Disclaimer:
I do not own any of the series used in the production of this fanfiction. I would list the things that I do not own, but I would prefer to keep the number of spoilers down if at all possible. Suffice it to say that not all of the materials used will be actual full crossovers, but you will likely recognize materials and concepts from a varied grouping of science fiction sources.
Warning:
There will be mentions of Cancer in the first chapter of this story. I will not make light of this horrible condition, or those people who have suffered from it either directly, or through a loved one. My own mother is, thankfully, a survivor of cancer. Part of the background of this story revolves around the fact that, in this alternate world's future, we have discovered a reliable way to cure Cancer.
Author's Note:
Yes, this is a Mass Effect fanfiction. This part of the story though is a background on how this alternative universe broke off from the canon Mass Effect timeline. Events that occur in this first 'Book' of my story will have far reaching effects into the future.
Magnum Opus
Book One: Exodus
Chapter 1
Mojave Desert - Sunday, November 2nd, 2025 - Evening
Nestled within an arid basin in the Mojave Desert, the Lunar Outlook Air Force base enjoyed the benefits of its remote location. Though the remoteness of the facility was not the only factor that went into the planning of this isolated Air Force Base, it did grant the benefit of not receiving many curious visitors wondering why the Air Force had decided to place a base in the middle of a barren desert without any supporting town nearby. One of the main benefits that decided the placement of this facility, other than its remoteness of course, was the general lack of cloudy days. What this meant was that the numerous sky gazing satellite dishes there could get their very important work done with a minimal of interference.
Shortly before the first ground was broken for this new base, the Federal Government had moved to officially place the National Aeronautic Space Administration firmly within the Military Chain of Command. Though NASA was a government organization, it had enjoyed Civilian administration for longer than many people had been alive. This decision was made to fold the organization within the funding envelope of the Defense Administration, allowing them to more easily secure funds for NASA projects due to a rising worry about other nations attaining space superiority.
One of the first show projects they had created with the USAF NASA team had been the Lunar Outlook program, whose stated mission was an in depth study of Earth's closest extra-planetary stellar body. The purpose of this project was to search for probable locations of valuable resources on and within the Moon, as well as to search for suitable sites for Lunar Habitation.
After the first successful launches of NASA's own Space Launch System rockets, named ARES I and ARES V, the United States had once more stepped into the Space Race, quick to catch up to it's old rival, Russia. ARES I was a manned rocket designed to carry crew members and light equipment into space, and was used to ferry crew members to and from the International Space Station. ARES V, on the other hand, was an unmanned cargo rocket built to carry bulk material into outer space.
Once they had space lift capacity once more, NASA immediately launched a probe into lunar orbit.
Called Lunar Ghost I, the probe carried about it what was, at the time, the most sophisticated sensors and scanners available. It contained ultra-high definition cameras set to numerous spectrums ranging from the infrared to the ultraviolet, x-ray telescopes, radar, Ladar, and a new form of radiation sensing camera that was the logical evolution of the Geiger Counter. The wealth of information downloaded had kept scientists busy for well over a year, while engineers worked on figuring out ways to construct viable lunar habitats using the fewest man-lifted materials as possible.
Initial plans called for modular units that would be anchored to the surface of the moon. Solid cored, the habitats would have an inflated outer skin made of a material similar to Kevlar which, when inflated, would have a rigidity similar to aluminum. Those units would then be surrounded by 'sand bags' filled with lunar dust taken from the surface of the Moon itself.
In large enough quantities, this lunar dust, called regolith, would act as a form of radiation shielding, as well as a guard against micrometeorite impacts. During solar flares, there would be the solid inner core, which would contain the water supply for the habitat. This water-filled jacket would protect the inhabitants during larger amounts of radiation bombardment, such as those experienced during solar flares.
Mockups of these shelters had been built and tested within a replica of the Moon's surface within a series of warehouse like buildings on base. These facilities were the main test bed for all of the equipment and technology that they planned to use once they have landed on the Moon. Scientists from around the nation had been brought together for this mission, and the amount of work that they accomplished so far was monumental.
Upon finding a suitable location for a future base upon the constantly lit rim of the Shackleton Crater at the southern pole of the Moon, an initial 'care package' in the form of a remote controlled moon crawler had been sent to start initial work. This crawler was even now busy filling up pre-formed bags with regolith and setting them aside to be assembled around the first habitation once it was landed.
One of the numerous problems with setting up a human presence on the moon is the general lack of rare earths, as well as a lack of life giving resources like food, water, and especially air to be had from the Moon itself. One of the features of the crawler currently collecting regolith would be the extraction of water vapor from the same material it was currently collecting. When super-heated to over six hundred degrees Celsius, the regolith would let out water vapor which could then be separated into Hydrogen and Oxygen, giving a second source of oxygen for the inhabitants.
Earlier that week a new probe had been launched, called Lunar Ghost Two, which was equipped with some new toys worked up by the scientists at NASA working with the folks over at DARPA. One of the most revolutionary pieces of new equipment was a new sensor called an EM-Dar, an expensive piece of electronics mounted within the new probe. This device utilizes focused pulses of electromagnetic energy at different frequencies to bounce a signal off of solid objects. Considered too brute force to use on planetary-based targets, it was perfect for use on an object with no biological concerns.
In addition to the new EM-Dar sensor, they had also added a series of ultra-sensitive gravimetric sensors to help map the gravity fields of the stellar body. One of the greatest risks when landing any mission on the Moon was that the gravity on the lunar surface was not constant, causing any landing object to potentially veer wildly off course due to unexpected pulls of gravity.
Information from all these different sensors were to be fed into a large supercomputer buried beneath the Command Center of the Lunar Outlook base. When combined together, this would allow the scientists to correlate where any bodies of rare earths or other useful materials might be located that would be of potential use, and help fund future expansion of lunar projects.
Once this information was entered into the computer, and its data was first checked by a small team of onsite scientific specialists all with fancy titles ending with 'ology', the data was then sent along via satellite uplink to other scientists and researchers around the globe for further study. Most of the time the scientists set certain search parameters that would send them reports to help disseminate this information into an easier to study series of reports. Generally, there was not much time spent by the scientists watching the life feeds coming from the probe itself.
This practice of waiting for automated reports had been in place since about a week and a half into the flight of Lunar Ghost I, and had not changed much upon the launch of the second Ghost. If anything time critical happened, the scientists could be called from their comfortable, climate controlled offices and labs to the Command Center.
What this meant, to First Lieutenant Simon Riggs of the United States Air Force, was that he currently had one of the most boring jobs on base.
Lunar Outlook AFB was a somewhat sprawling facility painted a slightly orange tan beige color that blended well with the surrounding terrain. Located in the center of the base was a large Recreational building, nestled next to the Mess Hall, where easy access could be had to the two from nearly any point on the base.
Just to the south of the Recreation and Mess was a large open patch of desert floor overtaken by man-made construction. A forest of satellite dishes aimed themselves up at the sky, each appointed to its own little piece of the heavens. At the feet of these giants was several aches of solar panel arrays making ample use of the freely given energy of the sun, feeding their harvest to a series of large underground batteries to stave off their energy needs during the cool desert nights.
