“I have a secret to tell.”

Bree looked deep into the electrical well of her console. A holograph of the local lunar system was displayed brightly in phosphorescent blue. A small red dot flashed in the upper-right corner. “Shush,” she said irritably. It was hot in the rover, and she didn’t want to listen to Blue right now.

“It’s important,” Blue said in its quiet but insistent way.

“Dad, it’s hot,” Bree complained, trying her best to ignore Blue, the AI from South Impact Control that monitored incoming ice asteroid impacts. “Can’t we turn on the air-conditioning?”

AC costs money. We’re not out here to spend money, Bree thought, a fraction of a second before her dad, hunched over the rover’s steering wheel like some mad coachman from the 1800s, replied, “AC costs money. We’re not out here to spend money. Besides, sweating is good for you.” Her oldest brother, Avery, sitting shotgun, looked over his shoulder and silently laughed at her. She stuck her tongue out at him. He looked away and went back to tapping a crazy rhythm on the rover’s dashboard. Probably some crappy Czech honky-tonk that was all the rage with his buddies.

Bree sighed, feeling the sweat drip down the inside of her pressure suit, and thought, Makes me slippery like a fish. If I don’t stop, I might drown, falling down.

“If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the rover,” said her second-oldest brother, Kemp, sitting up and winking at her from the rear of the vehicle. He then leaned against the bulkhead and quickly went back to sleep.

“It’s a simple message, and I’m leaving out the whistles and bells,” Blue said.

Bree wanted to pull out her earpiece to silence the annoying AI, but instead said, “Can you turn on the AC in our rover?”

“No. Sweating is good for you,” Blue replied. “But this might save your life and many others.”

This last got Bree’s attention. Even though she was just a teenager manning the impact tracking station, Bree knew how many things could kill you out on the lunar surface. “What do you have, Blue?”

“Impact Twenty-three is off its predicted trajectory.”

Impact 23 was the chunk of ice and rock Bree and her family were out in the hot-ass lunar day hoping to get a piece of. South Impact Control, or SIC, was responsible for tracking the ice rocks coming in from the local belts, Oort cloud, and Kuiper regions. The crews down in the Cabeus dome on the south lunar pole could adjust the trajectory of the incoming objects as they neared the lunar impact zone. SIC would remotely fire rocket packages attached to the surface so that the massive balls of rock and ice would come down straight onto the lunar surface, far away from inhabited or industrial domes, with minimal splash and ejecta tossed out of the impact zone.

It was that ejecta that Bree’s family and dozens of other retrieval teams were out here to collect. Minor water companies bid each year on sections around the impact zone, slices of lunar pie that the owners hoped a small fraction of the ice asteroids, water comets, or other chunks of frozen water-ice would land in following an impact. It might be only a little piece of the incoming object, but even one-millionth of a percent of a nearly four-million-metric-ton ice asteroid translated into over 384 liters of processed water-ice. And that translated into over sixteen million lunar credits. Not that all the ejecta would fall in the leased area, but anything that did land in the owners’ slice was theirs to keep. Even though only a tiny bit of the impact would fall into the surrounding grants, it was enough to keep them in business. They’d make money off the ice chunks they collected, processed, and purified, then sold to independent domes and settlements across the Moretus region.

Her father’s company, the Indiana Water Works, owned the lease on the section of the ejecta zone they were currently sitting in. He had his crew spread across the fifteen-degree-wide grant he had bid for and won three years ago waiting for Impact 23.

And now Blue was telling her that it was off course. Depending on what angle it came in at, an off-course object the size of Impact 23 could mean disaster for any of the settlements that surrounded the polar region.

“Dad?”

“I’m not turning on the AC, Bree.”

“It’s not about the AC, Dad.”

“Can’t it wait, Bree? We have impact in less than five minutes.”

“The impact is off course.”

That caught everyone’s attention. Avery stopped his incessant tapping, her father quickly twisted around in his seat, and even Kemp sat up and opened his eyes.

“What do you mean, ‘off course,’ Bree?” her father asked, knowing exactly what it could mean but needing to hear it again, to wrap his mind around a falling piece of rock and ice half a kilometer wide landing outside the controlled impact zone.

“The, uh…one of the AIs from SIC is telling me that Impact Twenty-three is off course.”

Her father turned to the rover’s dashboard and pulled up the latest trajectory data from SIC. He studied the image carefully, ran the impact calculations himself, then said, “It looks good to me. Impact Twenty-three is coming straight down the pipe at a ninety-degree angle. Who is talking to you?”

