We waited for about an hour and a half to get the command's reply from Ackermann and spent the time by preparing our suits.
"Command sends their congratulations. You're to proceed with the recovery."
Everything was dead silent as I stepped on the surface of the Moon. I tried to think of something excessively inspiring to say, but that those times were already over. With Carver, we assembled the rover and after planting our flag next to our spacecraft, we drove off. As we drove across the surface, I saw what I thought was a flash, like a glare reflected by something metallic in the far distance. Since it was fairly common to see flashes of light because of an interesting physical phenomenon caused by the space radiation interacting with our eyes, I didn't give it much thought and soon forgot about it.
After driving for a couple of hours, we reached the satellite – or what was left of it. We immediately noticed that something wasn't right. There were dozens of footprints around the probe, leading to a set of two tracks, dragging out into the distance.
"What the hell is this?!" asked Carver in disbelief.
"I don't know, but it seems that somebody got what we came for before us," I replied.
Both the tracks and the footprints were different than ours. Whoever took the data wasn't here under the American flag. As I expected, we didn't find the data box. We found the part where it was supposed to be, but it was missing. Luckily for us, we were just in contact with Ackermann, so we reached out to him to describe our findings.
"This doesn't make any sense. Who would take it? Russians? They don't even have a lunar program! Even if somebody took it, how could we not be aware of that? How can the Russians land on the Moon without us noticing?" he responded.
"As far as we know, the Russians have no idea that we are here, you know," said Carver over the radio.
"We're going to follow the trail" I cut off their conversation.
"Are you guys sure about this?" asked Ackermann.
"Hell, I'm not sure about this. We're clearly missing something here. But I'll do as you say, cap," responded Carver.
"Yes. If whatever was on that probe was so important for two countries to send people here to retrieve it, we have to find out what happened to it," I replied.
"Copy that Charon. I'll relay your whereabouts to command as soon as I can. Be careful out there."
Our oxygen was about at half capacity now, but we moved on with hopes of solving this mystery.
It wasn't long until I saw something in the distance. As we got closer, I realized that it was a spacecraft. Its design was different than ours and it was decorated with a flag of the Soviet Union. I couldn't explain why, but I felt that something was really odd about the spacecraft. If there really was Russians with us on the Moon, they would have picked up our comms long ago, so there wasn't a point in hiding.
"To the unidentified Soviet lander, this is the crew of Dawnbreaker, please respond. We know you're here, we have you in sight."
Nothing.
We attempted to contact them several times again in both Russian and English but always received only silence in response. We got closer and I realized why I found the spacecraft odd before. It looked like it had been there for a while. We didn't see much of the interior through the small windows, which had been covered with something from the inside.
"Our air is running low and I don't like this Miller. We should really head back now," said Carver with clear uneasiness in his voice.
"I know, but we have to find out what's going on here."
It took some time until we figured out a way to open the airlock. No one was home. The inside was a mess. The interior was splattered with brownish-red fluid, presumably contents of one of the many opened food packages lying on the floor. Or was it …? No. I quickly pushed that thought out of my head.
It was a two-seater craft. There was a small number of leftover supplies and samples, but no signs of the satellite's black box. There was a space suit hanged on the wall near the airlock. Two occupants, and one space suit with a clearly missing name tag. We both quickly realized that the other one must still be out there somewhere – along with its occupant. At this point, we were really low on oxygen, so we rushed to get back to our spacecraft. As we reached Charon with the last bits of oxygen in our suits, I realized something.
"Tell me, Carver, was it just me or did we not pass the wreckage on our way back?" I asked.
"Fuck. Don't even mention it. It wasn't there, that's right."
We shared our intriguing discovery with Ackermann later, and he was as surprised as was command when he informed them in turn. That night I took a watch for the first four hours. It wasn't really a night since the sun was still shining, but for the sake of timekeeping, we referred to the time when we slept at night.
When it was finally my turn to sleep, I had a dream about following the flash that I saw the previous day. I walked on and on until I found the same space suit from the Russian craft just lying there, in the dust. The limbs were twisted and contorted in gruesome ways, but it was clear that someone or something was inside that suit. I approached and slowly began opening the sunshield that obscured the inside of the helmet. I looked in terror, as I saw the inside. It was my face, covered with brownish-red blood. In place of eyes, there were only two gaping holes.
The next day we started picking up something on an unused channel of our radio. It was a faint signal coming from somewhere in the crater. We tried to patch it to the speakers, but it didn't make any sense. It was just a repeating sound resembling a person vocalizing the sound of a single letter or vowel but stretched to about 3 seconds followed by an equally long pause. It was very distorted, and it clearly wasn't a loop, since each sound was just slightly different than the previous one.
We ate, and once again prepared for the moonwalk. It was darker than the other day. The sun was still shining, but it was steadily creeping its way under the horizon. We followed the source of the signal for about an hour when we found something lying in the dust in front of us. I tensed as I looked closer and found out what it was.
It was a space suit.
The same as the one in the Russian lander.
"Well, it looks like we found our missing friend." Said Carver with disbelief.
I didn't say anything. I simply jumped off the rover, and slowly, silently approached the suit.
"What are you doing Miller?" continued Carver.
Just as I was about to open the sunshield with my shaking hands, the suit came alive and grabbed my hand. With the sound traveling through our suits, I heard a weak "Pomogite" – meaning help in Russian.
We carried him to our lander. The patch on his suit revealed his identity as "Tarkov". He was in shock and hypoxia. I don't know how long or why he was just lying there but he was lucky to be alive. For the next couple of hours, he fell in and out of consciousness. He eventually woke up. Our Russian was bad but luckily, he spoke English enough for us to understand each other. He didn't remember why he was there, what had happened to him and his crew or what his mission was. When I looked out of the window, I realized that our flag was gone. There were no footprints, it looked like as if it simply vanished. At this point, each one of us was really concerned, and we asked to terminate the mission. The command refused, explaining that the recovery of the satellite's data was of paramount importance. We decided to continue our search tomorrow and went to sleep.
I again had the same nightmare as the day before. I woke up terrified and drenched in sweat. I saw Tarkov standing by the window and looking out. He then walked over to Carver, and just stood there, looking at him while he slept for about a minute or two. Silently, I asked him:
"Tarkov, what are you doing?"
but he just mumbled something like "them" or "when" and lied down. I didn't sleep for the rest of the night, and I kept an eye on him, but nothing interesting happened.