Reddit Collection (Fresh-Short #10) - DeYtH Banger (best way to read an ebook TXT) 📗

I know why we never returned to the Moon

 by DELTA129

 

 

 

My grandfather was a combat pilot. Even though he always felt distant I liked him. When I grew older, I realized that he was always aware, always looking for any signs of danger. Shell shock, PTSD, it has many names. My mother told me that he didn’t use to be like that, that he changed when he came back from Vietnam.

 

My grandpa's profession was likely the reason why I was obsessed with space, astronauts, planes and pilots. We used to talk about it when we were together. He was a really skilled and high-ranking officer in the army, and he knew some people, even a couple of really well-known astronauts. When I once asked him, if he met anyone who went to the moon, he simply replied:

"Don't ever talk to me about the Moon, boy. It's a dark and evil place."

He died back in 2004 from natural causes.

 

About two months ago, we decided to renovate my grandparents’ old house. While clearing out the attic. I found an old metallic box. In the box, there was a number of things which as I assumed belonged to my grandfather. There was a military medal, a stack of papers and an old picture of my grandfather and two other men I didn’t recognize. My grandpa looked around 40, so I assume that the picture was taken in the 70s. All of them were wearing space suits, and the scene was a typical backdrop used by NASA, but the logo was missing. Only a blank monochrome background. The mission patch was titled Dawnbreaker. I didn’t understand anything. My grandfather was an astronaut? Why did he never tell anyone about this? Dawnbreaker? I never heard about such mission. It must have been covered up really well. But why?

 

I found the answers in the papers on the bottom of the box. I’ll rewrite the literal contents below, but I warn you that many people might find it very disturbing.

 

My dear family,

 

If you ever find this, I must confess something. In 1972, I wasn’t in Vietnam. I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, but if you have found this, it probably doesn’t matter anymore. Back in 1965, me and a handful of other pilots were selected for a non-public team of astronauts, who would participate in covert missions in space for our government. We wouldn't get the glory and fame of regular astronauts, but our country needed us, and so we were there.

 

In early 1972, we were told that for an unspecified period of time, our country had a secret satellite orbiting the Moon. They never told us what it did, or why it was there, just that a few weeks prior, it had crashed to the surface on the dark side of the Moon for unknown reasons and that the data it carried was crucial. The government needed to recover it, and thus was sending me and two other astronauts to reclaim the satellite’s memory module. The equipment of the planned Apollo 18 mission was essentially transferred to us. From what we'd been told, the Apollo team was furious. They had a reason to be after all. It seemed that whoever we've been under was much more powerful than NASA. The whole mission was top-secret obviously.

 

I was officially deployed to Vietnam, while in reality we underwent extensive training for the mission. After a couple of months, we found ourselves standing on the launch pad in front of this behemoth of a rocket, that would take us to the Moon. I was the mission commander, while Lt. Carver was the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) pilot and Lt. Ackermann was the Command/Service Module (CSM) pilot.

 

The flight to the Moon took roughly three days. After arriving, we made a couple of orbits around it. Each time we flew behind the horizon created by the Moon itself, I felt a bit of helplessness when our communication to the whole world went dark, as the signal got obscured by the spherical mass of rock and dust below us. The dark side of the Moon was nothing like the light side, which we see on almost a daily basis. Instead of smooth grey fields and tranquil lunar seas, it was completely covered in dark, deep craters and holes, like as if it was being slowly eaten away by the universe itself. It was finally decided to begin the descent to the surface. Me and Carver exchanged wishes of good luck with Ackermann and in the Lunar Module named Charon we separated from the CSM named Trinity.

After we announced “Charon has touched down,” our response wasn’t cheers and applause, but just mere “This is Trinity, congratulations Charon! I’ll relay the news on the other side. Be safe out there pals.”

 

Just like that we became cut off from the rest of the world. Ackermann was our only link. While he was above the light side, he could communicate with ground command, and while above the dark side he could communicate with us. Never both at once. Even though the CSM’s orbital period was roughly two hours, we would be in touch for only about 35 minutes each orbit.

 

We landed on a flat plane inside a huge crater. Contrary to what some people believe, the sun shines at the dark side of the Moon the same way as the light side. The amount of light depends on the lunar phase. It was still shining daylight in the place where we landed, but we knew that it would go dark in a few days. I felt excited and curious about what awaits us in this alien world.

We waited for about an hour and a half to get the command’s reply from Ackermann and spent the time by preparing our suits.

