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The Titans of Camp Four

by Brian Trent

“One more thing,” Elizabeth said as she drove, and she gave him an apologetic smile. “It’s kind of strange, but if you really want to make a good first impression then this will do it. Guaranteed.”

Randall pried his gaze from the lunar horizon. He sat in the passenger seat of the buggy, his luggage in the backseat, feeling strangely naked without a bio-suit. Arriving at Tanabata spaceport hadn’t been so different from disembarking in an Earthly air terminal. Now, he was getting his first taste of the great frontier. The buggy jostled along the road from the central hub towards one of the outlying modules. It was a top-of-the-line Bombay vehicle, entirely encased in glasstic. A diamond-drill was all that could crack it… though that didn’t stop Randall from nervously glancing up at the exposed pit of endless black sky.

“I’m listening,” he said.

“If you want to get in his good graces, be sure to do this.”

“Do what?”

“Greet him in Latin.”

Randall blinked. “What?”

Elizabeth laughed, her green eyes glittering. “You heard me. Greet him in Latin. And you might want to download the entire language when you get a chance.”

The toughest thing about meeting someone new was not knowing their sense of humor. Randall had met Officer Carlo ten minutes ago. She seemed friendly enough, polite, with a natural way of putting him at ease as she explained the inner workings of Tanabata Colony. But his instinct was to think she was joking about this. Who on Earth spoke Latin anymore? And what did that have to do with life on Luna?

So he smiled. “I’ll download whatever you people want me to. I’m just happy to be here.”

“It’s not a requirement,” Elizabeth said, though her tone said the rest. Randall had worked for two major corporations on Earth before receiving his colony visa. Each had their own under-the-table rules for getting in good with the higher-ups. For the Tokyo corporation it was to play golf with the big wigs (and be sure to lose.) For the North Carolina company, it was playing tennis.

Here on the moon, it was learning Latin. Oh well.

Randall could see the module ahead of them. The globular structure looked like a precise arrangement of linked igloos, the exterior shells glossy with photovoltaic film to convert sunlight into usable energy.

Randall’s pulse quickened. He felt giddy.

The whole experience thus far was proving like a dream, anyway. His eyes continually strayed back to the horizon through the buggy windows. It was so close here! Randall felt unexpectedly stirred by the sharp contrast of the powdery grey surface with the pure blackness of space.

The module grew closer, and soon they were passing into its pressurized gateway.

Elizabeth parked the buggy next to several others. She looked at Randall.

“Ready?”

He nodded, blotted his hands dry on his pants.

“Wait,” he said as he stepped out into the frigid parking garage. “How do you say ‘hello’ in Latin?”

“Salve.”

The office smelled of cherry blossoms.

It was so pungent that at first Randall thought it was artificial scent piped through the room’s ventilation system. Then he saw the cherry blossom trees sprouting like lavender starbursts from the room’s garden, water swirling in the dreamlike slowness of low-G in their vats.

Tanabata Colony ran under the auspices of a governor and nine-member elected council, with the main office located at the community’s central hub. In an expressed effort to avoid a bureaucratic caste, the councilors spent most of their time in the five colonist modules that extended from the center like the points of a star.

Governor Cyrus Markowicz lived in North Module. A short, robust man with graying hair, Cyrus leapt up from behind a desk as soon as Randall entered the suite. “Randall McCallister!”

Randall smiled. “Salve.”

“Salve to you!” Cyrus said, and shook his hand vigorously. “Cedant armae togae!”

For a horrible moment, Randall feared the great man was going to attempt an actual conversation in the dead language. Instead, the governor said, “I’m Cyrus Markowicz.”

“An honor to meet you, sir.”

“Your trip was pleasant?”

“It was.” The space elevator ride had been the worst part; an ascent that never seemed to end. The actual flight, once he had reached the docked ship, was an exciting rush.

“Let’s sit down at the garden here.” Cyrus led the way to the benches and pink foliage.

