Chapter 1
Solitary Man

Former Detective John Mathews was still quick on the draw, only now it was with the handle of the tap of a domestic micro brew or an imported dark. He let the head foam up, his precision in the pull preventing any of the thick foam from spilling over the side of the tall glass.

“There you go. Can I get you anything else, Tom?” he asked.

“Nope! That’s just perfect, John. How’s the crowd been tonight?” the new regular inquired.

“Slow, but steady. I think the change in barometric pressure is keeping them away, it feels like it might rain any minute.”

“Probably right. I just needed a couple of tall ones before I head home,” said Tom, a twice-a-weeker, as Pete called them.

Pete’s Place, a staple of the elite jazz and blues lovers in the Atlanta, Georgia area, boasted the most sophisticated sound system in the state. To spend any time in Pete’s was to have a live music experience without the benefit of any musicians. The sixty speakers, a whole wall of expensive power amplifiers, and the most advanced, computerized digital sound system was an audiophile’s dream.

To have the sounds of live jazz and blues, without the overhead of musicians was a value proposition Pete appreciated every time he did his monthly profit and loss statement.

John, a middling computer jockey at best, appreciated the evening-long play lists Pete had the good sense to assemble for the times when he or the other bartenders manned the bar in Pete’s absence.

He knew he would never acquire the same encyclopedic knowledge of the many thousands of selections stored on Pete’s music server, but John’s own love for jazz was a point of convergence in interests he and Pete shared. Truth was, he didn’t even have a sound system of his own at home. His music hardware consisted of two clock radios, one in the bedroom, one in the kitchen.

As a cop, he never had the time to devote to a hobby like music. He even had an older tube television with the government-sponsored digital converter box so he could pick up the local sports broadcasts; no cable or satellite service for him. He always gave the installation of one or the other consideration whenever one sport or another went into their playoff season, but he never followed up on the notion.

Now that he was no longer employed by the Atlanta Police Department, his hours were skewed from starting work in the morning to beginning late in the afternoon. Sports had lost their primacy in his life, except for reading scores in the newspaper.

Ten years ago his life was very different. As the lead missing persons detective on the Atlanta force, he faced investigations of teens gone missing instead of working a high-tech music system. But that was before the astounding discovery of a colony of African Americans secretly living on the back of the moon.

Tasked with trying to uncover the whereabouts of a missing local-area black coed, the focus of that investigation turned out to be a college administrator who ended up leaving Earth to join that mysterious group of black separatists on the moon.

The resulting investigation into his involvement with Dean Sydney Atkins turned his own life upside down for over a year after the colony of separatists left the moon, traveling out to the solar system’s asteroid belt. The countless times he was interviewed, or interrogated as he characterized it, served no real purpose except to single him out as the lightening rod for all the frustration and humiliation an embarrassed government had to heap on someone for having been shown up by a group of blacks no one knew existed for decades.

The FBI’s embarrassment over having overlooked the disappearance of over 2,000 blacks who vanished from their lives over more than three decades manifested itself in their all-but-shouted accusation that John had known about the Dean of Student Affairs at Steddman College’s role in the recruitment of women for that secret group.

His admission of the romantic relationship with Dean Atkins served no other purpose than a hammer with which his own department and the FBI used to try to beat a confession of conspiracy and guilt out of him.

The bitterness festered and grew until John had had enough. He hadn’t planned falling in love, as he fully believed himself of having done with Sydney Atkins. She disappeared from the Atlanta area only to be listed as one of the members of the group of space-based separatists. She was now somewhere out past the orbit of Mars while he was literally stranded on earth.

He stuck it out on the police force as long as he could, but eventually it was made clear that he had lost the confidence of his superiors, but not because of any lack of quality in his work.

His fellow officers knew the experience had left John withdrawn. He couldn’t be enticed back into the activities he had participated in before, the ball games, friendly card games or just that drink after the day was done. It was like the departure of the Atkins woman had also taken a vital spark of life from him. He was still the most effective detective in the missing persons department, but the constant assault on his honesty and integrity took its toll.

He waited until the very hour of his twentieth year of service arrived, then resigned to collect a modest pension and flip the bird to those superiors responsible for the continuous scrutiny of his every move.

Having been driven out of the police force and up the wall sitting around the house with nothing to do, his good friend Pete invited John to hang with him at the bar. Their relationship had begun with the commonality of both serving in Viet Nam years back. John even helped Pete install his grand sound system when Pete purchased the joint, although John’s major contribution was to hand Pete whatever he pointed to throughout the renovation of the bar.

