"Quiet you two this is not some movie." the captain ordered. In all his years in the Navy he had never thought he would be in this situation. Though he never thought he would be captaining the first true spaceship either. He watched as the bridge crew did in silence as the ship got closer and closer. The last one hundred meters took forever, but it gave the crew a good look at the hanger they were being pulled into. The hanger wasn't big enough to take the Nautilus completely inside, but the two rings and the bridge was inside, and the tail of the ship was outside. The captain watched as vehicles and strange robots moved through the hanger and wondered what was going to happen next. A vibration was felt and the engineer tech gasped. "What was that for?"
"Sir I just lost all contact with the engine computer and I am not getting any cameras on line in the aft section." the tech reported. "Let me try the hub cameras. Oh shit, um sir. They cut the aft section free."
"What?!" Hardin yelled as they camera view came up on screen and they all saw it. It was as if the aft section was cut loose, and with the amount of robots floating around the stub they left of the ship, it meant they did it on purpose. Two large doors closed below the stub. The camera turned off as the ship went to emergency power. The main batteries were in that section and the solar cells were on the aft section. The bridge was now only lit by the few LED backup lights. "Are we leaking air?"
"From hub ring two the pressure gauge is showing vacuum, but it is showing two pounds of pressure." the helmsman reported. "Must be out of tolerance."
"Can we get the cameras back online?" he asked.
"I doubt it." the engineer said. "Without more power we can't get the monitors to power up." The bridge suddenly moved ninety degrees as gravity suddenly pulled the bridge into an aft down position. The comm tech screamed and the entire ship fell to the side. One of the rings contacted the deck of the alien ship and then the frame not designed to handle the weight failed and they fell again and the first ring didn't even stop the movement as the ship collapsed in on itself. The bridge finally settled and the breach alarms were going off. Everyone was stunned and only a bit of cursing was heard. Major Jack Gorden was yelling over the intercom, demanding what the hell was going on. The captain hit the button to tell him to cool it went the transmission died. Seconds later the hatch to the bridge flared as it was cut from its hinges. The captain looked on in horror as a mechanical spider crawled in and a lightning bolt hit him a second later, sending him into painful darkness.
"Admiral, the Nautilus has failed to report back in and the tracking satellite is reporting blank screens." Joan reported. "Not sure what this means, but we are trying to hail the craft and get other satellites to scan for signals."
"How can the Nautilus be lost it has ten radio backups with their own power." He said angrily as he got up to his full six foot four height. The admiral was a contrast to Captain Hardin. Where the captain was short and compact the Admiral was tall and broad his fifty years had put on enough weight to barely keep him in uniform. He was a bear of a man and his reaction made Joan flinch and back out of the office. He stormed after Joan and passed her as he rush to mission control. This was his worst nightmare. If the Nautilus was lost he couldn't explain the loss of the personal involved. He had less then a month before family and friends would start asking questions. "John what the hell happened?"
"Not sure Tom. Everything was perfect when they went behind the moon, but they never came out the other side." John reported. "Not a single signal coming from the Nautilus and nothing to indicate a critical failure in the engine. I got even the Hubble telescope looking at the moon." That got the admiral to pause as his eyebrows rose.
"Well let me know if you come up with any answers. I got some phone calls to make." the admiral stated and stormed off as about as fast as he came.
"Okay people I want answers and I want them yesterday." John yelled out. Two hours later they still had nothing. John thought he was going to pace a hole in the floor until a tech called him over. "What do you got?"
"Not much but I don't believe it myself." he replied.
"Why is that?" John asked. The tech pointed to the screen and hit play.
"That is the aft section of the Nautilus." the tech explained. "We picked up telemetry from the craft and focused Hubble on it and that is what we discovered, but as you can see here it appears to reverse direction and go back behind the moon."
"What are those dots there?" John asked. "can you zoom in on that?"
"Not on this equipment." he answered. "But I can transfer the recording to another system and we can."
"Good work, well at least we know most of the story." John said as he stood up and closed his eyes for a second. He then sighed and headed to the admiral's office. Joan wasn't at her desk and probably that was a good thing. John thought as he knocked on the door. The admiral opened the door as if he was standing next to it. John walked in. Tom held a finger to his mouth and faced his desk.
"I understand Mr President, but I can not tell you any details until you have been briefed and the only way to brief you is for you to come here. How you got this number is beyond me." the admiral stated.
"Well when I want to call someone I get the number I am the president, and that also entitles me to answers which you are avoiding." the president said. "I want to know how we lost twenty five men and women and what the hell Project Nautilus is and I want to know now!"
"Sir, President Kennedy was the last president to know about this project and this is not a secure line." the admiral stated.
"This is a red phone and it is secure." the president replied.
