Moon Disaster

A new disaster threatens to destroy us.

I just couldn't believe what is happening, after all, that we have come through, could this be our fate, to meet our end by an invisible alien bug. As I was on the first pod to arrive here, I was with all of the people that died at mission control headquarters, two of them lived in the Happy Valley pod here with me and had a seven-year-old son they left behind so I took him under my wing as I had no children and felt saddened by his loss. The next step was to scatter the pods all over the planet and up in the sky, when these bugs are in enormous numbers they resemble a thin dust cloud but when scattered they can't be detected.
As our population has grown to a stage that we can't evacuate them all now so we need to by time to find a way to deal with these deadly bugs. By spreading our population all over is a start, if we don't and seeing the speed that these things work, our population could be wiped out within twelve months.
All was quiet for two weeks then the bugs detected one of our farming communities living in a ground village, in another two weeks all six hundred and twenty-five we dead and of course, the plague of these space bugs grew even larger.
They had travelled over nine hundred miles northeast in their last deadly attack, so which way will they go next, that is the question. All of the mission control leaders who were now spread all over the place came up with a plan, to send out Bee drones to track them as while visible in numbers. It worked so pods would just move out of their way or remove ground communities that we're in danger.

Then after twelve weeks they just disappeared as the swarms broke up. Then a week later they struck again in one of our pod communities flying high in the sky and once again all we're killed in just weeks even though this pod had a sophisticated air filtering system which was designed to stop them entering Mission controls the next plan was to create a vaccine and immunise everyone against this alien super big, by how to do this and how long will it take?
The plan was to send a two-man team back to the place where these bugs came from, the creatures that were feeding on them must have a unity to these bugs so we need to capture that. The high-speed pod used last time will take these brave volunteers, once they locate these flying monsters they will release hundreds of Bee drones fitted with hairy bristles to collect many internal fluids as they fly through them.Meantime one mission control pod has set up twelve test centres with thousands of these bugs in each they have tried every kind of drug to contain them but without success.
The plan now is to strip the drone Bees of all the material from each hair separately, document it then tests each one in the containers. The drone Bees had the vision of their journey through the flying monsters so the location of the effective substance could be identified for future trips.The alien bugs continued to destroy our people and within twenty months over eleven million people had perished, everything now was riding on the drone Bee tests.

It was a slow process but after three months one of the substances introduced into an alien bug container showed great promise as the bugs just lay on the bottom of the container, more of the substance was added and the bugs soon all died. The vision was shown to everyone all over the planet, finally, a glimmer of hope now after a year's of fear and disparate, cheers rang out everywhere but the scientists said don't be too hasty as we still have a long way to go to making a human vaccine.
We have identified that the effective substance comes from the gills of the flying monsters so it is relatively easy to collect but we will spend thousands of special design flying drones to do the job instead of the Bee drones, these drones will be the size of a human head and covered with hair like a mop. As the monsters are so large they won't even be aware of just what is going on, and we don't want to harm these graceful creatures.
People were being wiped out now more rapidly as these space bugs grew in number after feeding on the human lung tissue, more than half the population was now gone and with them went most of our leaders.
We lost contact with some community pods as they left this planet to avoid the disastrous events, the last contact with them told us they were going to take their chances of survival on E1 which is a three-year trip. The four pods had no technicians, doctors or scholars so they just had to rely on the computers and luck to guide them to their destination.
Fear of the rising death toll had many people leave their pod communities and wander off into the forests, some lived in caves in the mountain's and could not be able to be contacted. I was lucky to be here with the Happy Valley pod community as our leader decided years ago when the outbreak started to spread that we would keep moving continuously in a zigzag pattern around the planet at various altitudes, whether that saved us or was it just as the new mission to collect the magical nectar to stop the space bugs was underway, the scientists and chemists managed to make an effective nasal spray from the small amount of nectar the drone bees brought back from the first mission.

They used it successfully on everyone at the laboratory and also discovered that the space bugs found us by the air we breathe out, this finding was shown to all the people living in the remaining community pods. The people who left and scattered around the planet in small numbers indeed had the best chance of survival as there would be no large volumes of breath to detect.
The researchers advised everyone to wear masks and live in small groups, so I left my home pod with Mickey, my adopted son and two others, we were determined to survive and tell our story.
Mickey was seventeen years old now and has followed all my stories as well as all past stories going back to my ancestor, Justin Harris who told the Moon Disaster story in 2032. Life was hard now and the luxury of the pod life is greatly missed, we found the best way to sleep on the ground was to dig a shallow grave then line it with soft vegetation for a bed.
We then covered it with bark to shelter us from the rain and the shallow grave gave us protection from the cold wind.
We chose a new location every week and always found soft sandy soil as we had to dig with our hands. The way I told the stories was to speak into a pendant I wore around my neck, I would edit it and upload it to the computers at the mission control centres, books and paper ceased to exist hundreds of years ago.I am now in my seventies, so I will soon hand my storytelling pendant over to Mickey to continue this important task.

The all-important high-speed space pod has returned to the research team now with their precious cargo of nectar to give our remaining population immunity from the alien bug, the research team has now found that the quickest way to administer the treatment was to dampen a face mask and then people just breathe it in for two hours to allow it to line their airways which prevents the bugs entering their lungs. The researchers travelled to several people who had recently been infected by the alien bugs, in most cases they were cured but anyone who has been infected for more than two days couldn't be saved.
The task now was to get this miracle nectar to the rest of the people it won't be easy as they have spent many years wandering this enormous planet hiding from this killer bug. The millions of community pods were easy to deal with as they were always in touch with the researchers and the residents rushed to get treated, most of the pods were operated by a few technicians as numbers had to be kept to a minimum. The treated people then began the seemingly endless task of finding and treating the scattered population, pods would drop ground crews to locations where humans had been spotted, when they found them, the people would run and hide as the fear of joining with other groups was still a threat to them.

Ground crews then returned to the pod and had it fly low over the area with loudspeakers announcing that an antidote to the alien bug had been found. It took seven years to round up what was left of the population; many had died from starvation the most successful survivors were those travelling back and forth along streams planting sweet potato and corn.
I am glad that I was in this group as our leader a farmer put us on this path from day one. My time now to hand the storytelling pendant to Micky was at hand, there was a lot of travel and people to meet and as I am almost eighty the task was too great for me now. I still feel well even after enduring the hard times of the past seven years living on and indeed in the ground, I have seen many people here in their late nineties still going strong. We all aged twelve years on the trip from the earth to this planet, I think the diet which is free from chemicals, clean fresh air and maybe the lesser gravity has given us more years of a healthy life.
Micky took on my roll and left with a small mapping pod with a team to find people living in rugged remote areas of which the planet had many. They found evidence of people living in many caves in a rugged gorge on the edge of a forest which contained many trees that bore nuts and berries. They searched for weeks and in one hidden cave they discovered writing on one cave wall telling of a tribe of cannibals seeking out people, rounding them up and taking them away.
A little further into the dark cave, they found a man's skeleton and beside him lay a length of the burnt stick which he used for writing. The team reported this back to the new mission control leader, the decision was made for them to just fly around the area to try to find any evidence it would be too dangerous to them to continue on the ground. Three more small navigation pods were sent to assist these pods carried forty Bee drones to take close video images of the inside of the many caves within the canyon.
One large cave showed evidence of years of fire, fragments of bone could be seen in piles of charcoal on the floor, the drones found no one living within the caves. I went into the cave with a team of specialists to examine the find, even though the Bee drones had not detected any life, I still felt scared.

Read part 13       Are there Cannibals here?

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