As promised, here is a rough 2nd draft of the first 3 chapters of this work in progress. Its unedited and not even a final draft so bare with me. It should however give new readers a bit of a feel of the kind of stories that I'm working on.

Chapter 1: Bold Moves

Robert’s mind was racing. As Robert backed away from the scene of the carnage , he realized his chances of surviving might be slim. Even if he would manage to make it back to earth alive, the same powers that had managed to keep these horrific facts quiet for almost 80 years would not risk him exposing them and what they apparently had worked so hard to cover up. Robert had ignored all of his brother's hints that cautioned him against his endeavour. Cautioned him against what he might unearth. He had truly not considered actually finding something that would contradict the historical records. Least of all did Robert expect to find something as terrifying and shocking as what he was now slowly backing away from. All that he had really wanted to do was impress his mentor with a dissertation like none she had ever seen. Could whoever or whatever did this unthinkable thing still be around today after 77 years? Was he himself in direct and imminent danger right now? Or was the true danger for him personally located on earth waiting for him on his return? It was both intriguing and disturbing how the combination of decades long exposure to radiation and a lack of an atmosphere had preserved the scene of the carnage. While these discoveries scientifically exceeded the wildest dreams that Robert as a forensic science graduate student might have had regarding his idea of doing on-site research on the moon, Robert understood he was in mortal danger, and quite possibly in more ways than one. He really needed to the research what happened here, so much was absolutely clear. Not so much, as he had originally set out to, for his dissertation, all of that did not really matter right now. He needed to find out exactly what had happened here 77 years ago. What could have created such damage to the lander? What weapon could have caused these terrible mutilations of these human remains. He also needed to form hypotheses about what happened on earth after that? How had NASA managed to pass this mission of as a success back in 1969? And how could this information not have been disclosed during the early years of the repli-war.
None of the fractions or alliances had had any ties to NASA or to the old North American governmental structures. In fact, disclosing the nasty secrets and conspiracies involving old governments and large companies had been a major propaganda tool for both the corporate alliances and many of the information freedom fractions. As for the current post-war states, these definitely had had other things to worry about than keeping nasty old day conspiracies secret. There had to have been such a major conspiracy to cover this up and to keep this covered up during the war. This conspiracy had to involve pre-war , war-time and even some of the emerging modern day power structures. The idea was almost too proposperous to consider, yet there seemed to be no alternate hypothesis. How else could a tragedy like this have remained hidden? There had been many ancient pre-war conspiracy theories regarding the moon landing. Debunking these theories with on-site forensic research had in fact been Roberts bold idea for his dissertation. So many conspiracies had been disclosed during the war: the fluoride conspiracy, the pharma/carbohydrate conspiracy, the CO2 emission-rights conspiracy, the new-Babylon conspiracy, the Multi layer fractional reserve conspiracy and of course the conspiracy that started the war in the first place: The quantum conspiracy.
After the many waves of conspiracy disclosure during the war, nobody, including Robert expected any remaining old-day conspiracies could be left hidden.
No, Robert had in no way expected any trace of a real conspiracy, and certainly not one involving something as terrible as this.
Suddenly Robert felt himself losing his balance and as he slowly fell to the ground, Robert realized that his instincts were not helping him. Robert had been slowly walking backward away from the crime scene keeping his eyes focussed on the remains of the cold war moon lander. As Robert softly hit the dusty moon surface, while he realized the danger could just as well be behind him, a warm and moist feeling signaled that Robert had just lost all control over his bladder.
Oh, why didn't he listen to his brother Pete? Pete might have been a tough guy, the type of person with little interest in academic pursuits, Pete immediately guessed the true reason behind Robert’ s mission. A reason that only now Robert was starting to admit to himself. The day Robert had first tried to tactfully ask his brother for a favor with his mission, Pete’s instant response had been: “so you’re trying to impress another one of your bone ass geeky chicks?”