Bree cringed, knowing what was coming. Blue was a tertiary AI who, over the years, had become less and less reliable in predicting trajectories. SIC had pulled him from monitoring duties over and over again, but somehow he managed to get back online and bug all the trajectory watchers across the region, like Bree. But he had never said that lives were in danger, so Bree took a deep breath and said, “It’s Blue.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Avery said and went back to his tapping. Kemp snorted and resumed his napping. Her father sighed.

“Blue is unreliable, honey chip,” he said. Bree hated it when he called her “honey chip.” It was his subtle way of saying that she was still a kid. At fifteen, she had been manning the trajectory watch station for over three years, and still her father called her “honey chip.”

“I know, Dad, but he has never said that lives were in danger.”

“You can’t trust him, Bree. Mute him and look at channel two. It shows a clean impact in just under four minutes.”

Bree heard Blue whisper in her ear, “SIC will fire a course correction in fifteen seconds. This will cause a little-known fault identified in Impact Twenty-three ten years ago to fracture, causing the impact trajectory to change by fifteen degrees.”

“Blue says SIC is about to make a trajectory correction,” Bree said.

Her father turned to her again. A course correction this late in the impact process was extremely rare and dangerous. He scowled, then looked at the trajectory data. Ten seconds later, SIC announced a trajectory adjustment maneuver.

“See, Dad?”

Her father sighed again. “Where does Blue think the impact change will be?”

“Blue says the fault line has fractured, changing the center of gravity of Impact Twenty-three. It will no longer land in the center of the impact zone but will hit at an oblique angle of fifteen to twenty degrees. Twenty percent of the ejecta will splash…,” Bree said, relaying the information Blue was telling her, then stopped, her already pale skin turning sheet white, “directly into our zone.”

Her father turned to Avery. “Get on the horn with SIC and find out what they’re saying.”

“Dad, we should warn the Paz and the other retrieval teams!” Bree said, her voice filled with anxiety. Era Condi, the Paz station they had visited earlier in the day, would be directly in the path of the ejecta.

“Four minutes to impact,” Blue whispered in her ear.

“Warn the others, Blue!” Bree said, feeling the panic rushing up inside her.

“They are not listening. You are the only operator who has responded,” Blue replied.

“They are out of radio range,” Kemp said, finally getting up from his bench and moving to stand behind Bree’s station.

“Then we can call them!”

Bree saw her father wince. “That’s expensive, Bree. And we don’t know for sure if Blue is right. What does SIC say, Avery?”

“SIC is saying the impact is coming down four-by-four.”

Four-by-four was SIC’s way of saying that everything was going according to their impact plan.

“Dad! We can get an independent reading from the Malapert Array!”

Bree’s dad winced again. “That’ll cost a fortune!”

“Dad!” Bree yelled. “I’ll pay it out of my allowance!”

All three men looked at Bree with shock, until finally her father said, “Your allowance? But, Bree, you’ll need that for college.”

“I know, Dad, but we have to find out!”

Her father nodded and turned to the communications console, mumbling, “If you’re wrong, Blue, I’m going to erase every bit of your programming,” and called the Malapert Array.

The Malapert Array was a data collection facility located in the Malapert dome. It collected geological information, space weather, solar activity, and other data about the lunar environment and sold it to buyers all across the moon’s surface.

“Malapert Array, what can we do for you today?”

“I need a trajectory check on Impact Twenty-three.”

“That will be fifteen seconds on a primary array dish.”

“I know.”

“And it will cost five thousand lunar credits.”

“Great Lunar Baby Jesus,” he said.

“Would you like to purchase the stated services?”

“Yes. Debit my account.”

“Done. Stand by.”

The four people waited nervously in the hot rover for the Malapert Array to take its readings. Nearly a full minute later, the operator came back on the line.

“You need to get out of there. The impact ejecta is going to cover your entire region. Sending you a projection now.”

Bree ran back to her station, followed by her father and brothers, and watched as the projected ejecta zone appeared on her screen.

“Good Lord,” her father whispered. “Call the Paz, our retrieval teams, and everyone else you can reach, Avery!” he said, as he hustled to the rover’s controls. “We’ll head west and try to get outside the ejecta zone. Kemp, keep an eye out for any crater big enough to fit the rover in!” Kemp nodded and jumped into his station seat. “Bree! Time until impact?”

Bree looked into her well, let out a long breath, and said, “Thirty seconds.”

Seconds later, she saw red lettering crawl across her console screen, followed by a high-pitched tone in her ear from SIC. “Warning! This is an impact warning. Persons in the following lunar grids must seek shelter immediately!” SIC listed the impacted areas and continued to blare out its warning, counting down the time to impact.

“Dad!” Kemp yelled. “To the left! Three hundred meters!”

