Legacy (13 page)

“And we don’t know where the crates are now?” Sarah asked as she stood and started pacing.

“No. No trace of them has ever been found,” Alice said with resignation. “The last known sighting was Ecuador. So, either Germany or Washington is where you should look.” Alice removed her hands and then sat in the empty chair next to Lee’s. “I think you need to start there.”

“Start what?” Niles asked.

“Your investigation, of course. I assume it would be within the parameters of what the president has given you authorization to do,” Lee said, smiling at Niles.

“Why not start at the excavation you spoke of?” Jack asked.

“Because it has been buried and the ground salted. The Ecuadorians allow no one near the site. I know. I was shot at years later trying to get in,” Lee said.

“May I suggest, since we have a geologist on hand, that we use her to find out what she can about the excavation? And while Sarah is doing that, Niles and Jack can start the search for the crates. Because whatever is in those wooden boxes holds the answer to what they just found on the Moon.”

As they watched Alice answer for a very tired-looking Lee, she stood and helped the senator to his feet. She placed her arm around him and started walking toward the hallway.

“That’s enough for you for one day,” she said. “Say good-bye and good night.”

“Damn woman won’t let me play no more.”

“Get some rest,” Niles said as Sarah walked over and kissed Lee on the cheek once more. Then she regretted the gesture; the senator had to bend low to accept it.

Jack turned toward Niles and shook his head. “I don’t see the point of this. NASA will soon have the answers we need, and if the skeletons are indeed from one and the same civilization, why bother to find the crates? And we have to consider the big question here.”

“What’s that?” Sarah asked.

Jack stood and replaced his chair. Alice walked back into the room to show them out. Jack thought a moment and then came to the conclusion that Alice also needed to hear his question.

“Someone thought the find in 1945 was important enough to get rid of, and important enough not to announce. Now here we are trying to find out where those crates are. Whoever has them may want them protected at all cost, for reasons of their own.”

Niles bit his lower lip and then his eyes settled on Jack.

“Good point.”

2

JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, HOUSTON, TEXAS

Evans looked up from his clipboard to the monitor.

Atlantis
was on its way.

Hugh Evans had worked his way up the chain of command from engineering to flight director. His normal duties called for his expertise on the space shuttle program, but eighteen months earlier he’d had a mild heart attack. Shuttle missions were well beyond his health situation at the moment, so when his superiors asked for a liaison and flight manager to work with JPL on the Peregrine mission, he jumped at the chance to get on the boards once again. He was working closely with Stan Nathan out at Jet Propulsion Lab, not interfering with his mission leadership but helping with some of the more NASA-based situations that sprang up. It had been his suggestion to Stan that morning to use
John, George
, and
Paul
as a linkup from
Ringo
and then up to REMCOM at JPL, completing the relay of the communications signal back to earth.

Mission control was running shorthanded. The Peregrine mission was squeezed in between STS 129, one of the last space shuttle missions to be launched before that particular program came to a close, and a Mars orbiter currently on course for the red planet.

Now, in the large monitor to the right-center of the main screen, Hugh Evans saw the shuttle
Atlantis
as it started making its journey from the barn to the launch pad. The large-tracked vehicle carrying the giant shuttle moved slowly and surely toward one of the final missions of the shuttle program. Hugh was looking at it longingly, as he knew he would never be a flight director again for one of the last few missions to the International Space Station.

Hugh turned his gaze back to the main screen in the center of mission control. He watched as
Ringo
started another grid pattern search of the center of Shackleton Crater. He glanced over at the large telemetry readout next to the image and saw that
Ringo
was beginning to show a power loss of over 65 percent.

He frowned.

If he had been in charge he would have cut the grid search down. He would have concentrated
Ringo
closer to the center of the crater for expediency. He had started to suggest just that four hours before, but he knew that Stan Nathan in Pasadena was having a far more harrowing day than he. So Evans had decided to keep quiet, even though as a second recommendation he would have used
Paul
, the second rover into the crater, as a search partner to
Ringo
instead of digging out the mysterious skeleton. After all, they knew what the damn thing was. So his priority would have been on finding other remains or something that could identify what it was they were dealing with.

Finally, Hugh switched his view from the interior of the crater to the rim, where
George
was watching with its long-range lens. He saw the zoomed image of
Paul
as it used its drill arm to scoop out deposits of lunar dust from around the left side of the half-buried skeleton. All of a sudden the robot stopped. He saw the image being streamed from
George
switch to the close-up view from
Paul
’s camera.

“What’s that?” he asked aloud as several of the overnight telemetry technicians looked on just as confused.

On the large monitor was the left arm of the space suit. On it was a patch. It was not unlike the flag that United States astronauts wore on their left shoulder. This one, however, was a multicolored series of rings, eclipsed by each before it, the first being the only whole circle of the four.

“If that’s a flag, it sure as hell rules out the remains being anyone from this side of the border,” he said. He stood and tilted his head. There was something just underneath the shoulder blade of the now exposed left arm of the skeleton. He hit the small transmit button on his belt, and then adjusted the headset to his mouth.

“Stan, this is Houston, can you ask REMCOM to order
Paul
to zoom in on the object just beneath the arm. Yeah, do you see the black thing there? It’s partly exposed.”

