“Would you like me to inform her that you will be attending?” Genesis inquired.
Joy looked at her mom for approval, the excitement of seeing her favorite teacher’s presentation clearly evident.
“Can I go, mom?”
“If that’s what you would like to do today, of course. Are you planning to stay in school all day?” asked Sydney.
“Of course! I’m going to call everyone so we can all hang out there together,” Joy said as she skipped out of the kitchen, going to her bedroom to make the calls.
“Thank you, Genesis. It looks like you lost them for today,” said Sydney.
“That is quite all right. Her school work is several years in advance of children her age on Earth. And she appears to have a very positive relationship with all her teachers.”
“How was her science homework last night?”
“It was perfect, and that was without any prompting or assistance on my part. If I were to make a guess, her interests are very much in line with those of her uncle, Peanut.”
Sydney laughed at the A.I.’s observation, more so for Genesis having actually said “Uncle Peanut” than for anything else.
“Thank you, Genesis. That will be all for now.”
Joy came running out of her room, her data pad slung in its case on her back.
“Whoa there, Sport. Be sure to get a good lunch today, you hear?” said Sydney, giving Joy a hug.
“I will! See ya later, mom!” said Joy over her shoulder as she raced out of the apartment.
Sydney shook her head, marveling how everything about her life as a mother was so normal in light of the fact that they were living millions of miles from her own planet of birth.
The thought of Earth brought a bittersweet touch of sadness to her as it reminded her that Joy and her father were never going to meet and get to know each other, and that the difference in the color of her skin and John’s was the only reason why.
* * *
“So, John, anything new with you?” Tom asked, after draining a third of the brew.
“Not really. Same shit, different day. You?”
“Some shakeups at work. Probably some shuffling around of people, some in, some out,” answered Tom.
“That’s right, you work for one of those big conglomerates, right?”
“Global Space Technologies.”
“That’s right, GST. They’ve taken over the supply and maintenance runs to the International Space Station. They’re also one of the two firms that send supplies to the moon for those navy SEALs stranded there, right?”
“When NASA retired the shuttle fleet, only the Russians had the capability of resupplying the station. There’s a bunch of entrepreneurial companies, as well as a couple of the industrial multinationals, who decided to go the private enterprise route into space. GST’s one of the best.”
“I guess opportunities are everywhere these days,” said John.
“They are. The next thing now is the race to get out to the belt to try to meet up with those folks from the moon. So far GST and NASA’s Project Jove looks like it’s going to make it out to the belt first. Still kind of hard to believe, a whole colony of Americans, black at that, living on the moon for decades and no one knew? Amazing,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief.
John was silent, nodded and then moved to another patron at the other end of the bar.
Tom watched him walk away, trying to gauge John’s reaction to his casual mention of the separatists. He was looking for anything that would hint at how much John knew about the group, or any unusual interest in the subject at all.
Tom Weston wasn’t just some mid-level functionary at GST, he was the global head of security. Over the last ten years he had taken on the task of investigating every clue, every person who might have unpublished knowledge of the people in the colony or their work before they had established their facility on the moon.
He had used the staggering lobbying power and financial resources of the conglomerate to pump elected and unelected officials who served in President James Bender’s administration. He followed the financial lives of those same people to see if any unexplained largess had been bestowed upon them once they left government service.
Tom had put hundreds of high-level African Americans in government and industry under surveillance in an effort to determine if any of them had been in contact with, or had secret knowledge of, those listed in the final message transmitted on every cable and satellite channel when the moon colony left for the asteroid belt.
To date, GST had spent billions of dollars following up every possible lead to obtain any information whatsoever on those people. It was only recently that classified information, locked up in the most secret files of the FBI, about John’s true relationship with Sydney Atkins had been breached.
Wanting no possible mistakes with this line of investigation, Weston decided to personally conduct the research and surveillance on former detective Mathews.
For several months, Tom had been dropping into Pete’s on Tuesdays and Thursdays almost as regular as clockwork, putting in the occasional Saturday or Sunday just to vary the routine.
He even went so far as to have John’s email account hacked and monitored, in addition to the normal surveillance of all phone calls and postal mail.
As he knew John’s every movement, it was no problem to align his visits with John’s usual evenings on duty.
When John returned to Tom’s end of the bar, he brought another beer, knowing his patron’s habits.
“Thanks John. I won’t tell you to have one on me, but how about an iced tea?”
“You know something, that would go down pretty good about now. Thanks.” He grabbed a tall tumbler, scooped some ice into it, and poured from a pitcher kept in the cooler. Adding a sprig of fresh mint and a straw, John clinked glasses with Tom and drank.
“That does hit the spot. What you said earlier, do you really think any of the three or four top-tier space technology companies and governments are seriously considering a trip out to those folks, and expect something other than a cold shoulder in response?” John asked casually.
