. She glanced down at the little drone and wondered if this was how an alien might see their ship—tiny, fragile, insignificant.

  “Houston, how do you read us?” Benny’s voice was hoarse, and his breathing was labored from his efforts. “Over.”

  “We read you loud and clear, Benny. Ready when you are.”

  There had been some discussion as they were making their preparations about whether they should televise the burial. After conferring with Mission Control, the crew had ultimately decided to film the burial for possible broadcast later, if Moose’s family approved. For now his mother and two of his sisters watched the ceremony on a private-circuit television at Mission Control. Moose’s father, disabled by his stroke, had no way of seeing the burial.

  Remotely, Mission Control pointed the Copernicus’s main camera at the three astronauts gathered around the grave. Behind them flew the American and Chinese flags, put up before the camera was in position. The long shadows of the assembled astronauts stretched across the grave. Through the camera’s eye, the grave itself was a black pit, made all the more deeper and blacker by the unfiltered sunlight on the Moon.

  “We lay to rest not one man, but two: Yuen Bai and Thomas Mosensen,” Benny began, his voice flat and grave. This was his friend, his brother. He struggled to find the right words. “One will find his rest in space, forever comforted by the warmth of our sun. The other will be laid to rest here on our moon. We owe them not only our lives but the lives of all who will be comforted by the knowledge brought from our mission. And we lay them to rest with the knowledge that all of mankind needs only to look to the heavens to know their sacrifices and forever honor their names.”

  With that, Zell mounted the rover and covered the grave.

  Benny stood at its edge and watched as his friend’s body was covered with some of the most ancient soil in the universe. Suddenly, something occurred to him. “Wait!” he called out.

  Zell powered down the rover, craning his neck to see what Benny was doing.

  Benny reached down into the grave, opening one of the pockets of Moose’s space suit and extracting the small packet of Kansas soil his friend had brought with him. Benny poured it into his gloved hand, letting it mingle with the lunar dust.

  June 27

  7:30 p.m., Houston Time

  4 days, 13 hours, 15 minutes, Mission Elapsed
Time

  Returning from their EVA, the crew members were surprised by good news. Mission Control had informed Wilson and Yeoh that they believed the Tai-Ping’s hull was not compromised. Houston also believed that they could reboot the ship’s backup systems remotely so that the Tai-Ping could be warm and waiting for them upon their return. What the engineers and designers couldn’t guarantee, however, was how well she would fly, but they felt that by using a free-return trajectory and conserving as much fuel as possible, the ship could handle the stress. As to food, water, and air supplies, Houston had calculated that the crew had roughly four and a half days remaining, provided that they strictly adhered to scheduled sleep periods. As far as the ascent engine was concerned, Mission Control’s engineers and backup computers agreed that it was functioning within normal parameters. Wilson, however, wasn’t convinced. He knew something was wrong with the engine and managed to coerce another approved EVA from Mission Control so they could inspect it.

  Wilson cut off the live feed to Houston. “Benny, Yeoh, I think you might have to drag me out there so I can take a look at it.”

  “Sir—”

  “I know what you’re going to say, Benny. That wasn’t a serious request. I guess you can use a helmet camera so I can take a look at it from in here.” Wilson’s face clouded with frustration. “Yeoh, if anything looks like a problem, could you disassemble it and bring it in here?”

  “Disassemble it, sir?”

  “Not the whole damn engine, just the power couplings.”

  “Sure,” Yeoh said with a grin. “Why not?”

  “Okay. That’s what we’ll do then.” Wilson smiled at them. “But let’s keep this in the family, okay?”

  “In the family? I don’t understand.”

  Benny nudged Yeoh. “Don’t tell Mission Control, genius.”

  All they were waiting on now were the preliminary recon reports from the Pigeon. The six crew members gathered around Soong’s laptop-sized portable monitor and cheered as the little drone blasted off. Soong had little to do other than the occasional course correction; its onboard computerized maps would seek out recognizable features of the lunar landscape and use them as a guide toward the fissure. Donovan removed his gloves and wiped the sweat off his hands onto his dusty space suit. He wondered if this was how Robert Ballard had felt as his robot submarine searched the cold North Atlantic depths for the debris field that would ultimately lead him to the Titanic.

  Though the video on the Pigeon’s monitor was clearer than any of the old Apollo films, it was still grainy enough on that tiny screen for all of them to be hunched forward and squinting. They tried to keep quiet as the Pigeon’s control board lit up and pinged whenever the drone identified known features and adjusted course accordingly. Billions of years of geologic history flashed before their eyes. Practically anyone else would have been gasping at the sights, but to them all those craters and mountains and valleys were nothing more than signposts on a highway.

  The flashes and pings on the control panel slowly built in intensity. Zell bit his tongue on several occasions when he felt that Soong was not adjusting the Pigeon’s course quickly enough. He tried to keep his eye off the ever-decreasing fuel gauge.

  “Wait,” Wilson spoke up suddenly. “What’s that shadow?”

  “Zoom back over it,” Zell suggested.

  Soong glared at him but quickly brought the drone back toward the shadow. The shape was long and black and narrow, resembling a lamppost trailing down a sidewalk at daybreak.

  “Jesus, would you look at that,” Donovan muttered. “Soong, could all of that ejecta have come from our fissure?”

  Soong glanced at the coordinates and let the drone hover for a moment. Each of them in turn studied the shadow and its outward-spanning fan of ejecta, looking very much like sand spread out by a child digging a hole at the beach. “The Pigeon says this is where it should be.”

