SWORDCAST: Tale of the Darkside

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The long lunar nights can be cold and lonely and the eternal night of the farside made time stand still, frozen in a moment of stillness and utter silence. Keeping busy during these downtimes was always a problem for Commander Wotan and as he gazed out the wide viewport across the barren lunar sea, he felt his gloved hands drumming unconsciously on the plexar console. Although the station more or less ran itself, there was always need for a real human presence on the base from time to time to change batteries, check readouts and make sure all the little things that robots couldn't actually accomplish were taken care of. If he was honest with himself though, Wotan knew he actually secretly enjoyed the solitude and the extreme isolation, if only for a little while, as the busy spaceports and waystations were constantly thronged with traffic and officials barking orders or requesting information. The small base of Farside Station was a welcome relief from the bustle and press of life and Wotan had happily volunteered to pay a brief visit to the station before taking off again to man Mars Base in a few lunar days.

There was something extremely romantic and nostalgic about Luna, he thought. It had been mans first foothold into space centuries ago and the stepping stone for forays into the inner system during the second space age after the urge to explore the planets and the means to travel efficiently and quickly between the stars had been developed. Now, as man had effectively colonised the solar system and Earth had become a virtual backwater due to its dwindling resources, its Moon was largely overlooked too. Farside Station was home to a series of navigation beacons, a large astronomical telescope array and an emergency rescue facility. In all the time that Wotan had visited the station during his tours of duty, the rescue ship had never been launched. 

The only time there had been anything like an emergency was several years ago when the base scanners had lit up with a collision warning - he had been realigning the main ATS array to focus on Jupiter as it was wracked by an especially intense storm and the alarms had rung out through the empty corridors, and it had taken Wotan several terrified minutes to find his helmet and scramble back to the main unit to check the telltales and look out the viewport in the direction the scanners had indicated, to see a huge mass heading across the horizon. 

In the utter silence of the lunar night, a large vehicle of unknown design had fallen out of space and plummeted towards the plain about a mile from the base. Wotan had watched as the craft had catapulted into the dust, showering debris across the landscape. There had been no explosion or any kind of discharge from the impact, which he found unusual - had any kind of ship crashed, the fuel would have ignited, incinerating the craft even in the airless environment. As it transpired, the object had been a large container, presumably launched some time ago and punched into lunar orbit, before crashing down to the surface as its orbit decayed. 

Wotan was used to finding wreckage on the moon and also aware of the activities of freelance junkers - salvage teams looking for scrap. This time however he reached the point of impact before anyone else and was amazed to discover the bulk of the container had survived the crash. It had been a very old looking design and the outside shell was pitted and scarred, it had obviously been drifting for some time. After hauling the object back to Farside behind the Molab, he had managed to break into it to discover it had been a virtual treasure trove of artifacts from decades ago. Securely wrapped in several layers of mylar  had been a small plaque which gave brief details of the person who had sent this capsule into space. As Earth had begun its decline and the natural catastrophes had begun to render the planet inhospitable, one man - a prominent industrialist - had taken a large portion of his personal collection of treasures, literature, art and history - sealed it into a container and blasted it into space on board a chemical rocket. His intention had apparently been to direct the rocket into deep space, but technical malfunction or just improper astrogation had conspired against him and the container had eventually entered a long, elliptical lunar orbit. Decades later, the feeble gravity of the moon and the last fingers of influence of the Earth had conspired to bring the capsule down onto the lunar surface. On the obverse side of the plaque was an inscription - a few lines of an ancient poem, presumably reflecting the industrialists frame of mind as he packed up his message to the stars:

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

Of all the materials in the container, Wotan had found this bleak message the most poignant and had taken the plaque and placed it at the crash site on the edge of a lunar rille, facing deep space and the lunar horizon. The rest of the container he had unpacked and amongst the various boxes of strange unreadable media and esoteric artforms, there had been a great number of books. Wotan had seen images of books, an archaic method of using pressed vegetable fibre made into sheets, collated into stacks and then printed on with text and images. To hold one in his hands was a revelation - the weight in the hand and the peculiar smell from the pages engaged his imagination and transported him to a distant unknowable time when such things were commonplace and all information was held in such fragile, impractical vessels. A lot of the books had been historical and periodical texts and he had given these over to the archives on Cydonia base, for preservation. But one or two of the volumes had proven fascinating to him, especially some of the fictional tales of the exploration of space and he had kept these for himself. One particular book had become a special favourite of his - a large treatise on early space exploration which showed pictures of the unfeasibly strange vehicles which had heralded mans first tentative steps off the motherworld into near space. The volume covered all the major events up to the end of the 21st century when mans interest in space had paled and eyes had turned inward to the failing Earth and the means to preserve humanity.

It was during these periods of peace and quiet, when there was nothing to do but wait for the relief shuttle and potter about the station checking and rechecking the seals on the airlocks or cleaning the solar panels, that Wotan took down one of the smaller books and read stirring stories of science fiction from so long ago.