His mission was his way to impress his mentor. Ah dear Rachella. For one moment Robert allowed his mind to escape his predicament. Rachella was Robert’s mentor but apart from that Rachella had been the focus of Robert’s life for reasons other than his education. Not that Robert was in love with Rachella, he could not allow himself any such feelings for his mentor. A married woman of almost twice his age. Ever since that kiss however, Robert’s life had been about impressing Rachella. They had both agreed that that kiss should never have happened. That they should simply both forget about it. Rachella was married. Happily married as she had repeatedly ensured Robert. They had nothing whatsoever to offer each other and Rachella had left absolutely no doubt regarding the depths of her commitment to her husband and family.
Both Robert and Rachella had been totally caught by surprise by this one time passionate kiss that seemed to have come out of nowhere. No, there could be nothing between them. Yet ever since that kiss, Roberts every waking moment had been filled with an unexplainable urge to try and impress his mentor.
Taking his replica Apollo moon lander to the moon had been a bold and dangerous move that Robert knew very well he would never had made had he not been unexplainably obsessed with trying to impress her. It had turned out even more dangerous than he could ever have projected though. The trip to the moon in a printed replica of eighty year old technology had been dangerous enough by itself. Nothing had prepared Robert for what he had found on the Apollo 11 landing site. Yes, contrary to what Roberts research had shown, there had indeed been a 'real' conspiracy surrounding the 1969 moon landing.
All the conspiracy theorists though had been so far of the mark about what the nature of this conspiracy really was.
As Robert finally managed to gather enough courage to get up and walk towards his pod face forward, his mind refocused on the present.
What had happened here? What or who could have created such terrible carnage? Whatever had murdered these astronauts in this gruesome way, whatever tore up their bodies and their equipment, was it gone? Was Robert himself in mortal danger at this moment? Or worse, would he be in mortal danger when he returned to earth? In danger from whoever the conspirators were that had kept this carnage from the general public for almost 80 years. To what lengths would they go to protect this secret?
No! Virtually nobody back on earth knew about Roberts forensics mission to the moon. His brother Pete knew and two members of Pete’s crew, but none of them was likely to speak to anyone else about Roberts ‘mission’. No, nobody would 'yet' know about his mission . To Pete and his crew his big mission was just a silly school science project. These man that on a daily bases manoeuvred the dangerous debrisphere as it was now called, the place where the low orbit satellites used to be that were destroyed to end the replicator war. To these man , surviving a trip to the moon through virtually debris free space was about as risky as a ride on a merry-go-round. No, none of these rough and really not that talkative crowd was likely to ever mention what to him was a big and dangerous mission even without what he had just seen. As long as these guys didn't know about what Robert had discovered, nobody on earth would hear from them about his moon mission. So far Robert was safe from any conspirators. Once he got back, if he would manage to come back, Robert would need to simply keep quiet about his mission, let sleeping dogs lie. But knowledge was important now, Whatever had killed these astronauts could still be here. Robert had come to the moon fully armed with a semi professional forensics lab. He needed to work fast to gain a solid information position that he could work from. He needed to asses the dangers, both here on the Apollo 11 landing site on the moon and back on earth. He had to work quickly but methodically now. Every little bit of information might help improve Robert’s chances of survival. With sufficient data he might devise a strategy that could both help him get back to earth safely and stay under the radar of whoever was part of the conspiracy.

