From the speakers came “Mumble STATIC crew of the Harmony calling mumble mumble crashed and we need assistance!”
That got everyone’s attention. Five heads turned toward the front of the Dreamscape. Singer was the first to ask, “What is that? Did someone just call for help?”
“Yes. Listen up. I can’t make out everything that’s being said, but it sounds like there are people down there.”
“Ridiculous!” Thibodeau replied.
“Shh!” Wells scolded him, holding a finger to her lips.
“Mumble mumble mumble can you hear us? Please, please, can you hear us?” The voice was unmistakably that of a woman with a Chinese accent.
Gesling made sure the microphone was open and replied, “Hello? This is the Space Excursions liner Dreamscape. What is the nature of your emergency? And who the hell are you?”
“Mumble mumble. You do hear us! We’re the crew of the Chinese exploration ship Harmony. We crash-landed seven days mumble mumble mumble air for another eight, maybe mumble days mumble mumble only this low-power transmitter and mumble mumble home mumble mumble mumble mumble STATIC.”
“Harmony! This is Dreamscape. We lost some of that. Please repeat how many days of air you have remaining.”
Gesling heard only static.
“Can we help them?” It was the voice of John Graves. Graves had floated to the front cabin and was positioned just behind Gesling.
“I don’t see how we can do anything,” replied Gesling, looking out the front window of the Dreamscape. “We’re not designed to land on the Moon. Hell, we can’t even brake into orbit to stay and look around for them. They didn’t tell us where they landed, but it has to be somewhere either here on the far side or near the limb. We’d not have heard their signal otherwise. They must have been monitoring our transmissions and used our loss of signal as their window to try and reach us. That was a very low-power signal—almost totally lost in the noise.”
“The telescope!” Bridget snapped her fingers and swam to her seat, buckling herself in. “Where do I look?”
“Who knows?” Gesling looked exasperated. He was used to doing something in a crisis, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about this one. He looked around the interior of the Dreamscape and at the five expectant faces staring back at him.
“We’ll be out of radio blackout in a few minutes. I’ll relay the news. The audio transmission will automatically downlink back to Nevada. I just need to tell them to listen to it.”
“Captain Gesling,” Thibodeau said gravely. “If there’s nothing we can do, then who can?”
The question hung in the air for several minutes, sticking in everyone’s ears like molasses.
“We can look for them!” Bridget said over her shoulder.
“Needle in a haystack,” responded Gesling, audibly but in a hushed tone. “I don’t think there’s a damn thing anyone can do. Those people are as good as dead.”
“Yes, there is.” Graves smiled and swam his way to his seat. “Captain. Could you relay all the radio signal-strength data to my seat plus our orbital ephemeris data?”
“Of course! Good thinking, John.” Paul knew exactly what the engineer was on to. He swam to his pilot’s seat and flashed through several screens of icons until he found the radio data, mission time down to the hundredth of a second, and the orbital data. “There, John. You should have it.”
“Right,” John replied. All Paul and the others could do was sit and wait. Well, mostly. Paul continued to broadcast, trying to get a response from the Harmony. Bridget had the telescope on maximum zoom, scanning across craters wildly. The others looked out the windows and through the ship’s cameras at the monitors on their seats.
“Bridget.” Mbanta swam up and interrupted her. Paul looked over his shoulder at the two to make certain there was no “friction” between them. But there was none. “Can you turn the gain of the telescope down to a minimum and reduce the brightness?”
“Uh, yes, I can.”
“Okay, do that, and also go to a wide zoom angle,” he told her.
“Wide zoom angle?”
“Zoom out,” Dr. Graves added.
“Oh, alright. There. Now, why did I do that?” she asked.
“Because, my dear,” Mbanta said, “if they are in the sun, then their ship will glint at us.”
“I see. So, I’ll scan and look for glints?”
“Great idea, Sharik,” Maquita Singer agreed.
“Let me know if you find anything,” Paul ordered.
“Roger that.”
“Paul!” Graves called.
“Yes, John?” He swam his way to the fat engineer’s seat. “Got something?”
“Well, I once made about seventy million dollars off of a video game that involved fighting aliens on a Moon base on the far side of the Moon. I put into the game a lot of detail regarding how to calculate orbits and such.”
“Really? Had no idea about that.”
“Well, at any rate, the signal was strongest when we were here.” Graves pulled up the time-of-flight view of their orbital location that each of them had as a screensaver at their respective stations. Graves pointed out their location and then continued. “The antenna-beam angle was simple to figure. I designed a satellite-phone network for communications in Africa once, made millions. So, our antenna was covering this footprint on the surface of the Moon, and from the signal strength we could narrow their location down to this spot here.”
“Holy…” Paul looked at the map of the Moon where John had overlaid his calculated spot. “That’s the size of a state!”
“Yes, but now we know which state. I’d suggest Bridget look there. We will be out of line-of-sight in a matter of minutes. We might also point our directional feeds that way as well. We might pick them up again.” Graves looked neither proud of himself nor careless. Paul felt the man’s expressionless explanations were just part of his personality. This was the kind of thing Graves did all his life. It was nothing unusual for him.
“Right. Good job, John.” Paul pushed over to seat 3B. “Bridget, did you get the map coordinates from John?”
“I’m zooming out on that area now.” Bridget worked feverishly at the touch screen. She had become proficient at the controls of the little spy telescope system over the past two years of training. Paul saw no need in taking over. By the time he managed to get into her seat or back to his, it might be too late. He pushed off and floated back to the pilot’s seat. “Good, keep looking.”
At the pilot’s seat, Paul strapped down and started training the high-gain directional antenna across the general location that Graves had calculated, listening with the volume all the way up. Had there been an eleven on the controls, he’d have used it. He closed his eyes and listened hard.
“Paul!” Bridget shouted, followed by the others. It startled him.
“What?”
“We have a glint! I’m zooming in now.”
The spot was more than two hundred miles away. At that range, the telescope could resolve trashcan-sized objects. Bridget zoomed all the way in on the glint and then brought the contrast and brightness of the image back up to normal. And there it was.