SPACE 1999/PLANET OF THE APES CROSSOVER
By "jemarcu"
Based on "Space 1999" created by Gerry Anderson
And the movie "Planet of the Apes"
Screenplay by Rod Serling and Michael Wilson
Original novel written by Pierre Boulle
Plot elements added from "Eclipse of the Sun" by
Michael D. O'Brien

Inspired in part by Eric Paddon's Planet of the Apes/ Battlestar Galactica crossover story

This is for entertainment purposes only, no copyright infringement is intended.

Prologue

Astronaut George Taylor stood staring at the sight before him, not wanting to believe what his eyes were telling him. There, on the sandy beach where the land met the ocean, stood the remains of the statue of liberty, once a proud symbol of freedom and safe haven for his countrymen, now reduced to a corroded hulk.
"Oh my God. I'm back. I'm home..all the time it was.." he stammered to himself, his mute paramour Nova looking on in confusion. " They finally, really, did it! You maniacs! You blew it up! Ahhhh, God damn you.. God Damn you all to hell!" he cried out, condemning the long gone leaders of a civilization that had, apparently, self-destructed and left in its wake a world dominated by intelligent apes, with humans reduced to the level of mute animals.
As the leader of Earth's first inter-stellar space expedition, the U.S.S. Icarus, Taylor along with his three crewmembers had crash-landed on what they assumed to be a distant, planet in another solar system. The expedition's only female astronaut, Stewart, had been discovered to have died during hibernation shortly before their spaceship had sunk in an inland salt lake. Taylor and his remaining crewmates, Dodge and Landon, had set off on foot over the barren, moonless landscape in search of life. After a journey of several days, they encountered a lush jungle region inhabited by a civilization of intelligent apes that treated the primitive humans as a lower animal, worthy only of experimentation and extermination. Taylor was the only survivor of that encounter, thanks to the compassion of two maverick chimpanzee scientists, Zira and Cornelius. Now, standing before the wreckage of his own civilization, the awful truth revealed as the sea washed over him, all he could do was pound the wet sand in despair.
At length, he got back on his horse, utterly drained of any emotion, and resumed his trek along the shoreline.
"Well, what comes next?" he said to himself. He turned to his companion, Nova. Surprisingly, she smiled at him. 'Well, maybe all is not lost." he said, smiling back as he continued his journey into the unknown.
Hours passed. The sun started to sink closer to the western horizon, behind the trees and rocky cliffs of the coastline. The wind and sound of the crashing surf acted as an almost hypnotic balm on his nerves. He realized that his months of captivity in Ape City and the degrading treatment he had been subjected to, had to have taken its toll on him. Now, having regained his freedom and luxuriating in the sensations of the coastline, he was able to think clearly. Yes, he thought to himself. For better or worse, I'm home. I have to find a way to start over, for myself and maybe for all mankind.
As the sky turned more purple than pink, Taylor decided to start looking for a place to camp for the night. Presently, he came to a slight grade in the land that led to a wide valley where he could see for miles and miles. There were forested areas more resembling the eastern woodlands he would have expected to see in the area around New York City, rather than sub tropical jungles, punctuated by meadows and clearings. He shook his head in amazement. This is as good a place as any to start over, or at least to spend the night. As he turned the reigns to head down into the valley, he became conscious of the sound of a wind, as though through a tunnel, coming from the opposite direction. Strange, he thought to himself. The air away from the coastline is calm. In the distance he saw what looked like the opening to a cave. As he turned his mount to investigate it, Nova grabbed his arm and was gesturing excitedly in the other direction.
"It's all right, Nova. Its all right." he said reassuringly to her. But the panic in her eyes grew with every step the horse took towards the cave. He was about to dismount and walk over there alone, when something made him stop. That cave. He remembered the ape's fears about the so-called Forbidden Zone, which he supposed he was technically still in the middle of. During the time in his cell, he had over-heard some gorillas talking about strange sights and sounds, and how two gorilla patrols sent secretly to investigate had never returned. He looked again at Nova, and saw the raw fear in her eyes. His disregard of the instincts of the primitive humans had landed him in trouble once. Not again, he thought to himself. He turned his horse towards the lush valley in front of him, and never looked back.
It was full dusk now, and he was finding the crackling of the campfire to be just as relaxing as the sounds of the ocean. Nova was already asleep next to him, curled up into a fetal position. He himself was rejoicing in the feeling of a full belly. The provisions the apes had given him were simple. Assorted fruits and vegetables, and water in what looked to be leather skins. Carrots and potatoes roasted over an open fire had never tasted so good. Perhaps tomorrow, he thought to himself, I might try my luck at hunting.
He prepared his bedroll, fed his campfire a few more thick branches to guard against the night chill, and finally lay down next to Nova. As he looked up at the night sky, he recounted carefully what he knew. This was unquestionably Earth, he was somewhere in the area of New York City, and based on the last reading from his ship's clock, and what ape archeologist Cornelius had told him, it was the late 40th century. Upon discovering the wreckage of the statue of liberty, he had assumed that a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet bloc had brought about the downfall of human civilization, but now he was beginning to wonder if that was true. Would he ever know what really happened? Probably not, he thought to himself. As exhaustion finally overcame him and he started to doze off, (but not before checking to make sure his stolen carbine was next to him, with the safety off), he pondered the great mystery that his crewmate Dodge, the brilliant scientist now a stuffed exhibit in the ape museum of natural history, had typically been the first to notice shortly after they had landed. At that time, they were still assuming that they were on a planet in some distant solar system. As mysteries went, it was a huge one, and whether it tied into the larger mystery of what happened to mankind, Taylor had no way of knowing. But as he fell asleep, the question nonetheless rattled around in his head, until he finally had to speak it out loud to the cosmos. "What the hell happened to the moon?"

