The Find

By Cliff Allister

In the year 2087, helium-3 miners on the Moon discover an ancient alien spaceship.The consequences of this find for mankind, which is still divided into competing and even hostile nations, are paramount. An international team of scientists succeeds in rendering the ship largely functional again. But its superior hyperdrive attracts the attention of extraterrestrial forces, which claim the spaceship, called the Golden Nova, for themselves. The ship could be the key to humanity's survival in a cosmic conflict that has raged for millennia - or lead to its demise.
Can Alexander Walker, the commander of the Golden Nova, overcome the tensions and distrust in his international crew? Does the crew of the Golden Nova stand a chance against the invasion fleet that enters the solar system and threatens to turn Earth into a disenfranchised galactic colony? However this ends, it is a dramatic turning point in human history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Dec 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9783963573644

Book preview

PART 1

– 2087 to 2089 –

May 7, 2087: Luna / Mining Site NFS XIV

The huge shovel of the gigantic harvester made a loud clanging sound as it pounded the unrelenting surface, meeting resistance. The autonomous control system of the robotic harvester immediately shut down the enormous machine. This was programmed into the beast of the machine when one of its 18 excavator buckets got stuck on an unyielding obstacle. The nearly 100-meter-long, 30-meter-wide, and 15-meter-high device cost over 300 million euros, including delivery and final assembly here on the Moon. The basic program of the self-learning but still frighteningly primitive AI included the priority command to avoid any damage, no matter how small. Repairing the large machine under the lunar surface's conditions was not only difficult, but above all time-consuming and outrageously expensive. So, when the excavator bucket got caught on something it could not budge, it stopped the machine immediately.

Pierre Fournier scowled as he halted his Lunarover to reposition its solar panels. He took great care to realign them with precision accuracy to catch the power of the Sun's rays. He was a stickler for details and fanatical regarding safety, vitally important traits in the vast barrenness of the Moon. The batteries would now fully recharge while he searched for the cause of the malfunction. He took pride in his attention to minute details. Carelessness, recklessness, or negligence could quickly be punishable by death on the Moon. That was an ever-present lesson the Moon was ready to teach lunauts of any age or skill level. Full batteries were always safer than half-empty ones, even if you were confident in getting back to base on a half-charged battery—if nothing went wrong!

And things went wrong all the time on the Moon. The international, multi-faith cemetery held dozens of graves to testify to that fact.

Pierre Fournier had been working at the largest energy company in the Sol system, the Nuclear Fusion Society—NFS—for six years. Everyone knew what those three letters meant. In just over a decade, they developed not only the market-ready technology for helium-3 fusion, but also the necessary technology to mine the isotope on the Moon. This catapulted the European consortium to being on par with industry leaders like technology and space giant Tesla, dominant search and advertising engine WebFind, online retail giant Hǎo mǎi (好买), and even Facebook's successor MyConnect. This ranked the Nuclear Fusion Society as one of the most lucrative and valuable companies on Earth.

Pierre Fournier took his helmet from the passenger seat and fastened it on his head. After the control unit confirmed his suit's internal pressure was stable, he activated the cabin's pressure equalization. A hum of pressure droned as air sucked back into the tanks, slowly becoming increasingly quieter as the cabin's air pressure dropped. Eventually, Pierre only felt its faint vibrations murmur through the cabin floor.

The indicator light on the rover's small dashboard changed from green to red, indicating a vacuum had been achieved in the cabin. The rear cabin's exit could now be opened.

He stood up, unlocked the safety, pulled down the large locking lever on the inside of the exit, and lifted the oval door inward. Without resistance from the cabin pressure, the heavy metal door easily swung open on its hinges.

He was met by a world of glaring brightness outside. It was noon hour of the lunar day. He knew he had to get into the shadow of the harvesting robot. The rather weakly designed cooling unit in his light suit's flat backpack could protect him from fatally overheating for a few minutes at most.

Maybe I should have taken the heavy protective suit after all, Pierre thought. He immediately dismissed the notion. He had chosen the lighter suit for a good reason, even though the heavier model offered more coolness and better protection for a longer time. Those factors were outweighed by the stiffer, heavier suit being much more uncomfortable while working under the harvesting robot.

The light suit's energy pack was enough to keep him warm in the shade under the vast machine for up to six hours, which was as long as his air supply would last.