Randall felt his mind working swiftly, processing a thousand things at once. He realized that nothing so far was what he had expected. This surprised him; he had thirsted for a lunar posting since a child in New Hampshire. Growing up in that hilly country, he often sat with the stars bright above him – brighter and larger than anywhere else he’d ever known – and imagined living up here. Luna had two colonies already at the time: a subterranean camp for regolith processing, and the Shackleton base at the lunar south pole where sunlight was nearly perpetual. The two places formed a yin-yang in the public consciousness: One of darkness, one of light. Photos of both were as well-known as the Mona Lisa.

Tanabata became the newest, and therefore most cutting-edge, of the frontier colonies when Randall was finishing college. It was a glossy flower sprouting petals from the powdery lunar desert. Glasstic greenhouses flanked the roads connecting the modules to the central body, and buggies drove about like industrious beetles en route to the three colony mining camps.

Or was it four?

Randall’s heart quickened in his neck. A peculiar panic swarmed over him; what an overeducated friend of his back home would have called the imp of the perverse. He imagined turning to Governor Markowicz and confessing the real reason behind his arrival here, the investigation he must do, and the deadline which went along with it.

“So?” Cyrus asked.

Randall forced a new smile. “Sorry?”

“I said, how do you like our little frontier?”

“I love it, sir.”

Cyrus held up his hands. “Please, stop with the ‘sir’ stuff, okay? We have no monarchies up here. No plutocracies, no feudal states. This is the freshest republic in three hundred years. I would ordinarily tell you to call me Mr. Markowicz, but for some reason I keep forgetting your last name… so it wouldn’t be very fair to insist you call me by mine. I call you Randall, you call me Cyrus. Got it?”

“Got it. Cyrus.”

“There! Welcome aboard to the officer core of Tanabata.”

“Thank you.”

The governor breathed deeply of the sweet air, and Randall shot Elizabeth a glance. She nodded approvingly.

“What do you think of my office?” Cyrus asked.

Randall made a show of looking around. As he did, he noticed a few things he hadn’t before; on the governor’s desk were some decidedly odd paperweights. One looked like the inner workings of an elaborate timepiece, with a dozen gears interlocking in mechanical harmony. The other was a strange metal bird with a pilot’s cabin dug into its feathered back.

Cyrus followed his gaze. “Ah! That device with gears is an accurate replica of the Antikithera mechanism, discovered off the coast of Greece in 1901.”

“I’ve heard about,” Randall nodded. “A relic of anachronistic complexity from two thousand years ago. One of the great mysteries of archaeology. What about the mechanical bird there?”

“The Archytas plane.”

“Excuse me?”

Cyrus grinned. “In 400 BC, a Greek inventor named Archytas designed and built a steam-powered aircraft. You can look it up for yourself. It could launch, fly, and land under the controls of a pilot. Historians hate it since it screws up all their notions of when flight was invented. And they also hate the manuscripts recovered from the lava-sealed library at Herculaneam, which shows that Archytas’ invention was improved upon by later generations.”

Cyrus stared at the toy aircraft as if entranced. His chubby cheeks quivered. Half a minute passed, and then Cyrus seemed to remember himself. “Whenever I welcome a new employee to the colony, I like to perform a small ritual. Would you indulge me? I want us all to take a moment to stare into the pool over here.” He stood and ambled to the fountain. “A moment of meditation, if you like. You too, Elizabeth. Everyone stare into the water.”

The newsclips back on Earth liked to characterize Cyrus as an eccentric.

They have no idea, Randall found himself thinking.

He looked down into the water with the others.

At first it was difficult to see his reflection, because he found himself transfixed by the surreal laziness in which the water was flowing. In the low gravity, it spilled down from flower-shaped spouts like melting gelatin. Earthly water was a foaming torrent by contrast. The effect was incredibly disorienting.

Cyrus laughed beside him. “I think our new employee is hypnotized already!”

Elizabeth chuckled. Randall felt himself blushing.

As the merriment died, he forced himself to look away from the magical eddies of the fountain and found his reflection against the black basalt stone.

“Out of the past,” Cyrus whispered beside him, “And up to the stars.”

Randall stared.

“Out of the past and up to the stars,” Elizabeth repeated.

