Battle Luna

by Travis S. Taylor

  “The Earthers want whatever it is that we’ve got, Mr. Mayor. How’d the other mayors feel about our gambit?” Tami kept the accelerator all the way to the floor. “I mean, they couldn’t have been happy about it.”

  “They were mostly pissed at the UNE for authorizing the damage of a multibillion-dollar habitat dome. And now the citizens there are forced to live in shelters and under siege.” Alton looked up and pointed at an outcropping at the rim of a crater about a kilometer off the roadway. “There it is over there.”

  “What are we going to do about it? The attack, I mean?” Tami slowed down and edged the buggy off the main road. There were clear construction vehicle tracks to follow. “We’ll need to sweep these tracks.”

  “Good idea,” the mayor agreed. “As far as the attack goes, first the Coalition of Lunar Mayors and Governors is suing the shit out of the UNE. We filed the injunction this morning.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  “Yeah, and, I want you and your sheriff counterpart from Luna Eight to file criminal charges against the commander of the attack squad. Find out who it is and I want him made Luna public enemy number one! I want him charged with murder, destruction of property, terrorism, Hell, jaywalking even. Charge him with everything you can imagine.”

  “That’s a good idea. Always great to have a bad guy for the public to point at.” Tami eased the buggy around the edge of the crater and down the switchback that had been put together in order to carry equipment to the bottom. “Wouldn’t hurt to find out who gave the order from Earth. We could charge them with conspiracy to commit mass murder.”

  “Do it. Whatever it takes.” Alton unbuckled himself and looked up toward the rim of the crater. The Moon was big. Nobody came out this road any longer since the highway had been put in. As long as they swept the tracks from the old road nobody would ever find this place. “I can’t think of a better secret hidey-hole. Pull the cart into the alcove so no orbital flights can see it.”

  “There isn’t one expected today, but good practice,” Tami agreed.

  “Who knows if the damned Earthers have tossed out some tiny spysats we haven’t detected yet. We don’t want this place being revealed at all costs.”

  The two of them stood at the edge of the two-car garage-sized opening looking out at the crater. From out there looking in, the entrance would appear no more interesting than a million other shadows or caves in craters on the far side of the Moon. They were over three hundred kilometers from the nearest city or dwelling of any sort and the far side of nowhere was as good a description as any as to where they were. Where they were exactly, was about two hundred meters above the alien room that housed the Object. They turned and walked down the path the earth-borer had made and in the low gravity, the two-hundred-meter walk downhill was pretty easy.

  “They had to blast the outer wall to get through to the room. Whatever the aliens did to the basaltic rock made it superstrong,” Alton explained. “Jerry, the construction foreman, he said he’s never seen anything like it. But in the end they managed.”

  “No security on the airlock?”

  “No need. We had a ready chamber built to accommodate larger numbers in case we have to stage troops out here too. But nobody can get through the security doors to the Object without access.” Alton cycled the airlock outer door and then the inner door light went green and slid open. “In we go.”

  “Are we putting in other rooms like this at the other locations?”

  “We’ll get to that. Right now, we need to worry about protecting our main asset here.” He worked his way out of the spacesuit and kicked it into an alcove that had been cut out of the rock wall. “We’ll go back the easy way. I wanted to make the trip out and to leave a cart out here. We really need to bring several out here. And start caching suits and weapons and food and air.”

  “I’ll get on that.”

  “That doesn’t seem right though,” Sarah said.

  “I’m not so sure I understand. What do you mean?” David wasn’t sure exactly what the physicist had on her mind and was more distracted than startled by the new backdoor light turning green and opening. The mayor and the Aldrinville sheriff entered unannounced and unexpectedly.

  “Mr. Mayor.” Jerry jumped up from the couch to greet the two. “I see you found the back door.”

