Ah, a place to vent my creativity! Now I can do something with the stacks of half-finished stories I've started and never had the heart to finish.
For starters, here's one of my more recent one.
“That’d be it over there,” the driver told me. He pointed out the window of the cramped little buggy at a tall antenna array rising up from behind the hills like the mast of a ship disappearing over the horizon. The pale blue crescent of Earth provided the only light other than the dim glow of the beacons from the steel spire of the antenna. Out here, even the bright light from Armstrong Terminal had vanished behind the jagged lunar mountains. Not more than a day or so ago, I had been called in by a panel of NASA officials to perform an investigation of ‘unspecified circumstances’. Had I known they would be sending me here, I would never have said “yes.”
According to the documents given to me by my employers, I was to investigate an extremely bizarre incident that must be seen to be believed. Less than two months ago, the space program had established yet another isolated research outpost on our own moon, a few hundred kilometers from the Armstrong Terminal colony at Tranquility. The station’s introductory crew of six rode up to the base in the transit buggy (transportation to the outpost by flight was impossible; there was not a single patch of level ground to set down on nearby) about a week later for their extended forty-two day stay. Business proceeded as usual, and six weeks later, the research crew was ready to return home. The four scientists headed out to the terminal in the buggy, while the two maintenance crew members, Adrian Campbell and Yu Chang, remained behind. That’s when the problem started. About eight hours later, communications from the outpost stopped. There was no distress signal, no calls for help, they just stopped talking. The very next day, a team was sent to the outpost to investigate. When they arrived, Yu Chang was nowhere to be found. Adrian Campbell was dead.
I was to be the first person to enter the research outpost. I must admit to a sudden feeling of, of something. A mixture of nerves and a nagging feeling that could have been fear. The doorway was still holding its airtight seal and hissed as I entered the airlock. The interior of the base appeared cluttered and disorderly, with equipment of all kinds lining the walls, and leaning stacks of diskettes and papers shoved precariously into every available corner. As instructed, the preliminary search team had left everything exactly as it had been found. The whole place seemed so surreal, like everything had been frozen in time. Here, a tray of food, perfectly preserved in the bacteria-free air. There, a chessboard still set in mid-game. Proceeding further in, the scenery took a drastic change. The laboratory module was almost obsessively pristine, with everything stacked and ordered in neat little rows. The first two horticultural modules were just as perfect, filled with every species of plant imaginable in straight, perfect rows. As I walked up to the door of the third module, I vaguely realized something was amiss. The door was sealed and locked. Then I saw it. Looking through the viewport to the other side, I could see the collapsed translucent shell of the module scattered across the ground. There, in the center of it, lay the body of Adrian Campbell, preserved by the vacuum of space.
After this first examination, I divided my crew into teams of two to begin a thorough investigation and search of the base. I personally took my assistant William (never Bill or Billy) outside to recover and examine the body. We had to work carefully or risk damage to the evidence. All of the body’s soft tissue was frozen solid and as fragile as glass. The cause of death turned out to be a gunshot wound to the head. The shot had been inflicted by the worst type of weapon for our work: a caseless flechette round, likely from a frictionless coilgun, yielding no information on the type of weapon. Continuing the examination, I noticed something clutched in Campbell’s hand, a smallish electronic device of some kind. As I attempted to pry it free, the whole glove slipped free of the hand, still glued solidly to the device. This surprised me. All of the rest of the clothing had been exposed for so long that it would have shattered at the slightest touch. The gloves were still new and pliable, albeit somewhat stiff. I carefully peeled the glove free from the device and elected to save it as evidence. The device turned out to be an older model recorder, little more than a simple personal organizer. I believed that at least some hint of the reason for Campbell’s death would be held within. The recorder itself had been destroyed, most likely by the same weapon used to kill Adrian, but the memory units inside were still perfectly intact. Back inside, I pried the casing open and retrieved the memory, passing them off to one of my investigators to decode.
“What about surveillance footage?” I asked one of my investigators.