Randall swallowed hard. He felt his lips moving, though his voice seemed very far away.

A surge of delight and fear coursed through him. He wanted to be here, had wanted it so badly for so long, that now everything seemed like a dream he might awaken from.

And yet …

I’m here to betray these nice people, he thought in shame.

He was assigned officer’s quarters in Camp 3, where to his astonishment the miners threw him a welcome party. He had expected a group of grizzled, sweaty ruffians scoffing at a fresh-fish outsider; instead he found a diverse group of neat-looking men and women who rotated short, intensive shifts at the Helium 3 mines, and spent the rest of their time divided between dorm and module library.

“We each have to make a pie,” explained the supervising miner, a lithe dark fellow named Srikumar.

Randall blinked. “Apple?”

“History. Math. Literature. Philosophy. Tanabata requires everyone pass through a curriculum and earn badges. You can shape your own curriculum, but the founding mandate is that we must improve ourselves through study.”

He handed Randall a booklet of courses.

Randall twirled it around in his hands. “If you fail a course, do they space you?”

Srikumar grinned. “It’s not about the grades. The High Council’s masthead asks that we ‘enhance our understanding of the universe and of where we’ve come from.’.”

“Sounds good.”

“Does it? When I first got here, I worried I had joined up with a cult!”

Randall shrugged. “Tanabata has one of the most celebrated Constitutions in history. A Bill of Rights ensuring personal freedom, and a masthead bent on promoting the best in the species. The whole Latin thing is a little strange, but it’s not like we’re sacrificing goats.”

In the camp office, Srikumar called up a display map of the colony and began explaining the daily schedule of the camp. Everyone had a highly specialized role to fill: botanists toiled in the roadside greenhouses, replovat engineers minded the vat-grown foods, and technicians scurried around to inspect the webwork of air filtration, cables, and power supply stations. There was even a small think-tank which paid mind to everything from potential meteor impacts to the monitoring of solar radiation levels.

But the colony’s lifeblood was the mining. Regolith for oxygen, Helium 3 and ore for industrial exports.

“The mining operations run pretty smoothly, aside from constant problems with the drillers and bots,” Srikumar said.

“The lunar dust, right?”

The miner nodded. “It gets into everything. Solar panels have to be cleaned twice a day.”

Phrasing his question carefully, Randall asked, “And the buggies?”

“Tough, but they do break down.”

Randall remembered the secret images he had seen of the moonbuggy routes. Lunar dust left tracks, and though someone up here was trying very hard to conceal it, it was clear to the governments of Earth that some Tanabata citizens were straying off of their expected routes.

Outliers, the government official had called them.

The waiting list for a lunar visa had half a billion places. Randall had applied, of course, while in college. Years later while working for a North Carolina security firm, he had been approached by a government agent named Velez. The man took over one of the firm’s offices for their meeting. Randall sat, intrigued, while Velez thumbed through his personal file and complimented him on his exemplary record.

So you want to go to the moon? Velez asked.

With all my heart, Randall replied.

Velez gave him a hard stare. Then as of this moment, you work for us.

The deal was simple. Randall would be bumped to the front of the line, and would go to work for Cyrus’s community. He would immerse himself into their peculiar little culture. And he would investigate rumors of a secret camp—a fourth camp—which seemed to be attracting an illicit pilgrimage.

Technically, it was suspected tax evasion that lay behind the government’s concern. But Randall perceived a bubbling cauldron of other fears motivating the investigation.

He had seen the images. A multi-spectrum analysis of the lunar surface clearly showing that some colonists, the outliers, were making occasional journeys into the mountains along the major crater’s rim—the rockier terrain north of the colony where tracks evaporated.

When Randall suggested that perhaps the strange excursions were no more mysterious than an Earthly citizen going for a hike into remote regions, Velez had glared.

“We know they’re up to something,” the man hissed. “You find out what.”

Four months on Tanabata passed before Randall had his opportunity.

