David Golemon - Legacy

Collins looked at Everett and shrugged.

“Okay, gentlemen-again, welcome. Shall we get down to business?”

The twelve-man capsule, dubbed Falcon 1, was attached nose to nose with the Altair lander. The crew module was roomy enough to move around in, but for real exercise the crew had to crawl through to the far more spacious three-decked lunar module.

During their downtime on the voyage, the entire crew, with the exception of the command module pilot, worked on breaking down the large M-39 rocket-assisted projectile weapons designed by DARPA, as well as the short-barreled M-4 carbine, the little sister of the venerable M-16 that each man would carry on any excursion on the lunar surface. There were also four Stinger missile systems and five LAWs armor-piercing rockets that Sarah and Ryan had to learn about. Each of the excursion personnel would also carry a Glock nine-millimeter pistol in a nylon holster.

After six hours of weapons training in breakdown and cleaning, Sarah gave the crew a quick but detailed course on the mineral. Water and air of any kind were forbidden within a dozen yards of the mineral if any was found. Information on the alien weaponry was sparse at best, with only a few grainy pictures of the items they were looking for. Most were rifle-shaped weapons, but Sarah reminded the men present that there could be larger, heavier weaponry that wasn’t discovered by the Beatles.

After the meeting broke up, the crew went about eating and exercising. Ryan went forward to speak to the command module pilot and learn about the systems. Sarah had been proud of Jason as he tried to cram everything he could learn in the two-day voyage of Dark Star 3. This was a shortened venue for all the training they had to undergo, since it used to take four days to get to the Moon in the old Apollo days, but thanks to the added engine power of the new solid rocket booster engines on the command module, the trip had been cut in half.

Sarah approached Colonel Kendal as he floated onto the exercise bike.

“Any word on the Chinese?”

Kendal started pedaling and looked around to see who was in earshot. Then he placed two small earpieces in his ears and paused over the play button for his iPod.

“The time frame will be right around the time Altair lands. We won’t know until we’re either ambushed or welcomed as an ally. Maybe we can get some chatter from the French, since they land five hours before us, but I don’t anticipate getting that lucky.”

“The Russians?” Sarah asked, leaning into Kendal.

“Our old friends are a full day and half behind us. They won’t get there until the shooting has stopped. Besides, I understand they’re having problems onboard their lunar lander Peter the Great.” The colonel tapped the video monitor next to the lander control station. There was a picture of a large craft that looked similar to their own Altair lander, only more base looking. Below the picture were the Russian words,

– Peter the Great Lunar Lander.

“That doesn’t help me,” Sarah said frowning. “What’s wrong with the damn lander now?”

The colonel hit his play button and started pedaling. “I guess they didn’t steal the right plans from us back in the eighties,” he answered with a wink.

Sarah turned away and bumped into a floating Mendenhall. “What was that all about?” he asked, as turned a complete flip in the air.

“Just more good news about the Russians being a day late and a ruble short.”

“Well, let’s just hope the Chinese have a good attitude when we land.”

Sarah floated past Will and stopped him from spinning before he vomited for the fifth time on the trip.

“That, my friend, is in serious doubt.”

Dark Star 3 was hurtling toward the moon at a record-breaking pace of 35,790 miles per hour. Altair 1 would attempt to set down in a possible hostile landing zone in exactly nine hours.

The ESA and Russian spacecraft were yet to be heard from.

Niles slammed the headphones down in frustration and was thankful he hadn’t been speaking to the president on one of the laptop computers Pete had offered.

“Unbelievable,” Charlie said behind the sweating back of Pete Golding. The two men had been steadily poised over a laptop plugged directly into the Europa system, which was being bounced off two satellites. One of these, the Event Group’s KH-11 bird code-named Boris and Natasha, had been retasked and was just now coming online for direct aerial views of the mine and the surrounding terrain so Jack could plan his makeshift assault accordingly.

“What is it?” Niles asked as he stood and walked over to the two scientists.

“Europa and our linguistics team have a promising link to the alien alphabet,” Pete said and turned the monitor of the laptop enough so Niles could see. “They’ve been studying the video from the crater-the flag, the lettering on the space suit, the number system on a few of the weapons, and so on. Europa has evaluated the writing and is comparing it with different symbologies that we have here on Earth. She’s come to the conclusion that it is a definite cross between a written language and a pictograph system similar to Chinese.”

“I don’t see how Europa can grasp their language from just a few words.”

“Actually, the number system was pretty easy, Niles. She just took every number that we had photographs of and repeated them through her system. As no number was higher than nine, she figured that the system was based on ten. Now, breaking down each number was a little harder. This is where Europa got extremely lucky. It all started with the very first find by the robotic Beatles, the skeleton itself-in particular, the air tank system on the spaceman’s backpack. The numbers were taken off and the size of the tanks evaluated by Europa as compared to a similar system of air tanks used by NASA, the U.S. Navy, etc. Europa figured it was twenty gallons or eighty cubic feet of air. She took the symbology for these numbers and deduced that what the writing on the tank said was air capacity of eighty cubic feet, the very same system we use, only it took our strange friends eight letters to spell out the word eighty and three numbers to indicate the numeral 80. The parentheses were easier.”

Niles shook his head. “And from this she has decoded their language? That’s hard to believe, gentlemen.”

“We won’t know for sure until we can get more detailed text, but I wouldn’t bet against Europa, Mr. Director,” Pete said as he pulled the screen back. He looked insulted that Niles had doubted Europa.

“Well, Jack’s going to try to get us in the mine as soon as he can. What about the flag and its symbology?”

“The four circles in elliptical form,” Charlie said for Pete, who had switched the view on the laptop from the writing program to the picture of the flag and the symbols described by Jack and the senator:

“Europa is very confused, as are most of the best astronomers in the world. She had been monitoring the study of the flag at every university in the world and most of them are of the opinion that it’s an elliptical orbit of the alien home world,” Charlie said, pointing to the animation of the flag.

“However, Europa does not agree,” Pete said, interrupting Charlie. “She seems to believe, and we are arguing with her on this point, that it’s a system of neighboring planets-perhaps a series of planets and moons. Of course I have asked her to explain and she states that the alignment could be two planets and two moons in the same orbit but on opposite sides of the sun. Personally I think the old girl’s guessing. There’s nothing remotely like this diagram in the solar system. Not even Saturn or Jupiter has moons that close to their own orbit. As for Europa’s theory that those two worlds and their moons could occupy the same orbit, but on opposite sides of the sun-well, we just don’t have a precedent for that scenario.”