A lunar survival novella
Cold Soak
By Nicky Hooke
Mission status · prelaunch
Publication is planned for early August 2026, subject to proof approval.
About the book
Cold Soak is a hard science fiction story about an astronaut stranded on the Moon after an explosion destroys his base and kills the rest of his crew. With his oxygen running out, Jack must reach the ascent vehicle in time for his only launch window while Mission Control tries to keep him alive.
Publication links will appear here when they are available. Join the Mission Log to receive the release announcement.
Read an extract
The walk to the secondary relay was seventeen minutes by the checklist if nothing went wrong, and a walk had always been the part that stayed a walk. I had run this procedure forty times across three surface campaigns and the rhythm was in my hands before the panel was in sight. The wrist display cycled through the usual numbers. O2 seventy-one per cent. Battery draw steady at two point one amps. EVA clock two hours twenty minutes and change. My boot prints trailed behind me across the regolith, and I gave them no more attention than the numbers cycling on my wrist.
The relay panel stood out as a grey box bolted to a basalt outcropping two hundred metres ahead and I fixed my eyes on it and let my stride settle into the gliding lope that ate distance on the Moon. The comms loop was silent. The suit hum was a constant companion sound, the ventilator fan cycling on and off at intervals I no longer heard. My breath was even. My hands were unmoving inside the gloves, kept that way by not making fists. The outcropping drew closer and the panel came into focus and I was eighty metres out when the world went white.
No sound. The vacuum took that. The light hit the visor as a flat brightness that erased the regolith and the ridge and the sky. The tint layer slammed down. I felt it in my temples. I was moving before the ground shock arrived. Not because I understood. The light was wrong, and wrong light on the Moon meant catastrophe, and my body threw me sideways at the low shelter of a basalt fin jutting from the crater rim before my head had caught up to any of it.
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Go deeper
The extract above opens on a walk to a relay on the crater rim — you can plan that traverse yourself on an Apollo-style contour board. Or visit the Lunar Base for field notes and more lightweight interactives about the physical constraints behind the story.