Pierre, however, intended to be back in his rover and on his way to the station long before that.

He hated the idea of now having to crawl around in the loose dust and broken rocks under the great colossus of machinery—Godzilla, as his crew called the machine—to look for the reason for the auto-shutdown.

In the distance, four large dots moved in the bright sunlight. Pierre watched the other harvesting robots making their way around the NFS XIV mining site. They had been unofficially christened with the equally mammoth-sounding names of Baphomet, Leviathan, Tiamat, and Abaddon. The titanic machines drove unerringly straight ahead over nearly 200 kilometers, removing almost two meters of the lunar surface's regolith layer with each of their 18 excavator shovels.

Pierre had followed Godzilla's excavation track with his Lunarover, which now put him level with the giant machine. With each pass they made, the harvesting robots crushed the upper meters of regolith layer, and scooped the contents into their bodies, where the material was ground and heated to several hundred degrees. This process released the helium-3 the material contained. The gas was then forced into large pressurized tanks that, once full, could be disconnected and sent to Earth. Each harvesting robot traversed its calibrated deployment area, which could be hundreds of kilometers long and many kilometers wide. Depending on the topography of the lunar surface, this could be up to five times in parallel tracks, able to remove ten meters of the upper rock layer of the lunar surface before being redeployed on another yet untouched area.

Godzilla had been on its third pass when one of its excavator buckets had gotten stuck in the lunar rock, something that was not supposed to happen in the given terrain. The machine's considerable force should have been able to handle any kind of rock that came its way with ease.

Pierre suspected that a weak point had developed in the drivetrain of the rotating blades, resulting in failure when encountering a particularly hard rock. He considered the corporate side of the failure. It might even have been a production or assembly defect not discovered during final inspection, which in turn could raise the question of a claim for damages, since every day that Godzilla sat idle in the field cost NFS a fortune. Either way, it was Pierre Fournier's job to determine the reason for the harvesting robot's failure and see that it was repaired as quickly as possible.

He could already feel the suit's interior begin to heat up despite all the efforts of the cooling unit by the time he reached the shadow of the behemoth towering high in front of him. It seemed almost unreal to him that it should be possible for such a gigantic machine to move even a millimeter under its own power. But the solar cell-powered electric motors were developed for an incredible torque capability and could effortlessly power the many dozens of drive wheels of the crawler tracks. Sunlight—and thus energy—was available in unlimited supply during the 14 Earth days, 18 hours and 22 minutes of a lunar day on the Moon's atmosphereless surface. During the equally long, pitch-black lunar night, the NFS lunauts replaced the pressure tanks and performed maintenance work under spotlights.

This was a constantly repeating procedure, which had gone on undisturbed for many cycles now—until Godzilla had suddenly sent an alarm message to the monitoring station in the mining field NFS XIV in Mare Imbrium.

Pierre Fournier was able to walk upright under Godzilla's massive metal belly that provided an equally massive shadow. The excavator buckets were in the front third of the colossus, and he had parked the rover in front of a gap between two crawler tracks. He could see it was the third bucket on his side that had snagged.

In the light of a handheld spotlight, Pierre walked carefully over the loosened and uneven ground, always careful not to trip over any rocks. The excavator shovels left behind an area that only appeared to be level. At close range, the subsoil was littered with countless boulders, some up to a meter in diameter. It was all too easy to trip and fall in the low gravity, which could damage the suit and inevitably lead to death if a hole or rip in the material was too large to seal with the superglue each lunaut carried in an outer suit pocket.

It took only a few minutes for Pierre to reach the blocked shovel. His suit heater had long since replaced the cooling unit in the dark of Godzilla's deep shade and provided a comfortable temperature. Nevertheless, Pierre felt a chill in the pit of his stomach when he saw what was blocking the giant wheel shovel, several meters in diameter.

It wasn't a rock. It was an unnatural object, one that looked like a beveled metal wall. It was about a foot thick and sticking up from the ground!

During the previous pass, the excavator shovel must have slid straight over it, but now one of the wheel blades had hit the silver-colored metal wall squarely and got hung up on it. There had to be much more underneath the visible part of this obviously artificial object. Anything able to withstand the elemental force of the wheel shovel had to be very large, extremely hard, and buried deep, and was likely of several tons, many tons of mass.

