F6: The Marlborough Man in the Moon

"— to your sleeping chamber! Lock yourself in! Cassie can you read me, mission aborted! Run, Cassie, hurry!"

Cassie ran towards her sleeping chamber, but managed to grab two bottles of water as she careened past her desk. Once inside she zipped it closed, and locked it. She shut off the lights, and the water reclamation unit. Set the controls to only the very minimal life support. A sudden thought panicked her and she grabbed at the small operating computer inside the chamber. She quickly accessed the relaxation dome programming and deleted all of her Brock programs, made sure there was no trace of them in the computer. Then she shut down everything electronic she could in the habitat, without killing herself. How much energy did that thing need to manifest? She had no idea. All she had running in her little chamber was the com link and the small amount of air she needed to keep breathing until Roz could send the retrieval pod for her.

"Roz?" She called. "Are you there?"

"Oh my god, Cassie, are you ok? What was that thing?"

"I don't know. An alien entity of some kind. I can't even begin to describe it, but it's energy based and can communicate quite well."

"Dammit. Damn those bastards!" Roz was furious."Get ready for pick-up Cassie. I'm close, but it will be a few hours. Are you set in there? Are you safe?"

"I have no idea. What bastards?"

"I'll tell you after retrieval."

"Roz, wait a minute, are we overreacting? I was startled by him ... it ... by the way he made contact." Cassie felt chagrin, thinking of her all too real tryst with "Brock. "But this is contact from an alien life form! It's unprecedented. Isn't it our job as astronauts, as scientists, to stay and maintain contact? Explore the possibilities?"

"No. Not with this thing. Cassie, trust me. Just get ready for the retrieval pod. Don't bring anything with you, no drives, no discs, nothing electronic"

"It's just me in here and enough air to last, I hope. It's cold, Roz, hurry."

"Ok. I'm shutting down the com, just in case."

Cassie zipped herself into her sleeping cushion and tried to focus on deep, steady breaths. She took small sips of water. She was tense, expecting Brock to use what meager energy was activated in the chamber, to appear, but he did not. She shivered from the cold. When the retrieval pod landed on the roof of the chamber, she activated the escape hatch and climbed inside. She held back tears as she buckled herself in, thinking of all of her hard work wasted, left behind on what was supposed to be an uninhabited planet. How had this happened?

Roz had the answers once she was safely back on the Prodigy.

"We were set up, Cassie. By the Space Administration. By Dr. Shapiro, probably. Hand-picked to withstand the duress of the mission, my ass."

Roz was still fuming, days after leaving the orbit of EP-274, on a trajectory back to Earth. The long road home.

It was through Roz's boredom-fueled reading of old mission logs, and her ace hacker skills, that she had come to find the truth. They had been lied to. This planet was not EP-274. It was EP-101. The planet the crew of four had been exploring 20 years ago when on the way home one of them went batshit and killed his crew members and himself.

Cassie paced around Roz's small sleeping quarters. "Are you fucking kidding me? They knew something was down there and they just sent us in unprepared? Taking fucking soil samples like an idiot? I was just bait, wasn't I? Brock said we called to him. I bet there was something, an energy beacon, a noise frequency we can't hear, embedded somewhere on the habitat, or even the Prodigy. Fuck!"

"Brock?" Roz looked at her with a raised eyebrow, but Cassie brushed her off with a wave of her hand.

Cassie was furious. What had the Space Administration expected would happen?

Roz continued her tale. She still couldn't get through all of the redacted information. She didn't know if the mission to explore EP-101 was to make contact, or if that happened unexpectedly. She didn't know why the crew member had murdered his shipmates. But she did know that he had likely carried the entity with him onboard his ship, downloaded somehow on a computer drive.

"God, Roz, Brock kept asking me to take him with us. What did he want?"

"I have no idea. But when we get home, heads are going to roll and we are going to get some answers."

Two months into the trip home, and Cassie and Rosalind had rekindled their cozy arrangement of keeping each other company during the long nights, making the tedious days more interesting. They had run out of foil-wrapped cookie dough, but had discovered some dusty tasting brownie batter that held promise. One evening, when Roz was busy, Cassie decided to spend some time in the Relaxation Room onboard, just to listen to some music, get a change of scenery. She hadn't programmed the room's computer with anything more than the misty shadow of a forest. No more trysts with imaginary men for her. She just might give the androgyny scene a second chance. Roz had been very convincing these past few months.

Cassie started up her forest visuals and programmed some ancient blues music. It was just what she needed. Very relaxing.

"Hello, Cassie."

With a gasp Cassie turned, and there was Brock, in all of his cowboy glory. Stetson hat, wrinkled black t-shirt, worn jeans and creased boots. He stood and watched her fumble towards the door, a mischievous grin on his face.

"You can't be here. I deleted the Brock file. I didn't bring you here. Roz!" Cassie screamed but Roz did not reply.

"Captain Avery can't hear you, Cassie. It's just you and me. I told you, your people are much more technologically advanced than you were before. I found that I didn't need you to bring me up here, I managed it on my own. I am all energy, I was there, now I am here. Though really, I am still there. I am many places, many beings."

Cassie continued to press the door's open button, though she knew it useless. "What do you want?" She whispered, cold fingers of dread creeping down her spine.

"Your people are so arrogant, imagining that just because they know nothing of us, that we know nothing of them. We know you, Cassie. We have since the first slug crawled out of the slime. We were startled when your meager ship found us, quite accidentally, I might add, and then alarmed when you came looking on purpose. We had to remedy that."

"Did you kill those men? From the other mission?"

"There is no place for you here, Cassie. Your people will learn that. I am not the only one of my kind. And my kind is not alone. We are legion. We are endless. We power the universe, every universe you have not the capacity to imagine. But you, and your people, do not belong here. You have not earned your place, and from our observations, you never will."

"Just let us go, we'll scrub the data. We won't tell anyone." Cassie felt the cold door of the room through the back of her jumpsuit. She was pressed up against it, though there was nowhere to go.

"I think we both know it's too late for that." Brock set his hands on his hips and smiled widely. Cassie regretted making him so goddamned handsome. "But I will let you go. There's something I need you to do for me, Cassie."

Brock flickered, and then appeared right in front of her. He leaned in, kissed Cassie deeply, passionately, just as she had programmed him to do. He gave her one last smile, and then bent and whispered in her ear.

The Prodigy, when eventually retrieved from its erratic orbit around Earth, was empty of living souls who could tell any tales of where it had been, or what it had seen.