“Jesus, what in the hell have we dug up here?” Stan Nathan asked from Pasadena.
“What we have here is a damn battlefield,” Hugh answered.
“A what?”
The most experienced flight director in the United States stared at the most unsettling image he had ever seen from space.
Then he hit his transmit button.
“It’s a killing field.”
EVENT GROUP COMPLEX, NELLIS AIR FORCE BASE, NEVADA
“What is the body count thus far?” Virginia Pollock asked from her seat next to Niles.
The entire divisionary infrastructure of the Event Group was seated around the large conference table next to Niles Compton’s office on Level 7. They had been silent as Pete Golding played them the video of the last series of images he had just stolen with the use of the supercomputer Europa-or “hijacked” as he put it-on the large thirty-foot monitor on the wall.
Virginia Pollock had voiced what was on all their minds.
“Yes. The body count.” Compton turned toward the lieutenant commander on detached service from the Navy. The Japanese American signals officer was tasked with infiltrating NASA and JPL communications. “Commander Yahamana, what have you found out?”
“In a secure message sent to the program’s head, that being the vice president, we have learned they have uncovered parts of sixty-two bodies inside Shackleton Crater. Some were whole, some less intact. Most were without space suits. That is where we stand at the moment since JPL has ordered all four Beatles to stand down for solar recharge.”
“I’ll add this,” Niles said. “There seem to be support structures from a destroyed composite environmental unit, or shelter. They don’t know at the present time how many or how large these shelters were.”
“I take it we are now leaning toward this site not being of Earth origin?” Colonel Jack Collins asked from his seat at the opposite end of the table.
Next to him Captain Carl Everett, the second man in charge of the Security Department, was at a loss for words, as were most in the room at hearing about what was happening on the Moon. He leaned over and whispered to Jack. “Okay, I spent the last eight hours off base-what in the hell did I miss?”
“Oh, you’re going to love this one,” Jack said. He turned his attention back to Niles.
“No,” Compton answered with a slight shake of his head, “not unless someone made a leap in technology that would outpace the rest of the world by at least two to three hundred years.”
“Have they uncovered any more weapons?” Charles Hindershot Ellenshaw III, the head of the Cryptozoology Department, asked from the center of the table.
“They think three,” answered Yahamana. “One of them considerably larger than the weapon strapped to the back of the first skeleton.”
“Do we have any idea the makeup of any of the weapons?” Virginia asked Niles.
“Jack, what does our resident military man have to say?”
“If I had to speculate, which is bad business in our world, I would say it was some sort of light weapon.”
“Light? You mean in weight?” Ellenshaw asked.
“No, I mean it’s a particle beam weapon. The crystal installed on the end of the first weapon is the tipoff here. Aberdeen Proving Grounds used a crystal that intensifies a particle or light beam upon discharge through the emitter.”
Charlie Ellenshaw looked around the table and passed his hand over his head. “Okay, you lost me,” he said, as a few chuckles and agreeing nods came from around the table.
“A ray gun, Charlie,” Jack simplified.
“Oh.”
“Which brings me to the next point,” Compton said, standing and pacing in front of the large table. “How many nations have the capability to decode NASA and JPL transmissions?”
Jack turned to Yahamana and then to Captain Carl Everett. “These two would be far more capable at an educated guess than anyone else.”
“Anyone with a ham radio could receive the data, but to decode?” Yahamana said, looking at Everett for his concurrence. “I would say maybe five or six nations can decode NASA’s and Jet Propulsion Lab’s communication codes.”
“The imagery from the Moon would be far easier. It would be like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle,” Everett said, still not understanding the full extent of what was happening on the Moon.
“What are you thinking, Niles?” Virginia asked, knowing her boss was ten steps ahead of everyone else in the room.
“What I’m thinking is, if nations, particularly the space-capable nations, find out we are digging up advanced weaponry on the Moon, how soon before they’re crying bloody murder about us withholding valuable information from them? This could open up a can of worms we really don’t need right now.”
“What do you propose to do about it?” Virginia asked, seeing Niles’s point.
“We have some work to do historically. And we have things we need to find out about what exactly happened up there on the Moon. I will have orders and instructions very soon for each department. Jack, you and Captain Everett may be able to get a jump on the rest of us and take a trip to Ecuador. Snoop around a little. Take whatever men, tools, identification you deem necessary and see if you can get a lead on Columbus.”
Jack nodded his head as the meeting broke up. As he gathered his papers he looked at Carl, who was staring at him.
“We’re chasing Columbus now? I think he’s dead, at least that’s what my fourth grade teacher informed me.”
Jack smiled as he looked at Everett and then started picking up his notes and briefing materials.
“Far deader and for far longer than you may have been led to believe, Captain,” he said.
This time the smile was missing when he looked back up at Everett.
***
Jack had made the arrangements for himself, Everett, Will Mendenhall, and Jason Ryan, to fly south to Ecuador. The two lieutenants, Ryan and Mendenhall, were thrilled to be getting out of the training schedule they had been facing with all of the new recruits in the Security Department. In their absence the training would be conducted by the Army and Marine noncoms under them. Ryan would be doing the piloting of the Air Force Learjet C-21A.
