The Dark Side of the Moon. Jeramey Kraatz
moved over the locked chests, canisters labelled with all sorts of warning signs he didn’t recognise, HoloTeks, computer terminals covered in switches, blinking lights everywhere, and what looked to him like dozens of items that resembled the cannon that had taken down the alien ship, sitting alongside a stockpile of what Benny could only describe as futuristic guns.
“Dude,” Drue muttered, and Benny couldn’t tell if he was terrified or out of his mind with excitement.
“What is all of this?” Jasmine asked, stepping forward and peering into the shed.
“An armoury,” Dr Bale said. “Your next move is simple. You must protect Earth.”
Jasmine blinked, looking back and forth between Dr Bale and the weapons inside the shed. “You’ve been up here this entire time creating some sort of Moon arsenal?”
“That’s merely a portion of what we’ve been doing,” Dr Bale said, letting the flap fall back down, hiding his armoury once again.
“I can see why you and Elijah didn’t get along,” Jasmine continued. “He was completely against the further weaponisation of the human race.”
“And look how that worked out for him,” Dr Bale said quickly, his eyes wild for a flash.
“He could have survived.”
Dr Bale’s features softened. “Well, I suppose we don’t know what happened, exactly.”
Benny shifted his weight. “What are you planning to do with those?” he asked, though he had a pretty good idea already after seeing what the Tank could do.
The man took a long breath, but before he could answer, Drue was talking again.
“Uh, also, where was all this earlier when we were gluing mining lasers to the fronts of our Space Runners and going to stop the aliens ourselves? Because I bet we could have used some of this.”
“We did OK on our own,” Hot Dog said.
“I got blasted by one of those ships!”
“OK, sure, it didn’t go perfectly.” She thought for a second and then rolled her eyes at him. “Also, I was sucked into the mother ship and almost put in some kind of alien zoo, so, who should be complaining here?”
Dr Bale grunted. “We didn’t see this asteroid storm coming until you’d already deployed. We don’t have scanners like those found in the Taj. For the most part, we’ve made do out here, but our equipment isn’t exactly state-of-the-art. We didn’t have a dozen spare satellites to launch after the first wave.” He raised an eyebrow. “Now, if we had the resources of the Taj, that would be another story altogether.”
Benny swallowed hard. He wasn’t sure what he’d thought Dr Bale would be like, but he definitely didn’t expect him to be showing them a bunch of weapons within minutes of their finding his camp. And the way he talked about Elijah and the Taj was tinged with something that didn’t sit well with Benny, despite Dr Bale’s calming, precise manner of speaking. The man may have been a genius, but the last time Benny had put his faith in someone on the Moon who supposedly knew better than him and his friends, Earth had almost been destroyed.
Still, they needed all the help they could get, and this man knew the Alpha Maraudi. Plus, he had saved Benny’s life. He kind of owed him the benefit of the doubt.
“You said you were working on other projects,” Jasmine said. “Is there anything else here that could help us?”
Dr Bale nodded and began to walk to the next shed. Once he was in front of them, Jasmine turned to look at Benny. Her lips were pressed together tightly, and her eyes were wide as she shook her head.
“I know,” Benny mouthed silently.
“The key to progress and success is to never rule out any possibility of advancement, no matter how remote,” Dr Bale said as they followed him. “That’s one thing Elijah and I agreed on. The difference between us is that Elijah’s thoughts were always stuck in his own solar system, whereas I have a much more open mind.”
He held the flap covering the entrance of the shed back and let the four of them walk inside. When Benny saw the circuitry-filled stone terminals pulsing with a dim green light, he immediately recognised what they were looking at. This was Alpha Maraudi technology, the same kind he’d seen in the alien mother ship and …
“The abandoned Moon base,” he murmured as he took in the dozens of asteroid chunks sitting on a table and a hologram of a three-sunned solar system in one corner. There were other things, too, that he didn’t recognise: tools made out of some red metallic substance, glass cylinders housing various mineral samples floating in mid-air, and what looked like pieces of bone – long, narrow and a dull bronze in colour.
He swallowed hard.
“So you’ve seen it,” Dr Bale said.
“Yeah,” Hot Dog said. “It’s, uh … kind of a long story.”
“You scavenged these things,” Benny said. “That’s why it looked so empty when we were there.”
Dr Bale stepped forward, picking up one of the asteroids as big as his fist. “Scavenge implies that these items were cast-offs from the Maraudi we found. These items were … inherited after the extraterrestrials no longer existed. We brought what we could back to the resort with us. Well, the building site, at least. Everything was still under construction.”
“Oh,” Drue said. “I get it. This is the stuff you took from the Taj when you left.”
“I didn’t steal anything, if that’s what you’re implying.” Dr Bale turned away from them slightly, surveying the items in the shed. “We found that base together, and contrary to what he may believe, Elijah does not own the Moon. I had as much a right to anything in that base as he did. Earth had a right to these things. Besides, what was he going to do with such important resources? Bury them away in his resort and pretend he was untouchable? Let them languish in some research lab? I couldn’t let that happen.”
There was a strange sensation against Benny’s right leg as Dr Bale spoke. Not quite strong enough to be called a buzzing, but some sort of dull energy, like the feeling he got when his HoloTek vibrated from across the RV and he could just barely, almost intuitively register it. He slid his hand into the pocket of his space suit, fingers grazing the golden glove.
It felt warm to the touch.
“And what have you learned?” Jasmine asked, stepping further into the room, looking at the collection of artefacts that had originated light years away.
“Plenty,” Bale said. He held up one of the asteroid rocks. “You see, these beings are engineers beyond our wildest dreams. Imagine being able to create new elements. Stones that are partially organic, able to grow, veined with energies. Minerals you could control given the correct type of frequency. The way they’ve learned to use metals and rocks … They could reshape Earth if they wanted to.”
“That must be why their ships look like pieces of quartz,” Jasmine said.
“So, they can control rocks?” Benny asked. “How? With, like, their minds?”
“Of course not,” Dr Bale said. “With science. They have instruments of their own.” He paused, smiling a bit as he walked over to a black case. He flipped it open, and, as he held up its contents, Benny’s heart jumped.
It was a metallic glove, much like the one he had. Only this one had a gash through it, like something very hot had sliced through the palm.
Hot Dog glanced at Benny. He nodded slightly. The others kept their eyes forward, even though they both knew he