Luna (8 page)

15 | Below

James Burton had never known himself to be claustrophobic. Yet as he walked through the narrowing cavern, he felt his pulse quicken, his lungs working to take deeper, longer breaths. On either side of him the walls of rock appeared as though they were about to reach out and grab his arms. He imagined the floor of the cavern melting around his feet, pulling him under like quicksand. Even the ceiling, which was well above their heads and seemingly stable, looked to him like it was made of snow and could succumb to a cave-in at any given second.

In front of James, Asami Imura remained enthralled. As she studied the rock formations, she spoke aloud, uttering suppositions, muttering something about the
subterranean
regolith
, predicting what they would find next. Her voice put him at ease. Somewhat.

When they finally reached a fork in the tunnels, Blake interrupted Asami and said, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do…” He outlined a plan.

“You’re splitting us up?” James asked once Blake finished giving instructions. Burton didn’t sound frightened – on the contrary, more like puzzled. But only for a moment. Only until he went through the two teams in his head.

Caitlin Swain would lead Asami and James.

Blake would lead Martin Hughes and Suzette Calderon.

He was readying them for a discovery of some sort. Wanted to make sure the moment was captured by cameras when he was there. Having Suzette on his team would allow him as many “takes” as he needed.

No “One small step for man” on this journey. Blake was hell bent on getting this right. The world would see and hear exactly what he wanted them to, would remember this moment precisely how he wanted them to.

The billionaire explorer said, “Caitlin, you’ll lead Team One through the tunnel on the right. The tunnels merge again in about eight hundred feet. I’ll lead Team Two through the left tunnel, and we’ll switch on the return trip.”

“Aye, sir,” Swain said.

“Ready?” Blake said to Martin after the first team disappeared.

The exobiologist smiled under his helmet. “You bet your life, old boy.”

There was no discussion about switching frequencies. The two teams needed to remain in touch at all times. So James continued to listen to Suzette prattle on about flattering angles and ideal backgrounds while she, Blake and Hughes traveled through the left corridor. In the other tunnel, James’ team, led by Caitlin, remained silent. He soon learned that in addition to recording this event, Suzette was required to do a bit of playacting as well. A few gasps of wonderment and awe for the sake of Outer Limits and Team One.

James’ headlamp lit his way while Caitlin and Asami forged on up ahead of him. His eyes were trained on the floor because it may have been that they were playing tricks on him again, as they had on the surface. The ground seemed unsteady beneath his feet. Not quite unstable, but…

Suddenly, Blake Garner’s voice was shouting in his ears. “Suzette!
Stay with the group
.”

The videographer replied in her usual tone. “I just need some shots of this.”

  Then Asami: “What the hell
is
that?” James looked at that unsteady ground again. Was that what she was talking about?

Blake again: “Suzette, this is the last time I’m going to warn you.
Remain with the group.
”

Hughes’ voice suddenly cut in. “Good god!” 

“Rethinking things, Martin?” Blake taunted.

“It’s an expression, you idiot.” James made a mental note of the short fuses everyone seemed to have as soon as they entered the tunnels.

Up ahead somewhere out of sight, Blake and Hughes had stopped. They stood in front of a sloping wall. Over their shoulders James could just make out what looked like a large opening in the rock.

“Your crew did this, right, Blake?” Hughes asked.

Blake didn’t respond. Something had apparently caused Hughes not to follow the script.

As James reached them, the biologist was shrugging Blake’s arm off his shoulder. “Fuck off,” Hughes said. “You’re a goddamn liar, Bla—”

Hughes’ voice suddenly cut out, and all James could hear was Suzette’s. She was speaking quickly, rattling off words like a machine gun. Describing something very similar to what stood before them—some inexplicable opening in the rock wall.

“Suzette!” Blake shouted again. “We can’t
see
you. Return to the team,
now
.”

Suzette continued her frantic description as James peered into the hole in the side of the tunnel.

“…appears that the rock was smashed, or perhaps
drilled
here…from the inside out.”

16 | Lights, Camera…

Caitlin did her best to sound authoritative while her voice wavered. “Suzette, I can’t see you yet, but step back from the opening. The ground may not be stable.” Up ahead, the marketing VP continued to aim a video camera into the hole in the tunnel wall.

A spot of light moved erratically to Caitlin’s right and James Burton loped his way up to her. She couldn’t hear his footfalls—there was no sound on the moon other than through their communications channels due to the absence of air—but when his headlamp remained fixed on the same spot of tunnel wall, she knew he had reached her. He said nothing. Their FAA chaperone was turning out to be quite a cool customer for a first-time lunar visitor who was usually bound to a desk, Caitlin thought. For that she was grateful.

Aside from Suzette, it was actually Asami who gave her cause for concern. Though she’d been to the moon before, this was her first trek inside the tunnels, as it was for all of them except for Blake. The moon scientist was in an almost trance-like stupor as she meandered up to Caitlin and James, hypothesizing aloud to no one in particular about the extensive subterranean channels.

