Space: Above and Beyond 1 - Space: Above and Beyond by Peter Telep

Author:Peter Telep
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2013-07-17T04:00:00+00:00

They stood atop a hillock, looking down at the tracking drone which sat a half dozen meters away. It was like an old piece of furniture sitting in an alien living room, eroded, half-buried in the sand, its solar array foil flapping in the freezing breeze.

"Didn't they count on storms when they built that piece of junk?" Pags asked.

Bartley aimed her directional Geiger Counter at the drone. "Point-oh-one-seven rads."

Damphousse arrived next to Bartley, sloughed off her pack and withdrew the circuit storage box. She opened it and produced three small plug-in modules.

Seeing that Damphousse was on the ball, Shane said, "Good. Replace the transceiver units and let's get back. We have about ten hours of daylight."

"Hey, Coop. Pags. I'll need your help diggin' it out," Damphousse said as she descended the slope.

Pags and Hawkes dropped to their knees before the tracker and used the butts of their rifles to shovel away the sand and small rocks that had collected there. Seeing that they weren't making much headway, Nathan signaled for Stone and Wang. The three Marines joined Pags and Hawkes, and in less than five minutes they were using their gloves to wipe the tracker's legs free of sand.

"All right, gentlemen. Let me in there." Cautiously, Damphousse reached down toward a small, square compartment, its surface etched with line drawings of Earth that the briefing said were the same ones carried by two ancient spacecraft: Pioneer Ten and Eleven.

"There's an eject switch in there somewhere," Low said.

Damphousse found and pressed a button. A small drawer containing a micro-CD slid toward her. She lifted the golden disc from the drawer. "This it?"

"That's the Earth message," Wang informed the group. "They made it a requirement in the twenty-first century that all off-Earth installations had to have one. It has pictures and sounds of Earth in case an extraterrestrial found it."

Hawkes stepped around the tracker, then got on his haunches before another door. "Let me have it."

"What're you doing?" Shane asked.

"Read about this," Hawkes said. "Don't worry. It won't explode."

Damphousse looked to Shane, who shrugged, then gave Hawkes the micro-CD.

The tank tapped open a door, then inserted the disc into a tiny, metallic disc drive. "Everyone. Set your links for proximity scan and lock. You're gonna like this." He tapped a switch.

Nathan, along with the others, adjusted two knobs on the com-panel at his hip.

And his ears filled with slow, sad, passionate music. "Mozart."

"Yeah, I know this one, too," Bartley said. "My sister used to play it all the time at home. It's his Piano Concerto in D-minor."

"K Second Movement, to be precise," Carter said.

"Why, Carter. I didn't know you were a connoisseur of the arts," Damphousse said.

"I'm not. There was a list of the disc's contents in the briefing. Guess I was the only one who read that part."

"If only this had been our first contact with them." Shane groaned and looked askance to Nathan. "They never would have killed the colonists."

Nathan was about to say something, but thought better of it. He listened to the music, tones like waves that bobbed him and carried him closer to Kylen.

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