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From Our Downloadable Sample:
0925 hours Houston Mean Time (HMT) July 24, 2019:
Sea of Crises, Moon
They sailed a sea more arid than any earthly desert, but the Rover bucked and heaved life a skiff riding huge swells.
It was enough to make even an astronaut seasick.
Janet Luckman eased off the throttle and twisted the hand controller, guiding the Rover’s wire mesh tires around another in a series of big, gray hummocks. They looked like overlapping giant’s footprints on a trash-strewn beach.
Where had she heard that before?
“I’ll be damned,” she said. “The Moon looks just like Bill Anders described it on Apollo 8–like a dirty beach.”
Alexei Sergeyovich Feoderov raised a bushy eyebrow, an expression plain even through the glare on his helmet. “Not very poetical, but one must consider the source.”
“What, cosmonauts are more poetic than astronauts?”
“Is in our blood. Example, I look around and see wondrous things–plains of powdered glass, mountains old as time. You see dirty beach.”
Luckman’s gaze swept the undulating horizon. Maybe the Russian was right. Maybe she was inured to the wonders around them, all business, scanning for hazards in the rock-studded regolith, when she might instead be overwhelmed by awe.
Like most of the cosmonauts Luckman knew, Sasha Feoderov had the brain of a test pilot, heart of a Tolstoy, soul of a Pushkin, kidneys of a Cossack. Were they preselected for such gravitas, or was it part of their training?
“All right,” Luckman said, “if it’s poetry you want, try this. ‘Over the mountains of the Moon, down the Valley of Shadow. Ride, boldly ride, the shade replied, if you seek for Eldorado.’”
Feoderov sniffed. “Poe, your version of Lermontov. Obvious, but not bad. Perhaps we make cosmonaut of you yet.”
Too late, Luckman spotted a football-sized rock in their path. She jerked the hand controller, but the left front tire slammed into the boulder, sent a jolt through the frame.
“Shit!” She checked the fender for damage, found none.
Feoderov chuckled. “Perhaps I should take over?”
“Keep your paws off my hot rod, Sasha.” Driving the Rover was her job, goddammit. It was an ungainly beast – four seats and a control panel bolted to an aluminum frame resting on four wire-mesh tires. But she loved the vehicle for the sheer fun of driving it.
A garage-sized crater loomed up in front of them, a fresh one deep enough to tip them over. Luckman swerved, a maneuver that would have been more dramatic had they not been trundling along at a leisurely 14 kph. The sharp turn sent a spray of moondust into the black sky. Tiny glass beads glittered as they arced back to the surface in dreamlike slow motion, each in its own precise parabola.
Wondrous.
An icy hand caressed her neck. God, how she wished Marcus had lived to see this. She imagined his sparkling blue eyes, his deep-dimpled grin.
Another boulder-strewn crater yawned before them, yanking her back to the present. Luckman steered carefully, keeping the Rover on the narrow rise between the two depressions.
“Still getting used to the close horizon,” she said. “Stuff just pops up in front of you. The sims haven’t got it right.”
Feoderov grunted. “We shall have to reprogram them. But should not we be seeing the target by now?”
Luckman checked her retinal display. A yellow triangle marked their position, a red cross their target. “If there’s anything left to see. Only three klicks away now.”
“Pull over.”
Luckman wasted a moment thinking how silly the phrase sounded–no roadside to “pull over” to–then eased off the throttle knob. The Rover rolled to a halt.
Feoderov unlatched his seat restraint and stood, his big, space-suited frame glowing brilliant white in the harsh, unfiltered sunlight. He turned, scanning the horizon.
The Sea of Crises was a broad, flat plain, though “flat” was a relative thing on a world bombarded for eons without an atmosphere to shield or gentle its surface. The lunar soil–regolith–was uniformly gray, ash-textured, strewn with blocky boulders. Nothing on Earth’s surface looked so lifeless.
She swung her gaze up to the gibbous Earth, a swirl of vivid blue and white in the black void, suspended above the rolling horizon. A strange tightness clutched her throat.
She’d grown up helping her parents work the family orchards in Lindsay, California, bringing forth life from the San Joaquin Valley’s cracked hardpan. Then came the Great Drought. The Colorado River ran dry, irrigation subsidies evaporated. Acre-by-acre, their prize orange and olive trees withered into black, gnarled hands clawing at an empty sky.
