Cold Soak

About the book

Cold Soak is a hard science fiction story about an astronaut stranded on the Moon after an explosion destroys his base and kills the rest of his crew. With his oxygen running out, Jack must reach the ascent vehicle in time for his only launch window while Mission Control tries to keep him alive.

Available now on Amazon in ebook and paperback, and on Goodreads if you'd like to shelve or review it.

Read an extract

The walk to the secondary relay was seventeen minutes by the checklist if nothing went wrong, and a walk had always been the part that stayed a walk. The diagnostics would take fifteen. I had run the procedure forty times across three campaigns and the rhythm was in my hands before my head caught up. The wrist cycled the usual numbers. O2 seventy-two per cent. Battery draw steady. EVA clock two hours twenty and change. My boot prints trailed behind me, and I gave them no more attention than the numbers.

The rim was a low ridge of compacted dust and fractured basalt thirty metres above the base. The suit was heavy in the places it was always heavy, the small of my back, the tops of my thighs, the heels where the tread was thinning on the abrasive ground. I checked the next item, SECONDARY RELAY DIAGNOSTICS PANEL A, and read it twice because the first time the words had not stuck. The hatch had been on my mind. I was not thinking about the hatch. I was thinking about the walk and the checklist and the way the dust plumed from my boots in slow arcs that hung an extra beat before falling back.

Over the rim the relay panel stood out as a grey box bolted to a basalt outcropping two hundred metres on, and I fixed my eyes on it and let my stride settle into the gliding lope that ate distance on the Moon. The loop was silent. The fan cycled on and off at intervals I no longer heard. My breath was even, my hands unmoving inside the gloves, kept that way by not making fists. The outcropping drew closer and the panel came into focus and I was eighty metres out when the world went white.

No sound. The vacuum took that. The light hit the visor as a flat brightness that wiped out the regolith and the ridge and the sky. The filter tripped, the tint slammed down hard enough to buzz in my temples. I was moving before the ground shock came. Not from understanding it, from the wrongness of the light, my body throwing me sideways towards a basalt fin on the rim before my head had caught up.

The shock rode up through the regolith into my boots, and the soles of them had never felt anything like it. Not a trembling. A single percussive blow that lifted me off the surface and threw me into the basalt face, left side first. The impact rang through the suit hardpoints, the kind of blow training said meant microfractures in the shoulder bearings. The integrity light held green. The pressure gauge held nominal. I was scrambling up before I had finished reading either, because whatever had happened was still happening. Grit rained down in a fine hiss, sandblasting the visor, streaking the tint.

If you enjoyed this consider joining the Mission Log to receive the release announcement and future works by Nicky Hooke.

Go deeper

For an earlier glimpse of Jack and Petra, read The Pool. The extract above opens on a walk to a relay on the crater rim — you can also plan that traverse yourself on an Apollo-style contour board, or visit the Lunar Base for field notes and more lightweight interactives about the physical constraints behind the story.