10 The Archimedes Effect by Steve Perry

Author:Steve Perry [Perry, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

20

Near Mare Ingenii

Luna

The FBI and military intelligence had ops chasing information on the dead terrorist, too, and after talking to Thorn, Jay decided that his time might be better spent working on things they couldn’t find as well as he could. So after Thorn left, Jay bagged the jungle-man scenario and flew off to the other side of the Moon.

From the lip of the crater where he stood, Jay had a good view of the alien base. For all that it was the “dark” side of Luna, there was a good amount of light—unnatural light, to be sure, but still. The terrain was rocky here, just north of Mare Ingenii—the Sea of Cleverness, which seemed an appropriate location.

He was at one of the final levels of the bug game. And it was stumping him—he couldn’t figure out which military base it corresponded to in the RW.

He jumped, falling down the wall of the crater. Gravity was only 0.165 that of Earth, but there was inertia, so he used his braking rockets to slow his descent even more. He floated downward like a broad leaf.

The VR was gorgeous. Dynamic lighting and particle effects added to the visuals, making him feel that he was really here. The stark lighting and eerie silence combined with the very realistic alien base to give him the creeps. Smooth, powdery dust flew from his boots as he bounded down the steep slope, ghosting into the vacuum and back down in slow motion.

He wasn’t live in this mission—the goal here was to evaluate the base and see if he could find out what his team had missed. So the game was frozen as he roamed around the set.

He trotted toward the base, kicking up more slo-mo dust.

Good thing this isn’t real-time, or they’d see me coming for sure.

The base was roughly hexagonal, the most unusual layout he’d seen yet. It was a deep blue color, and slightly translucent, as if made from huge sapphire crystals. There were alien-sized air locks on all six sides, with larger, vehicle-sized locks on three walls.

The walls had a monumental look, like something built in ancient Sumeria or Babylon. He almost expected to see huge bull-gods emblazoned on the wall, or ziggurats peeking up from inside.

Some memory nagged at the back of his mind. As if he’d seen this before—something like it, but not this, exactly.

He hit a button on his space suit and was propelled upward by a small rocket on his backpack. The wall was well-defined VR, but not quite as sharp as the rest of the scenario. The crystalline texture seemed to have been overlaid on somewhat older code. It wasn’t as … integrated as the rest of the scene.

He reached the top of the wall and looked at the roofline.

Here was a sharper, more defined VR—a herringbone of giant crystals.

The roof is newer.

Jay paused the scenario and shifted frame of reference, which grew larger as the base shrank to the size of a coffee table.

“Remove newer base sections as defined by these parameters,” he said to the analysis program.

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