Behind Sarah, Evans could see the joint lunar team moving slowly down the explosion-wracked sides of Shackleton Crater.
SHACKLETON CRATER, LUNAR SURFACE
The first thing Sarah saw was several large chunks of the mineral. She had no idea if they had been there before the explosion or if they were thrown free of the complex below. She examined one of them up close, and then let it slip from her gloved hand as she noticed for the first time the complex below in the crater’s center. She was amazed at the sight as she took in what was once an underground bunker. The explosion had not only removed the top sixty feet of accumulated lunar dust, it had shattered several of the buildings’ roofs. Inside one she saw what looked like tracked transports of some kind, complete with large tanks and other big pieces of equipment.
“It makes one rethink the small problems we on Earth share, does it not?”
Sarah was torn from her thoughts by General Kwan, who had stepped up beside her without her noticing. Sarah looked from the general to the complex below.
“Sometimes we create those problems for lack of something better to do, it seems.”
“Well put, Lieutenant. You and I are the same sort of soldier, I believe. Someday maybe my superiors will allow me access to their thinking about why this project could not take a more cautious approach and a time frame more amenable to safety. I have lost many good men who wanted nothing more than to ride a rocket into space.”
“Well, we won’t find out anything they need to know up here,” Sarah said, as she spied Will Mendenhall bouncing toward her. “I believe my escort is here, General. Would you care to join us?”
“It would be an honor.”
Will bounded to a stop and gestured toward the slope.
“We’re rigging safety lines so we can have handholds on the way down. I didn’t think it would be such a hot idea sliding down on our asses.”
Sarah hit Mendenhall on the shoulder.
“Always thinking of the easy way to do things.”
“Hell, I thought that was why everyone was so hot for me to come along on this little picnic,” Will said, looking from Sarah to the general. “That is one nice environment suit, General,” he said. He returned his gaze to Sarah. “Now why does NASA insist on white-colored space suits where if you fell down no one could see you, while the Chinese use red ones that you can see from fifty miles off?”
Sara rolled her eyes and eased past Mendenhall.
“You’ll have to excuse the lieutenant, General. He’s been bitching ever since he volunteered for this.”
“Volunteered?” Mendenhall protested. He turned to look at Kwan. “That’s our army’s euphemism for kidnapped.”
The general laughed as he turned to follow Sarah.
“In our army also, Lieutenant.”
As they approached the twenty secured ropes, Sarah stepped up to Sergeant Andrews, the man she had chosen to command the rest of the Green Berets. He was conferring with the Chinese soldiers who would be a part of his team for the initial descent into the crater.
“Language barrier?” Sarah asked the sergeant.
“Surprisingly, none at all,” Andrews answered. He slung his weapon over his shoulder. “It seems they picked troops with English-language training. Maybe they knew something we didn’t, huh, Lieutenant.” He reached down and took one of the secured ropes into his gloved hands.
Sarah didn’t answer. She knew the sergeant was more right than he would ever know.
The sergeant raised his right hand and then lowered it. At the same moment three other Americans and five Chinese soldiers eased themselves off the edge of the crater, proceeding hand over hand down the treacherous slope.
Sarah took the time to push a small button on the left side of her helmet. A third visor slid down and covered the clear one she had been using. Will followed suit. Sarah immediately saw the difference as she used the Optical Range Enhancer for the first time. The ORE was designed like a set of binoculars, only it had one solid lens instead of two. Sarah shook her head as she became a little dizzy using it for the first time. Nonetheless, a better picture emerged than before. The damage to the bunker system was more extensive that she had first thought. The material the bunkers were made of looked more like Styrofoam than anything else. She figured the walls and roofs of the buildings were plastic of a type she could not imagine.
“Look,” Will said, touching Sarah’s arm through her suit.
Sarah looked down to where Will was pointing. They were outside the bunker system and had been uncovered by the mineral’s detonation. She counted sixteen skeletons, some half buried, others scoured clean of lunar dust. None of them wore space suits.
“Another mystery,” General Kwan said as he looked through his own amazing piece of equipment. It was a boxlike device that was actually a camera. The general placed his entire visor into the slot in the back and saw a digitally enhanced view of whatever he was looking at. “Why would these … these persons be caught out in the airless environment?”
“I have a feeling it will take more than one trip to the Moon to find out exactly what the hell happened here. A buried bunker complex, a crashed warship, bodies everywhere? Something happened here that we may never understand,” Sarah said. She switched her view to Sergeant Andrews and his team. They were nearing the bottom.
General Kwan lowered his viewing device and ordered the remaining men to take up covering stations at the crater’s rim.
“Why didn’t I think of that,” Sarah said angrily.
“Don’t feel bad, Lieutenant. I failed to think of it until I saw those bodies down there,” the general said, and made sure the men were placed accordingly. “Sergeant Andrews, please cover this northern area on your first walkthrough. That will be the extent over which we can give you covering fire.”
Sarah looked at General Kwan, expecting him to justify his dire warning to the sergeant, but he just looked at her, explaining nothing. She looked at Will and he frowned, not liking the feeling he was getting as the men on the ropes neared the bottom of the crater.