  “Yes, great job there, Jerry.” The mayor shook his hand. “You know Sheriff Jones?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tami, this is Dr. David Sandeep, Dr. Carla Pruitt, and Dr. Sarah Rollin. These four have been the A-team in deciphering the alien technology and language,” the mayor said proudly. “I hope we are getting closer, team?”

  “Every second, Mr. Mayor,” Jerry said excitedly.

  “Any word from Luna Eight, sir?” Carla asked. “I have some friends down there and I haven’t heard from them at all.”

  “The Ueys have cut off all the comms through open channels. They’ve claimed there was a terrorist plot to steal goods and services from the UNE and some other nonsense.”

  “The only info we’re getting is scuttlebutt through underground channels, but worse than that, our people on Earth tell us that more ships are being loaded with troops and equipment and being readied for launch,” Sheriff Jones added. “If you ask me, I’d say the Ueys are planning to come show us Loonies who’s boss.”

  “Tami, no need to spread scary rumors,” the mayor scolded. “Changing the subject, tell me some progress.”

  “Okay, sir, we have made the thing print—we can all get blobs of goop,” Sarah told him. “And for some reason Jerry has been able to think a couple items to it and it printed a shell of them but not a one-to-one likeness. More of a rough mold as such.”

  “Why Jerry?”

  “That is the million-dollar question,” David answered. “He seems to be connected to the thing somehow and we don’t know why. My theory is he happened to touch just the right buttons in the right order before anyone else did and it connected to him. We’ll figure it out.”

  “Well, it seems to me like just letting a person think of the three-dimensional object, while that’s interesting and efficient, it could be inaccurate as hell.” The mayor turned to David and only sort of glanced at Jerry. “I mean no offense, but I couldn’t think of exactly how to build a hammer much less a complicated piece of equipment. So, unless the aliens had better minds than we do, there’s got to be more, right?”

  “Yeah, I agree and we’ve talked about this before.” David was excited that Jerry was able to get things to print even if they were just hollow shells of what he was looking at.

  “It takes months to get a blueprint, a three-dimensional design drawing right, I’m guessing. Exactly right, I mean,” Jerry agreed with them. “Just look around the excavation site here.” He waved his arms about, pointing at the room, the giant door, and upward to the roadways leading down to the alien construction.

  “What about it?” The mayor shrugged.

  “We took weeks to get survey maps drawn up from the ground-penetrating radar and the geology maps. Then we had to use the lunar positioning trackers to guide the excavators. Engineering a thing has to be at least that complex. Hell, I’ve only ever printed out toothbrushes and buttons and little doohickeys that I needed around the apartment. And I got full-up blueprint downloads for all of those from the web. We needed a special tool to remove the field coil on one of the mini-excavator wheel drives when we were digging the East Dome and it took the LoonieCart company engineers two weeks to get it right. I couldn’t have imagined or thought of all the parts of my toothbrush at once, much less a really complicated thing. No way.”

  “You built the backdoor shaft pretty quickly,” Tami noted.

  “That was straightforward,” Jerry said. “Drill down, set up support girders, drop in a readymade airlock, build a door. Still took five guys and a week.”

  “I see,” Tami said.

  “You’re right, Jerry.” Sarah nodded. “You have to know where every screw
goes, all the tolerances for the holes. You have to know the distance between all the parts, the materials each of the parts are made of. There’s a lot of inputs there, more than just thinking of the picture, I don’t think a human can do that. Right?”

  “Well, maybe whoever built this wasn’t human and maybe they were smarter than us.” Jerry smiled and shook his head. “Might be we humans ain’t evolved enough to use this thing.”

  “That is an unacceptable answer, David,” the mayor said. “I can’t accept that we can’t figure this thing out.”

  “That could be, but I think even these aliens were smart enough to realize that thinking of something on the fly isn’t the way realistic things are designed.” David couldn’t accept that the builders of the device were that super or godlike. “They had to have physical limitations if they were organic beings, didn’t they? The handprints on the elevator buttons look like living creature hands, not like robot hands.”

