Salvador Mercer - Lunar Discovery

She ordered her usual salad with hot tea and toasted bread. Looking around never helped; she first thought she’d be able to see someone every time she performed a transfer, but the bar always seemed to have different people in it no matter how attentive she was. Her affair with the program director was pure icing on the cake, allowing her access to his work space and facilitating the espionage she was doing. Too bad he ended the relationship, but it was obvious he didn’t feel right about just kicking her to the curb, at least not just yet. The money was good, and she didn’t care who had her data as long as she got paid. She’d get out of this Siberian hellhole for good, one way or the other.

She finished her meal, paid her bill, and then returned to her flat a few blocks away, sure that her device was queried and that the data was transferred even though she never saw her handler. Tomorrow she’d see confirmation in the form of an increased balance in her Swiss account. Irina smiled as she prepared to watch Balkovsky’s Ozera , a sort of Russian take off on Girls in the City.

NASA Space Center

Houston, Texas

In the near future, Day 6

The meeting was tedious at first until the presenter, a lady by the name of Mrs. Brown, started to discuss the SIGINT that the NSA had been working on. “So after the tenth pulse, there is a pause of exactly three seconds before some sort of high-speed data burst is recorded. The compressed signal is beyond the ability of our current receivers to decode properly, and even the first few thousand bytes that we have managed to decipher correctly are not intelligible to us at this time.”

“So how does this account for the ability of the higher line of sight RF waves to reach earth from the backside of the moon?” Lisa asked.

“Yeah,” Jack chimed in. “There is no atmosphere either to bend or reflect the lower band waves either. It doesn’t add up.”

“Unknown at this time,” Mrs. Brown said, looking from the screen at her questioners.

“You’re the SIGINT experts. You mean to tell us you can’t trace the path the radio waves are taking to reach us?” Tom asked, stifling a yawn, which did little to placate the woman.

“We analyze the signal and its stream. I’d say you space experts should have a hypothesis proposed by now,” she shot back.

“Who says we haven’t?” Marge said.

Rock wasn’t sure if his team was just probing her with necessary questions or if they were trying to push her buttons. Since she arrived, she wasn’t greeted any more warmly than Mr. Smith was, and judging by his facial expression, he wasn’t pleased either.

“Let’s just move on, shall we?” Rock said, diffusing the tension with his remark. “Mrs. Brown, let’s just say the path isn’t important for right now. What is the actual significance of the data spurt after the count up?” This referring to the opposite of a countdown since the pulses went higher in number rather than lower.

“Since the two-point-seven-megabyte stream takes twelve nanoseconds and the entire transmission lasts approximately seven hundred thousand, one hundred and eleven nanoseconds, we’ve computed the data burst to contain about one hundred fifty nine gigabytes roughly.

“That’s it?” Jack asked, surprised. “My kid’s collection of movies takes up more digital storage space than that.”

“Maybe the data isn’t comprised of alien movies,” Mr. Smith replied, a tone of sarcasm evident in his voice.

“Or the information is just enough to open another, larger data site,” Jeff said, finally breaking his silence from across the table.

“So why is the mandate to reach the moon? Why not just analyze the signals or send up an orbiter to collect data?” Tom asked.

“I’ll handle this one, Brown,” Mr. Smith said, and Rock was pleased to see he wasn’t the only one Smith addressed by surname only. “We have other information that relates to the discovery, and also the intentions of the Russians and Chinese have been clarified somewhat. Can you bring up section three on the PowerPoint?” Smith said to Brown.

Mrs. Brown leaned over the table, manipulating the laptop till a still-titled Section Three: Photographic Data became visible on the wall’s screen.

This perked Rock’s team up considerably. “You have photographs?” Tom asked.

“Next slide,” Smith said. “Yes, here you can see the actual object as photographed by the Chinese rover. Note the side ruler bar which is scaled in feet for reference.” Rock noted the red and white bar that denoted scale overlaid on a grainy black and white photo of what appeared to be some sort of oblong cylinder protruding from the surface of the moon and reaching a height of well over five feet.

“Is that our scale or theirs?” Marge asked.

“Theirs, and we have no reason to doubt it,” Smith said. “The interesting fact here is that your telemetry feed intercept on the mag detector.” At this, Smith rummaged through a couple of pages till he found what he was looking for. “The mag detector went past the maximum range that the Chinese instrument could handle, so it’s hard to say if there is something metallic there as small as half the size of a car or something much larger, as large as an oceangoing ship, for example.”

“You’re saying there is something metallic there, larger than the object we’re looking at now, perhaps buried under the lunar surface?” Jeff asked.

“Yes, quite possibly,” Brown jumped in, advancing the presentation to the next slide where a closer view of the object was visible as seen from the perspective of the rover.

“If I didn’t know better, I think that looks like some kind of antenna mast. How many photos do you have?” Marge asked, half standing and leaning closer to the screen, her eyes squinting at the effort.

“We only have three, but we think the Chinese have a few dozen,” Mr. Smith said.

“How’d you get the Chinese to share these?” Tom asked, looking over at Smith.

“They didn’t. We… acquired them by other means,” Smith said. Tom only arched an eyebrow and leaned back in his chair.

“So we have Chinese photos of an unknown alien metallic object protruding from the lunar surface and perhaps part of it potentially buried below it. This thing disabled not only the Chinese rover but the orbiter as well. Does that about sum it up?” Director Lui said from where he sat next to Rock.

“That’s about right,” Mr. Smith said. “What you haven’t learned yet is that the president will be going public with this information tomorrow evening. Too many science civvies have detected the transmissions and are discussing their significance. A couple of university types are even putting two and two together and linking the event with the Chinese mission.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen the news. Going to be groundbreaking stuff, but won’t that tip off the Chinese that we’ve been spying on their space program?” Jack said.

“They know, just not the extent that we’ve been surveilling them. The bigger problem right now is Russia—” Smith said, being interrupted by Tom.

“Damn! Told you them Ruskies would be involved.”

“Now, Tom, don’t go jumping to conclusions,” Marge said, sitting back down and looking across the table at the old mechanical engineer.

“Actually, the man is right, to a degree. Brown, can you go to section five?” Smith said.

Mrs. Brown advanced the presentation, skipping over the title and stopping on a schematic of two rockets laid side by side along with a data bar on the right side indicating various technical specifications such as height, weight, thrust, payload in tons, propellant type, and capacity, amongst a myriad of other detailed data.