Within three years, desert reclaimed the hard work of generations, the dead dunes of the great valley looking not so different from the surrounding moonscape. Inevitably, as the runaway greenhouse effect progressed, the whole Earth faced the same fate.
Unless they found the Mother Lode.
Luckman looked in the rearview mirror at the Rover’s tracks, four silver lines snaking across the regolith. If her mentor Milo Jefferson was right, locked beneath the Sea of Crises was a huge deposit of cometary ice, chock-full of the rare isotopes deuterium and helium 3, precisely the fuel needed for the new clean-burning Helios-class thermonuclear reactors. A glass of water from it could have the energy potential of five million barrels of crude oil. If the Mother Lode was as big as Jefferson suspected, it could supply the world with clean, green energy for centuries to come.
Four days they’d been searching for it. So far, no good. All core samples and spectral surveys had come up dry. She wished to hell they were out looking for it today, instead of for a fifty-year-old piece of Soviet space junk.
Feoderov raised his right arm toward the horizon. “I have something–two o’clock.” Luckman caught sight of a metallic glint near a swell in the pockmarked moonscape.
“You think that’s Luna 15?”
“Possibly. I wish I had binoculars for better look.”
“There’s some in the back. You’ll have to remove your helmet to use them, though.”
“Ha ha. Good one.” Feoderov sat down, buckled in. “Astronaut humor much better than your poetry.”
That’s about the closest thing to a compliment she could expect from Feoderov. She knew it galled him that a rookie spacefarer with only four years’ training, a geologist for God’s sake, had been put in command over him, a stalwart of the Russian program for nearly a decade. It didn’t help that she was a woman.
What the hell. Luckman had never asked to be made commander. That political maneuvering was way above her pay grade. But commander was her assigned role, and by God she was determined to perform it well.
“Tallyho, and hang on.” Luckman twisted the hand controller, applied throttle. She rather enjoyed the Russian’s startled look as the acceleration shoved him back into his seat.
They bumped along for another few minutes as the star-like point resolved into an obviously metallic object.
“Looks fairly intact,” said Luckman. “I thought we’d find an impact crater and fragments.”
Feoderov gave a grunt of assent and puzzlement.
Her headphones beeped. “Rover One, this is Armstrong station.” The Aussie drawl belonged to Roger Maitland, the mission’s third crew member. No doubt he wanted to be out gallivanting around with them, not cooped up in the MLV.
“We copy, Armstrong.”
“If you’ll check your time, you were supposed to have been on site and starting your broadcast four minutes ago.”
“Can’t help it. Terrain’s a bit rougher than we anticipated. We have it sighted. ETA in, oh, ten minutes.”
“Copy, Rover. But the folks back home want their show.”
“I’ll bet.” This mission was too much of a dog-and-pony show for Luckman’s taste. Of course, that’s why President Dorsey had signed on to Project Prometheus in the first place.
She remembered her one meeting with the dwarfish, big-eared ex-media mogul. Dorsey had waxed nostalgic about what he called the most memorable event of his childhood, watching Armstrong and Aldrin cavort around Tranquillity Base in eerie black-and-white. He’d used the search for the Mother Lode as a means of squeezing bucks out of a tightwad Congress, but Luckman suspected the president was really after a replay of Apollo 11, a flag-waving extravaganza to be broadcast live on DTV and experienced by millions more via virtual reality on the Web. Perfect for a nation trying to recapture past glories after a decade of Depression and Dustbowl.
“Sasha,” she said, “can you switch on the camera?”
“Da.” Feoderov reached back and flicked a toggle on the pole-mounted stereo DTV camera. “How do you read?”
“Good signal, Rover. You’re giving all the VR surfers a nice roller coaster ride.”
Feoderov punched a couple of buttons on the control panel. The computer map projected on Luckman’s retina was replaced by the DTV image, showing the horizon ahead bouncing crazily. Feoderov touched the “zoom out” key, and the picture drew back to a
steadier wide-angle view.
“That’s better, Rover. Care to say a few words to the billions back on Earth?”
She glanced over at Feoderov. He shrugged.
Her gut squirmed. “Okay, ah, greetings to all from the Sea of Crises. This is Mission Commander Janet Luckman. My colleague is Colonel Alexei Feoderov. Today Alexei and I are on a quest to answer one of the great mysteries of space exploration–what became of Luna 15? Alexei, why don’t you fill in our audience.”