“Hell, yeah. I mean, look what they did! From the scientific reports that have been made public, they have mastered the control of gravity. That capability alone would revolutionize transportation right here at home. Imagine, trains that didn’t use fossil fuel? Hell, they wouldn’t even use tracks; no infrastructure needed except stations and right of way.”
“You know what I would want if we had that kind of technology available?” Tom asked.
“No, what’s that?”
“I want to have a George Jetson flying car.”
John laughed. “Yeah, that’s gonna work. Can you imagine the kinds of midair collisions in places like Florida? Shit, most people can barely drive in two dimensions, let alone three. You wouldn’t be safe anywhere except in some underground bunker. Your house could be smashed by a falling car, your apartment could become an unintended drive-through; forget about it,” John said, taking another pull from his glass.
“Okay, I haven’t worked that out yet. But the possibilities are endless.”
“Sure they are. But I keep going back to that last message they sent. It seemed pretty cut and dried about them not sharing any of their technology with anyone from Earth. It seems to me that if we do get any of those technologies, we’re going to have to do it on our own,” John observed.
“Maybe, maybe not. You never know, people change.”
John nodded his head in agreement. However, behind his smiling countenance was a mind honed by years of successful detective work, especially in the fine art of interviewing suspects. He was now alerted to the fact that there might be a hidden agenda in Tom’s having brought up the subject of the separatists in the first place.
“Just maybe some sort of dialogue could be st
arted with them. Once your company puts together the technology needed to get out that far, who knows?” said John.
“I hope you’re right. But whatever the top brass are thinking about, especially with their relationship with NASA over the last decade or so, it’s way above my pay grade.”
“You said you work in security. Isn’t it part of your job to protect the plans and technologies of the company?”
“Me? At my level? We’re more concerned with people who take home office supplies, make personal long distance calls on the company’s dime or check out online porn on company time. Sometimes I feel like an overpaid school security guard. But the pay is stellar!”
“Sounds like the job’s a keeper.”
“It’s not bad. The Atlanta offices at least afford me the opportunity to hang out in places like this. Not too sure how long they’ll let me stay. I asked to be permanently posted here, but since I sometimes have to train staff on things like, oh, log off your computer when you go out to lunch or when you freaking go home for the day, it’s hard to say where I’m going to be sent next! You have no idea the excitement I face every day on the job,” Tom said, laughing.
“Doesn’t sound too terribly bad.”
“Well, it’s nothing like being a cop like you were, right?”
John was looking right into Tom’s eyes as he asked the question. And saw nothing but normal interest.
“Actually, as a missing persons detective, there was a lot more leg work than actual danger. Pretty boring in fact,” John answered, now almost certain Tom was on a fishing expedition.
“I guess. Anyway,” Tom began, as he drained his glass, “I’ve gotta run. Early morning seminar about securing your company smart phone. That means not installing apps for your kids on the same phone you receive the corporate email or access your bank account. You have one of those smart phones, John?”
John reached into his pocket and pulled out a flip phone approaching ten years old.
Tom laughed and reached out to shake John’s hand. “You are something else. ’Til next time… .”
“Take it easy. Don’t be too hard on them tomorrow.”
John watched Tom leave the bar, unable to decide for sure whether he was being played. Shrugging his shoulders he decided to bag the internal debate and get back to work.
Though he never said anything about her to another soul, not a day went by that John didn’t have thoughts about Sydney Atkins. Pete knew. Special Agent Samuels of the FBI knew. After all, it was Samuels who assigned John to investigate Jaylynn Williams’ disappearance in the first place, which brought John and Atkins together.
Meeting Sydney was a once in a lifetime opportunity, and it spun him around like nothing had before. His measured, reserved protections against the pain and disappointment in finding those he was assigned to locate, people hurting, people trapped by horrible circumstance, people who, through no fault of their own, ended up losing their way, normally would have protected him from such an unexpected emotional whirlwind.
With every fiber of his being, John felt he would never love again. Sad, perhaps. Extreme, definitely. But the last thing he needed was some corporate nosey-body dropping in on him at his shitty job to remind him of the greatest loss in his life; he had done what he still believed was right in letting her go. He tried not to feel sorry for himself, he had been around the block enough to know that shit happened. But sometimes, every now and then, he was also aware of his burning anger over the whole situation. An anger at a woman who could express an abiding love for him, make love to him, then moments later leave forever.
John would give his life to find out what was happening with Sydney in the asteroid belt. At best, she was over fifty million miles from earth; most of the time it was much farther than that. In any case, he still had a hard time accepting she was lost to him forever.
He was going to be extremely vigilant the next time Weston visited the bar.