  “We need to give this thing a blueprint of something and see what it does,” Jerry stated.

  “Okay. I see what you’re getting at.” David thought. “So tell me something, then. How do we do that? How would we input something that complex into that thing?”

  Sarah walked around the Object for a few moments and let out a flabbergasted sigh. “I’ve got no clue what to do. I was hoping the glyphs would tell us how.”

  Jerry stood up from his camping chair and started walking about the tall alien device as well. The two of them ran their fingers over cracks, icons, and any other places that looked different from the smooth obsidian-like material it was constructed from.

  David watched them with interest, half-expecting Carla, the sheriff, and the mayor to join them. But they didn’t. Carla’s mind was focused on patterns in the glyphs that she and David had recently found. Carla thought the patterns were mathematical, but David was hoping them to be a language primer.

  “Well, on this side, there’s an output that nothing ever seems to come out of.” Jerry pointed.

  “Hey, you’re right! Every time we’ve thought of something it always comes out of the other side.” Sarah walked back to the other side where the printed material had always emerged.

  “Yeah, I’ve noticed that. It kind of reminds me of an Easy-Bake Oven.” David laughed. “A very big, grayish, obsidian-looking, alien Easy-Bake Oven.”

  “An easy what?” Sarah looked at him. “I’m not sure what that is.”

  “I know what that is,” Sheriff Jones said. “I used have one, like, forty years ago.”

  “You’ve never had an Easy-Bake Oven.” David looked at Sarah with a smile. “I thought all little girls played with those things.”

  “First, sexist. And second, how old are you David?” Sarah asked.

  “Meant nothing by it.” David laughed.

  “Hey, and it doesn’t matter, because they still make Easy-Bake Ovens. They even have them on the Moon,” Jerry added. “David, I think you’re right.”

  “Yeah, my great-granddaughter has one back on Earth. I have videos of her cooking with it.” David felt lonely briefly, thinking about how he’d never go back to Earth again. But that was the trade he’d made for living twice as long. He looked up at the mayor, who was watching intently but remaining quiet for the time being.

  “Okay, now I’m curious,” Carla looked up from her tablet screen. “Never heard of it.”

  “Well, David, don’t leave us hanging. What is an Easy-Bake Oven?” Sarah put her hands on her hips and tapped her foot on the solid rock floor. “I guess I never cooked as a child. I was always building bicycles and playing with computers and playing video games.”

  “There’s something wrong with a generation that never had an Easy-Bake Oven.” He laughed.

  “We’re waiting! Are you going to tell me and Carla what it is or not?”

  Jerry just looked back and forth between the women and David, but he didn’t say anything. David could see a grin forming at the corners of his mouth.

  “Alright, alright.” He said, waving his hands. “Hey, Luna, show me some full images of an Easy-Bake Oven.” A three-dimensional display popped up from his smart tablet before them, showing the child’s toy cooking device. “You see, Sarah, you mix up the ingredients in this pan here and you slide it into this side of the oven. It’s like a conveyor and as the pan goes to the inside, the heating element inside cooks the cake and then you reach in with your handle and take the cake out from the other side. It goes in one side, it comes out the other. It goes in one side as mixed-up ingredients comes out the other side as a cake.”

  “They’re pretty good, too,” Jerry added. “I think they quit making it for a few years, but you know how it is with retro toys these days.”

  “Oh, I get it. It is just an oven, but why’d they call it Easy-Bake?” Carla asked.

  “Well, it’s all put together easily so kids can do it. It’s just a sample packet with water that you mixed together.”

  “I see. That looks like fun, but I never really was a big cake fan,” Sarah said. “Too many carbs.”

  “Who doesn’t like cake?” The mayor finally broke his silence.

  “Not the point, I think.” David laughed and shook his head.

  “There really is something wrong with you. You know that?” But she was smiling when she said it.