“I would say they remind me of lava tubes. Ancient lava tubes that once contained hot magma during young Luna’s volcanically active beginnings, but so far I haven’t seen any flow lines on the walls to indicate a drained tube…” Asami’s suited hand trailing along the tunnel wall took over as her voice trailed off. “It’s also unusual that I haven’t seen any traces of mineral deposits in the walls, given that—”

Caitlin interrupted her. “Dr. Imura, I’m sorry, but right now we need to focus on getting our group back together.”

“Certainly. My apologies,” Asami said. The beam from her headlamp bounced around the ceiling, but she stopped talking.

Then Blake’s voice cut through everything. “Suzette! Did I hear you say you were taking video? Turn it off, now. Now! Is that clear?”

Silence.

“Suzette, acknowledge at once!” Still no reply. Caitlin could hear Blake and Martin speaking to one another in hushed tones. She couldn’t help but strain to hear…
What is that…stop stepping on my foot!

“Caitlin, I need you to handle this!” Blake’s demanding tone drowned out all other conversation and snapped Caitlin to attention.

“I’m almost to her, sir.” Caitlin put her hand behind her, palm out, warning Asami and James to stay back while she followed the tunnel’s curve to the left. The ceiling here was lower by a couple of feet, forcing Caitlin to stoop as she came to what was obviously the opening of which Suzette had spoken. A narrow tunnel continued left and wound around a rocky promontory that divided Caitlin’s tunnel from the one where Blake’s team was. On her right side the tunnel wall was marred by a jagged hole thrust through it.

“Suzette?” she transmitted. Their marketing exec wasn’t in front of the hole in the wall, which Caitlin recognized immediately from Suzette’s harried description.
It does look like something drilled through this wall from the other side.

“Blake, is Suzette with Team One?” She could picture the girl hunched obliviously over her computer, thinking she could get out one of her vapid messages to whatever social media site was in fashion these days through the walls of these tunnels.
Not gonna happen.

She heard a groundswell of chatter, mostly indistinguishable. …
do you mean…how did I know? …a box!

“Blake?” What was going on over there?

“Caitlin,
no
, Suzette is not here, over.”

Goosebumps travelled up Caitlin’s legs and arms as she looked back to the hole in the wall. She stepped closer to it. It didn’t lead straight back more than a few feet, but went down. With great care and while calling out Suzette’s name, Caitlin eased onto her hands and knees. She crawled to the entrance, where a few larger rocks jutted up through the rim of the opening like crooked incisors in a gaping mouth. Careful to avoid them, Caitlin stuck her neck through the hole. Nowhere to go but down, although the hole widened the deeper it got. And then she saw it.

Suzette’s video camera, lying on the ground about ten feet below. Its own light source fanned out across the tunnel floor, illuminating a greater swath of the chamber than Caitlin’s piercing but narrow headlamp beam. At the outer edges of the camera’s light, Caitlin saw movement. It wasn’t Suzette, but in the back of her mind she realized she was still calling her name.

The ground itself was moving, rolling.

17 | … Reaction

Caitlin backed away from the hole and stood. When she turned around, Asami and James were rounding the corner.

“Did Suzette go though there?” Asami asked, pointing into the ragged passage.

“Not sure yet. It leads straight down. Asami, James, I need you to follow me, please.”

James silently nodded his helmet up and down.

“Sure,” Asami said, still eyeing the hole. “You know, that doesn’t really look like geological upheaval,” she said, starting to walk over to it. “Was there any kind of digging or drilling activity by Outer Limits on the earlier missions? Because I could swear—”

“There wasn’t,” Caitlin said. “There were some preliminary tunnel walks like we’re doing now, that’s what I was—”

Caitlin cut herself off as Martin Hughes’ voice trilled in his upper registers. “What the fuck
is
that, Blake? If this is some kind of hoax it is not the least bit amusing.”

“It’s not a hoax.”

“Then what
is
it?”

“That’s what I was hoping you could tell me,” Blake said. “You’re the exobiologist.”

Caitlin, James and Asami stared for a moment at their own space-suited reflections in each other’s helmets before Caitlin took the lead into the tunnel that led around the corner to the one Blake’s team was in.

“Blake, Caitlin here: Team Two is on the way to join you at your location with information, over.”
With information
was an Outer Limits code phrase that meant,
we need to switch to a secure channel to discuss an issue not meant for outside ears.
Not that Burton wasn’t already aware Suzette was missing, but still. She knew Blake would want privacy while they figured out how to deal with it.

Caitlin reached for the volume control to her earpiece as static crackled over the comm channel, probably because of the thick rock wall separating them. She heard Blake say, “…saw them once before but I…astrobiologist…”

Caitlin strode as fast as she dared, careful not to hit her head on the ceiling, while gesturing for James and Asami to follow her. They rounded the end of the rocky wall that separated their tunnels. She sidestepped around a jumble of loose rock on the tunnel floor and entered the stretch of tunnel where Blake’s team was supposed to be. She intended to interrupt whatever the hell they were doing; this was no time for courtesy. But she was not prepared for what she saw here.