Pierre swallowed, staring at the immutable object beneath the shovel. At least a few hundred tons, he knew very well. Whatever was hiding under the lunar surface had to be absolutely enormous. Perhaps even as enormous as Godzilla itself!

However, logically, politically, there could be nothing made of metal underneath the ground that had such size and mass. If one of the spacefaring nations had buried such a huge object here, it could not have gone unnoticed. The nations active on the Moon watched each other very closely and were always suspicious of any new anything coming to the Moon.

This allowed only one conclusion: whatever lay under the lunar surface had not been brought here and buried by humans.

He turned and, forgetting all inherent and learned cautions, raced over the uneven ground as fast as he could back to his Lunarover.

Pierre Fournier had no way of knowing that his name would go down in the history books, and from this day on, nothing would be the same for mankind.

June 4, 2089: Luna / UNFORG Excavation Site

Impressive, isn't it?

Can you zoom out a little further?

Alexander Walker increased the thrust on the small drone's tiny jets and steered it a little higher, at the same time setting the built-in holocam for maximum wide angle. This was the only way he could capture the full size of the object over which the drone hovered.

The gas will only last for a few more minutes, thought Alex, as his friends called him. I hope Schmitt has seen enough soon.

Dr. Maximilian Gregor Schmitt attached a certain importance to his middle name, and was not only the head of the European Space Agency, but also project leader of the United Nations Foreign Object Research Group. He was unquestionably the most important decision maker in the struggle over the discovery—after the Nuclear Fusion Society, of course. The object had been found in Mare Imbrium, in the middle of the several thousand square-kilometer area of lunar surface the UN had awarded the NFS at the Luna Conference of 2079. Although lawyers were still arguing whether that particular contract passage, which included unlimited mining rights and guaranteed NFS ownership of everything extracted from the lunar soil, applied to this particular case, the corporation's management had been smart enough to share the find with the other nations under UN supervision. The epochal significance of this discovery, regardless of the open legal questions, was an option few had considered when the region's initial rights had been assigned.

The NFS had agreed to joint exploration of the discovery, not joint ownership, and even this only under certain conditions. One of these conditions had been to have the final say in all personnel decisions. NFS had not objected when Dr. Maximilian Gregor Schmitt was proposed as UNFORG project leader by all the nations involved in the exploration of the object, but they had insisted on appointing the person in charge of the on-site excavation themselves. That was how Alex got the job, much to the displeasure of everyone else involved.

Although there could not be the slightest doubt about his qualifications, everyone knew Alexander Walker's background. In fact, there was almost no one on Earth who did not know the Englishman and his story. Everyone had formed an opinion, most of which were not flattering to Alex. Only the NFS had given Alex a chance after the accident and allowed him to continue doing what he loved—being an astronaut and flying spaceships.

From becoming head of NFS's own orbital station, he had risen to chief pilot of the company's space transport fleet, and now he had climbed yet another rung of echelon by being named the Society's station chief on the Moon. In this new capacity, he was in charge of the on-site excavation. It was the first time in many years that Alex had been able to set foot on the Moon again, and it felt good.

Any word from the metallurgists?

No, unfortunately not, Alex replied to Schmitt's question. We haven't even managed to get a scratch into the surface yet, let alone take a sample of the material.

To summarize: Even after we completely uncovered the … object several days ago, we still know next to nothing about it. It's all going way too slowly for my taste.

Bureaucrats, Alex thought snidely. First, they argue for more than a year about who gets to do the digging, and after wasting so much time, it can't go fast enough.

We're pretty sure it's a spaceship.

Because it looks like what you imagine an alien spaceship would look like? Schmitt laughed condescendingly. Aside from human imagination, there's no real indication what it might be. Maybe it's a sculpture, a monument left here by an alien species.

Although he thought it was a nonsensical theory, Alex did not want to be rude. Schmitt could not relieve him of his position, but Alex had to work with him and it was in his better interests not to unnecessarily annoy the man or make him an enemy. Alexander Walker truly had enough enemies.

We will keep an eye on all possibilities, he said, opting for a diplomatic tone.

I'll admit, it's hard to think of it as anything other than a spaceship, Schmitt said with another glance at the hologram.

And that even from your cozy office in Frankfurt, Alex thought. If you were standing here in front of it, you wouldn't have any doubts about it! He did not voice that, however.

