Opportunity

Reconnaissance

Prompt profile: SpeculativeFiction 

Prompt: NASA's huge rocket Artemis is eventually launched and goes into orbit around the moon. Everything looks promising until... it fails to reappear on the other side. Write a short story describing what happened to Artemis.

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G16 was currently stationed behind the moon of a planet, but unlike his usual missions, there had been no direct fighting. Perfectly redirecting an asteroid that weighed several tons had been his only serious task so far, since shooting down one of their satellites had been too easy. Beyond that, his orders had been to just watch.

Stay hidden.

Monitor the planet- inside and out.

Report to the commander if anything unexpected happens.

G16 had been trained never to feel any emotion regarding his missions, but after being stuck in his ship for years on surveillance duty, he had to admit, he had started getting attached to the civilization that inhabited the tiny planet he watched. They looked so frail and helpless from his point of view, unable to stop a disaster that they knew was heading their way several years in advance. Their own planet was crumbling around them, not that they helped, and he knew that even if they somehow found a way to divert the asteroid, soon enough they would destroy their own home.

They couldn't save themselves, but still, they refused help. The asteroid had simply been a way to speed up the process, in the hopes that they could realize how close they were to the tipping points that no civilization ever recovered from.

G16 had never met the commander, but he knew his superior was somewhere below, trying to negotiate a deal that would add earth to the ever-growing intergalactic empire being built back at the Capital. Owing to the fact that he had not been given orders to leave yet, G16 presumed the humans had turned down the commander's offer, at least for now.

Currently, G16 had been asked to keep an eye on a new satellite that had been launched. G16's ship floated in the shadow of earth's moon, completely hidden from them, aided by the fact that it was tidally locked onto its planet so only one side of it was visible from below. The new satellite, however, had been sent to orbit around the moon, which would normally not have been a worry for G16 since earth's cameras could only detect light limited to specific wavelengths. Staying undetected required fuel, and G16 had been using rare minerals on the planet's moon to keep his ship afloat.

He struggled with the controls, trying to keep his ship in flight over the orbiting satellite. It was primitive technology, but there was a chance it could detect the differences in densities under the moon's surface caused by his mining. That discovery would not disclose his presence instantly, but if the humans found out how to properly utilize the minerals he had been drilling, it could suddenly skyrocket their rate of progress by decades, which would ultimately render this entire mission useless.

"Call the commander," G16 said to the onboard ship AI. "We've got a serious problem."