The coronal mass ejection reached the Earth-Moon system at approximately 12:03 UTC Earth time, a fiery, bright tendril of solar plasma and charged particles stretching thousands of miles wide and ninety-three million miles across. It flashed across Earth’s atmosphere, frying communication satellites and knocking out the entire Western US power grid and most of the Eastern.

Teague was sitting at his desk in his ready room when the lights flickered and went down. An excruciating five seconds later, some of them came back up at half power thanks to the battery backups. He thanked the designers of Luna 1 that the batteries were all buried under dozens of feet of lunar regolith, though he worried about the solar panels on the surface. As soon as this was over he’d need to dispatch crews to check them out, but for now, everyone had to remain inside. He listened for the steady hiss of the air handlers as they came back online. Another minor miracle. They wouldn't run out of oxygen.

He watched Earth through a camera feed on his screen, the usually peaceful blue-green marred by giant angry gray storm clouds that roiled across Europe and Canada, and was startled by a new phenomenon, auroral flashes cascading across the upper atmosphere as the magnetized solar particles from the CME bounced across the Earth’s magnetosphere. The usual southern and northern lights were on display thousands of miles from their usual locations, giving much of the planet a splendid light show. It was a pity that everyone under the raging storm wouldn’t be able to see it.

The image flickered and winked out, and Teague got a red NO FEED ACCESS error on his screen and slate. “Uh oh,” he murmured. “Not good.”

He tapped his comm button, but it was dead. Also not good.

Taking a deep breath to steady his jangled nerves, Teague stood and exited the ready room, thankful the doors still worked. When the primary power had failed, so did the ready room’s locking mechanism. Security would be compromised as well. Hopefully, it wouldn’t last very long.

The command blister was a chorus of noise as Luna 1 personnel moved about in dim lighting, staring at screens that could no longer give them the information they needed.

“Status,” Teague shouted, loud enough to be heard over the din.

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Natalia Romeo came toward him, her ordinarily cool and professional persona looking harried. “Comms are down. We’re on backup power. No way to check the status of our solar array without the base’s feed, nor can we get status updates from the other departments.”

Teague locked eyes with her. “It’s all right, Nat. We expected this. How’d we make out?”

“As far as we can tell, it was a somewhat glancing blow, but it fried our infrastructure. We should be OK as long as it doesn’t last too long. Life support has manual, analog workarounds, redundant failsafes. I dispatched crews to manually keep an eye on them an hour ago.”

Teague nodded. “Good. Redundant systems are good. I wonder how the cradle of our birth is doing.”

“No word from Earth, but with comms down that is unsurprising. Weather and science stations reported wide auroral displays before the feed went down, but Astronomy is keeping an eye on her with their optical telescopes.”

“Yeah,” Teague said. “I saw that too. Any way we can get our base feed back up?”

“We’re working on it, sir,” said the communications officer, a scrawny, young, blond-haired man named Lucas. “The funny thing is, I don’t think the solar storm knocked it out. It’s almost as if—”

They felt rather than heard a deep, resonant concussion from somewhere.

“What the hell was that?”

“Hang on,” said Lucas. “I’m checking.” He typed furiously on his workstation.

“I thought the cameras were down,” said Teague.

“No, sir,” said Lucas without looking up from his work. “The cameras are fine. It’s the feed that’s down. The cameras record everything. I’m accessing their buffers directly.”

The screen flashed, bisecting into dozens of smaller squares, each displaying a distant section of the Luna 1. Some of the squares remained black.

“These black screen sections are the surface cameras. CME probably fried them. But these interior cams are still working and recording. Look.”

He pointed to an image near the center, showing an airlock. The image shook as the door buckled, then was pushed inward. It fell to the floor before a group of men and women wearing black jumpsuits and almost completely covered in silvery black tendrils of an all too familiar substance.

Teague and Romeo exchanged knowing glances. “Where is this?” Teague asked, pointing at the image.

“It’s a maintenance airlock at the far end of the base,” said Romeo. “It’s seldom used.”

“Storm must have fried the controls,” said Lucas. “So they forced it open. With breaching charges?”

“Or their bare hands,” said Teague.

“Sir, what the hell are those things?”

“Big trouble, son,” Teague said. “Big trouble.”