The Relentless Moon recap

In 1963, while the first Mars expedition is under way, astronaut Nicole Wargin is also the wife of a governor running for president, and the space program she serves is under attack from a movement convinced the money should be spent on Earth. What began as protest has become sabotage and killing. Nicole rotates up to the lunar colony and the trouble follows her: equipment fails in ways that point to someone already inside the base, and then polio moves through a settlement with limited medicine and no way to evacuate. Nicole investigates using skills from a wartime past her colleagues know nothing about, concealing both her methods and her own health, while news of the political violence around her husband's campaign reaches her hours late. The epidemic eventually reaches her too, leaving her paralyzed and directing the last of the investigation from a hospital bed. She recovers enough to help force the confrontation; the saboteur is exposed and stopped and the conspiracy behind the campaign is opened up. The colony survives at heavy cost, and Nicole faces a long recovery and an open question about flying again.

Previously: a meteorite struck the eastern United States in 1952, destroying the capital and most of the federal government. Elma York's calculations showed that the impact had thrown enough water vapor into the atmosphere to drive the climate toward temperatures the planet could not sustain, and the surviving government responded by building an international space coalition with a mandate to establish human settlements off Earth. Headquartered in Kansas, the program went from first orbital flights to a permanent base on the Moon inside a decade. Women were admitted to the astronaut corps only after a public campaign led by Elma, who became famous as the Lady Astronaut; Nicole Wargin was among the first women selected, and Black pilots and computers were admitted later and more grudgingly still. Not everyone accepts the science behind any of it: a movement holding that the money belongs on Earth rather than above it has grown from protest into organized opposition. As this book opens, the coalition's first crewed expedition to Mars has departed with Elma York aboard, a multi-year voyage the public follows through the news, and the lunar colony continues to expand under the coalition's settlement program.

Nicole Wargin divides her life between the astronaut corps and her husband Kenneth's political career, which is entering a presidential campaign fought partly over whether the country can keep paying for space. The opposition has escalated well past picket lines: the program suffers failures, accidents and deaths that are too convenient to be accidents, and it becomes clear that the campaign against it now includes people willing to kill. The damage is compounded by the fact that nothing can be proved, leaving the coalition's leadership, including its lead engineer Nathaniel York, investigating its own program while trying to keep it flying. Nicole, whose wartime service taught her things the corps does not know she knows, starts paying a different kind of attention to what she is being told. Her own rotation to the lunar base is coming up, which means leaving Kenneth and the campaign at what may be the worst possible moment.

Nicole travels up to the Moon, where the coalition's base is a working colony rather than an outpost: engineers, computers, farmers and pilots, all dependent on machinery that cannot be replaced quickly and on supplies that arrive on a fixed schedule. The trouble follows her. Equipment fails in ways that do not match wear or accident, and the pattern points to deliberate interference by someone already inside the base rather than to bad luck. A settlement that small offers no anonymity and no escape, and the possibility that a colleague is responsible poisons every ordinary interaction. Nicole investigates quietly, aware that a suspected astronaut is a grounded astronaut, and works with the few people she trusts completely, among them Myrtle and Eugene Lindholm. News from Earth reaches her filtered and delayed, and what she hears about Kenneth's campaign is not reassuring.

The sabotage escalates from equipment to the things keeping people alive: power, water, air and the food supply are all attacked or threatened, and the colony's margins shrink fast. Then people start falling ill. Polio moves through the settlement, and a base with limited medical facilities and no possibility of evacuation has to quarantine, improvise and ration care, while the epidemic itself begins to look less like misfortune than like a weapon that was deliberately introduced. Nicole keeps investigating through it, assembling access, timing and opportunity into something like a pattern, and every line of it points inward. On Earth the campaign against the space program grows bolder and Kenneth is increasingly exposed to it. Inside the colony, suspicion breaks along the social fault lines that were already there, which makes the investigation harder and the place itself much less habitable.

The colony is under quarantine, short of supplies and short of healthy people, and the coalition on Earth has to decide what it can send and what it must simply let happen. Nicole's investigation narrows, and pursuing it costs her: it requires concealment, physical risk and the acceptance that she may be disbelieved or blamed rather than believed. She is not helped by the fact that she is also hiding her own health and her own methods from almost everyone. The saboteur, aware of being hunted, moves against the people closing in. On Earth the political violence reaches Kenneth's campaign directly, and the news arrives across a communications delay that makes Nicole useless to him. The base survives the immediate emergency, but its capacity, its trust in itself and its schedule are all badly damaged.

The epidemic reaches Nicole. Struck down by polio, she is paralyzed and dependent on machinery to breathe, and she has to keep working out who is responsible from a hospital bed, unable to move or to speak normally. The people she trusts carry the investigation for her, following the lines she had already drawn, and the evidence finally accumulates into a case rather than a suspicion. The colony's position is dire: the dead, the permanently disabled, a life-support system that has been attacked repeatedly, and a resupply schedule that cannot be met. The saboteur is still inside the base and still acting, which makes Nicole's immobility a danger to everyone rather than only a frustration to her.

Nicole recovers enough movement to act, and she and her allies force the confrontation. The saboteur is identified, exposed and stopped, and the network on Earth that directed and supplied the campaign against the space program is opened up along with it, though the movement behind it is damaged rather than destroyed. The lunar colony survives at heavy cost: people are dead, others are permanently disabled by polio, and infrastructure that was never meant to fail has to be rebuilt while the settlement keeps running. Nicole is left with lasting weakness from the disease and an open question about whether she will be certified to fly again, which she refuses to treat as settled. She and Kenneth end the year with their marriage and their partnership intact and their political future reshaped by all of it. The Moon base continues, the coalition's settlement program continues, and the Mars expedition is still out there, months from home and unaware of nearly all of this.

Nicole recovers enough movement to act, and she and the people she trusts force the confrontation. The saboteur inside the colony is identified, exposed and stopped, and the network on Earth that supplied and directed the campaign against the space program is opened up along with it, though the wider movement behind it is damaged rather than destroyed. The lunar colony survives at heavy cost: people are dead, others are permanently disabled by polio, and infrastructure that was never meant to fail has to be rebuilt while the settlement keeps running. Nicole is left with lasting weakness from the disease and an open question about whether she will be certified to fly again, an answer she has no intention of accepting as final. She and Kenneth come out of the year with their marriage and their political partnership intact and their prospects reshaped by everything that has happened. The coalition's colonization program continues, the Moon base continues, and the Mars expedition is still out there, months from home and unaware of nearly all of it.