| Chapter 15 | Chapter 17 |
Part III
16
Soviets
Mare Tranquillitatis, The Moon,
March 17 2047
After deploying a large number of sensors around his pod, Robert had allowed himself a bit of a nap. Or allowed? He had been dead tired after having been awake for almost forty hours in total, after setting up the sensor perimeter and after fine-tuning a set of alarms to barely restrain from triggering each time that a bigger piece of debris hit the closest debris dumping crater some five hundred km from his current position.
He had been monitoring his surroundings for over twenty-four hours, ready to launch his pod into a moon orbit at a second's notice and not even a speck of dust had behaved oddly in that time.
Robert had finally allowed himself to feel relatively safe after having been awake for so many hours. So when after the weeks-long moon-daytime, the sunset relatively quickly and darkness had set in, Robert had felt sufficiently secure to allow himself to fall asleep. Due to being too tired to think though, he had done so without having set his pod to auto-launch on sensor anomalies.
So when after only a few hours of sleep the alarms had triggered, Robert’s body had still been so tired of the long and stressful day on the moon that it refused to let Robert awaken from a dream.
Just as Robert was dreaming about his mentor Rachella commending him for his amazing research, the alarms started sounding within his dream and what had started out as a beautiful dream turned into the most frightening of nightmares. It was a lucid dream. Robert was fully aware he was dreaming and felt he was in real danger, Robert’s body though refused to let him wake up.
In this dream, Robert’s pod was destroyed by an ancient looking, CCCP labeled spaceship. The monstrous black ship the size of an oil tanker hovered menacingly at about 40 metres above the moon's surface. Robert felt himself running for his life. He was making slow and prolonged leaps over the moon surface as the clarity of being inside of a dream faded again.
Nowhere to run to and no place to hide. Too scared to even dare to look over his shoulder to see what it was undoubtedly chasing him. One moment this dream reality felt totally real, the next Robert realized he was dreaming and needed desperately to wake up out of this dream. He was struggling between two realities. On one side there was the dream reality where he was being chased by an ancient Soviet spaceship and whatever could have emerged from it. There was something behind him but Robert was too afraid to even look over his shoulder.
Robert snapped back to lucidity and tried to grasp where this crazy dream was coming from. The original Apollo Eleven mission took place at a time of big tensions between the former United States of America and the old Soviet Union. Robert realized his mind had created this Soviet scenario. Had projected it to his nightmare as a result of the alarms going off.
Robert knew he had to somehow get to the other side. Snap out of this dream! Wake up! On the other side, there was reality. Outside of Robert's dead-tired body, the alarms were ringing to notify Robert of imminent danger. He could hear the alarms even in his dream reality. He had to wake up. Now!
In both realities, Robert felt he was about to die. One second he was aware of the fact that he was asleep and needed to urgently wake up speak out the launch command to his main computing unit. The next second the dream reality felt real enough for Robert and Robert was frantically looking for shelter on the barren moon landscape of his dream reality.
Then Robert finally managed to wake himself. The alarms had stopped ringing but Robert didn't immediately manage to process that reality yet. After his long struggle to wake up from his dream, he was still too much caught up in trying to get away from the dangers to think clearly, so Robert spoke the launch command.
"Computer: emergency launch sequence. Now!"
At that moment though, he realized the alarms had long stopped ringing. Realized he had time to think. He needed to think. A premature launch could not be reverted.
"Computer: abort the last command! Now!"
As Robert issued the delay command, his eye went to the vintage segment vane display that showed the remaining countdown time till launch:
0:01
Phew, just in time. "Computer, give me a full analysis"
A strip of paper came out of the computing unit. It had felt appropriate at the time to add some vintage features to the computing units as not to make them seem too much out of place but at this point, Robert wished he hadn't. The computer reported a strange pattern of destroyed sensors and disturbed ground, yet nothing but dust clouds had been registered by radar or IR sensors.
Robert could conclude only one thing: Six hundred metres. As Robert ran the numbers once more, his findings were conclusive. Six hundred metres was what had stood between his continued survival and the fate that had become the original astronauts.
Something terrible had tried to get to his moon lander and failed. A two hundred metres long, slightly arc-shaped, region of violently disturbed earth left no doubt that whatever had created the carnage was still very much present and still very much dangerous.
He wasn’t going back to the Apollo Eleven landing site that much was sure. He shouldn’t be in any real hurry to launch though either. Time to work things out. Time to consider survival strategy.
There was some kind of circle, Robert had concluded from analyzing the arc shape of the disturbed ground. A circle with a radius of about fifteen kilometres. Whatever this thing was, it somehow was confined to this circle and Robert's moon lander was safely beyond its reach.
At the exact center of the circle, Robert's lunar maps had shown a deep crater. Images of giant monstrous tube worms went through Robert's mind.
Was there some kind of beast living in the crater? If so, how could it survive without an atmosphere, without a source of food? And why the circle? It was almost as if it was a giant monster on a leash.
No, the moon could not support any life. No air, no food, nothing that a life form could use to survive. The strange circular reach of whatever this was kept Robert puzzled.
He needed to find out more about what was lurking in this crater and what confined it to this circle. His sensors had picked up large clouds of dust and fine sands but not whatever created these clouds. There had been regions in the cloud though that were completely void of any dust and sand particles according to his measurements. Robert had only taken low powered computing units, so he would have to wait for hours, for dust and sand cloud measurements to render what he hoped would be an outline of whatever this object was.
Computer: Run a probabilistic analysis of all unexplained dust-free space assuming an object and render that object!
The vane display lighted up again:
3:18:44
3:18:43
As the computer started counting down to rendering completion, Robert wished he had taken a larger computing unit on his mission.
Ah, time for another nap.
Once the rendering would be complete, hopefully, Robert could develop a strategy to gathering more data before launching his pod back to dock and trying to make his way back to Earth to face that other danger.
But for now, time to continue catching up on some sleep.
If he was going to survive this, he had to be sharp. He had to be well rested.
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