26. the children of The Moon

The GVT7800 egg crossed into the darkness, as it skirted around the Earth through the stratosphere.  “Look below, the sun is setting in Italy” Yellow Yama Leaping Lynx said as they cruised overhead.  The Moon was coming into full view from behind the Earth.  Then she pointed out India, as they continued on their course.  Just as India passed below, she said “Attention: this is your pilot speaking; well folks, this is it.  It’s now or never.  This vehicle uses the Earth’s gravitational field to accelerate and slow.  It warps the gravitational field in front of us, or around us if we are turning, and we are pulled forward.  In space we have no propulsion.  This pod is capable of interplanetary travel, but between celestial bodies, we are just cruising by inertia.  It was really just meant as a prototype, to be used to travel around Earth, or hang out in orbit; that’s why it has the ability to create gravity inside for our comfort.  But we’ll make it.  Say "uncle" now if you’re chickening out.”

She pushed the speed control arm forward quite a bit more, and they suddenly hit 18,000 M.P.H. as she pulled back on the altitude control and sped through the mesosphere, the thermosphere, and into the exosphere, and then Lept into outer space towards the Moon.

“O.K.  From here, it will take us about 13 hours ’till we reach the far-side of the Moon.  I kept it slow; I didn’t know what the hull is truly capable of handling in the atmosphere, even the upper atmosphere.  It hinted at closer to 28,000 M.P.H. being no problem when I was reading the owner’s manual, but, it IS a prototype.  So we have some time to kill” Yellow Yama Leaping Lynx said.

“Well, let’s not waist it!  Turn off the gravity for a minute!” Josy Lynx replied.

“Ah, grab your lunch-bags first, and have them open and ready!” Violet warned.

Jasmine reached into the pocket on the wall next to her, and passed them out.  She handed one to Jazmin last.  Jazmin was staring out the glass hatch at the stars and the Moon ahead, her eyes as wide as they could be.  The stars were even brighter, more vast, more plentiful, more beautiful than they were back in the Mountain village she grew up in as a little girl.  "Amazing" was not even close to describing the view she was seeing.  Jasmine pulled her out of her little-own-world as she looked at the bag, wondering what it was for.

“Ready?” Leaping Lynx asked the group.  Then she cut off the artificial gravity.

Jazmin screamed as she floated out of her seat.  She had heard something about "gravity" in school back in Cuzco, and "weightlessness" in outer space, but it never really made sense to her.  She looked around the egg’s cabin at her friends all floating and smiling and the attitude of fun they had, as she herself almost started to panic.  Then it hit her.  She suddenly knew what the bag was for, as she heaved into it.

“Ut-oh!”  Jasmine pointed to Jazmin, and Leaping Lynx slowly increased the gravity back to normal.

“Sorry, Jazmin” Leaping Lynx said.

Jazmin didn’t know what to say.  She barely understood anything about what was going on.  She believed in her heart that her kids were on The Moon, and that her new friends would help her find them, and she could see the GVT7800 egg was going that direction …  But she was speechless.

The team kept it low-key for the rest of the flight.  Violet arranged her backpack as a recliner, and sat on the floor against the wall, and closed her eyes.  Jasmine and Jazmin grabbed the few blankets they had, and laid down on their backs side by side to nap, as they stared out the glass hatch at the stars.  Josy Lynx curled up laying on his side, in the back on the floor, to catch a few winks, after his long night in the warehouse; he was out quick.  He woke a few hours later with Leaping Lynx lying next to him, his arm over her body.  He was shocked into instant wakefulness.  How?  Again?  He didn’t wake up when she joined him!?!?  This time he didn’t sit up.  He laid there next to her …

Jazmin opened her eyes.  She had fallen asleep looking at the vast universe of stars shining through the glass hatch.  Now, The Moon was only about 20,000 miles away.  It was huge compared to the view from Earth, and the details of the surface, the craters, the streaks from explosions caused by meteorite impact, the Mountains that formed so long ago waiting patiently for change in the barren weatherless environment free of an atmosphere were clearly visible and distinct.

Yellow Yama Leaping Lynx woke and Josy lifted his arm, and she walked over to the control screen and assessed their current status.  The weak gravitational field of The Moon was starting to interact with the GVT7800 egg in more and more influential ways.  This meant the gravitron-drive unit could begin to control the vehicle’s speed and direction again.  The A.I. unit had not failed them, as it guided them in the final moments of travel around the Earth and away to the Moon; Leaping Lynx had instructed it to do so as they circled the hemisphere towards the night-side — she didn’t want to play the part that Tom Hanks did in "Apollo 13".  Missing the target by a mere 0.25° of angular momentum would have sent them into the center of the Milky Way galaxy — very slowly in galactic terms.  The egg was heading strait for the center of the fully illuminated disk in front of them.

