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Cold Trap: Hard Science Fiction from the Lunar South Pole
Not yet published
Expected 26 Jun 26Two bases. Forty seven kilometers apart. One solar storm. And an order from Beijing that says no.
NASA flight surgeon Vikram Patel has been on the lunar surface for three weeks when the cascade begins. A solar particle event worse than any forecast hits while his geologist is outside. The power bus catches fire. The lander cooling loop starts failing on a seal his engineer never got around to fixing. The relay satellite drops to safe mode. Earth can hear him but cannot help him. The Chinese base across the ridge can help him but has been told not to.
Then the Chinese commander reverses his own order, loads a rover with medical supplies and a satellite transponder kit, and drives forty seven kilometers across irradiated regolith to a base he has never seen the inside of, built by people his government considers competitors, to keep a crew alive that his own career will not survive saving.
The cooperation works. It is not free.
Cold Trap is a hard science fiction story about what happens when the only people close enough to help are the people you have been forbidden from asking. Grounded in real Artemis program architecture, real Chinese ILRS planning, real ISRU chemistry, and real radiation medicine, it follows one doctor through a cascade of failures that can only be solved by hands from across the ridge.
A standalone novelette (approx. 20,000 words) in the Cosmic Thresholds collection, Volume II. Each story is a complete narrative, designed to be read in about two hours.
NASA flight surgeon Vikram Patel has been on the lunar surface for three weeks when the cascade begins. A solar particle event worse than any forecast hits while his geologist is outside. The power bus catches fire. The lander cooling loop starts failing on a seal his engineer never got around to fixing. The relay satellite drops to safe mode. Earth can hear him but cannot help him. The Chinese base across the ridge can help him but has been told not to.
Then the Chinese commander reverses his own order, loads a rover with medical supplies and a satellite transponder kit, and drives forty seven kilometers across irradiated regolith to a base he has never seen the inside of, built by people his government considers competitors, to keep a crew alive that his own career will not survive saving.
The cooperation works. It is not free.
Cold Trap is a hard science fiction story about what happens when the only people close enough to help are the people you have been forbidden from asking. Grounded in real Artemis program architecture, real Chinese ILRS planning, real ISRU chemistry, and real radiation medicine, it follows one doctor through a cascade of failures that can only be solved by hands from across the ridge.
A standalone novelette (approx. 20,000 words) in the Cosmic Thresholds collection, Volume II. Each story is a complete narrative, designed to be read in about two hours.
Kindle Edition
Expected publication June 26, 2026
About the author
Alan Voss
7 books6 followersAlan Voss is a veteran technology architect and lifelong astronomy enthusiast who writes hard science fiction grounded in real physics.
His COSMIC THRESHOLDS collection puts working scientists in front of the universe's most extreme phenomena and asks what happens next. A solar physicist discovers a magnetar close enough to sterilize Earth's atmosphere. A governor leads 2,000 colonists onto a tidally locked planet where the wind never stops. An astrobiologist descends through twenty one kilometers of ice into an ocean on a rogue planet drifting between the stars. An astrophysicist builds a telescope to peer into the one region of the sky no one has ever seen, and the data starts looking back. Each story starts with a real object, a real process, a real piece of physics, and follows it to its human consequences.
The stories are standalone novelettes, each about 18,000 words, designed to be read in a single sitting and in any order. The science is accessible. The physics is real. The protagonists are professionals who understand exactly what they are facing, which tends to make things worse.
Alan grew up reading Arthur C. Clarke, Gregory Benford, and Peter Watts, and their fingerprints are all over this work.
His COSMIC THRESHOLDS collection puts working scientists in front of the universe's most extreme phenomena and asks what happens next. A solar physicist discovers a magnetar close enough to sterilize Earth's atmosphere. A governor leads 2,000 colonists onto a tidally locked planet where the wind never stops. An astrobiologist descends through twenty one kilometers of ice into an ocean on a rogue planet drifting between the stars. An astrophysicist builds a telescope to peer into the one region of the sky no one has ever seen, and the data starts looking back. Each story starts with a real object, a real process, a real piece of physics, and follows it to its human consequences.
The stories are standalone novelettes, each about 18,000 words, designed to be read in a single sitting and in any order. The science is accessible. The physics is real. The protagonists are professionals who understand exactly what they are facing, which tends to make things worse.
Alan grew up reading Arthur C. Clarke, Gregory Benford, and Peter Watts, and their fingerprints are all over this work.
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