Collins stopped off on Level 7 to see if Director Compton had any last-minute orders before they lifted off from Nellis Air Force base a mile and half above the complex. Jack nodded at the assistants as he strolled through the outer office. From the way the three men and one woman were hunched over their computer terminals, it looked like Niles had them dealing with a heavier than normal workload. Jack knocked on the door, sparing the ten-foot-by-six-foot portrait of Abraham Lincoln a brief glance after being told to come in.
“Niles, we’re getting ready to shove off,” he said as he saw Compton switching his interest from a file in his hands to the large center screen monitor.
“Jack, good, you may want to see this before you go,” Niles said, offering the colonel a seat in front of his desk. He handed Collins a copy of the report he was reading. “I had these typed up from memory and a brief conversation with the senator just an hour ago. Also, take along some of these photos of what was found in the debris of the crater. It looks like paperwork and pictures of star fields. They’re made of the most unusual material; they look like paper, but seem to have a property like glass or dense plastic. I’ve passed them along to Virginia and Pete Golding to get their take on it. The public has no knowledge of these… at least for the moment.”
Jack took the typed report and downloaded photos from Shackleton, glancing over them as they were printed out. The written report was basically everything they had covered at the late lunch meeting with Lee and Alice at their home. The photos sent by the probes from the Moon, however, were a different story. Some showed the Moon from different angles, some showed Earth in heavy cloud cover. One showed the star field deeper into the solar system. Some of them Jack didn’t recognize. After he perused the report and the strange photos, he turned and watched the center s
creen. It was the grainy telemetry signal from Shackleton Crater. One of the rovers looked as if it had a small stone in its Canadian-built steel grips. It was rolling it over in its “fingers” as though examining it. Then Jack watched as the rover swung its arm around and deposited the stone in a pile that was at least two feet in height.
“With everything inside that crater, I would think JPL and NASA would be concentrating their efforts somewhere else instead of rock collecting.”
“That’s the thing I wanted you to see. Remember when the senator said that inside the crate that fell over there were skeletal remains and some strange-looking rocks?”
Jack looked at the report again. Then he found the spot where Niles’s memory had recorded the senator’s exact words. “I didn’t until you just mentioned it.” Collins looked at the video feed again. “Is this live?”
“Yes, they’re running a special on CNN about the collections going on in the crater, that’s why the picture is so grainy,” Niles said. “It’s streaming right to us before JPL’s had a chance to clean it up. The point is, look at those rocks. I’ve seen Moon rocks before. Hell, I’ve probably held at least two hundred of them. They’ve always fascinated me.” He stood and moved closer to the large screen. “I have to say this, and I think someone else also has noticed this at NASA and JPL. Those are not rocks indigenous to the lunar surface.”
Jack stood. He tried to focus on the grainy picture. The rocks resembled lava. They looked porous. But he had seen Moon rocks that looked the same way.
“How can you be sure?” Collins asked.
“Look here,” Niles said, pointing at the uppermost layers of rocks that the robot had piled in the center of the crater. “That silverish material looks like mercury, or possibly even lead. That’s not a Moon rock.”
“Maybe small asteroids or meteors then. That would go a long way to explaining the devastation inside the crater.”
“I don’t know, but point taken, Jack,” Niles said, watching the robot pick up the rock it had just placed on the pile. “Maybe we’ll find out something in a moment. It looks like they’re going to try and get a spectrograph report.”
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY, PASADENA, CALIFORNIA
Stan Nathan had just agreed with Hugh Evans in Houston that they should run a spectrograph analysis on one of the stones. Stan was hesitant at first. Hugh had just sanctioned the use of a limited supply of bottled air and water to clean off the surface of the rock before running the analysis. The Beatles all had a very limited supply of air and water, and Stan hated the idea of expending the supply of George for the test. But as Hugh had pointed out, they had supplies from three other Beatles if they needed water or air.
“Okay, REMCOM, get the order out to George to start the centrifugal force rotation of its hands.”
“Roger, Flight, commencing spin.”
A full minute later they all watched as the two-handed George started to spin the rock in its three-fingered grip. They saw dust fly off the stone as the centrifugal force became too great for the small particulate matter to adhere to the porous surface. It spun for fifteen seconds and then came to a halt. By that time, the command to wash and blow off the small rock had been sent and received.
As the world watched live, a third arm located beside the small drilling derrick extended and came within two inches of the rock. The finger grips started spinning once more as a stream of heated water shot from a small nozzle embedded in the arm. The water struck the stone. Frozen particles of ice were thrown free as the centrifugal force forced them from the porous stone. A fourth arm extended. A burst of air hit the spinning stone. More particulate matter blasted away from the rock and then as quickly as it had started, the spinning and washing ceased.