He never regretted leaving the police force, happy in the knowledge that they, the FBI or anyone else were never going to have the satisfaction of using Sydney against him again. As far as he was concerned, his involvement with the Sydney and the rest of the former “missing persons” began and ended when she drove away from his house in the rain that night a decade back.

                                                                      * * *

Unbeknownst to John he actually did have a direct connection to the separatists; John had a ten year-old daughter living in the space colony.

The final time John had seen Sydney Atkins, Dean of Student Affairs at Steddman, he was standing on his lawn in just his undershorts in the pouring rain, watching Sydney’s car zoom off after they had made love for the very first—and last—time.

As he was tending bar at Pete’s, Sydney was raising their daughter, Joy, as a single parent in the Separatist’s space habitat out beyond Mars’ orbit. With a community totally dedicated to the support and nurturing of their children, raising a child as a single parent had no stigma for parent or child, and in the colony, no child was ever left behind.

“I don’t want to study right now, I want to play with my friends,” Joy said with just a hint of a pout on her face.

Sydney had heard this refrain too many times to count and knew that it was just a token bit of resistance done out of habit. She smiled and gave Joy a hug.

“Really? You mean to tell me that you don’t want to play with Genesis? I thought she was your best friend, sweetheart.”

“Is she really a girl?” Joy asked, not so easily mollified.

“We’ve talked about this over and over. Genesis is anything you want her to be. And you know as well as I do that your friends love the fact that they can do their schoolwork at home just by calling her up,” said Sydney.

“But she’s not a real person. I want to work with a real person today!”

“Okay, Joy. Let’s see who’s teaching math today, shall we. Then you can decide whether or not to stay home and do your schoolwork. Genesis?” Sydney called out.

“Yes, Sydney. How may I be of assistance?” the colony’s Artificial Intelligence replied.

“Joy has a question for you this morning.”

“Good morning, Joy. How may I be of assistance?”

“Who is teaching math at school today?” asked Joy with no hesitation at all.

“Does this mean that you and I will not be having the opportunity to work on your assignments today? I will miss doing so. Both Lilith and Stephen are scheduled to teach math classes for those who attend school today, Joy. Lilith has a new interactive presentation she wrote for your grade level on Algebra that I think you will enjoy. She is scheduled to begin class at 10 this morning.

“Would you like for me to inform her that you will be attending?” Genesis inquired.

Joy looked at her mom for approval, the excitement of seeing her favorite teacher’s presentation clearly evident.

“Can I go, Mom?”

“If that’s what you would like to do today, of course. Are you planning to stay in school all day?” asked Sydney.

“Of course! I’m going to call everyone so we can all hang out there together,” Joy said as she skipped out of the kitchen, going to her bedroom to make the calls.

“Thank you, Genesis. It looks like you lost them for today,” said Sydney.

“That is quite alright. Her school work is several years in advance of children her age on Earth. And she appears to have a very positive relationship with all her teachers,” observed the AI.

“How was her science homework last night?”

“It was perfect, and that was without any prompting or assistance on my part. If I were to make a guess, her interests are very much in line with her uncle, Peanut.”

Sydney laughed at the AI’s observation, more so for Genesis having actually said “Uncle Peanut” than for anything else.

“Thank you, Genesis. That will be all for now.”

Joy came running out of her room, her data pad slung in its case on her back.

“Whoa there, Sport. Be sure to get a good lunch today, you hear?” said Sydney, giving Joy a hug.

“I will! See ya’ later, Mom!” said Joy over her shoulder as she raced out of the apartment.

Sydney shook her head, marveling how everything about her life as a mother was so “normal” in light of the fact that they were living millions of miles from her own planet of birth.

The thought of Earth brought a bittersweet touch of sadness to her as it reminded her that Joy and her father were never going to meet and get to know each other, and that the difference in the color of her and John’s skin was the only reason why.

                                                                * * *

“So, John, anything new with you?” Tom asked, after draining a third of the brew.

“Not really. Same shit different day. You?”

“Some shake ups at work. Probably some shuffling around of people, some in, some out,” answered Tom.

“That’s right, you work for one of those big conglomerates, right?”

“Global Space Technologies.”

“That’s right, GST. They’ve taken over the supply and maintenance runs to the International Space Station and the other two space stations. They’re also one of the two firms that send supplies to the moon for those Navy SEALs stranded there, right?”

