David Golemon - Legacy

“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-”