“So you say the base is on the dark side of the Moon?” Yellow Yama Leaping Lynx asked Violet.

“Well, that’s what the intel suggests; all the weird activity in the past few years is on that side.  I guess this is our second-to-last challenge.  If we find it, somehow we’ve got to convince them to let us in.  My hope is this egg will be our beacon and passport, and they will find us and guide us there.  The files you showed me from the portal you found say we can search for them, but the tech is limited.  It will be slow.  My preliminary calculations suggest less than 2 days, though.  Let’s just slowly creep around the Moon to the far side with the sensors off, keeping a distance from the surface.  They might be able to sense our sensors — we don’t want to scare them being nosy or coming in too fast and hard.”

Leaping Lynx sat back in the pilot’s seat and retook manual control of the GVT7800 egg.  She slowed the vehicle down to a nice 5800 M.P.H. cruising speed, and headed around the over the "top" of the Moon to its other side, currently facing away from the Sun.  No details could be seen on the Moon’s dark surface.  The vehicle kept going around the Moon, until it fell into the Moon’s shadow.  Within seconds, a light appeared down on the surface.

“Well, they’re not shooting at us.  Yet” Violet said.

Leaping Lynx slowed the vehicle down even more to 3800 M.P.H. and aimed for the light.  Suddenly it started blinking.  Then a ring of red lights appeared around it, blinking.  Then the lights all went off.

“They are expecting a reply, but our communications is shut off” Josy Lynx said.

Suddenly, a flare from the surface appeared, and a missile headed their way.  Leaping Lynx had only a few seconds to react.  She knew she could zip away, but how agile and fast was the missile?  The flare suggested no better than typical conventional weapons, but who knows?  Maybe it had a gravitron drive also?  Or something else?  And if she zipped away fast enough to evade the missile, would the Moon’s gravity then be strong enough at the new location to counteract her current movements this close to the surface?  Or would she leap out of the way, only to end up with no place to land, floating away into space with no way to slow back down?  Or should she slow down and take the hit, and let the A.I. unit dispose of the missile as it did back off the shores of New York City?  Or would the missile be more powerful, and destroy them?  All this went through her head in under 1.5 seconds, and she lept into a split-decision.  She slowed the vehicle down to 500 M.P.H. and remained on course to the spot where the lights had shown themselves.

The missile hit the black hole that the A.I. system created, exploded, was consumed, and was crushed to sub-atomic particles, which were subsequently released as "stardust" behind them.  She took further control of the vehicle, and started to "wag" back and forth.  Then she did 4 loop-de-loops.  “I saw this in an episode of "Battlestar Galactica" when I was a kid” she said, smiling.

Moments later, the lights from the Moon’s surface came back on without the red ring, and a green light started to flash.  Leaping Lynx kept the vehicle speed slow and proceeded down to the lights, found the partially hidden doorway in the side of the mountain cliff, and pulled the vehicle to the entrance … and waited, hovering in the air 30 feet above the rocky crevice below.

Ten long seconds passed.  Then another ten.  “Do you think they will let us in?” Jasmine asked rhetorically out loud.  Then another ten seconds passed, as the team looked at the giant steel door in front of them.  Slowly, it started to open, sliding sideways, to reveal a vast spacecraft hanger dug into the mountainside.

Yellow Yama Leaping Lynx wasn’t sure if she should expect a visual signal to fly inside, or just wait until a comfortable amount of clearance was available to enter the doorway.  She waited until the door was about ⅝ of the way open, leaving herself at least 50 feet on each side to maneuver, and proceeded through the doorway onto the landing pad zone marked off on the floor just inside.  This hanger was certainly built for anti-gravity craft.  As she passed though the doorway, the giant door reversed direction, and slowly started to close.  There was plenty of time to fly away, if they felt like it was a trap.

The door finished closing, and at the far side of the hanger a small man-door opened from the underground base beyond, and a figure stepped through.  He was tall and thin, with a frock of hair on top.  He looked older, and wore a pair of round glasses.  He held in his two hands a giant gun-looking thing.  It looked more like a sawed-off grenade launcher.  He closed the door behind himself, and took about 20 steps into the room and stopped, and waited …

Leaping Lynx opened the hatch, and stood up and yelled across the room “Hi!  We’re looking for some children.”