“Of course, Janet. Luna 15 was unmanned space probe launched from Soviet Union on 13th of July, 1969, just before American Apollo 11 mission. Aim of this probe was to land on Moon, dig up lunar sample, return it to Earth. Radio contact was lost with probe as it descended. Is believed to have gone out of control and crashed into lunar surface.”
Luckman made mental note of what he was leaving out: launched at the very climax of the Moon Race, Luna 15 was a blatant attempt by the Soviets to steal the thunder on Apollo 11 by returning a lunar sample before the Americans could get back with their own Moon rocks.
She wondered what Feoderov thought about the issue. The old communist empire had collapsed when he was all of twelve, yet he took as great a pride from his nation’s heritage in space as Luckman did from hers.
“The object you see now on your screen is what remains of Luna 15,” Luckman said. “By recovering some of the wreckage, we hope to learn about the effects of long term exposure to extreme lunar conditions on structural parts and electronic components. This will be helpful when it comes time to build our own permanent–”
Suddenly, her vast audience seemed light years distant.
The crash site was now only about 200 meters away, its details resolving into clarity. The vehicle was in remarkably good shape. But it was also utterly unlike the old Soviet mechanical drawings or mock-ups. Luna 15 was supposed to be a squat, pyramidal vehicle about three meters tall, surmounted by a sphere the size of a soccer ball.
Luckman made out a descent stage studded with fuel tanks and stubby landing legs. Mounted atop it was a huge silvery egg.
It looked nothing like the photos and line drawings of Luna 15. Nothing at all. Even taking the close horizon into account, it appeared maybe twice as tall as the mock-up, much larger than any robotic space probe she’d ever seen.
This wasn’t part of the program. She let go of the throttle knob. The Rover trundled to a halt.
“Wrong,” she muttered. “It’s all wrong.”
“Da,” rasped Feoderov. “Is not, not Luna 15.”
“Are you getting this, Armstrong?”
“Roger that.” Maitland’s voice sounded distant, mystified. “Could you give us a closer view?”
Luckman touched the “zoom” key. The image pulled in. Her mind struggled to make sense of it. There was an opening in the side of the silvery egg. A ladder extended from the opening to the scorched lunar surface beneath the vehicle.
Prickly unease spread through her. She turned to look at Feoderov, met his baffled gaze. “Armstrong,” she said quietly, “are any manned lunar missions supposed to have set down in the Sea of Crises?”
A long pause ensued while Maitland relayed the question back to Mission Control. But she knew the answer already.
“Ah, that’s a negative, Rover.”
“Boz’e moy,” Feoderov said.
Luckman fought to control her breathing. A high tone sounded in her earphones, shot straight down her spine.
“Rover, this is Houston. Do you copy?”
She recognized the Texas twang of Samuel “Satch” Owens, flight director for Project Prometheus. Jesus, some serious shit must be hitting the fan for Flight to jump straight into the com loop. A serious deviation from procedure.
“Copy, Houston.”
“Your camera is malfunctioning. Please shut it down.”
The words resounded in her head. “Say again?”
“I repeat, shut down your camera. Turn it off. Now.”
Feoderov reached back and flicked the power switch. Luckman’s retinal display went blank. She felt the blood pumping in her head, her heart thudding against the mesh lining of her space suit.
Alien spacecraft? Couldn’t be. She’d never bought any of that UFO crap, always thought the people who’d reported being kidnapped by bug-eyed creatures back in the 80s and 90s were suffering from “millennium fever.”
How else to explain the manifestly real object resting on the Sea of Crises?
As an astronaut, she’d trained to expect the unexpected. There were always procedures–if not A, try B, or C, or any number of alternates. There was no A for this.
“Armstrong? Houston? Do you read?”
“Rover, your signal is breaking up.” Owens again, his voice inhumanly calm. “Please maintain radio silence until we establish a secure uplink.”
“Copy.”
Silence. She became aware of noises she’d long ago tuned out: the rasp of her breathing, the whir of fans forcing oxygen into her helmet, the burble of coolant circulating through her suit lining.
“Janet, do you read?” Feoderov was using their private channel. She looked at him. Wide gray eyes stared back from behind his faceplate. “We go in for a closer look. Yes?”
For a moment, she felt the sharp edge of fear. The moment was brief. She was an astronaut, goddammit, and a scientist. She lived for this kind of thing.
Her gloved hand closed around the throttle.