Earth had ordered him to run silent for the first six months or until he had something to report; no doubt the colony’s High Council would be closely watching all new recruits for at least that long. So Randall immersed himself in colony life. He transformed his assigned quarters into a real home with downloadable posters and rapid processor knick-knacks for his shelves. Every day he dined in the central hub, allowing him to rub elbows with colonists from the other modules. Each module operated as an island in an archipelago, geographically separated yet within easy reach and united by the same culture.

“It’s like the ancient Greeks!” Cyrus told him at his first review in the man’s office. It was early December, and the office had come to reflect that; the walls displayed digital images of white snow and icy forests. Even the cherry blossoms were no longer in bloom.

Between bites of cave-grown oysters, Cyrus explained himself. “Greece became the greatest civilization of the ancient world because of its diversity. Each city-state was geographically isolated from one another. Athens, Sparta, Delphi, Argos, each inhabited by a people who spoke Greek, who celebrated Greek culture, who shared a common history and purpose, but who were able to develop uniquely!”

Randall smiled politely.

His first review was excellent. Cyrus said the council was impressed with how quickly Randall had taken to everything and everyone (he had already earned a reputation for being a charismatic and skilled team-player for the hub’s monthly game of capture-the-flag, done in the sports dome and featuring a few technological upgrades from the game he had known in his youth on Earth.)

In particular, the review highlighted Randall’s keen memory, and how he knew when and where to find everyone … even without a neural uplink to the colony positioning system.

“I think you know everyone’s daily routine by heart!” Cyrus exclaimed merrily.

They couldn’t know the real reason he was honing this talent.

Four months in, he knew the daily comings and goings of the council so well that he was able to stealthily enter their quarters when they were away. He scoured for clues to the alleged fourth camp. Cracking their computers was an easy matter for his high-level decryption jacks. Within one week, he had combed through all nine councilor’s personal messages, folders, files, and infocubes.

He discovered nothing of relevance. Only the oily sensation of being a spy among friends, working for invisible powers he was starting to disbelieve in. Even during planet-rise, that shockingly blue orb seemed a mere visual ornament— no more real than Cyrus’ faux winter panorama.

But that wasn’t the way to look at things. In two months, emissaries would come to the colony, disguised perhaps as contractors or reporters. They would arrange a meeting with him. They would ask him what he had learned. If his answers didn’t satisfy, they reserved the right to take him back to Earth … back down the gravity well.

There was only one thing to do.

For the first time since his arrival, Randall called out sick from his shift at the mine. Then he used one of his nifty espionage tools—an electromagnetic wrench—to disable his personal transmitter and set up a fake signal in his quarters.

Hastily, he climbed into his bio-suit, snapped on an oxygen cylinder, stocked up on three emergency rebreathers, and set out on foot for the mountains.

There was no other way to do it. While he certainly had access to the buggies, he couldn’t use them while he was supposed to be sick in bed. Besides, the buggies had transponder tags which automatically transmitted their location. A secret spymobile they were not.

Randall skipped along in the low-G, a form of locomotion linked to happy thoughts back on Terra. Here it was simply a convenient way of covering ground quickly. When he reached the deep shadows of the crater’s rim and began climbing the rise, Randall was stricken with the eerie sensation of being a prehistoric hunter heading into the desolate wilds for food.

That sensation stayed with him as he climbed. Halfway up he stopped to catch his breath and readjust his suit’s oxygen mixture. The suit dials were already blanketed by the irritating lunar dust. Up close against the woven texture of his gloves, the stuff looked like granules of crumbled glass… a less-than-reassuring thought.

From this distance, the colony crater was a milky sea. The lights of Tanabata were bioluminescent algae on that creamy surface.

Keep moving, he told himself, aware of how low his air already was. If and when his oxygen tapped out, he had the rebreathers. They could recycle his air for a time. Not long, but for a time.

Keep moving.

Down the other side of the mountain he spotted a narrow ravine as black as an inkwell. The satellite images of the outlier trails evaporated here. Cold lunar rock in the crevices, rarely touched by the sun. All porous boulders and scree, remnants of ancient lava flows that cooled and crumbled eons ago. In a way, it reminded him of the twelve-thousand-foot ascent up Mount Fuji which he had done while in Japan; like an ant crawling up the ancient bones of long-extinct animal.