As he waited for the time delay in communications, Hugh became a little anxious. Soon the image changed as the camera angle from
Paul
adjusted and focused on a long tubular object jutting from the dust. As it became clearer, Stan Nathan’s voice came over the loud speaker.

“What in the hell is that?”

Stan walked a few steps down the steep steps leading to the control room floor and stopped. His mouth became a little drier. He knew exactly what the strange object was.

“Uh, Stan, we aren’t going out live this time are we?” He looked around at the small staff of technicians inside his own facility as they in turn watched him.

“No, most of the press is dozing inside the press facility. Why, what is that thing?”

“The object at the very top of that tube is a sight, maybe a scope.”

“I’m not following,” Stan said from Pasadena.

“Sometimes having a history as an Air Force officer has its advantages,” Hugh said, “because what we’re looking at is a back sight and scope for a weapon.”

“A what?”

“A gun, and look at the end of the tube. That isn’t any sort of weapon currently available to any inventory in the world.”

As they looked on, the camera view zoomed in at four times power. Everyone saw what Hugh was talking about. At the hollowed-out tip of the cylindrical object, just in front of what Evans had called the front sight, was a small crystal.

As everyone started absorbing the possibility of what they had found strapped to the back of the skeleton, loud warning alarms started sounding in Pasadena.

“What is it, Stan?” Evans asked. The screen on the main viewer changed to the outer rim of the crater. There,
George
had a shot that froze the hearts of everyone in both Pasadena and Houston. The rover
Ringo
had made its second major discovery of the day. At the far right center of Shackleton Crater was another red and blue space suit. As the camera adjusted its picture and zoomed in closer, the scene changed dramatically. As
Ringo
started backing away from the scene as it had been ordered to do, they saw the three skeletons that were ringed around the second space suit. They were more than three quarters buried in the lunar dust, and not one of them looked to be in environmental suits. They seemed to be partially dressed in burned and shredded lab coats of some kind.

“Jesus, what in the hell have we dug up here?” Stan Nathan asked from Pasadena.

“What we have here is a damn battlefield,” Hugh answered.

“A what?”

The most experienced flight director in the United States stared at the most unsettling image he had ever seen from space.

Then he hit his transmit button.

“It’s a killing field.”

EVENT GROUP COMPLEX, NELLIS AIR FORCE BASE, NEVADA

“What is the body count thus far?” Virginia Pollock asked from her seat next to Niles.

The entire divisionary infrastructure of the Event Group was seated around the large conference table next to Niles Compton’s office on Level 7. They had been silent as Pete Golding played them the video of the last series of images he had just stolen with the use of the supercomputer Europa—or “hijacked” as he put it—on the large thirty-foot monitor on the wall.

Virginia Pollock had voiced what was on all their minds.

“Yes. The body count.” Compton turned toward the lieutenant commander on detached service from the Navy. The Japanese American signals officer was tasked with infiltrating NASA and JPL communications. “Commander Yahamana, what have you found out?”

“In a secure message sent to the program’s head, that being the vice president, we have learned they have uncovered parts of sixty-two bodies inside Shackleton Crater. Some were whole, some less intact. Most were without space suits. That is where we stand at the moment since JPL has ordered all four Beatles to stand down for solar recharge.”

“I’ll add this,” Niles said. “There seem to be support structures from a destroyed composite environmental unit, or shelter. They don’t know at the present time how many or how large these shelters were.”

“I take it we are now leaning toward this site not being of Earth origin?” Colonel Jack Collins asked from his seat at the opposite end of the table.

Next to him Captain Carl Everett, the second man in charge of the Security Department, was at a loss for words, as were most in the room at hearing about what was happening on the Moon. He leaned over and whispered to Jack. “Okay, I spent the last eight hours off base—what in the hell did I miss?”

“Oh, you’re going to love this one,” Jack said. He turned his attention back to Niles.

“No,” Compton answered with a slight shake of his head, “not unless someone made a leap in technology that would outpace the rest of the world by at least two to three hundred years.”

“Have they uncovered any more weapons?” Charles Hindershot Ellenshaw III, the head of the Cryptozoology Department, asked from the center of the table.

“They think three,” answered Yahamana. “One of them considerably larger than the weapon strapped to the back of the first skeleton.”

“Do we have any idea the makeup of any of the weapons?” Virginia asked Niles.

“Jack, what does our resident military man have to say?”

“If I had to speculate, which is bad business in our world, I would say it was some sort of light weapon.”

“Light? You mean in weight?” Ellenshaw asked.

“No, I mean it’s a particle beam weapon. The crystal installed on the end of the first weapon is the tipoff here. Aberdeen Proving Grounds used a crystal that intensifies a particle or light beam upon discharge through the emitter.”

Charlie Ellenshaw looked around the table and passed his hand over his head. “Okay, you lost me,” he said, as a few chuckles and agreeing nods came from around the table.

“A ray gun, Charlie,” Jack simplified.

“Oh.”

“Which brings me to the next point,” Compton said, standing and pacing in front of the large table. “How many nations have the capability to decode NASA and JPL transmissions?”

Jack turned to Yahamana and then to Captain Carl Everett. “These two would be far more capable at an educated guess than anyone else.”

“Anyone with a ham radio could receive the data, but to decode?” Yahamana said, looking at Everett for his concurrence. “I would say maybe five or six nations can decode NASA’s and Jet Propulsion Lab’s communication codes.”