  David looked at the three dimensional image of the Easy-Bake Oven projected out of his tablet and then back at Sarah and then something struck him. He had an idea that he couldn’t let go. He looked back at the Easy-Bake Oven, three-dimensional picture, and then back at the diagrams. There were three icons beside each other on the face of the Object’s “monitor.”

  “Hmm? Three icons, three-dimensional thing.” He thought.

  “Say that again,” Sarah said.

  “Look, there are three buttons here, right? Well, we know that we are wanting to print in three dimensions. Right?” David pointed at the glowing and morphing icons on the upper right of the “monitor.”

  “Damn.” Sarah smacked her head with her palm. “Of course, that’s probably X, Y, Z, or R, theta, and phi, or any other three-dimensional coordinate system in the alien language!”

  “Well, I guess other than the funky handprints and the infrared stuff everywhere, we don’t really know that aliens built this thing. I mean . . .” David said half-jokingly.

  “Seriously. Can you really believe that humanity made this thing? Some advanced ancient human race that saw in the IR and had long goofy fingers?” Sarah cocked her head sideways at him. “We still don’t even know exactly what it does.”

  “I just told you what it does. It’s an Easy-Bake Oven.” David paused for effect. “An alien Easy-Bake Oven. We should try making a cake.”

  “Ha!” Carla sniggered. Jerry guffawed. Sarah wasn’t quite as amused.

  “How does it know what to bake, though?” Jerry asked. “I mean, you mix chocolate cake mix in the pan, you get chocolate cake.”

  “Somehow we have to tell it what to bake.” Carla touched her tablet stylus to her right temple in thought.

  “Wait, I have an idea. Let’s put some materials on this side and let’s think of a three-dimensional model and then let’s see what happens.”

  “Okay, but it can’t be that simple.”

  “Well, let’s start with simple and go from there.”

  “Where do we input a three-dimensional model?” Jerry asked.

  “Don’t know. Let’s put some stuff through it and see what happens.” Sarah was on board with the plan now. “We need some basic building materials.”

  “Carbon, metals, paper, plastics, are all right here.” David walked across the alien room and found the human-designed and -built trash can and poured the ingredients out onto the side of the Object that nothing had ever printed out of. When he did, several of the icons on the front of the device morphed into different symbols.

  “You don’t think this thing just looked at the trash and figured out what materials we just put there, do
you?” Sarah looked very excited. She studied the objects closely and then it was clear she had a plan.

  “I want to try something.” She scooped all of the materials off of the input side back into the trash can, and then she looked for something specific. There was an aluminum can from a soft drink dispenser there, so she took the can out. “This is only aluminum, mostly. There may be some impurities in it.”

  “Holy shit! That’s it, Sarah!” Carla clapped her hands together and then excitedly pointed at one of the IR icons. “Look, I think you just discovered the symbol for aluminum.”

  “Oh wait, there are two symbols.” David looked closer and he could see that two symbols had indeed appeared and by each symbol there was a bar that seemed to be like a percentage bar graph. The one to the left was almost completely full and the one to the right was almost completely empty.

  “I think we’ve just discovered what the symbol for aluminum is, Sarah. And this other symbol is probably tin or carbon or some other impurity.” David looked back at her. They now had a way to decipher the glyphs.

  “Are there two of the same thing in there?” Jerry asked.

  “Well, here’s a plastic spoon from yesterday and you can take mine from my lunch if you want to.” Carla started digging through her backpack. “Here.”

  “What are you doing, Jerry?”

  “A hunch.” Jerry took both spoons and examined them. “They look pretty much the same. Close enough.”

  He broke one of the plastic spoons into multiple pieces and then set the broken pieces on the device. Jerry stood in front of the Object’s “monitor” holding the spoon in his hand and focusing on it. A beam of infrared energy reached out from the Object and scanned the spoon in his hand. Had they not been wearing their goggles they would have never seen it. The tray holding the broken spoon pieces slid into the inner workings of the Object and the infrared goggles saturated again, the flash blinding them all briefly.