Bree looked out the side window at the area Kemp indicated, hoping to see a nice deep crater; instead, she saw nothing but the flat, featureless lunar surface stretching away from them.

“I don’t see anything, Kemp!” her dad yelled.

“To the left! Two hundred meters!”

Bree finally spotted what her brother was pointing to: a small ridge of basalt, or maybe the rim of a buried ancient crater, no more than three meters high and running for a few meters before diving beneath the lunar basalt.

“That’s it?” her father said, seeing the meager shelter. “It won’t cover the entire rover!”

“It’s the best we have! There is nothing deeper that we can reach before impact!”

“Dad, everybody’s signaled in, including the Paz. They are locked down or heading to their shelters,” Avery said.

 His father jerked the controls of the rover to the left and headed for the dark brown ridge sticking out of the lunar surface. “Helmets on! Strapped in tight!” He pulled alongside the ridge, scraping the rover’s side to get as close to the rock as possible.

Bree winced as she heard the grinding of the rover against the outside rock. She snapped her clear helmet into place and pulled her seat straps as tight as she could, thankful now that her father always made them wear their pressure suits when out on the surface, whether they were in a rover or not.

“Ten seconds to impact!” She flipped on her monitor and found one of the local tracking stations broadcasting a live view of Impact 23. The image was terrifying; it was as though Bree was looking up at the massive beast of rock and ice hanging above her that somehow was growing larger as she watched. “Five seconds!”

“Good luck, Bree,” she heard Blue whisper in her ear.

Three…two…one…impact.

Four minutes and thirty seconds later, Bree felt a small vibration beneath her feet. Twenty-five kilometers away, four million metric tons of ice and rock of Impact 23 collided with the surface of the moon. Had it come down along its intended trajectory, the majority of the body would have remained within the impact zone, scattering small and mostly harmless chunks of ice and rock into the adjacent retrieval zones. But it had come in at an angle. It would now be pushing up a wavefront of lunar basalt in addition to the rock-and-ice body of the asteroid that would be heading toward Bree and her family at nearly three hundred kilometers per hour.

“Wavefront is traveling at two hundred and sixty-two kilometers per hour,” Blue whispered in her ear. “It will arrive at your location in thirty seconds.”

“Shut up, Blue,” Bree replied through gritted teeth. Her hands ached from the death grip she had on the armrests of her chair. Blue shut up.

The vibration under her feet increased in intensity, shaking the rover and rattling every piece of equipment not secured. Outside her window, she could see only the face of the rock her father had put the rover up against. She craned forward, but could only get a glimpse of a sliver of the black lunar sky. She then pressed a button on her control station. A monitor to her left came to life. A camera located on top of the rover slowly spiraled up on the end of a long boom until it extended a full meter above the rim of rock. The picture on the monitor showed the bright, clear surface of the moon stretching out to a horizon of deep black. Bree took the joystick and swiveled the camera around until it pointed east.

There, a thin gray-and-black line appeared, rapidly expanding as it rushed toward Bree and her family.

“Fifteen seconds to impact,” Blue whispered.

The wavefront from Impact 23 grew in height and width, the details becoming clear as it smashed its way across the surface. The vibration within the rover now shook open equipment compartments, bouncing the vehicle up and down, rattling her teeth. Bree could see the churning dust billowing toward them, hiding the basalt, rock, and ice that would slam into the rover, tearing it apart and smashing her family to bits. To the left and right of the wave, she could see smaller impacts throwing up lunar dust as they made fresh craters that were quickly swallowed up by the advancing wave of the primary impact.

“Three seconds to impact,” Blue said. “Hold on tight, Bree.”

Bree looked at the display and saw that the wavefront was still a good hundred meters away, but then it seemed to sprint at her. She closed her eyes and gripped the seat arms with everything she had.

“Impact,” Bree heard Blue say. Then there was nothing else, except the continuous roar of the wavefront as it engulfed the rover.

Bree was jerked forward then slammed back as the wave grabbed the rover and tossed it away from the rim of rock, rolling it along as though it were a toy. Rocks and ice hurtling against the rover punctuated the monstrous sound of the blast as it tumbled along the surface. The intensity of impacts against the metal hull of the machine increased. Bree opened her eyes. All around her, control panels flickered and blinked. Sparks rained down from electrical panels, and smoke began to fill the cabin. The rover was dying.