“When NASA retired the shuttle fleet, only the Russians had the capability of resupplying the station at the time. There’s a bunch of entrepreneurial companies as well as a couple of the industrial multinationals who decided to go the private enterprise route into space. GST’s one of the best.”

“I guess opportunities are everywhere these days,” said John.

“They are. The next big thing now is the race to get out to the belt to try to meet up with those folks from the moon. So far our company and NASA’s Project Jove looks like it’s going to make it out to the belt first. Still kind of hard to believe, a whole colony of Americans, black at that, living on the moon for decades and no one knew? Amazing,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief.

John was silent, nodded and then moved to another patron at the other end of the bar.

Tom watched him walk away, trying to gauge John’s reaction to his casual mention of the separatists. He was looking for anything that would hint at how much John knew about the group, or any unusual interest in the subject at all.

Tom Weston wasn’t just some mid-level functionary at GST, he was the global head of security. Over the last ten years he had taken on the task of investigating every clue, every person who might have unpublished knowledge of the people who ended up in the colony or their work before they had established their facility on the moon.

He had used the lobbying power and financial resources of the staggering conglomerate to pump elected and unelected officials who served in President James Bender’s administration. He followed the financial lives of those same people to see if any unexplained largess had been bestowed upon them once they left government service.

Tom had put hundreds of high-level African Americans in government and industry under surveillance in an effort to determine if any of them either had been in contact with, or had secret knowledge of, those listed in the final message transmitted on every cable and satellite channel when the moon colony left for the asteroid belt.

To date, GST had spent billions of dollars following up every possible lead to obtain any information whatsoever on those people. It was only recently that classified information, locked up in the most secret files of the FBI about John’s true relationship with Sydney Atkins had been breached.

Wanting no possible mistakes with this line of investigation, Weston decided to personally conduct the research and surveillance on former Detective Mathews.

For several months, Tom had been dropping into Pete’s on Tuesdays and Thursdays almost as regular as clockwork. He also put in the occasional Saturday or Sunday just to vary the routine.

He even went so far as to have John’s email account hacked and monitored, in addition to the normal surveillance of all phone calls and postal mail.

As he knew John’s every movement, it was no problem to align his visits with John’s usual evenings on duty.

When John returned to Tom’s end of the bar, he brought another beer, knowing his patron’s habits.

“Thank’s John. I won’t tell you to have one on me, but how about an iced tea?”

“You know something, that would go down pretty good about now, thanks, Tom,” he said. He grabbed a tall tumbled, scooped some ice into it, and poured from a pitcher kept in the cooler. Adding a sprig of fresh mint and a straw, John clinked glasses with Tom and drank about half down.

“That does hit the spot. What you said earlier, do you really think any of the three or four top-tier space technology companies and governments are seriously considering a trip out to those folks, and expect something other than a cold shoulder in response?” John asked casually.

“Hell, yeah. I mean, look what they did!  From the scientific reports that have been made public, they have mastered the control of gravity. That capability alone would revolutionize transportation right here at home. Imagine, railroad trains that didn’t use fossil fuel?  Hell, they wouldn’t even use the tracks, no infrastructure needed except stations and right of way.

“You know what I would want if we had that kind of technology available?” Tom asked.

“No, what’s that?”

“I want to have a George Jetson flying car.”

John laughed. “Yeah, that’s gonna work. Can you imagine the kinds of midair collisions in places like Florida? Shit, most people can barely drive in two dimensions, let alone three.  You wouldn’t be safe anywhere except in some underground bunker. Your house could be smashed by a falling car, your apartment could become an unintended drive-through; forget about it,” John said, taking another pull from his glass.

“Okay, I haven’t worked that out yet. But the possibilities are endless.”

“Sure they are. But I keep going back to that last message they sent. It seemed pretty cut and dried about them not sharing any of their technology with anyone from Earth. It seems to me that if we do get any of those technologies, we’re going to have to do it on our own,” John observed.

“Maybe, maybe not. You never know, people change.”

John nodded his head in agreement. However, behind his smiling countenance was a mind honed by years of successful detective work, especially in the fine art of interviewing suspects. He was now alerted to the fact that there might be a hidden agenda in Tom’s having brought up the subject of the separatists in the first place.

“Just maybe some sort of dialogue could be started with them. Once your company puts together the technology needed to get out that far, who knows?” said John.

“I hope you’re right. But whatever the top brass are thinking about, especially with their relationship with NASA over the last decade or so, it’s way above my pay grade.”