The main facilities of the base were arranged around the central hub of the Recreation and Mess halls like a wheel, wide avenues spreading out to a road that ran along the outer facilities. Between the hub and the outer rim were numerous essential facilities like the boiler room, the laundry facilities, the commissary, and medical facilities.
At the far eastern end of the Base were the numerous offices and laboratories for the scientists on base, blending into a series of large warehouse like buildings that contained both the lunar simulation that they tested their new equipment at, as well as machine shops and manufacturing facilities they could use to produce their inventions right on base.
Heading counter-clockwise brought one next to the side of an airfield landing strip that was the main source of materials, goods, and outside transportation for the Base. Any time they needed to send a scientist to a seminar, re-assign an airman, or just get a shipment of bullets beans or bandages, it would arrive or depart from that landing strip.
On the North Eastern side of the base was the warehouse district, located conveniently close to the landing strip to help facilitate the loading and unloading of material goods. Row upon row of tall-roofed storage buildings sat in a grid, holding all those things that kept life sustainable on base.
To the side of the warehouse area was located the Residential building, sitting on the north western side of the base. This is where the military base personnel lived, while the scientists had their own separate houses built between their laboratories and the central hub of the base.
The far western side of the base contained two facilities, one of which was the large hexagonal Administration facility that held the clerical staff and administrators during working hours. This is also where the base commander had his office. However, it is the building just to the south of the administration building, at the far western end of the hub, that our focus is drawn.
The Command Center is a squat, solid looking building that is easily dwarfed by the nearby Administration building. Only a story and a half tall and built from solid concrete painted to match the desert floor it was built upon, the windowless building could almost be mistaken for a rather regularly shaped, unattractive boulder. One of the few things the Command Center had going for it was that it was, like the rest of the facilities on base, fully climate controlled.
Inside of the facility was an entirely different view, as a majority of the building was filled with a large control room built half-buried beneath the ground, making it much taller than the building itself appeared. Dominating the far wall was a giant series of LCD monitors linked together to form one massive, floor to ceiling display screen.
To the far right of this giant display was a stretched map of the Moon showing the traced trajectory of both the Lunar Ghost II, and it's older sibling the Lunar Ghost I, which was still operational but not sending them anything noteworthy by this point. Opposite the stretched map was a real time display of the information currently being streamed down by Lunar Ghost Two. Luckily for anyone who bothered to look at this real time display, the different feeds were split up into a grid, combined with several different line graphs showing data over time comparisons.
With this being a Sunday evening, the room was all but empty, and the sensitivity designed for the high resolution scans from Lunar Ghost II meant that it took an incredibly long amount of time for anything resembling a complete picture to be formed. Automated programs checked the orbital path of both probes, with alerts set in the instance there happened to be any trouble with either probe. There were several technicians on call in case any problems should arise, but policy dictated that at least one airman be present in the Command Center at all times.
Which brings us to the single occupant of this vast display of information and technology.
Sprawled out on in a comfortable high backed office chair in front of the only active desktop station was a sandy-haired young man in his mid-twenties, a single boot propped up on the edge of the desk, and his hands folded over his stomach. Clad in a set of desert camouflage BDUs, he would have blended in well with the desert outside the Command Center, but he stood out as a splash of beige light in the otherwise dark tinted room. A series of halogen lamps mounted high in the ceiling above cast pools of bright light upon the work stations, while leaving the main display in relative darkness.
First Lieutenant Simon Riggs was not happy with the turn of events his military career had taken recently. He had originally signed up to be a fighter pilot, and was assured by his recruiter that he would achieve this goal once his recruiter saw his test results. He had even gotten into flight school, and had been the head of his class at Sheppard AFB, when General Greenwode had come along during an inspection of the training facilities and had Riggs fast-tracked into a job as a sensors technician.
Unhappy about this turn of events, but pleased that at least he was still in the Air Force, Riggs had gone on to do his best as a sensors technician. His hope had been that, if he got good enough at that job, he might be able to transfer to Cheyenne Mountain and work with NORAD watching the skies above their nation. Unfortunately, he had done such a good job at becoming a sensors technician that he had instead been assigned to work at a facility with the newest, top of the line sensors the Air Force had at their disposal.
One of the few rays of light with this whole assignment was that the head scientist in charge of this program, Doctor Hamlin, had decided that Riggs would be a perfect assistant in testing the new equipment that the astronauts would be using on their future trip to the moon. This gave him a chance to test out the controls of a Lunar Lander flight simulator that utilized data fed through the super computer buried deep beneath his feet, as well as walk around in several prototype models of space suits.
Of course, that bit of excitement did not entirely outweigh the fact that not only was he not an astronaut, and he would never get the chance to use these things in real life, but he wasn't really doing anything to help defend his nation, either. Watching an empty room as a computer mapped the surface of the Moon on a Sunday evening while the other people on the base played pool, watched movies, or cheated each other at poker, was not his idea of a good time.
On the other hand, it did beat gate duty.
With a deep sigh, 1st Lt Riggs allowed his raised boot to drop back to the concrete floor with a loud slap that echoed throughout the empty room. Sitting up, he rubbed the heels of his palms over his eyes, trying to drive away the ache that was developing there, before giving it up as a lost cause. After sitting still for so long in the room waiting for nothing to happen, he was aching in places he didn't even know he had.
Deciding that he needed to get his blood flowing, he stood up from the chair and started doing stretches. Arms raised above his head with fingers intertwined, the sandy haired man reached for the ceiling, then slowly tilted his torso from side to side. completing a few more stretches to limber out, he then switched to jumping jacks like he did back in PT in boot. A few moments later and his heart rate was up enough to get the blood flowing, helping wake him up from his stupor.
Reaching over to the desk, the First Lieutenant picked up his discarded coffee cup. Sniffing at the cup in an unconscious reaction, he eyed the last bit of dark liquid that sat at the bottom. Deciding that it did not look, or smell, like poison, he quickly drained what little remained of its contents into his dry mouth.
Immediately regretting doing so, he made a face as what seemed to him to be half a pot's worth of coffee grounds lined his mouth, the bitter grit underlining how irritated he was that evening. Still making odd faces as he tried to dispel both the taste and texture in his mouth, preferably without having to use his tongue or saliva to clear it away, Riggs carried his now empty cup towards the back of the room.
Opposite the main display, the back wall of was laid out with a long counter topped with everything needed to keep a Command Center running. In other words, numerous restaurant style coffee makers with glass pots sitting atop hot plates, several water and ice dispensers, a few sinks, and racks filled with drinking cups and coffee mugs.
Heading for the nearest sink, Riggs rinsed out the remaining grounds with cold water from the tap, filling and emptying the cup several times before bringing it, half full, to his mouth. A few switches and a gargle later, and he had cleared the remains of his previous cup of coffee from his mouth, and was feeling much better about himself.
Maybe he would grab a fresh cup of hot coffee, hopefully with fewer grounds this time.