Bree felt the rover jerk violently and heard a tremendous bang. Her head was slammed back against the seat rest as the rover twisted, then another bang that drove her head into her face shield. The faceplate splattered with blood as her nose impacted with the glass, dazing her. The immense roaring grew higher in pitch, and she heard the shrieking of metal tearing and the rover’s internal atmosphere escaping. Bree looked right and saw a long tear appear in the rover’s body, saw her father and brother tossed like rag dolls but still strapped into their seats. Then the front of the rover lifted up and away as the breach in the hull gave way, and the rover split in half. The front half disappeared in a blink. Bree watched the churning cloud of dust and debris as it swept into the remaining half of the rover. With the air of the rover gone, Bree was suddenly surrounded by silence, punctuated only by her sharp breaths. She could still feel the vibrations as the split rover tumbled along, and objects slammed into the sides until suddenly the entire back of the rover was lifted up. For a moment, Bree experienced weightlessness. Then the body of the dead vehicle slammed back to the surface, driving Bree’s head against the side of her helmet and into darkness.

Bree awoke, surrounded by complete silence. For a moment, she thought her suit might be dead, which meant soon she would be dead, too. She held her breath, listening for the sounds of her suit’s environmental system, and let it out in a huge gasp as she heard the suit’s fan kick on. The control panel in front of her was utterly black, and the lights of the rover were out. Still, she could see the light from the sun shining into the exposed interior of the machine and a wall of rock partially obscuring whatever was outside the rover.

“Blue, are you there?” she asked, knowing the rover was dead but hoping maybe the radio was still functional.

Silence. Not even the buzz and static of a dead line. She slowly turned her head toward the aft of the rover and saw Kemp still strapped into his seat, and like Bree’s, his faceplate covered with blood. Bree pressed the status button on the left forearm of her suit. The display lit up, showing that her suit had full pressure and enough oxygen for ten hours. She sighed in relief and pressed the release on her safety harness. The belts unlatched, and she slowly got to her feet.

Bree ached everywhere. She felt like her entire body was one big bruise, especially where the straps had held her in her seat. She pressed a small red cross on her suit’s forearm and felt a sharp prick as the suit gave her a mild painkiller. She stood there, surveying the wreckage as the pain faded to a mild ache.

The front opening of the rover had jammed into the wall of a crater at a crazy angle, and the floor was a jumble of debris. She picked her way through the chaos carefully and moved back to her brother. There, she pressed his suit status button and saw that it was pressurized but had a small leak. Bree was able to identify the source of the leak immediately: Kemp’s faceplate had a spiderweb of cracks emanating from where his head had impacted his helmet. She quickly pulled an emergency repair kit from one of the overhead compartments, took out a pressurized tube of sealant, and applied it liberally to the cracks in Kemp’s helmet. The foam flowed along the cracks of the glass, creating a tight seal. Small bubbles popped out of the sealant’s surface, letting Bree know she had found at least one of the leaks. The sealant quickly hardened and became transparent as it sealed the breach in the suit.

Bree waited ten seconds, then checked Kemp’s suit status display. His pressure was now stable, indicating that there were no other leaks in his suit. She then pressed his medical status display. The suit did a quick check of Kemp and informed Bree that he had a minor concussion but had suffered no other injury during the impact.

“Hey, kiddo,” Kemp said, as his eyes slowly opened.

“Hey, big brother. Stay still. Your suit says you have a concussion.”

Kemp looked around the dead rover, his eyes lingering on the opening where the front half of the machine used to be. “Dad and Avery?”

“Haven’t gone out yet. I just came to a few minutes ago.”

Kemp pawed at his straps, groaning from the pain of the concussion.

Bree put her hand on his chest and pushed him back. “You rest,” she said and pressed another series of commands on Kemp’s suit. “The suit just gave you a shot of painkiller. You’ll feel better in a minute. I’ll look for Dad and Avery. As soon as you feel up to it, try to get power to the emergency radio.”

Kemp nodded gingerly, leaning his head against the back of his helmet. “Be careful, Bree. There are lots of jagged edges that can tear your suit. It’d be a shame to survive that impact just to be turned into lunar jerky.”

“I love you too,” she said and put her helmet gently against his. She pressed the emergency beacon switch, then turned on her suit’s emergency broadcast radio. The steady beeping of the emergency beacon was loud and clear in her helmet. She changed to another channel. “I’ll be on channel six. Call me if you get the radio working.”

Kemp nodded and closed his eyes. Bree turned from her brother and began picking her way to the front of the rover, carefully avoiding the many sharp metal edges of the debris-cluttered floor. She reached the rover’s opening and saw that the shockwave had thrown it into a crater wall. The right side of the rover had buried itself a half meter into the rock with the force of the impact. She still had plenty of room to exit the rover. She slowly slid past the torn edge of metal, then out of the machine entirely and onto the wall of the crater.