“You said you work in security. Isn’t it part of your job to protect the plans and technologies of the company?” John asked.

“Me? At my level? We’re more concerned with people who take home office supplies, make personal long distance calls on the company’s dime or check out online porn on company time. Sometimes I feel like an overpaid school security guard. But the pay is stellar!,” said Tom.

“Sounds like the job’s a keeper.”

“It’s not bad, John. The Atlanta offices at least afford me the opportunity to hang out in places like this. Not too sure how long they’ll let me stay here. I asked to be permanently posted here, but being that sometimes I have to train staff on things like, oh, log off your computer when you go out to lunch, or when you freaking go home for the day, it’s hard to say where I’m going to be sent next! You have no idea the excitement I face every day on the job,” Tom said, laughing.

“Doesn’t sound too terribly bad.”

“Well, it’s nothing like being a cop like you were, right?”

John was looking right into Tom’s eyes as he asked the question. And saw nothing but normal interest.

“Actually, as a missing person’s detective, there was a lot more leg work than actual danger. Pretty boring in fact,” John answered, now almost certain Tom was on a fishing expedition.

“I guess. Anyway,” Tom began, as he drained his glass, “I’ve gotta run. Early morning seminar about securing your company smart phone. That means not installing apps for your kids on the same phone you receive the corporate email or access your bank account. You have one of those smart phones, John?”

John reached into his pocket and pulled out a flip phone approaching ten years old.

Tom laughed and reached out to shake John’s hand. “You are something else. ‘Til next time...”

“Take it easy, Tom. Don’t be too hard on them tomorrow.”

John watch him leave the bar, unable to decide for sure whether or not he was being played. Shrugging his shoulders he decided to bag the internal debate and get back to work.

Though never saying anything about her to another soul, not a day went by that John didn’t have thoughts about Sydney Atkins. Pete knew. Special Agent Samuels of the FBI knew. After all it was Samuels who assigned John to investigate Jaylynn Williams’ disappearance in the first place, which brought him and Atkins together.

Meeting Sydney was a once in a lifetime opportunity, and it spun him around like nothing had before. His measured, reserved protections against the pain and disappointment finding those he was tasked to find, people hurting, people trapped by horrible circumstance, people who, through no fault of their own, ended up losing their way, normally would have protected him from such an unexpected emotional whirlwind.

With every fiber of his being, John knew he would never love again. Sad, perhaps.  Extreme, definitely. But the last thing he needed was some corporate nosey-body dropping in on him at his shitty job to remind him of the greatest loss in life.  He didn’t feel sorry for himself, he did what he still believed was right in letting her go. He definitely didn’t feel sorry for himself. He’d been around the block enough to know that shit happened. But sometimes, every now and then, he was also aware of his burning anger over the whole situation. An anger at a woman who could express an abiding love for him, make love to him, then moments later, leave forever.

John would practically give his life to find out what was happening with Sydney in the asteroid belt. At closest, she was over fifty million miles from earth, most of the time it was far more than that. In any case, he still had a hard time accepting she was lost to him forever.

He was going to be extremely vigilant the next time Weston visited the bar.

                                                                       * * *

Much had changed on Earth in general, the United States in particular n the 10 years since the Black Separatists had taken their entire installation out of the lunar bedrock and sent it to the Asteroid Belt.

President Bender’s authorized mission to send SEALs to the moon yielded bitter fruit at every turn. There was almost universal condemnation by the other countries, the US and Russia bearing the brunt of the international ire.

The fact that an armed SEAL team was sent, then stranded on the surface, couldn’t be spun in any positive way to give the US cover.

The SEALs had taken shelter in one of the Separatists’ surface installations, supplied with air and water. The surprise of the century was finding the actual Apollo 13 lunar lander and the damaged service module just inside the inner airlock door looking exactly like some kind of museum exhibit. At the time it had been assumed both burned in the Earth’s atmosphere prior to the astronauts’ safe splashdown. When they informed mission control of the fact, NASA and the US Military went wild speculating on just how the Separatists had pulled off that feat.

Four of the SEALs had pooled everyone’s remaining oxygen so they could return to their escape pods and strip them of everything useful. All of the extra supplies, oxygen bottles, rations, the radio transceivers and anything else that could be detached went on the two sledges and hauled back to the installation.

When the SEAL team members toured the lunar installation they found the source of their oxygen, algae and grass, atmosphere purifying hardware, and an intact kitchen. They also found connections to a high-gain antennae on the surface, to which they attached their own communications gear.  