“Yes, sir. Northern area only,” Andrews said. He allowed the rope to fall free of his hands and jumped the last two feet to the crater’s floor. “I will send two men at a time into the buildings with roofs. The rest will cover from the door and in open sight of the rim. That way no one is out of view except for the entrance team, and we will cover them.”
“Excellent, Sergeant.”
Sarah watched as the rest of the first team hit the bottom. They all removed their weapons from their backs and divided up into two-man teams.
Sarah couldn’t help but get nervous as the leading two men entered the first of what had apparently once been underground bunkers.
“Well, we didn’t get dressed up for nothing.”
Both General Kwan and Sarah looked over at Will Mendenhall, who was checking his own weapon and making sure the air cylinder was charged.
“I’m in favor of getting this done and seeing if the Altair can get us the hell back to smog- and traffic-choked freeways.”
* * *
Over the small rise and a thousand yards north, Captain Philippe Jarneux studied what they had uncovered. He could tell that the ships had impacted with the Moon at very high velocity. He had seen aircraft impact craters many times in his flying days, but never had he seen anything so utterly buried by a blunt-force, high-velocity impact. Still, it was a tribute to whoever designed the craft that the bulk of it had not been obliterated.
Jarneux, after examining the saucer, stood on an exposed superstructure of the second massive warship. They had found evidence of another turret forward of the exposed section. He wondered if there had been still more aft of where he was standing. The men of the ESA expedition seemed to relish their work uncovering such a prize. Whatever powered the great ship and her weapons systems would fit nicely into the ESA plans for uncovering the wealth of technology they had come for. As he looked at the three-barreled turret, he saw the two surviving six-foot-
diameter crystals at their mouths. The crystals alone would be worth a ton of diamonds back on Earth.
“Captain, we have uncovered something you may want to look at,” one of his men said over the radio link.
Jarneux jumped easily from the exposed superstructure and saw the man who had spoken. He was waving and was about thirty feet away from the leading edge of the crashed ship. Jarneux hopped the twenty yards to the group of two men, who had uncovered something shiny and oblong. He stopped and looked down to see a cylinder. It was covered in a strange swirling design and looked to be made out of something resembling copper. It was fifteen feet long and half again as wide. Its oblong shape tapered at both ends. Jarneux saw thirty or so smashed and cracked lights on the surface and what looked like a small television screen in the center. There was a large gash running the entire length of the object, and it appeared to have been destroyed during or soon after the impact of the two ships.
“A container of some kind?” Jarneux asked aloud.
“Maybe, or maybe it’s a shell for one of those weapons,” the man on his knees said.
Jarneux looked from the copper cylinder back to the raised third gun of the turret over their heads.
“I don’t think so, it’s far too big, and I believe the other is some form of light weapon. This is something entirely different. Do you have your digital camera?”
“Yes, sir,” the man standing said. He reached for a large pouch on his belt and brought out a small portable digital camcorder. He pointed it at the cylinder and started filming.
Suddenly an aperture opened and a small antenna-like device popped free of the pod. It started spinning rapidly, like a turning radar dish. It stopped and then started again. A few sparks shot out of the damaged section of the cylinder, but then stopped. Several of the lights flashed on and off. The man with the camera stopped filming and stepped back. He lowered the camera and at the same moment the small dish antenna stopped turning.
Jarneux looked from the copper cylinder to the man holding the camera. The thought struck him that the device inside the copper pod had been activated when it detected the digital device filming it.
“Aim the camera at the cylinder and push the record button,” he said. He stepped closer to the copper pod and lifted the man who was kneeling there to his feet.
As the second man complied, the dish antenna started turning once more. It stopped, sparked, and started again.
“Stop. That is sufficient,” Jarneux said, as he backed away a step.
The three men stared at the dish as it continued to turn.
“Have you stopped filming?” the captain asked.
“Yes, sir,” the man said, worry tinting his voice.
At that moment the dish stopped turning and it seemed to have come to a standstill with the open face toward the man with the camera.
“Move the camera to the left,” Jarneux said, watching the cylinder closely.
The second man moved the camera and the dish moved with it. It stopped when the man’s arm ceased moving.
“It’s tracking the digital output of the camera,” Jarneux said as he backed away from the cylinder. He reached for his left wrist and switched frequencies on his shortwave, utilizing the digital feature of his COM unit instead of the short-range radio of his man-to-man communication. He caught himself as he realized the digital output would be the same as the camera. He grimaced at the thought that he had almost made a mistake with this unknown device.
As he thought this, all three men jumped. The cylinder cracked open about a foot with an explosive force that shocked them and made one of the men fall backward. As the captain watched in fascination, a long, three-rod assembly popped free. It was about eight feet in length and unfolded before their eyes between the top of the cylinder and the bottom. Then they watched as the thing that resembled a crane’s tower slowly lay down in the lunar dust.
“It’s damaged, whatever it is. It must have—”
“Captain, look,” the man who had fallen said, his eyes fixed on the appendage.
Jarneux was speechless as he saw the very end of the arm open up and the three large fingers unfold, tick once, and come to a stop. They were looking at a hand large enough to cover their entire helmeted heads.