Blinking his moss green eyes in confusion, Riggs stopped where he was standing, his hand frozen in midair, as something caught the edge of his attention. An odd warbling sound was coming from his computer station, causing him to pause in indecision as he decided wither to pout himself another cup of coffee first, or go check out what was going on with the system. More than likely it wasn't anything important, but his sense of duty won out over his need for caffeine.
Leaving both cup and pot on the back counter, he walked back to his station. While making his way back to his computer, he glanced at the wall display and frowned to himself, coming to a stop as he tried to understand what he was looking at. The college classes, and military officer training that brought him his current specialization, allowed him to take in the data scrolling across the immense set of screens. Unfortunately, that didn't mean that what he was currently seeing made any real sane sort of sense.
Upon the display for the EM-Dar was showing a mass buried beneath the regolith of the Amundsen Crater near the south pole of the moon. With the slow speed in which the satellite orbited the Moon for its high resolution scans, the picture was long in forming. This was one of the many reasons that Riggs was the only person in the command center, as watching the real time display was often as fun as watching paint dry, when one cam come back later to see the full painting.
Mass concentrations like this were fairly rare on the lunar surface, due to a lack of seepage and geological activity. Minerals tended to be sparsely distributed, and didn't tend to group together in such a manner as he was seeing. Secondly, the shape of the deposit seemed a bit too regularly formed to his trained eye to be formed by the forces of nature. Third, a few of the other sensors were showing a lot more activity than he had noticed before now.
Oddly enough, the sensor showing the highest level of activity was the gravimetric censor, which was showing fluctuations in gravity that peaked and fell in line with the scan pattern of the EM-Dar as is was scanning a particular area of the mass.
Decision made, 1st Lt Riggs walked the rest of the way to his station and picked up the phone there, not even bothering to sit back down. Punching in the extension the base CO had given him in case anything came up, he waited as the line rang, the warble still coming from the computer filling his other ear. With a click the other end of the line was picked up.
"Report," his commanding officer ordered.
"We have an anomaly on Lunar Ghost Two, Colonel," Riggs replied.
"This had better be one hell of an anomaly for you to interrupt my Sunday evening, Lieutenant," the Colonel told him.
"Sir, if what the sensors are telling me is true, then we have something really unusual here," Riggs assured his CO.
A sigh could be heard on the other end of the line.
"Right, then," the other man agreed. "Give a call over to Doctor Hamlin and tell him he is needed in Command... And Riggs?"
"Yes, sir?"
"Put a fresh pot of coffee on... make that two."
Washington DC - Sunday, November 2nd, 2025 - Late Evening
Lazlo Steele wondered again why he had decided to run for the office of President of the United States of America. Having retired at the age of fifty-five from the Air Force with the rank of a Brigadier General, he could have lived comfortably off of his retirement fund. But anyone that knew Lazlo knew that he was not a man that took to idleness well.
He had been thinking about what to do with his life now that he was out of the military when his old commanding officer had jokingly said that if Lazlo really wanted to make a difference, he would have to do so from the top.
That had been over seven years ago when he had first decided to run for office, back in the summer of 2020.
Not wanting to be embroiled in 'party politics' between the ever present Democratic and Republican parties, the retired Brigadier General had decided to run as an Independent more as a statement than in thinking that it would help his chances for election. The last president elected from a party other than Democrat or Republican had been John Tyler, who was elected back in 1841. Indeed, the last president that was not a Democrat or Republican had been Millard Fillmore, who was elected in 1850 just three terms after that.
As luck would have it, the Democratic and Republican nominees were both 'old money', and had been very verbal about their plans to curb military funding and increase tax breaks when they came into office. Wizened somewhat due to years of recession, the general populace understood that as meaning that they planned to take money away from the people protecting their nation, give tax breaks that benefited only the rich like themselves, and continue to line their pockets.
While this might have been enough cause for voters to look to other candidates, like Lazlo himself, the sheer amount of funding that the primary candidates had backing their campaigns gave them an overwhelming advantage. With over a hundred, in fact around one hundred and thirty years, of bi-partisan voting backing them, the odds seemed long that Lazlo would even reach the Debates.
However, mere days before the final Debates were about to begin, Lazlo had barely managed to get enough popularity to enter. That was when his fortunes changed, as a new flare up in tensions in the Middle East broke out as several groups fought over the control of the dwindling oil fields. One nation decided that due to the fact that the fields in question were mainly located beneath the borders of their own country, that they had rights to this resource, while another country disagreed and stated that since the field was also within their own borders, then they were well within their rights to place oil wells on their own sovereign territory.
Shortly after that fateful Presidential Debate, Independent candidate Lazlo Steele had taken the polls by storm. He had come off with the aura of a man that was not only in control, but also knew what was needed to support a nation during times of conflict. One major point in his favor was that he was most assuredly less concerned than the primary candidates about how much money companies might be losing, and more concerned about making sure that the people had the resources and safety needed to live their lives.
Standing at six foot three, and weighing over two hundred and fifty pounds of bone and muscle, the retired Brigadier General appeared to loom over his Debate opponents. His pale gray eyes seemed to gaze into the souls of those that watched the debates, shadowed beneath his thick black eyebrows. When he answered the questions posed to the candidates, his impassioned replied were spoken with a staccato pace of a man familiar with giving orders, easily cutting through the simpering tones of the two rich men that happened to share the stage with him.
Shortly after the Presidential Debate, candidate Lazlo Steele had taken the polls by storm, jumping from a 6% approval rate to a 74%. While the bipartisan parties had scrambled to regain control of a suddenly derailed election, Lazlo was suddenly receiving funding from grass-roots organizations and online donation groups, giving him the ability to turn down several corporate sponsors who tried to approach him in the weeks following, thus allowing him to stay his own man.
After what seemed to be one of the fastest political climbs in history, Lazlo Steele had been sworn in as the 46th President of the United States of America on January 20th, 2021.
As President, one of the first bills that Lazlo had signed had been the approval for final testing to be completed on a new form of cancer cure by a company called Ziodex Industries. Though the company had started out by developing synthetic plasma, and later succeeding in creating cloned blood, their recent research into curing cancer had shown great promise as well.
The bill had been opposed due to grief originating from the major pharmaceutical companies that profited on the industry they had build based upon treatment of cancer instead of curing the deadly and horrific malady. In his mind, he also understood that numerous corporations were also against the bill due to the vast amounts of funding that they also received on their parts to discover new ways to treat cancer patients. Unbelievable amounts of money were funneled into the medical community each year as more and more people suffering from cancer continued to flow in due to the increased pollutants in their environment.
Amazingly, this new treatment was a form of actual gene therapy that involved taking a healthy genetic sample from the patient, altering it in a manner that was above Lazlo's own head, and reinserting it into the patient in the form of a retrovirus. Although the exact process was a mystery to the President, the actual effects were easily enough understood.
By altering the telomeres and the IGF-1 growth gene, they were able to help prevent the genetic decay that was part of the cell division process. As part of this process, they had managed to create a condition that caused any genetics that deviated from the normal without certain chemical markers would have the telomeres quickly dissipate, causing any rampant unhealthy cells to quickly die off and be reabsorbed by the body's own immune system.
