by Peter Damon
“So you want us to recover the satellite for you, but in complete secrecy,” Cheryl summarised.
“We do not want it recovered, Miss Hall. We want it disposed of. We want the problem to disappear,” Dmitry smiled.
Gary nodded and grinned. “We can push it out towards the sun. It will be vaporised well before meeting it,” he explained.
“That would be good enough for us,” Dmitry agreed. “And your fee for such a service?”
“We would need a fee of 20 million US Dollars for each satellite de-commissioned in this manner. There will be a written contract between us to outline our service, and stress the confidentiality of the agreement,” Cheryl told him while Gary made notes.
The Russian Cultural Attaché held out his hand. “You can send the documents and bank details to this address,” he told them, passing them his business card. “You can do this task quite soon?”
“Within 5 days of receipt of our fee,” Gary agreed.
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Leanne and Allan watched Michael with suspicion. Michael rarely entered the control-room just to wander round it, looking with interest at the un-manned control-tables but otherwise ignoring the two people on duty.
They glanced at each other, their expression conveying the shared thoughts, and waited, knowing that Michael would raise his concern at a time of his choosing.
They didn’t have long to wait.
“I have to make a trip into USA,” he explained.
Allan nodded. “And you’re worried the US will pick you up.”
“Or as worse, shoot me down,” Michael told him.
“Where about?” Leanne asked.
“East coast. Place called Dover, state capital of Delaware,” Michael told them. “I need to meet with a senior man in the US administration, so I’d like to get there, and out again, without being seen,” he explained.
“Being costal and close to Washington DC, security is going to be very tight,” Leanne suggested.
“Air-space is tight too. There are quite a few major airports in that region of the USA, not to mention the air force base, right in Dover,” Allan pointed out.
“You could travel up the river,” Leanne suggested, bringing up a map of the area on one of her screens. “There again, possibly not,” she laughed. The river was a meandering creek used for recreation and not very deep.
“Can you have the man meet you further south, say right down on Cape Charles? Less population, less security,” Allan was pointing out, but Michael was shaking his head.
“This is more a surprise visit. He doesn’t know I’m coming, and I don’t want to risk him knowing and making the wrong decision,” he explained, now with a sigh as he saw the difficulty he was in.
“Well, I do have an idea for a form of stealth-ware. We can load it into the Range Rover and try it out, if you’d like,” Leanne offered.
“Inside of a week?” Michael asked hopefully.
“Sure. We’ve got all the electrical components in the store and Frankie’s mob could build you a new car in half the time, if they needed to,” she shrugged.
“They’ll see something,” she explained to him. “They won’t know what it is, and they won’t actually know where it is either. My system distorts the returning signal so it appears to come from other nearby objects, like clouds, a flock of birds, and even other aircraft if they’re close enough. Add that to HYPORT and our vehicles having no heat signature, and you’re almost undetectable by all of the automated systems used by the super-powers.”
July 24th.
The control-room for the ARC was a large and high ceilinged room somewhat to the rear of centre of the ship’s hull. To the back, immediately above Michael and Heather’s suite, was a narrow mezzanine viewing room from which visitors could look down and admire the control of the vessel without compromising the security of the ship, or the concentration of those operating it.
That morning, all desks in the control-room were manned and the viewing room was full, everyone wanting to watch as another chapter in history was made.
There were three notable absences; Frankie, Matt and Paddy. They were seated in one of the pristine but heavily modified Sports Utility Vehicles, their attention riveted on their individual control screens as the vehicle moved sedately out of the rear docking bay and swung slowly to face the moon.
“You’re green on our boards,” Thomas told them from the control-room as he once again checked the main console in front of him. Allan was nodding, his app sitting on the vehicle’s main console, just waiting to be tapped into activity.
Oliver Cole sat at his own desk within the control-room, in front of a plain blue backdrop onto which any image could be added. In front of him, large screens allowed him to monitor the social media networks. He had worked with Allan to help produce software that would bring keyword and people use to his attention, helping him to affect ongoing threads. An electronic secretary wrote his spoken words while another translated them into ten key languages while word and text recognition software automatically selected the services he wished to respond to. Video cameras waited above the screens, in the event he wanted his image to be transmitted, while feeds from the other cameras controlled by the ARC were also on hand. He was, in effect, his own program director and editor too.
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“Here we go,” Frankie told his two passengers, and touched the app.
“Shit!” Matt breathed.
“Dear Mother of God,” Paddy prayed as, outside, the earth began to visibly shrink while the moon grew steadily larger.
“You’re right on the green,” Thomas told them calmly as, like the doctor sitting close by, he saw the three’s heart rates shoot upwards.
Allan was nodding, his telemetry confirming what their testing had already shown. Speed and power usage were precisely as predicted. He checked their course and watched the play of logic on his screen as the program continued to receive details of the vehicle’s path, and continually corrected it with minute adjustments of electricity to the front and rear sheets of HYPORT.