Chapter 2: Circle

After deploying a large number of sensors around his pod, Robert had allowed himself a nap. He had been dead tired after having been awake for almost forty hours in total. After setting up the sensor perimeter and after fine tuning a set of alarms to barely restrain from triggering each time that a bigger piece of debris hit the closest debris dumping crater some 500 km from his current position. He had been monitoring his surroundings for over twentyfour hours. Ready to launch his pod into a moon orbit at a seconds notice and not even a speck of dust had behaved oddly. Robert had finally allowed himself to feel relatively safe after having been awake for so many hours. So when after the weeks long moon-daytime, the sun set relatively quickly and darkness had set in, Robert had felt sufficiently secure to allow himself to fall asleep without having set his pod to auto-launch on sensor anomalies. When after only a few hours of sleep the alarms had triggered, Robert’s body had still been so tired of the long and stressful day on the moon that it refused to let Robert awaken from a dream. The alarms though reached Robert in such a way that a beautiful dream had turned into a terrible nightmare. While Robert was aware he was dreaming and felt he was in real danger, Robert’s body refused to let him wake up. In his dream, Robert’s pod was destroyed by an ancient looking, CCCP labeled space ship the size of a oil tanker and Robert felt himself running for his life, making slow and prolonged leaps over the moon surface. Nowhere to run to and no place to hide. To scared to even dare to look over his shoulder to see what it was was undoubtedly chasing him. Robert realized he needed to wake up out of this dream. He was struggling between two realities. On one side there was the dream reality where he was being chased by an ancient soviet space ships and whatever had emerged from it. The original Apollo 11 mission took place at a time of big tensions between the former United States of America and the old Soviet Union so Roberts mind had created this Soviet scenario and had projected it to his nightmare as a result of the alarms going off. On the other side there was the reality outside of Roberts dead tired body where the alarms were ringing to notify Robert of eminent danger.
In both realities Robert felt he was about to die. One second he was aware of the fact that he was asleep and needed to desperately wake up speak the launch command to his main computing unit. The next second the dream reality felt real enough to Robert and Robert was franticly looking for shelter on the barren moon landscape of his dream reality.
Robert finally managed to wake himself. the alarms had stopped ringing. After his long struggle to wake up from his dream, Robert had spoken the launch command. At that moment though, he realized the alarms had long stopped ringing and Robert issued the delay command just in time and asked the computer for a full analysis.
The computer reported a strange pattern of destroyed sensors and disturbed ground, yet nothing at all but dust clouds all had been registered by radar or IR sensors.
Robert could conclude only one thing: Six hundred meters. As Robert ran the numbers once more, his findings were conclusive. Six hundred meters was what had stood between his continued survival and the fate that had become the original astronauts
Something terrible had tried to get to his moonlander and failed. A two hundred meter long arc shaped region of violently disturbed earth left no doubt that whatever had created the carnage was still very much present and still very much dangerous. He wasn’t going back to the Apollo 11 landing site that much was sure. He wasn’t in any real hurry to launch though either. There was some kind of circle, Robert had concluded, with a radius of about fiveteen kilometers. Whatever this thing was, it somehow was confined to this circle and Roberts moon lander was safely beyond its reach.
At the exact center of the circle, Roberts lunar maps had shown a deep crater.
Was there some kind of beast living in the crater? If so, how could it survive without an atmosphere, without a source of food? And why the circle? It was almost as if it was a giant monster on a leash. No, the moon could not support any life. No air, no food, nothing that a life form could use to survive. The strange circular reach of whatever this was kept Robert puzzled. He needed to find out more about what was lurking in this crater and what confined it to this circle. His sensors had picked up large clouds of dust and fine sands but not whatever created these clouds. There had been regions in the cloud though that were completely void of any dust and sand particles according to his measurements. Robert had only taken low powered computing units, so he would have to wait for half an hour for dust and sand cloud measurements to render what he hoped would be an outline of whatever this object was. Once the rendering would be complete, hopefully Robert could develop a strategy to gathering more data before launching his pod back into orbit and trying to make his way back to earth to face that other danger.

