A CHRISTMAS ON THE MOON

CHAPTER 1 — THE MOON WEARS A HALO TONIGHT The snow they’d imported looked wrong beneath the stars—too earnest, too bright for a place that had learned to live without weather. Plastic flakes drifted into Haven Crater’s LED halo, each one catching the light in obedient arcs before sinking toward the concourse floor. Someone had tuned the dispersal fans carefully, compensating for one-sixth gravity so the illusion would last longer. On Earth the snow would have fallen and vanished into itself; here, it lingered, slow and theatrical, as if reluctant to admit it did not belong. For a few hours, the Moon would pretend it remembered winter. From the maintenance ring above the central concourse, Liora Jameson watched the celebration through a transparent pressure panel streaked with condensation and careless fingerprints. Below her, the colony glowed in soft bands of gold and green. Families clustered near the central mast. Children bounded higher than they intended, laughter escaping in startled bursts as their bodies overcorrected. Adults laughed too, a fraction too loudly, as if daring the silence beyond the dome to contradict them. Pre-recorded greetings from Earth scrolled along the inner curve of the habitat: living rooms strung with tinsel, churches packed shoulder to shoulder, markets alive with motion. Lagos flashed by briefly—bright, loud, impossible to ignore. The sound mix lagged just enough to remind everyone where they were. Liora turned back to her console. Joy was not an argument against failure. If anything, it was the moment systems chose to embarrass you. Her hands moved by habit, fingers gliding across diagnostic overlays projected above the rail. Substructure Ring C. Cryo-mechatronic stabilizers. Thermal drift curves mapped against predicted regolith contraction. The Moon answered in neat columns of green, every system reporting compliance. She exhaled slowly, the breath fogging the panel. Then she frowned. There it was again. A deviation so small it barely merited a flag. A whisper along the load-bearing arc beneath the southern quadrant, deep enough that most monitoring suites would smooth it into noise. But Liora’s eye snagged on it immediately. She had learned, years ago, that disasters did not announce themselves with drama. They arrived as manners out of place. She zoomed in, isolating the waveform. The line wavered once—polite, almost apologetic—then settled. Not an impact signature. Too clean. Not thermal contraction either; the timing was wrong, and so was the rhythm. Thermal stress had a lag, a slouch to it. This did not. “Don’t start,” she murmured, unsure whether she was speaking to the Moon or to the memories lodged behind her ribs. She took a sip from her espresso bulb—condensed, bitter, still too hot—and let the burn ground her. The bulb trembled faintly in her hand, a reminder that nothing here was ever quite still. The Moon flexed constantly, tides tugging at it, temperature crawling across its skin like a patient animal. She tagged the reading PRIVATE and copied it into a shadow log she hadn’t told anyone about. Experience had taught her that alarms were easier to dismiss than questions. Below, someone began a countdown in three languages. The crowd responded, voices echoing softly off the concourse walls. Liora typed a note beside the waveform. Microtremor. Non-random. Investigate after ceremony. She hesitated, then added a second annotation—one she almost deleted. Feels intentional. She closed the log. For a moment, everything held. Then the Moon breathed again. Mika Okoye had turned the comms attic into a crime against regulations and a small miracle of improvisation. Strands of wire looped across the ceiling like festive garlands. A repurposed maintenance drone hovered in one corner, wearing a Santa hat someone had printed badly on purpose—the brim too large, the pom-pom wobbling with every micro-adjustment of its stabilizers. The air smelled faintly of warm circuitry and citrus cleaner. His terminal was split into a dozen panes: live telemetry, power routing maps, archived Earth protocols scavenged from servers no one officially admitted still existed. Mika sat cross-legged in his chair, socked feet hooked around a rung, curls floating gently with every shift of his weight. He grinned as his Christmas patch went live. Across the colony, speakers chimed and a synthesized choir began a cheerful, slightly off-key rendition of O Come, All Ye Faithful. Mika tapped his foot, counting latency by instinct, his head bobbing once the timing stabilized. “Clean,” he said to