Apollo 53
Author Bio: I like the Harry Potter book series. I like to play hockey and lacrosse. My favorite subject is science.
Blurb: A space mission to Mars goes wrong and something unexpected comes back.
People passing by, the buzz of the prototype hoverboards filling your ears with irritation like sound.
“Hey Ed,” someone says to me.
I turn around and see my friend Moe sitting on a bench in the street in front of his new apartment.
“Hi, Moe how is your new place?”
“Good, it’s even got an air fryer.”
“Nice, well I’m gonna let you enjoy your view of Earth.”
My watch buzzes, “It’s my boss. I’m late for work!” I shout. “They need me at the control center!”
As I get there everybody looks at me with a nasty look. As I go to sit down I still feel the tension in the air. A few minutes pass. I get myself situated at my station as I also monitor the pilots. Everything is fine on the way there. On the way there they talk about what could be similar between the moon and Mars.
Then one of the astronauts makes a peculiar comment, “I know that there is lower gravity here but it feels so much heavier here.”
That comment gives me a bad feeling. I go over to the central command and ask to check the radar from the ship. They are hesitant at first but they do. Everything is normal until they look at the right side of the scanner. At first there is just a little fuzz in the scanning, but there is something much bigger than that. Quickly I go over to the astronaut surveillance station to look at the suit cams. None of the angles that the cams have can get a look at what is on the opposite side of the shuttle.
“John, you need to get back to the shuttle ASAP!”
They are running as fast as they can. I am watching the suit cams when one of them goes black.
Then the next and the last. The vitals go flat from one to the next. The room goes silent and falls with sadness.
“What just happened?” One of the ship supervisors asks.
“They went blank. Maybe the sensors in the suits just got blocked from whatever is out there.”
“We need to find out if they are still out there and what cut the connection,” the base commander says.
“Well, are we going to do that?”
“We send out one of the drones.”
“The drones are not fit to go that far into space.”
“That is only to come back in one piece. We can just send it out to get footage on Mars.”
“Well, let's go get to it.”
I go to my station and launch two drones. It doesn’t take long for the drones to get to Mars (depending on which side of the earth we are on). The drones aren’t much bigger than a 2017 truck. The mineral that we discovered under the moon's surface can be broken down into shiny heavy duty titanium like metal. We are thinking about calling it moonshine. The moon is basically made of it. The drones and the colony barriers and the drones are made of this metal. If this metal is hit by a small piece of fast-moving debris, it will barely make a dent.
As the drones are approaching mars we see the space shuttle on the camera. It is torn into hundreds of pieces. The shuttle is not the only thing that we see. There they are, the three astronauts floating with their suits partially on. The drones keep going. We haven’t seen anything that could block the signal or tear up the ship. As the drones are searching the only thing that they find are long imprints in the surface of Mars. The screen blacks out.
“We lost it, sir,” I say.
“How did we lose it this soon? We still had another twenty minutes.”
There is nothing for us to do now. I’m glad that I’m the one informing the families as much as I do feel sorry for them. I decide to take the offer that my boss gave to us to go home since we had nothing to do there.
On my way home I look up into space through the colony dome. As I am looking I see something coming in this direction from the direction of Mars. It is coming towards the moon at an exponential speed. I wonder what it looks like but as it gets closer I realize what it is. It is one of the drones that we used to go look at Mars. But on this drone, there is something very dark even though it is in the sunlight. I soon realize it is going to hit the colony dome. I quickly grab a hoverboard off the ground and go the fastest I can back to the control center.
Through all of the buzzing, I hear someone yell at me, ”Hey, that’s mine!”
I don’t bother to look back. As soon as I get back everybody has already seen what was coming. They had already sent out some of the patrol and repair drones. All of the drones are controlled at the control center by someone.
“What is that?” I asked the captain.
“We don’t know yet.”
I walk over to the people controlling the drones to look at the screens. The drone that is coming towards the moon crashed onto the dome but whatever I saw on it is nowhere to be seen. Except for some black sludge that is found inside the drone. The sound of the shrieking alarms fills my ears.
“There is a breach in the dome!” A man yells.
The drones are immediately redirected to where the breach was detected.
“Quick, go evacuate that sector!”
The colony is drowning in panic. The drones find a clean cut hole and put down an emergency patch so they can fix it without letting any oxygen out. Then, there it is. A big black figure with bright empty green eyes that make you feel sad inside, a sharp point above its head that points downward at an angle. It has arms but on the arms are long, thick, rope like tentacles dragging behind.
“That’s what was on Mars,” I yell.
Everybody is slowly starting to connect the dots. This thing killed the expedition astronauts and ripped apart the shuttle.
“Captain, defense protocol!” Someone yells.
The captain scurries the telecom and says, “Code red. I repeat, Code red!”
The drones can’t do much to that thing. It is destroying everything in its path. Nobody knows what to do.
“We need to get it off of here, Captain get a rocket ready to launch,” I say.
The Captain gives me a questioning look at first but then realizes what I am planning.
The Captain yells to someone in the control center, ”Ready MK lll.”
A rocket appears on top of the building. I grab a flare gun and climb. The building is not tall but has a plateau-like roof. Once I am up there I aim the gun towards the black figure and fire. It looks towards me and starts walking. The walk turned into a sprint. I go to the other side of the rocket but where it can still see me.
It leap above the rocket and I yell to the captain, “Launch it, launch it now!”
He does, the rocket springs up and catches the figure. Then the rocket heads straight for Earth.
“They can deal with that.”