Lunar Legends

Nathan Singerman took in the cool air that was brushing Ontario’s spring night. He loved his quiet walks on Toronto’s metro edge. It was here that he could escape his middle-management job at BioScience and Technologies, located somewhere in the midst of all those glittering lights miles away from Nathan. On this particularly beautiful night he was thinking about how much he was becoming disappointed with his position.

Nathan, by training and formal education, was an accountant. BioScience and Technologies just happened to be the first company to contact him while he was still a grad student at Chicago. Nathan just did not get into the life sciences which the corporation specialized in. All that Nathan was to the company was your classic bean counter.

All such self-reflection was going throughout Nathan’s mind as he walked along the isolated road, while only a few vehicles and a couple of skyporters whisked by in the whole opened area. He smiled, much like a child would at play when he saw what appeared to be a falling star. "Wishes are for superstitious fools!" Nathan thought within his himself, his smile long gone by now.

Now his thoughts had gone back to his home in Chicago. How he and his parents had constantly clashed over the issue of religion and other issues of philosophical controversies.

Another shooting star, he noticed.

Nathan finally hit his two-hour mark for his walking regimen. He timed it so that he was already walking back toward his personal engine, parked just off the side of the road near a couple of trees. Once again, Nathan’s eyes were snatched upward by streaks in the sky ... this time three of them. And they seemed a bit larger than what meteors usually are when they enter the Erth’s atmosphere. Nathan stopped to observe this. A few seconds later, his communications device requested his attention. Without even looking down, he automatically uncovered the device that was covered by a flap on his jacket’s arm-sleeve.

"Yeah," Nathan responded, a bit aloof as his eyes remained on the darkened sky.

"Listen to me very carefully, Nate," Francis Dupre, Nathan’s roommate from Quebec, answered hastily, his voice thick with the francophone accent. "The government is making an announcement over the globalnet. We’re under a nation-wide alert, Nate!"

Nathan was finally looking at his friend on the portable com-link. He had never seen his friend like this before. Even his hair was frenzied looking, as if to fit the mood. In the background, Nathan could hear the sound of Toronto’s emergency warning sirens blaring wildly.

"What for? Because of a few meteors!"

"Just hook your link onto the tele-mode, Nate! The announcement is on every channel!"

He did as his friend suggested. While he entered the instructions to his com-link, Nathan could now see a series of bright streaks of light showering in the sky. The first thing he noticed was that they were all headed in the general direction of the city of Toronto. It was now clear that this was no meteor shower!

The news about the "rain of terror"—as it was later called by historians—on Canada was instant news around the world. The Canadian government had no doubts about the origins of such deceitful weaponry. Prime Minister Alison Tekjoma’s address to the nation that night made unambiguous allegations that it was the society of Tellmondo who had bombed the cities of Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. After seven years of a drawn-out, undeclared war (except for the first two, back in 2051 and ’52) between the Erth Industrial Alliance (EIA) and the lunar city-state, Erthlings in every government in the world could recognize Tellmondo’s strategies and tactics.

Besides, the Tellmondonian society was still more advanced than the EIA in space technology. With Tellmondo’s fifty extra years of experience on the Moon than the Erthland civilizations, through a simple test of deduction one could reasonably say that only the Tellmondonians had the technology to inflict a bombing on Erth that almost looked exactly like a meteor shower!

What was not exactly known, however, was why the Tellmondonians had attacked when they did. There had been a bit of a lull in the Lunar Conflicts (again—as is common among them, and properly so—as historians labeled the unofficially declared war in the latter years). The last major clash between Erth and the underground metropolis of (now) twelve-and-a-half million citizens was over two years ago when Japan proclaimed several hectometers of land on the Moon as a legal possession of their government. Complete with an occupying troop of the Japanese Space Force. That conflict was one of the more disturbing ones. Tellmondo, in retaliation, had sent several spies into Japan with the explicit order to bomb civilian targets ranging from big corporate skyscrapers to even the homes of innocent victims who had absolutely nothing to do with space politics!

The closest reason for the "meteorical bombing" that some of the Canadian politicians and officials within the government could think of were the plans that Canada had for a new lunar base for its own nation. If true, this would prove to be fatal to the integrity of Prime Minister Tekjoma’s administration. For the plans were at their initial phase; only her immediate aids had any knowledge about the proposed base! This meant that there was a house cleansing in order... Prime Minister Tekjoma was determined not to lose any more lives by the hands of the Tellmondonians.

As what usually happens after a military attack on an enemy, nationalistic sentiments grew ever stronger in Canada as well as within the seven other economically progressive countries which composed the Erth Industrial Alliance—the United States of America, the Federation of European States (FES), the Central-South American Alliance (CSAA), Australia, Egypt, China, and Japan. Each nation (or federation, as was the case for the FES and the CSAA) had sent their respective ambassadors to Ottawa to demonstrate global solidarity with their fellow member-state, just as they had done for Japan two years ago. But it was also a chance for the EIA to meet together, in person, in a secured setting to draw up plans for a counter-attack against Tellmondo!

Unfortunately, those nationalistic tendencies were not restricted to the governmental levels in society. Average citizens throughout the world (including non-EIA member-nations) were increasingly manifesting their hatred of the Tellmondonians in various outlets in life. From coining derogatory, slang adjectives about the Tellmondonians to even a few cases of paranoid citizens actually spying on their own co-workers and/or family members!