Read Chapter 21: The Ridge

The slope steepened, and Elena’s thighs burned inside the EVA suit as she hauled herself up the final pitch of the ridge. Jack moved ahead of her, his gait stiffening with every step, though he never once asked to stop. The light they’d spotted from the rover’s scope had vanished twenty minutes ago, swallowed by the jagged horizon of the crater wall.

“There,” she said, pointing.

A half-buried shelter sat wedged between two basaltic boulders, its panels scoured gray by micrometeorite rain. Emergency beacon, the stenciled marking read, worn but legible. The airlock door was sealed. That was either very good or very bad.

Jack reached it first, palm flat against the exterior latch. He didn’t pull. He turned to her, visor reflecting the pale Earthlight. “If Liang’s inside, he’s been in there for four days. No resupply. Oxygen recycler rated for two.” He paused. “Could be a corpse with a full tank and a broken transmitter.”

“Or it could be a corpse with a booby trap,” Elena said.

“You’re all warmth tonight.”

She stepped past him and tapped the control panel. The screen flickered, crackled, then rendered a single line: MANUAL OVERRIDE ENGAGED. She exhaled. “He engaged the override. That means he was conscious when he got here. He didn’t want anyone remotely cycling the lock.”

Jack nodded. “Worst case, we open it and find what our friend Liang left as a gift.”

“Best case, we find a witness.” She hit the release.

The seal hissed, then groaned open. A gust of warmed air hit her faceplate, condensation blooming across the glass. She wiped it with her glove. Inside, the cabin was dim—emergency lighting only, a faint amber glow pooling over a crumpled figure strapped to the medical cot.

Liang was alive. Barely.

His face was gray, lips cracked, eyes half-lidded. An emergency oxygen tube ran from a portable tank to a nasal cannula. His chest rose in shallow, irregular breaths. Jack was at his side in two strides, checking the tank’s reading.

“Twenty percent left,” Jack said. “He’s been rationing it.”

Elena knelt beside the cot, touching Liang’s shoulder. His eyes found hers, recognition flickering there. “Vasquez,” he rasped. “You found the relay.”

“We found your message,” she said. “And your breadcrumbs.”

A dry laugh rattled in his chest, and she saw him wince. Good—a wince meant ribs were still structured enough to hurt. “You always were clever with a multi-tool,” she added.

“You found Marcus’s,” he said. “I left it. Had to make you come.”

“You could have just called.”

“Couldn’t risk the airwaves.” Liang tried to push himself up on one elbow and failed, falling back against the cot with a grunt that turned into a wet cough. Jack’s jaw tightened.

“Don’t move,” Jack said. “Your O2 saturation is dropping. You need to get to a med-bay.”

Liang’s hand shot out, grabbing Elena’s wrist with startling strength. His grip was hot, feverish. “Listen. There’s a fourth.”

“A fourth what?”

“On the crew. Delta Base crew manifest said twelve. But there was a thirteenth. A systems contractor who flew up six weeks before launch. Signed in, signed out on paper, but his biometrics never matched the base registry. I ran the logs three times.”

Elena’s blood turned to ice. “The detonator.”

“Syndicate work. Clean, professional, designed to look like an accident. The official who signed off on the investigation? He’s not a bureaucrat. He holds controlling interest in Helios Consolidated Mining.”

Jack went still. “Helios. The company that bid on the lunar water-extraction rights.”

“The same,” Liang wheezed. “They want the ice deposits locked up. They want anyone who could prove the deposits were accessible independently gone. Eliminated.” He coughed again, and this time flecks of blood speckled his lips. “The Mars accident wasn’t about your guilt, Elena. It was about the same thing. The same company. Marcus—he wasn’t blackmailed by some shadowy individual. He was blackmailed by a corporation.”

Elena’s throat tightened. She’d spent years replaying the Mars explosion a thousand times, calculating every variable she could have controlled. And it hadn’t been about her. It had never been about her. It was about water, about money, about territory.

“Who is the contractor?” she asked. “Give me a name.”

Liang’s eyes fluttered. His grip loosened. “He’s still… still on the base. He stayed behind. He’s the reason the base went dark. I got out before he triggered the full shutdown. But the others—they’re not all dead.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “He’s holding them hostage. Using them to lure rescuers.”

“You know this how?”

“I saw him enter the communication array’s server room. He had a manifest of survivors. He crossed off names as he moved them.” Liang’s breath hitched. “Yours isn’t on the list. Mine isn’t either. We’re marked.”

Jack leaned in. “Who?”

Liang opened his mouth. His eyes rolled back. His body convulsed once—then went limp.

“Liang.” Elena shook him. “Liang!”

Jack pressed two fingers to his throat. “He’s still alive. But he’s not breathing right. Collapsed lung, I think, from the blast trauma.” He looked at her, the urgency sharp in his voice. “We have maybe an hour before the internal pressure crushes his remaining lung. He needs surgery.”

Elena’s mind raced. The hospital module was forty minutes east by rover—closest medical aid on the Moon. But the base was southwest, a sixty-minute detour across radiation flats, and the rover’s tracks had already been compromised on the northern slope.

“The base,” she said.

“We don’t know who’s waiting there.”

“We do know. We know there’s a saboteur still alive. And if we walk into the hospital module and he controls the comms, we’re done. The base has the med-bay, the surgical suite, and the lab to run a sync-bank diagnostic on Liang’s evidence.” She looked at Liang’s still form. “And we both know we can’t transmit his logs without him physically there to corroborate. Earth won’t believe a dead man’s data.”

Jack didn’t argue. He was already unstrapping Liang from the cot, lifting him with a grunt that told her exactly how much his knee was hurting. “Then we move fast,” he said. “And we pray the radiation flats don’t kill us first.”

“There’s an abandoned maintenance transport about half a klick from here,” she said. “I saw it on the drone scan, tucked into a crevasse along the southern ridge. If it’s shielded, we can cross the flats without cooking.”

Jack paused, staring at her. “You’ve been holding that back?”

“I was saving it for when we needed it.”

He loaded Liang over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, face tight with controlled pain. “Lead the way, Doc.”

Elena turned for the airlock, then stopped. Back on the cot, something glinted beneath the emergency blanket. She lifted it: a small data chip, taped to the frame. Liang had hidden it after all.

She slid it inside her suit’s inner pocket—close against her chest—then stepped into the void, with nothing but a dying man, a wounded pilot, and the name of a company she was going to bring down with her bare hands if she had to.