TQB Base, Colorado – USA
Jeffrey Diamantz still felt it a little surreal to be working inside a mountain. He was walking into what his team called ‘the pit’. It was a room that looked like an auditorium. There were four levels, ending at the bottom with a large table full of monitors built into the table itself. All of them were touch sensitive with large high-definition screens across the wall at the front.
Basically this was the most up-to-date version of a space focused command center you might want.
There were three sets of work areas on each side of the main aisle as you went down the three levels. The top level was for supplies along with food and drinks. Almost like someone expected there to be situations when no one would leave the room for any length of time.
At this particular moment, nothing was operational. Tom Billings, who headed the I.T. department, hadn’t wired up the eighteen individual computer connections yet. That was scheduled for this afternoon.
Still the large meeting table was good to be used and allowed them to view some of the data they were receiving from their observation satellites and other home-built devices they had stationed between earth and the moon.
Like moon-droid-one.
Jeffrey laid his coffee down on the table and opened his folders to review the latest information.
He pulled out the report on moon-droid-one and reviewed what it had done in the last twelve hours. The device was actually a twenty-four-volt adult sized dune-buggy with gear installed all over it. Shipped up on their first cargo container and using one of Team BMW’s power units they had it driving all over the dark side of the moon. Not that it was dark, but it was the side not seen from earth.
Fortunately, the team was able to find and override the detection units that the U.S. had on the moon and on that side facing out towards space.
Not too many people knew that some of the earlier rockets with nuclear warheads were designed to go into space. You can’t hit what you don’t know about, so the U.S. had orbiting detection satellites as well.
Kind of makes it hard to build a moon base if you’re under the watchful gaze of Uncle Sam.
The dune-buggy had worked its way around a couple of larger craters and had been taking samples. Jeffrey looked over at the top-down pictures their own satellite had taken and then back at the report. He looked down to see that Bobcat had been in control of the dune-buggy for an hour.
Well, that explained the donuts Jeffrey could see on the Moon’s surface.
He needed to tell Bobcat to take Shelly up for a few hours to burn some energy out of his system.
He heard a few more people coming down the hallway, and then William’s booming laugh, it seemed that Team BMW was arriving.
Sure enough, seconds later the three guys entered with Marcus protesting. “That isn’t what I said!”
