“…mumble mumble God, please! Do you hear us! This is Harmony. We crash-landed seven days ago. We only have air for another eight. We only have functioning this low-power transmitter and have no means of getting home. Can you respond? Dreamscape please reply!”
“Harmony, I read you. Dreamscape copies! Do you hear me?”
“Dreamscape! Please help us. There are four of us…static…help, need air and evacuation…STATIC.”
“Harmony! Do you copy? Harmony, Dreamscape heard you. If you hear us, we WILL relay this information back to Earth!”
“I got some nice video of their lander. If that is what you’d call it.” Bridget Wells put the imagery data up on all the screens she had access to.
“Wow! Look at that there.” Mbanta pointed at the large divot in the lunar surface that scratched out up to the lander. The Chinese spaceship appeared to be on its side, and there was a gaping hole near its bottom.
“Talk about being up a creek,” Graves said.
“They’d need a lot more than a paddle,” Thibodeau added.
“Right. Good work, everybody. There is nothing more we can do for them at this point.” Paul looked out the window as they moved away from the Chinese crash site. They would be in radio contact with Earth in just a few minutes, and then all they could do was send the data they had taken. For now, Paul had a lump in his throat.
No one in the cabin of the small spaceship looping behind the Moon on the world’s first space cruise uttered a word for the next several minutes. The crew of Dreamscape had turned out to be a fairly capable bunch, with hidden talents. Mbanta understood cameras, imagery, and finding needles in haystacks. That suggested to Paul that he might have some involvement with African military or intelligence groups, but he had no way of knowing that. Bridget Wells had followed her training and run the ISR telescope like a trained Air Force spy. But it was John Graves who had really stepped up. Paul had known the man was smart and a computer-savvy engineer just this side of Bill Gates, but he hadn’t understood the depth of the man’s knowledge. Paul had a new respect for his crew. Sure, they were all rich fat cats that sometimes seemed spoiled rotten. On the other hand, they had skill sets that enabled them to become those rich fat cats. Except perhaps Mbanta, who was born into it, and even he wasn’t useless after all.
It wasn’t until Paul heard the voice of his friend Rob Anderson in his headset that he moved away from the window and back toward the command chair. Suddenly the chair looked a whole lot smaller. In fact, the Dreamscape looked a whole lot smaller and much more fragile.
“Rob, you won’t believe what I have to tell you. Get Caroline and Mr. Childers on the line ASAP. The Dreamscape is okay, but I’m not sure about the people on the Moon.” Paul waited for his bombshell to drop, which it did a mere second later after the light-speed radio signal made it back to the Earth.
“Paul, say again. Did you say people?” Anderson sounded like someone had just told him that aliens had landed in Washington, D.C.
“Yes, I said people. How soon can you get Mr. Childers on the line? I believe I need to explain this to all of you at the same time. And get the audio and video portions of the engineering data that’s coming down now from the flight computer. You need to hear it and see it.” Gesling paused, waiting for Childers and, hopefully, Caroline O’Conner to get on the line. Bandwidth limitations would prevent the video images from making it for a few minutes, but the audio would be instantaneous, barring the speed-of-light limitation, of course.
Chapter 17
This was one press briefing for which Caroline O’Conner hadn’t prepared Gary Childers. They had the speech ready for a fully successful mission. They had a speech ready for a disaster. In fact, they had five different speeches ready in case the worst happened and Dreamscape didn’t make it back to Earth. They didn’t have one prepared for telling the world that they’d discovered stranded Chinese astronauts calling for help from the surface of the Moon.
The hastily assembled press corps was expecting one of the five prepared speeches. It was, after all, too soon to declare the voyage a success, since the Dreamscape was still at the Moon and wouldn’t be home for another few days.
“Hello.” Childers began speaking. “A little over an hour ago, the pilot of the Dreamscape, Captain Paul Gesling, took the ship around the far side of the Moon and into radio blackout. The mass of the Moon blocked all radio transmissions to and from Earth. At this time, the Dreamscape picked up an SOS from the surface of the Moon.” He paused.
The assembled press was truly surprised. Not a sound was uttered—other than one chuckle from a reporter who thought it was a joke—as they expectantly waited for Gary Childers to continue.
“The SOS apparently originated from the crew of a Chinese expedition that crash-landed on the Moon about a week ago. We know there are four of them, but we don’t know how they came to crash. All we know is that during the radio blackout, they, whoever they are, used a very low-power radio transmitter to signal Dreamscape and ask for help.”
The men and women of the press corps quickly regained their composure. A few were already texting or twittering the information to their newsrooms, while others were preparing follow-up questions.
“Ahem.” Gary Childers was not yet finished. “Captain Gesling spoke briefly with one of the Chinese, a woman, and she told him that they had enough air to last at least another eight days. The onboard telescope was able to zoom in on their crash site due to some amazing work by the crew of the Dreamscape. Who said they are space tourists? Those people are astronauts, if you ask me! And we have images of the crash site that will be available soon.
“We sent the information off to NASA and have no idea what they intend to do with it. I’m not even sure they knew we sent it. That is all I know. We weren’t sure whom to call, and, given the urgency of the situation, we thought it best to let the world know about the crisis—so those that need to know can learn about it as soon as possible. That’s why I’m here. And to be honest with you, I never expected I’d be up here saying anything remotely like this.”
The reporter from ABC, recognizable to any space advocate as the “voice of all things space” from his almost cheerleading-like coverage of NASA and space flight in general, got the first question. “You’re sure they are Chinese? Are you telling us that the Chinese test flight that launched recently wasn’t a test flight but a real flight?”
“No, I’m not telling you that. You and I might infer that the Chinese actually launched people on their purported test flight, but I don’t know any such thing. The woman told Paul they were Chinese. She called her ship Harmony. And no, I am not sure they are Chinese. I suggest you ask the Chinese about that.”
“Mr. Childers!” shouted a CNN reporter. “Can your ship render any sort of aid?”
“Unfortunately not. And it’s not my decision. Dreamscape is firmly in the hands of Newtonian physics and on its way back home. The ship’s trajectory took it around the Moon, and now she’s headed back toward the Earth. There isn’t enough fuel on the ship to change course, and she isn’t designed to land anywhere except here. That is, unfortunately, reality. I truly wish it weren’t so. I would very much like to help these people. Perhaps merely detecting their signal was more help than we realize. I hope so.”