They were in a crater a few hundred meters wide, with shallow walls that rose ten meters above her. Scattered across its floor were debris from the rover, black chunks of rock, and a handful of blueish bits that Bree could not identify.

She walked over to a chunk the size of her fist, bent down, and picked it up. Water-ice. Bree stood there, stunned, marveling at what she had in her hand. She was holding a chunk of water-ice. And judging from its heft, there was nearly a kilogram of it. Normally, this would have thrilled Bree and her family. She was holding almost forty-three thousand lunar credits’ worth of water or nearly two years of her allowance. Bree looked around the floor of the crater and spotted dozens more of the water-ice chunks. She looked behind her at the crumpled wreck of the rover and dropped the one she held in her hand. All of this wealth around her meant nothing unless she could find her father and Avery.

She moved around to the side of the wreck and opened a hatch on the rear of the vehicle. Inside were emergency supplies. She strapped on packages of medical gear, extra oxygen, water, and batteries for her suit. Then Bree grabbed the end of a long black cable connected to a small emitter dish. She pulled the dish out and set it down, then opened another compartment and took out several stacks of black metal rectangles. She walked a few meters from the back half of the rover and set the stacks of rectangles on the crater’s floor. She leaned down and pressed a button, and the stacks began to unfold themselves, revealing them to be solar panels. As the section of the emergency solar array unfolded, she went back to the rover and pulled out several more, until she had deployed six solar arrays. Bree hooked them together and attached a cable from the last section to a plug in the now empty compartment. She watched as the arrays began pulling in energy from the sunlight, and the flow of electricity increased. If the blast had not severed the electrical lines from the batteries, Kemp would have power for the radio.

She picked up the tiny emitter dish, pulling its cable along behind her as she scrambled up the side of the crater to its rim. Now, if Kemp could get the emergency power online and the radio working, he could broadcast much farther than from the bottom of the crater. Bree set up the small antenna dish and looked around her.

The nearly flat landscape looked like it had been scraped by a giant rake from horizon to horizon, with horizontal channels emanating from far to the south where the impact had occurred. Some of the channels were only a meter or so deep, while others looked like small canyons. Where a few of these channels ended, she could see large chunks of rock.

Bree looked to the south and saw a few puffs kick up from the scarred lunar surface. Debris from the impact was still falling. She looked up fearfully, knowing she’d never see anything falling from above before it hit her, but imagined just the same spotting a large chunk from Impact 23 hurtling toward her. Another, larger impact broke the lunar surface a kilometer to the west, churning up debris and creating another crater. A second later, Bree felt the vibration of the impact through the soles of her boots.

She shook off her fear. It didn’t matter that rock and ice were still falling from the sky. There was nowhere to hide or take shelter from it, and she needed to find her father and Avery. She looked north along the path of the grooves created by the debris and shock wave of Impact 23 and began walking. She listened to the radio as she scanned her surroundings, searching for the front half of the rover. All she could hear was the steady stream of static from the sun’s endless broadcast, punctuated by the squeals of radio burst from solar flares. She flipped from channel to channel, hoping for another human voice, something to let her know that she wasn’t out here all alone. Usually, the sounds of SIC updates, automated lunar weather broadcasts, or the friendly chitchat of surface workers nearby talking with their peers filled the radio channels. There should have at least been a steady beep interrupted by a mechanical voice indicating the nature of the emergency in progress and giving the listener information about what to do. But now? Nothing but the whispers of the sun.

Around her, the gray, brown, and black soil marred by the impact stretched across the landscape. No sign of any other human was evident: no rovers, no surface buggies, no lone domes broke the black horizon. The shockwave could have buried the front of the rover under a mountain of rock and ice. Or maybe the rover had been torn apart so thoroughly that she would not be able to recognize it among all the debris on the ground.

Bree pushed her dark thoughts away and focused on searching for the wreckage. Her family would either be alive or not. There was no use worrying about what might have happened. The only important thing now was to find them. She continued to walk north, looking in every medium-sized crater, hoping the wavefront had thrown the rover into a hole like the aft section. But so far, each had been empty.

She had been walking for nearly an hour when she spotted a large hill up ahead. She frowned and pulled up a local map on her wrist pad. There were no ridges or small mountains in this area that she knew of, and the map proved it. What she was seeing was a massive chunk of Impact 23. A glint of light from its base caught her eye, like sunlight shining off a piece of metal.

She pulled in a sharp breath of excitement and increased her pace, moving as quickly as she could toward the reflecting light. As Bree neared the hill, it became clear that she had been correct. This was no natural lunar feature, but a massive piece of Impact 23. She reached a small rise in the lunar landscape and pulled out a pair of binoculars from the side pouch of her suit. Placing the oversized eyepiece to the surface of her helmet, she scanned the lower portion of the hill. Bree moved the glasses down the sharp edges of the fragment toward the base, carefully searching for the wreckage of the rover.

