Lem yawned.
The control room was quiet and calm, the only sound the gentle, whirring hum of computer fans and the sluuurp of Lem's lips as they pulled in another sip of coffee.
He flipped through a series of pictures, each one a feed from a different drone. There were hundreds of them up there now, too many to monitor by hand, but hand monitoring had been done away with long ago. This wasn't some clumsy operation with human-controlled "drones" being operated by wire from 300,000 miles away - this was true automation, a symphony of parts and pieces moving in harmony, each one contributing some small but vital effort to the overall operation.
None of that, however, stopped Lem from watching the feeds. He enjoyed it. He loved watching the little crawlers as they buzzed around searching for more pockets of H3, loved seeing the dredgers and drillers bore through the dusty surface to pull up the treasures beneath, loved observing the haulers take the loads back to the central refineries. It was like watching the inner workings of a fine old clock, each tiny gear and mechanism doing its part with utmost precision, with something very close to grace.
Of course, even the best-made clock needs occasional adjustment, and that was what Lem was watching for. His drones all knew their parts and how to play them, but they still required a conductor to sense the feel of the whole.
H3 production was going strong, and the main tanks were nearing capacity. It was nearly time to ready another return shipment, but Lem decided to wait a little longer while a few more loads were brought in. The system understood how to maximize its own efficiency, but it wasn't capable of making big decisions on its own. Rare earths production was running as planned, but efficiency numbers weren't quite were Lem wanted them to be. He decided to divert a few spiders and support drones to RE production and away from H3 to try and boost the figures a little before his supervisors got antsy.
Hummm. Click. Hummm. Sluuuurp.
The night wore on, much as every night before it had. Lem looked at his watch - 4:34. He was just considering stepping out to grab another cup of coffee when the alert came in.
Drone Offline.
Great, he thought, another stray. Drones lost contact with the central base on a not-irregular basis; they could get rolled over in a crater, stuck in a soft spot, or even glitch out and try to trundle to the other side of the Moon. Lem scanned for the missing drone but didn't see it in the system - odd.
He decided to send out a few dormant support drones as searchers to scan the area around where the missing drone had been last active. As a safety measure he pulled up their feeds, six in total, and threw them to his main monitor in a group. He watched as they came online and, using their tiny maneuvering jets, took to the skies above the Moon's surface.
The lunar ground swished by in a blur of gray as the six drones converged on the missing one's location and then spread out in a search pattern. They moved in a spiral, each rotation a little larger than the last, their sensors' operative ranges coordinated to cover every nanometer of the surface. Nothing.
Lem was puzzled. How could a little drone have gotten so far off track?
And then it swirled by - just a shadow at first, but the next drone showed the same thing, and the next.
Lem ran to the control panel and hit a series of buttons he'd only had cause to hit a few times before. A warning flashed up: "Do you wish to start Manual Override?"
He confirmed, and support drone #242-B came under his control.
Lem had forgotten how odd it was to fly with the seconds of lag between the Earth and the Moon, but he adapted and managed to find the spot he'd seen before. It only took a moment - they hadn't even bothered to hide it.
Footprints.
Someone had stolen his drone.
Lem relinquished manual control and began to lock the system down. He needed to cut off the central system before...
There was a flicker in the screens, and he knew he was already too late.
Even as he watched, he saw the commands being issued across his terminals and systems, systems he wasn't touching, systems he didn't even have access to. Drones were shutting down and disconnecting, refineries were clogging, and through it all Lem remained silent. He tried every access and override he could, but whoever had hacked their systems had moved fast, to the point it seemed inhuman. He was totally locked out, all his access and credentials revoked.
He watched, helpless, as the drones turned in unison and began to whir and trundle and crawl their way away from the refinery, away from the Earth. Toward the dark, cratered, far side of the Moon. He watched as his refineries were shut down and their unrefined materials vented into space or burned into unusable slag. And he watched as his almost-full resource shipments took off and rerouted themselves to an encrypted destination, probably somewhere in Russia or East Asia or wherever. It didn't matter where they were headed - they weren't headed back to him.
Lem sat down, dazed by the speed and precision of the attack. He did the only thing he could think to do.
Sluuuuuurp.