Starlight Running

By Leigh Kimmel

Eight lives depend on Kyle's desperate trek across the Moon to get help. But someone -- or something -- intends for him to fail. Can he defeat it in time?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Starship Cat Press
• Release date: Apr 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223824824

Book preview

Transcript of recording by Kyle Petros:

Whatever you do, Kyle, don't screw up.

Yeah, it's a variation on the Astronaut's Prayer. So what if I'm cloned from a member of the third selection group rather than Shepard, I've repeated it so many times it's become a mantra. That's one way of focusing my consciousness amidst the mind-numbing sameness of the lunar regolith passing under the wheels of the antique rover I'm driving. Eight lives are riding on this mission, including those of my wife and our unborn daughter.

With my radio turned off in hopes of foiling pursuit, the only sound is the hum and whir of my life-support equipment and the blood pounding in my ears. It's way too easy to feel like the last person alive, and I can't afford despair, not when I'm genetically predisposed to depressive disorders. So I keep talking, a personal record of this trip to Shepardsport to marshal assistance for our mining outpost. It's something to distract me from the dwindling time that remains until lunar sunrise, and the growing fear that my mission may be futile.

Things hadn't looked so bad at first, even after a failure cascade took down our nuclear reactor and compromised our habitat's life-support system. I'd survived worse in Shepardsport the first couple of lunar days after the Expulsion, when we were struggling with the strain of three hundred extra residents on the life-support systems and came close to losing people to hypercapnia. At least drowning in your own carbon dioxide isn't as nasty as roasting to death as the sun bakes a habitat that can't maintain its temperature—you just get woozy and doze off into a sleep that never ends.

But we'd no more than gotten the repair robots back up and running when we discovered we needed parts. We've got the standard autolathe and 3D molecular printer, but we didn't have the right feedstocks to fabricate high-velocity bearings or high-pressure fittings. Not to mention replacing the refrigerants vented when the seals blew. I could synthesize those in our chem lab, but not in the industrial quantities we needed.

It should've been a quick radio call to Shepardsport and they'd fly in the parts, or send someone to Grissom City on Nearside to pick up anything that couldn't be fabricated in the port facility machine shop. Except right before the nuke scrammed, it gave us a surge that fried half the electronics in the main dish, leaving us with nothing but the low-power radio circuits for suit comms and minerbot WiFi controls. Which meant somebody had to make the trip.

Our commandant didn't even go through the ritual of asking for