Free Over the Moon (Star-Crossed Book 1) by K. McLaughlin Page B

herself clutching her seat in spite of herself. But Patrick braked gently a few times, and their downward plunge slowed, then halted just a few feet above the rocky ground. Their ship, seeming even more like a soap bubble to her this close to the ground, came to rest with a gentle bounce as the legs absorbed the weight.
    He’d set down on the ridge of a crater. Through the glass bubble, Carmen could see dusty solar panels spread out above a crate-like structure the size of a refrigerator.
    “If the water is in the craters, why set the base up on the heights?” she asked.
    “Need the light for the solar panels,” he replied, setting the ship down gently on the ground. Carmen shook her head slightly at her folly. Of course they needed the sunlight. She could see the panels herself, right? Thankfully, he seemed happy enough about her curiosity to overlook her stupid questions. She held her tongue and watched him work instead.
    Patrick goosed the thrusters just a little, and their ship jumped up about two feet into the air and two feet forward. It settled back onto its landing legs as gracefully as the first time, but now Carmen had a much better idea why they called these things “hoppers”! They’d closed about half the distance to the little automated outpost. She looked at Patrick. His brow was furrowed with concentration. His entire being seemed focused on those controls. He hit the thrusters again – a tiny spurt – and they went up and forward another foot. They came to rest about a foot away, and he relaxed back into his seat.
    “It’s a pain in the ass if we bang into something in one of these,” he said. “The sphere is strong – aluminum oxynitride. It’s designed to survive even small meteor strikes. But the mass of the Hopper would crush those solar cells, for example. And anytime we bang into anything, we have to take the Hopper offline for a full series of inspections. Takes forever.”
    “Do they ever fail inspections?” she asked.
    “Not that I’ve seen. These are tough little machines.”
    Patrick flipped out a new set of controls, and a pair of arms extended from the front of the hopper. He extended one arm out to the side of the boxy structure and plugged it in there. Then he ran the other arm back and forth over the solar panels, blowing air out through a nozzle over each pass. Dust drifted clear of the panels, leaving behind a smooth matte-black surface instead of the dusty white they had been.
    “What’s the other arm doing?” Carmen asked, her curiosity overcoming her resolve to stop asking questions while Patrick was busy.
    He didn’t seem to mind, flashing a smile at her. “It’s doing two things. Charging the battery of the platform from our engines, because the solar cells were so dirty that the thing was running on backup power. And it’s also downloading the last few weeks of data so I can go over it when we get back home.”
    Home. So odd that he called this place home. It wasn’t like he’d been here that long – how long did they let someone stay in space, anyway? A year? Two? But he called those domes home without any hesitation or irony. She wondered what it took to get a person to feel like this place was home.
    “Why so much data?” she asked. “Couldn’t it just transmit the data back?”
    “I haven’t been able to get out for weeks now. Between preparing for your father’s arrival, and then running out to get him – it’s been tough to keep our primary mission on track at all, right now.”
    She opened her mouth to reply that the people dying on Earth were more important than some rocks, but he cut in before she could say it.
    “Don’t get me wrong,” he said, holding up a placating hand. “I know your father’s mission is crucial. I’m not complaining. I’m just explaining why we’re behind. And it can’t transmit the data because we don’t have communication satellites orbiting the moon, and there’s no line of sight. Radio just won’t