The Infinity Corps: The Silent Moon: Infinity Corps Origins, #1

By Philip A. Lee

Stranded on a Dead Rock…

Ensign Farrah Hawthorne of the Infinity Corps's Exploration Division mistakenly volunteered for a solo mining-survey expedition to an empty, lifeless moon in a distant, newly discovered solar system. With nothing but a small rocket pod, a space suit, and a raygun to keep her company, she soon discovers her greatest foe is the terminal boredom of tedium and loneliness. But is she truly alone out here in this airless, rocky wilderness? Or have the spidery fears from her very nightmares come to life, threatening to prematurely end her first real mission?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Philip A. Lee
• Release date: Sep 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223764335

Book preview

The Silent Moon

THE SILENT MOON

AN INFINITY CORPS STORY

PHILIP A. LEE

THE SILENT MOON

Sixteen days into Ensign Farrah Hawthorne’s six-month assignment to this deadened rock, she knew she’d made a huge error in judgment in volunteering for this long-term survey for the Infinity Corps’s Exploration Division.

In retrospect, her first clue she’d made a mistake: after the briefing, Captain Pollard had asked her if she ever suffered from claustrophobia.

At first the mission sounded like an absolute dream: ship off to an unexplored moon and conduct an advance geological survey for eventual long-term mining expeditions. She would fly solo, have her very own Stellaris Mk. XVI Ambulatory Survey Pod, finally get some peace and quiet after four hectic years at the Procellarum Academy on Luna. Maybe even find herself out there among the stars.

But there was a reason so few hands were raised. Those who had kept their hands down at the briefing, the junior and flag lieutenants, must have known some truth they declined to share with the younger crop of ExDiv officers. None of them had told her or her fellow volunteers what deep-space survey missions really meant: interminable boredom, frustration, and the inevitable self-loathing.

Now that Farrah was out here, she was stuck unless some medical emergency occurred, so she had no choice but to suck it up and do the work. The silver lining in her cloud was probably mercury vapor, so she settled on a different metaphor: the bright side of this horrendous, ugly little moon was maybe they’d give her her own command for suffering through this. Even the smallest rocketship exploring some backwater nebula would be preferable to this drudgery.

By Day Seventeen, she started developing coping mechanisms whenever the slithering sense of her isolation tried to constrict around her middle. Envisioning the promotion, humming her favorite song, turning each mundane task into a game of sorts.

Each turn of the clock resembled the day before. She’d wake to an alarm in her pod on the cratered, airless surface of 346-26—just a number designation she’d come to call Twenty-Six, a misshapen little moon orbiting the gas giant Grímnir in the Sunna star system. Bleary eyed and fuzzyheaded, she’d crawl out of the cramped sleeping space, which was so narrow she often accidentally banged her knees against either bulkhead whenever she flipped over.

Two lockers flanked the foot of her bed. The left-hand one contained uniforms, casual clothes, and spacesuits—all regulation in cut, with the appropriate Infinity Corps and Exploration Division insignias on full display. Fishbowl helmets were stowed in the rack above. The right-hand locker held just about every tool or small arm she could