The Titan Mole didn’t roll or float. It chewed through the planetoid like an ancient burrowing titan.
Sixty meters long and three stories tall, the heavy underground crawler was a heavy-duty relic of the First Lunar Spreading. Its heavy prow was dominated by three massive, counter-rotating diamond-tipped boring heads. It was wrapped in high-heat power-coil coils that melted brittle lunar dark rock into glass-fused melted rock waste. Behind its heavy high-pressure shock absorbers, the high-pressure crew cabin was padded by eight layers of aerogel and dense dark rock shielding. That created a climate-controlled safe hall deep beneath the frozen void.
The crawler hummed with a low, rhythmic shaking that rang through the deck plates at thirty cycles per second.
Inside the central operations bay, the air was warm, circulating at a comfortable twenty-two degrees with seventy percent moisture in the air. After days of freezing empty pocket, the smell of recycled cabin air, heated high-pressure oil. The earthy scent of drying fur felt like an oasis of deep luxury.
Arthur Vance sat on an overturned composite storage crate, leaning his back against the heavy inner wall. His heavy EVA suit was unlatched and resting on a magnetic rack nearby. He wore only his dark tactical squeezing undersuit and a pair of soft fleece deck shoes.