Electrical power was plentiful, and ran the few devices left behind, including that fully functional kitchen. However, there was no furniture, and several larger rooms were equipped with broad swaths of grass underfoot.

In what looked like a locker room for the previous residents’ space suits, there was a built-in air compressor, and an oxygen extraction unit.  It didn’t take long to fashion a threaded sleeve to attach their own suits’ oxygen bottles to the equipment to top off their own air supplies.

On Earth, NASA scrambled to find some way to supply food to those stranded soldiers. The lead SEAL, CPO Pritchett took it upon himself to try consuming some of the algae left behind in the abandoned hydroponics department. With no real ill effect other than a complaining stomach looking for something more substantial, the rest of the team also consumed the water-borne plant life in order to sustain them until Earth could make a delivery.

Ten years later, seven of the original eight were still alive, Seaman Greenfield having died from sepsis brought on by a burst appendix.

They received shipments of food and other supplies, dropped to the surface in the same manner as their own trip to the surface. NASA also put up a polar orbit, repeater satellite allowing the men on the backside of the moon to maintain regular communication with Earth.

NASA, as well as the entrepreneurial companies taking advantage of government subsidies allocated for investment in space technologies, had increased man’s presence in Earth orbit, but had yet to develop a craft capable of landing on the moon, and returning to earth. Their focus was on an extended mission out to the Separatists’ space stations in the asteroid belt.

Secret instruments, developed by the US military to track gravity-based anomalies, showed the single installation that had left the moon was now joined by at least four others employing the same gravity-controlling technologies. Though detectors on Earth could locate gravitation anomalies throughout the solar system, scientists were no closer to duplicating the Separatists’ technology than they were a decade before.

Martin Harris, Ph.D., was still the world’s leading researcher in gravitational studies. His detector was the pre-eminent investigational tool in the study of gravity and the detection of gravity-based technologies the Separatists used to extract and lift their habitat from the moon propelling it out past the orbit of Mars. His unique detector had been replicated in two other underground, military-controlled installations across the United States. The devices were a closely-held secret that, so far, US allies knew little to nothing about.

The details about the secret group of African Americans who had been living on the backside of the moon were eventually released to the public. There seemed no point in holding anything back since the Separatists had transmitted a roll call of their group to the entire world. Everyone also knew the details of the highly visible mission to the moon, which had pushed NASA space shuttle technology to its limit.

The inevitable leaks about the mission, it’s crew complement and the U.S. Navy SEAL team that had been transported to the moon went public in the most spectacular way when technicians in Japan decoded and rebroadcast the SEALs’ camera and audio feeds from the moon to the rest of the world.

Everyone on earth wanted to know as much about the lunar inhabitants as possible. It was former Detective Mathews’ misfortune to have fallen in love with one of the last members to join the inhabitants on the moon.

The intervening decade that passed since the discovery of the Separatists fostered a number of changes in national and international priorities. And though the excitement and the public’s demand to know everything about those remarkable American blacks had cooled considerably, what hadn’t changed was demand for the marvels those people had at their disposal.

The capabilities of the spacecraft that had picked up Sydney Atkins from the outskirts of Atlanta, Georgia, and an unknown person or persons out on the waters of Massachusetts Bay were unprecedented, the stuff of science fiction. Leaked reports from the FBI lab that had analyzed the foot of a member of the lunar inhabitants who had met with a deadly accident flying in the Middle East demonstrated that the members of the lunar community were not aging at the same rate as normal human beings. From all indications it appeared they would live far longer than their earthbound cousins.

The fact that they were living out where no other man had ever gone before was a constant reminder of just how far America, and everyone else on earth, was behind in science and technology. The more paranoid members of the world’s governments feared any direct confrontation, assuming that the Separatists’s weapons technologies were equally as advanced as the rest of their equipment. There wasn’t a military in the world that wasn’t lusting after the wonders they imagined in possession of the Separatists.

The Separatists control of gravity was at the top of the list of technologies earth was most anxious to get their hands on. The cost of lifting a pound of anything our of earth’s gravity well was the most limiting factor in man’s expansion into space. Thousands of top-level scientists and physicists world wide were shifted to gravitational studies to try to duplicate the observed characteristics of the Separatists’ spacecrafts.

But none of this was of any interest to John..Not only did he know that’s where Sydney Atkins was headed the night they parted, he was responsible for stalling the search for her by the FBI giving her the needed time to make her escape.

The sad irony in the whole ordeal was that he and Sydney could never be together for no better reason than he was white.