“My God, what the hell is this thing?” Jarneux asked aloud.
Suddenly, three feet away and without making a sound, two copper cylinders exploded outward from the dust. Their lids immediately flew open, and to the terror of the three men they weren’t damaged like the first. As they watched in fascination, first one and then the other device unfolded itself from its egglike cylinder. They rose into the air. The legs made fast their footing and then the torso started to expand. The arms unfolded from the main trunk, and the head slowly rose from a hiding place deep inside the shiny metal structure.
Jarneux watched as the two manlike robots rose into the air. They were at least twenty feet in height and looked as if they were made of chromed steel. He saw the inner workings through the riblike protection, with gears and cogs turning, and he suspected that if he could hear them they would have a mechanical or loud turbinelike whine as they activated and gained power. He saw a series of glasslike appendages pop free on their backs, briefly shining in the daylight. They reflected like glass and Jarneux realized that the plates were solar panels, rapidly collecting energy. The panels sank back into the bodies of the mechanical giants and were covered by what looked like shoulder blades. The two mammoth beasts stood stock-still as first one and then the other started turning their heads, examining their surroundings.
Jarneux eased his right hand over to his left wrist and decided he had to risk communication with the Shackleton team.
“To anyone listening, this is Jarneux. We have uncovered something mechanical at the first site. I believe they are hostile.”
The closest mechanism moved its head toward Jarneux, who took both of his companions by the arms and started pulling them backward.
They watched as the devices stood their ground. The heads swiveled and looked at the three men, then turned and continued to scan the area. The giants stood with massive legs spread and arms half turned up at the elbow. Their construction design was a steel rod system that looked as if it could take serious punishment. Their electrical systems were buried deep inside the cagelike rods, like the life-giving veins of a living creature. They could see no discernible weaponry on the structures, but the powerful claws and thick limbs suggested that they didn’t need any weapons other than their mechanized hands.
“My God!” a voice said through their COM system.
Jarneux slowly turned and saw the rest of his team as they stood on the superstructure of the downed spaceship. They were staring at the amazing sight in front of them and were frozen in awe at the two mechanical giants. The captain raised his right hand, intimating that the men should not move or make any threatening gestures. The two robots remained still. They were producing a small vibration that the men could feel through their thick boots. The robot on the left turned slightly and they saw a parabolic dish pop free from the shoulder area. It immediately started turning. The men felt a slight pressure in their ears as a sound wave passed through their helmets and into their heads. The dish stopped turning and folded back into the shoulder. The robot remained still after that.
“Attention, we will slowly start making our way to the crater,” said Jarneux. We will not fire unless attacked. I want everyone to be clear on that. Now slowly turn and start walking.”
As the six men on the superstructure and the three below on the lunar surface turned, they stopped dead in their tracks. They were face-to-face with a third mechanical giant. It stood just thirty feet south of the crash site and was silently watching the scene in front of it. Every man saw the beast stand like a predator eyeing its prey. Jarneux realized then that the first two mechanisms had been waiting for the third to block their retreat. They were surrounded. The three menacing mechanicians just stared at the nine survivors of the E
SA LEM Astral. The machines were not moving, but looked aggressive nonetheless. The colonel once more made sure his frequency was correct.
“Shackleton team, this is Captain Jarneux. We are about to be attacked by a mechanical force of unknown origin. We will attempt to escape and join—”
At that moment the third giant sprang into motion. It took six long strides and slapped the first man it came to off the superstructure of the crashed ship. It hit the man so hard that his helmet was ripped from his head. His body flew off through the Moon’s light gravity. The men all broke as one, each one of them jumping and bounding away.
Jarneux, instead of running, pushed his two companions away and removed his weapon from his back. He sighted his rifle on the first robot on his left and fired his weapon on full automatic. The ESA weapon used a combustible mix of gas and gunpowder that sent an explosive .50 caliber round out at supersonic speed. The round would explode on contact. Several of the explosive shells hit the first robot in the chest, making it take three large steps backward, but then it righted itself and followed its companion forward. Jarneux aimed at the head area of the same beast and fired another long stream of rounds into the airless void. They struck its thick neck and face, but it kept coming on, shrugging the powerful rounds off as if they were mere blows from the captain’s fists.
“All personnel fall back, fall back to the crater,” he yelled as he fired again at the oncoming menace.
The next set of rounds exploded at the giant’s feet, taking out large chunks of Moon dust. The void in the surface tripped up the mechanical giant and it staggered, falling face-first into the dust. The captain aimed at the second robot, which had veered to its left in an attempt to strike at the men above. As he aimed, he was grabbed from behind by the third giant. Jarneux was raised to a height at which he was face-to-face with the thing. The captain could see the inner workings of the beast. Its brain looked like a turning gyroscope deep inside its head. He tried his best to get the rifle aimed, but found that his arm had been broken when the robot had picked him up from the surface. Several of his men had stopped in midflight to turn and fire at the giant, but their rounds were just as useless as Jarneux’s had been.
Legacy: An Event Group Thriller Page 54