The moon is just one percent the mass of Earth, Randall thought, panting as he slipped and slid his way down the mountain’s far side. One percent the mass, and I still feel like an ant.

At the foot of the mountain, Randall stopped. He never suffered from phobias, least of all of the dark. But the lightless ravine was so deep that even sunlight never fully snaked down here—and the surface temperature had plummeted fifty degrees with a single step into that darkness. There might easily be water-ice there.

Was that the reason for the colonists’ secret pilgrimage? Frozen deposits were rare on the moon; between the three colonies, only a dozen ice fields had been found. A vast deposit of water would affect prices dramatically. It would also fuel political concerns that the colonies were plotting to achieve independence.

He clicked on his flashlight.

No ice glinted in the beam’s white cone. Just lots of very jagged, knife-like terrain.

Randall crept along the lip of the ravine for several minutes, until his oxygen gave out with a pressurized hiss. His heart squeezed in dread. Working quickly, he installed the first of his three rebreathers to the front of his suit and made sure it was functioning.

It was time to head back.

He pulled himself out of the ravine’s ledge.

At first, it was like someone had grabbed him by the leg and was trying to yank him back down. The thought set him panicking, and he pulled harder against his attacker. The resistance loosened. He heard his suit tear against the rocks —only rocks—which were clawing his suit. Then his leg was cold, and his air expelling out into the void.

It was the easiest mistake to make, so every bio-suit contained adhesive patches for such an eventuality. But in his panic Randall fell back into the ravine, and he couldn’t see his bio-suit pockets well enough to find the patches.

Calm yourself! he thought. His thoughts were like a wild burst of ravens, squawking and beating their wings in his skull.

Cognizant of the escaping pressure and air, Randall moved with deliberate care. His bulky gloves found the correct pocket. He was able to slip out a patch, position it over the tear in his leg, and press it firmly in place.

Black dots swam before his eyes. He breathed deeply.

If you pass out …

Gradually his vision returned to normal. He looked for another place to climb up.

Six minutes left on the rebreather. Only two others in reserve.

Searching the ravine lip for a good handhold, he realized the depth of his error. Going down the mountain hadn’t been especially difficult because the jagged terrain was only a problem for someone going up; like porcupine quills at rest from one angle, and painfully apparent from the opposite.

Randall found a few spots he might be able to use. But if he tore his suit again …

One minute. The rebreather was already sending a quiet ping of alarm to announce its imminent death.

Randall shivered. He would have to radio the colony for help. They could send an emergency shuttle for him. Back inside, they would want to know why he was down here.

What could he say? Yes, I played hooky because I wanted to go hiking? I was so eager for it that I doctored up a false beacon, so you’d all think I was still in bed! Oh, and I even disabled my own transmitter! Ah, the cleverness of me!

His fingers touched his radio. He shook his head, disgusted with himself and the duty he had been assigned to.

Before he could make the call, the ground shivered.

Like a mythic beast, the buggy rounded the mountain’s base. The headlights burned like cold fire as it made straight for his direction.

Randall sprang up.

His headset radio crackled. “Randall? This is Elizabeth.”

The vehicle’s headlights cast him in piercing gold light. There was something astonishing and wonderful about seeing the vehicle coming down this lifeless ravine. For billions of years the moon had slept in silence, and now the warmth and sound and drama of humanity had arrived!

He squinted and shielded his face. A hasty lie formed in his mouth, crept out to his lips.

The buggy pulled alongside him. Within the glasstic windows, Randall could see Elizabeth and Cyrus.

“Come in,” Cyrus said, looking grim. “We have something to show you.”

At first, Randall could see nothing. The buggy’s headlights revealed a narrow cone of the ravine, too narrow to make out much detail. The wheels jostled violently, kicking lunar dust out in billowy plumes behind them. The ravine walls pressed close on both sides.

Inside the buggy, the silence was torture. Randall tried breaking it twice, but found both his companions non-responsive and grave-faced. His pulse was a jackhammer in his neck.

