Chapter 1

Mare Tranquillitatis my ass!

Go ahead. Thrash some Duster bastard over Luna’s northeastern Nearside. Make him eat death slow and painful.

Then, after you’ve won, after his ass is going down hard, his drive goes nova. It kicks out an electro-magnetic pulse so hard that it cooks your ship, too. You dump out two klicks up and watch your ship punch a new crater close beside his.

See how you feel about that shit.

Scary as hell ride down. The EMP had cooked my suit’s electronics as well. I had to handle the landing retros manually. Ran out of fuel a few dozen meters up—damn glad this was Luna grav and not Earth’s unforgiving full-g. Felt the leg go when I hit, but I was down and the suit was intact for all the good it did me.

Welcome to the fucking Sea of Tranquility.

The Duster’s ship had gone as bright as a second sun, before it piled into the inside cliff face of Cauchy Crater, less than a dozen klicks away. Instead of acting like a beacon shouting “Come save my ass,” the crater had funneled all that light into a beam that was crossing nobody’s path—not Earth, not some off-track freighter. Like a rifle shot due north, it was going straight up. Some dipwad alien scientist sitting on the North Star four hundred years from now might scratch himself and wonder what that tiny fleck of brightness could be, but I wasn’t counting on it.

As if the busted leg hadn’t just stamped ‘Paid’ on my ticket, my Army training kicked in and I checked my suit. Dead. H2 and oxy recyc had enough mechanical fail-safes to give me something to drink and breath for now. All I could do was hope the suit blocked the rads of the reactor burst, because the dosimeter readout had cooked along with the rest of my electronics. No dosimeter, no radio, no readouts on how much longer I’d have before even the recyc couldn’t save me. Not even a beacon in case someone did come looking.

I unclipped my RACR and fired a shot at a likely rock. The Recoilless Army Combat Rifle didn’t recoil, but it didn’t shatter the rock either. Three kilos of dead plastic and fried electronics.

I slammed a hypo through my suit leg, trying not to scream at the jarring to my broken bone. The cold clarity of the meds washed through me and the limb went blessedly numb.

The Army taught us a whole lot about how to survive in hard places. Zero atmo and the one-sixth g of Luna’s surface wasn’t anything new in the manual. Sitting in a white-gray camo suit at the bottom of a three-klick deep crater four hundred kilometers from the next nearest piece of humanity without even a signal flare? Not so much.

Walking that distance was in range, if my leg hadn’t decided to take leave without permission. Didn’t really matter; without the nav gear, I didn’t stand a chance of finding a specific point four hundred klicks away. There wasn’t shit at the old Apollo 17 site anyway except scrap—Chinese had gotten pissed half a century back, when there was still a China, and dropped a ten-thousand kilo shrapnel head right at ground zero. Shock-wave munitions—concussers—didn’t work in zero atmo, but the shrap-heads never left anything bigger than a boot sole behind, not for a long way round. The Chinese blew out the museum, the historic lander and buggy, and about three hundred tourists—all done back before this shit war when there were still tourists.

Army trainers had pounded a lot into my thick skull. Not a single piece of which was going to salvage this screwed-up mess. No impossible engineering feat sprouting from my grunt brain. No “just lean into the fucking traces, man, and grunt it out” solution. Even in one-sixth g I wasn’t going to hop one-legged for four hundred kilometers to nowhere. No miracles—not out here.

I was dead; I knew that. But I was no cracker. I’d keep my helmet closed and hold on for every second I had.

Army did a whole lot of mental training. Will to survive was high on their list. But how to turn fear into something useful was the big one—useful to them anyway.

You’ll be afraid. Don’t care who you are, you’ll be shitting your pants when you’re in it.

A lot they knew. Why didn’t the psychs ever actually fly a mission? Too goddamn scared was my guess.

They didn’t get that fear came before the mission. During the fight, there was only time for adrenaline and survival.

You’ve got to turn that fear. Turn it to anger! Turn it to rage! Turn it to winning the battle!

Fuckin’ psychs.

We did what they told us. Afraid of something? Attack it! Except the fear came before the mission—we turned it anyway. We’d beat on each other in the ready room, throwing “friendly” punches that would level a grunt if they weren’t as wound up on adrenaline as the next jock. We’d start the flight with bruises purpling and fear-eating grins plastered on our faces. Yeah, we had the old turn-fear-into-rage routine nailed.