He had almost come to the end of one of the fragile tomes and was wondering absently what to do next when a burst of static broke the silence in the base. Wotan sat up, carefully placing the book down safely and wandered over to the main communications array. The static roar had begun to modulate into separate bursts, becoming a signal of some sort. Wotan directed the main receptor dish towards the signals source and the crash of static and white noise faded to be replaced by an increasingly clear tone. It wasn't unusual to have pilots visit the remote base unannounced as they passed through, but he generally recognised the transmission codes. This signal was different, strange somehow - a spare and bleak sequence of squeals and discordant notes that Wotan had never heard before. The console had automatically pinpointed its location now and the dish was tracking the signals source. 
The visual scanners had been brought into play and Wotan could hear the sound of the servos adjusting the alignment of the main scope above the base and it occurred to him that it was rare that the scope had to be moved so far out of position as it scanned the heavens. As the monitor kicked in and he saw the image flicker to life, he realised that the scope had been moved a full 90 degress and was currently trained on the distant lunar horizon and was still moving lower, to scan the dusty mare.

All this time, the sound of the ghostly signal became stronger and Wotan could now make out a definite sequence to it. Long bursts of garbled squeals were punctuated by a sequence of five distinct notes before the rapid staccatto began again. Just then the screen froze and the noise of the motors manoevering the telescope ceased. The image on the screen showed a distant lunar hill on the edge of the teminator where the eternal night of the darkside began to give up its hold to the light. The image flickered briefly as the scan zoomed in and centred on a small plume of dust at the base of the hill. As Wotan watched, something caught the light at the base of the plume as it moved out of the dark. Another jump of focus and the telescope found the source of the signal and the monitor suddenly filled with a close up view of a strange and wonderful vehicle. Trundling fitfully across the rocky base of the hill was something that Wotan realised was a throwback to a different age. Eight wire wheels supported a round bowl-like hull which sprouted antennae and lights and above and behind the body sat a large round mirrored dish, the upper quarter of which was catching the glimmer of sunlight reaching across the mountains. As the vehicle trundled towards the light, the long spear-like anntenna on its roof appeared to scan the horizon and Wotan became aware that the brief pauses in the signal corresponded to the movements of the antenna. The vehicle appeared to be searching for something..

Setting the comms array to gather as much information as possible, Wotan dashed out of the unit and back to the rec room. Amongst his few belongings which he carried with him from base to base were some creature comforts for him to enjoy in his solitude. One thing that always came with him when he left Cydonia base was the old book on space exploration. He was working his way through the information, memorising the historical details of the brave pioneers who had gone before and marvelling at the means at which man had struggled to visit the Moon. Grabbing the book, he headed quickly back to the comms unit and threw himself into the seat again, checking the monitor. The weird contraption was still barely visible and it had crested a small hill now and was paused, its mirror catching the full light of the sun. Fanning through the pages and decades of the book, Wotan found the section he was looking for. Apparently at the early stages of the exploration of the moon, a great rivalry had existed between what had then been the major powers on earth and it had a been a race to uncover the secrets of Earths nearest neighbour. Many frantic attempts to reach the moon by umanned probes had been tried, some successful and others less so. Space travel had been vastly expensive and arduous then and sometimes it was at great expense that a flight to the moon was attempted. 

The book described a remotely operated vehicle which translated as 'moonwalker' that had successfully reached the moon and transmitted photographs and live video back to earth. The book went on to suggest that beside the two successful official launches, many other covert operations may have taken place, but due to the secrecy surrounding them and the rivalry between the countries, any failures were not made public. The technical schematics and images of the Moonwalker vehicle bore a startling similarity to the contraption sat on the surface of the moon before him now, although Wotan could not fully understand how, after so many long years, it could still be operational. 

Checking the current position of the vehicle against the maps held at the base and triangulating the original source of the signal, he discovered that it had originated somewhere just at the lip of the darkside. The book explained that in order to minimise weight, the majority of the power onboard these early probes was derived from solar panels and the large mirrored dish was in fact a single solar array. If the probe had accidentally wandered off course and landed near the darkside, sunlight would be in very short supply and the vehicle would have become stranded. Somehow though, after decades of inactivity in the lunar cold and shadow, the probe had juddered into waking life and the dish covering the main body of the vehicle had sprung open, catching the wan light of the distant sun and the battery had been able to gather enough charge to operate the onboard systems.
 

Now the Moonwalker sat on top of a lonely hill, its computers desperately searching for a home long gone, its signals crying fitfully across the void in search of commands from a country now dissipated, a base lost in history. Watching the insectile craft waving its antenna like a confused beetle and hearing the discordant strains of its electronic calls crackling from the voder, Wotan felt a tinge of sadness. Its makers and commanders would now be less than dust back on earth, its mission a little known memory and its purpose now redundant. Suddenly, the sound of its frantic searching ceased and the image on screen became still. For long seconds, silence reigned once more and Wotan became aware that he was holding his breath - the sound of the moonwalkers chatter now conspicuously absent. 

Without warning the screen flared brilliant white like a magnesium torch and it took a fraction of a second before a filter kicked in to reduce the glare before the brightness burned out the receptors. Automatically, Wotan had thrown up a hand to his eyes to shield them - he had seen enough explosions and ignitions to know what the blast of light signified. 

The moonwalker had gone. As the screen cleared, a cloud of dust hung in the image, silent and ghostly. Whether the sudden influx of light and power had been too much for the ancient systems he would never know. Perhaps the vehicle had been fitted with a device to preserve its secrets after its mission was over or perhaps the moonwalker had looked to Earth for instructions and found none - after so much time had passed the falcon could no longer hear the falconer and things had at last, come apart.