Leanne changed the main display on the far wall of the control-room to show images from the external cameras on the vehicle. She smiled, sensing the awe-induced silence from the viewing room as they began to appreciate just how quickly Frankie and his team were moving. No human being had ever achieved such speeds. Nothing of earth origin had ever moved towards the moon at such velocity. She hoped Oliver was aware of that.
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Oliver didn’t need Leanne to tell him the significance of what they were doing; a twelve year old girl from Florida was doing that for him, reeling off her knowledge of space for everyone who was ‘listening’.
He added a few remarks, and fed some of the video through to You Tube with links to it on Twitter and Facebook. He also answered a query from a producer within the BBC while giving CNN a five second video from the inside of the SUV.
His software alerted him to the Prime Minister’s presence on Twitter as he fed in more details of their on-going project.
The ARCs new Facebook page was now receiving record number of hits, with visitors selecting the pages of the various astronauts so they could ‘follow’ them as they helped coordinate their trip to the moon. Frankie’s page, not surprisingly, was getting the most hits.
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“You’re half way there,” Thomas murmured into the silence of his earpiece while, in the viewing room above and behind them, people came and went, some returning with refreshments and snacks.
“Time for a cup of tea,” Matt said, and brought his thermos out to begin unscrewing the top cup as his fellow passengers laughed.
Cocooned within the vehicle’s own gravitational field, Matt, Frank and Paddy enjoyed a hot cup of tea from plastic cups and talked in subdued voices about the rapidly growing moon, going over, one more time, what was expected of them.
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Oliver answered some of the technical questions
from stock answers the team had prepared earlier. It seemed half the world didn’t yet appreciate that the ARC had gravity. Matt’s approach seemed to be drawing followers and Oliver used a video feed to show him sipping his tea and joking with Paddy in the back of the SUV, their faces lit by the light from their screens.
There were some hostile Twitter messages coming through, highlighted to him from his software, and he rapidly put factual responses across the other social media sites to squash such trivia. His attempts didn’t have any effect though, as more and more hostile accounts came on-line, feeding off of each other’s comments and ignoring his attempts to correct them. Perplexed more than annoyed, he continued to correct them, reminding them in more general terms of the benefits the ARC was bringing to earth as a whole. Much to his chagrin, his messages only seemed to spark off still more virulent comments.
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As the vehicle grew nearer to their destination, the moon moved upwards, confirming their destination as the southern pole. Details of the moon’s surface became clearer and more defined, capturing and holding their attention as, with every passing second, more and more details appeared.
“Outward automated flight program is closing in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and closed,” Allan recited. “You are now stationary and 100 kilometres from the moon’s southern surface,” he confirmed.
Oliver fed the voice and video directly down to the main media companies on a five second delay and held his thumb over the Stop key in the event something untoward should occur.
“So I see,” Frankie observed. He and his team stared at the moon through their monitors, very conscious of it sitting immediately off to one side of them, no longer the small and inconsequential sphere it had always been. It was now a huge presence beside them, pitted and rough, universally tinted in shades of dark gray.
“How far are we from earth?” Paddy asked in a low voice.
“400,000 kilometres,” Matt told him, altering one of his screens to show the earth behind them.
“Jesus! I’ve never been further than Aberdeen!” Paddy admitted, trying to laugh, his eyes glued to the earth, a small orb hanging in the middle of Matt’s monitor.
Frank cleared his throat and took the steering wheel. He tested movement on it before pressing the accelerator to begin moving the vehicle down, towards the moon’s surface.
Matt, in the back, returned his monitor to forward facing and used his fingers to move the image of the moon’s surface back and forth, searching for likely locations. Finding one, he held his finger pressed to it, and the heading came up on Frankie’s head-up display, in this case a screen that was acting as his windscreen.
Having been using the display nearly every day over the last few weeks, Frankie smoothly altered the path of the vehicle to bring him into green on the display.
Back on the ARC, the team checked on Matt’s choice of location and affirmed the probability of water. They, like everyone else, watched in near silence as the vehicle moved cautiously down and into shadow.
Changes to the social network had just about come to a halt as people digested what was happening and ceased commenting on it. Over half of the SUV’s cameras were recording some view of the moon, all of them digital, and all in a detail rarely if ever recorded before.
Paddy turned on the strong lights and tried looking in all directions at once, his heart hammering. “Should we put our faceplates on now?” he asked, his throat dry.
Matt licked his lips and watched the distance from their objective slide down, slowing as they reached five hundred metres.
“Nearly there,” Frankie murmured calmly.
No one on the ARC chose to answer, but watched in silence as the camera feed picked up the ground below them as the vehicle moved across it.
“The wall should be about two kilometres further on,” Matt murmured.
Frankie nodded, his heads up display already having alerted him to it. He slowed down still further and maintained a fifty metre distance from the floor while continuing to move forward.
“Eight hundred metres. Seven hundred, six hundred,” Matt murmured.