Blake and Martin stood facing one another about four feet apart. Martin’s helmet light reflected off Blake’s faceplate in a brilliant starburst of light. But it wasn’t Blake’s head Caitlin was looking at.

His hands were held out in front of him, cupped together. In them, something squirmed and wriggled. Caitlin was still too far away to discern any detail. Whatever it was, it had the unwavering attention of both Martin and Blake, neither of whom appeared entirely comfortable with it. Martin shifted his weight from one foot to the other, as if ready to put distance between himself and Blake at any second, but unsure of which direction in which to go.

Whatever was going on was far too bizarre for Caitlin to make sense of immediately and she needed to act now. “Blake, listen to me.” She gave him a hand signal that meant to switch to a private channel. Blake either ignored her or didn’t see it, because he continued his animated conversation with Martin.

“Just look at it! It’s harmless, at least with your suit on.”

“I really don’t recommend coming into contact with it even through a suit, Blake. Whatever it is—”

To hell with the private channel, Caitlin thought. “BLAKE! SUZETTE IS MISSING!”

Blake slid one of his feet back on the tunnel floor as he crouched down and scooped up some dust in one hand while bobbling the object in his other.

“They get nervous without the dust,” he said, pouring the regolith onto the thing, which appeared to be moving, but it was difficult for Caitlin to be sure because Blake himself was also in motion, in some kind of lunar balancing act. “Almost like a fish out of water,” Blake continued, dumping more gray dust onto his cupped hand until it was full and rained in slow motion from his gloved fingers back to the cave floor.

“
Blake
, her camera is lying on the floor of a tunnel below us, and I saw the floor
move
!” At this, Martin looked away from the spectacle of Blake and the thing and turned toward Caitlin.

“I hear you, Caitlin,” Blake said, his face unreadable behind his helmet.

“Maybe we should split up and go looking for her,” Martin suggested.

“No splitting up.” Blake reached into a vest pocket of his suit. The motion threw him off balance and he almost fell over as he juggled the object in his palm. “Martin, reach into my front left chest pocket, please, and pull out the sample container.”

“I think you should let it go, Blake,” Martin said. “We’re not properly equipped for live biological specimen collection. We’ll need to—”

“Whoa, wait a minute, did you just say ‘live biological specimen?’” Asami asked, rounding the rock wall into view. “What
is
that in your hand, Blake?”

“This, my friends, is E. fucking T. The first ever extraterrestrial life, documented and witnessed by scientific professionals on this very mission. And it appears to be multi-cellular at that. All of you are making history.”

“Suzette?” Caitlin reminded Blake.

“Let’s go down into the cave you found and get her,” Blake said. Martin reached a hand into Blake’s suit pocket and removed a clear plastic cube. He stepped back from Blake and turned the container over in his hands.

“Put some dust in it,” Blake said, before adding, “Caitlin, please take your team into the tunnel to get Suzette. We will be right behind you.”

Martin knelt and put the cube to the ground. “This doesn’t look like any bio-specimen container I’ve ever seen, Blake,” he said, dragging the box through the lunar dust.

“About two-thirds full,” Blake said, before addressing Caitlin. “Go now, Caitlin!”

The astronaut fought an upwelling of mixed emotions raging inside her. Blake had found some kind of life on the moon! She wanted to revel in the moment, to reflect on what this milestone meant for her life and career, and indeed, for humanity, but there was not time. She turned and headed back toward the mysterious opening.

Asami skipped after her, saying, “You said you saw the floor move. Could be a moonquake, although that thought is less than comforting down here. But seismic activity is quite common on the moon, and some quakes would register a 5.5 on our Richter scale back on Earth.”

“It’s for geologic specimens,” Blake said as Martin rose to his feet, “but it’s airtight, it has a locking lid, it’s sturdy and it’s chemically inert.”

“And it’s all we’ve got, right?” Martin said, walking over to Blake with the dust-filled cube.

“Right.”

“All right, I’m on board. I would give my left nut to get some DNA from this thing. If it has DNA. Drop the critter in.” Martin held the cube poised beneath Blake’s hand.

“I’d like to go back to the lander now,” James announced. He stood motionless behind Asami, where he’d been silently observing the goings on for some time.

At this, Caitlin turned around in time to see Blake fumble the creature as he looked up at James. Martin deftly maneuvered the container in time to catch it, snapping the lid down with soundless finality. She saw Blake nod thanks to Martin while a flurry of soil roiled inside the acrylic cube like a dust devil in miniature.

“Is something wrong, James? We need to find Suzette now.” Blake took the specimen in its cube from Martin and placed it carefully into his own suit pocket.

“I don’t need to go cave exploring anymore,” James replied, his voice low and calm. “I came this far, I saw this much, and that’s enough for me. Earlier you told me that anytime anyone wanted to go back to the lander, for any reason, that you would have Caitlin escort them back. You said that’s how the tourist trips will work, too. So, let’s see it. I want to go back now. ”