Crimson Regolith The Battle for the Silent Sea

Three hundred and forty thousand people. One dead world. And an Earth that wants it back.

For eighty years, the people of Selene Base built something impossible — a city on the Moon, carved from rock and willpower and the bone-deep conviction that a place could become home even when the universe offered every reason it shouldn't. They built schools and gardens and murals and a future. Then Earth sent forty-seven warships to take it.

Sergeant Kael Morrow didn't choose this war. He just arrived with it, dropping from a carrier in the black onto a grey plain where sound didn't exist and every decision had weight. His orders were clear: disable the defences, breach the base, take the command structure. What the briefing files couldn't tell him was what it would feel like to move through someone else's home with a weapon, or what he would do when the enemy turned out to be exactly what he was — a person trying to protect the people they loved.

On the other side of the airlocks, Commander Idris Vance had known the fleet was coming for two years. He had prepared his garrison, organized his people, and made his peace with the fact that he could not win — only negotiate the terms of how much his world would cost. In the tunnels below the city, engineer Aria Chen had done the same calculation and reached a different answer: that sometimes the bravest thing you can do in a war is decide not to fight it.

Set across a single brutal day on the surface and corridors of the Moon, Crimson Regolith is a war novel about the space between orders and conscience, between victory and what victory costs, and about the small, specific human acts — a door opened, a pair of gloves removed, a photograph kept — that determine whether the peace that follows a war is worth what the war destroyed.

For readers of Joe Haldeman, John Scalzi, and Annalee Newitz.

📖 101 pages