Read Chapter 3: Suit Up

The rover’s cabin lights flickered once, twice, then steadied into a low amber hum. Elena climbed into the passenger seat and let the door seal with a pneumatic hiss that felt, for one blessed second, like safety. Her ears rang from the near-silence of the void, that terrible emptiness where sound simply stopped existing.

Jack was already at the controls, hands moving over the console with practiced efficiency. He didn’t look at her. “Check the suit rack. We need full charge before we go anywhere.”

She unclipped from her seat and moved aft. The rover was a battered Mule-9, designed for hauling core samples and hauling ass when the ground told you to leave. Two suits hung in the rear rack like shedding skins, their power indicators glowing a sickly yellow.

“Seventy percent,” she said. “Both of them.”

“Shit.” Jack’s voice came back tight. “Seventy’s still four hours of surface time at low activity. We’ll burn through it faster if we’re moving.”

“Moving is the plan.” She turned back toward him, and that’s when she saw it—a small locker bolted to the wall beside the driver’s seat, sealed with a biometric pad that was definitely not standard fleet issue. The locking mechanism was aftermarket, commercial-grade encryption from a Mars-bound company called RedRock Secure. She’d seen those pads before, in the hands of black-market prospectors who didn’t want base command poking through their finds.

“What’s in the locker?” she asked.

Jack’s jaw tightened. “Spare parts. Not important.”

“RedRock Secure for spare parts?”

“I like redundancy.” He killed the topic with a hard look and turned back to the windscreen. “We need to move. Relay Point 7 is two hours out if we take the long route. I’m taking the crater field.”

“Absolutely not. The seismic instability hasn’t settled. A shockwave could—"

“Could kill us in two hours instead of four.” He checked the charge readout again. “We don’t have four hours of air, Elena. We have ninety minutes in base suits, and these rover suits at seventy percent. The crater field is rough, but it’s direct. The long route winds through a regolith basin that’s been shifting all week. If we get bogged down, we suffocate.”

She wanted to argue. Every instinct flared against him, against his insistence on speed over sense, against the way he’d already made the decision without consulting her. But he wasn’t wrong. Air was the currency now, and they were running a deficit.

“Fine,” she said through gritted teeth. “But if we hit a sink, I’m logging it in your permanent record.”

“You do that.” A ghost of a smile crossed his mouth before it disappeared. “Suit up. I’ll drive.”

She pulled the suit from the rack and began the laborious process of checking seals, seams, and oxygen scrubbers. Her fingers moved by memory, and her mind drifted to the locker. RedRock Secure meant one thing: something Jack didn’t want anyone seeing. Something illegal enough to need that kind of protection. She’d known he was hiding something about this mission, about the odd phrasing when they’d discussed who to contact.

The rover lurched forward as Jack engaged the thrusters, and the crater field sprawled ahead of them, a pockmarked graveyard of ancient impacts. The ride was brutal—every wheel strike sent a jolt through the frame that rattled her teeth. Jack handled it like a man born to it, weaving around the worst of the terrain with economy of motion.

“You’re good at this,” she said, not meaning to speak aloud.

“Ten years hauling gear between Hab Ridge and Tycho Station. You learn to read the shadows.”

“And the locks?”

His hands didn’t move, but she saw the faint tension in his shoulders. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The locker. RedRock pads aren’t standard issue. You’d know that better than most, since you’ve been requisitioning gear outside official channels.”

“I built my own life support filters out of scrap and coffee cans when Supply dropped the ball. You learn to do what you have to.” He inclined his head toward her. “You want to catalog my equipment, or you want to get us to the relay before we run out of air?”

She subsided, but the question burned in her chest. What kind of “spare parts” needed biometric security that high? She waited until he was focused on a particularly jagged series of ridges, then reached over and pressed her thumb to the pad.

The seal released with a click so soft she nearly missed it.

Inside: a compact comm unit, military-grade, wrapped in shock-absorbent foam. Not the standard X-band frequency of base communication. This was K-band, encrypted, the kind used by deep-space relay stations for mission-critical uplinks. Beneath it lay a data chip labeled with a name she knew: Liang. Y. Liang.

Dr. Yuki Liang. The base’s environmental systems engineer. The woman who’d been scheduled on the four a.m. shift in Sector C the morning the explosion ripped through.

Elena’s fingers trembled as she slid the chip into her suit’s auxiliary reader. The screen flickered, and a text log unspooled in harsh white letters.

*Observation 3: The anomaly continues to emit at consistent intervals. Extrapolating from core samples, Ishida’s model is correct—vitreous layer is not natural formation. It’s a shield. Something has been down there long enough to build a structure, and it’s still active.*

She read it twice. The vitreous layer in her samples—she’d assumed it was a volcanic glass formation, a fluke of ancient lunar history. But Liang had called it a shield. A structure. Something *active*.

The log continued, the words blurring as she scrolled.

*Base command has been informed. Directive issued: observe only. No contact protocol. I believe Jack’s orders came from the same source. If he knows what’s down there, he’s not saying.*

Elena’s breath caught. The rover hit a bump, and she slapped the chip out, shoved it into her own suit pocket.

“Everything okay back there?” Jack called.

“Fine,” she said, and her voice sounded false even to her. “Where are we?”

“Halfway through the field. No sinkholes yet.” He hesitated. “What were you looking at?”

“Nothing. Suit diagnostics.” The lie sat heavy on her tongue. The chip burned in her pocket like a live coal. She should tell him. She should demand to know what Liang had meant, what Jack knew about the explosion, about the thing beneath the surface.

But she’d seen his face at the airlock, the hesitation when asked who to call. Whatever he was hiding, he’d already chosen to hide it. If she confronted him now, they’d waste precious air arguing, and they had none to spare.

Instead, she sealed the locker and said nothing. The guilt curdled in her stomach, but the log was hers now. Insurance. A truth she could hold over him when the time came.

The rover crested a ridge, and Relay Point 7 appeared in the distance—a skeletal tower pushing up from the gray dust, its antenna glinting in the low sun.

They were still alive. But for how long?