Legacy by David Lynn Golemon

Communications called out. “Signal strength on telemetry is weak. Okay, signal lost at 0922 local time.”
    “Come on people. Let’s get the rest of the Beatles in on this,” Nathan called out as he closed his eyes, hoping that Ringo didn’t go belly-up in the last thirty feet of its unscheduled walkabout.
    “We have a patch through from Paul ,” Communications said. “Okay, we now have video from Ringo  … it stopped. It looks like—”
    “The damn thing’s sideways—it’s hung up on something,” Nathan said angrily. He was trying his best not to take it out on his people.
    On the monitor, the video streaming from Ringo showed the side of the crater. As they relayed a signal down into Shackleton from Paul , they ordered the camera to rotate 60 degrees. They wanted to see what they were hung up on before trying to extricate Ringo from its current 10 degree tilt position.
    “Okay, at least we know it’s on the bottom and in one piece,” Nathan said as he stepped toward the large monitor, watching the area around the rover as it panned its view to accommodate its orders from Earth. “Goddamn big crater,” he mumbled as he looked at the darker than normal picture surrounding Ringo . “We must be in the lee of the crater’s northern wall.”
    As the camera completed its 180-degree sweep, it stopped. Its lens was automatically trying to focus on something that would be oriented to its left side. It was obviously the obstacle that had arrested Ringo ’s run down the slope.
    “Okay, there it is,” Nathan said, as he tried to get a clear picture. “Is that all we have on focus?” he asked.
    “Without the external lighting, that’s it,” REMCOM said as he turned in his seat and looked at the flight director.
    “Well, the batteries be damned,” he said, looking at the remote communications specialist. “We have to get Ringo into the sunlight anyway to charge the damn thing. Turn on external lighting and see what we’re snagged on,” Nathan said in frustration, because he knew battery life was real life when you’re on the Moon.
    “Relaying the order,” REMCOM called out.
    As they waited for the delay in communications, Nathan sat on the edge of one of the consoles and rubbed his face. He hoped this would be the only glitch of the mission, but he knew when you were dealing with robots and remote technology, anything could go wrong, so he figured this whole endeavor could take years off his life.
    As everyone in mission control in both Pasadena and Houston watched, and with the press yawning, displaying their boredom in both press rooms, Ringo turned on the powerful floodlights rigged to the top of its camera tower. The lens refocused and the picture suddenly turned to red and blue.
    “Color? What in the hell is color doing on the Moon?” one of the technicians said as she stood up to get a better view.
    Of all the photos from the Apollo program and countless views from the Moon, with the exception of anything man-made or views of the Earth, there was never anything of color to be broadcast from the lunar surface, just the white, grays, and blacks of its geology. But here was Ringo , the little remote designed for the search and testing of water deposits, sending out a full color image of something that had reached out and grabbed it on its way into the crater.
    “Pull the view back by a foot,” Nathan ordered, as a sliver of recognition came into his mind. He stared intently at the color image
    As the view pulled away from the object holding Ringo in place, more detail started to emerge. The colors were from what looked like some kind of material, possibly nylon in nature.
    “Pan to the right,” Nathan ordered.
    After a minute the camera view turned away from the colorful material, eventually settling on something white. Then it focused its high definition camera onto something jagged and dark.
    “Damn it, what the hell is that?” Nathan asked, his heart beating faster. “Pan back another