Free Moonbase Crisis: Star Challengers Book 1 by Kevin J. Anderson, Rebecca Moesta, June Scobee Rodgers

of mirror segments—a telescope—as big as a football field! JJ wanted to ask about everything. She felt like a gawky tourist, but who wouldn’t? Dyl, King, and Song-Ye, also walking with great wonder, bounced about in the low gravity.
    “Look up there,” Dyl said, pointing with a gloved hand. “It’s the Earth, right in front of us in the sky!”
    They all turned their curved faceplates upward, and JJ felt a chill at the sight of Earth hanging in space like a big blue marble aswirl with clouds. Right now part of the planet was in shadow.
    “As you can see, when viewed from the Moon, the Earth goes through phases, similar to the Moon’s phases when one looks at it from Earth,” Major Fox said.
    “I wondered why our view of the world wasn’t quite full.” Dyl chuckled. “I guess Earth’s just going through a phase.”
    “ Pfft ,” Song-Ye said.
    “The phase of the Moon between a quarter and full is called gibbous,” King commented. “At the moment, though, I’m less interested in the Earth’s phase than in finding out how the Moon feels? He took a few quick steps, hopped high in the air and pretended to slam dunk a basketball.
    “This is amazing!” even the Korean girl admitted. She sprang upward, did a graceful spin, and touched down again.
    “I’ll bet I could jump a few feet in the air, no problem,” Dyl said. JJ noticed again how much more easily her brother moved on the Moon, though he still seemed tentative. Maybe he wasn’t ready to “fly” just yet.
    “Feet?” Major Fox asked. “I’m sorry, I don’t follow—what do you mean by that?”
    “Meters,” JJ quickly amended. Obviously no one at the moonbase would use old-fashioned measurements like pounds or feet. The cadets would have to remember to use metric units. “He meant he could jump and get his feet a few meters off the ground.”
    “Ah. That is certainly within the realm of possibility, but your tasks today do not require jumping a few meters in the air,” Fox admonished. “Our priority is to set up a supplemental solar-power array for Moonbase Magellan.”
    “We’re not going anywhere in the rover?” JJ asked, crestfallen. The enclosed, pressurized vehicle looked intriguing. She wanted to stand on the low lunar mountains and look down into distant craters where meteors had bombarded Earth’s only satellite eons ago.
    “Longer expeditions are for another time, Cadet. Magellan has needed this additional array for half a year. For safety and efficiency, the task requires five workers. However, since safety protocols preclude all four base crewmembers being outside at the same time, we’ve been unable to attempt the job. Now that you’re here, however, this is our first priority.”
    “Somebody needs to do it—might as well be us,” JJ agreed, trying not to sound as excited as a kid going to Disney World.
    “Sure, why not?” Song Ye said.
    Major Fox explained how when Moonbase Magellan had been established decades earlier, versatile vehicles had pushed crumbly lunar soil—called regolith—up against the modules for added shielding and packed it tightly like the walls of a snow fort. Metal-wrapped packages of unused equipment, tools, spare parts, and supplies were piled in exposed caches across the crater floor; the moonbase modules were too cramped to keep all those large items inside.
    “There’s just … dirt everywhere,” Song-Ye said. She scuffed with her boot and kicked up a spray of tiny pebbles and dust that settled back to the ground in slow motion.
    “The regolith is made up of powder, broken stones, all sorts of loose material,” Major Fox said, “created by billions of years of bombardment from space. It’s a great resource for us, as you’ll see later. But first, the solar-power station.”
    Major Fox led the cadets in a low-gravity march to a large rectangular canister that rested on the ground at an angle, as if it had just been dumped there. With meticulous movements, Fox unclipped a tool at