5 YEARS LATER

Chapter 1

Commander John Koenig of Moonbase Alpha picked himself up off of the floor and quickly looked around Command Center. The damage was not too bad, and injuries seemed minor. "Tony, get a damage report" he ordered. He then went to Maya's station. As science officer and refugee from a planet whose science was far in advance of Earth's, she would likely have a sensible answer.
"Don't tell me that was some meteor strike." he quipped, while he massaged his sore neck.
"No Commander", replied Maya as she worked her console. "I'll have to correlate these readings with Computer, but offhand I'd say we went through another wormhole."
"Are you sure about that, Maya?" inquired Tony Verdeschi, coming over from his station. "That was quite a ride, but it was nothing like the last spacewarp we went through when we found the Menom ship".
"Would you like to run the readings yourself? It shouldn't take you more than, oh, six months to interpret the data." replied Maya with her usual impish good humor.
"No thanks, honey. I'm just a security guy. I leave all the heavy thinking to you aliens." Tony laced this reply with his most ingratiating smile. Although he liked to affect the air of a working class knuckle-dragger, he was actually quite intelligent, earning his PhD in Aerospace Engineering at age twenty-five. He liked to joke that he once thought of himself as well-educated before he met Maya. He knew, false modesty aside, that he was quite intelligent. But when you were up against a woman from a civilization five hundred years ahead of your own, you were fighting out of your weight.
"Sandra, link up with stellar cartography." ordered Koenig. "See if you can get a position fix."
"Yes, Commander" replied Sandra. With only the star charts they had available at the time of Breakaway, that would have been a hopeless task. With the information gleaned from the recently encountered derelict Menom ship, along with what they had acquired from the Voyager probe databanks, they might just get a fix. Sandra went to work.
Koenig then called up Medical Center. "Helena, what's the casualty count?"
"So far, cuts and bruises mainly." replied Dr. Russell. "Jim Haines has a broken arm. That's it. We were lucky this time."
"Tony, damage report?" inquired Koenig.
"A blown compartment in Technical, but it was unoccupied. It's sealed off, should be repaired within the hour. Two force field towers are damaged, long range scanners are off-line. Main power is stable. Repair crews are on it."
"Good. Give long range scanners top priority."
"Right"
"Sandra. Anything from stellar cartography yet?"
"No position report as yet, Commander. However.. I can tell you that this system has nine planets, one sun, and a large asteroid belt. Some of the inner planets may be capable of supporting life, but we're too far away as yet for that kind of detail."
"Nine planets?" Koenig said thoughtfully, then exchanged a sober glance with Tony. He had to be thinking the same thing. But the odds..!
He spoke into his commlock. "Victor, you better get up here."
"On my way, John" In his office, Professor Victor Bergman sprang up out of his chair, grabbed his cane and walked a surprisingly quick pace to Command Center. Very soon, he mused to himself, I won't even need the cane. His recovery had been coming along rather well, all things considered. Shortly before the Moon had encountered the planet Psychon, they had transversed a space warp. Victor Bergman had been out on the lunar surface with astronaut Bill Frasier overseeing improvements to the force field that carried his name when the Moon had entered the warp. With no warning, the Eagle he had been traveling in crashed when it encountered severe gravimetric distortions. Were it not for Frasier's expert handling of the Eagle, they both would have perished. As it was, Bergman was severely injured and comatose. If not for Dr. Russell's skill as a surgeon, and the Elendorf brain complex, his comatose state might have been permanent. Even so, it had taken him many months and many treatments to finally regain consciousness, and many more months of grueling physical therapy before he could return to duty. As he walked into the Command Center with just a trace of a limp, he thought to himself how grateful he was that this ordeal was finally (almost), behind him. Bergman had never liked lying about. He had been shifting for himself since he was fifteen, and on Alpha, everyone had to pull his own weight.