  “That ejecta looks fresh,” Zell mused. “It isn’t at all pulverized by meteoric bombardment like the older specimens. That has to be it.”

  Benny leaned in over the monitor. “It’s a helluva lot of it, in any case. Man, that thing’s gotta be pretty deep for all of that to have been kicked to the surface.”

  “But what kind of a power source could blast that much material out of the Moon?” Yeoh wondered, a trace of excitement in his voice. “It has to be something phenomenally powerful—”

  “Punch up the Pigeon’s map of the fissure,” Wilson ordered.

  Soong tapped out a few keystrokes. “Got it.”

  Wilson arched himself up farther. “Now overlay it onto the picture we’re receiving.”

  Soong clicked on the orbital photographs taken by the Chinese mission and dragged them onto the live feed. Despite the indistinctness of the orbital picture, the combined images looked like—

  “A perfect match.” Wilson grinned. “That’s our baby.”

  Donovan leaned over Soong’s shoulder. “Bring the Pigeon in closer. Let’s see if we can take a look-see inside.”

  Soong nodded and decreased the Pigeon’s altitude. When it was fifty feet above the fissure, she set the controls to hover and turned up the drone’s belly lights to full. Despite the intense glare, the lights pierced the fissure’s darkness no farther.

  “We should be seeing much more than this,” Soong muttered. “It doesn’t make any sense. It should—”

  “It’s as if the fissure is absorbing all ambient light,” Yeoh theorized, “almost the way a black hole would—”

  Before he could finish his thought, a warning light flashed on the Pigeon’s control pad and the image on the video screen winked out of existence.

  “What happened?” Wilson demanded. “Have we lost the signal?”

  Soong looked over her instruments and turned to Wilson. “It’s as if the Pigeon just turned off. I’m not getting any readings at all.”

  Zell stared at the screen. “Curiouser and curiouser . . .”

  “What’s the range?” Wilson asked.

  “Five and a half miles from our intended landing site.” Soong was unable to suppress a smile. “Ten and a quarter miles from our present position.”

  Donovan returned her smile with one of his own. “Practically within walking distance.”

  Zell laughed and clapped Donovan soundly on the back. “Alan, they’re never going to believe this.”

  Chapter 12

  June 28

  2:30 p.m., Houston Time

  5 days, 8 hours, 15 minutes, Mission Elapsed Time

  “Pain bad?” Zell wondered.

  Wilson shook his head. “Not so bad.”

  “Here,” he said, reaching behind an overhead panel and producing an embossed silver flask. “Single malt. Take a nip.”

  Wilson’s eyes darted between the flask and the smile quickly spreading across Zell’s bearded face. He grasped the flask and took a mighty swig and clenched his teeth as the sharp liquor coursed down his throat.

  Wilson screwed the cap back on the flask and handed it to Zell. “This is against regulations, you know.”

  “Take it out of my pension,” Zell replied. He clapped Wilson’s shoulder. “No hard feelings, eh?”

  “Dr. Zell,” Wilson said with a shake of his head, “you’ve done so much to piss me off since we first met that I’ve pretty much become desensitized to your antics.”

  “Good, now you know how Alan feels,” Zell answered, then looked around at the others. “So how do we look? I don’t know about any of you, but after that catnap, I’m fairly eager to stretch my legs.”

  After the crew had lost the signal from the Pigeon, Mission Control had mandated that they take a four-hour rest period while they analyzed the data back in Houston. None of them was very willing to sleep except for Wilson, who had spent most of his waking hours since the accident fighting off the agony in his knee with just the occasional dose of ibuprofen. Despite themselves and the cramped quarters, the others also felt very refreshed after their rest—even Yeoh, who was
half-convinced that he had been dreaming about the fissure the entire time he slept.

  “Has Houston finished analyzing the data from the Pigeon yet?” Yeoh asked Wilson, not bothering to mask the excitement in his voice.

  Wilson shook his head. “Not as far as I know. Any theories about what might be down there?”

  “Just one,” Yeoh answered. “It’s the one I keep coming back to. I think we’re looking at some sort of highly advanced nuclear reactor, probably fusion based.”

  “Fusion based?” Soong wondered. “Is such a thing possible?”

  “With respect, Dr. Soong, you forget where we are,” Yeoh replied good-naturedly. “If this object was placed on the Moon millions of years ago, it was obviously put there by a species considerably more technologically advanced than we are. They wouldn’t have nearly the problems that we’ve had building a viable fusion reactor.”

  “You’re about six steps ahead of me, Bruce,” Benny said, “as usual. How do you figure it’s fusion based? Why not something like our own fission reactors? Or solar powered? Hell, for all we know, it could be run on spit and baling wire.”

  “Even without the data from the Pigeon, we can discount it being powered by fission. Fission, as you know, gives off enormous amounts of radioactive waste. Both our unmanned orbiter and yours have given no indication of that. As for solar power, it isn’t likely. Seeing as the object was buried for more than two million years, there’s little chance of that.”

  Donovan crossed his arms. “But that still doesn’t explain why we lost all the telemetry from the Pigeon.”

  “True,” Yeoh replied. “It could be the residual electromagnetic energy from the EMP that knocked out the power on the drone. But the EM energy we’ve been recording for the last six months doesn’t explain the power readings that have been coming from inside. Whatever is inside the fissure must have extraordinary power reserves—enough to power a small city.”

  Wilson rubbed his bristled chin. “So there’s no danger of radiation?”