“That went well,” Stan said with relief as he reached over his console and patted one of the programmers on the back. “Pretty flawless, now we need to connect the spectrograph and see-”
“Flight, we have a glitch in the power readings for George. The stored battery charge has risen by thirteen percent.”
“What?” Nathan moved rapidly to his console and looked at the telemetry streaming in from Shackleton.
“I’m also showing a rise from the stored battery power of Ringo, Flight.”
“That’s impossible. Where can they be picking up power? Ringo ’s not even in sunlight.”
“I don’t know, Flight, but George is now back up to fifty-two percent power and rising.”
As they watched, the grainy picture from Shackleton cleared and became crystalline in clarity.
“Flight, we have a one hundred percent surge in communications from John on the upper rim of the crater. Whatever is going on is affecting the remote from almost a half a mile up.”
Stunned, Nathan looked at the programmers and technicians.
“Look!” someone said, louder than necessary.
On the main screen, the rock that was being held by George was glowing with a soft luminescence. The illumination was silverish in color and seemed to act as a halo around the stone.
“Pasadena, this is Houston,” Hugh Evans called on the VOX system. “Stan, this reaction started happening when oxygen and water was added to that rock. For the time being have George drop the rock and get the hell away before we lose him.”
“Right,” Nathan answered as he nodded for REMCOM to pass along the order.
Technicians started to furiously type commands from their stations. They were ordering all three of the Beatles to get as far back from the stone as they could without climbing out of the crater. The rock on the screen was glowing brighter.
“Come on, come on!” Nathan said out loud.
“The batteries can’t take this. The voltage regulators onboard are not shutting down the charge. We are at one hundred and twelve percent and rising on all three Beatles. John on the rim is at eighty-five percent recharge and rising.”
Finally, on the television screens and in front of most of the world, George dropped the rock and immediately started backing away.
“Leave John in place on the rim, I want to get as many readings from the crater floor as we can,” Nathan said. He wished the Beatles would move faster.
“We have no effect. Power readings are off the scale. We may have to-”
“Jesus, look at that!” another technician said. Nathan was glad that their reactions were kept in-house. CNN had left it up to JPL’s science advisor for descriptions of what was happening. He wished he could hear how he would explain this.
The pile of strange rocks began to glow, apparently reacting to the air- and water-contaminated rock. They were much brighter than the first stone.
“That’s it,” the George remote leader called out. “We just lost George. Massive power surge and overload. He’s dead.”
On the main viewing screen the picture from a retreating George went to snow.
“That’s it for Ringo and Paul!”
Ringo and Paul had maxed out at over 100 stored amps. Stan Nathan watched as his robots succumbed to the strange properties of the rock they had found inside of the crater.
“Jesus-”
That was as far as Nathan got in his exclamation over the event happening more than 244,000 miles away. The entire view screen, along with the picture coming from the rover John on the Shackleton Crater rim, turned to snow after a fantastic flash from the interior.
“What the hell just happened?” Nathan demanded. “Did we lose John to the same power surge?”
The room grew silent as the picture from John looked as though it wanted to come back on. Then it went white again.
“Pasadena, this is Houston,” called the voice of Evans at the Johnson Space Center. “Pasadena, Houston!”
“Go ahead, Houston,” Nathan finally answered.
“Goddamn it, get on the ball out there, Stan, we’ve just recorded a large detonation from the surface of the Moon. It was caught from orbit by Peregrine 1, over.”
Peregrine 1 was the mother vehicle orbiting the M
oon as a relay platform for the Beatles. It had also been the vessel that brought the four lunar rovers to the launch point for their landing the day before.
“Say again, over,” Nathan said, his mind racing as his eyes watched for the picture to return from John.
“ Peregrine 1 is reporting a large-scale detonation equal to two kilotons of TNT at 89.54 degrees, south latitude, and zero degrees, east longitude. That’s inside Shackleton, over.”
Before Nathan could answer, the picture from John flashed, and then flashed again, and then the picture cleared.
“We are receiving picture from John!” REMCOM called out.
“What in the hell is wrong with it?” Nathan finally found his voice at about the same time he regained control of his racing heart.
“He’s been knocked on his side, Flight,” the John remote team reported, as they started typing commands once again.
“Damn it! Give its camera arm a ninety degree turn. Now!” Nathan ordered.
A minute later the picture started to rotate. The view cleared and the camera pointed skyward with just the edge of the crater’s rim in the picture. They all stood and stared, unable to believe what they were seeing.
“This can’t be,” Nathan said.
“Pasadena, Houston, we have a three-hundred-times-power picture coming in from Peregrine 1. It should be coming up on your screen, over.”
“Roger, Houston,” Nathan said, leaning heavily against his console.
The room was completely silent as the view changed from the bright, almost blinding, picture of George to that of Peregrine flying over 180 miles above the lunar surface.
“What the hell did we dig up?” Nathan asked, turning and sitting heavily on his chair as he realized that the Peregrine mission was now finished for all time.
On the screen, the mushroom cloud expanded into a silent and energy-filled cloud that rose from the lunar landscape, snaking into the airless void of space before dissipating sixty miles up.
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