Josy Lynx said, mostly to himself, “that’s one way to deal with it.”  Violet smiled.  Jasmine looked at Jazmin, who’s eyes were wide, as she stared into the hanger.

The figure across the room started walking towards the GVT7800 egg.  Caution was in his steps at first, although that did not seem to slow him down nor speed him up.  As he came closer to the newly landed vehicle, his demeanor gently relaxed, and he lowered his gun-thing a bit.  It became clear he seemed to be in his 70s, and his vision was not as good as a young man’s.  Once he realized it was a pod full of "young ladies" and a long-haired skinny dude with a tie-die, his anxiety level dropped quick.

Something inside Jazmin was stirring.  She didn’t know what it was, and really wasn’t even consciously aware of it moving her.  She walked right up to the edge of the egg, and started to step out, before anyone else decided to act.

“Watch it!  That first step is a doozy!” the old man in the hanger yelled out to Jazmin just as she stepped onto the ground, and shifted her weight from one leg to the other.  The step she took was accustom to the Earth’s level of gravity.  But in one step, she moved from that "artificial" higher level inside the pod to the Moon’s natural lower level, and she bounced right up and soared through the air, leaping like a cat in slow motion back on her home planet.  She screamed out loud as she slowly returned to the floor a few feet away from the GVT7800 egg.  “It takes some getting used to out here in the hanger” the old man said to the newly arrived group.  Jazmin squatted and put her hands on the floor, alongside her feet, feeling very awkward and a bit scared.

Jasmine spoke out for Jazmin, as she quickly followed her out of the pod, carefully, and squatted down next to her and placed a hand on her back right in the middle.  “This is Jazmin.  We think her children are here.”

Violet and Josy Lynx started to exit the vehicle, as the pilot, Leaping Lynx, remained ready for emergency action if need be.  Without warning, the door at the back of the hanger opened, and in ran two teenage kids.

“¡Mom‼ ‼ ‼”  “¡Mom‼ ‼ ‼” the pair yelled in unison, as they ran towards Jazmin.  Jazmin saw them coming, and immediately screamed out loud in joyous excitement.

They jumped on her, and embraced her, as she embraced them, forgetting about the low-gravity that had just begun to make her nauseous again.

At the same time, the old man turned to Violet and Josy Lynx and said “sorry about the unwelcoming attitude when you first arrived.  No one was out here in this section watching things, and the computer took over and thought you were another government craft coming to blow us up.  I got here and shut it off when I saw you do stunts.”

“I disabled our communications” Josy Lynx said.  “Sorry to surprise you.”

“The kids said last Earth-cycle that you were coming.  I didn’t know what to think, until I saw your craft.”

Jazmin’s two children were showing off their arms to their mother.  She was shocked, not as impressed as they assumed she would be.  Her middle-daughter was a tool-master.  Her fleshy arms had been amputated above the elbow, and in their place were all-mechanical look-alike replacements, but there were hidden door-panels in her forearms and hands that housed a plethora of different tools.  All these were controlled by an A.I. computer that interfaced directly with her brain.  She had spent the last 5 years training how to control and use these tools with skill, just by thinking, as if they were no different to use than normal hands, no different to use than winking an eye or chewing food.

Her oldest son had been transformed into an infantry soldier.  His arms were replaced with mechanical ones containing weapons of all types.

“Where is Lilia?” Jazmim asked them after a minute of them showing themselves off to her.  They became silent, and looked at each-other.

The old man walked over and took Jazmin’s hand.  “You need to see this for yourself.”  He escorted the five newly arrived guests at the Moon base out of the hanger, and inside the main base, where the sense of Earth’s gravity returned.  They walked through the control area, full of desks with computers and chairs that were all empty.  They entered the central living quarters, where they met several hundred other children, all staring at the new visitors in awe, some wanting to touch them on the legs or arms or hands …  They passed through the living quarters, through the sleeping barracks, towards the back where the research departments were all located.  They walked down a long hall, into a laboratory full of incomprehensible tech, and through a swinging double-doorway, into the lab’s giant experimental development quarters.

Jazmin stopped in her tracks as she got the first glimpse of Lilia’s face.  She stopped in shock.  She stopped in horror.  She screamed out loud.  Her daughter was an interplanetary spacecraft.