On the moon, oxygen is the most precious commodity. Without it, death comes quickly. But there are other things of value in the vastness of Luna, and other reasons to die.
Something tragic has happened in Purgatory Crater on the far side of the moon. Three NASA astronauts are dead and a fourth is trapped inside Purgatory Moon Base. Commander David Holtz, leader of the rescue and recovery mission, expects to confront the horrors of death in the vacuum of space but what he and his two companions find is worse than they could have imagined. The survivor, George Dobbs, appears to have gone mad in his months of confinement. But is he really crazy, or is he hiding some deeper, darker secret?
Excerpt
Stars shone coldly in the black vacuum of the lunar night sky. The unlit rim walls of Purgatory Crater appeared to be nothing more than starless hummocks of solid black, miles away across the flat crater floor. Three sets of headlamps bobbed in the darkness as the lander Athena’s crew trudged across the dusty quarter mile between the landing area and Purgatory Moon Base.
Walking single file and laboring heavily with the exertion of moving in their bulky spacesuits, the astronauts heard each other’s percussive breathing through their communications headsets but, as they approached the base, no one said a word. Any joy they might have felt at the opportunity to walk across the moon’s surface had been sucked out of them by the somber purpose of their mission.
The three newcomers moved carefully in the unfamiliar one-sixth gravity, each burdened with two bulky duffel bags of supplies and personal gear. In the lead, Commander David Holtz gazed with growing apprehension at the cluster of habitation buildings—six horizontal metal cylinders, each about the size of a railroad car, arranged like six spokes of a wheel with a seventh upright cylinder like the axel. The horizontal cylinders were buried under a circular mound of gray moon dust with only their outer ends exposed. The upper third of the central cylinder stood above the mound, but its ring of observation windows were dark. Lit only by a few inadequate flood lamps, the entire base looked ominously still and uninhabited, like death had claimed all who lived there and was waiting for Holtz and his companions as well. Although he’d radioed the sole surviving occupant, George Dobbs, repeatedly since Athena landed, the radio link from Purgatory Base remained as broodingly silent as the coal black skies overhead.
Holtz paused a hundred paces from the base and set down his heavy duffels when he noticed something crumpled in the dust fifty yards to his right. “Is that what I think it is?” he asked his companions as they came alongside him and set their burdens down. “I mean who?”
“Chen!” exclaimed Eleanor Jones, the second astronaut in line, in a voice that sounded atypically small and frail.
Ray Ramirez, the third in line, remarked, “Right where Mission Control said we’d find him.”
They went to the space-suited body. Chen lay face down in the gray dust, his motionless hands clutching the faceplate of his helmet.
“I don’t think I really want to see this,” murmured Holtz, “but—” He bent and grasped Chen’s suit by one shoulder, struggling against both the claustrophobic constraints of his space suit and mounting dread. With a groan of mingled anxiety and physical strain he tugged hard and turned the rigid form over.