With the final testing complete, an actual cure to cancer had been found that was able to remove cancerous cells from those suffering from this horrible malady, and help prevent any future reoccurrence. An unbelievable number of lives had been returned to the world, and many families that had been torn apart by loss had been mended, the worry over remission slowly fading away as time went on, and more and more success cases were achieved.
Long term effects of this cure were just beginning to be truly felt, a year into his second term in office, and three years since the cure had first been successfully released. Despite production bottlenecks in creating individual cures for each patient, the population of the world was now starting to grow at an ever increasing rate.
As the months and years went by, they noticed more and more things that this cure now helped remedy. Although it was not a cure all, many degenerative conditions could be brought back into remission, or even outright halted in some limited cases, that medical science before had been unable to touch.
Beyond that, though, there was one final effect of this cure.
While at its most basic the cure was designed to prevent improper copies of cells, the lasting effect was that with the cells being copied with a higher matching quality to their parent cells. Degeneration of the DNA chains was slowed down to a crawl in those individuals that were given the cure, and even now just a few years later it was noticed that these people were aging at a much slower rate.
As soon as reports of this effect became known to the general population, the name Prolong had been pinned to what was originally called 'Degenerative Prevention Retrovirus Engineering'. Despite how this was altering the face of humanity, the initial purpose of this 'Prolong' hit closer to home than Lazlo himself had expected.
Shortly into his second year in term his wife of thirty years, Shannon, had been diagnosed with uterine cancer. When he had asked her why she hadn't told him about the symptoms she had been suffering, she had told him that it had just been some aching in her hips. Shannon had assumed it was just old age and the stress of supporting him as he worked hard to steer their Nation, and hadn't thought anything about it.
When they had talked to her doctor, they had been told that she had been at a higher risk of this form of cancer, as she had never had any children. This had been a hard blow to the both of them, as they had always planned on having a child of their own, but they had never felt that it was the right time. They had been weighing their options, when the reports had been released that the cure he had approved testing on had finally produced reliable results.
Amazingly, the head doctor that helped develop the cure had come to their hospital personally to oversee Shannon's treatment. Doctor Amelia Farkas, was the co-founder of Ziodex Industries, and was an exotically beautiful woman native to Hungary. Although, it did bug him that he could never remember if the dark haired woman's eyes were blue or brown.
With Doctor Farkas' personal touch, the procedure had gone off without a hitch. When he had asked the Doctor if there was any way that he could help her in return, her reply was that all the reward she needed was knowing that the many peoples of the world would continue to live on.
New life had been breathed into them when Shannon had been successfully treated with the new cure, and all tests had shown that there were zero cases of cancerous cells within her body a few short months later. Although they had not had any children with each other in the years after, they had both been grateful that not only had she been cured from cancer, but that they would never have to worry about her suffering from cancer ever again.
In fact, there were several small health problems she had been living with before all of this occurred that had seemed to slowly disappear in the months following her treatment. During her most recent physical, her doctor had told her that she was healthier than she had been ten years previously. Elasticity was returning to her tissues, smoothing wrinkles, and easing the aches that had been developing in her joints.
For Lazlo, this was nothing less than a blessing. He had always been a very healthy man, the only signs of him aging the crows feet at the corners of his eyes and the silver in the temples of his crew cut hair. He was expected to live a very long life, as both his parents, as well as his grandparents, had lived to be slightly over a hundred before passing on. One of the greatest fears he had was to outlive his wife, and now that fear was gone.
But not without a price.
A population boom was occurring all around the developed world, not just because of new births, but also because of fewer deaths. With this new cure not only preventing deaths from Cancer, but also extending life past its original limits, fewer and fewer people were dying every year since Prolong was released. People were living longer, and healthier, than they ever had before in the recorded history of mankind.
Unfortunately, this was all happening on the backdrop of a world now finding itself in a fierce battle over dwindling natural resources. Most people did not realize how much even the relatively simple seeming task of getting food to their table depended upon fossil fuels every step of the way. From the machines that tended the fields, to the fertilizers and pesticides that helped them grow, and to the very process by which raw material was combined into the pre-packaged items they purchased at a supermarket.
With ever dwindling resources, combined with an ever faster increase in population, there was little to no chance that supply would be able to keep up with demand. The recent flares of war in oil producing countries was but a symptom of this problem, as competing groups tried to ensure that they would be the haves, as opposed to the have nots.
Unless a miracle happened soon, Lazlo could only foresee a future filled with war and strife. His only hope was that, somehow, all of those well paid scientists and engineers could come up with some way to save humanity from itself.
Mojave Desert - Sunday, November 2nd, 2025 - Evening
Closing his satellite phone with a snap, Tanner shoved it back into his pants pocket and stood up from the uncomfortable metal chair he had been sitting on for the last hour and a half.
"Well, it looks like you all get to keep some of your wages tonight," Colonel James Tanner said with a wide grin, dark brown eyes looking at the other officers sitting around the card table.
Mixed looks of joy and regret could be seen on the other men that he had been playing against as he got ready to leave, picking up the pile of money he had won off of them. Some of them had been planning to try to win their money back from the Colonel, while others expected their luck to be much better now that the older man was leaving.
Tanner's luck at cards was downright unnatural at times, and it had gotten him into trouble more times than he could count during his youth. In fact, there was still a standing order forbidding him from going into any of the casinos up north in Las Vegas ever since the last time he had taken leave there. He knew that the other officers would have suspected him of sneaking cards up his sleeves if he hadn't made a show of taking off his jacket every time he sat down, hanging it on the back of his chair.
Chuckling, Tanner shook his head at the varied reactions of the other men as he picked up his jacket from the back of the chair. With a sweep of blue cloth, and a quick buttoning of three bright silver buttons, he had morphed from the laid back ex fighter pilot back to the professional Air Force officer and Base Commander most people knew him as.
Pulling his garrison cap from beneath the shoulder strap of his jacket, Tanner placed the pile of dollar bills in the crown, then placed the entire assembly neatly upon his head. Florescent light shined off the silver eagle tank insignia on the front left of the cap, bringing attention to the blue and silver braided piping.
Bidding farewell to his victims... er, poker partners, Tanner turned on his heel and made his way through the recreation building towards the main entrance. As they were indoors, and it wasn't an indoor ceremony, no salutes were given as he made his way through the crowded facility. With the Recreation Facility being the only place available to kick back and relax, the building was naturally filled to the brim with both Air Force personnel, as well as those scientists and engineers employed on base for the project at this time of evening on a Sunday.
Leaving the 'poker room', the base commander made his way past the movie hall, a burst of sound and music escaping as someone entered the small theater with snacks in hand. It was amazing how many amenities they had crowded into the large building, but it was one of the compensations to ease the burden of being stationed at what was, for all intents and purposes, an isolated desert outpost in the South Eastern United States.
Passing between the pool hall and the TV lounge, which was showing a news report on fighting breaking out somewhere in Africa, Tanner's eye was drawn to another figure making their way towards the entrance. Immediately recognizing them as being his equivalent to the scientists and engineers on base, the Colonel raised his voice loud enough to be heard as he called out the other man's name.
"Doctor Hamlin!"