Elizabeth drove, and she expertly rounded a large mound without reducing her speed.

“Have you explored here for ice?” Randall asked.

No one replied. The silence grew like the threat of thunder in his head.

Then, Elizabeth turned to him. “Snap on another oxygen cylinder. They’re in the box under your seat.”

“Where are we going?”

Instead of answering, Cyrus said, “We know why you were sent here, Randall.”

Randall felt like shrinking away through the microscopic fissures of the vehicle.

“Come on,” Elizabeth said, tugging at him.

“Are you going to kill me?”

The expression of astonishment on both their faces was priceless.

“Stop being an idiot,” Cyrus snapped. Elizabeth braked the buggy, and then they were all stepping outside. She inspected his suit’s integrity.

“Watch your step,” she cautioned. “Even in the low-G, you can easily break your ankle on this jagged surface.”

Randall clicked his flashlight on, illuminating the sharp rocks at their feet. He swung the flashlight back at the jeep to reveal its translucent glasstic wheels.

“If you people come out this way, why not smooth the path here?”

“We’d need to bring out heavy bots. No way to keep that secret.”

“So you are doing something illegal!”

Elizabeth sighed. “Randall …”

“Yes, I was sent out here to investigate what you people were doing,” Randall said, almost dizzy with the confession. “But I love Tanabata. I have wanted to be here, on the Moon, for as long as I can remember! My only ticket was to accept their offer and they expect me to do my job. There are people who worry about secret weapons research going on here. Biological experiments conducted where no watchful eye can monitor.”

Elizabeth’s face flushed angrily behind her faceplate. “Those watchful eyes couldn’t possibly understand what’s up here. They would never appreciate the significance.”

“Of what?”

Cyrus and Elizabeth looked at each other.

“When did people first walk on Luna?” the governor asked.

“1969,” Randall said automatically.

“And for the three years afterwards, we made a half dozen visits. Then we gave up on the moon. Until the lunar program was renewed, our last visit was 1972! I want you to think of that when you look at what we have to show you.”

Randall shrugged. “I don’t understand.”

“What he’s saying,” Elizabeth cut in, “Is that we found something of incredible significance here.”

“Alien civilizations?”

“Not at all. Something far, far more important than that.”

For the buggy, the next hundred paces would have been impossible. The ravine was too narrow, littered with strange outcroppings. Their flashlight beams swung in front of them. Something metallic glinted ahead.

Randall’s breath was fogging his faceplate. He adjusted his suit mixture and the haze cleared.

His beam suddenly painted a bright light on dull metal. There was a craft, several times larger than the buggy, sitting lopsidedly in the ravine. Unusual patterns were pressed into its hull, exotic and yet familiar. They looked like … exactly like …

Eagle feathers.

Randall stopped. The blood drained from his face.

“That’s …”

Cyrus cradled him around the shoulder. “We know. I was waiting for the right time to show you.”

“But you said this had nothing to do with aliens!”

Cyrus and Elizabeth exchanged glances. Elizabeth shook her head and said, “It doesn’t Randall.”

Randall’s mind whirled. “But … I don’t …”

“Look closely at it. Go ahead. You’ll see your answer soon enough.”

He obliged. His flashlight illuminated the craft as he encroached, dispelling the shadows from the raised feathery patterns. It was an oblong construction with hawk-like feet, carved of the same amber-colored metal as the rest of it. There were narrow black windows caked in moondust, and Randall hopped over to one, brushed the thick dust away, and shone his light inside.

Four skeletons were seated in ornate chairs. It was unlike any control room Randall had ever seen, but the skeletons were unquestionably human. Dull grey togas clad their frozen bones.

Randall stumbled back from the craft, letting out an astonished cry.

On the craft’s lower half, Latin letters met his gaze.

“Don’t you see?” Cyrus began excitedly.

“But … but …”

Elizabeth was smiling now. “The dream to reach Luna and step into space doesn’t just belong to our century. The Romans tried it … tried it and succeeded. They built this craft with all their engineering skill, they figured out a way to launch it into space. They made it airtight, and with a smelting process we don’t understand. These four people are the first astronauts in history.”