"What have we got , John?" he inquired as he strolled into Command Center.
"Take a look at this." replied Koenig, as he handed Bergman a computer printout of the telemetry. After a moment, he asked in a quiet voice "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
"Hmmm?" he replied, then after catching Koenig's look, Quietly, he said "John, there must be hundreds, maybe thousands of solar systems, that have a superficial resemblance to ours. We can't make any judgments until we get a position report."
"Ok." he said. Then pausing to gather himself he added. "Ok, we'll hold judgment in abeyance until we have more data. Victor, work with Maya on correlating our current position with our star charts. With all the new data we have, we should be able to have some idea where we are."
"Right" replied Bergman, but thinking to him that the universe is a very big place.
"Alibe, can you tell me what our position is relative to that sun?" asked Koenig.
A few minutes of data entry and wrangling with her console, and the black-Canadian Operations Officer had an answer. "It's just a rough, but I'd say we're about twenty AU's distant, and about five degrees south of its elliptical plane. Our speed is off the scale, but I'd estimate twenty-percent of light and decelerating fast."
Koenig whistled. "That wormhole, or whatever it was, must have shot us out like a bullet." The accidental explosion that had hurled the moon out of earth orbit had blown them out of the solar system, and off the elliptical plane. Since then, they had been through three space warps. The most recent one had left them in possession of a derelict alien spaceship and a treasure trove of technology, only some of which they were able to comprehend so far. The Alphans had used that technology to upgrade their own systems. Koenig now planned on putting some of the fruits of that labor to good use. He moved to his console and keyed the visual communicator. Alpha's chief Eagle pilot, Alan Carter, appeared on the screen. "Alan, what's the status of the Swifts?"
"Santa Maria is just finishing final tests, John. Mayflower should be ready in about a week."
"All right, Alan. I want Santa Maria on thirty minute standby for a long range survey mission."
"Right." replied Alan.
The Swifts were advanced spacecrafts, completed not long before breakaway. Although there were none stationed on the moon at the time of the accidental explosion of nuclear waste that hurled the moon into the depths of outer space, Alpha had later encountered the planet where an expedition of three Swifts had landed. Due to a malfunction in an advanced prototype robot named "Brian", the crews of all three ships had been killed when they opened their hatches to the poisonous atmosphere of the planet, believing the false information that the psychotic robot was feeding the ships sensors. After deactivating the robot, Koenig had ordered the Swifts to be salvaged. One Swift was deemed beyond repair, and was thus designated for use as spare parts. The remaining 2 were repaired, upgraded with technology from the derelict Menom spaceship, and re-christened. They now possessed weapons, shielding, advanced navigation technology, and were capable of seventy-eight percent of light-speed. Koenig was glad to have them, and was grateful for the skill of his technical staff. Improvising and jerry-rigging were valued skills when you were marooned in space, Koenig reflected to himself.