no one. “Clean enough.” Then a background channel twitched. At first he assumed it was his fault. He’d been experimenting all week—patching old Earth-era communication frameworks into the colony’s newer architecture, partly for fun, partly because the older systems had a stubborn resilience the newer ones lacked. He muted the music and leaned closer, eyes narrowing as he pulled the stream forward frame by frame. The signal wasn’t loud. It wasn’t even new. It had been there, buried beneath routine telemetry like a hum beneath conversation. Easy to ignore if you weren’t listening for it. Regular. Structured. Mika’s grin softened into concentration. He overlaid timing markers, watching the pulses fall into place. Heartbeat-steady. Then a second layer emerged—spacing that suggested framing. “Okay,” he whispered. “That’s not nothing.” He fed the stream through a quick parser. Junk. He frowned and switched approaches, stitching together deprecated Earth protocols with a timing trick he’d taught himself back in Lagos, when power outages had made creativity a necessity. He introduced a quantum-clock offset, nudged the alignment by fractions of a microsecond. The result wasn’t language—not exactly—but it carried the shape of one. The pattern repeated. Again. Again. On his screen, the frames resolved just enough to make his skin prickle. NOT ALONE. NOT ALONE. He laughed, a quick bark of disbelief. “Ha. Very funny.” The Moon declined to explain itself. Mika tagged the feed and rerouted it to a private buffer. For the first time since the patch had gone live, he forgot about the music entirely. Rafe Calder had meant to stay away from the archive tonight. Celebrations were dangerous. They loosened people. Made them careless. Made them believe that because nothing had gone wrong yet, nothing would. The archive lay beneath the older section of Haven—before the expansion, before the polished optimism. The lights here were dimmer, the corridors narrower. The walls bore scuffs from equipment dragged through before anyone thought to worry about aesthetics. Rafe preferred it this way. Memory behaved better in the dark. He sat alone at a terminal, jaw tight, scrolling through mission footage never meant for public eyes. Early orbital passes. Subsurface scans degraded by time and politics. Redacted lines stacked like scars across the data. The file had been sealed for decades. He knew that. He also knew which seals were technical and which were convenient. The pattern appeared halfway through a degraded scan—barely visible, a structured echo in the regolith that didn’t belong to natural layering. Rafe’s fingers stilled. Carefully, he pulled up a comparative overlay from memory. The match wasn’t perfect. It was close enough. “Of course,” he muttered. “Of course you’d choose tonight.” He remembered the briefing room. The arguments that went nowhere. The order he hadn’t given fast enough. The silence afterward, heavy with consequences no one wanted to name. Rafe copied the file to an encrypted slate and resealed the archive. Some things, once reopened, refused to stay quiet. Above him, the choir swelled. Somewhere in the crater, lights flared brighter. Commander Aline Voss adjusted her uniform and smiled for the camera. The broadcast control room hummed with rehearsed calm. Earthside feeds queued neatly. Approval metrics scrolled where only she could see them, numbers translating risk into digestible colors. Haven Crater looked good tonight—resilient, festive, safe. That mattered. “Remember,” she said, voice warm but firm, “we do not interrupt the ceremony unless the dome itself is compromised. Minor system chatter stays internal.” A technician nodded. Another glanced at a flickering readout, hesitated, then—after a moment’s calculation—looked away. The countdown reached its final seconds. Outside, the central mast brightened, light climbing its spine in a controlled surge meant to symbolize connection—Earth to Moon, past to future. “Five,” the crowd echoed. Commander Voss clasped her hands. “Four.” In the maintenance ring, Liora’s console screamed. Not an alarm—alarms were dramatic. This was worse. A sudden, undeniable spike that tore through the quiet lines she’d been watching all night. Data cascaded across her display, red blooming where green had been moments before. The substructure flexed. Just once. Enough to feel. Liora’s stomach dropped. She grabbed the rail as the Moon gave a single, unmistakable cough—no longer polite, no longer ignorable. Below, the lights on the mast stuttered. Down in the crater, the snow kept falling. End of Chapter 1