The glint of sunlight on metal caught her eye again. There! At the very bottom, wedged against the rock, was the front end of the rover! She quickly put the binoculars away and began loping across the surface as fast as she could, all the while watching the rover grow ever so slowly in size as she used all her surface excursion skills to speed across the ground. She tried her suit-to-suit radio, calling for her father or Avery, and got nothing but silence.

They could be unconscious, she thought, or their suits damaged.

Her panic grew as the silence stretched out. Finally, she reached the wreck and skidded to a stop. For a moment she stood still, looking at the heavily damaged machine, afraid of what she might find inside. She steeled herself and approached the ragged edges of the back of the rover. Its walls had buckled in nearly a foot from the impact with the mountain of rock that had stopped it. The floor was a jumble of wreckage that kept Bree from getting through. She carefully began pulling out boxes, loose equipment, and junk, setting it outside the rover. She slowly made her way deeper into the machine until she could see sunlight coming in through the front. There, she could see her father and brother, still secured in their chairs but completely still.

“Dad! Avery!” she called into her suit radio. “Can you hear me?” She tore at the debris in front of her, heedless of the jagged edges as she struggled to reach her family. “Dad! Avery! Can you hear me?”

She paused for a fraction of a second as she heard a break in the static.

“Bree?” her father whispered.

“Dad! I’m right here! I’ll be there in just a minute!” she cried, feeling the tears running down her face. She yanked out the last bits of scattered equipment between her and her father’s seat, and crawled beside him. “Dad, are you OK?” she said, frantically scanning his suit for tears.

Her father’s helmet was splattered with blood and had nearly shattered with the force of the impact of his face against the glass. He had severely bruised his face, and his eyes were swollen shut. She spotted several ragged tears in his suit and pulled out a tube of sealant from her kit, applying it liberally to every hole and split she could find. Then she sprayed his helmet, sealing any breaks in its visor. She pressed his suit’s status button and saw that her father had lost over 90 percent of his air. He had maybe an hour of oxygen left, but his pressure was increasing as the suit replenished his oxygen. She watched the pressure indicator nervously, fearful that there were tears she couldn’t see. After a minute, the pressure stabilized, indicating the suit was intact. She checked his medical monitor and saw that he had suffered six broken ribs, partial decompression, fractures to his face and skull, but no cuts or lacerations and no internal bleeding.

Bree let out a sigh of relief and gently hugged him. His suit had given him a shot of painkiller while she worked, and now he leaned back against his seat.

“What a ride,” he said.

Bree then turned to her brother. Avery was in much worse shape. His suit had multiple tears and cuts. Bree sealed them using tube after tube of sealant, sealed his faceplate, then checked his status bar. He had lost nearly all his oxygen and had at most thirty minutes of air left. She hooked one of her few emergency bottles to an inlet port and opened the valve. She watched as the suit’s pressure rose, then checked his medical readout. Avery was unconscious and had broken both of his arms. He was bleeding from a deep cut on his lower left leg, as well as suffering a concussion and fractured facial bones.

After Bree had stabilized his suit, she wrapped a compression cord around his knee just above the bloody tear in the leg of his suit. She pulled it tight until the medical indicator on Avery’s suit told her that the bleeding had stopped. She put a clamp on the compression cord, locking it in place, then sat down between the two men and wept. Her family was alive. They had survived. Now all they had to do was wait for rescue.

A few minutes later, she got her tears under control and flipped over to the emergency channel. No one was talking, but she could hear the steady beeping of the beacon she had activated from the rear of the rover. She flipped back to channel six and heard Kemp’s voice.

“Hey, dorksita? You out there?”

“Yeah, Kemp. I’m here,” she said, letting out a small laugh.

“I got the radio working.”

“You don’t say?”

“Yeah, yeah. MOTO, right?”

Master of the obvious. “Yeah, right.”

“Did you find Dad and Avery?”

“I’m with them now. Dad’s OK, but Avery is in bad shape. We need a pickup. Is anybody out there?”

“Nothing but me and you, little sis. We wouldn’t even have that if you hadn’t connected the emergency solar panels. Do you need me out there?”

“I’m nearly three klicks to your north. Stay with the radio and let anyone you get hold of know we’re here.”

“Three klicks!”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, honey chip,” her father said, placing a gloved hand on her shoulder.

“Hi, Dad.” To Kemp, she said, “Hey, Kemp, Dad’s talking to me. I’ll call you back.”