“No such luck. Nobody thinks about somebody being murdered on the moon.”
“Neither did I. Any sign of our disappearing friend?”
“None, sir, wherever he is, he’s not here.”
“Is there any way he could have left? Say someone killed Campbell and took Chang as a hostage?”
“Not likely. Both space suits are still in the airlock. There’s supposed to be an auxiliary buggy for emergency purposes, but…”
“But, what?” I prompted.
He paused, then said “The buggy’s just, just not here. No tracks, no wreckage, nothing.”
I was baffled. How could someone make a man – maybe two – and a two-ton vehicle disappear on the moon of all places? Perhaps our other findings could shed some light on this baffling mystery. The only items that appeared to be of any help were the two astronaut’s personal computers. Mr. Chang’s personal computer proved to be a little more difficult to find. In fact, it was absolutely nowhere on the base. During the search, however, we were able to recover Mr. Chang’s toothbrush. His hairbrush was found nearby, both buried under mounds of paperwork and data disks. I placed both of these items, plus the gloves found on Campbell’s body, into individually labeled, vacuum-sealed bags for protection until they could be sent off to be examined more thoroughly. I handed them off to William, telling him to “Put them somewhere until we can get them back to be tested.”
“Y’know, this stuff is starting to pile up around here,” he told me.
“Do you have any better ideas about what to do with it?”
“How about that box over there?” he said, indicating an empty rations container tossed into a corner. I decided it probably wouldn’t hurt, and seeing as how we had nowhere else to put anything I piled the items inside and left the box where it sat.
***
Sven Adams had more suit hours than my crew had life hours, it seemed. If it had been done in space, on the moon, or on any of the other colony worlds, he had been there. It was upon his shoulders that I had placed the task of searching the mountain ranges farthest from the base. He was the only person that I felt could venture out that far and return. He was an extremely gifted explorer, and if there was anything out there to be found, well then Sven would find it, one way or the other.
I had been at my examination of the base for fully thirty-six hours when the unmistakable face of Sven came onto the net. He would be returning with the missing buggy shortly, nothing follows. I was on the razor’s edge. What new facts could be taken from this vehicle that would make the pieces of the puzzle become more of a picture? I could do no more than wait. Knowing Sven, the wait would be short. Less than half an hour later, the roar of thrusters shook the station. Rushing to the viewport, the distinctive shape of Sven’s battered old shuttle came into view, with the elusive buggy clutched tightly under its belly. The ship hovered in place for a moment or two before dropping the buggy unceremoniously to the ground, sending up a cloud of dust. I rushed quickly to the airlock, finding Sven already inside. He pushed his faceplate up, sending a fine coating of dust from any of twenty worlds into the air. Upon seeing me, he grinned. “I believe this’s yours, then,” He said.
“Absolutely. Where exactly did you find it, may I ask?”
“O’er in the ranges to th’ south, ‘bout twenty klicks out. Yer friend must not’ve planned on comin’ back anytime soon.”
“I see. Was there anything in the buggy? Surely if he didn’t plan on returning, there would have been certain things he’d want to bring with him.”
“Oh, a few things here’n there: radio, suit; thought ah’ saw a couple a’ empty water tanks stashed in back.”
“Was there a weapon of any kind, a firearm specifically?”
“Y’mean this?” he held out a small pistol, obviously of military origin,”The clip’s empty. ‘splains how he ‘kicked.”
I was puzzled, “What exactly do you mean?”
“Yer friend’s done gone an’ put himself out. Blew the canopy out. He’s a corpse-sicle by now.”
I was stunned. Hadn’t we had enough of frozen bodies lately?
“Sven, it looks like we can’t do anything else here. Can you fit the rest of my crew into your shuttle?”
“Sure, they’ll fit.”
“Take them and the buggy back to Armstrong Terminal. William and I will join you shortly.”
One month later.
