Service History
A long-range explorer vessel, Ultra Probe was designed to transport a crew of four (one command pilot and three mission specialists) to the planet Ultra, which was discovered by Victor Bergman in 1994. Due to its irregular orbit, the planet would be in range of the probe for only a limited time. Ultra Probe was launched from the Space Dock, in lunar orbit, on 6 June 1996 and arrived at Ultra in February 1997, at which time it lost radio contact with Moonbase Alpha.
The objective of the mission had been to land on Ultra, but this was postponed when a group of derelict alien spacecraft was found orbiting the planet. When the crew attempted to board one of the vessels, a monstrous alien life form entered Ultra Probe through its airlock and killed all onboard except Captain Cellini. Apparently immune to weapons fire, and possessing the abilities of mind control and hypnosis, the creature used its tentacles to seize Doctors King and Fouchere and Professor Mackie and drag them towards its "mouth"—a hole at its base—and consume them. It then regurgitated the skeletal carcasses of its victims. Cellini was only able to escape by detaching the command module lifeboat from the rest of the probe; he was found, on the brink of death, six months later by an Earth rescue team.
Since neither the creature nor the derelict spacecraft appeared on any of the Ultra Probe flight records, Cellini's account of the loss of his colleagues was dismissed as fantasy. The Earth authorities ruled that he had opened the airlock prematurely and that the rest of the crew had died in the vacuum of space. Cellini was ordered to undergo psychiatric evaluation on Earth; Dr Helena Russell's explanation was that his guilt had caused a nervous breakdown and that the story of the alien creature was a subconscious fabrication. Moonbase Alpha Commander John Koenig, a friend of Cellini, believed his version of events and publicly defended him in the years after the disaster, later securing a position for him on the moonbase.
Five years later, following the Moon's departure from Earth orbit, Ultra Probe was discovered by the inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha still docked to the alien spacecraft. Determined to redeem himself and prove that he had been truthful, Cellini stole an Eagle spacecraft and returned to the probe; there, he battled the creature with an axe. Although he managed to wound his opponent, he ultimately suffered the same fate as King, Fouchere and Mackie. Koenig arrived and apparently succeeded in killing the creature with the axe; it vanished, leaving a pool of blood and the decomposed bodies of the four Ultra Probe crewmembers.
Read more about this topic: Ultra Probe
Famous quotes containing the words service and/or history:
“We could not help being struck by the seeming, though innocent, indifference of Nature to these men’s necessities, while elsewhere she was equally serving others. Like a true benefactress, the secret of her service is unchangeableness. Thus is the busiest merchant, though within sight of his Lowell, put to pilgrim’s shifts, and soon comes to staff and scrip and scallop-shell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)