Salvador Mercer: Lunar Discovery

To the men and women who gave their lives in the quest and search for knowledge. May we never forget.

The Neanderthal looked up in time to see the large, black, angular shape entering the earth’s atmosphere, causing the oxygen around it to ignite as it was superheated from its rapid entry. He spoke to his comrades who were hunting the blood trail from the mammoth they had wounded the day before. There was no need to point at the strange object as the sonic boom rolled over them, surprising several enough that they dropped their crude spears and fell to the ground, covering their ears.

Kark wasn’t one of them. He stood on the edge of the forest’s tundra, feeling the cool permafrost under his feet, looking north toward the rapidly slowing object. He didn’t know what it was, but unlike his brethren, he couldn’t allow himself as leader of his clan to show fear, no matter how bizarre the display.

The sleek-looking form seemed to stop in midair, floating a few miles north of where they stood over a glassy, ice-laden lake that started where the forest ended. Slowly his companions stood, helping one another and pointing to the mystical object. The sense of God, or any other omnipotent power, was a foreign ideal to these people, and the thought wasn’t even possible in a species that had literally no culture.

A bright beam of blue light shot out from the tip of the angular shape, illuminating the ground beneath it at the lake’s shore. The object moved again, floating southward toward Kark and his hunters. The blue ray of light pulsated, sweeping the ground from lakeshore to forest’s edge, and then it disappeared momentarily as the object swung about, hovering over the trees.

Kark heard faint shouts from the forest before seeing the Cro-Magnon hunters running from it toward the base of the hilltop where Kark stood. His rivals had been tracking their prey, and Kark felt anger rising within him. Without warning, the object moved, once again sending out the surreal blue light sweeping the forest behind the Cro-Magnons who were now running directly at Kark’s group, the object following.

“Prepare, battle!” Kark uttered, his voice strong and powerful but guttural. The sight of their rivals galvanized the Neanderthals into action as they picked up dropped spears and formed a rough line next to their leader, facing the fleeing Magnons. “Hold!” Kark shouted, hefting his spear and preparing to throw it.

The Magnons ran until the blue ray of light intercepted them. Several suddenly stopped, falling where they were as the rest scattered in all directions, no longer heading toward Kark’s group. “Run,” Kark said, pulling his spear in tighter to his body and sprinting quickly downhill toward the other group and the light. Several smaller black objects dropped from the large angular one and floated just above each Cro-Magnon.

Kark ran faster until his group was within a hundred yards of the spectacle, caution finally slowing and then stopping his advance. There were no signs of the other Magnons who had kept running either back into the forest or over the far hills near the lake. Kark would not allow fear to show in front of the Magnon, though several of his hunters looked at him apprehensively. Kark prepared his spear in his attack stance, facing the blue light and the immobile Magnons.

Each levitating black ball had a slender, silver-looking line coming out of it, and they were placed or injected into the spine of each of the prone Cro-Magnon, none of whom moved. Then, just as quickly as they arrived, the smaller floating objects flew back to the angular object, disappearing within its massive shadow, and the blue light ceased its probing sweeps, stopping altogether.

The angular object turned away and started to rise into the bright blue sky until it disappeared from sight over the horizon many miles distant. Kark’s hunters lifted their spears and shouted their war cries, triumphant in deterring the unknown object from their lands. Then the Cro-Magnon all awoke at the same time, standing and brandishing their own spears in front of them, despite being outnumbered. Kark prepared for battle, but his fate and that of his fellow hunters was sealed. The future of the Neanderthals was over; the rise of the Homo sapiens had begun.

37,000 years later

NASA Space Command

Houston, Texas

In the near future, Day 1

“Telemetry readings are no longer updating, Chief,” Jack said, peering over the communications console and looking at Mission Leader Richard “Rock” Crandon sitting at the main control console. “We have new signals, multiple types, multiple frequencies, but no more data from the rover or orbiter.”

“Low gain on our interceptor or an issue with the originating signal?” Rock Crandon asked in return, leaning forward in his black leather chair.

“Wait one,” Jack shot back, using his old military lingo and concentrating on the computer feed coming into his work station. “Marge, you getting the same readings I am on that Chinese probe?”

Marjorie Jones was the senior-most analyst in NASA’s black ops room. She had more PhDs than the rest of the technicians combined. “You referring to those intermittent gamma bursts?” Marge replied, not bothering to raise her eyes from her console where she sat just in front of the command desk. Rock liked to keep her close. Any intelligent man would, and for the same reasons.

“Not just gamma. I’m showing activity on the x-ray band, as well as low gain AM and higher gain FM,” Jack said, standing to look at Marge for confirmation.

Marge began typing furiously on her keyboard, eyes constantly trained on her main monitor. After a few long seconds, she finally peered over her bank of monitors at Jack. “Confirmed on all frequencies.”

“What the hell is going on, people?” Rock asked, standing to observe his control room better.

“It seems the Chinese probe’s telemetry feed has been terminated,” Jack said, “and replaced with unknown radio bursts covering the entire RF band.”

Rock was confused. “You’re saying the digital data feed has been replaced by radio waves, Jack?”

“That’s what it looks like from my desk, sir.”

“Something’s not quite right with that,” Lisa said from one of several consoles in the room. Only about four of the twenty consoles were being manned for the overnight mission as not every NASA staffer had been cleared by the NSA for this operation.

Marge looked disconcerted at Lisa’s remarks, a fact that didn’t go unobserved by Rock. “Marge, you have something to say?”

“No,” Marge shot back, returning her focus to her bank of monitors at the scientific desk she manned.

“Lisa, what isn’t looking right from your perspective?” Rock asked.

Lisa Wilson was the antithesis of Marge. Tall, young, and with more than her share of good looks, she commanded attention in most any room dominated by the male scientific and engineering types commonly encountered in the old school NASA ranks. Rock chalked up the unusual interaction between the two to some sort of female rivalry, which extended to not only the physical appearance but the intellectual as well.

“Richard,” Lisa said, refusing as usual to use his nickname, “can you look at my console repeater? Specifically look at the signal strengths that are being recorded.”

Rock sat back down, turning his attention to his third monitor which repeated what Lisa had displayed on her main console. There were several data bands that showed the radio signal telemetry that NASA’s interceptor was currently receiving. He had to pay close attention to the key metric graph to the far left of each signal line. They no longer read in the lower decibel microvolt range, but instead in the millivolt range, and the lined graphs were in the hundreds, not single digits.