Standing upon the barren dark rock plains of Mare Tranquillitatis once more, Arthur Vance looked up into an angry, burning sky.
The lunar heavens were not dark. Above the curved, charcoal horizon, low lunar orbit was choked with a world-ending blizzard of tumbling moving debris. Millions of tons of shattered dark rock, crushed fiery glass, and twisted wreckage from destroyed void dreadnoughts were screaming through the empty pocket at ten miles per second. Heated by friction from void-star-fire explosions and lit up by the unshielded glare of the sun, the debris cloud tumbled in a chaotic, expanding halo of crimson and silver sparks.
The fragments were already beginning to migrate.
Pulled by the overlapping gravity gradients of the Earth and the Moon, the leading edge of the debris field was drifting toward the Earth-Moon Lagrange halls. In less than eight hours, the chaotic cloud would intersect low Earth orbit, initiating a runaway chain reaction of moving impacts that would shred humanity’s sky-high satellites and rain fire down upon the continents.
“Debris speed is speeding up,” Toby warned. He stood beside the portable tracking end-post on the crater rim. “The balance point is wobbling wildly! If we don’t corral the field now, the tidal forces will fling two million tons of rock straight into the Pacific Defense Grid!”