Five years ago, the same year their current President had been elected for his first term, Doctor Hamlin had been diagnosed with cancer. A certifiable genius, the elderly doctor could have written his own paycheck in just about any lab in the world, but instead he had chosen this project to be his final flash of brilliance before fading quietly into the night. With the diagnosis that, even with the best therapy money could buy, he could only live a few more years at most, he had been resigned to the idea of dying before seeing this project to the end.
Instead, life had thrown him a curve ball when a miracle cure had come out less than two years later. With this new lease on life, the scientist had focused his energy on the project with an intensity few could match. Within the next few years he had helped design, and launch, two sophisticated probes to the moon while, at the same time, developing the equipment and technology that would help sustain life where the only resources available are those you bring with you.
Ice blue eyes sparkled as the Doctor stopped to wait for the base commander to catch up with him. The man had a wide grin on his salt and pepper bearded face, revealing brilliant white teeth that had just a little too much of a gap between them to be photogenic, looking almost like the keys on a piano.
It was hard to believe how much the man had changed in the five years since the Colonel had met him. Gone was the sagging skin, the dark bags beneath the eyes, the pallid complexion, and the pure silver white hair. Instead, Hamlin's skin was as smooth and healthy ad a man in his forties, not his sixties, with a faint but healthy tan. Not only that, but the black was beginning to grow back into his hair again, with only a peppering of in his beard, but leaving behind only a few stray silver hairs dotting his head.
The Doctor kept his hair short and parted to the side, with a neatly trimmed beard, to keep them out of the way when doing work in the labs. When Tanner had asked him why he didn't just shave his beard, the man had jokingly replied that it was because he was not allowed to have a straight razor on base. In the Doctor's opinion, the only true way to shave was with a piece of mirror bright sharpened steel to one's throat, as nothing else can make a man feel more alive. He figured that if he couldn't shave the proper way, he wouldn't bother to shave at all.
Tanner checked, there actually was a rule against straight razors on base.
With all of the health benefits he had seen the elderly man enjoy from the Prolong treatment, Tanner was almost jealous of a man half again his age. Quite unlike the pained shuffle from before, the man moved with a smooth, energetic gait that belied his chronological age. With all of the effects that Prolong brought, it wouldn't surprise the Colonel if they started treating people in the armed forces as a matter of course in the near future.
"I take it you got the call," Colonel Tanner asked the man as he reached him.
"Sharp lad, that Riggs," Hamlin commented, joining the other man as they walked the final stretch towards the exit. "Of course, that is the main reason that I wanted him to be there keeping an eye on things while everyone else was here goofing off. It was either that, or Stevenson, but she had the morning shift today, and that would hardly be fair."
"It wouldn't be the first time that either of them has needed to pull two consecutive twelve hour shifts," Tanner told his companion. "Besides, don't for one moment think I haven't noticed how much time you have him spend over there in your labs and testing facilities trying to break everything you make there. Between his duties in the Command Center and your little tests, it's amazing the Lieutenant has time to sleep."
"Sometimes I think he doesn't," Hamlin confessed with a grin. "On that note, you do know that most of the work we have had him doing in the last few months has been less to do with stress testing the equipment, and more to do with making the young man intimately familiar with all of it. We haven't told him, but Riggs is technically second chair for the role of Lunar Lander pilot, if anything happens to Captain Howell."
Stepping outside the Recreational building, the Colonel had to place a hand on his head to keep his garrison cap firmly in place. The day's earlier heat was being replaced by a strong breeze coming down from the nearby mountains, bringing with it the promise of a chilly November night. Off at the eastern horizon, the sun was just beginning to set, taking with it the light and warmth of day.
"I figured that might be what was going on," Tanner said, spotting a nearby electric cart and heading towards it. "The poor bastard had been so set on becoming a pilot when he entered the Air Force when he had been pulled from class to become a damned sensors technician, of all things. Be nice to see if he's able to fly something some day."
"Weren't you yourself a pilot? the Doctor asked him.
"I flew," Tanner agreed. "Mainly the A-10 Thunderbird II, you probably know it as the Warthog. It's amazing that those things are still being flown, if you think about how many changes have been made to the birds they have us flying now. There is just something about building a plane around a gun, instead of a gun into a plane."
"Oh, indeed," the Doctor agreed as they reached the electric cart.
With all of the solar power available, and the expense of shipping gas fuel to the isolated base, it had been decided to supply the base with a large number of four seater electric carts. They would honestly be called golf carts, if there happened to be a golf course anywhere within a hundred miles of the base. With this being a busy Sunday afternoon at the Recreational building, a majority of the carts were already parked outside the building, causing any latecomers to have to come on foot.
The cart sat on four large knobby tires with independent suspension set into deep wheel wells, with a roof propped up with metal framing at the corners to shade the passengers. Two bucket seats were on either side at the front of the cart, the steering wheel and pedals in the traditional left-hand driver's seat, and a bench seat spanned the rear of the cart allowing another two to three passengers along for the ride.
Sitting down in the passenger side seat the Colonel bucked himself in one handed, the other hand keeping his hat securely on his head, and his hard earned poker winnings from blowing away in the breeze. With Hamlin driving, the two men rode towards the setting sun, the moon currently a pale circle not yet quite full in the slowly darkening sky.
Knobby tires found an easy grip on the wide paved roads that ran out towards the edge of the base as they navigated their way towards the Command Center. After a few moments the headlights were turned on to create a river light before them leading the way amongst pools of shadows cast by the surrounding buildings and rolling terrain.
"Actually, I hear they are doing final testing on a new Fairchild Republic plane tentatively called the A-15 Thunderbird III," the Doctor advised his companion after a few moments of silence. "With the A-10 being phased out and no more being built, they are trying to see if the Air Force will accept a contract for a replacement ground support craft."
"Really?" Tanner replied, obviously interested. "Why haven't I heard anything about this?"
"My 'reliable source' might happen to work in the X-Planes testing facility," Hamlin confessed. "In other words you didn't hear this from me."
Tanner chuckled in reply.
"From what my friend told me, they have continued the tradition of keeping the plane as simple as possible," the elderly Doctor continued. "One of the major upgrades has been using composite materials and carbon fiber in the construction, removing approximately thirty percent of the mass that the original Thunderbird II possessed. This, of course, allows for a much better operational range and more agile footing in the air as there is less mass to be flinging around."
"I assume that they have upgraded the electronics and controls," the ex-pilot hummed to himself. "Anything else you might have heard rumors about?"
"Well, there is the fact that they have designed it with vertical takeoff and landing capability, as well as vectored thrust," the Doctor mentioned in an offhand manner. "Not that I can imagine why you would want to make one of those flying tanks move any slower, mind you."
Laughter floated through the air as the two men made their way towards the Command Center.
An hour and a half since Riggs had made his first call the main theater of the Command Center had gone from an empty room to a den of noise and activity. Numerous scientists and technicians why had been on call across the base had been called in upon getting the report on the unusual sensors activity.
Both Colonel Tanner and Doctor Hamlin had arrived shortly after his first call, and the Doctor was still going over the initial data from their first pass. The other technicians were working on refining their different sensor packages to get a better read during their next pass, which would be in the next few minutes. But there was one technician amongst all those now crowded into the now uncomfortably warm room that was currently the star of the main attraction.