"Mr President no phone in the White House is secure enough. Every word you say is recorded." the admiral said with conviction. The president sighed.
"Very well my secretary just brought me the meaning of the code you gave me." the president relented. "I'll be in Florida as soon as I can."
"Mississippi sir, Stennis Space Center is in Mississippi." the admiral corrected.
"Fine but whatever your explanation is it better be good." the phone disconnected and the admiral plopped down on the couch.
"How the president found out is beyond me." Tom said looking as defeated as he sounded. "Got any news?"
"Not good but we have video not long but enough." John said as he pulled up a chair. "The Nautilus broke in half separating the living quarter from the rest of the ship."
"Oh my God. What of the crew?" the admiral asked.
"Uncertain we don't have anything on the crew compartment, but we do have something unusual." John replied. "The aft section appears to change course and go back behind the moon. I am having one of the techs enlarge the images, but the funny thing is, I think there is something pulling the aft section back."
"What do you mean?" the admiral asked.
"I think there is an alien craft hiding behind the moon." John answered and saw the immediate disbelief in Tom's eyes. "Now I am not completely sure, but every satellite or probe for the last twenty years has failed to report after it goes behind the moon. Now I don't have all the details but I have heard enough rumors. Nautilus was huge compared to all those satellites, but it failed also to return and if I am right when we see the footage once it is enlarged we might have the answers."
"John I respect you and I can't tell the president and God knows who else wants to know that aliens have taken apart the Nautilus." Tom replied.
"No your right but we can show them." John said. "At least come and look at what we have so far."
"All right let's see what you got." The admiral got up slowly showing far more age then he had shown before. John knew him well and this loss broke him. He hoped the footage would show something to Tom that would fire him up again. Many people believed that back in forty seven that a flying saucer crashed near Roswell. Many believed that it was a weather balloon like the government tried to use to cover it up, but the real reason was that it was a ship. Not a saucer but a blocky drop ship. It was this ship that they had found and it was the ship that had lifted the Nautilus up piece by piece. The droid they found with the ship and the very human but very dead crew was a wealth of information and had provided a wealth of technology over the years. It was this ship that had saved the Apollo 13 mission, and it was the same ship that did a few other clandestine missions. The droid was stubborn to work with only it had the knowledge to rebuild the craft properly and what was all needed. Many of its systems had been successfully copied but none worked until after the droid did something to its copies and the ship copies failed to get off the ground. The air scrubbers were the biggest problem of the little ship and there was something the droid was holding back. We knew that the little ship was more than capable of flying to Jupiter and back but the droids last order had been to prevent the ship from ever leaving the gravity mass of Earth again. It could fly out to the Earth moon Lagrange point, but the droid warned that the air scrubbers would fail after that distance and we tested it and wouldn't have made it back if it were not for the load of oxygen tanks that was in the hold of the little ship.
Many times we threatened the droid with shutdown and eventually we did shut it down as it had tried to destroy the Nautilus's key systems. Now that John thought about it, it probably was trying to protect us from whatever happened. The Nautilus contained many of the key systems that the ship contained except for the air scrubber control systems. It was a design based on it but completely controlled by a different set of computers. If the droid was more willing it could have helped design a better engine system more like the little drop ship, but at least it gave us a design we could use and it was the same system that powered the Stennis Space Center a small fusion core. As John thought about this the admiral watched the tapes from the Hubble telescope over and over, and the over powering urge to reactivate the droid came to mind. It had been fifteen years since the droid had been active and he doubted the admiral would authorize its reactivation, but we might need the knowledge it carried to help the crew of the Nautilus.
"Hey Aric the girls from last night want to go skiing you up for a bit of fun?" Josh asked as he burst into Aric's room.
"Don't you ever knock I could have been doing something you didn't want to see." Aric said as he looked over his computers.
"Ya right all you ever do is sleep and sit behind that monster you call a computer." Josh countered. "What you working on today?"
"I have come across a few sites that talk about what we saw last night." Aric answered. "One group site watched it for over two hours and got some pretty good footage. Come on I'll show you." Josh came around to the other side and sat down. "This is sped up, but it has to be a ship." They watched the five minute video and Josh leaned back and grunted in away that Aric knew he was impressed.
"I have to admit that sure does look like the exhaust trail of a ship as it goes around the moon, but the lack of any return view or any other sign of it After that is strange." Josh stated.
"Well that could explain the ship was headed some where else and the moon would hide its exhaust trail." Aric suggested.
"Ya, but it is not enough to convince normal people to put it up on the news." Josh said as he got up. "Until that happens we can make all the guesses we want. Anyway, we have two girls that are wanting to have a bit of fun and maybe a repeat of last night."