Moon Shadows

Humanity has returned to the Moon for less than a decade, but its orbit is already contested ground: a silent ledger of half-billion-dollar wrecks that nobody in Washington, Brussels, or Moscow is willing to explain.

Alex Carter is an investigative journalist with one career-ending mistake behind him, a teenage daughter who has stopped picking up the phone, and exactly enough credibility left to chase one more story. When a fourth American lunar lander disintegrates on a clean descent, he stops calling it bad luck and starts pulling threads that lead, one by one, toward a conclusion no government will print: the failures aren't failures.

Meanwhile, Dr. Evelyn Pierce — the engineer her own company scapegoated after Aquila-3 — has reached the same conclusion from the inside. She has the telemetry, the simulations, and forty seconds of vulnerability on every descent to close. She also has a board that doesn't want to know what she's building in the lab after hours. The next lander launches in three months, and the navigation code she writes in secret will either save it or it won't.

Above them, in the dead quiet of lunar orbit, a hull that does not reflect radar is tracking the next descent and waiting.

Carter and Pierce will have to navigate corporate counsel, vanishing sources, anonymous threats arriving in the middle of the night, and a weapons program that flies no flag and has already decided five wrecks aren't enough. The odds are bad.

But the data doesn't lie, and someone has to write down what the silence is hiding.