Although she was a lower rank than he, Second Lieutenant Elizabeth Stevenson was their resident specialist on the EM-Dar sensor, possessing an innate talent on how to finesse the settings to get exactly the information that she wanted. Since Riggs had noticed that the gravity fluctuations had been spaced in time with the EM-Dar's signal, the two of them were working together to refine the settings to get a clearer reading from the anomaly.
Standing at only four feet, ten and a half inches, Stevenson had just barely met the minimum height requirements to enter the Air Force. With a mixed British Irish heritage, the Second Lieutenant had pale skin with a scattering of freckles crossing the bridge of her nose, offsetting a pair of bright, grass green eyes. Her dark red hair was pulled back into a twist, a few stray strands tickling the sides of her cheeks, causing her to brush them behind her ear absently as she stared at her computer monitor.
Casting a long glance at his friend, Riggs turned back to the monitor and watched the numbers march across the screen. He was leaning over her left shoulder, one hand propped on the back of her chair, the other holding some of his weight against the edge of the desk.
Originally educated at the University of Oxford, the young woman had a brilliant head on her shoulders, which had only been further refined during her time in the officer's school, and eventually the field, working with sensors technology. Riggs was not embarrassed to admit that, when it came to finessing the EM-Dar, she stood head and shoulders above him in skill. That was saying something, as she was over a head shorter than him in the first place.
"How much data were we actually able to get from that first pass?" Riggs asked of the Second Lieutenant, taking a moment to glance at his own computer monitor in the next station over.
"Not much, unfortunately," Stevenson admitted, bright green eyes squinting. "On the other hand, what we have gotten so far from that first pass tells me enough to know where to start looking. Just based upon how the readings fluctuated during the peaks and valleys of the sine wave, I should be able to narrow down a more exacting band of frequencies of electro-magnetic energy to get us a better read on whatever it is that is causing the gravitational flux.
"At the same time, Lieutenant Patel is working on refining the ground penetrating radar system. Hopefully he can get us a better picture of what is there, while I find out what it's doing."
"You know, you would think that the old GRAIL probes launched back in oh-twelve would have noticed something like this," Riggs said, pointing at the graph showing the gravity fluctuations from earlier that night. "Isn't this the kind of thing they were supposed to be looking for?"
"Sure, Simon," Stevenson said, half shrugging without taking her hands from her keyboard. "But we have one thing on the Ghost that the GRAIL did not. Whatever is down there in that crater is reacting specifically to the energy being sent out by the EM-Dar. Without that causing it to act up, we might have never noticed it in the first place."
"Young Elizabeth here makes a good point," a voice spoke up from behind the two, causing them to look over their shoulders.
Doctor Hamlin stood behind them, coffee cup in hand, his ice blue eyes locked on the main wall display as a clock counted down the time until their next pass over the anomaly. With an orbit of a little over one hundred minutes, they had not yet gotten a second glance at the Amundsen Crater, and tensions were mounting in the room as the time whittled down.
"Sorry, I didn't see you there, Doctor," Stevenson apologized, an embarrassed grin on her face.
"Think nothing of it," Hamlin replied, taking a quick sip from his coffee. "The moment of truth approaches us, though. Have you finished calibrating the EM-Dar for our next pass?"
"Yes, Doctor," Stevenson said, finishing the last commands and having them beamed up to the satellite. "Based upon the information we received from the first pass, I have refined the wavelength used by the EM-Dar to get the most powerful reaction we can hope for. At least, this will be the best we can get, until we manage to get more precise information, of course."
"Of course," the elderly Doctor agreed, flashing his brilliantly white teeth.
"The other technicians should be about done calibrating the other sensors," Riggs reported to the lead Scientist on base. "Although most of what we should be able to get on this pass will likely come from the EM-Dar, the Gravimetrics, and the ground penetrating Radar."
"You don't expect anything to come from the other sensors?" the Doctor queried.
"Not in particular, no," Riggs shook his head. "From what we could see from the first pass, the Anomaly is buried beneath a later of Regolith, which will block off most line-of-sight readings. The multi-spectrum cameras already mapped a good image of the surface, and the Ladar already has a 3d representation of the area accurate down to three meters."
"If any other sensor might get some data, it will likely be the radiation cameras," Stevenson surmised. "But that's only if whatever is causing this effect is sending out exotic particles from radioactive decay, which was not spotted on the first pass."
"I see," Hamlin nodded, eyes turning back to the dwindling numbers on the count-down clock. "Well, either way, we should know within the next few minutes. Ah, Colonel Tanner, nice of you to join us!"
Both Riggs and Stevenson looked over at their commanding officer as he approached, a coffee cup in his own hand matching the Doctor's. Colonel Tanner nodded to the two commissioned officers as he reached them, receiving nods in return. Since the Command Center was designated as a no hat no salute zone, the Colonel's garrison cap was tucked into his belt, and neither airmen were to salute him as he approached.
Looking up at the massive wall display, Tanner watched as the small icon of the LG2 probe traced it's path across the lunar map, the clock counting down until it reached its destination. It was almost irksome that they had only just now discovered the anomaly, when it was located so close to the area of the southern pole that had been placed under the most intense scrutiny that Mankind had ever placed on an extra-planetary piece of terrain.
What made it most ironic, was that the Amundsen Crater lay within a decently short distance from the rim of the Shackleton Crater, where they had earlier landed the moon crawler. If they had indeed found something interesting enough to make the scientists sit up and pay attention as much as those on Base had, then they would need to work quickly to secure the anomaly. If his instincts were correct, things were about to get very busy.
"Showtime," Riggs stated, staring intently as the countdown reached the final seconds. "Visual in five... four... three... two... one... now."
The entire Command Center waited with baited breath as the rainbow of scanner information began painting itself on the wall. With all of the refining of the sensors, increasing power and narrowing the gain, they had held off active scans until they reached their target area. Line by line of colored light, and soon a shape began to paint itself before them, the ground penetrating Radar showing the faint outline of a mass beneath the surface of the Moon. As more and more of the object passed beneath the intense gaze of Lunar Ghost Two, a more complete picture began to form before their eyes.
What seemed at first to be one solid object, soon could be seen as part of a fractured whole. Vaguely triangular in design, the front of the object looked like it had been crushed in against one of the two mountain peaks that stood in the center of the Amundsen Crater. A short distance later, and a large piece could be missing from the object, like a bite had been taken out of one side. With a triangular front. A fuzzy halo could be seen around the area of the missing chunk, perhaps debris that had fallen off during impact. The object soon tapered to a more rectangular shape, flaring out again as the scanners reached the edge of the object.
During the pass, the EM-Dar had been getting readings from the object, showing it to be of an unusual metallic consistency. Usually capable of telling the mineral content of ore veins and surface deposits on the Moon, the EM-Dar was unable to classify the exact material the object was made out of, though they could tell that it was not entirely solid.