“Court reporter, transcribe the following interview with Mr. Stevens, Special Investigative Consultant, NASA Prime, in accordance with Governing Rules section 12-1-2002, sub-paragraph, uh ... , well you know the language.”
“Mr. Stevens proceed with a concise narrative of your findings.”
From the box I removed each item as I detailed the story as I now knew it.
“Chang and Campbell were working for the Chinese Science Agency. Chang had long been an agent; Campbell most probably was led to believe that his pay was to come from the black market proceeds the object would bring. As no money was exchanged, no trails exist to lead us to whoever paid Chang...”
“Campbell’s gloves turned up nothing. He had put them on and disposed of his real gloves to remove any traces of evidence of what they were up to.”
“Tests on the toothbrush, hairbrush, and clothing all confirm that there were two Changs. They must have changed places when the researchers were transported to the moon just days prior to the incident.”
“Information from the com gear and personal computers record brief messages to a third party relating to an “object found”; “object moved to station”; “object at pickup point this date”; but not a single clue that suggests what they had found, nor where they had discovered it.”
“Campbell must have sent a message home about a large sum of money, because a letter, yes a letter, congratulates him on his soon to be life of passion and leisure. We believe it was from a girlfriend; however we have not located the sender, just dropped off the scope, as it were.”
“The buggy and its contents were thoroughly analyzed by “people” at NASA Prime.”
“The weapon that killed Campbell was black market junk, impossible to reliably trace.”
“The com gear supports our findings that Chang took the object to a pickup point outside the coverage of our surface gear. There he shot himself before he could be made to surrender the contests of this disk. The data it contained must have been irreplaceable, maybe even how the object could be used or activated. A hole in the screen supports at least the theory that he killed himself. He must have shattered the disk into the pieces you now see shortly before he died. Whatever it was, the object and nothing else was taken from the crawler. One must assume that it is no longer on the moon, and is probably in the hands of the Chi-Sci group. There are too few facts to support an accusation, so we may never know.”
“Lastly, letters taken from Chang’s body lead us to believe that he was a patriot. His actions were on orders from someone we have as yet to identify. That’s what made him so elusive, he truly believed his actions were “samurai;” more than himself... To Chang, Campbell was a friend, but a greedy man who could never be entirely trusted. Chang believed that Campbell would brag about the operation, or, more likely, blackmail Chang’s government for more money. He had to be quieted.”
“It appears that the Chi-Sci Agency felt just so about Chang.”
“A very clean operation with no real trace of who may have pulled the strings. Only the puppets they cut loose are left.”
“In conclusion this was a murder-suicide perpetrated to claim an object no bigger than this ration box I carried my evidence into this court room in. Government and greed appear to be the base motives.”
“Gentlemen, I will answer some questions from this board, but quickly, as I must return to NASA Prime upon an urgent request...” That’s when I had my final insight. My evidence box was the same that Chang and Campbell had used. No need to tell the board, no good would come of it.
It can be funny how the biggest mystery of a generation most often hinges on the simplest piece of evidence. When I had collected the evidence at the station, I had needed a way to carry it all. An empty box just large enough was there, used first by the keepers to transport rations to the base and then by me as an evidence carrier, this box was part of the story. I didn’t know it then, so it was misused. Whatever they had discovered had once been in this box, at least until it had been taken from the station by Chang. This box, that has trailed the evidence from the station through the wide ranging series of tests, had never been tested itself. What ever trace evidence it once had held is now gone beyond the best science to recall.
“Recorder, Transcribe”
Investigative post-script
“It is now 14 days removed from the briefing before the lunar board. I awoke to find I had received the following com:
To Mr. Stevens via NASA Prime ComSat 1a:
Message follows:
Mr. Stevens as to our last conversation on the surface, Sir it appears
we have not done all here. You are being requested to return on
priority carrier. You’re gonna love what I found.
Sven Adams
Remarkable man, Sven Adams, as I said a gifted explorer, if it can be found...well I guess it has been.
End Post script.
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Topic: Writing Workshop! (Read 19683 times)