* * *
Much had changed on Earth in general, and in the United States in the 10 years since the separatists had taken their entire installation out of the lunar bedrock and sent it to the asteroid belt.
President Bender’s authorized mission to send SEALs to the moon yielded bitter fruit at every turn. There was almost universal condemnation by other countries, the US and Russia bearing the brunt of the international ire.
The fact that an armed SEAL team was sent, then stranded on the surface, couldn’t be spun in any positive way to give the US cover.
The SEALs had taken shelter in one of the separatists’ surface installations, supplied with air and water. The surprise of the century was finding the actual Apollo 13 lunar lander and the damaged service module just inside the inner airlock door, looking exactly like a museum exhibit. At the time, it had been assumed that both burned in the Earth’s atmosphere prior to the astronauts’ safe splashdown. When they informed mission control of the fact, NASA and the US military went wild speculating on just how the Separatists had pulled off that feat.
Four of the SEALs had pooled everyone’s remaining oxygen so they could return to their escape pods and strip them of everything useful. All of the extra supplies, oxygen bottles, rations, the radio transceivers and anything else that could be detached went on two sledges and hauled back to the installation.
When the SEAL team members toured the lunar installation they found the source of oxygen—algae and grass—atmosphere-purifying hardware, and an intact kitchen. They also found connections to a high-gain antenna on the surface, to which they attached their own communications gear.
Electrical power was plentiful, and ran the few devices left behind, including that fully functional kitchen. However, there was no furniture and several larger rooms were equipped with broad swaths of grass underfoot.
In what looked like a locker room for the previous residents’ space suits, there was a built-in air compressor, and an oxygen extraction unit. It didn’t take long to fashion a threaded sleeve to attach their own suits’ oxygen bottles to the equipment to top off their own air supplies.
On Earth, NASA scrambled to find some way to supply food to those stranded soldiers. The lead SEAL, CPO Pritchett, took it upon himself to try consuming some of the algae left behind in the abandoned hydroponics department. With no ill effect other than a complaining stomach looking for something more substantial, the rest of the team also consumed the water-borne plant life in order to sustain them until Earth could make a delivery.
Ten years later, seven of the original eight were still alive, Seaman Greenfield having died from sepsis brought on by a burst appendix.
They received shipments of food and other supplies dropped to the surface in the same manner as their own trip to the surface. NASA also put up a polar-orbit repeater satellite allowing the men to maintain regular communication with Earth.
NASA, as well as the entrepreneurial companies taking advantage of government subsidies allocated for investment in space technologies, had increased man’s presence in Earth orbit, but had yet to develop a craft capable of landing on the moon and returning to Earth. Their focus was on an extended mission out to the separatists’ space stations in the asteroid belt.
Secret instruments, developed by the US military to track gravity-based anomalies, showed the single installation that had left the moon was now joined by at least four others employing the same gravity-controlling technologies. Though detectors on Earth could locate gravitation anomalies throughout the solar system, scientists were no closer to duplicating the separatists’ technology than they had been a decade before.
Martin Harris, Ph.D., was still the world’s leading researcher in gravitational studies. His detector was the preeminent investigational tool in the study of gravity and the detection of the gravity-based technologies the separatists used to extract and lift their habitat from the moon and propel it out past the orbit of Mars. His unique detector h
ad been replicated in two other underground, military-controlled installations. The devices were a closely-held secret that, so far, U.S. allies knew little to nothing about.
The details about the secret group of African Americans who had been living on the backside of the moon were eventually released to the public. There seemed no point in holding anything back, since the separatists had transmitted a roll call of their group to the entire world. Everyone also knew the details of the highly visible mission to the moon, which had pushed NASA space shuttle technology to its limit.
The inevitable leaks about the mission, its crew complement, and the navy SEAL team that had been transported to the moon went public in the most spectacular way when technicians in Japan decoded and rebroadcast the SEALs’ camera and audio feeds from the moon to the rest of the world.
Everyone on Earth wanted to know as much about the lunar inhabitants as possible. It was former Detective Mathews’ misfortune to have fallen in love with one of the last members to join the inhabitants on the moon.
The intervening decade that passed since the discovery of the separatists fostered a number of changes in national and international priorities. And though the excitement and the public’s demand to know everything about those remarkable American blacks had cooled considerably, what hadn’t changed was demand for the marvels those people had at their disposal.
The capabilities of the spacecraft that had picked up Sydney Atkins from the outskirts of Atlanta and an unknown person or persons out on the waters of Massachusetts Bay were unprecedented, the stuff of science fiction. Leaked reports from the FBI lab that had analyzed the foot of a member of the lunar inhabitants who had met with a deadly accident flying in the Middle East demonstrated that the members of the lunar community were not aging at the same rate as normal human beings. From all indications it appeared they would live far longer than their earthbound cousins.
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