Eventually, as they reached the rear third of the object, half way from the missing chunk and the far end, the Gravimetric sensors began picking up highly fluctuating gravity waves coming from the object, pulsing in time with the EM-Dar scanner signal, like paired heartbeats. Over in the control section, one of the technicians fought with the probes thrusters to maintain a straight path in orbit as the pulses of gravity fought to pull the expensive piece of government property crashing down to the lunar surface.
For his part, Colonel Tanner could not help but compare the shape to that of the now retired space Shuttle program. Vaguely arrowhead shaped, with sweeping wings formed into the body along the sides, to give control when entering an atmosphere. The hole in the side might be where its power generator blew, perhaps some form of nuclear reactor that destabilized in the crash. Finally, the strange gravity pulses seemed to come from the rear of the craft, almost exactly where one would expect an engine room to be located on a human build craft of similar design.
"Well now," Doctor Hamlin muttered to himself. "Well well well."
"What is it, Doctor?" Tanner asked the man.
"A common theory hold that any successful form of high speed space travel would deal with the manipulation of gravity itself through some medium or mechanism," the Doctor said, eyes glued on the display. "If that is indeed what it looks like, and our sensors are not lying to us, we have found one of those things right here in our own front yard. Whatever it is that is creating this effect, it is still intact enough that our EM-Dar is able to cause it to react, which gives us some clues as to how it might work."
Doctor Hamlin paused for a moment, absentmindedly taking a large drink from the coffee cup in his hands, his mind working in several directions at once.
"We need to get access to this strange craft, if indeed that is what it is, and find out as many of its secrets as we can before anyone else gets wind of this," the Doctor said, thick black eyebrows crashing down over ice blue eyes as he thought about what would happen if it became common knowledge before Science got to it first.
"This could be our Key to the Stars, James," Doctor Hamlin continued, looking over at the Colonel. "I have to make a call."
Undisclosed Location - Sunday, November 2nd, 2025 - Shortly before Midnight
Buried beneath a building that technically did not exist, there was a small room that would look more at home within late Victorian England. Dark woods and rich embroidered cloth upholstery dominated a room lined on three sides with large bookshelves that stretched from floor to vaulted ceiling. Upon the third wall a large fireplace sat, the glow of burning logs fighting against ancient gas-lit lamps, their light revealing the single occupant of the room.
Rafe Holmes was the Director of National Intelligence for the United States of America. His job title was unknown to most people that lived within the borders of the nation that his efforts helped protect, but that did not make his work any less critical to extending the safety and prosperity of the nation and its people.
He was a tall, almost gangly man with a deep widow's peak and straight, dark black hair. His face was dominated by a beak like nose, and a pair of piercing eyes of so dark a brown that they seemed black in all but the brightest of light. He wore an old fashioned gray tweed suit, the jacket unbuttoned to show a matching vest beneath, the gold chain of a pocket watch looping across a button hole.
Everything about the man, from the modest dark red bow-tie at his neck, to the aged decor of his office, spoke of deliberate archaism in both manner and appearance. In this manner, he kept himself grounded to the world in an age of high technology and cyber-espionage.
That did not mean, however, that he did not use these tools to their greatest effect. Being the Director of National Intelligence, Holmes reported directly to the President, the National Security Council, and the Homeland Security Council. As head of the sixteen-member Intelligence Community, and direct overseer of the National Intelligence Program, this man who seemed to have stepped out of a Victorian detective novel was a man who seemed to know everything.
At that moment, he was looking at several reports on a laptop computer that seemed jarringly out of place in its surroundings. Within his brilliant mind, facts and suppositions fit together like pieces to a vast puzzle, small tidbits of information that had before seemed out of place suddenly making a macabre sense. A pattern was emerging in his head that was painting a disturbing picture of the near future.
After their contracts had lapsed due to the national budget reviews, several private military contractors had failed to sign back up for what had been rather lucrative contracts once the budget had been again approved. With the ever increasing tensions in the Middle East, there was no lack of work to be found for those groups, but their presence was now distinctively lacking.
What was even more unusual is that those private military groups who had not signed back up for their contracts had suddenly begun hiring more men in record numbers. A vast majority of these new hires were coming from the forces of African warlords, or from the less developed or less privileged areas of other countries around the globe. And yet, despite the resources available to him, Holmes had not yet discovered where the groups were getting their funding from.
Sitting back in his overstuffed, high back leather chair, the Director considered the facts that he did have access to.
First, of course, was the fact that PMC groups that had once been reliably employed by the United States had refused rather lucrative new contracts. The only logical reason for them to do so would be if they received a better offer, which is unusual because there was no record of one of the other major nations hiring these groups in their stead.
Secondly, it was not the action of one or two PMC groups turning down contracts. When the United States government had taken their offer to the next contractor, they had discovered that they too had also already been hired. This pattern continued until they found but a few contractors who were not yet already 'gainfully employed'.
Third off, any organization that could hire that many contractors, if indeed it was the act a single organization, would have to have disturbingly deep pockets. This fact was supported by the fact that, not only were those contractors hired off, but had also begun to bolster their numbers with new blood.
Fourth, the pattern of the new hires indicated that they were not looking for those individuals educated and easily trained for the tools of modern combat. Instead, they had begun hiring people whose main attributes were strong backs, sharp eyes, and desperation. All these were traits one would expect from someone expecting to go to war and needed cannon fodder and shock troops, not a private military contractor hired out for peacekeeping missions.
Fifth, and finally, the majority of people confirmed hired off by these missing PMC groups were coming from middle Africa, a region that was often war-torn and desperate even when times seemed quiet. In Rafe Holmes' mind, this indicated that not only were their new patrons looking for large numbers of people willing to do anything to escape poverty hunger or disease, but that they planned to use these people in a much larger theater of war than the current wars in the Middle East could possibly account for.
Upon his desk, an ancient looking phone rang, a small hammer swinging back and forth between two brass bells in short, double-beat pulses. Setting his laptop aside on his leather ottoman, the Director rose up from his chair and walked calmly over to the phone, picking up the handset.
"Director Holmes speaking," he answered with a faint Received Pronunciation accent from his time at Cambridge.
"Rafe, my friend, we've found something," came the excited reply from Doctor Emil Hamlin on the other end of the line.
"Indeed," Holmes said languidly. "And I assume this 'something' is important enough for you to call me in the middle of the night?"
"Don't kid yourself," Hamlin snorted. "We both know you live entirely off of hot water, tannin, and free radicals."
"Quite," the Director said, reflexively glancing at a nearby teapot. "So, what did you find?"
"Well... are you sitting down?"
"No."
"Well, you might want to," the Doctor suggested.
Rolling his eyes at his friend's theatrics, and wondering if the older man might be a bit more cultured if he had gone to Cambridge instead of the Michigan Institute of Technology, Holmes sat down in another high backed chair that sat next to the phone for that purpose.
"Fine, I am sitting down now," the Director said.
"Good, good," Hamlin replied. "We seem to have found a crashed alien space ship in the Amundsen Crater, at the base of one of the peaks there. Initial data indicates that it crash landed, the front crumpled from impact, and an explosion blew a gaping hole in the side. We only found it because that new sensor the Board didn't want to approve funding, the EM-Dar, caused a reaction within the shipwreck causing pulsating gravity waves in time with the EM-Dar's signal."