Fear when you went down was different kind of thing. I’d beaten the odds about three hundred-to-one by surviving. Couldn’t get that kind of help in a poker game, but I had the luck now for all the good it was doing.

No way to rescue myself and no one looking for me here.

Zara had eaten it at the far end of Mare Fecunditatis—Sea of Fertility. Shit! She’d been the best partner I’d ever had in flight or in the sack. New Army thinking—fighting partners who were also fucking partners.

Heightened wingman bond. Subjects more likely to go to extreme measures to defend their sleep mate.

“Sleep mate.” Lame-ass psychs—like that even began to cover it.

Zara had rocked. Better than anyone, even before the Army and their psychs got their claws in me. Zara and I had talked about rooting down together when our tours were up. Meant it, too. It hadn’t been some feebs’ pillow talk; we’d meant it right down to our boots.

Yeah, stamp ‘Paid’ on that one, too.

You want terror, you fuckin’ psychs? Not fear, but unholy, mind-numbing, shit-in-your-suit terror? You watch a renegade Duster zero in on your wingmate when your thrust vector is going the other way and there isn’t squat you can do about it. That’ll teach you terror.

But I’d turned it. Yes I did. I turned that terror into one flaming, searing, ball-busting tower of pissed-as-hell fighter-jock rage. Rather than just killing him and going home alive, I took that Duster apart one piece at a time. I moved in close and hurt him and kept on hurting him. No kill—just pain.

When I finally let the bastard die—when he’d crisscrossed a thousand kilometers of Luna trying to get away but knowing he was going to burn in hell—I got close enough to see him right through his canopy. Almost close enough to hear his final scream despite the gap of empty space between us.

But he’d kept that one last trick up his sleeve.

When his engine blew, it fucking went EMP, cooking all my circuits.

And down I went, too.

I tried to spot the new craters our two ships had punched—side-by-side holes a kilometer up Cauchy’s side.

Not even a hint. It was night and only cold Earthshine lit that section of crater wall. Earthshine would never reach me here at the bottom of Cauchy’s icy deep. Even sunrise—still a week away—would never reach me.

The ships had hit in the steepest part of the rim’s cliff. They’d probably triggered a rockfall to bury any trace. Only evidence left was me.

Some day, a thousand years from now, some geologist would stumble on my camouflaged suit—almost the same color as the soil and lightly dusted with micrometeorites by then. He’d have to look up my suit design in some historical database to figure out what century I’d been fucked by. My personal recorder was cooked, so no record there. No pad or pen, so I couldn’t even leave him a goddamn note. I considered scrabbling a long message in the Lunar dust; it would last for centuries. Millennia.

Then, like some lovesick recruit, I simply scribed two first names—mine and Zara’s. It wouldn’t mean anything to anyone but me, but I liked seeing it there.

She’d taught me joy in war. She’d trained me, far more thoroughly than the psychs, that there were emotions other than fear and rage—even Army victory celebrations weren’t joy; they were rage thinly disguised as triumph.

More important than joy, Zara had taught me hope. Hope of one day seeing a girl with her long hair floating behind as she raced down the corridors of Tycho City. Of a boy with her mother’s light eyes watching a ball bounce in one-sixth g and seeing nothing strange because he’d never been to a full-g planet.

The recyc ran out. I felt the tightness growing in my chest. Oxy-dep setting in. I knew my training. From when I could truly feel it—not some fear or panic reaction, but really feel it—I would have only moments before it killed me. They’d learned that the slow bleed-out of oxygen depravation led to unpredictable panic attacks, bad news in armed soldiers with hell-bent rage burning in their guts. So the recyc ran at a hundred percent until it was gone. The air in the suit was good for three more thinning breaths, maybe four, then I’m done.

One final look at the stars Zara and I had dreamed beneath.

Lying here in my last moments, I learned a new fear.

One that the goddamn psychs would never be able to understand no matter how I tried to explain. It wasn’t a fear born of rage or vengeance or honor. It was born of something they could never know—weren’t capable of knowing. Weren’t worthy of.

My fear, Zara? The one thing that shrivels me? The one thing I can’t turn into soothing, familiar rage?

It’s that the woman who taught me to love so deeply might not be there waiting for me when I cross over.