“Stop that,” Frankie told him.
“Sorry,” Matt grinned.
They moved steadily forward, coming to a halt some fifty metres from the dark wall that the lights had revealed.
“We’re going to land now,” Frankie told them.
Paddy glanced at the images of the floor of the moon directly beneath them through his monitor. “You’re good,” he agreed.
The ARC collectively held its breath as they watched the surface of the moon grow more and more distinct, until practically every small rock and grain of the surface was in sight.
“We’re down,” Frankie confirmed.
Matt let his breath out and turned to grin at their pilot. “Good one, Frankie. Hardly felt a thing mate.”
“Don’t unfasten your seat belt until the engines are off and the pilot has turned off the seatbelt sign,” Frankie told him as he cycled through the external cameras one more time.
“Can we put our masks on now?” Paddy asked in a small voice.
They did so, leaning forward and pulling their heads back to lodge the rear of the head mask into the seal on their suits, then drawing the seal over the full circle of the mask before pulling their heads back to have the mask lodge against the back pack, connecting the small air pipes into the mask. Information appeared on the front of the bowl-like face plate, confirming a seal, confirming air, confirming communication, cycling through its start-up procedure before leaving navigational details on display.
Paul, back on the ARC, nodded as he saw their heart rates feed from the faceplate technology onto his console. He glanced to his left and right, wondering if anyone had noticed the receipt of heart rate information before the faceplates had been put on and shrugged. He’d deal with that small inconsistency when it arose, if it ever did.
Leanne watched their vital signs appear on one of her displays and confirmed their status. “Face masks on. You’re all green,” she advised. The doctor might not agree though, not with such fast heart beats, but that wasn’t her call.
Frankie glanced at the other two, saw their sharp nods, and closed the switch to exhaust the air from the cabin. Completed, they removed their seatbelts, opened their respective doors, and stepped down onto the surface of the moon. They looked at one another.
“Aren’t you going to say something?” Matt asked of Frankie.
“What, like, ‘will you stop messing about and go get the tools, Matt’?” Frankie asked.
“No! You have to say something profound, you know, like ‘One Small Step for Man’, or something like that,” he explained.
Frankie sighed. “Matt, will you stop messing about and go get the tools?”
“Michael; will you tell Frankie he’s not doing it right?” Matt pleaded.
Michael stopped his laughter long enough to repeat what Frankie had already told him, and Matt sighed and got to work still shaking his head while mumbling something about philistines.
Oliver groaned to himself as hundreds of thousands of people on the social networks tried to remedy Frankie’s lack of respect for the moment.
The team on the moon moved cautiously towards the rock face, small but bright lights on their shoulders lighting their way. The surface of the steep-faced wall that they came to was dusty, but when wiped clean of its surface dust, looked like dark molten rock. Paddy used his small hammer and the material broke and splintered.
“Do you think that’s water?” Frankie asked, picking up a piece. It looked grey and black, crystalline but easily breakable. “What do you think, ARC?” he asked, holding it up in front of him so the cameras would capture it too.
“Add a Geologist to that list of required subjects for the ARC,” Michael murmured, looking at the screen along with everyone else on the ship and trying to decide.
“Put it into one of the flasks and bring it back, but get some samples from other locations too,”
was the decision they made, relayed to them via David.
So that’s what they did; Paddy breaking off more fragments, Matt holding the flask while Frankie dropped the pieces into it. They then returned to their vehicle and stowed the flask before closing the doors and regaining an atmosphere that allowed them to take off their masks before lifting to find another location.
There were plenty to choose from, but Matt made a conscious decision to find one a good distance from the first. It was smaller and the substance looked much like the first. Nevertheless, they broke off small pieces and put them into a second flask.
Paddy stowed it in the rear while the other two took their seats in the cabin. He took his time, judging the moment when the other’s attention was elsewhere, to then quickly kneel to fill three plastic sealable bags with soil.
Back on the ARC, Doctor Paul Wright sat up as Paddy’s heart rate spiked. “Anything wrong, Paddy?” he asked, keeping his own voice neutral with some effort.
Thomas had seen the spike and turned the vehicle’s cameras to find Paddy, and for a moment there was no sign of him.
“Paddy?” he asked.
“Yes?” Paddy replied. Standing again, he quickly stowed the bags deep in the nearby tool box and closed the lid.
The doctor settled into his seat as he saw Paddy’s heart rate slow to normal again. “Take it slowly,” he suggested. “The tools may not feel heavy, but their mass is unchanged,” he warned, now seeing him on one of the video feeds.
Paddy nodded and stepped into the vehicle, squirming for a moment to allow the backpack to lock with the connectors in the back of the seat before closing the door and giving Frankie the thumb up sign.
Frankie lifted the vehicle smoothly from the surface and took them silently up to 100 kilometres before pressing the second app. Once more the crew made a startled exclamation as the moon began to move astern of them, the earth visibly enlarging in front of them.