“Give my love to Dad and Avery, and call me soon.”

“Will do.”

“We’re OK?” her father asked. The swelling had gone down, and his eyes were open.

“Yeah. Avery is stable, but we need a pickup.”

“Nothing on the suit radio?” he asked, slowly unbuckling his seat straps and turning to look behind him. “The back of the rover seems to be missing.”

“It’s about three klicks to the south. That’s where Kemp and I ended up.”

“Kemp?”

“He’s good. He has a lot of bruising and a mild concussion. He got the radio up and running, and the beacon is broadcasting. Help will be here soon.”

Her father switched on his suit radio. “Kemp, you there?”

“I’m here, Dad.”

“You OK?”

“Just a bit bruised. Nothing damaged but my head and, like you always say, I don’t use that very much, so all in all, everything is OK.”

“What about the rest of the crew?” He had ordered the retrieval crews west and east to try to get out of the impact zone.

“Nothing yet. I’ll call you if I hear anything.”

“Well done to both of you.” To Bree, he said, “Help me out of this thing.” He pointed at the wreckage around them. “At least the insurance will cover this. What a way for the old girl to go.”

Bree helped her father get out of his seat, and they maneuvered their way to the back of the rover. Out on the surface, her father sat down and looked around.

“I’ve never seen the footprint of a recent impact.”

“Neither have I,” Bree said, sitting down in the gray dust next to him.

“Ha, ha.” He looked back at the broken and mangled rover. “Well, the important thing is that we survived.”

“Will they let us keep all the water-ice in our section?” Bree asked.

“What water-ice?”

“All those little chunks scattered around us.”

Her father looked around the equipment Bree had thrown from the rover and spotted a blue chunk of debris. He picked up a small black box lying nearby, flipped a switch, and swung the box back and forth in front of him.

“Sweet Lunar Baby Jesus,” he whispered.

“What is it?”

“It’s all around us, water-ice, it’s…” He trailed off as he swung the spectrometer toward the vast chunk of rock that had stopped the rover’s tumble across the surface. “A whole mountain of it?”

Bree stood up and looked to where her father was pointing the spectrometer. She glanced at the indicator. It was flashing a blue light rapidly. She took the meter from her father’s hand and checked the readout: water-ice. It was telling them the entire mound of rock in front of them wasn’t rock at all, but several million kilograms of water-ice.

“Bree,” her father said, still staring at the towering mass of ice, “get a flag. We need to tag this monster.”

A flag was a metal pole nearly a meter long painted bright red. Water scavengers would place the rod into a chunk of water-ice to claim it. Once planted into the ice, the rod would broadcast a signal to the local communications network, registering the claim with the federal water authority and SIC, letting everyone know that it belonged to whoever had tagged it.

Bree quickly made her way to a compartment near the front of the rover and opened it. Inside were dozens of flags. She grabbed one and handed it to her father. He stood there, looking up at the mountain of water-ice, unable to believe what his eyes were telling him.

“I’m unconscious, right? And this is all a dream. I’ll wake up in the rover or a hospital, and none of this will have been real.”

“It’s real, Dad. Plant the flag,” Bree said, moving his hand holding the flag to the edge of the water-ice.

He lifted it and planted it firmly into the surface of the chunk. The flag immediately lit up and began broadcasting his registration information. A small green indicator light blinked on then became solid, letting him know that his registration was complete. It was theirs. The entire mountain of water-ice was all theirs.

Bree stepped back with her father as he scanned their immediate surroundings. “There’s more! Look, Bree! It’s everywhere!”

Bree looked all around the area by the rover. Now that the immediate crisis had passed, Bree could see chunks of the water-ice everywhere, some nearly as big as the one her father had just claimed.

“We need to start flagging this!” her father said, then stumbled as he moved back toward the rover.

“You need to sit down until rescue comes,” Bree said, helping her father sit down on the lunar dust.

“But Bree! Look at all of that.”

“It’s no good to us if you’re dead.”

Her father sighed. She was right, but all that money was just sitting there waiting for them to pick it up. Soon, SIC would be back online, declaring a state of emergency and suspending flagging and retrieval operations. This would bar independent companies like his from claiming any of the water-ice in their section. But maybe…

“Bree, you can flag them!”

“I can’t flag them, Dad. I’m just an impact tracking operator.”

Bree’s father thought for a moment, then tapped a few commands into his suit’s wrist pad. “Corporate log, May fifteen, 2321, Chief Executive Officer Johnathan Jindra Taylor, Indiana Water Works. Verify.”

His suit whispered in his ear, “Identity verified.”