Chapter 3:

Robert had positioned his reentry pod between four relatively large pieces of debris in what Pete had told him was the least dangerous section of the debrisphere. The ISS cluster, a debris cluster made up for a large part of bits and pieces of what once was an old international space station, was located on his brother’s regular route. Pete was a debrisphere miner. The task of debrisphere miners was to clean up low orbit space debris, harvesting material that could be recycled by replication printers and ejecting useless debris towards designated moon dumping sites. The dream was that in about half a century the debrisphere could be sufficiently thinned, and intercontinental tensions could have sufficiently been settled that a HEOPS deflection shield would become possible and communication satellites could once again be used. Pete had given Robert a lift to the outer limits of the debrisphere at the beginning of his trip to the moon, and Pete had helped him on his way by ejecting his replica moon lander in the direction of the moon together with a dump load of useless scraps of space junk. His trip to the moon so far should have gone quite unnoticed. Parts of the moon had long been used as dumping ground for non-reusable space debris. Nobody and nothing would consider looking for an extra piece of space debris being jettisoned towards the moon. It was the return trip that was the tricky part. With what Robert knew now about what happened on the moon in 1969, and how this information had been hidden from the public for all these decades, Robert understood the dangers he may find on earth might be worse than the dangers he had faced on the moon. His return needed to be just as stealthy as his trip to the moon. He had taken his chances for biggest part of the return trip. It had been a truly slow return trip as to remain inconspicuous. Robert had calculated a return path that would make his pod look like what Pete refered to as a wanderer. Some of the HEOPSs had grown dense over the years. Dense enough to occasionally send a larger part of space debris off into a more elliptical orbit instead of punching holes through it and contributing to the low-orbit cascade effect. These wanderers had relatively low kinetic energy though, especially at the outer ranges of their elliptical orbit. So for Roberts path from moon orbit to the debrisphere to look like a wanderer, Robert had to use a trajectory that took him an order of a magnitude more time than it would normally have taken. With what Robert had discovered, he had grown convinced that someone might be keeping close watch on things related to the moon, so he better not take chances. David had managed to get back to a low orbit position , but now the hard part was ahead. He could not remain under the radar if he used his capsule for re-entry. While the war had long ended, the current stability was still an uneasy one. Each one of the newly formed nations was routinely monitoring any object entering earths atmosphere. If there were still conspirators left, as Robert suspected, a direct entry was sure to put them on his track Robert was counting on Pete and his crew now to spot his pod and pick him up before cascading debris would hit him or worse, before a stray HEOPS sub-swarm would rip his pod apart. While Robert was relatively safe from cascading debris, shielded by large stable orbit ISS cluster debris, and while no full HEOPS was projected to hit this part of the debrisphere any time soon, the debrisphere remained a dangerous place to hide out. There might be days or even weeks to kill before his brother would come this way. But than Robert rather took his chances in the debrisphere than to expose his moon mission to whatever was left of the conspirator organisation that he had no doubt existed even today. He had no way of knowing to what lengths they would go to protect this coverup.
A low power short range radio transmission should grab Pete’s attention and get him his lift home. Robert had some time to think now. The mechanical monster that he had discovered gave him so much to wonder about. The technology was way beyond 2046 earth technology. The monster was massive in size. Despite of its size and destructive strength, it had an agility and speed that seemed physically impossible for a machine this size. None of the sensors had had the ability to register this beast. Not on sonar, not on Radar, not even on Camera when it had artificial lighting directed on it. And then there was its odd shape. This giant monster was shaped like a giant wolf. The first hint of its shape had come from Roberts rendering of the dust patterns. Only when Robert had used his orbiter had the monster become visible to the cameras and to the naked eyes. Robert had remotely controlled his orbiter to act like a directed mirror that reflected moonlight towards the moon. Doing so a monstrous pitch black wolf like monster had become visible. Its behavior was not unlike that of a rabid dog. While logically, from its strength and speed, nothing should be able to stop this beast, a thin colorful cord , less than a centimeter in diameter, somehow acted as an unbreakable leash to this wild mechanical monstrous dog. What could have created this monster? What was this cord that was stronger than any material could possibly be?
Both technologies had to be extraterrestrial. This monster must have been tied up in this moon crater for many decades. Possibly even centuries. What was its power source? Why did NASA fake a safe return for these astronauts? Why did they cover up the tragic death of these young astronauts? Who were the people that replaced the astronauts that died on the moon? How did they pull off a cover up of this magnitude, and ‘why’ did they cover it up in the first place? Robert was sure of one thing. The people who had covered up this tragedy would stop at nothing to protect their secret. Robert’s curiosity wanted to get to the very bottom of this.
He knew though that he had to tread lightly. He would have to work alone and in total secrecy on this if he wanted to get anywhere close to the truth.