To Rafe Holmes, Director of National Intelligence, the world seemed stop. The crackling flamed in the fireplace froze in place, the constant crackle of burning wood disappearing. This sensation lasted for just a brief moment before time seemed to reassert itself upon reality.
"I see," he replied into the phone. "That is indeed the sort of information that would necessitate a call at this late an hour. In fact, I believe there is someone I will need to wake up tonight, so that I can relay the news onwards."
"Gotcha," Hamlin said, sounding distracted. "Well, let me know if you need anything. I don't think I am going to get much sleep until we get a few more passes with the Ghost, see if we cannot get a better picture of the internal structure.
"This is big, Rafe... Real big."
"I know," Holmes replied, eyes distant. "You will need to tell Colonel Tanner to enact an immediate communications lock down of the facility. Word of this must not reach other parties before we are able to secure the... shipwreck for ourselves."
"He already did," the Doctor assured him. "One major concern at this point is going to be keeping things quiet over at NASA headquarters, though. They are going to be the ones getting us there, after all. It's a good thing we finally got the Habitats tested and built, we're going to need them a bit sooner than we thought."
"Ah, Emil," Holmes sighed. "Still thinking you can tell me how to do my own job. Major General Lee is going to be the second call I make after you let me go, believe me. You keep your eye on the prize."
"I will," the Doctor replied.
The line disconnected with a muted click, and the Director of National Intelligence set the handset gently back on its cradle. Reaching over, he poured himself a cup of tea from a silver teapot, the scent of Yorkshire Gold filling the air. Taking a sip of the strong black tea, Holmes contemplated what he had just been told.
If they had indeed discovered a crashed alien space ship on the surface of the moon, then the technology that they could reverse engineer from the craft might jump-start humanity's development. Even if all of the technology was destroyed in the crash, the fact that the EM-Dar was creating a gravity distorting effect meant that they would be able to recover materials from the artifact that their scientists could work with.
As he well knew, even just finding out the chemical composition of an alloy could tell you an unbelievable amount of information on its smelting and forging process, as well as the environment that the source materials originated from.
Secrecy would, of course, be the first and primary priority in this situation. Of a corporation discovered that there was a wealth of extra-terrestrial materials to be had but a rocket trip away, then there would be no stopping them from bending their vast funding to securing it for themselves. A disturbing thought, considering that the very nature of Corporate mandate an law made those large, multinational entities the very definition of sociopathic behavior.
Draining the rest of the tea from his cup, Holmes prepared himself for a very important call.
White House - Monday, November 3rd, 2025 - Just After Midnight
Broken from a troubled sleep, Lazlo Steele, 46th President of the United States of America, became dimly aware of his surroundings once more.
The faint scent of vanilla filled his nose as chestnut brown hair tickled his face, telling him that his face was buried in the pillows right behind Sharron's head. Stirring slightly, he noticed that his right arm was currently trapped beneath her, while his left hand was currently resting across her warm body just beneath her ribs.
Moments later, he realized that his right arm was numb, but that likely wasn't what had woken him. Well, at least, he didn't think so. It usually took strange sounds or-
On his bedside table, his official red bedroom phone rang with a soft trill. Chosen for the simple fact that the sound was too low to wake up his sleeping wife, the sound was a rather persistent, but intermittent buzzing hum that caught his attention when dead asleep. This fact had helped him many times in the last five years to maintain his marital bliss. Although he loved his wife with all of his heart, she was not at her most charming when woken in the middle of the night.
Slowly extricating his right arm from beneath Sharon's head, Lazlo slid across the mattress, regretfully leaving their combined warmth for the colder part of the bed. The fine silk pajamas that he wore helped him slide across the bed sheets, his muscular frame pressing into the cloying comfort of the bed. With the improvements that mattress technology had enjoyed during his lifetime, the sleeping woman did not even notice the weight shifting as he reached the edge of the bed.
Reaching a silk-clad arm from beneath the covers, he reached out a strong hand for the humming phone. Finding the receiver in the dark room on his second try, he pulled it off the base, the archaic coiled cord stretching out as he pulled the speaker up to his ear.
With his head half covered by the comforter blocking what light penetrated the tall curtains, he was half way back to sleeping as he recognized the voice of Rafe Holmes, Director of National Intelligence, speaking into his ear. A few, long moments passed as the words began to penetrate his brain, fighting for dominance with the worried thoughts that had gone to bed with him, and apparently woken up with him as well. He knew that whatever news the man was trying to tell him must be important, for him to call the President on his personal phone line in the middle of the night, but the cotton filling his head made it hard to think.
"Could you repeat that?" Lazlo uttered into the phone.
He spoke quietly, trying not to wake the woman sleeping in the bed next to him. There was no reason that she should suffer from a lack of sleep as well, even if he was currently suffering. Luckily, she had always been a sound sleeper, and only stirred slightly at the sound of his voice.
"Our project at Lunar Outlook has found what appears to be a crashed alien ship on the Moon," the calm voice of Rafe Holmes repeated, his word finally cutting through the last vestiges of sleep from the President's head.
"You mean to tell me that a project designed to scout out resources on the Moon has just found the wreckage of an alien shipwreck?" he grunted into the phone, Shannon stirring behind him again.
"Yes, Mister President," Holmes replied. "At this time we have managed to get a reading on the ship's main form beneath the surface of the moon, covered in moon dust. Scans from the EM-Dar are causing gravity waves to emanate from the object, which Doctor Hamlin - who is in charge of the project - believes means that we should be able to figure out how the craft was able to reach its final destination from an extra-solar origin."
Now fully awake, the President's mind worked on the possibilities of this monumental find.
If it was indeed an alien ship lying dead and unclaimed up there on the Moon, who knows what kind of technology could be held within, just waiting for humans to decipher. Even the fact that they had managed to create an effect altering gravity with what little influence the Lunar Ghost probe had upon the surface indicated that, at least, could be brought back and studied.
Priority one, of course, would be securing the site.
Luckily, they had been ready to launch the first of the Constellation missions to place a more permanent human presence on the moon within the next few months. With the urgency of this find, they should be able to move the time table forward. During his last status report on that project, his staff had indicated that the only delay in launching was making sure that the most recent scans did not show any potential issues with the landing site they already had a moon crawler preparing.
Undoubtedly, they would need to do some last minute training and preparations, as getting ready for a mission of this scope was no minor task. That would give him the chance to have his speech writers come up with something inspiring that would hopefully not give away the hidden purpose behind the early launch.
If they could discover how to harness the power of gravity itself, that alone would leapfrog technological development. Humanity's development of computers had caused their technological climb to skyrocket, and he could only imagine what new things they would discover from the alien craft. If they were lucky, then perhaps they could discover how the original owners of the craft had navigated through space, how they built their computers, and how they powered their technology.
Perhaps they would find the solution to the growing energy needs of Humanity. That alone would postpone his species from killing themselves off as they quickly ran out of the resources needed to keep themselves alive. Even if that failed, then the ability to harness gravity itself could help them spread their way past the surface of their own planet in earnest, and reach new worlds to populate out there amongst the stars.
One could hope.