“Command sends their congratulations. You’re to proceed with the recovery.”

 

Everything was dead silent as I stepped on the surface of the Moon. I tried to think of something excessively inspiring to say, but that those times were already over. With Carver, we assembled the rover and after planting our flag next to our spacecraft, we drove off. As we drove across the surface, I saw what I though was a flash, like a glare reflected by something metallic in the far distance. Since it was fairly common to see flashes of light because of an interesting physical phenomenon caused by the space radiation interacting with our eyes, I didn’t give it much thought and soon forgot about it.

 

After driving for a couple of hours, we reached the satellite – or what was left of it. We immediately noticed that something wasn’t right. There were dozens of footprints around the probe, leading to a set of two tracks, dragging out into the distance.

“What the hell is this?!” asked Carver in disbelief.

 

“I don’t know, but it seems that somebody got what we came for before us,” I replied.

 

Both the tracks and the footprints were different than ours. Whoever took the data wasn’t here under the American flag. As I expected, we didn’t find the data box. We found the part where it was supposed to be, but it was missing. Luckily for us, we were just in contact with Ackermann, so we reached out to him to describe our findings.

 

“This doesn’t make any sense. Who would take it? Russians? They don’t even have a lunar program! Even if somebody took it, how could we not be aware of that? How can the Russians land on the Moon without us noticing?” he responded.

 

“As far as we know, the Russians have no idea that we are here, you know,” said Carver over the radio.

“We’re going to follow the trail” I cut off their conversation.

“Are you guys sure about this?” asked Ackermann.

 

“Hell, I’m not sure about this. We’re clearly missing something here. But I’ll do as you say, cap,” responded Carver.

“Yes. If whatever was on that probe was so important for two countries to send people here to retrieve it, we have to find out what happened to it,” I replied.

 

“Copy that Charon. I’ll relay your whereabouts to command as soon as I can. Be careful out there.”

Our oxygen was about at half capacity now, but we moved on with hopes of solving this mystery.

It wasn’t long until I saw something in the distance. As we got closer, I realized that that it was a spacecraft. Its design was different than ours and it was decorated with a flag of the Soviet Union. I couldn’t explain why, but I felt that something was really odd about the spacecraft. If there really was Russians with us on the Moon, they would have picked up our comms long ago, so there wasn’t a point in hiding.

 

“To the unidentified Soviet lander, this is the crew of Dawnbreaker, please respond. We know you’re here, we have you in sight.”

Nothing.

 

We attempted to contact them several times again in both Russian and English, but always received only silence in response. We got closer and I realized why I found the spacecraft odd before. It looked like it had been there for a while. We didn’t see much of the interior through the small windows, which had been covered with something from the inside.

 

“Our air is running low and I don’t like this Miller. We should really head back now.” said Carver with clear uneasiness in his voice.

“I know, but we have to find out what’s going on here.”

 

It took some time until we figured out a way to open the airlock. No one was home. The inside was a mess. The interior was splattered with brownish-red fluid, presumably contents of one of the many opened food packages lying on the floor. Or was it …? No. I quickly pushed that thought out of my head.

 

It was a two-seater craft. There was a small amount of leftover supplies and samples, but no signs of the satellite’s black box. There was a space suit hanged on the wall near the airlock. Two occupants, and one space suit with a clearly missing name tag. We both quickly realized that the other one must still be out there somewhere – along with its occupant. At this point, we were really low on oxygen, so we rushed to get back to our spacecraft. As we reached Charon with the last bits of oxygen in our suits, I realized something.

“Tell me, Carver, was it just me or did we not pass the wreckage on our way back?” I asked.

“Fuck. Don’t even mention it. It wasn’t there, that’s right.”

 

We shared our intriguing discovery with Ackermann later, and he was as surprised as was command when he informed them in turn. That night I took watch for the first four hours. It wasn’t really a night, since the sun was still shining, but for the sake of timekeeping, we referred to the time when we slept as night.

 

When it was finally my turn to sleep, I had a dream about following the flash that I saw the previous day. I walked on and on, until I found the same space suit from the Russian craft just lying there, in the dust. The limbs were twisted and contorted in gruesome ways, but it was clear that someone, or something was inside that suit. I approached and slowly began opening the sunshield that obscured the inside of the helmet. I looked in terror, as I saw the inside. It was my face, covered with brownish-red blood. In place of eyes, there were only two gaping holes.

 

The next day we started picking up something on an unused channel of our radio. It was a faint signal coming from somewhere in the crater. We tried to