Stormhaven Rising (Atlas and the Winds Book 1) (77 page)

Lying prone in a spacesuit was no easy task, even in the light lunar gravity. Lying still was even harder. Especially when the soil around you threatened to give way at any second. But that’s exactly what Lieutenant Teng had to do; lie motionless, holding the ultra-high-resolution sensor in front of his face, while the scanner gathered data.

He was a Special Operations soldier, and a surveillance specialist. The only one in Chang-Er who had the skills for the job. So even though he had little experience on the surface, and only a little more in a spacesuit, he’d volunteered for the mission.

He’d landed his skimmer almost four kilometers beyond the ridge, in a dark-bottomed crater. The sun was still low to the east, and he hoped the darkness of the tiny crater’s floor would hide its position from any casual observer. The route he’d taken to get to Plato had been carefully planned by the General himself, and he knew that this was going to be a tough mission no matter how he approached it.

The hike through the steeply rising ejecta wall had winded him more than he would have expected given the ease with which he had been able to bounce over the obstacles, but he’d learned that the different muscles used in walking here had a strange way of showing up in fatigue.

That has to be it, he reassured himself as he pushed the last few hundred meters over the summit of the rim.

Yet lying on this narrow ledge, he struggled to steady his hands enough to get a good reading. He watched sand cascade down around him in a dustless stream of gray, while concentrating on his body. Oddly tight and painful, his heart pounded in his chest.

He looked down at his oxygen readout, its luminous display obscured by a layer of dirt that had built up on it. He flicked at it with the tip of a gloved finger, but couldn’t clear the dust. Rolling onto his side, he capped the sensor, setting it down on a rock.

Sweat had begun to build up on his skin, and he knew something had to be wrong. A suit malfunction? he thought, shaking his head to clear the fog. His mind was drifting. The voices of the stars called to him, echoing in his mind with a thousand distinct voices.

“No,” he shouted, clinging to the edges of his tenuous sanity. His voice roared back at him from the empty interior of his helmet.

He thought about turning on his transmitter, to scream for help, but remembered the General’s orders; “Be seen or heard by no one.”

His finger danced away from the mic switch, flitting back to the display of his suit life support controls. Dirt still obscured the readout. “What is happening?” he gasped, trying to think through the twisting maze of confusion.

In his mind, he retraced the last few meters of his hike, scrambling down onto this narrow perch. Tumbling slowly toward the ledge, a scraping sound on the base of his helmet.

Had it cracked? he wondered, but lucidity forced itself into his awareness. No, if I had broken a seal, the visor would have frosted up with condensation in the decompression.

Struggling to his feet with his chest feeling like it was about to explode, he twisted his arm up to the connections on the back of his head. “The supply lines,” he choked out into the darkness, feeling only the sealed valves where hoses should have been.

The ground spun crazily around him, and the regolith crumbled under his boot. He jerked back from the edge, slamming against the boulder that had formed the ledge. Ricocheting away, he dropped without a sound through the swirling debris, recovering enough balance to execute a nearly flawless swan dive into the abyss.

Several long seconds later and already unconscious, the visor of his helmet did indeed frost up, along with the rest of his suddenly over-exposed skin.

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