“What?”

“They were killed not long after leaving Earth’s atmosphere,” Cyrus explained. “Our people have confirmed that this vessel couldn’t withstand solar radiation. Our bold travelers would have died during the first day of their voyage. Their ship must have drifted towards the Arcadia of their legends, crashing in this ravine without any human eye to rejoice in the achievement. These people had brought some food and water, and scrolls detailing the flight and personal histories. But even if the radiation didn’t kill them, the lack of air would have in time… though they had attempted to thwart that by bringing plants!”

Randall shook his head violently. “That’s not possible.”

Elizabeth took his gloved hands into her own. “Remember the Archytas plane! Steam-powered flight invented twenty-four hundred years ago, and improved upon by later Greeks and Romans. Think of the technological progress we’ve made in the last fifty years. Rome was around for seven hundred. That proved ample time for them to create planes which could reach great altitude … planes which were seen and recorded in the writings and hieroglyphs of other cultures. Eventually, they must have piggybacked this spacecraft onto a high-altitude plane and send it off towards the moon.”

“Then why wasn’t the moon fully colonized?!”

“That’s exactly what people might have said about us,” Cyrus said reproachfully, “We touched the moon and then gave up by 1972! During our absence, we flirted with global wars and economic collapse. We put our dreams of space exploration away for so long. The same thing happened with the Romans! They had no military need for flight; their ground legions were perfectly capable of conquering Rome’s enemies, and since no other civilization possessed a rival air force, flight was quickly seen as an unjustifiable expense. Just like Heron of Alexandria’s steam engines. He wanted to build trains that ran on steam two millennia ago, but do you know what political rulers of the time said to him when he pitched his idea?”

Randall shook his head.

“They asked him what would happen to all the slaves if trains became commonplace!” Cyrus threw up his hands. “Look it up! Fears of ruining a slave-based economy caused the idea of train travel to be scrapped! The same thing must have happened with flight and space exploration. After the initial awe of their invention faded, Rome didn’t see the point in continuing. It could have happened to us too, and a future civilization might be equally astonished to learn that a Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked here!”

The craft stood like a silent, keeled over guardian.

“We went to the moon and then abandoned the dream.” Cyrus jabbed a finger at the ship. “They must have done the same. Maybe when the ship didn’t return, they grew frightened. Maybe they thought they had pissed off the gods! If only they could have realized the impact it would have on us, two thousand years later!”

They stood together, beholding the astonishing handiwork of unremembered lives. Randall touched the hull gently.

Randall found his voice. “Why not tell the world?”

“In time. For us at Tanabata, this is a holy journey. Soon enough Earth will shine a blinding spotlight here, stealing these bodies from their tomb. Blowtorches, microscopes, drills!” Cyrus stopped, his face angry.

Elizabeth’s green eyes glinted. “For now, this belongs to us. We won’t retreat this time. It is ours to admire and inspire, before they come to dissect and argue!”

“They?”

“The Earthlings.” She spoke the word as if it was infinitely alien, distasteful, and antiquated. “The tribe that we graduated from, Randall. Their suspicions and wars and politics, their cut-throat plans and paranoia! Look around you. We are on a new beachhead. We are not Earthlings any longer. They don’t control the fate of our species any longer like selfish gods hoarding Olympus to themselves.”

“We’re Lunars,” Randall said, trying out the word.

“No, Randall. We are titans, beholden not to a place but to an idea and to each other.”

He swallowed, heart dancing wildly. “Titans.”

“In charge of our own destinies. Willing to make leaps forward. Daring to disturb the universe, as these astronauts did before us.”

“Out of the past,” Cyrus whispered, and two voices answered him.

Brian Trent's work has appeared in over 100 publications including The Humanist, Boston Literary Magazine, Clarkesworld, Electric Velocipede, Bewildering Stories, Dreams & Nightmares,The Copperfield Review, Strange Horizons, OG Speculative Fiction, and many others. He is also the author of the historical novels Lady Hypatia and Never Grow Old. His website is www.briantrent.com.