Rust & Ruin

Chapter 1: The Soil of Ambition

There is a place in the Utah desert where the sand has been raked into perfect, unbroken waves, and where the silence is so complete you can hear the blood moving in your ears. It is not a national park, though it should be. It is not a memorial, though it functions as one. It is, officially, a storage facility—a leased parcel of hardpan and scrub leased by a private space logistics company that has since gone bankrupt, its assets sold off in the slow, legal liquidation that follows all corporate deaths. The facility’s only remaining tenant is a rover.

It arrived here after a commercial mission to the lunar south pole, a mission that was supposed to herald a new era of private exploration. The rover had a name, a corporate one—something with the word “Horizon” in it, I believe—but the name has been forgotten, painted over or scrubbed away by the same wind that polishes the desert rocks. What remains is the machine itself: a six-wheeled chassis of aluminum and carbon fiber, roughly the size of a golf cart, its solar panels folded against its back like the wings of a sleeping bird. Its wheels are caked with a fine gray dust that is not from Utah. That dust is from the Moon.

It sits on a concrete pad, bolted down against the possibility of theft, though the notion is absurd. Who would steal it? It is a dead thing. Its batteries