As soon as we manage to access it, we'll know for sure, he said instead.

Keep me posted, Schmitt told him, ending the transmission.

Alex sighed and brought the drone down. It landed gently at his side.

He stood on an elevated pedestal constructed from steel pipes next to the excavation site. Due to the low lunar gravity, which was only one-sixth of the Earth's standard, it could be built with a much more fragile design than would have been possible on Earth. A visitor seeing the platform for the first time could hardly imagine that it was capable of supporting a full-grown lunaut wearing a heavy suit and the inevitable backpack. Alex, on the other hand, knew that as many as three lunauts could occupy the pedestal at the same time to monitor the progress of the excavation without fear of structural collapse.

This time he was alone. For three days now, the object had been completely exposed. After months of political wrangling and technical preparations, the excavation work had actually taken the shortest period of time since the discovery of something hidden beneath the lunar surface.

Alex looked down from the ten-meter-high platform into the rectangular pit that had been carefully dug around the spaceship. There was no doubt in his mind that it was indeed a spaceship that someone had left here several hundred thousand years ago. At least, that was the suggested dating after analyzing the Moon rocks buried nearby. Since it had not yet been possible to scrape even a speck of material from the ship itself, a direct analysis had been impossible to undertake so far.

Several light poles supporting strong lamps powered by solar panels surrounded the work area, shining on the pit . These spotlights illuminated every corner and angle, even during the moonlight day. The pit was about ten meters deep, 40 meters wide, and 80 meters long. In its center, the ship rested on three massive metal runners that appeared to be seamlessly connected to the hull. The hull itself was shaped roughly like an arrowhead, and some who saw it compared it to a hand axe, except that the front was rounded rather than pointed. It also had several depressions and flat superstructures. Everything seemed to have been fashioned out of one piece.

Even under examination with the microscope they had brought in, no seam or other kind of connection could be found. Or, at least none anyone recognized. At the wide stern of the ship—what Alex thought was the stern—behind a narrower waist sat two lateral stub wings, and on each, a sort of fin shape protruded perhaps three meters vertically. They looked to Alex like the tails of an interceptor fighter.

Maybe this ship is even suitable for atmospheric flight, he thought, pondering the design.

It had been one of those fins that the harvester excavator had snagged more than two years ago. Alex had to smile when he recalled that Godzilla had long since returned to another area of Mare Imbrium and was doing its mechanical harvesting work there.

As he descended from the scaffolding, he noticed a flurry of activity among the workers in the pit. He switched to the public channel.

Get out of here!

… there's no such thing …

… always said!

… about to explode!

The babble of voices increased in volume and franticness until it was almost impossible to pick out a single voice, let alone understand it.

Alex ran as fast as the low gravity allowed to the edge of the pit where a spiral staircase led down to the bottom. When he arrived, at least a dozen workers were pushing their way up, almost running over each other.

Alex grabbed one by the arm and held him tight.

He pressed his helmet against the other man's. What happened? he shouted.

The … the ship! Something is happening to it. It started vibrating! the man sputtered, eager to flee. Maybe it's about to explode!

Alex let go of the man, who immediately ran away. He was aware that no one could run far enough to escape the effects of an explosion. If this was a spaceship, and if it did go off, which he did not think would happen, a few hundred meters of distance certainly would not make any difference. Even primitive terrestrial spaceships destroyed everything within the several hundred-meter radius of an explosion. Alex did not want to imagine the power of this spaceship's explosion, a vessel whose technology must be miles ahead of earthly versions and whose propulsion was certainly not based on fossil energy. No stone would remain intact in the periphery for several kilometers.

Alex descended the stairs and approached the ship. When he put his hand on the exterior, he could feel a faint vibration through his glove. He looked around. There seemed to be no one else in the pit except him.

Slowly, he walked along the ship, repeatedly tracing the vibrations with his hand, feeling his way, his every sense alert for information. The vibrations seemed to get stronger the closer he got to the stern. He suspected that an engine had started up for the first time in many hundreds of thousands of years. Perhaps it was an energy generator come to life.

He was still thinking about it as the vibrations grew even stronger. Then they suddenly stopped altogether.

Only five meters away from Alex, a round part of the exterior side seemed to simply dissolve. A ramp slid out of