Chapter 5

I was right scunnered,tired enough to put up my boots and snooze away the last of my air reserves—which were way down.

Like down in the below twenty-percent “Damn it!” territory. Fast sneaking up on the “Oh shit!” of ten percent. I’d rather we didn’t hit the resigned “Aw, fuck” at five.

We’d found plenty of shelters destroyed by the quake. Almost as many intact but with too many people inside—they’d run out of air. Saw only one with a live person inside. We couldn’t do a thing but wave through the tiny inspection portal; the Russians had built the shelters, but not stocked them with any suits. She was in there alone, wearing her civvies, was gonna go down that way, and not crap we could do to help her.

And leave it to the Russians to not use a universal adapter, so we couldn’t recharge our own suits from the shelters’ tanks. Nor could we swap tanks with the few space suits we had found.

The final option—crawl out of my nice safe Scottish-built suit, through hard vacuum, on the chance that I could don and power-up a piece of Russian crap before I passed out and turned into a popsicle-girl—was way past the “Aw, fuck” category.

Even if there’d been no radio, Grant had salvaged a functioning RACR from the crash, so we still had each other’s backs.

For now, we were still up and moving.

Two more brief skirmishes. The first, we kicked Russian ass. The second bumped against a wall trying to hide—and it collapsed on him. Still counting that as a win.

“Sarge?”

“Uh-huh.” I wasn’t depressed, desperate, despairing, or some other D-word. I was just trying to save air.

Apparently Grant was doing the same as all he did was point up at a ledge with his rifle.

One good look and we hit the dirt together.

Okay, we kicked out our feet and took a long second to drift down to the regolith, raising tiny puffs of dust when we landed.

A guard.

Walking on guard duty.

“What do you think he’s protecting?” Grant was scanning with his imager, and not getting any clues. I knew by now he’d have seen them if there were any. The man was way sharper than his three stripes advertised.

“Why aren’t you an officer? All that education and such.” I was looking for other ideas while he watched the guard.

He was silent long enough that I looked to make sure he was still there. He was.

“I’ve got my reasons…Isla.” I’m pretty sure it was the first time he’d ever used my name.

I was debating pursuing that when I had an idea. “You ever come to Tycho before?”

“Nope. You?”

“Couple times. Which way do you think is north?” I tried looking at Earth. It was just a crescent and there wasn’t a whole lot of night lights down there bigger than a campfire. Hard to tell which way was up and which way was down. And I couldn’t remember if it was a waning or waxing crescent. Living on Farside, I didn’t pay its phases a whole lot of mind.

Grant tapped my shoulder and sliced a hand about thirty degrees to the right to indicate north.

Our nav electronics were gone along with our long-range radio, but then I saw it.

We were within two days of a new Earth, which meant we were near enough a full Moon from their point of view. That meant the sun was blistering Luna’s Nearside smack in the center. Tycho lay to the southeast of Nearside. The shadows of everything still standing in Tycho were also pointing to the southeast.

That meant north was thirty degrees to our right, and we were at the northwest edge of where the dome had been.

“I know what they’re guarding. It’s our ticket home. We just need to get past them.”