“I do hereby promote Sabrina Carmen Taylor to Retrieval Technician Class One,” he stated and caught a dirty look from Bree. “Fine. Retrieval Technician Class Two, entitled to all the rights and privileges therein. Confirm.”

The computer within the suit responded, “Confirmed. You have promoted Sabrina Carmen Taylor to Retrieval Technician Class Two.”

An RT Class Two! Bree thought. That meant she would get a 5 percent bonus for every piece of water-ice she flagged!

“Bree, grab the scooter and go! Flag everything you can before SIC can declare a state of emergency! Go! And stay in radio contact.”

Bree squealed like the teenage girl she was, gingerly hugged her father, and quickly opened another compartment of the crushed rover. Her father carefully crawled back inside the rover to check on Avery.

She pulled out an electric-powered motorcycle and unfolded the unit, leaning it against the side of the rover. She then grabbed four fuel cells and strapped them to the sides of the bike. Thinking for a moment, Bree found a quick-charge solar array and hooked it to the back of the bike, then strapped on as many flags as it could carry. She was ready.

She grabbed the handlebars and checked the battery indicator. It told her that she had over an hour of charge in it. She then threw her leg over the machine, pointed it toward the nearest large chunk of water-ice, and gunned it.

She was off! The electric bike kicked up a small rooster tail of dust and jerked forward, then scurried along the surface at a steady fifty kilometers per hour. The irregular block of water-ice she was heading for was large—not as big as the one her father had just flagged, but larger than anything she had ever seen on previous operations. She reached the side of the hunk, pushed down the kickstand with her foot, grabbed a flag, and walked up to the edge. Bree looked at it for a moment, seeing deep into the blue-and-white ice covered in thick black dust. She planted the flag and waited for it to recognize the signal from her suit, identifying her as an authorized retrieval technical and registering her first claim with the SIC database.

The flag’s indicator light first flashed red, then green, and then became a solid green light as it successfully registered her claim. Bree was now an official retrieval technician! She jumped on the bike and headed for the next big chunk just to the north of her, shooting across the gray-and-brown lunar surface. She flagged it and moved on, circling farther and farther from the rover wreck, hitting every sizable chunk within a kilometer before she had to head back, grab more flags, and switch out the fuel cell. Then she was off again.

Bree refilled her oxygen and water every time she returned to the rover and checked on her father and brother. Her dad was monitoring the radio with Kemp, watching Bree’s signal on a tracking station monitor he had gotten running, and keeping track of Avery’s vital signs. So far, no one was broadcasting on the radio, and Avery was resting comfortably, still strapped into the rover’s shotgun seat.

Fully loaded once again and satisfied that her family was OK, Bree shot out into the lunar countryside, flagging more and more water-ice chunks until all the big ones within range were flagged. Then she worked the medium-sized ones before running out of those, then the smaller claims, until she had exhausted them as well. She still had many flags left in the rover, so she began collecting all water-ice chunks that were a few kilograms or more and piling them up. When she had enough to hold up a flag, she would plant it and move on to create another pile.

Four solid hours later, Bree was exhausted and covered in sweat. The fan in her suit had been working at the maximum rate to keep her cool, but just couldn’t keep up. She dropped another large boulder of water-ice on the pile before her. She planted her last flag, watched it register her claim, then sat down heavily on the rock and drank as much water as she could suck from the mouthpiece in her suit. Satisfied, she let out a long sigh and looked at the field of flags all around her, each one showing a solid green light, indicating her claims had been registered and verified.

On her suit radio, she listened to her father and Kemp talking to each other. Kemp had gotten in contact with the other company retrieval crews. All of them had gotten out of the impact zone and, as soon as the immediate danger had passed, been flagging everything they could before SIC came back online. He had also called in an emergency pick up from the Shoemaker Search and Rescue Company located at the nearby Shoemaker-Levy dome. They were inbound and would be there within the hour. It would be expensive having S-L SAR pick them up and bring them back to the S-L dome, but who cared? They were all now rich beyond their wildest dreams.

Bree stood up, feeling the aches and pains from their tumble in the rover and the fatigue from the last hours weighing her down. She straddled the bike for one last time, her tailbone registering its disapproval of having to sit on the narrow seat again, and headed back to the rover.

There, she crawled inside with her father and Avery and lay down in a clear space on the floor. As she did, she heard SIC broadcasting an emergency announcement signal, followed by the declaration of an emergency suspending all retrieval activities.

Bree laughed and whispered, “Better late than never.”

“You got it, honey chip,” her father said.

Bree would have been annoyed by her father calling her that, but she was already asleep, dreaming of their future beyond the ice fields of the moon.